In For A Pound?

Supermarkets’ Christmas adverts never used to be events. The media decided to report them as such, meaning that then they were. That kind of thing happens a lot. And if John Lewis was going to use a Rolling Stones track covered by a children’s choir, then it should have been Sister Morphine. One for Poundland, perhaps?

Sonny Leong is a highly accomplished businessman. But in answering John Redwood, I suspect that he misspoke, and that he was really trying to rule out the nationalisation of Poundland. Still, thank or blame Robert Jenrick if that happened. If it was not quite his suggestion, then he did pose the question to which Government’s reply might be, “Nationalisation?” What would be his response, and why? What would be his alternative proposal, and why?

If the Conservatives had anything about them, then they would point out that it had been their Finance Act of 2017 that had begun the abolition of the tax relief on interest payments for corporations, and that the last Prime Minister to have called for worker-elected directors on the boards of large companies had been Theresa May, so that the first should be completed while the second was revisited. And a publicly owned chain of low cost, fully unionised supermarkets that bought only British produce if at all possible, and only local produce if at all possible? If that is not a brilliant idea, then it is barking mad. There may be only one way of finding out which it was.

The Poundland crisis results in no small part from the fact that even Britain’s merely middling level of welfare spending by OECD standards still translated into near-bottom individual benefit generosity and value. For example, by international standards the triple lock delivers a pitifully low pension from a shockingly high age, but it puts money in the pockets of the people who spent it, thereby injecting it into the consumer economy and thus employing the young.

40 per cent of people on Universal Credit are in work, including 60 per cent of those who benefit from the lifting of the two-child cap, so the problem is low pay. Most of the rest are medically unable to work, an extremely difficult status to attain. If you doubt that, then try it. You can have any job you like on PIP, which you do not get for having a specific condition, but for how your conditions affect your life. You most certainly cannot self-certify onto it. Again, try it. By giving money to people who spent it, PIP stimulates our consumer economy, as sickness and disability benefits in general do, as the triple lock does, and as the lifting of the two-child benefit cap does, all while declaring the social and cultural value of the direct beneficiaries.

There is a case for Motability to buy only vehicles manufactured in the United Kingdom, but show me a PIP claimant who had been bought a BMW or a Mercedes on Motability. And you may have constipation, or tennis elbow, or whatever, while also on Motability, and that would be listed among your conditions on the paperwork. But nothing like that could be grounds for the award. The cost of leasing your vehicle is deducted from your PIP, costing the State no more than you would in any case have received. If you did put that towards a “premium” car, then you yourself would have to pay the difference. For a vehicle that you still would not own.

Without Motability, far fewer physically disabled people would be able to work. While as a Brexit benefit the vehicles themselves ought to be British-made where at all available and the industry thus stimulated, it is a cause for joy that Motability buys and then owns one in five new cars purchased in this country and that Motability Operations Ltd was therefore the largest fleet operator in Europe, since that also translates into a lot of people’s jobs and some of those people are on PIP. Yet Alex Ross writes:

A driver who had his Motability lease terminated after taking an attack victim to hospital demanded £35,000 in compensation from the company after “31 days of hell”, a financial ombudsman heard. The man, known only in papers as Mr H, had his vehicle seized by police for forensic investigation after he drove the injured man to hospital in October last year. Shortly after, Motability issued a termination notice after telling the customer it had received conflicting information on the matter, before a week later reversing the decision after police said the man was not suspected of any crime.

However, Mr H was then told he’d have to pay more than £800 for the car to be cleaned before getting it back, and in the meantime was given a hire car, which he complained had a smell which gave him headaches. After disputing the cost of the clean, Motability offered to pay the difference of a quote from a local company he provided, but this did not stop the man filing a complaint with the financial ombudsman with a demand for £35,000 in compensation. He said the company had caused him “severe stress” and said it was “discriminating against him as a disabled person acting as a “Good Samaritan”. Later, he told the ombudsman he had been through “31 days of hell” during the period.

Ombudsman Hannah Dunkley, however, declined his demand, instead ordering Motability to pay Mr H £400 in compensation “to reflect poor customer service and support”. She wrote: “There were several times Mr H contacted Motability by email and made comments about his mental wellbeing I think were concerning. Motability acknowledged these emails but I can’t see that it reached out to check Mr H was safe or provide details of services able to support him with his mental wellbeing. So, I think Motability let Mr H down here.” Ms Dunkley wrote that Motability took the decision to terminate the man’s rental agreement after receiving “an error or inconsistency” of information from police investigating the initial incident.

She also recognised that under the terms and conditions, Motability was allowed to end a contact if a car had been seized by police. But she wrote: “I think Motability ought to have considered whether it was fair to continue with the termination process given the uncertainty about the situation with the car. The circumstances in this particular complaint were unique and highly sensitive, so I think Motability needed to step away from normal processes and consider whether it needed more information before starting the termination process.” She said a £400 compensation award was fair given previous cases considered. She also said that she understood it had been a stressful time for Mr H, but that a lot of it was due to events that led up to the car being seized by police. “I’m only looking at the things Motability was responsible for,” she wrote.

Motability provides car lease agreements to those with a qualifying mobility allowance, such as personal independent payment (PIP). As of March last year, there were 860,000 customers, with the average age 52. It claims to have a 9.4 out of 10 customer satisfaction score. A spokesperson for Motability Operations, the company that runs the Motability Scheme, said: “We recognise this was a difficult experience for Mr H and we’re sorry we didn’t handle every aspect of his case as well as we should have. We have a responsibility to protect the scheme and take concerns about misuse seriously. In this case, we acted in line with our terms and conditions based on information from the police. Once it was confirmed Mr H was not involved in the criminal investigation, we quickly arranged for his vehicle to be returned and provided a hire car in the meantime.”

Stop The Standstill

Ethan Shone writes:

Coalfield MPs will force a debate on the broken miners’ pension promise if it is not resolved within weeks, openDemocracy understands. Labour MPs in former mining heartlands have been “lobbying hard behind the scenes” since the government quietly dropped a promise to release more than £1bn from the Mineworkers Pension Scheme (MPS) from last week’s Budget.

Sources involved in government discussions told openDemocracy that a last-minute technical bungle within the Treasury was to blame for John Healey removing the measure, which would cost taxpayers nothing but provide more than 100,000 ex-miners with an extra £20 per week in their pensions. The government has now pledged to release the money “within weeks, not months” – meaning it could still reach miners before Christmas as planned – after more than 40 MPs wrote to the chancellor to complain.

Jon Trickett told openDemocracy that MPs have warned the Treasury they will table an amendment to the Finance Bill if ministers fail to meet this timeline. “After an apparent blunder the day before the Budget, it is clear that the Treasury didn’t understand the strength of feeling their decision would provoke,” Trickett said. “But I am hopeful that we will see justice for the miners in the coming weeks and I, along with my colleagues, will continue to fight hard for this. Speaking for myself, and, I am sure, for others, I will not rest until justice is done.”

When British Coal was privatised in 1994, John Major’s Tory government struck a much-maligned deal to guarantee the two primary miners’ pensions if they ever fell into deficit. In exchange, the Treasury demanded 50% of any investment surplus. The funds performed well enough that the government never had to pay a penny into them, but still got access to the reserves. Miners have lost out on more than £4.4bn as a result, according to the National Union of Mineworkers.

As chancellor, Rachel Reeves released one of the MPS’ funds in 2024, and the sole fund for the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme, whose members were generally better-paid, non-mining staff, last year. After months of discussions and assurances from ministers, campaigners and coalfield MPs expected Healey to release the final pot of money, the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme, this week, freeing up £1.2bn according to MPs’ estimates. Instead, former miners were left furious when the Budget left them without a timetable to receive the money – and no explanation for the government’s last-minute U-turn.

openDemocracy understands there was a technical misunderstanding relating to the source of the cash. While the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme guarantor’s fund is not taxpayer money, but a share of an investment surplus generated and held by the pension fund, the government’s claim to it still needed to be accounted for in the fiscal headroom under certain accounting standards, according to Treasury sources. MPS trustees who have held meetings in coalfield areas in the week since the Budget report that many members feel “distraught” and “betrayed”. The government initially offered no timeline for resolving the issue, prompting significant concern about a prolonged process. openDemocracy understands the trustees have invited the chancellor to a meeting in his South Yorkshire constituency, home to around 2,200 MPS members, later this month. A trade union source said they worried the political damage had “already been done”, with miners feeling “angry they’d had something taken away that they’d been promised”.

Gary Saunders, chair of the trustees, said: “The trustees welcome the chancellor’s commitment to resolve the issue of the Guarantor’s Fund in weeks rather than months. But our members need action within days. Every week, 100 of our members pass away. For them, delay cannot be undone. The Trustees have worked with the government in good faith throughout this year, and an agreement is ready to sign today. Signing it would allow us to start making payments to our members by the end of this year. We ask the chancellor to come to the table now and resolve the issue in the coming days so that more members can receive these payments during their lifetimes.”

Opposition MPs have also pushed for the Treasury to release the funds. Reform said if it wins the next general election and the funds have still not been released, it would transfer them within the first 100 days in office. Chris Kitchen, the general secretary of the NUM, welcomed the chancellor’s commitment to release the funds within weeks, not months. “We are pleased that the government has recognised the injustice and committed to resolving this, and releasing the money. Weeks are better than months, but days would be better than weeks, as time is working against our members. At the budget, the chancellor rightly took the other steps to make right the historic injustice of the miners’ pensions, and we are confident he will put right this final issue.” Healey did use the Budget to end the 50:50 split of future surpluses between the government and members, telling MPs: “For ex-mineworkers, I’m guaranteeing that every penny of the pension fund surplus now goes to miners. I know the job’s not done, and I will go on to ensure the full transfer of the guarantors’ fund.” The chancellor also abolished the “standstill” rule, under which bonus pensions could be frozen if the scheme fell into deficit.

Dark Blue, Indeed?

Baroness Falkner of Margravine and Akua Reindorf KC tear to shreds the draft Conversion Practices Bill. Still, perhaps they are just more delicate flowers at Oxford, or perhaps it is because his students are scientists, but Matt Rattley would have been only moderately eccentric if he had been teaching an arts degree at Durham in better days.

I have never set foot in the City of Oxford, and although I visited the City of Cambridge a few times when an aunt and uncle lived nearby before retiring back to Saint Helena, they had no connection to the University. So I have no boat in the race. I merely observe that Nathan Cofnas, whose only field is not the study of race realism but the thing itself, is obviously trying to relaunch himself at Oxford, where he shows no sign of being rebuffed, specifically by the college from which Lola Salem was suspended. Her story was suppressed over the summer by the distraction of attention to Jason Arday, whose only serious error turns out to have been that he called the Police and Carter Ruck. That was hardly a reason to hound him to his death.

If Cofnas can get in at Oxford, then so can James Orr, sacked as Head of Policy for Reform UK and removed from anything very responsible at Cambridge. Although the restrictions that Orr’s compound is alleged to breach would have been laughed out or met with bemusement even at Durham back in the day. No such strictures existed when most undergraduates were not possessed of the age of majority. How do the Oxbridge authorities think that their colleges originated?

Not that the infantilisation is to stop there. Not only are parliamentary candidates to be “vetted”, bearing in mind that every member of the gigantic 2024 Labour intake had been vetted by Peter Mandelson, but elected MPs and their choices of staff are to be given Enhanced DBS checks, so every morsel of malicious gossip that the Police had ever heard and every anonymous allegation ever sent through the post, before being subjected to “anti-harassment training”. What would count as “harassment”? Stating the reality of biological sex? Insisting on the presumption of innocence in rape cases? What if you failed?

The more pressing need is for drug testing, since in December 2021 cocaine was found in 11 out of 12 powder rooms in the Palace of Westminster on the same randomly chosen evening, Mr Speaker Hoyle promised “full and effective action”, and then nothing happened. But they will not rest until they have a lanyard class HR Department that managed MPs, including by allocating their staff out of a central pool of the socially and politically monolithic. Resist.

Enough To Tell You How This Case Is Going To Go

Craig Murray writes:

I am in London at the UK Supreme Court for Huda Ammori’s appeal against the proscription of Palestine Action. Three Jewish groups have been granted intervention rights by the Court (two of them pro-genocide) but no Palestinian group. One of the strongest grounds to contest the proscription was that it entails discrimination against Palestinians. That ground was dismissed at the permission stage and appeal on that ground has been denied throughout.

So the Court will refuse to hear any argument on anti-Palestinian discrimination, a key part of the case, but will hear argument on alleged anti-semitism, which was never in the case and has been brought in by the Court. That, I think, is enough to tell you how this case is going to go. There is in any event almost no chance of a win in the Supreme Court as at present constituted under the right-wing Lord Reed. He has made no secret that he does not believe the courts should contradict the Executive and has excluded from the Court for the last eight years any judge who did not share this view. Forgive my immodesty if I say that my article on this is absolutely essential reading.

I am not sure I will get into the court to report. As the petitioner in the parallel Scottish case which is sisted pending this decision, I applied to the Court that I need to be there to hear the arguments, and asked them to reserve me a seat in the gallery. I received a very dusty reply telling me to stay at home and watch the livestream. I shall try to arrive early to queue for the public gallery, but have been told there may be no seats allocated to the public. If this appeal fails, the government will go ahead with its plans to process the 4,000 people facing terrorism charges for holding placards or wearing T shirts supporting Palestine Action, through juryless kangaroo courts in batches of five, with 36 minutes allotted to each individual, including process and the prosecution case. The UK is bringing more terrorist charges per head than any other country in the world, the majority against aged pacifists. This is absolutely a choice by the Labour Friends of Israel government. Burnham does not have to do this. They do not have to fight the Supreme Court case tomorrow. The interests of the people are utterly subordinate in the UK State to the interests of the State of Israel.

We are still short of money for the Scottish leg of the judicial review. I am sorry to have to keep asking, but I have no choice. The legal bills currently exceed the amount raised to date, largely due to the government succeeding in having our legal crowdfunder closed down. Other donation methods are currently still available even though the CrowdJustice route has been closed. Obviously we now need funds more than ever to carry on.

Beneath Contempt?

As Donald Trump ends aid to Israel while the Democrats get the vote out for Abdul El-Sayed, congratulations to the Labour Party on being far to the right of both main parties in the United States.

Who is behind that? The spooks? MI5 is to be investigated by the Police for misconduct in public office. Still, if lying to three courts was not contempt, then Rajiv Menon KC has certainly not committed it, either.

Picking At The Scab

The stocks are sold, the Press is squared, the middle class is quite prepared for the only thing even worse than being back in the EU, namely being bound by its rules without having so much as the tiniest say over their content. We are to be a colony, a satrapy, a vassal state, back in the Customs Union and in Margaret Thatcher’s Single Market. If Switzerland is indeed to be the model, then we are even going to be joining the Schengen Area. There will of course be no referendum. We are ruled by people to whom the vote is a nice thing to have, but who got their way by other means every day, so they did not really need it. If 60 per cent of the laws to which they were subject were made without the formal participation of their elected representatives, well, those were still going to be the laws that they themselves wanted, because that was how the world worked. We on the Left have been telling you this forever, as Paul Knaggs still is:

Andy Burnham did a great job picking at the scab, and social media is the new frontline where the Brexit wound refuses to close. A decade on from the referendum, the die-hard Rejoiners are still weeping into their timelines, crying “Bregret” and sneering about “Brexshit” as if their surface-level understanding of the European Union were an intellectual badge of honour. Their historical amnesia is almost comedic. It was Ted Heath and the Tory establishment that dragged Britain into this neoliberal architecture in the first place, yet a certain brand of comfortable liberal still treats a corporate, right-wing trading bloc as if it were an international peace commune. Their contempt is not really for a treaty. It is for the people who dared to vote the wrong way.

There is a peculiarly British arrogance that only surfaces when the establishment loses an argument to the public. It retreats immediately into the small print. The loudest voices no longer sit in Whitehall committee rooms; they lurk on social media, clutching the word “advisory” with the smug satisfaction of a clerk who has found an expired parking voucher. You know the profile: the constellation of yellow stars, the “Still European” bio, the reflex reply insisting the 2016 vote was merely a glorified opinion poll. Leaving a treaty organisation no more makes you un-European than resigning from a Pall Mall club removes you from London. But this was never about geography. It was about belonging to a professional class that wears its virtue as a badge and its defeat as a personal insult.

Ask yourself a straight question: suppose Remain had scraped over the line by a single postal vote in Oxfordshire. Would these same voices have spent ten years demanding that Parliament rip up the result? Would they have dismissed their own victory as an “advisory” suggestion? Not on your life. A Remain victory would have been declared the settled will of the nation, carved into granite and placed permanently beyond appeal. The crime of 2016 was that the working class broke the script. The former pit villages and steel towns, written off by polite society for forty years, walked into polling stations and voted the wrong way. From that moment on, the asterisk became more sacred to the establishment than the ballot paper.

THE PROMISE IN THE SMALL PRINT 

Since the Rejoiners are so fond of facts, let us deal with theirs. Yes, the referendum was legally advisory. The European Union Referendum Act 2015 contained no clause compelling the Government to act on the result. Nobody serious disputes it. But before a single vote was cast, David Cameron’s government spent £9.3 million of public money sending a leaflet to households across the country. It said, in plain English: “This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide.” It did not say “we will take your views into account”, nor “subject to approval by people who know better”. It said implement.

Parliament then did exactly what the constitution requires. After the Supreme Court ruled in the Miller case that ministers needed Parliament’s authority to trigger Article 50, MPs passed the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017, by 498 votes to 114 at second reading. Theresa May invoked Article 50 on 29 March 2017. Weeks later, both main parties fought a general election on manifestos pledging to respect the result. That is not a mob trampling the constitution. That is the constitution working. A vote can have no automatic legal force and still carry full democratic legitimacy. The Remoaners have spent a decade pretending not to know the difference.

THE BUS, THE MARGIN AND RUSSIA 

Push a Remainer past the advisory argument and the arithmetic, and you get three more excuses: the bus, the margin and, when all else fails, Russia.

The Arithmetic

The arithmetic of the sore loser, endlessly recycled online: “only 37 per cent of the electorate voted Leave.” Correct, 37.4 per cent. And 34.7 per cent voted Remain, a figure that never makes it into the thread. The 27.8 per cent who stayed at home voted for nothing, yet we are invited to file their silence under Remain. Of those who did vote, 51.9 per cent chose Leave, a margin of almost 1.27 million votes, on a turnout of 72.2 per cent. That turnout was higher than at any general election since 1992. Apply the Rejoiners’ test consistently and no modern British government survives it.

The Margin 

Then the margin. Fifty-two to forty-eight, we are told, is far too narrow for constitutional upheaval. The European Union itself was built on less. In September 1992, France ratified the Maastricht Treaty, the treaty that created the EU, by 51.05 per cent to 48.95, a thinner margin than Brexit. Three months earlier, Denmark had rejected it outright, by fewer than 47,000 votes. Brussels did not treat that as the sacred will of the Danish people. Denmark was handed a package of opt-outs and asked to vote again, and in May 1993 it gave the right answer. A narrow vote, it seems, is a solid foundation when it builds the European Union and a constitutional outrage when it leaves it. Labour’s 2024 landslide rested on roughly one registered voter in five. Strangely, nobody called his government advisory.

The Bus 

Every campaign has its slogans, and the £350 million on the side of a bus was one of them. It was hardly a secret weapon. The UK Statistics Authority publicly called the figure misleading weeks before polling day, and the bus was picked apart on the news night after night. To claim that 17.4 million adults heard all that and still voted on the strength of a bus is not analysis. It is contempt with a footnote. And if campaign exaggeration voids a result, the Remain side should look at its own record. The Government spent £9.3 million of public money pushing its case through letterboxes. George Osborne stood in a DIY warehouse and declared that “a vote to leave will push our economy into a recession”, with half a million jobs lost and a punishment budget of tax rises and spending cuts to follow. The recession never came. Philip Hammond scrapped the punishment budget within weeks of taking over at the Treasury.

The Russians

Which brings us to Russia, the Remainers’ last resort. Very well, let us talk about Russian money and the British press in 2016. Two newspapers told their readers to vote Remain: the Independent and the Evening Standard. Both had been bought by Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB officer once posted to the Soviet embassy in London, and both were run by his Moscow-born son, Evgeny. Nobody sensible thinks that made Remain voters Kremlin stooges. But apply the Remoaners’ own rule, under which any Russian connection anywhere near a campaign is proof of a plot, and they have some explaining to do. Strangely, the rule only ever seems to point one way.

As for the material case for our departure, one could fill volumes citing the socialist giants who warned for decades that the European project was an engine of corporate power, from Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan to Tony Benn, Peter Shore, Barbara Castle, Michael Foot and Dennis Skinner. They understood that you cannot build a democratic socialist commonwealth if your economic policy is permanently policed by an unelected commission in Brussels. But strip away the constitutional theory, and the core of the matter remains what it has always been: it is the economy, stupid. The working class did not vote to defend abstract statutes; they voted against forty years of managed decline, wage stagnation and the deliberate sacrifice of domestic industry to global capital.

Dislike the result if you must. Campaign to reverse it, and win the argument if you can. That is your democratic right. What you are not entitled to do is pretend that one word in a statute cancels a government’s promise, an Act of Parliament and the votes of 17.4 million people. In the Remoaners’ democracy, the people are sovereign when they vote correctly and merely advisory when they don’t. The ballot was never their problem. The voters were.

Uncivil Partnerships

Carla Lockhart resigned from the DUP 40 years to the day after Ruairí Ó Brádaigh had led his supporters out of the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis to constitute the Republican Sinn Féin that has one council seat in Galway and no other elected representation anywhere. There is a message in that somewhere. And such walkouts seem to be in season. Never mind whether Haley Stevens now agreed with Mike Rogers. What do he and the Republican Party find so welcome about any endorsement by her?

Similarly, since Labour is prepared to collapse the local government of 11 council areas, including the tenth largest city in the country, out of loyalty to a foreign state, then many people might reasonably ask why it had previously found the Green Party an acceptable coalition partner. But at least as good a question is why the Greens had been prepared to do so such deals with Labour. And the answer is that, again rather like Sinn Féin, as soon as they are in office rather than in opposition, then they vote giddily for cuts and austerity. Their conduct of successive bin strikes was so union-busting that anyone would have thought that Brighton and Hove was a Labour council at the time.

The state without whose approval the governing party of the United Kingdom refuses to enter into municipal cooperation still supports the Argentine claim to the Falkland Islands, having armed Argentina during the Falklands War. On 1 April 2024, it killed James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman, unarmed British veterans who were delivering humanitarian aid, whom it bombed three times to make sure that they were dead, as could not have been an accident.

Britain has named and condemned the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, an ideology that gave rise to ethnic cleansing must by definition be racist, Britain has welcomed the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, Pillay chaired the Commission of Inquiry that found Israel to be committing genocide in Gaza, an ideology that gave rise to genocide must by definition be racist, and an ideology that forbade coalition with parties for which the wrong ethnic group had voted is racist no matter how many people adhered to it.

In any case, Jews are half of one per cent of the United Kingdom’s population, and a third or more of that tiny minority does not identify with Zionism. There are no more than 200,000 Zionist British Jews, less than a fifth of the 943,598 votes for the BNP at the 2009 European Elections. Yet the Labour Party did not allow that to dictate its arrangements for the administration of any local authority. Think on.