Whose Streets?

In London, unassimilable immigrant minorities have taken over whole streets under the flag of the foreign state that in April 2024 used British intelligence to murder three British veterans who were delivering humanitarian aid, and under the flag of the absolute monarchy that they demand be restored by British military intervention.

The demonstrations against such an intervention are not in support of Ali Khamenei, who is dead. They are being organised and led by the people who have been called the supporters of Saddam Hussein, of Bashar al-Assad, and of Vladimir Putin, despite having spent many, many years as the only opponents of each of them in British politics. Also being waved on the other side is the flag of an Islamo-Marxist organisation that was long headquartered in Saddam’s Iraq, where it fought for him against Iran and participated in atrocities committed by his Revolutionary Guard. During the Iraq War, it was bombed into surrender as part of a deal with Iran to hand over certain al-Qaeda suspects who were of course opponents of the Iranian regime.

If you have supported the previous catastrophic adventures, but you draw the line this time, then that is only because you find Donald Trump personally distasteful. Likewise, Reform UK is pro-war for two reasons, that it cannot say no to Trump, and that Richard Tice lives in Dubai. Some patriotism there. Truly, Reform is the Conservative Party Mark II, craven before the American Empire and its princely states in the Gulf, and largely resident in one or both of them, at least for tax purposes. The same goes for Advance UK and for the Irishman Stephen Yaxley-Lennon who, from his home in Spain, endorsed Advance the day before it took fewer votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party.

Restore Britain is sound enough on this, but its membership extends to foreigners who are nothing less than banned from the United Kingdom, yet it will soon be using a seat in the House of Commons to demand that much of the England football and cricket teams be cut on racial grounds. Still, Rupert Lowe’s opposition to this war is consistent with his desire to protect the safety of girls, 165 or ore of whom were killed in Minab when their elementary school was bombed yesterday morning, the beginning of the working week in Iran. Yaxley-Lennon, or Ben Habib, cannot say that. Nor can Robert Jenrick or Matt Goodwin.

But regime change from the air alone? Curtis LeMay’s turn as George Wallace’s Vice Presidential running mate in 1968 was a very rare political intervention by an Air Force Officer, and I can think of only one who has ever headed a military coup, Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings in Ghana, where he tried three times and succeeded twice. Is that reticence because you cannot change a regime from the air alone? Are we about to see that proved in Iran? Are we already seeing it?

An Uncannily Apt Epitaph

Steve Howell writes:

For almost 40 years, Peter Mandelson stood in the shadows of Labour governments, exerting influence over their policies through undemocratic means. By exchanging access for money and status, he represented the worst tendencies of British politics.

When Peter Mandelson was a teenager, he made no secret of his political ambitions. His grandfather, Herbert Morrison, had been deputy prime minister and school friends like me wondered if he would go one better. On one occasion, he showed me a copy of Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince and was clearly smitten with its tales of intrigue and treachery. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, Mandelson’s dramatic fall from grace has been triggered by the release of emails with Jeffrey Epstein that have more than a whiff of the Italian’s subterfuge about them.

Rise and Fall

For nearly forty years, little has happened in Britain’s Labour party without the seventy-two-year-old Lord (as he still is) pulling at least some of the strings. From early ally of Tony Blair to Britain’s ambassador to Washington, he has enjoyed enormous success and heavily influenced political discourse. But now he’s a pariah, disowned even by protégés and long-term allies, and facing three investigations: one into his role in Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s appointment as a trade envoy in 2001; a second into possible fraud while a member of the European Commission from 2004 to 2008; and a British police probe into misconduct in public office.

Meanwhile, Mandelson’s lucrative consultancy business, Global Counsel, has collapsed leaving his 21 percent stake worthless after clients bailed in droves. He had stepped down as the consultancy’s chairman in May 2024 as part of a restructuring that saw Jim Messina, the former Barack Obama aide, join the board when his own firm, Messina Group, took a 20 percent stake in a deal valuing Global Counsel at around £30 million.

In making his investment, Messina either did not know or did not care that media outlets in Britain had already revealed that Mandelson maintained an association with Epstein after his conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008.

Similarly, Keir Starmer, who has now admitted he knew of the longevity of Mandelson’s Epstein link, did not consider it to be an obstacle to appointing him to Britain’s top diplomatic role. Mandelson took up the post in February 2025 but was sacked by Starmer only seven months later, after the first batch of Epstein emails released by the US Department of Justice revealed more details of his ambassador’s post-conviction fraternization with Epstein.

Aided by friends in the media, Mandelson attempted to rehabilitate himself in January. The BBC indulged him with a long interview in which he portrayed himself as an innocent fool for trusting Epstein. The Times even continued to treat him as a credible political commentator by publishing a piece in which he praised Donald Trump and argued that “in one night, the US had achieved more in Venezuela than the so-called rules-based order did in decades.”

Drawn to Scandal

The reprieve was, however, short-lived. The release three weeks ago of more Epstein files revealed that Mandelson had sent the pedophile market-sensitive information while Britain’s business secretary and had even suggested encouraging Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, to “mildly threaten” one of his own cabinet colleagues over plans for taxing bankers’ bonuses. Whatever the formal outcome of the three investigations, Mandelson is now so toxic that it is hard to imagine any way back into public life for him.

Mandelson’s political career can be divided into three phases: consigliere to Tony Blair in the New Labour project from the 1980s to 1997; controversy-prone cabinet minister and European commissioner from 1997 to 2010; and arch-conspirator against the Left since 2010.

The first phase began in 1985 when Mandelson was appointed Labour’s director of communications. It was a role that allowed him to give politicians aligned with his agenda media exposure, and he soon started promoting Blair, who had been elected to Parliament two years earlier. On becoming an MP himself in 1992, Mandelson backed Blair in a successful Labour leadership bid, opening the way for the two men to create what they called “New Labour.” Essentially a cosmetic exercise — the policy substance being a continuation of Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberalism — the role of Blair and Mandelson was to package it, literally, in red roses for the party faithful and voters already eager for a change of government.

Labour’s election victory in 1997 opened a new phase in Mandelson’s career, with him immediately becoming a roving minister without a portfolio and then, a year later, being promoted to the cabinet as secretary of state for trade and industry. His elevation was, however, short-lived: in December 1998, he was forced to resign after it emerged that he had not declared an interest-free loan of £373,000 from a ministerial colleague to buy a house.

When I emailed Mandelson to tell him I started working for Jeremy Corbyn, he replied: ‘It pains me more than I can say that you should be making such a sacrifice but it’s your life.’ Ten months later, Blair brought his ally back as Northern Ireland secretary only for him again to be forced to resign after just over a year amid allegations that he had used his position to help a wealthy Indian businessman apply for British citizenship. Blair gave Mandelson a third chance in 2004 but at the safe distance of Brussels where he became one of Britain’s European commissioners, a role he held until Blair’s successor Gordon Brown surprised Westminster by appointing him business secretary in October 2008.

The third phase of Mandelson’s political career, after Labour’s election defeat in 2010, saw him orchestrating a battle against the Left, whose support had been replenished by millennials angered by the Iraq war and the imposition of austerity after the bank crash. Mandelson backed David Miliband to replace Brown as Labour leader, but he was beaten by his brother Ed, who was supported by the Left. When Labour lost again in 2015, Ed Miliband resigned, triggering a leadership ballot that an outright left candidate, Jeremy Corbyn, won comfortably.

Mandelson despised Jeremy Corbyn and made no secret of it. With Blairites still in control of the party machine and dominant among its MPs, Mandelson and his allies made life extraordinarily difficult for the new leader. After voters backed Brexit in a referendum in 2016, Mandelson blamed Corbyn and encouraged a vote of no confidence in him by Labour MPs. Corbyn won the resulting second leadership election but there was no respite. In February 2017, Mandelson said: “I work every single day to bring forward the end of (Corbyn’s) tenure in office . . . Every day I try to do something to rescue the Labour Party from his leadership.”

Toward the end of that month, I started working for Corbyn as deputy director of strategy and communications. When I emailed Mandelson to tell him this, he replied saying: “It pains me more than I can say that you should be making such a sacrifice but it’s your life.”

It would prove to be anything but a sacrifice. When the prime minister, Theresa May, called a surprise general election that spring, it allowed Corbyn to escape the stifling confines of Westminster and do what he does best: go out across the country and rally support for his ideas. To the surprise of many, though not those of us working on the campaign, Labour won its biggest popular vote for twenty years and gained enough seats to deny the Tories a majority. As May clung to power by negotiating a deal with a group of Northern Ireland unionist MPs, Mandelson admitted that he had underestimated Corbyn and told the BBC: “An earthquake has happened in British politics and I did not foresee it.”

With Corbyn’s position buoyed by relative electoral success, Mandelson changed tack and turned his attention to reversing Labour’s policy of accepting the result of the EU referendum. Shrewdly, he knew the issue could be Corbyn’s Achilles’ heel because it split his support base: while many Labour activists were strongly Remain, the electorate in the majority of parliamentary seats held by Labour had voted Leave. When Labour’s conference decided to support a second referendum in 2018, the party doomed itself to being punished in Leave areas in any subsequent election. And, sure enough, it was when the vote came in December 2019.

The election defeat delivered Mandelson’s primary goal: Corbyn had to resign. But who would he support to replace him? When asked this early in 2020 on a Guardian podcast in which we both took part, Mandelson avoided giving a straight answer, and I sensed something Machiavellian afoot. At the time, Starmer was describing himself as Corbyn’s friend and offering continuity on policy. The endorsement of the archenemy of the Left would not have been helpful. However, when the list of donors to Starmer’s campaign was published after voting closed, nearly all of them were long-standing wealthy allies of Mandelson.

It was therefore no surprise that a year into Starmer’s leadership, the Sunday Times reported that Starmer was “putting his faith” in Mandelson “to inject a dose of New Labour’s ‘winning mentality’” into his team. Soon afterward, Mandelson’s influence became obvious in shadow cabinet selections, the ditching or dilution of progressive policies, and the suspension of Corbyn, who was still an MP, from the parliamentary party.

For Mandelson, the general election in 2024 was an opportunity to complete his nine-year mission to wipe Corbyn off the political map. With the former leader standing for reelection to Parliament as an independent, Mandelson told Times Radio that he would be going out personally to campaign for the official Labour candidate trying to unseat Corbyn. Once again, Corbyn surprised him by winning comfortably. Meanwhile, across the UK, though Labour had gained fewer votes than under Corbyn, divisions on the Right had handed the party a huge parliamentary majority.

So, would Starmer reward Mandelson? Sure enough, the call came before the year was out. Being ambassador to Washington,and mixing with world leaders in the White House must have seemed a stratospheric note on which to end a career with so many ups and downs. But one fatal flaw would soon catch up with him. In a letter to me in 1973, Mandelson wrote: “I am a bourgeois at heart . . . the people whose company I enjoy most are those from a strictly bourgeois and intellectual background.” More than half a century later, it is an uncannily apt epitaph to his political career.

The Umpteenth Time As Fars?

There is no reading of just war doctrine that could possibly allow for these strikes on Iran, so Catholic hawks have started to oppose that doctrine itself. Well, the only other position that the Church permits is absolute pacifism, a small minority view for most or all of Christian history but never condemned, so good luck with that.

For the condemnation of pacifism, you need the Augsburg Confession, or the Westminster Confession, or the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion; the first two assert just war principles, but the third requires only "the commandment of the Magistrate", effectively forbidding opposition to any war in the name of the King, which has of course come to mean any war that had been ordered by the Prime Minister.

There are more than one million ancient indigenous Christians in Iran, mostly Armenians, Assyrians, and Chaldean Catholics. These wars have brought such communities to the brink of extinction in Iraq, Syria and the Holy Land, and one of them created the Martyrs of Libya. Think on.

The supposed reasons for this war change by the minute, but none of them is compatible with America First. Even John Healey admits that the missiles "fired in the direction of Cyprus" were not aimed at the British sovereign bases there, and in any case no one thinks of those in the same way as the other British Overseas Territories, never mind the United Kingdom itself. To most people, they are overseas bases of an all-volunteer military that has certain occupational hazards. Why are they there, anyway? And undeniably, they have not been attacked.

The vast crowds mourning Ali Khamenei in Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan and elsewhere are sincere, and they are representative of the large proportion of the Iranian population that is in ideological agreement with the regime, or that is materially dependent on it, or both. They would cry even harder under either or both of Reza Pahlavi, who has already declared himself Transitional Leader, and the Mojahedin-e-Khalq. But so would most of those who were dancing now.

Beyond The Grave

Donald Trump and his supporters were stunned that the slain Qasem Soleimani’s longstanding deputy was bumped up without further ado. The Revolutionary Guard Corps is very much still in business. And complete with Plans B, C, D and E, the 86-year-old Ali Khamenei’s successor will have been arranged for years, to be announced in a few hours’ time exactly as if the old monster had slipped away in his sleep.

The deaths of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Muammar Gaddafi all brought hubris before nemesis, pride before destruction, an haughty spirit before a fall. The Epstein Class was still trying to tie up loose ends by killing Saif al-Islam Gaddafi last month. The Supreme Leader of Iran is not the leader of all Shia Muslims, nor even of all Twelvers, whose number includes both the Pahlavis and the MEK. Most of them reject the Khomenist understanding of velâyat-e faqih.

Dissent from this war will be framed as antisemitic, even though we were not supposed to conflate Jews and Israel. So remember that Josh Simons was trying to frame his disgrace as antisemitic. Against Gabriel Pogrund and Andrew Feinstein. With the fall of Larry Summers, a return to Harvard may not be open to Dr Simons. But the archetypal Epstein Class academic is Professor Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, although one does have to wonder for how much longer. In 2021, Pinker wrote that, “Oliver Kamm’s urbanity, erudition and compassion are raised to the power of two in Mending the Mind. He put them to work in crafting this gorgeous and urgent book, and on every page they remind us of his moral that enviable gifts are no protection against the affliction of depression.”

Pinker is on the Editorial Board of Evolutionary Psychological Science, which in 2018, a very short time before 2021 in the life of a quarterly journal, published this masterpiece by Edward Dutton, whom I knew at university. He once tried to seduce me after Mass, so I know his little secret. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Mankind Quarterly, which he used to edit. Another member is Dr Adel Batterjee of Jeddah, the founder of the Benevolence International Foundation, which was placed under UN sanctions because it was a front for funding al-Qaeda. Kamm, Pinker, Dutton, Batterjee. Batterjee, Dutton, Pinker, Kamm. Truly, an Axis of Evil. Douglas Murray, indeed. Murray was a great friend and mentee of Christopher Hitchens, whom Gore Vidal famously named his “dauphin or delfino” before outliving him, and whose dauphin or delfino Kamm comically purports to be.

As a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Heterodox Social Sciences, Matt Goodwin has links to Aporia Magazine, which is published by the same Human Diversity Foundation that publishes Mankind Quarterly and Dutton’s podcast, The Jolly Heretic, linking it to Pinker, and thus to Kamm. The HDF was founded in 2022 by Emil Kirkegaard, otherwise William Engman, of OpenPsych. Kirkegaard is noted for his calls to legalise child pornography so as to reduce the number of rapes committed by paedophiles, to lower the age of consent to 13, and to make it even lower if puberty had begun. In 2018, he sued Oliver Smith for calling him a paedophile, but in 2020 he had to drop the action and pay Smith’s legal costs, leaving him heavily in debt. The HDF has taken over most of the previous work of the Pioneer Fund, publisher of The Bell Curve and American distributor of Erbkrank. Goodwin has commended Coming Apart, Charles Murray’s follow-up to The Bell Curve that applied its racism to class differences among whites.

It is a big club, and we are not in it. Nor would we wish to be. But Dutton is now Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Asbiro University, although I would be fascinated to know what business Dutton had ever run. Asbiro presents itself is the perfect university for centrists and for right-wing populists alike, run by and for “business”, the Department into which the Coalition even moved higher education out of Education, and neither teaching nor researching anything “useless”. A happy home in Łódź therefore awaits Simons, Summers, Pinker, Kamm, Batterjee, both Murrays, Goodwin and Engman, joining Dutton as Fellows of the Jeffrey Epstein Institute. Assuming that they could at least match the scholarly calibre of the ever-expanding Dutton corpus. That latest addition really would take some topping.

Within Three To Nine Years?

On control of where the oil and gas went, the present regime in Iran must have offered Donald Trump a worse deal than either or both of the absolute monarchist but fake royal, Reza Pahlavi, who is almost a complete stranger to Iran, and the Mojahedin-e-Khalq of Islamo-Marxist terrorists whose collaboration with Saddam Hussein was up to and including fighting for Iraq in the war with Iran, a country where it, too, has now been almost completely unknown for two generations. Watch out for those Westerners who wanted to abolish the constitutional monarchies in their own countries while sending their compatriots to die to defend the absolute monarchies in the Gulf, which are in the Epstein Files, and to restore the absolute monarchy in Iran, under a man who, if he is not in them, must have been redacted.

The Revolutionary Guard Corps has vast interests in energy, engineering, construction, shipbuilding, automation and telecommunications, and enormous influence over the bonyads, which are fabulously rich and economically pivotal religious charities. If it had made the most attractive bid, then the United States would now be attacking Iran to keep it in power. But after the war, someone will still have to run those things, and a limited number of people have the training or the experience. Who else could drill the oil for Trump? That is how these things work. See the Eastern Bloc after 1989. See Austria, Japan and both Germanies after 1945. See Venezuela now.

Every one of these Epstein Class wars has ended in disaster, yet still there are those who will cheer on another one. It is time to start listening to the people who have been right. Right about Kosovo, which is the distribution centre for most of the heroin on British streets. Right about Afghanistan. Right about Iraq. Right about Libya. Right about Syria. Right about Ukraine. Right about Venezuela, where there has been no regime change, but only a resources grab. And preparing to be proved right about Iran. Not that it gives us any pleasure.

Ignore anyone who advocated a military intervention unless you could imagine that person as an 18-year-old in battle. The call for war always comes primarily from the liberal bourgeoisie, the Epstein Class. That is the class least likely to join the Armed Forces voluntarily, or to see combat even in periods of conscription. Operationally, that is just as well. Yet if there is not a strong enough case for conscription, then there is not a strong enough case for war. Unless a country needs to mobilise its entire healthy and able-bodied male population of fighting age, then it is not under sufficient threat to justify going to war at all.

The result at Gorton and Denton deprived Keir Starmer of the political authority to go to war with Iran, among other things. In principle, that would also have been true if Reform UK had won, but today Nigel Farage has backed British intervention. Ben Habib and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon are also pro-war, but Rupert Lowe is not. Therefore, having been disowned on air by David Bull for his views on Britishness, and of course for losing, Matt Goodwin has the issue on which to decide whether to join Advance UK or Restore Britain.

Douglas Murray has declared for Pahlavi, so we must assume that that is also the position of Oliver Kamm. I was once sent review copies of Kamm’s and Murray’s respective books as a kind of job lot; as essentially a single work. We have always known 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 have always pointed out that they constituted a single milieu. But we have been proved right beyond our worst nightmares. Whereas QAnon hallucinated that God had raised up a deliverer in the person of Trump, the Epstein Class is made up of centrists, right-wing populists, right-wing elitists, and the world’s only famous anarcho-syndicalist and libertarian socialist.

But never mind Noam Chomsky. Is Bernie Sanders an anarcho-syndicalist and a libertarian socialist? Is Jean-Luc Mélenchon? Is Jeremy Corbyn? Is Zack Polanski? Is George Galloway, whom Starmer believes to be electorally the most influential man on Britain, despite no longer being in Britain? No, the archetypal Epstein Class academic is Professor Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard. In 2021, he wrote that, “Oliver Kamm’s urbanity, erudition and compassion are raised to the power of two in Mending the Mind. He put them to work in crafting this gorgeous and urgent book, and on every page they remind us of his moral that enviable gifts are no protection against the affliction of depression.”

Pinker is on the Editorial Board of Evolutionary Psychological Science, which in 2018, a very short time before 2021 in the life of a quarterly journal, published this masterpiece by Edward Dutton, whom I knew at university. He once tried to seduce me after Mass, so I know his little secret. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Mankind Quarterly, which he used to edit. Another member is Dr Adel Batterjee of Jeddah, the founder of the Benevolence International Foundation, which was placed under UN sanctions because it was a front for funding al-Qaeda. Kamm, Pinker, Dutton, Batterjee. Batterjee, Dutton, Pinker, Kamm. Truly, an Axis of Evil. Douglas Murray, indeed. Murray was a great friend and mentee of Christopher Hitchens, whom Gore Vidal famously named his “dauphin or delfino” before outliving him, and whose dauphin or delfino Kamm comically purports to be.

As a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Heterodox Social Sciences, Goodwin has links to Aporia Magazine, which is published by the same Human Diversity Foundation that publishes Mankind Quarterly and Dutton’s podcast, The Jolly Heretic, linking it to Pinker, and thus to Kamm. The HDF was founded in 2022 by Emil Kirkegaard, otherwise William Engman, of OpenPsych. Kirkegaard is noted for his calls to legalise child pornography so as to reduce the number of rapes committed by paedophiles, to lower the age of consent to 13, and to make it even lower if puberty had begun. In 2018, he sued Oliver Smith for calling him a paedophile, but in 2020 he had to drop the action and pay Smith’s legal costs, leaving him heavily in debt. The HDF has taken over most of the previous work of the Pioneer Fund, publisher of The Bell Curve and American distributor of Erbkrank. Goodwin has commended Coming Apart, Charles Murray’s follow-up to The Bell Curve that applied its racism to class differences among whites.

It is a big club, and we are not in it. Nor would we wish to be. Yet there are those who have to be removed from it, or at least put at some remove from it. There have been high table rumours about Joe Docherty for years. Like Matthew Doyle, he was introduced to the House of Lords by Hilary Armstrong, whose Whips’ Office in the Commons had included all three of Phil Woolas (did someone say something about electoral fraud?), Ivor Caplin and Dan Norris. All three were made Ministers soon after the vote for the Iraq War, and here we go again. Norris does not  turn up to Parliament, but he has one of the best voting records, because despite his own suspension from the Labour whip, his proxy vote is cast every single time by the Labour Whips. Armstrong was the political patroness, both of Anna Turley, and of Caplin’s close friend, closest ally, former lover, and constituency successor, Peter Kyle. Armstrong remains an active Labour member of the House of Lords, giving it as her institutional affiliation when she endorsed a mercifully ignored book that claimed that the accused of the Cleveland child abuse scandal had been guilty all along. As the young people say, every accusation is a confession.

Kyle joined his old boss in supporting the brief Leadership campaign of Jess Phillips. “I would stab Jeremy Corbyn in the front,” said the woman who was now “Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls”. She has accused British Pakistanis of importing wives for their disabled sons. She claims to have been rude and abusive towards Diane Abbott, although it is possible that she has built her reputation on lying about having used gutter language towards a woman who was old enough to be her mother. Phillips laughs at male suicides, at male cancers, at other men’s health issues, at violence against men, at problems in boys’ educational attainment, and at fathers denied access to their children. She has said that attacks of the kind that were seen in Cologne on the New Year’s Eve of 2015-16, “happen every week in Birmingham.”

Phillips’s Leadership Campaign was chaired by Wes Streeting, who would have become Leader when, as expected in 2019, the Conservative majority had been much reduced in 2024 but Boris Johnson had remained Prime Minister. Yes, that was barely six years ago. Streeting’s then employee, Sam Gould, was a sitting councillor when he committed offences startlingly similar to those of Liron Woodcock-Velleman, who sent naked pictures of himself to a 13-year-old girl while asking her to “show me your bra”, whether she was “at home alone”, and whether she was a virgin. Woodcock-Velleman was also a Labour councillor in London, and he was such a cog in the right-wing machine that he gave the evidence of Hope Not Hate at committee stage of what has become the Online Safety Act.

And on Tuesday 2 September, Phillips, that machine’s first choice for Streeting’s stopgap, told the House of Commons that, “South Yorkshire police should never have been left to investigate themselves in this matter, and moving those investigations to the NCA is absolutely the right thing to do. I would be lying if I said that over the years I had not met girls who talked to me about how police were part of not just the cover-up but the perpetration.” Read again those words of the Minister who refused a statutory inquiry, an inquiry that had been, and still is, demanded by the Muslim candidate whom she had beaten by only 693 votes at Birmingham Yardley, which he intends to contest again, the wonderful investigative journalist Jody McIntyre. Then read the Epstein Files and worry about inferior cultures with no respect for women and with endemic predation on young girls.

Still, Ann Limb will not be taking up her peerage, and Josh Simons has resigned as a Minister. Good. Now send round the rozzers. They should already have been by now. Limb obtained several positions by fraudulent means, it looks as if she also cooked the books, while Simons tried to frame people for offences against the Official Secrets Act and the National Security Act. Why has anyone been waiting for some investigation by his own Cabinet Office? If you are unfit to be a Minister, then you are unfit to be an MP. And with his Harvard, Silicon Valley and Beltway connections, Simons is a flight risk. On him as on Limb, call the Police. Even if they are the same Police who failed to notice the detailed defacement of the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, one of the most policed and surveilled places in the world at any hour of day or night. On the same night that a previously unheard of outfit alleged a previously unheard of form of electoral malpractice, a man with “asset” written all over him waved the false flag, again to discredit the result at Gorton and Denton, and also to justify the continued proscription of Palestine Action while, as we now see, manufacturing consent for Operation Epstein Fury against Iran.

Without Reservation

When Hannah Spencer arrives at Westminster on Monday, then will Keir Starmer know who she was? His letter to all Labour MPs does not mention her. It names three people, Angeliki Stogia once, Zack Polanksi once, and George Galloway three times.

Apparently, "The Greens were able to capitalise on an endorsement from George Galloway to win over enough voters to push them over the line." Labour went into the by-election 13,413 votes ahead of Reform UK. It came out of it 1213 votes behind Reform, and 5615 behind the Greens. That was quite some capitalisation on an endorsement from a 71-year-old on the other side of the world. It also explains George and Gayatri's arrest at gunpoint, which has led them to leave the country for the safety of their children. Andy Burnham would have won Gorton and Denton. Except against George. See them both at Makerfield?

George now says that the Greens therefore owe the Workers Party a clear run in the three constituencies where it came second last time, as well as wherever it had councillors by the time of the next General Election. That is complicated by the fact that it has a councillor in Gorton and Denton, but more broadly, if the Prime Minister is to be taken seriously, then it is asking for too little. The Workers Party and the closely allied Independent Left, not least since Jeremy Corbyn campaigned for Spencer, deserve clear runs wherever they were either first or second in 2024, and wherever they had councillors in 2029.

Starmer does not really do dignity, but even blaming George manages to maintain more of it than the idea that Muslim women who had been all ready to vote for Matt Goodwin were coerced out of doing so by their husbands who instead  insisted on a white woman with a gay Jewish Leader. "My husband deals with that" is one of those things which women say to men when they want us to go away. Sam Coates must have had it before, and he must have known that a woman reporter would have elicited a very different response.

Hardly mentioned is that the Conservatives dropped from 2,888 to 706 and lost their deposit. But if Muslims were integrated when they voted Labour yet are sectarian now that they do not, then why not anyone else who got uppity? Why not Hindus who stopped voting Conservative? In 2024, the Conservatives' only gain was Leicester East, Bob Blackman at Harrow East received the highest vote share for any Conservative candidate in the country, he was the only Conservative elected with an absolute majority, and he was one of only three Conservative MPs to be re-elected with increased majorities. Blackman has repeatedly been sworn in as an MP on the Bhagavad Gita, and at the House of Commons he hosted Tapan Ghosh, who was at least as violently opposed to Christians in Bengal as he was to Muslims.

Don't go off the reservation, Indians. If Muslims need to know their place, then so do Hindus. So do Jews. So does everyone. But the Muslims are clearly ignoring that nonsense, as must we all. For a start, the result at Gorton and Denton has left Starmer with no political capital to subject us to digital ID and to live facial recognition, or to take away our rights to trial by jury and to appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court, or to go to war with Iran.

False Flags and Red Paint

Paul Knaggs gets it, of course:

Does the British state truly lack the capacity to protect a twelve-foot bronze icon in the most watched square mile on earth, or does it simply find the alternative more politically useful?

Shortly after 4:00 a.m. on Friday, 27 February 2026, the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square was found dripping in red paint. The slogans were unambiguous: “Zionist war criminal,” “Stop the Genocide,” “Globalise the Intifada,” “Never Again is Now.” the fourth face of the plinth was tagged in Dutch: “Groeten uit Den Haag”, Greetings from The Hague.

That last line is not incidental. The Hague is the seat of the International Criminal Court, which in November 2024 issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity in Gaza. It is the ICC’s city. The message was pointed, knowing, and international in scope.

By dawn, the Metropolitan Police had arrested a 38-year-old Dutch national at the scene. He had already published a pre-recorded, seven-part Instagram statement under the name Olax Outis, a deliberate pseudonym. In Homer’s Odyssey, Outis means “Nobody”: it is the name Odysseus gave the Cyclops to escape without being identified.

The man chose the alias of someone who disappears. Instead, he walked directly into arrest.

The Dutch group Free the Filton 24 NL claimed responsibility. The reference is to the 24 Palestine Action activists charged over a break-in at an Elbit Systems weapons facility in Filton, near Bristol, in August 2024. Elbit is Israel’s largest arms manufacturer. The activists destroyed drone components they believed were being used in Gaza.

The Question of Timing 

Palestine Action activists Jordan Devlin, Charlotte Head, Zoe Rogers, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio and Fatema Zainab Rajwani pose for the camera the night before they smashed up an Elbit arms factory in August 2024. 

Here is the detail your morning television did not dwell upon: nine days before the Churchill vandalism, on 18 February 2026, a jury at Woolwich Crown Court acquitted the first six Filton defendants, the “Filton 6” of every charge put to them, including aggravated burglary, which carried a potential life sentence. They had admitted destroying the drones. The jury acquitted them anyway.

In the same fortnight, the High Court ruled that the government’s proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation had been unlawful. The state’s entire legal architecture, built to crush this movement, was collapsing in open court. Government ministers were furious. The Crown Prosecution Service, within days, announced it would seek a retrial.

And then, nine days after that acquittal, a Dutch activist in a red boiler suit with “I Support Palestine Action” written across his back in large letters walked up to the most photographed monument in Britain and spent an extended period painting it, before being arrested in under two minutes.

We are not asserting the Home Office handed him the paint. We are asking why the door was left open long enough to get a result.

The Panopticon’s Convenient Blind Spot 

Parliament Square is ringed by some of the highest concentrations of CCTV cameras in the world. The Metropolitan Police’s “ring of steel” around Parliament is a point of institutional pride. The Met states its officers were “on scene within two minutes of being alerted.” Two minutes. Yet the man completed what appears to be an extensive, multi-sided mural before a single officer intercepted him.

The question is not whether the police can respond. Clearly, they can. The question is why pre-emptive monitoring, routine in this specific location, did not flag a man in deep red overalls approaching a Category A monument at 4:00 a.m.

There are three possible answers. The first is institutional incompetence, which those who built the surveillance state around Westminster will find it difficult to argue with a straight face. The second is that the cameras saw, the system logged, and a decision was made to let the act complete itself. The third the most structurally important, is that it does not matter which of the first two is true.

False Flags and Red Paint 

The charge filed is “racially aggravated criminal damage.” This is not a coincidence of phrasing. It is a legal instrument. The “Zionist war criminal” slogan triggers the racial aggravation element; “Globalise the Intifada”, which both the Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police declared a chargeable offence in December 2025, appears on the plinth as if placed for the purpose. 

This man did not merely vandalise a statue. He gift-wrapped a prosecution, a news cycle, and a pretext.

The Home Office called Churchill “a figure of great national pride.” Within hours, the Jewish Leadership Council called the act “disgusting.” The Board of Deputies invoked the Holocaust. Political figures across the spectrum rushed to condemn Palestinian solidarity protesters as a whole, not the individual, not the act, but the movement.

Nine days after the movement had won in court, it was back in the dock of public opinion.

The Verdict 

We are not in the business of conspiracy for its own sake. We are in the business of structural analysis, and the structure here is clear. Whether this individual acted from pure moral conviction, whether he was a “useful idiot” for forces he could not see, or whether the state’s security apparatus made a very deliberate choice about what it would and would not stop, the result is identical.

The paint dries. The arrest is made. The Filton acquittals are buried beneath outrage about Churchill. The High Court’s ruling on Palestine Action is crowded out by photographs of a defaced monument. The government, losing the legal argument, wins the emotional one.

It is not quite the burning of the Reichstag. But it does not need to be. The modern state has learned subtlety. It no longer needs to burn buildings. It needs only to leave a door ajar and wait for someone filled with the righteous passion of indignation or reckless enough to walk through it.

Greetings from The Hague, indeed. The question is whether the message arrived, or whether it was simply repainted into something more useful to those who were already watching.