Further Information

Louise Haigh's case is very odd. Only a conditional discharge for that? There is a more to this. But it is absolutely inconceivable that anyone was made a Cabinet Minister without the Prime Minister's being aware of her previous criminal conviction.

Haigh said that she regretted having nominated Jeremy Corbyn for Leader, and while it would be too much to hope that she now regretted that regret, she really ought to. Keir Starmer has now humiliated her twice for the sake of a company that, only in 2022 and not the many years ago that Starmer has suggested, fired 800 crew without warning, replacing them with agency staff working longer hours for less pay, in some cases below the minimum wage.

All of that was illegal at the time, yet the CEO, Peter Hebblethwaite, defended it both before a joint session of two Select Committees of the House of Commons, and in writing to the then Secretary of State for Transport, Grant Shapps. Neither Hebblethwaite nor anyone else has ever been prosecuted. P&O is in fact state-owned, just not by this state. DP World is owned by the Emirate of Dubai. That is of course one of the United Arab Emirates, where trade unions are illegal, and another of which was recently banned by Statute from buying two small-circulation newspapers and a tiny-circulation magazine in Britain. We are now, however, expected to regard the UAE as one of the souls of moderation in the Middle East. And so to Starmer and DP World.

DP World also owns the Port of Southampton, which is the second largest container terminal in the United Kingdom, and the legal name of which is now DP World Southampton. DP stands for Dubai Ports. Isn't capitalism patriotic? So much for Taking Back Control. But whatever has made possible the outrage at P&O, then it is not Brexit. In 1972, could balaclava-clad private security guards have wielded handcuffs and teargas as they evicted workers from their workplaces, which for the duration of their work were also their homes, with absolutely no notice whatever? All of the anti-union legislation was enacted while Britain was a member of what was really always the EU, and the biggest ever attack on British workers' rights, the Trade Union Act 2016, was brought to us by the Prime Minister who not only campaigned for Remain, but who resigned when Leave won.

We may have seen nothing yet, though. Even Angela Rayner's heavily diluted workers' rights are not to come into effect for at least two years. After this, believe in any of them when you saw them, and not a moment before. And never, ever, ever entertain the notion that the foreign policy stuff, in practice usually but not always about the Middle East, had little or no connection to bread and butter politics at home.

Meanwhile, Heidi Alexander was Shadow Health Secretary in Corbyn's ill-advised first Shadow Cabinet. She effectively scuppered the NHS Reinstatement Bill that would have prevented and reversed the Blairites' signature domestic policy of NHS privatisation. She was the first Shadow Cabinet member to resign. Later becoming Deputy Mayor of London for Transport, she delivered an increase in fares, delays, complaints, and strikes, as well as the Elizabeth Line three and a half years late and more than four billion pounds overbudget.

Having been promised her latest job by Starmer weeks ago, Alexander will now replace the partial renationalisation of the rail service with some ghastly "public-private partnership", allow the cost of the senior citizen's railcard to increase by even more than the present 16.6 per cent, allow bus fares to increase by even more than the present 50 per cent, abandon the reregulation of the buses, and build a third runway at Heathrow, also by means of a PFI or some such, just as the railways' rolling stock was always going to remain in private hands, adding exorbitant rent to every ticket. Where is that money going? To whom?

See also HS2, PPE, Test and Trace, the Rwanda Scheme, the arms companies, and everything else that is very good at kicking back to politicians while employing retired top brass. That includes the newly abandoned Bibby Stockholm. We have been paying £400 million per year to rent that 48-year-old engineless barge, which cannot be worth more than a few million pounds. Whatever happened with Haigh's mobile phone in 2013, it is the very least of our worries.