"There seems to be something wrong with our bloody politics today"

The left's wilful blindness, anti-semitism, electoral fraud and rape gangs

When Admiral Beatty famously surveyed the Battle of Jutland, and saw two of the Navy’s supposedly undeafeatable battlecruisers, HMS Indefatigable and HMS Queen Mary explode, he did not then realise that things had changed and the ships that he was watching were not fit for purpose for the challenges they faced, to him there was something wrong with our ships, but many had been warning of this for years. Today seeing senior figures on the left talk about about the scourge of antisemitism, it is as if they had not heard those voices.

Caroline Lucas, the Green Party’s founding conscience, posted a tweet yesterday calling antisemitism totally unacceptable and demanding immediate action against Green candidates whose social media histories had been dragged into daylight.

“Statements that have now come to light from a handful of @TheGreenParty candidates are totally unacceptable & require immediate action. There’s no place for anti-semitism or any hate speech in the party. This is a society-wide problem & needs to be rooted out wherever it’s found”

Labour produced a dossier of posts by 25 Green candidates describing what it called harrowing anti-Semitism, dangerous conspiracy theories, and appalling comments supporting Hamas. Lucas, who spent her career polishing the Green Party’s halo until it gleamed, now finds herself confronting the same suppurating sore that destroyed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour and is currently eating through the foundations of Zack Polanski’s shiny new left-wing vehicle.

The tweet is welcome. It is also, given what has been building in British politics for thirty years, about as adequate as a sticking plaster applied to a sucking chest wound.

We need to look at what has been happening for decades, without the euphemisms that have served the political class so well and served the country so badly.

The JL Partners poll for Policy Exchange, that was reported in the Times yesterday, conducted among British Muslims, is not comfortable reading for anyone who prefers comfortable reading. A quarter of Muslim respondents said they held a favourable view of Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation whose foundational purpose is the annihilation of Jewish people. More British Muslim respondents held a favourable than unfavourable view of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, another terrorist organisation, proscribed across the world, but tellingly not here.. One in seven expressed favourable views of Islamic State or al-Qaeda. The survey also found substantially higher antisemitic sentiment among Muslim respondents than the wider population, including significant support for the belief that Jews exercise undue influence over the media, parliament, and the banking system, the classical blood-libel conspiracy, dressed in the language of power analysis.

Hold those figures in mind. They matter enormously to what follows.

The same poll found stark evidence of electoral irregularity that should stop democrats cold. Fourteen per cent of Muslim respondents said they had had a postal vote collected by a campaigner, a practice that is illegal under British electoral law, since it creates conditions for coercion and fraud. Nine per cent said they had handed their blank ballot paper to another person. A further 16% reported receiving campaign leaflets not written in English.

Now apply the basic logic of self-reporting to those numbers. When a survey asks people whether they have engaged in criminal activity, the answer is systematically skewed towards the innocent. Those who have done nothing wrong will say so readily. Those who have handed over a blank ballot, or accepted a postal vote collected on a doorstep, may not even know it was illegal, or may know perfectly well and have no intention of saying so to a pollster. The real figures are not just likely to be higher. They are almost certainly substantially higher.

These are not new problems. The political class has simply been very effective at not noticing them.

In Rotherham, after the revelation of industrial scale rapoe of mostly working class white girls, the former Head of Children’s services while the rapes occurred and a Labour councillor, Shaun Wright won the inaugural Police and Crime Commissioner election in 2012. His vacated seat as a councillor was won by UKIP in a landslide. Two years later as the scandal gathered pace he was forced to resign, as either complicit or deliberately ignorant. At that time a young man of Pakistani heritage asked to meet me, we met in a coffee shop 10 miles from Rotherham. He revealed that his cousin, a local Labour councillor, had handed him a couple of hundred blank postal votes for him to fill in. So disgusted was he that he filled them in with UKIP votes.
UKIP won that ward by fewer than the votes he had cast. He wanted to whistleblow, I told him if he did he would be the one going to gaol, as the apparat would close ranks.

In December 2015, the Oldham West and Royton by-election produced a result that had those paying attention rubbing their eyes. An unprecedented 100% of postal votes in certain areas went to a single party.

I witnessed people carrying bags of votes to a polling booth, I reported it, the Guardian saw the same and reported it. Nothing happened. A Hansard record of the parliamentary debate that followed noted that council staff had said some voters in polling booths had no idea what they were doing there. Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson dismissed concerns as ‘sour grapes’. Westminster moved on.

In 2019 at the Peterborough by-election serious questions were asked yet again, one Labour activist formerly gaoled for postal vote interference was at the count with the Labour team - they argued he was just a member of the public - and won the case. Anybody who knows how hard it is to get tickets to electoral counts will know that that is only one interpretation.

And on it goes.

In February 2024, Rochdale elected George Galloway, the most accomplished political ventriloquist for Islamist grievance the British left has ever produced - to Parliament, running on a platform whose entire substance was Gaza and whose entire electoral strategy was the mobilisation of communitarian Muslim voting in a constituency where such mobilisation was possible at industrial scale. The postal vote count was astonishing: 43.3% of all votes cast were postal, representing a 27% increase since the previous election. Now Reform UK’s candidate, Simon Danczuk reported that his campaign had faced lots of examples of intimidation from Galloway’s supporters. Business premises threatened with firebombing unless they withdrew support for Reform. The Reform leader Richard Tice said his candidate had received death threats, that his team had been subject to daily intimidation and slurs, had been refused entry to hustings in council buildings. I moved the Reform campaign team from our Airb’nb as we discovered that one of the death threats came from 4 doors down the street. The Board of Deputies of British Jews called Galloway’s victory a dark day for Britain’s Jewish community. Westminster, for the most part, tutted and moved on.

Then came Gorton and Denton in February 2026. Democracy Volunteers, the independent election observer group, watched 22 polling stations. They recorded family voting - the illegal practice of accompanying another voter into the booth and directing their vote - in 15 of those 22 stations, affecting 12% of all voters they observed. The equivalent figure at the Runcorn and Helsby by-election had been 1%. Nigel Farage reported the incidents to the Electoral Commission and Greater Manchester Police. Manchester City Council said no issues had been reported. Westminster is currently conducting its by now well-rehearsed routine of tutting.

The Greens won. Their candidate’s leaflets were printed in Urdu.

Here is what connects Rotherham 2014, Oldham 2015, Rochdale 2024, and Gorton 2026: the same willingness, within a specific political subculture, to treat elections as a communal rather than an individual act. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is sociology, reinforced by the JL Partners data. If 14% of Muslim respondents will admit to a pollster that a campaigner collected their postal vote, and if 9% will admit to handing over a blank ballot paper, then we are not talking about isolated incidents of individual law-breaking. We are talking about normalised practice, the infrastructure of bloc voting, imported from political traditions where voting is a collective family or community decision directed by its patriarch, its imam, its community leader.

Labour built its northern electoral dominance on this infrastructure for a generation, and looked the other way. More than that: when people tried to dismantle it, or even name it, Labour machine politics actively destroyed them.

The first whistleblower was Ann Cryer, Labour MP for Keighley. In 2002, seven distressed mothers appeared at her constituency office on Devonshire Street. Their daughters, they told her, were being befriended and then sexually exploited by older men from Keighley’s Pakistani community, and the police and social services were refusing to act. Cryer did what an MP is supposed to do. She spoke out. For her troubles, she was smeared as a racist, she was shunned, and she was threatened to the point at which she had to have safety devices and emergency alarms installed in her home. The smears came not from the right, not from outsiders, but particularly from Labour figures. Her own party. The party that was supposed to represent the working-class girls being abused in its own heartland constituencies turned its institutional energy not towards the abusers, but towards the woman who named them. In 2004, a Channel 4 documentary on Asian men grooming girls in Bradford was quietly postponed for fear it would provoke race riots. The girls kept being abused. Cryer kept being smeared. And Westminster kept looking away.

A decade passed. The abuse spread: Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oxford, Derby, Halifax, Peterborough. An estimated 1,400 girls were abused in Rotherham alone between 1997 and 2013, in a town whose council was in denial for the duration and where the word Pakistani was tippexed out of children’s files in archive. In at least two cases, South Yorkshire Police arrested the fathers of abused girls when they attempted to retrieve their daughters from the houses where the abuse was happening. Simon Danczuk, then Labour MP for Rochdale, claimed that a senior Labour figure told him not to draw attention to the ethnicity of the gangs in his constituency in case it affected the party’s electoral chances. Denis MacShane, Labour MP for Rotherham for nearly two decades, later blamed a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat. That is the political class’s own verdict on itself: delivered after the fact, at a comfortable distance, with its victims still waiting for justice. Though Danczuk was hoi#st from Labour for challenging Corbyn’s perspective.

Then, in 2017, Sarah Champion tried again. The MP for Rotherham, who had taken over a constituency scarred by one of the worst child protection failures in British history, who had made the protection of vulnerable children the organising cause of her political career, wrote a piece for the Sun under the headline: British Pakistani men ARE raping and exploiting white girls and it’s time we faced up to it. The article said what Ann Cryer had said fourteen years earlier, what the Jay report had documented in clinical detail three years before, what every police officer in South Yorkshire who was paying attention already knew. Fellow Labour MP Naz Shah called the headline incendiary and irresponsible. Champion received death threats. And Jeremy Corbyn, the man whose political project was built on speaking truth to power, on giving voice to the voiceless, on standing with the oppressed, accepted her resignation from the shadow cabinet. Telling the truth about who was raping children in Labour’s own northern heartlands was, under Corbyn, a sackable offence. Champion later put the moral calculus with devastating precision: More people are afraid to be called a racist than they are afraid to be wrong about calling out child abuse.

During this period two senior UKIP figures, Caven Vines, who won that landslide council election in 2012, and Jane Collins the MEP for Yorkshire lost libel cases for suggesting that Labour MPs must have known what was going on their watch, in their patch.

That sentence is the epitaph for three decades of institutional cowardice. It explains everything: the tippexed files, the postponed documentaries, the panic alarms in Ann Cryer’s home, the death threats to Sarah Champion, the Labour chairman who told Simon Danczuk to keep quiet, the council in Rotherham that was too busy protecting its vote share to protect its children.

Into this existing rot, Corbynism poured an accelerant. The antisemitism that found sanctuary in the Corbyn project was not invented by Momentum. It had festered for years in the dog-whistle politics of Labour’s relationship with political Islam, in the Stop the War coalition, in the studied ambiguity about Hamas and Hezbollah as friends, in the tolerance for speakers at Labour-adjacent events whose views on Jewish people were indistinguishable from those of 1930s European fascism. Corbyn did not create this; he legitimised it, gave it a leader who embraced it, and surrounded it with a machine - Momentum - that treated every act of accountability as a factional attack.

The EHRC found the party had unlawfully harassed Jewish members. The evidence was not marginal. It was systemic. And for the Corbynite faithful, every piece of evidence was a smear, every Jewish complainant a tool of the Israel lobby, every accountability mechanism a Blairite counter-revolution in disguise. But it was convenient, as it solidified the Muslim bloc vote.

Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney broke that particular machine, or most of it. But the weeds don’t die when you cut the heads off. They seed elsewhere.

They seeded, first, in the 2024 pro-Gaza Independents, who captured five seats by fusing hard-left anti-imperialism with communitarian Muslim electoral organisation, not British politics at all, but the politics of elsewhere, imported wholesale through WhatsApp groups and mosque networks and the inherited loyalties of populations whose primary identification, as the JL Partners poll makes brutally clear, is with the global ummah before it is with the United Kingdom.

Then came Your Party, Corbyn and Sultana’s vanity project, launched with 800,000 sign-ups and the explicit ambition of building an anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist political home. The Liverpool conference dissolved into Pythonesque factionalism. Sultana’s grassroots faction, which wanted the most openly Islamist-adjacent politics, lost the internal elections. Corbyn’s more cautious vanity-project faction won. The real winner, as The Spectator observed, was Zack Polanski, the political butterfly who absorbed all this energy into the Green Party, printed his leaflets in Urdu, and swept Gorton and Denton.

Where the antisemitism went is now becoming clear. The Green Party is investigating more than 30 council candidates. Labour has published the dossier. Polanski urges nuance. Lucas tweets. The cycle continues.

There is one further consequence that the mainstream will not name clearly, though it is visible to anyone paying attention. When the state and the parties of government spend decades looking the other way, at the rape gangs, at the electoral fraud, at the antisemitism, at the bloc politics of communities whose political formation was in Lahore and Mirpur (anyone want an airport?) rather than Leeds and Middlesbrough, they do not contain the anger that results. They guarantee it will find other channels. The far right has always been most effective when it can point to a grievance the respectable cannot bring themselves to name. The tacit tolerance of antisemitism on the British left. a tolerance that the JL Partners polling shows is not a fringe phenomenon but a measurable community attitude, has provided cover and oxygen for the same hatred on the right. You cannot have it one way. You cannot police anti-Jewish racism only when it emerges from populations whose votes you do not need.

The JL Partners polling tells us that one in seven British Muslims holds a favourable view of al-Qaeda. It tells us that a quarter hold a favourable view of a proscribed terrorist organisation. It tells us that, on a self-reporting basis, illegal electoral practices are embedded within the community at levels that, when adjusted for the well-documented tendency to under-report one’s own criminal behaviour, suggest something systemic and serious.

These are not figures that should produce panic. They are figures that should produce action, honest, uncomfortable, politically costly action of the kind that British politics has been deferring, in the interests of electoral convenience and so called ‘community cohesion’, for thirty years.

The girls of Rotherham and across the UK are owed that reckoning. The Jewish members hounded from Labour meetings are owed it. Ann Cryer, who had a panic alarm installed in her home for the crime of telling the truth, is owed it. Sarah Champion, who received death threats for writing what every Rotherham police officer already knew, is owed it. The voters of Gorton whose democratic freedom was potentially coerced in a polling booth are owed it. And the country, which has been lied to by omission since at least the Rotherham PCC election of 2012, is owed it most of all.

Caroline Lucas’s tweet is not that reckoning. After all she stood in Brighton amongst celebrations, two days after the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel, calling for Israel to do nothing, leaving itself undefended from those who would kill every jew. She claims that it is a “society wide” problem. No Caroline, it is not society wide, it sits deeply in the world view and cupidity of the ant-American and anti-Jewish left.

In fact it is its opposite: the performance of concern by those who have had every opportunity to act, and repeatedly chosen not to.