Under The Counter

Have we the right to speculate on the death of Ann Widdecombe? Not if it might prejudice a criminal trial, but even if we did, then we have the right to do all sorts of things, and therefore the responsibility in how we exercised our rights. Now that National Counter Terror Policing has taken over this investigation, then it has never been more important to hold our tongues. If by choice, then by choice.

Elsewhere in counterterrorism, proscription is a lot cheaper than rebuilding the real means of countering or deterring the Armed Forces of other sovereign states. 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, not only Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia and the GRU Volunteer Corps, but ICE and the IDF as well. Why not?

HAYI is a Telegram channel that in Britain may or may not have had a role in setting fire to four empty and decommissioned ambulances in Golders Green, in failing to throw an ignited container at the offices of Volant Media in Park Royal, in throwing two bottles of petrol at Finchley Reform Synagogue while it was empty in the middle of the night, in discarding of two jars of harmless powder in Kensington Gardens and thus close to the Israeli Embassy among numerous other venues, in failing fully to ignite a bag containing two bottles of fluid at the former offices of Jewish Futures in Hendon, and in throwing a bottle containing an accelerant through the window of Kenton United Synagogue at midnight. Its attempt to claim responsibility for the nonfatal Golders Green stabbings in April was immediately dismissed as opportunistic. Had it also been responsible for the same attacker’s attack, on the same day, against the unmentionable Ishmail Hussein?

The ban on the GRU VC is presumably because, after we had laughed out the suggestion that the Wagner Group would have had nothing better to do than to pay two-bit South London drug dealers to set fire to an East London warehouse, the blame for that and similar has had to be shifted to the GRU. But no one would have had any such interest if our Government had not been sending the Starlink satellite equipment that that warehouse contained to 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, and all the rest of them, including the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps. When are we going to ban those agencies of a foreign state? 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.

By all means ban HAYI, the GRU VC, and indeed the IRGC, none of which has ever done anything like that in this country. At the same time, ban ICE, which detained Becky Burke for 19 days before deporting her in leg and waist shackles, which detained the valid visa-holding Karen Newton for six weeks before sending her to the plane home in handcuffs and leg shackles, and in whose custody Ben James Owens died while awaiting deportation proceedings. And ban the IDF, which killed James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman while those British veterans were unarmed and delivering humanitarian aid, bombing them three times to make sure that they were dead, using British-made Elbit Hermes 450 drones, and using intelligence from the over 600 nightly reconnaissance missions flown for the Israelis, yet free of charge to them, from RAF Akrotiri. The New York Times casually referred to the presence of the SAS in Gaza.

Believe that the Hillsborough Law will apply in practice to the spooks when you see it, and make yourself see it by charging Keir Starmer at least as an accessory to the murders of Kirby, Henderson and Chapman, as well as with incitement to genocide and with anything else that could be thrown at him for his assertion of Israel’s right to cut off the water and power supplies to Gaza’s entire population.

And Vickrum Digwa’s murder weapon was just one of his and his family’s extensive collection of non-ceremonial bladed articles. Families like that are not peculiar to any one community. That said, the family does belong to the Akali-Nihang warrior order within Sikhism, though not at all essential to it. 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, the hashish taken by the members of the Order of Assassins when they set out to murder the enemies of the Alamut state.

Proscribe that order under the good old Terrorism Act 2000, while introducing a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of two years for a first offence, three years for a second offence, four years for a third offence, and so on. I no longer believe in prison sentences that included the possibility of release in less than 12 months; in that case, then your crime was not bad enough to warrant imprisonment, which the possession of drugs is. We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one’s premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. And we need Peter Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought to be taught in schools, as pro-drugs propaganda is routinely.