Tiers Before Bedtime

Nigel Farage's cameo at Prime Minister's Questions was his first utterance on the floor of the House since 25 March, but he did not stay for the Draft Agriculture (Delinked Payments) (Reductions) (England) Regulations 2026, meaning that he still has not voted since 18 March.

Last night's riot in response to Farage's call for "pure cold rage" was his second time, after mass disorder had resulted from his false claim that the perpetrator of the Southport stabbings had been an asylum seeker and a Muslim. Farage's rare appearance in Parliament may have been to avoid the knock on the door, but an MP may be arrested in the Palace of Westminster as surely as at home. The House of Commons also has a power of expulsion, which might give the people of Clacton the chance of meaningful parliamentary representation.

And far be it from me to defend Kemi Badenoch, but Reform UK's misrepresentation of her is a missed opportunity. When she was Minister for Women and Equalities, she was Minister for Women and Equalities. There would be plenty in her record for Reform to exploit. Had the taking of the knee for Black Lives Matter by the England football team at the 2022 World Cup not been advocated by the then Immigration Minister attending Cabinet. Robert Jenrick.

Without Prejudice To The Generality

A ban on wheelie bins would make life so much simpler. No one ever knows which colour to throw at the Police. But Sikhs, as such, do not have an exemption from the law on knives. They are simply in the same position as tree surgeons, or as gentlemen attending the Royal Caledonian Ball. Section 139 (5) of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 reads:

Without prejudice to the generality of subsection (4) above, it shall be a defence for a person charged with an offence under this section to prove that he had the article with him— 

(a) for use at work; 

(b) for religious reasons; or 

(c) as part of any national costume.

The Five Ks are equally binding on both sexes, and when John Ashby raped a Sikh woman because he had thought that she was a Muslim, then her kirpan was no use to her. It was not a tiny symbol originally, it has not always been one historically, and it may not always be one internationally, but it has always been one in Britain, where in no known case has it been used as an offensive weapon. To the charge of possession of a bladed article in a public place, Vickrum Digwa's defence was that it was a kirpan. The jury rejected that defence by convicting him of that charge. His father and brother face similar.

Any Advance On This?

Advance UK has deregistered as a political party. I was reminded only recently, having quite forgotten, that I had been there and done that. Although I have never taken as few as 154 votes for anything. Nor have I ever taken fewer than the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, whose support at Makerfield is being split by Count Binface, such that their combined tally should be projected into the percentage of the electorate that was in favour of the retention of Keir Starmer as Prime Minister.

Neither Count Binface nor Howling Laud Hope will be on Question Time from Makerfield tomorrow, but nor will the candidate whom Ben Habib had already endorsed, Rebecca Shepherd of Restore Britain. Shepherd's husband is a Dutch-Indonesian immigrant. Is he a Muslim? At any rate, their business model is purely parastatal, consisting entirely of the provision of therapeutic equine activities to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Service of Wigan Council. To my mind, that is a noble pursuit. But would Restore voters agree? Would the professed 37,000 members of Advance, although the true number would become clear if we ever found out how much had been repaid in subscriptions? Would Habib? Would Rupert Lowe?

The defining issue of Restore is remigration, so it would presumably have sent Henry Nowak "back" to Poland with his father whom it would still deport, and it would presumably send Habib "back" to Pakistan. It would not, however, need to deport Stephen Yaxley-Lennon to Ireland, of which he was in any case already a citizen, since he lived in Spain. Yaxley-Lennon endorsed Advance at Gorton and Denton. Does he endorse Restore at Makerfield? And what of the Sikh immigration that, having been doing so for 20 years, he was still encouraging as an anti-Muslim bulwark until at least last month? Fringe Sikh figures have been appearing on his platforms for decades, as he has on theirs. Last night in Southampton, he delivered an almost comical speech against "Pakistani Muslims". What about them?

Charging Points

Anyone would think that Vickrum Digwa had got off. He is a convicted murderer serving a life sentence, and his mother, Kiran Kaur, is not going to be given litter-picking for having hidden a murder weapon. If she is an Indian national, then she cannot hold any other nationality, since India does not allow that, so she will be deported automatically upon completion of her pretty stiff sentence. But what of the further weapons-related charges against Digwa, his father and his brother? Why have they not also been charged with perversion of the course in justice in what was a murder investigation?

Speaking of charges, Bonnie Blue of Reform UK, and whose real name, assuming that it is different, I refuse to discover by Googling her, ought at least to face something if she went ahead with her latest cunning stunt. Outraging public decency? Conspiracy to corrupt public morals? If she really is pregnant, and she has lied about that in the past, then the concern at the risk of injury or infection to her unborn child is a welcome sign that no one truly believes in nothing more than "a clump of cells" that was "part of a woman's body" such that she was free to do with it as she pleased. Yes, of course the child ought to be removed at birth from so glaringly unfit a mother.

And speaking of sentences, why should the £1.8 million fine imposed on South West Water for having supplied the people of Brixham with cryptosporidium be paid by its customers, including the victims? If the provision to fine the company's directors and senior executives in person exists, then why was it not used? Or if there is no such provision, then how soon will there be?

Take Action Today

Here:

Once again, disabled and terminally ill people are being put at risk due to proposals to legalise assisted dying.

Assisted dying lobbyists are campaigning to persuade MPs near the top of the Private Members’ Bill ballot to bring back Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying Bill.

As a national, grassroots disability rights group opposed to the legalisation of assisted dying and euthanasia as deadly forms of disability discrimination, we have been campaigning hard against Kim Leadbeater’s Bill since its inception.

Kim Leadbeater’s Bill is not only unworkable, it is dangerous for people in vulnerable situations - including disabled people.

If the Parliament Acts were to be used to circumvent the House of Lords, as is the stated plan of campaigners seeking to persuade an MP to bring back the Bill, the Bill could not be amended, so all the concerns raised by groups such as Not Dead Yet UK could not be addressed.

The cost of this Bill passing as it currently stands will be paid by disabled people and others at greater risk of pressure and harm, and by a cultural shift that places greater value on some lives than others. We cannot allow this to happen.

For disabled people, this Bill is an existential threat, for at least the following reasons:

• Coercion - this danger is significant and cannot be adequately addressed by proposed safeguards; it simply cannot always be detected. At-risk groups (e.g. people who are elderly, disabled or financially disadvantaged) may feel pressured to choose death to avoid burdening families, as has happened overseas.
• Safeguards - they won’t work in practice. The legislation is weighted towards promoting eligibility rather than preventing risk.
• Slippery slope - other jurisdictions have seen widening of access and removal of safeguards. There are insufficient checks and balances to be sure expansion won’t happen here, too.
• Palliative care - resources for assisted dying could undermine already underfunded hospice care. Hospices are already warning of a “funding crisis”. The Association for Palliative Medicine warns that palliative care must be prioritised first.

All MPs need to understand that disabled people are terrified of this Bill being brought back. We already have to fight far too hard to be able to live dignified and independent lives. Legalising assisted dying through this Bill, which threatens our autonomy and our options, will make that harder still.

It comes down to the sort of country and culture we want to live in. We can’t settle for less, which is what Kim Leadbeater’s Bill asks MPs to do. It asks MPs to address the challenge of how we care for and support people who are in situations where they need greater protection and support - including disabled people - by giving them a way out through assisted dying, instead of a way up through investment in excellent palliative and social care.

When you enter your postcode, you will then be asked to provide your details, and you will see a draft email that you can make changes to before sending it to your MP. When you hit send, this email will be sent to your MP along with a physical postcard to their Parliament address (you can see what that postcard looks like here) - both will include the contact details you have provided, so it is clear to your MP that the message has come from a real local constituent.

Disabled people and others at greater risk of pressure or harm need the support to live, not a law that exposes them to greater danger. This Bill does the opposite - it facilitates premature death and puts people at risk.

We must stop this dangerous Bill from returning. Take action today - your message could make all the difference.

The text reads:

I am writing to you as a resident of [your constituency] and as a supporter of Not Dead Yet UK, a grassroots disability rights group.

I am contacting you following the recent MP Private Members’ Bill ballot, as I have been alarmed by reports that assisted dying lobbyists are campaigning to persuade MPs near the top of the ballot to bring back Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying Bill. I am very concerned about this and would be very grateful if you would reply to reassure me that you will listen to the voices of disabled people and not support the return of this Bill.

As Baroness Grey-Thompson made clear at a House of Lords Select Committee hearing last autumn about the assisted dying Bill, “there is no organisation of or for disabled people that supports this legislation”. She described the Bill as “a danger to disabled people”, a view widely shared by the disability community.

I find it extraordinary that MPs would consider bringing back a bill that is so widely opposed by not only disabled people but also countless medical Royal Colleges, including the Royal College of Psychiatrists, professional bodies and other groups representing vulnerable people, including people with learning disabilities.

Polling published since the assisted dying Bill was first introduced has shown how wide the public’s concerns are about the assisted dying Bill that was introduced in the last parliamentary session, including in relation to its existential threat to disabled people.

These concerns remain significant because if the Parliament Acts were to be used to circumvent the House of Lords, as is the stated plan of campaigners seeking to persuade an MP to bring back the Bill, the Bill could not be amended, so all the concerns raised by groups such as Not Dead Yet UK could not be addressed.

This is particularly worrying because the House of Lords had not finished its work on the Bill when it fell. Peers were still considering serious concerns about whether disabled people would be safe under the Bill, including the risk that people could come under pressure or feel they had no real choice because they could not get the care and support they needed. These are not minor issues. They go to the heart of whether an assisted dying law would put disabled people at risk.

When MPs voted on the Bill, this further scrutiny in the House of Lords had not yet been completed. MPs who supported the Bill on the understanding that concerns would continue to be examined and safeguards could be improved should be deeply troubled by an attempt to bring back essentially the same Bill before that work has been done. Disabled people should not be expected to accept a Bill while serious concerns about their safety remain unresolved.

In relation to its impact on disabled people, a poll commissioned by Not Dead Yet UK of over 2,000 adults last summer showed the following:

- Two in three people (67%, including 72% of disabled people) agree that the UK Parliament should prioritise improving access to care for disabled people before introducing assisted dying (only 13% disagree). 

- 63% of the public and 67% of disabled people agree that some disabled people may feel a sense of responsibility to access an assisted death if they feel they are a burden on family, friends or society (only 16% disagree). 

- 60% of the public agree that some disabled people could be coerced into assisted dying by others who do not have their best interests at heart. 64% of disabled people share this concern. 

- 57% agree that disabled people who struggle to access the support they need, given the current state of the NHS and social care funding, may be more likely to seek assisted dying instead (only 17% disagree). This rises to over 6 in 10 (63%) for people who are disabled. 

- 59% agree that if disabled people are living in poverty, and benefits are being cut, they may be likely to seek assisted dying instead of struggling financially (again, only 17% disagree). This rises to 65% for people who are disabled.

In Canada, which first legalised assisted dying in 2016 under a law similar to the one proposed here (restricted to those whose deaths were reasonably foreseeable), disabled people have increasingly been put at risk under the country’s assisted dying law, with Paralympians and disabled veterans among those who have been offered an assisted death proactively without requesting it; one woman was offered an assisted death when she requested a stairlift. 

Roger Foley has written powerfully in the Herald of his experience as a disabled man living in Canada: “As Canada has expanded its assisted dying law, I have faced neglect, verbal abuse, and denial of essential care. I’ve been told my care needs are too much work, and my life has been devalued. Worse still, I have been approached and told by healthcare staff to consider opting for Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD). Instead of offering compassionate support to alleviate my suffering, it is suggested to me that I should end my life.”

England and Wales cannot follow this path - the risk is too great, which was one of the reasons why Scotland recently decisively rejected assisted dying.

Legalised assisted dying would change our country forever. Disabled people will hear the message loud and clear that their lives are not worth living - Parliament will have said as much by providing a means of assisting death while failing to ensure disabled people have all they need to live dignified, independent lives.

Many disabled people are terrified about this Bill and were greatly relieved when it failed to become law in the last session. I plead with you not to support the Bill being brought back. My mind would be greatly put at rest if you could assure me that you will oppose any such attempts and any future similar bill.

Thank you for your work on behalf of our constituency.

Yours sincerely,

Gateway to the World?

The only thing even funnier than the vanguard elite is the master race. The specimen in the first photograph, on the front line of the throwers of burning bins at the Police in Southampton, is Luke Jahn, the Portsmouth Branch Organiser of the National Rebirth Party. That party is shown in solemn assembly in the second photograph, while the third is of its Leader, Alek Yerbury. Form an orderly queue, Aryan maidens.

Suddenly, the likes of the National Rebirth Party like the Poles, in stark contrast to their attitude either 10 years ago or 85. As for their fellow travellers in and around the Conservative Party, Reform UK and Restore Britain, the weapon used to murder Henry Nowak was found by the jury not to have been a kirpan, which has never been known to have been used as an offensive weapon in this country, while the exemption of the kirpan from from the ban on bladed articles in public places goes back to the Criminal Justice Act 1988. Who was the Prime Minister in 1988? She also allowed into Britain more than 10,000 Vietnamese boat people who had illegally entered Hong Kong, before giving British citizenship to tens of thousands more who were then still there. "Maggie would have stopped the boats"? Would she hell.

Having made his successful call for "pure cold rage" in an unchallenged Emergency Address to the Nation, such as every MP should take to issuing, Nigel Farage characteristically did not turn up to Shabana Mahmood's statement to the House of Commons. He did contribute to a Westminster Hall debate on Monday, but he has not been heard on the floor of the House since 25 March, and he has not voted since seven days earlier again. Yet he has never been known to miss his other paid work. Both Reform and Restore want greatly relaxed gun laws, yet they also want to ban the kirpan, which has never killed anyone in Britain, where it takes a form that could not do so. Contrast that with the Orange Order, which marches with its three-foot longswords drawn, Wazir Khan rather than Guru Gobind Singh. Still, at least Reform does not promise Restoration at the hands of the Cromwell Club. Either you are laughing at that, or we are laughing at you.

Assuaging The Gilt

Perhaps it is because the first ever sovereign bond was issued by the Bank of England as recently as 1693, so 27 years after the discovery of gravity. In other advanced economies, the bond markets are to varying degrees important. But only in Britain are they given the anti-democratic constitutional status that, for all his misplaced hope in the Labour Party, Andy Beckett describes:

Should politics always be dominated by economics? Should questions about how governments and voters pay for things – whether by earnings, taxes or borrowing – be settled before we consider the wider consequences?

In an anxious capitalist democracy such as Britain, with a modern history of patchy economic success and intermittent but recurring crises over public debt, the answer may seem obvious: governments and voters always need to behave in ways that fit with the market forces that shape our economy.

This is the assumption behind most of the debate about Labour and the bond markets. Pundits and politicians on the centre left as well as the right, and many mainstream economists and bond traders, all agree that whoever emerges as prime minister from the current undeclared leadership contest will have to design their spending policies according to what “the markets” – as they are called with reverent vagueness – find acceptable. As the once radical, now more conventional historian and journalist Paul Mason wrote recently: “Put simply, ‘defying the bond market’ is like trying to defy gravity.”

Such supposed reality checks have been delivered to Labour governments since at least the mid-1970s, when Jim Callaghan’s embattled administration was forced to agree to spending cuts in order to get a loan from the International Monetary Fund. Even Tony Blair’s much more secure premiership deferred nervously to free-market orthodoxies. “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation,” he told the 2005 Labour conference. “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer. They’re not debating it in China and India.”

Yet to see current capitalism as a force of nature, which cannot be held back or made to change course by governments in any way, is to underestimate all the effort that has been required to establish and sustain this economic model: busy conservative thinktanks, countless rightwing election campaigns, endless corporate lobbying. Free-market fatalism also requires a belief in economics as a set of simple laws – rather than a complex, contested, often inexact science, full of disagreements about the importance of and relationships between different economic interests and dynamics. As the late Samuel Brittan, one of the Financial Times’ most worldly commentators, once put it to me: “All economics is a construct.”

One of the most constructed – and therefore ideologically loaded – concepts applied to today’s UK economy and politics is “stability”. Broadly speaking, the financial markets understand it to mean a relatively long-serving government that keeps spending, debt and inflation under control. Such stability, the argument goes, allows businesses and investors to plan for the long term.

A more sceptical, less credulously pro-capitalist argument could also be made about this sort of stability, however: that some business interests actually want stability so they can behave in risky, destabilising ways and then be bailed out by the government if they get into trouble, as the banks were after the financial crisis. For some free marketeers, state intervention is always wrong – until suddenly it’s not.

Stability can also be defined in many ways the financial markets don’t think about much, if at all: social stability, climate stability, consistency in the provision of public services, cohesion between the nations of the UK, the continuation of traditional party politics and the current electoral system, and of faith in democracy itself. By all these measures, the market-pleasing austerity policies often followed by British governments since 2010 have produced not stability but the opposite.

Unless Labour takes an approach to governing less hemmed in by conventional economic thinking, this spiral of instability will probably deepen. As the investment analyst Cris Sholto Heaton writes in MoneyWeek: “What Britain needs is … pro-growth, pro-business policies combined with huge investment in physical and social infrastructure … to facilitate this and address the growing anger and despair that voters feel. Gilt [bond] investors seem averse to any hint of the latter [approach]. They appear not to fully appreciate that the consequences of the failing status quo will be much more populist governments.”

Arguably ever since Margaret Thatcher’s government replaced Callaghan’s, capitalism has often worked in Britain in a more short-term way than in much of Europe and Asia. For an unpopular Labour administration to persuade the financial markets and corporate establishment that much better-funded government will be better for the country – and also for the long-term prospects of many businesses – won’t be easy. It’s the perennial problem of left-leaning governments in the more conservative capitalist countries: how to convince instinctively suspicious, sometimes tribally rightwing business interests that a more functional state and a fairer economy will produce better economic outcomes.

Yet there are signs that Labour may be about to try. Andy Burnham argues that the UK has a sluggish economy and unhappy society because people are paying too much for essentials, often provided by privatised utilities that prioritise profits, shareholders and executive pay over delivering a functional or affordable service. His argument shows the influence of the thinktank Common Wealth and other well-informed leftwing critics of the economic status quo who contributed to Labour’s thinking during the iconoclastic shadow chancellorship of John McDonnell.

Until recently, that phase had seemingly been erased from the party’s history. But with Keir Starmer government’s initial economic orthodoxy having generated paltry gains and almost no political credit, and now being overtaken by events such as the inflationary war in the Middle East, even the usually cautious chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is sounding bolder. “I will not tolerate anyone exploiting a crisis to make a quick buck off the back of hard-working people,” she says, apparently condemning exactly the way many companies operate in this country. Meanwhile, the once thoroughly Blairite Wes Streeting writes: “The centre-left’s task is not simply to speak the language of markets more fluently than the Conservatives. It is to ensure markets serve society rather than dominate it.”

With the Tories and Reform UK promising yet more austerity, despite its unpopularity, a political space is opening up for Labour – one that its biggest rivals for the left-leaning vote, the Greens, are already exploring. It’s far too early to say that the domination of British politics by conservative economics is coming to an end. But that mindset is more vulnerable than for a long time.

The Evidence of Our Eyes and Ears

Nick Thomas-Symonds knows that no one believes him about the theft of his phone with all of his Peter Mandelson messages on it. The assertion of dominance is in making people pretend that they do. That is either also the case with regard to the autodelete function on Keir Starmer’s WhatsApp, or Starmer really is using it. Which would be worse? Pat McFadden agrees with Mandelson that most Labour MPs are contemptible and that Mandelson’s megarich, utterly depraved chums should not pay more tax to help the poor. The same McFadden claimed £40,000 in expenses to rent a constituency home next door to one that he already owned, on which he claimed mortgage interest expenses, and which he rented out. Well, of course. Now to talk about the really important things in the Mandelson Files.

Mandelson wrote by hand to David Lammy, begging to made Ambassador to Washington. He objected to having to list his foreign contacts, so an official emailed him to ask for a “handful of names” to “reassure the vetting team” in this “quite artificial” process. That was how it started. It ended with Starmer’s sacking of Mandelson because his account of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein had been “less than totally candid”. On page 10 yesterday, the Government breezily admitted that it was withholding files lest they fell into the hands of the Metropolitan Police. And Paul Knaggs writes:

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

There is a passage in Nineteen Eighty-Four, worn smooth by repetition but no less true for it, in which Orwell describes the Party’s most complete and final power: not merely the power to tell you what to think, but the power to decide what you are permitted to see.

Today’s Labour establishment has absorbed that lesson without needing to issue the order. They do not ask us to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears. They simply fail to provide enough of it.

The second tranche of the Mandelson files, over a thousand pages representing the largest government publication since the Chilcot report, has landed with the weight of a serious disclosure and the substance of a careful omission.

Large swathes are redacted, in significant part owing to the ongoing Metropolitan Police investigation into Mandelson. Vetting documents are not included for the same reason. The stated justification is legitimate as far as it goes. A police investigation does not permit the casual release of material that could prejudice a prosecution.

But not all the gaps are explained by the detectives at Scotland Yard.

The Cabinet of Missing Messages 

The government admitted in the Commons that some messages may not have been recovered where devices were changed, or where disappearing messages had been switched on. That is a remarkable admission, delivered with the bland composure of a minister announcing a minor procedural update. Ministers, it turns out, were in the habit of using WhatsApp’s self-delete function while conducting government business. Whether they enabled that feature before or after a Humble Address became foreseeable is a question the Government did not volunteer to answer.

Then there is the larger absence.

The Cabinet Office wrote to Peter Mandelson via his solicitors, requesting information held on his personal phone. Peter Mandelson declined to comply. The Government has no further recourse.

Let that sit for a moment. Parliament voted to compel full disclosure. The Government committed itself, with what Cabinet Office minister Darren Jones described as an unprecedented exercise in transparency, to publish everything in scope. And the central figure in the affair simply said no, through his lawyers, and the Government acknowledged it could do nothing further.

This is not proof of wrongdoing. It should be stated plainly. A person is entitled to legal advice and to act upon it, and an ongoing criminal investigation provides legitimate grounds for caution. But the democratic accountability argument runs in precisely the opposite direction. The public was promised the full picture.

What it received was the picture that could be assembled from everything except Peter Mandelson’s personal phone. That is a locked drawer in the middle of the room.

The Absent Prime Minister

If the refusal by Mandelson to hand over his phone is the locked drawer, the next absence is the empty chair beside it.

For a controversy centred on a direct Prime Ministerial appointment, Keir Starmer’s own direct communications are conspicuous by their absence. The files are thick with the movements of the court: officials, advisers, private offices, special advisers, Cabinet Office processes, FCDO machinery, and the ever-present hum of Whitehall procedure. Morgan McSweeney appears. Ailsa Terry appears. Jonathan Powell appears. Civil servants appear. The machinery whirs and clicks.

But Starmer himself? Barely a footprint in the snow.

This matters because the appointment was his. The assurance to Parliament was his. The later withdrawal was his. Yet the documentary trail shows remarkably little direct correspondence from the Prime Minister’s own hand.

There may be innocent explanations. Prime Ministers do not personally handle every email. Much of modern government is conducted through advisers and private offices. No one should pretend that absence is proof of guilt, but there was plenty of contact before the appointment, personal messages during the 2024 general election, just none on record for the times in question.

But absence is not nothing either.

In politics, a missing file can speak as loudly as a leaked one. A gap can be a fact. A silence can be evidence of how power chooses to move, who keeps their hands clean, and whose fingerprints are allowed to appear on the paperwork, and Starmer, as former DPP, knows all about evidence, what is admissible and well…what isn’t there.

Perhaps all of this is coincidence: the disappearing messages, the unavailable devices, the personal phone refusal, the absent Prime Minister’s correspondence, the wrong address in the police report on McSweeney’s stolen phone. Reasonable people can reach different conclusions about the weight of these coincidences taken together. What they cannot do is say they have been given the full picture. The man at the top of the appointment leaves the lightest footprint of all. In a thousand pages, Sir Keir Starmer is the quietest voice in the room.

McSweeney’s Committee Testimony vs. The Mandelson Files

What makes the locked drawer more conspicuous is what was found in the documents that were released.

The second tranche contains messages between Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s former chief of staff, which reveal a relationship far more extensive, and far more intimate, than any official account had previously suggested. In July 2025, Mandelson emailed McSweeney suggesting the Prime Minister meet Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire then planning a London visit. In earlier exchanges, Mandelson described Number Ten as “beleaguered and bereft” and said it needed a “complete revamp,” assessments he was sharing freely with the man who ran the building he was criticising.

This is not the correspondence of a distant acquaintance. It is the language of a political operative who had a key to the back door and felt entirely comfortable using it.

It matters because of what McSweeney told the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in April, under oath, on the public record.

McSweeney was keen to distance himself from Mandelson throughout that session, despite consistent reporting on their close relationship. He told the committee that Mandelson was not his hero. He chose the word “confidant” rather than “mentor,” as though the distinction between those two words might do significant load-bearing work. He claimed he did not know the full extent of Epstein’s relationship with Mandelson before recommending him for the Washington role, describing it as “a passing acquaintance that he regretted having and that he apologised for.”

The released files complicate that portrait considerably. The emails show a man offering unsolicited strategic advice about the Prime Minister’s schedule and the fundamental character of the government. Mandelson described himself, in one now-released note, as someone who would make sure Starmer “never regret” appointing him. He wrote in blue pen on House of Lords notepaper. He was lobbying for the job while publicly denying he was doing so. And the man at the centre of the appointment process was receiving emails of political substance from him while telling a parliamentary committee that their relationship was something rather less than it appears to have been.

McFadden Got You Watching The Other Card

So here is the position. The central figure has refused his phone. The Prime Minister has left almost no trace. And the one substantial body of correspondence that did survive, the McSweeney emails, flatly contradicts what its author told Parliament under oath. That is the scandal. That is where the appointment of an Epstein associate to the most prestigious posting in the British diplomatic service actually lives.

And what has the established press chosen to lead with?

Pat McFadden.

The detail that has dominated the coverage is a WhatsApp exchange between Mandelson and McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, in which McFadden complains about Labour MPs rebelling over welfare cuts. “Every meeting I have,” he wrote in May 2025, “is ‘who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others’. They’re asking the wrong questions.” It is a revealing line. McFadden’s contempt for colleagues trying to protect the people who voted Labour is plain, and those MPs and those voters deserve to see it written down.

But understand what has happened here. McFadden’s sneer has very little to do with the actual crux of the matter, which is how and why Mandelson was appointed, who vetted him, who vouched for him, and who is now declining to provide the evidence. The welfare exchange is a side conversation between two men, one of whom was not even the subject of the inquiry. And it has stolen the entire show.

The media needed its pound of flesh to make up for the loss of evidence. McFadden provided it. And while the cameras turned towards him, the locked drawer stayed locked.

Never mind the wrong question. McFadden is not the man behind the curtain. He’s the wrong direction entirely. He said the quiet part out loud, and for that he will take the week’s punishment in the press; he’s a big boy on a big salary, he can take it. But neither Starmer nor Mandelson ever says the quiet part out loud. That is the difference. They know which cards to show.

This is not a conspiracy. It does not need to be. It is simply how attention works when there is a void where the evidence should be. The press abhors a vacuum as much as nature does. Denied the documents that matter, it reaches for the quote that is available, and the quote that is available is McFadden being unpleasant about the poor. The result is a story that feels like accountability while leading away from it.

Attention Control: Transparency And Containment

The lesson of the Mandelson files is not a government pressured into being transparent and accountable. It is one that shows the oldest tricks of power, misdirection and contempt, are still the tools of their trade. You do not need to chain a mind. You only need to guide its attention. Repeat the right words. Frame the right fear. Hold up one card while the real game is played elsewhere. Language, repetition and the controlled management of attention are the most advanced technologies we have; they are as ancient as they are modern, and they have been hiding in plain sight for centuries.

McFadden’s contempt for Labour MPs defending the welfare state is a real scandal. But it is also a perfect card to hold up. It generates heat, it requires no further investigation, it confirms what people already suspect, and it leads nowhere near the locked drawer.

Real scandals rarely arrive conveniently. They do not come with signed confessions and cinematically placed smoking guns. They come, as this one has come, as fragments and omissions, procedural fog, carefully chosen silences, and a dozen separately explicable gaps that together form the shape of something withheld. No single document contains the cinematic smoking gun. There is no neat confession, no villainous flourish, no signed note reading: we knew and appointed him anyway.

But when the evidence is thin, when the Prime Minister’s direct correspondence is scarce, when the central figure refuses to provide his personal phone, and when the Government admits it cannot compel him, the public is entitled to ask whether this is transparency or containment.

The Party no longer needs to tell you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It can simply decide which evidence you are allowed to see. And when you point at the locked drawer in the middle of the room, it can remind you, with immaculate composure, that it has complied fully with every requirement placed upon it.

That, too, is a form of power. The oldest form, perhaps. Not the power to silence. The power to frame.

Watch which card they are holding up. Then ask what happened to the rest of the deck.

Transparency and disclosure are not the same thing. One is a process. The other is a result. This Government has mastered the first and avoided the second. The Mandelson files do not show us everything. That is precisely why they matter.

Bandit Country?

President Karol Nawrocki of Poland says that Ukraine's glorification of the "bandits and murderers" of the UPA makes it "not ready to be part of the European family", and thus unfit to join the EU.

Although Israel is equally critical, its capture of Beaufort Castle is not only a major symbolic assault on Lebanon's and the wider region's Christian and especially Catholic past and present, but also a major strategic capture north of the Litani, effectively laying claim to the whole of Lebanon. Those two aspects are intimately connected.

And those are just today, a day on which thousands more examples could be cited from around the world. In such a world as this, read the Mandelson Files and weep. But don't mourn. Organise.

The Grownups Are Back In Charge?

South West Water will today be sentenced for having supplied water unfit for human consumption, leading to an outbreak of cryptosporidiosis in Devon in May 2024, making more than 140 people ill and hospitalising four of them. Ofcom is once again to investigate the Royal Mail for having come nowhere near its annual delivery targets, and for having managed the remarkable feat of doing even worse in the year to the end of this March than it did in the year before.

For all the Government's self-congratulation about the railways, the rolling stock remains in private hands, adding exorbitant rent to every ticket. Rent to whom? And for all that one of Tony Blair's many unsavoury employers, the regime of Paul Kagame, will not be paid any more British public money, whatever happened to the £700 million or more that Robert Jenrick paid to Rwanda to take four volunteers, having always said that it would take only 100 people per year?

Yet in the midst of this and so very much more, six pages of the latest Mandelson Files are given over to Georgia Gould, who was then the Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office as well as the Member of Parliament for the good burghers of Queen's Park and Maida Vale, getting the vote out for Peter Mandelson to become Chancellor of the University of Oxford. And he still lost. To William Hague. But Gould is now the Minister for School Standards. By such are we governed.

Patient, Record

The BBC cannot get enough of Nigel Farage, so of course it has not banned him from Desert Island Discs; such blacklisting is reserved for Jeremy Corbyn. Farage was always going to be on it eventually, but he is growing impatient. Many appearances have been amusing at the time, such as Aung San Suu Kyi’s hilariously middlebrow playlist, while others are good for a laugh in hindsight, such as the fact that Nicola Sturgeon’s luxury item was a coffee machine. The coffee was clearly flowing in her household, since Peter Murrell bought 108 toilet rolls hours before she warned against panic buying during the pandemic.

Remaining in the lavatory, more joy in heaven and all that, but what new information caused James Murray to change his mind about whether a person with a Y chromosome and a penis could be a woman? Still, the Single Patient Record is a good idea in principle, even if the concerns about security and confidentiality are more than valid. Unlimited access to identifiable patient data has already been granted by NHS England to the Palantir of Jeffrey Epstein’s Peter Thiel, to the Palantir that was a client of Epstein’s Peter Mandelson, to the Palantir of ICE and IDF infamy, and to the Palantir with which Mandelson and Keir Starmer had off-the-books meetings in Washington while Mandelson was Ambassador there. Expressly in support of Javier Milei, Thiel himself is now based in Argentina, which is the only country in the world that might conceivably invade British territory.

A solution is at hand. The Terrorism Act was not designed to counter or deter the Armed Forces of other sovereign states, even if proscription is a lot cheaper than rebuilding the real means of doing so. But as the proscription of Palestine Action was an all-or-nothing measure that also banned the Russian Imperial Movement and the Maniacs Murder Cult (and how are the presumably urgent battles against those progressing?), so the proscription of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps should be an all-or-nothing measure that also banned ICE and the IDF. Palantir is embedded in both, and it is one of several means of enmeshing them with each other, so if they were banned in Britain, then it could not possibly have any part in our NHS or anything else.

Grinding Swords

Reformers, Restorers and all points right, 10 years ago you truly hated Eastern Europeans. Yet Henry Nowak had the most common surname in Poland, while his very Slavic-looking father had a slight but unmistakable hint of the non-native English speaker. And juries were absolutely sacrosanct to you, as they should be, until two of them were unable to convict Mohammed Fahir Amaaz of actual bodily harm, or Muhammad Amaad of anything at all. But now juries are just grand again, because one of them has convicted Vickrum Digwa and his mother, Kiran Kaur. If two juries drawn from the 80 per cent white City of Liverpool could not convict two Muslims of Pakistani descent, although the first one had convicted one of them of three other assaults, then the system was redeemed when two Sikhs were convicted by a jury drawn from the 80 per cent white City of Southampton.

Digwa was convicted both of murder, and of possession of a bladed article in a public place. The jury rejected his claim to have been acting in self-defence, and it equally rejected his claim that the bladed article had been a kirpan, not least because he had at the time been wearing a real one. He had already been barred from the gurdwara, Kaur will be sentenced on 17 July for having hidden the murder weapon, Digwa's brother Gurpreet participated in the original lie, and the behaviour of the family at yesterday's sentencing hearing caused 14 Police Officers to be summoned to the court. All communities have families like that.

People grieve in their own ways, of course, but when you already have a conviction for murder, then is it really worth a civil action for wrongful death at all, never mind if that involved getting mixed up with Elon Musk? The party that Musk has the insolence to support in Britain now wants to ban the kirpan, although, while I am open to correction, I have not been able to find a single case of its use as an offensive weapon since its exemption under the Criminal Justice Act 1988, 38 years ago and counting. As soon as it were used as such, then that exemption would cease to apply in that specific case. But unless you can show me otherwise, then that has never happened on these shores. Musk, Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain might also consider that there were no stronger opponents of halal meat than the Sikhs, and that the original kirpan was a real sword used defensively against Mughal persecution. In wearing the kirpan today, a Sikh still declares such readiness, willingness and ability in principle, all else having failed. Think on.

And think on that Digwa claimed to be a member of the Akali-Nihang warrior order within Sikhism. With its obvious attraction to Digwa's type of weapons-obsessed young man such as might accrue to Active Clubs and the like, many members of that order reject the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee's 2001 ban on shaheedi degh, their traditional drink to aid meditation and, interestingly, to make them fiercer in battle. Interestingly, because its base is cannabis.

In The Pink?

That Reform UK is the most popular party among gay and bisexual men will come as no surprise to those of us with ecclesiastical backgrounds. If anything, the wonder is that it is not Restore Britain, and even then only for want of anything even further to the right.

But what of the rest of the Reform electorate? Since the dawn of time, those people have at least pretended not to notice that preponderance in everything from the Conservative Party and the right-wing media, via the public schools and the grander groves of academia, to the Royal Households and the clergy. But that is no longer the etiquette. They never asked what it was about their old party that made it so attractive to men of that inclination. Will they ask about their new one?

Similarly, Reform and Labour are tied for the top spot among public sector trade unionists, who are a pretty middle-class lot and hitherto the core supporters of Tony Blair and Keir Starmer. Labour needs to reckon with their obvious disappointment, but not half as much as Reform needs to ask itself about the attractiveness of becoming their voice and vehicle. Even the broadest church needs walls.

The Tangled Web

Paul Knaggs writes:

The second tranche of documents relating to Lord Mandelson’s appointment as UK ambassador to the United States arrives in Parliament this week. It is, according to the government, among the largest publications ever laid before the House. Whether it answers the questions that matter is an entirely different proposition.

THE DRIP AND THE DELAY

Sir Walter Scott wrote it in 1808, and British politics has been illustrating it ever since: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.” The Mandelson affair has become the definitive case study of that tangled web, strand by strand, delay by delay, redaction by redaction.

Monday, we are told, brings the second tranche. A government spokesperson has called it one of “the largest publications ever laid in Parliament.” That is a remarkable boast for a government that initially opposed releasing any of it at all. Number 10 has refused to confirm the publication date, performing the by-now-familiar ritual of managing revelation by controlling the drip. The timing, as ever, is everything: Parliament returns from recess on Monday, and the documents land precisely when scrutiny resumes, not a day before.

The question that precedes every page of every release remains the same one this publication has been asking for months: what is not there? What has been redacted, withheld by the Metropolitan Police as part of its ongoing investigation, or quietly excluded under the elastic rubric of national security? The gap between what was said and what was done is where this story lives. The documents do not fill that gap. They illuminate its edges.

The government initially opposed this disclosure. It required a parliamentary ambush to extract it. That fact should preface every sentence of every analysis of what is published.

WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW

The first tranche, published in March, was instructive enough. It confirmed that Prime Minister Keir Starmer had been advised, nine days before Mandelson’s appointment was confirmed in December 2024, that the peer’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein posed a “general reputational risk.” The advice note informed the Prime Minister that Epstein and Mandelson’s relationship had continued across 2009 to 2011, that Mandelson reportedly stayed in Epstein’s house while the predator was in prison in June 2009, and that Mandelson was known as an advocate for closer UK-China relations.

Jonathan Powell, Starmer’s national security adviser, described the appointment process in a summary of a fact-finding call as “weirdly rushed.” Powell noted he had raised his concerns with Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s then-chief of staff, and been told the issues had been addressed. They had not been addressed. They had been managed. There is a difference, and it is not a small one.

We now know that UK Security Vetting concluded Mandelson presented a “high” overall concern and recommended his clearance be denied. The concerns included his business ties to Chinese Finance Minister Lan Fo’an, his connection to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, his relationship with former Israeli military intelligence general Tamir Hayman, a one-million-pound loan to invest in an Israeli start-up, and a potentially compromising relationship with a British individual. The vetting agency said no. The Foreign Office, then under David Lammy as Foreign Secretary, said yes. Sir Olly Robbins, the Foreign Office permanent secretary, overruled the vetting recommendation and granted Mandelson his clearance. Robbins has since been sacked. Lammy remains in Cabinet.

The vetting agency said no. The Foreign Office said yes. That sentence alone should end several careers. / Starmer told the country he knew nothing about the failed vetting until the Guardian’s confirmation broke in April 2026. Opposition parties disputed this promptly and with cause, pointing to exchanges showing Downing Street had been contacted about the failed vetting seven months earlier. David Maddox, political editor of The Independent, broke the story of Mandelson’s failure to clear MI6 vetting on 12 September 2025. It was raised in the House of Commons four days later. The Prime Minister and his office were not uninformed. They were, at best, incurious.

THE MINISTERS WHO WENT QUIET 

The second tranche brings something the first did not contain: Mandelson’s direct communications with ministers and government officials during his time as ambassador. It also brings, according to reporting by The Telegraph, a revelation of a different order. Cabinet ministers attempted to conceal their messages with Lord Mandelson from Parliament. 

Government officials dealing with the Mandelson files were forced to ask ministers to hand over their messages more than once, after initial reluctance. Under the terms of the humble address motion, ministers, officials and special advisers were required to submit all WhatsApp and email messages exchanged with Mandelson. Yet civil servants received “nil return” responses from some ministers known to have a close relationship with the peer. Some argued that their conversations with the US ambassador were not strictly ministerial, and therefore fell outside scope. Civil servants, The Telegraph reports, were dismayed. 

This is the texture of a cover-up. It does not require a single smoking gun. It requires a pattern: initial opposition to publication, belated compliance, narrow interpretations of scope, ministerial reluctance, and civil servants pressing again and again for material that should have arrived without asking. Every delay, every reinterpretation, every nil return is another thread in Scott’s web. 

The Intelligence and Security Committee accused the government of applying redactions far too broadly, of withholding documents it had no authority to withhold. The watchdog was not speculating. It had seen the material.

THE NETWORK NOBODY NAMES 

Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, has resigned from the government. There is a thread running underneath all of this that the document releases will not resolve, because documents do not answer structural questions. They record transactions. They do not explain the obligations that preceded them. To understand those obligations, you need to look at who funds whom, who is married to whom, who was placed where, and who held the whip when the vote came.

Labour Together, the think tank built by Morgan McSweeney and then run by Josh Simons, now a minister in Starmer’s government, funded 111 Labour MPs ahead of and during the 2024 general election. Of the 123 total parliamentary candidates the organisation backed, 111 won their seats. That is not a network. That is a parliamentary army. Labour Together donated more than two and a half million pounds to Labour ahead of the 2024 general election. Fourteen serving ministers received financial support from the organisation, including Rachel Reeves, David Lammy, Shabana Mahmood, Yvette Cooper and John Healey.

Cabinet Office minister Darren Jones, who is now responsible for propriety and ethics in government, received 57,400 pounds from Labour Together ahead of that election. Jones is now in charge of publishing the Mandelson documents under discussion.

Among those backed and endorsed by Labour Together for the 2024 election was Imogen Walker, elected MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley with a majority of 9,472. Within months of taking her seat she was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. By September 2025 she had been elevated to assistant government whip. Imogen Walker is married to Morgan McSweeney. Wikipedia records that McSweeney used his position to aid his wife’s selection as a Labour candidate. That is a fact, not an allegation. It sits in the public domain, and it sits uncomfortably there.

But Walker’s support did not come only from Labour Together. As Labour Heartlands reported in February 2026, in June 2024, just weeks before polling day, Peter Mandelson personally attended a fundraiser for Walker and her fellow Scottish candidate Gregor Poynton. Mandelson, the man whose relationship with Jeffrey Epstein would bring down this government’s first year, was in the room, microphone in hand, raising money for the woman who would become the wife of his most loyal protege. The photograph exists. The event happened. The connection is not alleged. It is documented.

Starmer put McSweeney in control of selecting Labour’s candidates. He included his wife, Imogen Walker, in that selection This is the network made visible. McSweeney learned politics from Mandelson. McSweeney built the machine that made his wife an MP. Mandelson fundraised for her. Walker became a whip. And on 28 April 2026, Parliament voted on whether to refer the Prime Minister to the Privileges Committee over his conduct in the Mandelson affair. McSweeney spent the day testifying before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, admitting his “serious mistake” in recommending Mandelson’s appointment. While he did so, his wife worked the lobbies. The motion was defeated 335 to 223. Fifteen Labour MPs defied the whip. The Speaker noted that some members voting against investigation were heckled with cries of “shame” as they walked through. It was raised from the floor of the House that McSweeney’s wife, now a whip, was among those pressing Labour MPs to vote against any scrutiny of the man her husband had championed and Mandelson had fundraised for.

Mandelson fundraised for the woman who became the whip who enforced the vote to protect the Prime Minister who appointed Mandelson on her husband’s advice. At some point, coincidence stops being a useful word.

THE FAMILY THAT GOVERNS 

It would be easy to dismiss the following as mere coincidence, and some will. Dismiss it if you like. But account for it first.

Rachel Reeves is Chancellor of the Exchequer. She is married to Nicholas Joicey, a senior civil servant who is Second Permanent Secretary and Group Chief Operating Officer at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and who was formerly a speechwriter to Gordon Brown when Brown was Chancellor. The Chancellor’s husband sits at the heart of the civil service machinery the Chancellor oversees. Her sister, Ellie Reeves, is Solicitor General, appointed in September 2025. Ellie Reeves is married to John Cryer, now Baron Cryer, who served as Labour MP for Hornchurch and then Leyton and Wanstead, and who was Chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party from 2015 to 2024 before being elevated to the House of Lords following the 2024 election.

But of course it’s just like one big family.

The Commons and the Lords, taken together, contain an extraordinary concentration of relationships that the mainstream record rarely joins up. Sisters who are government ministers. Husbands who are peers. Spouses who are senior civil servants. Wives who are whips. It is perfectly normal, of course, for spouses to keep their maiden names. It is perfectly understandable that people who work in politics meet partners who also work in politics. None of this is, individually, improper. But the aggregate picture is one that any serious democracy should be willing to examine honestly, rather than treat as impolite to mention.

These are not accusations. They are facts, properly sourced and verifiable. The question they raise is not whether any individual acted wrongly, but whether a political culture that concentrates power so tightly within a network of family, financial, and ideological loyalty is capable of subjecting itself to meaningful scrutiny. The answer, on 28 April 2026, was 335 to 223. The whip held.

I point these things out as I point out the corruption and decay in a house that is our seat of democracy.

WHAT THE SECOND TRANCHE CANNOT TELL US 

No document release, however large, will answer the question that sits beneath every other question: why was Peter Mandelson appointed to the most important diplomatic post in British foreign policy in December 2024, against the advice of the vetting agency, against the concerns of the national security adviser, against the reservations of the Foreign Office’s most senior civil servant, and with full knowledge of a relationship with a convicted paedophile financier that stretched from before Epstein’s first conviction to years after it?

The official answer is that Mandelson lied about the depth of his relationship with Epstein. Starmer has repeated this position with such consistency that it has acquired the rhythm of a prepared statement, which is precisely what it is. The documents show, however, that the risks were known. “General reputational risk” is not a phrase used by civil servants who are uninformed. It is a phrase used by civil servants who are recording, for the protection of everyone involved, that they have told the minister what they know and the minister has chosen to proceed.

The appointment was rushed. The vetting was overruled. The warnings were filed and ignored. The minister who overruled the vetting remains in Cabinet. The chief of staff who pushed the appointment resigned but was back in the building. The think tank that funded those who would later vote to limit scrutiny is under criminal referral. And the wife of the man at the centre of it all was working the lobbies while her husband answered questions about his role in the affair.

Scott’s line ends with a couplet most people forget. After “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive” comes this: “How tangled becomes the web when we attempt to make the world believe.”

The world is watching. The questions will not go away. The silence around Morgan McSweeney and Labour Together will not end because the government has published what it was compelled to publish. Transparency imposed is not transparency offered. The distinction matters, and so does the price of forgetting it.

A government that required a parliamentary ambush to begin telling the truth about itself has not suddenly become honest. It has become unable to sustain the lie at its previous cost.

Sentence, Structure

If Nicola Sturgeon is “serving a sentence for a crime [she] did not commit”, then is she serving it on the same wing as a rapist? She put other Scotswomen in that position. She gave a “no comment” interview to the Police before, days later, sending them a written statement that was copied to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, headed by the Lord Advocate in the Cabinet, which without further examination by anyone promptly decided not to prosecute her. Will this now be standard practice? Someone must have the file that Police Scotland sent to the Crown Office. This is what the Internet is for.

Sturgeon had better hope to have concluded her sentence well before the next Conservative Government, since, in yet another sign of the restoration of Blairism, that party has adopted the old New Labour groupies’ idea of replacing cash benefits with payment cards that could be used to purchase only approved items. Chris Philp wants this to be only for people serving non-custodial sentences or released on licence. But of course that would be only in the first instance. Even for them, would it extend to the state pension? If not, why not? Likewise, Universal Credit payments to those in work, who are two in five claimants. The administrative costs of this whole thing would make it more expensive than the present arrangements, but that is never the point, just as no one who decided anything would care that this gimmick would drive people into the black economy so that they could buy a pint at a birthday party. So much for rehabilitation.

Rather fewer workers might be on benefits if work paid enough to live on. Agree or disagree with equalising the minimum wage regardless of age, but Pat McFadden told Trevor Phillips today that it was not the Government’s job to do. Then whose is it? And why was it in the Labour manifesto? “Labour will also remove the discriminatory age bands so all adults are entitled to the same minimum wage,” it said on page 45. McFadden also claimed that, “Today, around seven in 10 young people claiming health and disability benefits are still claiming a decade later.” That was a lie. Those people will have been on Disability Living Allowance for under-16s, the application form for which is 40 pages long and requires the support of numerous specialist reports. Nearly half of severely disabled children live in poverty, and nearly a third of DLA recipients in childhood have their claims for Personal Independence Payment rejected when they dare to live another day.

But neoliberalism is reaching its outer limits. There is far more tax fraud then benefit fraud, yet tax frauds get to cut deals with HMRC and pay back as much or as little as they pleased. When he is not endorsing Restore Britain, then Elon Musk is privatising space. And the latest antics of Bonnie Blue, whose endorsement Reform UK has welcomed, are enough to test anyone’s commitment to the “free” market in general and to the non-personhood of the unborn child in particular.

The Radical Centre?

What chance would Andy Burnham stand of winning a General Election if he had needed the Greens to stand aside for him at a by-election, or at least to have behaved as if they had done so? Likewise, if Caroline Lucas thinks that only Burnham can beat Reform UK, then why is she still in the Green Party? That is as much a question for it as it is for her. But Burnham, like Keir Starmer or Wes Streeting, has no intention of removing from the Labour Party the only British member of Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace.

To end the war in which Tony Blair did not want Britain to pretend to be less than fully involved, not that that pretence has ever convinced the Iranians or their allies for one moment, the proposed deal includes a $300 billion “international investment fund” for Iran. Yes, the Iranian regime is appalling. The Ukrainian regime has just reburied with full state honours the Nazi collaborators Andriy Melnyk and Sofia Fedak-Melnyk, and the former President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose constitutional term of office has long since expired, has purportedly conferred the title “Heroes of the UPA” on the Independent Special Operations Centre (North) of the Special Operations Forces. Israel and Poland are in understandable uproar. But just as big, bad Russia can take only a small of corner of Ukraine, so big, bad America has so completely failed to take Iran that it is going to have pay what were effectively reparations and richly deserved as such. Still, there will be contracts in it. Trump and Blair themselves will not be out of pocket.

Blair may also be having some luck in domestic policy, as the Government has announced, “300,000 new training and work experience placements across construction, social care and hospitality to tackle youth unemployment.” Hospitality? In the present climate? But anyway, with no promise of a job at the end of it, this is a Blairite revival of Margaret Thatcher’s old Youth Training Scheme, giving a year of two of free labour to private companies that clearly had the work to do, but which did not feel like recruiting at the rate for the job, not even now that that rate would be only the reduced minimum wage for those deemed too young to deserve the full one for the same work. The 2024 Labour manifesto promised to end that iniquity, but instead the State is to pay that rate so that politicians’ corporate donors and rather more generous future employers did not have to.

It is not worth considering the possibility that the Tony Blair Institute would have no lucrative role in this. But the former Prime Minister with seven living successors does not speak for the centre, radical or otherwise. That is we who seek 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 sex (“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 of the three parts of Great Britain, the consideration of any all-Ireland settlement that failed to preserve the NHS 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.

Right To Warn

John Pring writes:

New government research has proved disabled activists were right to warn that receiving employment advice on top of NHS talking therapy would push many people with mental distress further away from the jobs market.

Mental health system survivors, anti-cuts activists and allies have been campaigning for more than a decade to warn that linking NHS treatment with employment advice could have serious consequences for many people with mental distress.

And now a study by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows they were right.

The government-funded study examined the impact of providing voluntary sessions with employment advisers alongside NHS talking therapy, checking the progress of those taking part three years after they first received support.

The study shows that, for those already in work or off sick from a job, adding employment advice to talking therapy reduced average earnings and the probability of being in work, compared with those only receiving talking therapy.

It also showed that, for most groups who were not working, providing voluntary employment advice sessions on top of talking therapy led – on average – to increased earnings and a higher probability of being in work.

But crucially, for those who were out of work and had the highest barriers to employment – those described as “long term sick or disabled” – the addition of employment advice to regular talking therapy made it less likely that a disabled person would be in work and reduced average monthly earnings, compared with those only receiving NHS talking therapy.

For this final group of disabled people, three years on from starting the employment advice sessions, the probability of being in paid employment fell by four percentage points (3.6), while average earnings fell by nearly £150 a month (£148.30), compared with those who were just receiving talking therapy.

Dr Jay Watts, a disabled activist and consultant clinical psychologist, said: “For a decade, disabled people’s organisations and survivor-led groups warned about exactly this: that bolting employment support onto therapy doesn’t add help — it changes what therapy is.

“The therapy room is meant to be the one place a person isn’t appraised for their economic usefulness, and the moment the work-and-welfare system is let into that space, the therapy itself is contaminated.

“We were marching on jobcentres over this while the professional bodies equivocated, and now it is borne out in the government’s own data.”

She said the data showed the impact on people who were long-term sick and disabled was “the exact opposite of what was promised”.

Watts called on the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to finally listen to disabled-led groups about the scheme’s impact on mental health.

She said: “Being handed ‘support’ and then watching one’s life deteriorate does not land neutrally; in the clinic it deepens shame and hardens the conviction of personal failure, and under a welfare system that equates worklessness with worthlessness, that is precisely the pressure that corrodes mental health rather than restoring it.

“None of this means employment support helps no-one – for people who were out of work [and not long-term sick or disabled] and actively seeking it, it did raise earnings and employment, and that matters.

“But an intervention that rewards those who choose it and harms those who are unwell is the very last thing you make compulsory.

“These were people who volunteered, who wanted the help and were harmed anyway.

“If something people actively chose can still worsen outcomes for sick and disabled people, then forcing similar interventions on almost everyone out of work, as [government adviser] Alan Milburn appears set to recommend, is ideology in the teeth of the evidence.”

Paula Peters, a member of the national steering group of Disabled People Against Cuts, said that adding employment advisers to a mental health service “only pushes people in mental distress further from the workplace”.

She said: “Campaigners have said for years that people in serious mental distress and trauma need investment in mental health services, crisis management and time to deal with their trauma without the additional trauma of dealing with an employment adviser giving advice on top of talking therapies.”

She said that successive governments “keep getting it wrong” by under-investing in mental health services while “pressuring people in mental distress to think about employment outcomes when they are simply not ready to do so”.

Peters said this results in mental health services being seen as “an unsafe space” and “a place of coercion and pressure to improve work outcomes”, leading people to disengage with services.

The ONS study was published as former New Labour minister Alan Milburn is set to publish his interim report this morning (Thursday) into the rising numbers of young disabled people not in education, employment or training (NEET).

He told MPs last week that he believes work can be a cure for the “tsunami of distress” affecting young people, and he appears to be set to recommend, in his final report later this year, that nearly all young disabled people – including those with significant levels of mental distress – will have to engage with DWP employment support programmes.

The ONS study was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), which itself is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

The employment support tested in the study is funded by the Joint Work and Health Directorate, which is jointly sponsored by DHSC and DWP.

But neither ONS nor DWP nor NIHR would comment on the findings that showed the negative impact of talking therapy and employment support on long-term sick or disabled people.

ONS said the findings relating to those in employment suggest that “people in employment are moving to lower-paying jobs or reducing their working hours, among other lifestyle changes to manage their mental health”.

But ONS declined to comment on the figures showing the negative impact on those who were out of work and long-term sick or disabled, or on whether these findings suggest that adding employment advice to talking therapy can push disabled people with higher barriers to work further away from employment.

ONS suggested that NIHR, which funded the study, was better placed to comment.

NIHR told DNS that it was not appropriate for it to comment and questions should be directed to ONS and DWP.

DWP declined to say if it was surprised by the findings; how it explained them; whether adding employment advice to talking therapy can be damaging for many disabled people and push them further away from work; and whether ministers would take the findings into account alongside the reports from the Milburn review.

Instead, it said in a statement: “Employment advisors in NHS Talking Therapies is an innovative programme that ensures patients get the support they need to overcome barriers to work while receiving clinical treatment.”

It also said the following, which is not an accurate representation of the ONS findings: “We are pleased the ONS found it has had a significant impact on employment outcomes for those out of work – especially for those aged 18-35 – and we will apply these findings as we continue the roll out of WorkWell, which is due to help up to 250,000 people across the country.”