Labour’s Civil War Explodes

Is this the end of the Labour Right?

This week on Politics Uncensored, Zoe Grunewald and Ali Milani break down the humiliating decline of the Starmer project: from billionaire outbursts to by-election chaos and a party machine built to crush the left now turning in on itself.

In the Week Unwrapped, Manchester United part-owner Jim Ratcliffe claims Britain is being “colonised” by immigrants, citing numbers that simply don’t add up. After shifting his tax residency to Monaco during Covid, is this just another case of elite hypocrisy dressed up as patriotism?

Then Reform UK candidate Matt Goodwin pulls out of a key Gorton and Denton hustings at the last minute, claiming bias. Labour call him a snowflake. Polling suggests Reform could take the seat. Is this by-election now a straight referendum on Keir Starmer?

We also unpack Labour’s new bill to ban foreign-controlled companies from bankrolling British politics - a move that could hit Reform hard. But does it go far enough? And why are individual overseas donors still free to give?

After the break, investigative journalist Paul Holden, author of The Fraud, joins the show to explain how Morgan McSweeney and Peter Mandelson built the machine that delivered Starmer to power and why it may now be collapsing under the weight of its own factional warfare.

With Anas Sarwar openly questioning the Prime Minister, and figures like Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana charting paths outside the party, we ask: is this just a bad week for Labour or the beginning of the end for Blairism itself?

Guest bio:

Paul Holden has over a decade of experience in investigating cases of grand corruption and corporate malfeasance, including as the senior researcher on the book and feature documentary Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade. He has published six books, three of them bestsellers in his native South Africa, and has written for publications including the Guardian and the Independent. He is a Network Fellow at the Safra Centre for Ethics at Harvard University.

Hosts: Ali Milani and Zoe Grunewald

Producer: Hugh Smiley