Emergency Stop

Lobbying on behalf of Elbit, CMS Strategic planted in The Times a false story that Palestine Action was under investigation for being funded by Iran. Days later, Parliament voted to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. The courts now face collapse as they attempted to try more than two thousand blind wheelchair-users and octogenarian clergywomen for having silently held up placards. There is, however, no such action against the organisations that are at the very least egging on the seasonal use of fireworks to attack hotels.

Such egging on has included the circulation of falsehoods about the Cambridgeshire train attacker. In reality, like the Union Flags in the old Irish quarters of English towns and cities, the knife-wielding sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of beautifully mannered, strongly family-centred African and West Indian churchgoers have assimilated perfectly into the country and city of the Krays and Richardsons. The Windrush generation arrived in the Teddy Boys' London, and those streets were vastly more dangerous than they are now. Violent crime in general, and knife crime in particular, are down both nationally and in London, as are hospital admissions for knife-related injuries, so it is highly unlikely that anyone is systematically fiddling the figures.

It is therefore no surprise that no MP either elected or now sitting for Reform UK attended Shabana Mahmood's Emergency Statement this afternoon. Do not look to those MPs for too much, if any, resistance to airport-style scanners at railway stations most of which are in any case unstaffed. Nor to even greater use of facial recognition, which is run by the state whose flag is conspicuous both at Reform's events and at those of the people whom it was desperate to prevent from denying it scores of seats by a handful of votes apiece. Notably on 13 September, those people were presumably happy to have put themselves on those databases, if less so to have contributed generously to the immigrant economy every time that they bought so much as a sandwich.

The rarity of anything like the Huntingdon train stabbings is why we find them so shocking. But how long will it be before railway and emergency workers were once again officially lazy, greedy, overpaid and obsolete? I give it until Thursday at the latest. Yet we demonstrably do not need scanners or facial recognition cameras, much less digital ID. We need guards on the trains, porters on the platforms, conductors on the buses, park-keepers in the parks, and Police on the streets.