Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, journalist Paul Mason managed to make it look like he was on the left. But with his support for Keir Starmer’s hostile takeover of the party, he soon showed his true colours. And now, he has left absolutely no doubt about where he stands. Because as Declassified co-founder Matt Kennard points out:
Paul Mason is now an Associate Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy, a “think-tank” funded by UK Ministry of Defence, Royal Navy, Modi’s India + pretty much every major arms dealer in West: BAE, Raytheon, Leonardo, Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin et al.
Perfect rest home. pic.twitter.com/unMhn4MuY7
— Matt Kennard (@kennardmatt) January 6, 2025
Mason once claimed to oppose austerity, but now supports a Labour government choosing an agenda of Austerity 2.0 and further NHS privatisation. He also criticised Keir Starmer’s purge of the left at one point, before then smearing the left himself and even trying to stand for Labour against Corbyn in the 2024 election (the party chose a private health profiteer instead).
By associating now with an organisation with highly unethical sponsors, however, he has made his ideological position clearer than ever. Because anyone happy to work with an organisation that gets funding from “pretty much every major arms dealer” in the Western world is a person that no one on the left should consider an ally.
Keir Starmer and Paul Mason – two charlatans in a pod
In the Brexit debate, we could see the signs of who understood what Labour’s best strategy was and who didn’t. It was tough, because there were good arguments for both leaving and remaining in the European Union. But Canary journalist James Wright saw the dangers of people like Paul Mason calling for Labour to back a controversial second referendum on Brexit in 2019.
Like Keir Starmer, who was pushing for this policy from within the shadow cabinet, Mason’s support for such a vote risked allowing the Tories to focus the 2019 election debates on Brexit rather than anything else.
It would also, as Wright explained, “undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-establishment and democratic credentials, especially among the working class”. And it would “damage Labour electorally”, as proved to be the case.
County Durham was a good example of the damage this policy caused. Because Labour once dominated there, but the Tories took four seats from them in the area in 2019.
Corbyn’s 2017 clarity on respecting the Brexit vote had faded under pressure from right-wingers like Keir Starmer. And as one 2024 independent candidate in the country told us, there were many people who thought Labour was disrespecting democracy and walked away as a result.
Curiously, Labour’s 2019 election loss and the dodgy rhetoric around why it happened then empowered people like Keir Starmer who pushed for a big shift to the right.
Academic papers have since insisted that the Brexit campaign managed to capitalise on “deep-seated political disaffection as people railed against prolonged economic abandonment and social injustice” in areas of Britain that southern political and economic elites had apparently forgotten about.
Whether London dwellers like Mason and Starmer consciously exploited that national divide to undermine Corbyn or not is a matter we can only speculate about.
Ignore the grifters
As soon as Keir Starmer offered himself up as the successor to Jeremy Corbyn, Paul Mason argued in his favour. He insisted in 2020 that Starmer would “advance the class struggle” as a social democrat. Even in 2024, after years of autocratic drift to the right under Starmer, he was trying to encourage the purged and maligned left to unite behind the Labour leader – as the ‘only option’.
His links now to arms corporations that profit from death and destruction should tarnish him forever as a shameless grifter whose opinions we should passionately avoid and ignore.
Featured image via screengrab
