Full Force

If Andy Burnham refuses to write for The Sun, then who should do so instead, and why? We trust that it would be someone who argued for Khloe Simmonds to be held in a men’s prison. But the Government’s definition of the full force of the law does not extend to arresting people who had assaulted and injured the Police, or who were wearing political or paramilitary uniforms in breach of the Public Order Act 1936, which imposed that ban specifically against the Blackshirts. There may be something similar about the black and orange outfits favoured by the Middlesbrough mourners, which may in turn account for the tightening of the leash on Meghan and Harry.

The Blackshirts and the Police had marched as a single formation on Saturday in Dover, which was not the most logical place to wish to Stop The Boats. But while Kent has gone Reform UK, Hampshire remains Conservative, the unitary City Council in Portsmouth is controlled by the Liberal Democrats, and Hampshire Constabulary mishandled the murder of Henry Nowak, so relations are clearly more strained.

“Tommy Robinson” is a nom de guerre of a man whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, but “Danny Tommo” is just what a boy named Daniel Thomas is called by his mates in school. It was fitting that a 37-year-old who still chose to be so addressed should become well-known on the day that Netflix announced a revival of The Inbetweeners. One of the Inbetweeners should have gone all Tommo if, as would seem quite likely, another, or at least another character, had gone all Khloe. With his teenage progeny as the Khloe, my money would be on Jay as the Tommo, in view of the Reform affiliation of Bonnie Blue, which brings us to that of which Ahmet Koçak writes:

Ukraine is considering dismantling its ban on pornography as lawmakers seek to bring a large online adult industry into the tax system and redirect millions of dollars toward the country’s wartime needs. Yaroslav Zhelezniak, an opposition lawmaker who chairs Parliament’s finance committee, estimates legalization could generate as much as $25 million a year, according to The Wall Street Journal. He says that would be enough to finance about 30,000 drones. The sum is modest against Ukraine’s stated annual defense requirement of $120 billion. However, supporters argue the industry is already generating taxable income while operating under laws that expose creators to criminal prosecution. A bill co-authored by Zhelezniak passed its first parliamentary vote in July and is awaiting a second reading. 

Taxing an Illegal Industry

 

Ukraine prohibits the production, distribution, and possession of pornography, with penalties of up to seven years in prison. At the same time, tax authorities are pursuing Ukrainians earning money from adult content, creating a legal contradiction for creators who disclose their income. “These women either don’t pay taxes and face criminal charges for that, or they pay taxes and get charged with violating pornography laws,” Zhelezniak said. “It’s a tragicomic situation.” The issue intensified after tax authorities received data from Fenix International, OnlyFans’ U.K.-based parent company. The figures showed that 7,900 Ukrainians earned more than $131 million on the platform in 2023. Authorities subsequently began contacting creators over unpaid taxes. Some models were earning more than $20,000 a month. But filing tax declarations could also provide evidence that could be used in pornography investigations.

Creators Move Abroad

Svitlana Dvornikova, an OnlyFans creator with one million subscribers, regularly travels from her home near Ukraine’s front line to rented villas in France or Spain to produce content. Working inside Ukraine could expose her to prosecution. Police searched her home last spring and seized electronic devices and the equivalent of $200,000 in cash, which she said she had set aside for taxes. “They had a list of webcam models, and knew all their addresses,” Dvornikova said. She said officers offered to take half the money as a bribe and allow her to keep the rest. She refused. Hundreds of Ukrainian OnlyFans models have moved abroad, while others have found ways to continue operating inside the country. Tax lawyer Lesia Mykhalenko, who has represented more than 100 OnlyFans models, said the existing law diverts legal resources during wartime. “This is a victimless crime,” she said. “It unnecessarily burdens the legal system at a time when we should be focused on defending the country.”

Corruption and Workarounds

Supporters of legalization also argue that prohibition has created opportunities for corruption. In May, the office of Ukraine’s general prosecutor said police departments in three regions had each been receiving more than $20,000 a month in bribes linked to the industry. Some businesses have adapted by operating behind other corporate structures. Former waitress Iryna Mosiychuk runs Beezone, officially presented as a consulting company. Its office outside Lviv contains webcam studios used by several dozen models serving mostly U.S.-based clients. Mosiychuk told WSJ her models earn between $2,000 and $7,000 a month. She pays about $5,000 in taxes each month and has told lawmakers that the amount could increase twentyfold if the business were allowed to expand.

Defense Revenue Drives the Debate

Dvornikova has also sought to frame legalization as a defense-financing issue. In June 2025, she submitted a petition to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s website after the police raid. Calling herself a “conscientious taxpayer,” she said she had paid 40 million hryvnias, about $900,000, in taxes, money she said could finance 100 pickup trucks or 2,000 drones. The petition secured the 25,000 signatures required for a presidential response within a week. Zelensky said Parliament would consider legislation to legalize pornography. Dvornikova’s case has not reached court, and she said it has been put on hold while lawmakers debate the bill.

Pornography had been legally prohibited and practically unknown in the Soviet Union. But post-Soviet Russia was flooded with it, to placate the young male population during the larceny of their country by means of the economic “shock therapy” that created today’s oligarchs. “Sex work” of various kinds has always been encouraged when the young men have needed to be stupefied, and it still is. The corporate capitalist pornogrification of our own society is no accident. In welcoming the endorsement of Bonnie Blue, Reform has picked its side, the same side as the Ukraine of 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. The Ukraine that in Ternopil has named a football stadium after Roman Shukhevych, on a street named after Stepan Bandera. The Ukraine that in its third-largest city of Odessa is poised to ban from the public sphere the Russian first language of two thirds of that city’s population. The Ukraine of Andriy Biletsky, to whom “the mission of Ukraine is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival against the Semite-led Untermenschen”. And the Ukraine of Pavlo Lapshyn, who is still in His Majesty’s Prison, and who will be there 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 Brigade, 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.

The AfD is in nothing like that league, even if, in Alfred Freyberg, it was the old Free State of Anhalt that delivered the first Nazi leader of a state, as early as 1932. The dominant right-wing vote in Saxony-Anhalt has not shifted at all, except in that it has shifted from the CDU to the AfD. The full-blown Nazis of Die Heimat finished below the satirical Die PARTEI, recalling the fewer votes at Gorton and Denton for Advance UK than for the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. The disappearance of the FDP is a story, and the kingmaking emergence of the BSW is a big story. Both have messages for a Britain in which third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in primary schools were to identify potential future NEETs so that third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in secondary schools might deliver to them a curriculum designed by and for local vape shops, phone shops, nail bars, tattoo parlours, carwashes, mini-marts, Turkish barbers, American candy shops, adult gaming centres, and lap dancing clubs, there being nothing else. In the absence of trade unions, no one would be able to come up through them to enter the political process, which would therefore be reserved for those who had followed Andy Burnham to Cambridge or Lucy Powell to Oxford and to King’s College London. Reform has nothing to say to what Rachel Sylvester calls “the mismatch between Reform’s policies and the voters it is trying to attract”:

Robert Jenrick, the party’s Treasury spokesman, has announced plans to save £50bn a year by cutting welfare, including disability benefits. He wants to replace personal independence payments (Pip), given to those with a long-term physical or mental health condition, with a “health security allowance” that would pay almost nothing to about two thirds of current claimants. But the data suggests this will disproportionately affect Reform voters and those the party needs to win over.

A study by Imperial College London’s School of Public Health found that the areas where Farage’s party did well at the last election have a higher prevalence of people living with chronic diseases than other parts of the country. The Reform constituencies had the highest average prevalence of 15 out of the 20 health conditions that were analysed including asthma, coronary heart disease, obesity, diabetes and depression. These voters are far more likely to rely on disability benefits including Pip.

To take an example from the West Midlands, in the parliamentary constituency of Walsall and Bloxwich, high up on Farage’s target list, there are 11,449 Pip claimants and a Labour majority of 4,914. In Birmingham Northfield, there are 10,600 people on the disability benefit and a Labour majority of 5,389. Reform cannot win – and Farage will not get to No 10 – if these voters decide it is against their own economic interest to support Reform. Analysis by the journalist Fraser Nelson has shown that almost all Reform’s target seats are heavily dependent on welfare. In Jenrick’s own constituency of Newark, there are 6,011 Pip claimants. His majority when he stood there as a Conservative at the last general election was 3,571.

This is not the only policy tension for a party that has always been torn between economic free marketeers and cultural protectionists. Reform voters are typically older and poorer than the wider population. Their average age is 56 and 27% say they are “struggling” on their current household income, yet Farage is promising to prioritise British-born workers under 35 when allocating social housing. He urges trade unions to affiliate themselves with his party while opposing new employment protections, and positions himself as a “man of the people” while promising to repeal the Renters’ Rights Act.

Reform wants to position itself as the “party for the workers” but it is run by a former commodities trader, property investor and banker, and funded by a crypto-billionaire. Farage has declared his intention to “bring cryptocurrency in from the cold” with a pledge to cut capital gains tax on crypto assets and create a “bitcoin digital reserve at the Bank of England”, which may appeal to his party’s donors but is irrelevant to the hard-pressed voters it needs to reach.

Tim Montgomerie, the right-wing commentator recently suspended by Reform, says Donald Trump won power in the US by convincing former Democratic voters that he would not take away their top-up benefits. “If Reform are going to achieve the same kind of result, they need to offer economic as well as cultural reassurance,” he argues. The NHS is another vulnerability, which is why Farage insists he has no plans to privatise it.

That is Britain today, and who would fight for it unless conscripted? The punishment for failure to comply with conscription is to be a fine, which is always the mark of a law that was binding on the poor but not on the rich. Who would fight for the Ukraine set out above? Not even Ukrainians will, with press gangs on the streets, and with secondary schools reporting that few or no boys had turned up for the start of the academic year. Who would fight for Saudi Arabia, which even the BBC, 25 years after some of us, has pretty much admitted was behind what I suppose that we are going to have to call 9/11? The recent twenty-fifth anniversary of the Holy Cross school dispute called to mind the 28 February double-tap Tomahawk missile attack on a girls’ primary school in Minab, killing 156 civilians, including 120 children.

Ratko Mladić did evil things to people who did evil things to the people who turned out in vast numbers to mourn him. As in most wars, there was no good side in those by which Yugoslavia was carved up into morsels digestible by global capital. But does Britain plan a midnight flinging into an unmarked pit for the corpse of Keir Starmer, who said that Israel had the right to cut off power and water to more than one million children in Gaza, and who furnished Israel with arms and intelligence accordingly? Or for the corpse of Boris Johnson, who in March 2022 scuppered a peace deal in Ukraine in return for one million pounds from the same Christopher Harborne who supplied Ukraine with drones even as he supplied the United States military with jet fuel refined from Russian and Iranian oil, and who famously also gave five million pounds to Nigel Farage? Or for the corpse of David Cameron, who brought back slave markets to Libya. Or to the corpse of Tony Blair, the mere mention of whose name says it all? Would you fight for the country that intended to send them off in style?

Still, Britain had to have been indisputably right once, and that is the case in relation to the Falkland Islands, which were uninhabited until Britain settled them with people who were neither slaves not indentured labourers; I am descended from both on Saint Helena. By contrast, Argentina, which in the 1830s wanted the Falklands as the penal colony that it has never been under Britain, is built on the eye-watering colonial genocide of its indigenous peoples, and its claim to the Islands is based on nothing more than a continental shelf, as if a mere topographical feature had political rights.

But around the axis of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu spin the likes of Javier Milei, who was until recently the chainsaw-wielding darling of a British Right that always needed a Fatherland somewhere away from the National Health Service. The supporters of Milei, of the unequivocally pro-Argentine Netanyahu, and of the ambivalent Trump, form a fifth column in this country, to be identified and treated as such. The commonest telltale sign, although there are many more, is the suggestion that Trump might have a point that Britain had been insufficiently supportive of his war with Iran.