MI6 enters the Labour leadership debate with vintage "Red Smear" piece in the Torygraph

[Paul Rigby]

This threat of a mutiny thing - there is a standing plan for Guards units to take control of broadcast-comms-transport-govt infrastructure. Forgotten what it's called, but it's a full plan, on the desk, ready to go. "In 1974 the Army occupied Heathrow Airport on the grounds of training for possible IRA terrorist action at the airport. However Baroness Falkender (a senior aide and close friend of Wilson) asserted that the operation was ordered as a practice-run for a military takeover or as a show of strength, as the government itself was not informed of such an exercise based around a key point in the nation's transport infrastructure.[SUP][10][/SUP]" from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Wil..._coup_plot sounds reasonable enough. Reminds me of the 'tanks' that turned-up at Heathrow a while ago.
Ho-hum.

It's the British establishment that has a problem with democracy

The elite has little time for elections that deliver the wrong results. And Jeremy Corbyn's was one of them

By Seamus Milne

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree...emy-corbyn

If there were any doubts that the British establishment has a problem with democracy, the last few days should have put them to rest. First there was the drama of the spurned Tory donor and piggate. Unsurprisingly, Michael Ashcroft's revelation that the prime minister simulated oral sex with a dead pig as part of a student initiation ceremony has been the centre of attention.

The question of whether David Cameron lied about when he knew of the former Conservative treasurer and donor's continuing non-dom tax status meaning Ashcroft paid no tax in Britain on his overseas earnings was dutifully raised by Labour and SNP MPs. Both Ashcroft and the Tories had promised he would take up permanent UK residence when he was given a peerage in 2000.

But the real scandal is that Ashcroft, like so many party donors before him, simply paid up and pocketed his unelected seat in parliament in return. His later argument with Cameron was apparently only about whether a "significant" government job was also included in the package for his £8m of donations. And the evidence suggests Cameron only dropped it because of embarrassment over the "non-dom" deceit.

But it's not as if Ashcroft's expectations were at all unreasonable, based on experience. Rewarding major donors with seats in parliament and jobs in government is a long-established British tradition. Statistical analysis has disposed of any vestigial doubt that this exchange is what is still going on. Among many others, John Nash, the venture capitalist with education and health interests, was given a peerage and a job as schools minister in 2013. David Sainsbury was made science minister in Tony Blair's government after donating millions of pounds to the New Labour. Outrageously, but to no great surprise, government jobs and seats in the legislature are very much tradeable commodities in the mother of parliaments.

The second shaft of light thrown on the contempt for democracy among the British elite appeared at the weekend, when a "senior serving general" in the British army told the Sunday Times that the armed forces would take "direct action" and "mutiny" if Jeremy Corbyn were to become prime minister. "Fair means or foul", the general reportedly declared, would be used to protect the country's "security".

At face value that is a threat of a coup against a future elected government and an attack on national security. Of course, the bluster of one unnamed general against the newly elected Labour leader is a long way from the reality of tanks on the streets, or even military insubordination against elected leaders. And the British military has in any case a long record of suppressing democracy around the world.

It's clear the problem unelected officials have goes far beyond the odd bilious general

But the lack of official and media response to the kind of openly anti-democratic top-brass talk that's not been heard in Britain since the 1970s and would be denounced as treasonable anywhere else is remarkable. The comments by the general were unacceptable and "not helpful", was the most the Ministry of Defence could manage. Self-evidently, the general should be disciplined. But the government ruled out even an inquiry on the grounds that it would be "almost impossible" to identify the culprit among 100 serving generals.

It's only necessary to imagine what would happen if a Muslim had threatened "direct action" against elected leaders to grasp the absurdity of the response. Add in the fact that the intelligence services have also said they will "restrict" information to Corbyn "or any of his cabinet" because of the opposition leader's "detestation of Britain's security services" and it's clear the problem unelected officials have with elected politicians who disagree with them goes far beyond the odd bilious general.

But political corruption and the implacable opposition of the spooks and military to progressive change are the traditional forms of anti-democratic politics, in Britain, as elsewhere. For the past generation it has been the corporate embrace, the revolving doors, the privatised contracts, the "free trade" treaties, European Union directives, and the removal of economics from democratic control under the neoliberal rules of the game that have set the boundaries of acceptable politics.

Since the 2008 crash the rejection of that broken economic model and the hollowed-out politics that reflects it has spread across the western world, now including Britain. Which helps explain why Cameron's Conservatives have turned to the most retrograde measures to bring opposition to heel.

The most extreme of those is the trade union bill now going through parliament, which will not only effectively outlaw most strikes but will slash trade union funding of the Labour party by erecting an individualised postal hurdle, a form of which was last imposed in the aftermath of the General Strike of 1926. No such obligations will apply, needless to say, to the entirely undemocratic corporate funding of the Tory party.

But establishment resistance to a democratic mandate is also running at a high pitch inside the Labour party itself. The reaction of a string of Labour grandees to Corbyn's landslide election including of several of those brought into the new leader's big-tent shadow cabinet has been to denounce most of the platform he was elected on.

More than anything else, the established international and security policies of the state, from renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system to support for any and every US military campaign across the Arab and Muslim world, are being treated as red lines out of bounds of democratic debate.

That doesn't reflect public opinion, let alone the views of Labour's hugely expanded membership. The only way to bridge the gap between the bulk of Labour MPs, most of whom were selected under a tightly controlled New Labour regime, and the mandate of a leader elected by a runaway majority outside parliament is to give full rein to the party's own democracy.

That process will start at next week's Labour conference. But it could be bolstered, and Corbyn's political authority strengthened, with a referendum of members and affiliated supporters on the main policies he campaigned on, from abolition of tuition fees to public ownership. It's only by unleashing democracy, inside and outside the Labour party, that the anti-democratic backlash will be overcome.

[David Guyatt]

An insightful article by Milne, one of the few journos who says it the way it actually is.

[Magda Hassan]

Yes, and I've been enjoying Mark Steel's contribution too which has been linked here before.

[David Guyatt]

Yes, and I've been enjoying Mark Steel's contribution too which has been linked here before.

Fortunately, there are still a handful of hacks out there who still have the insight and the clout to get their stuff published, even though I suspect their editors squirm and slither every time their copy lands on their desk.

[Paul Rigby]

A Short History of British Military Coups and Conspiracies

By Adeyinka Makinde
Global Research, September 24, 2015
Adeyinka Makinde, Writer 22 September 2015

http://www.globalresearch.ca/a-short-his...es/5477830

Preamble

Recent comments in a recent edition of the Sunday Times attributed to a serving British army general contained the not so veiled threat of mounting a military rebellion in the event of a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour government getting close to exercising the levers of power. The anonymous general painted a scenario which would involve "mass resignations" by high level officers in the British armed forces in what he claimed would "effectively be a mutiny."

Although a source for the Ministry of Defence sought to dampen the remarks by issuing a condemnation of the comments, they have caused much alarm.

The comments come in the midst of a concerted media campaign aimed at discrediting the leader and proposed policies of the Labour opposition party. While there is some room for treating words expressed anonymously with some caution, events in the recent political history of Britain suggest that they should not be readily dismissed.

There is much evidence that elements within the British military and the security services have acted against serving governments which the Establishment have viewed as threatening the interests of the United Kingdom as they perceive it. Targeted were the Labour administrations headed by Harold Wilson in the 1960s and 1970s. Threats of coups and efforts geared towards destabilising Wilson's government have been credibly corroborated over the years.

It was also reported that Tony Benn, the late Labour figure whose Left wing positions inspired great revulsion on the British political Right was threatened with assassination in the event of his ever assuming the leadership of an elected Labour government. The source of that threat is said to have emanated from the late Airey Neave, an Establishment figure in the Conservative Party who was well-connected to the British military and the security services.

Those who are aware of the manner in which state intelligence organisations can feed information to the public for the purpose of creating alarm as well as carving out what the powers that be perceive to be a threat to the well-being of society, may conclude that recent media activity seeking to discredit Labour's lurch to the Left culminating with the threat of a military rebellion, bear the unmistakable hallmark of the implementation of a strategy of tension.'

This is an excerpt from a wide-ranging essay that I wrote in early 2013 entitled Democracy, Terrorism and the Secret State' covering plots which were engineered by the military and security services.

In Britain the secret state' was active during this era of the communist threat, reaching the stage where at two distinctive points in history, the possibility of a military takeover of the country became mooted and later heightened to the extent that plans for action were substantively laid out.

Both coups were to have been directed against the socialist administrations led by Harold Wilson, the first plot occurring in the late 1960s and the second, a culmination of intrigues perpetrated by Right-wing operatives in British military intelligence and the domestic security service, MI5.

The latter part of the 1960s witnessed certain events and trends which caused certain members of the British elite to be alarmed at the direction in which the former imperial power was heading.

One key event was the devaluation of the pound in 1967, a symptom of the continuing perceived degradation' of a waning nation-empire still traumatised by the humiliation of the Suez debacle of 1956.

Another was the deteriorating situation in Northern Ireland, where the bourgeoning civil rights movement of the Roman Catholic community was being transformed into a militarised struggle led by a revived Irish Republican Army (IRA).

There was also the perception of Wilson and the Labour Party being tolerant of the Ban the Bomb' movement and a drift towards a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Furthermore, fears about the increasing power of trade unions and controversies related to the uneasiness felt about non-white immigration may have added to the sense of a nation in perpetual crisis.

In 1968, meetings were held at the instigation of the newspaper baron and M15 agent, Cecil King who took the lead in an enterprise which proposed that the army would depose the elected government and install a military alternative with Lord Louis Mountbatten at the helm.

Wilson's electoral victory in 1964 signified a lurch to the Left, a direction in which elements in the United States government looked upon balefully. The CIA's spy-hunter', James Jesus Angleton, believed that Wilson was a Soviet-plant. The thesis went along the lines that Wilson had been compromised years before by Soviet agents when as chairman of the Board of Trade, he made several trips behind the Iron Curtain'.

What is more is that the sudden death in January 1963 of Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, came to be believed by Angleton and some in the British intelligence community to have been engineered by the KGB in order to pave the way for Wilson to succeed him as the leader of the party.

Gaitskell was on the Right of the Labour Party, and he had proposed the then radical measure of ditching Clause Four of the party's constitution on common ownership. Wilson, on the other hand, was identified with the Left-wing of the party.

What followed was a dirty-tricks campaign mounted by British intelligence operatives. Code-named Operation Clockwork Orange', its remit was to smear a number of British politicians including not only Wilson, but significantly, Wilson's political rival from the Conservative Party, Edward Heath.

Heath's brand of One Nation' Toryism and perceived weakness in his handling of the increasingly belligerent trade unions did not meet with the approval of members of the Establishment who wanted a more Right-wing leader and agenda from the Conservatives.

This sort of thing was not without precedent in British political history. The infamous Zinoviev Letter', a 1924 forgery which came by way of an asset of MI6, was purportedly a communication from Grigori Zinoviev, the president of the Comintern, enjoining British communists to stimulate "agitation-propaganda" in the armed forces.

Thus, four days before the British General Election, the Daily Mail had as its banner headline the following: "Civil War Plot by Socialists' Masters: Moscow Orders To Our Reds; Great Plot Disclosed."

The Labour Party lost the election by a landslide.

The early part of the 1970s, a period which on the European continent was marked by an intensification of the ideological polarisation of the political Left and Right with malcontents on the Left favouring the use of urban violence in favour of the ineffectual' results of mass street demonstrations, saw the birth in Britain of an organisation calling itself the Angry Brigade.

The Angry Brigade, an anarchist group, temporarily provided Britain with a taste of continental-style guerrilla warfare which involved targeting figures of the state such as government ministers and judges as well as the bombing of foreign embassies and establishments of those states which its members considered as imperialist' or fascist'.

The "law and order issue" became the short-handed appellation of choice in referring to the battles between the radicalised forces of the Left and the apparatus of state authority which permeated the political and cultural discourse.

The question of how these deep-rooted tensions were going to be resolved were framed in terms ranging from a revolution which would profoundly alter the status quo to that involving the state preserving its authority through the implementing of extreme measures.

The sentiments representing one version of a possible resolution to society's discordant drift, namely one providing the template of the strategy of tension', even made its way into the public eye through the realm of popular entertainment.

In 1971, the ITV network aired an episode of the TV series, The Persuaders!'' entitled The Time and The Place' wherein the playboy heroes stumble upon a plot to carry out a coup d'etat by members of the British establishment which is being co-ordinated by a member of the aristocracy.

The idea is to have the prime minster assassinated during a live TV debate on a contentious law and order bill, which according to its opponents and proponents represents either a "death to democracy" or a "return to sanity".

The assassin, who appears to be a subdued and detached figure nestled in the audience, is to be activated Manchurian Candidate-style with a gun hidden in the compartment of what on the outside is a book. The murder would then present itself as the justification for a takeover of the government and the imposition of martial law.

As one of the foot soldiers of the eventually failed conspiracy explains, "the public will be outraged, and when Croxley (the Lord leading the coup) makes an impassioned plea for strong action, the people of this country will not only approve of a new government, they'll demand it."

The aforementioned fiction from early evening light entertainment nonetheless did reference one consistent aspect of the prevalent understanding among the mass of Britons about the nature of their governance: namely its alluding to the existence of the Establishment; a group of powerful people who although unelected and unseen, consistently influence the direction of the country.

It also followed that any plan to effect any radical change in society such as by a military coup would find its conception and execution from persons belonging to such Establishment.

Traditionally, the British Establishment referred to those of high-born status and usually with an old school tie/Oxbridge background, who along with others in high government positions of the judiciary, the armed forces, civil service, courtiers within the royal family, the police and security services, have a tendency to form coteries within the exclusive enclaves of gentleman's clubs.

The fictional Lord Croxley meets with establishment figures in the grandiose settings of a club to finalise the details of the coup which bears traces of reality to the claimed influence of the real life Clermont Club at which some argue that a plot to overthrow the Labour government in the 1970s was hatched.

It is useful to note that the Establishment does not necessarily merge with the concept of the Deep State', i.e. the state within a state' of which the Turkish derin devlet is considered the standard.

This other aspect of the secret state; that of a parallel government manipulating events in the background without the knowledge of the incumbent, visible elected power, has, unlike in the case of Turkey and Italy, never been specifically identified in the British context, although her majesty the Queen is once believed to have alluded to the "powers at work in this country about which we have no knowledge."

However, what is not disputed is the existence of an influential establishment alongside at least a sizeable element of the secret service which plotted against the Labour government in the 1970s with the aim of destabilising it. Wilson himself had made intimations to the reporters Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtiour of "dark forces threatening Britain."

There are historian-experts in the field such as the author Rupert Allason who assert that the intelligence services in the United Kingdom, unlike some of their European counterparts such as in Italy, is not composed overwhelmingly of individuals of a Right-wing bent. Those with Leftist tendencies, he has argued, were always represented.

While the personnel of the British secret service have tended to come from the elite of society, they did, after all, produce the notorious Cambridge set consisting of the likes of Burgess, McClean, Philby and Blunt, who indoctrinated earlier in their student days by the communist ideology, would later turn traitors against their country.

By the mid-1970s during Wilson's second tenure as prime minister, the nation had already been through a three-day working week during Heath's confrontation with the powerful miners union. Militant unions and a Left-wing agenda which could compromise Britain's commitment to the free market economic system as well as to NATO was a cause of great concern.

Thus it was that in this noxious atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia of the existence of pro-Soviet subversive elements within the political classes, the intelligence services and the powerful labour unions that a group of MI5 agents led by Peter Wright, the author of Spycatcher, "bugged and burgled" their way across London, he claimed, "at the behest of the state."

Harold Wilson was convinced that he was being watched and that insidious information about him was being disseminated from sources within the security services; part of the executive branch of the government which he was supposed to control.

Apart from the troublesome spooks who were lurking in the shadows, he was also of the mindset that waiting in the wings were high-ranking figures of the military, both serving and retired, who were ready for the signal to overthrow his government.

Not since 1648, when Colonel Thomas Pride strode into the august precincts of the English legislature one December day to bring an end to the Long Parliament', had anything of the semblance of a military coup d'etat taken place in the mother-nation' of democracy.

It seemed then to be a most unlikely development.

But Wilson, who privately complained of being undermined by the security services, also took note of a "ring of steel" mounted by the army around London's Heathrow Airport, first in January and again in June of 1974. The first occurred on the eve of the February general election in which Labour was returned to power after a narrowly contested result.

Although explained as security measures in response to unspecified terrorist threats, Wilson considered these manoeuvres to be clear warnings pointed in his direction.

Warnings came from elsewhere. General Sir Walter Walker, a retired former high echelon figure within the command structure of NATO, expressed dissatisfaction over the state of the country and wrote to the Daily Telegraph calling for "dynamic, invigorating, uplifting leadership…above party politics" which would "save" the country from "the Communist Trojan horse in our midst." He was involved with Unison (later renamed Civil Assistance) an anti-Communist organisation which pledged to supply volunteers in the event of a national strike.

Another military figure, Colonel David Stirling, the founder of the elite SAS regiment, created Great Britain 75'. Composed of ex-military men, its task would be to take over the running of government in the event of civil unrest leading to a breakdown of government functioning.

These two, however, were red herrings according to Peter Cottrell, author of Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, who claims that these public utterances were a distraction from "what was really going on."

But the Rubicon was not crossed. There would be no tanks rolling down Whitehall along with the probable modus operandi of solemn martial music preceding the presumed clipped upper class tones of a lord or general proclaiming a state of national emergency and the establishment of a junta.

In the end, however, the British Right won. Wilson abruptly resigned in March 1976, thoroughly exhausted by the campaigns directed at him, while Edward Heath lost the Conservative Party leadership to Margaret Thatcher, the choice of the Right.

[Paul Rigby]

Can Jeremy Corbyn end 70 years of UK subservience to endless US warmongering?

Tim Gopsill 22 September 2015. Posted in News

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/news/can-jerem...rmongering

A suffocating consensus has made Britain follow wherever the dictates of US foreign policy take it, says Tim Gopsill.

THE HOPES raised by Jeremy Corbyn's wonderful win in the labour leadership election for people who oppose the UK's wars are huge. More than in any other area, it will take a mighty effort to make those hopes real.

There is no other area in which politics at national level so ignores the population at large. On the economy, health, education and so on, there is at least debate and sometimes a battle between the interests represented at government level.

But on war, security, intelligence grouped under the significantly misleading heading of "defence" there is a suffocating consensus that places the actions of the state beyond serious challenge.

The Labour Party is firmly embedded in the consensus. In seeking power it feels a special need to prove its reliability in this area. For the last 70 years, since the Second World War, it has maintained a steady subservience to the military and security requirements of the USA that exceeds even that of the Conservatives, who have less to prove.

Jeremy Corbyn's anti-war stance evidently appeals to millions of people. He wins six in every ten Labour votes amid a clamour of warnings from the leadership of all national parties that he is walking threat to national security, a traitor set on surrendering the UK to middle east (or even Irish) terrorists.

No-one could have missed all these; so clearly they are not convinced. The majority must believe that the safety of the country does not depend on tagging along with American invasions and increasing expenditure on defence, including on stupefyingly expensive nuclear weapons systems that everyone knows serve no purpose, while hacking it back in all socially useful areas.

People can see, for instance, from the wave of war refugees fleeing across Europe, that any intensifying of hostilities in the middle east can only lead to more, that the whole morass arose from the invasion of Iraq and that this itself was launched with the rationale of a pack of lies on the part of the security establishment which at the time was in the hands of the Labour Party. And what a "safe pair of hands" they are!
Just look at the history.

Many on the left revere the memory of Clement Attlee and his Labour governments from 1945-51, when the welfare state was established, with free healthcare and education for all. But those governments also joined the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union alongside the USA, jointly founding NATO and building Britain's first nuclear weapons in secret, without consulting Parliament.

The anti-communism of this movement was intense; it was not as extreme as McCarthyism in the USA, but left-wingers in public service, especially education, were required to prove their loyalty and lost their jobs if they couldn't. It was the same sort of thing as the so-called "Prevent" agenda under which Muslims are required to prove their allegiance to the consensus values of today, but was imposed then by what is often hailed as the most progressive Labour government of all time.

There was some resistance from the left, which in 1960 succeeded in winning the party conference to the cause of nuclear disarmament. Attlee's successor Hugh Gaitskell appropriately went ballistic, declaring that he would ignore the democratic decision and reverse the policy. His outrageous 1961 speech to this effect is often held up by establishment Labourites as a triumph of party conference oratory.

Similar veneration is accorded to a speech by the vaunted left-wing leader Michael Foot in 1982, when a special session of Parliament was convened on a Saturday to give him the opportunity to pledge the obedience of Her Majesty's loyal opposition as Margaret Thatcher despatched her fleet to the Falklands.

It was not enough. The jingoism generated around that war finished off Foot's leadership as Labour crashed to election defeat a year later, to be succeeded by one-time CND firebrand Neil Kinnock, who gave even more fulsome backing to the Tories when they joined the first invasion of Iraq led by George Bush senior in 1991.

In 1998 Tony Blair launched his own war, in the Balkans. This was not an American war but a European one, with the former Yugoslavia dismembered and its territories set against each other by the then European Community (now EU). US President Bill Clinton was not interested but was dragged in by NATO, to attack Serbia.

This war had another telling parallel with today's world: the bombing of Kosovo caused a massive wave of refugees, which Blair used for propaganda purposes but ignored their plight, leaving hundreds of thousands unaided, lacking food or shelter.

The propaganda cynically presented this outrage as a "humanitarian intervention", and the same spurious justification was employed for the assault on Libya in 2011. This again was a European-led enterprise, promoted by the UK, France and Italy, again faithfully supported by Labour.

Such is the party's war record without even mentioning Iraq and Afghanistan! Today Labour emphatically backs Trident, the expansion of NATO and its 2 per cent minimum for spending on "defence".

This is what Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters are taking on, in the deepest challenge of all to the core of the Labour establishment.

Winning the leadership is obviously not enough. The left thought they were winning when they won the CND vote, and when Michael Foot became leader; even, some deluded souls, when Gordon Brown took over from Blair. But there was never enough support within the party to stop the right wing re-establishing control.

Since September 12 when Corbyn was announced the winner 50,000 have joined the Labour Party, adding to the hundreds of thousands who joined since the election in May. This should be a solid foundation on which to take a stand.

If people are joining up then they have got to get active. They are embarking on a serious enterprise. Jeremy Corbyn may not be able to get rid of the warmongers in the Labour Party, but with enough help from the grass-roots he might be able to stop them running it.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Stop the War Coalition.

[Paul Rigby]

It's the British establishment that has a problem with democracy

The elite has little time for elections that deliver the wrong results. And Jeremy Corbyn's was one of them

By Seamus Milne

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree...emy-corbyn

If there were any doubts that the British establishment has a problem with democracy, the last few days should have put them to rest....

But establishment resistance to a democratic mandate is also running at a high pitch inside the Labour party itself. The reaction of a string of Labour grandees to Corbyn's landslide election including of several of those brought into the new leader's big-tent shadow cabinet has been to denounce most of the platform he was elected on.

The intensely relaxed Lord Minty of Felch, the New Labour eminence grise with a special remit for the deserving wealthy, the preservation of the Washington neo-conservative consensus, and muscular Brazilians, has authored a paper urging Labour's far-right to play it long before overthrowing Corbyn. The CIA's favourite "liberal" British daily predictably has the details:

Mandelson: it's too early to force Jeremy Corbyn out
Private paper by Lord Mandelson says those on right of party should wait for public to decide as Labour cannot be elected with Corbyn'

By Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt
Friday 25 September 2015 07.01 BST

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015...-force-out

Labour critics of Jeremy Corbyn should consider forcing out their leader only when the majority of party members realise the public has formed a negative view of him, according to Peter Mandelson.

The former minister and adviser to Tony Blair offers his view in a private paper that circulated to political associates last week in which he urges them to dig in for the "long haul".

In his paper, Lord Mandelson writes: "In choosing Corbyn instead of Ed Miliband, the general public now feel we are just putting two fingers up to them, exchanging one loser for an even worse one. We cannot be elected with Corbyn as leader.

"Nobody will replace him, though, until he demonstrates to the party his unelectability at the polls. In this sense, the public will decide Labour's future and it would be wrong to try and force this issue from within before the public have moved to a clear verdict."

The Mandelson paper represents perhaps the clearest distillation of the response of the routed Blairites and comes as Progress magazine says the baton must be handed on from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to a new Next Left generation working across the party.

Mandelson's response comes as a Guardian account of the Labour leadership contest discloses:

Supporters of Liz Kendall tried to arrange for her and then shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper to stand aside to give shadow health secretary Andy Burnham a clear run when it became apparent support for Corbyn was surging

Cooper warned interim leader Harriet Harman that her decision not to oppose the welfare bill was handing Jeremy Corbyn victory and she threatened to quit the shadow cabinet if Harman refused to let Labour MPs vote against the welfare bill

Supporters of Burnham believe he could have won the contest if he had quit the shadow cabinet over the welfare issue and say the episode was the turning point in his defeat.

The Kendall team commissioned private YouGov polling as early as late June which showed the party membership opposed austerity and further spending cuts, making the Kendall team realise they were out of the running.

Labour officials discovered nearly 20% of those joining the party as £3 registered supporters had no record of previously voting Labour.

Corbyn himself had doubts about whether he would be a successful party leader and his team expected to secure only 20% of the vote at the outset.

Mandelson warned that he feared some moderates in that atmosphere would drift away from the party, leading to the party's possible disintegration. But he makes clear that he does not think defections or the formation of a new party are the correct response to the Corbyn triumph.

He predicts that Corbyn's supporters will be a force in the party who will not be quickly dissuaded from their support of him. "We need to acknowledge that those who supported him have invested a lot personally in Corbyn, we are not going to convince them overnight they were wrong and before then they will provide an army to draw on as they become absorbed into constituency parties.

"We are in for a long haul during which time the atmosphere in the party will become increasingly acrimonious at branch and constituency levels."

He argues there is a mood among many grassroots moderates in the party "we'll come back when the party gets its act together and is serious again". Those people need to be given the chance to come together, he writes. "Without this, the party in the country will slowly disintegrate as mainstream people withdraw from elected party and local council office. We have to give them hope that there is a way out of our predicament and that Labour does have a future."

The former spin doctor urges his wing of the party to acknowledge its mistakes, saying: "The old labels, totems and divisions have no use anymore; they are damaging and counter-productive.

"New Labour', Blairites, Brownites all these labels are redundant. They prevent us reaching out in the party and building essential new bridges. If we want people to listen to us, we must no longer look as if we are continuing past fights.

"The last five years' intellectual sterility has left Labour floundering before an electorate that wanted to vote against the Tories but did not feel they were being offered a workable alternative."

Although Mandelson says moderates in the party cannot begrudge Corbyn his success, he claims only a third of Corbyn's support came from people who had been Labour members before May. The rest of his support was from those who got swept up by him rather than by any commitment to Labour as such.

Far from being a tidal wave of new, young idealists, he cites research showing that, overall, only 12% of his voters were under 24 years old. The bulk were retreaded Old Labourites who, together with people who voted Green at the election, gave Corbyn his victory. "This does not take away his success but it puts it into perspective and colours its legitimacy," he concludes.

Separately, Corbyn said that he had not yet made up his mind whether he would kneel in front of the Queen when he takes part in the ceremony that will make him a privy counsellor. Giving what he described as an "honest answer" to ITV News, Corbyn said he had yet to receive a formal invitation to the ceremony.

The definition of a Labour "grandee": someone welcome at the American embassy-bunker in London.

[Magda Hassan]

::gtfo:: ::cokesniff::::drevil::::dalek::::vomit::

[David Guyatt]

Lord Minty of Felch ---- ::laughingdog::

I actually had to look up the word in an urban dictionary. :hock::

[David Guyatt]

Labour critics of Jeremy Corbyn should consider forcing out their leader only when the majority of party members realise the public has formed a negative view of him, according to Peter Mandelson.

Translation from double-speak:

Give the British media a year or two, long enough anyway to completely modify the thinking of the British people by repetitively blasting them with anti-Corbyn slanted and slur stories, then the time will be right to get rid of him.