Rather Than Spoken Outright

Paul Knaggs writes:

On Tuesday, in a reception room at the Chancellery in Berlin, Friedrich Merz stood in front of a group of teenagers who build things properly, and one of them asked him a question he did not want to answer.

The occasion was Jugend forscht, Germany’s national science competition for entrants aged fifteen to twenty-one. A year earlier, at the same event, Merz had told the assembled prodigies that Germany needed “clever minds” and “brave young people.” This year, one of those brave young people, a boy who had been researching quantum-secure telecommunications with his brother, took him at his word. He asked how a compulsory real-name requirement for internet users, the Klarnamenpflicht the Chancellor has been pushing, could be reconciled with the protection of whistleblowers and investigative journalists, who depend on the anonymity of their sources to do their jobs. It is the single most obvious objection to the policy, the kind of question a first-year law student learns to ask.

Merz did not answer it. He talked instead about bots, about the AfD’s result in Saxony-Anhalt nine days earlier, about how a public square in which nobody can be sure who they are talking to threatens democracy itself. Then he delivered the line that has since travelled across German media: “Bitte komme mir keiner mit Free Speech. Das hat mit Free Speech nichts mehr zu tun.” Please, nobody come to me with free speech. This has nothing to do with free speech any more. 

It was not a slip. Merz went on to describe the American conception of untrammelled expression as a “libertarian” indulgence he personally does not share, and argued that a liberal society has a duty to protect its citizens from “false information, personal degradation, discrimination.” He reminded his audience that he had “grown up in the analogue world,” when a newspaper that printed lies could be sued, and that this, he said, had produced a certain “hygiene.” The implication was left hanging rather than spoken outright: the unregulated mess of the internet needs the same discipline, administered this time not by courts weighing individual claims but by a state that has already decided, in advance, what counts as false.

Call it what it actually is. This is not consumer protection, and it is not really about hygiene. It is the oldest impulse in politics wearing the newest language: the state deciding, on your behalf, which thoughts you may safely hold in public, and calling that decision protection rather than control. Orwell gave the impulse its cleanest name seventy-seven years ago, in the three slogans inscribed on the face of the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Merz is not running a Ministry of Truth. But the reasoning he reached for at that podium, that citizens need protecting from information rather than trusted to weigh it themselves, is the same reasoning, scaled down to the size of a Klarnamenpflicht and a press conference.

Orwell noticed something else worth remembering here, about which freedoms a state actually leaves alone. “You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator,” he wrote, “but you are not free to think for yourself.” Capital crosses the German border in milliseconds, unexamined and unbothered. Consumption, private vice, even the coarsest content Merz claims to worry about, all of it moves freely enough. What his government wants to attach a permanent, traceable name to is the one thing that has always frightened power more than any of that: a citizen thinking something the state has not pre-approved, and saying so where others can hear it.

None of this began with Merz. Fifty-one years ago, an organisation called the Trilateral Commission, founded in 1973 by the banker David Rockefeller and the strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski, commissioned a report titled The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies, written by the sociologist Michel Crozier, the political scientist Samuel Huntington and the Japanese scholar Joji Watanuki. Huntington’s section on the United States argued that the trouble with American government in the 1960s was not too little democracy but too much of it. His diagnosis: “some of the problems of governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy.” His prescription: “the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups.”

He was candid about which individuals and groups concerned him. The report singled out the political mobilisation of “blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students and women,” people who had “become organized and mobilized in new ways to achieve what they considered to be their appropriate share of the action and of the rewards,” and treated that mobilisation as a symptom of the disease rather than a sign of democratic health. Noam Chomsky, reading the same document decades later, called it exactly what it was: the authentic voice of liberal internationalism confronting a public that had started to take democracy seriously, and concluding that the public was the problem. The Commission did not file the report and forget it. Brzezinski became Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser and restated its conclusions in print, and Commission alumni filled out the upper ranks of the administration behind him.

Friedrich Merz is not an outside admirer of that tradition. He is a paid-up member of it. Since 2009 he has sat in the European group of the Trilateral Commission, a fact recorded in the Commission’s own published membership rolls and in German lobbying registers, alongside a decade as chairman of Atlantik-Brücke, the Berlin network built to cement German ties to Washington.

There is a wrinkle here worth understanding, because it recurs throughout this story. To preserve its standing as a non-governmental body, the Commission’s own rules require that any member who takes public office step back from active membership while they serve it. That is the mechanism, not principle, by which Merz’s own membership lapsed into inactive status the moment he was sworn in as Chancellor, and it is why Sir Keir Starmer’s name came off the active roster once he entered Downing Street. It does not mean the worldview absorbed across years of closed-door meetings is surrendered at the same moment a resignation form is filed. The stepping back is procedural, not intellectual. The membership roster functions, more than anything, like a waiting room: people cycling out to hold power, and in plenty of cases cycling back in once they no longer do.

The company that waiting room has kept over the decades is instructive. Henry Kissinger sat inside it for years, a fixture of the same North American group whose past chairs and directors read like a Cold War cabinet reunion. So did Jeffrey Epstein, described in an October 2002 profile in New York magazine, published while he still enjoyed the run of Manhattan and Palm Beach society, as “an enthusiastic member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.” Nobody is suggesting Merz or Starmer ever met the man, and no evidence says they did.

The point is narrower and, in its way, more damning: an institution that vets its members by wealth, connections and a willingness to keep its proceedings off the record had no mechanism to notice, or no apparent interest in noticing, that one of its enthusiastic members was, at the very same time, running a trafficking operation for the rich and powerful. An organisation that comfortable admitting a man like that tells you something about what it actually screens for. Not virtue. Access. Readers who want to hear Epstein describe that access in his own words can judge for themselves from the footage accompanying this piece.

Britain has no grounds for smugness on the wider point either. Starmer joined the Trilateral Commission at some point between March 2017 and October 2018, while serving as Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow Brexit secretary, and the investigative outlet Declassified UK has established that Corbyn was never told. Starmer’s fellow members at the time included two former directors of the CIA, and he shared a platform at one of the Commission’s London gatherings with former heads of MI5 and GCHQ. He stepped back from active membership, by the Commission’s own rule, before entering Downing Street. The pattern that produced Merz’s contempt for free speech in a Berlin reception room is the same pattern that put a Trilateral alumnus in Number 10 without his own party leader knowing about it. This is not a German story. It is the house style of a network that spans both capitals, and readers wanting the fuller map of who sits where in it can find it in our earlier investigation, From Rockefeller to Starmer: Mapping the Trilateral Network in the Epstein Files.

Starmer did not have to wait long to see this pattern cost him something concrete. In early 2025 he appointed Peter Mandelson, who also appears on Trilateral Commission membership lists for its European group, to the most prestigious post in the British diplomatic service: ambassador to Washington. Mandelson lasted seven months. Newly surfaced emails showed a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein far deeper than had been disclosed at his appointment, including a letter calling Epstein his “best pal” and correspondence suggesting Epstein’s 2008 conviction was “wrongful and should be challenged.” On 11 September 2025 the Foreign Office withdrew him “with immediate effect.” As with Merz and Starmer themselves, taking up a government post should, by the Commission’s own rule, have meant stepping back from active membership; it evidently did nothing to interrupt the friendships formed inside it. A Prime Minister who was once a member himself lost his own ambassador to exactly the kind of undisclosed overlap this network is built to keep quiet. That is not proof of a conspiracy. It is a fair question about what this kind of network actually vets for.

None of that makes Germany’s anxieties fake. The AfD’s result in Saxony-Anhalt on 6 September, 43.8 per cent of the vote, more than double its 2021 showing, was a genuine rupture: no party of the far right has won a German state election so decisively since 1945. Merz’s own CDU collapsed to 17.2 per cent. Bot-amplified content and coordinated online abuse are real problems, and Germany’s history gives it particular reasons to fear where unchecked extremism can lead. The Network Enforcement Act of 2017, which obliges large platforms to remove “manifestly unlawful” content within twenty-four hours or face fines of up to fifty million euros, was passed with those fears in mind, and it has serious defenders as well as serious critics.

But none of that answers the question the boy at the Chancellery actually asked, and which Merz refused to answer. A compulsory real-name law does not primarily disarm the powerful. The powerful already speak under their own names, from platforms they own or control, backed by lawyers the rest of us cannot afford. What it disarms is the employee who wants to report fraud without losing their job, the source who wants to talk to a journalist without ending up in a government database, the citizen who wants to criticise a minister without their employer finding out by lunchtime. Strip away anonymity and you have not cleaned up the public square. You have simply ensured that everyone in it can be identified by whoever holds the power to act on that information, today Merz’s government, tomorrow whoever succeeds him. And the deeper question, the one he answered by refusing to answer it, is who decides what counts as false information once the state has the tools to trace every claim back to a name. He is proposing to be the judge in his own case.

It is worth remembering that the powerful elsewhere have discovered the same convenient elasticity in the idea of free speech. The day after Donald Trump’s 2024 election win was certified, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would scrap its third-party fact-checking programme and loosen its rules on subjects such as immigration and gender, calling it a return to free expression. He made no equivalent promise for Europe, where Meta continues to operate under the tighter rules it has never offered to relax. Free speech, on this evidence, is not a principle either side actually holds. It is a resource deployed wherever it serves power and withdrawn wherever it does not. Merz decides that democracy needs less of it. Zuckerberg decides that his shareholders need more of it, but only in the market that rewards him for saying so. In both cases, the public is the object of the decision, not a party to it.

That is the thread running from a memorandum written for bankers and statesmen in 1975 to a Berlin reception room fifty-one years later. The vocabulary changes. Apathy becomes hygiene. Excess of democracy becomes false information. The marginal groups of the 1960s become the anonymous accounts of 2026. The underlying claim does not change at all: democracy is fine, so long as it produces outcomes the people running it can live with, and when it does not, the fault lies with too much participation rather than too little accountability.

The remedy is not to trust the next polished formulation from the next member of that network, whether he sits in the Chancellery, in Downing Street, or steps back onto the roster once he leaves both. It is the Bundestag and Westminster alike doing the unglamorous work of forcing every real-name and online-safety proposal through genuine scrutiny, with the whistleblower and press-protection question answered before a single clause is drafted, not waved away at a podium. It is journalists asking the people who write these laws to answer the questions a fifteen-year-old already knew to ask. And it is voters remembering that when a Chancellor tells you a policy has nothing to do with free speech, he has, for once, told you the exact truth. It has everything to do with power, and nothing at all to do with you.

Merz got one thing right at that podium, without meaning to. This was never about free speech. It was about who gets to decide what you are allowed to say, and who, fifty years after that first quiet memorandum, still thinks the answer should be them.

Zelensky’s Strategy Is National Suicide

Volodymyr Zelensky’s former Press Secretary, Iuliia Mendel, writes:

For Americans who follow the Russian-Ukrainian war, the past few months must look very strange. In the first half of summer, the story from Kyiv – and the many western media outlets that repeated it – was that Ukraine was winning. Then, not long after the NATO summit in July, Kyiv announced it lacked the interceptors to prevent a winter disaster. The country needed 300 missiles to survive, we were told. Even if these 300 missiles arrive, they are unlikely to protect a country as large as Ukraine from the sheer volume of Russian ballistic attacks and glide-bomb strikes. Now it’s September, and Ukraine says it’s facing a $27 billion shortfall in defense funding. There seems to be a vast difference between the public relations campaign and the reality in Ukraine.

I know a little about that public relations campaign. I was President Zelensky’s first press secretary, entering office alongside him in 2019. I left in 2021 and remained sympathetic to the President as he fought the Russian invasion. But by 2025, I’d come to the conclusion that Ukraine will never be able to win this war militarily. The only solution is a negotiated peace.

Under the current Ukrainian regime, the chances of peace seem remote. In late June, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy approved a 40-day campaign of long-range drone strikes within Russia to force the Kremlin to end the war. It was supposed to be an “influence operation,” designed to show the Russian people the true cost of the conflict. But it was Ukrainians who suffered the most. The Kremlin instead escalated, bringing more destruction, more death and none of the negotiations that would ultimately save lives. Russia, it seems, was only emboldened by the attacks. The Kremlin merely reiterated its conditions for ending its aggression.

It is, of course, Russia who started this war. Its forces have tortured, raped, deported and killed Ukrainians. There is no moral symmetry between Kyiv and the Kremlin. Yet it is clear that the Ukrainian heroism of 2022 is long gone. Kyiv’s war policies have hardened into permanent mobilization and superficial PR – empty slogans and moral posturing are all that’s now offered. The desperate situation in Ukraine’s streets is concealed so that the refusal to compromise can be dressed up as courage.

In 2022, when the war began, the whole country stood up to defend itself. Men lined up at recruitment offices, and cities that Moscow tried to seize successfully resisted. All this naturally produced admiration throughout the world – and glorification in the western media and political circles. Today, that same glorification has become an unbearable burden. There is a feeling that the western political establishment would rather see Russia burn than Ukraine saved. Our daily losses are treated as an acceptable price for that end.

Ukraine has lost more than half its population in the 35 years since it declared independence from the Soviet Union. The largest collapse in population has happened since Russia’s full-scale invasion. By the most sober estimates, some 20 to 25 million people remain in the territory Kyiv still controls. Roughly half are of retirement age. At most, four million men are of conscription age. Russia can draw on the recruitment pool of approximately 10 times the number of fighting age men. Waging a war of attrition is therefore national suicide, not valor. Yet this is the strategy that the Zelensky government pursues.

The economy tells the same story. Ukraine is now entirely dependent on western aid, which is shrinking. Money that was supposed to be used to rebuild the country is being consumed by war. Public debt has crossed 110 percent of GDP. Russia, by contrast, has not had to borrow anywhere near this scale to wage its war, and it is still selling energy to the European Union. Since 2022, European countries have paid Moscow well over $230 billion for fossil fuels – more than they have given Kyiv in aid of all forms. Despite the innumerable sanctions packages, Russia keeps earning money and has a much stronger fiscal position than most EU states. Meanwhile, Ukraine is being crippled by the death of its people and the destruction of its productive base, while its debts keep accumulating.

Since the “influence operation” this summer, more than 90 percent of Ukrainian warehouses have been hit, our energy system has been torn apart and a humanitarian catastrophe will arrive with the winter snow. In the fifth year of full-scale war, the state’s offer to civilians in the worst-affected regions is often simply: leave. People on the front line who have no money and no means are told to go somewhere else. Every day Ukraine loses more of its people. Those who want their children to have proper healthcare and education are forced to emigrate. The number of people dying in Ukraine is roughly four times the number of births. The nation is perishing, and yet the war grinds on.

Finland lost land after a devastating war, yet it managed to preserve its nation and its future. Ukraine could still become a frontier between the West and Russia: armed, sober and alive. But the present strategy is pushing us down a different path: that of Afghanistan. The West spent 20 years pouring trillions of dollars into that conflict. All it achieved was flourishing corruption, decades of death and eventually the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. As in Ukraine, there was heavy censorship in western media. Most of those who reported from the region were uncompromising in their support of the Afghan state machine and the war, no matter what. We see many of the same parallels in Ukraine. Extraordinarily, corruption rivals the war in rankings of public opinion as the biggest national problem. There are those in the Ukrainian government who are making millions of dollars from this war. I have just been sanctioned by the Zelensky government for saying so publicly.

Meanwhile, normal Ukrainian men do not leave their homes for months, for fear of press gangs who hunt them in the streets. There are reports of the disabled being pushed into frontline combat, of men dying mysteriously in recruitment offices, of women fighting to save husbands from being kidnapped in plain daylight. According to the Ukrainian ombudsman, only 2-3 percent of those seized in press gang raids ever reach the frontline. Many pay, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, to buy their way out. The corruption around this system runs into the billions of dollars annually. I do not blame my people for refusing to fight for a machine they no longer believe in.

If the purpose of this war was to create a path for Ukraine to join NATO, that prospect is already off the table. If the purpose was to recover territory, Ukraine is losing more of it, not taking it back. If it was to protect democracy, then the wartime martial law has already killed it. Freedom of speech has been greatly restricted, institutions have been corrupted, basic political rights suspended, the constitution violated, political opponents persecuted. All of this with a casualness about human life that would be recognized as deeply authoritarian anywhere else.

The war in Ukraine has lost any plausible theory of victory. At this point, it only lines the pockets of a corrupt and narrow circle of elites while the country itself perishes. Ukraine can still choose the Finnish road: stop the bleeding, hold what can be held, restore the economy and a way of life to which people can return. The other road is already visible. It is a road down which we lose land and people every day – and with them, the chance that there will be a Ukraine left to win.

The Ongoing Fracture

Journalists do not all walk out when one of them is kicked out, so they are in no position to criticise Ed Sheeran’s support acts. But in music and elsewhere, there have always been intensely political acts and at least theoretically nonpolitical ones. Perhaps they were friends behind the scenes, but no one would have put them on the same bill. Did the Wolfe Tones ever support Val Doonican? Or vice versa? And if it is your stadium, then you do get to say who does or does not appear on its stage. That it is your freedom of expression. Again, though, you should have checked before the booking was made. The problem is the economic order itself, as Paul Knaggs writes:

When the machinery of modern stadium entertainment encounters moral conviction, the outcome is rarely subtle. It is swift, administrative, and designed to send a chill down the spine of anyone who mistakes a microphone for a tool of public conscience. It is the cold, hard stamp of cancellation.

The ongoing fracture of Ed Sheeran’s American tour continues. What began as a lucrative stadium run has descended into a full-scale corporate blacklisting. After Seattle rapper Macklemore stepped onto the stage at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, donned a keffiyeh, and uttered two words, “Free Palestine,” before performing his anti-war track “Hind’s Hall,” the corporate immune system of American live entertainment swung into action.

Within days, billionaire stadium owners and cartel-like tour promoters issued an ultimatum. Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots whose Kraft Group operates Gillette Stadium, spearheaded a campaign among venue operators to bar Macklemore from performing. The promoter, Messina Touring Group, duly notified the tour that venue access would be revoked unless the rapper was purged from the line-up.

But in those two words, Macklemore was doing nothing new. He was extending a tradition of using the stage to say what power did not want said: a tradition running from Thespis, the first man on record to step out of the chorus and speak in his own individual voice, through the troubadours who set political satire to music centuries later, to Paul Robeson, blacklisted and stripped of his passport for his politics, to Nina Simone, who turned “Mississippi Goddam” into a weapon, to the 1985 Sun City boycott, when musicians refused to perform in apartheid South Africa whatever the fee, to the anti-war anthems that defined a generation’s response to Vietnam. Live music has always been a contested space where moral urgency confronts institutional power. Macklemore simply took his turn.

Kraft, for his part, has not denied any of it. His statement cites “recent actions,” material “shared from the stage,” and a “broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery” (a reference to a widely criticised 2014 costume), and says Gillette Stadium will not “provide a platform for hate speech.” What his statement does not do is identify a single claim Macklemore made in New Jersey that was false. It couldn’t, because none of it was. What Macklemore said is not a rapper’s private opinion. It is what the United Nations’ own Independent Commission of Inquiry concluded a year ago, after two years of investigation: that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians. It is what the International Court of Justice has already ordered Israel, through binding provisional measures, to prevent while the fuller case proceeds. Israel rejects both conclusions as false. But neither conclusion came from a stage in New Jersey. They came from the two bodies the world built specifically to adjudicate this question, and Macklemore was simply repeating, in front of eighty thousand people, what had already been put in writing.

Ed Sheeran, Macklemore and the Price of Neutrality 

Sheeran is no bystander in his own show. In his Instagram statement, he insisted that “Macklemore coming off tour was the promoter’s decision, it was not mine,” and that he would not abandon “the touring crew and the other support acts and musicians who rely on me for work and to make a living.” He went further, explaining that he uses his platform to be “a place of safety and sanctuary” and that audiences at his shows “do not expect a political forum.” He closed with the declaration: “I am not complicit.”

It is an astonishing sentence for a man whose touring apparatus generates hundreds of millions of dollars to write about his own show. When an artist of that scale insists he is merely a passenger in decisions made in his name, on his stage, with his brand attached, we are watching something close to the complete abdication of artistic leadership to oligarchical power, dressed up as diplomacy.

And the claim to neutrality does not survive contact with Sheeran’s own record. In March 2022, he headlined the Concert for Ukraine in Birmingham, a benefit broadcast on ITV, and used exactly the platform he now says is off-limits to politics to declare where he stood: “I just want to say to all Ukrainians: I love you, I stand with you, and I’m so proud to be playing this fundraising event.” Nobody suggested at the time that this compromised his sanctuary. Nobody accused him of turning his stage into a political forum. He was widely praised for it. The difference between that moment and this one is not that Sheeran discovered a principle against political speech. It is that one cause carried no risk to his stadium bookings, and the other did.

And Then The Stage Emptied 

The Artists Who Walked 

Within days, every remaining act on that tour had gone. Finneas, producer and brother of Billie Eilish, resigned with a single, unadorned sentence: “Artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed. I stand with Palestine and its people.” Lukas Graham followed, writing that “money doesn’t give you the right to own the conversation,” and that nobody’s bank balance should decide “which suffering we’re allowed to acknowledge.” Then came the Irish contingent, and it is here that the tradition Macklemore stepped into found its sharpest voice yet.

Aaron Rowe, the Irish singer-songwriter Sheeran had personally championed, wrote that he could not “stand by and allow billionaires to use their position of power to silence the rightful voices of those who speak up against Israeli genocide.” He invoked, deliberately, his own history: “as Irish people we know all too well about genocide, forced famine and violent occupation.” Beoga, the traditional Irish band who had shared Sheeran’s stage every night of the tour and who describe themselves as founding members of the Irish Artists For Palestine movement, said much the same, framing their departure not as a rupture with Sheeran, whom they called a friend of ten years, but as an obligation to their own inheritance as “Irish people who understand colonialism.” When a nation whose own famine dead were the product of an empire deciding which starvation was politically convenient to notice tells you it recognises the shape of the machine, it is worth listening.

And that is the point both sides of this row keep missing, because both sides are still arguing about Gaza when they should be arguing about Gillette Stadium. One man, answerable to no electorate and no court, used control of physical venues to dictate the political content of a national tour, and reportedly recruited other stadium owners to do the same. No law was broken. No due process was required. A phone call sufficed. This is what unaccountable, concentrated capital actually looks like in practice: not a jackboot, but a booking calendar.

What makes this week remarkable is not that a billionaire flexed his leverage. Billionaires generally do. It is that four acts, none of them obliged to, chose to forfeit a stadium tour’s wages and exposure rather than play along. Sheeran tried to have it both ways and satisfied nobody. His support acts did not reach for that ambiguity. When private wealth can quietly rewrite who gets to speak in public, the correction cannot come from the institutions that wealth already controls. It came, this week, from a handful of working musicians who decided a pay cheque was worth less than the truth they’d watched the UN already confirm.

A stadium can be emptied of artists in a week. That is the easy part when billionaires own the gates, the stages and the contracts. What they cannot so easily own is the point at which people decide the money no longer matters. Macklemore spoke. The owners moved to silence him. One by one, the support acts walked. Thespis stepped out of the chorus to speak alone. Four acts stepped off a stage this week for the same reason. The chorus, as ever, kept singing.

A Start Can Be Made

Some people are beyond help. In his second go at being Business Secretary, the fake solicitor Jonathan Reynolds says that, “I would like the steel industry to be in private hands. That is my preference.” On the Today programme, he refused to assure Sharon Graham that publicly funded infrastructure projects would be required to buy British steel. Trade union money is the only financial contribution to a British political party that buys absolutely nothing at best, and worse than nothing a lot of time. But if the triple lock did take the state pension over the income tax threshold, then politically that threshold would have to be raised. Splendid. Now also raise the savings limits for Universal Credit claimants, two in five of whom were in work, since those limits had been carried over from the previous benefits system and had not changed since 2006. 20 years ago. Twenty. £6000 in 2006 is hardly £6000 today. Never mind next year. And Professor Prem Sikka, Lord Sikka writes:

Prime Minister Andy Burnham faces a difficult task in changing the UK’s economic fortunes. The decline is due to the obsession with neoliberalism, which has failed to improve the quality of life for millions. Chancellor John Healey’s first budget offers a chance to improve the purchasing power of the bottom 50% of the population, which in turn will increase people’s disposable incomes, invigorate local economy and fuel economic growth.

Neoliberal Destruction 

The evidence of neoliberal destruction is all around us. Workers’ share of gross value added has declined from 71.9% in 1975, to 59.7% in 2026. 1.23m workers are on zero-hour contracts. 4.4m jobs pay less than the real living wage. 6.3m workers are in insecure jobs with no guarantees of when they will work, how much they will earn, and whether they will have enough hours or even if they will have a job in future. The insecurity is compounded by a tax system in which the poorest 20% pay a higher proportion of their income in direct and indirect taxes than the richest 20%. 

Unsurprisingly, 25.3m people, including 14.9m working adults and 7.7m children, live below minimum income standards, and have little capacity to boost economic growth. At the same time, the richest 1% has more wealth than the bottom 70% of the population combined. 50 families hold more wealth than the poorest half of the population, comprising more than 34m people. Due to concentration of wealth in relatively fewer hands governments rely upon fewer people to stimulate the economy and are easily held to ransom. 

Public infrastructure has been dismantled. 6.16m individuals await 7.28m hospital appointments. 1.3m households (about 4m people) are on a waiting list for a social home; but only 12,198 social homes a year are being built. Social care is in disarray. Universities are in financial crisis. Rivers are polluted with raw sewage. Roads are potholed. Half of England’s schools are unfit for use. The court system is creaking and prisons are overflowing. The economy is vulnerable as manufacturing has declined from 30.1% of economic output in 1970 to 8.5% by 2026. 

Neoliberals have restructured the state. Instead of directly investing in infrastructure and new industries, it guarantees corporate profits through privatisations, outsourcing of public services, private finance initiative (PFI) and public private partnership (PPP). Profiteering by corporations has depleted the public purse, leaving less for frontline services. Neoliberals demand cuts in wages, benefits, state pension and public investment, but are silent on the social cost of corporate welfare and tax perks of the super-rich. 

Big banks have been bailed out and are now bankruptcy proof. The finance industry has turned town centres into economic deserts. Private equity has no long-term interest in the wellbeing of workers, customers and communities. It extracts cash through asset-stripping, cuts in wages and staffing, and tax abuses. It has devoured names such as Bernard Matthews, Body Shop, Byron Burger, Casual Dining, Cath Kidson, Claire’s, Comet, Debenhams, Flybe, Four Seasons Health Care, Homebase, HMV, Maplin, Monarch Airlines, The Original Factory Shop, Payless Shoes, Poundworld, Silentnight, Southern Cross, Thomas Cook, TM Lewin, Toys “R” Us and more. It owns supermarkets, hospitals, care homes, GP surgeries, water companies, vets and receives government contracts. 

China invests over 41% of its GDP in productive assets, and India 34.3%. The UK spends around 17.9%, with about 50% provided by the private sector. Due to low investment state the UK has languished at or near the bottom of the G7 and OECD league of investment in productive assets for over thirty years, resulting in low productivity.

Reviving the UK 

There is an urgent need to tackle social problems. What could the Chancellor do? The government could embrace the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and create new money for economic revival, but MMT has no political traction [then give it some]. It could increase tax rates but has pledged not to increase rates of national Insurance, income tax, VAT and corporation tax. The post-war prosperity we had was built on government debt of 270% of GDP. The public debt is currently around 95% of GDP and the government can borrow more for social investment, but it fears big corporations and the City of London who demand more privatisations. 

Despite the self-imposed constraints, the government can access billions for tackling poverty and social investment by eliminating tax, legal and fiscal anomalies .Here are some examples. Wages are taxed at marginal rates of 20%-45%. Earners also pay national insurance. Capital gains above £3,000 are taxed at marginal rates of 18% to 24%. By taxing capital gains at the same rates as wages, around £12bn to £14bn could be raised. More, if national insurance is levied. Dividends above £500 are taxed at marginal rates of 8.75%, 33.75%, and 39.35%. Bringing dividend taxes in line with income tax rates could raise £6 billion a year. Higher if national insurance is also charged. 

Gross tax relief on pension contributions to employers and employees in 2024- 2025 was £83.9bn. 14% of the tax relief benefited 1.1m additional rate (45%) taxpayers, 57% benefited 6.6m higher rate (40%) taxpayers and 29% went to 30.4m basic rate (20%) tax payers. By restricting tax relief at the rate 20% to all, the government could have £14.5bn spare. A 2% tax on wealth above £10m could raise £24bn a year. A modest Financial Transactions Tax (FTT) on the purchase and sale of financial instruments like shares, bonds, and derivatives could raise £5bn a year. VAT at the standard rate on private healthcare insurance premiums could raise around £2bn a year. A home worth £320,000 falls into the same council tax band as a property worth £32m. Additional council tax bands can raise revenues. 

The rules for curbing tax avoidance don’t apply to business rate avoidance. Promoters of one scheme boasted that they have deprived local councils of £500m of revenue. Millions can be raised by ending abusive schemes. In 2024-25, HMRC failed to collect taxes of £59.2bn; totalling nearly £500bn since 2010. Another £12.8bn is lost through profit shifting by multinationals. Billions can be raised by tackling tax abuse and its enablers. Lawyers, accountants, dentists, surveyors and architects trade through limited liability partnership (LLP) structure. As partners, they receive share of profit instead of wages. Their self-employed status means that the LLP does not pay employer national insurance on the profit shared by partners, saving the firms £150,000 for every £1m of profit shared. Big four law firms alone reportedly avoided paying £4bn of employer national insurance. Billions can be collected by ending the employer national insurance dodge. 

Dividends to foreign investors are paid without deducting tax at source. Countries such as the USA, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden have a dividend withholding tax for foreign investors. The UK should follow suit. Each £100bn dividend paid to foreign investors could yield £20bn or more in tax revenues. Research shows that since the pandemic corporations have increased their profit margins by an average of 30%. Electricity and Gas supply companies increased their profit margins by 363%, often without additional investment or risks. Governments can raise large amounts through windfall taxes. For example, a windfall tax on the UK’s four biggest banks could raise £19bn. A small windfall tax is already levied on energy companies and there is scope for much higher rates. Their 2025 profit of £23.1bn is further boosted by the Iran war. 

HMRC is an unsecured creditor for taxes specifically relating to a business (such as corporation tax and capital gains tax). It recovers little from bankrupt businesses. Phoenixing also robs the public purse. HMRC wrote-off £5.6bn in 2023-24, £7.2bn in 2024-25 and £12.8bn in 2025-26. Restoration of the preferential creditor status for HMRC can raise billions. Since 2006, the Bank of England has paid interest on central bank reserve deposits to commercial banks. Central bank reserves are deposits held by commercial banks at the Bank of England (BoE) and are used to settle payments between banks. They are also used by the BoE to manage interest rates through tools such as quantitative easing. The interest payments accelerated in 2009 as quantitative easing took hold. As interest rates rose, payments to commercial banks increased. The EU had similar arrangements but in 2023 virtually eliminated the practice. The Swiss central bank also stopped paying interest on central bank reserves. The UK continues to pay massive amounts; £38.23bn in 2023, £36.33in 2024 and £25.9bn in 2025. Billions can be freed by ending hidden subsidies to banks. 

The above is a small sample of the anomalies that need to be addressed to boost the public purse. The tax base needs to be broadened. Billions can be raised without increasing the basic rates of national Insurance, VAT, income and corporation tax. It won’t immediately dismantle neoliberalism but a start can be made by reducing inequalities, alleviating poverty, raising personal allowance and removing millions for paying income tax, bringing essential services into public ownership and by making much needed social investment. Does the government have the political will to act?

Misinformation About Misinformation

Yet another Government that does not understand that empowering itself means empowering its successors, who are currently its opponents. They never learn. David Rose writes:

The title of this article is not mine. The term “misinformation about misinformation” was coined by five academics, led by Ceren Budak of the University of Michigan, in a paper published in Nature in June 2024. It describes the gap between what public figures say about falsehood online and what the research shows. I borrowed it as the title of a briefing for the Free Speech Union, published this week, because it also describes the evidential foundations of what Andy Burnham’s Labour Government now proposes: the most far-reaching machinery for controlling public speech that this country has seen in peacetime since the seventeenth century.

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy’s Green Paper, Watch this Space, suggests that the algorithms governing social media and video-sharing platforms be compelled by law to give prominence to “regulated public service media”, so that outlets such as the BBC are “seen and heard in the fierce battle against mis and disinformation”. This is a zero-sum game: privileging the Beeb will demote everything else. Lucy Powell, Labour’s Deputy Leader, wants the Representation of the People Bill amended so that platforms come under “some of the same requirements” of accuracy and balance as licensed broadcasters during election campaigns – a plan that would require a vast, and as yet non-existent apparatus of surveillance and censorship. Meanwhile, following amendments earlier this year to the Online Safety Act, the media regulator Ofcom has instructed platforms to draw up protocols for restricting content during a “crisis”, defined as an “extraordinary situation in which there is a serious threat to public safety”.

Beneath all of this sits a single document: a 136-page “evidence review” of mis- and disinformation and their impact, commissioned by the Government Office for Science (GO-Science) from a seven-person team at Sheffield University and published in May. It was commissioned to supply the “full evidence base” ministers admitted they previously lacked. Its tone was apocalyptic, concluding that online fake news “is now widely recognised as a systemic national risk”, that “algorithms and business models contribute to [its] amplification and impact”, and that “system-level interventions are needed”. It went on to recommend statutory “quality signals” in the ranking of content, a state-linked “database of false and misleading narratives”, and official “prebunking” across education and public communications. Debates about what misinformation actually is, it added, “should not become a distraction from action”.

Two often repeated claims underpin this programme. The first is that mis- and disinformation saturate the internet and inflict grave harm: riots, vaccine refusal, subverted elections. The second is that platform algorithms are the engine of the crisis, pushing inflammatory content at innocent, vulnerable users because outrage maximises engagement and engagement maximises revenue, and that this radicalises them permanently. Yet tested against the primary sources and the peer-reviewed literature, neither proposition holds.

Somewhat surprisingly, the review’s authors made no attempt to establish the extent of what was true or false on the internet. Instead, by their own account, they relied on summaries generated by large language AI models of 228 academic papers they had not read, and on the monthly bulletins of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), a body that coordinates fact-checkers across the EU. Those bulletins record replies to questionnaires asking fact-checkers what subjects they have dealt with. Hence, the review’s claim that health misinformation was “detected” every month means only that this was something that fact-checkers chose to check. It does not record the number of misleading posts, the size of their audience, by what standard they were judged false, or how many people believed them.

Nor were the authors and their eleven “expert” reviewers equipped to make such judgements. They included no climate scientist, no economist, no clinician, immunologist or epidemiologist, and no scholar of migration, though inter alia the report pronounces on misinformation about climate, “EU financial policy”, transgender sportspeople and “migrant entitlement”. However, they did include longstanding members of what has been termed the censorship industrial complex, such as Clare Melford, chief executive of the Global Disinformation Index; Chris Morris of the self-appointed fact-checking organisation, Full Fact; Paula Gori, the head of EDMO itself; and Bob Ward, the London School of Economics communications officer whose output largely consists of complaints against journalists who question climate and energy policy. All are partisans in the contest the review was supposed to adjudicate, and their own work is cited repeatedly in its text. They were literally marking their own homework.

Melford’s record shows what that means in practice. The Global Disinformation Index, which she co-founded in 2018, does not correct falsehoods but tries to defund publishers by pressurising advertisers. It rates news websites for “disinformation risk”, compiles a “dynamic exclusion list”, and supplies it to ad agencies and their clients, so that those of which it disapproves are starved of revenue. In 2020, in the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, the GDI rebuked Senator Tom Cotton for suggesting on Fox News that it might have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. According to the GDI, through the broadcast of his words, a “debunked conspiracy theory” was being given “authority, validation and amplification”. It went on to insist that the lab leak hypothesis had been “fact checked and proven untrue” and that advertisers must withdraw from sites that echoed it. Its position has not aged well, for many experts, governments and intelligence agencies have come to believe that far from being a conspiracy theory, the likelihood is the virus did escape from the poorly-shielded Wuhan lab.

The GDI did not confine itself to origins. For example, in 2021 it denounced a Spanish-language site that had reported that a third of British deaths from the Delta variant were among the vaccinated, describing this as “clearly untrue”, and persuaded the restaurant chain Chipotle, whose advertisement sat beside the article, to withdraw support. Public Health England’s Technical Briefing 16, published on 18 June 2021, recorded 73 deaths in England among people confirmed to have the Delta variant. Of these, 34 were unvaccinated, ten had received one dose, and 26 – 36 per cent – had been fully vaccinated for more than a fortnight; more than half of the dead had received at least one dose.

Meanwhile the GDI and its allies have been redefining what constitutes dis- and misinformation, applying the terms not only to falsehoods but “adversarial narratives”: content that may be accurate but which, in the GDI’s judgement, sets people against an individual, an institution or “the science”. In 2024 it told UnHerd that the site would stay on its advertiser exclusion list because it published gender-critical writers such as Kathleen Stock, whose views are protected under British law. For UnHerd, the consequences were severe: it estimated that it was receiving between 2 and 6 per cent of the advertising revenue its audience would normally command.

Another leading component of the censorship lobby, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which was co-founded by Morgan McSweeney, now campaigns against the “new climate denialism” – a category that includes dissent not from the laws of physics but from Britain’s Net Zero energy policy, and voicing concern over the drawbacks of heat pumps and electric vehicles. It is a matter of record that between 2019 and 2023 the Foreign Office paid the GDI grants worth £2.6 million.

It is not therefore difficult to see why the GO-Science review reached the conclusions it did. Its proposed “database of false and misleading narratives”, refreshed monthly and linked to the state, is the GDI’s bank of disagreeable “narratives” with a government seal of approval. Having commissioned an evidence base, ministers were given a predetermined manifesto.

Maybe its authors should have used a different AI, but the fact remains that their sweeping assertion that “the governance of online platform algorithms is exclusively profit- and engagement-driven” and so fosters hatred and division rests on a single citation: a 2025 paper from staff at the Universitas Muhammadiyah Buton, a small private institution in the province of Southeast Sulawesi, which the UniRank directory says is the 433rd best of the 562 universities in Indonesia, and the 10,370th best in the world. I filed a freedom of information request to Sheffield University to elicit the cost of the review to the taxpayer. The answer: £496,355.

More significant is what the review missed: a body of research in the world’s leading journals, none of it cited, which contradicts its every finding. In the words of the Nature paper by Budak and her colleagues, “public intellectuals and journalists frequently make sweeping claims about the effects of exposure to false content online that are inconsistent with much of the current empirical evidence”. Their own review documented “a pattern of low exposure to false and inflammatory content that is concentrated among a narrow fringe with strong motivations to seek out such information”. They noted that visits to 490 websites deemed “untrustworthy” on the basis of fact-checkers’ lists made up just 5.9 per cent of Americans’ clicks on news sites, and when television is added to the denominator, “fake news” accounts for roughly 0.15 per cent of the average media diet. “This reality,” the Nature authors observed, “is not reflected in public discourse about social media.” The GO-Science review appeared two years later, but left this paper unmentioned.

On algorithms, the evidence is if anything more awkward for ministers. The largest study of the question was conducted by researchers at Twitter itself and published in PNAS in 2022, covering seven countries and millions of accounts. It found the algorithm amplified right-of-centre legislators somewhat more than those on the left, but as for extremism, “contrary to prevailing public belief, we did not find evidence to support this hypothesis”: far-right and far-left parties in France, Spain and Germany were amplified less than moderate ones. A landmark experiment published in Science in 2023 switched tens of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users from an algorithmic feed to a simple chronological one for three months. Their political attitudes did not measurably change, and the algorithmic feed turned out to have served them less content from untrustworthy sources, not more. Studies of YouTube found that consumers of extremist videos were overwhelmingly subscribers who went looking for them, not ingenues led astray by recommendations.

Budak and her colleagues drew the obvious conclusion: “Although algorithms indisputably shape the content people see, we interpret recent empirical evidence as suggesting that, on average, these algorithms tend to push users to more moderate content and to offer extreme content predominantly to those who have sought it out.”

The GO-Science review infers that misinformation may have caused “societal harms” such as Covid vaccine hesitancy. The most substantial study of that question was published in Science in 2024. Combining survey experiments with Facebook exposure data covering 233 million American users, it found that content flagged as false by fact-checkers had almost no aggregate effect on vaccination intentions, for the simple reason that hardly anyone saw it: such material attracted 0.3 per cent of the 2.7 billion views of the vaccine stories in the dataset. What did depress intentions was unflagged “vaccine-sceptical” content that contained no falsehoods at all, which had 46 times the aggregate impact of the material flagged as false. The single most influential item was an accurate report in the Chicago Tribune headlined “A healthy doctor died two weeks after getting a COVID vaccine; CDC is investigating why”. It was seen by more than 50 million people – over six times the views of all flagged vaccine misinformation put together.

Advocates of regulation cite this study as proof that moderation must go further. It proves the reverse. The material with the measurable effect was truthful reporting by an established metropolitan newspaper: precisely the “trustworthy” journalism Nandy’s Green Paper proposes to amplify. A regime aimed at misinformation would have missed it. A regime capable of suppressing it would have crossed a baleful line: from correcting falsehood into suppressing accurate news that officials found inconvenient. That is a choice the censorship lobby usually leaves unsaid, although Melford of the GDI came close in 2021, explaining that her organisation had moved beyond merely checking facts because “something can be factually accurate but still extremely harmful”.

If misinformation really were the threat ministers describe, one would expect its footprint to be visible in what people believe. A study published in PLOS ONE in 2022 went looking for it. The team examined national US surveys of 46 separate conspiracist beliefs, repeated with identical wording since 1966, alongside polling on six theories in six European countries, including Britain, and repeated measures of generalised “conspiracy thinking”. “In no instance,” they reported, “do we observe systematic evidence for an increase in conspiracism.” Of the 46 American beliefs, significant declines outnumbered increases by 15 to six. In Europe, just one theory had gained ground in a single country. Yet another belief that had grown was the assertion that conspiracy theories themselves were out of control: 73 per cent of Americans thought so, a conviction the authors attributed to alarmist statements by politicians and the press. Online conspiracy content, they concluded, “might not persuade as much as reinforce existing views.”

Britain has been here before. In July 1637 the Star Chamber of Charles I decreed that nothing might be published without a licence from approved authorities, with enforcement delegated to a private body, the Stationers’ Company. The categories of the forbidden – “seditious”, “scandalous”, “offensive” – meant whatever the licensers wished. The proposals of 2026 are not an exact echo. But exalted legal status for approved publishers, emergency powers over content, and official programmes to instruct children and adults in which voices to trust are that regime’s closest peacetime relatives in nearly four centuries. Of course they failed, and Charles was beheaded twelve years later.

Seven years after the King’s measures took effect, John Milton inaugurated England’s free speech tradition with Areopagitica, and his answer to the licensers still stands. If we believe in truth, “we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

The Government’s case rests on a review that read nothing, measured nothing and ignored the research that contradicted it. On the evidence, the case for the most far-reaching apparatus to restrict peacetime speech since the ousted Stuart king indeed amounts to misinformation about misinformation.

The Movement’s Moral Authority

Paul Knaggs writes:

Read TUC Motion 17 as many times as you like. Count every line, every clause, every one of its two hundred-odd words. You will not find the word “woman” anywhere in it. Not once. Not “women,” not “sex,” not “female,” not “girls.” A motion built entirely around reversing the practical effect of a Supreme Court judgment about the meaning of sex under British equality law manages, across five resolutions and four sub-clauses of condemnation, never to mention the people that judgment was about. That is not an oversight. It is the whole story.

On Monday 14 September, delegates at the TUC Congress in Brighton carried Motion 17, “Oppose the EHRC Code of Practice (Services, Public Functions and Associations),” without a recorded opposing speaker and without, as far as any published account shows, a card vote. It came from the TUC’s LGBT+ Conference, was moved on the floor by Maria Exall of the Communication Workers’ Union [and civil partner of Angela Eagle], and was endorsed for the General Council by the TUC’s Assistant General Secretary, Kate Bell. It commits the entire trade union movement, nearly five and a half million working people, to campaign for the reintroduction of gender self-declaration into UK law. And it does so while treating the women whose legal protections are actually at stake as a subject too awkward to name.

The text itself is worth reading closely, because the ambiguity is built into its architecture. Conference “unequivocally condemns” the EHRC’s Code as “a direct attack on LGBT+ equality.” It resolves that “the law must be changed.” It calls on the TUC “to campaign to introduce a process of gender self-declaration in the UK.” Every one of these is a direct, practical challenge to the effect of For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers, the April 2025 Supreme Court ruling that “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 means biological sex. Self-declaration would make legal recognition of acquired gender easier, but the Supreme Court held that even possession of a Gender Recognition Certificate does not alter a person’s sex for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010.

Campaigning to make self-declared gender determine who counts as a woman or man under that Act is therefore not a question of better guidance or a fairer interpretation: it would require Parliament to change the law the Court interpreted. That is a legitimate position for a trade union conference to hold. What is not legitimate is holding it while pretending the other half of the equation, the women whose sex-based rights the ruling upheld, simply do not exist as a relevant consideration. Kate Bell’s own words on the floor gave the game away. “While challenging this guidance,” she told Congress, “the TUC will comply with the law.” Sit with that sentence. It is an admission, dressed as reassurance, that the TUC knows exactly what the law currently says and intends to spend its political capital getting it changed. It is the trade union equivalent of a company that tells you it will obey the speed limit while lobbying furiously to have it raised. You are not meant to notice that the lobbying is the point.

The union movement women built

There is a bitter irony in a movement that owes so much of its modern legitimacy to women workers now organising to legislate around their protections without saying so out loud. It was women sewing machinists at Ford’s Dagenham plant who walked out in 1968 over unequal pay and forced the Equal Pay Act through Parliament two years later. It was women cleaners, care workers, dinner ladies and shop staff who built the base of unions like UNISON and USDAW into the mass movements they are today. Nearly half of TUC-affiliated unions are led by women. And yet when it came to a motion that touches directly on whether women can rely on single-sex spaces, services and sport being defined by sex rather than declaration, the platform found room for dignity, humiliation and exclusion, but not for the word describing the class of people the ruling was actually about.

This is worth being fair about, because the argument the TUC is not making explicitly deserves to be made explicitly. Trans people do face real hostility, and a trade union movement that ignored that would be failing a vulnerable group of its members. The EHRC’s own past research found that six in ten trans people report having experienced transphobic harassment from strangers in public. It is also true, though less convenient for either side of this argument, that the Home Office’s most recent figures show police-recorded transgender hate crime falling for the second year running, down 11 per cent to 3,809 offences in the year to March 2025, albeit still well above the 2,510 recorded five years earlier. Maria Exall’s charge that the guidance is impractical in places, and that its application to workplace facilities remains genuinely unresolved, is not a frivolous complaint. Even Community, one of the more cautious unions on this question, has said the EHRC needs to be “clear, legally sound” in how it applies the Code. These are real problems, honestly held.

Set that against the same period’s figures for women. Police-recorded sexual offences in England and Wales reached 209,079 in the year to March 2025, part of what the Office for National Statistics itself describes as a decade-long upward trend, one driven in part by improved recording and a greater willingness among victims to come forward, but a trend nonetheless. If the instinct behind Motion 17 is that rising figures demand a union response, it is fair to ask why that instinct did not extend, anywhere in its text, to the women whose safety in single-sex spaces this Code was written to address. But none of that requires erasing women from the sentence. You can defend trans dignity at work without pretending the Supreme Court ruled on nothing in particular. You can call for better, clearer guidance on how single-sex provision works in practice without resolving to campaign for the return of the very mechanism, self-declaration, that the court found incompatible with the Act as written. The TUC chose not to do this. It chose instead a motion that names its enemy (the EHRC), names its remedy (self-ID), and simply skips past the question of whose existing legal protections that remedy would unwind.

What “the law must be changed” would actually mean

Motion 17 never mentions a toilet. It does not need to. The single-sex exceptions in the Equality Act that a restored self-declaration test would swallow are not a toilet law. They cover women-only domestic violence refuges. Single-sex hospital wards and intimate personal care. Female prison wings. Women-only associations and support groups that exist because some spaces have to be run by women, for women, without qualification. Competitive sport. The right to organise politically as women. If the campaign Motion 17 commits the TUC to actually succeeds, every one of those exceptions loses the sex-based footing the Supreme Court confirmed it still has. That is what “the law must be changed” means once you follow it past the door of a public lavatory. Not a different sign. A different legal test for who counts as a woman everywhere the law currently protects one.

The last of those exceptions, the right to organise as women, is not hypothetical. It is the same right that UNISON, ASLEF, USDAW and the Musicians’ Union tested in July, when they boycotted Labour’s Women’s Conference sooner than accept a conference floor reserved for women defined by sex rather than by identity. Four TUC-affiliated unions had already shown, months before Motion 17, exactly how far they would go rather than let a women’s conference remain a women’s conference. Motion 17 is that same instinct, generalised and put into a campaign platform.

Ask, too, what happens to a woman who finds herself where the Darlington nurses stood. Eight nurses at Darlington Memorial Hospital were required to share their female changing room with a male colleague who identified as a woman. A tribunal found in January that the trust had prioritised his perceived rights over theirs, and that the arrangement created a hostile, humiliating and degrading environment for the women. Seven of them later received a combined £187,000 in damages. Their union was not the organisation that won that case for them. One of the nurses raised a complaint and was met with silence, then discovered her union was representing the man she had complained about. The women ended up founding their own organisation, the Darlington Nursing Union, because the one they already paid into would not do the job. Set that history against a TUC that has now voted, on the public record, to campaign for the very legal change that produced the Darlington dispute in the first place. If it happens again, and a reinstated self-declaration test gives no reason to expect otherwise, the question is not rhetorical: will these unions defend the woman, or will they need time to consider the judgment?

Weigh that against the scale of what is actually being contested. The number of people holding a Gender Recognition Certificate, the legal instrument the Supreme Court ruling actually turned on, is not in dispute: 8,464 full certificates have been granted across the entire United Kingdom in the twenty-plus years since the scheme began. Not per year. In total, over two decades. Motion 17 commits a movement of 5.3 million members, well over half of them women, to campaign for a change in the law on behalf of a certificated population smaller than the crowd at a lower-league football match, and does so without once naming the many millions of women whose existing legal protections that change would unwind.

Darlington nurses, TUC Motion 17 and the question every union must answer 

The TUC’s own site records Motion 17 only as “carried.” It does not publish how many hands went up against it, nor which affiliated unions, if any, held back. That opacity should not survive scrutiny. Every general secretary who backed this motion, or let it pass without a recorded objection, owes their women members a plain answer to a plain question: do you believe the Equality Act’s protection of sex-based rights for women is a settled matter, or a temporary inconvenience to be campaigned away? There is no third option that respects both groups of members honestly, and the attempt to sound as though there is, is precisely what makes this motion dishonest rather than merely one-sided. 

Women in these unions pay the same subscriptions, staff the same picket lines, and built no small part of the movement’s moral authority. They are owed more than a motion that discusses their rights without ever naming them. If the TUC wants to campaign for trans self-declaration, it should have the courage to say so plainly, and the honesty to say plainly what that campaign would cost the women whose legal protections it is designed to reverse. Anything less is not solidarity. It is a movement that has learned to talk about half its members by pretending not to see them. A trade union movement that cannot say the word “women” while legislating over their rights has not found a diplomatic form of words. It has found a way to stop being honest with itself.

Power To The People

Sam Richards writes:

Ten years ago, on 15 September 2016, ministers gave final approval to Hinkley Point C, then an £18 billion project expected to mark the revival of British nuclear energy. The anniversary is a useful moment to ask how a country that once led the world in nuclear became so bad at building reactors. By the time Hinkley Point C finally starts generating electricity, it will have taken at least 13 years to build and cost roughly £17 billion more than originally budgeted.

At Britain Remade, we reviewed every nuclear power station built since 2000. Hinkley was the world’s most expensive. Per kilowatt of capacity, it costs around six times as much as a modern South Korean reactor. It wasn’t always like this. Between 1956 and 1971, Britain built 26 nuclear reactors, some at less than half of Hinkley’s cost per kilowatt. By 1965, we had more nuclear power stations than the United States, the Soviet Union and France combined. Projects were routinely approved within months and generally connected to the grid within four or five years of construction beginning.

The contrast, as set out in Alex Chalmers’s recent account of Britain’s nuclear history, is extraordinary. When the Government proposed building Trawsfynydd nuclear power station in Snowdonia, concerns about its effect on the landscape were considered at a three-day public inquiry. The inspectors’ final report, including appendices, ran to 50 pages. Hinkley’s environmental assessment ran to more than 44,000. In 1959, Britain’s Nuclear Installations Inspectorate employed 13 inspectors. Its modern successor, the Office for Nuclear Regulation, has more than 400 specialist technical staff.

Britain’s nuclear failure is a story about power in both senses of the word. We have lost the ability to generate cheap electrical power in no small part because political power has been dispersed among institutions that can obstruct development, but none of which is ultimately responsible for ensuring that anything gets built.

Some of Hinkley’s spiralling cost reflects the simple fact that we allowed our nuclear construction industry to disappear. After nearly 30 years without building a new reactor, our skills and supply chains had atrophied to the point that, when construction started, there was reportedly only one nuclear-qualified welder left in the country. Yet instead of ordering a fleet of standardised reactors, we tried to rebuild an entire industry around one enormous project with thousands of bespoke changes.

Building anything, including nuclear power, becomes cheaper through repetition. A credible pipeline gives suppliers the confidence to invest in apprenticeships and equipment, while allowing skilled workers to move directly from one project to the next. Each reactor incorporates the lessons of the last. Welding on Hinkley’s second reactor is already being completed four times faster than on the first, helping to make it an estimated 30 per cent cheaper.

Yet not only were we trying to sprint to the end of one mega-project from a standing start, but we took an existing French design and improved it in the modern British manner: by making it considerably more complicated and expensive. UK regulatory requirements produced around 7,000 design modifications. As a result, Hinkley requires 35 per cent more steel and 25 per cent more concrete than it otherwise would have done. Rather than learning from the costly mistakes made overseas, we made entirely new mistakes of our own.

During Britain’s early nuclear programme, the Ministry of Power was responsible for both regulating and delivering new generating capacity. This system was perhaps insufficiently transparent, but it did contain something today’s system lacks: an actor with both the authority and the incentive to reach a decision. Today, projects must satisfy an ever-expanding constellation of regulators, statutory consultees and arm’s-length bodies, each pursuing its own limited objective. Each of these can impose new costs or cause delay, but none are responsible for balancing those costs against the country’s need for economic growth or energy security.

A prime example: EDF has spent or committed around £700 million on protecting fish at Hinkley. The breakdown is roughly £500 million on low-velocity water intakes, £150 million on a fish recovery and return system and £50 million on an acoustic fish deterrent — the now infamous “fish disco”. A reasonable person might conclude that this is a disproportionate amount to spend on fish. Natural England’s position is that even this may not be enough.

Recent trials suggest that the disco works, with the number of protected twaite shad boogying within 30 metres of the intake reportedly falling by 93 per cent when it was switched on. Nevertheless, the environmental quango’s advice is that if any impacts on protected fish remain, they must be fully mitigated or additional compensation secured. The most developed proposal involves creating up to 900 acres of salt marsh around the Bristol Channel, potentially requiring land to be acquired from unwilling farmers.

Natural England denies that it is demanding a salt marsh. It says it merely provides scientific advice to bodies including the Marine Management Organisation; it does not “sign off” nuclear power stations and is unaware of any delay caused by its position. While Natural England is technically right that it is not the decision-maker, without its support the Marine Management Organisation is highly unlikely to issue the permit EDF needs to switch on Hinkley Point C. This is a veto in all but name.

It is worth saying at this point that I do not think protecting fish is unimportant. I do, however, think that after £700 million has been committed, and a trial has shown the deterrent reducing nearby twaite shad by 93 per cent, an elected minister should be able to say: that’s enough, let’s get this thing switched on. Whether any remaining benefit to fish justifies delaying low-carbon electricity for six million homes is ultimately a political judgement. It involves balancing the rights of fish against our nation’s energy security, our household bills, our carbon emissions and the rights of farmers who do not want their land turned into salt marsh. It should be taken by someone whom voters can boot out if they disagree.

This is in fact what is missing from our new Prime Minister’s analysis of power in Britain. Power is not simply concentrated in Westminster; it has been squirrelled away inside hundreds of arm’s-length bodies with little or no democratic accountability. Ministers can fire out press releases about building new infrastructure, but effective decisions belong to the institutions that operate as veto players in the system. Voters cannot remove them, and they bear no responsibility for outcomes beyond their own narrow sectoral interests.

This matters to any credible strategy for cheaper electricity. Onward’s excellent report Firm Foundations envisages 20GW of nuclear capacity and estimates that a system with more firm generation could save consumers £320 billion by 2050. But its authors acknowledge that our current nuclear costs are a major barrier. The closer Britain gets to French or South Korean construction costs, the more real those bill savings become.

If Andy Burnham wants to give power back to the people, he should deliver on his Chancellor’s recent pledge and implement the Fingleton review of nuclear regulation in full as quickly as possible. Designs accepted by trusted overseas regulators like France or South Korea should be recognised by default. Planning permission should settle the main questions once, rather than, as has happened with Sizewell C, allowing them to be reopened across more than 160 permits, licences and consents. Statutory consultees should advise within firm deadlines, but elected politicians must make the ultimate trade-offs. For Hinkley, ministers should declare that £700 million of effective fish protection is enough. If the law does not let them reach that judgement, Parliament should change it.

Setting up a No10 branch office in Manchester will not return power to the people. That requires elected governments having the power to take decisions, and voters having the power to punish them when they decide badly. Hinkley’s reactors will eventually produce electricity. The salient question is whether Britain’s democracy is still capable of producing decisions.