Treason Doth Never Prosper?

Did the McCanns have their other two children taken away from them? Those twins were two when their parents left them with their not quite four-year-old sister in a foreign country and went out on the town. People without the McCanns' advantages lose their children for far less.

Elsewhere in court, Doreen Lawrence is trying to stop David Norris from being released on licence. With that of Julie Hogg, the murder of Stephen Lawrence led to the removal of double jeopardy. In fact, Imran Khan, seen again at Baroness Lawrence's side, tried to persuade Ann Ming, recently played by Sheridan Smith, not to pursue that removal.

But removed it was, by the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which also admitted hearsay evidence, 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. None of this was reversed by the Liberal Democrats.

That Act was part of the process from Michael Howard's Home Secretaryship to digital ID and beyond, and that is the context of everything from, at one end of the social or academic spectrum, the disbelief that Ricky Jones had been "allowed" to plead not guilty, to, at the other end, the demands to rerun the prosecutions of Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, and of Christopher Berry and Christopher Cash. Alfie Franco's conviction will have been greeted very differently from that of Fayaz Khan, or from the success of Hamit Coskun's appeal.

Anyone who has ever dealt with the Crown Court has seen how weighted towards the Crown it was. A judge is a salaried employee of the same State that brings the prosecution, and a judgeship in a criminal court is a salaried and pensionable reward for 30 years of success as a contracted freelance prosecutor. The Crown Prosecution Service's appeal against the dismissal of its out of time, and therefore unlawful and null, charge against Mr Ó hAnnaidh should itself be dismissed as an abuse of process, and as a breathtaking cheek on the part of those who had been shown to be professionally incompetent.

As to Mr Berry and Mr Cash, if China is the United Kingdom's enemy, then a lot of people are guilty of treasonably trading with it. It owns 10 per cent of Heathrow Airport. It owns UK Power Networks, which operates electricity distribution infrastructure across London, the South East, and the East of England. It owns nine per cent of Thames Water, and 75 per cent of Northumbrian Water, one of the five water companies that have been given permission to increase their charges even further than had already been rubber-stamped by Ofwat. China's original 33.5 per stake in Hinkley Point C has gone down, but only to 27.4 per cent. China owns and operates the Minety battery site. It owns the London EV Company that manufactures electric black taxis, and 25 per cent of the Beatrice offshore wind farm. It would own 66.5 per cent of Bradwell B. It already owns even Greene King, and Wolverhampton Wanderers. It has a vast property portfolio in Britain.

And then, of course, there is British Steel. Now, that is not British Steel as it once was. That is the problem. The company of that name is one of those which are once again run by the State. But it is still owned by Li Ganpo. Look him up. That does at least have the advantage that the tariffs that posed an existential threat to our steel industry had been imposed, not by China, but by the EU, which half of those who wished to re-prosecute the Christophers Berry and Cash regarded as the focus of their patriotic allegiance. The other half so regarded not even the United States anymore, but Donald Trump personally, and it is in response to Trump's tariffs that the EU has imposed its own.

Minnows are caught in both nets, and that is disgracefully what this once world-leading producer of steel has chosen to become. To rebuild our country, we need to rebuild our steel industry. Nor let it be forgotten that to rebuild our steel industry, we need to rebuild our coal industry, for which we thankfully have a thousand years' worth of the resource, having also been the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners' Strike. To be so again, we need to take to heart the latest intervention of the man who secured the defeat of that Strike.

Neil Kinnock is quite right that the Conservative and Labour Parties exist to justify each other's existence, formulating a consensus between themselves to the exclusion of all other voices. He may therefore dread that the collapse of either of those parties would lead to that of the other. But to the rest of us, that would be a win-win. So long as the beneficiaries were neither the party of Nathan Gill, nor any honoured guest of Amichai Chikli. There is plenty of treason to go round.