Full Force

If Andy Burnham refuses to write for The Sun, then who should do so instead, and why? We trust that it would be someone who argued for Khloe Simmonds to be held in a men’s prison. But the Government’s definition of the full force of the law does not extend to arresting people who had assaulted and injured the Police, or who were wearing political or paramilitary uniforms in breach of the Public Order Act 1936, which imposed that ban specifically against the Blackshirts. There may be something similar about the black and orange outfits favoured by the Middlesbrough mourners, which may in turn account for the tightening of the leash on Meghan and Harry.

The Blackshirts and the Police had marched as a single formation on Saturday in Dover, which was not the most logical place to wish to Stop The Boats. But while Kent has gone Reform UK, Hampshire remains Conservative, the unitary City Council in Portsmouth is controlled by the Liberal Democrats, and Hampshire Constabulary mishandled the murder of Henry Nowak, so relations are clearly more strained.

“Tommy Robinson” is a nom de guerre of a man whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, but “Danny Tommo” is just what a boy named Daniel Thomas is called by his mates in school. It was fitting that a 37-year-old who still chose to be so addressed should become well-known on the day that Netflix announced a revival of The Inbetweeners. One of the Inbetweeners should have gone all Tommo if, as would seem quite likely, another, or at least another character, had gone all Khloe. With his teenage progeny as the Khloe, my money would be on Jay as the Tommo, in view of the Reform affiliation of Bonnie Blue, which brings us to that of which Ahmet Koçak writes:

Ukraine is considering dismantling its ban on pornography as lawmakers seek to bring a large online adult industry into the tax system and redirect millions of dollars toward the country’s wartime needs. Yaroslav Zhelezniak, an opposition lawmaker who chairs Parliament’s finance committee, estimates legalization could generate as much as $25 million a year, according to The Wall Street Journal. He says that would be enough to finance about 30,000 drones. The sum is modest against Ukraine’s stated annual defense requirement of $120 billion. However, supporters argue the industry is already generating taxable income while operating under laws that expose creators to criminal prosecution. A bill co-authored by Zhelezniak passed its first parliamentary vote in July and is awaiting a second reading. 

Taxing an Illegal Industry

 

Ukraine prohibits the production, distribution, and possession of pornography, with penalties of up to seven years in prison. At the same time, tax authorities are pursuing Ukrainians earning money from adult content, creating a legal contradiction for creators who disclose their income. “These women either don’t pay taxes and face criminal charges for that, or they pay taxes and get charged with violating pornography laws,” Zhelezniak said. “It’s a tragicomic situation.” The issue intensified after tax authorities received data from Fenix International, OnlyFans’ U.K.-based parent company. The figures showed that 7,900 Ukrainians earned more than $131 million on the platform in 2023. Authorities subsequently began contacting creators over unpaid taxes. Some models were earning more than $20,000 a month. But filing tax declarations could also provide evidence that could be used in pornography investigations.

Creators Move Abroad

Svitlana Dvornikova, an OnlyFans creator with one million subscribers, regularly travels from her home near Ukraine’s front line to rented villas in France or Spain to produce content. Working inside Ukraine could expose her to prosecution. Police searched her home last spring and seized electronic devices and the equivalent of $200,000 in cash, which she said she had set aside for taxes. “They had a list of webcam models, and knew all their addresses,” Dvornikova said. She said officers offered to take half the money as a bribe and allow her to keep the rest. She refused. Hundreds of Ukrainian OnlyFans models have moved abroad, while others have found ways to continue operating inside the country. Tax lawyer Lesia Mykhalenko, who has represented more than 100 OnlyFans models, said the existing law diverts legal resources during wartime. “This is a victimless crime,” she said. “It unnecessarily burdens the legal system at a time when we should be focused on defending the country.”

Corruption and Workarounds

Supporters of legalization also argue that prohibition has created opportunities for corruption. In May, the office of Ukraine’s general prosecutor said police departments in three regions had each been receiving more than $20,000 a month in bribes linked to the industry. Some businesses have adapted by operating behind other corporate structures. Former waitress Iryna Mosiychuk runs Beezone, officially presented as a consulting company. Its office outside Lviv contains webcam studios used by several dozen models serving mostly U.S.-based clients. Mosiychuk told WSJ her models earn between $2,000 and $7,000 a month. She pays about $5,000 in taxes each month and has told lawmakers that the amount could increase twentyfold if the business were allowed to expand.

Defense Revenue Drives the Debate

Dvornikova has also sought to frame legalization as a defense-financing issue. In June 2025, she submitted a petition to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s website after the police raid. Calling herself a “conscientious taxpayer,” she said she had paid 40 million hryvnias, about $900,000, in taxes, money she said could finance 100 pickup trucks or 2,000 drones. The petition secured the 25,000 signatures required for a presidential response within a week. Zelensky said Parliament would consider legislation to legalize pornography. Dvornikova’s case has not reached court, and she said it has been put on hold while lawmakers debate the bill.

Pornography had been legally prohibited and practically unknown in the Soviet Union. But post-Soviet Russia was flooded with it, to placate the young male population during the larceny of their country by means of the economic “shock therapy” that created today’s oligarchs. “Sex work” of various kinds has always been encouraged when the young men have needed to be stupefied, and it still is. The corporate capitalist pornogrification of our own society is no accident. In welcoming the endorsement of Bonnie Blue, Reform has picked its side, the same side as the Ukraine of Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Brigade, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, and all the rest of them, including the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps. The Ukraine that in Ternopil has named a football stadium after Roman Shukhevych, on a street named after Stepan Bandera. The Ukraine that in its third-largest city of Odessa is poised to ban from the public sphere the Russian first language of two thirds of that city’s population. The Ukraine of Andriy Biletsky, to whom “the mission of Ukraine is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival against the Semite-led Untermenschen”. And the Ukraine of Pavlo Lapshyn, who is still in His Majesty’s Prison, and who will be there for decades yet, because of his 2013 murder of 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham. Lapshyn went on to put bombs outside three mosques in this country. He belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Brigade, being led by its “political ideologist”, Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell.

The AfD is in nothing like that league, even if, in Alfred Freyberg, it was the old Free State of Anhalt that delivered the first Nazi leader of a state, as early as 1932. The dominant right-wing vote in Saxony-Anhalt has not shifted at all, except in that it has shifted from the CDU to the AfD. The full-blown Nazis of Die Heimat finished below the satirical Die PARTEI, recalling the fewer votes at Gorton and Denton for Advance UK than for the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. The disappearance of the FDP is a story, and the kingmaking emergence of the BSW is a big story. Both have messages for a Britain in which third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in primary schools were to identify potential future NEETs so that third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in secondary schools might deliver to them a curriculum designed by and for local vape shops, phone shops, nail bars, tattoo parlours, carwashes, mini-marts, Turkish barbers, American candy shops, adult gaming centres, and lap dancing clubs, there being nothing else. In the absence of trade unions, no one would be able to come up through them to enter the political process, which would therefore be reserved for those who had followed Andy Burnham to Cambridge or Lucy Powell to Oxford and to King’s College London. Reform has nothing to say to what Rachel Sylvester calls “the mismatch between Reform’s policies and the voters it is trying to attract”:

Robert Jenrick, the party’s Treasury spokesman, has announced plans to save £50bn a year by cutting welfare, including disability benefits. He wants to replace personal independence payments (Pip), given to those with a long-term physical or mental health condition, with a “health security allowance” that would pay almost nothing to about two thirds of current claimants. But the data suggests this will disproportionately affect Reform voters and those the party needs to win over.

A study by Imperial College London’s School of Public Health found that the areas where Farage’s party did well at the last election have a higher prevalence of people living with chronic diseases than other parts of the country. The Reform constituencies had the highest average prevalence of 15 out of the 20 health conditions that were analysed including asthma, coronary heart disease, obesity, diabetes and depression. These voters are far more likely to rely on disability benefits including Pip.

To take an example from the West Midlands, in the parliamentary constituency of Walsall and Bloxwich, high up on Farage’s target list, there are 11,449 Pip claimants and a Labour majority of 4,914. In Birmingham Northfield, there are 10,600 people on the disability benefit and a Labour majority of 5,389. Reform cannot win – and Farage will not get to No 10 – if these voters decide it is against their own economic interest to support Reform. Analysis by the journalist Fraser Nelson has shown that almost all Reform’s target seats are heavily dependent on welfare. In Jenrick’s own constituency of Newark, there are 6,011 Pip claimants. His majority when he stood there as a Conservative at the last general election was 3,571.

This is not the only policy tension for a party that has always been torn between economic free marketeers and cultural protectionists. Reform voters are typically older and poorer than the wider population. Their average age is 56 and 27% say they are “struggling” on their current household income, yet Farage is promising to prioritise British-born workers under 35 when allocating social housing. He urges trade unions to affiliate themselves with his party while opposing new employment protections, and positions himself as a “man of the people” while promising to repeal the Renters’ Rights Act.

Reform wants to position itself as the “party for the workers” but it is run by a former commodities trader, property investor and banker, and funded by a crypto-billionaire. Farage has declared his intention to “bring cryptocurrency in from the cold” with a pledge to cut capital gains tax on crypto assets and create a “bitcoin digital reserve at the Bank of England”, which may appeal to his party’s donors but is irrelevant to the hard-pressed voters it needs to reach.

Tim Montgomerie, the right-wing commentator recently suspended by Reform, says Donald Trump won power in the US by convincing former Democratic voters that he would not take away their top-up benefits. “If Reform are going to achieve the same kind of result, they need to offer economic as well as cultural reassurance,” he argues. The NHS is another vulnerability, which is why Farage insists he has no plans to privatise it.

That is Britain today, and who would fight for it unless conscripted? The punishment for failure to comply with conscription is to be a fine, which is always the mark of a law that was binding on the poor but not on the rich. Who would fight for the Ukraine set out above? Not even Ukrainians will, with press gangs on the streets, and with secondary schools reporting that few or no boys had turned up for the start of the academic year. Who would fight for Saudi Arabia, which even the BBC, 25 years after some of us, has pretty much admitted was behind what I suppose that we are going to have to call 9/11? The recent twenty-fifth anniversary of the Holy Cross school dispute called to mind the 28 February double-tap Tomahawk missile attack on a girls’ primary school in Minab, killing 156 civilians, including 120 children.

Ratko Mladić did evil things to people who did evil things to the people who turned out in vast numbers to mourn him. As in most wars, there was no good side in those by which Yugoslavia was carved up into morsels digestible by global capital. But does Britain plan a midnight flinging into an unmarked pit for the corpse of Keir Starmer, who said that Israel had the right to cut off power and water to more than one million children in Gaza, and who furnished Israel with arms and intelligence accordingly? Or for the corpse of Boris Johnson, who in March 2022 scuppered a peace deal in Ukraine in return for one million pounds from the same Christopher Harborne who supplied Ukraine with drones even as he supplied the United States military with jet fuel refined from Russian and Iranian oil, and who famously also gave five million pounds to Nigel Farage? Or for the corpse of David Cameron, who brought back slave markets to Libya. Or to the corpse of Tony Blair, the mere mention of whose name says it all? Would you fight for the country that intended to send them off in style?

Still, Britain had to have been indisputably right once, and that is the case in relation to the Falkland Islands, which were uninhabited until Britain settled them with people who were neither slaves not indentured labourers; I am descended from both on Saint Helena. By contrast, Argentina, which in the 1830s wanted the Falklands as the penal colony that it has never been under Britain, is built on the eye-watering colonial genocide of its indigenous peoples, and its claim to the Islands is based on nothing more than a continental shelf, as if a mere topographical feature had political rights.

But around the axis of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu spin the likes of Javier Milei, who was until recently the chainsaw-wielding darling of a British Right that always needed a Fatherland somewhere away from the National Health Service. The supporters of Milei, of the unequivocally pro-Argentine Netanyahu, and of the ambivalent Trump, form a fifth column in this country, to be identified and treated as such. The commonest telltale sign, although there are many more, is the suggestion that Trump might have a point that Britain had been insufficiently supportive of his war with Iran.

Never Mind The Ballots

That 16-year-old who stabbed his teacher in the head rightly cannot be named. Yet on Wednesday evening, the House of Commons gave Third Reading to a Bill to give 16-year-olds the vote. If we are going to hold the line against allowing 16-year-olds to self-identify as the opposite sex, then we need to hold the line against this, too. I have always been uncharacteristically agnostic about that one, but while the usual arguments on both sides are rubbish, this changes the game. Intentionally or otherwise, the lowering of the voting age for devolved and municipal elections in Scotland set the scene for it, and must be reversed. The quality of the elections varies widely, but a formal voting age of 18 is very nearly universal. Consider the huge difference in, say, drinking ages, or ages of marriage. Yet the world looks at the question of when to allow people to vote, and overwhelmingly it concludes that, while these things were always going to be arbitrary, 18 would do.

The Greens voted to enfranchise people two years below the school leaving age, and most girls who voted at all would vote Green. But Reform UK mostly voted against it, with none in favour, even though most boys who voted at all would vote Reform if the General Election were held this week, although the abstention of Rupert Lowe suggested that that particular wind was increasingly blowing further right again. Watch out for something similar on Proportional Representation, which UKIP, the Brexit Party and Reform used to support, with Nigel Farage himself arguing forcefully in favour of it. Attitudes may change now that it was being considered specifically in order to prevent a Reform Government. Look, I am not necessarily against PR. It is just that First Past the Post is like the monarchy. It does not do any of the things that its proponents say that it does, and they spend most of their time complaining that those things are not there. But the other side's arguments are just as bad, so the case for change has not been made.

Britain has had six Prime Ministers in the last 10 years, including three in 2022. The idea that the world looks at this country and sees stability is completely laughable. First Past the Post has delivered hung Parliaments on two of the last five occasions, and there have been four hung Parliaments in my lifetime, even if only those two have resulted directly from a General Election. While I was politically active, the purported bulwark against "coalitions of chaos", the Conservative Party, led no fewer than three coalition arrangements with three different parties, including the only formal Coalition since 1945. That nightmare of austerity and war was with the supposed lynchpin of "the Progressive Alliance". But the argument for any specific or unspecific alternative is no better, and First Past the Post is what we have.

In treating of democracy, what is the demos? At the 2021-22 census, there were 10.7 million people who had been born abroad. They would have included Cliff Richard until he decamped to the Republic of Barbados. They included Boris Johnson. They included Daniel Hannan. They included Peter Hitchens. They included me. We are all British citizens, but the thing about allowing only British citizens to vote is that Britain has never done it. Almost no other country allows any category of non-citizen to vote. In the United States, you cannot become President unless you were born there. Imagine suggesting there or in Israel that any non-citizen should have the vote. National Conservatives have picked the wrong laboratory here, where an Irish or Commonwealth citizen could in principle become Prime Minister. Is anyone still sitting in the House of Commons for an English, Scottish or Welsh seat without being a British citizen, or for a Northern Irish seat without being British or Irish? That may now be an open goal for rivals to be First Past the Post. Yet it is perfectly possible.

Last year, the Migrant Democracy Project was merely stating the obvious when it called this country's qualifications for voting "colonial". Britain has a long, recent, and, as we see, ongoing imperial history. It was in the EU for two generations. It is mercantile. De Gaulle was right to call us "maritime", but not to call us "insular". Citizens of countries that were in the French Empire when he said that now have the vote in Britain as citizens of the Commonwealth. We already enfranchise the Commonwealth citizens of Rwanda, Mozambique, Gabon and Togo, none of which was ever in the British Empire. Why let a Gabonese or a Togolese vote, but not an American or an Israeli?

Extending suffrage to citizens of countries with which we had a connection is so British that it is positively Burkean, like the National Health Service. We give the citizens of the Commonwealth's other member states the right to vote and stand in elections to our Parliament, but very few of those countries reciprocate; two of the last six Prime Ministers of Australia have had to give up their natal British citizenship in order to sit in the Australian Parliament. The present system enfranchises Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, but not Americans or Israelis. Is that what those who write above the line in the Daily Telegraph want? It says that Ghanaians are more "like us" than Germans are, and that Swazis are more "like us" than Swedes are. Is that what those who write below the line in the Daily Mail want? 

Countries join and leave the Commonwealth quite frequently. None of them has any more recent connection to Britain that any member of the European Economic Area has. By any measure, many have less. Some fairly recent additions to the Commonwealth have no more connection to Britain than anywhere else in the world has. Although no less, either. Britain is now globally noted for its superdiversity, uniquely combining people from every inhabited territory on Earth, some level of ethnic diversity down to every neighbourhood and village, and a huge and exponentially increasing mixed-race population in the society that accepted mixed-race people and couples more than anywhere else. So, since there would seem to be no remaining example to the contrary, require parliamentary candidates to be British citizens in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens in Northern Ireland. But either restrict the franchise in the same way, or let everyone vote. Those two options should be put to the House of Commons, with whichever passed by the larger majority coming into effect, or with neither of them doing so if both had been defeated.

Beware of tying the franchise to the payment of income tax. 42 per cent of adults have incomes that do not reach that threshold, which Reform wants to increase. No, not "before benefits". Two in five adults have gross incomes, from all sources, of less of than one thousand pounds per month. If that does not sound like the Britain that you know, then you need to get out more. And if a Polish full-time cleaner could not vote because her income was too low for the taxman, then why should a British full-time cleaner be able to vote? So it would begin. 

Then there is the matter of party funding. The Sainsbury family still owns about 15 per cent of the company that bears its name, and that company has an annual profit of more than one billion pounds, so that family is not doing too badly, and it matters enormously that it makes eye-watering donations to all three main parties only for Sainsbury's to be sent 10,000 unemployed youths who will be compelled to work for it instead of Christmas temps, and to be paid only the Universal Credit that supermarket staff also claimed on an enormous scale. Other major shareholders include BlackRock and the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, also, like several more, with impeccable political connections. You do not need work experience for an entry level job in a supermarket, and in any case there is no job at the end of one of these so-called placements, yet the State will be subsidising Sainsbury's at least twice over, and giving it free advertising into the bargain by presenting the arrangement as an act of corporate civic responsibility. I cannot remember anything more brazenly corrupt.

But as with the companies named, yet not punished, for having criminally failed to pay the national minimum wage, it would be wrong to boycott Sainsbury's and damage its workers. Rather, where is USDAW, which gives nearly two million pounds per year to the Labour Party? Conservative and Reform councils are saved from abolition, while Liberal Democrat shadow authorities are assured that they will enter into their pomp, but, from Sainsbury's, to the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields, to wherever there is an equal pay claim such as the Employment Appeal Tribunal has today rendered meaningless, what about the workers?

From the impact of immigration in driving down wages and working conditions, to the softening of the British such that they submitted to the lockdowns, to the 62,199 or more arrests for speech crimes in the last five years, those bemoaning any one or more of those should consider that none of them would have been possible, in the same way in the second case or at all in the other two, without the weakening of the trade unions. The same would be true of that old New Labour standby, compulsory voting. If they do not want to ban something, then they want to make it compulsory. People will vote if they are given anything to vote for. Indeed, with Labour now ahead of Reform, it is not clear why those agitating for compulsory voting thought that there was a problem. As with the voting age and the electoral system that had given them 403 seats, in fact.

The Road To Reform

Paul Knaggs writes:

There was a small moment at Reform UK’s conference in Birmingham this weekend that deserves considerably more attention than it received. At a Christian Fellowship for Reform fringe meeting on Friday, 4 September, Andrea Williams of Christian Concern told the audience that Bethany Hutchison, the lead nurse in the Darlington nurses’ case, was sitting in the room. Williams told delegates that the established unions had failed Hutchison and her colleagues, leading them to establish their own organisation, the Darlington Nursing Union.

It would be very easy for the left to dismiss that scene. Another feminist has wandered off to Reform. Another woman has been seduced by the right. Another supposed example of some inexplicable rightward drift. That explanation is not just convenient. It is lazy, and it insults every woman who has ever had to build something for herself because the people paid to build it for her would not lift a finger. The more honest question is this: where exactly did people expect these women to go?

Seven nurses, one tribunal, and a union that looked away 

The Darlington nurses are not Reform activists, nor did they begin as activists of any sort. They began as NHS nurses who objected to being required to share a female changing room at Darlington Memorial Hospital with a transgender colleague who was born male. They raised it with management. They were told, in effect, to reconsider their attitude. They took it to an employment tribunal, and on 16 January this year, they won. Employment Judge Seamus Sweeney found that requiring the women to share the changing room amounted to unwanted conduct related to sex and gender reassignment that violated their dignity and created a hostile, humiliating and degrading environment. The case succeeded on indirect sex discrimination as well as harassment. The trust apologised, paid seven of the nurses a combined £187,000, and committed to separate facilities. 

Readers of this publication will recognise the pattern underneath it, because it is the oldest one in the movement. Emma Paterson founded the Women’s Protective and Provident League in 1874, at a time when the established unions frequently refused to organise women at all. Mary Macarthur founded the National Federation of Women Workers in 1906, then helped organise the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath into their famous victory four years later. Each generation of working women has, at some point, discovered that the room built to represent them has quietly locked its door, and has gone and built another room rather than wait for someone to unlock it. Nobody granted these women that right. They took it, because the alternative was to keep asking politely for something that was never coming.

This is what trade unionism looked like before it forgot itself, and what it looks like again the moment women decide to stop waiting for permission. The Darlington nurses asked Unison for representation and were ignored. Before the tribunal had even ruled, Unison’s own president accused the health secretary of pandering to anti-trans bigotry, for the offence of agreeing to meet them. When the judgment came down finding unlawful discrimination against seven working women, Unison’s public statement ran to a single paragraph confirming its policy remained unchanged. 

UNISON would argue that it is defending another group of workers it believes is vulnerable to discrimination, and it has every democratic right to campaign for the law to change. The question its female members are entitled to ask is why that campaigning has so often seemed to leave their own sex-based interests without an advocate, and why a statement responding to a tribunal finding of unlawful discrimination against seven of its own members found no room for a single word of solidarity. Four of the nurses, having already been vindicated in a courtroom, still face investigation by the Nursing and Midwifery Council for having spoken publicly about the case. Let that stand as its own sentence for a moment. Women who won in a court of law can still find their professional registration under scrutiny for speaking publicly about the dispute in which that court ultimately vindicated them. So they built the Darlington Nursing Union, the first of its kind, and they carried on.

The Moment They Stopped Asking and Started Demanding 

On the Saturday of the same conference, Bethany Hutchison stood in front of Nigel Farage himself, on camera, and did the thing every good organiser eventually learns to do. She stopped hoping for sympathy and asked for a commitment she could hold him to. What will Reform do, she asked, to ensure single sex spaces are lawfully enforced, not only across the NHS but across every institution in the country. And what will Reform do to protect a nurse who loses her career for defending biological reality in her own workplace.

Farage did not deflect. He told her there was a Supreme Court ruling on this, and that it was simply not being enforced, whether in the civil service, the public sector or the NHS. Women deserved their own single sex spaces, he said, and he would fight for that. When Hutchison told him she was currently under NMC investigation despite having already been vindicated in court, and asked him to hold the regulator to account, his answer came without a beat of hesitation. “All right. We will.” 

Watch that clip and understand what actually happened in it. A working nurse from Darlington stood in front of a man who may be the next prime minister of this country and made him say, on the record, in front of a room full of cameras, words that no health secretary has managed to put into enforceable guidance in over a year. Call it what it actually is: a woman doing precisely what her own union should have been doing for her since 2023, doing it herself because nobody else would. She deserves to be told that plainly, by us, before anything else is said about what happens next. 

What She Deserves Next Is the Truth, Not Applause 

Because she does deserve the truth, and the truth is this. The Supreme Court ruling Farage invoked was not a freestanding statement about biology floating above the law. It was an interpretation of the Equality Act 2010, the statute that defines what sex means in British law, the statute that contains the single sex exceptions the Darlington nurses actually won under, and the statute that creates the harassment and indirect discrimination provisions their tribunal victory rests on. That Act did not appear from nowhere. It consolidated fifty five years of legislation built specifically to give working women a legal remedy, running from the Equal Pay Act of 1970 through the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 and everything Parliament added to protect women in the decades that followed. 

Reform UK’s stated policy, announced by Suella Braverman in February and repeated since by Farage himself, is to repeal that Act entirely. In its place, Reform has proposed a Women and Motherhood Protection Act, promising to keep equal pay, sex discrimination protection and maternity rights intact. What it has not done, in the seven months since it was announced, is publish that promise in the kind of clause by clause detail that a solicitor rather than a press officer could actually rely on in front of a tribunal. Nobody has said what happens to the indirect discrimination test. Nobody has said what happens to the harassment provisions. Nobody has said what happens to the single sex exceptions that won the Darlington case in the first place.

Which means the man who told Bethany Hutchison the law simply needs enforcing leads the party whose published policy is to abolish that law. He did not say this to her, and to be fair, nobody in that room demanded he reconcile it. That reconciliation does not disappear because it went undemanded on the day. Somebody has to raise it now, before a single vote is cast on the strength of four words spoken from a stage, and it should be raised by people who are on her side, not by people looking for a reason to sneer at her for asking the question at all.

There is a case for Farage’s answer that deserves to be made honestly, because dismissing it entirely would be its own kind of dishonesty. For three years, the only public figures willing to say the word biological about this case out loud have sat somewhere to the right of the Labour front bench. Wes Streeting told the nurses something had gone wrong in our society, then took more than a year to produce guidance that still has not arrived. James Murray, his successor, has been accused of quietly dropping the meeting his predecessor promised. Against that record, a man willing to say the law simply needs enforcing, unprompted, in front of a camera, is offering something these women have not had from anyone claiming to stand with them. That matters. Acknowledgement is not nothing. But acknowledgement is not legislation, and warmth from a stage has never once amended a statute book.

A Political Promise Is Not a Legal Right 

This is not a hypothetical risk. It has already run its full course, on a different group of women, over a different injustice, within living memory. In 2019, Labour promised the WASPI women, born in the 1950s and given almost no warning that their state pension age was rising, a compensation scheme John McDonnell called “a historic debt of honour,” costed at fifty eight billion pounds. Labour won power in 2024 and rejected compensation that December. Legal action forced ministers to reconsider, and on 29 January this year, they rejected it again. WASPI is now back in the courts pursuing a further judicial review. The debt of honour survived opposition rather better than it survived office. 

A survey of nearly eleven thousand WASPI women, not a national poll, but a fair reading of how the campaign’s own membership felt, found support for Labour had collapsed to seven per cent, down from thirty per cent at the last election, while support for Reform had climbed to twenty four per cent, up from fifteen. Farage did not win those women with a promise. Asked directly by Talk Radio where Reform stood on compensation, he said: “I’ve never made any false promises to WASPI women. It’s done, it’s over.” He told them plainly that nothing would change, and they moved to him anyway, because a government that had broken its word twice had no patience left to spend.

Every union official who called these women bigots built the road to Reform 

None of this is a case for the institutional left to feel vindicated. It is the opposite. Every union official who called these women bigots, every general secretary who wrote a single paragraph where solidarity should have been, every liberal commentator who decided that defending biological sex made a woman disreputable, built the road that led Bethany Hutchison to that microphone in Birmingham. She did not wander off. She was walked to the door by people who called it progress. 

But the lesson she has already taught, in a tribunal room and in a changing room and now on a conference stage, is bigger than which party currently has the manners to say the word woman out loud. Nobody handed the Darlington nurses their tribunal win, their union, or four words from a future prime minister. They built each of those things themselves, one refusal at a time, because waiting for someone else to grant them their rights had already cost them three years. 

If Reform wants to keep what it was handed in that clip, it can publish the single sex exceptions, the harassment provisions and the indirect discrimination protections that actually won the Darlington case, in a bill, in public, where a lawyer can hold it up against the Act it intends to replace. Until that exists, what Bethany Hutchison walked away with is not yet support. It is a receipt for a debt that has not been paid. She built her own room when nobody else would let her into theirs. She is not about to hand the deed to whoever finally noticed she was standing outside.

Until It Happens To You

Freddie Lynne, Tristan Kirk and Harriet Tolson write:

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has criticised fast-track courts for convicting domestic violence victims over unpaid household bills, insisting the Government must deliver swift reform to save the justice system from "disrepute". Women who have suffered abuse at the hands of their partners are being prosecuted for slipping behind on payments, such as car tax and TV licence, and end up with criminal convictions through the controversial Single Justice Procedure (SJP).

Speaking at the launch of a £15.6 million safety fund for women and girls, Lord Khan said the convictions of domestic violence victims over unpaid bills "shouldn't be happening" and he called on Labour colleagues in the Government to overhaul the SJP system to avoid further damage to public confidence in the courts.

"There are too many women who are criminalised who should not be", he told the Press Association. "There are too many women who are imprisoned who should not be. I know that the Justice Secretary and, in particular, the Justice Minister Sarah Sackman are seized of this. It shouldn't be happening, and it's really important – in addition to magistrates and judges being more sensitive to these issues – that the whole justice system understands the unfairness that currently exists."

As Shadow Justice Secretary in 2014, Lord Khan warned about the dangers of creating a fast-track court process, insisting at the time that it "should not be to the detriment of proper open justice or due process." He said there is now a bank of evidence of errors being made in the SJP system. "That's why it's important for the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to look at this again," he said, "Every time there is a bad case, it brings the system into disrepute." 

The Government, which consulted on SJP reform last Spring, has promised proposed changes "will be set out shortly". Lord Khan unwittingly found himself at the centre of a SJP scandal last week when it emerged he had been convicted and fined by a magistrate in Hereford for not taxing a Nissan Micra. The Mayor branded it a "scam" and the conviction was overturned after it emerged the Micra had apparently been fraudulently registered in his name.

The debacle opened up further scrutiny of an SJP system which has been dogged by controversy in the last few years, including children being unlawfully prosecuted, thousands of fare evasion convictions being overturned, and a litany of cases involving harsh convictions of sick pensioners. In the SJP system, magistrates sit alone to decide on low-level criminal cases based on written evidence. In the latest batch of convictions was a woman from Hull who failed to tax her car and told South Shields Magistrates' Court about the domestic abuse she had suffered. "I was thrown out of this property by my abusive ex-partner, leaving me with nowhere to live," she wrote, "He controlled all my finances including this tax on this vehicle." She was given a six-month conditional discharge and was ordered to pay £43 in costs and settle the £49.17 car tax bill.

In a separate case, a Sheffield woman was convicted of not paying her TV licence, despite telling York Magistrates' Court she had been in a relationship "with extreme domestic violence and also coercive control". "My partner at the time was not giving me access to funds which has led to me being behind on my bills," she wrote. The woman said her ex-partner was ultimately arrested and charged, but she has been left needing medical treatment for mental health issues. The magistrate gave the woman a two-year conditional discharge and also ordered her to pay £120 in costs and a £26 victim surcharge within 28 days, or face the possibility of bailiff action, additional fines and even arrest. 

Lord Khan declined to comment on his own SJP case, but revealed he had been in talks with the MoJ last week. He said: "It doesn't matter about me or what happened to me, the issue is to make sure that every person receives a fair trial, and is seen to receive a fair trial as well." SJP magistrates can choose to refer cases back to prosecutors like the DVLA and TV Licensing, if new information offered by the defendant in mitigation could be important. But magistrates said in 2024 that they often feel rushed into decisions, in a system which deals with thousands of cases each day, and they do not feel sufficiently trained on their powers.

The MoJ said defendants in SJP cases can detail their circumstances, including domestic abuse, and magistrates "must consider that information before making a decision". "The Government is also reviewing what more can be done to support vulnerable defendants, and further detail on proposed reforms to the Single Justice Procedure will be set out shortly," a spokesperson said. The DVLA told the Government's 2025 consultation on SJP reform that it believes all prosecutors should see mitigation letters before cases go in front of a magistrate.

Both the DVLA and TV Licensing have said their officials do not routinely see mitigation due to the current design of the court system. TV Licensing said criminal prosecution is "always a last resort" and said its officers who conduct doorstep visits to unlicensed properties "ask whether a person's personal circumstances have affected their ability to stay licensed and explain how this information can be shared with TV Licensing after the visit if needed".

In its response to the government consultation, TV Licensing did not back the idea of SJP prosecutors automatically seeing mitigation letters. But the body has recently updated the letters sent out to people being prosecuted for not paying the licence, telling them: "If you committed the offence due to difficult personal circumstances or because you made a genuine mistake, you can contact the prosecutor to explain your reasons. In some circumstances they might reconsider your case."

An Unusually Moral and Humane Politician

Ed Miliband still has a long way to go, but the case made by Peter Oborne and Imran Mulla is worthy of consideration:

Rarely has a British foreign secretary come under such ferocious attack as Ed Miliband over the past weeks. Miliband provoked a two-pronged assault when he announced his intention to impose punitive measures against Israel in an attempt to halt settler violence - and rescue the prospect of a Palestinian state. The foreign secretary is set to announce a ban on trade with illegal Israeli settlements on Tuesday. The ban will aim to bring the UK into compliance with the International Court of Justice's advisory opinion of July 2024, according to Whitehall sources. 

Many pro-Palestine advocates complain that Miliband's statement comes far too late, will not go nearly far enough and in any case will consist of largely meaningless gestures. They are further angered by Labour's refusal to employ the term genocide, halt all arms sales to Israel and sanction Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The American and Israeli responses to Miliband's plans, however, have been brutal. In a highly unusual diplomatic intervention, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee posted on X on Saturday: "The Brits have lost it. The Jew hate of their government knows no boundaries and knows no facts." Miliband is Jewish and Huckabee is not.

Netanyahu last month branded Britain the "Islamic Republic of Britain". The Israeli government's outrage is accompanied by threats. "If Britain acts against Israel, Israel will act against Britain," warned the Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar last week. Yair Netanyahu, son of the prime minister, declared that the Falkland Islands belongs to Argentina, not Britain. US President Donald Trump then suggested he would not back the UK if Argentina invaded the territory. 

The Tory opposition, heavily backed by the British right-wing press, has echoed this vociferous criticism. The Sunday Telegraph awarded massive prominence to an interview with the new shadow foreign secretary, Tom Tugendhat. Tugendhat took the side of Israel against the British government and cited Israeli threats that British national security could be threatened if Britain sanctions the settlements.

The advocacy group Conservative Friends of Israel has moreover accused Miliband of planning "a morally indefensible move that further singles out and demonises the world's only Jewish state and a close ally."

Miliband is stepping out of line

The British foreign secretary, who has been in office for just two months, is showing unusual determination amid the onslaught of threats and criticism. No foreign secretary this century has ever successfully challenged either the power of the White House or pressure from Israel – let alone both at once. Miliband is stepping out of line. Moreover, he is doing so against strident opposition from significant sections of the British media. In short, Miliband has torn up the script on British foreign policy. 

In his first performance as foreign secretary in parliament last Tuesday, he insisted Britain "will not acquiesce in the destruction of the two-state solution." He assured Labour, Green and SNP MPs who pressed him to act against Israel's settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank that they wouldn’t have to wait much longer. Well-informed sources tell Middle East Eye that, inside the Burnham government, Miliband has been the internal driving force behind the policies he is expected to announce on Tuesday. 

The foreign secretary has also deployed a new language on Gaza: "I just came out of this meeting talking about Gaza to people who've been there and are there on the ground, and frankly it was horrific what is unfolding." He asserted last week that "we as a UK government, as the prime minister has said, have got to act and act more decisively than we have." His two predecessors as Labour foreign secretary, David Lammy and Yvette Cooper, will each have been given horrifying briefings on conditions in Gaza. Neither reacted in the strong and anguished way that Miliband has chosen to do. These words mark him out as an unusually moral and humane politician.

Almost as significant, the force of his language means that it will be impossible for Miliband to give in to future US and Israeli pressure without opening himself to charges of hypocrisy. A well-placed Labour source said on Monday that "the prime minister and foreign secretary are going to set out a comprehensive reset in the British government's approach" to the situation in Israel and Palestine.

Settlement goods ban set to be seismic

These developments come at a pivotal moment. Israel's new E1 settlement project east of Jerusalem is poised to effectively cut the occupied West Bank in two. It is designed to make a Palestinian state completely unviable. Britain’s settlement goods ban therefore looks set to be seismic. As Ben Jamal, until recently the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, recently put it: "Such a ban has been a core demand of the Palestine solidarity movement for many years, as a key basic step towards ending UK complicity with Israel’s violations of international law."

If properly implemented, the ban will bring the UK into compliance with the 2024 ICJ advisory opinion, which declared the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory to be illegal and obligated states - including Britain - to take steps to oppose it. To achieve this, the ban will need to be comprehensive and cover both goods and services. It will have to prohibit any investment in settlement businesses and be backed up by real enforcement powers.

Other European countries, including Ireland, Spain and Belgium, have introduced similar measures. But Whitehall sources insist the UK’s planned sanctions will be even stronger. While it is true that the ban will enrage the Netanyahu government and offend Donald Trump, it may also be a diplomatic boon for Andy Burnham's government, establishing it on the world stage as a country willing to defy the United States. And if Sunday's report that Netanyahu is already ordering the removal of settler outposts is confirmed, this would suggest that Britain's stand could be having an immediate effect.

Politically secure and in tune with the public

Pro-Israel critics of Miliband repeatedly accuse him of bowing to Muslim opinion in Britain. Polling does not support this claim. Miliband's approach is, in fact, bringing foreign policy back into line with British public opinion in general. Only 16 percent of Britons, a small minority, oppose a ban on settlement goods. This helps to explain why more than 140 Labour backbenchers have urged the government to implement a comprehensive trade ban with the settlements. Polling of Labour members earlier this year showed that a staggering 87 percent support a ban. This means Miliband is politically secure and in tune with the public mood. Crucially, he appears to have Downing Street's backing. But Labour insiders stress the foreign secretary also sincerely believes these measures are necessary.

Consider his record on the issue. As Labour leader when the party was in opposition, Miliband distinguished himself by strongly criticising the coalition government's failure to challenge Israel when it bombed Gaza in 2014, killing 1,600 Palestinian civilians, including 550 children. By contrast, six Israeli civilians were killed. In 2014 Miliband accused then-Prime Minister David Cameron of getting it "wrong" and slammed his "inexplicable silence" on "the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians caused by Israel's military action". That same year, Miliband backed recognising Palestinian statehood unilaterally, a position opposed by the Tories. In the cabinet last year, sources say, Miliband was a leading voice pressuring then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer to recognise a Palestinian state - which he finally did in September last year. According to a senior Whitehall source, Miliband and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood privately lobbied Starmer not to back the US-Israeli strikes on Iran this February.

The makings of an independent foreign policy

It is worth remembering just how significantly British foreign policy appears to have changed. Rishi Sunak's Tory government showed contempt for international law in late 2023 and early 2024. It publicly mocked the International Court of Justice ruling on the genocide case brought against Israel by South Africa, while Foreign Secretary David Cameron privately tried to influence the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor not to seek arrest warrants for Israeli ministers. Under Starmer, two Labour foreign secretaries - Lammy and Cooper - introduced a series of half-measures against Israel. There was an arms embargo, but not a full one. Intelligence sharing from surveillance flights over Gaza continued throughout Israel’s genocide. When Lammy suggested Israel had broken international law, Downing Street swiftly rowed back on the comments. There was advice against businesses investing in Israeli settlements, but no ban. 

If Burnham and Miliband want to avoid the ire of the Trump administration they will need to weaken the planned sanctions. This will signal to the US and Israel that it is fundamentally business as usual, and there is no substantive change in approach from that of the Starmer government. But if Burnham and Miliband press on with introducing and implementing the sanctions, they will be standing up to the US and Israel and announcing to the world that Britain finally has the makings of an independent foreign policy.

The Implications Are Truly Alarming

Hans Kundnani writes:

The far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is set to make a major breakthrough.

Saxony-Anhalt, a former East German state of around two million people, is relatively small. But the significance of the election there on Sunday could be seismic. The AfD is on track to win overwhelmingly and perhaps even secure an overall majority, which would mean that it could form a state government for the first time in its history. Long confined to the opposition, the AfD now stands on the cusp of wielding power — regionally, at least.

The rise of the AfD has already made coherent and stable government difficult at the national level. Its success in last year’s federal election, in which it came in second, with 20 percent of the vote, forced the center-right Christian Democrats to form a government with the center-left Social Democrats. The two parties have squabbled since Friedrich Merz became chancellor, and the AfD has surged in the polls. Now it is by far the most popular party in Germany.

What makes the AfD’s rise especially shocking is that it is much more extreme than other European far-right parties that either are already in power, like Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, or could be soon, like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. Whereas those parties have sought in some ways to detoxify and moderate themselves, the AfD has become more radical over time, deepening its ties to neo-Nazis and promising to repatriate migrants. As it has done so, it has grown more popular.

Last year, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classified the party as “right-wing extremist.” But the scale of the party’s support means it is too late to ban it. Instead, it has fallen to Mr. Merz’s government to stop it. Yet, preoccupied with remilitarization and foreign policy, it is seemingly incapable of doing so. For Germany — and the rest of Europe — the implications are truly alarming.

At the heart of the matter is the economy, which is going through a deep structural crisis. Over the past two decades, the German economy was often described as Europe’s strongest. In reality, its extreme dependence on exports made it quite fragile. This fragility has now caught up with it: Germany’s manufacturing industry, the basis of its economic success, is being hit by a combination of American tariffs and Chinese competition — what is often referred to as China Shock 2.0. This economic decline underpins the AfD’s recent surge in support.

The AfD actually began with economic issues. It was created in 2013 as a direct response to Angela Merkel’s insistence that there was no alternative to bailing out Greece — hence its name — and was originally a party of fiscal hawks who opposed a redistributive European Union. After the refugee crisis in 2015, it repositioned itself as an anti-immigration, anti-Islam party; two years later, it got into the Bundestag, leading some to imagine that it had become focused only on cultural issues. But alongside xenophobes and nativists, fiscal hawks retained a home in the AfD.

Central to their concerns was maintaining the so-called debt brake, a constitutional amendment that limited government borrowing. During his 2025 campaign, Mr. Merz promised to keep it, even as it prevented much-needed investment. But after the Christian Democrats won the election, he reached an agreement with the Social Democrats and the Greens before the new Parliament had been formed to amend the constitution, exempting military spending from the brake. This democratically dubious move alienated many right-wing voters. It was around this point that the AfD overtook the Christian Democrats in the polls for the first time.

Mr. Merz didn’t dismantle the debt brake entirely. That would have made it possible to begin to solve some of Germany’s problems. Instead, as nonmilitary spending remains subject to the debt brake, Mr. Merz has continued to cut back the welfare state and told Germans that they need to work harder so that the economy can regain its “competitiveness.” This approach — increasing military spending while cutting elsewhere — may appeal to foreign policy analysts, but it is politically disastrous. A significant part of the AfD’s appeal lies in its focus on job losses and declining prospects.

Germany’s remilitarization has also been disastrous in another way. Since 2022, centrist parties in Germany have largely abandoned their commitment to the idea of Germany as a “Friedensmacht,” or force for peace, and now speak more about preparing for a full-scale war with Russia. Mr. Merz, for his part, says he wants Germany to possess “the strongest conventional army in Europe.” This has allowed the AfD to present itself as the party of peace — not unlike the way that President Trump positioned himself in opposition to the “forever wars” undertaken by American Democrats and Republicans alike.

The increase in military spending has caused some to wonder whether Germany could become “Europe’s next hegemon.” But that is a fantasy. For one thing, it is far from clear that Germany’s spending plans will translate into real military capabilities, to say nothing of a revival of the economy. For another, Germany is increasingly isolated within the European Union, not least because of its unconditional support for Israel and willingness to block any measures against it, like suspending the European Union’s association agreement with it. Perhaps most important, there is little support for military power, let alone war, among German voters.

When Mr. Merz was running to be chancellor, he promised to reduce the AfD’s popularity — chiefly by taking tougher measures against immigration, including what in the coalition agreement was called a “deportation offensive.” Then, on the night of the election, he declared that his “absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the U.S.A.,” producing much excitement among supporters of greater European autonomy. A year and a half in, both objectives remain further away than ever.

Two more regional elections later this month are likely to produce further advances for the AfD, deepening the sense of national crisis. Some Christian Democrats, in a panic, are already speculating about Mr. Merz’s future. Yet what the country needs is not a different chancellor but a completely different approach. Until then, the AfD will continue to inch closer to power.

Give Them An Inch?

Where was Patriot Platform when we needed it? Why did we ever let in someone called William the Conqueror? The clue was in the name. And the Battle of Hastings was in fact fought about seven miles northwest of Hastings itself, at the nearby town of Battle. What are the chances of that happening? Anyway, although writers nearer the time greatly exaggerated the numbers for effect, it was won by an army of between 7000 and 12,000 Normans. After the most tedious roll call in history. Of the Bayeux Tapestry, Peter Hitchens writes:

I suppose I had better go and see the exhibition. But I do wish the King would stop saying how long it is in metres. As my Daily Mail colleague Robert Hardman has pointed out, it was made in feet and inches. And wasn’t one of the things our fathers fought for again and again the Britishness of Britain and the Englishness of England?

I cannot find the Hardman quotation, but while this is very on brand from Hitchens, it is quite misleading. Demands for the imperial system alone come from people who could not calculate according to it, as invariably comes out when they are tested, but that is not a new phenomenon. Into living memory, the average customer could have had little or no idea whether or not his change was right, but took it on simple trust, a “high trust society” that it is bewildering that a journalist, of all tradesmen, would wish to see restored.

Long ago, I was taught that a gentleman drank champagne by the pint. The only Briton ever to have been President of the European Commission was later known for taking a pint of claret to his desk in the House of Lords to get him through the afternoon. But it turned out in 2023 that only 1.3 per cent of people wanted any extended use of the imperial system, so that was assumed to have been the end of that. The peculiarly British compromise between the metric and the imperial systems is the most lasting monument to this country’s bitterest culture war in living memory, the one between scientists and humanities graduates in the 30 or 40 years after the Second World War.

The question of turning away from the Old Empire and towards Europe was also in the mix, but it was secondary. Much of the Old Empire was going metric at the time, and almost all of it has now done so. Rather, this was and is about whether the weights and measures used in everyday life, and taught in schools, should be the ones used in science, or the ones named in Shakespeare. Only named, of course. The imperial system dates only from 1824, making it barely 200 years old. Far from being Arthurian, it suppressed numerous customary weights and measures across these Islands and the Empire, replacing them with ones that often bore the same names, as certain customary units on the Continent still have names such as livre, but which had most definitely been devised by a committee. Scottish pints and gallons were more than halved. The claim that the imperial system was “more natural” needs to be squared with the existence of different traditional weights and measures, and with the absence of any organic reversion to our own, much less emergence of them. When uncontacted tribes turn up, then do they know the number of yards in a rod, perch or pole?

Britain joined the EU in 1973. New Zealand has had only metric road signs, which there has never been any serious suggestion that Britain might adopt, since 1972. Was that the work of the EU? Although New Zealanders still sometimes give their height in feet and inches, and by convention announce their children's birth weights in pounds and ounces, they have, again since 1972, measured even milk in the metric system, unlike the practice in Britain. By 1973, all schools in Australia were teaching only the metric system. Was that the work of the EU, too? All road signs there converted to metric in July 1974, and all cars made after that year have had only metric speedometers. Australians now rarely even convert their babies’ birth weights into pounds and ounces, and such units are employed for trading purposes only when exporting to the United States. Where there is residual use of imperial units in casual conversation in Australia, then it tends to be attributed to the cultural transmission of American English. But the reason why the American system is different, despite using much of the same vocabulary, is because it is older. Nor does it ring true that the United States went to the Moon using non-metric units. If, for the sake of argument, that were the case, then it was well over 50 years ago. There is no way that the Americans are doing anything remotely comparable in anything other than the metric system today, even if they were doing so in the 1960s, which itself strikes me as highly unlikely.

Unlike, unless I am very much mistaken, any part of what eventually became the imperial system, the metric system was invented by an Englishman, John Wilkins, who managed to be both a brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell and later a bishop in the Church of England. It is not a product of the French Revolution. The first attempt to mandate it in Britain was made in 1818, six years before the imperial system existed. Britain legalised the use of the metric system in 1875. Numerous industries have used nothing else in living memory, if ever. Even leaving aside how long ago Imperial Britain’s industrial zenith was, the bald claim that that was achieved entirely by the application of the imperial system does not stand up to the slightest analysis.

Who could possibly teach the imperial system these days? I hate to advocate for the other side, but Britain is in fact rather good at science. Yet imagine that the imperial system really were to be reincorporated into school Maths. Would you fail if you could not do it? That would be most people these days, deprived of the Maths certificate necessary to progress to further scientific education, for want of competence in a system that was not used for such purposes anywhere in the world. If you could find anyone to do so, then by all means teach it. But even those of us who probably quoted Shakespeare in our sleep ought not to wish to make anything else conditional on it. It is not as if it is Classics.

Yet at the popular level, a remarkably enduring compromise has taken hold. Britain is the only country in the world where the use of two completely different systems of weights and measures, but with only one of them taught in schools, could result in anything other than total collapse. We should cherish the fact that in ordinary conversation everyone gave their height and weight in imperial measures when only the metric system had been taught in schools since before most people had been born. The only problem is the legal ban on selling certain items in imperial measures by name, a piece of domestic legislation enacted by a Conservative Government. By all means let that ban be repealed. In practice, that repeal would change almost nothing. Corporate retail giants would have absolutely no intention of adopting the imperial system, but small traders should be free to use it if customers wanted it. At a significant markup, I expect. Almost no one under 60 would ask for imperial, since almost no one under 60 would ever have been taught it, but let those who wanted it have it. If they could afford it. Good luck to any licensed premises that sought to revert to the old measures of spirits, since those were shorter.

Have you ever had any trouble buying a pint of beer? Our own and so many other traditional weights and measures survive for the sale of bread or beer all across Europe because they are perfectly adequate, and even ideal, for the sale of bread or beer. But they are at least arguably too imprecise for anything much more than that, and an international scientific and technological culture could not function without a universally accepted system of weights and measures. And so on. Let anyone who wanted to do so buy or sell a pound of potatoes, although that is not an arduous thing to do within the present law. The never threatened pint of milk or beer will always be readily available in the Irish Republic, which will never leave the EU, the rest of which the Irish increasingly call “the Mainland”.