Kamala Harris is calling in for backup from overseas. One U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s top advisers, Deborah Mattinson, is set to provide key insights to the vice president’s campaign, according to Politico. Mattinson is expected to arrive in Washington D.C. next week to meet with strategists from the Harris-Walz campaign and share lessons from Starmer’s liberal Labour Party victory in the U.K.’s July election.
Mattinson, a seasoned polling expert, played a crucial role as Starmer’s director of strategy for three years. During that time, she focused on reclaiming traditional Labour voters who had defected to the Conservatives under Boris Johnson. Her upcoming meetup with Harris’ team was made in collaboration with the Progressive Policy Institute, a D.C.-based think tank led by Starmer’s former director of policy, Claire Ainsley.
A former colleague, who worked closely with Mattinson on Labour’s campaign, noted that she aims to prioritize a sharp focus on Harris’s appeal in critical swing states, sidelining broader themes like “hope and change.” Harris faces a tight race in several key battleground states, with Harris leading former President Trump in only three out of seven pivotal states.
Politico writes that the collaboration is just one strand in a growing transatlantic network of center-left think tanks and political operatives shaping policy and political messaging in Washington and London.
Common challenges on both sides of the Atlantic include immigration, housing and pressure from the left on issues such as the Gaza crisis.
Matthew McGregor, the former Labour digital director who also worked as a campaign strategist for former U.S. President Barack Obama, told POLITICO last month that collaboration between Labour and the Democrats had traditionally been “one-way traffic” — but that this is now changing.
For the first time in almost 25 years, McGregor said, the Democrats believe they have something to learn from Labour, after Starmer’s party returned to winning ways not seen since the era when U.K. PM Tony Blair and U.S. President Bill Clinton talked up a progressive center-left “third way.”
“Labour is one of the only Western parties that have recently won, or look likely to win, from the center left,” McGregor said.
This visit follows a recent trip to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago by several of Starmer’s close aides, including Labour’s election strategist Morgan McSweeney and Downing Street communications director Matthew Doyle, signaling deepening ties between the two political teams.
Taking advice from Labour seems a little odd because the situations of the Democratic Party in the United States and the Labour Party in the United Kingdom could not be any more different. The Labour Party was out of power for over 13 years. They lost power in the 2010 general election after over a decade in control under Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who led from 1997 to 2010. Labour remained in opposition from 2010 until they returned to power in 2024 under Starmer.
Democrats, of course, have held the White House for 12 of the last 16 years and Kamala Harris is the sitting vice president.
One thing Harris and Starmer do have in common, however, is their support for censorship. The prime minister recently used a riot as an excuse to crackdown against his opponents, writes Spiked.
“Britain has fallen. That’s been the take on the anti-woke chattersphere this past 24 hours, as prime minister Keir Starmer’s post-riots crackdown has taken an Orwellian turn. Alongside coming down hard on the violent racist thugs on our streets, a move no sane person has a problem with, Starmer has also trained his ire on the apparent cause of every societal ill, at least according to our ruling class: too much free speech on social media.
All week, the government has been calling on the Big Tech firms, particularly Elon Musk’s X, to do more to clamp down on misinformation and hate. Of course, we’ve seen plenty of both, online and off, recently. A lurid claim that the Southport child-killings, the spark for nearly two weeks of unrest, were committed by a Muslim asylum seeker swirled in the wake of that horror. But while you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who is passionately in favour of misinformation or hate, the past few days have reminded us of the sinister territory you enter into when the powers-that-be try to police them.
Since Musk has refused to play ball, even goading Starmer with accusations of ‘two-tier policing’ and feverish suggestions Britain is verging on ‘civil war’, the government has resorted to doing the silencing itself. Yesterday, we had director of public prosecutions Stephen Parkinson telling us that even a retweet could land you in an all-grey prison tracksuit. ‘You may be committing a crime if you repost, repeat or amplify a message which is false, threatening, or stirs up racial / religious hatred’, Parkinson told the PA news agency. ‘Think before you post’, screamed the Gov.UK X account last night, reminding Brits that ‘content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful – it can be illegal’.
The latter post caught the attention of Musk, who retweeted it to his millions of followers. Now Gov.UK’s mentions are full of furious Very Online yanks, mourning our tumble into totalitarianism, sharing pics of Starmer done up like a well-coiffed North Korean dictator – Keir Jong-Un. I appreciate the concern, guys. But the more mundane truth is that the UK’s slide into woke authoritarianism has taken place over decades, not days – and Starmer’s crackdown on speech will be of zero surprise to those who have been paying attention.”
In the United States, Harris has called for censorship of her own political opponents.
In case you didn’t already know, Kamala Harris is in favor of mass censorship on social media. pic.twitter.com/NWQxBu0OtF
— Steven Steele (@MrStevenSteele) September 3, 2024
Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, also has a history of attacking free speech.
Tim Walz’s communist Attorney General just thanked Brazil for banning X because they refused to listen to their censorship demands.
Does @Tim_Walz agree?
His previous statements on free speech would indicate that he does. https://t.co/HfEO1Vktv8 pic.twitter.com/4XYQhb5Yjs
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) September 3, 2024
Walz’s attorney general recently, Keith Ellison, recently posted a thank you message to Brazil after that country began blocking Twitter, noted The New York Post.
“The attorney general serving alongside Gov. Tim Walz in Minnesota wrote a thank-you message to Brazil on X just days after the South American country started blocking the social media platform, drawing a sharp rebuke from Elon Musk.
Keith Ellison’s “obrigado Brasil!” statement – which was posted in Portuguese on Monday – is also generating widespread criticism from conservatives on X.
“The Democratic Party – same one that used to defend the First Amendment – now wants to destroy the First Amendment,” Musk wrote in a message sharing Ellison’s post.”
The leftwing government in Brazil has announced it will be issuing daily fines of $9,000 against anyone caught using the social media service.
Twitter said in a statement that the judge shut down its site “simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”
In each case of censorship, the censors claimed to be “defending democracy.”
This article originally appeared on New Conservative Post. Used with Permission.
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