Legitimate Targets

In restoring the two pound cap on bus fares, and in pausing the early release scheme, Andy Burnham can say that he was not even in Parliament when the damage was done. He has none of the shamelessness of Keir Starmer's restoration of the Winter Fuel Payment that he had taken away in the first place, never mind of Starmer's claim that his proudest achievement in office was to have lifted the two-child benefit cap when he had withdrawn the whip from seven Labour MPs because they had voted for nothing more than such an amendment to the Humble Address, and when that amendment had been defeated, then they had voted with the Government.

But Burnham has kept up Starmer's barefaced lie that Britain was not a participant in Donald Trump's and Benjamin Netanyahu's war on Iran, in which the single largest loss of life has been the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' primary school in Minab with Tomahawks the components for which were manufactured by Raytheon at Glenrothes. And now the USAF base that hides behind the name of RAF Fairford has been identified as a potential target for Iranian retaliation.

How do the occupants of those bases comport themselves? First there was Anne Sacoolas, and now this. As for the Israelis, having armed Argentina during the Falklands War, they are on the cusp of formally recognising Argentine sovereignty over the Falkland Islands because of their very close relationship with Javier Milei. Trump also has such a relationship, to the point that like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir he expressly supported Argentina against England in the World Cup, and he is now reviewing what has always been American neutrality on the principle of sovereignty, mindful of the Monroe Doctrine that the American Republic was to expel the European colonial powers from its hemisphere from Greenland to South Georgia. The only British member of Trump's Board of Peace is a member of the Labour Party. Burnham should expel him, and not stop expelling there.

The expulsion of Tony Blair from the Labour Party, and his removal from the Privy Council as an agent of a foreign and increasingly hostile power, would be quite the Clause IV moment. As, following the most welcome dismissal of Richard Hermer, would be the cancellation of David Lammy's completion of David Miliband's reinforcement of Denis Healey's crime against the people of the Chagos Islands. A Chagossian contingent for the Parade of Nations ought to have picketed the Opening Ceremony of the Commonwealth Games. The Closing Ceremony will be held at the OVO Hydro, at 9pm on Sunday 2 August.

The Greatest Privilege of My Life?

At least before 2044, 30 years after the last referendum on Scottish independence, the answer to any request for another one is going to be no from anyone who might realistically become the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Yet none of the 37 Labour MPs sitting for Scotland, nor indeed any member of either House, has been deemed capable of appointment as Minister of State for Trade, so for the time being Anas Sarwar is in government without being in Parliament.

The position of Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding remains vacant, so here is the future Lord Lindsay of Lanchester reporting for duty. I have not already taken severance pay for the same job in the manner of Angela Rayner, never mind Margaret Curran, who resigned due to ill health after 15 days last year, or Alex Davies-Jones, who resigned due to ill health on 12 May 2026. Natalie Fleet will also have been paid off after less than three months.

Stop Calling Keir Starmer A Good Man

Oli Dugmore will be discussing this on Newsnight:

Mercifully, Keir Starmer is no longer prime minister. Though my unadulterated jubilation has been moderated by the shame of Atlanta, I’m glad – glad to see the back of the man it would be harsh to describe as Labour’s worst prime minister, but can fairly be called its most pathetic. Copiously present in national life, but utterly irrelevant to our meaningful existence, like nitrogen. The ambient man.

Starmer’s great skill was a lawyerly awareness of what to say and when, how to avoid verbal ensnarement and diplomatic complication, and – crucially, when it came to facing Boris Johnson – the application of those same mechanisms to his enemies while in opposition. So what intrigued me about Starmer was that, despite this clear grasp of the power of language, he said so little, and meant less of it still.

Consider his election to the leadership of the Labour Party on, as far as the membership was concerned, a weapons-grade platform of policy positions. Some of his promises: increase income tax for the top 5 per cent of earners, abolish Universal Credit, support the abolition of tuition fees, no more illegal wars, abolish the House of Lords, lower energy bills by £300. We now know that Starmer was less the architect of these ideas than their vessel, identified by Morgan McSweeney as the prime candidate to implement his own vision. We also now know the true nature of Labour’s general election campaign, organised by the scandal-ridden Labour Together, thanks to the exhaustive reporting of Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, and others.

The observant will have noticed the continued presence of ermine on the parliamentary estate. I could mention, too, that my energy bills are yet to be £300 cheaper. Maybe they will be in 2030. That’s because those pledges were lies, ankle-flashing to the Labour left.

We should pause here, briefly, to consider this dishonesty in its context. Starmer became party leader opposite Johnson, a man who could lie in 1,000 different ways: by obfuscation and bloviation, by exaggeration, omission and comic digression, by promising different things to different people. Starmer’s dishonesty was different: colder, more ruthless and specific. His were not the lies of a man with a pathological indifference to the distinction between truth and fiction, but of a man who knows precisely what he is doing.

Starmer was acutely aware of what the Labour membership wanted, and he told them they’d get it. But for his next election he faced a very different electorate, which required a different message. And so, he shifted his rhetoric to the right. He spoke more about fiscal discipline or welfare cuts than significant increases to infrastructure spending, or the revolutionary decreases in childcare costs for young parents. He promised not to increase taxes, before adding the qualifier “on working people”. Since securing power his government has increased taxes by £62bn.

It is not miraculous that this strategy, this disjunct between word and deed, alienated the broader electorate, just as it did the Labour Party’s left. It was too clever by half, and the ultimate cause of the collapse of Starmer’s political authority.

The irony is that Starmer’s great miscalculation was that he wasn’t cynical enough. He understood politics as a contest of messages, opponents and moments; he underestimated the extent to which politics is also a contest of meaning. Voters will forgive almost anything from a politician who is authentically taking them somewhere. They will forgive difficult choices, broken promises, even failure. But if they suspect you of dishonesty, of inauthenticity, they will not follow you.Starmer’s verbal precision discredited and condemned him morally. He was the prime minister who would sooner say that “Israel has that right” to cut off power and water to Gaza, a war crime, in an LBC interview a few days after 7 October, than condemn the slaughter of Palestinian civilians. Later, he said he had misspoken. I think the moment was more revealing: history will remember him for Britain’s complicity in the massacre of Gaza, perhaps alongside his more authoritarian indulgences: social media bans for teenagers, the thousands arrested for social media posts and the attempted imposition of digital ID.

I wish people would stop calling Starmer a decent man. It is not decent to lie. It is not decent to indulge warmongers. It is not decent to, as happened to Faiza Shaheen, abandon a mother who has devoted her life to beating former Tory leaders in safe seats because she is too left-wing. It is not decent to humiliate a predecessor because it’s expedient to do so. It is not decent to refuse to lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty, then scrap the two-child benefit cap after caving to internal pressure and to try to take the credit in a resignation speech.

That Starmer declines to name his children in public is not a moral absolution for these horrors. In fact, what kind of father would, when Russian-linked assets are firebombing your home? No, Keir Starmer is gone and I am glad. Here’s hoping Andy Burnham can do better. The bar is low.

Start By Challenging

Larry Elliott writes:

Some things never change. Fifty years ago, Britain was sweltering in the long hot summer of 1976. The Labour government was acutely aware that the financial markets were scrutinising its every move. And a man called Healey was running the Treasury.

On the surface, the challenges facing John Healey are less severe than those Denis Healey had to grapple with half a century ago. Inflation is a lot lower and the City has reacted calmly to Andy Burnham as prime minister. And, while things could turn nasty pretty quickly, they would have to get a lot worse before Healey Mk II felt the need to ask the International Monetary Fund for an emergency loan.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that today’s Healey has big problems of his own to solve, not least how to reconcile his pledge to run a tight ship with the new administration’s aims of rolling back more than 40 years of Thatcherism and reindustrialising Britain. Fine aspirations will eventually run into the quicksands of fiscal orthodoxy.

But so far things have gone as well as Burnham and Healey could have hoped. The message of optimism – a deliberate contrast with the doom and gloom when Keir Starmer arrived in Downing Street – was the right one. The cut in VAT on electricity bills and the cap on bus fares were largely symbolic but symbols matter. Burnham was keen to avoid a repetition of Starmer’s first big economic policy announcement: the means testing of the winter fuel payment for pensioners. That and the purging of the Starmerites from the cabinet are intended to give the impression that the real Labour government starts here.

Other conclusions can be drawn. Burnham clearly sees Reform UK as his biggest threat. That’s evident not just in the makeup of the cabinet – which has a stronger north of England flavour to it – but in the emphasis on the cost of living and rebuilding Britain’s manufacturing base. There is an attempt to reconnect the party with its working-class roots.

Keeping Shabana Mahmood as the home secretary was also significant because it shows that Burnham intends to maintain a tough stance on migration. That has economic consequences since it will force businesses faced with staff shortages to hire and train UK-born employees rather than bring them in from overseas. The days of unlimited cheap labour are over. Burnham’s desire to try a different economic model seems genuine, as does his intention to be heavily involved in the big economic decisions.

Prime ministers come in three types. There are those who enjoy focusing on domestic issues, there are those who get a buzz from foreign policy and there are those who want to do everything. It is not rare for a prime minister to start a term of office with a burning passion to sort out the economy only to find after a while that glad-handing on the global stage is more fun. But, for the moment, Burnham falls squarely into category one, and has plans to create an economic power base for himself at No 10 to act as a counterweight to the Treasury.

That, at least, is the theory. In reality, Burnham’s first 24 hours in office showed just how much power and influence the Treasury holds. Healey said meeting the existing fiscal rules was his top priority, and he now has to find the money for a fully funded defence investment plan that the Treasury denied him when he was defence secretary, precipitating his resignation.

The chancellor may get lucky and be able to pay for higher spending through stronger growth, but with the strait of Hormuz still closed and oil prices creeping up again it would be inadvisable to bank on it. That leaves borrowing more or higher taxes. A bit of extra borrowing may be available while sticking to the fiscal rules, but Burnham and Healey have big ambitions and are wary of upsetting the bond markets, which are already charging the government interest rates of 5% to service its debts. Something has to give.

Healey has floated the idea of war bonds to pay for higher defence spending, but that would be borrowing by a different name. Inevitably, therefore, taxes are going to rise in the autumn budget and the only real questions are: by how much, who pays them and what damage they will cause.

Faced with the prospect of a sluggish economy and tax rises to come, it is a tad hubristic for the seventh occupant of Downing Street in a decade to be serving notice that he will shortly be announcing a 10-year plan for change. Burnham doesn’t have the luxury of 10 years to deliver results. A general election is due within the next three years, leaving little wiggle room if things go seriously wrong – as they did for Denis Healey.

Some things have changed since the long hot summer of 1976. One of the abiding legacies of Britain’s shift to the right in the 1970s was the idea that there was no difference between the government and a household when it comes to spending, with the implication that either can go bust if it lives beyond its means. That notion lives on today, with even the most modest of ministerial spending pledges met with the challenge: how are you going to pay for it? If Burnham is serious about rolling back neoliberalism, he needs to start by challenging this entirely wrong-headed idea.

What Ukraine Doesn’t Want You To Know

Even in The Spectator of Michael Gove, Peter Hitchens can now write:

If you want to start a myth, make it a good one. Look at Odysseus. Imagine if the old liar had come home stony broke, a decade late, and told his wife: ‘Sorry, Penny, I got drunk, the ship was repossessed and the crew deserted, I gambled away all my money and I’ve spent the last ten years working in bars to pay my passage home.’ The tale would not have endured. Penelope would probably have kicked him out and married one of the suitors.

It’s more or less the same with the unmysterious sabotage of Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022. There’s a perfectly good, prosaic, obvious explanation. The giant undersea tube was able to supply cheap Russian gas to Germany, something the US government has disliked for decades. As long as it was there, Germany might get tired of the New Cold War and nurse its bruised economy instead. The US, using its superb, unique and expensive war technology, blew the pipeline up to prevent this.

Boringly, President Joe Biden specifically promised to do this, in February 2022. He proclaimed, at a White House press conference: ‘If Russia invades – that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine again – then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.’ One amazed reporter asked how President Biden would do this. With a tiny glint in his eye, Sleepy Joe replied: ‘I promise you, we will be able to do it.’ Duller still, the era’s greatest reporter of US government secrets, from the My Lai massacre to the Abu Ghraib prison disgrace, Seymour Hersh, has lengthily and credibly explained how the US did indeed plant and detonate the enormous bombs needed. But it’s no use. It’s too tedious and ordinary.

A world hungry for adventure wants to believe that the job was done by a sexy young woman sharing a cramped yacht with a bunch of ultra-masculine romantic Ukrainian boozers, in the middle of a storm. This woman ‘looks like a model’, is ‘young, strikingly beautiful and sometimes clad in glittering dresses’, except when she is clad in nothing at all and posing alluringly on the cover of what is politely described as an ‘erotic magazine’.

This version of the Nord Stream saga has so far been enthusiastically accepted by the estimable Owen Matthews, writing in these pages, by the distinguished historian Michael Burleigh, writing in the Literary Review, by the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Sunday Times and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). That is a pretty sparkling hardcover debut for its author, the North Macedonian WSJ journalist Bojan Pancevski. Mr Pancevski is himself gorgeously mysterious, and has an amazing journalistic pedigree. His career took off when he reported the case of the Austrian monster Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned and obscenely abused his daughter. Mr Pancevski later moved on, via the Fifa scandal, to more political stuff. He plainly has excellent sources in Ukraine (the book is surprisingly acerbic about President Volodymyr Zelensky).

I love the fact that German Wikipedia isn’t even sure whether Mr Pancevski was born in 1977 or 1978. What fun to have your date of birth lost in the mists of time before you are 50. When I laughed at his Nord Stream theory on X, he popped up there cheerfully to urge me to read his book The Nord Stream Conspiracy. This is (allegedly) ‘The Inside Story of the Explosions That Shook the World’. So I did read it. Gosh. My copy is scrawled with exclamation marks. Much of it reminded me of the adventures of Tintin, the Boy Reporter. I kept wishing that Captain Haddock would turn up, perhaps fresh from a meeting of the Society of Sober Sailors. I could scarcely refrain from crying out ‘billions of blue blistering barnacles!’ as I turned the pages.

It would make a great comic strip, with its rock-fisted, brave, terse, incorruptible, principled characters – except that none of these people appears under his or her real name. Nor does the erotic magazine in which the nude model, whose alias is ‘Freya’, had once featured. Nor does the mysterious institute which employs the ancient expert (Professor Calculus, perhaps?) who explained to our heroes how to blow up a pipeline built of steel more than an inch thick, jacketed in more than four inches of concrete, lying 260 feet below the surface of the chilly, murky and current-infested Baltic. This, by the way, is roughly twice as deep as the supermen of Britain’s SBS and the US Navy Seals are normally prepared to dive. As Michael Burleigh says of the pseudonymous diving team, they were ‘incredibly brave’, which is perhaps true in more ways than one. Mr Pancevski himself notes that when a German flotilla sent submarine drones to the aftermath of the explosion, ‘the currents were so strong that the drone operators struggled to reach the seabed around the blast sites’.

The top secret taskforce made many basic blunders – pointlessly caught on a speed camera, using insecure phones and emails, drawing attention to themselves in harbour through slobbish behaviour, using crude fake identities and above all leaving their boat so full of clues (a strand of Freya’s hair, some fingerprints, DNA by the ton, even a bloodstain, and some explosive traces). You might almost think they were trying to establish an alibi. But for whom?

Well, it is not for me to say. All my diving has been done in swimming pools, and my experience of erotic models is slender. But I suspect that the Berlin and Washington governments are increasingly worried about German voters, disenchanted with the Ukraine crisis, with their country’s growing decrepitude and with the high price of energy. If Nord Stream was blown up by sexy, sassy Freya, rather than by dreary old Uncle Sam, then good relations may last a little longer. Believe what you like. So will I.

Serfing USA

Michael Lind writes:

If today’s name ends in a “y,” then you can be sure that some business lobbyists in Washington are pressuring Congress to expand the role of cheap foreign labor in the US economy, at the expense of American workers and wages. The latest example is a bill with bipartisan support, the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act of 2026, introduced by Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson, Republican of Pennsylvania.

Yes, that would be the same Republican Party founded by Abraham Lincoln on the slogan of “Free Labor.”

The problem the bill addresses is real. Team Trump’s crackdown against illegal immigration has deprived farmers and ranchers of the low-wage foreign workforce upon which they once relied, in defiance of US employment and immigration laws. To address the genuine short-term labor shortages, the bill proposes to raise wages in American agriculture to lure US citizens, while providing federal subsidies to farms in labor-intensive sectors to allow them to purchase labor-saving agricultural technology.

Just kidding! Thompson’s bipartisan bill neither raises wages nor subsidizes labor-saving tech. Instead, it makes raising wages and investing in tech less necessary, by increasing the number of foreign indentured servants bound for fixed terms to American agribusiness and by granting amnesty to many illegal migrants already laboring in agriculture. According to the news release announcing it, Thompson’s bill widens the availability of temporary foreign labor “for year-round operations, controls costs to restore certainty to balance sheets, and streamlines the interactions of the government agencies administering the program.”

The proposed legislation has outraged some Right-wing populists. But unsurprisingly, it is “supported by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the Western Growers Association, the National Milk Producers Federation, and more than 400 other agricultural groups across the entire industry,” according to the Thompson news release.

Today, nearly 1 in 5 workers in the United States is a foreign national. These foreign workers fall into two categories: permanent immigrant workers (aka “green-card holders”) and temporary non-immigrant workers. Green-card holders are considered permanent immigrants because it is expected that in time they will apply for naturalization as US citizens, although not all of them do. Apart from the right to vote, green-card holders have most of the rights of US citizen-workers, including the right to quit their jobs without their boss’s permission.

So-called non-immigrant workers, in contrast, form an underclass of workers on US soil with fewer rights than either US citizen-workers or green-card holders. Technically, they are “temporary,” although their fixed terms of work in the United States can be extended indefinitely. They aren’t considered immigrants, because if their fixed terms of work aren’t renewed, they are expected to return to their home countries.

Another word for “non-immigrant worker” is indentured servant. An indentured servant is a worker who isn’t allowed by legally enforceable contract to quit his job without his employer’s permission, for a fixed period. Indentured servitude, however well paid, is temporary slavery.

The H-2A visa in agriculture that Rep. Thompson and the agribusiness lobby are trying to expand is only one of many non-immigrant visas for foreign indentured servants laboring in the United States. Other indentured-servant visas include the H-1B visa, used by firms in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and even universities and government agencies to replace American workers and green-card holders with unfree foreign professional workers; the H-2B, supplying the construction, landscaping, meatpacking, and other non-farm industries with unfree foreign labor; H-3 visas for employers to bring in labor in the guise of trainees; and an alphabet soup of other contract-labor visas. What they all share in common is the denial of the most fundamental rights of a free worker: the right to quit your job without your employer’s permission and without having to leave the country immediately.

Supporters of these varieties of indentured servitude tend to be found among business-class conservatives and libertarians who like to quote Adam Smith. But the 18th-century Scottish political economist would have recognized today’s American indentured-servant programs for what they are: versions of unfree labor, albeit versions less harsh than chattel slavery.

Speaking of 18th-century Scottish coal workers and mine workers who were bound to their employers, Smith wrote: “They can be sold, it is true, but then it is only in a certain manner. When the work is sold all the colliers or salters which belong to it are sold allong with it…” He contrasted this kind of indentured servitude, along with highly restrictive apprenticeship programs in guilds, with “perfect liberty,” defined as “the right of a worker to change his trade as often as he pleases.”

Convinced that unfree labor of all kinds is less efficient than the labor of free workers paid adequate wages, Smith argued that the reason for the near-universality of unfree labor in various forms was the psychology of slaveowners and business owners, who were willing to sacrifice efficiency and economic growth to the pleasure of lording it over their underlings. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote: “The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen.”

Indeed, all of the arguments made by the indentured-servant lobby for more foreign contract labor could also be made to justify legalizing slavery again in America. Take consumer prices. In the US workforce as a whole, illegal immigrants make up around 5%, with the number rising to as much as a fifth in construction, crop production, and food processing.

According to Goldman Sachs, in a tight labor market with lower immigration, consumer prices for some goods might go up. Why? Because employers would have to pay higher wages and pass along the costs of decent wages to consumers. Oh, the horror! But this argument applies to slavery as well. If only employers were allowed to use slave labor in the fields once again, then consumer prices might go down.

The Republican Party was founded in the 1850s to oppose the expansion of slavery. During the Civil War in 1862, the GOP-dominated Congress enacted and President Lincoln signed into law a bill that sought to prevent Southern slaveowners from importing “coolies” or indentured servants from China and India. Today, however, reflecting the capture of the party of Lincoln by former reactionary Southern and Western Democrats, many Republican members of Congress and every Republican president in the past generation, including Donald Trump, have consistently favored expanding access to unfree foreign serfs by individual American corporations.

In explaining why ICE should not raid farms, for example, Trump has used a weird neo-Confederate argument. According to Trump, speaking in the summer of 2025, “we have a lot of cases where ICE would go into a farm and these are guys that have been there 10 or 15 years, and the farmers know them — it’s called farmer responsibility. Or owner responsibility. But they’re going to be largely responsible for these people. And they know these people. They’ve worked at the farms for 15 years.”

Of course “these people” have sometimes worked for the same farmers “for 15 years.” Many of “these people” are rented to a single farm owner or corporation for repeated, fixed terms by a single labor contractor acting as a labor broker. If the stability of the workforce is a goal, then old-fashioned lifelong chattel slavery is even better than fixed-term indentured servitude. In the Old South, slaveowners often referred to their enslaved workers as “family” and boasted that they were more responsible for their welfare than cruel Northern capitalists who had to lure free labor by paying wages.

Which brings us to Irony No. 2. The dominant economic philosophy of the GOP until recently has been libertarianism. Libertarians claim to favor radical individual freedom — except for the freedom of certain categories of legal foreign workers on US soil to quit their jobs and seek others without the permission of their employers.

The libertarian philosopher Murray Rothbard, one of the founders of the Cato Institute, argued that “voluntary” slave contracts should be legal. The celebrated libertarian theorist Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, published in 1974, agreed with Rothbard that individuals should have the right to sell themselves into slavery, answering, “I believe that it would” to the question of whether “a free system will allow [an individual] to sell himself into slavery.”

So maybe the libertarian supporters of unfree indentured servitude on American soil are consistent after all. Unlike Rothbard, Nozick did not argue that the law should allow parents to sell their unwanted children or allow them to starve to death. Rothbard: “The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive…”

These two groups — pro-servitude Republicans and libertarian ideologues — are joined by conservatives who are confused about economics in a technological society, treating America as if it were a plantation economy like that of the Old South or the slave societies of Cuba and Brazil. Today’s Republican conservatives claim to favor economic growth, industrial development, and technological progress. But importing foreign serfs retards all three. While unfree labor in various forms may increase overall output in tobacco, cotton, or avocados, large numbers of low-wage workers undermine the formation of a national home market of prosperous worker-consumers to support advanced manufacturing industries. And cheap labor undermines technological progress, because it reduces the incentive of employers to limit labor costs by either replacing workers with machines or by investing in machines to make individual workers more productive.

Then there is the pseudo-nationalist argument for importing unfree foreign serfs to labor on American farms. If American farmers can’t import unfree, low-wage workers from Mexico to pick avocados, then the American avocado industry might lose market share in the United States to Mexican imports. Beware the avocado gap!

This argument persuades neither libertarians nor America First populists. Libertarians have no objection to cheap imports from foreign countries, including imports that are cheap because foreign wages are lower. And protectionists would answer that if there is a vital national interest in protecting the American avocado industry, then let it be protected by tariffs. The Trump administration sided with the libertarians in this case, by exempting Mexican avocados from tariffs.

When all other arguments are exhausted, one plaintive cry is heard: Will nobody think of the small farmers? Indeed, what about small farmers and other small employers addicted to imported, unfree labor? Won’t they suffer, if they have to pay free workers higher wages and can’t afford to invest in labor-saving technology in compensation?

They may well suffer — the way that Southern planters suffered when they were forced to pay their workers instead of owning them, and the way that other employers suffered later when child labor was outlawed. Good riddance to small capitalists who are so incompetent at business that they can’t make enough profits to pay their workers a living wage, after paying their other expenses, and demand that the government supply them with a never-ending stream of foreign serfs.

Here is a very simple test that can distinguish genuine pro-worker Republicans and Democrats from pseudo-populist mouthpieces of employer interests: support the abolition of all non-immigrant worker visas. There should be only two categories of workers employed in the United States: citizen-workers and legal permanent resident green-card holders with the right to apply for citizenship. All workers on American soil, whether citizens or green-card holders eligible for citizenship, would have the right to quit their jobs at will and seek other jobs in the United States.

In the 2020s and ’30s, we must adopt a gender-neutral version of the slogan of the antislavery Free Soil Party of the 1840s and ’50s: “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men.”

That Vigilance Should Start Here

Haroon Siddique writes:

The prosecution of a leading human rights barrister for contempt of court over his closing speech during a trial of Palestine Action activists has left lawyers fearful of doing their job, the chair of the Criminal Bar Association (CBA) has said.

Rajiv Menon KC, who was acting for the defence, is due to stand trial next week, accused of breaching the judge’s directions in the trial of six people for a direct action protest at an arms factory of the Israeli subsidiary Elbit Systems UK in Filton, near Bristol, in 2024.

On Wednesday, senior legal figures criticised the prosecution of Menon, believed to be the first barrister to be prosecuted over remarks made during a closing speech.

Riel Karmy-Jones KC, the chair of the CBA, told the online meeting: “We have heard of barristers changing their speeches or being told to change them – including in cases where no direction has been given by a judge. And that really can’t be ignored, because people at the criminal bar have become uncertain and scared of what they can and can’t say; scared that somehow they might be – at the end of a trial where they have faithfully represented their client themselves – facing a charge of criminal contempt.

“It is starting to feel like it’s about the politics of the subject matter of the trial, rather than the core principles of how a barrister represents his client.”

Last month, the trial judge in the Palestine Action case, Mr Justice Johnson, referred the question of whether Menon should face contempt of court proceedings to another judge, Mr Justice Nicklin, who subsequently ruled that he should. It came after a previous attempt to refer Menon was overturned on appeal on procedural grounds.

The Labour peer and former Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti said criticising judges was a delicate and dangerous thing to do given the threats they could face but that in Menon’s case they had made “a terrible, capricious mistake” and acted in “a very chilling manner”.

In a written message, her fellow Labour peer Helena Kennedy KC, one of the UK’s most renowned criminal lawyers, described Menon’s prosecution as “another assault upon our justice system … [which] ought to be resisted”, while the leading human rights lawyer Gareth Pierce called the prosecution “terrifying”.

Support for Menon was also conveyed by families of victims of the Hillsborough disaster, whom he represented.

Nicklin’s court order initiating contempt proceedings said Menon was alleged to have deliberately breached Johnson’s rulings and directions “knowing that his conduct would create, or was capable of creating, a real risk of impeding the administration of justice.

“It is further alleged that, in the same speech to the jury, the respondent made statements which were capable of suggesting to the jury that the court was not impartial, in that he referred to the defendants being prevented from giving evidence about Elbit Systems, and later referred to Elbit Systems being ‘protected’ and ‘wined and dined in the corridors of power’.

“Those statements were capable of creating the impression that the defendants had been treated unfairly and that Elbit Systems had been improperly protected in the proceedings.”

And Imran Khan KC writes:

Within days of Mr Justice Johnson’s decision to seek contempt proceedings against Rajiv Menon KC because of that barrister’s closing speech to the jury in a Palestine Action criminal damage trial, I happened to be making a closing speech to a jury. Neither the case nor the personnel of my case are relevant to what happened next, but it is telling that counsel for the prosecution appeared to invoke Mr Justice Johnson’s imprimatur to rebuke me for stepping over the boundary as to what was acceptable to say to the jury.

Thankfully, nothing of substance came of that. Not so for Menon. On 22 June 2026, Mr Justice Johnson handed down his approved judgment in Menon’s case such that he now faces a possible two-year prison sentence for defending his client in what was, it seems to me, in accordance with his professional duties and obligations.

As a highly experienced and successful member of the English bar, Menon was giving his closing speech in a case that involved pro-Palestine activists who broke into an Elbit Systems UK arms factory. The trial judge alleged that Menon deliberately ignored directions and misled the jury by discussing jury equity and the war in Gaza.

The judgment is significant not only for those directly affected by practising in the criminal courts but society as a whole because it starkly demonstrates how words spoken by those defending their clients – the traditional fortress of forensic freedom – can attract the machinery of contempt. The seriousness of that needs to be understood. The prospect of contempt proceedings is in danger of imposing a chilling effect on the willingness of defence advocates to test, for example, institutional misconduct themes robustly before a jury.

As I experienced first-hand, the risk will discourage advocates from deploying precisely those tools that the adversarial system contemplates. Defence counsel in cases involving allegations of police misconduct, for example, must be able to put credibility challenges with vigour, to name dishonesty where the evidence supports it, and to invite jurors to engage empathetically with the defendant’s experience. If such language can attract a contempt referral, advocates will face an unwelcome calculation: whether to advance the strongest case open to them or to temper their rhetoric in order to insulate themselves from future jeopardy.

The right to a fair trial, protected by article 6 of the European convention on human rights and embedded in the common law long before that instrument was enacted, encompasses the right to effective legal representation. Effectiveness, in a jury trial, requires more than the formal presence of counsel; it demands that counsel be free to deploy every legitimate forensic tool available to challenge the prosecution case. Public confidence in the criminal justice system depends upon the perception – as much as the reality – that proceedings are conducted fairly and that no party enters the courtroom at a structural disadvantage.

A climate in which defence advocates self-censor out of fear of contempt undermines that perception. If it becomes publicly known that counsel in cases involving police misconduct temper their submissions to avoid personal exposure, reasonable observers will question whether the adversarial process retains its integrity. That erosion of confidence is corrosive: the legitimacy of jury verdicts – acquittal and conviction alike – rests in part upon the assurance that they were returned after the defence case was pressed as fully and fearlessly as the evidence permitted.

The quality of jury deliberation is also imperilled. Jurors are lay decision-makers. They depend upon counsel to distil complex factual and legal questions into accessible, persuasive narrative. A closing speech that is moderated by the advocate’s anxiety about personal sanction is likely to be less effective. The result is not necessarily that the jury reaches the wrong verdict, but that it does so with a thinner and less complete presentation of the defence case than the evidence would have supported.

The risk of wrongful conviction must be a key factor here. It is an uncomfortable but empirically grounded observation that a disproportionate number of wrongful convictions in England and Wales have involved some form of police misconduct, whether in the gathering of evidence, the presentation of testimony or the suppression of material. Cases of that kind depend heavily upon vigorous adversarial challenge in the closing speech. If that challenge is muted, the risk that a factually innocent defendant is convicted is materially increased. The chilling effect of Menon’s case thus carries a direct, if unquantifiable, contribution to the wrongful conviction risk that the system as a whole must bear.

As for barristers themselves, if senior advocates perceive that hard cases carry a personal professional hazard not faced in more conventional litigation, the rational response is to avoid that kind of work. Defendants in such cases will find themselves represented by advocates who are either less experienced or less willing to advance their case with full forensic force. What price, then, the quality of justice?

But what is most fundamentally at stake is the constitutional value of fearless advocacy itself. The principle that counsel must be free to advance a client’s case without fear of personal retribution is not a professional privilege; it is a constitutional safeguard. It reflects the understanding, embedded in centuries of common law, that the state – which commands the resources of the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the wider apparatus of prosecution – should not also be able to deter challenges to its own witnesses through the threat of proceedings against the advocate raising them.

When the contempt is used or threatened in the context of advocacy, that constitutional equilibrium is disturbed.

Society has a collective interest in maintaining it – not for the benefit of the bar, but for the benefit of every person who may one day stand accused, and for the integrity of the process by which guilt or innocence is determined in their name. That vigilance should start here.