Kmflett's Blog

Jeremy Corbyn was a participant in an on-line meeting on Wednesday (on YouTube-Google for the link, it doesn’t copy). It was partly related to the campaign for his For the Many slate in the current Your Party CEC election, and Laura Smith (former Labour MP for Crewe and Nantwich also spoke(very well btw) It was chaired by Bradford Councillor Ismail Uddin. My political sympathies lie with another slate but this post is about one of the main themes of the meeting.

Jeremy Corbyn has been around long enough to know that meetings about election slates are niche, particularly when so much needs to be done in respect of practical campaigning.

A key focus was on Palantir and its efforts to get access to NHS patient records. Palantir is a highly unethical US based company but when Peter Mandelson was still UK Ambassador to the US, Starmer accompanied him to a meeting with Palantir in Washington. Mandelson was previously a key figure in a consultancy with links to Palantir. As Corbyn rightly noted there is much campaigning work needed to stop Palantir getting access to local NHS patient records.

However he also touched on the history of Mandelson, Blair and Starmer. He echoed Tony Benn’s views of Mandelson in the 1980s. He went on to note that when he became Labour leader in 2015 Labour HQ advised him to use Mandelson and Alistair Campbell as comms and PR people. He firmly declined.

Moving on to Mandelson’s appointment as Ambassador Corbyn noted that while the Foreign Office always preferred career diplomats for such a role their briefings to politicians were invariably well researched and thorough. It seems inconceivable that Starmer was not aware of Mandelson’s Epstein links at this point, even if a lot more has come out more recently with the release of some of the Epstein files in the US.

Corbyn was circumspect about the Government’s decision (eventually) to release all the papers related to Mandelson to the Commons Security Committee but did not rule out pressing for and possibly organising an independent inquiry.

Important points but possibly not ones that will get reported in the mainstream media…