Bench Marks

Magistrates are not trained to hear the cases of people who, if convicted, would be sent to prison for more than six months. They were not selected for that role. They had not applied for it. The last time that this was attempted, then they all had to be retrained, as will have to happen again. But the scheme was still abandoned after a few months, because the prisons were full while there had been no reduction in the Crown Court backlog. There is a serious shortage of magistrates, who are not paid a penny and who of course signed up on that understanding, and there is a serious shortage of their legal advisers.

There are people who need to be sent to prison for a very long time. I have drunk tea in front of Coronation Street with them. I have walked around exercise yards with them, talking about the weather. I have showered with them. I have turned to face the wall so that they might defecate, and they have done the same for me.

But if your sentence allowed for your release after less than 12 months, then you were obviously not bad enough to have been sent to prison at all, to spend 23 hours of the day either in front of the television or asleep. At an average annual cost to the public purse of £46,696, which is £127.93 per day, what good purpose does that serve? Let me assure you that there is absolutely none.

Incarceration should be for such as the five-year stretches handed down by judges after juries had convicted the directors and senior executives of United Utilities of having dumped more than 140 million litres of raw sewage into Windermere between 2021 and 2023 at times when it was not permitted. Dumping that would be known to future generations as one of the last acts of the lunatically privatised water companies, before the emergency renationalisation of Thames Water for nothing, since no one on the open market would have paid a penny for the shares, had set off the chain of events that had finally restored both sanity and sanitation.

Inherit The Wind

Inheritance tax is paid only on the estates of people who died richer than 24 out of 25 people who died in Britain that year. Ask almost anyone whether they had ever been a beneficiary of an estate that had been subject to inheritance tax. If they have, then they are probably in politics or its schoolfriend media.

If inheritance tax is unpopular, then that is because far more people expect to pay it than ever would. The cuts that would be necessary to abolish it, or to reduce it considerably, would be very, very, very unpopular, indeed. But if this or any other tax were going to go up, then we should all want to see something for that.

Rather than, for example, the abolition of the two pound bus fares. Having introduced those, the Conservatives would of course vote to retain them. As would the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and Reform UK. All just in time for the English county council elections.

Decision Time: The Race To Lead

I was hardly the target audience, but I thought that Kemi Badenoch did better than Robert Jenrick. "The Conservative Party is in a hole. Let's get all our best players on the pitch"? Where did he go to school? But two lost by-elections, and either of them would be finished as Leader. To Reform UK, and the strategy would have failed. To anyone else, and it would have been the wrong strategy. One of each, and both.

When the rules on MPs' presenting television programmes changed, then Nigel Farage will presumably give up his seat to retain his million pound gig on GB News, and the Conservatives would have done well if they were to take back Clacton. But Reform won all of five seats, one of those was with the incumbent, and most of its second places are to Labour, although even most of those are too distant to be flipped, while most of the rest, including here at North Durham, would depend on coming through the middle of a divided left-leaning electorate.

The Conservatives' big losses were to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. They even lost twice as many seats to the Greens as Labour did, having suffered major losses to them at the local elections. Liz Truss lost her seat to Labour. Hexham, which until this year had only ever returned a Conservative MP, was a major centre of UKIP activity back in the day. It was won by Labour. The Lib Dems are already doing victory laps. They took the seats from which Theresa May and Michael Gove had retired, they took David Cameron's old seat, and they took Boris Johnson's first seat, which he had taken over from Michael Heseltine. Based on unfolding developments, they have barely started.

Both of this evening's questions on immigration were from immigrants. Jenrick's was from an Australian, and Badenoch's was from some sort of Eastern European in his early twenties, who could not have been here five minutes. For a good half a decade, I have observed at a distance what looks like organised Rightist immigration from several parts of the world straight into certain activist networks in and around London. It is not an awful lot of people. But it does not need to be.

I did wonder whether we might have been on the brink of seeing national prestige publications that were written by people who really did hold socially conservative views, but unless Sir Paul Marshall acquired the Telegraph titles and reshaped them on clearly Holy Trinity Brompton lines, then there is no sign of that. He has appointed Michael Gove as Editor of The Spectator, and of course Gove has endorsed Kamala Harris. Badenoch declined to answer the question, and Jenrick was not even asked it. Yet within 18 months, even either of those is probably going to be overthrown from the left.

Gove says that he is following Dick Cheney, and unsurprisingly he is. No one doubts that George W. Bush and all the old Project for the New American Century ghouls voted for Joe Biden in 2020. This time, they are saying it out loud. Bill Kristol and Eliot Cohen, Karl Rove and the Cheneys, are all actively campaigning not only for Harris, but with her. Harris's and Biden's Democratic Party is the Republican Party of Bush and Cheney. Why would you vote for that? Why would Gove not? And if The Spectator endorsed the Conservative Party in 2029, as of course it will, then know that it was at least one of the branch offices of the Biden-Harris and Harris-Walz Democratic Party. Be it led by Badenoch, Jenrick, or anyone else. The Guardian, most obviously, will endorse Labour. On exactly the same basis.

Barack Obama is annoyed that black men are not overly keen on Harris, but if anything they are giving her too much of the benefit of the doubt, considering how many of them she kept locked up past their release dates in California as Thirteenth Amendment slave labour for her corporate donors. Both of her parents were immigrants, as was his black parent. James Baldwin said that Bobby Kennedy had "got here last week". If you had a black ancestor in the United States in 1924, then you almost certainly had one in 1824, you therefore had one on that territory in 1724, and you had at least one in 1624. But no one like that has ever been on the ticket of either party. And they know it.

Grunt and Smell

In eight years, Christopher Chope and his ilk have gone from "Theresa May can't be Leader because she doesn't have children" to "Kemi Badenoch can't be Leader because she does".

Most of my generation understood that Harry Enfield's Tory Boy was a joke. But not quite all. Step forward Robert Jenrick.

After two hours of Badenoch versus Jenrick on GB News, switch over to All Creatures Great and Small. If you could tell the difference, then you would not have had enough to drink.

A String of Controversies

Skwawkbox writes:

Keir Starmer and Health Secretary Wes Streeting have gone to war on unemployed people they consider to be overweight – with a clear indication they intend widening it to the general population, with an implicit threat that they will be refused NHS treatment if they don’t take it – by forcing them to take a weight-loss drug that is known to have fatal side-effects and psychiatric impacts.

The new scheme will massively enrich drug manufacturer Eli Lilly & Co, which produces Tirzepatide, also marketed as ‘Mounjaro’, which will reportedly charge around £30 a dose initially given to 3,000 people weekly but eventually to millions. But US firm Lilly has a string of controversies, sharp practice and lawsuits in its wake that raise serious questions about Streeting’s decision to form a strategic partnership with the firm:

Zyprexa

Lilly faced thousands of lawsuits from people who claimed the anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa gave them diabetes and massive weight gain: 16% of people taking it gained almost five stones in their first year of taking it – but Lilly had given doctors a far lower number. Lilly paid out $1.2 billion to claimants.

The firm was then sued by 32 US states for illegally marketing the drug for ‘off-label’ use, especially as a dementia treatment – and pleaded guilty to a criminal charge of illegal marketing. It received a total penalty of $1.415 billion, including an $800 million civil settlement, a fine of $515 million and asset forfeiture of $100 million. The firm’s chief executive had emailed colleagues saying:

we must seize the opportunity to expand our work with Zyprexa in this same child-adolescent population [for off-label use].

Evista

Evista is a drug used to treat or prevent osteoporosis, the weaking of bones in the elderly and in post-menopausal women. The company, which had trained sales representatives to sell the drug as a preventative for cancer and heart disease – and told them to withhold information that its effectiveness against breast cancer was unproven – agreed to plead guilty to illegally marketing the drug and paid a fine of $36m. The company had also published a video promoting Evista as:

truly…the best drug for the prevention of all these diseases. 

Trulicity

Lilly’s drug for the treatment of diabetes (and used off-brand as a weight-loss drug) is the subject of a major lawsuit in the US alleging that the drug causes cancers, blindness, neurodegenerative disease ALS, deep vein thromboses, pulmonary embolisms, serious gastrointestinal problems:

the drug, which mimics the GLP-1 hormone in the body that aids in insulin secretion, causes severe side effects, including gastroparesis and pancreatic cancer. Legal documents also suggest that the manufacturer of Trulicity, Eli Lilly, knew of these risks and failed to adequately warn healthcare providers or patients of the dangers.

Insulin pricing

Between 2012 and 2016, Lilly almost doubled the price of its insulin, prompting letters from members of Congress about the sudden and huge price increases.

Canada lawsuit

Lilly sued the Canadian government for US$500m in 2013, claiming it had violated the North American Free Trade Agreement by letting Canadian courts to invalidate patents for two of its drugs. The courts had found one patent invalid because the company’s drug study had lasted only seven weeks and involved only twenty-two patients. The other – for Zyprexa – was invalidated because the drug did not meet its promised usefulness. The company lost the case in 2017.

This is the firm that Streeting and his boss Keir Starmer trumpeted getting into bed with and whose drug – with its fatal side-effects – they plan to force on thousands and ultimately millions. Continuing its targeting of the vulnerable, the government has also announced that it will make people in hospital with mental health issues meet ‘work coaches’ – who have the power to impose punitive benefit sanctions on them – to ‘help’ them into work.

Labour has already announced policies that it knows will cost thousands of lives and has been exposed failing even to do assessments of the impacts of other policies. Both Starmer and Streeting have accepted large donations from private health companies and investors.

It Does Not Work Well

Hannah Sharland writes:

A report on the South London scheme that put job advisers into NHS hospitals is stacked with statistical biases. That being the case, it means that the positive findings from it are largely bogus. Of course, this happens to be the very same programme Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) boss Liz Kendall has lauded for its employment “results” and “dramatic” mental health outcomes.

As it turns out then, the existing scheme Kendall has been parading as a pretext for rolling out job advisers for patients with “serious” mental health problems is not the resounding success the DWP secretary has quite made it out to be. Crucially, if anything, it pours cold water on the egregious notion that work is always good for people’s mental health.

Of course, it’s not really surprising – since the Canary and others have repeatedly warned DWP-NHS integration like this is a dangerous and flawed idea. However, this bunk evidence should be another nail in the coffin of Kendall’s alarming project to put job advisers into more healthcare settings.

DWP mental health ward infiltration

On Wednesday 16 October, the BBC published a puff piece on Kendall’s plans to post job advisers in hospitals.

Initially, the BBC gave over the entire article to Kendall, in what it boasted as an “exclusive interview” with the DWP boss. Presumably due to rightful backlash against the scheme and odious piece of fawning stenography, the Canary noticed it has since updated this. Now, the article carries quotes from disability charities challenging it.

This included Scope’s executive director of strategy James Taylor, who underscored that:

We need to see evidence that work coaches being sent to visit seriously ill people works, and doesn’t cause distress.

Well, the Canary went in search of this so-called “evidence” for the DWP mental health plans. And let’s just say to start that it’s not exactly solid proof for Kendall’s claim to the BBC that:

the results of getting people into work have been dramatic, and the evidence clearly shows that it is better for their mental health. 

Kendall and the DWP are basing this on a programme that South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust have had in place.

So, we dug out an evaluation of the Work Well scheme there. Researchers from mental health organisation the McPin Foundation carried out the independent analysis of the scheme. It’s from 2020, was updated in 2022, and reviewed three years of the programme from 2017 onwards. Obviously, it’s likely this is – at least in part – the ‘results’ Kendall was crooning over. However, they’re hardly anything to write home about. In particular, it found that out of 551 participants:

28% (152) found employment by the time the project ended.
25% (140) were in paid employment when it finished.
10% (57) had stayed in this job for at least six months.

Far from the “dramatic” results Kendall claimed then.

Sly statistical selection bias

By contrast, in terms of mental health outcomes, ostensibly, the programme did help. That is, until you scratch a little under the surface. This was where some sly statistical gymnastics came in to tell the story the programme clearly wanted to project.

The report measured participants’ anxiety and depression over three separate periods in time. Notably, it found from the start of employment they both decreased at each time point. The evaluation isn’t completely clear here. It says it assessed people at three months on and then further at six, nine, and twelve months. Of course, it gives only two extra time points after the baseline, yet it doesn’t clarify which of these points in time they actually were.

Furthermore, there was a ‘but’, and a significant one at that. Specifically, the evaluation applied this to only the 57 participants who were still in work at six months or more. In other words, it didn’t assess the mental health of nearly 500 participants on the scheme. These were people it said had “disengaged” or left the project altogether.

What we don’t know then, is why those people dropped out or drew back their engagement with it. And of course, it’s very plausible that some of these people did so because the scheme – and work itself – was making their mental health worse.

Basing results solely on the people who maintained employment beyond six months in itself is clear selection bias.

DWP mental health plans: ignoring people who dropped out

The report goes to little effort to find out why a) some people didn’t stay in employment, and b) the impact the programme had on their mental health. It simply noted that some had resigned, others had their contracts come to an end, a few were dismissed, and one hadn’t passed a training test.

Nor did it really assess the mental health of those that participated in the scheme, but didn’t start a job, or dropped out altogether. It’s blatant selection bias to only look at the people staying in their jobs for six months or more – not least because it’s people with less severe mental health problems who are more likely to be able to work anyway.

On top of this, the report conducted in-depth interviews with some participants. From these emerged a swathe of glowing praise for the programme.

However, confirmation bias struck here again. For starters, out of a pool of 551 participants, it did these with only eleven of those. Once again, these were evidently among those who’d stayed engaged with the programme. At the time of the interviews, five of these were volunteering, three working, and one was studying part-time.

Here too then, it ignored the fact that people who’d maintained contact with the scheme were more likely to have had positive experiences with it. It didn’t appear to interview people who’d dropped out of it, or attempt to find their reasons for doing so. The report also solicited the views of eight Work Well staff, and six stakeholders from organisations that referred or took people on from the project. Unsurprisingly, they too largely hailed the programme.

Individual Placement and Support (IPS): more dodgy ‘evidence’

Besides all these issues, the background to the report made the bold claim that:

Individual Placement and Support (IPS) models for people with mental health problems are well evidenced

Despite the brazen assertion, it doesn’t actually reference any of the said evidence for this. Much further down the report it states:

Individual Placement and Support (IPS) models in the UK have achieved modest outcomes for people with severe mental health problems (Howard et al, 2010), where 13% of IPS clients retained competitive employment after one-year follow-up. In another UK study, 35% of people who saw an employment specialist within a mental health team after one year follow up (Marwaha et al, 2014).

So, that would be, barely over a tenth in one instance, and little over a third in another one in employment a year after participating in the scheme. Of course, the year on review doesn’t exactly show long-term retention. Aside from that, these studies are now over a decade old. None of this exactly screams “well evidenced”. 

Yet funnily enough, this is exactly the guff claim its own creators have made about it too. The Canary’s Steve Topple has pointed out the problems with this before, highlighting that:

The creators of IPS claim it’s evidence-based. However, one study found IPS only got people into work for a limited time. After six years, there was not a significant gap in employment outcomes between IPS and people who had standard psychiatric treatment.

Additionally, he underscored another more recent study that found:

Moreover, the success of IPS in the UK is questionable, too. Between January 2016 and March 2019:

31% of IPS participants started a job.

22% kept that job for at least six weeks.

12% kept that job for at least six months.

Hardly a resounding success. 

Most significantly though, these employment statistics tell us absolutely nothing about the mental health impacts of IPS on participants. Why? Because the studies haven’t measured it. This is, of course once again, precisely the problem.

Care not job advisers in hospitals

Ultimately then, the report doesn’t actually give us an accurate picture of participant’s experiences of the programme. So, Kendall’s claim that “the results have been dramatic” is quite a stretch at best. At worst, it’s wilful manipulation of reality.

This is because, while this evaluation might be flawed, as we previously pointed out, other DWP reports HAVE shown the devastating impacts of linking work as a health outcome. And the picture they’ve painted has been one of harm – of actively making people sicker – and putting their lives at risk.

The simple fact is, people accessing mental health services in hospitals categorically do not need DWP job advisers sticking their noses into their care.

The government is pushing these DWP mental health plans, knowing full well it’s evidence for doing so is self-fulfilling bullshit. It’s hard to see it as anything less than the eugenicist urges of a DWP hell-bent on coercing mental health patients into work.

However, people living with serious mental health problems do not need career advice. They need compassion and care. But that’s the two things that Kendall, Starmer and company hardly have a single fibre of between the lot of them.

We Must Prioritise Improving Care

The Guardian is to be commended for having published these contributions. Rachel Clarke writes:

Christiaan Barnard, the surgeon who performed the world’s first heart transplant, vividly skewered the notion of patients “freely” choosing to have such dangerous, experimental surgery. They were, he wrote, like someone chased by a lion to the bank of a river filled with crocodiles, who decides to hurl themselves into the water: “For a dying man, it is not a difficult decision because he knows he is at the end … But you would never accept the odds if there were no lion.” Barnard captures a fundamental flaw in libertarianism that is horribly pertinent, whether we like it or not, to Kim Leadbeater’s choice at the end of life bill. The freedom to choose, so superficially seductive, can disguise all manner of coercion.

Proponents of assisted dying love to ridicule this concern as centring on a few “greedy relatives wanting to bump off Granny”. But it’s not. It’s something far uglier and more pervasive that involves you, me, every one of us. It’s that in Britain, in 2024, we permit such wretched underfunding of palliative care, social care and healthcare in general that people with terminal illnesses can be left to rot behind closed doors – out of sight, out of mind – by a society that claims to care.

The brutal truth is that only a tiny proportion of hospice and palliative care is NHS funded, the rest – unforgivably – relying on charity cake sales and sponsored marathons. So much for “from cradle to grave”. Rather than truly caring about dying people, then, we allow some of them to suffer avoidable pain, avoidable indignity, that could be averted by investment in threadbare services.

Economically speaking, assisting someone to die is, of course, far cheaper than ensuring they have the care to make their life worth living. So, sure, we can all nod at those glib assurances that a new law will rigorously safeguard patients from being driven into ending their life prematurely. But given what we already permit? Those “safeguards” are a comforting, yet deeply dishonest, delusion.

As Barnard implied, we must make sure that these patients faced with so few choices still have as many as we can give them – which means the best palliative and social care possible.

Lucy Webster writes:

I’ll be the first to hold my hands up and admit: I used to be in favour of assisted dying. Nondisabled people are able to end their lives, so it seemed only fair that disabled people should have that option too.

Then Covid happened and I promptly changed my mind. Governments everywhere, including in the UK, made decision after decision about whose lives were worth saving and whose weren’t. Media commentators openly questioned why lockdowns were needed to protect the “already vulnerable”. And, most horrifyingly, where assisted dying is concerned, reports proliferated of doctors and other healthcare professionals imposing “do not resuscitate” orders on some disabled people without their or their families’ consent. It was clear to me that neither the state nor society at large can be trusted with any additional powers to take disabled people’s lives.

It’s not just what happened during Covid that changed my mind. Proponents of the choice at the end of life bill argue that it is tightly drawn and only those with six months or less to live will be allowed to die – if they freely choose to. But evidence from Canada shows that narrow rules can be loosened over time. Then there is the issue of whether a disabled person can ever be said to be making a free choice to die when decent health and social care is so hard to come by. No safeguards can possibly protect against the feeling of being a burden on family, or the anguish of living in a society that is so hostile to disabled people.

MPs backing the bill say they want to ease suffering at the end of life. But where are the laws to improve access to palliative care or increase support for unpaid carers? Without these, introducing the assisted dying bill during an acute care crisis just feels like another way for the state to say our lives are worth less than others.

Gaby Hinsliff writes:

Of course I want the right to die, at a time of my choosing. Who doesn’t seek autonomy over their own body, their most intimate destiny? I want it like I want the vote, legal abortion, no to mean no; and, obviously, I want choice for those suffering horribly dragged-out ends. What troubles me is what my individual freedom to die means for others – especially the vulnerable and powerless, for whom “choice” in political contexts can prove illusory.

I worry less about relatives bumping off Granny than grannies concluding they’re more use dead than alive to struggling children, or domineering, abusive partners losing patience with nursing a spouse. But mostly I worry about mean-spirited future governments, balking at the cost of an ageing population, nudging us towards a choice that’s barely a choice at all between a threadbare NHS and a swift, cheap exit.

Already hospices rely on running charity shops for their funding: as the palliative care team explained when my father was dying, in his area that means only 15 hospice beds per 101,000-odd residents, so you can say you want one but nothing is guaranteed. It reminded me of the birth plans pregnant women painstakingly complete, an illusion of choice sometimes shattered by actually giving birth. My father’s care at home was superb, but sadly that isn’t universal. So choice must begin with properly funded, specialist palliative care and pain management that doesn’t actively frighten people off to Dignitas.

Under Kim Leadbeater’s thoughtful proposals, the right to die applies once doctors think you have less than six months to live, which sounds clear cut if, like me, you had always imagined terminal illness to reach a definitive “sorry, but there’s nothing more we can do” point. But so often it’s blurrier: a process of difficult choices – do you want this treatment that may buy more time, but with a rotten quality of life? – and confusion about whose advice to trust, which feels too delicate for any suspicion of added pressure. In some ways, I envy people who can back this bill: I want what they want. I’m just not sure it’s safe.

And Nims Obunge writes:

The debate on assisted dying in the UK must consider all perspectives, especially those of minority ethnic communities, including African, Caribbean and Asian backgrounds. For many of these communities, life is sacred, and taking one’s own life is considered taboo or shameful, regardless of the level of suffering. We believe life is God’s gift, and that the end of life is his decision – not ours. Family structures are built around providing care and support, ensuring loved ones are not left to suffer alone but are surrounded by their community until their natural death. Legalising assisted dying would challenge these deeply held values and disrupt the faith and cultural role of family in providing end-of-life care.

In the UK, systemic inequalities in healthcare, particularly affecting Black and minority ethnic communities, remain a significant issue. These groups often experience poorer access to quality healthcare and are disproportionately affected by poverty. Before legalising assisted dying, the government must address these root causes of suffering. Instead of offering death as a solution, efforts should be made to combat these inequalities and improve access to palliative care, enabling all individuals to live well rather than focus on dying well. Legalising assisted dying without fixing these disparities would only reinforce existing mistrust of public institutions, particularly healthcare, within these communities.

As a society, we struggle with the notion of suffering and often seek to eliminate it. However, when we cannot alleviate suffering, the solution should not be to end the sufferer’s life. We must instead co-suffer with those in pain, advocating for justice and healthcare reforms that ensure quality care for all. Lord Darzi’s review of the NHS and social care system highlighted a system already struggling to meet the needs of the population, especially minority ethnic groups. Further justifying assisted dying would be a disservice to a healthcare system meant to preserve life and possibly increase its failing of an already vulnerable group. We must prioritise improving care, rather than sanctioning premature death.

Justice Delayed: Day 113

Even assuming, and it was far from clear, that the Crown had presented any evidence whatever on the morning of Wednesday 19 June, then no later than the afternoon of Thursday 20 June, I would have been found not guilty unanimously in the time that it took to walk to the jury room and send a note to the judge. On Monday 6 November, the only Prosecution witness did not turn up, having been suspended from the Police. Since then, he has been "asked to resign" because of his conduct of my case. On Friday 14 June, my barrister formally complained.

Lo and behold, on the morning of Sunday 16 June, enough Police Officers turned up at my door to take down an al-Qaeda cell, and behaved roughly as if that were what they were doing. Everyone is laughing, and not at me. Late that night, a nonsense additional charge, quite different from the stated grounds of the arrest, was added, with no expectation that it could possibly stick, but in order to postpone what would have been that week's open-and-shut acquittal. Be at Durham Crown Court on Wednesday 26 February 2025, almost exactly two years, although we dispute the timeline, after the original complaint was allegedly made. When I shall be found not guilty. But the process is the punishment.

Rather than embarrass itself any further, the Crown did not even ask for me to be remanded. Nor did it dispute that the Police had found nothing on my laptop or on my phone, even though the latest allegation therefore cannot be true. And nor did it dispute that its only witness had been sacked from the Police because of my case, or that this latest action against me was a revenge attack for my barrister's complaint, both of which are now on Monday 17 June's record of Newton Aycliffe Magistrates' Court, as is the cleanliness of my devices, of which the Police are nevertheless keeping possession, requiring me to replace them at considerable expense.

I wish that my solicitor had used such terms as "Mafia hit" and "punishment beating". I am using them now. This is a punishment beating for the sacked policeman. And it is a Mafia hit by some Fredo Corleone, because the latest complaint was supposedly made before I had withdrawn from the General Election, a withdrawal that has rendered it pointless in its own terms. Other than the unpaid position to which I was elected unopposed well over a year ago, and which has therefore been kept vacant ever since, I have no intention of contesting another election to public office.

Welcome to the Starmer State, which institutional Britain has treated as the status quo since Keir Starmer became Labour Leader. I am not the only dissident that it persecutes, and things are already getting an awful lot worse now that Starmer is Prime Minister.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 462

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of its organised persecution of the opponents and critics of Keir Starmer, which is its principal national priority.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from seeking the position of General Secretary of Unite the Union on a programme including disaffiliation from the Labour Party, a proposal that would be hugely popular two years into a Starmer Government.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a thinktank to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually also a fortnightly satirical magazine.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from taking journalistic, political or other paid work for fear of losing my entitlement to Legal Aid.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service out of the same racism that has caused it to refuse to prosecute the Police Officers in the case of Stephen Lawrence.

And I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to incite my politically motivated murder, a murder that the CPS has already decided would never lead to any prosecution.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Board, currently Monica Burch, Stephen Parkinson, Simon Jeffreys, Dr Subo Shanmuganathan, and Kathryn Stone.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the CPS senior leadership, currently Tristan Bradshaw, Dawn Brodrick, Mike Browne, Steve Buckingham, Matthew Cain, Gregor McGill, Grace Ononiwu, and Baljhit Ubey.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Audit and Risk Assurance Committee, currently Simon Jeffreys, Stephen Parkinson, Michael Dunn, Deborah Harris, Dr Subo Shanmuganathan.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Nominations, Leadership and Remuneration Committee, currently Kathryn Stone, Stephen Parkinson, and Monica Burch.

And each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the 279 members of staff of the CPS North East Area, by definition including, but not restricted to, Chief Crown Prosecutor Gail Gilchrist, and the Area Business Manager, Ian Brown.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The CPS Challenge: Day 462

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of its organised persecution of the opponents and critics of Keir Starmer, which is its principal national priority.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from seeking the position of General Secretary of Unite the Union on a programme including disaffiliation from the Labour Party, a proposal that would be hugely popular two years into a Starmer Government.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a thinktank to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually also a fortnightly satirical magazine.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from taking journalistic, political or other paid work for fear of losing my entitlement to Legal Aid.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service out of the same racism that has caused it to refuse to prosecute the Police Officers in the case of Stephen Lawrence.

And I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to incite my politically motivated murder, a murder that the CPS has already decided would never lead to any prosecution.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Board, currently Monica Burch, Stephen Parkinson, Simon Jeffreys, Dr Subo Shanmuganathan, and Kathryn Stone.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the CPS senior leadership, currently Tristan Bradshaw, Dawn Brodrick, Mike Browne, Steve Buckingham, Matthew Cain, Gregor McGill, Grace Ononiwu, and Baljhit Ubey.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Audit and Risk Assurance Committee, currently Simon Jeffreys, Stephen Parkinson, Michael Dunn, Deborah Harris, Dr Subo Shanmuganathan.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Nominations, Leadership and Remuneration Committee, currently Kathryn Stone, Stephen Parkinson, and Monica Burch.

And each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the 279 members of staff of the CPS North East Area, by definition including, but not restricted to, Chief Crown Prosecutor Gail Gilchrist, and the Area Business Manager, Ian Brown.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 1166

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

And I invite each and every Member of Parliament whose constituency fell wholly or partly in County Durham to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 1166

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

And I invite each and every Member of Parliament whose constituency fell wholly or partly in County Durham to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Lording It Over?

Has the House of Commons stopped dividing on Second Reading itself? On the last two occasions, MPs have bothered only to defeat the reasoned amendment, and then headed straight to the bar.

But on that amendment, in the only division that was held last night on the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill that is the talk of every foodbank, while Reform UK voted with the Official Opposition, three out of four stripes of Unionist from Northern Ireland voted with the Government, and the DUP abstained. They know who has never done a thing for them, and never will.

In similar vein, when the old Queen was still alive, then Richard Tice repeatedly went on record that she should be succeeded by President Nigel Farage. Yet look at him now. Do not try and look at Farage, though. Not on that or most other Division Lists, anyway. Any more than in Clacton. If you want to see him, then you need to look at Freeview 236. He should have been given a peerage instead.

Job Lot

HCRG Care Group, formerly Virgin Care, has been awarded a £1.3 billion contract to deliver all community health services on behalf of the Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire Integrated Care Board. A joint bid by NHS providers was rejected. This has been announced on the day that it has been made known that Alan Milburn was to be appointed as lead non-executive director of the Department of Health and Social Care.

The 10-year plan for the NHS is being written by Paul Corrigan. In 1997, Milburn, Corrigan and Tony Blair brought the concept of NHS privatisation from the outer fringes of the thinktank circuit to the heart of government. Since then, it has been the policy of all three parties except under Jeremy Corbyn, and of most Labour MPs and all Labour Party staffers continuously. The new intake of Labour MPs has been carefully chosen to be sound on this highly lucrative issue.

Labour's 1997 pledge card had promised to abolish the NHS internal market, and the final week of its campaign had been a countdown of days to save the NHS. Those were barefaced lies, and the opposite of the truth. Here we are again. Except that Wes Streeting is perfectly open about his bought and paid for intentions. He seeks and accepts such income streams because he agrees with what they stand for.

Back when Milburn was running a Newcastle Trotskyist bookshop called Days of Hope, known to its clientele as "Haze of Dope", it was obviously costing far more than it could possibly have been making, but it clearly suited someone's purposes to have a distraction from the Communist Party bookshop down the road. Yet in 1979, Corrigan was a parliamentary candidate for the Communist Party. Think on.

Elsewhere in the jobs market, Sue Gray's position as Envoy to the Nations and Regions looks set to be quietly dropped. At a stately 67, she will instead be given a hefty payoff and a peerage. We in the provinces will not be living in the Gray Areas after all.

And the crackdown on MPs presenting television programmes may not deprive the viewers of GB News of Lee Anderson. It will certainly not deprive them of Nigel Farage. GB News pays Anderson £100,000 per year, slightly more than his MP's salary, but still higher. He may decide that his MP's expenses would make it worth his while to keep his seat on the benches rather than on the sofa, but Farage's income from Sir Paul Marshall is very nearly that much per month, so about a million pounds per year, and unlike Anderson he was on that channel before he ever became an MP. Since his election, Farage has voted only five times, and only twice on anything with legislative effect.

Be in no doubt, then, that Farage would chose GB News over Clacton. Why would he not? Losing his newly vacated seat in a byelection would be quite the blooding in for his latest party. Even with him, its only possible gains would be from Labour, such as here at North Durham, and in most of those not very numerous cases, again including here, they could be made only by coming through the middle of split left-leaning vote. Without Farage, Reform UK would make no gains anywhere, and indeed lose its existing seats. To save it from that, would he take a significant loss of platform, and a colossal cut in income?

Ten Myths About Assisted Suicide

The legend that is Professor Kevin Yuill writes:

Today, a bill hoping to legalise ‘assisted dying’ for the terminally ill in England and Wales was formally introduced to parliament. It is due to be debated in the House of Commons at the end of next month. Although it is a private members bill, put forward by backbench Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, prime minister Keir Starmer says he is committed to allowing a vote on the issue.

If the parliamentary debate is anything like the one that’s been happening elsewhere, this doesn’t bode well. Discussion around assisted suicide and euthanasia (ASE) is dominated by emotional pleas, logical inconsistencies and outright myths.

Here are 10 of the most egregious:

1) The British people overwhelmingly support ASE

The support rate for ASE, we have been told over the years, is ‘more than 90 per cent’. The assisted-dying movement leans heavily on a supposedly supportive public to justify itself.

However, support has cooled as of late. More in-depth polling shows that British people are actually deeply ambivalent about legalising ASE. A poll commissioned earlier this year by the group Living and Dying Well found that legalisation came 22nd out of 23 issues in terms of importance to voters, only beating ‘regional devolution’. It also showed that, out of 54 per cent of those who gave an opinion on ASE (nearly a fifth of respondents put ‘don’t know’), most respondents favoured it in principle but didn’t think it was safe or practical.

An even more recent poll this month found that, while 63 per cent of British people favour legalising assisted dying, less than half (45 per cent) want their MP to vote for the law. A majority also say they don’t know enough about how it would work in practice to support a change in the law. Even a poll commissioned by pro-ASE campaign group Dignity in Dying this year found that fewer than half of all Britons wanted their MP to vote for ASE.

2) Assisted dying is not suicide

‘Assisted dying’ sounds much more pleasant than ‘assisted suicide’. But if a doctor hands you a gun and you shoot yourself, we all know that you would be committing suicide. If she hands you a rope and you hang yourself, that’s suicide. Yet if you have six months left to live and she hands you deadly poison and you ingest it knowingly, we are meant to believe that this is not suicide but ‘assisted dying’? ASE campaigners are desperate to hide the reality of what they want to legalise.

3) Safeguards can ensure that ASE is safe and limited

Leadbeater said earlier this month that, ‘wherever [an assisted-dying] law has been introduced… and it’s got strict, limited criteria with proper safeguards and protections, it hasn’t been widened’. She claimed there is no danger of a ‘slippery slope’. The trouble is, proponents of ASE tend to spin the globe, cherry-picking their examples of supposedly ‘safe’ assisted-dying laws.

They invariably ignore the Netherlands, where at least 39 people with learning disabilities or autism have been euthanised. They also turn a blind eye to Belgium, which has changed the law to include children. Most egregiously, the assisted-dying camp ignores Canada, pointing instead to Oregon, where ASE has been legal since 1997. ‘See?’, they say, ‘the safeguards work’. Except when they don’t.

There is no jurisdiction where ASE has been legalised where the eligibility criteria have not been relaxed. In Oregon, the definition of what constitutes a ‘terminal’ illness has been massively expanded – so much so that it can include mental illnesses like anorexia. Similarly, the ‘cooling off’ period for patients to change their minds has been cut from 14 days to less than 48 hours. Non-residents are now also allowed to apply for assisted suicides.

In Canada, the slide down the slippery slope has been even more dramatic. The Canadian government introduced its medical assistance in dying (MAID) programme in 2016 for those who were close to death and suffering unbearably. Just a few years later, in 2020, the eligibility criteria were expanded to those whose death was not ‘reasonably foreseeable’. A further vote to extend euthanasia to all those suffering from mental illness will take place in 2027.

This all follows a grim but undeniable logic. If death is redefined as medical treatment, how can it be denied to anyone who is ‘unbearably suffering’?

5) This is not a threat to the vulnerable

Assisted-suicide advocates insist there is no truth behind the claim that those at the margins of society will be placed most at risk from legalisation. It tends to be the educated and wealthy who opt for an assisted suicide, they say. Apparently, this proves that ASE is a freely made ‘choice’.

However, there are now numerous reports from Canada about people who asked for MAID because they were poor, homeless or could not afford medical treatment. Recent research found that at one hospital in Ontario, 58 per cent of requests for MAID were from people belonging to a lower socio-economic status (SES), despite the fact that only 39 per cent of the hospital’s catchment were ‘low SES’.

The story is similar in Oregon, where the number of yearly assisted deaths increased from 16 in 1998 to 278 in 2022. Over this time, patients’ health-funding status changed from predominantly private (65 per cent) to predominantly government-supported (80 per cent). This implies that, when ASE is first legalised, it is indeed taken up mostly by the comfortably off seeking a bespoke death. But it doesn’t take long before those who have little money or prospects start to view ASE not as a choice, but as their only option.

Not unlike eugenics at the turn of the last century, ASE is cleansing society of those who are shamefully seen as a drag on the economy.

6) This is about freedom

‘Each one of us should be free to make our own decisions about how we live – and die – as long as we don’t harm others’, says Professor Alice Roberts, vice-president of Humanists UK. This simple-minded argument is a recipe for approving – and presumably assisting in – any attempt to commit suicide, for whatever reason.

Surely the same logic could also apply to any kind of ‘consensual’ lethal violence. Should we not be able to engage in duelling, which kills only those who have consented to it? What about consensual cannibalism? Such arguments stretch the ‘harm principle’ beyond all recognition. Death, quite literally, destroys one’s freedom.

7) If you had experienced a bad death of a loved one, you would support ASE

This is a grotesque and insulting claim. Many of us have experienced bad deaths of loved ones and we still think legalising ASE is a horrible idea. This oft-repeated argument reveals that ASE advocacy is an emotional response to an awful situation, not a considered and thoughtful reflection about what should happen in law.

8) Britain’s suicide laws are unfit for purpose

According to Dignity in Dying and its supporters, the Suicide Act 1961 is ‘dangerous and cruel’, a ‘blanket ban’ on compassionate responses to the dying and a ‘broken law’. Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee once dramatically called the Suicide Act an ‘instrument of state torture’.

This is far from the truth. The Suicide Act decriminalised suicide, meaning that those who attempt it would no longer be prosecuted. It does, however, make it illegal to aid someone else’s suicide. This strikes a good balance. It signals not only that suicide is wrong and we ought to discourage it – but also that those who attempt suicide deserve our sympathy, not criminalisation. In other words, we do not want to punish those who feel they want to end their lives, but nor do we want to push the proverbial man teetering on the bridge.

How many people are even prosecuted under this supposedly cruel act of state torture? According to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), between 1 April 2009 and 31 March 2024, 187 assisted-suicide cases were referred to the police. Of these 187 cases, 127 were not proceeded with by the CPS and 36 cases were withdrawn by the police. Six cases are ongoing, four were successfully prosecuted. Eight were instead prosecuted as homicide and one case was acquitted. Even under our current laws, no one is now in prison for participating in a genuine mercy killing.

9) Britons suffer terrible deaths because ASE is not legal

Dignity in Dying’s own figures suggest that your chances of dying a terrible death are pretty small. ASE advocates make much of the fact that 17 people a day ‘suffer’ as they die – but that’s just one per cent of all daily deaths. In one report, Dignity in Dying follows this stat up with a dramatic flourish, saying that some ‘will retch at the stench of their own body rotting. Some will vomit their own faeces. Some will suffocate, slowly, inexorably, over several days.’ Dignity in Dying was forced to withdraw the video version of this report after Hospice UK said the film was ‘sensationalist and inaccurate’.

In any case, legalising ASE does not guarantee a ‘good’ death. A 2022 BMJ article found that, in the Netherlands, where euthanasia has been legal for more than 20 years, many dying patients still suffer pain and / or restlessness in their final moments.

10) There is no slippery slope

When I wrote the first iteration of this list for spiked 20 years ago, we lacked any real data on ASE. Now, we have extensive evidence from Oregon, Washington, Canada, the Netherlands and elsewhere. As a result, it is very difficult to maintain the idea that, once legalised, ASE will not expand, both in terms of numbers and ever-widening criteria.

In Canada, within less than a decade, euthanasia went from being a rare exception to something that ended the lives of an average of 36 people every day. More than four times as many people end their lives through ASE than through regular suicide.

The numbers dying have continually increased in every jurisdiction where ASE has been legalised. California has recently experienced a jump in cases. Belgium has gone from 235 deaths in 2003 to 3,423 in 2023. In the Netherlands, euthanasia increased from four per cent of all deaths in 2022 to five per cent in 2023.

Yes, the slippery slope is very real, although this isn’t even the most apt metaphor. We should think of legalising ASE as opening the floodgates to something deeply sinister.

Figuring It All Out

Let joy be unconfined that inflation is “only” 1.7 per cent. Things are “only” that much more expensive than the last time that anyone officially checked. Whoop-de-doo! Food prices are out of control, and energy prices are about to go through the roof again. Just at the triple lock on the pension will not kick in until after the withdrawal of the Winter Fuel Payment had carried away an additional four thousand pensioners, so today’s inflation figure will set the rate of other benefits after this very expensive winter. The pension is a benefit, so if there is a triple lock on that, then why not on the others? Two out of five Universal Credit claimants are in work.

The standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. The whole thing is a racket, and that in a country that, while not necessarily the sunniest, is uniquely blessed with coal, oil, gas and tides, as well as getting plenty of wind, as well as having turned out to have lithium, and as well as having once led the world both in nuclear power and in clean coal technology.

The issuing of currency is an act of the State, which is literally the creator of all money. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control. The responsibility of the Government is to ensure the supply of goods and services to be purchased with that currency.

It is impossible for the currency-issuing State to run out of money. Money “lent” to the Treasury by the Bank of England is money “lent” to the State by the State; such “debt” will never be called in, much less will bailiffs be sent round. Call this “the Magic Money Tree” if you will. There is no comparison between running the economy and managing a household budget, or even a business. There is no “national credit card” to “max out”. “Fiscal headroom” is only the gap between the Government’s tax and spending plans and what would be allowed under the fiscal rules that it sets for itself and changes frequently.

That is what both fiscal policy and monetary policy are for: to give the currency its value by controlling inflation to a politically chosen extent while encouraging certain politically chosen forms of behaviour, and while discouraging others, including economic equality, which is fundamental to social cohesion and thus to patriotism. There is no debt. It is an accounting trick. The Treasury, which is the State, has issued bonds to the Bank of England, which is the State. Even if those bonds were held by anyone else, then the State could simply issue itself with enough of its own free-floating, fiat currency to redeem them. There is no debt. There is no debt. There is no debt. 

Taxation is not where the State’s money comes from. Nothing is “unaffordable”, every recession is discretionary on the part of the Government, and there is no such thing as “taxpayers’ money”. Within and under that understanding, a tax of one to two per cent on assets above £10 million could abolish the two-child benefit cap 17 times over, while merely taxing each of Britain’s 173 billionaires down to one billion pounds per head would raise £1.1 trillion, an entire year’s tax take. Another accounting trick, but none the worse for that. Unlike increasing employers’ National Insurance contributions, which would depress both recruitment and next year’s pay rises.

There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. In Britain, we must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985.

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with it. Let there be solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, pipelines, or power stations. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners’ Strike. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all he rest of it. Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed. The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs.

Say it again, let us harness the power of the State, and deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of clean coal technology, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State. If we can do it, then we can afford it.

Sanction This

You too could have a body like this.

If there is a silver lining to this Government, then it is that people who might otherwise have been sympathetic to assisted suicide would be damned to see such power vested in the State while it was under such control. Wes Streeting has decided that those of the unemployed who also were part of the overweight majority were lab rats for intravenous medical experimentation. This country should be sanctioned.

As it is, then it is benefit claimants who are to be yet further sanctioned. There is to be State snooping into the bank accounts of people with nothing in them, but the line will have been crossed, so that it will come to us all sooner or later, and my money would be on sooner. No more Winter Fuel Payment for 90 per cent of pensioners. No more bus passes at all. The two-child benefit cap retained as a point of principle. PIP replaced with vouchers, an aspiration that, in relation to benefits in general, has been fundamental to Blairism from the very start, and never forget that the pension is a benefit. And the assessment procedure changed to reduce claims on mental health grounds by a fixed target amount, entirely regardless of clinical considerations.

John Harris gives Kemi Badenoch a well-deserved piece of his mind about neurodiversity and mental health, but it is Liz Kendall who is in government, planning to send hectoring Starmerrhoids into hospitals to jeer at the mentally ill to "pull yourself together" and "get a job". Will hospital authorities allow this? Will psychiatric nurses? Will psychiatrists? You have to be gravely ill to be hospitalised on mental health grounds. Assisted suicide, indeed. Like Streeting, and therefore also like Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, Kendall should be sanctioned in person by other states and by international bodies.

As should Starmer, David Lammy and Jonathan Reynolds for the continued British arming of Israel. Says Giorgia Meloni, who is a literally a Fascist and who tagged along with the WASP and WASP-adjacent defunding of UNRWA what seems like an aeon ago, "The Italian policy of completely blocking of all new licences is much more restrictive than that applied by our partners in France, Germany and the United Kingdom. We have blocked everything." Quite.

Meloni should ban members of the present British Government from Italy, as she should ban Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and logically therefore also Benjamin Netanyahu. Everywhere should at least until, in the British case, Starmer had walked the walk and sanctioned those Israelis. David Cameron was advised not to do so because it would have been, "political in the runup to the General Election." Give that a moment to sink in. The line now is "ongoing dialogue". With whom, and about what? With this Israeli Government, there is nothing left to discuss, if there ever was, and it is no longer open to discussion, if it ever was. Starmer and Lammy know this. As Cameron's advisers understood, they are actively on the side of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Sanction all four of them to Kingdom Come.

Justice Delayed: Day 112

Even assuming, and it was far from clear, that the Crown had presented any evidence whatever on the morning of Wednesday 19 June, then no later than the afternoon of Thursday 20 June, I would have been found not guilty unanimously in the time that it took to walk to the jury room and send a note to the judge. On Monday 6 November, the only Prosecution witness did not turn up, having been suspended from the Police. Since then, he has been "asked to resign" because of his conduct of my case. On Friday 14 June, my barrister formally complained.

Lo and behold, on the morning of Sunday 16 June, enough Police Officers turned up at my door to take down an al-Qaeda cell, and behaved roughly as if that were what they were doing. Everyone is laughing, and not at me. Late that night, a nonsense additional charge, quite different from the stated grounds of the arrest, was added, with no expectation that it could possibly stick, but in order to postpone what would have been that week's open-and-shut acquittal. Be at Durham Crown Court on Wednesday 26 February 2025, almost exactly two years, although we dispute the timeline, after the original complaint was allegedly made. When I shall be found not guilty. But the process is the punishment.

Rather than embarrass itself any further, the Crown did not even ask for me to be remanded. Nor did it dispute that the Police had found nothing on my laptop or on my phone, even though the latest allegation therefore cannot be true. And nor did it dispute that its only witness had been sacked from the Police because of my case, or that this latest action against me was a revenge attack for my barrister's complaint, both of which are now on Monday 17 June's record of Newton Aycliffe Magistrates' Court, as is the cleanliness of my devices, of which the Police are nevertheless keeping possession, requiring me to replace them at considerable expense.

I wish that my solicitor had used such terms as "Mafia hit" and "punishment beating". I am using them now. This is a punishment beating for the sacked policeman. And it is a Mafia hit by some Fredo Corleone, because the latest complaint was supposedly made before I had withdrawn from the General Election, a withdrawal that has rendered it pointless in its own terms. Other than the unpaid position to which I was elected unopposed well over a year ago, and which has therefore been kept vacant ever since, I have no intention of contesting another election to public office.

Welcome to the Starmer State, which institutional Britain has treated as the status quo since Keir Starmer became Labour Leader. I am not the only dissident that it persecutes, and things are already getting an awful lot worse now that Starmer is Prime Minister.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 461

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of its organised persecution of the opponents and critics of Keir Starmer, which is its principal national priority.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from seeking the position of General Secretary of Unite the Union on a programme including disaffiliation from the Labour Party, a proposal that would be hugely popular two years into a Starmer Government.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a thinktank to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually also a fortnightly satirical magazine.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from taking journalistic, political or other paid work for fear of losing my entitlement to Legal Aid.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service out of the same racism that has caused it to refuse to prosecute the Police Officers in the case of Stephen Lawrence.

And I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to incite my politically motivated murder, a murder that the CPS has already decided would never lead to any prosecution.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Board, currently Monica Burch, Stephen Parkinson, Simon Jeffreys, Dr Subo Shanmuganathan, and Kathryn Stone.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the CPS senior leadership, currently Tristan Bradshaw, Dawn Brodrick, Mike Browne, Steve Buckingham, Matthew Cain, Gregor McGill, Grace Ononiwu, and Baljhit Ubey.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Audit and Risk Assurance Committee, currently Simon Jeffreys, Stephen Parkinson, Michael Dunn, Deborah Harris, Dr Subo Shanmuganathan.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Nominations, Leadership and Remuneration Committee, currently Kathryn Stone, Stephen Parkinson, and Monica Burch.

And each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the 279 members of staff of the CPS North East Area, by definition including, but not restricted to, Chief Crown Prosecutor Gail Gilchrist, and the Area Business Manager, Ian Brown.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The CPS Challenge: Day 461

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of its organised persecution of the opponents and critics of Keir Starmer, which is its principal national priority.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from seeking the position of General Secretary of Unite the Union on a programme including disaffiliation from the Labour Party, a proposal that would be hugely popular two years into a Starmer Government.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a thinktank to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually also a fortnightly satirical magazine.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from taking journalistic, political or other paid work for fear of losing my entitlement to Legal Aid.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service out of the same racism that has caused it to refuse to prosecute the Police Officers in the case of Stephen Lawrence.

And I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to incite my politically motivated murder, a murder that the CPS has already decided would never lead to any prosecution.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Board, currently Monica Burch, Stephen Parkinson, Simon Jeffreys, Dr Subo Shanmuganathan, and Kathryn Stone.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the CPS senior leadership, currently Tristan Bradshaw, Dawn Brodrick, Mike Browne, Steve Buckingham, Matthew Cain, Gregor McGill, Grace Ononiwu, and Baljhit Ubey.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Audit and Risk Assurance Committee, currently Simon Jeffreys, Stephen Parkinson, Michael Dunn, Deborah Harris, Dr Subo Shanmuganathan.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Nominations, Leadership and Remuneration Committee, currently Kathryn Stone, Stephen Parkinson, and Monica Burch.

And each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the 279 members of staff of the CPS North East Area, by definition including, but not restricted to, Chief Crown Prosecutor Gail Gilchrist, and the Area Business Manager, Ian Brown.

This post will appear daily until further notice.