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Caoimhin O’Muraile  ☭ The British Labour Party came together in 1900 as the Labour Representation Committee consisting of the Fabian Society, the Independent Labour Party, social democrats and democratic socialists, and the largest organisation, the trade unions.

The LRC went on in 1906 to become the Labour Party standing in elections but, at the time, the Labour Party were in the shadow of the Liberal and Conservative parties. The hardy Scotsman, James Keir Hardie, was the party’s first parliamentary leader from 1906-1908 and the name ‘Keir’ is where any similarities with the present leader ends!

In those days liberal democracy was in its infancy and labour parties around Europe were considered revolutionary. Much early socialist thinking was based on the teachings of Karl Max and people like London Dockworkers Union and socialist organiser, Ben Tillet, flocked to the new party.

In 1917 the party inserted the fabled Clause IV into their constitution which made a commitment, on paper at least, to the common ownership of the means of production. Labour enjoyed electoral success in 1924 forming their first minority government under Ramsay McDonald. In 1929 McDonald and Labour won the election but failed to gain an overall majority and relied on Liberal Party support. In 1931 McDonald led a ‘National Government’ leading to his expulsion from the Labour Party. It was not until 1945 did the Labour Party under Clement Atlee enjoy real parliamentary success, defeating Winston Churchill and the Tories and for the first time implementing parts of Clause IV. The Atlee administration nationalised chunks of British industry, introduced the Welfare State including the National Health Service, unemployment benefit (though unemployment was virtually zero until Thatcher then all these hitherto hard-working people decided they would kick their jobs and go on the ‘dole’) and social security payments. Also introduced was the ‘pluralist’ system of industrial relations giving trade unions a greater say.

The party was part of the post war consensus in British parliamentary politics which lasted until the election of the right-wing Margaret Thatcher in 1979 finally ended this consensus. Callaghan was replaced as leader by a labour traditionalist, Michael Foot, who was persecuted by the right-wing media but stuck rigidly to his politics. Most of those principles the party was founded on are no longer present in today’s variant calling itself the ‘Labour Party’. It is not the party I grew up with when socialists and trade unionists were regular visitors to our house.

Labour enjoyed success in 1964, 1966 – some argued on the back of England’s World Cup success – under Harold Wilson. Wilson went to the polls again in 1970 calling a ‘snap election’ and lost to Edward Heath's Conservative and Unionist Party. Just as some claimed World Cup success guided Labour to victory in 1966 the reverse could be said – and was claimed by some – in 1970 after England crashed out of the competition to West Germany. Some claimed at the time this exit from the competition cost Labour the election? 

In the 1974 (ironically another World Cup year) general election Heath was booted out and Wilson was back in Number 10. He retired surprisingly in 1976 and Jim Callaghan assumed the leadership and role of Prime Minister. Callaghan lost the 1979 election and Thatcher became the first female – of sorts – Prime Minister in Britain. The Labour Party would not see parliamentary power again until 1997 under Tony (Tory) Blair. He was nicknamed this because he implemented many policies which would be associated with the Conservatives. Blair with his ‘Spin Doctor’ Peter Mandelson implemented many changes within the party supposedly making them “electable” - meaning betraying all Labour’s values and principles. Nobody told these that the art of politics certainly in their parliamentary sense is to persuade the electorate your policies are correct, not move towards the right. Blair and Mandelson, the latter being around chipping away at Labour values since Neil Kinnock's (pillocks) leadership, who had replaced Michael Foot after the 1983 election, advised Blair to abolish Clause IV and continue with the red rose instead of the red flag. This was the end of the British Labour Party despite winning the 1997 general election by a landslide. The party was now Labour in name only. When Blair got rid of Clause IV miner’s leader, Arthur Scargill, announced; “that man in there has just declared war on the working-class” and left the party as an individual, though the NUM continued to affiliate and contribute money to Blair's Labour Party as did and do many trade unions.

When Labour lost the 2015 election the then leader, Ed Miliband, stood down to be replaced by Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn offered some hope at revitalising the party and wanted to shift back to Labour values and principles. Corbyn was elected three times as leader by the then over 500,000 members despite the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) not wanting him. The 2017 general election saw Corbyn and Labour cut the Tory majority to just four. Tory leader and Prime Minister, Theresa May, was in tears as she had before the election a huge majority which she had now lost at the hands of Corbyn! Some Labour MPs, like Stephen Kinnock (son of Pillock) were in tears, not tears of happiness, but tears of sorrow because Jeremy Corbyn, and despite their best efforts, was proving popular among the electorate. If the PLP had got behind their leader as they should have done instead of undermining him at every opportunity then Labour could well have won the 2017 election. The PLP then set about a hatchet job on their leader who would have more knives in his back than did Julius Ceaser. Instead of Brutus and the Senate Corbyn had Margaret Hodge and the PLP out to get him. With their help the Conservative and Unionist Party won the 2019 general election by a landslide. Corbyn resigned as leader and was replaced by the two-faced Keir Starmer. Starmer had claimed he supported Corbyn when under attack but did not hesitate to expel the former leader from the party. Jeremy now stands as an Independent and holds his seat in Highbury and Islington, and continues to support Arsenal – good luck this year, anyone but City or Scousers!

Starmer and the party calling itself the ‘Labour Party’ won the 2024 general election with a record number of seats. Starmer was taking the party further to the right than did Blair and has betrayed even further the basic principles of the one-time Labour Party. Labours popularity with the electorate appears, in a short period of time, to have gone from an all-time high to a record low under Starmer. Despite this apparent decline in popularity Starmer continues with his policies. He is giving money to Ukraine to fight its war with Russia while, at the same time, implementing cuts in social security to the poor at home. In order to feed the Ukrainian war machine he proposed cuts in pensioners' heating allowance and despite how much many people support Ukraine in the war they do not expect to fund it through cuts to their own living standards, already at rock bottom! 

Starmer is also supplying arms to Ukraine under the false illusion Russia is a threat to Britain and the rest of Western Europe, which they are not, all of which cost money. He is talking about a ‘coalition of the Willing’ sending troops to aide Ukraine which would put Britain in a state of war with the planets largest nuclear power, Russia! Who is this fucking idiot? As the party continues to fall in the polls Starmer refuses to step down despite requests by some trade union leaders to do so. He believes his policies will bear fruit. But if things continue in this vein with support crumbling, even within the trade union movement, the Labour Party could well suffer the fate of the old Liberal Party, near extinction without actually dying! 

Never has a party lost support so rapidly as his government. With a huge majority, largely now on paper, they should be able to push policies easily through Parliament. The reason for their inability to do this comes not from Kemi Badenoch’s Tory opposition - they were nearly wiped out in 2024 - but from his own MPs. This is creating more than an illusion the party in government is split and fragmented. Despite all the signs Starmer continues his charge to the right trying to beat Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, a far-right party, in the right-wing race to the bottom. Starmer has become obsessed with these fascists and instead of beating them with left-wing ideology he is trying to emulate them. Could Starmer, like Blair before him I suspect, be an establishment mole in there to destroy the Labour Party from within? He has expelled anybody who holds traditional Labour left-wing views including a former leader!

On February 26th 2026 a by-election was held in Gorton and Denton, a seat held by Labour for almost a century, and Starmer’s Labour Party were humiliated into third place. The Greens, who now hold the mantle of ‘left-wing’ ideologists something Labour lost many years ago, won the seat with a landslide. They received 14,980 votes easily enough to see their candidate Hannah Spencer take the seat. The electorate, certainly in Gorton and Denton, voted for left-wing policies rejecting Starmer and his right-wing one-time Labour Party. The Labour candidate, Angeliki Stogia, came a humiliating third place behind Reform UK with 9,364 votes. Reform Candidate, Matt Goodwin, came second with a respectable 10,898 votes. Labour are already making excuses about ‘mid-term governments always suffering setbacks’ which is true but not to this extent. This was a humiliation, a hammering, a shattering blow for Starmer’s party. Reform are also looking for excuses as to why, as their leader Nigel Farage expected, they did not come first. Claims by party Chairman, David Bull, on BBC2 News on 27th February; “you saw around 12% of Muslim voters entering the polling booth with their wives which is illegal”. Could Reform’s major gripe be these voters voted Green and had nothing to do with so-called ‘family voting’? Either way Starmer has just suffered another crippling blow and the question must now be asked, what is the state of the British Labour Party? In a separate opinion voiced on the same programme it was claimed by a so-called political expert that the Greens could not “win a general election because their extreme policies include withdrawal from NATO”. Surely this would be a matter for the British electorate not the BBC? Or was this a subtle hint if they did win a general election their leader, Zack Polanski, could suffer the fate of Marxist Salvador Allende in Chile back in 1973 if Polanski became PM?

This defeat in the Gorton and Denton by-election is just another humiliation for Keir Starmer. He has been forced to U-Turn on so many occasions and this is the second by-election he has lost. Two safe Labour Party seats lost to either Reform UK or the Green Party. Reform UK won by just six votes the Runcorn and Helsby by-election beating Labour. On the same day Reform also swept the board in the council elections as the number of Labour Party councillors dwindled. All bad news for Starmer. 

The irony is it was Starmer who expelled former left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and it was the PLP who stabbed the same man in the back. The voters of Gorton and Denton voted for Corbyn policies, could this be repeated nationally? Not if the BBC and, I dare say, MI5 have their way! It was the polices similar to those of a former Labour leader expelled by Starmer which the electorate of Gorton and Denton voted in their droves for. Could there be a subtle message in this result? 

There is still time for the Labour Party to pull itself out of the ashes but not, I suspect, under this leader. Urgent repair work is needed and traitors like those who stabbed Jeremy Corbyn in the back, including Starmer, would have to go or take a back seat. Perhaps a think-tank could be organised consisting of sensible left-wing government MPs, Rachel Maskel MP for York comes to mind, starting by reducing money for Ukraine and spending on the home front. People want to see an improvement in living standards, safer working terms and conditions and a lot, lot less grovelling to US President and far-right nutter Donald Trump. Remember Britain has a Labour Government not a right-wing republican one based in Washington!!!
 
Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

The State Of The British Labour Party!

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And One

 

A Morning Thought @ 3077

Jim Duffy ✍ The US and Israeli attacks on Tehran have shown up again the usual phenomenon.

Iran had invested in top of the range aerial protection supplied by Russia. And yet it comprehensively failed, with Israeli and US missiles able to get through at will.The complete failure of Russian aerial protection also occurred in Syria, where rebels were able to use missiles to attack Assad's palace - forcing him to flee to Moscow. Russian aerial protection and Russian radar failed completely in Russian occupied territory in Ukraine, notably with the Kursk bridge, with Ukraine able to bomb the bridge. Russian protection and radar failed to protect Maduro.

Venezuela, Iran and elsewhere were allied to Russia. Lebanon wasn't, but bought top-of-the-range defence equipment to stop Israeli attacks on Beirut. It failed miserably, with Israel easily able to fire missiles at the city.

In fact, quite literally every where top-of-the-range Russian technology has been used to protect locations it has failed comprehensively and catastrophically. The same failure occurred with much of Russia's latest technology in Ukraine. Putin's major modernisation of the Armed Forces in the late 2010s was remarkably unsuccessful. One theory for the failure was that Oligarchs in a notoriously corrupt system (Putin has long been known in Russia as 'Mr Ten Percent' because he expects 10% of contracts to be paid to himself as a bribe - an approach copied by Trump, though he seems to want up to fifty percent to be given to him) took on the task of providing the latest kit and technology, only to provide cheap rubbish while they pocketed the loot.

Among the famous examples were tanks with no spare screws or spare parts, with the spare parts impossible to manufacture in Russia. Russia ended up raiding museums for World War II tanks. At least they knew from World War II and afterwards that they worked. The radios they bought broadcast on open channels, meaning that the Ukrainian military, neighbouring countries, NATO and even members of the public and broadcasters could listen into conversations. The kit supplied was famously substandard, and as was long feature of Russian wars, supply lines failed so comprehensively that Russian soldiers had to kill farm animals, and even rats, to eat as the food supply was intermittent and what was supplied was inedible. (In World War I, the complete breakdown in the supply lines was why the Russian army turned on the Tsar, seizing the Imperial Train and forcing him at gunpoint to abdicate. Catastrophic supply line breakdowns has been a phenomenon of Russian wars back to the Crimean War in the mid-nineteenth century.)

Nor has Putin shown any inclination or ability to rally to the support of Allies. Assad was told "you are on your own!" while a request to the Russian Foreign Minister by Iran for support was greeted with a promise to publicly criticise any US or Israeli attacks. In other words, no actual aid, just words. Then again, bogged down in a four year 'three day special operation' in Ukraine it has been reduced to relying on North Korea for troops, so it has no military to give aid to its allies.

Events in a number of countries show a Russia far weaker than its claims. Its neighbours fear it not from its military but from its history of brutality. Russia is far from the days of strength in the Soviet Union. Indeed, its weakness in Ukraine has shocked not just NATO but China also. They expected a quick defeat for Ukraine, not a weak Russia unable to defeat a smaller country with a far smaller armed forces.

While Russia talks as if it is still a great power, its inability to defend its allies, the failure of so much of its technology, and the far superior tactical skills of Ukraine, suggests that Russia is much weaker than it claims. It is not so much a great power as akin to Austria-Hungary or the Ottoman Empire in World World War I - in other words a great power in severe decline with an impression that it is stronger than it is. The failure of its top-of-the-range technology in Iran, and its inability to cope to its aid, as it was unable to come to aid to Assad, highlights once again that Russia is far weaker than it claims and thinks.

That does not mean it isn't dangerous, but its danger is not in conventional warfare or military technology, but in the area of cyber-warfare and disinformation. It also realises that democracies are highly vulnerable in their exposure with data cables, their reliance in their economy on connectivity, and in the spread of misinformation and disinformation. They are flaws the West needs to fix. It doesn't help that the critical connectivity points in Europe are located in the waters off Ireland, a country drunk on its neutrality delusions and with a barely functioning defence force.

⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Complete Failure Of Russian Aerial Protection

Ukraine Solidarity Group ✊ A Digest of News from Ukrainian Sources ⚔ 2-February-2026.

In this week’s bulletin

⬤ Bombing appeal to trade unions.
⬤ Peace talks farce.
⬤ Ukrainian PoWs tortured to death.
⬤ Further evidence of Russian torture and other crimes.
⬤ Ukrainian support for Palestine.

News from the territories occupied by Russia

Rescuing the living, searching for the dead (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 8th)

Russia’s terror by family: father and son get huge sentences on fabricated ‘Ukrainian saboteur’ charges (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 6th)

“Programs about Christ followed by beatings half to death”: Kherson’s ex-mayor Volodymyr Mykolaienko on his years in Russian captivity (The Insider, February 6th)

Materials on Russian Crimes in Crimea Presented in Washington (Crimea Platform, February 6th)

The Face of Resistance: The Story of Serhii Ofitserov (Crimea Platform, February 6th)

‘Guilty of not betraying Ukraine’. Russia’s supreme court imposes 13-year sentence against Oksana Hladkykh (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 5th)

Russia ‘arrests’ Crimean mother of two 15 months after abducting and hiding her (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 4th)

Weekly update on the situation in occupied Crimea (Crimea Platform, February 3rd)

Young Crimean deported from Kazakhstan to face huge sentence in Russia for donating money to Ukraine (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 3rd)

Russia sentences son of prominent Zaporizhzhia farmer to 15 years, after abducting father & son (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 2nd)

Abducted, tortured and sentenced to 17 years for opposing Russia’s invasion and for his love of Ukraine (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 2nd)

The Woman Who Didn’t Break. Part Four (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 1st)

News from Ukraine

Eternal memory to the miners murdered by Russia (Facebook, February 4th)

Bombed cities, freezing homes — a call to trade unions to stand with Ukraine (Youth Council of the Federation lf Trade Unions of Ukraine, February 2nd)

In war-torn Ukraine, showing sympathy for Palestine is no longer a taboo (Al Jazeera, February 2nd)

Apashe & Alina Pash – Kyiv (YouTube, January 20th)

War-related news from Russia

Ukrainian prisoners of war tortured to death in Russian captivity (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 8th)

In Search of Russia’s Lost Opposition (Jacobin, February 6th)

Rubber-stamping rejections. Germany turns away Russian army deserters (Mediazona, 5 February)

Russian plan to impose a single, state-backed digital messenger (Posle.Media, 4 February)

The surreal trial of Artemy Ostanin. Six years for a joke (Mediazona, 4 February)

The Antichrist Today: Russian Conservative and Techno-Enlightenment Versions (Ilya Budraitskis, Eflux, February 4th)

Russian Deserters and Kenyan Job Seekers (Russian Reader, February 3rd)

Military Ecology and Russia’s War Machine (Posle.Media, January 28th)

Analysis and comment

Farcical peace talks in Abu Dhabi resolve nothing as Ukraine shivers under Russia’s winter onslaught (The Conversation, February 5th)

End of Russian gas imports to the EU: closer than ever (OSW, January 16th)

International solidarity

Unison activists: we shared the reality of today’s Ukraine (Facebook, February 6th)

Solidarity motion with Ukraine by independent PCS left (Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, 4 February)

From 20 February to 6 March, we call on friends, comrades, and anti-authoritarian groups worldwide to take part in 2 weeks of Action (Solidarity Collectives, February 3rd)

Upcoming events

Saturday 21 February, 2.0pm, Piccadilly Circus, London. Demonstration: “Russian troops out. Stand with Ukraine!” on 4th anniversary of full-scale Russian invasion

Wednesday 4 March, 6–8pm, Ukraine Solidarity Campaign Public Meeting. Wilson Room, Portcullis House, Parliament, 1 Victoria Embankment, London SW1A 2JR. Chair: John McDonnell MP. Speakers include: Mick Antoniw MS / Yuliya Yurchenko, Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine / Yuliia Bond, Ukrainian Association of Wales / Tanya Vyhovsky, Vermont State Senator / Mariia Pastukh, Vsesvit – Ukraine Solidarity Collective / Johanna Baxter MP / Clive Lewis MP / Stephen Russell, TUC International / Mick Whelan, former ASLEF General Secretary

🔴This bulletin is put together by labour movement activists in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance. More information at Ukraine Information Group.

We are also on twitter. Our aim is to circulate information in English that to the best of our knowledge is reliable. If you have something you think we should include, please send it to 2U022ukrainesolidarity@gmail.com.


We are now on Facebook and Substack! Please subscribe and tell friends. Better still, people can email us at 2022ukrainesolidarity@gmail.com, and we’ll send them the bulletin direct every Monday. The full-scale Russian assault on Ukraine is going into its third year: we’ll keep information and analysis coming, for as long as it takes.

The bulletin is also stored on line here.

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News From Ukraine 💣 Bulletin 182

Seamus Kearney 🎤 Cowards die many times before their deaths, the valiant taste death only once' - William Shakespeare @ Julius Caesar.


In the aftermath of the Loughgall ambush, code named ' Operation Judy', on 8th May 1987 in which 8 heavily armed IRA Volunteers were killed by a 24 strong squad from the SAS, an IRA enquiry was launched into the circumstances surrounding the operation.

Alongside the IRA 's Northern Command operations officer, the OC of the Internal Security Unit, Freddie Scappaticci, got to work on attempting to ascertain what exactly happened. Fundamentally, British Intelligence, through their agent Scappaticci, were made aware of every aspect of the IRA enquiry, including the names of IRA personnel who escaped the ambush, safe houses, billets on the night before the operation, where the weapons were stored, etc. As it turned out the enquiry was inconclusive and a shadow of doubt would continue to hang over the Loughgall ambush for years to come.

After moving a quantity of explosives from an IRA dump to a safe house in 1981, Joe Fenton was arrested and taken to Castlereagh Interrogation Centre. A Special Branch officer told him that they were aware of his work for the IRA and in particular the transporting of a quantity of explosives. With nowhere to turn Joe Fenton, through threats and blandishments, agreed to work for Special Branch and thus entered a world of espionage and the dark art of spying on the Provisional IRA.

His main handler, who controlled a total of 18 agents from the IRA, INLA and Loyalist paramilitaries, provided him with survival techniques in the field and protected him to the utmost.

In 1982, Special Branch provided Fenton with 15,000 pounds sterling to set up his own estate agency, Ideal Homes on the Falls Road, West Belfast. He also received supplementary payments of over 2,000 pounds sterling. As an estate agent he was able to offer the Provisional IRA empty houses, meeting houses and temporary arms dumps. After taking up the offer, Special Branch proceeded to bug the IRA houses and thereby penetrate the IRA's Belfast Brigade, virtually wiping out their weapons dumps and Active Service Units from 1982 onwards.

In 1985 Fenton panicked and told his handler that his nerve had gone and cited that the IRA were investigating a number of botched operations, which he felt could lead to him.

His handler passed his concerns up the chain of command to the TCG, which made a corporate decision to sacrifice two of their own agents in order to deflect from Fenton. Subsequently, the handler passed the two names over to Fenton, who in turn passed the names to his senior Belfast Brigade contact. Within days the Brigade had invited in the Internal Security Unit to investigate the pair and Freddie Scappaticci kept his handler informed from that point onwards.
 
As a result of the TCG's actions a husband and wife, Gerard and Catherine Mahon, were arrested and interrogated by Scappaticci and his British agents within the ISU, and subsequently executed on 9th September 1985. Catherine, after seeing her husband being shot in front of her, broke loose and attempted to run away but was shot in the back. Both died at the scene and Joe Fenton gained a new leash of life.

Two years later in 1987 Fenton was again under pressure after a series of seizures and compromised IRA operations left him vulnerable again. He complained to his handler that he needed the pressure off him and the handler sent his concerns up to the TCG. Within a short space of time another person's name was handed over to Fenton via his handler and on 12th April 1987 Charles Mcllmurray was abducted by Scappaticci and the ISU, interrogated and executed. His body was found in a van left at the rear of a service station at Killeen, on the border.

Despite his long service with the British, Joe Fenton's fortune was about to end with the release of his nemesis, Brendan Hughes (The Dark) in November 1986. When Brendan was offered one of Fenton's bugged houses in Rockville Street, Falls Road, he declined the offer and became suspicious of Fenton and his relationship with the Belfast Brigade IRA. When he voiced his concerns over Fenton he was ignored, but Fenton panicked when his Belfast Brigade contact told him that Brendan Hughes was suspicious of him.

After a mortar team was captured in the Andersonstown area during the Summer of 1988 the suspicion on Fenton grew, especially after a link between the British successes and properties provided by Ideal Homes was established.
 
Inevitably, the Belfast Brigade invited in Freddie Scappaticci to investigate Joe Fenton in August 1988, the meeting between Scappaticci and Fenton taking place in the Lower Falls area. The actual meeting was a mild affair, but Fenton left it dishevelled and disorientated, and informed his handler that his nerves were at breaking point. The fact that Brendan Hughes was gunning for him sent a shiver up his spine. In the latter half of 1988 his business, Ideal Homes, began to crumble and he lost interest in business as the IRA lost interest in him. He was no longer an asset to the British nor the IRA, and this had a detrimental impact on his overall health.

He went to England on the pretext of going to a boxing match and disappeared for around eleven days in February 1989. Brendan Hughes left instructions with Scappaticci and the ISU that Joe Fenton was to be lifted by them on his return and taken across the border to be interrogated by him personally.
Meanwhile, Fenton met his long term handler, the Special Branch officer who had controlled him from the start, at an address in England. He was in an extremely distressed and agitated state, babbling on about Brendan Hughes finally exposing him and expressing a determination not to return to Belfast.
Despite his best efforts to impress upon his superiors in the TCG that Fenton had lost his nerve and needed to be extracted forthwith, the handler failed and Fenton was told to return to Belfast.

The only way they could get Fenton to calm down and agree to return to his native city was by telling him that the 'cavalry' would come and rescue him if he was abducted by the IRA. Furthermore, it was stressed to him that the people who would interrogate him would be on the same team, a reference to Freddie Scappaticci and co. As a result Joe Fenton agreed to return to Belfast.

Seamus Kearney is a former Blanketman and author of  
No Greater Love - The Memoirs of Seamus Kearney.

Stakeknife 🕵 The Rise And Fall 🕵 Act ⅤⅠⅠⅠ

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred

 

A Morning Thought @ 3076

Gary Robertson ⚽ Tuesday and what some refer to as the “New Firm” Derby. 

Dundee Utd at home to Aberdeen. A match that promised little delivered little and honestly the highlight of the match for Utd fans was a Camara volley, beautifully taken that crashed off the post and across the Aberdeen goal before being ushered away. In the second half the usually reliable Kevin Nesbit fluffed his lines big time by rolling the ball past an open goal. Final result 0-0. A point apiece that suited no one.
 
On a night for draws, in the championship games between Dunfermline v Partick and Queens Park v St Johnstone finished 2-2 and 1-1 respectively, and keeps the saints top of the league by three points. Partick squandered this opportunity to close the gap.
 
The first of the Challenge Cup semis was played with Scott Brown's championship side Ayr United facing high flying Inverness of League One. The final result being 2-1 to the visitors. With Ayr United in a playoff spot for the SPL whilst a trophy is nice the team from the town of “Honest men and Bonnie lassies” have their eyes, I suspect, focused on bigger prizes.
 
Wednesday saw championship sides Airdrie and Raith rovers battle out a 1-1 draw in the second semi final of the Challenge Cup, the home side eventually coming out the victors, winning 5-3 on penalties.
 
Thursday and Celtic travelled to Stuttgart more in hope than expectation of restoring at least a little pride after the bruising home defeat by the Germans. An early Luke McCowan goal settled nerves and for a while what seemed impossible hours before allowed us the hope of “what if?” 30 seconds in 1-0 to Celtic. However dreams rarely if ever come true and Stuttgart progressed to the next round but the Bhoys can come away from that with their heads held high as thoughts now turned to Sunday and the Glasgow Derby.
 
Goals galore on Saturday in the SPL, seventeen in fact with the highlight being Falkirk's 5-1 demolition of shellshocked Kilmarnock.
 
First up, Dens park where 6 goals were shared between Dundee and Hibernian. In the battle for European places this was a blow for Hibernian who looked set to collect 3 points before a 95th minute equaliser by the home side's Congreve sent the Edinburgh men back to Easter road licking their wounds. The pick of the goals being a superb shot by Hib's Suto. A cross field ball brilliantly controlled, and evading two Dundee defenders and keeper, bulleted home in the 84th minute to restore parity before McGrath once again gave the visitors the lead before the late equaliser. A thrilling match and a draw being perhaps the right result as neither deserved to lose this encounter. Throughly enjoyable to watch.
 
Less so perhaps Hearts who faced Aberdeen at Tynecastle with the prospect of extending their lead at the top of the table. A match won by a solitary goal by Braga and the home side went seven points clear. A game of very little quality and little to get excited about but enough to send the Jambo faithful home one step closer to a title party.
 
Performance of the day at the Falkirk Stadium where an own goal by Kilmarnock's Brown in the 11th minute opened the floodgates and a deflated Kilmarnock were steamrollered by a rampant Falkirk. Whilst the away team managed a goal on 40 mins by Kiltie the damage was already done. 3-1 at half time adding two further in the second half and a punishing performance by McGlynn's men. It’s been a difficult eight days for Neil McCann and Kilmarnock.
 
Motherwell did what Motherwell do and as the sun shone on Fir Park, a touch of spring in the air, the home side ran out 2-0 winners over Dundee Utd. A double by Maswanhise, the first from the penalty spot after 37 mins, and his brace completed on 46 mins, the Steelmen can quite rightly be proud of their recent form and could yet challenge for third place.
 
Doomed Livingston managed to scrap out a 1-1 draw with St Mirren to take them within 7 points of eleventh placed Kilmarnock and with time running out it would take a miracle of biblical proportions to save their season.
 
In the Championship St Johnstone restored their five point lead with an emphatic 3-1 victory over Ayr whilst their nearest challengers Partick played out a goalless draw with third placed Arbroath.
 
League One, and Inverness saw their lead cut to three points after a disappointing (and for me coupon busting) goalless draw with bottom of the table Kelty Hearts. Their nearest pursuers, Stenhousemuir, getting the job done by a solitary goal over Cove Rangers.
 
League Two - East Kilbride maintained their 5 point lead with a 3-1 victory over Clyde whilst second placed Spartans (still with two games in hand) crushed Annan 4-0.
 
So to Sunday …
 
Now anyone that reads my social media posts will know that before Thursday I was not looking forward to the trip to Ibrox. The home side looking like they have their act together under
Röhl. and Celtics MON having to patch together a team of half fit and disinterested players the signs we’re looking ominous. However Thursday gave Celtic fans at least a glimmer of hope. So as the teams took to the pitch, the Rangers to the strains of Tina Turner and “Simply the best” (in Govan perhaps but one title in 14 years does have fans of other teams sniggering at their delusion - even some home fans cringe at the playing of the track but I digress) and the sea of colour that one comes to expect at these “games” it all looked set for an exciting afternoon.
 
I remember once describing my first experience of what was then the Old Firm Derby as “frightening”, and mocked relentlessly for it, (I mean how dare a five year old from the countryside get overwhelmed on such a big occasion) and now as I’m older (much older) I still feel myself charged with an electricity, as I’m sure all fans of both clubs do, at kick off. It wasn’t to last though as right from the first whistle it was clear the better team were the men in red white and blue. Celtic's passing was sloppy, their marking way off, and were made to pay in the eighth minute when a spectacular overhead kick from Chermiti sent the majority of the 50,000 watching and millions around the world into raptures. In fairness, sat by the TV, even I applauded the goal. A piece of individual skill and brilliance from a player whom the Rangers will do well to hang on too as surely his numbers have not gone unnoticed from bigger teams and leagues. 

A comedy of errors continued for Celtic in the first half, and in the 26th min the big man from Santa Maria capitalised on an error by Celtic defender Dane Murray and stole the ball from Arajuo before firing home from close range to give the Gers a 2-0 lead. Jubilant Rangers fans and despairing Celtic fans at half time as three points looked certain to stay at Ibrox. 

At half time I phoned my son to talk about the game but found out he’d chosen to make a cheesecake instead as he was far from optimistic of a result. In fairness I couldn’t argue with him as right now the only thing Celtic were cooking up was a whole load of trouble and a league season ending humiliation. As the teams came out for the second half I feared more of the same and with a scuffed shot by Moore in the 47th minute landing comfortably in the arms of Sinisalo it all looked ominous for Celtic. The footballing Gods had other ideas though and Celtic pressure began to force the Rangers to defend and finally in the 56th minute a cross from Nygren was nodded into the net by Kieran Tierney. 

The clock in Ibrox showed 13-13 and the game swung Celtic's way. Relentless pressure from the Hoops but from some world class keeping from Butland the Celts could easily have had two or three more.
 
Then the controversy. The 88th minute a header from Maeda judged to have been handled by Rangers' Sterling and John Beaton was called to VAR to make a very big decision.
 
Penalty to Celtic!!
 
Up stepped Reo Hatate with the whole of Celtic's league season on his shoulders, the eyes of millions of fans on him. Prayers offered up to various deities for him to score or miss depending on your viewpoint.
 
The penalty taken and two magnificent saves by Butland kept the ball out before finally being bundled into the net by a much relieved Hatate.
 
The comeback complete and with stoppage time looming could a winner be found?
 
The final whistle and a 2-2 result that certainly suited the away fans more who with a game in hand now see second as a real possibility, some even still believe the league can be won.
 
The frustration boiled over after the final whistle. Clearly the most frustrated being Rangers who snatched a draw from the jaws of victory.
 
We go again next weekend but this time in the Scottish Cup.
 
And whilst I was happy with the point as the dust settled a message from a friend reminded me who the big winners were this weekend - Heart of Midlothian.
 
The title is theirs to lose now .. the run in will be interesting.
 
Celtic with a rearranged midweek match against Aberdeen can now regain second spot, however. But for me, now hanging onto second and perhaps a Scottish cup victory will be an achievement in itself.
 
Let me add purely from a footballing point of view the job Danny Röhl has done at Rangers this season is well worthy of praise and I’m sure success is just around the corner even if it is some time before they’re “simply the best” again.

Til next time ….

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

Hearts ⚽ Big Weekend Winners

Organisation For Women’s Liberation-Iran 🏴Statement on 2-March-2026.

Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq, a member of the central committee of the Communist Alternative Organisation and a prominent feminist, was assassinated this morning in Baghdad.

Yanar Mohammed
We condemn this brutal crime and offer our sincere condolences to her family, comrades and friends for this great loss.
 
Thanks to the military aggression of the United States and the West, Iraq has become a hotbed of terrorism for three decades now. Chaos, riots and terror are a permanent part of the shattered Iraqi society. Every day, several lives are lost and hundreds of people face constant harassment and pressure from these thugs. 

Unfortunately, following the brutal attack by Israel and the United States on Iran, chaos and terrorist crimes will spread in the region.

Freedom-loving and justice-seeking humanity must rise up against the monsters that created and feed terrorism. By targeting the source we might be able to stop the killing, crime and destruction in the region. We must build a strong barrier against these terrorist organisations from all sides, Islamic and State (US/Israel and the West.)

Yanar Mohammed Assassinated

Dixie Elliot ✊I have noticed that the Far-Right here in Ireland are still spreading the black propaganda of the Epstein Axis of Evil, Trump and Netanyahu, that the Iranians admitted to accidently bombing the girls' primary school in Southern Iran.
 
The Iranians admitted nothing of the sort, and it has since been proven that the lie began when a fake post appeared on social media claiming that Iran had made the admission and was quickly spread by cretins who feed on racial hatred and gleefully support the genocide of innocents.
 
Yesterday, March 2nd, the United Nations Educational Agency, UNESCO, released a statement condemning the bombing of the Iranian girls school which killed around 150.
 
It said that 'the school was struck during US and Israel military attacks on Iran on Saturday.'

These screenshots should be used to counter the black lies of the Epstein Axis of Evil and the human maggots who spread them . . . 









Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman.
Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie

Black Lies

Barry Gilheany ✍😔 Writing about the proliferation of far right loudmouths like the white US supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes and the UK anti-Islam, anti-immigration figure Tommy Robinson on social media who seem to outbid each other to say the most outrageous and offensive things, the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland writes that they are competing in an attention economy.[1] 

For the past few years, writers and reformers have issued siren warnings about how platforms like X/Twitter have become a toxic sludge of hate speech and disinformation giving a bully pulpit to extreme voices such Advance UK, a political party that now includes Tommy Robinson and that vows to ban indefinite leave to remain, ban the foreign -born from becoming British citizens and encourage all settled migrants to leave. That its candidate polled less than the Monster Raving Looney Party candidate in last week’s Gorton and Denton by-election and that it is competing with other micro outfits like Reclaim UK and Restore UK to leech support away from, in the words of Elon Musk, the “weak sauce” of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK does not detract from its contribution to the, as the late E.L. Doctorow put it, the steady “enshittification” of the internet. But it is the role of the attention economy in facilitating surveillance capitalism and its colonisation of humanity’s cognitive and deliberative capacities and one very real human casualty of it – the death by suicide of 14-year-old Molly Russell that is the overarching concern of this article.

In 1971, the economist Herbert Simon, when pondering the problem of information overload, opined that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”. Since his primary interest was in organisations, Simon saw this as a problem to be solved. In the 1990s, the moguls of Silicon Valley seized upon this opportunity. For if attention had become the scarce commodity in a newly networked economy, if it was possible to capture it, sell access to it to advertisers and monitor what it revealed, the world could be your oyster. It was the beginning of what the writer Michael Goldhaber called the “attention economy.” First out of the traps was Google with its user friendly, all things to all people search engine – the Universal Library of Things. It monitored what the users searched for and used the resulting data to improve the search engine. However this did not satisfy the company’s venture capital investors who demanded a business model. The Google bros then realised that they could use their monitoring data as raw material for a machine learning algorithm that provided outputted information about users whom advertisers might be interested in.[2]

Thus was born what the Harvard academic Shoshana Zuboff has labelled “surveillance capitalism.” In its Manifesto for Attention Liberation, The Friends of Attention describes how both surveillance capitalism and the attention economy have created a business model for us. Over the past three decades, the explosive growth of the internet and the global proliferation of data devices have meshed with a series of shortsighted political decisions: along the way, the entrepreneurial savviness of the Tech Bros has produced, in effect, an ostensibly “free” digital universe – whose hidden operating cost is the depletion and pollution of the minds and sense of its users.[3]

For attention activists, the business model of the “attention economy” is a globe-spanning industrial farm that extracts money from a billion vegetative humans suspended in an infinite web, eyes glazed. In this dystopia, humanity devotes almost the entirety of its waking hours in digital spaces substantially financed by extractive profit models that systematically tap human beings for the monetary value of our eyeballs. This twelve-trillion-dollar operation motors a global-scale, computationally intensive, and commercially lucrative system for the sourcing, aggregation, and nonstop auction-market of human attention. The fundamental immorality of analysing this business model in cost-benefit terms is that our dehumanisation cannot be quantified. In the words of Burnett et al, this is not a conversation about trade-offs. It is a conversation about coercion, theft, and the instrumentalization of human life.[4]

The global behemoth that is the attention economy is comprised of the world’s largest five companies who are all technology providers (Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet or Google, and Amazon) and who are each valued at more than two trillion.  Four of the five have billions of customers who use their products more or less continuously, and whose data-commodification constitutes a central business operation. The fifth makes the chips that power the processing and manipulation of that data by means of algorithmic AI. The Big Tech empire exploits the invisible iron cage ubiquity of its digital platforms to garner information about us – our clicks and keystrokes, our blinks and grimaces, our typos, and our personality types – and then input these data into giant predictive technologies. In turn our profiles, preferences, foibles, and projected future personalities are sold off to the highest bidder.[5]

The harms of this new economy are conceptualised by the Attention Liberation Movement as “human fracking.” For just as petroleum fracking is wreaking irreversible damage to our external environment (our woods and fields, our water and sky), while the human frackers are inflicting possibly permanent damage to our interior environment (our minds and hearts, our thinking and deliberative abilities, and our ability to be and to suit with ourselves and the people we love.[6]

The advent of the app ChatGPT in November 2022 which rapidly became the fastest-growing app in the world has raised for some commentators the prospect of the demise of the attention economy. For why not type that search which one would have automatically inputted into Google into ChatGPT instead. Surely the innovation of chatbots and LLMs (large language models) would sound the death knell of the attention economy. This conundrum is addressed by the Cambridge researchers, Yaqub Chaudhary and Jonnie Penn, in the Harvard Data Science Review where they develop their thesis on the “intention economy” a prospect which they view as a “lucrative yet troubling new marketplace for digital signals of intent,” from buying cinema tickets to voting for political candidates. This model is one of a marketplace for behavioural and psychological data that signals human intent and operates through natural language interfaces powered by LLMs. In the view of John Naughton, this differs from the attention economy in that it trades on users’ limited attention spans through advertising whereas the difference in the beast that is the intention economy trades on signals that predict, shape and game human intention before actions occur and so facilitates much deeper psychological manipulation through personalised AI interactions. This MO enables “conversation” with chatbots in free and unguarded ways heightening the risk of signposting to dangerous forums such as pro-anorexia and suicide websites. The plausibility and false authenticity is powered by the ability of LLMs to infer private attributes from conversations (while, incidentally, bypassing the cookie restrictions which so aggravate the advertisers and hucksters of the supposedly ancient attention economy).[7]

Regardless of any such academic or structural differentials within the new information economy, the human casualties of the aforementioned models and the deleterious effects on public life are stark. Be it the harvesting of the data of unsuspecting Facebook users by the rogue research company Cambridge Analytica in order to facilitate the victory of Leave in the 2016 EU Referendum in the UK; the flooding of the zone by shit (in Steve Bannon’s words) generated by the bot factories in St Petersburg to cause maximum disruption of US Presidential election and to bolster Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine and the coarsening of public discourse by the rage machine that is Twitter; social media networks appear to have lost their emancipatory lure and potential since the heady days of the Arab Spring. The foremost critic of the erosion of democracy is Shoshana Zuboff who in her 2019 seminal work The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power documents the conditions of online surveillance we all live under, the covert harvesting of private data that enables targeted advertising and allows for our emotional manipulation. This week will see on both cinematic and television screen the fruits of her collaboration with the British film maker film-maker Marc Silver the documentary Molly vs the Machines which was due to be shown at the Glasgow film festival on 1 March, having its simultaneous UK premiere, before being broadcast on Channel 4 on 5 March.[8]

The shift in the global economic paradigm that Zuboff so meticulously and coruscatingly documents in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is heartbreakingly humanised the destructive effects of Big Tech’s business model on the most interpersonal level. Molly was recorded and monitored for most of her adolescence, particularly after she downloaded Instagram and Pininterest. These apps function by tracking their “users” (drugs and social media – those are the only times they become “users” [“customers,” anybody?] and supplying them with the content that will keep them using. Though clearly struggling and negotiating with the ordinary pressures and unhappiness of adolescence, the algorithms Molly encountered online were tailored by an inhumane mechanism, supplying her content that reflected her unhappiness until it became unbearable.[9]

The coroner at Molly’s inquest ruled that she died “from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content.” The most poignant and powerful testimony in the film comes from Molly’s schoolfriends who concur with the coroner’s verdict. They saw they were shocked to learn after her death how she had been persistently measuring her stomach and looking at so much negative self-imagery. Guiltily, most of them confess they still look at Instagram on their own phones. For Zuboff, they are all victims of the tech monopolies’ strategy: “Where the algorithm senses high levels of engagement, it gives that material pride of place,” she says. “It will amplify it and it will send it out, as happened to Molly in the last months of her young life. She received hundreds of grotesque messages and images depicting suicide and self-harm.” Thus Molly Russell has yet another example of how, in Zuboff’s trenchant words, of how society has sent its precious young “like canaries in the coalmine” into a “death march with the all-seeing algorithm.”[10]

So the short span of Molly’s life parallels the trajectory of the development of the social media platforms, as they first learned to harvest and monetise our private information, then to predict our habits and eventually to shape them. Her story is the haunting backdrop to, and shadow of the “breakthrough idea that human behaviour should be treated as a commodity” [11]the genealogy of which Zuboff has so diligently and starkly chronicled.

The addictive nature of much social media output and their role in fuelling not just the global Triple P virus of Populism, Polarisation and Post-Truth but their assault on privacy and the developmental health of young people has led to a growing national and international clamour for the prohibition of access to social media to young people under the age of sixteen. Just such a ban has been instituted in Australia. Similar restrictions are coming down the track in France and Spain, and at least 15 European governments are looking at comparative measures. Last month, Keir Starmer gave full backing to establishing a consultation for a British minimum age for social media age. 

For Shoshana Zuboff, the iniquity of Big Tech’s attacks on privacy and the democracy of the public square is a moral crusade of our time, comparable to the abolition of slavery and child labour. For her the abolition of the business model behind the MO of the sites that Big Tech runs is essential rather than a mere prohibition for children. A social media ban for children is opposed by Ian Russell, father of Molly, who now chairs the Molly Rose Foundation and has, through grief, become an advocate to the accountability of social media platforms. 

The toxic effects on the developing minds and brains of children and young people of bad actors on social media are undeniable. But should the baby of the totality of digital media be thrown out with the bathwater of the effluent of the sites like the algorithm ones that drove a 14-year-old girl with all her life and potential in front of her to her death? How would such a ban be practically enforced? Human nature being what it is, prohibition always creates the allure of the forbidden fruit for those predisposed to testing boundaries. Is there universal consensus as to the inherent dangers to health of social media sites as there is in relation to tobacco and certain controlled drugs? While child protection must always be an overriding public duty and societal value, can some latitude be afforded to children’s natural curiosity and desire for experimentation? Debate around an under 16 ban still leaves unaddressed the wider harms of the monetised and behaviour altering model of the digital information economy whether in its attention or intention formats. The reclamation of our futures from the empire builders of Silicon Valley has to be an animating cause, even crusade, for our times.
 
References

[1] Jonathan Freedland. Here are the powerful men making racists feel great again. Guardian Journal. 14 February 2026 pp.1-2

[2] John Naughton, Big tach profited from our attention – now AI wants to monetise intentions. The Observer - Science & Tech 22 February 2026 p.19

[3] D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt, eds. (2026). The Friends of Attention Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. London: Particular Books p.25

[4] Ibid, pp.25-26

[5] Ibid, p.26

[6] Ibid, pp.33-35

[7] Naughton, op cit.

[8] Abolition is the correct response to a moral catastrophe. The Observer - Interview 22 February 2026 pp.17-18

[9] Nicholas Harris. The cost of an online childhood. New Statesman -Television 27 February – 5 March 2026 pp. 60-61

[10] Observer - Interview, p.18

[11] Ibid 

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

It’s The Attention Economy, Stupid 🪶 The World Of Information Dystopia And Its Human Casualties

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