Saving Our Own Seoul

My K-pop album will be released next year as planned. This kind of thing will not keep my art from its public, even if it is classified as an anti-state force and thus grounds for the imposition of martial law.

We should not laugh. Our own Government, recently elected with a very low share of the vote, is already approaching the stage at which regimes lashed out, and one Richard Horne would have it believe that all and sundry, again including supposedly unelectrified North Korea, had had nothing more pressing to do than to launch 430 cyberattacks on Britain between 1 September 2023 and 31 August 2024.

Yet Mr Horne's National Cyber Security Centre saw them all off without anyone's suspecting a thing. That would seem to suggest that it and its colleagues were already more than adequately funded and empowered. Or have I missed something?

Conservative Home, Indeed

Fresh from the votes of 60 per cent of its MPs for assisted suicide, a higher percentage than Labour's, Reform UK split three ways on, admittedly, only yesterday's Ten Minute Rule Bill for Proportional Representation, with three in favour and one against while Nigel Farage effectively abstained because he was off welcoming Tim Montgomerie, yet another spear-carrier of Boris Johnson's to have joined Reform.

Johnson was the Prime Minister of Net Zero. He was a very big spender long before Covid-19. He even lifted the requirement that jobs in Britain be advertised first in Britain, making him the most pro-immigration Prime Minister ever, since Liz Truss never got into her stride. Johnson was closer to Stonewall than any Prime Minister before or since. The lockdowns were Johnson's. The Northern Ireland Protocol was Johnson's. The war in Ukraine was Johnson's. If Reform UK is now the party of Montgomerie, then it is the party of all of that.

Even if it were not, then while there are easily 326 wannabe Donald Trumps in this country, there are not 326 constituencies in which each of them would be the First Past the Post. Using the far more favourable Single Transferrable Vote and having uncharacteristically managed their candidates to avoid cannibalisation, those broadly in that vein have made only limited progress, if any, in Ireland, while the hard core has been humiliated. Reform looks set to do fairly well under the Additional Member System for the Scottish Parliament, and very well under the closed list system that will be used for the Senedd from 2026. But it is a different question what its supporters will be voting for.

Middle-Class Women of a Certain Age

Unable to broadcast the MasterChef Christmas Specials, the BBC has approached me for uncontroversial and inoffensive alternatives. But the ordinary episodes will still be shown, and even Jess Phillips does not object, because siding with the accusers of the oafish Gregg Wallace could have been presented as punching up, or at least as punching sideways, before the General Election, but it could not possibly be so now. Louise Haigh’s resignation speech ought to be one for the ages, since it is absolutely inconceivable that anyone was made a Cabinet Minister without the Prime Minister’s being aware of her previous criminal conviction. But Haigh has been told to clear off and take her accent, hair colours, and trade union background with her. Hours ago, Wes Streeting was joking about that to Michael Gove’s Spectator.

Meanwhile, Phillips is going to introduce stalking protection orders against people who had been acquitted, meaning that once you had been charged, then you would be bound to get one. Now, I have two stalkers, and there is more than circumstantial evidence of collusion between them. I have had one of them for something like 20 years, but apparently his press card puts him above the law. The other, though, is most definitely a middle-class woman of a certain age, and although she has been tormenting me only since early in 2020, she has already had me sent to prison once, because that is what her sort can do, pretty much just by saying so. She would never stop until I had committed suicide. Even Wallace is sympathetic by comparison with that.

The all-women shortlist system has done more than anything else to turn the Parliamentary Labour Party from 50 per cent Broad Left in 1994 to 95 per cent Hard Right today. The changes to the British economy since the Callaghan Government’s turn to monetarism in December 1976 have turned into the ruling class the public sector middle-class women who dominate the PLP, while the wars waged since 1997 have barely affected them, having largely been waged for explicitly feminist reasons, albeit to catastrophic effect for the women of Iraq and Libya, and eventually also of Afghanistan. In power before 2001, the Taliban never banned midwives. No voice that had advocated that invasion should ever again be heard in public.

A position of being anti-industrial at home but pro-war abroad is ridiculous in itself, and bespeaks a total lack of comprehension of how wars are fought. But those MPs are Thatcher’s Daughters, unable to understand the rage against deindustrialisation and against the harvesting of young men in endless, pointless wars, and probably unaware of a growing number of young men’s closely connected discovery for themselves of the various schools of heterodox economics, and of the traditional Great Books that, for ostensibly if questionably feminist reasons, had been excluded from school and university curricula.

Young men tend to be as sceptical of gender ideology as they are of #MeToo, as well as strongly anti-war internationally, and, wittingly or otherwise, very left-wing economically; all those things are connected. But behind a small number of mostly older male transvestites march hordes of young women, a large minority but still a minority of whom think that they are men. Alongside those young women march a goodly number of their academic instructors and administrators of the same sex, as such instructors and administrators do now tend to be. Whether she likes it or not, Judith Butler is a woman. By some distance, she is the most cited female academic in the world. And who is citing her? Humanities academia is ever more heavily female.

It was a Conservative Government that presided over gender self-identification day in and day out. The public sector and its vast network of contractors simply presupposed it. It came to be treated as already the law only after 2015. Go back to 2010, and the concept itself was unheard of. This happened entirely under the Conservatives. In 2022, there was a rare television depiction of Margaret Thatcher. In Prince Andrew: The Musical, she was played by one Baga Chipz, a drag queen. Gender self-identification is the inexorable logic of the self-made man or the self-made woman, and a figure comparable to Thatcher, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman, just as Thatcher herself emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and Dick Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show. In a generation’s time, everyone will be saying out loud that Tony Blair had always been as androgynous as Thatcher. Leo Abse wrote eye-opening books on both.

Still in thrall to one of the two most androgynous figures ever to have emerged in British public life, who destroyed the stockades of working-class male employment while creating a new ruling elite of middle-class women funded and empowered by the State, the Right produces almost none of its own gender critics, and of course ignores the absolute soundness of the Morning Star and of Counterfire on gender self-identification, or the fact that both the Alba Party, and the Workers Party of Britain, have been founded in no small measure because of this issue. Instead, a platform is given to ostensible refugees from a Left from which their economic views had often suggested a dislocation, and their foreign policy views even more so, long before anyone remotely mainstream had ever suggested that human beings could change sex, or that biological sex did not exist.

Knowing their new audience and that it paid a lot better than their old one, and manifesting the fact that centrism and right-wing populism were con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war, the permitted voices of gender criticism joined gleefully in the takedown of Jeremy Corbyn, broadly hint that they think that Alex Salmond was a rapist, simply call Julian Assange a rapist in so many words, therefore never miss an opportunity to brand George Galloway “a rape apologist”, and parrot the #IBelieveHer case for the genocide of Gaza, a case that several of them have made for every previous neoconservative war, and most of them for at least one.

Those of a certain age have dusted down the file of lurid allegations that they deployed against white working-class men during the Satanic panic of the Thatcher years, and which have been levelled, practically word for word, against every designated enemy since. At best, they raise no objection to the same treatment of racialised communities in Britain, who are today’s Enemy Within, which is why that status will very soon be enjoyed again by the working class in general and by working-class men in particular, insofar as that has ever ceased to be the case. That said, the General Election campaign revived the Enemy Within of the better part of the last decade, and the role of the likes of Hadley Freeman, previously a catwalk correspondent but apparently now a Reith Lecturer in waiting, gives them no right to complain about the lack of impact of the Cass Review.

The most basic of checks would have confirmed that the mural, and the wreath, and the “not understanding English irony”, and the “friends from Hamas and Hezbollah”, and all the rest of those, were complete dross, as everyone who did bother to check did find out. The Equality and Human Rights Commission found precisely two cases of anti-Semitism in entire report into the Labour Party, neither of them involved Corbyn or indeed anyone who was still a member of that party, and even in relation to those, it was found in court that it was, “arguable that the Defendant [the EHRC] made an error of law in relation to Article 10 ECHR.”

Rather than defend that at judicial review, the EHRC settled with Ken Livingstone, whom it had continued to pursue despite knowing that he had Alzheimer’s disease, and with Pam Bromley. As a matter of record, “Labour anti-Semitism” never existed. But it does now. Labour has expelled more Jews under Keir Starmer than under all its previous Leaders put together, most or all of them for what has been found to be the protected characteristic of anti-Zionism. It was no wonder that Andrew Feinstein stood against the Leader who had turned Labour into an anti-Semitic party, halving his vote.

Yet the EHRC report may as well never have been published for all the difference that it is making to the political debate, and those who revel in that sorry fact are therefore in no position to object that the Cass Report may as well never have been published for all the difference that it is making to the popular culture in which these matters are decided. The soaps and the nine o’clock flagship dramas are of course filmed long in advance, but things that are broadcast much sooner after completion, or even live, are making it quite clear that that Report is to be filed alongside those Declarations which the anti-vaxxers used to issue to each other and then assume that everyone had heard of them. Through popular culture, it was immediately made a commonplace that Dr Hilary Cass had disregarded 98 per cent of the literature in the field because it had not matched her preordained conclusion.

Now take a look at who controls the cultural sector. People whose intersection of sex, class and generation matches the gender critics’ perfectly, and who are usually the same colour as well, just like the people who expel pro-ceasefire students, who send in thugs to give them a beating, who connive to revoke their visas, and so on. All while driving out or keeping down the gender critics, and while marching with those who threatened them with extreme violence. Those centrist mums and centrist aunties need to have a word with their own peers.

The Terrifying Thoughtlessness of Assisted Suicide

Professor Kevin Yuill writes:

The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill passed its second reading in the House of Commons on Friday by 330 votes to 275. The news was greeted enthusiastically by assisted-dying campaigners in Parliament Square, while a demonstration against the bill, held by disability-rights group Not Dead Yet in Old Palace Yard, grew sombre and even tearful.

As regrettable as it may be, I wasn’t surprised the bill passed. Although it was ostensibly a free vote and there should have been no whipping of any MPs, there have been rumours of ‘soft whipping’. In other words, No10 made it known what was expected of MPs, even while publicly insisting they could vote with their consciences. UK prime minister Keir Starmer certainly made no secret of his support for assisted dying. It is not difficult to imagine this had some influence over the 200 or so new Labour MPs who owe their political careers to him.

The pro-assisted-dying camp also gave MPs very little time to examine and familiarise themselves with the bill. The 38 pages of text appeared just 17 days before the vote. Those who managed to read it all found glaring inconsistencies and problems. Then, just four-and-a-half hours were allotted to debate it in the Commons (the 2004 ban on fox hunting, in contrast, was only passed after a government inquiry and 400 hours of debate). Yet Labour’s many new, inexperienced MPs were assured there would be time to iron out the difficulties. They were encouraged to vote on the principle, rather than on the bill itself.

On this, they were misled. This second-reading vote was to agree to the wording of this particular bill, not to affirm the principle of assisted dying more broadly. The process of getting a private members’ bill through parliament is such that it will be very hard to roll back or amend at a later stage.

This month, the bill will face the committee stage, where a group of MPs will examine the bill in detail – although all of them will be chosen by Kim Leadbeater, the MP who tabled the bill. On 25 April, there will then be a third reading when MPs will vote on a take-it-or-leave-it basis on any new amendments. If the bill passes the third reading, it will go to the House of Lords and then likely become law.

Even if the bill’s success was not just a product of political strategising, it certainly didn’t pass because of the rhetorical brilliance of its exponents. Liberal Democrat MP Christine Jardine, who sponsored the bill, clearly had no idea of even the basics. She was incapable of giving a straight answer when asked on BBC Newsnight how the coercion of patients would be spotted and prevented. Leadbeater herself has only ever displayed a vague understanding about what her bill would involve.

This low-information debate was truly at its worst during the discussion in the Commons last week. Leadbeater was long on empathy and short on knowledge, repeating stock phrases like ‘we are not talking about a choice between life or death; we are talking about giving dying people a choice of how to die’.

She told her colleagues that ‘doctors should be under no obligation whatsoever to participate’ in the assisted-dying process. But her own bill clearly states otherwise. Unlike the 1967 Abortion Act and even the Marris Bill (an assisted-suicide bill that was defeated in 2015), Leadbeater’s bill contains no provision for conscientious objection. Physicians can refuse to facilitate a patient’s wish to die, but they must refer them to someone who will.

Leadbeater then repeated yet another falsehood, often repeated by leading assisted-suicide proponents like Dignity in Dying, that ‘not one jurisdiction that has passed laws on the basis of terminal illness has expanded its scope’. Yet this is exactly what has happened in Canada. In 2016, it legalised assisted dying for those whose death was ‘reasonably foreseeable’. In 2021, it expanded the criteria to people suffering with any chronic physical condition. This is set to include people suffering solely from metal-health conditions from 2027. Even the US state of Oregon, the poster-child of assisted-dying advocates, expanded its criteria in 2020 and 2023.

Green MP Siân Berry displayed a similar ignorance when she stated: ‘Well-informed public opinion shows that a very large majority of people want the option to choose assisted dying.’ In reality, respondents to such polls are generally not that well-informed – not least because they have been misled by campaigners. Ten per cent of Britons think it means the right to access hospice care, while 42 per cent think it’s the right to stop medical treatment. Recent polling found that when people actually understand that legalising ‘assisted dying’ means helping people to kill themselves, support for it lowers to 11 per cent.

When members of the assisted-dying camp failed to counter arguments with their scant knowledge, they resorted to trying to shut down discussion completely. After Conservative MP Danny Kruger began his careful takedown of the bill in the Commons, he was interrupted by Labour MP Cat Eccles, who accused him of ‘using incorrect language’ when he described assisted dying as ‘assisted suicide’. ‘It is not suicide’, she said. ‘That is offensive.’ Needless to say, suicide is entirely the appropriate word to describe it.

After Kruger, Labour MP Diane Abbott also spoke against the bill: ‘If the bill passes, we will have the NHS as a 100 per cent funded suicide service, but palliative care will be funded only at 30 per cent at best.’ David Davis, a supporter, at least sounded a note of caution, telling the Commons that he would vote against the bill on third reading, should it lead the UK in the direction of Canada.

Some MPs did change their minds during the debate and voted against, but it was not enough. The ayes had it after four-and-a-half hours of debate. As a result, the UK is on the verge of passing a truly horrific law. This life-and-death debate deserved far more time and consideration than it received. We are in serious danger of legalising state-sponsored suicide, without any real thought as to the consequences.

A Victory for the Miners

Chris McLaughlin writes:

Labour has made good on its election promise to overturn a ‘historic injustice’ which has denied former mineworkers billions in pension payments since the privatisation of British Coal in 1994.

It means more than 100,000 retired pit workers will share £1.5 billion, amounting to a 32 percent increase in annual pensions, or an average of £29 a week.

The miners’ union and families welcomed the decision — announced in the margins of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ first Budget — after decades of campaigning for an end to a scandal that has meant thousands of mineworkers dying without ever seeing a fair pension.

Successive governments have taken £4.4 billion out of the miners’ pension fund under an agreement between Tory ministers and the trustees of the British Coal pension scheme as the industry was wound down and privatised. Governments never paid a penny back into the fund.

Under the deal, government became the guarantor of the scheme to ensure that pensions would rise in line with inflation. But it meant that the Treasury took 50 percent of all revenue generated by the scheme workers as a ‘buffer’ in case the fund ever went into deficit. It never did, but workers were left with just half the value of the fund into which they had paid.

Their struggle was highlighted in Tribune earlier this year as part of a special edition marking the fortieth anniversary of the historic miners’ strike.

Former mineworkers were struggling on an average of £84 a week, with some widows receiving as little as £8.50. Campaigners reported cases of former miners without the money to bury spouses, having no funds for their own funerals and being forced to move into their children’s homes, unable to afford their own.

There were opportunities to right the injustice. Four years ago, the cross-party Business, Energy and Industry Select Committee called for £1.2 billion to be returned to the pension pot to address what its damning report called an ‘historic injustice’. But prime minister Rishi Sunak, chancellor at the time the report was published, rejected the recommendation.

The new payments have been backdated to last November.

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said: ‘We owe the mining communities a debt of gratitude. For decades, it has been a scandal that the government has taken money that could have been passed on to the miners and their families.’

The National Mineworkers Union (NUM) general Secretary Chris Kitchen welcomed the announcement, and Allen Young, pensioner representative for the North East of England, said: ‘The government’s decision to make good on this part of their manifesto commitment means we can use the pension fund directly to increase our members’ share.’

Talks between the miners’ representatives and ministers are scheduled to discuss safeguards in the future working of the scheme, under which pensions could still go down in value if the fund goes into deficit. The fund is now worth £1.5 billion, which will be handed over to the pension scheme for redistribution to 112,000 surviving mineworkers.

Jon Trickett, Labour MP for the mining constituency of Hemsworth in West Yorkshire and a long-standing campaigner for pension justice for miners, said: ‘It’s not just about the money, it’s about fairness. We should never forget that it’s the miners who powered this country.

‘They never gave up the fight for what the miners and their families were owed. The restoration of their pensions is the least they deserve. It’s been too long in coming and, sadly, many miners have not lived to see this.’

‘We cannot change the past, but we can — and should — celebrate this victory.’

Strictly Off The Record: Day 44

Even assuming, and it was far from clear, that the Crown had presented any evidence whatever on the morning of Wednesday 19 June, then no later than the afternoon of Thursday 20 June, I would have been found not guilty unanimously in the time that it took to walk to the jury room and send a note to the judge. On Monday 6 November, the only Prosecution witness did not turn up, having been suspended from the Police. Since then, he has been "asked to resign" because of his conduct of my case. On Friday 14 June, my barrister formally complained.

Lo and behold, on the morning of Sunday 16 June, enough Police Officers turned up at my door to take down an al-Qaeda cell, and behaved roughly as if that were what they were doing. Everyone is laughing, and not at me. Late that night, a nonsense additional charge, quite different from the stated grounds of the arrest, was added, with no expectation that it could possibly stick, but in order to postpone what would have been that week's open-and-shut acquittal. Be at Durham Crown Court on Wednesday 26 February 2025, almost exactly two years, although we dispute the timeline, after the original complaint was allegedly made. When I shall be found not guilty. But the process is the punishment.

Rather than embarrass itself any further, the Crown did not even ask for me to be remanded. Nor did it dispute that the Police had found nothing on my laptop or on my phone, even though the latest allegation therefore cannot be true. And nor did it dispute that its only witness had been sacked from the Police because of my case, or that this latest action against me was a revenge attack for my barrister's complaint, both of which are now on Monday 17 June's record of Newton Aycliffe Magistrates' Court, as is the cleanliness of my devices, of which the Police are nevertheless keeping possession, requiring me to replace them at considerable expense.

I wish that my solicitor had used such terms as "Mafia hit" and "punishment beating". I am using them now. This is a punishment beating for the sacked policeman. And it is a Mafia hit by some Fredo Corleone, because the latest complaint was supposedly made before I had withdrawn from the General Election, a withdrawal that has rendered it pointless in its own terms. Other than the unpaid position to which I was elected unopposed well over a year ago, and which has therefore been kept vacant ever since, I have no intention of contesting another election to public office.

Welcome to the Starmer State, which institutional Britain has treated as the status quo since Keir Starmer became Labour Leader. I am not the only dissident that it persecutes, and things are already getting an awful lot worse now that Starmer is Prime Minister.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Justice Delayed: Day 150

Even assuming, and it was far from clear, that the Crown had presented any evidence whatever on the morning of Wednesday 19 June, then no later than the afternoon of Thursday 20 June, I would have been found not guilty unanimously in the time that it took to walk to the jury room and send a note to the judge. On Monday 6 November, the only Prosecution witness did not turn up, having been suspended from the Police. Since then, he has been "asked to resign" because of his conduct of my case. On Friday 14 June, my barrister formally complained.

Lo and behold, on the morning of Sunday 16 June, enough Police Officers turned up at my door to take down an al-Qaeda cell, and behaved roughly as if that were what they were doing. Everyone is laughing, and not at me. Late that night, a nonsense additional charge, quite different from the stated grounds of the arrest, was added, with no expectation that it could possibly stick, but in order to postpone what would have been that week's open-and-shut acquittal. Be at Durham Crown Court on Wednesday 26 February 2025, almost exactly two years, although we dispute the timeline, after the original complaint was allegedly made. When I shall be found not guilty. But the process is the punishment.

Rather than embarrass itself any further, the Crown did not even ask for me to be remanded. Nor did it dispute that the Police had found nothing on my laptop or on my phone, even though the latest allegation therefore cannot be true. And nor did it dispute that its only witness had been sacked from the Police because of my case, or that this latest action against me was a revenge attack for my barrister's complaint, both of which are now on Monday 17 June's record of Newton Aycliffe Magistrates' Court, as is the cleanliness of my devices, of which the Police are nevertheless keeping possession, requiring me to replace them at considerable expense.

I wish that my solicitor had used such terms as "Mafia hit" and "punishment beating". I am using them now. This is a punishment beating for the sacked policeman. And it is a Mafia hit by some Fredo Corleone, because the latest complaint was supposedly made before I had withdrawn from the General Election, a withdrawal that has rendered it pointless in its own terms. Other than the unpaid position to which I was elected unopposed well over a year ago, and which has therefore been kept vacant ever since, I have no intention of contesting another election to public office.

Welcome to the Starmer State, which institutional Britain has treated as the status quo since Keir Starmer became Labour Leader. I am not the only dissident that it persecutes, and things are already getting an awful lot worse now that Starmer is Prime Minister.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 509

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and the allegation at the base of any outstanding charge has been made in order to incite my suicide.

That purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Board of the Catholic Safeguarding Standards Agency, currently Nazir Afzal, Amanda Ellingworth, Wesley Cuell, Bishop Paul Mason, Sarah Kilmartin, Jenny Holmes, Sir David Behan, and Sr Una Coogan IBVM.

That purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Committee, currently Gail McGregor, Paul Weatherstone, Fr Christopher Hancock MHM, Canon William Agley, Catherine Dyer, Canon Martin Stempczyk, Canon Peter Leighton VG, Maureen Dale, and Tony Lawless.

And that purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Team, currently Meriel Anderson, Ian Colling, Andrew Grant, Kirsty McIntyre, Lisa Short, Yvonne Brown, and Petra Scarr.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and the allegation at the base of any outstanding charge has been made in order to incite my suicide. I should emphasise that there is absolutely no risk that I might ever give anyone the satisfaction of my suicide.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The CPS Challenge: Day 509

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of its organised persecution of the opponents and critics of Keir Starmer, which is its principal national priority.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from seeking the position of General Secretary of Unite the Union on a programme including disaffiliation from the Labour Party, a proposal that would be hugely popular two years into a Starmer Government.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a thinktank to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually also a fortnightly satirical magazine.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from taking journalistic, political or other paid work for fear of losing my entitlement to Legal Aid.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service out of the same racism that has caused it to refuse to prosecute the Police Officers in the case of Stephen Lawrence.

And I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to incite my politically motivated murder, a murder that the CPS has already decided would never lead to any prosecution.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Board, currently Monica Burch, Stephen Parkinson, Simon Jeffreys, Dr Subo Shanmuganathan, and Kathryn Stone.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the CPS senior leadership, currently Tristan Bradshaw, Dawn Brodrick, Mike Browne, Steve Buckingham, Matthew Cain, Gregor McGill, Grace Ononiwu, and Baljhit Ubey.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Audit and Risk Assurance Committee, currently Simon Jeffreys, Stephen Parkinson, Michael Dunn, Deborah Harris, and Dr Subo Shanmuganathan.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Nominations, Leadership and Remuneration Committee, currently Kathryn Stone, Stephen Parkinson, and Monica Burch.

And each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the 279 members of staff of the CPS North East Area, by definition including, but not restricted to, Chief Crown Prosecutor Gail Gilchrist, and the Area Business Manager, Ian Brown.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 1213

I invite each and every bishop, priest and deacon of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if he thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me.

Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 1213

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

And I invite each and every Member of Parliament whose constituency fell wholly or partly in County Durham to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

76 Weeks On

Nominations have been closed for 76 weeks, so when is the election?

If I sought election to any other public position now, then I would rapidly find myself just another death in custody, especially under a Starmer or post-Starmer Government, and most especially if Labour had also taken back control of Durham County Council next year.

But I was a public governor of County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust from 2017 to 2020, having been elected unopposed, an extremely unusual occurrence. Unopposed among the 90,000 or more people in the part of County Durham that I was elected to represent. I failed to be re-elected by three votes, on a recount. Yet I was again elected unopposed well over a year ago, a double feat that I am not aware that anyone else has ever managed, and which has caused the position to be kept vacant ever since. I am determined to have it for at least as long as I was elected to it. Do your worst. As, now under both parties, you are already doing to far better than I.

Strictly Off The Record: Day 43

Even assuming, and it was far from clear, that the Crown had presented any evidence whatever on the morning of Wednesday 19 June, then no later than the afternoon of Thursday 20 June, I would have been found not guilty unanimously in the time that it took to walk to the jury room and send a note to the judge. On Monday 6 November, the only Prosecution witness did not turn up, having been suspended from the Police. Since then, he has been "asked to resign" because of his conduct of my case. On Friday 14 June, my barrister formally complained.

Lo and behold, on the morning of Sunday 16 June, enough Police Officers turned up at my door to take down an al-Qaeda cell, and behaved roughly as if that were what they were doing. Everyone is laughing, and not at me. Late that night, a nonsense additional charge, quite different from the stated grounds of the arrest, was added, with no expectation that it could possibly stick, but in order to postpone what would have been that week's open-and-shut acquittal. Be at Durham Crown Court on Wednesday 26 February 2025, almost exactly two years, although we dispute the timeline, after the original complaint was allegedly made. When I shall be found not guilty. But the process is the punishment.

Rather than embarrass itself any further, the Crown did not even ask for me to be remanded. Nor did it dispute that the Police had found nothing on my laptop or on my phone, even though the latest allegation therefore cannot be true. And nor did it dispute that its only witness had been sacked from the Police because of my case, or that this latest action against me was a revenge attack for my barrister's complaint, both of which are now on Monday 17 June's record of Newton Aycliffe Magistrates' Court, as is the cleanliness of my devices, of which the Police are nevertheless keeping possession, requiring me to replace them at considerable expense.

I wish that my solicitor had used such terms as "Mafia hit" and "punishment beating". I am using them now. This is a punishment beating for the sacked policeman. And it is a Mafia hit by some Fredo Corleone, because the latest complaint was supposedly made before I had withdrawn from the General Election, a withdrawal that has rendered it pointless in its own terms. Other than the unpaid position to which I was elected unopposed well over a year ago, and which has therefore been kept vacant ever since, I have no intention of contesting another election to public office.

Welcome to the Starmer State, which institutional Britain has treated as the status quo since Keir Starmer became Labour Leader. I am not the only dissident that it persecutes, and things are already getting an awful lot worse now that Starmer is Prime Minister.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Justice Delayed: Day 149

Even assuming, and it was far from clear, that the Crown had presented any evidence whatever on the morning of Wednesday 19 June, then no later than the afternoon of Thursday 20 June, I would have been found not guilty unanimously in the time that it took to walk to the jury room and send a note to the judge. On Monday 6 November, the only Prosecution witness did not turn up, having been suspended from the Police. Since then, he has been "asked to resign" because of his conduct of my case. On Friday 14 June, my barrister formally complained.

Lo and behold, on the morning of Sunday 16 June, enough Police Officers turned up at my door to take down an al-Qaeda cell, and behaved roughly as if that were what they were doing. Everyone is laughing, and not at me. Late that night, a nonsense additional charge, quite different from the stated grounds of the arrest, was added, with no expectation that it could possibly stick, but in order to postpone what would have been that week's open-and-shut acquittal. Be at Durham Crown Court on Wednesday 26 February 2025, almost exactly two years, although we dispute the timeline, after the original complaint was allegedly made. When I shall be found not guilty. But the process is the punishment.

Rather than embarrass itself any further, the Crown did not even ask for me to be remanded. Nor did it dispute that the Police had found nothing on my laptop or on my phone, even though the latest allegation therefore cannot be true. And nor did it dispute that its only witness had been sacked from the Police because of my case, or that this latest action against me was a revenge attack for my barrister's complaint, both of which are now on Monday 17 June's record of Newton Aycliffe Magistrates' Court, as is the cleanliness of my devices, of which the Police are nevertheless keeping possession, requiring me to replace them at considerable expense.

I wish that my solicitor had used such terms as "Mafia hit" and "punishment beating". I am using them now. This is a punishment beating for the sacked policeman. And it is a Mafia hit by some Fredo Corleone, because the latest complaint was supposedly made before I had withdrawn from the General Election, a withdrawal that has rendered it pointless in its own terms. Other than the unpaid position to which I was elected unopposed well over a year ago, and which has therefore been kept vacant ever since, I have no intention of contesting another election to public office.

Welcome to the Starmer State, which institutional Britain has treated as the status quo since Keir Starmer became Labour Leader. I am not the only dissident that it persecutes, and things are already getting an awful lot worse now that Starmer is Prime Minister.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 508

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and the allegation at the base of any outstanding charge has been made in order to incite my suicide.

That purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Board of the Catholic Safeguarding Standards Agency, currently Nazir Afzal, Amanda Ellingworth, Wesley Cuell, Bishop Paul Mason, Sarah Kilmartin, Jenny Holmes, Sir David Behan, and Sr Una Coogan IBVM.

That purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Committee, currently Gail McGregor, Paul Weatherstone, Fr Christopher Hancock MHM, Canon William Agley, Catherine Dyer, Canon Martin Stempczyk, Canon Peter Leighton VG, Maureen Dale, and Tony Lawless.

And that purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Team, currently Meriel Anderson, Ian Colling, Andrew Grant, Kirsty McIntyre, Lisa Short, Yvonne Brown, and Petra Scarr.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and the allegation at the base of any outstanding charge has been made in order to incite my suicide. I should emphasise that there is absolutely no risk that I might ever give anyone the satisfaction of my suicide.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The CPS Challenge: Day 508

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of its organised persecution of the opponents and critics of Keir Starmer, which is its principal national priority.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from seeking the position of General Secretary of Unite the Union on a programme including disaffiliation from the Labour Party, a proposal that would be hugely popular two years into a Starmer Government.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a thinktank to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually also a fortnightly satirical magazine.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from taking journalistic, political or other paid work for fear of losing my entitlement to Legal Aid.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service out of the same racism that has caused it to refuse to prosecute the Police Officers in the case of Stephen Lawrence.

And I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to incite my politically motivated murder, a murder that the CPS has already decided would never lead to any prosecution.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Board, currently Monica Burch, Stephen Parkinson, Simon Jeffreys, Dr Subo Shanmuganathan, and Kathryn Stone.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the CPS senior leadership, currently Tristan Bradshaw, Dawn Brodrick, Mike Browne, Steve Buckingham, Matthew Cain, Gregor McGill, Grace Ononiwu, and Baljhit Ubey.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Audit and Risk Assurance Committee, currently Simon Jeffreys, Stephen Parkinson, Michael Dunn, Deborah Harris, and Dr Subo Shanmuganathan.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Nominations, Leadership and Remuneration Committee, currently Kathryn Stone, Stephen Parkinson, and Monica Burch.

And each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the 279 members of staff of the CPS North East Area, by definition including, but not restricted to, Chief Crown Prosecutor Gail Gilchrist, and the Area Business Manager, Ian Brown.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 1212

I invite each and every bishop, priest and deacon of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if he thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me.

Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 1212

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

And I invite each and every Member of Parliament whose constituency fell wholly or partly in County Durham to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Milestones

Raise a glass on this tenth anniversary of the death of Telegraph Blogs. How different history might have been if that had published my last copy, which was based on a charming telephone interview with Sir Jeremy Bagge, 7th Baronet, and Mullah Omar of the Turnip Taliban. This year, his brother, James Bagge, was an Independent candidate, backed by figures such as David Gauke and Dominic Grieve. He came fourth with 6,282 votes, ahead of the Liberal Democrat and the Green, and his 14.2 per cent of the vote easily saved his deposit, while of course Liz Truss lost the seat by only 630 votes, one tenth of Bagge's total. Those who had disliked her in South West Norfolk had done so far longer than anyone else, but eventually the country caught up.

Not that matters have improved. We are on the eve of the relaunch of Keir Starmer's Government a mere five months into its existence. Only in the last couple of days, among numerous other things, Liz Kendall is having her £350 monthly energy bill paid out of the public purse while the Winter Fuel Payment has been withdrawn from 10 million pensioners, Henry Tufnell's parents have been found to have transferred a farm worth more than two million pounds to his 22-year-old brother 20 days before the Budget, and World Central Kitchen has had to pause its operations in Gaza after three more of its aid workers had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. At no expense to the Israelis, 47 per cent of their reconnaissance missions over Gaza are flown by the RAF, more than Israel and the United States combined. There is a one in two chance that the RAF identified those aid workers as targets.

The Armed Forces do as they are told, so if the State wanted to kill people, then it should call in the people whom it employed for that task. Those are not the doctors. It could take an horrific length of time to die by the means proposed for assisted suicide. A crack marksman could do the job in seconds, and at vastly less expense. This is not a joke. Those are the State's killers. If you are repulsed at this proposal, then you are repulsed at this suggested form of state killing.

Only 28 MPs would need to change sides in order to defeat assisted suicide at Third Reading, and at present there is talk of 36 waverers, mostly Labour, with the Liberal Democrats accounting for most of the rest. There is all to work for; "play" would not be the right word here. But that assumes that the Conservative opponents held firm. The part of the country that is most opposed to this Bill is ultra-diverse London, while the deep countryside, though no longer anything like as white as it was even 10 years ago, is still vastly more so, and the bastion of support for this measure. Anyone who seriously wanted to re-Christianise this country would need to think about first immigration and then dispersal on a scale that had never previously been contemplated. The healthy crop of rural Labour MPs may well be cut down by the farm tax, but it will not be cut down by this.

As few as 23 Conservative MPs voted in favour of assisted suicide, but ignore the breadth and feel the depth. The party's most recent Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Health Secretary (whereas the present Health Secretary voted against), and Work and Pensions Secretary. A former Chief Whip who went on to function as Foreign Secretary in the Commons as deputy to Lord Cameron. The present Shadow Chancellor, Shadow Home Secretary, Shadow Defence Secretary, and Shadow Education Secretary, as well as the Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and the Shadow Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. Several more Shadow Ministers, one of whom used to chair the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. The Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. A man who had already been knighted before he entered Parliament this year. And so on. Complete with Cameron, alongside Rishi Sunak is the machine that effortlessly installed him as Prime Minister without a vote's being cast and a mere seven weeks after he had lost a Leadership Election.

Three out of five Reform UK MPs voted for assisted suicide, and if there were no negative consequence of that from Mar-a-Lago, mostly obviously if there were still a large donation to Reform from Elon Musk, then who knows how many Conservative MPs might feel it safe to curry favour with the people whom they know perfectly well to be their party's permanent ultimate authority, by adopting a position that was far closer to their own instincts, which these days are fiercely libertarian, and no less secular than the country at large?

Reform is a party with problems across the board. Ben Habib has gone, Richard Tice has disowned Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and "all of that lot", Nigel Farage is close to the Priti Patel who as Boris Johnson's Home Secretary presided over the highest immigration ever, and he says that 50 per cent of Conservative MPs ought to join Reform. The party is dancing with joy at having recruited Andrea Jenkyns, an undying fangirl of Johnson, the Prime Minister of Net Zero. Johnson was a very big spender long before Covid-19. He even lifted the requirement that jobs in Britain be advertised first in Britain, making him, as has been said, the most pro-immigration Prime Minister ever, although admittedly only because Liz Truss never got into her stride. Johnson was closer to Stonewall than any Prime Minister before or since. The lockdowns were Johnson's. The Northern Ireland Protocol was Johnson's. The war in Ukraine was Johnson's. If Reform UK is now the party of Jenkyns, then it is the party of all of that.

Even if it were not, then while there are easily 326 wannabe Donald Trumps in this country, there are not 326 constituencies in which each of them would be the First Past the Post. Using the far more favourable Single Transferrable Vote and having uncharacteristically managed their candidates to avoid cannibalisation, those broadly in that vein have made only limited progress, if any, in Ireland, while the hard core has been humiliated. Kneecap should now challenge Philip Dwyer to a rap battle in Irish. Mind you, Kemi Badenoch should challenge Kneecap to a rap battle, and Kneecap should reply that they would rap against her in Yoruba, if she would rap against them in Irish. But I digress. Dwyer's sort got nowhere under STV, so what chance would the Gregg Wallace Tendency have here? And has no hack tracked down Wallace's aunts and asked them, well, you know? Come on, fingers out.

World AIDS Day

The position of the Catholic Church is fully borne out by the facts, and is unique in being so.

Certain people might consider applying some journalistic or scientific objectivity to the question of where in Africa the condom use relentlessly promoted by Western non-governmental organisations and compliant governments has ever arrested, never mind reversed, the rate of HIV infection. There is nowhere.

Huge numbers of condoms were distributed in Botswana, and the result was for the then President Festus Mogae to declare, "Abstain or die." But a a reversal has long been underway in Uganda, ever since a 70 per cent reduction in the 1990s due to the government's message being the same as the Catholic Church's: "Change Your Behaviour."

Who is incapable of fidelity within a monogamous marriage and of abstinence outside? Women? Black people? Poor people? Developing-world people? Or just poor black women in the developing world?

Whatever Happened to the Rule of Law?

Professor Prem Sikka, Lord Sikka writes:

Whatever happened to the ‘rule of law’ in the UK? We all value the rule of law. It is the foundation stone of democratic, open and peaceful societies. It helps to protect rights, provides stability, accountability, and enables people to flourish. When applied correctly it can limit the arbitrary powers of the state and wealthy elites.

However, all is not well. It is often claimed that everyone is equal before the law. The assumption is that everyone can access timely legal advice and ultimately go to the courts to adjudicate on disputes. Following the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 people can’t get legal-aid for many family, employment, housing and debt problems. The number of legal aid cases to help people get the early advice they needed dropped from almost a million in 2009/10 to just 130,000 in 2021/22. The number of advice agencies and law centres doing this important work has fallen by 59%. It is estimated that the number of people helped by legal aid in that period dropped by 4.5 million. Over the same period the number of people having to go to court without representation trebled.

Even if you beg, borrow and sell your possessions, most people can’t get timely access to the courts. There is a backlog of 370,700 cases for magistrates’ courts. The backlog in crown courts, which try the most serious criminal offences, is 71,000. Of course, the rich and powerful can jump the queue and hire lawyers to lie and prosecute innocent people as vividly shown by the Post Office scandal. In this case a giant corporation, with the aid of compliant lawyers, secured criminal convictions of hundreds of innocent postmasters. There can be no equality before the law unless there is equality in access to the law.

In folklore, laws apply equally to all natural and legal persons, but some are more equal than others. The Duchy of Cornwall, an archaic residue of bygone times, enjoys exemptions from paying inheritance tax. It is also exempt from paying corporation tax and capital gains tax even though it trades. This seriously disadvantages its competitors who are required to pay all such taxes. The Duchy of Lancaster also enjoys similar privileges, which are not available to other businesses or citizens.

Even if people can get access to the courts, at best they will get an interpretation of law, not justice. The ‘rule of law’ and justice are not synonymous. Justice is a higher order concept and is concerned with fairness, equity, and respect for others, freedom, equality, human rights, sanctity of life and more. Such concerns are increasingly missing from law-making.

It is hard to recall any mass street marches, petitions or demonstrations urging the government to inflict social harms, but they have. Laws have been enacted to implement austerity, cuts in real wages, benefits, and public services to hand tax cuts for the rich. The result is that over 16m people, including 5.2m children, 9.2m working-age adults and 1.5m pension-age adults live in poverty. Some 6.34 million people in England are waiting for 7.57m hospital appointments. 2.8m people are chronically ill. Around 300,000 people a year die awaiting hospital appointments. A report published earlier this year noted that in the decade after 2011 more than one million people in England died prematurely due to poverty, austerity, and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. A recent study reported that 111,000 Britons died last year in poverty; 128,000 people died in fuel poverty, including 111,000 pensioners; and due to laws increasing the state pension age 15,000 died before accessing the state pension.

Hungry children and shivering pensioners are the product of the contemporary rule of law. The two-child benefit cap is the biggest cause of child poverty. The government has withdrawn winter fuel payments from thousands of pensioners living below the poverty line.

Legislators are silenced by the party machine and parliament cannot be relied upon to enact laws beneficial to the masses. Against a background of political populism the Criminal Justice Act 2003 introduced imprisonment for public protection (IPP) or indeterminate prison sentences for minor offences. A person spent 12 years in prison for stealing a mobile phone. A 20 year-old was given eight-month prison sentence for waving an imitation gun, but 18 years later is still in prison. Between 2005 and 2012, the courts imposed 8,711 IPP sentences. As of 31 March 2024, there were 1,180 unreleased IPP prisoners in custody in England and Wales. In addition to these unreleased IPP prisoners, there were 1,616 recalled IPP prisoners in custody on 31 March 2024, bringing the total number of IPP prisoners to 2,796. Over 700 have served more than 10 years longer than their minimum tariff. Such laws are the outcome of political populism which has little regard for the human consequences, and a political system where legislators are pressurised to follow the diktats of the party machine. The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 abolished IPP sentences but the abolition did not apply retrospectively to people who had already received such a sentence.

People expect the rule of law to be impartial and fair, but that is not the case. Thousands of unpaid carers looking after disabled, frail or ill relatives are being forced to repay huge sums to the government and threatened with criminal prosecution after unwittingly breaching earnings rules by just a few pounds a week. The same fervour does not apply to corporations and the rich. Since 2010, HMRC admits that it failed to collect over £500bn in taxes though others say it is closer to around £1,400bn. To soothe public anxieties, the government introduced the Criminal Finance Act 2017 and target corporate tax evasion. To date, there hasn’t even been any prosecution. Big accounting firms are the epicentre of a global tax abuse industry. They receive plenty of government contracts, but despite strong court judgments none have been investigated, fined or prosecuted.

In 2022, P&O Ferries sacked 800 staff without any regard for the employment laws, and replaced them with cheaper agency staff. Its chief executive told a parliamentary committee that the company knowingly broke the law. The then Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: “P&O plainly aren’t going to get away with it.” However, the company faced no sanctions from the government.

Regulators act as judges, juries and quasi-courts but their sympathies are with the industry rather than its victims. Just this week, a 350 page report by the All Party Parliament Group on Investment, Fraud and Fairer Financial Services stated that despite mounting evidence the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) failed to investigate frauds. And it is not the first time. Frauds by HBOS go back to 2002, but are yet to be investigated. The FCA considers £1bn frauds to be a private matter for Lloyds Bank (it acquired HBOS in 2008). Lloyds promised to publish a report in 2018, but no report has been published. The UK state has a long history of covering up banking frauds. For example, in 2012 HSBC was fined $1.9bn in the US after pleading guilty to “criminal conduct” and laundering money. The then Chancellor George Osborne secretly wrote to the US authorities and urged them not to prosecute HSBC as the bank was somehow too big to fail. To this day, there has been no UK investigation, and no statement has been made to parliament.

The insolvency laws protect finance industry and penalise traders, employees and unsecured creditors. The pecking order for distribution of the assets of a bankrupt business is that secured creditors, usually banks, private equity and hedge funds must be paid first. That leaves almost nothing for the remaining creditors. Employee pension schemes rank as an unsecured creditor and people lose their pension rights. Thousands of SMEs and traders are destroyed by the inability to recover anything from a bankrupt client. There is no equity, equality or justice in insolvency laws, and no political party is inclined to challenge the power of finance capital.

The UK has a particular kind of ‘rule of law’. It denies people access to legal advice and access to the courts. Major political parties rarely, if ever, talk about justice, equity, equality or the human cost of the skewed laws. People look to parliament, but parliament is disconnected from the people as the political system primarily serves corporations and the rich, with few crumbs occasionally thrown to the masses.

Parliament plays a complex dual role. The tendency is first to exclude and silence people. For example, women’s demand for vote was denied. Some had to resort to violence to make their case and eventually parliament relented. People have long highlighted the evils of gender and racial discrimination before parliament could be persuaded to act. Similar patterns can be found in the emergence of employment and environmental laws.

To create possibilities of emancipatory change we need to ask questions about whose rule it is, whose law it is and who actually benefits and suffers from it.

Related Priorities

In the midst of holding the line magnificently against assisted suicide, the Morning Star editorialises:

Reignited civil war in Syria is down to destabilising shockwaves from Israel’s wars of aggression in the Middle East and the malign role of Nato powers in shielding the jihadist forces in Idlib now terrorising Aleppo.

There is no ignoring the overlapping alliances which shape this conflict. Syria is allied to Iran, which Israel has repeatedly attacked, including through bombing an Iranian consulate in Syria itself. Both are allied to Hezbollah, which has fought on the Bashar al-Assad government’s side in the civil war and which Israel seeks to crush by invading Lebanon.

It does not follow that every outbreak of violence in the region is part of a master plan, but perceptions that Hezbollah and Iran have been weakened by Israeli attacks will have encouraged the terrorist regime in Idlib to reopen hostilities.

And it is a terrorist regime, though Western reportage since the civil war began 13 years ago has been coy about the nature of Syria’s opposition.

The Idlib-based Syrian Salvation Government is dominated by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), itself a merger of a number of al-Qaida-affiliated Islamist groups, including Jaysh al-Sunna, whose recruitment of child soldiers was exposed in 2016, and Nour al-din al-Zinki, notorious for filming the beheading of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy in the same year.

Ahrar al-Sham, the largest of the groups, has been nicknamed the Syrian Taliban and its rule is just as repressive. An EU asylum agency briefing noted in 2020 that “the jihadist coalition HTS has been responsible for the repressive social norms and policies against female residents … resulting in further violations including executions, corporal punishments, restrictions of freedom of movement, of dress, on work, education and on access to healthcare.”

The open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary forces in Syria has continued in the country’s north-west to date through the illegal presence of Nato armies on Syrian soil.

It is the presence of the Turkish army that has stopped Syria’s military stamping out the last bastion of jihadist rule in the country, just as it is the presence of the US military in the north-east which has prevented reintegration of Kurdish areas.

The official rationale for stationing troops in Syria against its will is to prevent a revival of the Islamic State terror group, though once-and-future president Donald Trump was more honest when he stated the US was in Syria “only for the oil,” hundreds of thousands of barrels of which have been illegally exported via Iraqi Kurdistan — with Damascus estimating revenues lost to this theft at hundreds of billions of dollars.

This underlines the hypocrisy of US officials now blaming Assad for failing to engage in a “political process” to end the war. The process has been prevented by foreign occupying armies.

Assad too has his foreign allies, and Russian bombers are again conducting air raids over rebel-held territory: if HTS assumed Russia was too overstretched in Ukraine to engage (the apparently accurate assumption of Azerbaijan when it marched past Russian peacekeepers to drive the entire Armenian population out of Nagorno-Karabakh last year) it may have miscalculated.

That only emphasises the potential of Syria’s war to draw in great powers, powers which are now far closer to direct conflict than in the war’s earlier stages. The spread of war across the Middle East comes at a huge cost in human lives, and increases the number of flashpoints for a new world war.

The answer must be to redouble our efforts for peace. These wars cannot be considered in isolation.

Stopping Israel’s genocide in Gaza and attacks on Lebanon, prioritising a ceasefire and negotiations to end great power conflict in Ukraine, and demanding British pressure on our Nato ally Turkey to stop its jihadist allies rampaging through Syria are related priorities for the peace movement.

I Cannot Share Their Glee

Chris Bayliss writes:

The news that insurgent forces have launched an energetic and apparently unexpected campaign against regime forces across northern Syria has come as an early Christmas present to the renewed cohort of liberal hawks in the West.

Whilst liberal opinion in the West has been firmly opposed to Assad throughout the war, in earlier stages of the conflict, their attention was usually focussed on humanitarian aspects of the war. However, their degree of investment in the kinetic phases of the Russo-Ukraine war have turned many progressive internationalists into armchair open source intelligence analysts.

In some ways, it’s heartening to see our liberal friends come to enjoy the simple pleasures of a bit of war. As a schoolboy, I always felt a bit sorry for them that their assorted humanitarian qualms and hangups meant that they couldn’t enjoy the ground invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq as I did; it was as if they’d never got over Vietnam. Couldn’t they at least try to appreciate it as they might have a particularly one-sided cricket match that we couldn’t lose? However that has all changed now. As the boys of the Hayat Tahir Al-Sham close in on Aleppo, I find that it is I who cannot share their glee at a loathsome tyrant apparently coming undone.

Before I go any further, I will clarify that I share much if not all of the liberal consensus around Bashar Al-Assad. Unlike others on the Right I do not regard him as somebody who could have been bolstered to preserve stability in the long term. Like all of the regimes established across the Arab world by his father’s generation of secular dictators drawn from religious minority groups, that regime was living on borrowed time and its end was always going to be bloody. Like Saddam’s regime in Iraq, the Ba’athists had created a political and religious pressure cooker in Syria, and when it blew, the West’s priority should have been to try to make its overthrow play out as fast as possible.

Like most of the West’s failures in the Middle East over the last 20 years, the botching of our response to the uprising against Assad flows from the unhappy consequences of the Bush Administration’s terrible decision to disband the Iraqi Army in 2003. It was this that created a huge pool of unemployed and resentful manpower and leadership for Al Qaeda aligned Sunni militia groups in the region, and also created a vacuum for Iranian-aligned Shia militia groups to fill. After 2011, Syria became their playground. The ongoing existence and increasing brutality of the regime and its Russian backers, pushed an ever greater number of Syria’s remaining population toward support for increasingly extremist Sunni militancy, leading to the conflagration of ISIS.

The subsequent war to destroy ISIS led the West, under the hapless leadership of Barack Obama, to simultaneously support a coalition that had pro-regime, Iranian-aligned Shia groups doing the bulk of the fighting on the ground, at the same time as continuing to support radical (but nominally non-ISIS) Sunni groups in their war against Assad. It was a catastrophic example of path-dependent muddle, in which nobody on the Western side had the moral fibre to step back and take a hard decision about what the range of plausible outcomes at that point might be, and which one we would reluctantly have to support.

The aftermath left the remnants of the regime atop the leadership of a broader but far more sustainable coalition of interest groups than it had been before 2011. This included many elements that had fought bitterly against the regime in the early phases of the civil war; they did not forget the terrible crimes committed by Assad, but by this point, so much brutality had been experienced by and from so many sides, that those who were left had little choice to but to come to terms with the least worst of the available options. So many others were dead, or in permanent exile. Assad remained in power simply by being the last plausible man standing.

The formation of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham itself tells the story of the Syrian civil war. As an organisation, it contains traces of the DNA of each of the dozens of radical Sunni Islamist groups that were formed across the country between 2011 and 2014. The explosion of ISIS across eastern Syria in 2014 triggered a wave of splinters, mergers and disappearances of these groups as they struggled to maintain their independence and identity in the face of the onslaught. These groups included the Al Nusra front (Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), which broke off from Al Qaeda, as the events of 2014 suddenly made that association far less useful. Others were hastily cobbled together in alliances of convenience, such as the marriage of a group of Moroccan fighters with a small band of local Salafists that went under the name of Ansar al-Din. Most of the groups emphasised their autonomy, and their position of neutrality with regard to other groups opposed to Assad; however almost all of them cooperated with ISIS on various occasions, particularly during the siege of the Kuweiris airbase which included many different Sunni factions at different periods.

In 2017, the defeat of ISIS and the entry into much of Syria’s territory of large, well-equipped Iranian aligned Shia militias, manned mainly by Iraqis, triggered another wave of consolidation among non-ISIS Sunni jihadists. HTS was formed at this time, officially from the merger of six different groups including Ansar al-Din and Al Nusra; but among its members it counted men who had fought with a far greater number of Salafist organisations over the course of the war. One of these groups was the Haraka Nour al-Din al-Zenki, who had controlled the rural areas to the west of Aleppo earlier in the war, and which HTS has re-taken during November 2024 — although this group later splintered off from HTS and went to war against them. Each of these groups has stood accused of war crimes, including abductions, the killing of journalists and the beheading of people suspected of fighting for groups to whom they opposed. Each of them adheres to exceptionally austere Salafist religious doctrines that are completely opposed to democracy and to the kind of values that Western liberals typically support — and each of them insists on the total exclusion of non-Sunni elements from the areas they control.

Now, another wave of Sunni insurgency is underway in the Northwest, and Aleppo once again looks vulnerable. I find it very difficult to imagine how any humanitarian-minded Westerner, no matter how implacably they detested Bashar Al-Assad, could possibly see that as anything other than a complete disaster.

Are people still so deluded that they imagine organisations like Hayat Tahir Al Sham (HTS) are anything other than sectarian fanatics who will make life unbearable for anybody who doesn’t share their ethnicity and very narrow religious perspective? Do they still imagine that there is any significant element left in Syria with the numbers to fight for something even vaguely resembling a democratic or liberal vision?

It’s poor practice as a writer to pose a long series of rhetorical questions to the reader, but the position of progressive humanitarians seeing something to cheer in the HTS breakout leaves one with so many questions, there is little one can do but ask them. Even if Aleppo falls, do they believe these militants can take the whole country? If they do, what happens to anyone who isn’t a Sunni Arab? If they don’t, do they see a return to high intensity conflict as preferable to the current settlement? If HTS take Aleppo and leave it at that, do they imagine that the regime, after everything it has come through, will allow them to establish their own Sunni Islamist statelet in the Northwest? Is that something that they’d even want, if they stopped to think about it for five minutes?

It’s important to ask these questions, because they highlight a complete absence of any kind of strategic approach to Syria from Western liberals (who will remain the dominant faction in the west’s diplomatic and foreign policy establishments, even after Trump takes office). And its important to bear in mind that the Syria conflict has been going on so long now that we’ve almost forgotten the time when it began, back in 2011, when liberals were still largely highly critical of neoconservative overreach in the Middle East; hence Obama’s reluctance to intervene significantly in the first place.

The most charitable perspective, possibly, is that the Ukraine war has given them such a sharp friend-enemy distinction that they are able to see through all of the flaws and failures of HTS; “Assad is with Russia, and Russia is the enemy. Therefore HTS are our friends, and we will work through whatever problems we have with them after they’ve won”. In many ways, this has become for them the kind of sports fixture that neoconservatives naively imagined Iraq was going to be all those years ago.

A resurgence in the fighting in Syria will come as a terrible blow to communities that have only recently started to rebuild their lives and homes after many years of war. The Syrian conflict has already blown away all previous assumptions about how long an upper-middle income country could sustain a civil war for. Radical Sunni Islamists taking hold of Aleppo will do nothing to help the people of Ukraine, no matter what aid Assad is forced to beg from Putin. The rebels stand little to no chance of unseating Assad, and seems very unlikely that the people of Syria would be better off if they did. This latest bout of violence should bring absolutely no cheer at all to anybody with a humanitarian bone in their body.

Consider The Political Fate

Lisa McKenzie writes:

Britain’s struggling prime minister, Keir Starmer, should consider the political fate of Margaret Thatcher. In 1990, she resigned as prime minister before leaving No10 in tears, having united not just her own party, but also large parts of the country against her.

Indeed, through Thatcher’s struggle against the organised working class, especially during the Miners’ Strike, she made enemies of many families like mine. In doing so, she prompted many of us to find solidarity and commonality with sections of society we might not have otherwise met, from inner-city working-class black communities, gay and lesbian groups in London and even middle-class lefties working in publishing and studying at Oxbridge. She brought all these people together in the name of one cause: the struggle against Margaret Thatcher and her government.

Four decades on, and Starmer appears to be doing something similar. The PM is bringing disparate groups of people together in opposition to his increasingly hated government.

Starmer has zero rapport with the electorate. He lacks any sort of political personality. Since winning the General Election in July, he has failed to articulate Labour’s vision for the nation. Instead, we have been drip-fed half-baked policy announcements and robotic soundbites about 14 years of Tory misrule and the need for ‘difficult decisions’. No wonder Labour’s poll ratings have plummeted. The party never enjoyed that much support anyway, but now large swathes of the UK actively detest Starmer and his cronies.

Labour demonstrated how woeful it is within weeks of its election victory. The horrific murder of three young girls in Southport in late July shocked the nation. Misleading social-media rumours quickly started circulating, falsely claiming that the perpetrator was an asylum seeker. These were enough to spark large-scale disorder. But Starmer’s response made a terrible situation worse.

After the initial disturbances, Starmer could have spoken to the nation – condemning the riots while also trying to address what caused them. While the vast majority were appalled by the rioting, they were also appalled by the Southport stabbings, and felt their concerns about immigration and a lack of housing had been ignored for far too long. But he has ignored the underlying causes. What’s more, on top of punishing the rioters, he went after those engaged in unpleasant social-media activity. He barked about ‘far-right thugs’ and ‘hooligans’, but said nothing about the challenges facing working-class communities. The message this sent to millions was that Starmer’s government is not listening. Or worse, that his government sees you as no better than the thugs.

In August, Starmer quickly followed up his post-riots crackdown by cutting many pensioners’ winter fuel allowance. Trade unions and charities protested, claiming that thousands of elderly people would be plunged into poverty and some would die. But Starmer and his ministers ignored their concerns and pushed the changes to the winter fuel allowance through parliament.

At the same time as Labour ministers have been immiserating the elderly, work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall’s talk of cutting spending on disability benefits has caused concern and anger among disabled people and disability-rights campaigners.

It has looked, at points, as if this Labour government has been trying to turn people against it. On top of its attacks on working-class communities, pensioners and disabled people, it has been busily rushing through the legalisation of assisted dying, via Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s private members’ bill. ‘I think they want to finish us off’, said one elderly ex-miner who lives in my village in Nottinghamshire.

Labour’s long-awaited budget, finally delivered last month, only stirred up further animosity – this time from farmers about to be hit by inheritance tax. It’s not unreasonable to want to close some of the loopholes in inheritance tax, but the government’s dismissive attitude towards farmers, as if they’re all super-rich chancers buying up property for a tax dodge, angers many beyond rural communities. After all, there are many who see farmers as representative of small-c conservative values of family and hard work – values that Labour seems to be waging war against.

In the 1980s, Thatcher’s government brought people together in opposition to it. It politicised a generation. This Starmer government seems to be doing something similar, forging unity among ostensibly strange bedfellows, from pensioners and disabled people to farmers and working-class people across Britain’s post-industrial landscape. Like Thatcher’s government, Starmer’s also seems intent on stigmatising and demonising its opponents rather than listening to their concerns. It stereotypes its opponents as the greedy landowning farmer, the rich pensioner, the workshy disability-benefits claimant and the racist white working-class thug.

Many now can’t wait to see Starmer and his sidekicks gone. It took 11 years for those of us on the wrong side of Thatcher’s Britain to finally see her crying outside No10. I hope Starmer doesn’t last 11 months.