The Pits

Camilla Turner writes:

Andy Burnham has been accused of betraying miners over a pension scheme U-turn. Ministers had indicated to backbenchers that a £1.2bn payout to surviving miners and their widows from the controversial Guarantor’s Fund pension scheme would be announced in the Budget. The fund was set up in 1994 after the Government intervened to underwrite miners’ pension payments following the privatisation of British Coal. In return for providing a guarantee, the Government gained half of any surplus generated by the scheme’s investments, a deal that had netted the state almost £8bn by 2024. 

Labour has long backed calls for the Government’s share to be paid out to miners. However, in an apparent last-minute about-turn, ministers declined to sign an agreement allowing the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme (MPS) payout to be released immediately. A letter signed by a dozen Labour backbenchers criticised the decision: “We understand the fiscal pressures on the Treasury, however, in light of the facts, we cannot see a justification for withholding money that belongs to scheme members alone.” 

Before becoming Prime Minister, Mr Burnham called the situation “a disgrace and an injustice” and pledged that if he were in a position to do more he would “keep fighting to make sure every promise is honoured and every penny reaches the people it is meant for”. In its 2024 election manifesto, Labour promised to “end the injustice”, and subsequently returned £1.5bn to the 100,000 surviving members of the MPS. It also handed back £2.3bn to around 43,000 members of the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme (BCSSS), who had been managers, engineers and safety officers in the coal-mining industry. The £1.2bn that remains in the Guarantor’s Fund is the balance of what accrued to the Treasury over three decades. 

‘Political distress’ for coalfield MPs

Jon Trickett, a veteran Labour MP and one of the letter’s signatories, told The Telegraph: “I didn’t find the explanation given to me by the Treasury to be plausible. We need an immediate resolution to this matter. Miners and their families are telling me that they feel betrayed.” Another Labour MP said: “There is obvious frustration among Coalfield MPs that this wasn’t sorted. We had been led to believe it had been sorted. They have sorted the BCSSS one.”

A third backbencher added: “Not doing the payout has really caused a lot of political distress for those of us with mining constituents. All the signalling to the MPs and the pension trustees was that they will get the £1.2bn. At the last minute, we got told that it counted against the headroom so couldn’t be done.” Mr Burnham was understood to be “blindsided” by the Treasury’s last-minute decision. On Friday, he insisted that a “big step was taken” in the Budget towards resolving the issues surrounding the MPS. The Prime Minister told broadcasters:

“The commitment is in no way diminished. We will come to a full solution that is about fairness and justice for the miners. The only thing I would say is that, obviously, the Budget didn’t give us all of the room for manoeuvre that we would have wanted and we have been operating in a changing climate. It does have to be scored on the public balance sheet and that is part of the challenge that we’ve got, but there is full commitment here from me, from the Chancellor, to deliver everything that people have waited a long time for, but also what people deserve. And we will. I understand these issues. It wasn’t right for that swipe to be taken from their pension part all of those years ago. We will work and keep going at this until we’ve got a full solution that delivers.”

In a statement, the MPS said: “What the Chancellor has said [in the Budget] is that the Government will ‘ensure the full transfer’ of the undistributed surpluses to members. The trustees are cautious that this is not a guarantee to either do this, or a commitment to a specific timescale.” They added: “The trustees feel strongly that, once again, MPS members are not being treated equally and are receiving a second-class deal.” The Treasury declined to comment.

There is a lot of this sort of thing. For example, Mark Thomas writes:

A fight born from collapse

If you ask most people what they were doing 24 years ago, they will probably struggle to remember. For John Benson and Phil Jones, the answer is immediate: “We were fighting and campaigning for our lost pensions.” These proud Welshmen, now in their eighties and facing ill-health, are still fighting after the collapse of their works pension fund following the failure of their Cardiff-based employer, Allied Steel & Wire (ASW), in 2002. John, Phil and around 1,000 fellow workers lost promised retirement funds when a £21 million pension shortfall was uncovered. It began an epic Dafydd v Goliath battle between determined Welsh steelworkers and successive governments. They have now worked through nine Prime Ministers and numerous Pensions Ministers, including James Purnell, now Burnham’s Chief of Staff. 

From Cardiff to Westminster

Their battle has also coincided with the early history of Wales’s devolved democracy. With Rhun ap Iorwerth, they are now on to the seventh First Minister. In that time, thousands of emails have been sent, petitions submitted to the Senedd, UK Parliament, House of Lords and Number 10, and protests held in Cardiff, London, Brussels and Luxembourg. It is difficult to comprehend the workload they have absorbed, or the mental strength needed to keep going as a small voluntary group. They received many cross-party assurances that their pensions would be restored and justice served. In their view, those commitments were never properly fulfilled. They see echoes of their struggle in the experiences of Post Office workers, WASPI pensioners, victims of contaminated blood, and Grenfell and building safety campaigners.

Protection without full justice

Public pressure eventually led the UK Government to launch the Financial Assistance Scheme and the Pension Protection Fund, securing up to 90% of victims’ basic core pension values. But the payments were not index-linked. Without proper inflation-proofing or coverage for pre-April 1997 service increases, the real-term value of their pensions eroded dramatically. The latest chapter has seen the new UK Labour Government introduce the Pension Schemes Act 2026, addressing pre-1997 service increases with Consumer Prices Index uplifts capped at 2.5%, scheduled for January 2027. But John argues that, compared with what they paid into their ASW scheme, the proposed adjustments still fall far short of full restitution.

The human cost of delay

John and Phil’s determination, despite huge setbacks and what they see as political failures, marks them and their fellow campaigners as exceptional. Their goal is simple: to secure what was rightfully theirs — a decent pension they could live on. Instead, proud colleagues struggled to find work in later life, many forced into low-paid jobs in their 70s and 80s. John himself stacked shelves in Marks & Spencer and loaded passengers’ luggage at Cardiff Airport to make ends meet. Between such jobs, his time was absorbed by campaigning and lobbying. As the years have passed, many colleagues and campaigners have died, often leaving widows to struggle financially. Still, John, Phil and their dwindling band battle on. Like other long-running social justice campaigners, they believe their continued presence is uncomfortable for a political class that may prefer the issue to fade from view. So, they persist, exuding a dignity and camaraderie seldom seen in today’s industrial and commercial world.

A difficult Whitehall meeting

Earlier this year, John and Phil travelled to London to meet the new Pensions Minister, Swansea’s Torsten Bell, to discuss the ongoing crisis and the Government’s response. It was an unusual summit: two elderly former steelmen from Wales’s lost industrial heritage meeting a young policy thinker at the heart of the UK Labour Government. In Whitehall, they were supported by independent Senedd MS Rhys ab Owen, one of the ASW workers’ most eloquent advocates, who had initiated the meeting. Rhys was following in the footsteps of his late father, Owen John Thomas, who had campaigned forcefully for ASW workers in the early years of devolution. It is striking that two generations of Senedd MSs have sought justice that remains unfulfilled. 

Campaigners bound by injustice

John and Phil were joined by Richard Nicholl and Terry Monk, who lost company pensions in a similar scandal. Like them, they have devoted huge parts of their lives to fighting for fellow workers and pensioners. That team spirit, and burning injustice, has bound these men together for so long. The meeting did not go well from the campaigners’ perspective. Bell acknowledged the injustice and agreed that what had happened to the ASW workers was wrong, but his final message was not what the group had hoped for. The response left them disappointed. John later described Bell’s attitude as “arrogant” and says Bell is among the most disappointing Ministers he has encountered in 24 years. His team were also frustrated to learn that Bell would continue in his role as Pensions Minister under the new Burnham administration.

Letters that fall short

In a letter sent in January this year to Mark Drakeford, then Welsh Finance Minister, Torsten Bell accepted the shortfall of the new Government’s response: “I appreciate that this proposal may not go as far as some would like.” In August, the new Secretary of State for Wales, Stephen Kinnock wrote to Phil Jones and acknowledged “that many former ASW workers remain disappointed that the changes do not go further”. It’s difficult to comprehend the crushing impact that these letters have on campaigners. Their sense of understatement is testimony to a government machine that after 24 years, is still able to sidestep a widely acknowledged social injustice.

John contrasts these latest Government responses with a letter he received from former Secretary of State for Wales Cheryl Gillan, written after she left office in 2012. “Dear John, I am so sorry I could not do more for you and your colleagues. IT IS SO WRONG.” John and Phil met her by chance years later in Westminster’s Portcullis House while meeting Labour MP and trade unionist Jack Dromey. John recalls Dame Gillan saying she still thought about ASW Cardiff and could not understand why the workers had been treated so unfairly.

Two decades of political promises

Talking to John, Phil, Richard, Terry and Alan Marnes, another long-standing campaigner, you realise they have met a “who’s who” of the last two political decades. In Wales alone, the names include Natasha Asghar, Mick Antoniw, Andrew RT Davies, Mark Drakeford, Nick Bourne, Jane Dodds, Mike Hedges, Jane Hutt, Eluned Morgan, Darren Millar, Sam Rowlands, Bethan Sayed and Leanne Wood. In Westminster, they have enjoyed support from Julie Morgan, Jenny Willott, Jonathan Evans, Elfyn Llwyd, Hywel Williams, Liz Saville Roberts and Lord Dafydd Wigley. 

John and Phil are particularly positive about Wales’s new First Minister, Rhun ap Iorwerth, with whom they have previously engaged. But it remains to be seen whether he can change Westminster’s response when so many before him have failed. John’s frustration is often directed at Westminster Labour and Conservative politicians, whom he believes have repeatedly let down his fellow workers. Across the UK Labour and Conservative parties, there is hardly any senior politician they have not lobbied or met. With nine Prime Ministers and numerous Pensions Ministers in the background, their fight is truly epic. John argues that ASW could probably have been saved with a relatively small cash injection to update the plant, contrasting this with recent government support for jobs at Port Talbot and Scunthorpe.

Why some injustices move faster

They also point to the UK Government’s transfer of a £1.5 billion investment reserve back to members of the Miners’ Pension Fund, providing an immediate 32% pension boost. In the campaigners’ view, successive governments have still failed to resolve the ASW injustice. It raises a difficult question about why some causes receive more political attention than others. 

A dwindling band still fighting

For John, Phil and their tight band of campaigners, the fight goes on. Many are now battling the effects of age and ill-health. John recalls a meeting with Pensions Minister Steve Webb at the Welsh Office in London: “Of the seven ASW members who attended, four of those brave fighters have already passed on.” It is still hoped that, after so much effort and pain, the new UK Government will find a way to bring closure to what campaigners regard as a deeply painful case of injustice. As each year passes, the estimated cost appears to decrease, but with so many politicians already come and gone, it remains to be seen. John and Phil fear the latest responses are not encouraging.

Recognition for outstanding Welsh citizens

It is also hoped that some form of official recognition will be shown to John, Phil and fellow long-serving campaigners Richard, Terry and Alan. Their lived demonstration of camaraderie, community and respect for fellow workers sets them apart as outstanding Welsh citizens. None seeks such recognition; their single-minded focus remains the full restoration of their pensions. But whatever the outcome, Wales is a better place for their determination, community loyalty and selfless endeavour.

As for any safety net, let Albert Toth disabuse you:

Nearly 200,000 families will be pushed into poverty or deeper poverty due to Labour’s decision not to end the freeze on housing benefits at the Budget, leading charities have warned. In an open letter to prime minister Andy Burnham, seen by The Independent, groups including the Trussell Trust, Generation Rent and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation say that maintaining the measure will “critically undermine” his commitment to end rough sleeping.

The formula used to calculate housing benefit levels – the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) – has been frozen since April 2024. The mechanism is designed to ensure benefit levels are in line with at least the lowest 30 per cent of rents in any local area. But as market rents have continued to surge, the shortfall between LHA rates and affordable rent hit a record 23.3 per cent in October. This means a shortfall of around £200 a month for renters in London, and £100 a month for the rest of the UK.

She told The Independent: “Basically, you don’t have a life, you’re just existing because all your money is just going to live. It just takes every penny, and especially now with the energy... It gets you down very much because you don't know what's going to happen from one month to the next.” Private renters will be around £700 worse off per year by 2029 without action, figures from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation showed, pulling 50,000 into poverty for the first time. Around 60,000 will also be forced into deep poverty, and 80,000 into very deep poverty, the research indicates.

In the UK, households are in poverty if their income after costs is below 60 per cent of the national average, falling to below 50 per cent for ‘deep poverty’ and below 40 per cent for ‘very deep poverty’. The 19 signatories, also including Shelter and The Salvation Army, have urged Mr Burnham to reconsider the continued freeze, and spend the £1.7bn needed to end it, alongside the introduction of an inflation-linked rent cap to limit rising costs. The letter says: “You have been clear that tackling homelessness is a top priority. These two steps would bring your vision within reach by tackling the cost of rent and ensuring that housing support for those who need it actually covers the cost of a home.”

Holly Williamson, chief executive of Generation Rent, said that it is “hugely disappointing” that the government maintained the LHA freeze. She added: “When housing benefit doesn’t cover the rent it forces families into impossible decisions, traps them in poverty and leaves them vulnerable to homelessness, with councils picking up the pieces. This decision also brings into question the government’s goal of ending rough sleeping, as it will mean there are very few affordable long-term homes for people currently sleeping rough.” 

Joanne, who lives with her 22-year-old daughter and works 10 hours a week at a local supermarket, suffers from fibromyalgia, spondylitis, and is recovering from breast cancer. She says she can’t afford to move to a bungalow because it would cost her even more. “It doesn't take a genius to work out, you know, the landlords are allowed to put their rent up every year, but the price cap doesn't go up. It’s so unfair,” Joanne said. “I just wish whoever makes that decision just lived a couple of months in our shoes, and they'd realise it's not working, it doesn't work.” She has been supported by Citizens Advice, whose research team recently found that more than half (58 per cent) of all privately renting households across Great Britain receiving housing benefit now are not getting enough support to cover their rent.

Ahead of the Budget, the prime minister announced a further £432m towards his pledge to end rough sleeping at a summit with several leading campaigners and frontline charities. This brings the total funding commitment to £874 million, coming alongside an extra £1.5bn for the government’s affordable housing programme. While both announcements were welcomed by experts, many continue to warn that the continued LHA freeze is exacerbating the UK’s housing crisis by pushing more people towards homelessness. There were a record 135,580 families living in temporary accommodation as of March 2026, the most recent official figures show, housing 177,530 children. Councils in England spent a record £2.9bn on temporary accommodation in the year to April, equating to just over £8m a day and marking another record high.

Signatories of the open letter tell the PM that around 8 in 10 (78 per cent) of low-income private renters receiving housing support are now going without essentials, adding that “this reality becomes untenable and they can no longer afford to stay living in their homes, and councils are left to pick up the pieces.” A government spokesperson said: “We’re determined to turn the tide on poverty and ensure people can access secure, affordable homes. That’s why we increased Local Housing Allowance rates in 2024 at a cost of around £7 billion over five years, while also investing over £40 billion in affordable and social housing and launched a £1 billion Crisis and Resilience Fund. Alongside this, our landmark Renters’ Rights Act will protect tenants from unfair rent hikes and bidding wars, while we’re building the homes this country needs to help tackle the root causes of housing affordability pressures.”

And the fact that even Britain’s merely middling level of welfare spending by OECD standards still translated into near-bottom individual benefit generosity and value, is a significant factor in the Poundland crisis in which Robert Jenrick has sought to intervene. In between that and his denunciation of the Boriswave, that member of the Government that denied that any wrong had been done in relation to Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme now tweets:

Today, Reform UK calls on the Government to finally settle the mine workers pension scheme (MPS) and pay its members before Christmas; if it fails to do so, Reform UK commits to doing so within 100 days of entering Government. To the dismay of many, the Chancellor failed to set a clear and unambiguous timetable for resolving the MPS in the Autumn Budget. The Prime Minister was also unable to provide the clarity miners deserve when subsequently questioned.

Enough is enough. Miners and their families have waited too long. Tragically, 18 ex-miners die every day without the fair resolution of this matter they deserve. The members must now be paid by Christmas. If that does not happen, a Reform UK government will end surplus sharing and the standstill mechanism and immediately transfer the undistributed surplus funds (including the Guarantor’s Fund) to MPS members. No more messing around. Miners can be assured that they will get the resolution they have been denied until now under a Reform UK Government.

Rt Hon Robert Jenrick MP, Reform UK Shadow Chancellor 

Lee Anderson MP, Reform UK Chairman

The Nerve To Govern

I still think that “Sandie Peggie” sounds like a drag name, but this is no time for levity. In 1530, England was an extravagantly Catholic country of many centuries’ standing. Yet by 1560, it had become the country that would define itself as fundamentally anti-Catholic for the next 400 years. Just as we are on the cusp of consigning Brexit to the same memory hole as the Commonwealth of England, so we are on the verge of taking the period from 16 April 2025 to some date in the near future, and filing it alongside the reign of Mary I. In each case, that would be because the wrong people had been given responsibility for holding the line, people who never used to believe it, who still did not quite believe it, and who had no real idea why they should. We urgently need to move them aside in favour of those who always had, who truly did, and who knew exactly why. For example, Paul Knaggs:

On Monday morning, two scenes played out across the same city. At the Royal Palace in Brussels, Belgium’s Prime Minister, Bart De Wever, handed King Philippe his resignation because his five-party coalition could not agree how to balance the books. Across town, at the glass-and-steel headquarters of the European Union, Britain’s Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, was making his first official visit, talking up “deepening security and defence cooperation” ahead of a UK-EU summit on 20 November. One government was buckling under the weight of the European fiscal order. The other had come to knock on its door.

Look across the English Channel this autumn, and you will not see the orderly, rational commonwealth that British liberal orthodoxy has spent half a century worshipping. You will see an empire of technocrats coming apart at the joints. It began, as so much does in France, in the schools. When term opened in September, sixth-formers walked out of lycées that had too few teachers and too little of everything else, just as the government laid out tens of billions in fresh spending cuts. By early October, their union said some 1,800 high schools were blockaded or shut for the day. Then the anger spread beyond the school gates. Trade unionists of the CGT joined in, and so did a revived gilets jaunes movement furious at fuel prices. On 17 October more than half a million people marched and France saw some of its worst rioting in years; on Saturday came a third weekend of protest.

In Germany, once hailed as the unshakeable engine of the Continent, a youth movement calling itself Gen Z regelt marched the same Saturday in 34 cities, demanding money for schools and homes, protesting against budget cuts and rising defence spending, and refusing any return of conscription. By nightfall, shops were being looted in Frankfurt, the city that houses the European Central Bank. The day before, Italy came to a halt for its second general strike in a month, as workers and students marched for higher wages and public services and against military spending.

Nor does it stop there. In Spain the fury is over housing, and it has spilled across the border into Portugal, where police broke up a protest camp in Lisbon and arrested dozens. In Athens, students pitched tents in Syntagma Square over the cost of rooms they cannot afford, and teachers and pupils marched on parliament chanting that from Greece to France they wanted public, free education. Belgian students have rallied in Brussels and Liège over crumbling schools; in Vienna, thousands marched against cuts to the universities. This is not one country’s bad autumn. It is a continent’s young people discovering, all at once, that the system has nothing left to offer them.

Different countries, different triggers, the same complaint. Prices rise, schools decay, services fall, and governments announce that there is no money. Yet these are the same governments that, at The Hague in June 2025, signed up to Donald Trump’s demand that NATO members spend 5 per cent of national output on defence and security by 2035: 3.5 per cent on the military itself and 1.5 per cent on everything around it. Spain’s Pedro Sánchez alone dug in, calling the target unreasonable and counterproductive, and secured wording he says lets Madrid spend far less; Trump threatened him with tariffs. Britain signed without a murmur. Trump hailed the pledge as a monumental win, and for the arms industry it was. The leaders who lecture their own people about sovereignty let their defence budgets be set in Washington, and the bill was sent to the classroom. Europe is not at war. Its schools are being made to pay as though it were.

POLAND: WHO RULES? 

Then there is Poland, where the crisis has stopped being a matter of budgets and become a matter of who rules. Last Thursday, Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the opposition Law and Justice party, gave a speech about Poland’s future terms with Brussels. Within hours Donald Tusk had told the country that Kaczyński wanted to lead Poland out of the European Union, and that next year’s election would decide whether Poland stays or goes. Kaczyński insists he wants to reform the Union, not leave it. The next day, the police arrived at the Constitutional Tribunal, and the words coup d’état echoed across the air. 

A judge elected by Tusk’s parliamentary majority suspended the tribunal’s PiS-appointed president and his deputy, and riot police sealed the building. President Karol Nawrocki turned his plane round on the way to Senegal, flew back to Warsaw and pushed his way inside in the small hours. The ousted president of the court called it a coup d’état. So did Kaczyński, who stood outside and urged his supporters to topple Tusk. Night after night since, crowds have faced lines of police on Szucha Avenue, with rosaries hanging from the fence.

Tusk’s reply, delivered in a televised address to the nation, was that the court PiS built had never been a genuine court, that no politician may enter a courtroom to give orders to judges, and that the campaign against him enjoyed the support of pro-Russian forces. He had a point of sorts: Dmitry Medvedev had obligingly declared that Tusk’s liberals were “protected by Brussels”. And Brussels? The European Commission, which spent years freezing Poland’s money over PiS’s capture of the judiciary, said it was following events closely. Then it reminded everyone that appointing the new judges lies within the powers of the Polish parliament, and that the tribunal must respect the case law of the EU’s own Court of Justice. Police around a constitutional court drew no such reminder.

None of this makes Kaczyński a democrat. His party spent eight years bending the tribunal to its will; PiS taught Poland that the constitutional court was a prize to be captured. But that is exactly the point. Marcin Matczak, a liberal law professor and no friend of PiS, has warned that a future government could now point to these scenes as proof that sending police into the constitutional court is an acceptable way to settle a legal argument. A rule of law enforced by riot police, and applauded from Brussels when the approved side wins, is not the rule of law. It is the rule of the winning faction, with a European stamp on it.

Older readers will hear an echo. In the autumn of 1993, Boris Yeltsin, the West’s favourite democrat, found Russia’s Constitutional Court ruling against him. When the shooting in Moscow was over, he suspended the court, and Western governments stood by their reformer. Warsaw is not Moscow; there are no tanks and no dead. But the shape is familiar: an executive that has decided a court is an obstacle, a foreign patron that has decided the executive is on the right side of history, and a population told that the forcible solution is the democratic one. 

Poland is also where the politics and the money meet. It took the largest single share of the EU’s new SAFE defence-loan scheme, almost €44 billion. In March, Nawrocki vetoed the law to implement it, arguing that it would load decades of debt onto Poles and give Brussels a hand in Polish defence. Tusk simply routed around the veto, and the first billions arrived in May. Whatever one thinks of Nawrocki, he asked the question most European leaders will not: who is this rearmament really for?

BREAD, AND GUNS 

Which brings us back to Brussels, where the machinery has seized up on its own doorstep. De Wever’s government wants €10 billion of savings by 2029 to bring down a deficit running above five per cent of national output. Its plan leans mainly on cuts to public spending, healthcare included, topped up with a rise in VAT. The talks broke down over the VAT rise, which the French-speaking liberals of the MR refused to accept. On the reported account, the cuts to healthcare were not what stopped the talks. The argument was over which regressive measure the public would be made to swallow, while the unions, who have been mobilising against austerity for months, waited outside. And in October, the same government banked the first €1.2 billion of an €8.34 billion EU loan for weapons. Eurostat’s own figures show the sickness is structural: eleven member states ran deficits at or above the bloc’s sacred 3 per cent ceiling in 2025, with Romania, Poland, Belgium and France the worst. When the books fail to balance, the response from the European ruling class is always identical: the working class is handed the bill. 

Here is the heart of it. Europe’s rulers have discovered that there is money after all, but only for one thing. Alongside the Hague pledge sits the Commission’s own plan, unveiled in March 2025, to mobilise up to €800 billion for defence, including €150 billion in SAFE loans. Brussels relaxed its own fiscal rules so that extra military spending would not count against governments the way spending on hospitals and schools does. In October, EU leaders told the Commission to find a further €70 billion for Ukraine in 2027 and began pressing Britain, Canada and Japan to help. The beneficiaries are not hard to find. Rheinmetall, Germany’s largest arms maker, reported an operating profit of €1.84 billion last year and a record order backlog of almost €64 billion.

We are told that none of this may be questioned, because of Russia. But a continent that can find €800 billion for arms, yet cannot find €10 billion for Belgian healthcare without a government offering its resignation, has made a choice, and it is not a choice about Russia. Rearmament has become the only industrial policy Brussels permits itself: public money channelled to private arms makers and their shareholders, exempted from the austerity imposed on everything else. Guns for the shareholders, cuts for everyone else. The young Germans who marched against conscription and the Italian strikers who marched against military spending understand this perfectly well.

Fairness demands the counterargument be stated plainly. Not every national grievance from Paris to Warsaw can be laid at the door of the Berlaymont. The European Union is an established geopolitical reality that will not vanish overnight. Nor should any serious socialist pretend that leaving the bloc came without real trade friction, supply chain disruption, and administrative burdens. There remain sensible, practical reasons to trade closely, cooperate across borders, and share scientific research with our European neighbours.

Yet trade does not require political vassalage, and the economic costs of our departure do not absolve the European project of its fatal flaw. The European Union was never an internationalist project for the working class; it was an enclosure of democracy. It steadily moved crucial levers of economic power out of the reach of sovereign electorates and lodged them with unelected commissioners and remote courtrooms. Poland shows where that road ends: a national constitutional court whose legitimacy is now measured against the rulings of Luxembourg. The Union adopted a flag, an anthem, and an institutional vanity, constructing an aggressive supranational nationalism while congratulating itself on having abolished nations altogether.

WESTMINSTER AT THE DOOR 

Which makes this morning’s visit so telling. Streeting went to Brussels, by the Financial Times’s account, partly to press for British arms firms to share in Europe’s procurement boom. The government will say this is cooperation, not membership, and on the narrow facts that is true. But it tells you everything about the limits of Westminster’s imagination that the one European project it is eager to join is the arms bazaar. Behind the ministers stands an entire class of comfortable British politicians and commentators who look at this gathering continental crisis and conclude that our greatest mistake was walking away from the fire. They watch our own governments fail to build homes, fail to invest in industry, and fail to rebuild our public sector, and their only instinct is to plead for Brussels to govern us again. Britain’s own Chief of the General Staff has told the country that its citizens “have got to consent to sacrifices to prioritise defence and security”. He did not say which sacrifices. He did not need to. The schools of France and Belgium have already shown us.

What a wretched poverty of political imagination. The real issue rests within this paragraph: “We do not lack the money to rebuild this country. We lack politicians with the vision and the political will to do it. They would sooner outsource their responsibilities to the EU than exercise the democratic authority entrusted to them by the British people.” Britain urgently needs massive industrial renewal, water and railways returned to public ownership, decent municipal housing, and wages that allow families to live with dignity. If it spends more on defence, that money should defend these islands, not buy a seat at someone else’s procurement table. Not a single one of those policies requires the permission of Brussels. The refusal of our domestic political class to exercise sovereign democratic power is an indictment of Westminster, not an argument for handing that power back. We did not throw off one unaccountable bureaucracy merely to crawl back into its arms because our own leaders lack the nerve to govern.

Effective and Legitimate

David Frost writes:

Most people assume, without thinking much about it, that only British citizens get to vote in British general elections. They are often very surprised to learn that it’s not so. In fact Britain has probably the largest electoral franchise in the world. Not only do Irish citizens get to vote, but so do so-called “qualifying Commonwealth citizens”. And that “qualifying” doesn’t mean a lot. Commonwealth citizens need not have settled here permanently: time-limited immigration permission is quite good enough. The Electoral Commission spells it out: “Any type of permission to enter or stay is acceptable, whether indefinite, time-limited or conditional.” That covers workers, students, family members, even refugees.

All such Commonwealth citizens get to help choose our government, without becoming British, or even having a permanent right to live here. A student on a short visa can help elect a government whose mistakes may well last a lot longer than his or her time in the UK. The reality is that if any of the Commonwealth’s 2.7 billion citizens can get to the UK on any basis other than being a simple tourist, they can get to vote here too. I find that people are extremely surprised when you describe this situation to them. Often they literally cannot believe it. It’s time to end it. That’s why I am tabling amendments for debate this week in the House of Lords as it examines Labour’s Representation of the People Bill. 

My amendments maintain the Irish exception. The Northern Ireland settlement recognises the right of its people to identify as British, Irish, or both, and it is not the moment to start requiring British citizenship as the price of parliamentary participation. Moreover, it’s reciprocal: Brits get to vote in Irish elections. But the Commonwealth entitlement is quite different and frankly indefensible in its current form. For one thing it’s a complete anomaly internationally. No EU country allows non-citizens to vote in national elections except for Ireland (for British citizens) and Portugal (in the arguably somewhat similar case of Brazilians). You have to be a citizen to vote in national elections in Norway, Switzerland, Canada, Australia (unless a Brit resident there in 1984), and the United States.

The only real exception is New Zealand, which allows all permanent residents to vote, not just a subset. That, at least, is logical. What we do is extend the right to vote to citizens of countries on the basis that Britain governed them 60 years ago (mostly, but not exclusively: Rwandans and a few others are included too). This makes no logical sense in the modern world. Nor are the arrangements reciprocal. Only a small number of Caribbean countries, and a couple of small African ones, allow Brits to vote, and even then they generally have to be permanent residents. Indians can vote in Britain, but no Brit can vote in India. It’s the same for Pakistan. It’s the same for Canada. Sri Lanka — no. Bangladesh — no. Nigeria — no. The list goes on. I don’t blame them. They rightly regard choosing their government as the business of their citizens. We should do the same.

This really is an imperial hangover. These voting rights reflect an entirely antiquated relationship between Britain and the Empire, a legacy of the original expansive definition of who could claim to be a “British subject”. The definition of citizenship has of course been tidied up since then (though we have handed it out far too freely) but the legacy rights to vote have not. They have nothing to do with citizenship of a modern nation state. Of course I value the Commonwealth and our friendships with its members. But they are different countries. That has to mean something.

When I have discussed or written about this issue, I don’t find any convincing objections of principle. Sometimes, of course, there is a half-suppressed admission that Indian or Pakistani citizens are felt to be more likely to vote for a particular party, but that really can’t be a basis for providing voting rights. The argument I hear more often is “it’s always been like that”. It’s true that Conservatives should respect inherited arrangements. But one of our inherited arrangements is the British nation state. Preserving effective and legitimate democratic government of our state should surely be our top priority.

I am not the first person to question the arrangements as they currently stand. The Labour peer and former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith wrote, in his review of UK citizenship for the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2008, that “I do propose that government gives consideration to making a clear connection between citizenship and the right to vote by limiting in principle the right to vote in Westminster elections to UK citizens”, adding “it is right in principle not to give the right to vote to citizens of other countries living in the UK until they become UK citizens.” Unfortunately Gordon Brown ignored the report. So did David Cameron’s government and all its successors. But Lord Goldsmith was still correct.

Goldsmith’s proposal would have preserved existing voters’ rights while changing the rules for new Commonwealth arrivals. That would probably have been reasonable at the time. There were around a million Commonwealth citizens in Britain at that point. Things have changed since then. Research from Pimlico Journal estimates that, thanks to the Boriswave, around 2.5 million Commonwealth citizens could now be in the country and eligible to vote. The Electoral Commission has suggested in the past that around two-thirds of Commonwealth citizens register to vote, a figure that will probably go up when auto-registration, provided for by Labour’s proposed new Act, is introduced. Given the way that migration is concentrated in particular areas, it is entirely plausible that numbers like this start affecting British elections.

But the case for change doesn’t rest on this. It rests on the constitutional reality of what it means to be a nation state. A nation is not the same thing as the people who happen to be standing on these islands at any given moment. A nation is a political community of citizens who have, at least in theory, specific rights and responsibilities, and have made particular commitments to stick by each other. One of those rights is to help choose the government. Non-citizens haven’t made the same commitment. For one thing, they can leave if things get bad. So they shouldn’t have the same political rights as those who make up the nation. If they want them, they should become citizens, and if doing that is too high a price to pay, it’s entirely correct that they don’t get the right to choose the government.

It’s time to tidy all this up and join the international norm. That’s what needs to be debated this week and what my amendments seek to do. Only British (and Irish) citizens should have the right to vote in national elections or those for the devolved assemblies. Only those citizens should have the right to stand at elections, and if those standing for election are citizens of other countries too, electors should know that. And, finally, the rules should be set centrally at Westminster, not tinkered with for political convenience by the likes of the Scottish “Government”. There should be one set of rules for the whole country. This isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a party political campaign. It’s a campaign to bring the rules into line with what most people in Britain already think they are. It’s a campaign for reason, fairness, and equality in our electoral arrangements. It’s a campaign whose time is coming, for there really is no good argument against change.

But there is not necessarily a compelling argument for this change. The thing about allowing only British citizens to vote is that Britain has never done it. Almost no other country allows any category of non-citizen to vote. In the United States, you cannot become President unless you were born there. Imagine suggesting there or in Israel that any non-citizen should have the vote. National Conservatives have picked the wrong laboratory here, where an Irish or Commonwealth citizen could in principle become Prime Minister. Is anyone still sitting in the House of Commons for an English, Scottish or Welsh seat without being a British citizen, or for a Northern Irish seat without being British or Irish? That may now be an open goal for rivals to be the First Past the Post. Yet it is perfectly possible.

Last year, the Migrant Democracy Project was merely stating the obvious when it called this country’s qualifications for voting “colonial”. Britain has a long, a recent, and, as we see from the Chagos Islands to the Falkland Islands, an ongoing imperial history. It was in the EU for two generations. It is mercantile. De Gaulle was right to call us “maritime", but not to call us “insular”. Citizens of countries that were in the French Empire when he said that now have the vote in Britain as citizens of the Commonwealth. We already enfranchise the Commonwealth citizens of Rwanda, Mozambique, Gabon and Togo, none of which was ever in the British Empire. Why let a Gabonese or a Togolese vote, but not an American or an Israeli?

Extending suffrage to citizens of countries with which we had a connection is so British that it is positively Burkean, like the NHS. We give the citizens of the Commonwealth’s other member states the right to vote and stand in elections to our Parliament, but very few of those countries reciprocate; two of the last six Prime Ministers of Australia have had to give up their natal British citizenship in order to sit in the Australian Parliament. The present system enfranchises Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, but not Americans or Israelis. Is that what those who wrote above the line in the Daily Telegraph would want? It says that Ghanaians are more “like us” than Germans are, and that Swazis are more “like us” than Swedes are. Is that what those who wrote below the line in the Daily Mail would want?

Countries join and leave the Commonwealth quite frequently. None of them has any more recent connection to Britain that any member of the European Economic Area has. By any measure, many have less. Some fairly recent additions to the Commonwealth have no more connection to Britain than anywhere else in the world has. Although no less, either. Britain is now globally noted for its superdiversity, uniquely combining people from every inhabited territory on Earth, some level of ethnic diversity down to every neighbourhood and village, and a huge and exponentially increasing mixed-race population in the society that accepted mixed-race people and couples more than anywhere else. So, since there would seem to be no remaining example to the contrary, require parliamentary candidates to be British citizens in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens in Northern Ireland. But either restrict the franchise in the same way, or let everyone vote. Those two options should be put to the House of Commons, with whichever passed by the larger majority coming into effect, or with neither of them doing so if both had been defeated.

Constitutional Tribunal

Craig Murray writes:

I was First Secretary at the British Embassy in Warsaw 1994-98. While that was a long time ago, I knew personally many of the people at the heart of the current crisis, such as Donald Tusk and Radek Sikorski.

1) The first thing to say about Poland is that the current crisis is unlikely to turn violent, certainly not in a sustained way. There will be a lot of yelling and name calling and a lot of references to obscure old feuds and scandals, but Poland is not Ukraine or even France, and will muddle through as usual with some kind of woolly compromise to see us through the next few years. General Jaruzelski, the last major leader under Communism, used to be the neighbour who shared the boundary fence at the bottom of my garden. He oversaw martial law and a secret service which was pretty vicious – but looking back with the perspective of history, the remarkable thing is not how much, but how little, violent repression was used against Solidarnosc in 1980 to 1983. Some 120 people were killed and thousands imprisoned, but for a revolution that triggered world-shaking political change that is remarkably restrained. Then with Walesa in power as President, Jaruzelski used to go about Warsaw quite openly, and I would say “Dzien Dobry Panie Generale” to him in the mornings as he walked past my gate. Violence is not natural in Polish politics.

2) The second thing to understand is that Polish politics is split between the right and the nationalist right. The left is now almost insignificant – the mildly social democratic Nowa Lewica is a small junior partner in Tusk’s governing coalition and polls about 8%. That is pretty well the only “left”. Elements of the governing Civic Coalition – such as Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, are very right by British standards. Sikorski was in the Bullingdon Club with Osborne and Johnson and is a bit to the right of either on social or economic policy. The opposition nationalist right are socially conservative and religious: abortion remains the touchstone defining issue, which directly relates to the current dispute about the Constitutional Tribunal. There is no significant economic division between the right and nationalist right, with the latter perhaps slightly more socially minded in matters like welfare spending. It is a great mistake to try to shoehorn the divisions into a classic economic policy related party alignment of left and right, or even into the liberal vs populist model. Poland is sui generis, a thing unto itself.

3) The crisis about the Constitutional Tribunal is Superficially Meta. It is about the composition of the Constitutional Tribunal rather than any case currently before the Court. But it has become the totem of the deep divisions in Polish society. Poland has a hybrid system that is neither an executive presidency nor a parliamentary democracy. The power of legislative initiative lies with the Parliament (Sejm) and the Prime Minister appointed by the Sejm. But the President has an active power of veto and controls important appointments.

The Constitutional Tribunal ensures the constitution is properly followed and thus judges disputes between the President, Prime Minister and Sejm. The tribunal also ensures that the rights of citizens enshrined in the constitution are respected. It also – and this is a major difference from the UK where there is no such judicial power – ensures Polish legislation is compatible with international law and Poland’s treaty relations.

The most important recent decision of the Constitutional Tribunal was naturally on abortion, which it limited in 2020 by abolishing the health related exemption which had provided for most abortions. The history of abortion in Poland is again very strange to a non-Pole. When I was in Poland in the mid 1990s it had both the highest rate per capita of Catholic church attendance in the world and arguably the highest abortion rate per capita in the world. It is a complex subject for another day.

4) As usual in Poland, both sides are entirely unreasonable. At the moment Poland has a PiS (Nationalist right) President Nawrocki versus a right Civic Coalition Prime Minister Tusk. The longstanding problem with the Constitutional Tribunal is that its members must be appointed by the Sejm but sworn in by the President. When neither are prepared to compromise – frequently the case – this has led to impasse after impasse.

The immediate crisis began on 30 October 2026 when Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska — elected by the present Sejm majority but never sworn in by Nawrocki — ordered the suspension of Tribunal President Bogdan Święczkowski (a PiS appointee) and declared herself in charge. Tusk’s government then deployed riot police to secure the building in support of her move; Nawrocki abandoned a trip to Senegal to return, and PiS supporters gathered outside. Each side accused the other of a coup.

The conflict dates back to 2015 but every legacy media account I have seen gives a false account of how it started. In 2015 the right Civic Platform government, a direct predecessor of Tusk’s coalition, knew it was losing power. It therefore sought to pack the Constitutional Tribunal. It appointed five new judges. Three of these fell due just before Civic Platform left power, but it also passed a law allowing it to appoint in advance two further judges whose terms fell due under the incoming PiS government. Civic Platform thus attempted to appoint five new judges, to attempt to limit the scope of the incoming PiS Sejm and Presidency.

The new PiS government immediately sought to cancel the appointment of all five new judges and appoint its own judges in their place. This was indeed of dubious legality. But in truth it was a reaction to a profoundly undemocratic action by Civic Platform to pack the court with its own supporters as it left power which, while it may have been legal, was outrageous. The Constitutional Tribunal itself eventually decided that the first three Civic Platform judges were appointed legitimately, and that the next two Civic Platform judges whose appointments should have fallen due outwith that Sejm’s term were not legitimate. They therefore also approved two of the PiS judges.

This was an obviously correct decision which the politicians had been incapable of agreeing. But it was Civic Platform not PiS which first tried to fix the court, a point completely misrepresented in current legacy media accounts and by the European Commission. Subsequently the PiS made further changes to the composition and powers of the Constitutional Tribunal, which were ruled illegal by the European Court of Justice, the judicial body of the European Union.

5) The EU is at the heart of the division. Donald Tusk himself has tried to spin the conflict this way. His address to the nation after his coup was made in front of a plethora of Polish and EU flags. He had repeatedly claimed over the previous two days that the PiS was seeking to take Poland out of the European Union. The PiS counter that Donald Tusk wishes to join the Euro, the European Central Bank and transfer Poland’s gold reserves to the EU (which the pre-coup Constitutional Tribunal would seek to bloc). Both sides have a point. Donald Tusk would like to join the Euro, and frequently said so in the past – though joining the Euro does not actually entail transferring Poland’s substantial gold reserves. The PiS would like to leave the EU. But neither side currently has their inward desire as a stated official objective, because both positions are unpopular. 

PiS President Nawrocki’s senior adviser on EU affairs is Jacek Saryusz Wolski, a man with whom I worked closely on Polish EU accession. For decades in the national and European parliament he was the face of Polish EU enthusiasm. Saryusz Wolski is however now deeply disillusioned that the EU of von der Leyen, Merz, Macron and Kallas is not the body he dreamt of. He views the present EU asvdeeply undemocratic and overbearing. He has, in short, gone through exactly the same transformation in his views on the EU as I have. 

The EU was seen as central to Polish nationalist identity because it guaranteed Polish independence, which give Poland’s traumatic history of occupation and foreign domination was central. EU membership led to two decades of outstanding economic growth, But a number of factors have eroded the EU sheen with time. These include a fear of German domination. the EU’s social liberalism and the undemocratic nature of EU institutions.

When I knew them in the old days, I would have thought it impossible that Jacek Sarusz Wolski would be on a eurosceptic nationalist right while Radek Sikorski would be on an opposing europhile right. The opposite was plainly the case back then. To understand the switching of allegiances you need to consider something western legacy media is blithely ignoring; the centrality of Ukraine to current events in Poland.

6) Ukraine is central to this. Simply put, the nationalist right has had its full of Zelensky, whereas Tusk is a devotee of the von der Leyen/Kallas/Merz war hawk line. For British people, Ukraine is another “far away country of which we know nothing”. To Poles it is a neighbour, of which they know a very great deal indeed. Poland probably houses more Ukrainian refugees than any other state, both in absolute numbers and per capita. Part of the antipathy from the nationalist right is anti-immigrant resentment.

But Ukraine really is an extremely corrupt state, and the Poles understand this very well. Poles contribute to the vast sums which the EU has poured into the Zelensky regime, and Poles also have a close-up view of Ukrainian regime aligned figures in supercars buying top end properties. Ukrainians are the largest foreign buyers of Polish real estate. This is simply true. Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski ended up on the Civic Coalition side of the equation, because his primary loyalty is, and always was, to NATO, as befits a member of the Bullingdon Club and husband of crazed Russophobe Anna Applebaum. A combination of events in Ukraine and the advent of President Nawrocki have caused a shift of the nationalist right to a much more sceptical position on Ukraine. Nawrocki is of a younger generation of politician – he is 43 and was only 15 when I left Poland. But his entire professional career prior to becoming President was connected to World War II commemoration.

Zelensky had been given Poland’s highest award. The Order of the White Eagle. Nawrocki cancelled the award and made Zelensky return it, due to Ukrainian official commemoration of Nazi allied figures and units who had participated in the massacres of Poles during World War II. Other senior Ukrainians also returned their Polish decorations. That is a pretty startling diplomatic split, hugely under-reported in the West. The most prestigious Ukrainian TV production at this moment is “Winged Lions”, a series about the Galician Division which was formed in the First World War to fight primarily against Poland. This was not only in the field against Poland as a second front in Poland’s defining national war against the Soviet Union in 1921, it was also the predecessor of the Galician Brigade of the Waffen SS – the continuing commemoration of which is a running sore between the two countries. To add insult to injury the series is filmed in the former major Polish city of Lvov. Naturally at time of war Ukrainian nationalism is running amok, and its insensitivity and – in Polish eyes – ingratitude towards Polish sensibility is a real problem.

Poland is itself a traumatised state. The Poles lost their state completely in the eighteenth century. Polish states re-emerged at times under French and Soviet domination, but I broadly accept that, apart from 1919 to 1939, a truly sovereign Polish state did not return until the 1990s. Add to that the fact that until 1946 Western Ukraine was a part of Poland and integral to Polish identity. Lvov was a major centre of Polish architecture and culture. It is hard to find a fitting simile, but to Poles it is as though Canterbury and Norwich, Kent and East Anglia, were taken from the English by France in the 1940s. There is no serious movement to reopen boundary questions, not least because so much of Poland was Germany until 1946. But the fact that the parts of Poland where the Ukrainians massacred tens of thousands of Polish civilians, are now Ukrainian territory, naturally has an impact on the Polish psyche.

7) This was an attempted coup. That is a fair description. All Hallows’ Eve is a massive thing in Poland. People return to their ancestral graves and light candles in red glass lanterns, keeping vigil. Families leave the cities and return to ancestral villages to do this. It is an official Catholic church festival, so naturally it is disproportionately PiS supporters who are occupied in this. Choosing the Friday a day before All Hallow’s Eve to move physically against the Constitutional Tribunal was clearly a deliberate tactical choice when the least resistance might be expected. It also has the classic ingredient of a coup that President Nawrocki had just left the country on an official visit. Nawrocki’s decisiveness in turning around the Presidential plane and returning to Warsaw, forcing his way through the cordon of riot police around the Constitutional Tribunal, has changed the situation on the ground towards him.

There is the fog that surrounds highly contested events in real time. It is widely claimed that Tusk attempted to have Nawrocki’s plane denied landing at Warsaw airport. It is hard to judge yet if this is true. It is also widely claimed that major portions of the massed riot police Tusk put around the Constitutional Tribunal displayed no numbers and did not speak Polish. I am not inclined simply to dismiss this, because there are so many eye witness reports, including from Polish MPs and MEPs. Widely circulated footage allegedly showing German police convoys inside Poland is hotly disputed. Again a little time may be needed to determine the truth. What does appear highly probable is that the European Commission had advance notice of the coup, because the speed with which they jumped in to support Tusk and Pietrowska’s takeover of the Constitutional Tribunal was remarkable, given the complexity of the situation. Personally I cannot see any argument whatsoever that Pietrowska’s action was legal.

8) I expect this to fizzle out. It may appear like the most massive bust-up, but I know many of these people and they all know each other. The bitterness does not really extend far into personal relationships. Tusk probably expected to win control of the streets with his riot police and because his supporters are very much urban. A much higher proportion of the Polish population lives in rural areas than is the western norm, and that is where the strength of the PiS lies. It is therefore much harder for the nationalist right quickly to mobilise an urban crowd than for Tusk’s right, even when it isn’t All Hallow’s Eve. But PiS supporters did turn out to confront the riot police, whereas there has been a distinct lack of people pouring onto the streets to support Tusk.

So far it seems Tusk’s gambit has failed spectacularly. He is left in the position of appearing to have attempted to use physical force and the riot police, against the Tribunal and the President, on behalf of van der Leyen, Merz and EU interests which are a cipher for Germany. The videos of German police convoys add to this impression, irrespective of whether they are genuinely in Poland or not. The extraordinary footage of the police on All Saints’ Day leading away in handcuffs, from the grave of their two year old child, the husband of popular nationalist right journalist Danuta Holecka, is an image that will haunt Tusk’s future. Nothing could be more shocking to Polish sensibility. The official explanation of a traffic violation is extraordinary. It could of course just have been apolitical and coincided with the capital’s events, but the damage is done (and anyway I doubt it).

The Constitutional Tribunal ruling from 2020 on abortion has been followed as law in Poland, irrespective of who has been in power and irrespective of what the European Court of Justice and European Court of Human Rights have said. So in spite of all the wrangling, it is not a dead institution. We will see how the power struggle plays out. My expectation is that it will calm down, there will be long-running inquiries but nobody will go to jail. I do expect that Tusk, the EU and Zelensky are all weakened by this, and it has been a good weekend for the PiS.

When I was in Poland, I immersed myself in the culture and language, and spent time in every single region. I had learnt the Polish language including at the Catholic University of Lublin and in Sopot. I believe I was the only western diplomat to predict correctly that Kwasniewski would defeat Walesa in the 1996 election. My Ambassador sent an urgent telegram to London to contradict my final campaign report because it said Kwasniewski would win. I knew because I had a real knowledge of provincial Poland that other Warsaw focused western diplomats lacked. But while I have a deep love for Poland and its people, I very seldom write about its politics or its politicians, because frankly I find both exasperating. Polish politics consists almost entirely of unreasonable men with foolish opinions yelling at each other about points tangential to their real disagreements. I do hope that my explanation of current events is helpful to your own thoughts on the matter.

While Frank Furedi writes:

Ever since the election of pro-EU Donald Tusk as the prime minister of Poland in 2023, Brussels has regarded the country as the staging ground for perfecting its experiment in imperial domination. As a former European Council president and now the European Commission’s favourite son, Tusk knows that he can get away with just about anything. That is why, on the evening of Friday 30 October, he effectively sent in the police to Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal.

The intense drama unfolded after the court’s president, Bogdan Święczkowski, and its vice-president, Bartłomiej Sochański, were suspended by Anna Korwin-Piotrowska – a fellow judge who is close to the Tusk regime. Korwin-Piotrowska has since announced that she is taking ‘control’ of the court. Waldemar Żurek, Poland’s justice minister, said he instructed Korwin-Piotrowska to take these measures in order to pave the way for the prosecution of Święczkowski and Sochański for ‘failing to perform their duties’.

This judicial coup d’état was timed to coincide with an overseas trip of Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s populist president who represents the Law and Justice Party (PiS). He is also a bitter critic of Tusk. Upon hearing the news of this coup, Nawrocki turned his plane back on Friday evening and returned to Warsaw.

Nawrocki forced his way into the Constitutional Tribunal on Saturday – a confrontation that played out on live television. Outside the court, he issued a statement warning that, ‘there was a breach of public order in the Republic of Poland and a forcible takeover of a constitutional body’. For its part, the tribunal warned that Tusk had staged a coup.

In turn, Tusk justified his action by claiming that there was ‘no other way’ to restore the rule of law. ‘There was never any doubt that the court in the form imposed by PiS was not a genuine court’, Tusk said in a televised address on Saturday. He claimed that there are ‘organisations and politicians in Poland who seek to destroy democracy and the rule of law’, and cited Russia’s opposition to his changes as proof that he was acting in the interests of citizens.

What Tusk really meant was that the judges sitting on Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal – most of whom were appointed by PiS – refused to dance to his tune, and therefore had to be prevented from performing their legitimate judicial role. According to Tusk’s authoritarian logic, since there was no other way, the use of force was a legitimate response to the situation.

The key issue at stake in the dispute between the Constitutional Tribunal and the Tusk-EU bloc was whether Polish constitutional law could take precedence over EU laws. For the EU oligarchy, the laws cobbled together in Brussels must take precedence over national courts. Through its pursuit of lawfare against sovereign decision-making, Brussels hopes to ensure that its federalist project prevails over the national interests of its member states. Bringing the Polish courts to heel is key to ensuring the dominance of EU law.

It is worth noting that even some liberal Polish legal scholars, who are fiercely opposed to the conservative Nawrocki and PiS, were shocked by the scenes at the Constitutional Tribunal. Marcin Matczak, a liberal law professor, was taken aback by Tusk’s actions. He declared that there is ‘no legal basis’ whatsoever for the suspension of Święczkowski.

Tusk’s violation of the foundational principles of the rule of law was met with studied indifference by the Commission. In fact, Brussels has effectively given Tusk a free pass. A Commission spokesperson noted: ‘It is for the Polish authorities to ensure that the Constitutional Tribunal can function in accordance with the Polish constitution and in respect of the relevant case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union.’ 

There was never any doubt about the Commission’s support for Tusk’s coup. For some time now, Brussels has been actively promoting the project of undermining and ultimately crushing its opponents in Poland. Tusk’s election in 2023 represented an important step towards realising this goal. However, thanks to the election of Nawrocki in 2025, and a constitutional tribunal fiercely protective of its independence, Tusk could not gain full control over the levers of judicial power. 

The EU has consistently demonstrated that it will not tolerate any government in its orbit that pursues independent, sovereign interests. Europe’s outright hostility to former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, and its blatant interference in the Romanian elections last year, show just how far it will go to crush populist politicians and their movements.

Making it most welcome to read the report of Andrew J Quinn:

A Scottish Labour MP has warned Andy Burnham against rejoining the “pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist” European Union. Brian Leishman has revealed that he voted Leave in 2016 - making him the only Scottish Labour MP to have publicly said that they backed Brexit. The Alloa and Grangemouth MP said that the European Union “imposes cuts to public services”. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said he wants a closer relationship with Europe - and some Labour MPs have been pushing for him to rejoin. It comes as former Chancellor Rachel Reeves said “Britain’s future lies in the European Union”.

Mr Leishman told The Scotsman: “There's a lot of things in the EU that is very good, and it has been a benefit for people. “But let's be honest: the EU is a European capitalist imperialist project that basically is there for corporate dividend and shareholder benefit, and they inflict and they pretty much impose cuts to public services and capitalism. That's what it is. It's all about co-operations for the EU. It's not about public services.” He added: “I voted leave because the EU is a pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist project. You can see it right now. It is terrifying. This rearm Europe, getting all the member states to five per cent. It's just going to feed the military-industrial complex, and what that then means is you're going to then have extreme austerity across Europe, where people's living standards will deteriorate to then fund your arms manufacturers.”

The PM wants to lock in deals on food and drink, emissions trading and a youth mobility scheme at a summit with the EU next month. But he has told ministers that the period beyond that would be to “explore options” for the long-term relationship. Mr Leishman said that the UK rejoining the EU would push more voters towards Reform and Restore. He said: “Let's look at it from a domestic democracy point of view. We had a referendum. The people voted to leave. You've got to honour these things. I look at it from a Labour Party point of view. When you look at the red wall pockets of England that voted leave, and then and then on the back of Boris Johnson, they voted Tory to ‘Get Brexit Done’. Then they made their choice. You've got to then deliver democracy and do that. People voted for Brexit because in communities like that they had been basically shafted for decades by bad, horrendous neoliberal political decisions and choices.”

He went on: “Now you get MPs arrogantly saying the public was wrong. That's not going to win these people back over. What it could end up doing is by belittling their democratic decision that they made at the ballot box, you then drive them into the hands of folk like Farage, Tice in Reform, or, dare I say it, Rupert Lowe and Restore.” Ms Reeves, who was sacked as chancellor in the summer, said: “I am proud of the progress we have already made in strengthening our relationship with the European Union. “Brexit has made us poorer, weaker and less secure. There is a debate to be had about our future relationship with Europe, and I welcome Andy Burnham’s leadership in facing up to this. No one in the Treasury ever doubted where my instincts were.” The UK Government was approached for comment.

Something To Say

There are never going to be reparations and no one seriously expects them; anyone who has ever negotiated anything knows to ask for too much at the start in order to have enough at the end. But there should obviously be an apology. If we had not been wrong before, then why did we change tack? A change of behaviour does not meet the need to apologise as well. Nor does the bad behaviour of other people. And while Tony Blair did say something, in a monarchy the words of a politician are not sufficient. This needs to come from the top, as the King of the Netherlands, on the advice of his Ministers as would be the case here, accepted three years ago, on which Raoul de Jong writes:

Dear King Charles,

You are currently on a Caribbean royal tour through the Bahamas, Guyana, and Antigua and Barbuda. I understand that during this tour you will not issue a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, or address the role your own family played in it. You will instead express your “sorrow”, and this will make it easier for politicians to also dodge the question. Whether that is Kemi Badenoch calling an apology a “navel-gazing distraction”, or the prime minister, Andy Burnham, saying he would support an apology, while flatly opposing reparations.

Coincidentally, I’m also in the middle of a world tour for the English translation of my book, Jaguarman, a novel about how my enslaved Surinamese ancestors survived 300 years of hell on Earth. I travelled from Ghana to Indonesia to New York, when I was asked to respond to you, as soon as possible. That’s how it often goes in this strange story, I’ve noticed: people like you get centuries to find the right words, while we must scramble to respond to your actions. But, yes, I do have something to say.

Three years ago your Dutch counterpart, King Willem-Alexander, stood before an audience of people of colour, many of them my friends. Dressed up like kings and queens, they listened solemnly as he did what you will not and apologised for the role of the Dutch state in enslaving our ancestors, and for the failure of his own family, the house of Orange-Nassau, to act against it. Slavery was “a crime against humanity”, he said, “and the stadholders and kings of the house of Orange-Nassau did nothing to stop it”.

It was a moment that people on whose shoulders I stand had fought for for centuries, often at the risk of their health or even their lives. Willem-Alexander’s speech was directed at people of colour such as me. But I felt that the apology was perhaps even more important for the rest of the population.

It happened in 2023, on 1 July, the day the Netherlands commemorates the abolition of slavery, a celebration called Keti Koti. In the Netherlands, many institutions tend only to invite writers such as me to speak on this one particular day, so as Willem-Alexander was addressing the nation, I was somewhere else, in a small library, in front of an audience of mostly white people, giving my own lecture about what they could learn from my Black ancestors.

We from the colonial diaspora already know the true history of our mother country. We already know what the powers that govern us are capable of. We know the darkness they can create. And we also know that it is possible to come through that darkness. To me, the apology was most important for all these other people who thought my history had nothing to do with them. For those who had never considered that there might be something to learn from the people who gave me this life.

You know the truth, Willem-Alexander knows it, I know it, but many of your subjects do not. The truth is my ancestors were kidnapped. Chained. Trafficked across the ocean. Sold. Torn from one another. Turned into property. Brainwashed. Silenced. Mocked. Cursed. But the fire inside us was never extinguished. Despite the plantations. Despite the Atlantic. Despite the slave forts. That is why I am alive.

That is not a small thing. It is enormous. That’s why the people receiving Willem-Alexander’s apology were dressed up like kings and queens. They know what a huge gift it is to be alive, and how important it is to take care of what you have been given. They know that they have not been put on this earth in order to wither. They have been put on this earth to blossom. And even if all your freedom is taken away from you by other people, you can find ways to flourish, because the spark of life itself is on our side.

Its fire will keep burning, your majesty, whether you apologise or not. The true heroes in this history were rarely born as royalty. But, of course, being born as royalty doesn’t prevent you from doing the right thing. You cannot stop the truth from coming out. But you can choose whether history remembers you as someone who stood in its way, or someone who stood with it.

And although this, by Professor Alan Lester, is two years old, it remains timely in view of what might be called the folkloric aspects of this debate:

In recent months the Daily Mail and right wing groups have mounted a clamour for a new memorial to be built in Portsmouth. In principle, the proposal seems reasonable, since it is to commemorate a British antislavery initiative. However, given its motivations, the way that it has been promoted and its proposed design, this particular memorial campaign has attracted considerable opposition. In this blog I examine the case for and against it, concluding that the project is an exercise in White virtue signalling, historical falsification and the denial of racism.

Four months after Black Lives Matter protestors drowned the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol’s harbour, the conservative historian Jeremy Black wrote a piece in The Critic highlighting the exploits of the Royal Navy’s antislavery activities. The Critic describes its purpose as pushing back ‘against a self-regarding and dangerous consensus that finds critical voices troubling, triggering, insensitive and disrespectful’. Black found the critical voices of Black Lives Matter troubling, triggering and disrespectful and decided to defend the consensus instead. ‘Why does’ the slave trade, ‘this dramatic long-forgotten aspect of our history matter so much?’, he wrote.

… [D]espite all the criticism seemingly endlessly repeated today, we actually have many, many reasons to be proud of our history and of what ends we used our power to purpose. Notably so in our leading role in ending first the international slave trade and then slavery around the world. For over a century, Britain stood at the forefront of the push to end both, using much effort, losing many lives, spending much money, and exerting much diplomatic pressure to achieve these goals. Yet, you would not know it today from the narrative from campaigners and activists keen to denigrate Britain’s history and to destroy our sense of identity in and through it. 

In February 2021, Jeremy Clarkson launched a tirade in the Sunday Times. Uninterested in any lesson that activists might have to teach about Britain’s past, he declared, the ‘history lesson that floats my boat’ is ‘the stories of British slave rescues we never hear about’. Clarkson continued, ‘I’ve been doing some research about the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, which was formed in 1808, just a year after Britain abolished the slave trade. It was stationed at first in Portsmouth and equipped with two warships, and its job was to patrol the west coast of Africa, apprehending anyone who was ignoring the new law’, freeing ‘thousands of slaves’. He gave the example of the most famous ship in the squadron, the Black Joke, which had captured the Spanish brig El Almirante.

In the hold, the captain of the Black Joke — a man called Lieutenant Henry Downes — found 466 slaves, who were later landed and freed. This sounds like the sort of exciting story that would enliven a history lesson, but I’m afraid no one really knows anything about Downes. I suppose his story doesn’t tally with current thinking … I guess that muddle-headed lefties really don’t like the idea that for nearly a hundred years, and at vast expense, the country that they hate waged easily the most morally just war of all time.

Clarkson wanted to emphasise that Britain’s history was more about antislavery than slavery. He claimed that ‘the Royal Navy’s operations to end the slave trade cost more than Britain had earned from earlier slaving enterprises.’ Alex Renton wrote to the Sunday Times pointing out that this was untrue, but the paper dismissed Renton’s complaint. Only when Renton went through IPSO was the paper obliged to add, a year after the original publication, ‘We have been asked to point out that the consensus among historians is that this was not the case, and we are happy to set this on record.’ This was not the only aspect of Clarkson’s story that was incorrect, but a seed had been firmly planted. Celebrating the Royal Navy’s ‘liberation’ of captives was a way of countering the attention that Black Lives Matter had brought to bear on Britain’s involvement in slavery and the slave trade.

The Case for the Memorial

In August 2023, Wanjiru Njoya, author of works such as ‘Harry Frankfurt, Humbug, and the Battle against Wokery’, ‘The Socialist Road to Destruction amid So-Called Good Intentions’ and ‘Civilization Depends upon Economic Freedom’, posted a proposal on X (formerly Twitter) for a memorial ‘to honour the men of the Royal Navy West Africa Squadron’. In October 2023, Colin Kemp, a semi-retired management consultant from Chichester launched the West Africa Memorial Fund to raise the money for such a memorial in Portsmouth. In the course of conducting genealogical research Kemp had learnt that 1,587 British sailors had died to rescue ‘tens of thousands of people from a lifetime of servitude and torture’. A memorial he said, would ‘not only honour those who lost their lives but highlight Britain’s role in ending slavery’, it would also redress a situation in which ‘no one seems to know that we were the first country to abolish’ slavery.

There was already ‘a small part dedicated to the West Africa Squadron’ in The Royal Navy Museum, but Kemp insisted that ‘there needs to be something quite major.’ His initiative was for a ‘larger, free-standing memorial that would commemorate the facts that between 1807 and 1867, Royal Navy sailors ‘freed over 150,000 Africans who were going to become slaves in America’, by capturing 1,600 slave ships. He claimed that ‘during the height of the 1840s, the squadron took half of the naval budget and 2 per cent of the country’s GDP.’ 

Kemp’s aim was to raise £70,000 to commission Vincent Grey, who had designed the Horatio Nelson statue in Chichester. His campaign received a major boost when the Daily Mail took up the cause in October 2023. The paper added a new justification. The memorial was needed not just to celebrate the West Africa Squadron, but to demonstrate that ‘Britain has “very little to apologise for” over slavery’ itself. In the Mail’s reporting, the Squadron’s 1,587 casualties sky-rocketed to 17,000, the extra 15,000 being those who had died after succumbing to diseases and illness.

History Reclaimed’s Robert Tombs joins the campaign

Momentum was building. In January 2024, the Conservative Leader of the House of Commons and Portsmouth North MP Penny Mordaunt told the Daily Mail that, unless Kemp’s memorial is erected, the ‘truth is in danger of being lost forever’. She did not make clear why it is only truths memorialised in bronze that are remembered, but she did ‘hit out at “anti-British, grievance-based” attempts to rewrite history’. The memorial would make it clear that ‘the country is not to be ashamed of its past or keep quiet about the achievements of its armed forces … Yes, Britain had a role in the slave trade. Yes, people made money out of it. But let’s be clear about something. We ended it. Our biggest contribution to the evil trade was to end it. We should honour those who gave their lives fighting to do that.’

This Daily Mail piece was the first, but not the last, to include a quote from an article by Robert Pape and Chaim Kaufmann published in the academic journal International Organisation in 1999. They had apparently described the Royal Navy’s antislavery patrols as ‘the most expensive moral action in modern history’. That claim was important to the campaigners. It suggested that Britain as a nation made great sacrifices to end the slave trade, simply because it was the right thing to do. In this Daily Mail article, the ‘half of the Royal Navy’s budget’ that Kemp claimed had been spent on the West Africa squadron was allocated a figure: ‘equivalent to as much as £50 billion today’. Mordaunt stated that this was the amount of the entire defence budget. It was also no longer an individual proposing the memorial, but a group of ‘local historians’, while the campaign group had become a private limited company with a raised target figure of £100,000. When the Tory peer Lord Ashcroft donated £25,000, things were looking good for the campaigners.

In May 2024, however, the project received its first major setback. The campaigners had been in negotiation for a suitable location with Landsec, the company that owns Gunwharf Quays on Portsmouth Harbour’s edge, but before agreeing to release the site, Landsec had consulted with its ‘corporate affairs team and employee diaspora network.’ Having seen the design, they decided that ‘the proposed memorial lacked sensitivity and authenticity to what is a very emotive topic and dark part of our history as a nation’. The Daily Mail turned to Toby Young, founder of the Free Speech Union, who declared ‘Landsec’s decision to effectively toss the West Africa Squadron Memorial into the English Channel is outrageous.’ At this point the History Reclaimed founder and author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, Nigel Biggar, weighed in, writing for the Mail that

Landsec is afraid of looking racist, though it is apparently not concerned about revealing its utter ignorance of history. Presumably, the “diaspora” refers to people of African descent. Some of them may be the distant descendants of slaves. But they might also include descendants of those African slavers — and the traders who dragged their fellow Africans to the coast for sale to Europeans — as they had been doing for centuries, first to the Romans and then to the Arabs. So why on earth would they or anyone else regard a statue as “non-inclusive” and “insensitive” for commemorating the Royal Navy’s heroic anti-slavery West Africa Squadron? Why would they not want this important, admirable part of the truth about Britain’s history remembered? The obvious reason is that it’s a story of white Britons doing good to black Africans. As such it distracts from the Black Lives Matter-inspired mission to keep our focus absolutely fixed on the evils of African enslavement and on British guilt for it. Any celebration of how Britain fought against the slave trade disturbs the politically advantageous, comic-book narrative of unremitting black victimhood at the hands of white oppressors.

Like Clarkson, Biggar extolled the heroism of HMS Black Joke. He also followed the TV celebrity by weighing up the costs of antislavery against the profits from the slave trade, only with a little more sophistication. Biggar took the time to track down the academic source that Clarkson had bowdlerised after receiving it second or third hand. Rather than directly repeating the erroneous claim that ‘the Royal Navy’s operations to end the slave trade cost more than Britain had earned from earlier slaving enterprises’, Biggar selected an extract from the historian of slavery David Eltis’ more circumspect words: ‘The British spent almost as much attempting to suppress the trade between 1816 and 1862 as they received in profits over the same length of time leading up to 1807’. We will return to Eltis’ calculations and the context in which he was careful to place them below.

Biggar followed Penny Mordaunt too, citing Kaufmann and Pape’s conclusion ‘that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade was ‘the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history’. He elaborated: while ‘some would argue there was an obvious commercial advantage to Britain in disrupting our European rivals’ slave trade, Kaufmann and Pape had ‘found the real driving force was not economic but religious: in the churchgoing 19th century, moral duty counted for more than any financial incentive. The British were among the first people in history to repudiate and abolish slave-trading and slavery — at colossal cost in money, diplomatic effort, naval resources and lives.’ Biggar’s conclusion was, ‘Rather than kowtow to the distorted, biased agenda of the BLM movement, imported from the U.S., Landsec should try to copy the moral courage of HMS Black Joke’s heroic sailors — and salute one of the noblest episodes in our national history’.

The Case Against the Memorial 

There are four main reasons for objecting to this memorial: the campaigners’ motives, their misrepresentation of history, their obfuscation about the fate of those supposedly ‘freed’ by the Squadron, and the proposed design. 

1. Motives 

We don’t have to assume the memorial campaigners’ motives because they have been quite explicit. They want to deflect the spotlight that Black Lives Matter has directed at Britain’s extensive participation in the slave trade and the Atlantic system of slavery. Dismissing antiracist campaigners’ grievances as merely historic, they are also denying that racism is still a significant issue. In the campaigners’ view, antiracists are simply ‘muddle headed lefties’ who ‘hate Britain’ and Black Lives Matter is an ‘anti-British, grievance-based attempt to rewrite history.’ The Daily Mail is campaigning for the memorial to demonstrate both that ‘Britain has very little to apologise for’ over slavery and no significant contemporary racism to concede. 

According to Office for National Statistics figures, let alone a barrage of other forms of evidence, Britain still has a significant issue with racism whatever the memorial campaigners might say. Black Lives Matter’s ‘grievances’ were not concocted and neither were they ‘anti-British’. When Colston’s statue was toppled, the mortality rate from COVID was running at 256 per 100,000 Black men and only 87 per 100,000 White men. Black women were dying at the rate of 120 per 100,000 and White women at 52 per 100,000. The discrepancies were due to the over-representation of Black people in low-paid public-facing service roles, along with housing and health inequalities. In 2016 black graduates were paid 23 per cent less than their White counterparts, and since 2010 there had been a 49 per cent increase in the number of unemployed ethnic minority sixteen to twenty-four years olds, while the figure for their white counterparts had fallen by 2 per cent. 

Black people were twice as likely to be murdered and, when accused of crimes, three times more likely to be prosecuted and sentenced than White people. In 2022, Black households were the most likely out of all ethnic groups to have a weekly income of less than £400. People in White British households were consistently the least likely to live in low-income households. In every region in England and in Scotland, unemployment rates are lower for White people than for all other ethnic groups combined, with the biggest differences in West Midlands, the North- East and Yorkshire and the Humber. 

The Windrush scandal was part of the British social fabric that gave rise to the 2020 protests. As the official report explained, it was allowed to happen in part ‘because of the public’s and officials’ poor understanding of Britain’s colonial history, the history of inward and outward migration, and the history of Black Britons’. The dumping of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol Harbour reflected these facts. As David Olusoga explains, ‘Those wrongly caught in the dragnet of the hostile environment were the children of men and women who had been encouraged to migrate to post-war Britain … These people with their centuries’ long links to Britain and British history, were suddenly classified as illegal immigrants in the country they had called home for decades … The Colston statue, like hundreds of others scattered across Britain, was … an active part of the great amnesia and obfuscation that has long functioned to airbrush the realities of slavery and the slave trade out of the mainstream of British history’. He continues,

… the generation that found its voice and expressed its demands in the summer of 2020 not only had access to a once-hidden history, they came to it with attitudes radically different from those of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Rather than being eager to conceal and whitewash over the inglorious and murderous chapters in the long history of Britain’s relationship with Africans and Africa they were determined to confront them. The historical amnesia that enabled the veneration of slave-traders and empire-builders is to them a clear and obvious outrage. This determination to acknowledge and confront Black British history and draw it into the mainstream is new and may well shape our relationship with our national history in the coming decades.[1] 

The West Africa Squadron memorial initiative is driven by the powerful political backlash against any such reshaping. Its intention is to restore and preserve a conventional, White-Centred, celebratory history of Britain. The sailors who lost their lives off the West African coast are merely incidental to it. 

2. Falsifying History 

Penny Mordaunt tells us that ‘… there’s a new generation having its first encounter with historic facts. It’s important that they are told the truth’. But she and the other campaigners have told a number of untruths.

Whereas Kemp and the Mail have claimed that ‘we were the first country to abolish’ the slave trade, Denmark abolished its slave trade in 1802, followed by Great Britain and the United States in 1807. Britain was not the first country to abolish slavery itself, as Kemp claimed in the Mail, either. That was Haiti. Furthermore the campaigners have consistently distorted the history of the Royal Navy’s antislavery initiative by misrepresenting its financial costs, cherry picking the academic literature on it and obscuring the fate of those supposedly ‘freed’.

To return now to Biggar’s reckoning of the financial costs and benefits of the slave trade. He was more accurate than Clarkson, but there was still manipulation involved. The selection of Eltis’ words used by Biggar was ‘The British spent almost as much attempting to suppress the trade between 1816 and 1862 as they received in profits over the same length of time leading up to 1807.’ However, Biggar omitted the start of this sentence. It began, ‘In absolute terms, the British spent almost as much …’. This is significant because, as Eltis went on to explain, in the forty-six year period leading up to 1807, the money generated from the slave trade was a larger proportion of National Income than the money spent on antislavery during the succeeding period. Furthermore, Britons had made money from the slave trade not just for the forty-six years leading up to 1807, but for some 200 years. The profits made from trading in captives over this extended period vastly outweighed the costs of the Royal Navy’s suppression at the trade’s end.[2]

The memorial campaigners have also inflated the costs of the West Africa Squadron. They claim repeatedly that ‘the squadron took half of the naval budget and 2 per cent of the country’s GDP.’ This is not true. The figure is based on the table below from the oft-cited Kaufmann and Pape article. The campaigners have rounded up the grand total at the foot of the table as the costs of the West Africa Squadron alone. But this figure of 1.78 per cent of National Income includes the cost of compensating slave owners for the loss of their enslaved ‘property’ after emancipation in 1834. This amounted to £20m, equivalent to 40 per cent of annual government revenue. The table also includes the projected opportunity costs of earnings from both the slave trade and slave ownership, had they been allowed to continue. These account for the customs revenue, trade, exports and sugar carrying trade rows. The final row is the counterfactual price increase for sugar that British consumers are presumed to have paid as a result of the abolition of slavery after 1834. None of these rows have anything to do with the costs of the West Africa Squadron. The only row that does is the first and smallest figure, accounting for 0.05 per cent of annual National Income, or one fortieth of the claimed ‘half of the naval budget and 2 per cent of the country’s GDP’.

A more realistic assessment of the scale of the squadron and its achievements is given by the same David Eltis whom Biggar cited selectively on its costs. Eltis concluded that the squadron

usually absorbed a small proportion of British naval strength and was sensitive, first, to competing demands on naval resources and, second, to the possibilities of success … Immediately after 1815 when the British had lost the wartime right to search vessels and before the 1817 conventions with Spain and Portugal came into effect, the West African squadron was close to the size necessary to protect British trade, and no more. It was doubled in the year the courts of mixed commission were opened [see below] and increased a further 50 percent with the formal abolition of the Cuban trade. Thereafter it changed little until the Anglo-French conventions of 1831 and 1833 and the concomitant formal abolition of the Brazilian trade. These measures effectively opened up the traffic south of the equator to British interference … The ending of the Brazilian traffic in 1851 saw a diminution of the squadron’s strength. But the major weakening of the force occurred in response to armed conflict elsewhere. The sharp drop in 1840 occurred at the time the first naval expedition in the Opium War was being assembled as well as the period of strained relations with France. The Crimean War is also clearly apparent … [in its effects] for the years 1854 to 1856. At the peak of the British antislave-trade effort, in the mid-1840s, about 15 percent of British warships in commission and nearly 10 percent of total naval manpower were assigned to the task of interrupting the flow of coerced labor to the Americas.

The British had the biggest but not the only antislavery squadron, since the French, Americans and, to a lesser extent Portuguese and Brazilians also joined in at various points. The French antislavery squadron ‘was doubled to twenty-eight as a consequence of the Anglo-French convention of 1845 and at this point was absorbing one fifth of French naval resources’. Overall, Eltis’ claim was that British naval suppression did very little to eliminate the slave trade. The West Africa squadron was hardly effective before 1850, and even after that, only because of Brazilian and Cuban withdrawal from the trade.

Returning to the Kaufmann and Pape paper, we can recall the memorial campaigners’ repeated quote referring to the West Africa Squadron as ‘the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history’. From this Biggar inferred that ‘The British were among the first people in history to repudiate and abolish slave-trading and slavery — at colossal cost in money, diplomatic effort, naval resources and lives’, because of their moral and religious conviction. In fact Kaufmann and Pape interpreted the decision to enforce abolition as being ‘a function of three factors’:

First, the political needs of the ruling elite. The more precarious their hold on power and the more intense their fear of losing power, the greater their incentive to bargain [with lobbying groups such as the antislavery activists]. Second, the enhanced political legitimacy that the rulers can gain from association with the saints and their program … Third, the extent to which the saintly faction can ally with more than one main political faction. Moral movements whose supporters’ positions on other issues lie near the middle of the political spectrum will have greater leverage than those whose loyalties are confined to one end.

For all their invocation by the campaigners, Kaufmann and Pape reached the same conclusion that the Nigerian-American historian Moses Nwulia had reached in 1975 – that British antislavery intervention was ‘more the humanitarianism of self-interest than anything else’.[3] The treaties that Britain negotiated with African rulers to end the slave trade reflected this pursuit of more self-interested goals. Whilst insisting on ending the sale of captives they also obliged kingdoms to grant a most-favored-nation status for British commerce, protection for British property and freedom for Britons to trade with any individual or group within the African territory. But, as Eltis explains, ‘the resistance of Africans to such broad terms, particularly the last, meant that the standard slave trade treaty quickly came to encompass only the first two of the above provisions’.

For all of Penny Mordaunt’s insistence on historical truth, the memorial campaigners have distorted the findings of every academic source they cite to suggest British moral purity.

3. The Myth of Liberation 

Perhaps the campaigners’ slyest manoeuvre is obfuscation about the fate of the captives supposedly ‘liberated’ by the West Africa Squadron. They repeatedly state that once taken aboard Royal Navy ships these enslaved people were, in Clarkson’s words, ‘landed and freed’. They were not. They were ‘disposed’ of in accordance with British imperial requirements.

While many of the Royal Navy’s officers and crew showed genuine compassion and goodwill towards the captives taken on board, these people were only technically released from slavery. They continued to be treated as disposable units of Black labour. The historian Richard Anderson has written an excellent summary of the large and ever-growing body of literature outlining their varied fates, from which much of the following description is drawn.[4] 

From 1808, when the West Africa squadron was established, until 1834, when slavery was abolished, captives found aboard the ships intercepted by the squadron remained the property of the Crown. A clause in the 1807 Act abolishing the slave trade and establishing the squadron required that they be enlisted, apprenticed, or ‘disposed of.’ Enlistment meant the forcible recruitment of at least 8,000 people into the West India Regiments, Royal African Corps, and Royal Navy. Those not enlisted, including the women and the children, who amounted to forty per cent of ‘liberated’ Africans, were ‘disposed’ of as ‘apprentices’, bound to unpaid work for colonists and colonial governments ‘for any Term not exceeding Fourteen Years’. Since they would be unlikely to choose such service unless forced, the Act allowed third parties to agree to indentures on their behalf.

https://liberatedafricans.org/about/essays.php

Special Courts of Commission were established in Sierra Leone, Cuba, Rio de Janeiro, Tortola, Cape Town, St. Helena, Angola and Mauritius to act as this ‘third party’, overseeing the indenture process. The Liberated African project based at the University of Colorado is trying to recover the ‘identity of each child, woman, or man documented by name’ in their proceedings. Corruption was rife, with court officials assigning the captives they most desired to their own homes, plantations and farms. Female apprentices were regularly coerced into sexual relationships with their allocated masters.

The West Africa Squadron’s sailors were often deeply affected by the conditions in which they found captives aboard seized ships. But its is likely that some would have served on slave ships before entering the Royal Navy’s service and they received a share of the ‘prize’ value of any slave-trading vessel they captured, just as they did for the capture of enemy ships. The value of the ‘cargo’ of captive people contributed to this prize, with ‘headmoney’ earned for each captive. One of the squadron’s sailors, John M’Kie, wrote in his memoirs that the ‘capture of a full slaver had a very exhilarating effect … the chief talk being how much prize money it would bring’, although the rewards were often disappointing once condemned ships’ value – around £1 million between 1807 and 1846 – had been parcelled out unevenly among the crew. The intercepted slave ships were taken by a ‘prize crew’ not to the nearest African coastline as one would assume from the campaigners’ propaganda, but to the nearest ‘disposal’ court. They often endured a voyage of months and mortality rates that differed little from those of the ‘middle passage’ from which they were saved.

https://www.slavevoyages.org/past/database#maps

In Sierra Leone, the ‘liberated’ Africans were initially sold to colonists from a cattle pen. In the longer term, at least 75,000 were allocated to masters and mistresses as menial agricultural labourers or household servants, many of the children being handed over to missionaries to look after. Some were able to assimilate into Sierra Leonean society and attain a relatively high status. The most notable was Samuel Ajayi Crowther, who became the first Anglican Bishop of West Africa. However, adverts were issued for the recapture of others who absconded from their indentures, in the same way as they were for runaway slaves. In the Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape Colony adults were put to work alongside or instead of enslaved people on plantations and farms, while children were ‘disposed of’ as personal servants. After the abolition of slavery in 1834, former slave owners were assigned ‘liberated’ Africans, along with indentured Indian workers, to address the shortage in labour supply. In Brazil and Cuba, they were bought, sold, and traded like enslaved people. Many had their terms of apprenticeship extended by years and even decades.

The ‘disposal’ of these supposedly ‘freed’ people was not the end of the story. They remained subject to constraints that were inconceivable for free White subjects, including further involuntary relocation. From 1818 onward, approximately 3,500 were forcibly transported from Sierra Leone to British settlements along the Gambia. Some 15,000 were later transported to the West Indies to cover the labour shortage caused by emancipation. This was a majority of those ‘liberated’ by the West Africa Squadron after 1848. Most of the ‘liberated’ Africans taken to St. Helena were moved on again. The overwhelming majority of the 18,000 survivors from the 24,000 people taken to the receiving ‘depot’ were forcibly shipped to Caribbean colonies or the Cape Colony, some of them in terror of the fate that awaited them. None was returned to their African homeland.

Despite some remarkable stories of a few among the ‘liberated’ Africans absconding and even pooling resources to buy ships to secure their own freedom, Anderson’s conclusion, and that of a great number of historians in a great many publications, is that ‘Liberated African migration was a morally ambivalent program of forced labor and relocation’. Those ‘rescued’ and ‘freed’ by the West Africa Squadron are often described by specialist historians not as ‘liberated Africans’, but as ‘Recaptives’. Long after the trans-Atlantic slave trade had ended and slavery had been abolished by the European colonial powers, Black people, including these ‘Recaptives’ continued to be treated as disposable units of labour. As Nancy Stepan put it, ‘just as the battle against slavery was being won by abolitionists, the war against racism in European thought was being lost’.

It is inconceivable that the memorial campaigners are unaware of all this. Their casual assertion that the Squadron ‘freed’ captives without any further information about their ensuing fate suggests a knowing and dishonest elision. To have recounted that fate would have been to undermine the White ‘virtue signalling’ upon which the memorial campaign relies.

4. The Memorial Design 

Given the fate of ‘liberated’ Africans, anyone with the slightest sensitivity might appreciate why Landsec’s employees felt that the proposed memorial design (see below), lacks sensitivity and authenticity. It could not manifest the White Saviour complex more explicitly if it tried.

The Proposed Memorial

One of the squadron’s vessels that has been studied in detail, HMS Waterwitch, provides an example of the racially mixed nature of the squadron’s crews. During the initial months of a three year cruise at the peak of the Squadron’s activities in the early 1840s, it captured 29 slave ships and a number of boats as well as ‘freeing’ 877 captives from raiding barracoons on shore. Its captain, Henry Matson, knew that such work was impossible without the help of African sailors with experience of the coast and its ‘trade’. In the early months of the cruise he took on 20 of these men, known as Kru, mostly at Sierra Leone. Roughly a third of the ship’s crew at any one time was Black. Matson described them ‘to the parliamentary select committee as “the most serviceable” people on the squadron, who it was impossible to do without’. However, all of the Kru were discharged from the vessel while it was still in the South Atlantic so it is unlikely that they collected the considerable prize money from the cruise which was awarded to the rest of the crew. Not one African is listed on the memorial column to the Waterwitch in Jamestown’s Castle Gardens.

Eclipsing Africans’ role in the ‘liberation’ of other Africans all over again, the proposed memorial shows a single White British officer guiding two enslaved Africans to freedom. The captive woman is still in shackles and supine while the man is breaking his chains as he arises. The design is not only based on the lie of ensuing freedom, but is also racially infantilising and patronising. 

Biggar wondered in the Daily Mail ‘why on earth … they [Landsec] or anyone else’ would regard this memorial ‘as “non-inclusive” and “insensitive”’’. I think the answer is pretty obvious. In fact he gave it himself: it’s nothing more than ‘a story of white Britons doing good to black Africans’.

*With thanks to Andrew Pearson, whose Distant Freedom: St Helena and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1840-1872, Liverpool University Press, 2016 is the best source on St Helena.

[1] David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History, revised ed. Picador, 2021, 530-334.

[2] David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Oxford University Press, 1987, 97.

[3] Moses D. E. Nwulia, Britain and Slavery in East Africa, Three Continents Press, 1975.

[4] Richard Anderson, Liberated Africans, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, 2021, Retrieved 27 Jun. 2024, from https://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-741.