A Study In Contrasts

Timothy Pratt writes:

A two-hour hearing in Spain’s high court Friday on the US extradition request of wealthy leftwing activist and philanthropist James “Fergie” Chambers turned out to be a study in contrasts. Chambers’s defense took most of the session to query the US citizen and detail irregularities in the Trump administration’s extradition request – several of which The Guardian has reported on – as well as the figures of Spanish law that would lead the three-judge panel to deny the request; while the prosecutor sped through his case, head down, asking Chambers no questions at all.

Notably, neither the judges or the prosecutor asked Chambers to address the insinuation in the extradition request that the wealthy activist had supported Hamas. Chambers’s case is the first known instance of the US seeking to extradite a citizen over alleged support for Hamas, an accusation apparently tied to an international money laundering charge and donations to organizations helping Palestinians in Gaza.

But the defense’s queries did allow him to speak for the first time since his 10 July arrest in Ibiza about events at the center of the case: 2023 protests against Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and 2024 transfers of $7.2m to Tunisia, where he lived at the time. The latter was buttressed with testimony from a financial expert. On the whole, Chambers painted a picture different from the depiction contained in the extradition request, that of a violent backer of Hamas on the run from the US. At one point, he noted that his family’s next door neighbor in Tunis was the US ambassador.

The court will decide next week on extraditing Chambers. If the decision is affirmative, Spain’s council of ministers can reverse the court’s decision. This means Chambers’s extradition may be among the last decisions made under Pedro Sánchez, the socialist prime minister, before national elections on 29 November. Friday’s hearing began with Chambers’s defense asking about his wealth. A self-described communist and anti-imperialist, Chambers sold stock back to his family’s business, Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises, worth about $250m in mid-2023.

Then he started a foundation, he told the court. He and the foundation’s three-member board decide on funding and ensure that no projects seeking support are under US sanctions, Chambers said. The foundation has funded an estimated 100 progressive and humanitarian projects in 20 countries, according to his partner, activist and actor Stella Schnabel – including, Chambers said Friday, organizations in Gaza working on issues such as “medical treatment for children, transportation out of dangerous areas and clean water and food”.

Two of the request’s three charges – riot and conspiracy to riot – are related to the late-2023 protests against Elbit. Chambers detailed his participation in the protests: locking himself to a door, marching in the street and – in New Hampshire – standing in the road, speaking to the media and paying bail for four protesters who were eventually found guilty of misdemeanor charges and served 30 days in jail. As for the $7.2m, the defense and a financial expert serving as a witness laid out how ten bank transfers from the US to Tunisia mostly went to sponsor the football club Club Africain – described by Chambers as “one of the largest football clubs in Africa” – and a sporting business Chambers launched while living in Tunisia.

“Is there any indication that the money went to support terrorist activities?” asked defense attorney Aitor Martínez. “None,” said financial expert Albert Deulofeu Schilt. Then, in about 15 minutes of rapid-fire monotone, prosecutor Juan Hernández Villalba laid out a wholly different picture of Chambers as backing “an organized structure … aimed at repeatedly committing illegal acts … together with funds destined for terrorist organizations”. He accused the defense of laying out the facts of the case “in a fragmented way … when what’s most relevant is an evaluation of the whole picture”.

“The extradition petition isn’t based on ideology or political statements, but on actions [Chambers] organized, financed and carried out, causing material damage,” Hernández Villalba asserted. The actions against Elbit “were presented as a simple protest”, he said. “Nevertheless, the actions described by the US were planned for days … with objectively violent content.” Given all this, the prosecutor said, “there are more than enough indications to consider … that [Chambers’s] funding was aimed at terrorism”. 

Among the 100-plus people in varying time zones following Friday’s hearing on the court’s YouTube channel was Irish film-maker and journalist Sinéad O’Shea, whose documentary on Chambers called All About the Money makes its New York premiere this weekend. It covers the time period cited by the FBI affidavit underpinning the US request. O’Shea said that extradition case “builds a false narrative which begins with the protest in New Hampshire – a piece of vandalism at worst and for which people ended up serving 30 days. I saw myself the football club in which he invested in Tunisia and his donations to Palestinian and other charities are a matter of public record. It is impossible not to see this as a politically motivated case.”

Chambers’s views have been extensively profiled in US media. A week after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, he posted on X about Israel’s response: “Stop calling it ‘collective punishment’/There’s nothing to be ‘punished’ for/No faction of the Palestinian resistance, Hamas or other, has done *anything* wrong/It’s simply genocide/Like it has been.” Dressed in dark jeans, a grey-blue shirt, a black jacket, with a close-cropped haircut and mustache, Chambers got the last word during the hearing.

“To this day I cannot understand why I have been in prison since July for what amounts to speaking emotionally and committing minor offenses of public disturbance,” he said. “I’ve never had any contact with any terrorist organization. I’ve certainly never financed any terrorist organization … and for this my family has been torn apart. I missed my grandmother’s funeral last week. My five-year-old son asks where I am every day. And my wife will give birth, God willing, in March – and I don’t know if I will be by her side.” [All] because I have spoken my mind, and I had a lot more money than others who have spoken their mind, in my country. And that’s all it amounts to.”

The Moral Confusion of MeToo

Echoing The Word (whatever happened to that?), OffGuardian and George Galloway at the time, John Maier writes:

Being a student during the high-water mark of MeToo, 10 years ago, was a curiously chastening experience. The authorities at my university resolved that all undergraduates should participate in a mandatory “consent workshop” during freshers’ week. Gathered in circles on the floor, mixed-sex groups of hungover 18-year-olds, whose lifetime sexual experience tended overwhelmingly towards zero, were made to assess a series of hypothetical case-studies. The first few examples eased you in (accounts of clear-cut criminality). But the exercise quickly took on a more Talmudic quality: the vignettes assuming such a level of baroque moral intricacy — crucial information about the sexual encounter strategically withheld, characters multiply wrong-footed by their epistemic environments, the gravity of the transgressions in play held in a kind of suspended animation — that it became radically unclear who, if anyone, was to blame for what.

Luckily by that stage our instructor, a worldly wise third-year, had made it helpfully clear that this was a test with only one correct answer. If you looked closely enough, it always turned out that, in attempting to have sex, things had gone disastrously, perhaps irreparably, morally wrong for our male protagonist. He was the perennial villain of the piece. Indeed, the more creatively unforgiving you could make your interpretation of his offence, the more notional “points” you seemed to earn in the resulting discussion (the rule of thumb, I suppose, being that the more esoteric an injustice, the graver it is, because the more often “marginalised” by society at large).

As the vignettes took on the textual complexity of High Victorian literature, I saw a seasick look creep into the faces of some of my heterosexual male peers. Most of them were self-aware enough to realise that the odds were already stacked against them in the sexual marketplace; but this degree of liability was greater than they could ever have feared. One asked, subversively, why, if workshops like these in fact helped to reduce sexual wrongdoing, they were not used by the state to combat other kinds of crime. I interjected that his rhetorical question sounded rather “problematic” to me and mentally awarded myself another point. By the end of the struggle session, I watched these defeated young men trudge from the room contemplating an immediate future of nervous celibacy.

Of course, no political ideology is ever flattered by having its central tenets filtered through the minds of zealous, under-socialised, Oxbridge freshers. Yet, within the MeToo movement proper, there is significant reason to fear that the tendency towards a certain kind of moral hallucination is a feature, rather than a bug — the pressure to discover heightened moral seriousness in minor as well as major infractions being key to the movement’s forward propulsion.

One tension within MeToo has always been that it is simultaneously a project of vigilante sexual justice (aiming to take out select famous and powerful men) and a social movement that aspires to recast collective social norms in a more progressive mould.

In achieving the first aim (claiming famous male scalps), all kinds of sensationalist smear tactics are usually deemed to be fair game. Revelations merely trashing the characters of the rich and famous share frontpage space with allegations of more obvious criminal seriousness. When there is no smoking gun, the strategy can seem to devolve into something like “death by a thousand reputational cuts” — no single anecdote or detail needing to be probative, the prosecution’s case resting on the quantity, rather than quality, of the loosely gathered evidence.

Indeed, there is an unsettling sense in which MeToo attack jobs sometimes indulge the very same, unnervingly tabloid, urges of the era they claim to despise. Their fixation with inspecting the lives of celebrity targets for unedifying (but often non-criminal) behaviour is frequently only faintly disguised by the new puritanical lens used to justify their exposés.

This all is, you may think, part of the bargain the famous strike for notoriety. But the approach prototypical MeToo activists take to indicting their celebrity targets spells disaster when coupled with the movement’s other aim — that of motivating better collective social-sexual norms. In this conflation of the criminal and the creepy, the clear-cut and the vague, the movement has sown moral confusions that end up pathologising vast swathes of ordinary life. This tendency would probably more often be called out were it not that criticism of the movement’s tactics was in turn so often glibly conflated with condoning the wrongdoing of the criminals it sometimes unmasks.

Just look at recent weeks. Russell Brand will spend 10 years in prison for a rape conviction; following a long-anticipated joint ITV and Guardian investigation, David Walliams now too stands accused of potentially serious criminal wrongdoing in his behaviour towards young girls who were below the age of consent. (The Met has announced it is now investigating historical claims against Walliams, too.) Yet in the same breath as these bleak allegations are relayed, further aspersions are attached of a less obviously criminal, more dubiously moralistic kind: exploiting their “power” and “status”, and behaving in lewd or “inappropriate” ways. Rolled in as part of a package deal frontloaded with graver allegations, the implication seems to be that the wider public should accept that these lesser offences too are now grounds to socially and professionally destroy someone.

The move to indict grubby but consensual sexual behaviour becomes destabilised when one remembers that, in their wider thinking about social-sexual norms, many MeToo activists are uncompromisingly “sex positive”: they think of mutual consent as the final word when it comes to judging the moral appropriateness of all sexual interactions.

The underlying tension that results is unmanageable. The reluctance to articulate stable standards of wrongdoing that go beyond consent-violation leads to a heavy reliance on less specific insinuations. Wrongdoers are typically accused of “manipulating” or “exploiting” their “positions of power”. (When interpreted in a thinly relational way, it can become quite unclear who the “powerful” can enjoy a morally acceptable sexual “dynamic” with — only those, perhaps, exactly as rich and powerful as themselves?) In news reports, women who were young adults at the time they met Walliams are spoken of as having been “groomed” by him: a phrase once reserved for children, now applied freely to fully adult, but vulnerably non-famous, people too. The rhetorical effect of such “concept creep” is to extend the scope of a term while attempting to smoothly retain its original moral severity (a bit like calling every political development you dislike “fascist”).

The Guardian’s extensive investigation into Walliams’s sexual life certainly suggests it was an insalubrious affair. Walliams, it is alleged, routinely courted women many years younger than himself, often contacting them through friends at modelling agencies; he would send them unctuous handwritten notes; when one woman sofa-surfed at his London townhouse he “pawed” at her to come and share his bed. While serving as a judge on Britain’s Got Talent, Walliams allegedly “stared at [the] chest” of a female runner on the show “in a way that made her feel uncomfortable”; later he was overheard referring to her as “the one with the arse”. A different complainant recollects that, while visiting Walliams’s TV dressing room as part of a larger group, “the door was shut and we were alone with him” in a way that “she now feels that was inappropriate”. Sitting alongside far grimmer (and potentially criminal) allegations, it is difficult to know what to make of reports of mere creepiness or indeed anecdotes that read as something closer to innuendo (since when was “shutting doors” any part of a case for wholesale reputational ruin?).

On occasion, the quoted verdicts of complainants are used as interpretive ballast: Walliams was, in their words, “pushy”, “highly inappropriate”, and “a weird old man, like, trying his luck”. One woman, while acknowledging that her sexual contact with Walliams was consensual, elaborates at length: “OK, it’s legal… but the context of who you’re having sex with — if that person is double your age, if that person has known you from a young age and promised you things and is in a much bigger position of power than you, both in age, in work, in finance, in stature and size, like, everything, I really don’t think that’s OK.” By leaning rhetorically on such anguished, but somewhat hard-to-parse, attempts to theorise the non-criminal moral transgressions of men like Walliams, activists operating within MeToo’s moral paradigm attempt to let themselves off the hook: allowing the standard that he is supposed to have flouted to remain morally lively but conveniently impressionistic. Added to which, every last lurid detail then becomes admissible as evidence in the chaotic moral case being constructed.

But the collateral damage of this approach is to foist the same newly moralised standards onto the wider public, too. There, the movement’s effect has often been to pathologise benign behaviours, sowing doubts about the propriety of relationships between colleagues, “age gaps”, “power imbalances”, and quotidian kinds of romantic indiscretion.

Many people sense that the standards MeToo has conventionally employed in taking down the powerful sit uneasily with life as they know it to be. The famous injunction to “believe all women”, for example, was a clearly socially irresponsible piece of public anti-epistemology (what are you supposed to do when, as sometimes happens, two women disagree with each other?).

In placing so much evidential weight on retrospective reassessments of past sexual episodes, many onlookers are also left with the uneasy sense that MeToo’s baroque morality can make the ethical status of physical encounters virtually impossible to read in the moment they are occurring. The philosopher Bernard Williams famously coined the term “moral luck” to describe a feature of actions whose justificatory status depends essentially on future contingencies the decision-maker is not in a position to assess at the moment of action. (Should Anna Karenina run off with Count Vronsky?, Williams asks, to illustrate his concept: the decision would be retroactively justified should their romance eventually flourish, catastrophically unjustified otherwise.) On MeToo’s background logic, it can seem that many powerful men, and by extension men in general, are subject to a radically pervasive kind of “sexual luck”: their every sexual overture and action held hostage to later becoming a catastrophic moral error, depending on the contingent twists in how the recipient comes to think of its “appropriateness” years down the line.

Though exquisitely sensitive to the nuances and power differentials of “problematic” sexual encounters with famous men, MeToo remains strangely deaf to the subtly malign effects its own ideology has on wider sexual culture. The movement’s proponents are an odd mixture of cynicism and naivety. Cynicism — for example, in constantly dialling up the moralistic mood music to 11, pitching all manner of sins in the same hysterical key. The movement’s politics, on the other hand, are often naïvely obtuse. With each new scandal, the media finds another opportunity to declare a fresh crisis, reasoning that every country, profession and industry is eligible for its own bespoke “MeToo moment”. On occasion, sympathetic commentators allow themselves to wonder in amnesiac fashion whether this time may at last prove to be the decisive cultural reckoning — the moment that, somehow, finally straightens out whatever crooked feature of certain human beings’ natures inclines them towards such transgressions. In the end, the implicit hope that one last push in the direction of regulation or censorious vigilance will finally give force to a rule against rule-breaking is an obvious chimera.

MeToo has, to its undoubted credit, exposed a fair number of utter villains. But a movement that so unforgivingly holds others accountable for their every transgression cannot exempt itself from questions about its own methods. Its worst excesses see it increasingly lump together bona-fide criminality with behaviour that veers closer to the simply debauched, emotionally cruel or merely awkward. It then relies on the graver cases to moralise the weaker ones by brute association. While leaning heavily on flexibly impressionistic assessments, it pretends its rigoristic judgments are the outputs of a confidently worked-out theory of sexual morality, one fit to be approved and adopted by all. Such pretences do the wider world an inadvertent wrong — and more than an impressionistic one.

National Belonging and Ancestral Heritage

Much of the response to Rupert Lowe’s Early Day Motion on English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish identities has suggested that Northern Irish identity did not exist. But at the 2021 census, 31.5 per cent of people in Northern Ireland identified as Northern Irish either alone or with another designation, and those professing to be only Northern Irish were 19.8 per cent, comparable to the Arabs in Israel.

Lowe, however, should consider who they were. They seem most likely to vote for the Alliance Party, although the parlous condition of Unionism might lead to the revival of the perennial muttering about UDI among people who would otherwise seem fertile soil for Restore Britain, yet who in that case could not be further from it.

Lowe’s co-signatories Andrew Rosindell, Suella Braverman and James McMurdock suggest that ethnonationalism in Reform UK, however confused in Braverman’s case, had been infused from the Conservative Party, where much of the same tendency no doubt remained.

And speaking of Remainers, those who would rejoin the European Union should face the fact that its governments and electorates were as indifferent to them as Donald Trump was to his British fan club, or as almost everyone in Great Britain was to Ulster Unionists, while four fifths of people in the 26 Counties regarded Sinn Féin anywhere, and actually existing Nationalism of whatever stripe in the Six Counties, with something a great deal more virulent than mere indifference.

Systemic and Fundamental

Throughout its existence, this site has argued for a criminal offence of sexual activity with any person under the age of 18 who was more than two years younger than oneself, with a maximum sentence equal to twice the difference in age, and the abolition of different rules for “positions of trust”. We need to ban abortion and contraception for those under 18 at least without parental knowledge and consent, just as they thankfully cannot now be given puberty blockers.

What sort of parent would want to put his underage daughter on the Pill? There is only one possible reason for doing so. The Thatcher Government secured a judicial fiat that, without bothering to ask Parliament, abolished the age of consent altogether. Gillick competence ought instead to be called Thatcher competence. The Major Government did write Thatcher competence into the Age of Legal Capacity (Scotland) Act 1991. But it is applied in Northern Ireland on no apparent authority. Even in England and Wales, it has never been subject to a parliamentary vote. Let there be one now.

We need to rule out the legal possibility of being a specifically sexual assailant below an age of consent that had been raised to 18, thereby correcting the anomaly that had existed since 2003. In that year, a male heterosexual age of consent of 16 was created by default due to political horse-trading among the feminist and gay groups around Harriet Harman, of all people, which insisted that both sexes and all acts be treated in exactly the same way. Yet the age of criminal responsibility remains 10, meaning that boys can be prosecuted for rape, itself significantly redefined in 2003, six years before they can legally have consensual sex. And they are. Indeed, boys who allege abuse by women are routinely accused of rape.

We need the replacement of the existing categories of sexual assault with aggravating circumstances to the general categories of offences against the person, such that the sentences could be doubled. There should be no anonymity either for adult defendants or for adult complainants. Either we have an open system of justice, or we do not. We need to specify that intoxication was a bar to sexual consent only insofar as it would have been a bar to driving. We need to end the blocking of progress into paid or voluntary work even though one had been acquitted. C5 notices should be outlawed. And we need to make it a criminal offence for anyone aged 21 or over to buy or sell sex, with equal sentencing on both sides. The Universal Basic Income, the Jobs Guarantee, and the dividends from public stakes in the FTSE 500 companies, distributed equally to everyone, would remove any conceivable excuse for prostituting oneself. That would include filmed or photographed prostitution. As Jonathan Cook writes:

There is something all too obviously going unnoticed as the latest scandal breaks about a celebrity engaging in sexually abusive behaviour – this time concerning the comedian and children’s author David Walliams. Days after fellow comedian Russell Brand was sentenced to 10 years for rape and sexual assault – and there are already indications that the cases heard in his trial may be just the tip of an iceberg – Walliams is accused of a long history of grooming teenage girls.

Perhaps the most shocking scene in an ITV documentary that broke the story this week is of fellow comedian Jonathan Ross joking at the 2004 Comedy Awards: “The comedy awards is 15 years old – 15 years old! And like most 15-year-olds, it’s drunk, it’s unpredictable and it’s probably going home with David Walliams.” Shocking because his comment precedes most of the cases of alleged grooming uncovered by the documentary. Shocking because the author, or authors, of Jonathan Ross’s “joke” – Ross denies he wrote it – knew full well what Walliams was up to and thought it worthy of being turned into a joke. Shocking because the audience at the awards ceremony – including many people dear to the public’s heart – appeared to be in on the “joke” and found it uproariously funny. And shocking because Walliams himself responded to the “joke” as if it were a pat on the back rather than any kind of rebuke, or as if there were any real danger of exposure.

In ITV’s documentary, let us note, Ross is also shown in a photo of a group of celebrity friends on a night out that includes Walliams accompanied by one of his young accusers – a teenage model who, alone among the group, appears not to be having a good time. She looks deeply uncomfortable, more like a hostage. And of course, Jonathan Ross was the other participant in a notorious 2008 BBC radio-show “prank” that backfired disastrously. For the first time, it got the self-confessed sex addict Russell Brand into trouble. Brand left messages on the answerphone of ageing actor Andrew Sachs – Manuel from Fawlty Towers – revealing that Brand had had sex with Sachs’ granddaughter. Ross got off relatively lightly from that affair, dubbed Sachsgate, with only a short suspension. He’s been a staple on TV ever since.

Power imbalance

We have been here before. Many times. And just as happened in 2011 after posthumous revelations emerged – again that had been widely known for years – of Jimmy Savile’s decades-long sexual abuse of children, we have been delivered the same predictable responses. Those closest to Walliams have hastily denounced him and distanced themselves from his behaviour. Institutions and companies that profited from his TV work and books are making no less implausible claims that they did not know what was going on, as well as empty promises that lessons will be learnt. None of this should be taken seriously. The industry that creates the Saviles, the Brands and the Walliamses – and the culture that stands behind it – is not about to change or be reformed. Too much money is at stake.

We will continue to act outraged when such people are outed. But they are very much products of a culture we helped create and that we continue to venerate. We made them. We are the Dr Frankensteins to their monster. Not surprisingly, sex is the medium through which these male celebrities’ particular depravity was expressed. But sex as a weapon – rather than as intimacy – is not really about sex, as the feminist movement explained to us decades ago. It is about power. Brand’s expression of power crossed the line into illegality. It is not yet clear whether Walliams did the same.

What the women in the Walliams’ documentary keep noting is the power imbalance in his relationships. As one, “Alex”, notes: “OK, it’s legal to have sex when you’re 17, 18 – 16, even. But the context of who you’re having sex with – if that person is double your age, if that person has known you from a young age and promised you things and is in a much bigger position of power than you, both in age, in work, in finance, in stature and size, like, everything, I really don’t think that’s OK.” She’s right. It’s not okay. And she’s right that it is the imbalance of power that is the problem, not some arbitrary legal definition of a sex crime. That power imbalance clears the way to exploitation, manipulation, abuse and violence.

Celebrating depravity

TV and newspapers are not averse to exposing a celebrity sexual predator – especially one who is near his sell-by date, when his most profitable years are behind him. Earlier, the media cashed in on Russell Brand by celebrating his sex addiction. We the public were meant to marvel at his “antics”, either in admiration or envy. The media are now cashing in on Brand’s humiliation over the abusive acts his sex addiction inevitably spawned. This time we are meant to be consoled by his downfall, by his comeuppance. The media similarly celebrated Walliams for his creepy, ugly private life – again hiding in plain sight – in exactly the same way it had earlier enthused about the creepy, ugly characters he played on TV.

But the framing of this as individual stars abusing their position, or even as proof of oversight failures by the industry, misses the main story. This isn’t simply about one man’s abusiveness. It is not even about men and the weaponisation of sex. Nor is it about poor industry practices. It is about something much bigger. It is about a culture, whole societies, that are built on the basis of deep structural imbalances of power – in every sphere of life – as their most cherished value. Indeed, as their purpose. 

We prefer to define the Brand and Walliams problem simply as one of sexual predation, of a power differential in the sexual arena. It is easier for us to corral that behaviour into a category of the grotesque, the abhorrent – and for us to sneer at these deviants. But the point is they precisely are not deviants. They are the logical culmination, the distillation, of values we colluded in engineering – whether we did so actively or passively. The Brands and Walliamses are what happen when power knows no limits, when power becomes unaccountable, when power is an end in itself, not the means to achieve something better, to realise something more transcendent.

Too big to fail

This isn’t about showbiz, though the media would love you to think it is. Brand and Walliams’ abuses are just one – the most easily noticed and punished – ripple on the surface of an entire lake of similar abuses, caused by gross disparities of power in every aspect of our lives. It should hardly need stating that those who chase power are also those with an appetite for it. And those with an appetite for power are the most likely to abuse that power if and when they achieve it. That happens in the entertainment industry, but it also happens in media, in politics, in law, in business.

The creation of deep power imbalances is the very purpose of capitalism. It divides: the “wealth creator” from the worker, the have from the have-not, the landlord from the tenant. And it measures that difference – rewards it – with money. Greater wealth equals greater power in the political, economic and social systems we in the West are educated to respect and revere. The rich own the media that act as our window on the world. Rich donors capture our politics, ensuring that the political priorities of the billionaires – the protection and expansion of their wealth – must also be our political priorities. The rich wage the wars – wars the rest of us pay for – that steal the wealth of others, of poorer nations. And, as we learnt after the 2008 economic crash, when the rich screw up, when they break the self-enrichment system they themselves devised, our captured governments bail them out with our money. The rich are too big – too powerful – to fail.

The focus on sexualised abuses of power is intentional. It distracts from these far more systematic and fundamental abuses. After all, the power imbalances of our societies are not diminishing. They are accelerating like never before. And that growing, yawning gap is something the powerless – the vast majority – are being persuaded to exalt rather than rebel against. We live in an era that celebrates the very first trillionaires in history – trillionaires whose fortunes have been built on the backs of overseas workers stripped of their dignity in sweatshops and of domestic workers eking out a living on zero-hours contracts.

We live in a time when the billionaire class can unleash AI on us, selling it as our salvation, even as it threatens to bring much human work to an end – and with it our sense of purpose and potentially our ability to survive. We live in a time when western governments openly collude in the mass slaughter of children abroad, when they arrest and jail people as terrorists for holding placards stating their opposition to a genocide, and when they crush any meaningful criticism of the state carrying out the slaughter as proof of “antisemitism”.

We live in a time when an oil industry grows fat as it destroys the basis for advanced life on our planet – raping the Earth – and when the politicians it owns pass ever more laws designed to make protesting this looming mass extinction event a crime. We live in a time when the tech industries have more powers than ever to stalk us, to harvest our most intimate thoughts, to control us, and when the state readies its militarised police forces to beat us into submission should we ever try to liberate ourselves. 

We are watching this dystopia gradually unfold before our eyes, powerless to stop it because we have been groomed into acceptance, into passivity, into helplessness. We live in a state of growing precariousness, playthings in the hands of the super-rich. And in contrast to the belated condemnation of Brand and Walliams, our abusers continue to be feted, rewarded and honoured.  But the disease is the same. It is a disease caused by a hierarchy of value. Of people who matter and people who don’t. Of those who have a voice and those who are silenced. Of those who get to choose and those who must submit.

Never mind protecting children from YouTube Kids or from Lego Play. The real danger is elsewhere. Nor is it where Nish Kumar in the Netflix documentary Russell Brand: Open Secret, or Diane Morgan in last night’s Cunk on Cinema, would lazily have it. In the latter case, are we supposed to accept that from the BBC? Just as it has always banned cousin marriage, Catholic Canon Law has a specific offence of sexual activity with anyone under 18, regardless of any lower age of consent, if there even is one, in the civil jurisdiction where it took place. It is beyond dispute who has the moral high ground.

After the murder of Sir David Amess MP, I wondered whether anyone knew of a case in which a priest’s administration of the Last Rites had contaminated a crime scene, causing a prosecution to collapse. We would have heard about it if that had ever happened. The same is now true of the Seal of the Confessional. Priests would of course choose to be thrown to the lions or burned at the stake rather than break the Seal. But the Epstein Class has been exposed, so this whole furore is being got up in order to reintroduce the somewhat faded popular association of child sexual abuse with the Catholic Church instead.

They are playing the long game. Their very last motivation for discrediting the Church would be to protect children from sexual exploitation. On this as on so very many other matters, they need the Church out of the way so that they can get down to business. I shall almost certainly be dead, but in 50 years’ time, the Church will be “blamed” for “what is now the unbelievable fact” that there ever was an age of consent. Print this off and keep it.

Support Offer?

Rightist opponents of the lockdowns and the vaccines ought to feel vindicated by the explosion of mental illness and physical disability among the children of that time. I cannot understand why they would wish to deny it. There is no tough decision involved in punching down. The tough decision would be to punch up. MPs whose inspiration was the Blair Government can no more claim that they did not come into politics to kick the poor than they could claim to be blessed among the peacemakers. Labour is a party of extremely right-wing people who lack the social connections to make it in the Conservative Party, and whose two defining experiences were being brought up to spit on everyone below them, which was everyone else where they grew up, and discovering in their first 36 hours at university that they were nowhere near the top of the class system, a discovery that embittered them for life. Cutting sickness and disability benefits neither cures anyone nor creates jobs, but neither of those is the point.

The only thing missing from the present spite is Harriet Harman, who was the Secretary of State in 1997, when Tony Blair proved himself by relying on the votes of the Conservatives to snatch the bread out of the mouths of children, and who was the Leader of the Opposition in 2015, when Labour abstained on another such measure which eventually proved too much for Iain Duncan Smith but not for Andy Burnham. Burnham is heavily dependent on James Purnell, who was memorably likened by the late Alice Mahon to a Poor Law Guardian such as Alan Milburn now wished to bring back.

Milburn knows that PIP, which was introduced by the Conservatives, has nothing to do with being in or out of work. But by taking away the PIP of 16 to 24-year-olds, Milburn would also take away the Carer’s Allowance of other members of their households. It would be impossible to tell which of those young people was unable to work, since they would also be disqualified from the health element of Universal Credit, which is payable only to people who had, with immense difficulty, succeeded in establishing that fact.

Disgraceful Labour MPs accepted the halving of that element as somehow the compromise last time, but they are not even planning to oppose the Milburn Plan at all. Clearly, Ministerial office now beckons whereas they stood no chance of it under Keir Starmer. And a cross-party consensus of the very worst kind is emerging, since while John Pring is being overly generous by glossing over the fact that causing deaths, not least by suicide, was most emphatically the intention of both Government and Opposition policy, nevertheless he writes:

Conservative plans to cut £36 billion a year from social security spending have completely ignored the risk of harm to disabled people, despite past Tory governments being responsible for hundreds, and probably thousands, of claimant suicides and other deaths. On Tuesday, party leader Kemi Badenoch spoke of the need for “some tough decisions and some tough love” as she announced the publication of Welfare that Works: The Conservatives’ plan for Welfare Savings. The document includes seven separate attacks that target disabled people’s support, with these measures making up half of the £36 billion-a-year cuts. Helen Whately, the party’s shadow work and pensions secretary – although she calls herself the “shadow welfare secretary” – told the invited audience of journalists and Tory supporters that making these cuts was “morally the right thing to do”. But the 52-page document includes not a single mention of “safeguarding” or the risk to many long-term and new claimants of disability benefits if the cuts were introduced.

Among the measures announced in the plan are to force every claimant to undergo a face-to-face assessment, apparently eliminating the long-established reasonable adjustment that allows a small proportion of claims to be decided only on paper evidence, and possibly also ending telephone and video assessments. Another proposal would remove cash support from claimants with what the party calls “milder mental health issues and neurodiversity conditions such as anxiety, depression and ADHD”, across both personal independence payment and the universal credit health element. Both measures risk repeating the harm caused by post-2010 Conservative-led governments, which were closely linked to deaths such as those of Michael O’Sullivan, David Barr, Ms DE, Roy Curtis and Ker Featherstone.

But there is no mention of safeguarding in the report, or of claimants in vulnerable situations, and the need to protect those claimants from the risk of harm. The closest Badenoch came to such a reference was when she told the launch event: “Of course, there are people who genuinely cannot work, people with serious illnesses or severe disabilities. We must have a safety net for those people.” But she also told the event: “Conservatives believe that real compassion means not writing people off. We understand that a nation is built by millions of people getting things done every day, overcoming challenges, taking responsibility for their future. That is why fixing Britain’s welfare system and getting Britain working again is a moral mission for the Conservatives.”

Her words mirror those of Iain Duncan Smith in December 2010, when he told Sun readers – when talking about the old incapacity benefit (IB) – that they were right to be “upset and angry” when they saw neighbours who do not work, because such “unfairness saps away at our sense of togetherness in society”. Duncan Smith, at the time the Tory work and pensions secretary, told The Sun that Britain used to be “the workshop of the world” but had now “managed to create a block of people” who “do not add anything to the greatness of this country”. He added: “They have become conditioned to be users of services, not providers of money. This is a huge part of the reason we have this massive deficit.”

In subsequent years, the reforms Duncan Smith was introducing – trying to force IB claimants into work by putting them through the new work capability assessment – would be linked to an estimated 590 suicides in just three years, according to government-funded research by Liverpool and Oxford universities. None of the media organisations that were chosen to ask questions about the party’s proposals on Tuesday mentioned the past deaths connected with cuts to disability benefits, and the risk of future deaths if the Tory plans were introduced, even though all of them have reported on such deaths in the past. The Conservative party is not currently engaging with Disability News Service, although it refuses to say why. It had not responded by noon today (Thursday) to a question about its failure to mention safeguarding in the report and launch event.

Over on the other side of the pantomime bidding war, Rowena Mason writes:

Downing Street is considering whether plans to replace key disability benefits with work and training for people under-25 should be expanded to older age groups, The Guardian has learned, in a move that risks reigniting Labour tensions over welfare changes. Andy Burnham and other cabinet ministers are looking at applying the idea of “participation first” to all people of working age, meaning spending billions more on support to enter the workplace while cutting or removing some disability benefits. The move would be politically risky given the difficulties that Keir Starmer faced in getting changes to health and disability benefits past the Labour parliamentary party last year, with a rebellion leading to a major U-turn.

The government is preparing to accept recommendations from its adviser, Alan Milburn, next week on overhauling the benefits system for young people. In his report, Milburn will propose that under-25s should get training and support instead of the universal credit health element. Under the plans, young people with disabilities will also lose their personal independence payment (Pip) but will be able to apply to a local fund for specific short-term expenses and equipment, rather than an ongoing payment. Those with the most extreme needs who cannot work will have their entitlements protected.

This week, cabinet ministers looked at whether the arguments could be applied more broadly to over-25s, and were considering an intervention from the prime minister or Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, to make the case that the principles should apply to all. This could happen within weeks of both the Milburn review and the Stephen Timms review into disability benefits being published. Some government sources said they believed the idea of expanding the welfare changes to over-25s would ultimately not survive given the probable backlash from some parts of Labour. Others said they believed Milburn had successfully made the case that the system needed to change and that the public were behind his efforts. Burnham has repeatedly said the changes would not be “crude cuts”, but some backbenchers have said they are sceptical and worried about the impact on young disabled people.

If the changes were expanded to the over-25s, it could yield more savings as the cohort is much larger than the under-25s and the level of support needed to get people back into employment would probably be lower. Ministers have said they believe any system for the over-25s would need to reflect the different circumstances of older people, many of whom had families or caring responsibilities, and more complex health needs. However, there was a belief that many of the core problems, including detachment from the workplace and a need to encourage greater participation, were the same for under- and over-25s.

A government source said: “The support offer and benefit changes Alan has set out were devised for young people and the specific circumstances they face. But the Timms review has set out that Pip is no longer fit for purpose, and the government will respond to that review when it reports.” Milburn, a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, has promised his report is about giving billions more in support to young people to help them into work. The Guardian has learned there has been consternation within some government departments – including the Department of Health and the Department for Education – that the upfront funding for Milburn’s extra support will come from within their budgets. Some estimates have put the cost of Milburn’s proposals at around £6bn. However, it is understood the report will not commit to a level of spending that high, even though it will provide some costings for the upfront funding needed and a trajectory for projected savings.

Milburn told The Guardian this week that the support for young people outlined in his report would create 440,000 employment and education opportunities by 2036 and raise the net incomes of young people by more than £2bn. He said the main finding of the review was not a lack of ambition from young people but a lack of opportunities. “I have not met a single young person who wanted to be Neet [not in education, employment or training]. Not one. They want independence, they want to earn their own money and they want someone to give them a chance,” he said. The Guardian revealed last month that ministers were working up sweeping plans for welfare changes, including scrapping key disability benefits for under-25s and replacing it with a multibillion-pound package of support to get into work.

Charities are nervous about how the proposals will affect young people. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation said the proposals could significantly weaken the safety net for hundreds of thousands of young people with a disability or health condition, leaving many of those on universal credit living on a basic rate of support of about £80 a week. “Cutting someone’s income when they’re already struggling to afford food or the bus to college makes it harder for them to stay in education or find work,” said Iain Porter, the charity’s senior policy adviser. More than 40 of the UK’s leading charities have warned ministers against imposing tougher benefit sanctions or cuts on disabled young people.

In their joint letter to Milburn and McFadden, they said cutting support or bringing in sanctions risked pushing thousands of vulnerable youngsters deeper into poverty and further away from employment. Polling suggests that while the public favours cutting the welfare bill overall, they believe that tackling the root causes of joblessness instead of cutting benefits is the best way to do it. Welfare spending has reached £333bn this year, with pensioners receiving roughly 55% of the budget, and young people, including Neets but not children, about 2.5%. A government spokesperson said: “The Milburn and Timms reviews are due to be published shortly, and we will respond to their recommendations in full. We will always ensure there is a safety net for the most vulnerable and those who are unable to work. But the prime minister has been clear that we need a wholesale change in the way we support young people to grow up in this country, where we invest in their success rather than paying for failure.”

And as to how things were already progressing, Maryam Zakir-Hussain writes:

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) will have the power to check the bank accounts of millions of pensioners and benefit claimants under new government powers, it has been announced. This is part of new benefit fraud rules, with powers created by the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill. According to DWP, the department will share “eligibility indicators” with banks and other financial institutions.

These will be based on “benefit eligibility rules and help institutions identify accounts that may need to be checked by DWP”. It is planned to help ensure people receive the benefits they are entitled to. Financial institutions will then check the information they hold on accounts receiving certain DWP benefit payments. They will tell DWP when a personal account into which a relevant benefit is paid meets an eligibility indicator. This includes linked accounts. The account may belong to either a claimant or a non-claimant.

What information will be shared?

Where an eligibility indicator is met, financial institutions will only share limited information with DWP for two reasons:

1. To help identify incorrect benefit payments
2. To check benefit entitlement. 

They may share:

• the names of all account holders details of any accounts you hold, including linked accounts and joint accounts
• account numbers
• sort codes, if the accounts have these
• information about how much money is in the relevant accounts
• the date of transactions that took place in another country

It is important to note that DWP cannot log into your online banking or see your account in real time.

Banks and other financial institutions cannot share:

• full statements or transactions
• how you spend your money
• sensitive personal information about your background, such as political opinions or religious beliefs
• specific transaction locations

Banks and other financial institutions can be fined if they do share this information. 

How DWP collects and uses your information:

• DWP will only use the data to help check benefit entitlement, help identify incorrect payments and support any enquiries into those payments, if needed
• DWP cannot ask for information that breaks data protection laws
• where information is shared with DWP that is not directly relevant to a benefit claimant, it will be destroyed in line with DWP’s Information Management Policy
• DWP will not share your personal information with banks or other financial institutions

An independent reviewer will check that DWP, banks and other financial institutions have followed the law, amongst other things. Its reports will be presented to Parliament.

Against This Bleak Background

My comrade, Yanis Varoufakis, writes:

Opposition politicians critical of the sitting chancellor always have an ambitious plan to rebuild Britain — until they move into No. 11. There, petrified that the gilt market will punch them in the nose, their ambition dies. Soon, as if by rote, they begin to recite the line that has imprisoned every chancellor since Denis Healey: “We can’t afford it.” And that’s how stagnation triumphs, a rich country gets poorer, politics gets discredited.

Painfully aware of how daunting it is to inherit the Treasury of a stagnating country in the bond markets’ crosshairs, let me dare answer the hard question: “What would you do if you were chancellor?” Any answer depends on your diagnosis. Here is mine.

Britain’s malaise is not due to Brexit, as the Rejoiners would have it, nor immigration, as Britain’s Rightists seem to have convinced themselves. Britain is plagued by the collapse of a business model that Margaret Thatcher launched, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown deepened, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and George Osborne shored up, and Liz Truss tried, albeit farcically, to reboot.

Thatcher’s growth was never the fruit of shrinking the state, of trickle-down, of her fictional “shareholders’ democracy”. It came from liquidating council houses and public utilities, and throwing them, at cut-down prices, into the City’s cauldron — while allowing its bankers to go haywire. In other words, Thatcher’s famous putdown to socialists, that we fail because eventually we run out of other people’s money, became a kind of boomerang: Thatcherites, and their New Labour imitators, failed the moment they ran out of silverware to pawn.

After 2008 established the madness of putting every egg in the bankers’ basket, the Bank of England refloated the City with gargantuan quantities of money plucked from the proverbial moneytree, which miraculously materialises every time the spivs lose their shirt. Then along came George Osborne to impose austerity on almost everyone else.

That’s how Britain landed in the most delicious of antinomies. On the one hand, austerity crushed demand for high-end goods and services, so British firms cancelled their planned productive investments. On the other, the City and its big-business customers were drowning in cash. And what happened to all that free money? It was squandered on Britain’s ugly assetocracy.

CEOs ploughed the new money into share buybacks, and bankers into raising house prices, not into factories or any other productive activity. Between 2011 and 2018, as the nation’s net savings turned negative, Britain’s hundred largest companies handed £468 billion to their shareholders. Bluntly put, British capitalism has been devouring itself for decades.

In response, Truss tried to do a Thatcher with a bare cupboard of assets to privatise. Burnham is now trying to do a Wilson without the white heat of technology. The Tories pretend to foster entrepreneurship; Labour pretends to care about social justice. Both keep feeding the same beast — the same assetocracy — impoverishing the country and angering its populace.

Against this bleak background, the first task of a progressive chancellor must be to avoid antagonising the gilt market, while also refusing to bend to its will — a balancing act requiring innovative public financial tools. The second must be to convert the UK’s ample liquidity into patient, productive investment in people and infrastructure, in innovators and maintainers alike, generating new incomes for the majority.

So, how would I dodge another Truss debacle while boosting public investment? Recall that Truss was not walloped for her ambition but for dropping a new load of gilts — to fund her tax cuts for fat cats — into an already saturated gilt market. And the Treasury has been oversupplying that market for years: in 2025 alone, by an additional £303 billion, or 4% of GDP. My first task, then, would be to refrain from any net increase in the supply of gilts.

How to do so, while also funding large-scale public investment? In three ways. First, stop subsidising the City. The Bank of England pays Bank Rate on hundreds of billions of commercial bank reserves, while selling gilts below the price it paid for them and sending the losses to the Treasury. The interest bill alone runs to around £25 billion a year. Pay interest on only a small slice of reserves, however, and you’d reduce the Treasury’s need to issue more gilts over the next decade by approximately £210 billion.

Second, swap the £482 billion of gilts the Bank of England now owns with new perpetual bonds that the Treasury issues of the same face value — but at 0.5% interest rate (in other words, a quarter of the average yield of these gilts). Given that the average maturity of the existing gilts held at the Bank is just over 15 years, this translates into one-off gains of a net present value of £362 billion.

Third, as Jamie Driscoll suggests, offer savers a National Infrastructure ISA, run by National Savings & Investments, holding non-tradeable bonds that no hedge fund can short. Also restrict ISA tax relief — savers who prefer their cash to be wagered on Silicon Valley remain free to do so, just not at the taxpayer’s expense. To absorb about £100 billion of the current annual ISA inflows, meanwhile, have the Bank of England announce that, “if needs be”, it will stand behind this ISA, an announcement which, by itself, will push its yield below the gilt equivalent without the Bank spending a penny. A trillion pounds would thus become available, over a decade, for the infrastructure everyone agrees Britain desperately needs.

These three measures alone would create a trust fund for Britain exceeding £1.5 trillion over the next decade, much of it available early on. These monies must be invested, not frittered away on day-to-day expenditures. Invested in what? The reclamation of public utilities, crumbling infrastructure, social housing, and large-scale training. To this mix, I would add a significant cut in national insurance contributions, which currently leave small businesses unable to breathe.

Water and the grid are natural monopolies. Private ownership brought £78 billion paid out in water dividends, £64 billion of debt loaded onto companies sold debt-free, and sewage pouring into Britain’s rivers. The solution is obvious: place the water companies in special administration, as the law already allows, rather than buying them back at inflated regulatory values. From there, bring the national grid into public ownership, and price electricity from wind and solar at what it costs to produce, rather than at the margin set by imported gs. This should be shadowed by properly funding Great British Railways, introducing the best practices of Chinese and Japanese railways.

Housing is where Britain’s assetocracy bites hardest. Private developers offer a few “affordable” flats at 80% of an exorbitant rent, as a fig leaf for 10 more at the full rate. The average social rent in London is around £550 a month; in the private sector it exceeds £2,300. The only cure is council housing, built by municipalities for local families at rents no higher than a quarter of disposable income: 100,000 homes a year, on land bought at existing-use value. Alongside this, a right-to-rent rule should allow struggling families facing repossession to remain in their homes at a fair rent.

Next, rebuild the productive base without which Britain cannot generate shared prosperity. As Costas Lapavitsas and the other authors of Reindustrialise Britain propose, start modestly, aiming to raise manufacturing from 8% to 11% of national income by 2035, adding about 725,000 jobs. I would also fund a decade-long mass training scheme with a living wage and trades-union rights for apprentices. Because short-term contracting stops firms committing to four-year apprenticeships, Driscoll proposes a “Retrofit Blitz”: a long-term, publicly financed drive, delivered by small businesses, to retrofit whole streets with insulation, heat pumps and solar panels. To keep the program non-inflationary — while boosting local wages, tax receipts and pay elsewhere — I’d further adopt a “capacity guardrail” that releases each funding tranche only when trained workers and supply chains become available locally.

Last but not least, in what’s perhaps the most radical but defensible proposal, I would end the banks’ scandalous monopoly over our payments system. Instead, every UK resident gets the right to a free digital wallet, hosted by the Bank of England but governed as a commons, paying interest at the Bank Rate that now only bankers enjoy. Transactions would be anonymised, with a citizens’ jury deciding when to de-anonymise them: no Chinese-style surveillance, no Visa-style toll.

Naturally, such a Budget would cause a hail storm of criticisms, some well-meant. I would doubtless be accused of violating the fiscal rules. But these should have been torn up long ago and replaced, as Lapavitsas et al propose, with a test of public-sector net worth: borrowing that builds earning assets is not a burden on our grandchildren, instead creating the means of its own repayment.

From there, critics are likely to claim my perpetual bonds swap amounts to a default on the state’s creditors. Not at all: these gilts are already parked within the UK state sector. The state, in other words, would merely be reshuffling debt it owes to itself.

“But you are violating the independence of the Bank of England!”, others will scream. Not really. I would leave interest rates to the Bank. But when it comes to public monies thrown at the City, no, the Bank should have zero independence on that. A chancellor need only insist that the Bank stop subsidising the City and, if rebuffed, legislate with a simple majority in the House of Commons.

“Won’t your policies bring house prices sharply down?”, the smartest journalists will ask. “The pound will take a hammering,” The Economist will prognosticate ominously. In saying these things, my critics would be threatening me with a good time. Let’s be honest: breaking the assetocracy means a managed decline in house prices and a weaker pound, kept orderly by a scheme to liberate mortgage owners from negative equity and the graduated controls on hot money that Lapavitsas and his co-authors set out. It’s anyway a price worth paying to end Britain’s assetocracy and the aridity that it spreads in its shadow.

It’s clear, then, that there is an alternative to Britain’s continuing malaise. People with inordinate influence over the money markets will hate it. As the party that dares put these policies in its manifesto begins to ride high in the opinion polls, gilts and the pound would wobble. But remember: the funds that move these markets hold just below one third of the gilts, which they buy with money borrowed in the US to use as collateral for purposes that have nothing to do with Britain. Once they realise that the total supply of gilts will not only not rise but, in fact, may fall, yields and the pound would steady. The more pragmatic among them may even appreciate the solid plan to boost productive investment by £1.4 trillion without new taxes. They won’t like any of it — but it will be in their interest to make their peace with it.

Of course, I may be fond of Britain but I can never be its chancellor. So, my message to a future progressive chancellor who contemplates all of the above is simple: hold your nerve! Provided your prime minister keeps her or his cool, you’ll be alright. Then again, I know from experience that it is pure folly to presume your prime minister’s steadfastness!

Slashing The Dinghy

I have known Jonathan Ashworth for 29 years, but whenever he is on television, then I wonder where Shockat Adam is. And I am no supporter of the Green Party, but whenever Matt Goodwin is on television, then I wonder where Hannah Spencer is.

The Liberal Democrats are now pitching to disgruntled Greens. Until the point of defection, each of those would at least have pretended to believe that Zack Polanski ought to be Prime Minister. Polanski has never been a spokesman for the British Red Cross, he has never been a spokesman for Make Votes Matter, he has never been a full member of the National Council for Hypnotherapy, and he has never worked for the nonexistent “justice assessment committee” of the Ministry of Justice. But he did fail to pay Council Tax on his narrowboat despite having been registered to vote there, he did fail to register to vote anywhere in the local elections this year, and he did take payment to hypnotise women so that their breasts would grow bigger.

The Greens are the British party for which Noam Chomsky would vote, so taking in their refugees formally admits to the Epstein Class the Lib Dems who were the more pro-austerity and pro-war party to the Coalition when Polanski stood as a Lib Dem for the Camden Borough Council seat of St Pancras and Somers Town, in the Holborn and St Pancras constituency that he recently failed to win as a Green. Polanski had joined the Lib Dems during the Coalition, but they now provide a happy home to Greens for whom even he was too left-wing.

Meanwhile, with deep reactionary roots, the Greens are a party of anti-industrial Malthusianism and misanthropy, and therefore of NATO and the EU, of their war in Ukraine, of the conscription to which that was leading inexorably, of Scottish and Welsh separatism, of gender self-identification, of drug legalisation, of licensed prostitution, and of Peter Tatchell. So yes, interchangeable with the Lib Dems, then.

The Green Party was all of those things on the day before its recent conference, yet just as the Old Greens are not making a fuss about its hugely significant abandonment of its opposition to nuclear power, so there was no talk of a firewall until it passed a resolution stating the view of most of the relatively few people in Britain who had much of an opinion on Zionism. Polanski was defeated at Holborn and St Pancras because he was as described above, not because of that resolution.

But how does that resolution look now, anyway? Israel was not an apartheid state because the Arabs were “allowed” vote, but they barely did, so that once they did in such numbers at to end up with the potential balance of power, then that must have been because of the kind of foreign interference that the implacable opponents of Brexit or of Donald Trump were wont to allege? And Zionism required no inclusion of the Arab-led parties in government no matter how well they had done, even if that required further elections, quite possibly on a more restricted franchise, or with a higher threshold, or with the Arab-led parties banned, or with all of those measures? If that is not racism, then what is it? And if that is not racism, then what is?

Speaking of racism, Daniel Thomas has pleaded guilty so that his sentence will be reduced, with his time on remand also taken into account, because the Crown Prosecution Service had been too frightened of my fellow obese middle-aged men to charge him with attempted murder. That Stephen Yaxley-Lennon was able to become involved in a brawl at a boxing match in Kilkenny demonstrated that, with a very long and serious criminal record, he had been permitted to leave the country while on bail awaiting sentence, again out of physical fear of his supporters. How and why does Nathan Cofnas still hold a United Kingdom visa? And how long can anything be imminent, as the report into Nigel Farage’s five million pounds has been for as long as some of us can still be bothered to bring ourselves to remember?