Hunger Games

And those drones reached Ireland how, exactly? Yet who is to call out this nonsense? The 16 Collective Leaders of Your Party? Whenever they did some Collective Leading, then would they all be able to claim at least a second class rail fare, and the cost of a bed and breakfast? Or will those positions be restricted to the independently wealthy?

A coup was launched against Jeremy Corbyn’s Leadership when Labour was on 34 per cent, several points ahead of Reform UK now, and 20 points ahead of a Labour position that would leave it with three MPs, two of whom would be John McDonnell and Ian Byrne.

Four of the last lot of hunger strikers’ five demands were granted on 6 October 1981, and by 1983 even the right not to do prison work had been conceded. Who was the Prime Minister then? It can be done. But the six Palestine Action hunger strikers have no one to speak for them. Or, rather, they have nearly three times as many people to speak for them as there are of themselves. Although they are only on remand. Would it be impossible for one of them to contest a parliamentary by-election? At, for the sake of argument, Hampstead and Kilburn?

Regular Fit

Royal Tunbridge Wells is spa town. There really is no answer that. Ofgem has permitted energy bills to go up yet again, this time to improve the electricity and gas grids. Believe that when you see it. But was that not what the ever-soaring standing charges were supposed to be for? Yes, and they would cover it many times over. This is a racket.

And Ofcom has fined AVS a paltry one million pounds, been completely and understandably ignored, slapped on another 50 grand, and been left wondering why that had also had no effect whatever. AVS will therefore now be fined a further one thousand pounds per day. So there. In its way, the British Establishment is quite sweet.

Thai and Tether

There is being right-wing, and then there is having two kings. But do you have to take a Thai name to be naturalised in Thailand? If not, then why does Christopher Harborne have that name on his British passport, but “Chakrit Sakunkrit” on his Thai one? Harbone’s generosity has made Nigel Farage the political spokesman for cryptocurrencies, and specifically for Harbone’s Tether.

Yet the speculative value of cryptocurrencies is hurtling towards their intrinsic value of zero. A suspicious number of those who decry us sceptics of the cashless society also claim that we are under constant threat of cyberattacks, and a surprising number of those who are forthright against the cashless society are enthusiasts for cryptocurrencies, about which the clue is in the name. In the cashless economy, every penny that we spent would be tracked. Cryptocurrencies are beyond democratic political control. The combination of the two would be, and increasingly is, that level of tracking by those who were thus unaccountable.

Unaccountable not least because Tony Blair and Gordon Brown surrendered democratic political control over monetary policy, a surrender for which they had no electoral mandate but which they had plotted in Opposition, just as Keir Starmer and his cronies plotted fiscal drag, assisted suicide, puberty blockers, digital ID, facial recognition, the abolition of trial by jury, the taxation of family farms to the point that they would have to sell up to giant American agribusinesses, and much more to which we have yet to be made privy.

At least Brown did keep us out of the euro. Much to the chagrin of Peter Mandelson, who now enjoys the hospitality of George Osborne. Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin have vital information, with a book due out next year, about the Epstein network’s connections to cryptocurrencies. Osborne has written in the venerable pages of the Financial Times that Britain risked being “left behind” by stablecoins.

All that, and digital ID and facial recognition, too? Starmer has said that to access our own money, we would need the digital ID that the Tony Blair Institute would have linked to facial recognition. Expect it to be illegal to fail to produce whichever form of it a state functionary demanded, and impossible to make or receive payment without it. There is a word for the merger of state and corporate power to the point of the physical violence on which that merger depended.

Not that it would be anything new in this country. If the spycops inquiry received anything like the coverage that it deserved, then digital ID would have public approval below 10 per cent. Facial recognition probably already does. Reform UK wants to hold the line against them. But it already has nine million reasons why it cannot.

On The Face

Having already angered everyone with the abolition of trial by jury, the Government has now decided to anger everyone again with facial recognition. Those two should pull anyone back from support for digital ID. Like the assisted suicide that we now know was always planned to be pursued as a Private Member's Bill that was really a Government Bill, like puberty blockers, like the Chagos sellout, unlike protection from unfair dismissal on day one of employment, and unlike a cap on ground rents, those measures were in no one's manifesto.

If they cancel your local elections, then do not pay your council tax. They are doing this to soften us up for the "postponement" of the next General Election "because we are at war". We saw another step towards manufacturing consent for that today. The Socialist Workers Party is full of spooks, and look what it has done to Your Party. On the day of a demonstration against digital ID, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is to hold a carol concert. Yes, really. Again, how spooky.

The suspension of the whip from Markus Campbell-Savours is a warning to Labour MPs in general not to oppose the Government's present and future obscenities. Next up, the fruits of an "independent review" that simply presupposed the "overdiagnosis" of mental health conditions. Yet the Financial Conduct Authority had announced that it will not even investigate Rachel Reeves. She had already broken the law by renting out her house without a licence, the simplest of matters. But would her latest transgression be sufficiently complicated to have to be tried by a judge sitting alone, since the plebs were too thick to understand it? What do judges know about high finance, either?

Talk of facial recognition is already causing the usual suspects to crow about women in niqabs, but the more important point is that this would drive those women out of public places. It has also come on the same day as Nigel Farage's invocation of 1970s blackface. Well, it did not stop there. Last year, David Harewood's otherwise excellent documentary on blackface ended with the fading away, since it was never cancelled, of The Black and White Minstrel Show. But Little Britain started on television seven years after the end of Fantasy Football League. It was the centrist darling and sage David Baddiel who had single-handedly brought back blackface, which had not been seen on British television in a good 10 years.

Until then, blackface had not been acceptable in the 1990s, even among the white people by whom I was almost entirely surrounded while growing up. Or if it was, then it must have been a class thing. Certainly, the reaction of Fantasy Football League's studio audience to Baddiel's first impersonation of Jason Lee included an audible element of heavy shock. If blacking up was mainstream entertainment, then who else was doing it? Baddiel gave it an extra decade of life. Look at him now. As Far Right terrorist suspects are arrested in liberal Brighton, remember that centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war, while Fascism is inherent in both of them, and it never arises except by their joint enterprise.

Morally Responsible

When is there going to be a Coroner's Inquest into the death of Dawn Sturgess? We are expected to accept that everyone involved in this plot either could not have afforded a gun, or did not know where to find one, or did not know how to use it. Those who believe these hallucinations walk among us. Those who knowingly spread these falsehoods rule over us and purportedly hold our rulers to account.

Novichok has killed, at most, one person ever, and that was an accident. On 12 March 2018, The Times announced that Sergei Skripal was dead. But on 18 May, he was discharged from hospital. Yulia had been discharged on 9 April. I wonder where they are now? I expect that we shall never know. But then, the files on the death of Dr David Kelly have been sealed for 75 years, so we shall never know about that, either. In reality, of course, we all know perfectly well about Dr Kelly. But when is he, too, going to be given a Coroner's Inquest?

Firm Ground

Angela Rayner did not help herself, but between the decision that you could not be unfairly dismissed until you had worked somewhere for six months, and that of which Vicky Spratt writes, you do begin to wonder about the throwing of Rayner under the bus:

Labour’s pledge to cap onerous ground rents for leasehold homeowners at no more than £250 a year is facing being cut after treasury officials intervened, The i Paper has learned.

Campaigners fear this has delayed Labour’s leasehold reforms and the long-awaited changes may “no longer meet expectations” and “break election promises” as a result.

Failing to cap ground rents would be an “outrageous betrayal” of millions of voters, they said.

The reforms were being brought forward by former housing secretary Angela Rayner before her resignation in September.

The former deputy prime minister is understood to be determined to see that the Government follows through on its manifesto commitment to tackle unregulated and unaffordable ground rents. One Rayner ally told The i Paper: “We promised to sweep away the feudal leasehold system, not prop it up, and she stands firm on that.”

“This comes down to a question of whose side we are on. It’s core to tackling the cost of living, and now is not the time to buckle,” the source added.

Former Conservative housing secretary Michael Gove said that Rayner was “quite right to press this point” and added that Steve Reed, her replacement, “must not back down”.

It comes after Rayner, the architect of the employment rights bill which was watered down last week, secured a deal with ministers that will see protections against unfair dismissal for workers start from 2027 – staving off a plan by the former deputy PM to force the Government to set a start date.

The Leasehold Reform Act 2022, introduced under the Conservative government, brought an end to ground rents on new-build leasehold properties. Labour had pledged to go further and help people in existing leasehold homes whose charges were not addressed. Ministers had been looking at capping what freeholders can charge up to a maximum of £250 a year.

But Treasury officials are understood to be pushing for this cap to be dropped over concerns this would affect pension funds that own freehold properties.

It is estimated that there are almost 5 million leasehold homes in England alone, which are home to millions of people.

Britain’s leasehold-freehold homeownership system means that blocks of flats, in particular, are owned by freeholder landlords. Some of these are major institutional investors, others are backed by pension funds.

The Residential Freehold Association – the trade body for freeholders – estimates that pension funds have invested more than £15bn in residential ground rents and the total value of investment in UK ground rents is thought to be close to £30bn.

However in recent years expensive ground rents, which sometimes run into thousands of pounds, have forced leaseholders into financial ruin and made homes impossible to sell, causing untold misery.

One leaseholder from Salford told The i Paper that doubling ground rent meant their charges had gone up from £250 a year to £500 and, then, £2,000. The flat itself was bought for £125,000. Another said that her ground rent would eventually reach more than £1m a year in 50 years time without a cap.

Last year, before Labour’s election victory, housing and planning minister Matthew Pennycook told Parliament he wanted to “cap ground rents at a peppercorn” as he urged the then-Conservative government to “act to protect leaseholders from ground rent exploitation”.

In Labour’s manifesto, they pledged to “go where the Conservatives have failed and bring the feudal leasehold system to an end”.

Leaseholders must pay ground rent on top of a service charge and their mortgages. Some of these people have particularly problematic leases which allow their freeholders to double ground rent every ten years, causing bills to run into tens of thousands of pounds over time.

Labour’s forthcoming Leasehold and Commonhold Bill, which Pennycook is responsible for, aims to address this complex web of legislation, but it has been delayed. It is expected that the Government will announce it before Christmas.

A “peppercorn” rent is zero or next to zero – but Labour have been looking at capping what freeholders can charge at a maximum of £250 a year.

Katie Kendrick, founder of the National Leasehold Campaign (NLC) said: “Every single day we hear from leaseholders who are trying to sell their homes, but the sale is falling through because many mortgage lenders will no longer lend on escalating ground rents.”

“This issue is not going away. It has brought the house-selling process to a halt,” Kendrick added. “Leaseholders are physically trapped in properties that they cannot sell. They cannot move on with their lives and feel powerless to escape this feudal system.”

Housing market analyst Neal Hudson said homebuyers worried about leasehold is a major reason why flats – which are often sold as leasehold by developers – are not selling, particularly in London.

“If the Government is serious about hitting its housing targets, then it needs to build far more flats than are currently being built. The problems with leasehold are one of the barriers to achieving that,” Hudson said.

As The i Paper has reported, freeholders are often investment funds, and sometimes they are not based in the UK.

One source involved in discussions about Labour’s leasehold reforms told The i Paper that if the Treasury continues down this path, they will be “effectively putting millions into the pockets of offshore property investors” at the “expense of ordinary people”.

A cap of anything more than £250 a year won’t help the majority of leaseholders, they added.

If Labour do axe the cap, it will make them less progressive on the issue than the previous Conservative government. After much wrangling with his own Treasury and an intervention from former prime minister Rishi Sunak, Mr Gove promised all leaseholders that their rents would be a “peppercorn” moving forward.

It follows a landmark court judgement in favour of the Government, following a challenge brought by major freeholders who argued that Conservative reforms to cap their ground rents, which passed in the 2024 pre-election wash-up but were not implemented because of the challenge, “infringed their human rights”.

The High Court disagreed and ruled that freeholders were not entitled to charge ground rents or bill leaseholders for legal costs. However, in spite of this legal judgement clearing the path for reform, Labour’s bill has not yet been announced because of the wrangling with the Treasury about ground rents.

Mr Gove said: “The Treasury has always resisted justice for leaseholders”. He said this was because they believe it “sends the signal that the UK is not a good place for investment, because we legislate retrospectively.”

However, he added that failing to address this issue was relying on a “butler economy” where “the interests of foreign investors are put ahead of British citizens”.

In opposition, Pennycook pledged a move away from the leasehold system – where buildings are ultimately owned by freeholder landlords – to a commonhold system, where flat owners collectively own and manage the building their homes are in. It has been successful in Australia, Canada and America and has been deemed the fairest model of ownership by the Law Commission.

If the promise on ground rents is abandoned, experts say the transition to commonhold will also be watered down.

As one housing expert who has been involved in reform discussions said: “Higher ground rents will make it more expensive for leaseholders to move to commonhold and, in some cases, it will simply be unaffordable – so it won’t happen.”

It could even “damage the property market because the value of leasehold flats will go down even further in relation to newer flats which may be built as commonhold without expensive ground rents,” they added.

Campaigners think the Treasury has been “hoodwinked” by the “powerful” freeholder landlord lobby, who insist that capping ground rents could “spook investors”.

A spokesperson for the Residential Freehold Association (RFA) warned “capping ground rents will drive freeholders into insolvency” which could have a significant impact on Britain’s economy.

They added that capping ground rents signals “that investments and property rights can be rewritten by the state.”

Barry Gardiner, the Labour MP for Brent North, who has regularly raised the plight of leaseholders in his own constituency, told The i Paper that it would be “unconscionable” if the Government did not see a cap on ground rents through.

“It’s a fee for no service,” Gardiner added. “It’s the definition of exploitation, and I am absolutely confident that no Labour minister would do such a thing.”

Harry Scoffin, founder of the campaign group Free Leaseholders, said, “it is disturbing that a self-styled pro-growth government is now rushing to defend rent-seeking elite landowners and offshore shell companies who use coercive legal arrangements to extract wealth from working people.”

The Treasury declined to comment.

A housing ministry spokesperson said: “Far too many leaseholders face unregulated and unaffordable ground rent charges. “We will legislate to address this and we’ll set out further details in due course.”

Where We Draw The Line

Alex Deane writes:

I agree with David Lammy.

The trouble is, I agree with 2020 David Lammy, who said this:

A jury trial gives people the final say on the guilt or innocence of their fellow citizens. It entrusts the public to make life-changing decisions, rather than merely leaving it in the hands of lawyers. This is a civic duty – developed over centuries – which ensures fairness and representation in the criminal justice system and forms part of the bedrock of our democracy.

I think that was right, and – charitably, perhaps – I don’t think that even David Lammy really believes the David Lammy of 2025, who now proposes to do away with juries in the majority of cases they presently hear.

Let us not pretend for a moment that this plan is about addressing the backlog of cases waiting to be heard. There are three reasons for this.

First, juries aren’t slowing the system down, in any case. This second reason is because any change would not be retrospective, so all cases in the backlog would still be heard by a jury. These two points mean that the mechanism the Government has proposed won’t do anything to address the problem they have identified. But thirdly, if this were really about the backlog, the Government would be telling us that its proposed changes would be temporary, to revert to the historic norm after it has gone. That is quite clearly not the basis upon which they are proceeding. While the Government is certainly exploiting the present temporary difficulty to justify its changes, it don’t even pretend to claim that the solution it has identified will sunset when it is resolved. No, these changes are permanent. Again, as one David Lammy said in 2020 – ‘it would be wrong of the government to abandon this valuable tradition for short term benefit’. 

Nor do these proposals reflect the conclusions of Brian Leveson, whose report made recommendations that went nowhere near as far as Lammy now wishes us to go. We should be clear: no matter how much he claims to be following Leveson’s conclusions in his vandalism, this isn’t what Leveson concluded. We have a rash; the doctor recommended some ointment; Lammy doesn’t get to say that he is following the doctor’s orders when he produces the guillotine.

I declare a historic interest. In the earlier part of this century, I practised at the criminal Bar – not for that long, and not at all illustriously. But still, I put in my years and I saw my fair share of juries. They uniformly took their responsibilities seriously. And while losing is never the desired result, looking back, I don’t think that I ever saw a jury go wrong.

Still, some will say that it’s just a question of organisation. We already have trials without juries for less serious offences (Lord knows, as a junior advocate I saw many more of those). It’s just a question of where we draw the line. Bluntly: does it really matter?

It absolutely does. Trial by a jury of one’s peers, while codified in Magna Carta in 1215, predates even that. A form of such a process was present in this land in the time of Æthelred, whose reign began in 968. It takes someone with David Lammy’s chutzpah to think that you’re the person to blithely sweep away over 1,000 years of established practice, and demonstrate a remarkable contempt for the people you govern. Involving the people in the judgment of the guilt or innocence of their peers rather than the state is a bulwark against an over-mighty government.

This protection was not conceived in some recent burst of ‘human rights’ legislation – conjured up in one parliament, only to be taken away in another – but rather an innate part of our constitutional guarantee of liberty. It is a birthright we inherited, and one we should safeguard and pass to the next generation lucky enough to be born into its protections.

It is this fundamental principle that our present Lord Chancellor seems to fail to understand, or to pretend to fail to understand. In his document to other departments, David Lammy wrote that ‘there is no right to trial by jury’. Which is wrong. There absolutely is.

In many ways, the respected legal system embodied by jury trials is our most successful export. It finds itself replicated in courts around the world in the jurisdictions of our friends in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.

On a basic level, what right does the Government have to do this, anyway? Up to this point, with the exception of the Chagos Islands giveaway, the Labour Government’s positions have been broadly defensible. I disagree with pretty much all of them, but I’m a Tory and that was inevitable. The point is that they secured a huge majority in the House of Commons and have a clear mandate to do all manner of left-wing things I don’t like. That’s democracy.

But this policy is utterly out of – no pun intended – left field. It wasn’t in their manifesto, and surely such a significant constitutional change requires that? It has not been offered as a choice to the people, neither by election nor referendum.

Abolishing most jury trials is about the most authoritarian thing mooted by any government in our lifetimes. And yet the same people who shrieked at the prospect of Britain leaving the really quite new European Convention on Human Rights, which offers no protection in this regard, are now oddly dumb.

It is true that there is a multi-year delay in cases being heard, and it is a powerful point in favour of changing the status quo. Behind the (accurate) maxim ‘justice delayed is justice denied’ sit serious and systemic issues prompted by the passage of time. When delays of this length occur, victims do not see justice done. Witnesses also naturally forget details or more about the events in question and despite doing their best are reduced to ‘if that’s what I said in my statement, then that’s what I saw’. Lawyers and case officers are promoted, retire, become sick, have parental leave or are reassigned, disrupting the continuity of management. As for the accused – presumed innocent until proven guilty, remember – they often can’t work, suspended by employers for the duration and an unattractive proposition for new work with the allegations hanging over them; and some faced with delay measured in years will say ‘sod it’ and plead guilty in order to be able to move on with their lives, the antithesis of justice.

But the answer to this is to properly maintain the justice system financially and ensure that courts don’t sit empty, rather than taking a pickaxe to our long-established exemplar of legal process. Our court system has been damaged by governments of all stripes – Labour, Coalition, Conservative and Labour again. Courts up and down the land have been closed. Those remaining have been systematically neglected. Advocates have been underpaid – or not paid – year on year.

Government should do few things and do them well. Defending the realm from external threats and maintaining order and the law internally are two of those basic functions. Instead, we have preferred government to do many, many things, and most of them badly.

Regardless of party, the approach of recent governments to the justice system has been akin to a man starving someone for a long time, then saying he’s the absolutely right person to make decisions on their care – and, in their parlous state, the kindest thing to do is invoke the new, coincidentally proposed assisted dying measures.

We certainly should not allow our present challenge to be used as the pretext for fundamentally changing our justice system.

Systematically Failed

Haroon Siddique writes:

UN experts have said that one of England’s biggest social landlords appears to have systematically failed to ensure the habitability of its rental properties.

In a letter to the UK government, they cite the case of a disabled tenant, Sanjay Ramburn, 55, who they say lived with his family of five in an L&Q group property in Forest Gate, east London for several years with no electricity. They experienced four ceiling collapses, as well as severe damp and mould that affected their health.

The children developed breathing issues, tinnitus and skin problems. Ramburn, who reported racial harassment and antisocial behaviour at the hands of his upstairs neighbour that he said was not addressed by L&Q, suffered severe mental health issues, the letter says.

The letter from the special rapporteur on adequate housing, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, and two other UN experts, states: “L&Q and several other residential developers and housing associations managing social housing in England appear to systematically fail to ensure or restore the habitability of their rentals … we wish to express our serious concern that the delayed, insufficient or lack of action by L&Q to address the issues raised by Mr S Ramburn and other tenants, as also documented by the housing ombudsman, may be having a significantly negative impact on the enjoyment of their human rights, particularly the right to an adequate standard of living, including housing.”

In 2023, L&Q, the largest housing association in London, was ordered to pay £142,000 to residents after an investigation by the ombudsman identified a “prolonged period of decline” in its service. 

Ramburn, who moved into the flat in December 2013, said: “I started to get water from my kitchen and half the ceiling collapsed. I was waiting nearly four years without half the ceiling in the kitchen and then in 2017 the other half collapsed. Then they came, they fixed the ceiling but when they fixed it at the same time the bathroom ceiling collapsed.

“I always have to send them emails, beg for them to do something. I’ve been through hell in this place with L&Q, I’ve had anxiety, hopefully now they will do something about it.”

The letter says that, according to information received, in November 2023 the ceiling collapsed in the living room, injuring Ramburn, his son and youngest daughter. L&Q offered Ramburn compensation of £2,271 but he rejected the offer as “wholly inadequate”, it says.

It states that, in September, Ramburn and his family were offered temporary rehousing in another building owned by L&Q, while the previous apartment would undergo repairs, which he reluctantly accepted despite the fact it had “only one small bedroom for five persons, and may have similar issues with poor maintenance as the other flat”.

Matt Foreman, the executive group director of customer services at L&Q, said it was sorry for the difficulties experienced by Ramburn, adding: “We are working closely with him to resolve the situation and have made several offers of temporary accommodation in the area so we can complete the repairs needed. We have a dedicated antisocial behaviour team who investigated Mr Ramburn’s case, and will support him if any future incidents occur.”

He said the organisation had responded to the letter explaining that it operated within the UK’s social housing regulatory and complaints framework, which “provides clear routes for residents to access support if they aren’t satisfied with their landlord’s response”.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said: “These claims are shocking and our sympathy goes out to Mr Ramburn and his family.

“We are clear housing providers must provide safe and decent homes for residents and that all forms of racism are inexcusable.

“Through Awaab’s law we are taking decisive action to crack down on unsafe conditions like damp and mould and make people’s homes safe.”

Ukraine Has Lost Its Halo

His articles on Ukraine used to come with an editorial health warning. But now, in those same pages, Peter Hitchens writes:

Ukraine has lost its halo, as corruption charges swirl like an evil-smelling fog around its political elite.

For years, it has been portrayed as a saintly nation, a paradise of freedom and democracy, the anti-Russia. Vladimir Putin is said to fear that his own people would like to live there. This belief, always absurd to anyone who knows the region, has now collapsed as Ukrainian elite figures are exposed with bundles of banknotes under their beds and golden lavatories in their bathrooms, making unhealthy livings out of a supposed holy war.

President Zelensky is not among them – but he tried very hard to squash the investigations, which have led to this exposure of shame and misrule. There is no suggestion he is involved.

It would be grotesque if he were. For he came to power as a ‘servant of the people’, a fairy tale hero dedicated to cleaning up his country. He had played that very role in a TV drama. But the dark figures who control real power in Ukraine are another matter.

Is it time we looked behind this actually rather misleading image of Ukraine as a paradise of birdsong, goodness and sunshine, and began to treat it as a normal country? If we did that, would the leaders of Europe be so keen to commit themselves to a forever war on the shores of the Black Sea? For that is what they are now doing.

And on the face of it, it is very strange behaviour. Several EU leaders were very doubtful about George W Bush’s policy of offering Ukraine Nato membership. When they agreed it at the Nato summit in Bucharest in April 2008, they knew it broke pledges made to Moscow at the end of the Cold War.

They knew it risked conflict, which would certainly damage their economies and might lead to uncontrolled violence in our continent. But in the dying months of his presidency Bush wanted it, a lot, and pushed for it, hard. So they gave it to him.

This was his bruising response to a spine-chilling performance by Putin, at the Munich security conference of 2007. The Kremlin despot said that Nato expansion was ‘a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?’ What he meant was that Russia was sure it was aimed at Moscow and he wanted it to stop.

Bush’s unyielding answer to this warning was probably the point at which war became likely. This is not an argument about whether Putin’s aggression was justified. It obviously wasn’t. He was stupid to be provoked as he was. But it is an argument that a foreign policy faction in Washington –the same people who created the illegal 2003 Iraq invasion –wanted war with Russia and hoped to provoke one.

And Ukraine was the ideal spot. Precisely because it is not in Nato, a war on its soil would not lead to a nuclear confrontation. That is why the Western allies have been so careful to make sure it doesn’t spread.

I suspect the Russia hawks in Washington hoped they would quickly wreck Moscow’s economy, bleed its army white and so bring about the downfall of Putin. It has not worked

That is one of many reasons why President Trump wants to slither out of it. Most of his voters are sick of endless foreign wars and can see no sense in this one.

But a crazy thing has happened. European leaders, including our own Sir Keir Starmer, have decided they want it to carry on. Each time Trump tries to stitch together a peace deal, the EU’s main figures rush about the place begging to be allowed to take over America’s abandoned war. It is hard to see a rational explanation for this.

They lack both the money and the weapons to drive Russia back, let alone to defeat Putin. They would be rash to send troops there (the US has not), or allow their missiles to be used to bombard Russian cities. This could bring direct Russian retaliation on our soil. And the war hurts us. Germany’s economy, especially, has suffered greatly from the war, which is strongly opposed by growing numbers of its voters.

So why do these leaders support it? I suspect it is because of the myth of Ukraine as a paradise, now very tattered indeed.

Then there is the opposite myth of Russia as a sort of Mordor, the most uniquely evil country in the world.

Actually it has several rivals for this title. These include our close friend Saudi Arabia, much visited by our Royal Family, courted by Trump and holidayed in by metropolitan trendies such as Emily Maitlis, in a tasteful hijab.

How many people must die, be made homeless or just kept miserable, to fulfil this fantasy of a war in which one side is so right and the other so wrong that it must be fought to the very end? Borders are not as sacred as we claim and they can be changed by violence, even in Europe.

Aggression is, in fact, rewarded. In 1998, Britain agreed to get rid of the border dividing Northern Ireland from the Republic. It will only be a matter of time before it vanishes. We did this in response to 30 years of ruthless violence by the IRA and under pressure from the US.

An entire country, Yugoslavia, was removed from the map of Europe and cut up into convenient morsels through aggressive Western and American diplomacy plus a little light bombing. A new country, Kosovo, was created in the same convulsion.

East Germany was swallowed by West Germany, thanks entirely to the military and economic might of Nato, even though Britain, France and Russia were all privately deeply worried by the prospect.

Turkey seized Northern Cyprus 51 years ago and plainly has no plans to leave, ever. Even though it is a Nato member, nobody has tried to expel it for this action.

Many would argue that some or all of those changes were improvements. They would say that the old borders were unfair or in the wrong place. They would often have a point, though in truth it was strength and readiness to fight that decided them all.

But the great unsayable heresy is that Ukraine’s borders are open to question. They were devised by stupid Communist bureaucrats long before Ukraine became a nation or anyone imagined those frontiers would be significant in world strategy.

How many more Ukrainian deaths, how much waste, demolition and misery, how much squandering of their own wealth, are Europe’s leaders prepared to put up with? What principle do they hope to prove by doing so, which they have not already violated elsewhere?

When the great Tory statesman Lord Lansdowne tried in 1917 to bring World War One to an end by a negotiated settlement, he warned: ‘Prolonged war means world ruin.’

He was right. That war went on – and out of the bankruptcy and death that it caused, arose Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor, and many worse things.

Wars begin in anger, a kind of madness. They end in reason, which is far harder to locate in the world.

Can we find it in Ukraine?

Boots On The Ground

Nichola Lashmar writes:

Nationalist vigilante ‘street patrol’ groups with ties to Reform UK and the far right are falsely claiming to be working with the police, while seeking to infiltrate local school networks in order to “protect” women and children, Byline Times can reveal.

Earlier this year we revealed how one such group, the Essex Spartans had been seeking to recruit “boots on the ground” for its “volunteer service protecting vulnerable residents, particularly women, children, and the elderly”.

The group is based in Epping, near the scene of this year’s far right protests over the hosting of asylum seekers at the Bell Hotel. They claim to be a local grassroots organisation, but in reality have ties to senior far-right figures across the UK, with its founder having a history of extreme racist and Islamophobic views, including expressing a desire to “start my own rebellion” in order to “kick all” Muslim people out of the country.

The group’s social media profiles carry pictures of its uniformed members touring the streets in stab proof vests, and in one case carrying handcuffs, in order to “protect” local women and children, in claimed “partnership” with the police.

However, the local council and local police deny any involvement with the group.

Since our earlier reporting on the group, a number of other connected groups have sprung up both in Essex and elsewhere in the country, claiming to be “collaborating” with the Essex Spartans.

Offering what can be defined as “concierge nationalism” these groups advertise walk-you-home escorts, street patrols, SOS apps and premium mentorship through QR codes and subscription models.

However, in recent months their activity has escalated into an attempt to infiltrate local school networks, prompting serious safeguarding concerns.

Enemies at the Gates

Documents seen by Byline Times show that the Essex Spartans contacted at least one educational trust responsible for several schools in Epping Forest. They introduced themselves as a new “Community Interest Group” claiming to work with police to make local streets safer.

The services they offered included patrols around schools at drop-off and collection times, meetings with school leaders, and information letters for parents. They described members as being DBS checked, uniformed, carrying ID badges, and using a QR code system linking calls directly to police. The trust declined the offer.

The group’s founder Jack Golding has claimed to be working “in partnership with Essex police”.

However, the police have denied any connection to the group. Chief Superintendent Leighton Hammett of Essex Police told Byline Times: “While we are aware of this group, we are not affiliated with them, we do not endorse or promote their activity, and we do not work with them.

This directly contradicts the group’s claims.

Councillor Joel Charles, Harlow Council’s Cabinet Member for Public Protection, told local news site Your Harlow: “It is not normal practice for an organisation, not known to the council, to start patrolling the town. Members of the council’s community safety team already carry out a significant amount of community engagement work and join patrols with police officers in known crime hotspot areas.

“Volunteers representing Essex Spartans have recently been approaching vulnerable people in the town. Anyone feeling unsafe, in a state of distress or facing the prospect of being homeless can access advice and support from official sources.”

An Extremist History

Essex Spartans claim their members are DBS checked. However, the only evidence offered is a Facebook montage of certificates that lack official seals and reference numbers. The group also admits that not all members hold Security Industry Authority (SIA) licences, saying only licensed members may carry handcuffs. UK law requires frontline private security roles, including security guards and door supervisors, to hold a valid SIA licence. Working in these licensable activities without one would be a criminal offence.

The lack of transparency is particularly concerning given the past rhetoric of their founder Jack Golding. Byline Times has seen evidence from his social media history where Golding posted racist comments about Muslims and Black people, and made misogynistic comments, including writing “Took my girlfriend out last night… Yeah, one punch.”

When challenged further about domestic violence, he wrote: ‘…better when you do it some where [sic] no one will see it x’”.

In a post from 2011, he wrote about his plans to “start my own rebellion” in order to kick out Muslims from the country.

““This countrys gettin a fuckin joke why did the let all the dirty muslims in the fucking country kick all the lil pricks out now befor everything gets bombed I think i’m gunna start my own rebellion againt all off them and kick them out myself” he wrote.

In another post from the same year he states: “just bought a wardrobe from IKEA, the pakistani assistant was bringing it to my car when somebody ran her over. Now that’s what i call fucking flat pak.” [sic]

This history of racist and misogynistic rhetoric directly undermines the group’s current claims to be “protecting women and girls.”

Safeguarding Alarm

Educators and unions warn that the Spartans’ presence risks undermining statutory safeguarding. Luke Burrows, Assistant Head Teacher at Bridge Academy Educational Trust in Chelmsford, told Byline Times: “We are well aware of this group, and it is concerning that they are framing themselves as working with schools and the police…

“Statutory guidance states that safeguarding must only be carried out by trained, vetted professionals operating within recognised frameworks.”

Murray Sackwild, Essex Branch Secretary of the National Education Union, said: “While Essex Spartans present themselves as ‘concerned citizens, their vigilante activity, not supported by police, raises serious safeguarding and Prevent concerns. Large groups in paramilitary-style uniforms and rhetoric about ‘protecting women and girls’ echo far-right narratives… This is a dangerous path that risks influencing young people and undermining community safety.”

The Female Founder Pivot

Once the Spartans began approaching schools, its leadership was reframed as being female-led, with Stephanie Golding now described as the founder. This suggests a tactical move, presenting female leadership precisely when seeking legitimacy in safeguarding spaces.

Far-right groups have long sought to weaponise women’s safety narratives. When asked about qualifications and insurance, the group refused to comment.

A woman’s safety leader working with Essex councils, speaking anonymously, raised concerns: “My concern is that this group had a male founder and appears to have transitioned to female leadership, with women on patrol…

“When I inquired about their qualifications, particularly regarding insurance, they became defensive and were unable to respond. If these women are uninsured, they are at risk.”

This tactic is not new. Professor Nigel Copsey, specialist in fascism and anti-fascism at Teesside University, explained: “Far-right activism is not just about marches and hate-filled rallies.

“Historically, the far-right has often tried softening its image through local engagement…

“The initiatives may vary, but the underlying strategy is clear: normalise as a neighbourly concern.”

A Nationalist Network

The Spartans’ approach to schools is not an isolated initiative but part of a wider far-right ecosystem. 

Sarah White, a former Reform UK candidate now aligned with the far-right Advance Party, has been photographed working on ‘philanthropy’ projects alongside uniformed Spartans. Her trajectory illustrates the overlap: she has marched with anti-migrant protesters and recently posted a video of herself collecting Tommy Robinson from the airport, having dined with him in Poland.

The Spartan’s own X account has also appealed to Robinson as well as the site’s far-right owner Elon Musk.

Callum Barker, a former activist in the Neo-Nazi Homeland Party, has also appeared with Spartans members and publicly engaged with Reform UK figures. Reform UK’s Orla Minihane has shared platforms with Barker at anti-refugee protests, openly declaring she would accept the “far-right” label.

Crucially, one of the most prominent defenders of this network is Reform UK Councillor Jaymey McIvor, who currently serves as the party’s national Director of Local Government. He was previously expelled from the Conservative Party over denied claims that he sent an unsolicited explicit image.

As Byline Times previously reported, McIvor declared a company he owned insolvent two months before this year’s local elections, leaving hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of unpaid debts – including a £31,000 Covid Bounce Back Loan and a further £5,154 owed to HMRC in corporation tax.

Street patrol groups like the Spartans have also received the backing of national Reform figures, including the party’s MP for Runcorn and Helsby, Sarah Pochin who in August praised what she called “concerned British men for organising private street patrols” without mentioning specific groups.

 Pochin hit the headlines earlier this year after complaining about seeing adverts “full of black people, full of Asian people”. Reform leader Nigel Farage opted to take no action against her for the comments.

From the Streets to the Council Chamber

The route from far-right street activity to political influence is already visible. On November 25 2025, the division between protest and political decision-making became stark.

Outside Epping’s council chamber, protests regarding the future of the Bell Hotel (which accommodates asylum seekers) included Spartans founder Jack Golding among the demonstrators. Inside, councillors were advised to use side and rear entrances due to concerns about intimidation and harassment from the crowd.

However, Reform UK councillor Jaymey McIvor entered through the front door and later defended the protests.

The Accountability Gap

When concerned residents have raised their fears with Essex Police about the patrols, they were told to report any criminal activity and given contact details for Police Community Support Officers.

However, there was no apparent proactive action, or investigation, just a phone number.

The burden has therefore fallen on residents who may feel intimidated by a group patrolling in paramilitary uniforms, falsely claiming police backing, and approaching schools. Residents are expected to report crimes to officers, while the group projects an authority it does not hold.

A meeting with local MP Dr Neil Hudson offered little help. Residents raised concerns about photographs on the Spartans’ website showing children dressed in versions of their uniforms, including stab vests, allegedly for Comic Relief fundraising.

Residents say he failed to address their concerns. Frustrated, they have requested a meeting with Gold Commander Simon Anslow.

One resident, speaking anonymously to Byline Times, said: “We’re watching people in stab vests walking our streets claiming they work with police. Our councillors are using back doors. Schools are being approached. And we’re told to ring 101 if we see a crime. This feels like we’ve been left to fend for ourselves.”

The police statement does not address whether they are monitoring the group, investigating potential offences under the Private Security Industry Act 2001, or taking action to prevent further approaches to schools.

However, the Spartans’ paramilitary-style uniforms, false claims of police backing, and far-right ideological framing project an authority they do not hold. The test now lies with school trusts and safeguarding frameworks, as to whether they can succeed in resisting infiltration and upholding safeguarding against the far-right in a town where some residents now report feeling abandoned by those institutions meant to protect them.

Where Is Our Party?

Thames Water has returned to profitability. By hiking its bills. While there are grey areas, if something would obviously have to be rescued by the State rather than allowed to go bust, then it belongs in public ownership, just as if something obviously would not, then it does not. Corner shops? Obviously not. But water? Obviously.

At the point of privatisation, the water companies were debt free, as befitted the monopoly suppliers of something that everyone had to have, and the raw material of which fell out of the sky for free. The money that those companies paid out in dividends would easily cover any infrastructure costs. Yet leakage is out of control, and raw sewage is pumped into our rivers, our lakes and our seas.

And that is just water. See all the others as well. There is money for, as was again made clear this evening, the King's war in Ukraine, but not for trial by jury or for disability benefits, presumably not even for disability benefits for those injured fighting for a Ukrainian regime that itself seems to be heading to the dock for being as corrupt as we always told you that it was. We want 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. In the struggle for economic equality, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class, while in the struggle for international peace, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class and the youth.

Social solidarity is an expression of personal responsibility, personal responsibility is protected by social solidarity, international solidarity is an expression of national sovereignty, and national sovereignty is protected by international solidarity. Equality and diversity must include economic equality and class diversity, regional equality and regional diversity, the equal sovereignty of diverse states, and equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law with the presumption of innocence, requiring that conviction be beyond reasonable doubt.

All of this is opposed by and to the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the anti-industrial Malthusianism and misanthropy of the Green agenda, the treatment of identity politics as equal or superior to class politics, the treatment of gender identity as equal or superior to biological sex, the cancel culture of which our people have always been the principal victims, the erosion of civil liberties, the stupefaction of the workers or the youth, the indulgence of separatist tendencies in any part of Great Britain, the consideration of any all-Ireland settlement that failed to preserve the National Health Service and other such achievements, or the failure to recognise that a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency had as much of that currency as it chose to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore needed to be under democratic political control.

On point, after point, after point, we never could have voted Green, and we cannot vote for what Your Party has chosen to become. Parliament's website lists Zarah Sultana as the latter's only MP, and the Hard Right staff that controlled Labour candidate selection both in 2019 and in 2024 should explain how anyone ever signed off on a candidate with her views and connections. Say it again that we could never vote for that, just as we never could have voted Green. But we will vote.

Is Nothing Sacred?

What has a blasphemy law ever achieved? There was one in England and Wales until 2008, there was one in Scotland until 2024 (yes, last year), and there is one in Northern Ireland to this day. To what effect? Rather, the success of Hamit Coskun’s appeal was a good result against the Public Order Act 1986. Who was the Prime Minister in 1986? A couple of years later, her supporters wanted to use that very Act to prosecute people who had set fire to copies of The Satanic Verses. They are very recent converts to free speech, and very selective about it.

See also the Supreme Court ruling about the legal definition of sex. Yesterday, it was the actual news in this country that you would henceforth have to be a girl to be a Girl Guide. Today, it is the actual news in this country that you will henceforth have to be a woman to be in the Women’s Institute. Both organisations have made no bones about the fact that they were complying under duress, and the view that that ruling merely permitted, but did not require, compliance with biological reality is the position of Lord Sumption, whom the populist Right practically canonised during the lockdowns, but who has now also come out in support of the assault on trial by jury. Think on.

Pro Tanto Quid Retribuamus?

The Belfast rioters should try preaching on the streets of Kiryat Arba, where Itamar Ben-Gvir lives, or of Kedumim, the home of Bezalel Smotrich. As Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamad are already doing, the Union Flag and the Palestinian flag should be flown side by side. The British military veterans James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman were unarmed aid workers in Gaza until 1 April 2024, when the IDF bombed them three times to make sure that they were dead. 

Israel armed Argentina during the Falklands War, and the late Queen Elizabeth II, who visited almost every country in the world including Ireland, never went to Israel because of its anti-British terrorist origins. The founders of the State of Israel plotted to kill Winston Churchill, murdered Lord Moyne, sent letter-bombs to the White House of Harry S. Truman, contracted the 1933 Haavara Agreement with Nazi Germany, fought against Britain throughout the Second World War, allied with Fascist Italy, twice sought an alliance with Germany during the War on the grounds that it was a lesser evil than Britain, hanged the boobytrapped bodies of Sergeants Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice and photographed them, and bombed the King David Hotel. By contrast, Haj Amin al-Husseini was holed up in Berlin with no practical influence in the Middle East, being instead a kind of mascot for the recruitment of Balkan, Caucasian and Central Asian Muslims into the predecessor organisations of those which now controlled Ukraine and for which the New Right campaigned during the collapse of Yugoslavia.

Accordingly, the future Unionist member of the Northern Ireland Assembly for South Down, Brigadier Ronald Broadhurst, had been Assistant Chief of Staff of the Arab Legion during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, when the Israelis had dubbed him “a soldier of fortune of British nationality”. The Chief of Staff was the inventor of the black and white keffiyeh, John Bagot Glubb, a British Lieutenant-General who was already a Companion of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George, and who was subsequently also made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath after he had commanded one of the last great victories of an Imperial client princely state’s British-led Army, namely the British-funded Arab Legion’s securement of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in 1948. That securement was recognised immediately by the United Kingdom and the United States. It was the Soviet Union, and those Communist Parties loyal to it, that were strongly pro-Israeli, with Phil Piratin, and fellow-travellers such as John Platts-Mills, using Parliament to call for Glubb to be prosecuted under the Foreign Enlistment Act 1870. Of course, he never was.

Heavy Influence

Jessica Elgot and Pippa Crerar writes:

Labour planned while in opposition how to introduce assisted dying via a private member’s bill, suggesting that would still allow “heavy influence” for the government in the process, a leaked document has revealed.

The document, seen by The Guardian, proposed a change strikingly similar to the private member’s bill put forward eventually by the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater – to limit the change in the law to those who are “mentally competent, terminally ill and have a prognosis of less than six months left to live”.

The leak will raise fresh questions over how much government control there has been behind Leadbeater’s bill and comes ahead of a major battle in the House of Lords continuing this Friday, where many opposing peers have tabled hundreds of amendments for debate, which has been seen by some as an effort to filibuster the bill.

Because of the number of amendments, ten more sitting days have been assigned to debate but those on the pro-side still fear it will run out of time in the parliamentary session and have been holding private talks in an effort to persuade peers not to tie up the bill using parliamentary tactics.

A Labour source opposed to the bill said the leak exposed “a shadow policymaking process, outside of the Labour manifesto, and with no consultation with MPs, unions or members, that sought to evade scrutiny on an issue of huge importance”.

A spokesperson for Leadbeater said they “categorically denied” that the MP had any conversations with No 10 or the party leadership before she took up the issue of assisted dying after winning the private member’s bill ballot.

Keir Starmer has long been a supporter of changing the law, drawing on his experiences as director of public prosecutions. Shortly after the document was circulated internally, the prime minister publicly raised the possibility of a law change via a private member’s bill.

When leader of the opposition, he told broadcasters in December 2023: “There are grounds for changing the law … Traditionally this has always been dealt with through a private member’s bill and a free vote and that seems appropriate to me.”

Though the change was not in Labour’s manifesto, the policy note suggests that legalising assisted dying could be popular as it would help win back older voters traditionally more in favour after having experienced the suffering of dying elderly relatives.

The policy note – which makes 11 references to the campaign group Dignity in Dying – was drafted in November 2023 and warns there would be “strong, impactful campaigns in favour of assisted dying during the general election campaign” and that the party needed to set out its position.

The note said the change was “popular with the public” and mentioned a Daily Express campaign to legalise assisted dying and a Sky News poll showing widespread support for the change.

It added that because of the likelihood of questions during the general election campaign, it was “necessary to reach a position on how we approach legalisation of assisted dying”.

The document said moves to legalise assisted dying “polls well, particularly amongst hero voters in areas we must win back, for whom this is particularly prescient (eg older demographics with ageing parents who are more likely to experience serious and terminal illness)”.

The document said the party’s current line was neutral on the issue, with the note warning that was “unlikely to sustain us through an election campaign where there are strong campaigns advocating for us to adopt a clearer position.

“We could choose to do nothing, but this is an option that fails to recognise public opinion and which campaigners argue leads hundreds of people to take matters into their own hands and puts relatives who help their loved ones at risk of prosecution.”

It also warned that not to act would “show Labour as unable to take a position on difficult issues or face challenges head on”.

The note uses the warmest language about the possibility of using a private member’s bill to take the issue forward, “allowing all members of the house a free, conscience vote on a cross-party matter”.

“We know there are existing Conservative MPs who are supporters of this policy. We also know we can control the parameters of legislation carefully through working with advocacy groups and government civil servants to draft the legislation and provide conditions for parliamentary time.”

It said a government bill would carry more risks by Labour taking ownership of the issue and that the parameters of any bill could be “influenced heavily through the PMB process if we are lending government support”.

Leadbeater’s spokesperson said the government had “remained scrupulously neutral throughout the passage of the bill through the House of Commons and now into the Lords”.

He added: “Government officials, lawyers and parliamentary draftsmen have given extensive expert advice to ensure the bill is workable and effective, but all the policy decisions have been for Kim and Lord [Charles] Falconer alone. The allegation that this is government legislation by the backdoor is simply false.”

But the party source opposed to the bill said: “At a time when the Lords are being told democracy requires them to nod this bill through, it is now clear that the process in the Commons bypassed the usual processes for developing laws of this magnitude and that everyone has been misled about the nature and origin of the bill.

“It’s bitterly disappointing that No 10 have sought to use the machinery of government and other parties as cover on an issue that needs more scrutiny, not less.”

Other options in the note include the possibility of establishing a commission, tabling a non-binding vote or putting a government bill down on assisted dying, though many of the options are heavily caveated.

The note warns that any legislation that included intolerable suffering as a route to assisted dying “should not be considered by Labour at this time and would carry significant political and ethical risk, alongside opposition from … NHS staff”.

A Labour spokesperson said: “It’s completely normal for a wide range of policy proposals to be assessed by political parties in opposition. MPs have been able to vote with their conscience on the terminally ill adults bill throughout its passage through parliament and the government has not taken a position. It is for MPs to decide whether this bill is passed.”

Bold But Necessary?

An absolutely vital documentary about Britain's biggest mass poisoning establishes what everyone had always suspected, that it had had to be covered up and whitewashed or no one would have bought the water companies that the Government of the day was privatising. Might there be a case for charges of corporate manslaughter here, as are being considered in relation to the Post Office scandal? Oh, the comments that I used to have to reject when I mentioned that the Post Office had had to be cut out of the Royal Mail in 2011 so that the Royal Mail could be privatised, because the City had known, even then, about Horizon. On 24 May 2024, that was confirmed in open court.

Speaking of open court, how would any backlog be eased by requiring a judge, who would otherwise have moved on to hearing the next case while the jury considered its verdict, to retire to consider and compose a verdict, and then to return and read it out, since that is what judges do? Sitting alone, this case hardened employee and personification of the same State that had brought the prosecution would not only determine your guilt, but then be able to imprison you for anything up to three years, or sometimes even more, since the common people have been declared too stupid to understand fraud cases, just as they are too stupid to control their teenagers' social media use, too stupid to control either their own or their children's sugar intake, and so stupid as to need to be controlled by means of digital ID.

And breaches of those social media, sugar, and digital ID controls would no doubt be a matter for the magistrates, who would now be empowered to lock you up for 18 months, or for two years if that were deemed beneficial to easing the backlog. Deemed by whom? At least once a fortnight, some old political, ecclesiastical or academic associate, fully aware of my circumstances, will ask whether I was "on the Bench yet", or will just proceed from the assumption that I must be. Including very recently, they have known to offer to make it happen. It never will, of course. But that does seem to be my choice, if taking nothing on due to being as sick as a dog can be so described. Still, only ill health. Nothing else, apparently. One third of the vote to decide your guilt and then send you down for 18 or even 24 months. Think on.

Who will decide whether or not a charge was "likely to lead to a sentence of more than three years"? What switch in the brain will a judge be expected to press in order to erase the evidence that that same judge would hitherto have ruled inadmissible? Far from clearing a backlog, these changes would send vast numbers of additional people, many of whom would have been found not guilty by juries, to a prison system that was already at or beyond breaking point. All to create an American-style penal servitude class, providing politicians' corporate sponsors with prison slave labour and with a barely costlier pool of the otherwise unemployable who had nominally been freed.

The slave trade financed enclosure, so there has always been One Struggle. In the city that was built on that trade, ask the families of the Hillsborough victims. They ranked with the victims of Grenfell Tower, for which there has still been no prosecution after eight years, whereas 15 people have already been arrested for manslaughter in Hong Kong. David Lammy is a disgrace to the Middle Passage.

Tulips and Sultanas

Bangladesh did not become independent directly from Britain, but it is extraordinary that places that were British territory 80 years ago do not have extradition treaties with the United Kingdom. Tulip Siddiq's sentence of two years is only two thirds of what the Government wants to be imposed by, as in this case, single judges sitting alone. In certain cases, they will be able to bang you up for longer than that, and even for life. Specifically, those would relate to financial wrongdoing.

Muhammad Yunus was supposed to have been the Bengal Tiger until he came after Siddiq, who resigned because she had done nothing wrong and who was so obviously innocent that she refused to attend her trial. If Siddiq were anything but a right-wing Labourite, then she would be out. Perhaps unfairly, but life is hard, politics is very hard, and she comes from a political family, so she has known that from the start. As for having an aunt who had been sentenced to death for war crimes, being closely related to a convicted war criminal makes her only as Royal as the King, but not even that old Mitläufer and Minderbelasteter was ever lined up to be another Charles I, Louis XVI or Nicholas II. Siddiq must be the bluest-blooded blueblood in Britain.

So she had better watch her back. Plenty of MPs have been republicans, of course, and in principle that is at least arguably not a breach of the Oath of Allegiance as phrased. But it is extremely unusual for a sitting MP to declare publicly that, "We should abolish the monarchy itself." Not in an independent Scotland. Not in an independent Wales. Not in a United Ireland. Just, "We should abolish the monarchy itself."

Zarah Sultana is the only MP listed on Parliament's website as a member of Your Party. Interviewed by Owen Jones, she initially claimed that her call to "nationalise the entire economy" had meant only workers' cooperatives, the traditional public ownership of the things that used to be in it, and the elected workers' representation on corporate boards that Theresa May had been going to introduce, all of which would be to the good. But towards the end, she could no longer help herself, and Jones, the most sympathetic mainstream interviewer that she will ever have, could barely contain himself. His interview with Jeremy Corbyn was like a digestif, not least for both of them.

Not that it made any difference, but rather than the thinktankers-for-hire preferred by his enemies, Corbyn was advised and endorsed by world class economists, in the tradition of the contributors to the Alternative Economic Strategy of his mentor, Tony Benn, one of the greatest defenders of the sovereignty of Parliament and of the primacy of the House of Commons, who would have been horrified at Your Party's 16-member Leadership with no MPs allowed and presuming to direct MPs in the exercise of their parliamentary responsibilities.

Like "a workers' MP on a worker's wage", these ideas are not new. Just as, although never a member of Momentum, I was in the hall when its North East Regional Conference thankfully voted down that one, so in 1981 a section of those who proposed it and the anti-parliamentary measures that Your Party had now adopted, as well as economic maximalism, cast just enough votes to deny Benn the Deputy Leadership, mirroring the handful of MPs who had in 1980 given Michael Foot the Leadership because they had already resolved to set up the SDP. As defined in such circles, does Sultana now draw only a worker's wage? No other Labour MP had defected to Your Party even before this. None will do so if this were what was expected.

Nor should they. An MP is a worker, since being an MP is a job, so that the set remuneration package is the trade union rate for the job. Taking less to curry favour or because "I don't need that much" would be scabbing. Since I am having to explain the basics, and while there are grey areas, if something would obviously have to be rescued by the State rather than allowed to go bust, then it belongs in public ownership, just as if something obviously would not, then it does not. Water? Obviously. As Jones put it, "Little café kiosks"? Obviously not.

It is not only on the Labour side that parliamentary service makes improbable people inexplicably well-to-do. Jonathan Gullis had only previously been a teacher, yet his five years in Parliament made him worth five million pounds. How? From where? From whom? For what? On 31 March 2024, Richard Tice tweeted, "With a special Easter message to Tory MP Jonathan Gullis: Given the multiple bits of embarrassing personal information we have on you, I suggest you pipe down on your attacks against me." But that was before Reform UK was projected to take Stoke-on-Trent North. As well as both Bolton West and Great Grimsby, the respective former MPs for which, Chris Green and Lia Nici, have also just joined Reform, taking to at least 21 the number of former Conservative MP who had gone turquoise.

All five Reform MPs have been Conservative Party members, two of them have been Conservative MPs, and one of them was returned as such to this Parliament. This evening, Nigel Farage has had to deny that he was negotiating a pact with his original party. But the real story is that, entirely openly, that party is taking over his present one. Never mind the SWP and Your Party. Nothing about the undeniably bizarre Your Party Conference, which tellingly concluded with Imagine rather than with The Red Flag or even The Internationale, compared to the Conservative Party Conference's exhibition of Margaret Thatcher's clothes for the, er, delight of these future Reform MPs.

The only person ever to have sat as Reform MP without ever having been a member of the Conservative Party is James McMurdock. In Saturday's polls, a hypothetical party led by the former Conservative Rupert Lowe started on 10 per cent. On Sunday, we learned that 43 per cent of Reform supporters would vote for it. And yesterday, it was launched. It is called Great Yarmouth First, and Lowe has paid the membership fees of the first 500 of his constituents to have signed up.

Either-Way Offensive

David Lammy wants to sell his proposals today as a reasoned and reasonable compromise. They are not. Give him no quarter. Attend instead even to the Blairite grandee, John Rentoul:

Sources close to David Lammy deny that he was engaged in what Rachel Reeves called “scene setting”: namely, allowing people to believe that he was going to do something terrible, so that when he did something that was only bad, everyone would be mightily relieved.

That got the chancellor into a whole pile of trouble. Instead of managing expectations, she made things worse for herself and an opinion poll today confirmed that most people thought she had not been “honest” in the way she presented the state of economy in the run-up to the Budget.

Last week, it was reported that the justice secretary planned to abolish almost all jury trials, except for charges of rape, manslaughter and murder. The suspicion was that when he came before the Commons today to announce a less dramatic restriction in the right to trial by jury, he hoped that MPs would unite in approval of a more modest reform.

His people insist that they did not leak the maximum restriction plan, which was one of a range of options.

But when Lammy made his statement he presented himself as the Great Blairite Reformer, pursuing a third way between extreme action and inaction. He had a good line, which sounded like authentic New Labour, about coming to parliament not to scrap jury trials but to save them.

And he had a plausible argument about our ancient liberties, saying that he recognised that Magna Carta enshrined the right to trial by jury, but that it also says that justice shall not be delayed.

Therefore, he said, it makes sense to restrict jury trials a bit in order to speed up the courts and clear the backlog.

His argument has a surface plausibility – leaving aside the myth that the right to a jury trial was codified in Magna Carta, which it was not, but that is what most people believe so there is no point in a reforming minister getting pedantic about it.

Lammy’s more serious problem is that his argument fell apart under a moment’s scrutiny, and he has hardly any support for his plan from Labour MPs.

As several MPs pointed out, if only 3 per cent of trials are heard in front of juries, reducing that number to, say, 1.5 per cent is hardly going to speed things up significantly.

There must be more effective ways of reducing the backlog. Shouldn’t the government be looking at the causes of court cases first, asking whether there is too much legislation and too many offences, and whether people should be going to court for posting things that upset other people on social media?

Then the courts could be made more productive. The gains of the greater use of video links, which happened during coronavirus lockdowns, seem to have been dissipated already.

It seems surprising that Brian Leveson – on whose report Lammy based his reforms, and on whom the justice secretary lavished praise, calling him “one of the foremost judges of his generation” – started with jury trials, and will be writing a second report later on courts’ “efficiency”.

Shouldn’t he be looking at the incentives in the system, including lawyers paid by the hour who have an interest in stringing things out? Or, if late changes of plea are a problem, as Lammy suggested several times, should ways not be found to encourage early ones? I doubt that Lammy would have leaked the maximum plan in the hope of persuading his colleagues that his only mission in life was to save jury trials from the inevitable pressures of demand.

But he must have been worried that only a handful of Labour MPs supported him in the Commons today. And, as Kieran Mullan, a shadow justice minister, pointed out, one of the few supporters of his plans that the deputy prime minister quoted was the victims’ commissioner, who “sadly passed away weeks ago and cannot possibly have seen these proposals”.