Raise The Colours

To access a range of political views, the Online Safety Act constantly requires that we prove that we are at least two years older than the Government wants the voting age to be. This is not due to a lack of joined-up thinking. On the contrary, it is intended that in 2029, the 12-year-olds of 2025 will be enfranchised having been exposed to no politics other than those rammed down their throats in school.

Behind all of this is the spectre of digital ID. Tony Blair treated us to his view on the small boats when he had the effrontery to comment on the twentieth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks that he had caused. His solution was digital ID because of course it was. Identity cards have been the solution in search of a problem at least since Michael Howard was Home Secretary, Shadowed by Blair. Ever since, British politics has been largely defined by the unseemly bidding war between them. Now calling for digital ID, Blair is still at it.

Blair did in fact secure passage of the Identity Cards Act 2006, but so little came of it that when it was repealed by the Identity Documents Act 2010, then that was unamended and unopposed, without even any compensation for those who had forked out for the cards. Did you ever see one? It was supposed to have been about terrorism, as everything was in those days, but the latest excuse is the boat people, as it is for everything these days. Yet just as all the 9/11 bombers had had genuine identity documents, and just as identity cards had done nothing to prevent the Madrid bombing, so the small boats are coming from France, which already has identity cards. The fallback option will be to argue that this was necessary to keep under-18s off social media, and thus to preclude events such as those depicted in Adolescence. Again, though, even in its own terms, does that work on the Continent?

The real targets are elsewhere. Both traditional conservatives and the non-Establishment populist Right are at last waking up to the fact that they are as much enemies of our rulers as the rest of us. They would be endlessly ordered to show their digital ID as surely as would be the working class and the youth from which they were in any case largely drawn, as surely as would be trade unionists and anti-cuts campaigners, as surely as would be environmentalists and peace activists, and as surely as would be ethnic minorities and the religious minorities that all religions now were.

The Liberal Democrats were in office for all five years of a Government that, if largely for ill, got far more done than any of its successors, none of which has yet lasted anything like as long. Yet to say the least, the erosion of civil liberties under John Major, Blair and Gordon Brown was not reversed. We remain subject to the infamous Criminal Justice Act 2003, which admitted hearsay evidence, removed the protection against double jeopardy, provided for Crown Court trials by a judge without a jury (the first ever such resulted in a life sentence), and effectively made it possible to be convicted of having previously been convicted. While you cannot go wrong with Sheridan Smith as an actress, the forthcoming I Fought the Law will no doubt be shameful propaganda for double jeopardy, and thus for the demands by Conservative and Reform UK politicians that the jury’s acquittal of Ricky Jones be overturned. I hesitate to ask, but how, exactly?

Still, the message of that case, always to plead not guilty, will have been heard loud and clear by, for example, the ever-lengthening list of people who were apparently to be brought before the courts charged with having expressed support for Palestine Action. Jury trials for every single one of them, Yvette Cooper. Although we have yet to see the details, Cooper may have made good on Theresa May’s promise of a statutory inquiry into Orgreave. But I was refused on 23 June the tag that I had twice been promised in writing, the decision of a Home Office headed by that close ally of the former Labour Leadership of and then on Durham County Council, and I was released on 7 August only because the judge had specified that I must be, every effort having been made to keep me banged up at least until 7 November.

After I had been due to be tagged, this guilty-pleading convict of non-violent, non-sexual, non-domestic, non-terrorist, and non-drugs-related offences watched that close ally of the former Labour Leadership of and then on Durham County Council tag wifebeaters, drug-dealers, and ringleaders of last year’s race riots. The Leadership of what little Labour Group remains on that authority has passed to the old NUM Left from the Strike; to the last of the five Councillors who were suspended from the Labour Party in 2008. But the mere electoral will of the people is irrelevant to these matters. Nevertheless, let Cooper feel it when an acquitted Palestine Action defendant contested what she had already turned from her safe into her marginal seat.

John Healey has asserted that the RAF reconnaissance flights over Gaza, provided to the Israelis free of charge, were solely in support of hostage rescue, with intelligence shared only for that purpose. If that were true, then this would be one of the least successful missions that the RAF had ever undertaken. The truth is that, to its great credit, the RAF at every level dissented so fiercely that the Government has had to contract this out to Sierra Nevada Corporation instead. Ignore any other version of events. The spirit of 1946 lives.

There was of course a Labour Government in 1946. Britain’s best ever, but that is only a relative statement, not exclusively, yet nevertheless especially, where Abroad was concerned. As the Chagos deal unravels in terms that would force the resignation of a Prime Minister who ever really had been a human rights lawyer, remember that both of the previous betrayals of the Chagossians also happened under Labour Governments, and were indeed perpetrated by those whom the Right regarded as its two greatest lost Leaders since Hugh Gaitskell, Denis Healey and David Miliband. As a fighter for the Chagossians, Alex Salmond ranked with Tony Benn, Tam Dalyell, George Galloway and Jeremy Corbyn, so the calumnies against him continue to come thick and fast. Justice for his name is not a secondary consideration.

Nor is justice for Palestine Action, whatever one may think of its tactics or its strategy. Not that free speech has ever been especially robust in Britain. Last November, D-Notices were extended to counterterrorism policing. They are not the law, but they attain their desired end because the entire media have the necessary class loyalty, the same loyalty that permits the rest of us to guffaw at the inconsequential Prince Andrew and at the even less significant Sarah Ferguson, but never to mention Jeffrey Epstein’s links to the three times Cabinet Minister, plus a spell as European Commissioner for Trade, who was now the British Ambassador to the United States. In that spirit, the truth about the flights was hidden behind a D-Notice until the incident with the spray paint made that unsustainable even in the age of the Online Safety Act. Lo and behold, that incident was duly classified as an act of terrorism. As a result, the criminal justice system, which is already on the brink of collapse, could and should be brought to a standstill.

The only people even funnier than the vanguard elite are the master race, and they are engaged in a classic display of their superior intelligence by hoisting Saint George’s Flags while tearing down Palestinian ones. If they knew anything at all, then they would be hoisting Saint George’s Flag in the Palestinian cause, including in solidarity with the Palestine Action defendants, as well as, not unconnectedly, against the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, the Nationality and Borders Act, the Elections Act, the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, the National Security Act, the Public Order Act, the Online Safety Act, the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, together with the prospect of digital ID. The rest of us ought to do precisely that. Not least to identify licensed premises that, while mindful of their responsibilities as at present, would never ask for digital ID. And to identify businesses that would never refuse cash.

It is amazing how many people assume that because there is a legend about Saint George, then he himself must be a purely legendary figure. He is not. The Tomb of Saint George has become a shadow of its former self in his maternal hometown, which is now known as Lod, and which is the location of Israel’s principal airport. But at what those involved insist is also his birthplace against the stronger claims of Cappadocia, it was once a major focus of unity between Christians and Muslims in devotion to the Patron Saint of Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt before, and as much as, the Patron Saint of England and a very large number of other places. Three quarters of those who practised that devotion were violently expelled in 1948. On what remains, see here.

Saint George’s Flag goes back to the fourteenth century in England, although it is far older than that in many other places, having been the ensign of the Republic of Genoa from perhaps as early as the tenth century. The King of England had to pay an annual tribute to the Doge of Genoa for the protection that flying it afforded to English ships in the Mediterranean. But in England, it had long fallen into almost complete desuetude until 29 years ago.

Before Euro 96, although nearly everyone incorrectly called it something else, the English regarded the Union Flag as their national flag without complication. It was not even a question. In my childhood, no one would have had any idea what Saint George’s Flag was outside certain ecclesiastical circles that were obscure even in the 1980s, but around which I did happen to grow up. The 1966 World Cup Final is probably on YouTube. Check which flag most of the English fans were waving. The present Medieval revival was initiated 30 years later, which was in my adult lifetime, to sell bad beer to football’s new middle-class audience, who were the only people who could still afford the tickets. Or the beer. It predates devolution or anything like that. But we do have it now. It can be used to advantage.