Where Will The Kiev Chickens Roost Next?

And so squibbed Keir Starmer's and David Lammy's hilariously pretentious conference about Ukraine. It is all over bar the paperwork, which will not not be completed in London. Nor, indeed, in Kiev.

But whither Mikheil Saakashvili, among others, this time? Perhaps California under Steve Hilton? Wayne Madsen sets out how very common that kind of thing is on the Right. National sovereignty and controlled immigration are not for The Project's insiders.

Short Selling

An all-women shortlist gave a parliamentary seat to Rachel Reeves, who has just gone on to overshoot her own official borrowing figures by nearly £15 billion, and that is hardly her first offence.

Reeves has ruled out taxing the rich, so yet more austerity will be along in the autumn. You would think that she were doing it on purpose. If she had two brain cells to rub together.

Rather than faff on about whether transwomen, who are in fact men, could be on all-women shortlists alongside transmen, who are in fact women, just abolish all-women shortlists once and for all.

Money Down The Drain

Someone is getting paid, and it is not us. In a move perilously close to making itself useful, Ofwat is investigating the water companies for spending many times more on refurbishment projects than operators in comparable countries, leading to much higher bills.

None of those countries has privatised water. Likewise, 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. Someone is getting paid, and it is not us.

The whole thing is a racket to rank with HS2 and what must be its diamond-encrusted platinum tracks, with PPE, with the money paid to Rwanda to take absolutely nobody (having always said that it would take only 100 people per year), and with the top secret £1,593,535,200 to rent the Bibby Stockholm for two years. And there is more. So very, very, very much more. Never, ever, ever let it be said that there is no money. Someone is getting paid, and it is not us.

One Way Or Another

Crooked, cruel, and a Remainer at the time, Robert Jenrick has set himself up as the Prime Minister in waiting of a coalition between the Conservative Party and Reform UK.

The first should kick him out, and the second should refuse to take him. But neither of those things is going to happen, or it would have happened today. Think on.

Another Gate

Imran Mulla writes:

British MP Shockat Adam was denied entry to Al-Aqsa Mosque through an Israel-controlled gate last week because he was Muslim, Middle East Eye has learnt.

MEE revealed last Friday that Adam, an independent MP for Leicester South, and Andrew George, Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives, arrived in Israel on 13 April and toured Hebron, Bethlehem, Tulkarm and East Jerusalem - areas recognised under international law and by the British government as being Palestinian territory under Israeli occupation.

Last Wednesday morning the delegation visited Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem.

A witness to the scene told MEE last week that George and other members of the delegation entered the mosque compound through the Western Gate, which is controlled by Israel.

But Adam was identified as Muslim and denied entry.

On Wednesday, the parliamentarian confirmed he was "not allowed to enter".

"My colleagues were let through," Adam said. "[An Israeli officer] asked me my faith. I said I was a Muslim. He said I wasn't allowed through."

The mosque's Western Gate was previously connected to the Moroccan quarters of Jerusalem's Old City, which Israeli forces demolished in 1967 to build the Western Wall plaza.

The Western Wall is the last remnant of the supporting wall of the second Jewish temple, built by King Herod and destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.

It is one of Judaism's most sacred sites, and Israeli authorities forbid Muslims from entering through the Western Gate.

Record number of settlers in Al-Aqsa

Last week during the Passover holiday over 6,000 Israeli settlers entered the courtyards to pray - a record number - in defiance of a delicate status quo governing worship and visits to the site.

Members of the delegation told MEE they witnessed Israeli settler groups enter the mosque complex under police protection, adding that there were few Palestinians inside the mosque.

Adam entered the mosque compound through another gate, controlled by the Jordanian Waqf.

"I went [to Al-Aqsa] four times," he said at a press briefing in London on Wednesday. "Every single time bar one there were always more Israeli settlers than there were Arabs in the compound.

"We saw dancing and singing. We were told the songs were celebrating the imminent building of the temple," Adam added.

For decades, Israel prohibited Jewish prayer at Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam, but ultranationalist settlers and several members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government oppose this stance and have increasingly allowed Jewish prayer there.

Adam said there were hundreds of settlers accompanied by armed Israeli soldiers in the mosque compound. Some of the settlers themselves were armed.

"It felt intimidatory."

He added that he "couldn't believe the level of animosity towards the Christian community" he witnessed among settlers, describing them spitting on Palestinian Christians.

The MPs also visited Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron in the southern West Bank, where they met members of the local Palestinian community and witnessed Israeli settlers attacking Palestinians. 

Members of the delegation told MEE that armed settlers and security forces confronted them while they were witnessing how Bedouin farmers were denied access to their land, before backing off when they found out there were British parliamentarians in the group.

'Colonisers'

In Hebron, they said security forces raised their assault rifles as the delegation's vehicle attempted to pass a checkpoint.

Adam said he came to believe during the trip that settlers could more accurately be labelled "colonisers".

"We saw first hand aggressive Israeli colonisers. It was absolutely shocking," he said.

"Many of these Israeli colonisers or settlers not only work with the protection of armed police, they work in collaboration with armed police."

Adam described visiting a man in Hebron who told the delegation he had been tortured and sexually abused when detained by Israeli forces after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. His house was surrounded by houses taken over by settlers.

"While we were sitting with him two colonisers came and said, 'you might as well give us this house or we will take it anyway'.

"We asked why. He said, 'God gave it to us'."

Liberal Democrat MP George said he was hopeful Palestinians and Israelis could "coexist". But he noted that the delegation met many Israeli and Palestinian campaigners who believed a two-state solution was unviable.

"I floated a two-stage solution where they'll be no resolution to the conflict until the state of segregation and discrimination is dismantled," he said, so then "full democracy" can be established with "votes for all".

This January, Israel launched a military operation called Operation Iron Wall with the aim of tightening its grip on resistance strongholds in the occupied West Bank.

The UN says the operation has seen at least 40,000 Palestinians forced from their homes. In the Tulkarm governorate in the north-west, the MPs met Palestinian families displaced from their homes by the military.

The delegation also visited Ramallah, where they met Palestinian political and human rights figures, including Mustafa Barghouti, general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative.

Earlier this month, Labour MPs Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang were refused entry by Israeli authorities to the occupied Palestinian territories on the grounds that they intended to "spread hate speech".

Adam said he believed the British Foreign Office likely contacted the Israeli government in advance of their visit, securing their entry into Israel.

The Assisted Suicide Bill Should Not Survive

Dan Hitchens writes:

Until about six months ago, it would have been hard to find a more inoffensive politician than the Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater. A well-liked, upbeat, down-to-earth Yorkshirewoman, she entered politics because of a personal tragedy, the murder of her sister, the MP Jo Cox, in 2016. When asked on a Spectator podcast what was the worst piece of advice she had ever received, Leadbeater half-joked: ‘Have you thought about being an MP?’ Visibly a normal, friendly person plunked down in SW1, she won many admirers and attracted little controversy.

Then in September Leadbeater came top of the private members’ ballot and chose to take up the cause of assisted suicide. The current law, she argued, is cruel to those dying in terrible pain. With the Prime Minister quietly supportive, and celebrities such as Esther Rantzen vocally backing her, it seemed the perfect moment.

So how did we end up here? Six months after Leadbeater launched the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, a group of Labour MPs have pronounced it ‘irredeemably flawed and not fit to become law’. It’s ‘becoming beyond a joke’, according to the Tory MP John Lamont. Leadbeater’s bill has been hectically rushed, then frantically delayed, and somewhere along the way has lost its biggest safeguard, the inclusion of a High Court judge. The seasoned policy expert Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, says he has ‘never seen a bill less up to scratch’. For some, the imbroglio threatens to overshadow the government’s own reforms. ‘It’s become an embarrassment,’ says one Labour MP. ‘It’s more than a mess. A mess is something you can fix.’

From the start, the bill has faced major questions. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, warned that people might ‘choose’ assisted suicide because they felt like a burden on their loved ones, or because proper palliative care was unavailable. Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary, also opposed this ‘profound shift’ towards a ‘duty to die’.

Even the bill’s most basic aspects do not hold up to scrutiny. Applicants need a six-month terminal prognosis, but such predictions are notoriously unreliable: a fifth of those given six months to live are still around three years later. The bill forbids ‘coercion’ – but in a world where only 5 per cent of recorded domestic abuse crimes result in a conviction, how many vulnerable people will slip through the cracks?

‘Assisted suicide is being sold to people as a way to avoid pain,’ says Baroness Finlay, former president of the British Medical Association. ‘But the bill doesn’t mention pain, and an amendment to make it the only qualifying reason was rejected. Pain was very poorly understood 30 years ago – often people didn’t know how to prescribe morphine and the use of nerve blocks was rare. Today we know what to do: the real problem is the lack of specialist services. But the evidence from abroad is that assisted suicide slows palliative care advances, to fund ending lives.’ European countries which forbid assisted suicide, for instance, have increased palliative care provision three times more than those that permit it.

Other alarm bells started ringing. The leading criminologist Jane Monckton-Smith said the bill could be ‘the worst thing, potentially, that we have ever done to domestic abuse victims’. The civil liberties group Liberty warned that it had all the makings of bad law. The head of the national suicide prevention strategy, Sir Louis Appleby, said it undermined the basis of his work.

At the bill’s second reading on 29 November, Leadbeater offered a deal: vote for it now and it will be scrutinised to the nth degree in committee. Expert witnesses would be called, amendments considered, every line of the bill examined, she promised wavering MPs – then you can properly make up your minds at third reading.

MPs took the deal, by 330 votes to 275. But nothing since has gone according to plan. ‘People are less enamoured of Kim now,’ says a Labour colleague. ‘After the last few years in politics, MPs want any process to be beyond reproach. They couldn’t have imagined what was going to happen in the bill committee.’

First Leadbeater gave herself a two-thirds majority on the committee (the Commons margin had been 55/45). Then she picked a witness list skewed 80/20 towards the bill’s supporters, omitting Disability Rights UK (which opposes the bill) and blocking the Royal College of Psychiatrists (neutral but with some penetrating criticisms). After an online outcry, both were hastily included.

Among the expert witnesses was Professor Allan House, an NHS psychiatrist specialising in the psychology of severe illness. He was taken aback, he says, to find himself listening to ‘pre-prepared’ speeches from the bill’s supporters ‘to say that the bill was so fantastically safe’. There was no ‘serious attempt to understand the issues and what the pros and cons of the bill were’. As for Leadbeater and her most voluble supporter, the Tory Kit Malthouse: ‘I don’t quite know how to put it politely, but they strike me as way out of their depth.’

It’s hard to summarise the committee’s proceedings, except with a kind of Homeric catalogue of rejected amendments. MPs proposed changes to bar doctors from raising assisted suicide unprompted; to prevent people receiving lethal drugs because they feel like a burden; to explicitly rule out ‘encouraging’ someone to apply; to narrow the definition of terminal illness to exclude conditions such as diabetes or anorexia; to raise the standard of proof of eligibility from ‘balance of probabilities’ to ‘beyond reasonable doubt’; to allow families to appeal if they think an assisted suicide has been wrongly approved. All these proposals were voted down.

There were amendments to guarantee a palliative care consultation for every applicant; to ensure a meeting with a mental health professional at the start of the process; to require doctors to check for ‘remediable suicide risk factors’ such as depression; to make it impossible to apply straight after a terminal diagnosis, when people are most vulnerable to suicidal feelings; to ensure that doctors ask why someone wants an assisted suicide; to require that the lethal drugs – which according to some researchers could put patients at risk of highly distressing deaths – are approved by the official regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. These were voted down as well.

All this was accompanied by a series of disconcerting public statements. Leadbeater declared that families discouraging loved ones from assisted suicide were guilty of ‘coercion’, and that doctors should be allowed to raise the subject even with under-18s (who are ineligible). Malthouse asserted that the terminally ill can’t be classed as suicidal: ‘To me, suicide is a healthy person taking their life.’

In this context, sceptics have grown frustrated with the relentless everything-is-awesome breeziness of the bill’s supporters. ‘There is an element of the Ministry of Truth,’ says one Labour MP. Another summarises Leadbeater’s line as: ‘These are the strongest safeguards in the world, and we’re making them even stronger, and we’re dropping the judge.’

The bill’s supporters had made a great deal of the provision that every case had to be approved by a High Court judge. But the Ministry of Justice said that would overburden the courts; so the judge has been replaced with an ‘expert panel’ of a psychiatrist, social worker and KC, distantly and sympathetically overseen by a new quango, the Voluntary Assisted Dying Commission. The commissioner – inevitably dubbed the ‘death tsar’ – will be a retired or current judge, but in either case will have no judicial function and little direct involvement with the panel’s decisions. Instead, they will be tasked with monitoring their own commission. ‘If we haven’t fixed your GP surgery but have allowed your nan an assisted death, what does that say?’

The new panels can’t summon witnesses: if they suspect a woman is being coerced and invite her husband to answer questions, he can just put the letter in the bin. The panel has to ‘hear from’ an assessing doctor, but there’s no obligation to ask anyone any questions, and the whole thing can be done over Zoom. Even the applicant themselves may not have to be heard from, if there are undefined ‘exceptional circumstances’. Leadbeater attempted to rebrand this process as ‘Judge Plus’, which did not exactly dispel the sense that there is too little scrutiny going on and too much PR.

Speaking of PR, it’s hard not to wonder about the influence of the campaign group Dignity in Dying, which spends more than £2 million a year, a third of it on campaigning. It is clearly helping Leadbeater, who gave one interview sitting next to a large Dignity in Dying placard, but did it also shape the bill? All the group will say is that it ‘shares… policy expertise with parliamentarians across the House’. It’s hard to be sure who is actually driving the train. Or, for that matter, of the train’s ultimate destination. Dignity in Dying declined to comment when I asked if it would campaign in future for any further change in the law.

Another great unknown is the future of the NHS. The bill features a startling clause which redefines NHS legislation, so that its duty to ‘improve health’ can include assisted suicide. The government has said that private firms can be involved, raising the disquieting prospect of an outsourced, for-profit suicide service.

Care homes and hospices would also find themselves on the front line. Some, no doubt, would close down rather than offer lethal drugs to their clients: there were amendments to give them legal protection from being forced to provide it, but Leadbeater and Malthouse squashed those proposals too.

Officials at the Department of Health face a logistical nightmare in working out the practicalities. Hence the recent extension of the implementation period, which in turn nudges the bill towards the awkward date of 2029. ‘The prospect of Keir [Starmer] having to appoint a death tsar in the run-up to the next general election is pretty concerning,’ says a Labour source. ‘If we haven’t fixed your GP surgery or your hospital, but we have allowed your nan to have an assisted death, what does that say?’

The bill will fail if 28 MPs change from aye to no. Two – Reform’s Lee Anderson and his ex-colleague Rupert Lowe – have already switched, and others have let it be known they’re considering it. But nobody on the Labour benches wants to take the spotlight by going public. Even privately, few are eager to discuss this terrifyingly large decision. ‘There’s a sense of dread,’ says one member of the 2024 Labour intake. ‘For or against, you have a knot in your stomach.’

The third reading vote, which will be held probably next month or in June, is not exactly the last word – the Lords are an unknown quantity – but it is likely to be decisive. On one side, the hope that our institutions, and the state itself, can be reshaped around the ideals of choice and autonomy. On the other, the belief in a fundamental, blanket protection for the vulnerable. No vote in our lifetimes, perhaps, will tell us so much about what kind of country we live in.

And Tom Hunt writes:

The report stage of Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was meant to be held later this month, on April 25 to be precise. However, earlier this month, in a letter to MPs shortly before they broke up for Easter recess, Leadbeater announced that the date had been pushed back to May 16. Bearing in mind that it is unlikely that the report stage will be sufficient for all the various amendments to her flawed Bill, this will likely mean that the final third reading vote will not be until sometime in June.

Leadbeater has claimed that the reason for this delay is so MPs can be given more time to consider the Bill following the changes that were made to it during the committee stage. The issue now, though, is that thanks to her constant chicanery and game-playing over the past few months, many no longer take her explanation for the delay at face value.

Far from moving report stage back to give MPs more time to consider her Bill, or because she has listened to some of the concerns that were raised by some MPs about the original April 25 date clashing with the local elections, it seems reasonable to presume that the true reason for the delay is more to do with nervousness about voting numbers and issues surrounding the Government’s impact assessment.

For anyone who didn’t follow committee stage closely, on more than one occasion – and often with very short notice – Leadbeater compelled members of the Committee to sit well into the evening. On one occasion, the sitting lasted beyond midnight. This was not necessary. There was time for the Committee to have further sittings before the report stage – so why the rush? Certainly, the compressed, push-it-through tactics of the Committee don’t square with the sudden concern that MPs be given time to consider the Bill purely in the interests of creating good legislation. It is notable that concern for time to consider things has come when the eyes of all MPs are again on Leadbeater and her Bill – messing a few members of a committee around is one thing, but contempt for the entire House might be more conspicuous.

In truth, Leadbeater campaigned her Bill through the committee stage, rather than taking a more considered and open-minded approach that genuinely listened to good-faith concerns. This was very disappointing to see in action, but perhaps shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Throughout Leadbeater’s campaign to force her Bill onto the statute book, we have had to become used to lots of underhanded tactics and misleading statements. Leadbeater has been helped in this regard by her Bill’s chief cheerleader, the campaigning group, Dignity in Dying.

In their latest ruse, Dignity in Dying’s campaigners worked with pretty much the only newspaper left offering consistent support for Leadbeater’s flawed Bill, the Daily Express. They tried a new tactic that extended beyond the repetitive interventions from Esther Rantzen.

The Express recently led with a front page involving an analysis of the numbers of Britons going to Dignitas each year to end their lives. The headline read: ‘Concrete proof Britons want a right to die choice’. It referred to new data on the number of Britons registering with Dignitas in 2024. This is the new tactic of the pro-assisted suicide lobby – to claim that there is some mass stampede of ill and dying people wanting to go to Swiss clinics to end their lives, and that the kind and compassionate thing to do is to give them the option of doing so closer to home, whatever the risks the Leadbeater Bill presents to vulnerable people.

The reality, though, is very different, and – in truth – you don’t really have to work that hard to see it. Behind the misleading Daily Express article, buried within the story on page 4, it becomes clear that far from there being a big increase in the number of Britons travelling to Switzerland to end their lives, there has actually been a drop between 2023 and 2024. In 2023, 40 Brits travelled to Switzerland; it’s now 37. This, incidentally, is a microscopic proportion of the total number of deaths in the UK last year.

This latest story is indicative of a troubling pattern of behaviour from Leadbeater and her allies. A month or so ago, the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) published survey results of its members on the issue of support for the principle of assisted suicide. The results actually demonstrated a notable shift away from support for assisted suicide towards opposition. Despite this, Leadbeater and her allies at Dignity in Dying jumped on the fact that the RCGP Council had shifted the overall position from against to neutral (a peculiar decision), to try and suggest growing support from GPs towards the principle of assisted suicide when, in actual fact, precisely the opposite was true.

This was pointed out in the media, which led to some more inventive spinning of the RCGP survey results. In a handbook sent to MPs a few weeks ago when presenting the RCGP survey, the results from the 2024 survey are compared to a survey in 2013 (conveniently ignoring the 2019 survey).

We have also had the misleading presentation of the British Social Attitudes Survey. The field work for this survey was carried out in early autumn before the Leadbeater Bill was even published. It was focused purely on the principle of assisted suicide, not Leadbeater’s actual Bill. However, in a letter to MPs a few weeks ago, Leadbeater claimed the survey results demonstrated support for assisted suicide remaining strong ‘following second reading’, which was on 29 November. A deeply misleading statement, but one that Leadbeater clearly believes she can get away with as most MPs simply don’t have the time or capacity to interrogate whether what she says is true.

We also have Leadbeater trying to make it seem she was a reasonable consensus builder at committee stage of the Bill. Nothing could be further from the truth. The bulk of the amendments to her Bill that were accepted by her handpicked Committee were her own amendments. Moreover, 393 amendments were tabled by MPs who opposed her Bill at second reading, and out of these, just seven, which appear objectively likely to increase safeguards, ended up being accepted by Leadbeater, representing 2% of those tabled by Bill opponents at second reading. Among the amendments rejected were attempts to strengthen safeguards for those with Down’s syndrome and anorexia.

It has been deeply depressing to watch a Bill that touches the lives of the most vulnerable in our society in such an intense way handled so shoddily. Or, at least, depressed resignation is where I began. Now I find myself increasingly angry. There are understandably strong views on either side of the argument on this issue, but that is no excuse. A Bill of this nature demands extreme sensitivity, a willingness to listen and to admit you are wrong, a desire to build consensus and a determination to legislate with the vulnerable in mind – not the pattern of misrepresentation and bad-faith political ploys that have defined the Bill’s passage so far.

Unité, Progrès, Justice

Keep your eye on Burkina Faso.

I have been right about these things before.

Happy Saint George's Day

Although, this being the Octave of Easter, it has this year been transferred to the next available weekday, Monday 28. In 2000, the Daily Mail was furious that Easter Sunday was given precedence on 23 April, or at least furious that that was the line taken by "the so-called Church of England". Yes, really. Those were the days.

Like Saint Andrew's Day, Saint David's Day and Saint Patrick's Day, today ought to be a public holiday throughout the United Kingdom. Away with pointless celebrations of the mere fact that the banks are on holiday. Yes, that was a Labour manifesto commitment in 2017 and in 2019. I am very glad that it was. But I had been saying it for more than 20 years. Admittedly, that was also true of several other things that were in the Labour manifestos of 2017 and 2019.

It is amazing how many people assume that because there is a legend about Saint George, then he himself must be a purely legendary figure. He is not. The Tomb of Saint George has become a shadow of its former self in his maternal hometown, which is now known as Lod, and which is the location of Israel's principal airport. But at what those involved insist is also his birthplace against the stronger claims of Cappadocia, it was once a major focus of unity between Christians and Muslims in devotion to the Patron Saint of Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt before, and as much as, the Patron Saint of England and a very large number of other places. But three quarters of those who practised that devotion were violently expelled in 1948. On what remains, see here.

Saint George's Flag goes back to the fourteenth century in England, although it is far older than that in many other places, having been the ensign of the Republic of Genoa from perhaps as early as the tenth century. The King of England had to pay an annual tribute to the Doge of Genoa for the protection that flying it afforded to English ships in the Mediterranean. But in England, it had long fallen into almost complete desuetude until 29 years ago.

Before Euro 96, although nearly everyone incorrectly called it something else, the English regarded the Union Flag as their national flag without any complication. It was not even a question. In my childhood, no one would have had any idea what Saint George's Flag was outside certain ecclesiastical circles that were obscure even in the 1980s, but around which I did happen to grow up. The 1966 World Cup Final is probably on YouTube. Check which flag most of the English fans were waving. The present Medieval revival was initiated 30 years later, which was in my adult lifetime, to sell bad beer to football's new middle-class audience, who were the only people who could still afford the tickets. Or the beer. It pre-dates devolution or anything like that. But we do have it now. It can be used to advantage.

Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs

Leave aside soap operas, and has any actor had a longer association with a television character than Kelsey Grammer's with Dr Frasier Crane? 41 years. And counting, since CBS Studios is still shopping Frasier even though Paramount+ cancelled it in January. Someone has to pick it up. They just have to.

You see, Frasier (I cannot call him anything else) is now a professor at Harvard, while Grammer is a noted supporter of Donald Trump. Everyone involved would have to be the best in the business to get the laughs out of that. Thankfully, they would be. This has to happen.

Just Say Neigh

I mean, come on. When the drug is called “horse tranquiliser”. But is ketamine sold in metric measures, or in imperial? Cannabis is sold in ounces, but cocaine in grams. Yet the dealers with whom I lived at close quarters did not know why. It had just always been like that. This seems a question for Peter Hitchens.

There cannot be a “free” market in general, but 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, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today.

Unlike the Conservative Party, which merely thinks that it is and acts as if it were, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are constitutionally committed to the “free” market. Richard Tice wants to legalise cannabis, Nigel Farage wants to legalise drugs across the board, and Lee Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023.

Instead, we need a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis and ketamine, 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. I no longer believe in prison sentences that 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 Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought should be taught in schools, as pro-drugs propaganda is routinely.

A Meal To Be Made

750 breakfast clubs are a start, I suppose. But universal free school meals would be unaffordable compared to what? Charging for school meals would boggle the minds and turn the stomachs of many other developed countries. As with so many things, so much for the Europeanism of those who opposed free school meals for all, and so much for the EU that never made us have them.

Like free prescriptions, free eye and dental checkups, free hospital parking, and so much else besides, free school meals for all will soon be "unaffordable" in England only, and in the case of free primary school meals only outside London, with abolition in Scotland or Wales advocated no more by the Conservatives than by anyone else. Why?

But behind it all, Klaus Schwab has handed over to Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, who has long been noted for his insistence that there was no human right to water, which should be treated as just another commodity. There is only one country in the world where the entire political class would agree with him. Guess which one. The one whose governing party has taken four times more money from private health companies than all other parties put together. The one whose growth forecast for 2025 the IMF has slashed from 1.6 per cent to 1.1 per cent.

Brothers, What Shall We Do?

The one per cent could be as diverse as it liked, but it would still be the one per cent. It is far harder to define a white person or an upper-middle-class person than it is to define a woman, yet no one needed to go to court to ensure that only upper-middle-class, white people would be appointed to public positions. That was a given, and it remains so.

My teeth have ground almost to nought at the descriptions of Millicent Fawcett as a "Suffragette". If those making that error know nothing about her, then it was hardly surprising that nor did those who marked their territory by passing water on her statue, thereby negating their own argument that they needed access to the ladies'.

But they had presumably heard of Nelson Mandela, whose statue they also defaced. As well they might have done. In every way, they were the heirs of the two most androgynous leading politicians in British history, Margaret Thatcher who called Mandela a terrorist and whose flame-keepers say to this day that he should have been hanged, and Tony Blair who comically thought that he was cutting off Mandela, rather than the other way round, over the Iraq War.

Why were the vandals not arrested? Why are the Police appealing for information about events in broad daylight, in the most surveilled area of the most surveilled city, certainly in Britain, and possibly in the world? But it is not difficult to see why they were making the most fuss about this rather than about anything else. The last Government made that the more serious offence, a measure that the present governing party did not oppose and has never suggested that it would repeal.

Public urination was also a feature of last year's race riots. I am the first to say that Lucy Connolly and Julie Sweeney got what they deserved, although Sweeney must be due out about now, so I hope that the same will be meted out to those whose placards called for the murder of "TERFs", for the return of witch-burning in order to deal with J.K. Rowling, and for her straight murder without even so much as a witch trial, while professing, alongside a drawing of a gallows and a noose, that, "The only good TERF is a dead TERF." I am no stranger to demonstrations, and I have never seen the like.

Nor have I ever heard anything like those speeches. I remember when Tony Benn tore a strip off Ali G for "calling women bitches", and as Benn later conceded, that was supposed to have been a joke. This was not. If it were let go, then David Lammy, who branded "dinosaurs" those who denied that hormonal treatment could enable a man to grow a cervix, would be in a position almost as invidious as preparing to vote for a Bill to render impossible any attempt to revive the sentencing guidelines that he had proposed to the last Conservative Government. However many tiers there are, Lammy is at the very bottom, where Marie Antoinette won the Nobel Prize for Physics, Henry VII succeeded Henry VIII, Red Leicester is the blue cheese served with port, and speculation as to whether the smoke from the Sistine Chapel would be black or white is "silly innuendo about the race of the next Pope".

Whether or not the United Kingdom ought to have a Supreme Court, it made no new law here. It simply said what the law had always been. There does have to be a final court of appeal, and this time it acted as nothing more, nor less, than that. The statute that it interpreted was the Equality Act 2010, because all the way up to the very last days of the last Labour Government, "What is a woman?" was not a question. Indeed, Saturday's protesters made it clear that what they felt was being reversed were "10 years" of, as they saw it, "progress".

In other words, the whole thing began only in the year that the Conservatives attained an overall majority in the House of Commons for the first time in 18 years, but five years into a Conservative Premiership. From that point, David Cameron was openly highly supportive of their cause. As Prime Minister, Theresa May always was. Boris Johnson always had been. While Johnson was Prime Minister, Liz Truss proudly lowered to five pounds the fee for a Gender Recognition Certificate. If the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Equalities, Kemi Badenoch, raised any objection, then there is no record of it. A few weeks later, Johnson made her Minister of State for the same portfolio. Nor does anyone recall a peep out of Rishi Sunak. When Badenoch and Bridget Phillipson laid into each other's records this afternoon, then they were both right.

The right-wing media were likewise either silent because they saw themselves as having no side, or not uncommonly actively in favour. After all, men and women could be self-made, could they not? It was only when former Guardian writers were employed elsewhere for purely and legitimately commercial reasons that their new employers adopted a more critical stance, or at least permitted it to be expressed. Many stalwarts were and are unhappy at the change. Like Conservative MPs, right-wing hacks routinely have the remarkable private lives that liberals merely advocated from a state of domestic mundanity.

There have been good career moves all round. Gentlemen, are you tired of being only moderately successful actors or comedians? Then declare yourselves transwomen, and feel your careers hurtle into the stratosphere. Ladies, do you fancy a bit more prominence than you had attained through academia or the worthier sorts of journalism? Then make names for yourselves as gender-critical feminists, and watch the new platforms build themselves. Notice that the latter rarely use those platforms to advance economic equality or international peace. In what way are they still left-wing? In what way were some of them ever?

The same is true in the present Government. When it is not ordering schools to show a drama that warned teenage girls that the bookish boys who were no good at football were liable to kill them, and when it is not using that as an excuse to ban teenagers from accessing alternatives to centrism, then it includes as Ministers people who were openly resisting the Supreme Court, the kind of thing that is not unreasonably likened, and more than likened, to Fascism when it is done by Donald Trump. Those are the Gay Grandees, whether in the persons of Dame Angela Eagle and Sir Chris Bryant, or by proxy through Steve Race, protégé of Sir Ben Bradshaw. They did not approve of such disregard of the Court in the Brexit days, even if it did deliver the verdict that Benn, Barbara Castle, Peter Shore or Michael Foot would have delivered on the principle of the proroguing of Parliament.

Contrast the Gay Grandees with David Cullinane, for all his forced non-retraction retraction, and with Pádraig Mac Lochlainn, respectively Sinn Féin's health spokesman and its Chief Whip in the Dáil. Mac Lochlainn has called for "the debate to be had" in Ireland in response to the British ruling that Cullinane has described as "common sense". Sinn Féin now faces being banned from Pride in Dublin, as it already has been in Belfast because of its own ban on puberty blockers. Even Sinn Féin should be proud of that.

Prouder than Reform UK, in fact, which is courting Truss. There is no sensible question to which the correct answer is "Liz Truss". Whatever else Nigel Farage may be, he has hitherto been an astute political tactician. What is he thinking? And what does this tell us about his and his party's true positions? Truss made it possible, or so she thought, for a man to declare himself a woman for a fiver, and then she was the Foreign Secretary for Johnson's adventure in Ukraine.

The same may be said of anyone who gave houseroom to Douglas Murray, and of the Homeland Party, and therefore also of the Patriotic Alternative to which it is still closely connected, with its invitation to Renaud Camus. Camus wants a European Army with Ukraine in it. When he says patrie, then that is what he means. When his British fanboys say Homeland, then that is what they mean.

No less than Murray, Camus also approves of the IDF's violence against Palestinian Christians at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on Holy Saturday, and of the arrest and detention at Heathrow for eight hours on Good Friday, in front of his eight-year-old son, of the Palestinian Christian Cambridge academic and British citizen Professor Makram Khoury-Machool, under the Terrorism Act's infamous section 7, which does not require the Police or Immigration Officers to suspect anything at all.

In today's Epistle, Saint Peter's preaching in Jerusalem adds about three thousand souls to the Church. This is how Keir Starmer wants their descendants to be treated. And those who bang on about "Christian heritage" and whatnot agree with him. Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war, if that in either Murray's or Renaud's case. Fascism is inherent in both of them, and it never arises except by their joint enterprise.

Miserando Atque Eligendo

Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen.

Tu es Sacerdos in aeternum secundum ordinem Melchisedech.

96 Weeks On

Nominations have been closed for 96 weeks, so when is the election?

If I sought election to any other public position now, then I would rapidly find myself just another death in custody under a Starmer or post-Starmer Government, and most especially if Labour had also taken back control of Durham County Council this year.

But I was a public governor of County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust from 2017 to 2020, having been elected unopposed, an extremely unusual occurrence. Unopposed among the 90,000 or more people in the part of County Durham that I was elected to represent. I failed to be re-elected by three votes, on a recount. Yet I was again elected unopposed not far off two years ago, a double feat that I am not aware that anyone else has ever managed, and which has caused the position to be kept vacant ever since. I am determined to have it for at least as long as I was elected to it. Do your worst. As, now under both parties, you are already doing to far better than I.

Domestic Servants of the Global Elite

Ethan Shone writes:

When Nigel Farage took to the stage at Reform’s local election campaign launch in Birmingham last month, he was clutching the cab of a JCB Pothole Pro – an innovation of the construction equipment manufacturer whose owner, Lord Bamford, has pumped millions of pounds into the British right in recent years.

Bamford became a Conservative peer in 2013, and the vast majority of the £10m or so he has donated to political causes has gone to that party or the campaign to leave the EU. But he stepped down from the Lords last year, and his decision to lend Farage the prop, along with a recent £8,000 donation of a helicopter tour of a JCB facility, is fueling rumours that he may join a growing number of Tory donors switching their support to Reform.

In the days after the event, it was reported that Lord Bamford and JCB could “take a leading role” in a national pothole repair programme under a Reform government. These claims, attributed to “sources close to Farage”, were first published in the in-house journal of Great British PAC (GB PAC), a new political organisation that wants to unite the British right ahead of the next general election.

But GB PAC says it didn’t just report on the pothole policy – it came up with it. The organisation, founded by Tory activist Claire Bullivant and fronted by former Reform deputy co-leader Ben Habib, told openDemocracy that the plan was drawn up by its policy director and “given” to Reform. Farage’s party declined to comment on this claim.

Bullivant is keen to stress that GB PAC isn’t a political party. Instead, as its name suggests, it is a political action committee – an entity almost entirely unique to the US. There, PACs are used by corporations, special interest groups and the super-rich to funnel huge amounts of money into politics, either by donating directly to their favoured politicians in key races or mounting political campaigns on specific issues or in support of broad movements.

“They are very powerful over there,” explains Bullivant, who has worked as a journalist in the US. “They’re very good at the ‘drip drip drip’ of education and the behind-the-scenes legal initiatives. They’re also good at picking the right horses.”

GB Pac may be US-inspired, but its website is determinedly British, awash with images that might be best described as patriotic AI slop. Lions clad in armour charge from the screen, inexplicably wielding Union Jack shields. The organisation’s goals, the site says, are to “save the country” and to “defend Britain against the current socialist government’s agenda”, and its leaders range from former secretaries of state to fringe far-right media influencers.

It’s not yet clear how seriously GB PAC should be taken as a political entity. The group’s policy head, who supposedly gifted the pothole plan to Farage, runs a blog/think tank called Brainfart Policy. But its arrival on the Westminster scene is worrying, regardless. It unquestionably marks the UK taking yet another step in the direction of Americanised politics, where big-money political donors hold outsized influence.

A political party?

GB PAC has helpfully already set out its spending priorities, should it suddenly come into a large amount of money.

Firstly, there are legal challenges. The group has highlighted three main policy areas it wishes to challenge the government on: the decision to hand over control of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, the cut to pensioners’ winter fuel payments, and the ban on issuing North Sea oil licenses. Bullivant says GB PAC has a team of four KCs working on these cases, led by Martin Howe KC, a well-respected and presumably expensive barrister.

Beyond that, GB PAC wants to embark on several other strands of work.

The organisation wants to train political operatives and movement leaders through its ‘academy’, which it describes as “more than just a training programme – it’s a blueprint for reshaping British politics”.

Then there is its ‘Media Watchers’ initiative, which seemingly involves GB PAC activists monitoring news coverage of the movement, “using advanced digital tools and social listening software” to identify ‘bias’ or ‘inaccurate reporting’. “We also maintain a comprehensive database of articles, reports, and public statements that misrepresent facts or display clear bias against centre-right policies,” its website says.

Perhaps most concerningly, it wants its supporters to send in Stasi-like reports on “activist judges, two-tier police and biased civil servants”. An image shared by the group multiple times on X calls on supporters to “REPORT THEM”. Written beneath this call to action is a strapline: “In 2029, justice will be served – no exceptions, no privileges.”

Bullivant doesn’t see how this message could be construed as ‘threatening’ – the word openDemocracy put to her in a phone interview in late-March – but did clarify that GB PAC would never publish the names of the people who are reported to them. This carries worrying echoes of another, increasingly prevalent feature of US politics, where pro-Israel campaign organisations collect “deportation lists” of activists and academics who speak out against the country.

At the time, Bullivant mostly wanted to stress that GB PAC hoped to bring together the existing parties on the right, rather than create a new rival one.

“Come 2029, I really want to make sure the right vote isn’t split again,” she said. “We’re definitely NOT a political party”.

But in the weeks following our conversation, rumours began to swirl that Habib, GB PAC’s chair and big-name star, had other ideas.

Habib was once a Conservative donor, who switched his allegiance to Farage and was elected as a member of the European Parliament for the Brexit Party in 2019. In 2023, he was made a co-deputy leader of Reform UK, but was removed from this post after failing to win a parliamentary seat in last year’s general election. Months later, he quit Reform altogether, citing “fundamental differences” with Farage over Brexit, the party’s structure, and “mass deportations” (which he says he supports and Farage does not).

Now it seems he is going it alone. On 7 April, Habib became the director of the Integrity Party, according to documents filed with the UK’s business register, Companies House.

A few days later, Bullivant sent a message to members of GB PAC, restating the group’s commitment to being “policy-first, principle-led, party-neutral”.

“Ben is still very much our chairman,” she wrote, “and will explain his latest move in due course.”

The new political party’s website says it is dedicated to promoting “social cohesion, strong institutions, functional economic systems, open communication, cultural identity, innovation, participation and governance, education and knowledge, social safety nets, and conflict resolution.” Anyone who wishes to become a “corporate partner” (read: donate over £2,000) is encouraged to get in touch.

‘Major loopholes’

In the future, when the story of this period in British politics is written, GB PAC and the Integrity Party may not even appear in so much as a footnote. But the nature of the current political moment means that either group – or any similar future organisation – could chance upon the exact right combination of events to become a well-resourced, highly influential political vehicle overnight.

The £100m donation to Reform that Elon Musk was reported to have been considering earlier this year has, so far, failed to materialise. In the meantime, Musk’s at-one-time frenzied interest in UK politics seems to have waned, and his purported favoured son of the British right, Rupert Lowe, now sits as an independent MP, having had the Reform whip suspended over allegations that he verbally threatened the party’s chair. (Lowe has denied these allegations, calling them “vexatious”.) The latest Westminster gossip suggests Lowe could join the Conservatives. 

All in all, the chances of that money appearing in Reform’s account, or even featuring at all in British politics, have fallen. But the chances are still significantly more than zero, and may well rise as the 2029 general election nears. Musk’s erratic nature means there’s always a possibility that one day soon, if the right tweet or meme catches his eye, the bet could be back on.

It’s worth keeping in mind that while to Musk, dropping £100m is roughly equivalent to me or you buying a round of drinks, the total donated to all UK political parties in 2024 – a general election year – was around £97m. Without blinking, on a whim, the richest man in the world could yet decide to fundamentally alter the course of British politics for a generation.

“I know Ben [Habib] is friends with [Musk],” Bullivant told openDemocracy. “Elon is interested in what we’re doing. He retweeted us a few weeks ago, which was very nice. I don’t know if they’ve talked about the PAC. But if he did want to give us money, there’s nothing to say he can’t.”

Other foreign donors could, too. Bullivant told openDemocracy that “some of the American PACs” have invited GB PAC to Washington in the coming months, though she wouldn’t say which.

An organisation such as GB PAC could be a very effective way of funnelling untraceable cash into British politics, from anyone, anywhere. Although UK political parties are barred from receiving foreign donations, there’s no such rule for other political entities. A PAC could take in money from overseas and donate it to a party as an effective way around the rules. 

And openDemocracy understands that, unlike in the US, UK electoral law means a British PAC would not need to declare its funders. In fact, outside of an election period, it would likely not have any transparency requirements whatsoever. Even during an election period, it would probably be bound only by spending rules – if it campaigned on behalf of a party or a coherent grouping of parties, for example – but would still not need to declare its funders.

GB PAC, or the model it seems to have almost stumbled upon, may yet form a critical part of the expanding and changing right-wing ecosystem.

“The appearance of political action committees in the UK is deeply alarming,” said Susan Hawley, the director of Spotlight on Corruption.

“There are very real risks that outfits like this could supercharge huge flows of foreign money into the UK for political campaigning, which the UK’s current laws and framework are simply not equipped to tackle.

“Currently, major loopholes, which allow foreign funders to finance non-party political organisations and digital campaigns, pose an existential threat to our democracy.”

Hawley added: “It’s time the UK looked at the Canadian model of regulating third-party political campaigners in the same way as political parties, and banning them from using foreign funds for their campaigns.”

Even without help (that we know of) from GB PAC, Reform seems to be attracting significant donor interest. The party now resides in an expensive office in Westminster’s Millbank Tower, which has previously been home to Labour and Tory HQs and UN offices. It will soon share the building with, among others, a pro-Reform think tank that has already secured £1m in backing, according to the Financial Times.

Westminster’s money-watchers are eagerly awaiting Electoral Commission data due out in early June, which will show just how much Reform has brought in during its first period of intense fundraising. The expectation is that the figure will be significantly higher than for any other party, and likely for all the other major parties combined.

As Reform continues to dominate the national polls ahead of May’s local elections in England, Labour MPs in seats the party is targeting are acutely aware of the threat, particularly if the Reform candidates they’re up against can attract the kind of cash needed to resource a big national campaign.

One of these Labour MPs, who spoke to openDemocracy on condition of anonymity, said they feel the party should be highlighting the disconnect between Reform’s populist pitch and its elite, big-money backing. They feel unable to do so, they said, because of Labour’s own relationship with big-money funders.

“Parties should serve the people and not the super-rich. Labour must bring itself into line along with other parties. It’s time to end the role of big money in politics,” added the MP, who represents a constituency where Reform came second in last year’s general election.

Labour leader Keir Starmer would certainly struggle to make too much of any party taking cash from donors with overseas links, given two of his major backers are Labour’s own South African-born billionaire, Gary Lubner, and a Cayman Islands-controlled hedge fund – even if they are, respectively, a UK resident and a UK resident ‘for tax purposes’.

The Labour MP also told openDemocracy that “billionaire foreign oligarchs like Musk do not have our country’s interests at heart”, adding: “The super-rich should not be allowed to weaponise their wealth to dictate British politics.

“Reform are exposing themselves as domestic servants of the global elite. The law should be changed to prevent this corruption of democracy. We need total transparency about all their income sources.”

Christus Surrexit, Alleluia, Alleluia!

Surrexit in vere, alleluia, alleluia!

The Great Replacement, Indeed

When articulated by callers to LBC, the Great Replacement Theory has been endorsed by Keir Starmer. How do we go about banning him? But while banning Renaud Camus only lends him an undeserved allure, what West is it that he fears is being replaced? He is an avowedly godless purveyor of pornography, and one of his staunchest defenders against Yvette Cooper (what a pity that only one of them can lose) is Jean-Yves Le Gallou, who will not have been at the Easter Vigil this evening, nor will he be at Mass in the morning.

Like the similar, and similarly pseudo-intellectual, Douglas Murray, Camus supports the corrupt and repressive regime in Ukraine, which is sexually decadent and at least backed by Nazis, rather than the corrupt and repressive regime in Russia, whose faults are other than his own. Accordingly, and also like Murray, he cheers on those who have taken advantage of this year's coincidence of Easter in the Eastern and Western Rites to exceed even their normal levels of violence against those wishing to celebrate the Resurrection in the city in which it occurred, the city in which many of their ancestors have lived continuously these twenty-one centuries.

Suits and Ties

Jeremy Corbyn is suing Nigel Farage, so their respective supporters will meet outside the High Court before heading to the pub together, like those people who variously followed the King around in royalist tat and followed him around with Not My King placards.

But Corbyn and Farage should both sue Fred Thomas, meaning that those supporters would meet as comrades on the courthouse steps. Even before then, they should picket Thomas together wherever he went. Who would turn up for Thomas? Presumably his close friend Ivor Caplin. We are a third of the way to identifying the Dirty Dozen de nos jours. Caplin, his partner "Steve", Peter Kyle and Thomas make quite the Sidney Cooke, Leslie Bailey, Robert Oliver and Steven Barrell.

Farage's libel of Corbyn depended on the Blairite enforcement agency that was the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war. Fascism is inherent in both of them, and it never arises except by their joint enterprise. But this week, the Blairites lost control of the EHRC, and also of the Supreme Court. Think on.

The Very Stone Cries Out With Laughter

Together with, as we also predicted, the giant commercial benefits for the person, relatives and associates of Donald Trump, the impending conclusion of the war in Ukraine, on the terms that some of us had predicted from the start, is not going down well with one Fred Thomas, who is apparently a Labour MP, and who has tweeted this libel.

That he is yet another close friend of Ivor Caplin is yet another reason why not even his having unseated Johnny Mercer can make Thomas an attractive character. Rather than say nothing, as the real thing do, he does that "nudge nudge, wink wink, I could tell you but I'd have to kill you" routine about his military service, which is always the sign of a Walter Mitty. In 2001, Jeremy Corbyn led a protest against Vladimir Putin in London. In 2008, Corbyn accused Putin of rigging elections. In 2010, Corbyn called for Putin's assets in Britain to be frozen. In 2012, Corbyn called for a Magnitsky Act. In 2013, he called for a bar on the Russian Arms Corps. In 2016, as Leader of the Opposition, he accused Putin of war crimes in Syria. And in 2022, Corbyn condemned the invasion of Ukraine. Please, please, please, let him and Nigel Farage both sue this Thomas person at the same time. It would be customary to say that it would take a heart of stone not to laugh. But I famously have a heart of stone, and I am already laughing my head off.

In recent days, the Blairites have lost both the Supreme Court, and the Equality and Human Right Commission. In recent hours, those who would have welcomed Renaud Camus have been confronted with the question of how Britain could be incapable of controlling its borders if it could deny him entry, while those who had imposed that ban have been confronted with the fact that it would have been impossible without Brexit. And in the coming months, many who had opposed Bovaer, and many who were crowing at the ban on bringing back meat or dairy products from the EU, will have to explain why they welcomed a situation in which, "The product labels aren't going to make it clear that you are eating American chlorinated chicken or hormone beef, or GM crops, or products grown with UK-banned pesticides, or dyed with UK-banned colourings that might make your kids hyper." It would be customary to say that it would take a heart of stone not to laugh. But I famously have a heart of stone, and I am laughing my head off.

Not Benign Exercises

Chaminda Jayanetti writes:

Thousands of people with cancer, cardiovascular disease and respiratory diseases, and more than 200,000 people with arthritis are among the 1.3 million who could be rendered ineligible for the daily living personal independence payment (PIP) payment by the government’s disability benefit plans, according to official data.

Data published by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) this week, in response to a Freedom of Information request from disability rights campaigner Martin Bonner, revealed that 87% of the 1,283,000 working age people currently receiving the standard daily living PIP payment scored less than four points in each of the ten categories in the PIP assessment – meaning that they would no longer qualify for the daily living PIP benefit under Labour’s proposed new rules.

A further 13% of the 1,608,000 working age claimants receiving the higher, ‘enhanced’ daily living PIP payment would also fall foul of the planned changes – giving a total of about 1.325m current PIP claimants who would be rendered ineligible by the DWP’s proposals.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) – the government’s independent financial watchdog – suggested that around half of those hit by the rule change would adapt their PIP applications, or appeal rejections, in order to meet the new requirements, but the OBR itself described this forecast as a “highly uncertain judgement”.

The government’s plans, published last month in a DWP green paper, are set to be voted on by MPs this summer without any formal public consultation, sparking a furious backlash from disability activists and some Labour MPs. If they are approved by parliament, the changes will apply to new applicants from November 2026, and from then on will affect existing claimants when their claim is reviewed.

“These figures show how absurd it is to exclude the changes to the PIP assessment from the government’s consultation on the green paper proposals,” said Julia Modern, senior policy and campaigns manager at disabled people’s organisation Inclusion London. “It is unacceptable that a policy change this big – effectively wiping out the standard category of PIP daily living – is being implemented without consultation. This is not a minor ‘technical’ change: it is a serious threat to a wide range of disabled people living with substantial support needs.

“We are deeply disappointed that this Labour government is repeating past mistakes, proposing exactly the kind of ‘reforms’ that previously caused deprivation and despair in the disabled community while failing to save the government money because of knock-on effects on health and social care budgets. Taking money away from disabled people does not mean our needs will go away.”

PIP is the main disability benefit in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and is not restricted by income or work status.

At present people qualify through an assessment that scores applicants under a series of ‘activities’ that measure the severity of their illness or disability. Ten of the activities concern the PIP daily living payment, while another two decide who gets the PIP mobility payment.

Applicants must score at least eight points in the daily living activities to get the standard daily living payment, with 12 points qualifying them for the enhanced payment. The same structure applies to the separate PIP mobility payment.

At present these totals can be accumulated across different activities – if someone scores two points in four different daily living activities, their eight point total will qualify them for the standard daily living payment. But under the DWP’s plans, they would have to reach those totals while scoring at least four points in any one specific daily living activity.

Despite claims that PIP has become too easy for people to claim, only about 54% of applications are successful. The government claims the new rules will ensure PIP only goes to people with serious disabilities. But someone who needs help to cut up food and wash their hair, and also needs an aid to dress and to be able to speak or hear, would currently qualify for PIP but would miss out under the proposed system.

DWP figures released in response to an FOI request from the Benefits and Work website show how many people with different disabilities and illnesses currently receive the PIP daily living allowance having scored under four points in all categories. They include:

• 214,000 claimants with arthritis – that’s 77% of all arthritis claimants receiving the daily living allowance
• 38,000 with cardiovascular diseases – 62% 
• 45,000 with respiratory diseases – 55% 
• 38,000 with multiple sclerosis and neuropathic diseases – 48% 
• 23,000 with cancer – 33% 
• 11,000 with cerebral palsy and neurological muscular diseases – 24% 26,000 with psychotic disorders – 23%

The figures also indicate how many new applicants with different conditions would over time fail to qualify for PIP from November next year if the plans are voted through.

The ‘four-point rule’ would also have a big effect on people with mental illnesses – a group of claimants that have faced a media and political onslaught. Around 282,000 claimants with anxiety and depression would fall foul of the four-point rule.

The DWP data only shows the main condition claimants are recorded as having – in practice many have more than one condition, and claimants may have both mental and physical problems.

“The latest DWP data on PIP highlights the ongoing challenges faced by people with mental health problems in accessing the support they need to live with dignity and independence,” said Nil Guzelgun, policy and campaigns manager for mental health charity Mind. “Benefits like PIP are a lifeline for people with mental health problems, helping them to pay for support like taxi fares when public transport feels impossible, help with chores due to fatigue, or food costs due to difficulties making food from scratch. 

“The proposed changes will mean that people whose mental health problems impact numerous elements of their daily lives will be left without the vital support they need. These reforms will only transfer costs and pressure to other government departments including already stretched mental health services by exacerbating poverty and worsening the nation’s physical and mental health.

“Behind every statistic is a real person struggling with their mental health and terrified by the government’s plans. We need urgent action to protect and improve support, not take it away. We are calling on the government to stop these planned cuts and instead commit to meaningful involvement of disabled people in shaping future benefit reforms.”

Around 480,000 of those currently receiving the standard daily living payment don’t receive the PIP mobility payment. This means that under the new rules, they would no longer receive any PIP benefit after they have been reviewed.

Moreover, the green paper outlined long-term plans for the health element of universal credit, which is paid to disabled people on low incomes and usually out of work, to be based on the reformed PIP assessment – including the four-point rule. This means that many disabled people will find themselves ineligible for any disability benefits at all – DWP figures published in response to a separate FOI request show that among all those receiving the UC health payment, 60% also receive the PIP daily living award, and of these, nearly 70% did not score four points in any daily living activity in their assessment.

“It is a particular problem that many of the people affected do not receive the PIP mobility component,” said Inclusion London’s Modern. “This is because PIP exempts recipients from the benefits cap. If the consequences of the policy change are that a large number of people lose PIP entirely and become exposed to the cap, this will increase homelessness among disabled people – already much higher than for non-disabled people – even further.”

Fingers Walker, spokesperson for grassroots disability activist group Crips Against Cuts, said: “Why, we wonder, is a policy supposedly intended to get claimants in all categories back to work almost exclusively targeting the most disabled people? There is zero fraud in PIP claims, according to the DWP, yet PIP claimants face exclusion from lifesaving income because [work and pensions secretary] Liz Kendall thinks it is us who are ‘taking the mickey’.

“The green paper was published with unseemly haste in a scramble to meet the chancellor’s Spring Statement. It has nothing to do with helping disabled people back into the work as a “moral” issue.  It is ill thought out; inconsistent and contains a number of inaccurate and misleading statements.

“The DWP has been forced to retract statements twice by the Office for Statistics Regulation for publishing wildly  exaggerated figures about the increase in the numbers of claimants.  It is highly likely that the DWP is also massaging the figures which say very few PIP claimants will be affected.”

A government spokesperson told Big Issue: “This data is partial. It doesn’t reflect that the majority of people who are currently getting PIP will continue to receive it, nor does it take into account our wider reforms to get people back in to work.

“This government will always protect the most vulnerable, it’s in our DNA. The social security system will always be there for those who need it most with severe health conditions, and we will ensure their income is protected.

“Too many people are being let down by a system that traps them out of work and holds them back. One in eight young people not working shows the system is broken. Our reforms will support those who can work – backed by £1bn additional funding to guarantee tailored help. This government will support everyone to thrive.”

And Steve Topple writes:

Rumours and comments from the government have been circulating for months over a Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) survey on how people spend their Personal Independence Payment (PIP). Since October last year, the corporate media has been drip feeding stories with little substance about the supposed DWP PIP research.

However, now people are coming forward saying they’ve got the survey – after a minister confirmed this week that it was going ahead. The first, and only thing, to say on this is: do NOT fill it in. How you spend your DWP PIP is none of the government’s business.

DWP PIP survey on how people spend their money: yes, it is real As the Canary reported last October, minister for disabled people Stephen Timms referenced the DWP PIP survey in response to a written question by Poole MP Neil Duncan-Jordan.

Duncan-Jordan was querying what assessments the department had made to assess the “adequacy” of PIP for supporting the “extra costs of disability.”

As part of his reply, Timms said that:

DWP pays close attention to the evidence base on the extra costs faced by disabled people; including academic research, analysis by Scope, and DWP’s own commissioned research on the Uses of Health and Disability Benefits from 2019. In order to understand more, DWP is now undertaking a new survey of Personal Independence Payment customers to understand more about their disability related needs. This project has an advisory group of experts including representatives of the disability charity Scope and academic experts.

Fast-forward to this week, Duncan-Jordan and Timms had another DWP PIP exchange. The latter confirmed that:

DWP is now undertaking a new survey of Personal Independence Payment customers to understand more about their disability-related needs. It is expected to produce findings in Autumn 2025.

However, that was all the detail provided. Buried on the DWP website was a shred of detail. On 7 April, it announced all research programmes that were being undertaken by private companies. Listed was:

April to July 2025, Verian – Areas of extra cost survey: If you are claiming Personal Independence Payment you may be contacted to take part in research. The aim is to understand disability-related needs and assess how these translate in additional costs that claimants incur.

Now we know

Now, thanks in part to Atlanta from campaign group Disability Rebellion, people have been coming forward with the details of the survey – as Verian has already being sending it out.

Replies to Atlanta’s post included this video – where the father of a DWP PIP, ‘Disability Talk With Steve’, claimant talks the viewer through the survey.

The questions in the survey revolve around things such as spending on aids and adaptations; travel, and food. Essentially what the DWP is doing is asking people about costs for each component (task) that features in the PIP Daily Living and Mobility elements of the benefit.

Meanwhile, Verian had also sent it to other people.

So, the much-talked-about DWP PIP survey has arrived. However, the department is not the only one conducting this kind of survey. Campaign group There For ME, which raises awareness around the illness myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS), along with other organisations is also conducting their own survey into DWP PIP and benefits.

This survey too, linked to a parliamentary group of MPs with an interest in ME, also asks questions on how benefit claimants spend their money. For the avoidance of any doubt, do NOT tell either the DWP or a charity how you spend your DWP PIP money – or any benefit money for that matter.

DWP PIP survey (and the others): not benign exercises

Firstly, it is none of the DWP’s business.

Secondly, this is not a benign exercise from the government.

By tailoring the questions to be specifically around each component (task) of the DWP PIP assessment, Labour is looking for ways it can cut PIP. For example, if a lot of claimants say they spend their PIP on aids and adaptations, then the DWP could argue this should be a matter for local authorities, who already fund adaptations – ergo, they can cut that financial part of PIP.

On a side note, There For ME and the other organisations conducting their own survey’s on DWP PIP claimant’s spending habits are being useful idiots for the government. They may think that they are showing the extra costs people with ME have, to use as some sort of leverage in mitigating parts of Labour’s planned cuts. However, Keir Starmer’s government is not going to care one iota – and if There For ME’s survey gets to them, the evidence will be used against chronically ill and disabled people.

So, in short the DWP PIP survey is here – and do not fill it out. It is a phishing exercise to help give a manipulated evidence base for Labour’s cuts. Anyone thinking otherwise needs to get their heads out of the sand, and quickly.

When 1.3 million chronically ill and disabled people are facing cuts, giving Labour a helping hand in doing it is perverse, at best.

WhatsApp With Him?

Robert Jenrick is clearly on manoeuvres.

Kemi Badenoch should sack him, withdraw the Whip, and tell anyone who did not like it to go with him.

If she does not, then he is right about her.

Bare Facts

A day and a half later, are there still any male prisoners in the women's estate? If so, why? In fact never mind why. How? How the hell?

The Supreme Court did not change the law yesterday. It said what the law had always been. While that has been the law, then women and possibly even girls have been stipsearched by male Police Officers and possibly also by male Prison Officers. Prepare for civil suits. And prepare for criminal prosecutions.