Public? Duty? Costs? Allowance?

It delivers a pitifully low pension by international standards, and even for that people will soon have to wait until beyond average male life expectancy, but the triple lock puts money in the pockets of the people who spent it, thereby injecting it into the consumer economy, and thus employing the young. Yet Tony Blair wants to scrap it, calling it “unaffordable”, unlike a former Prime Minister’s Public Duty Costs Allowance, which Blair has quite properly always claimed in full, and which currently stands at £115,000 per annum. Blair also receives ministerial and parliamentary pensions higher than £234.30 per week.

As to what else Blair thought would be affordable instead of the triple lock, he is the only British member of Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace, making Labour the only British party with a member on that Board. Keir Starmer or any candidate to succeed him should pledge to expel Blair from the Labour Party in what would once have been called a Clause IV moment, and Blair should be removed from the Privy Council in view of Trump’s insults to His Majesty’s Armed Forces and in view of Trump’s threats to Canada and the Falkland Islands. All speakers at the Unite the Kingdom jamboree on 16 May should be asked their position on the Falkland Islands, and if any foreign speaker were to do as happened repeatedly at the last one and call on Trump to invade Britain with a view to regime change, then the Home Secretary should resign even before we mentioned her suspected electoral fraud.

That event is to be on the same day as the next London Gaza march, at none of which has anyone ever called on, say, Iran to invade Britain with a view to regime change, yet there is no proposal to ban Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s hate march properly so called. Both its proximity to mosques and the Gaza march’s proximity to synagogues would properly be irrelevant, but since the latter has been made an issue, then what about the former? What do certain interests want? A Parades Commission? Has that been a roaring success in Northern Ireland?

And what of the former East London Central Synagogue? Closed since its ceiling collapsed in 2020, it was recently bought at public auction to be turned into a mosque, but that goes as unmentioned as the attempted murder of Ishmail Hussein, the fact that Essa Suleiman had been charged with three attempted murders rather than two, the fact that he had not been charged with any offence of terrorism, and the fact that all three of his alleged victims were still alive. Funny how these arsonists never attack anything with anyone in it. Yet we are expected to believe that such was the modus operandi of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which was therefore to be theatrically proscribed, challenging anyone to vote against that proscription and unleash the Epstein Class media. No one should give Keir Starmer the satisfaction. Nevertheless, 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 IRGC should be an all-or-nothing measure that also banned ICE and the IDF. Why not?

And as Volodymyr Zelensky threatens drone attacks on Red Square during the Victory Day parade, considering which Victory’s Day it was, then why not proscribe Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Brigade, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, the Freedom of Russia Legion, and the Russian Volunteer Corps? Pavlo Lapshyn is still in His Majesty’s Prison, and will be for decades yet, because of his 2013 murder of 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham. Lapshyn went on to put bombs outside three mosques in this country. He belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Battalion, being led by its “political ideologist”, Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell. That gives some perspective to the acquittal of two of the Filton Six, the conviction of three more only of criminal damage, and the additional conviction of the sixth of grievous bodily harm but not of GBH with intent. Such is the basis for the proscription of Palestine Action as if it were Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham. Terrorism is not what it used to be.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, it has always been “the most dangerous time since the end of the Cold War”. Our Armed Forces are so tiny, so badly paid, and so badly equipped, that even when you remembered that we counted things like military pensions, the Coast Guard, the Met Office, and the BBC World Service, then someone would still be being paid on an enormous scale. Such is the British way. The arms companies are very good at kicking back to politicians and at employing retired top brass. For only the twenty-second highest population in the world, the sixth highest military spending is still not enough for some people, because they are the hired megaphones of corporate greed. In any case, a huge proportion of that figure is Trident, which we have instead of tanks, frigates, fighter jets, and indeed personnel for our own country, never mind for anywhere else.

De facto American withdrawal means that NATO has effectively ceased to exist. Instead, we need bilateral non-aggression treaties with all other European countries including Russia and indeed Ukraine, with the United States, and with Canada. We need non-aggression treaties with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and with the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, and preferably also with each of their members bilaterally. There should be no foreign military bases on British soil. Military force should be used only ever in self-defence, and only ever with the approval of the House of Commons, the composition of which therefore needs to be changed dramatically.

Whatever happened to Josh Simons, the Minister for Digital ID who had tried to frame critical journalists, including Starmer’s Independent opponent at the last General Election, for crimes against the Official Secrets Act and the National Security Act? Whatever happened to Simons’s close associate Joani Reid, the Lewisham councillor whom Peter Mandelson imposed as the Labour MP for East Kilbride and Strathaven, and who turned out to have been carrying on drunkenly with 50 per cent of the captains of Britain’s nuclear armed submarines while married to a man who had been arrested as an alleged Chinese spy three weeks after his firm had paid her £2,400? Well, we know the answer to that second question. In the face of very stiff competition, Reid has been recognised as the laziest member of the House of Commons, leaving her seat vacant in every sense except that she was still being paid. Even Sinn Féin abstentionists get more done.

Having disposed of such waste, BAE Systems should be renationalised as the monopoly supplier to our own Armed Forces, with a ban on all sale of arms abroad, and with a comprehensive programme of diversification in the spirit of the Lucas Plan. And since armed neutrality never included the nuclear weapons that were by definition purely offensive, then instead of Trident, an extra £70 billion should be given to each of the Royal Navy, the British Army, and the Royal Air Force. That would not entail depriving anything else of funding. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with the fiscal and monetary means to control inflation, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control in both cases.