Of Note

I did Winston Churchill yesterday, but there really should not be any politician on the banknotes of a monarchy. If there must be one, though, then it should be by far the most successful British politician in living memory, Queen Camilla, whose very title declares her astonishing ascent. She is at it again today, doing the #BelieveAllWomen line in the midst of the parliamentary progress of the Bill to abolish almost all trial by jury, even though rape will supposedly still be triable only by jury, and even though juries convicted in 76 per cent of rape cases. She may have access to information that was not in the public domain, she is a Privy Counsellor, and indeed a Counsellor of State alongside the man whom the Royal Family's own website still calls Prince Andrew.

One would have thought that both the famously bibliophile Queen, and the upper-middle-class gynocracy that was the Parliamentary Labour Party, would have raised enough objection to have kept Jane Austen on the tenner. On my stated principle, the sometime Robert Maxwell MP may be tricky. But the case for Jeffrey Epstein in unanswerable by or under a Government that had been appointed by Peter Mandelson last year, the year after Mandelson had handpicked the members of its Commons majority. That ought to enjoy crossparty support, since the Epstein Files named centrists, right-wing populists, right-wing elitists, and an anarcho-syndicalist libertarian socialist. At least unless Noam Chomsky would not vote either for the Green Party or for the Zarah Sultana wing of Your Party, then their proximity to his views and indeed to him should identify them as Epstein Class parties, and thus no more deserving of our votes than any of the others was.

War Footing

If Britain is not at war with Iran, then why ban the Quds Day march? By, or in support of, which proscribed organisation has it been organised? Yesterday saw that ban, the vote to abolish most jury trials while abolishing the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court, and the further progress of digital ID.

On that last, you may have thought that the People's Panel was called the House of Commons. But since apparently not, where does one apply to be on it? And then again, while the quality of debate on jury trials was very high on the side opposed to their erosion but woefully low on the side of the proponents, it was the proponents who won the vote. Rape will supposedly still be triable only by jury, and juries convict in 76 per cent of rape cases, so what is someone like Natalie Fleet going on about? And has anyone ever bothered to check Fleet's career-making version of her early life story? She was pregnant at 15, but how we do know that that was not by a boy from school?

Yesterday, for the first time since Dan Norris lost the Labour whip, the Labour Whips did not cast his proxy vote, so something about him is about to come out. There were 90 Labour abstentions, and while no one would suggest that, say, Yvette Cooper was making a political statement, no one would deny that about 80 of them were. If there really are several Labour MPs in discussion with the Greens about defection, then one trusts that none of them voted with the Government last night, or to withdraw the Winter Fuel Payment, or to keep the two-child benefit cap, among other examples.

Learn from Reform UK, which is hoovering up veterans of the Government that the electorate massively rejected two years ago, and whose poll lead is already starting to slip, three years before the next General Election. Neither Nigel Farage, nor the former Attorney General and Home Secretary Suella Braverman, turned up to vote to save trial by jury and the right of appeal. At the time of writing, Farage now says that Britain should keep out of the war with Iran, while Kemi Badenoch has the front to claim that she had never called for British involvement in it. British commanders boast nightly on social media about the sheer extent of that involvement. Most jury trials are to be abolished, along with the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court. We are all to be issued with digital ID. And the Quds Day march has been banned. Think on.

Kwasi and Crypto, Thai and Tether

Other than Nigel Farage, who could possibly think that anything involving Kwasi Kwarteng was an investment opportunity? Why would you want anyone of that mind as First Lord of the Treasury? But having taken £12 million from Christopher Harborne, Reform UK’s ties to cryptocurrencies are very much current and very far from cryptic.

There is being right-wing, and then there is having two kings. But do you have to take a Thai name to be naturalised in Thailand? If not, then why does Harborne have “Christopher Harborne” on his British passport, but “Chakrit Sakunkrit” on his Thai one? Harbone’s generosity has made Nigel Farage the political spokesman for cryptocurrencies, and specifically for Harbone’s Tether.

Yet the speculative value of cryptocurrencies is hurtling towards their intrinsic value of zero. A suspicious number of those who decry us sceptics of the cashless society also claim that we are under constant threat of cyberattacks, and a surprising number of those who are forthright against the cashless society are enthusiasts for cryptocurrencies, about which the clue is in the name. In the cashless economy, every penny that we spent would be tracked. Cryptocurrencies are beyond democratic political control. The combination of the two would be, and increasingly is, that level of tracking by those who were thus unaccountable.

Unaccountable not least because Tony Blair and Gordon Brown surrendered democratic political control over monetary policy, a surrender for which they had no electoral mandate but which they had plotted in Opposition, just as Keir Starmer and his cronies plotted fiscal drag, assisted suicide, puberty blockers, digital ID, facial recognition, the abolition of trial by jury, the taxation of family farms to the point that they would have to sell up to giant American agribusinesses, and much more to which we have yet to be made privy.

At least Brown did keep us out of the euro. Much to the chagrin of Peter Mandelson, who now enjoys the hospitality of George Osborne. Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin have vital information, with a book due out this year, about the Epstein network’s connections to cryptocurrencies. Osborne has written in the venerable pages of the Financial Times that Britain risked being “left behind” by stablecoins.

All that, and digital ID and facial recognition, too? Starmer has said that to access our own money, we would need the digital ID that the Tony Blair Institute would have linked to facial recognition. Expect it to be illegal to fail to produce whichever form of it a state functionary demanded, and impossible to make or receive payment without it. There is a word for the merger of state and corporate power to the point of the physical violence on which that merger depended.

Not that it would be anything new in this country. If the spycops inquiry received anything like the coverage that it deserved, then digital ID would have public approval below 10 per cent. Facial recognition probably already does. Reform wants to hold the line against them. But it already has 12 million reasons why it cannot.

Inter Arma Silent Leges?

Rumour has it that tomorrow, the Government will release some of the Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein documents, conveniently just after Prime Minister’s Questions. Presumably, they will relate neither to Mandelson’s selection of the vast Labour intake in 2024, nor to his conduct of the 2025 Ministerial reshuffle. If Britain were not in the Epstein Class’s war with Iran, then Keir Starmer would no longer be Prime Minister. But while half of that Class’s London operation pretends that he had bravely kept us out of it, even though the British commanders in the Gulf boast nightly on social media about their participation in their hosts’ missions, the other half screams that we had not gone far enough into it, making Starmer “no Margaret Thatcher” and “no Winston Churchill”. They ought to be pleased.

The only organisation that ever succeeded in getting rid of Thatcher was the Conservative Party. If it loved her in life as much as it loves in her death, then it had a very, very, very strange way of showing it. In her memoirs, the extremely bitter chapter on the Poll Tax makes it clear that she laboured under no delusion that she had been removed because of “Europe”. That was the cover story, but “Europe” had not been the reason why scores of Conservative MPs had been on course to lose their seats. The content, rather than the tone, of that policy did not change under her successor. By contrast, the Poll Tax was abolished completely, with a reversion in all but name to the previous system of domestic rates. The Conservatives then unexpectedly won the General Election of 1992, when Thatcher retired from the House of Commons.

Thatcher’s humble origins are greatly exaggerated. She was the daughter of a major local businessman and politician who ran most of the committees and charities for miles around. Even the people who love her can see why the people who hate her do so; they just do not agree. But why the people who love her do so is, in their own terms, a complete mystery. She gave Britain the Single European Act, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the Children Act, the replacement of O-levels with GCSEs, the destruction of the economic basis of paternal authority in the stockades of male employment, the massive increase in benefit dependency, the rise of Political Correctness, the general moral chaos of the 1980s, the legalisation of abortion up to birth for “severe fetal abnormality” that did not have to be specified, the fight against Victoria Gillick, and that is just the start. Her only Commons defeat was when she tried to make Sunday just another shopping day. The basis of the lockdowns was the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. Who was the Prime Minister in 1984? For having publicly set fire to the Quran, Martin Frost and Hamit Coskun were both charged under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. Who was the Prime Minister in 1986? Three years later, Thatcher’s supporters wanted to use that provision against those who had publicly set fire to The Satanic Verses.

The stockades of working-class male employment were destroyed, and a new ruling elite of middle-class women funded and empowered by the State was created, by the politician who proclaimed the self-made man and the self-made woman, a proclamation of which the inexorable logic is gender self-identification. Just as Thatcher emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and Dick Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show, so a comparable figure, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman. Thatcher has already been played by a drag queen at least once on British television, and specifically on Channel 4, which she created, meaning that one of her most abiding legacies is that Britain has two state broadcasters, one of which nevertheless carries advertisements. Thatcherism in a nutshell, as has always been clear from the output.

Was Thatcher “the Iron Lady” when, in early 1981, her initial pit closure programme was abandoned within two days of a walkout by the miners? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she had Nicholas Ridley negotiate a transfer of sovereignty over the Falkland Islands to Argentina, to be followed by a leaseback arrangement, until the Islanders, the Labour Party and Conservative backbenchers forced her to back down? Was she “the Iron Lady” when, within a few months of election on clear commitments with regard to Rhodesia, she simply abandoned them at the Commonwealth Conference in Lusaka? Was she “the Iron Lady” when, having claimed that Britain would never give up Hong Kong, she took barely 24 hours to return to Planet Earth by effecting a complete U-turn? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she took just as little time to move from public opposition to public support of Spanish accession to the Western European Union?

In the Budget of December 1976, Denis Healey and Jim Callaghan had delighted Thatcher by blindsiding the critics of monetarism on the Conservative benches, but was she “the Iron Lady” when she gave up monetarism completely during her second term? Thatcher’s continuous contact with the IRA, universally assumed at the time, has long since been confirmed. Four of the Hunger Strikers’ Five Demands were granted on 6 October 1981, and by 1983 even the right not to do prison work had been conceded. The Lady was as Iron about that as she was about most other things, namely not at all.

Thatcher was, though, true to her assurance in 1979 and in 1983 that, although until 1985 the Ulster Unionist Party remained affiliated to the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations, there would be no return to office for Enoch Powell. But then, when told that Thatcher professed to have been influenced by his books on economics, Powell replied that, “She couldn’t have understood them, then.” He baffled her by telling her that he would have fought in the Second World War even if Britain had had a Communist Government. He would still have fought for his country. With no Tory roots, that was beyond her. With deep Liberal roots, she thought that wars were about “values”. That wider conversation was about what was then the recent Falklands War. While Powell had supported it on his own principles, Thatcher had seen it as an example of her dictum that, “If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values.” Many years later, when asked her greatest achievement, she replied, “New Labour.” Quite. Thatcher has been named as her political heroine by Shabana Mahmood, who would issue us all with digital ID, and who would make people who had lived here for at least 10 years earn indefinite leave to remain by performing both paid and unpaid work to her satisfaction.

In 1981, Thatcher did impose an absolute ban on all government work for Andersen in view of its role in the DeLorean fraud, a ban that lasted until the General Election of 1997, when Patricia Hewitt was made Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, having only just entered Parliament from her position as Head of Research at Andersen Consulting. And in 1988, Thatcher and Nigel Lawson did correct the taxation of wealth at a lower rate than earnings until, in 1998, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown put the clock back to the Chancellor of the Exchequer who had gone on, as First Lord of the Treasury, to introduce monetarism to Britain and vice versa. But if those moves made Thatcher a better social democrat than New Labour, then their reversal made New Labour better Thatcherites than Thatcher or even Lawson.

The middle classes were transformed from people like Thatcher’s father into people like her son. She told us, and she really did, that “there is no such thing as society”, in which case there cannot be any such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation. Even more damagingly, and that is quite a feat, she endorsed the vugar illiteracy that the currency-issuing State had no money of its own, and could therefore “run out of other people’s money”. All in all, she turned Britain into the country that Marxists had always said that it was, even though before her, it never had been. Specifically, Thatcher sold off national assets at obscenely undervalued prices, while subjecting the rest of the public sector, fully 40 per cent of the British economy, to an unprecedented level of central dirigisme.

Thatcher continued public subsidies to private schools, to agriculture, to nuclear power, and to mortgage-holders. Without those public subsidies, the fourth would hardly have existed, and the other three, then as now, would not have existed at all. So much for “You can’t buck the market”. You can now, as you could then, and as she did then. The issue is not whether private schooling, agriculture, nuclear power, or mortgage-holding is a good or a bad thing in itself. The issue is whether “Thatcherism” was compatible with their continuation by means of “market-bucking” public subsidies. It simply was not, and is not.

Thatcher’s assault on council housing created the Housing Benefit racket, and it used the gigantic gifting of capital assets by the State to enable the beneficiaries to enter the property market ahead of private tenants, or of people still living at home, who in either case had saved for their deposits. What, exactly, was or is conservative or Tory about that? Or about moving in the characters from Shameless either alongside, or even in place of, the respectable working class?

It is thanks to Thatcher that the Conservatives have been the party of Net Zero for 40 years. Svante Arrhenius first theorised about anthropogenic global warming in 1896, and Thatcher was briefed about it by Sir Crispin Tickell, the then Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs at the Foreign Office. Thatcher always credited Tickell with having convinced her, leading to her speech on the subject to the Royal Society in 27 September 1988, the point at which the agenda of his 1977 Climatic Change and World Affairs entered the political mainstream. Tickell’s briefing of Thatcher was in 1984, tellingly the year that the Miners’ Strike began.

Thatcher began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, but she was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. By the time of her speech to the UN on 8 November 1989, she had made Tickell the British Ambassador to it, and the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative on its Security Council. Johnson described Thatcher’s destruction of the coal industry as “a big early start” towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for many years.

In 1979, Thatcher had not initially wanted to meet Menachem Begin in London, since her generation remembered what he was, and afterwards she expressed her regret at not having stuck to her guns. In 1980, she signed the Venice Declaration of nine European countries against Israeli settlements on the West Bank. In 1981, she denounced the Israeli bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, calling it illegal. In 1982, she responded to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon by imposing an arms embargo on Israel that remained in force until 1994; when Begin wrote to ask her to reconsider, then she did not even reply. In 1988, she expelled two Israeli diplomats and closed the London Mossad station when one of its double agents had been convicted of terrorism in Britain and when that station had been caught for a second time forging British passports, a practice that was to resurface, with similar but notably less severe consequences, in 2010; no Israeli diplomat had ever before been deported from a friendly state.

While all of that was to her credit, that would not be the view of her flamekeepers today, any more than they would approve of her attitude when visiting Kiev in June 1990, when she said that Britain would no more open an embassy in Ukraine than in California or Quebec. When the Soviet Union did collapse anyway, then she ludicrously pretended to have brought it down merely because she had happened to be in office at the time. But she did make a difference internationally where it was possible to do so, by providing aid and succour to Pinochet’s Chile and to apartheid South Africa, and by refusing to recognize either the Muzorewa-Smith Government or Joshua Nkomo, thereby paving the way for Robert Mugabe. Known as “the Peking Plotter”, she never saw a Maoist whom she did not like, from Mugabe, to Nicolae Ceaușescu, to Pol Pot. She even sent the SAS to train the Khmer Rouge, putting in the same boat as Noam Chomsky, but making her worse, since he had no power to deploy Special Forces.

And it was Thatcher who issued what amounted to the open invitation to Argentina, armed by Begin’s Israel, to invade the Falkland Islands, followed by the starved Royal Navy’s having to behave as if the hopelessly out-of-her-depth Prime Minister did not exist, a sort of coup without which those Islands would be Argentine to this day. Until the eve of the invasion, Thatcher had been about to sell the ships that then had to be deployed. At a bargain basement price. To Argentina.

Unlike Thatcher, although like the American Old Right, when the British New Right was still new, than it had little or no time for Churchill. Andrew Roberts devoted much of Eminent Churchillians to criticising Churchill’s Indian Summer Premiership of 1951 to 1955 as a period of betrayal on immigration and on relations with the trade unions, by a Government with scarcely a proper Tory in it, effectively a continuation of the Wartime Coalition. Rightly or wrongly, that was the view of the intellectual founders of the post-Thatcher Conservative Party. And Churchill’s role in the coup of 1953 makes him the last Briton who should ever be invoked in relation to Iran.

In Great Contemporaries, published in 1937, two years after he had called Hitler’s achievements “among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world”, Churchill wrote that, “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” That passage was not removed from the book’s reprint in 1941. Great Contemporaries was reissued in 2024.

In May 1940, Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini, whom he had called “the greatest living legislator”. Gibraltar is still under British sovereignty only because Labour won the 1945 Election. After Franco had refused to let Hitler use Spain in order to invade Gibraltar and thus seize control of the Strait, Churchill had promised him Gibraltar once the War was safely won. That would have been just another colonial transfer in those days. But Churchill lost at the ballot box. In the meantime, over one thousand Spanish Republicans had fought the Second World War in the British Army. What do Churchill’s noisiest partisans think of that? It ranks with last September, when Konstantin Malofeev and Aleksandr Dugin played host to the Falange Española de las JONS, annual wreath-layers in memory of the Blue Legion.

So much for those who would use Churchill to make the case for continued support of the Ukraine of Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Brigade, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, and all the rest of them, including the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps. The Ukraine that in Ternopil  has named a football stadium after Roman Shukhevych, on a street named after Stepan Bandera. The Ukraine of Andriy Biletsky, to whom “the mission of Ukraine is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival against the Semite-led Untermenschen”. The Ukraine of Pavlo Lapshyn, who is still in His Majesty’s Prison, and who will be there for decades yet, because of his 2013 murder of 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham. Lapshyn went on to put bombs outside three mosques in this country. He belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Brigade, being led by its “political ideologist”, Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell. 

All sorts of things about Churchill are simply ignored. Gallipoli. The miners. The Suffragettes. The refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. His dishonest and self-serving memoirs. The truth about the catastrophic humiliation at Dunkirk. The other one, at Singapore, for which Australians and New Zealanders have never forgiven Britain. The Lancastria. The men left behind in France. Both the fact and the sheer scale of his 1945 defeat while the War with Japan was still going on, when Labour won half of his newly divided seat, and an Independent did very well in the other half after Labour and the Liberals had disgracefully refused to field candidates against him. His deselection by his local Conservative Association just before he died. And not least, his carve-up of Eastern Europe with Stalin, so very reminiscent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He borrowed the phrase “the Iron Curtain” from Goebbels and used it to mean exactly what Goebbels had meant by it. Broken by the War, the Soviet Union had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe, or the Red Army would have carried on marching in the summer of 1945. Still less was the USSR willing or able to cross either the Atlantic or the Pacific.

The electorate was under no illusions while Churchill was still alive. His image was booed and hissed when it appeared on newsreels. He led the Conservative Party into three General Elections, he lost the first two, and he only returned to office on the third occasion with the support of the National Liberals, having lost the popular vote. In the course of that Parliament, he had to be removed by his own party. It comfortably won the subsequent General Election. We have not forgotten the truth about him in the old mining areas. Nor have they in the places that he signed away to Stalin, including the country for whose freedom the War was fought. Churchill coined the nickname “Uncle Joe” for Stalin.

Churchill presided over the famine in Bengal. His views on race shocked his younger colleagues even in the Conservative Party of the 1950s. He wanted to transport the Jews to Palestine, since he saw them as not really British. Having deployed the Black and Tans to Ireland, he redeployed them to Palestine in that Zionist cause. The Zionists later expressed their gratitude by plotting to kill him and by murdering his friend, Lord Moyne, as well as sending letter-bombs to the White House of his ally, Harry S. Truman. In the meantime, they had contracted the Haavara Agreement, fought against Britain throughout the Second World War, allied with Fascist Italy, twice sought an alliance with Nazi Germany on the grounds that it was a lesser evil than Britain, hanged the boobytrapped bodies of Sergeants Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice and photographed them, and bombed the King David Hotel. By contrast, before anyone brings him up, Haj Amin al-Husseini was holed up in Berlin with no practical influence in the Middle East, being instead a kind of mascot for the recruitment of Balkan, Caucasian and Central Asian Muslims into the predecessor organisations of those which now controlled Ukraine and of those for which the New Right campaigned during the collapse of Yugoslavia.

In such circles, the great cause of the moment is withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. Yet in May 1948, when the pompously self-styled Congress of Europe assembled in the Hall of Knights in The Hague, then it was Churchill who dubbed “the Voice of Europe” that assembly of politicians who had recently been defeated at the polls, of the representatives of Royal and Noble Houses that had fairly recently been dispossessed at least in political terms, of the likes of Churchill who fell into both categories, and of people whose lives’ work was trying to delude themselves that so did they. In the name of the order that had held sway for a century between the defeat of Napoleon and the First World War, their aim was very explicitly to check the social democracy that was sweeping Western Europe at the time. The material that they produced had that intention, and it has had that effect. It was written into British domestic law by Blair, whom, as we have seen, Thatcher identified as her own greatest achievement.

The famous dipping of the cranes for Churchill’s coffin occurred only because the London dockers, who despised him, had been paid to do it. Churchill’s cult seems to have begun only once he was dead, or at least so old as to have been politically as good as dead. It never translated into votes. But it is equally true that once the Attlee Government had a record on which to be judged, then it was barely reelected in 1950, and although it did win the popular vote, it lost office in 1951. For 75 years and counting, the Labour Party has dined out on a mere six years that did not impress the electorate at the time. If Churchill and Clement Attlee were the twin giants of the Golden Age, then that was lost on the voters who lived through it. They did not think much of either of them.

A Filter For Prejudice

Kim Johnson MP writes:

In 2017, David Lammy received deserved praise for his landmark review into the criminal justice system, which shone a light on the unequal treatment of minorities. One striking revelation was that jury trials were found to be one of the few parts of the system consistently free from racial bias, overall treating defendants equally, regardless of their ethnicity. In contrast, judges have been found to be significantly more likely to give jail sentences to Black, Asian and mixed ethnicity offenders than to white offenders for comparable crimes. As the then Shadow Justice Secretary concluded, juries were shown to “act as a filter for prejudice”.

Nine years on, Lammy now holds the government role he once aspired to, with the power to address many of the issues he previously highlighted. Yet instead of protecting juries, the Justice Secretary appears determined to sideline them. Under pressure to cut the courts backlog, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is proposing to almost halve the number of jury trials in England and Wales, giving magistrates and lone judges the power to decide the outcome of thousands more cases. Unlike juries, they do not reflect the diversity of modern Britain.

Given the findings of Lammy’s own review, these reforms are highly likely to increase the risk of racial bias, leaving ethnic minority defendants more vulnerable to miscarriages of justice. That is why I have coordinated a letter to the Justice Secretary, signed by ten Black Labour MPs, urging him to remove the plans for jury reform from the Courts and Tribunals Bill.

Frustratingly, the government has already acknowledged the risk of increased racial bias, but this serious concern is being treated as an afterthought. Last month, courts minister Sarah Sackman revealed the MoJ intends to review the impact of judge-only trials on minorities, but only after the reforms take effect. This is a backwards approach: roll out the change nationally, then investigate its harm later. The problems identified in 2017 have not disappeared – if anything, the resurgence of racism makes the lessons of the Lammy Review more relevant than ever.

Ministers keep insisting that these reforms are necessary to tackle the Crown Court crisis. The backlog – now more than 80,000 cases and projected to rise to 100,000 by 2028 – is extremely serious. But, as expert legal charity JUSTICE sets out, juries are not the cause of these delays and cutting juries will make no significant dent in this backlog – rather, it will create a host of new problems.

The true source of the delays lies in brutal justice budget cuts from the 2010s, and successive governments’ failure to repair this gutting of the system. Sitting days have been capped, legal aid decimated, and buildings left to crumble. I welcome the additional resources the government has promised as part of the package of measures to address the backlog, but this is just a first step.

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I’ve seen in my own constituency how trial backlogs can be driven down without curtailing juries. Through pioneering fast-tracks trials and other practical measures, Liverpool crown court has cut the average wait from charge to trial to 206 days, compared to a national average of 321. Undermining the right to jury trial is not a solution to this crisis, it is a diversion from addressing its real causes.

Everyone deserves a fair trial, free from discrimination. Juries remain one of the most important mechanisms we have to protect that right. Any move to remove or restrict them – particularly in the face of persistent racial disparities – risks eroding trust and confidence in our public institutions and damaging the very legitimacy of the justice system.

I urge the government to withdraw these proposals and commit unequivocally to protecting one of our fundamental democratic rights.

Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst MP writes:

Few features of the British constitution command as much quiet respect as trial by jury. It is not merely a legal mechanism, nor simply a tradition preserved for its own sake. It is a living expression of a constitutional principle.

When the state accuses a citizen of a serious crime, guilt must be established not only before officials of the state, but before ordinary members of the public.

That principle deserves careful consideration in the debate now unfolding around the Courts and Tribunals Bill. Amongst its provisions are proposals that would, in certain circumstances, limit the availability of jury trials in order to address the severe backlog within the criminal justice system.

No responsible parliamentarian should deny the scale of that challenge. Victims are waiting too long for justice. Defendants are waiting too long for their cases to be resolved. Confidence in the system is inevitably strained when delay becomes the norm rather than the exception.

However, acknowledging the problem does not absolve us of the responsibility to ensure that the solutions we adopt are the right ones.

Before entering parliament, I practised as a barrister. Whilst I was not a criminal practitioner, I did appear in the Coronial Courts, where juries still sit in certain inquests. Through that experience I saw first-hand how seriously jurors approach their task: listening carefully to the evidence, reflecting on the arguments presented to them, and appreciating the gravity of the conclusions they are being asked to reach.

It is a powerful reminder that justice in this country is not administered solely by the state, but with the participation of the public.

For that reason, proposals to curtail jury trial cannot be regarded simply as matters of efficiency or case management. When the state reduces the circumstances in which it must persuade twelve citizens before securing a conviction, it fundamentally alters the balance between the individual and the power of the state.

Those who propose such a change therefore carry a significant burden. They must demonstrate not only that reform is necessary, but that the particular reform proposed will genuinely address the problem it seeks to solve.

At present, that case has not yet been made.

The government has placed considerable reliance on the recent review conducted by Sir Brian Leveson. Sir Brian is a jurist of immense experience and his work deserves careful attention. However, a review, even one conducted with great care and expertise, cannot substitute for the broader evidential base that a reform of this constitutional significance requires.

In particular, there is a striking absence of clear modelling demonstrating that limiting jury trials will materially reduce delays.

In response to a question in the House of Commons on 3 February this year, the lord chancellor indicated that the government would publish modelling supporting the assumption that these proposals would reduce trial times by around 20%. Yet the impact assessment accompanying the legislation contains no such modelling. Instead, it adopts Sir Brian’s analysis as the basis for its projections.

Analysis is valuable, but analysis is not modelling. When parliament is being asked to scale back a centuries-old safeguard, it is reasonable to expect robust evidence showing that doing so will deliver the promised benefits.

Moreover, the causes of delay in the criminal justice system are neither obscure nor controversial.

The first is judicial capacity. Courts cannot hear cases without judges, yet judicial sitting days have for years been tightly constrained. Courtrooms sometimes sit unused not because juries are unavailable, but because there is no judge available to preside.

The second is the state of the court estate. Across the country many criminal courts operate in buildings that are outdated and poorly equipped. Trials are frequently disrupted by unreliable technology and inadequate facilities. These are not problems created by jury trial, and they cannot be solved by limiting it.

Thirdly, there are continuing operational problems with prisoner transport and custody arrangements. It is now far from unusual for proceedings to be disrupted because defendants arrive late, or occasionally not at all. Juries are left waiting, witnesses are sent home, and valuable court time is lost.

Finally, there is the growing strain on the criminal bar. The system increasingly struggles to secure suitably experienced advocates to prosecute and defend serious cases. Delays arise not from inefficiency but from the gradual erosion of the professional capacity on which the system depends.

Taken together, these factors suggest the backlog is primarily a problem of capacity. In that context, curtailing jury trials risks treating the symptom rather than the cause.

There are also questions about the practical implications of the proposals themselves. Sir Brian Leveson envisaged alternative tribunals including lay magistrates as 'wing members', preserving an element of public participation. The government’s proposals do not adopt that aspect of his recommendation. At a time when magistrate recruitment itself presents challenges, it is legitimate to ask how the system will absorb the additional caseload these reforms envisage.

Trial by jury has endured for centuries not simply because it is ancient, but because it commands public trust. It ensures that the immense coercive power of the criminal law is exercised not only by the state, but with the participation and consent of the community.

If we are to change that balance, we must be confident that the change will genuinely strengthen the justice system rather than merely rearrange its pressures.

Efficiency is essential in any modern justice system. However, efficiency must never come at the expense of the constitutional principles that give that system its legitimacy.

Dominic Casciani writes:

More than 3,200 lawyers including 300 top barristers and retired judges have called on the government to drop a plan to abolish some jury trials.

The letter to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions, says there is no evidence the "unpopular" plan will solve unprecedented delays in criminal courts.

The proposals, which return to Parliament on Tuesday, would replace juries in England and Wales with a single judge in cases where a convicted defendant would be jailed for up to three years.

Justice Secretary David Lammy says changes to jury trials and other reforms can help turn around the Crown Court backlog, which has reached record levels of 80,000 cases.

The delays mean some defendants charged today may not face trial until 2030.

Labour MP Karl Turner, who is opposed to the plan, has told the BBC he held a "constructive" meeting with Lammy in which the deputy prime minister promised a "meaningful" review period to scrutinise how the reforms are working if approved by Parliament.

MPs will debate and vote on the overall principles of the measures in the Courts and Tribunals Bill during its second reading on Tuesday.

While some MPs have voiced concerns, potential Labour rebels may choose to abstain rather than vote against the bill as a whole - seeking to make changes when the bill returns for further debate in the House of Commons on specific amendments.

The bill will still have to clear the House of Lords before it can become law.

The right to jury trial - in which ordinary people decide on the guilt or innocence of defendants brought before Crown Courts - is a cornerstone of the constitution dating back more than 800 years.

The letter organised by the Bar Council, which represents all barristers in England and Wales, says the plan is an attempt "to force through an unpopular, untested and poorly evidenced change to our jury system".

The signatories include:

• Three hundred KCs - top barristers who act in the most complex cases
• Twenty two retired Crown Court judges with first-hand knowledge of the backlogs and their causes
• Former Director of Public Prosecutions Sir David Calvert-Smith
• TV lawyers Rob Rinder, Shuan Wallace from The Chase and two barristers who have featured in The Traitors 

'Bulldozing' jury trials claim

"We have long warned that the criminal justice system is in crisis.... Juries have not caused this crisis," says the letter.

It urges ministers to focus on delivering reforms and steps to modernise criminal justice, set out in a major independent review by former senior judge Sir Brian Leveson.

Sir Brian also called for jury trials to be restricted - but his proposal included volunteer magistrates deciding affected cases alongside a professional judge in order to keep a link to communities.

Kirsty Brimelow KC, the senior criminal lawyer who heads the Bar Council, said: "This letter and its more than 3,000 signatories demonstrate the unequivocal principled and practical opposition to the restriction of jury trials from not only the Bar, but the legal profession as a whole.

"There is very little evidence to support even basic rationality of the government's decision to rush through this legislation which unnecessarily removes jury trials from thousands of people.

"It's not too late for the government to listen to us as experts and as a profession and stop before bulldozing our jury system."

Shadow justice secretary Nick Timothy has urged Labour MPs to join the Conservatives in voting against the changes, adding that juries provide a "safeguard between the citizen and the state".

He said: "Parliament has a clear choice. It can stand up for one of the oldest rights in our justice system or let Labour take a sledgehammer to our constitution."

Speaking to BBC Breakfast on Tuesday, Justice Minister Sarah Sackman said "jury trials will remain a cornerstone of British justice" but argued that there was "no point in having a jury trial if it takes years to get there".

"We have to have all three levers - the reforms, modernisation and investment," she added.

"Only all three will bring down the backlog in our courts."

Study casts doubt on plan

A study of the court backlogs by the Institute of Government, a think tank, projected that cutting jury trials would save less than 2% of court time, assuming that the cases would be dealt with more quickly.

Research carried out by Lammy in 2017, before he was a minister, revealed that juries were particularly trusted by ethnic minority defendants. 

He says many comparable criminal justice systems, including Canada's, have introduced similar reforms to speed up justice with no loss of confidence in the courts.

The Ministry of Justice said that more than 90% of criminal cases were already heard fairly without a jury. 

A spokesman said: "With victims facing unacceptably long waits for justice after years of delays in our courts, we make no apologies for pressing ahead with our plans to reform the system based on Sir Brian Leveson's independent review, alongside modernising it for the 21st Century with record investment."

Sonia Sodha writes:

Later today the House of Commons will have its first opportunity to vote on the government’s plans to cut access to trial by jury. In order to browbeat sceptical backbenchers into toeing the government line, justice secretary David Lammy has entreated us to think of the victims of crime, such as the women who’ve experienced sexual assault. How could we deny them the speedier justice that would supposedly result if we charged a judge rather than jury with deciding on the accused’s guilt? His deputy Sarah Sackman has invoked the career criminals who she says “game the system” by electing for jury trial to delay their reckoning with justice. Meanwhile, the government says removing the right of some defendants to elect for a jury trial will “bring the courts more into line with other public services - where it is the experts… who do that triage.” As if a defendant wrongly accused of a crime is in the same boat as someone who goes to their GP expecting to be referred to the right specialist.

It is a deeply cynical attempt to ram through a rollback of civil liberty safeguards. We are supposed to believe this is at once an incremental reduction in rights for those who stand accused of committing a crime, and that it will also deliver a transformation in outcomes for victims. This is an insult to voters’ intelligence.

Justice needs juries

Trial by jury is the fairest way of determining the criminal liability of defendants whose liberty is at stake. Unlike in civil cases, in which the facts of a case are usually decided on the balance of probability - what is more likely than not to have happened - the criminal standard of proof requires juries to be sure that a defendant is guilty of a crime in order to convict them. Almost certain isn’t enough. This standard means we quite rightly let probably-guilty people walk free. That is the price of minimising the number of innocent people locked up for a crime they didn’t commit.

Putting the decision about whether or not someone is guilty into the hands of one judge increases the risks of miscarriages of justice, because it requires just one person to be “sure” of someone’s guilt rather than twelve (or in the case of majority verdicts, ten). That feels like a significant watering down in how we practically apply the criminal standard of proof. Judges are learned individuals highly expert in the law. But when it comes to deciding the facts of a case, they are as human as the rest of us: there is no such thing as an unbiased individual.

Juries provide a triple safeguard. Ten to twelve fellow citizens, not a single judge, must agree someone is guilty based on the evidence. The process of deliberation helps iron out human bias as jurors can challenge each other’s understanding of the facts. And jurors have not seen case after case in the criminal courts, heard the same defence run over and over, and sentenced countless criminals to prison, like judges have. This helps them put themselves in the shoes of the defendant as well as the victim, and to appreciate just how much is at stake on all sides.

The government’s proposals

Not everyone charged with a crime has the right to a jury trial. The vast majority of criminal charges brought are for minor, “summary” offences that are tried by three volunteer lay magistrates, or a single legally-trained magistrate. For mid-tier “either way” offences such as burglary or intent to supply drugs, defendants pleading not guilty have the right to choose a jury trial or to be tried in the magistrates’ court. The most serious indictable offences, are always tried in the crown court by a jury. Until relatively recently, magistrates were only able to sentence individuals to up to six months in prison; back in 2022, the government extended this to 12 months.

The government is proposing three radical shifts. First, it wants to dramatically increase the sentencing power of volunteer magistrates so they will now be able to send someone to prison for up to two years, a quadrupling of the maximum sentence in just four years. Second, it wants to remove the right of those accused of “either way” offences to choose a jury trial. Instead, a single judge will charged with deciding whether or not to convict someone of a crime that comes with a prison sentence of up to three years. Only individuals charged with crimes that carry sentences of more than three years will have the right to trial by jury. The government estimates that as a result, the number of jury trials in England will halve from 15,000 to 7,000 a year. 

Third, it is planning to remove the automatic right of appeal for people convicted by magistrates, at the same time as extending their sentencing powers. Volunteer magistrates are unrepresentative of the population at large and often have limited experience of the chaotic lives of those before them. More than 40% of appeals against magistrate verdicts and 47% of appeals against magistrate sentences are successful. And while juries are no more likely to convict ethnic minority than white defendants, black women are 22% more likely to be found guilty by magistrates than white women.

Why mess with our civil liberties in this way?

The government has put increasing the efficiency of the courts system, and reducing the backlog of cases that has steadily grown as a result of fifteen years’ of underfunding, front and centre of its arguments for reform. 

The court backlog is indeed terrible for justice: years-long delays in cases coming to trial mean it is less likely to be served, harming not just victims but innocent defendants. But the Institute for Government has assessed the impact of these reforms on court delays, and its verdict is that they would only result in “extremely marginal gains”. It concludes the government would do better to focus on their other, uncontroversial reform proposals, such as increasing the number of court sitting days.

But ministers have also implied that even if there wasn’t a major backlog, they would still be considering these reforms. Sackman has claimed the reforms are “ideological” and part of a “modern justice system”. Lammy seems to intimate trial by jury is somehow antiquated, writing “in Canada, I felt like a visitor from the past as I toured their modern justice system, where judge-alone trials are an everyday occurrence”.

“Old-fashioned civil liberties!” might seem like an odd strapline for a government led by none other than a human rights lawyer. But it hints at a couple of unattractive traits in Starmer’s politics.

The first is about vantage. On a range of issues, Starmer seems to understand the concept of “human rights” from the perspective of those who have more power in society, who are more easily heard, and whom the system is less likely to envelope in Kafkaesque nightmare. We see this not just in his approach to jury trial, but to assisted dying, where the rights of affluent campaigners with excellent social support who want the right to state assistance to end their own lives matter more than the rights of those who are vulnerable to being coerced into asking their doctor to prescribe them lethal drugs. Or in his inexplicable reluctance to make clear before 2023 that allowing men to self-identify into women’s spaces, services and sports would undermine their privacy, dignity and safety.

The second relates to how he sees ordinary citizens. Voters are not especially keen on politicians who they sense looking down on them. It is a bit of a tell when ministers move from promoting judge-only trials on the basis they reduce the backlog, to notions of modernity. It suggests Starmer actively prefers the idea of justice done by the learned judges in his social network over the little people who sit on juries. That plays straight into the anti-elitist rhetoric of populist politicians like Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski.

This is not a government generally characterised by a reforming zeal or a passion for change. It is remarkable to me that two of the most radical - and ill-conceived - shifts backed by Starmer are the risky legalisation of medically-assisted suicide, and curtailing citizens’ rights to jury trial. Are they really what he wants his premiership to be remembered for?

And Matt Dathan writes:

A wrongly convicted sub-postmaster has warned David Lammy there will be “many more miscarriages of justice” if he goes ahead with his plans to curb jury trials./ Jo Hamilton has written to the deputy prime minister, urging him to rethink the controversial change in the law that would replace jury trials in England and Wales with a single judge in cases where the defendant is likely to face up to three years in jail.

She warned that without the “safety net of a jury”, the changes will further erode trust in the establishment and the justice system.

Hamilton, whose story featured prominently in the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, has urged wavering MPs to vote against the government in the House of Commons on Tuesday night, when they will debate and vote on the proposals for the first time in parliament.

Hamilton was one of more than 900 sub-postmasters prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for offences including theft, fraud and false accounting. This occurred as a result of incorrect information from the Post Office’s faulty Horizon accounting system, built and run by the Japanese firm Fujitsu. More than 230 sub-postmasters were sent to prison and 2,800 were asked to pay back money to escape prosecution.

Hamilton said she was coerced into pleading guilty to 14 cases of false accounting in order to avoid the more serious charge of theft and was sentenced in 2008 at Winchester crown court. Her conviction was finally quashed in 2021 by the Court of Appeal after years of torment and campaigning.

In her letter to Lammy, Hamilton, who won an OBE for services to justice last year, wrote: “As one of 900 sub-postmasters wrongly prosecuted by an arm of the state, I feel compelled to write to you about restricting jury trials for criminal cases with a likely sentence of less than three years.

“I was coerced into pleading guilty and was sentenced in 2008 at Winchester crown court. I did not have a jury but having experienced the might of the criminal justice system I can see how this could go horribly wrong.

“There is no trust in the establishment and the justice system, and this will erode things even further. Crimes that would carry a three-year sentence will be serious ones (like mine) and I can see many more miscarriages of justice (like mine).”

She added: “Almost nobody has access to legal aid any more and as such vulnerable people could find themselves in court without the safety net of a jury.

“As somebody who has received an OBE for services to justice, I cannot let this go without telling you how strongly I feel and there are thousands more who feel the same way. I urge you to rethink this and share my letter with anyone who is undecided.”

The government is confident of winning the vote but Sarah Sackman, the courts minister responsible for the reforms, accepted that a significant number of Labour MPs would rebel.

The plans to abolish some jury trials form part of Courts and Tribunals Bill, and the wider provisions have widespread support.

However, Karl Turner, the veteran Labour MP who has led efforts to defeat the changes to juries, said he would attempt to force the government to dilute or scrap the proposals altogether at a later stage of the bill, when it returns to the Commons for its report stage, which is when MPs debate and vote on specific parts of the legislation.

He has told The Times that he already has 67 Labour MPs willing to back his amendments. He would need at least 80 Labour MPs in order to defeat the government’s majority in the Commons.

In a sign of the concern among ministers about the size of the rebellion, Lammy met Turner for last-minute talks in an attempt to quell dissent.

Turner said he would abstain in Tuesday’s vote because Lammy had promised to publish an assessment of the impact the curb on jury trials is having on reducing the court backlogs after a “meaningful review period”, and also offered to give a Labour MP opposed to the reforms a seat on the committee of MPs that will scrutinise the legislation line-by-line.

Turner said he was likely to offer the seat to a female critic as it would be more powerful to have a female voice on the bill committee. However, despite the concessions offered by Lammy in the meeting on Monday night, Turner still intends to table amendments to the legislation when it returns to the Commons in order to protect jury trials.

Sackman said the government was confident of avoiding a defeat in Tuesday’s vote. She told Times Radio: “I know that there will be some MPs that will vote against this, but I also know, as we saw from a letter yesterday containing the signatures of 40 women MPs from the parliamentary Labour Party, that there is strong support. Their message was clear. The changes in this bill cannot come soon enough for women and girls in the criminal justice system. And I’m listening to their voices as we go through the lobbies tonight.”

There is also widespread opposition to the jury curbs in the legal sector. More than 3,200 lawyers, including 300 top barristers and retired judges, wrote a letter to Sir Keir Starmer urging him to scrap the proposals. They argued there was no evidence that the “unpopular” plan would deliver the government’s goal of reducing the crown courts backlog, which stands at 80,000 and is on course to hit 200,000 by 2025, according to Ministry of Justice modelling.

Leadership Responsibilities

Of your charity, pray for the repose of the soul of Father Pierre El-Rahi, the Parish Priest of the almost entirely Maronite town of Qlayaa, where he was killed yesterday while coming to the aid of a parishioner during an Israeli bomb attack in pursuit of the stated aim of annexing, clearing and colonising Lebanon at least south of the Litani. Three days earlier, he had preached that, "None of us carries weapons. The only weapons we carry are peace, love and prayer." But we arm this, and the precious RAF Akrotiri provides intelligence for it. Indeed, it is a front in the war that half of our Epstein Class pretends that we are not fighting, while the other half angrily demands that we fight it harder.

The Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' primary school in Minab was bombed with Tomahawks, which neither the Israelis nor, as if it needed to be said, the Iranians have, but which the Americans do, and components for which are manufactured by Raytheon at Glenrothes. While taking a good, hard look at Prestwick Airport, which the Scottish Government owns, the SNP should also register its firm objection to this arrangement. But it will not. It is an Epstein Class party. Alba may be no more, but that clears the way in May for the Workers Party. On either side of the Border, the Greens are the party politically and personally closest to Noam Chomsky, but do not tell them to stay in their lane when Tehran is under the black smoke of bombed oil depots such as Saddam Hussein inflicted on Kuwait in 1991.

Then there is Oman. It plays host to the three GCHQ bases of Timpani, Guitar and Clarinet, which tap into the undersea cables that pass through the Strait, before obediently passing on their findings to the United States National Security Agency. There is the British military base at Duqm. There is the Omani-British Joint Training Area. There is the training role of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. There certainly used to be a Privy Council featuring Sir Alan Duncan, past and present Chiefs of MI6, past and present Chiefs of the Defence Staff, senior advisers to our own Royal Family, and a former Governor of the Bank of England. And yesterday, His Majesty Sultan Haitham bin Tarik al Said sent Mojtaba Khamenei "best wishes for his success and good fortune in assuming his leadership responsibilities in his friendly country" as the new Supreme Leader of Iran. Think on.

Grounded

Brandan Buck writes:

Ten days into President Trump’s Iran war, what was supposed to have been a swift, Venezuela-style operation has widened into a massive air campaign that the Pentagon reportedly believes could last into September. And as the mission’s ill-defined objectives continue to bloat — from regime change and denuclearisation to “unconditional surrender” — there is growing talk of a ground invasion. Trump himself has refused to rule out dispatching a ground force, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt going so far as to suggest that the administration might re-institute the draft.

It’s not hard to see why. Military history teaches us that airpower alone is insufficient to achieve the kinds of aims the Trumpians have set for themselves. Unless the administration accomplishes what has historically proved impossible, it must either scale back its objectives or attempt a ground invasion of Iran. As a former US Army infantryman, who fought in what used to be called the War on Terror, I know one thing: the latter option shouldn’t even be on the table.

A ground war against the Islamic Republic, on Iran’s own terrain, will send American troops into hell on earth — or about as close as we mortals can get to it.

First, the sheer size of the ground force will be staggering. Any serious American invasion of Iran would likely rival or exceed the scale of Vietnam or the 1991 Gulf War, making it the largest US military undertaking since the Second World War. Iran’s land mass and population size alone would prove a daunting hurdle. The country is nearly four times the size of Iraq, and its population is more than three times larger.

Iran’s terrain is, in a word, punishing. Its topography is dominated by mountains, which by some figures constitute half of its territory. Unlike most nations, Iran’s urban centres are located inland, nestled amid mountains, and buffeted by uninhabitable deserts to the east and the south. This combination of Iran’s built and natural environments would mean that US forces would have to advance through numerous bottlenecks to even reach Iran’s military and population centres. And while Iran is in the middle of the pack in terms of population density, its capital, Tehran, teems with more than 15 million souls; a fight to capture the city against a determined enemy would amount to the largest urban battle in American military history.

The idea of capturing and pacifying Tehran alone illustrates the near-impossibility of such an invasion. Using the troop density employed in the 2004 battle for Fallujah, Iraq, as a point of reference, suggests that it would require more than 600,000 soldiers — roughly the size of the US deployment during the Vietnam War. Hence, perhaps, Leavitt’s talk of reinstituting the draft.

Looking to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a similar invasion of Iran, given its population size, would require as many 1.6 million troops. Those estimates appear more daunting still when compared with the actual force structure of the US military, which boasts about 2.1 million members in active service, reserves, and the National Guard. Of these, only about 20% are combat troops. Simply put, committing 1.6 million personnel would mean using roughly three-quarters of the entire US military, including combat forces America simply doesn’t have.

Such a war couldn’t be undertaken without a massive mobilisation, and a fundamental reordering of American global commitments, requiring the diversion of forces from Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. An invasion of Iran would therefore impel the United States to confront something it has long sought to avoid: hard choices about the limits of its global military footprint. Summing up the scale of the prospect, the columnist Max Boot, not exactly known for his pacifism, described an invasion of Iran as “the mother of all quagmires.”

Then comes the next obvious problem: fighting the war. While Iran’s military would likely lack air superiority and remains less technologically advanced than that of the United States, the Islamic Republic shouldn’t be taken lightly. Before the outbreak of the current war, the country’s regular armed forces were estimated at roughly 420,000 personnel. Iran’s more ideologically committed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps numbered around 190,000, backed by a militia force, known as the Basij, of more than 600,000.

How much of this force could ultimately resist an invasion is speculative: some may defect, and others removed from the battlefield before they can fight. But what is clear is that Iran would likely adhere to its long-standing doctrine of defence in depth. Drawing on lessons from the Iran-Iraq War, Iranian planners have adopted what they call a “mosaic strategy”: decentralised command structures combined with a willingness to trade territory to wear down an invading force through attrition.

Supporting this strategy would be Iran’s still-significant arsenal of rockets and drones. These have already surprised US military officials in recent engagements, and could prove even more dangerous on Iranian soil, where shorter flight times would give the Americans far less warning. Iranian militias in the region, too, are battle-hardened, versed in irregular warfare, and, in many cases, acquainted with American tactics.

US forces would likely find themselves fighting a determined asymmetric opponent armed with effective weapons and operating on difficult terrain. For a military that has not attempted a major invasion in more than two decades, and that remains only partially tested against modern drone warfare, such a fight would be far from easy. In short, Iranian commanders would aim to draw the United States into a long and bloody war of attrition, and they would have the terrain and urban density do it.

Some will argue that the past is not prologue — that the Iranian regime is unpopular and therefore unlikely to inspire serious resistance. It’s telling, however, that American bombing has yet to create fissures in the regime. Nor has the American air campaign inspired the Iranian people to revolt. On the contrary, all available evidence points to regime consolidation, and the closing of the gap between public sentiment and elite opinion.

Then, too, critics underestimate the power of nationalism, particularly in the Iranian case. The “rally around the flag” effect — the well-documented tendency of citizens to unite behind their government in wartime — was most clearly demonstrated in Iran after Saddam Hussein invaded the country in 1980, a move that ultimately consolidated the very regime the Iraqi dictator had hoped to topple.

Even under the most ideal circumstances of state collapse — like those seen in the early days of George W. Bush’s Iraq War — a post-invasion insurgency in Iran would be all but certain. Between the most fervent supporters of the IRGC, and with the potential backing of Shiite militias across the region, it would not take many committed fighters to prolong the conflict. As Washington learned in both Iraq and Afghanistan, even a relatively small but determined insurgent force can sustain a war for years. That force could draw from an estimated “fit-to-service population” in Iran of 41 million, plus the larger Shiite sphere, including warriors from Iraq, Bahrain, Lebanon, and Pakistan, among others. Much like Iraq and Afghanistan, the defeat of the Iranian army would be a fleeting victory assuredly followed by a bloody and open-ended slog with an insurgency.

Finally, an American escalation into a conventional ground invasion would deepen the already daunting regional crisis. Deploying ground troops in Iran would provide an ample opportunity for America’s great-power rivals, Russia and China, to drain Uncle Sam of blood and treasure. So far, the pair have yet to expand their assistance to Tehran beyond diplomatic and intelligence support. But the presence of American forces on Iranian soil would provide Moscow and Beijing with a tempting pressure point against a superpower that is already overextended, indebted, and domestically fractured. Iran, then, could become a bloody site of great-power competition.

Given the totality of Iran’s geography, demographics, military capability, and geopolitical connections, the prospect of an American invasion of the country should be unthinkable. Yet Trump’s ill-considered decision to launch the war, coupled with his vague-but-ambitious goals, has made this impossible scenario a military possibility. Given the horrific costs such an invasion would entail, however, Trump should choose a different path: declare “victory” and de-escalate. Washington must stop throwing good American money after bad — and preserve the lives of the brave men and women who daily underwrite our national security with their blood.