Exurge Domine et judica causam tuam

Something called Occupy the Vatican has castigated the Pope for having visited Spain without having apologised for the Spanish Inquisition, on which see here. Apparently, he should have abased himself to "Jews and Muslims", neither of whom asked him to do any such thing, or have complained at his not having done it.

The Spanish Inquisition neither claimed nor exercised any jurisdiction either over Jews or over Muslims. For that, you would need the British Greens, who would ban the medically unnecessary circumcision of children, in which case would they also ban their chemical or surgical castration in the name of gender identity? If not, why not?

Or you would need Rupert Lowe, who would ban kosher and halal slaughter, in which case would he also ban the medically unnecessary circumcision of children? If not, why not? And against circumcision, Christopher Hitchens was robust even by his own standards. Is that also the view of his flamekeepers, among whom in Britain Oliver Kamm is probably preeminent? If not, why not?

Deal With It

Donald Trump has spotted the commercial opportunities in Iran, not for the United States as such, but for himself, his family, and his made men. If the Israelis got in the way, then that would be their hard luck. 

Those made men include Tony Blair, who is the only British member of Trump's so-called Board of Peace, making Labour the only British party with a member on that Board. A vote for Labour is a vote for that.

And Labour is functionally a Trumpian party, from Peter Kyle's hit job on Claire Kerrison, to the parliamentary selection at Croydon East. Where is the fourth man who, on 2 June 2025, was arrested in relation to the arson attacks on Keir Starmer's former homes and former car?

Bond Villains?

While there are grey areas, if something would obviously have to be rescued by the State rather than allowed to go bust, then it belongs in public ownership, just as if something obviously would not, then it does not. Corner shops? Obviously not. But water? Obviously. The bond markets do not object to the public ownership of water everywhere else in the world apart from England and Chile, so there is no reason to assume that they would object to renationalisation, which ought in turn to lead to the National Grid that was proposed by Labour in 1979.

It is only in Britain that we accord this anti-democratic, quasi-constitutional status to the bond markets. When social democratic measures beyond anything proposed by the Labour Party since at least 1983, and far beyond anything suggested by Andy Burnham, are assumed as basic facts of life under Christian Democratic, Gaullist and similar governments, then does anyone ever mention the bond markets? Do those markets take the slightest interest, so to speak?

The best Chancellor of the Exchequer that the Conservative Party never had was Sir Peter Tapsell. As Keynesian and as Eurosceptical as Peter Shore, he identified the money markets, along with the media moguls and the intelligence agencies, as the heirs of the nabobs and the Whig magnates whom past generations of Tories had made it their defining cause to cut down to size and subject to the sovereignty of Parliament.

Unboxing?

Poor little Preston Davey. He was born in prison, complete with the mother and baby unit at HMP Styal as his mother’s address on his birth certificate, because she had been recalled for breach of her licence having been sent down at 14 for the murder of a close relative of a friend of mine. What a world. If Britain thinks about small children at all, then it regards them as a nuisance.

But Britain is actively terrified of adolescents. In Australia, 60 per cent of 13 to 15-year-olds admit to bypassing the social media ban, and anyone who had ever met a teenager must assume that another 30 to 35 per cent were liars. Here, though, with Bluesky amusingly forgotten about in the first instance, we are to have Australia Plus, because nothing must stand in the way, either of forcing digital ID and facial scanning on everyone, or of depriving those who were becoming politically conscious of anything other than the presuppositions of the football team pretty boys of both sexes.

Lucky Prince George, who at Eton will have an outside chance, but still a better one than any state school pupil, of ever hearing anything other than the point at which the Liberal Establishment in academia and the media met the right-wing Labour machine in local government. By all accounts, Jeremy Corbyn turned down several invitations to speak at public schools when he was Leader of the Labour Party, although he may well accept them today. George Galloway regularly did accept such invitations before he went into exile. Yet it is impossible to imagine that a state school might offer a platform to anyone from the Left. And soon, nobody even one day below what was to become the voting age would be able to encounter it online, either.

Are we really going to tell 15-year-olds that they might not watch YouTube videos on science, or history, or anything else that was not on YouTube Kids, with even 16 and 17-year-olds not allowed to do so after a state-mandated bedtime? YouTube Kids itself says that it goes up only to the age of 12, with some emphasis on “toy unboxing”, whatever that may be. In those formative years, politics would be derived solely from school and the telly, and so would everything else. Between those two and with nowhere else to go, it would be the World Cup all day, every day of all year, every year. I do not say lightly that there would be far more teenage mental health problems and even suicides than there were now, and there are a hell of a lot now. Well, of course there are, in the culture of which Rachel Charlton-Dailey writes:

The number of disabled children who are kicked off benefits when they are reassessed as an adult has doubled in two years. Under the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) rules, children get disability living allowance (DLA) until they are 16. Instead of just automatically moving on to Personal Independence Payment (PIP), they then have to reapply. It should be a straightforward process, but because PIP is a needlessly cruel system, many find it harder to qualify for.

Disabled kids suddenly not disabled at 16

Information service, Benefits and Work, examined the statistics on moving from Child DLA to PIP on DWP StatXplore. Its team found that between 2023 and 2025, the rate of failure doubled. From August to October 2023, 11% of claimants who had received DLA failed the assessment to get PIP. But for the same quarter in 2025, the failure rate had jumped to 23%. Those are the most recent stats available, so the situation could be much worse by now.

Not only that, but success rates where the claimant gets more money with PIP than they did from DLA have also fallen. Between August and October 2023, 69% of claimants saw an increase in their award from moving to PIP. But in the same quarter in 2025, this increase rate was 54%. So, despite there being no changes to the PIP assessment yet, it’s clearly already a ridiculous system to qualify for, if there’s such a discrepancy between children getting DLA and over-16s getting PIP. A young person’s disabilities don’t magically disappear on their 16th birthday.

Higher poverty rates

It’s especially worrying to see that so many disabled young people are left without support once they turn 16, when you consider how many disabled children live in poverty. The children’s charity Variety found that 21,000 disabled children live in temporary accommodation. This equates to one out of every eight children facing homelessness. It’s also important to consider that temporary accommodation often cannot meet the needs of disabled people. Temporary accommodation is supposed to be a short-term fix, but Variety found that, on average, disabled children spend six to 10 months in temporary housing. Some cases exceeded six years. Whilst there have been no policy changes since 2023, there has been a sustained campaign by the Tories and then Labour to demonise benefits claimants. These latest statistics evidence another way that the DWP is trying to make life harder for people with disabilities.

Evidence and Proof

What would be the correct conviction rate for rape, and why? And it is illegal in Scotland, as it is in England, to ask a former juror anything about the trial in which he or she participated. How, then, can anyone else know that Scottish, or English, jurors were influenced by rape myths? As Stuart Waiton writes:

It was late last year, walking to work, when I noticed graffiti on the Dundee High School wall opposite my office. It read, “Fuck Waiton. Rapist sympathiser.” It came alongside an online onslaught and 300 direct complaints made to Abertay University about a group of women I had invited to speak about miscarriages of justice in rape cases in Scotland.

The media kicked into gear, calling the women who came to speak to my fourth-year class a group of rape apologists, and a character assassination started about me and my work. Even coverage in the so-called conservative press was terrible, using cheap innuendos and half-truths to pile on the pressure. After all, what sort of beast would raise questions about rape victims?

Management reacted nervously and started an investigation. A “counter-lecture” by Police Scotland and Dundee Women’s Aid was held at the university within days and a small protest took place at the end of the week demanding that something be done about me.

Few people seemed to be concerned about the message the women were trying to get across to my students — that the Scottish justice system was broken and that hundreds of men had not received a fair trial after being accused of and charged with rape.

Scotland now found itself in the company of countries such as Iran and North Korea where a fair trial was not possible It was therefore timely that a week after this all started the UK Supreme Court passed its judgment about this precise matter. It read:

The common law of Scotland in relation to the admission of evidence in trials for sexual offences, as currently applied, is liable to result in violations of the rights of the accused under article 6 ECHR.

In other words, alongside the likes of Iran and North Korea, Scotland now found itself in the company of countries where a fair trial was not possible — at least in rape cases. This was the issue I was writing about at the time, and it was the reason I had invited the three women campaigners to speak to my class.

They were members of a group called Justice for Innocent Men Scotland (JIMS). Made up largely of women — mothers, daughters and partners of men who had been found guilty of rape — this was, and is, the most active grassroots campaign that almost inevitably emerged around this issue.

It was almost inevitable because for at least 20 years the Scottish justice system and Parliament has been inviting feminist academics to carry out research into how to change rape trials and specifically, how to increase the conviction rate in rape cases.

It’s not hard to see how things could go so terribly wrong, especially when we now have a climate where simply raising questions about this issue results in such moral outrage.

I had already written in the International Journal of Evidence and Proof about the Scottish government’s failed attempt to abolish jury trials in rape cases. This itself had been justified with constant reference to academic feminist Fiona Leverick who argued that there was “overwhelming evidence” that juries could not be trusted in rape cases because they believe in “rape myths”.

The evidence for this claim is weak. It also suggested to me that there was something deeply worrying and elitist about the approach the Scottish authorities were taking towards the Scottish people who sit on juries. The phrase “basket of deplorables” springs to mind.

Looking further into this matter, I found that appeal court judges had developed a system of justice that excluded more and more evidence from court, particularly about the complainer’s character and sexual history. I guess if you can’t abolish juries, you can at least limit what they can actually hear. The evidence being withheld from juries is mind-boggling and is justified through the idea that the victim in court needs to be protected from harm. Of course, there is no “victim” until the verdict is returned — and herein lies the problem.

In Scotland, the development of a victim justice system has resulted in processes and policies being warped, twisted and manufactured to protect women in rape cases. Understandable and humane as this may appear, the end result has been that limits to evidence has become so extreme in Scotland that even the UK Supreme Court (having a similar understanding of rape myths to us north of the border) had to conclude that since 2013 many accused persons in Scotland have been denied the right to a fair trial. As a result, hundreds, possibly more than a thousand men, could be rotting in prison because this basic human right has been abandoned.

Tragically, despite the Supreme Court ruling, the Scottish government is doing precisely nothing to resolve what should be seen as the biggest legal scandal in Scottish history.

Meanwhile, the press continue to paint a picture, not of moral outrage about this scandal but about all the rapists who are doubly traumatising their victims by demanding a new trial. Even the Tory spokesperson for victims, Sharon Dowey MSP, recently said this was “an extremely unsettling and distressing situation for victims of rape and sexual violence”.

When it comes to the issue of Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) there is only one victim narrative that can be heard. Across the political spectrum and our institutions there appears to be a new moral absolute developing and it is one that is profoundly dangerous and one that has degraded our system of justice.

Thankfully, my university’s investigation into this matter is finally over, and I have been cleared of any wrongdoing.

Interestingly, of the 300 complaints made to the university, only one came from a student in the class, and I suspect this complaint only came about after the online outrage erupted. Many other students who were in the class defended the lesson and expressed their surprise at the reaction. One had emailed me at the time of the onslaught, noting that our discussions about the potential dangers and authoritarian nature of the victim narrative was being played out in real time by what was happening to me.

Not only had only one complaint come from a student in the class, but 86 per cent of all of the complaints had come from outside of the university. As the Committee for Academic Freedom notes, this “episode points to a worrying direction of travel, in which externally mobilised campaigns, often driven by online reaction, can generate pressure for greater institutional control over academic content”.

There is now a discussion about whether Abertay University should institutionalise trigger warnings and have tighter oversight of external speakers. As it happens, I had told the students about the JIMS speakers before the event, so what trigger warnings would change is unclear. And as the mental health lecturer, Sebastian Monteux — one of the few colleagues at Abertay who defended me publicly — notes, evidence suggests that trigger warnings “do not reduce stress”, nor do they “improve comprehension or learning outcomes”.

For me, the lesson from all of this is that Scotland (and arguably many other Western nations who are developing similar polices and approaches to “victims”) is in serious trouble. Basic liberal principles, from academic freedom to fundamental aspects of law and justice are being undermined by a new progressive morality that is developing around the principle of protecting the vulnerable.

Whether it is students in the classroom or women in a courtroom, a new sense of virtue is developing that increasingly attempts to protect perceived victims from harm. Helped by a view of ordinary people as deplorable others, and pushed by our political class and the press, the new elites have created an incredible situation.

Something has to be done about all of this, indeed somebody needs to listen to women like those involved with JIMS, because they understand from their own (lived) experiences the utter brutality and barbarity of a system that has lost its liberal heart. After all, all they’re asking for is a fair trial.

Prove It Again

Having accepted the generous hospitality of Saudi Arabia, Helen Whately became, as she has remained, a staunch defender of its executions of minors and so forth. In 2020–2021, she claimed £3,250 per month for London rental accommodation, the highest among Conservative MPs at the time. That was £39,000 per annum, although her main home in Faversham was only 50 miles from Westminster. And she and her party are currently under investigation for their misleading claims about the benefits system. But what is she complaining about? PIP now makes you prove that your leg has not grown back, as Rachel Charlton-Dailey writes:

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is wasting money by reassessing amputees in case their condition has improved.

A damning report by anti-poverty charity, Z2K, has uncovered that hundreds of thousands of disabled people endure unnecessarily gruelling Personal Independence Payment (PIP) reassessments, despite their conditions being lifelong or progressive.

The Prove It Again report found that 86% of amputees were given fixed-term PIP awards, meaning they’re required to undergo regular reassessment. These reassessments determine whether someone’s disability or condition has changed.

Other conditions given fixed-rate awards include 62% of claimants with cerebral palsy, 73% with learning disabilities, 61% with Parkinson’s disease, 89% with multiple sclerosis and 83% with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Samuel Thomas, senior policy advisor at Z2K, said:

Disabled people should not have to keep proving the same thing over and over again when their condition is not going to improve. Routine PIP reassessments are causing needless anxiety, hardship and bureaucracy, with little evidence that they are saving money.

DWP tries to force disabled people off benefits

The reality is, the DWP wants to know whether someone’s condition has improved so they can reduce their benefits.

It’s absolutely absurd that amputees are being forced into demeaning reassessments to see if there’s been any ‘improvement’. Someone’s leg isn’t going to grow back.

The charity also found that 74% of reassessments resulted in no change to someone’s benefit entitlement. But for many, they couldn’t actually get more money as 28% of disabled people whose award stayed the same already received the highest level of PIP. Therefore, all that happened was that severely sick or disabled people were put under even more stress.

DWP PIP increases have nosedived since Labour took over. Between November 2025 and January 2026, less than one in 15 PIP claimants saw an increase in benefits after reassessment.

The PIP process

There are two types of PIP awards: fixed and ongoing. Anyone who receives an ongoing award is left alone for 10 years, then has to complete a six-page form to say whether their condition has changed at all.

Anyone on a fixed-term award must be reassessed every few years and fill out the initial form again, which is more than 40 pages long.

Forms aren’t kept on file, so you can’t just comment ‘No change’ — you must detail your condition in excruciating detail, including whether it makes you incontinent. You then will be reassessed by an often unsympathetic assessor, who is often not trained in safeguarding.

One disabled person told Z2K that the review process made them feel like they were in a criminal court.

…like I was being charged with crimes against being a disabled person or impersonating a disabled person.

They added:

It leaves me feeling like less of a person. Another reminder of everything I can’t do. Instead of being allowed dignity to live my life as I know how, I’m put through an ordeal.

DWP ignores guidance to force people into work

The DWP’s own guidance states that anyone who identifies with these descriptions should be given ongoing awards and spared reassessment:

• A level of functional ability which is not likely to change in the long-term
• High levels of functional impairment which are only likely to increase

However, just 7% of new claimants receive an ongoing PIP award.

Whilst PIP isn’t an out-of-work benefit, people fear that without an ongoing award, they could be forced into unsuitable work. This is a valid concern when the government constantly includes PIP claimants into out-of-work statistics.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) found that PIP claimants are less likely to try to work because they’re scared it will be used against them.

A JRF survey on barriers to accessing work support revealed that 70% of people receiving work-related disability benefits were worried that starting work would trigger a change of circumstances for PIP.

A DWP memo confirmed that while entering work won’t trigger an award review, decisionmakers can decide to do one if they fancy.

Recommendations from Z2K

One good thing is that the DWP is extending the reassessment period from two to three years, increasing to five at a person’s next review.

However, this isn’t for the claimant’s benefit. No. It’s because the DWP can’t handle the amount of reassessments it must complete.

Z2K has recommended that any claimant whose main disability or health condition is lifelong or progressive should be given an ongoing award.

The charity also says there should be a more streamlined reassessment process. If someone’s condition or needs haven’t changed, they shouldn’t be subjected to a review.

These are great recommendations, but it’s highly likely the DWP will completely ignore them. It’s too busy pretending that disabled people are being included in its farcical review to actually do anything that would benefit them.

And Frances Ryan writes:

Disabled people with lifelong conditions are repeatedly being put through “pointless” benefit reassessments, contrary to official guidance, new analysis suggests.

A study by the anti-poverty charity Z2K has found that hundreds of thousands of disabled people are going through “unnecessary” personal independence payment (Pip) reviews, “wasting” public money and “significantly harming” the mental and physical health of claimants.

Figures show 73% of people with learning disabilities, 86% of those who had an amputation, and 62% of claimants with cerebral palsy were given fixed-term awards – meaning they are required to undergo reassessments every three years. This also applied to 89% of claimants with multiple sclerosis and 61% with Parkinson’s – conditions with little to no prospect of significant improvement.

Samuel Thomas, senior policy adviser at Z2K, said: “Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) guidance says disabled people with lifelong and progressive conditions should not be reassessed more than once a decade – but the data shows these rules simply aren’t being followed.

“Shockingly high proportions of disabled people qualifying on the basis of lifelong disabilities like cerebral palsy, permanent hearing loss and amputated limbs are being forced to undergo pointless reassessments, even though their disabilities will not change.”

Almost 75% of planned award reviews last year – equivalent to more than 500,000 reassessments – resulted in no change to the person’s payments, Z2K found. This included many cases involving claimants already receiving the highest level of support, who were reassessed even though their health is unlikely to improve.

Of reviews that led to payments being changed, 10% were increased, while 16% were decreased or stopped.

After Pip was introduced by the coalition government in 2013 and lifetime awards were abolished, ongoing “light touch” awards – which mean a case is only reviewed every 10 years and typically without a face-to-face interview – were said to be reserved for people whose conditions are unlikely to change. But the Z2K study found ongoing awards are very rare, accounting for just 6.9% of new claims in 2025.

The default length of a fixed award – which the vast majority of disabled people are given – changed from two to three years for new Pip claimants last week. It is hoped the move will reduce costs and lengthy backlogs. But Z2K warned this change will not stop people with lifelong disabilities from being given fixed-term awards incorrectly – as it will just delay their reassessment for up to a year.

Thomas said: “The move is a welcome recognition of the system’s wastefulness, but it doesn’t address the core issues with the system. These changes do not affect the rules or guidance that are keeping disabled people wrongly trapped on fixed-term awards, and they won’t reduce the numbers of people subject to full reassessment. All they will do is make reassessments slightly less frequent.”

A source who was formerly an adviser to the DWP and is now a consultant expert on Pip told The Guardian he does not expect the number of reassessments for lifelong conditions to change.

At a time when welfare expenditure is increasingly under the spotlight, the findings bring into question how much public money is being wasted on unnecessary checks carried out by private companies, rather than used to support disabled people. The DWP currently spends more than £350m a year on Pip assessment contracts.

The Z2K study found the design of Pip award reviews – which now take an average of 38 weeks to complete – to be widely inefficient, frequently reassessing people “from scratch” rather than focusing on how their needs may have changed since their last review. This results in inconsistencies, errors and expensive appeals, the charity said.

The financial impact on claimants is also stark. Z2K say they regularly see disabled people having their support wrongly removed or reduced upon review, with many pushed into significant financial hardship, including a risk of homelessness.

Steve, formerly an NHS technician, had to give up work after sustaining a brain injury in a car accident in 2019. Since then, he has relied on disability benefits to get by. Backlogs meant the 46-year-old from south London only started receiving Pip in 2021, but it was reassessed just two years later. Upon review, he had his award reduced by £120 a month, despite his disability remaining the same.

With his Pip cut and universal credit his only other income, Steve struggled to pay his rent. He appealed, but navigating the system was arduous. “My brain injury makes paperwork much more difficult, particularly as the benefit forms are written in a way that’s hard to understand. It leaves me fatigued and anxious.”

In January 2026, the decision was overturned and Steve’s payments were increased to the original rate as well as backdated. In total, it took two-and-a-half years to get back to where he started. He is already worried about when he will next be reassessed.

“Even though I won, it felt hollow because I know I’ll have to go through it again in 18 to 20 months,” he said. “Each time I have less fight left. They take lumps out of you.”

A DWP spokesperson said: “We’re taking action to fix the broken welfare system we inherited, including by extending award review periods which will remove unnecessary pressure on disabled people and help to deliver savings of around £2bn.

“Rather than their diagnosis alone, the assessment considers how well someone can manage Pip activities so outcomes depend on individual circumstances.

“As part of our work to reform the system we also launched the Timms Review – co-produced with disabled people and their representative organisations – to make sure Pip is fit and fair for the future, including reassessments.”

Not Piecemeal Tweaks

According to Helen Whately, "1 in 4 people now report as disabled. But we can't afford to sign off 25% off the population. Bold action is needed. Not piecemeal tweaks." Reporting as disabled and being signed off are two entirely different things. Whately is unfit for office. The only question is whether she is morally unfit, intellectually unfit, or both. 

By 2030, PIP claims are predicted to increase by three million to 5.4 million, with 836 successful claims every day for a decade. Well, PIP is all of 7.4 per cent of the benefits bill, and already 41 to 45 per cent of those claiming it are aged 55 or over. Just as raising the state pension age has predictably led to an increase in youth unemployment, so it has also led to a surge in people who needed additional help to work when they would once have been retired. They would be in many comparable countries, and on much more generous pensions in all of them.

Why Arson, Not Terrorism?

Has the Russian frigate Admiral Grigorovich fired warning shots at a British yacht 20 nautical miles south of the Isle of Wight, and therefore outside British territorial waters, causing neither damage nor injury? The Police could not find any evidence to support last night’s Panorama, and the Ministry of Defence, which hates Russia, will find nothing to back this up, either. A warning against what?

El Money spoke both Russian and Ukrainian. Most Ukrainians can speak Russian, but very few Russians can speak Ukrainian, so El Money was as good as certainly a Ukrainian. According to the BBC, he was posting on Telegram long after the three suspects had been arrested, sharing pictures, identity documents, and details of his father’s work. As spies do, of course. Still, this is yet another reason to have no fear of Russia, which cannot capture more than a small corner of Ukraine, and which attacks Keir Starmer’s former homes and former car by hiring Ukrainian rent boys, who were acquainted with those targets, to set fire to them while spraying the white spirit all over their own shoes. Oh, well, we had already been expected to believe that the GRU itself was given to coating door handles with Novichok. In the rain. As Paul Knaggs writes:

If the Russian government were behind the arson attacks on Sir Keir Starmer’s properties, why were the men in the dock convicted of arson, and not terrorism?

The question is not mine alone. By Monday’s verdict the press had already settled the matter: this was a Russian attack on the Prime Minister, and the BBC published its own investigation that morning declaring the fires part of a Russian campaign of sabotage and lies. And yet, in the courtroom itself, no evidence was put before the jury that the handler known as El Money worked for any state at all. Counter-terrorism police called it an attempt to cause unrest. No terrorism charge was laid. The headline said Russia. The indictment said arson. Only one of those had to be proved.

The state’s own conduct tells the story. Counter Terror Command investigated it. The Counter Terrorism Division prosecuted it. The Crown Prosecution Service filed it under “Terrorism.” The Prime Minister called it an attack on our democracy. By every operational signal the state itself sent, this was treated as an act of terror. And then it was charged as arson.

The official account asks a great deal of our credulity. We are invited to believe that a foreign power, reaching into the capital to strike at the Prime Minister, did so by recruiting an indebted young man from a Ukrainian jobs group on Telegram, walking him up from fly-posting to firebombing, and settling the bill in cryptocurrency. If that is genuinely how a hostile state now operates on British soil, the threat is graver than the verdict suggests, and nobody in authority appears to be examining it. If it is not how a hostile state operates, then we are being handed a story, and a story always has an author.

Either way, the charge tells the truth the rhetoric conceals. A terrorism prosecution, brought under the National Security Act written for precisely this, would have forced disclosure. It would have dragged the question of El Money into the light: who he was, whose work he was doing, what the state already knew. An arson charge forces none of that. It convicts the hands and closes the file. Whatever the reason for the downgrade, and there may be a lawful, unglamorous one, the effect is the same. The one trial that would have compelled a public reckoning was the one trial that was never held.

When the state declines to answer, it should not feign surprise that others rush in. The vacuum at the heart of this case is the state’s own making, and a vacuum is always filled, often with the lurid and the false. We have seen the theories already, peddled outside the court and across the internet, and they are baseless. But the appetite for them is not created by cranks. It is created by official silence. The cure is not a better rumour. It is disclosure, and disclosure is on offer from no one.

So we are left with the harder fear, the one you cannot guard your door against. What this trial reveals is sabotage with the glamour stripped off. There is no man in an ushanka, and no James Bond sent to stop him. There is a jobs group on a phone, a few thousand in crypto, and young men far from home willing to take the money and set fires on the streets of the country that took them in. A British state that would rather secure a tidy conviction than confront what it found is a danger of a different order, because it is the watchman, and it has chosen not to look. We are forever told to fear the enemy abroad. This trial suggests the more pressing failure is the one at home: not a state that cannot find the answers, but one that has decided it would rather not have them.

That is the mismatch. Here is the scandal. Two miles west, on the very same morning, the Court of Appeal upheld the decision to brand Palestine Action a terrorist organisation. The act at the root of that ban was the spraying of two military aircraft with red paint at RAF Brize Norton. No one was hurt. Nothing was set alight. Yet membership of, or support for, the group now carries up to fourteen years in prison, and since the ban came into force more than three thousand people have been arrested across the country. Among them, a retired vicar of eighty-three. Their crime, in many cases, was to hold a piece of cardboard reading “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”

The headline said Russia. The indictment said arson. Only one of those had to be proved.

Trying

Today, Helen Whately will set out her plans to address the purported problem of 150,000 people in receipt of sickness benefits worth £5,000 annually when the Government had no idea why, since there had supposedly been no diagnosis and there was no evidence on file, with the DWP just handing out £770 million of public money every year.

Try it. Try getting five grand like that. I'll wait. If the DWP has lost the paperwork, then that is not the claimant's fault. But there certainly had to have been paperwork, and a very great deal of it. The assessment is not of specific conditions, but of specific needs, so 150,000 people might have no listed specific condition, such as only a doctor could diagnose, but unless they had jumped through endless hoops to prove their needs, then they would not be receiving a penny. And it can never be said too many times that PIP is an in-work benefit, without which large numbers of disabled people would be unable to work.

Ask a psychiatrist, as I have. There is no such thing as "mild depression" or "mild anxiety", and politicians or journalists, as such, are not qualified to judge these things. Every condition with which you had been diagnosed would be on your forms, but you cannot get benefits for constipation, or tennis elbow, or whatever. Again, try it.

Dormition, Indeed

To oppose military involvement in Ukraine is to do nothing less than condemn unreservedly the bombing of the Dormition Cathedral in Kiev. It is an illustrious dedication in Orthodoxy. At the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow, Tsars were crowned and Patriarchs were buried. The Russian Orthodox Cathedral in London also bears the name.

The attack on the one in Kiev, which could not possibly have been a mistake, calls attention to the schism in and over Ukraine, between and around those who adhered to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine as constituted in 2019 with the recognition of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and those who continued to sit under the Patriarchate of Moscow. This huge story is mostly ignored in the West.

Now, about the bombing and burning of churches by "our" side in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, all parts of the Holy Land, and Narendra Modi's India. About the spitting on priests, and the assault on at least one nun, in Jerusalem and the wider country. The Suffragettes bombed or burned at least 32 churches, damaging the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey, narrowly failing to inflict similar damage in Saint Paul's Cathedral, significantly damaging Christ Church Cathedral in Lisburn, and entirely destroying the newly built Saint Catherine's, Hatcham. But all of that paled or pales in comparison to Palestine Action. Of course.

Transparently In The Open

How perfect a circle. Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation so as to ensure the convictions of the Filton defendants, the first four were sentenced as terrorists despite never having been charged as such, and the next day that the courts sat, the day on which the trial of the next eight began with their comrades' heavily publicised sentences for terrorism fresh in the jurors' minds along with the lie of the broken spine, the Court of Appeal upheld that initial proscription.

Also that day, Petro Pochynok was found not guilty, but the convictions of Roman Lavrynovych and Stanislav Carpiuc in time for lunch led to the broadcast at seven o'clock of a Panorama that must have taken months to make. Apparently, the Russians have nothing better to do than to set fire to somewhere that Keir Starmer no longer lived, and to the old car that he had sold to a neighbour, causing little damage and no injury. Nor have they anyone better to do it than Ukrainian rent boys; all three defendants were on Grindr. All the way back to Profumo and beyond, indeed since the dawn of time, states' clandestine agents have maintained contact with the courtesans and streetwalkers patronised by their enemies, but even so. Yet all the way back to Profumo and beyond, indeed since the dawn of time, states' clandestine agents have maintained contact with the courtesans and streetwalkers patronised by their enemies. Lavrynovych has been declared mentally disabled, having scored 66 on the general ability index, with anything below 70 being considered "intellectual disability". Yet he is the sole director of the construction and roofing company that bears his name.

Whether to distract attention from the resignations of John Healey and Al Carns, or to exert pressure for more expenditure than they had been able to secure, or some combination of the two, the Royal Marine Commandos and the National Crime Agency staged a comical act of piracy, and when we all laughed at that, then the dear old BBC was activated to claim that the pesky Russkies were not only setting such fires in between sailing their "Shadow Fleet", but also astroturfing both Islamist and neo-Nazi terrorism. Any incident of either will now be attributed to Russia, which is in reality a major target of both. Not only are we being played, but we are being played in a very dangerous game.

Who is to protect us? The National Security Adviser? Jonathan Powell's company, Inter Mediate, rebranded the man who was then known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani in the manner of "Tommy Robinson", with a $10 million American government bounty on his head, as the man to whom in March Starmer literally gave the red carpet treatment as President Ahmed al-Sharaa of Syria. Al-Sharaa is still massacring Christians as befits a sometime second-in-command both of Al-Qaeda and of the so-called Islamic State, but his Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham has been removed from the list of proscribed terrorist organisations, and Inter Mediate has an office inside his palace. The terrorists are the blind wheelchair users and the octogenarian clergywomen who are silently holding up signs in support of Palestine Action.

In contrasting Palestine Action with the Suffragettes, the Lady Chief Justice demonstrated that her knowledge of the latter had been gleaned entirely from Mary Poppins. (Incidentally, Dennis Skinner always refers to "Shirley Poppins", whose letter presumably inviting Roy Hattersley to join the SDP Hattersley kept but never opened. Will it be opened now? He had no children, so one assumes not.) A Suffragette, Theresa Garnett, horsewhipped Winston Churchill and cut him in the face, although that still got her a shorter sentence than any of the Filton Four. The Suffragettes engaged in bombing and arson against churches, in the same spirit as al-Sharaa, and against railway stations, the Bank of England, and David Lloyd George's country house, among numerous other targets, with more than 300 incidents in 1913 and 1914 alone. They smashed windows in commercial districts, they damaged works of art in galleries, they sent letter bombs, they injured at least 24 people, and they killed at least four. Of course they carried out such operations in secret rather than "transparently in the open", as Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill would have it.

Until its proscription, Palestine Action operated through a website, social media accounts, press releases, and named spokespeople. It has caused at most one injury, and even then without intent. Sergeant Kate Evans walked unaided out of Accident and Emergency. Her hairline fracture could not be detected by X-ray, nor even by her first MRI scan. She was put on over-the-counter painkillers and told to take mild rest for six weeks. She was healed in three months. And the sledgehammer had belonged to Elbit's private security guards, who wielded such weapons in the presence of sworn constables on duty, inflicting far worse injuries on the protestors, including the fully acquitted Jordan Devlin. No security guard has been charged. Think on.

One Small Justice

Skwawkbox writes:

Starmeroid MP Peter Kyle and state prosecutors have been humiliated today after a constituent resoundingly defeated Kyle’s attempt to criminalise her for emailing him about Israel’s Gaza crimes.

Claire Kerrison had copied Kyle — her constituency MP — in on emails to Keir Starmer and his ministers about Israel’s criminal abduction of humanitarian volunteers trying to sail aid to Gaza during Israel’s illegal starvation blockade. Kyle took exception to this and complained to Sussex Police. Following the regime’s usual pattern, the police arrested Kerrison in a 4am raid.

The state charged Kerrison with ‘persistent misuse of a communication system to cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety’, for emailing her MP. She told Skwawkbox that Kyle knows who she is, as she has previously emailed him for help with standard ‘local MP’ issues. Kyle, a ‘Labour friend of Israel’, clearly took exception to emails about Israel’s appalling crimes.

But the case has ended in failure, much worse than failure, in fact. Magistrate Paul Goldspring is no friend of the left. He has controversially released a neo-nazi on the basis of his A-level results and been disciplined for appearing to endorse “contentious” political views during a case. But he sent the crown’s lawyers away with a flea in their ear over the prosecution of Kerrison.

Litany of failure

In a “litany of failure,” the prosecution failed to prepare its case properly in time and begged Goldspring for an adjournment. Goldspring refused and the crown presented no case. Goldspring dropped the charge. And as the icing on the cake, he ordered the prosecution to pay Kerrison’s legal costs.

Ms Kerrison said after the result that the case had been “lawfare,” “disingenuous at best” and brought by an MP with an appalling record of “support[ing] and assist[ing] Israel” in its genocide in Gaza. And she ended by bringing attention back to the people of Palestine facing Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing:

To suggest that my emails were sent for any other reason than to express my absolute disgust and horror at what is happening in Gaza and the Middle East is disingenuous at best.

Peter Kyle MP and the UK Government have supported and assisted Israel throughout the Gaza Genocide with little or no regard for the lives of Palestinians or indeed any of the victims of Israel’s murderous activities throughout the Middle East.

Lawfare is increasingly being used to silence our voices and quell our dissent. This is not only a waste of time and public money, it is also an infringement of our rights and freedom of speech.

Palestinians continue to be terrorised, dehumanised and murdered every day at the hands of the Israelis. The very least we can do is raise our voices in each and every way possible to let them know: ‘We see you’

“FREE PALESTINE!”

One small justice for Gaza

Her lawyers, Doughty Street Chambers, said in a bulletin about the result:

Brighton woman acquitted on charge of persistent emails to cause annoyance to Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and local MP about Israel’s conduct in Gaza

A Brighton woman, CK, was charged with a single offence under s. 127(2)(C) and (3) of the Communications Act 2003, for emails she sent on 10 and 11 June 2025 to senior politicians. The charge concerned emails sent by CK to the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and her local MP Peter Kyle MP, expressing concerns about the conflict in Gaza.

By 17 June 2025, the office of Peter Kyle MP had alerted the police in Brighton about the above emails, triggering the arrest and detention of CK at 04:33am. A skeleton argument was filed on behalf of CK, denying the emails were persistent or that their purpose was to cause annoyance, and that her communications were protected by her rights under Article 10(1) of Schedule 1 of the Human Rights Act 1998.

On 15 June 2026, the date of trial, the prosecution applied to amend the charge to include additional emails between 12 and 16 June 2025. On submissions on behalf of CK, the Chief Magistrate refused the prosecution application, and a further application to adjourn. The prosecution offered no evidence. The case against CK was dismissed.

One small justice to celebrate on a day in which the legal system has completely failed the people of Palestine and betrayed the rights of British people.

Contrast the sentences handed down to the Filton Four with the events of 20 March, when the convicted paedophile Liron Woodcock-Velleman was given eight months, suspended for 15 months. His past “service” as a councillor, and the ruination of his “promising” political career, were accepted in mitigation. No wonder he and his parents were celebrating. Like you, I have never met a paedophile. I mean, we may have done, in the way that we may have met a Muggletonian. But we are wholly unaware of having done so, you and I both. I apologise to any Muggletonian reading this. Yet this country’s cultural and political elite cannot get out of bed, if that, without tripping over one or more nonces. And every single time, our betters had had no idea. Or so we are invariably expected to believe. Last May, the supposedly hard-as-nails Shabana Mahmood tried to give nonces “chemical castration” instead of prison, where that proposal was received, not only by the inmates, as well as one might have expected. As an old lag, the word “nonce” is part of my culture. In that culture’s citadels, nonces are given the suspended sentences that we were not, or they are given the cushiest jobs inside, they are housed in the newest or the most recently refurbished wings, they have gym when ours has been cancelled, and so on. Why?

At committee stage of what has become the Online Safety Act, Woodcock-Velleman gave the evidence of Hope Not Hate. When Labour returned to office in 2024, then Anna Turley was both a Director and a Trustee of Hope Not Hate. As an ultimately successful parliamentary candidate in 2015, the then Ruth Smeeth described herself as “the Deputy Director of Hope Not Hate”. The American Embassy classified her as “strictly protect”. As Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent, she was recently made a Parliamentary Secretary in the Cabinet Office while remaining a Whip. Not bad for having lost her Commons seat to Jonathan Gullis. Even with the departure of Josh Simons, there are now four Parliamentary Secretaries under Darren Jones, and three Ministers of State. That amounts to a Prime Minister’s Department with, including Keir Starmer, nine Ministers, the most of any Department. They must do something. What is it?

Woodcock-Velleman’s offences were strikingly similar to those of another Labour councillor in London, Sam Gould, who offended while on the staff Wes Streeting. Streeting would have become Leader when, as expected in 2019, the Conservative majority had been much reduced in 2024 but Boris Johnson had remained Prime Minister. Yes, that was not much more than six years ago. But in 2015, Streeting had chaired the Leadership campaign of Jess Phillips. On Tuesday 2 September last year, Phillips told the House of Commons that, “South Yorkshire police should never have been left to investigate themselves in this matter, and moving those investigations to the NCA is absolutely the right thing to do. I would be lying if I said that over the years I had not met girls who talked to me about how police were part of not just the cover-up but the perpetration.” Read again those words of the Minister who refused a statutory inquiry, an inquiry that had been, and still is, demanded by the Muslim candidate whom she had beaten by only 693 votes at Birmingham Yardley, which he intends to contest again, the wonderful investigative journalist Jody McIntyre. Then read the Epstein Files and worry about inferior cultures with no respect for women and with endemic predation on young girls.

Phillips had been supported for Leader by Hilary Armstrong and by Armstrong’s erstwhile staffer, Peter Kyle. Both Joe Docherty and Matthew Doyle were introduced to the House of Lords by Armstrong, whose Whips’ Office in the Commons had included all three of Phil Woolas, Ivor Caplin and Dan Norris. All three were made Ministers soon after the vote for the Iraq War. Norris does not turn up to Parliament, but he has one of the best voting records, because despite his own suspension from the Labour whip, his proxy vote is cast every single time by the Labour Whips; there was a blip on 10 March, but normal service was restored from the next day. Armstrong was the political patroness, both of Turley, and of Caplin’s close friend, closest ally, former lover, and constituency successor, Kyle. Armstrong remains an active Labour member of the Lords, giving it as her institutional affiliation when she endorsed a mercifully ignored book that claimed that the accused of the Cleveland child abuse scandal had been guilty all along. Every accusation is a confession.

Making The Cut?

So, Greens, if you were going to ban the medically unnecessary circumcision of children, then would you also ban their chemical or surgical castration in the name of gender identity? If not, why not? And Rupert Lowe, if you would ban kosher and halal meat, or at least such slaughter in Britain while still permitting the product's importation in which you would no doubt take an interest, then would you also ban the medically unnecessary circumcision of children? If not, why not?

30 per cent or more of lamb and mutton bought in this country is halal. The South Asian Muslim diet, at least, is decidedly meaty. As is at least the Ashkenazi Strictly Orthodox diet, a much smaller but rapidly growing market. Virtually all sheep end up in the human food chain, and disproportionately on the plates of those who kept kosher or halal.

Yet the experimental puberty blockers that have been given to children as young as 10 or even eight had already been banned in sheep, which they had given impaired memory, altered behaviour, enlarged amygdala, and lasting brain damage even once the treatment had stopped. What happened to those sheep? There was already a natural alliance between the opponents of puberty blockers and those who adhered to kosher or halal. It may have found its immediate basis.

"Mum said to me, on 'er deafbed," tweeted Oliver "Del Boy" Kamm 10 years ago. Or words to that effect, "Last thing Christopher Hitchens ever said to me was to urge us to keep on Galloway's case." He deleted the tweet after I had had fun with it on here. Hitchens devoted the third chapter of God Is Not Great to ridiculing "porcophobia", but that can wait, like his excommunication by Kamm's dismissal of opposition to abortion as "morally reprehensible". Against circumcision, Hitchens was robust even by his own standards. Do his flamekeepers, among whom in Britain Kamm is probably preeminent, agree? If not, why not?

Arise, Sir Christopher

Sir Andrew Mitchell writes:

Arise Sir Christopher! One of the more unexpected but nonetheless well-deserved knighthoods in the King’s birthday honours was that conferred on former Labour MP, journalist and author Chris Mullin. Well before he was elected to parliament, he made his mark with A Very British Coup, the first of his four novels, which was made into a successful television series. He later published four widely acclaimed volumes of diaries.

In parliament he had a reputation as a principled politician who might have risen higher up the ministerial ladder had he not voted against his government on Iraq. But all this is surely eclipsed by his almost single-handed struggle to rescue the six innocent men convicted of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings, one of the gravest miscarriages of justice in British history.

The Birmingham Six had been convicted during the wave of public outrage at the bombings, which killed 21 people and injured more than 200. Once the machinery of the state pronounced them guilty, every pillar of authority closed ranks.

Police officers lied with practised confidence. Dubious forensic science was accepted as conclusive. A succession of senior judges displayed a chilling willingness to overlook contaminated evidence and upheld the convictions.

Mullin endured a long campaign of vilification. The entire apparatus of the state behaved less like a justice system than like a medieval priesthood defending its infallibility. Mullin not only helped to demolish the case against the six. He tracked down and confronted those actually responsible for the bombings. 

His book Error of Judgement remains one of the greatest examples of investigative journalism. As Robert Harris, political editor of The Sunday Times, wrote at the time: “Whoever planted the bombs in Birmingham also planted a bomb under the British legal establishment.” The consequences were far-reaching.

Within hours of the collapse of the convictions, in March 1991, the home secretary set up a royal commission to examine all aspects of the criminal justice system. Among its many recommendations was the creation of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which has resulted in more than 600 successful appeals.

In an age when the British legal establishment appeared immovable and unchallengeable, Mullin forced the country to confront a terrible wrong. Arise, Sir Christopher.

Clearing The Stairwell

It is no wonder that Kemi Badenoch has felt the need to reprimand Conservative MPs for having pointed out the blatantly obvious theatricality of yesterday’s operation. As Ben Obsese-Jecty tweeted,“How is the cameraman ahead of the Marines clearing the stairwell to be able to film them coming towards him? How has the cameraman gone past the open doors of rooms that haven’t yet been cleared? How much of this has been staged for the cameras?” From the Right, Jennifer Kavanagh writes:

Yesterday, Royal Marine Commandos seized a Russian shadow fleet tanker sailing in the English Channel, the first time they had done so without American support. Keir Starmer heralded the move as an indication of the country’s military strength and resolve to increase pressure on Russia until it agrees to end its military campaign in Ukraine.

The military operation is already being praised by those who welcome any move that targets Russian assets, but the reality is more sobering. Seizing the Russian tanker imposes limited costs on Moscow and comes at a price to the rest of Europe in the form of uncontrolled escalation risks. Just as importantly, it cannot distract from Britain’s lack of a coherent and resourced defence strategy.

Back in March 2026, Starmer first announced that Britain had the legal authority to seize Russian shadow fleet tankers operating in its waters. Up until now, however, the country’s armed forces have only participated in search and seizure operations alongside the US military. The three-month lag between his statement of legal prerogative and any independent British action raises the question of why Starmer chose to act now.

The timing offers some clues. Coming just days after Defence Secretary John Healey resigned amid a row over military funding, the move appears less a strategic shift than a political gambit aimed at deflecting domestic and international criticism of the state of Britain’s armed forces. It seems hard to believe that there were no sanctioned vessels in and around UK waters at any point since March. After all, Britain has placed at least 600 Russian tankers on its sanctions list. Instead, it seems more probable that political factors were at play.

Unfortunately for Starmer, the seizure of the Russian tanker only serves to underscore the fact that Britain lacks a coherent defence strategy and a plan for financing it. As John Healey’s replacement admitted, the UK is still discussing how much to spend on defence, with fears that the much-vaunted Defence Investment Plan does not have enough funds to adequately protect the country.

Taking control of a single Russian vessel imposes minimal costs on the country’s economy. While this may complicate its oil exports, seizing ships happens too infrequently to affect Russia’s strategic calculus or Putin’s willingness to continue the war. In this sense, the British military operation seems largely performative.

That said, Moscow is unlikely to ignore the British move, which it will likely characterise as little more than state-sanctioned piracy. In turn, this will add to already elevated and intensifying escalatory pressures between Russia and Europe, heightening the risk of miscalculation that could spiral into a broader war.

This would not be so concerning if Britain — or the rest of Europe — had a plan to manage these tensions and a clear, coherent strategy for the continent’s defence — especially one that does not depend on the United States. At this point, however, neither exists.

Starmer may have hoped the raid on a Russian tanker would offer a reprieve from these problems, but it is likely to have the opposite effect. Questions over Britain’s defence posture will remain firmly in the spotlight. The Strategic Defence Review marked a step forward in articulating a clearer threat assessment and setting out the capabilities required to meet it. Yet without the funding to resource that strategy, it risks amounting to little more than rhetoric. In that context, the tanker seizure projects less strength than strain, reinforcing a sense of improvisation that may ultimately leave Britain — and Europe — more exposed than before.

And from the Left writes Craig Murray, who is a former Head of Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and a former Alternate Head of the British Delegation at the Preparatory Commission for the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, so that he drafted much of the Protocol that brought that Convention into effect:

I was genuinely surprised by the Starmer regime’s refusal to state that the Israeli boarding of the Global Sumud flotilla on the High Seas was illegal. I did not realise it was because the UK was planning to undertake similar illegal seizure itself.

The Gaza Flotilla seizure was illegal, while for obvious reasons freedom of navigation had been the undisputed basis of UK maritime policy for centuries. The UK is a set of islands whose population is dependent on food imports to stay alive. Freedom of navigation is a core strategic interest of the UK. The relevant provisions of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea were very heavily UK driven, including on passage through straits.

Abandoning the primacy of freedom of navigation is absolutely a radical policy departure for the UK, driven like so many other changes to traditional British legal positions by the Starmer regime’s extreme support for Israel. It is not generally understood how profound a change this is. Even the Tory government of David Cameron, with William Hague as Foreign Secretary, had opposed the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza and particularly Israeli seizure of vessels on the High Seas. William Hague stated in 2010 to the House of Commons of the boarding of the Mavi Marmara: We are seriously concerned about the seizure of British nationals in international waters. This is a long term British legal position now directly repudiated by Starmer, Lammy and Cooper.

I had not realised that not only was the UK now supporting the campaigns of illegal blockade and seizure of vessels being openly pursued by Israel and by Trump, but Starmer was actually intending to abandon freedom of navigation and join the Trump/Netanyahu doctrine. That is what the UK has now done by its seizure of the Smyrtos as it had passed through the Straits of Dover en route to Sikka in India. The Dover Strait is a strait. The clue is in the name. The UK has absolutely no right to close it to Russian shipping. This is in Article 39 of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea:

Transit of international straits “shall not be impeded” is pretty plain. This is the applicable legal regime for both the Strait of Dover and the Strait of Hormuz. Obviously in time of war different considerations apply, and commercial shipping of belligerent states - and to and from belligerent states - becomes a legitimate target. Iran is fully justified in also treating states permitting attacks launched from their territory as belligerent states. If hostilities end this Article 39 regime that should apply again in the Strait of Hormuz.

It is worth a footnote to say that Iran had, until the recent illegal aggression by Israel and the United States, always strictly observed the international law on straits even though Iran did not sign the Convention and actually had entered a formal reservation on passage through straits. Even during the war, Iran had attempted, in extremely difficult circumstances, to establish a system for passage of genuinely neutral vessels.

It is astonishing that at this moment, when navigation of the Strait of Hormuz is arguably the single most live question in all of international politics, the UK has decided to abandon the principle of free transit through straits. It takes hypocrisy to an entire new level, it truly beggars belief, that the day after closing the Dover Strait to Russian shipping, Starmer issued a joint statement with Germany, France and Italy insisting on “Freedom of Navigation” in the strait of Hormuz. 

Even if you don’t care about international law and believe that Trumpian realpolitik is better, to act against freedom of navigation now would seem an unwise decision. The UK is now copying actions like the United States naval blockades of Cuba and Venezuela, and the Israeli genocidal blockade of Gaza. These are gross violations of the Law of the Sea.

UK Government minister Lisa Nandy was on television news last night as the government pumped out militaristic propaganda. The Royal Navy’s action in boarding and capturing an entirely unarmed and peaceful merchant vessel was portrayed as an act of Nelsonian brilliance. Nandy justified the seizure on the grounds that Russia’s oil sales pay for its war with Ukraine, and that the UK was enforcing sanctions against Russia.

Neither provides an atom of legal justification for seizing the vessel. The UK is not at war with Russia. Ukraine is, and the Ukrainian navy would have been entitled to seize the vessel. For reasons of cheap popularity and to increase the massive amounts of public money swirling around the corruption honeypot of military spending, UK ministers seem determined to move us to the brink of war with Russia. But we are still not at war, and the UK accordingly has no right to seize peaceful and innocent Russian bound, owned or flagged commercial vessels.

The UK is legally entitled to put whatever sanctions it wishes on Russia. But it can only enforce those within its legitimate jurisdiction. A foreign vessel, even when engaged in innocent passage or transit passage through a UK strait or other territorial waters, is not under UK jurisdiction. The Smyrtos was in fact in international waters south of the UK when seized. In fact this attempt to enforce western sanctions in areas where western powers have no jurisdiction is a classical example of the current aggressive resurgence of imperialism, where the “rules based order”, meaning rules imposed by the imperialists, replaces international law.

Nandy also stated that the Smyrtos was a member of the “Russian shadow fleet”. This is a term that the Starmer regime and their client mainstream and corporate media have relied upon repeatedly to demonise the Russian owned or directed merchant fleet. Russia sells oil to countries like India and China perfectly lawfully. That this oil is carried in ships bearing flags other than Russian is perfectly normal. Nil or close to nil of those ships carrying hydrocarbons to and from the UK are UK registered and flagged. 

It has been a sad truth of international shopping for many decades that commercial vessels bear flags of convenience, and that jurisdictions compete to offer the very lowest standards of crew salary and welfare regulations, officer and crew training, vehicle condition and maritime safety and inspection regimes. Most of the registries of well-known international flag of convenience states such as Panama, Liberia and the Marshall Islands, do not really exist in the sense of being government departments of those countries, as they should be. They are private companies with almost no real world footprint, which pay a fee to the government to operate the registry, and collect the fees from the shipowners registering. The register is just names in a laptop - and very often that laptop is in London.

UK colonies often have substantial such fake registries. The UK is a strong opponent of the International Transport Workers Federation, which has struggled against this system to improve mariners’ rights. The system evolved for wealthy shipowners to avoid all maritime safety, environmental and welfare regulation, and the UK and other western countries which pander to the needs of the ultra wealthy have always been complicit.

The incredible hypocrisy of western states pointing fingers at Russia for running “Flags of convenience” is breathtaking. The West has spent decades building and profiting from the global flags of convenience system. Russia is simply using the same system that Western companies created and still dominate. Incidentally the MOD’s own propaganda footage, shown by all UK mainstream media yesterday, proves that the Smyrtos is a modern, clean, well-equipped and comfortable vessel and all the propaganda about ancient rustbucket is completely untrue.

I have finally managed to pin down the alleged legal basis of the seizure of the Smyrtos, and it is that the vessel was stateless and thus subject to boarding under Article 110 of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea.

The UK is claiming that the Smyrtos fell foul of Article 110.1 (d) that it was “without nationality”. We will inspect that claim more closely in a moment. But, assuming it for a moment to be true, note that you only have a right to visit and inspect on the High Seas a ship that is without nationality. Article 110 absolutely does not confer any right to seize a ship on the High Seas not found on inspection to be in unlawful activity. The UK has seized the Smyrtos, brought it into UK territorial waters and then claimed it is under UK jurisdiction. Nowhere is that allowed in the Convention.

Now let us look at the claim that the Smyrtos is without nationality. This is an astonishing story which the media will not tell you. When the Smyrtos set sail from Russia it was flying the Cameroonian flag, and on the Cameroonian register. That is not in doubt. While the ship was on its voyage, on 10 June Cameroon withdrew its registration. It did so because the EU and UK threatened to halt development aid to Cameroon unless they removed Russian vessels from their shipping register. So the UK blackmailed Cameroon into deregistering the ship. Then, before the ship could reach a friendly port, the UK boarded it because it had been deregistered.

Now doubtless there are chortling people in the UK security and military industries congratulating themselves over how clever they are. But while this may be a clever ruse de guerre, it is hardly a ruse de paix. It is not going to survive scrutiny by an international court. An unexpected change of registration, forced upon the owners, is very difficult to complete instantly, but doubtless one was in train and perhaps finished. The UK actions are patently - and deliberately - unreasonable.

Politicians seek to drum up cheap popularity by stupid jingoism. Starmer has won a cheap headline. The world inches closer to the next world war. The UK loses yet more legitimacy in the eyes of the wider world. Meantime Trump claims as a great victory a possible return of the Strait of Hormuz to the open status it enjoyed before he started an illegal war in the interests of Israel. 

Freedom of navigation was a principle worth defending. It has been abandoned in favour of a return to the rule of the seas by those with the strongest navies. Fortunately Putin is neither as war hungry nor as politically desperate as Starmer. However Russia will now be obliged to send at least a frigate to keep the Strait of Dover open. The drums of war beat ever closer.

Safety and Happiness?

Paul Knaggs writes:

Ask yourself one plain question, and refuse to let go of it. How do you stop a fifteen-year-old girl from opening Instagram without first establishing the age of the forty-five-year-old man just about to log in? You cannot. There is no machine that quietly checks the child and waves the adult through unseen. To know that one user is too young, the system must interrogate every user. Which means it must interrogate you.

This morning, in Downing Street, Sir Keir Starmer announced a full ban on under-16s using the major social media platforms: TikTok, Snapchat, X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit. There will be exemptions for YouTube Kids and Google Classroom, a curfew on 16 and 17-year-olds after half past eight at night, and new action to stop strangers contacting children on gaming and livestreaming services. Legislation by the end of the year; the gate itself closing in the spring of 2027. The Prime Minister, who not long ago thought such a ban impractical, now says he will not compromise on: “the safety and happiness of our children.”

It is a good sentence. It is meant to be. And it performs a precise piece of work: it moves the argument off the only question that matters. Because the policy does not actually turn on whether children should be on Instagram. It turns on what the rest of us must surrender so that the question can be enforced at all. The child is the shield. The adult is the target.

BritCard by Stealth: How Child Safety Becomes Surveillance

The Cheese in the Mousetrap 

Strip away the press-conference warmth and the mechanism is cold and simple. You cannot bar under-16s from a website without checking the age of everyone who visits it. And you cannot check everyone’s age without making them prove, in some fashion, who they are. “Child safety” is the cheese in the mousetrap. The trap is the verification layer that closes behind every adult who reaches for it.

This is not a forecast. It is a description of something already running. Phase 2 of the Online Safety Act came into force on 25 July last year, requiring services likely to be accessed by children to deploy what Ofcom calls “highly effective age assurance.” The permitted methods are exactly what you would fear: facial scans estimated by AI, photo-ID matching, credit-card checks, verification through your mobile carrier, analysis of your banking data. Within days, age checks were running at more than five million a day, most of them on adults trying to reach perfectly legal content. VPN sign-ups surged by well over a thousand per cent as the public reached, by instinct, for the nearest exit. The new ban does not invent this architecture. It extends it, and points it at the rest of the internet. It is a recipe for mass surveillance with a child’s face painted on the front.

What “Highly Effective Age Assurance” Actually Buys You

Look closely at what you are being asked to hand over, and to whom. Not to the state, which at least answers to a ballot box, however feebly. To private verification vendors, many of them overseas, bound by privacy promises written by their own lawyers. In October last year, Discord, the platform where a great many British children already gather, suffered a breach through the third-party firm handling its age checks. Attackers held access for some fifty-eight hours and walked off with around 70,000 government identity documents, with some analyses putting the true figure far higher. They demanded a ransom; Discord, to its credit, refused. But here is the part that should make any thinking person stop. Discord’s response to a breach caused by collecting identity documents was to expand age verification to every single user on the platform. That is the logic of this entire enterprise in miniature. The harm done by demanding your papers is met by demanding them more often.

A password, once stolen, can be changed. The cryptographic record of your face cannot. Your passport cannot. The data being amassed in these systems, faces, passports, card details, banking histories, is not a list of who watched what. It is the raw material for identity theft, deep-fake fraud, and forms of crime we are only beginning to name. The government assures us that facial estimation can guess your age without saving the image or knowing your name. Perhaps. But the Australian government’s own landmark study of these technologies, commissioned before its own under-16 ban, found that every method carried serious risks, that some retained far too much data, and that there is no reliable way to stop a determined teenager slipping the net with a VPN. So the system will be invasive, costly, insecure, and trivially circumvented by the very children it claims to protect. That is not a recipe for child safety. It is a recipe for mass surveillance with a child’s face painted on the front.

The Case for the Prosecution, Fairly Put

It would be dishonest, and it would be weak, to pretend the other side has nothing. They have a great deal, and it deserves to be heard before it is answered. Ninety per cent of parents backed this ban in a consultation that drew well over a hundred thousand replies. Esther Ghey, whose daughter Brianna was murdered by two teenagers steeped in online cruelty, says the measure could save children’s lives, though she rightly insists it cannot stand alone. The NSPCC, no friend of the tech giants, wants robust checks rigorously enforced. The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, says plainly that this is about stopping the coercion and sextortion of children, not policing anyone’s phone. These are not the words of tyrants. They are the words of people who have looked at what the platforms do to the young and decided that something, anything, is better than the shrug we have offered for a decade. And Australia, the model Britain is copying, took pains to insist that platforms should not verify every adult, on the grounds that they already hold enough data to identify the children among us.

Here, then, is the pivot, and it rests not on suspicion but on the record. When Britain ran precisely this argument through Phase 2 of the Online Safety Act, the promise to check only the children produced five million checks a day on everyone, and a breach that scattered tens of thousands of real identities into criminal hands. The threat of fines worth a tenth of global revenue does not encourage platforms to verify carefully. It encourages them to verify everyone, and to keep the receipts. The intention may well be narrow. The outcome, every time, is universal. We are not required to impute bad faith. We need only read the meter. The intention may well be narrow. The outcome, every time, is universal.

The Contradiction Starmer Will Not Answer 

If a government genuinely wished to keep phones out of children’s hands, there is a measure to hand that is cheaper, faster, and proven: ban the smartphone in the school. New Zealand has done it, and reports calmer classrooms, more reading, less bullying. It requires no facial scan of a single adult. It costs almost nothing. It is targeted, proportionate, and immediate. The government has refused to do it. When the Conservatives tried to write a statutory school-phone ban into the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, Labour MPs voted it down, and the Prime Minister pronounced it “completely unnecessary,” insisting most schools already manage the problem themselves. His own department’s survey suggests otherwise, and a group of parents under the banner Generation Alpha is now seeking judicial review precisely because the guidance, in their account, leaves children exposed every school day.

Hold the two decisions side by side, because the contrast is the whole story. A narrow, cheap, effective intervention aimed squarely at children, in the one building the state already controls: refused. A sprawling, expensive, insecure intervention that requires the verification of the entire adult population: embraced. A government serious about children would reach for the first. A government interested in the architecture reaches for the second. So we are entitled to ask why. And the answer is not hidden. It is sitting in the recent record, in plain sight.

The Architecture of Control

In September last year, Sir Keir announced the BritCard: a digital identity he intended to make mandatory for the right to work. “You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID,” he said, and the country recoiled. A petition passed 2.7 million signatures. Polling that had shown comfortable majority support collapsed into net opposition. Big Brother Watch called it a “domestic mass surveillance infrastructure.” Jeremy Corbyn called it “an affront to our civil liberties.” Nigel Farage said much the same from the other shore. It is a rare and instructive thing when the principled left and the populist right read the same blueprint and arrive, independently, at the same word: no.

The government retreated. By January it had dropped the mandate; by March the consultation had been rewritten to sell digital ID as a voluntary convenience for accessing public services, no obligation, no compulsion, nothing to fear. But notice what was never withdrawn. The plumbing. The GOV.UK One Login, the digital wallet, the whole identity scaffold, continued to be built while the public’s attention was allowed to wander. And now, five months later, here is a policy that cannot function without an age-and-identity layer, arriving to plug into the very scaffold the public thought it had refused.

This is what the lawyers call function creep: data gathered for one stated purpose, quietly repurposed for another. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is the most ordinary thing in government. You will note that even Palantir, Peter Thiel’s surveillance firm and no shrinking violet, declined the British digital-ID work, warning that fusing the nation’s databases into one identity would vastly enlarge the “surface area of risk.” When Thiel’s people think your data architecture is reckless, the hour is later than you suppose.

Different countries, different pretexts, the same infrastructure. Australia reaches for child safety, Britain for child safety and migration, Brussels for a tidy digital wallet, several American states for pornography, Hanoi and Beijing for the open requirement of identity before you may post at all. The justification is always local and always sympathetic. The destination is everywhere the same: a verified identity standing between you and the open internet, and an internet that has quietly stopped being a public square and become a monitored enclosure, where every account, search, post, payment and message is anchored to a name the state can read.

The New Ministry of Truth 

Follow the logic past its first stop and the destination comes into view. Surveillance is the means. A managed information state is the end: a settlement in which news, opinion and public argument reach you only through authorised channels, approved platforms, and the established filters that decide what is fit for you to read. We are already most of the way there. A handful of global corporations now shape what hundreds of millions of people see, hear and believe before breakfast. Bolt a verified identity onto that machine and you do not widen the public’s freedom; you fit it with a turnstile. Participation stops being a right and becomes a privilege, granted on good behaviour and revocable at the gate.

Today it is the social media giants. Tomorrow it is the independent news blogs, the awkward little outlets built precisely to challenge governments, publish alternative views, and ask the questions the obedient press will not touch. The day after that, it is the influencers, writers, campaigners and citizen-journalists who reach the working-class audiences the legacy media abandoned years ago. Each one can be labelled a “platform likely to be accessed by children”. Each one can be dragged under the same system, wrapped in the same soft language, and justified by the same unanswerable slogan: your safety.

This anxiety is not new, and the men who first set it down were not shy about naming it. In 1975 the Trilateral Commission published The Crisis of Democracy, and diagnosed the trouble with the West not as too little democracy but as too much. An informed, mobilised, argumentative public was the disease. The cure, the report’s American author conceded, was that a functioning democracy requires “some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups,” together with a press returned to its proper, deferential place. Half a century later, the apathy can be manufactured at the door. You cannot organise what you cannot reach, and you cannot reach what the gatekeeper declines to pass.

George Orwell drew the same machine and gave it its name. “Who controls the past controls the future,” read the slogan on the wall of his Ministry of Truth, “who controls the present controls the past.” A verified, gated internet is no mere filing cabinet for the past. It is a hand laid on the present, deciding in real time who is permitted to speak and who is permitted to be heard.

Benn’s Five Questions 

Tony Benn left us a tool for exactly this moment, five questions he said we should put to anyone who holds power over us. What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? And how do we get rid of you? Put them to the verification system now being built in your name. Its power is to decide whether you may speak, read, and gather online. It took that power under the banner of protecting children, granted by a Parliament the government now seeks new powers to bypass. It serves, in the first instance, the platforms and the vendors who profit from holding your identity, and a state that finds an identifiable citizen so much more convenient than an anonymous one. It answers to almost no one you can name. And you cannot vote it out, because it is not a government. It is a piece of machinery, and machinery does not stand for re-election. 

George Orwell understood the shape of this long before the technology caught up with the instinct. “Big Brother is Watching You,” he wrote, and the horror of it was never the watching alone. It was that people came to accept the watching as the price of safety, and then to be grateful for it. The gate is not yet closed. The legislation has not yet passed. The infrastructure is not yet complete. But the direction of travel is clear. And if you accept “online safety” laws at face value, you are helping to close the gate behind you.

Once every account, search, post, payment, message and website visit is tied to a verified identity, the internet stops being a public square and becomes a monitored enclosure. And the child who was meant to be protected will grow up into an adult who has never known anything else. That is not safety. That is surveillance. And it is being sold to you as kindness. The Ministry of Truth does not arrive shouting censorship. It arrives smiling, with safeguarding legislation. Papers please.