Nick Cohen talks to John McTernan - , the political strategist and commentator, and a former senior advisor to the Labour Party. John was Tony Blair's Director of Political Operations from 2005-2007 before acting as special advisor to two cabinet ministers under Blair's Number 10 successor - Gordon Brown. Other roles since then has been as a columnist at The Scotsman and as Director of Communications for Australia's Labor party prime minister Julia Gillard.

The Conservative Party appears to be crumbling before our very eyes: poorly led, tanking in the polls way behind Reform, myopically fixated on failed crank ideologies like Brexit & its preposterous Rwanda migrant scheme - while Nigel Farage surges ahead of them in the polls with his latest political vehicle - Reform. The first step to seeing off the populist right embodied by Farage, argues John, is to understand his appeal , adding "Farage sees the demand for change in the public, names his party Reform, another word for change, and is going quite successfully, just simply stating "The country voted for change. Where's the change?"

John says that Labour has to be aware of the coalition support. - the two wings of different supporters the party needs to balance out on a wide range of issues and win round, saying "they elected us this time around, and that was a coalition of two halves. It was absolutely liberal minded, guardian reading, graduate London and South East voters, as well as, working class, Northern voters... if Labour moves too far in either direction towards the liberal green minded green agenda, or towards, the right wing agenda, it will lose.

"It's got to maintain both of those wings. You know, a plane flies on two wings. This government needs two wings of support. So I would be, my advice into combating Farage us is take him seriously. This is real, you can't ignore it. Understand the dynamics that are working out on the right of politics everywhere in Europe."

Nick Cohen's @NickCohen4 latest Substack column Writing from London on politics and culture from the UK and beyond.

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This week, Nick Cohen discusses the current & disturbing breakdown in international law - in the week indicted alleged war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu was the first overseas guest of convicted felon President Donald Trump with author & campaigner Steve Crawshaw, the author of the just published Prosecuting the powerful: War crimes & the pursuit of justice.

Donald Trump, Vladamir Putin & Xi Jinping - let alone their 'mini mes' in Hungary, Israel & elsewhere - are proving a toxic combo' for the maintenance of a new world order that came into being in the wake of the Nuremberg trials. Slobodan Milošević, Ratko Mladić and 19 other individuals have been jailed by the International Criminal Court at The Hague for crimes ranging from genocide to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Bringing powerful political crooks seemed to usher in a new age of international justice. Yet now indicted personalities such as Putin remain at large, while Benjamin Netanyahu is feted by Donald Trump, himself the first convicted felon to occupy the White House.

Trump has just issued sanction against the ICC and its senior officials, partly in retaliation for their indictment of Netanyahu!

What can we do to stop our world reversing into a new international disorder? Steve Crawshaw argues this is not the time to "hide under the duvet" but to fight back against a tide of authoritarianism and contempt for the international rule of law.

Steve Crawshaw @stevecrawshaw reported extensively for decades from Europe. He was in Poland during the rise of Solidarity in Poland, a pivotal event in the fall of the Berlin Wall, and covered the wars in the early 1990s in the former Yugoslavia. Steve has worked subsequently for NGOs, including Amnesty International and Freedom From Torture. He is now a freelance journalist and writer. His latest book, Prosecuting the powerful: War crimes & the pursuit of justice, has published by Little, Brown Book Group.

Nick Cohen's @NickCohen4 latest Substack column Writing from London on politics and culture from the UK and beyond.

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On the fifth anniversary of Brexit, Nick Cohen @NickCohen4 talks with Naomi Smith, @pimllicat chief executive officer of Best for Britain which is campaigning for a re-building of the important relationship the UK once enjoyed with its closest and biggest trading partners in the European Union.

Poll after poll has shown that public confidence in Brexit has all but collapsed. The July 2024 election returned a strong remainer-friendly parliament and yet the Labour government is trying to work with the badly bungled hard Brexit deal inflicted on the country by Boris Johnson and David Frost.

Naomi argues that the government can be bolder in re-building the relationship with Europe, so recklessly destroyed by Johnson & co. The country should not allow itself to be trapped with a project that has obviously failed. It seems Brexit is being prosecuted by people who don't believe in it to indulge the extremist nationalist fantasies of the political & media grifters & con artists who argued for for it.

"We are not stuck with it and there is a way out," insists Naomi, who cites reliable recent research showing how Brexit is impoverishing the average Brit by at least £2,000 a year, killing growth, ransacking public services, crippling business with red tape and not only killing growth, but is knocking a massive 4% off annual GDP. (The 2008 Great Recession/crash led to a 2% reduction.)

Namoi said the government is beginning to break the taboo on Brexit, adding, "they are now beginning to talk more openly about how bad the deal that Johnson and Frost negotiated was for the country...They are now beginning to talk more openly about how bad the deal that Johnson and Frost negotiated was for the country. They don't do it ad nauseam."

Naomi adds, "People aren't stupid. They've realised that they were sold a load of rubbish, and that their lives weren't going to improve and they can't now see their GP any more easily than they could before we left the EU etc."

Naomi Smith is one of the country's most incisive commentators on politics & the UK-Europe relationship. She can also be found on Bluesky . Naomi is also a seasoned podcaster, co-hosting the Quiet Riot Pod, the politics podcast with more passion, less shouting & lots of laughter.

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Nick Cohen talks to Andrew Gawthorpe - historian, substacker and researcher of the modern and contemporary United States at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands - about Donald Trump's cataclysmic first week in the White House.

The first week of Trump's 2nd presidency is turning out to be an even bigger disaster than anyone feared. With pardons for violent thugs and unprovoked threats against traditional allies, the U.S. is rapidly turning into the world's first banana republic super power!

Trump has issued pardons for a notorious international drug dealer, a man convicted of possessing child pornography and hundreds of violent extremists convicted for the January 6th attack on the Capitol. He has spread chaos and fear throughout the government, firing senior federal officials and even nobbling cancer research, as well as initiating initiated trumped-up investigations into the Biden administration. He has even threatened to abolish the country's federal dIsaster response body, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA. Trump has also given officials unprecedented authority to expedite deportations for up to one million immigrants who entered the country with government authorisation through two key Biden-era programmes.

Trump has already threatened allies - notably Denmark over Greenland - and predictably made threatening noises about aid to Ukraine. He has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords and the World Heath Organisation. Monstrously, he has suggested ethnically cleansing Gaza of Palestinians and dumping them in Egypt and Jordan. He's slapped 25% tariffs on Columbia for refusing planeloads of deported illegal immigrants. And all this before the end of his first weekend!

Andrew Gawthorpe @andygawt explains an increasingly bat-shit U.S. to his baffled readers in his highly thought of Substack column America Explained.

Nick Cohen's @NickCohen4 latest Substack column Writing from London on politics and culture from the UK and beyond.

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Nick Cohen @NickCohen4 dials up Washington to speak to namesake & fellow commentator Ben Cohen, editor of The Daily Banter website @thedailybanter about the coming Trumpian Terror, that starts in earnest following this week's presidential inauguration. The world is likely to witness the emergence of the U.S. as the world's biggest banana republic, headed by a billionaire oligarchy out-going President Joe Biden warned us all about.

Ben expects a revanchist reign of Terror from Donald Trump, with a purge of his enemies in the judicial system, the media, government and possibly even the military. '"There was a hit list ... that was just being shared in right wing circles," says Ben Cohen ." We know that the federal government is going to be raised from top to bottom of anybody they perceived as being loyal to Biden or the Democrats."

Ben says it's likely that politicians, military and government employees will be forced to an oath of loyalty to Trump, just as nobles and peasants were forced to sign oaths to medieval monarchs. Ben thinks this will also involve signing up to the biggest, baddest lie of all - that the 2020 presidential election was "stolen" by the Democrats. Ben adds, "I do know that a lot of people I know in government are busy, wiping their online profiles...because they're very worried about what the incoming administration is going to be doing."

The new Trumpian dystopia will descend very rapidly, says Ben. We can expect mass deportations of immigrants, attempts by Elon Musk to slash government spending by a staggering 80 per cent and a series of trade wars sparked by Trumpian tariffs. "It's going to be worse than you think it could possibly be," is Ben's grim prediction. He adds, "we are in uncharted territory and we are in with a government that is more radical than any government that I've seen in my lifetime, at least in America. I can't think of...and that's including the first Trump administration And that was generally a failure - the first Trump administration -because they weren't organised. But this is different."

Read Ben's The Banter Substacks here and listen to his podcasts here.

Nick Cohen's @NickCohen4 latest Substack column Writing from London on politics and culture from the UK and beyond.

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This week Nick Cohen @NickCohen4 talks with Steve Richards @steverichards14, political commentator, author, broadcaster & historian about the threat posed to the Labour government by in-coming U.S. president Donald Trump & the menagerie of far-right weirdos like Elon Musk who has been launching a barrage of inflammatory tweets at the government since last Summer.

Steve and Nick explore the post-war history of the U.S. - UK relationship which hit a severe low during the 1956 Suez crisis. But Steve says the threat posed by Trump & his gang was "much more dangerous." Eisenhower's administration was recognisably stolid & solid; Trump's government of MAGA nutjobs & fanatics looks set to be even worse than his first administration. The inauguration is only days away and already Trump has threatened to annex Canada, Greenland and the Panama canal! Brexit and Trump have made UK isolated from Europe & the U.S. "The British electorate has changed dramatically," says Steve. So, Starmer must be bold in dealing with the UK's isolation and continue rebuilding the country's relationship with Europe. Starmer's caution "isn't working", says Steve, adding, "it's risky being cautious, but they haven't realised that."

Steve says it's clear the Tories, particularly Kemi Badenoch & Robert Jenrick, have decided to throw their lot in with Trump/Musk & help them attack the government. "They have made a decision & they are going to ride these bonkers wild waves as much as possible," says Steve in relation to the the latest Musk X assaults including his deranged libels against Starmer over grooming gangs. Steve says of today's Tories: "they're a revolutionary party now...they're not the party of one nation kind of moderates."

Steve is an accomplished political commentator, author & podcaster. His latest book Turning Points: Crisis and Change in Modern Britain, from 1945 to Truss is published by Macmillan & his regular podcast Rock and Roll Politics is a must listen.

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Nick Cohen talks to investigative reporter & author Peter Geoghegan, the UK's leading journalist exposing the dark money and cash from right wing extremist billionaires that's been driving UK politics since the ill-fated 2016 Brexit referendum.

Peter @PeterKGeoghegan explains how Donald Trump's election victories, Brexit and the failed Liz Truss experiment have helped fuel a crackpot anglocentric extremist right wing movement that has taken root either side of the Atlantic. In London, Tufton Street so-called "think tanks" a-wash with dark money mainly from U.S. billionaires and corporations have been influencing UK politics - helping to drive a number of right wing culture wars from climate denial & Europe to Ukraine and the NHS.

This UK-U.S. phenomena was recently best exposed by the "National Conservatism Conference" in London in May 2023 which heard from a number of extreme right voices from either side of the Pond. Peter tells Nick: "You have a growing link between that sort of Trumpist right, the MAGA right, and ... the Right to the Conservative Party, Robert Jenrick, Liz Truss, people like that, all have strong links."

Peter says even if Trump stooge Elon Musk does not or cannot make good on his promise to bung Nigel Farage & his Reform gang a reported £100 million, the story has already boosted the radical right in the UK.

But Peter is despondent about the prospects of stopping foreign cash fuelling extremist politics in the UK. The Tories castrated the Electoral Commission, & Sir Keir Starmer shows no appetite to tackle the issue. Peter says Labour will reportedly not change electoral law because it "could stoke populism" if the government is seen to react to the threat posed by Trump, Musk & Farage. Peter adds, "I think is a completely crazy position to take, to say that we're not going to do something that we are actually philosophically in favour of ...because it, it might create a couple of bad headlines.

Peter Geoghegan's must read Substack is Democracy for Sale & his best selling book Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics is published by W.F.Howes Ltd.

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Nick Cohen reads the runes for 2025 with fellow Substackers and writers - Tim Walker @ThatTimWalker and Nick Tyrone @NicholasTyrone.

2025 promises to be full of nasty surprises - particularly following the inauguration of Donald Trump as the U.S.'s 47th presidents. Pardons for the thugs and insurrectionists of January 6th looks baked in and the impacts on Ukraine could b deadly.

Read Tim Walker's Substack column A Point of View. Tim, an established Fleet Street columnist and journalist, has written several plays including Bloody Difficult Woman about Gina Miller's brexit legal battle with Theresa May. He has a new political play in the new year on BBC Radio 4.

Nick Tyrone is an author, activist, policy advisor and commentator and keen observer of the Tory party whose Substack column as Neoliberal Centrist Dad - nick.tyrone.substack.com - is a must read for those of us desperate for the return of sanity to our national political discourse.

Nick Cohen's @NickCohen4 latest Substack column Writing from London on politics and culture from the UK and beyond.

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