The Standard Expected?

Like Billy Smith, Brahim Kaddour-Cherif wants to hand himself in. But he cannot find a police station that is open, if at all. Seriously, though, because I did write that as a joke even if it turned out to be true, they are not telling you a tenth of what is wrong with the prisons.

Elsewhere in the criminal justice system, Prevent, which is itself based on a proven hoax, now deals mostly with what it chooses to classify as violent nihilists, and thereafter mostly with the Far Right. The problem there is that it distinguishes between the two. "No political ideology" is what self-styled "technocrats" normally claim to have. But 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. Even Prevent now admits that it is the ones who come from the highly politicised position of having "no political ideology" who are the worst of the lot.

As to the Far Right, did Stephen Yaxley-Lennon follow through with his promise to turn up at Villa Park in support of Maccabi Tel Aviv? No, of course not. Indeed, notably few people answered that call, issued in a foreign country while he was there at the expense of its Government. An English team beat one from that country 2-0, so they were probably wise to have stayed away. Following Yaxley-Lennon's recent acquittal of terrorism, an acquittal by a salaried State employee sitting alone, any such conviction of any of the Palestine Action defendants would be a declaration by the State that it feared Yaxley-Lennon's supporters but not theirs. As much as anything else, how could Palestine Action therefore be a terrorist organisation, if no one were scared of it?

Lisa Nandy lied to Parliament about the match that was eventually played this evening. That brought together her twin vices, football and Israel. She has appointed one of her campaign donors to head the Independent Football Regulator without declaring the fact, something that it would be impossible to do inadvertently. And she refuses to disclose information about her secret meeting with Tzipi Hotovely, whose appointment as the Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom was opposed even by Melanie Phillips. As the Ambassador of a foreign state, Hotovely appeared in Liz Truss's campaign video for the Leadership of the Conservative Party, and thus for the office of Prime Minister, as an example of "core Conservative principles".

As to the substance of those principles, Hotovely is linked to the church-burning anti-miscegenation activists of Lehava. She wants Israel to expand into Jordan and Syria. She denies that the Palestinians exist at all, yet somehow she wants their homes to be demolished. In 2017, she attacked American Jews in classically anti-Semitic terms as, "People that never send their children to fight for their country, most of the Jews don't have children serving as soldiers, going to the Marines, going to Afghanistan, or to Iraq." In 2019, she put out a video of Israel's Jewish critics exclaiming, "Oy vey! My German euros!" 

In May 2021, she addressed a London rally that called for Arab villages to be burned. That was a meeting of supporters of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whom in 1981 the Thatcher Government had had the courage to ban from entering the United Kingdom. That ban remained in place until his assassination in his native New York in 1990. In Hotovely's presence in November 2021, Keir Starmer made what was then the most racist speech to have been delivered since the War by anyone with the remotest claim to have been considered a mainstream British politician. And court has been paid in secret to Hotovely by the Culture Secretary in the Government that persecuted everyone from Kneecap, to Bob Vylan, to the children in Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone.

Should that Culture Secretary resign over conduct that even Keir Starmer has had to describe in writing as "not entirely up to the standard expected"? Yes, of course. But will she? No, of course not. Any more than David Lammy will. Or any more than Rachel Reeves has, despite having been found to have broken the law for a year by renting out her house without a licence. Lucy Powell, Louise Haigh and Angela Rayner were each sacked for far, far less.

Powell has indicated the trouble ahead for Reeves's impending emulation of one of the Labour Right's great lost Leaders, Denis Healey, when she raises the basic rate of income tax for the first time in 50 years, now as then to avoid taxing the extreme wealth of one's social circle of potential future employers. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell never even suggested such an increase, and imagine if they had, as surely as if Corbyn had ever done as Lammy did and presented himself at the despatch box for Prime Minister's Questions without a poppy, before purloining one halfway through from a veteran. But Healey would have had access to such social and professional life anyway. Reeves cannot even do her own basic paperwork. She really does have to keep the super-rich sweet. Too bad for the rest of us.