Is the Policy Exchange think tank connected to the shape of Keir Starmer's Labour?

Watch British independent media for this story to emerge but there are several steps in a link between Starmer's Labour faction and the think tank.

Policy Exchange (PX) is one of the think tanks in the UK associated with the label “Tufton Street” since many have their address in one building, No.55. Many of those are connected as official partners to the Atlas Network. Policy Exchange claims to have left.

PX is notorious amongst other things for taking substantial fossil fuel money, drafting Tory Rishi Sunak’s draconian anti-protest laws, providing the Tory’s Net Zero minister, and encouraged the government to categorise Extinction Rebellion as “extremist”.

Policy Exchange has Australian former foreign minister Alexander Downer as Chairman of Trustees. He has contributed an essay to a PX anthology on the imperative of “restoring the nation state”, reflecting the ideology of national conservatism. Downer spoke of immigrant “Bantustans” at a Viktor Orbán thinktank event.

(Another contributor to the anthology is a new Reform candidate whom investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed has just revealed as having connections to “race science” promotion. Last year he was named a “visiting professor” at the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham whose partners includes bodies and publications connected to the notorious Pioneer Fund. PX is one of the members of this network, as are at least eight Atlas Network partners: the Centre’s director is a Manhattan Institute “Adjunct Fellow”.)

Policy Exchange is also noted as one of the key hubs in the promotion of demonising mis- and disinformation about Islam in the British side of that transnational network.

From Nafeez Ahmed in Byline Times. Labour MP Khalid Mahmood privately told Baroness Warsi, who has written a book about the threat to British Muslims posed by extreme Islamophobia, that he worked with the “dangerous” Policy Exchange to try to “temper” the speech.

Several affiliates of Policy Exchange have been placed in the House of Lords, which has lifelong repercussions for British politics.

It was Labour’s Ed Milliband who placed Labour’s Maurice Glasman in the Lords.

Policy Exchange also houses Lord Glasman’s “Future of the Left” project. It is headed by Jonathan Rutherford who considers it a “revolt against change”. It is the home of Blue Labour.

Blue Labour is the “Family, Flag and Faith” incarnation that holds ascendency in the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Glasman attended the Trump inauguration at the invitation of JD Vance and is a vocal supporter of that US faction, including Steve Bannon. Ahmed quotes Glasman on a podcast having “extolled the virtues of the MAGA project and berated ‘progressives’ as ‘a sickness’ and ‘the enemy’.”

Glasman is on the board of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship alongside longterm actors in the promotion of disinformation against Muslims. Also present are several past and aspirant Australian Prime Ministers.

Starmer’s aide Morgan McSweeney has left that role for recommending the Epstein-disgraced Peter Mandelson to be ambassador. Mandelson has just been arrested.

Maurice Glasman and Jonathan Rutherford were both active in the Labour Together think tank that investigative journalist Paul Holden exposed. Morgan McSweeney was head of that tank in 2020. Investigative journalist Peter Geoghegan describes McSweeney as the man who built it.

McSweeney has repeated the far right’s weaponisation of the “grooming gangs” story which has been exposed as a bigoted distortion of a genuine problem of child abuse.

From George Eaton in The New Statesman

Director of Labour Together was (now) MP and Cabinet Office minster Josh Simons. Holden has exposed his use of “reputation management” firms to silence investigative journalism, aiming to destroy reputations. Declassified UK here narrates the machinations of Labour Together and assorted figures within this network to bring down Jeremy Corbyn and replace him with Keir Starmer. Starmer has opened a (second) investigation into Simons’ activity.

Josh Simons is an affiliate member of Labour Friends of Israel. This report summarises Al Jazeera’s exposé of the hollowness of the campaign over Jeremy Corbyn and Labour’s “antisemitism” promoted in a BBC Panorama special. It includes Labour Friends of Israel’s links to the Jewish Division of the far right ethnostate organisation the English Defence League.

Also smeared were The Times’s investigative journalists Patrick Maguire, and Gabriel Pogrund, then investigating Labour Together’s scandals. Here Porgrund expresses his devastation at the distortion of his Jewishness in this activity. The book’s blurb describes the investigation: “Get In is a blistering narrative exposé of the most significant and ruthless political transformation in a generation. At its heart is Morgan McSweeney, a mastermind of political subterfuge and author of a strategy, years in the planning, to eviscerate the party, bury the left and rebuild it as a vote-winning machine. In Starmer he saw the perfect vessel for his vision: a man with no political identity but burning with ambition and a single all-consuming principle: to win.”

From Mic Wright on the “Starmtroopers” possibly overreaching in attacking Murdoch journalists, highlighting the in-house contradictions.

From investigative journalist Paul Holden, who wrote The Fraud about the “dirty tricks” campaign that brought down Corbyn and replaced him with Starmer.

Under Starmer, the proscription of Palestine Action has meant that the highest number of UK “terrorism” arrests and charges are currently of elderly people holding placards rejecting Britain’s support for genocide.