Securus Judicat Orbis Terrarum

Consider those words as our Augustinian Pope inscribes Saint John Henry Newman in the General Roman Calendar.

The Donatists did not call themselves Donatists. They called themselves Catholics. But they were not. And although they lasted the better part of 400 years, and at their height had more than 400 bishops, they no longer exist. Think on.

Papers Prejudicial

We were right beyond our worst nightmares. QAnon hallucinated that God had raised up a deliverer from it all in the person of Donald Trump. But we always knew 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 a culture war, while Fascism was inherent in both of them, only ever arising by their joint enterprise. We pointed out endlessly that they constituted a single milieu. Now that we see the fundamental character of that, how did we ever miss it?

And to Kemi Badenoch's motion to require the release of all papers relating to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to Washington, Keir Starmer, Darren Jones, Nick Thomas-Symonds and Jonathan Reynolds have tabled an amendment, which will of course pass, to exempt "papers prejudicial to UK national security or international relations", which could of course be any or all of them.

The Politics of Dividing Lines

Morgan McSweeney is still there. Alastair Campbell and Dominic Cummings both went for less, and McSweeney is hardly in their league. What a shower this Government is. All power to the arm of Gordon Brown, who is making himself the nemesis of Peter Mandelson, not only for his own sake, but also for the honour of the memory of my distant cousin, Alistair Darling.

Brown's great political cause has always been the fight against child poverty, and it must be said that this evening the House of Commons gave Second Reading to the Bill to abolish the two child benefit cap. Three of the four stripes of Northern Irish Unionist MP voted in favour of that measure, while Jim Allister was not there, but Reform UK split three ways, with five votes against (including the supposedly natalist Danny Kruger, who has now voted for the cap as a member of two different parties), two in favour, and the abstention of Nigel Farage.

The line from Reform is that Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick "accidentally" voted in the wrong lobby, but Braverman had long opposed the cap, and she voted accordingly. To mask the division, the Leader did not vote at all, despite having just announced a policy of restoring the cap in order to cut the price of a pint of beer by all of five pence. Those are his own figures. And even accepting them, whose vote has this gained? Who approves of this policy but had not already been determined to vote Reform?

Braverman did not sign up for that, so she found herself voting with people to whom, like the withdrawal of the Winter Fuel Payment, the retention of the cap had been absolutely sacrosanct until it wasn't. Seven Labour MPs lost the whip because they had voted for nothing more than an amendment to the Humble Address after the King's Speech, and when that amendment had been defeated, then they had voted for that Address. But Braverman and Jenrick have now rebelled on legislation in this area. Will Lee Anderson be withdrawing the whip from them? It takes something to bring out sympathy for Braverman, but there is the combination of this and of the fact that when she was sacked as Home Secretary the first time, then it was because she had forwarded her Ministerial emails to her personal account. Think on.

Should Never Have Been In Doubt

Ben Reiff writes:

Israel’s official and unofficial spokespeople are in damage control mode after a senior military official admitted last week that Israel accepts the death toll published by Gaza’s health ministry, which currently stands at more than 70,000. This comes after two years in which Israel and its supporters took every opportunity to disparage and dismiss the health ministry’s figures, arguing that they were overblown or fabricated by Hamas.

That prestigious list of repudiators, to name just a few, includes spokespeople for Israel’s government and military, then-US president Joe Biden, US Congress, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) chief Jonathan Greenblatt, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) and any number of talking heads at influential thinktanks and policy centres. Adding credibility to their denials were prominent media outlets around the world that often described Gaza’s health ministry as “Hamas-run”, thereby encouraging readers and viewers to treat the death toll with suspicion.

In truth, the reliability of the official death toll should never have been in doubt. For one thing, the UN has independently verified the accuracy of the health ministry’s figures after each of Israel’s previous bombardments of Gaza going back to 2008. For another, the data published by the health ministry since 7 October is extremely detailed: it includes a full name, date of birth, gender and ID number for all victims whose deaths were confirmed either by hospital morgues or by their relatives.

Naturally, mistakes were made amid the intensity of an Israeli onslaught that virtually destroyed Gaza’s entire health system, but these were remarkably few and promptly rectified: Sky News found last year that entries in the death toll list with missing or invalid ID numbers dropped from 2,769 in early April to just 313 by the end of July. As such, several external investigations of the published data found that it stood up to scrutiny.

Back in January 2024, my colleague Yuval Abraham reported that Israel’s military intelligence agencies had even surveilled health ministry personnel in Gaza to check whether their data was accurate; upon finding that it was, they subsequently began using it in internal intelligence briefings. “In every status briefing, when everyone updates each other on what’s happening, there’s a slide that shows the current number of civilians killed in Gaza. And that’s based almost exclusively on the Hamas health ministry,” an intelligence source told him.

Yet still the denials continued, for two whole years. And even now, the Israeli army came out quickly after last week’s reports to claim that “the details published do not reflect official IDF data” – despite Israeli media outlets clearly stating that this is what they were told by a senior official in a private briefing.

So are we about to see a wave of mea culpas, or at least a modicum of self-reflection, from all those who peddled the line that the death toll was not to be trusted? Don’t bank on it. In fact, some of them already appear to be shifting the goalposts, arguing that while the overall death toll of 70,000 may be accurate, what actually matters is the ratio of civilians to militants among them, which they claim is comparatively low for urban warfare.

Throughout the war, Israeli leaders have cited a civilian casualty ratio as low as 1:1, or, more recently, 1.5:1, and now they allege that militants account for as many as 25,000 of Gaza’s dead. But these claims, too, fall apart under basic scrutiny.

To understand why, you need only consider whom the Israeli army defines as a militant. After invading the strip in late 2023, the army began establishing militarised areas that it referred to as “kill zones” with arbitrary and often invisible boundaries, inside which they would automatically kill any Palestinian who entered, including children – and retroactively label them as terrorists. (This currently includes the roughly 60% of Gaza’s territory that the Israeli army still occupies despite the ceasefire.)

And the army’s own data proves it. Last August, +972 magazine (where I am deputy editor) and The Guardian published a joint investigation revealing the existence of a classified Israeli intelligence database that maintains updated information on the status of every Palestinian in Gaza whom, through a combination of mass surveillance and AI algorithms, Israel suspects to be a militant belonging to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. According to data we obtained from this database in May last year, Israel had killed fewer than 9,000 militants at a time when the health ministry’s overall death toll stood at 53,000.

The database, therefore, indicated that 83% of Gaza’s dead were civilians, pointing to a civilian casualty ratio with few parallels in modern warfare that adds further weight to accusations of genocide levelled at Israel by the UN, human rights groups and leading genocide scholars. (The army stated in response that “figures presented in the article are incorrect”, without denying the existence of the database and without specifying which data it disputed.) 

And that’s if we’re going by the health ministry’s figures, which do not include the roughly 10,000 bodies still thought to be under the rubble; nor do they include “indirect” deaths from starvation, disease, hypothermia and treatable health conditions, which often exceed “direct” deaths in war zones. Indeed, various scientific studies conducted throughout the war have estimated that the true death toll from Israel’s onslaught may in fact have gone well beyond 100,000.

While we won’t know for certain how high the death toll since 7 October really is until Israel stops bombing Gaza and preventing the local and international media from being able to report freely across the strip, there is one thing we can be sure of: the climate of denial regarding the health ministry’s figures helped Israel keep slaughtering Palestinians en masse with impunity.

Turning Saint Peter's Keys

No one self-identifies as a schismatic. They can always tell you at great length why they are not. But they are.

Other than the Maronites, who have never been out of communion with Rome, none of the Eastern Catholic Churches dates from earlier than the sixteenth century, and several are a lot newer than that. There was no provision for Personal Ordinariates until 2009.

If the Society of Saint Pius X proceeded to ordain more bishops, then there would be no collective way back for several hundred years.

At Full Capacity

Joanna Hardy-Susskind tweets:

I could literally reduce the Crown Court backlog in 9 steps starting tomorrow. And precisely none of it would involve tampering with jury trials.

First. Sit at full capacity. Open closed courtrooms. The argument ‘there aren’t enough judges or lawyers’ really doesn’t lend itself to supporting a Crown Court Bench Division either. Open the physical space. Without it, prospects of success are 0%.

Second. Reverse the resigned acceptance that companies with lucrative contracts of public money can’t drive a prison van up a road on time, or at all. They can. And they should. And if they don’t - the contract should be pulled.

Third. List cases sensibly. Stop listing interlocutory matters in the middle of trials. Step one will help. Giving each case proper time (instead of simply setting stage dates on a conveyor belt) will help resolve cases sensibly. Justice isn’t a factory. Stop treating it as one.

Fourth. Repair. Why am I walking around wet carpets? Why is the temperature either ‘inferno’ or ‘arctic’? Why are the jury being sent home because it’s too hot/cold/wet? Why - in 2026 - can we still not master a videolink? We are the only adults left who cannot do this.

Fifth. Recruit and retain judges. And recruit and retain judges who have the very specific skills required to navigate the rough and the tumble of adversarial criminal litigation. This will require investment. It’s worth it.

Sixth. Take real steps to stem the attrition of criminal barristers. Last week I had a conversation with 2 other senior barristers fantasising about being a) a florist, b) a dressmaker & c) a stay at home mummy. We are all experienced RASSO lawyers. And we were deadly serious.

Seven. Legislate that full credit for a guilty plea is available until the evidence is served. Yes ‘he knows if he did it’ but, welcome, my friends, to the real world. The prosecution need to prove their case & - shock, horror - when they can people are much more likely to plead.

Eight. The ‘Better Case Management’ regime is the funniest name in the world for a system that is neither better nor managed. Most days it resembles a clown car that has become a flaming inferno. Work out why hardly anyone ever complies with a court direction. And solve that.

Nine. We need emergency measures to get the backlog down. Now. If you’re willing to run the gauntlet of public opinion by fiddling with jury trials then do this instead: A set period. A set group of offences (non violent, non sexual). An enhanced credit system for backlog cases.

I won’t trouble you with ten because it sounds counter-productive but, for anyone still interested, the option of a 4-day trial week with a 1-day ‘free’ listing day for other matters (for judge and counsel) would actually speed up the flow of the entire system considerably.

Eleven, if the MOJ were still talking to me (hi guys 🥹) is to abolish the judge’s factual summing up in cases lasting 3 days or less. The jury don’t need to hear it all again. A bullet point summary of the competing issues with a RTV would do - with the option to apply for more.

And twelve, if you’re going to commission an experienced and retired judge to opine on these matters and part of his enquiry relates to ‘efficiencies’ then maybe, just maybe, in a system that is so inefficient it is basically haemorrhaging time, maybe do that bit *first*.

Criminal barrister saying she had 9 points and making 12. A CLASSIC, YOUR HONOUR ❤️

Among The Dead Tulips

Jeffrey Epstein seems to have had a lot of secret children. Please, please, please let someone stand up at Prime Minister's Questions this week and call on Keir Starmer to condemn such irresponsibility. Both of the most recent General Elections have been won by men like that. Consensual adultery used to end Cabinet Ministers' careers, would have brought down the Prime Minister if anyone had known, and came close to bringing down the President of the United States.

The Labour Leader in the Major years was a heavy drinker, although again he had nothing on Starmer, but he refused to have Peter Mandelson in the room even then. Bryan Gould would have been better in policy terms, but the death of John Smith was the making of Mandelson, as it was the unmaking of so many better people. Yet look at the Labour Right now. Beyond Mandelson, Tony Blair himself is on Donald Trump's Board of Peace while retaining his party membership, so why would anyone vote for a parliamentary candidate who did?

The tradition represented by something like Labour First has to applaud the Chagos deal as completing a 60-year project of Denis Healey and David Miliband, but it cannot have enjoyed the transfer the Chagos Islands to a signatory to the Pelindaba Treaty. If Blue Labour still means anything, then it must oppose the deal itself, as well as the failure to defend British sovereignty in the face of the hijacking of the Marinera by the United States Coast Guard. And so on. The general decadence, if that does not suggest too much fun, was demonstrated when this afternoon's Commons debate on Mandelson was treated to, and respectfully heard, the contribution of Tulip Siddiq.