Perverse Prudence

Lisa Nandy is my generation of Labour hacks to a tee. “The best way to honour the dead of the two World Wars is to do an Erasmus year.” Beyond satire. And unchanged in 30 years. As, on Nandy’s Departmental watch, is that of which Yusuf Tamanna writes:

Plans to turn the British Library’s science and social sciences reading rooms into pay-to-use co-working spaces have divided those who use the space. In an email sent on October 21, the historic library in London’s King’s Cross said the decision came in response to the changing ways its reading rooms are used. The email read: ‘We want to reassure you that our commitment to science and social sciences remains as strong as ever,’ adding that it hoped the move would enable the library to ‘generate the necessary revenue to keep our core services free’. Entry into the British Library and reading rooms is currently free. It offers an annual membership at a fee, which gives members access to exhibitions and a private member’s room.

A British Library spokesperson told the Metro: ‘Science and social sciences research services will be preserved and relocated within the Library’s other eight reading rooms, maintaining the same level of specialist support for research and access to the collections. Analysis of daily usage levels across our reading rooms shows that we are still able to accommodate demand within a reduced reading room footprint – even including an anticipated increase in demand once full services are restored.’ The British Library said the co-working space will help foster collaboration between businesses, researchers, entrepreneurs and innovators, and a detailed design of the arrangements will be shared in due course. This is in addition to the development of an extension to the library, which started this summer and is due to open in 2032.

But not everyone is a fan of the plans. A spokesperson for the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), which represents British Library staff, said it was ‘deeply concerning’ that a space designated for public research could be repurposed for commercial gain. ‘Our members are deeply concerned about the proposed closure of the science reading rooms and the impact this will have on both the service the library provides and the staff whose jobs, terms and conditions could be affected.’

Academics and scholars have also voiced concerns over the decision. Dr Harvey G Cohen, senior lecturer in cultural and creative industries at King’s College London, said the British Library is a special place in which he has spent months of his life. He now encourages his own students to use it to support their own research. He told Metro: ‘Removing the reading rooms for business purposes just seems crazy to me. If you drive around central London you’ll find plenty of other co-working spaces that already exist for people to use. If people need to collaborate and network, you can do that without having to take away space from this library that has qualities and resources that you can’t get anywhere else in Europe.’

Cohen understands that budgets are strained, but said funding the library’s future shouldn’t be at the expense of the reading rooms. ‘When you start with taking away a few reading rooms, they’re not going to come back. I’m concerned that the space isn’t being put to the best possible use.’ Georgy Kantor, associate professor of ancient history at the University of Oxford, said on X: ‘This is utterly horrible, but the fault is the government’s for effectively bankrupting a national institution over a hack.’ Cohen believes removing the reading rooms, particularly for science and social sciences, is an insult to the subjects themselves. ‘We have to make sure Britain continues to be one of the top nations for research. To take this away just for business people to be able to do their calls is upsetting.’

A British Library spokesperson said: ‘We have announced a series of changes as part of our Growing Knowledge strategy, a six-year programme to put the British Library on a more sustainable financial footing and ensure it remains accessible, relevant and world-leading for everyone – with core services free to use. As part of this strategy, we will be repurposing our Science and Social Sciences Reading Rooms to create a new flexible workspace. The new space will enable businesses, researchers, entrepreneurs and innovators to work and collaborate at the heart of the Knowledge Quarter, while generating income that can be reinvested in the Library to keep our core services free to users. Detailed design and access arrangements will be shared in due course.’ The spokesperson added that the library would work with an ‘external partner’ to ‘deliver and run the day-to-day operation of the flexible workspaces’.

Lucy Mangan writes:

I should have known. I should have known the minute Andy Burnham announced the launch of a campaign against those who play their music and conversations out loud on public transport (“Share the carriage, not the noise”) and £100 fines, that something would be coming down the pike to obliterate this tiny gain in the quality of my life. And it was the tiniest gain, by the way. There was no information on where the resources with which to confront the offenders – I’d like Swat teams on every train, armed patrols on every bus – or impose the penalties were going to come from but at my time of life, and in the godforsaken year of 2026, even a gesture in the right direction gladdens the heart.

What has arrived to smash this small, fragile piece of happiness and hope to smithereens? Why, it’s the British Library and its declaration that three out of its 11 reading rooms are to be remade into – someone please hold me as I type – “flexible workspaces”. They will be permanently closed to the public and rented out for private use as office space, meeting rooms and hot desks instead. At the moment, the three rooms act as science reading rooms and the rationale for closing them is that science readers and researchers do more of their reading and researching online that those in other disciplines do. User numbers have, we are told, correspondingly dwindled over the last decade. More overarchingly, the British Library’s public funding has declined by about a third in real terms since 2010 and its finances took a brutal hit in 2023 when it was cyber attacked by a ransomware gang. Rebuilding from the technological rubble is thought to have cost £7m so far.

So, it is understandable from a certain point of view that it is time to start sweating those reading room assets. But it’s a very narrow point of view. It’s a very short-termist point of view. It’s a very…managerial point of view. And it’s certainly not one that asks what the point of a national public library is, what it is supposed to provide or what it is supposed to stand for. Most immediately when you pass through its doors, I would argue, a library should offer a quiet space. These are two things in increasingly short supply (especially, of course, in London, where the British Library lives) and they are correspondingly increasingly precious. The modern world is cacophonous and intrusive and we are becoming acclimatised to the idea that this is normal and that it has no effect on us. And yet, the minute you step into a place that does still ban talking out loud, chomping on crisps, listening to music through leaky headphones and all the rest of it, you realise that this is what you have been missing.

This is what is required for the brain truly to rest and then to reflect, to follow up odd thoughts, link stray ideas, dwell on formerly fleeting insights and begin uninterruptedly joining all the weird synaptic firings and misfirings that we call thinking. That’s not a luxury add-on to what’s happening in reading rooms. That’s an integral part of it, and thus an integral part of a library’s business – even if it is not of an instantly profitable kind as far as the bottom line is concerned. Libraries, as many people have pointed out before me, occupy a special place in the social ecosystem and in the collective psyche because they are the closest thing we have ever managed to create to an unadulterated public good. A library is a collection of books is a repository of knowledge is an untrammelled offering of power to anyone who steps through its doors.

Libraries are amongst the last places we have that can be used by absolutely anyone for free; bastions of egalitarianism, a last stand against rampant capitalism – this isn’t romantic hyperbole, this is the truth. And it is what a national library beyond all others, instead of salami-slicing its facilities and selling pieces off, should stand for. Libraries have always had to fight for their status as an uncommercialised public service and should, more than any other institution, understand that once such a service is sold off it rarely, if ever, comes back. We become permanently the poorer.

And Andy Beckett writes:

In a crowded country that is short of public money, any expansive public building that seems underused in any way is vulnerable. Professional critics of state spending can claim taxpayers’ money is being wasted. Managers of the building who are under financial pressure can argue it needs to be used more intensely, perhaps that some spaces should be commercialised and offered for rent. The original open, uncommodified, egalitarian quality of the building can be steadily sliced away.

The British Library in London is in danger of that fate. A huge brick battleship moored on the Euston Road since 1997, it claims to be the largest public building constructed in the UK in the 20th century. Its both forbidding and exhilarating exterior conceals 11 unusually elegant and comfortable reading rooms and one of the world’s most extensive print and digital collections, free to use for anyone who is over 18. Last week, these readers received an email with the subject line, “Transforming your Library”. Next summer, the library would “begin work on repurposing our [three] Science and Social Sciences Reading Rooms to become a flexible workspace … available for hire by workers and businesses for co-working, collaboration and meetings”. The reason given for removing more than a quarter of the library’s much-loved research space was “ensuring we generate the necessary revenue to keep our core services free”.

The library has a current annual budget of about £170m – a third the size of my local London hospital’s – 84% of which comes from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The rest is from donations, investments and “charitable and other trading activities”, such as the private parties and ticketed exhibitions already frequently held in the sweeping interior connecting its reading rooms. Even with these multiple income streams, the library’s financial reserves are perilously low – according to its latest accounts – thanks to inflation and austerity, which mean its state funding has in real terms declined to two-thirds of what it was in 2010, and also a devastating cyber-attack in 2023, from which the library has still not fully recovered.

Despite this troubled context, and in some ways because of it, the library’s drastic reading room reduction plan has provoked “outrage” from staff, say the Prospect and Public and Commercial Services (PCS) unions that represent them. Reading room staff understandably fear for their jobs, but also for the building’s fundamental purpose, which was set out by law in 1972 – an indication of how hard the complex was to conceive and build – as “the establishment for the United Kingdom of a national library”. Staff are now “the most furious I’ve ever seen them about anything”, says a union source. A strike over the reading room plan, following one last year over low pay, could begin as soon as December.

Behind this potentially explosive dispute – not least because many well-connected authors, academics and journalists use the library – lurks a big question. In a digital age of decentralised study and dispersed online resources, what is a national library for? During the quarter of a century I’ve been regularly using the library, usually the reading rooms that are now under threat, its hierarchy has been trying to answer that existential question by steadily, not always harmoniously, widening the building’s user base and functions. Reading room passes have been transformed from a rationed credential for a few thousand people with supposedly serious research intentions – though some always ended up snoring at their desks – to something provided in minutes to everyone from elderly amateur family historians to undergraduates, particularly when dissertation deadlines pile up in early summer.

Meanwhile, the library’s lobbies, landings, hallways and outdoor terraces have been lined with hundreds of chairs and tables and turned into study areas, meeting places, cafes and locations for loud laptop video conversations. These are all heavily used: a sign of good, free spaces lacking elsewhere. A “family station” inside the entrance offers play materials, art supplies and reading corners for young children. What Karl Marx, who researched for years in the reading room of the British Museum, precursor to the British Library, would have made of the latter’s invitation this Halloween to “pop in for spooky crafts” and “enjoy a fang-tastic time” is an intriguing question.

I generally like the contrast between the library’s studious and boisterous sides: an antidote to the solitary obsessiveness of research and writing. But there are also tensions between the library’s diverging uses, which its management prefers not to acknowledge – and which the proposed changes would almost certainly worsen. Modern life is noisy, especially in London, and the semi-silence of the long, wood-lined reading rooms, with pages softly turning, keyboards pattering, books being slid on and off shelves, and the odd murmured conversation, is precious and addictive, as the constant influx of new young readers makes obvious. First thing in the morning and last thing in the evening, the rooms are half empty. That will probably be used to argue that fewer are needed. But a half-empty place can be an aid to crucial thinking and concentration. And if the reading rooms become fewer and therefore fuller, then users from outside London, whose taxes also pay for this national library, are less likely to be able to get there in time to grab a desk. In the busiest periods, they already sometimes run out.

The library is straining to cope with its daily crowds. On bad mornings, the entrance queue lasts over half an hour. The toilets are increasingly often out of order. The free lockers are wearing out, partly because of use by travellers from the many stations nearby. And across the reading rooms, a mysterious hissing has been spreading for months, like a kettle that never boils. The library says it is coming from a failing pneumatic ventilation system, and “there is no quick solution”. The library is starting to get old.  In 2032, a towering extension, blander than the original building, is due to open. It is already noisily under construction. Last year, Rebecca Lawrence, then the library’s chief executive, who resigned during the strike, said the extension would “open up the Library even further … [for] future generations of visitors, learners, researchers and budding entrepreneurs”. It will not contain new reading rooms. If you find that ominous, you are not alone.

Please sign here.

Professor Stuart Holland RIP

Professor Stuart Holland has died. He was a tremendous encouragement to me, all the more remarkably since we never met and he was 75 when we first had any contact. On 18 August 2015, this was published in The Times, at least one contributor to which has never got over it. We were right then, and this is still right now:

We do not all hold British nationality or reside in the United Kingdom, although some of us do. We are not all members or supporters of the British Labour Party, although some of us are.

However, we are united in rejecting the charge of “economic illiteracy” against Jeremy Corbyn, and in recognising that his economic analysis and proposals are, at the very least, superior to those of the current British Government, as well as being more comprehensive and coherent than those of any other candidate for Labour Leader.

Yours faithfully,

David Lindsay, Lanchester, County Durham

Professor Victoria Chick, Emeritus Professor of Economics, University College London

Professor Alfredo Saad Filho, Professor of Political Economy, Department of Development Studies, The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Professor John Grahl, Professor of European Integration, Middlesex University Business School

Professor Stuart Holland, Visiting Professor, Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra, Portugal; Senior Scholar of the Institute of Social and European Studies, Köszeg, Hungary; Member of Parliament for Vauxhall, 1979-1989

Professor Christopher May, Professor of Political Economy and Faculty Associate Dean for Enterprise, Lancaster University

Professor Ozlem Onaran, Professor of Workforce and Economic Development Policy, University of Greenwich

Professor Prem Sikka, Professor of Accounting, Essex Business School, University of Essex

Professor Pritam Singh, Professor of Economics, Department of Accounting, Finance and Economics, Oxford Brookes University

Professor Robert H. Wade, Professor of Political Economy and Development, Department of International Development, London School of Economics; Leontief Prize in Economics 2008

Dr David Harvie, Senior Lecturer in Finance and Political Economy, School of Management, University of Leicester

Ismail Ertürk, Senior Lecturer, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester

Ewa Karwowski, Lecturer in Economics, Kingston University, London

And as recently as 30 March 2025, the following, though admittedly quite long, was sent to the papers:

The issuing of currency is an act of the State, which is literally the creator of all money. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control. The responsibility of the Government is to ensure the supply of goods and services to be purchased with that currency.

It is impossible for the currency-issuing State to run out of money. Money “lent” to the Treasury by the Bank of England is money “lent” to the State by the State; such “debt” will never be called in, much less will bailiffs be sent round. Call this “the Magic Money Tree” if you will. There is no comparison between running the economy and managing a household budget, or even a business. There is no “national credit card” to “max out”. “Fiscal headroom” is only the gap between the Government’s tax and spending plans and what would be allowed under the fiscal rules that it sets for itself and changes frequently.

That is what both fiscal policy and monetary policy are for: to give the currency its value by controlling inflation to a politically chosen extent while discouraging certain politically chosen forms of behaviour, and while encouraging others, including economic equality, which is fundamental to social cohesion and thus to patriotism. There is no debt. It is an accounting trick. The Treasury, which is the State, has issued bonds to the Bank of England, which is the State. Even if those bonds were held by anyone else, then the State could simply issue itself with enough of its own free-floating, fiat currency to redeem them. Say it again that there is no debt.

Taxation is not where the State’s money comes from. Nothing is “unaffordable”, every recession is discretionary on the part of the Government, and there is no such thing as “taxpayers’ money”. Within and under that understanding, a tax of one to two per cent on assets above £10 million could abolish the two-child benefit cap 17 times over, while merely taxing each of Britain’s 173 billionaires down to one billion pounds per head would raise £1.1 trillion, an entire year’s tax take. The taxation of unearned income at the same rate as earnings, as was the case under Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson, could easily abolish the two-child benefit cap as advocated by Nigel Farage and Suella Braverman, restore the £20 per week uplift to the Universal Credit two in five claimants of which were in work, and extend that uplift to disability benefits, all of which would inject money directly into the consumer economy. And so on. 

There is no case whatever for cutting the benefits of the sick and disabled as if that would cure them or find them jobs, for retaining the two-child benefit cap, for withdrawing the Winter Fuel Payment from anyone, for increasing workers’ bus fares by 50 per cent, for failing to freeze Council Tax, for threatening to abolish the single person discount, for increasing employers’ National Insurance contributions so as to destroy charities and small businesses while making it impossible for big businesses to take on staff or to increase wages, for forcing working farmers of many decades’ standing who formally inherited their parents’ farms to sell them to giant American agribusinesses, or for any other form of austerity. There is an unanswerable economic and moral case for the full compensation of, among others, the victims of Orgreave, Grenfell Tower, the Windrush scandal, the Post Office scandal, and the contaminated blood scandal, as well as the WASPI women.

Yours faithfully,

David Lindsay, Lanchester, County Durham

Professor Stuart Holland, Visiting Professor, Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra, Portugal; Senior Scholar of the Institute of Social and European Studies, Köszeg, Hungary; Member of Parliament for Vauxhall, 1979-1989

A luta continua.

What Needs To Be Challenged

Kenan Malik writes:

Last week, in the latest implementation of measures from the 2025 Employment Rights Act, trade unions were granted the right to organise in any workplace with more than 21 employees. “I don’t want to sound churlish,” wrote the Financial Times columnist Camilla Cavendish, a former director of policy for David Cameron, “but won’t that raise the cost of doing business?” I don’t want to sound churlish either, but is that not the usual response from “supporters of business” to any improvements in workers’ rights or conditions? By Cavendish’s own account, everything from raising the minimum wage to easing some restrictions on strike action is misguided. She even worries that “Employers will not be allowed to monitor what is said” in union meetings. Lord forbid that workers be able to meet without being spied on by their bosses!

The irony in yelps about “a union storm coming for employers” is that workers’ rights today are weaker than they have been for most of the past century. From the early 1980s, successive governments have aggressively pushed back on the ability of workers to take collective action. The Labour party largely accepted the Tory deprecation of employment rights. In 1997, barely a month before New Labour’s landslide victory, Tony Blair wrote in The Times that “the essential elements of the trade union legislation of the 1980s will remain” and that his government would ensure that British law would be “the most restrictive on trade unions in the Western world”. After their 2015 election victory, Conservatives introduced yet more legislation to make the most restrictive laws even more so. The 2025 Employment Rights Act, based on Labour’s New Deal for Working People, aimed to reverse some of these restrictions. But, under pressure from employers, many proposed changes, such as the banning of “fire and rehire”, protection against unfair dismissal, the abolition of zero-hours contracts, and the creation of a single status for all workers, were watered down.

In his new book, An Injury to All, the historian Ewan Gibbs unravels the story of what he calls the “‘de-organisation’ of workplaces” – the “diminishing importance of unionised workers in the British economy”. Such de-organisation, Gibbs argues, was the consequence not simply of deindustrialisation and globalisation but also of “class struggle from above… waged by employers, with important support from Conservative and Labour politicians”. The story of the Thatcher government’s assault on the unions, most notably the miners, is well known. But, as Gibbs shows, the process of de-organisation began earlier. Central to his account is the Grunwick strike, which began 50 years ago. Grunwick was a photo-processing plant in north-west London, where in August 1976, 137 mainly Asian women went on strike in protest at appalling conditions, racist intimidation and the banning of unions. Within weeks the women received support from other workers – miners, electricians, builders, bus drivers – who organised mass pickets, while postal workers refused to move the company’s orders.

The strike lasted for almost two years before the TUC withdrew its support, an act of betrayal that led to defeat. Nevertheless, for many on the left the Grunwick dispute was a touchstone, revealing the possibilities of working-class solidarity and, at a time when racism was woven into the fabric of Britain in a way almost unimaginable today, of the possibilities of building coalitions across racial divides. Gibbs, while acknowledging these elements, points to Grunwick as emblematic in a different way, too. The strike, and its defeat, prefigured what was to come, foreseeing “Britain’s future of increasingly precarious and non-union employment”. “The mail-order room at Grunwick,” Gibbs observes, “anticipated the contemporary Amazon ‘fulfilment’ centre in its form of labour process, intensity and cost minimisation”, a place of “low wages and ‘flexible’ conditions”. The violent policing of picket lines, with 550 arrests the most at that time in any industrial dispute since the 1926 General Strike, and a concerted political effort to undermine the legitimacy of the dispute by associating solidarity with criminality, also pointed to coming developments.

The failure of mass pickets to close the plant or to gain union recognition exposed the limits of traditional trade unionism, especially in organising poorer marginalised workers. At the same time, the “political forces committed to the de-organisation of the labour movement were emboldened by Grunwick”, which encouraged the all-out assault on unions that came in the 1980s. The “Grunwickisation” of industrial relations has helped create a “flexible” labour market, a euphemism for the expansion of insecure, poorly paid jobs. “Insecurity,” as a 2022 study observed, has “become an endemic part of British working life” and “the proportion of the workforce employed precariously has ballooned”. The kind of insecurity once associated solely with the gig economy has spread through many sectors of employment, from hospitality and social care to “previously protected middle-class jobs in academia”.

Meanwhile union membership has halved from 13.2 million in 1979 to 6.6 million last year. In 1979, 29.5m days were lost in strike action; last year the figure stood at 740,000 – a fall of 97%. This is the reality behind all the warnings of a “return to the 1970s”. The unstated assumption in much of the discussion is that the rights and conditions of workers need to be sacrificed in the name of being “business friendly”. So successful has been the “class war from above” that many accept this almost as common sense. That is what needs to be challenged, not the still pitifully weak rights that workers now possess.

Palestine Action Supreme Court Hearing: Day Two

Craig Murray writes:

I woke up at 5am, and rather than dashing back to court, I made good progress on writing up the first day. The surprising lack of demand for the public gallery was probably due to the fact that you were not actually allowed in the courtroom, but an overflow court. So I arrived about 9am confident that I would get in with no problems. There were fewer protestors around, but a great many more policemen. There were four separate teams of policemen photographing demonstrators. Each was a two man team, and two of these teams functioned with a camera operator plus a man with a hefty backpack, which was presumably uploading for facial recognition in real time.

Due to the lack of demonstrators, the police camera teams were forced to queue up to photograph individuals. I felt perhaps the police would feel left out of the game if nobody photographed them, so I took this nice picture of one of the teams, who were playing hide and seek behind a wall. I have since uploaded to our own website facial recognition technology, which tells me that the policeman in the left is named Jimmy Palantir, and the policeman on the right is Xavier Wellington Felixstowe-Gillespie, a distant cousin of the Marchioness of Accrington.

Once in court, Sir James Eadie KC was continuing the case for the Government. It is very, very important to understand that Eadie is representing the government view. He is not outlining some neutral analysis of the law. It would be entirely fair to replace his name with Shabana Mahmood, Ed Miliband or Andy Burnham, because that is on whose behalf he is talking. I make this point because of the appalling hypocrisy of the Burnham Government (proprietors Labour Friends of Israel). Ed Miliband directly lied when he said that nobody wanted to criminalise grannies. Compare that with the account below of what Eadie actually argued on his government’s behalf in court.

Sir James Eadie KC opened by saying for the Burnham Government that Palestine Action meets the statutory definition of terrorism. No permission had been given to appeal that decision and it was not a matter that could be disputed before this court. The threshold test is set by Parliament. The Joint Terrorism Assessment Centre had identified three incidents which met the threshold of terrorism. Lord Briggs interrupted that this was before the Brize Norton attack. Sir James agreed that at the time of the JTAC assessment, the Brize Norton incident had not yet happened. The lower courts had assessed that the three terrorist incidents were in fact not outliers as to scale and intent.

The Court of Appeal had said Palestine Action’s activities were the antithesis of a democratic society, said Sir James. Palestine Action in fact lauds those actions described as terrorist, including Filton. Eadie’s second point for the Burnham government was that Palestine Action had a wide range of targets, not just Elbit, but also any other company in the UK considered by Palestine Action to enable Israel. The Secretary of State (Yvette Cooper) had told Parliament that Palestine Action claimed responsibility for attacking Jewish businesses in North London, including smashing windows.

The JTAC assessment was that Palestine Action’s activities included incidents being investigated by the Metropolitan Police as hate crimes against the Jewish community. There were recent incidents but these were in closed material. [In addition to the public hearing, the Government can introduce “closed” secret evidence from the security services. Huda Ammori and her legal team are never shown this, are given no idea of what it alleges, and no opportunity to answer it.]

James Eadie said thirdly for the Burnham government that it was not sustainable to call Palestine Action a non-violent organisation. The lower courts had rejected the claim that Palestine Action were engaged in civil disobedience. The attempt to place it in this tradition was disproved by the lower courts’ findings of fact. The Underground Manual encourages the use of an “efficient sledgehammer”. Activists had carried sledgehammers and crowbars as weapons. JTAC’s assessment of the Filton incident was that Palestine Action entered the factory with weapons including sledgehammers intending to attack. Subsequently security guards and a policewoman were injured.

[Eadie was not ever interrupted by the judges except for a very few occasions when they intervened to agree with him. If the judges had been testing Eadie’s argument in the same way they had constantly attacked Raza Hussain KC when he spoke for Ammori, they might have pointed out that this JTAC assessment had been completely rejected by successive juries. All charges of carrying weapons had directly been found not guilty. One one person had been convicted of a violent offence, and that specifically without intent. The judges had this information in front of them from Henry Blaxland KC. But the judges allowed Eadie, who was speaking for the Burnham government, to continue his factually untrue allegations with no intervention.]

Eadie continued on behalf of the Burnham government that the Underground Manual instructs activists in how to conceal their actions. It calls on people to “dream up crazy actions”. It tells them to “damage, disrupt and destroy” and to “think big”. A major part of Palestine Action’s funding went into these destructive actions. The Margaret Jones case makes clear that there are proper bounds to the scope of civil disobedience. Damage to property can be violence. The attempt by Raza Hussain KC to draw a distinction between violence to the person and violence to property had not substance whatever. You end up making a virtue of not advocating serious harm to persons. This was shown by the JTAC assessment of Filton. Also at Thales, pyrotechnics were thrown into an area where people were gathering. This could hardly be termed non-violent.

Mr Blaxland’s characterisation was entirely untenable. There was no intention to accept arrest. The Underground Manual taught encryption, use of burner phones etc to avoid detection. At Filton the sledgehammer attack upon Sergeant Evans was of particular concern. Judge Johnson had found a terrorist connection. He analyses serious damage to property, but that pales into insignificance compared to the assaults. This level of criminal damage and use of reckless force with no restraint did not amount to civil disobedience. Lord Briggs asked what sentences had been imposed, and was told six to eight years. Lord Sales asked whether the sentencing remarks could be taken into account in the proportionately exercise, as they were post proscription, then he convinced himself that they could. James Eadie on behalf of the government said yes it was agreed they could be included. The remarks about the sledgehammer attack were particularly important.

[Again the judges tested Eadie with no contrary questions. They could have pointed out that those sentences were given without proscription, with which they had no connection as it happened after the Filton incident. So they might be viewed as showing that proscription was not necessary. But of course, they said nothing against the government case. The contrast between how they treated Eadie and how they had treated Hussain and Blaxland was stark indeed.]

For the Burnham Government, James Eadie continued that Brize Norton was dealt with in the second statement of Mr Sinclair of the Home Office. Palestine Action has sprayed paint from repurposed fire extinguishers directly into the turbines of planes and had done damage with a crowbar. This plainly falls within the definition of terrorism as serious damage to property. The Secretary of State had been entitled to take it into account as part of the proportionality exercise. Lord Briggs said that the only question was, was the damage serious? Eadie replied that paint into turbines is undoubtedly serious. These planes were used for humanitarian relief missions. What if one had been needed the next day?

Speaking for the Burnham Government, James Eadie now made his fourth point. Palestine Action’s membership and structure was obscure. It operated in secret cells. Huda Ammori had been found to lack candour about this. Eadie’s fifth point for the Burnham Government was that the advice received by the Secretary of State was that Palestine Action’s activities showed an escalating pattern of violence. This escalation had begun with the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel. JTAC stated that Palestine Action members intended to further escalate their activities. Palestine Action had a footprint within all 45 policing jurisdictions in the UK and had pledged escalation. Any suggestion it was moderating after Filton was disproved by Brize Norton.

Lord Lloyd Jones asked if there had been any indication from Huda Ammori that she was planning to escalate. Eadie replied no, but there were judgements on the facts from two lower courts that violence was escalating. The Filton sentencing remarks showed this. Palestine Action was not engaged in any kind of domestic campaigning. For the last ten minutes Eadie had been repeating the same few points. He asked for a recession to confer with his team, which was granted. On behalf of the Burnham government, James Eadie KC then said he would now address the decision-making process.

1) The Secretary of State (Yvette Cooper) had been advised throughout by experienced and competent people on the security side on the benefits of proscription. The Proscription Review Group were themselves advised by JTAC and by Counter Terrorism Police (CTP). CTP had produced a lengthy report weighing up the pros and cons of proscription. Lord Stephens said the Secretary of State had presumably also received legal advice. Eadie confirmed that she had.

JTAC had justified proscription in terms of the statutory tests. Counter Terrorism Police had listed the benefits of proscribing Palestine Action. They had weighed the benefits of proscribing against use of the criminal law in terms of operational impact. They identified the need for a holistic approach to go after the organisation’s activities. This included the point made by Lord Briggs, that the existing law had not prevented the attacks, including the violent one at Filton. [If the judges were scrutinising Eadie in the same way they did Hussain, they would logically have asked him at this stage how this had worked out. Had the attacks stopped? Of course, they did no such thing but continued to show Eadie great deference as the Government’s representative.]

On behalf of the Government, James Eadie stated that the proportionality exercise had to be about the legislative context and about margin. [The margin of appreciation is a legal term roughly corresponding to benefit of the doubt. The doctrine is that a large amount of discretion or deference should be shown to the executive in matters of national security.] Eadie said on behalf of the Burnham Government that the 2002 Terrorism Act makes the provision for the Secretary of State to proscribe against set criteria. The law confers both the power and the responsibility on the Secretary of State. There is an affirmative vote procedure in parliament for democratic accountability.

On behalf of the Burnham Government, James Eadie set out multiple judgements by the Supreme Court under Lord Reed the current President, which had argued a wide margin for the Secretary of State. In weighing proportionality the court must give a wide margin for constitutional reasons of the separation of powers. It was for the executive, not the court, to safeguard national security. National security decisions must have the widest margin. James Eadie argued on behalf of the Burnham government that it was the government, not the court, which had the expertise and competence to judge questions of national security. It was the Government which had the democratic mandate and responsibility. Eadie quoted a judgement in another case, on which he said four of the five members of the current court sat, which said precisely that. There was, he said, a long line of top court authority which gave the Secretary of State the widest margin in cases of national security.

On behalf of the Burnham Government, Sir James Eadie said that a wide margin is to be given to the government’s discretion in the area of national security, even when applying criminal prohibitions to freedom of speech. This margin applies at all points of the proportionality analysis, including in assessing the impact on freedom of speech. On behalf of the Burnham Government James Eadie KC stated “Amnesty and Liberty are wrong about this.” Lord Briggs said that the Appeal Court had suggested in some decisions that less margin should be given to the Secretary of State in terms of the effect upon individuals. Lord Lloyd Jones said that seemed to be the same point being made by UN Special Rapporteurs in this case.  Sir James Eadie said yes it was, but that argument had been rejected by the Court of Appeal. There are limits to proportionality.

On behalf of the Burnham Government, Eadie said that the aim of proscription is to protect the lives and liberties of ordinary citizens from Palestine Action. Proscription is not the objective, degrading the capabilities of Palestine Action is the objective. The Government was entitled to take into account the escalating patterns of violence as shown in the very serious attacks at Bristol and Brize Norton. The second point on proportionality, said Sir James Eadie on behalf of the Burnham Government, was that proscription operated at a national and international level. It would enable authorities to degrade and disrupt Palestine Action as a network.

On behalf of the Burnham Government, Sir James Eadie said that the third point was that less intensive measures were not available which would be equally effective, and they would compromise the achievement of the objective. This he said had been set out in another earlier Lord Reed judgement (they gazed at each other smoulderingly and there was a beat, during which I wondered if I should book them a room). On behalf of the Burnham Government, Sir James continued that proscription brings with it a fixed suite of measures which had been mandated by parliament. It amounted to a holistic attack on the organisation itself. Lord Reed commented that here the Secretary of State had agreed the Counter Terrorism Police analysis.

On behalf of the Burnham Government, Sir James simpered in agreement. He said none of the proposed lesser measures would, individually or together, achieve the same effect. The lesser measures proposed were not such as to take the proscription outside the margin to be allowed to the Secretary of State in choosing proscription instead. The covert nature of Palestine Action’s activities required proscription rather than criminal prosecution. There was nothing in the evidence before this court about Red Teams and Black Teams. Some participants wished to escape arrest. That is the advice from CTP. The criminal law had not stopped this activity or prevented damage to property or people.  [Again there was no attempt by the judges to intervene and test some incredible underlying assertions here. Is criminal law expected to actually prevent any crime from ever happening? Do ordinary criminals never seek to evade arrest?] Sir James then continued that civil injunctions were utterly hopeless in this case, as stated by the Court of Appeal.

On behalf of the Burnham Government Sir James stated that none of the proposed alternatives to proscription passes muster when judged objectively. But the minimum position is that the Secretary of State, within her wide margin of discretion, was entitled to conclude based on the advice she received that proscription was necessary. Finally, Sir James Eadie said the would address on behalf of the Burnham government the question of the balance of proportionality. The Secretary of State must be afforded a wide margin of discretion on national security matters. You will have noted by now that Sir James was endlessly repeating himself. He kept glancing at the court clock. Due to well over 100 highly hostile interventions by the judges, Huda Ammori’s legal team had needed to cut their arguments very substantially short, but still overran by 20 minutes. That meant they would only have 10 minutes for rebuttal when Sir James finished speaking; but could regain some of that time if he finished early.

It had been obvious for some time that Sir James was padding out his thin material to take up the time, and as he said “margin of appreciation” and “serious attack at Bristol” for the umpteenth time, it was difficult to stay awake. Sir James droned on, on behalf of the Burnham Government. The fundamental question, he opined, is the nature of Palestine Action as an organisation. It is not, he said, a non-violent direct action group in the tradition of civil disobedience. It is the opposite. It engages in covert action. It does not accept responsibility and punishment. It bears no resemblance to non-violent civil disobedience groups. It took crowbars and sledgehammers as weapons. It could not be a surprise if in the heat of the moment that turned into serious violence as at Bristol.

On behalf of the Burnham Government, Sir James Eadie said that any criminal conduct is outside the protection of Articles X and XI (freedom of speech and freedom of assembly). This applies even more strongly if the activity falls within the definition of terrorism. Lord Briggs suggested that those who spoke up for Palestine Action were not involved in the terrorism itself. On behalf of the Burnham Government, Sir James Eadie KC said that Parliament had foreseen that terrorist organisations would have such supporters and parliament had set out the criminal provisions that would be applied against them. Parliament had decided that these measures against the organisation and its supporters are appropriate to degrade the organisation. Palestine Action had been engaged on an escalating trajectory of violence. There was a benefit to degrading Palestine Action and its finances. The aim was to prevent and discourage terrorism and to degrade the organisation, taking all of its activities into account.

Lord Reed stated that as described by the Secretary of State, the organisation had attacked Jewish businesses in North London. Sir James Eadie agreed that this is very important; all of its activities have to be looked at. Sir James then argued on behalf of the Burnham Government that the Appeal Court had rejected the argument about impact on Article X and XI rights. He stated that the proscription will not prevent any protests against Israel or Palestine or against Elbit. On behalf of the Burnham Government, Sir James Eadie KC said that the Court of Appeal had found that only a small number of people were likely to face arrest as supporters of Palestine Action. In any event, little weight ought to be given to those who made a conscious decision to break the law by supporting Palestine Action.

Indeed, said Sir James on behalf of the Burnham Government, there is evidence that Palestine Action are deliberately engaged in an effort to encourage people to get arrested to overwhelm the justice system. Huda Ammori had overstated the effects of proscription. The Court of Appeal had said that the number of people whose speech might be chilled was significant, but whatever level it is at is outweighed by the benefits of proscription. It was a strange performance. Sir James had saved up until the last two minutes the utter demonic callousness of the Government’s attitude to the thousands of protestors being arrested for holding placards, and then rushed it all out at once, completely unvarnished. I suppose as his time then ended he avoided being challenged on it by the judges, but there was no chance of that happening anyway.

Raza Hussain KC now had 11 minutes to respond to Sir James on behalf of Huda Ammori. He stated that he would address nine topics. This was very ambitious, and I am not sure it was wise, as he bolted through them so fast I could hardly get any notes. let alone weigh their significance, but here we go. 

1. The proportionality framework does not give primacy to the Secretary of State, only a degree of discretion. This was the omniscience problem: Parliament could not foresee all future events. That is why the proscription regime is subject to the provisions of the Human Rights Act.
2. Eadie said that the divisional court and Court of Appeal stated that the three incidents analysed as terrorist were not “outliers”. But what they actually said was that they were “at one end of a spectrum”.
3. Eadie repeatedly said that Palestine Action were a “self-styled” nonviolent direct action group. But that was what every single one of the official Home Office papers and assessments called them. There was not one document before the Secretary of State that said they were violent. Lord Stephens at this stage looked apoplectic and demanded whether Palestine Action had condemned the sledgehammer attack. Raza Hussain KC said that the matter was sub judice as currently subject to a criminal case appeal. Judge Johnson’s rulings were under challenge which should be borne in mind in considering his sentencing remarks. The Underground Manual was very similar to guides produced by other non-proscribed groups, especially in climate action. Trident Ploughshares had also used hammers in their actions.
4. It was untrue that Palestine Action did not try to convince democratically through their arguments. They did so in the same kinds of way as the Suffragettes.
5. I couldn’t follow.
6. Palestine Action has legitimate aims. It is seeking to prevent material supply to an active and widely seen genocide.
7. Palestine Action had never attacked Jewish businesses or Jewish people per se. The court had evidence from Andrew Feinstein that he would never support Palestine Action were it anti-semitic. The accusation of anti-semitism was rejected in the strongest possible terms.
8. Impact on free speech had been widespread. Lord Lloyd Jones intervened to say that if you supported a proscribed organisation you opened yourself up to the suite of measures under the Terrorism Act. Hussain countered that the point was that Palestine Action did not pose a threat to society.
9. There was now under a minute left. Raza Hussain KC said that this was about the most important issue of our time: Israel’s annihilation of the already oppressed Palestinian people. Palestine Action’s activities ranged from protest to the destruction of drones intended to kill Palestinian children. That was the true import of these proceedings.

So the last sixty seconds from each side showed what they truly thought. The Burnham Government said that all those pensioners being arrested are anti-semitic terrorists and should be in jail. Raza Hussain said that Israel is murdering children and it is legitimate to try and stop it.

That was it for the public sessions. There was to be a closed session. That would be held before the judges without Huda Ammori’s legal team. The Government presents its “secret” evidence from the intelligence services. Huda’s team are never told what they say and never get any chance to answer it. We can be pretty certain they will claim that Palestine Action is funded by Iran or is part of Russia’s “hybrid warfare”. They probably make claims about bombs and guns and other lies. These are coming from the same security services who told you that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The irony is that the very day before these Palestine Action hearings, the High Court ruled that MI5 would not face contempt of court action for lying in another case – not misleading, not misjudging, but actually lying. They conveniently decided that for MI5 to face charges would “not be in the public interest”. The court was now going to give these liars a secret hearing where they could tell more lies about Palestine Action.

The implications of all of this are truly chilling. The Court’s doctrine is that in matters the government deems “national security”, the Human Rights Act is a dead letter because the decision of the “democratically elected” Secretary of State must be respected, also because she has “national security” technical experts. National security and the security services is precisely the area where the Human Rights Act is most needed and the state abuse it protects against is most likely to occur. Under Lord Reed the British “justice system” proudly announces that it is entirely at the service of power in an increasingly fascist state. As I walked out into London there was an entirely appropriate postscript. A small group had gathered around a police van. I took a photo and then walked over. An 84-year-old lady named Margaret had been arrested for supporting Palestine Action. I stood in the rain and waved as the police drove her away.

There Is No Future Without Oil And Gas

Richard Lyon writes:

On 9 November, delegates from almost every country will gather in Antalya, on Turkey’s south coast, for COP 31, the United Nations’ annual climate summit. In 2023, at COP 28 in Dubai, they agreed on ‘transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems’, and that ‘transitional fuels can play a role’ along the way. Britain put that second line into practice on 21 October, when the Labour government announced its approval of the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea.

The UK would ‘still require oil and gas as part of our energy needs for decades to come’, prime minister Andy Burnham said after the Jackdaw announcement. Energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh spoke of Britain’s continuing ‘transition to renewables and nuclear’. North Sea tax revenue is to go into a new Energy Wealth Fund for renewable and low-carbon power. Gas, on this account, is a bridge. It carries us over while the wind farms are built, and then we step off on the other side.

I trained as an electrical engineer and worked as a petroleum engineer, so I would like to take the idea at its word. A bridge is useful only if the far bank can bear the load you are carrying. Here, the far bank is an electricity system, and the test is whether electricity can do what oil and gas do now.

Three-quarters of the energy Britain uses arrives as oil, gas or coal. In 2025, based on the government’s own energy statistics, electricity supplied 19 per cent of all the energy used by homes, businesses, vehicles and factories. Oil supplied 46 per cent and gas 28 per cent. In our homes, we used more than two and a half times as much gas as electricity. Oil supplied 92 per cent of the energy used in transport, and electricity just over two per cent.

The gap is widest on a cold winter day. Britain’s gas network is built for the kind of cold day that comes once in 20 years. On that day, homes and smaller businesses would burn about two and a half times as much energy in gas as Britain drew from the electricity grid at its 2024 cold-weather peak, if that peak lasted all day. The pipes under our streets carry far more than the wires above them.

Those who back electricity have a good answer to this. Electric machines waste less energy. Electric technologies get more useful work from each unit of energy than the boilers and engines they replace, and a gas power station turns only about half of its fuel into electricity, as the Climate Change Committee – the government’s climate advisers – points out. So the far bank need not carry the whole load, unit for unit. The National Energy System Operator, which plans Britain’s electricity system, allows for all of this. Even so, its own Net Zero scenarios have peak electricity demand more than doubling by 2050, from 58 gigawatts in 2024 to between 120 and 144. That is to be built in 25 years, out of steel, copper and concrete.

Moreover, oil and gas are also raw materials. Most nitrogen fertiliser, and the basic ingredients of most paints and many medicines, start as oil or gas. Plastic is made from hydrocarbon molecules. There is not a single component in a wind turbine that does not need hydrocarbons to make it, nor in the equipment that makes the turbine, nor in the equipment that makes that equipment. Almost all new steel made from iron ore uses carbon, mostly from coal, to strip out the oxygen. Some uses need the fuel itself. Aircraft need fuel that carries a great deal of energy for its weight, and in 2025 aircraft refuelling in Britain used the equivalent of 13million tonnes of oil, and no electricity at all.

The most careful study I know of how far industry can run on electricity is by a team that included researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Its summary reports that 78 per cent of European industry’s energy, based on 2015 figures, could be electrified with established technology. The body of the paper shows that figure leaves out the oil and gas that industry uses as raw material. Count them, and the figure falls to 50 per cent. Add technologies still being developed, and assume all steel is made from scrap, and it reaches 60 per cent. The rest, the authors write, ‘cannot be supplied directly with electricity’.

The UK government’s own Jackdaw documents are franker than its speeches. The press release, written for voters, presents gas as a passing stage whose tax revenue will pay for renewables, and says Jackdaw will help ‘heat millions of homes’. The decision document published alongside it says the field, at its peak, could supply ‘about 350,000 homes on a rare cold winter’s day’. And it says what the gas is for: oil and gas ‘will remain an important part of our energy mix for decades to come, including for home heating and power generation during cold winter days, especially when solar or wind power is unavailable’. It also expects Britain to keep buying more gas from abroad than it sells for the whole life of the field, up to 11 years, even with Jackdaw adding about six per cent to Britain’s gas output at the field’s peak.

If voters were told the truth, they would face a hard question. Given Britain will need oil and gas for as long as anyone can plan, how much of it should we produce at home, and how much should we buy from abroad? Of the 20 items on COP 31’s provisional agenda, not one mentions oil, gas or coal. The delegates will discuss the far bank for 12 days. Meanwhile, the bridge to get there has never looked weaker.

Beginning with the full exploitation of the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields, let us harness the sovereign power of the State, to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of clean coal technology, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State. There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. We must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985. Is Kemi Badenoch? Is Nigel Farage? Is Ed Davey? Is Zack Polanski?

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with that. China manufactures most of the world’s solar panels, which should be on buildings rather than on farmland and which we need to start making here, but let there be solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, pipelines, or power stations. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners’ Strike. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right. Does Andrew Rosindell, whose constituency office is called Margaret Thatcher House, say that? Does Robert Jenrick, who gave his daughter the middle name Thatcher? Not Margaret. Thatcher.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all the rest of it. Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed. The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs.

The standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. Thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, just abolish them. And thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, let there be an all-of-the-above transport policy based around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on the electricity that public ownership would also supply to charging points in every neighbourhood and village. Astonishingly, and yet not, the fewest charging points for electric vehicles are in the coalfield areas. Also, never forget that, when we can catch them, buses carry far more passengers than trains do, but those passengers tend not to be politicians or the “opinion-forming” sort of journalists. And so on. Let a thousand flowers bloom. In a garden well-tended and well-watered as an expression of democratic sovereignty.

À La Carte Before The Horse?

They are only stating the obvious about what the deal would have to be, and in any case, Leo Varadkar and Michel Barnier are the least of our worries. Those who would welcome the victories of Marine Le Pen and the AfD are a thoroughly international lot, sitting very light indeed on borders as surely as the royal and aristocratic elites of old, or indeed of the present day. They believe in a Western civilisation that transcends such matters. If they thought that that were getting a hearing in Paris, in Berlin, and thus in Brussels, then they would be as enthusiastic for rejoining the European Union as the Monday Clubbers Geoffrey Rippon and Jonathan Guinness were for joining it in the first place. Present affections for Donald Trump would easily be transferred.

The centrist affection for the EU would be baffling if we did not know that centrism and right-wing populism were con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage culture wars, and that Fascism was the shield and sword of the liberal bourgeoisie, which for a century had always chosen it when the choice had to be made. But even so, and not least because they were only stating the obvious about what the deal would have to be, Leo Varadkar and Michel Barnier are the least of our worries.

Like Trying To Play Chess With A Squirrel

Peter Hitchens writes:

I dislike Russell Brand so much that I cannot honestly decide if he is guilty of the crimes for which he has been convicted. I am too prejudiced to say. But I am sure beyond reasonable doubt that he is a rather nasty person. He is unfit to play any important role in public life. Allegations that he is a comedian now seem to me to have been definitively disproved. Evidence in the case shows he is very unfunny indeed.

Yet I am fairly sure that the British liberal elite still prefer him and his views on drugs to me and mine. Three times during 2012 I was thrown unwillingly into his company. Once was in a Google debate, where he responded to my criticism of his views with personal abuse. Once was on the BBC, where he ceaselessly heckled me and at one stage threatened to kiss me.

There, I attacked the Corporation for employing him – of all people – to make a BBC3 series on the drug issue. Of course it did. Though it is well-known that nobody at the BBC takes drugs, that organisation is strongly in favour of drug liberalisation and weaker laws on the subject. Brand was their man. I was there as part of a pretence of balance. Remember that in 2008, the BBC had suffered the Sachsgate scandal: Brand and Jonathan Ross left crude voicemail messages for actor Andrew Sachs on Radio 2. The BBC fined itself £150,000 and Brand resigned. Yet four years later he was a fit person to act as a presenter.

Both of us also gave evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee about drug policy, he in a sleeveless black shirt, tattoos and about 40 crucifixes, me in a suit and tie. I think that the committee gave him a more sympathetic hearing than they gave me. That was because his opinions on drugs were pretty much the standard liberal ones, that drug abuse is a disease. Mine are not. Brand, whatever he really is, is far more in tune with the spirit of this age than I am.

And:

I'll never forget the night Russell Brand offered to kiss me. He had been busy losing an argument about drugs on the BBC Newsnight programme, back in 2012. I already knew him of old. During our first encounter, at a London debate on drugs chaired by Emily Maitlis, I had teased him about his silly hat and referred to him as an 'alleged comedian' (I think the jury is still out on that).

I thought that a person who enjoyed mocking others, such as poor Andrew Sachs, might not be used to it himself. I tried to get him to say if he had been responsible for his own drug-taking. But instead I received a verbal explosion about how I was bigoted, about how The Mail on Sunday was bigoted, about how I 'peddled hatred' and lacked love for other human beings. Then there was the usual accusation of racial prejudice. The audience at that debate loved it, and the encounter ended with the unmistakable sound of North London liberals baying for more.

Now here we were again, debating drugs and the law, this time under the chairmanship of the BBC's Stephanie Flanders. Not that it mattered that he was losing the argument: Mr Brand was the one who had been asked to make a series of programmes on the subject, and I wasn't. I was the one who had written and published a critical history of British drug laws since the 1960s, and he had written a volume called My Booky Wook. He was also the one who knew how to rip his shirt (or on this occasion, I think, his jeans).

Not long before, Mr Brand had been invited to give evidence — cowboy hat, ripped shirt and all — to the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee. I had the strong impression that its members were keener to hear from him than they were from me and my two colleagues Mary Brett and Kathy Gyngell, increasingly lonely opponents of the weakening of the drug laws.

Mr Brand, remember, had in 2008 distinguished himself with his horrible, creepy prank, alongside Jonathan Ross, that he played on the actor Andrew Sachs. Remember what he did. He left three messages on Mr Sachs' answerphone, making repeated lewd and graphic claims about his granddaughter. These were then broadcast by BBC Radio. The BBC was fined £150,000 over the so-called Sachsgate scandal. It cost Brand his job at Radio 2, and led to the suspension of Ross and the disciplining of executives. Yet four years later the same Russell Brand was commissioned by another part of the BBC to make a major documentary series about drugs, apparently because he had once taken them.

Brand, in my view, is not stupid, though he is ill-informed and very bad at arguing. He makes much use of his teeth, baring them as he jeers. His voice, if you challenge him, is very strange. It is a sort of rising hedge-trimmer whine when he is trying to talk over you. Then it is a disturbing baby-talk simper (disturbing because it is issuing from a grown man), when he is trying to ingratiate himself either with you, the presenter or the audience. He may be conscious of this. He once called me, without any obvious justification, a 'peculiar child', but I remember thinking the term applied much more to him. 

He is especially contemptuous towards anyone older than him. I was struck, during his appearance before the Home Affairs Committee, by his attitude towards the oldest member, the very spry and sharp David Winnick, then aged nearly 80. Mr Winnick very properly rebuked Mr Brand for being flippant, saying: 'It is not quite a variety show, Mr Brand.' The supposed comedian slashed back like an irritated cat, displaying an unpleasant smirk and once again demonstrating that he was not as nice as he looked.   He chose a direct sneer about Mr Winnick's age, saying: 'You are providing a little bit of variety, though. You are making it more like Dad's Army.' 

Mr Brand jumped into the discussion and emitted the following: 'Being arrested isn't a lesson. It is just an administrative blip. You need to demonstrate an awareness of the situation. Yes, of course, in many ways the disease or the condition of addiction does exacerbate, and if you start taking drugs it is likely you will take worse drugs, and if you are taking expensive drugs you will end up committing crime. But again, mate, what we need to identify is a degree of authenticity and compassion in the way we deal with this problem, otherwise you just seem like you don't know what you are talking about.'

It is gibberish. Note the mixture of long, pretentious words and the pseudo-friendly use of the word 'mate'. Arguing seriously with such a person is like trying to play chess with a squirrel, which might move the occasional piece without any real idea what it was doing, but at the next moment will overturn the board, scattering the pawns, kings and queens, and chattering shrilly as it does so. But I have seen him taken seriously. I meet people quite often who do take him seriously. And that is why I am a bit proud that, on that August night, Brand tried so hard to put me off my stride, and failed. Once again there was the molasses-like sentimentality about how we should feel more compassion, calling me 'mate', then the patronising dismissal, calling me antiquated and accusing me of 'foghorn madness from bygone times'.

Then it came. The baby voice was fully deployed, the teeth fully displayed: 'I have learned to love you, Peter, and in a minute I am going to give you such a kiss on the lips. I am going to challenge you on a few other of your prejudices.' He never got near me, I am pleased to report. I asked then as I ask now why such a person is given such a powerful place in the national debate. The answer, I think, lies in the astonishing power of celebrity over those deprived of any real hope in life. In our society, what would once have been a comfortable, secure way of life is incredibly hard to obtain. Education has failed, the economy offers little but low pay and high rents. Celebrities are like us, yet they are rich. The more like us they are, the more we love them for their success, and the more we listen to them. The older voices of education, research, skill, experience are just crabby, Victorian and outdated. Unless we can do something pretty radical about it, the future belongs to Russell Brand, or someone very like him.

There cannot be a “free” market in general, yet not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction. Contrived in the past, that baleful situation is being contrived again today.

We need a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of two years for a first offence, three years for a second offence, four years for a third offence, and so on. No prison sentence should include the possibility of release in less than 12 months; in that case, then your crime was not bad enough to warrant imprisonment, which the possession of drugs is. We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one’s premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. And we need Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought to be taught in schools.