Benedictus Benedicat

If my old friend Dr Serenhedd James had not already been a National Treasure, then he would have attained that status with this:

Freshers’ week at Oxford begins this weekend: from all across the country, and indeed the world, young hopefuls who have satisfied the university’s stringent admissions requirements will soon be starting the first day of the rest of their lives. College social-media accounts are groaning with messages telling them all how welcome they will be, and doing their best to use humour to dispel the nerves. One head of house sportingly allowed himself to be filmed wandering disconsolately around his empty quads, crying “Is anybody here?!”

I always feel a bit sorry for the freshers, all of whom have already excelled in one way or another simply to have got this far. Today, most of them are the cleverest people they know; tomorrow, most of them won’t be. Impostor syndrome hits hard, and comes and goes with the terms and the tide. The Sorting Hat has done its job, however: now there are routines to be learnt, a city to be explored, and customs and traditions to be embraced. The last bit, inevitably, brings out the hand-wringers in their droves.

Writing in the Financial Times last week, the food writer Ajesh Patalay talked about what dinner – “formal hall” – is like at “modern, progressive” Worcester College under the new provost, Lord (David) Isaac. In 2019 the then-acting provost, Professor Kate Tunstall, tried to abolish grace and other traditions “in an attempt to be more inclusive”. When the proposal was put to the Junior Common Room at Worcester, it fell. “Surprisingly,” wrote Patalay, “the undergraduates voted overwhelmingly to retain these customs.”

“Surprisingly.” I sometimes wonder whether the pearl-clutchers who are shocked that so many young people like nice things with historic hinterlands have ever met an undergraduate, or indeed remember being one. Sitting down to a meal together is the backbone of any residential community, academic or otherwise, and it’s not as though there aren’t less-formal eating options for those with neither the time nor inclination to put on a jacket and throw on a gown. “Informal hall”: the clue’s in the name.

A wise former colleague, elected to a fellowship at one of the grander colleges from the other side of an ocean, wryly observed that “formal hall is intimidating: once”. All you need to do is to get stuck in: if you know which utensil to pick up first, then crack on. If you don’t, then glance around and see what other people are doing. Say “thank you” when the staff bring you your plate, and “thank you” when they take it away. You got into Oxford: you’re bright enough to work this out as well.

Alas, if only it were that straightforward: the assault on formal dining in the colleges started years ago and continues apace. Students are deprived of delicious things like octopus, which was taken off the menu at Somerville in 2019 (evidently a bumper year), in case its unfamiliarity makes them uncomfortable. Read it and weep: in case something unfamiliar causes students discomfort. At a university: a place of learning and encounter intended to stretch and broaden young minds.

Meanwhile, those who come from backgrounds in which formal dinners are not a regular feature are frequently given the impression that they should be abolished on their behalf. That’s a kick in the teeth for a kid from a comprehensive school in the Rhondda, who’s won her place at the table only to find that it has been hastily unlaid for her – so that she can feel more welcome. I remember a student in exactly that situation. “My grandfather was a miner,” she said. “He’d have died of pride to see me eating here.”

A grammar-school boy from Lancashire summed it up more gruffly in a JCR meeting: “I hear that some of you are trying to abolish formal hall because people like me don’t enjoy it. Well, I bloody love it, so there.” It did not go down well with his self-appointed gatekeepers, which he loved even more. In another moment of lunacy a member of the same crowd exasperatedly told one of his contemporaries that it was socially unacceptable of him to identify as working class if he didn’t have a regional accent.

How does this madness begin? Principally, with the peevishness of people with power. I once witnessed a college officer (not at my present institution, certainly) pronounce solemnly, during the first pastoral-team meeting of an academic year, that “we need to look out for our non-traditional students, because they might meet someone from Eton and that would be very distressing for them.” I thought briefly that she was making a joke at the expense of a stereotype, then remembered that she was entirely humourless.

I’m still none the wiser as to how she drew that conclusion, save from her own confirmation bias and the echo chamber that she inhabited on the internet. At the time I decided that her galloping prejudice was more usefully noted quietly and discussed elsewhere, but she put it to energetic use later and I wish now that I’d told her there and then where to go. The disagreeable irony of someone purportedly in charge of welfare for all students being only interested in the welfare of some speaks for itself, every single time.

Ahead of a different freshers’ week, in days before the mob went for JK Rowling, another colleague observed that the one point of reference that all the new students had was probably Harry Potter. “They’re coming for the Hogwarts experience,” he noted. “Why not just let them have it?”

Why not, indeed? You don’t need to cast a spell to keep the magic alive: all you have to do is encourage people to look smart, sit on a bench, eat a meal, and enjoy each other’s company. Oh, and leave the virtue-signalling at the door.

Free, Except For The Bill

Andy Burnham’s National Care Service would be run as if National Health Service inpatients were to be charged for bed and board. But then, in June 1997, Labour tried to do exactly that, as well as to impose prescription charges on “wealthy pensioners”. And as a wealthy pensioner, Alan Milburn is back, while Paul Knaggs writes:

There is one word in the Government’s care announcement that will decide whether thousands of families keep the house they live in, and it is the word that went missing between the press release and the applause.  The word is “personal”. The Downing Street statement of 30 September is careful, in the way these things always are. It promises “no personal care charges”. By the time Andy Burnham reached the climax of his speech in Liverpool, the adjective had quietly fallen away. “So this is the deal,” he told conference. “A state pension that rises every year. No care charges. And a high-quality National Care Service to give peace of mind in later life.” 

No care charges. The hall rose.

He had earned the moment. He spoke about his gran Kitty, whose engagement ring was ripped from her finger and stolen in a care home, and whose modest savings were all taken to pay for it. He called his own generation of politicians “too cowardly to fix something as basic as the care we give to each other.” And he promised a service that would protect “people’s homes and their savings.” Then, on Thursday night in Tottenham, Fiona Bruce pressed the Energy Secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, on what that sentence actually means. The answer arrived inside twenty seconds. 

“It’s not going to be free,” Fiona Bruce said. People going into a care home “will still have to pay accommodation costs, which can be very hefty.” When the obvious conclusion was put to Fahnbulleh, that some people may therefore still end up having to sell their homes, she did not contradict it. She moved instead to the hope that free personal care would allow more people to stay in their own homes for longer. That is a reasonable hope. It is not the promise that was made from the stage. 

Free Personal Care: The £1,300-a-Week Bill That Remains

Personal care means help with eating, washing, dressing and using the toilet. That is the part the state proposes to pay for. Accommodation, food, heating and the rest of what a care home charges remains means-tested under the existing rules, and the Institute for Government notes that the No 10 press release explicitly rules out free “bed and board”. Look at the proportions. Industry surveys put self-funded residential care in England at roughly £1,300 a week in 2026, and nursing care at about £1,500. In Scotland, where free personal care has existed since 2002, the weekly personal care payment for a care home resident is around £255. The state picks up a fifth of the bill and the family picks up the rest.

Scotland matters here, because Scotland is not a theory. It is the experiment already run. The Scottish Parliament’s own research service puts it without euphemism: because accommodation and living costs are not covered, “some people might be required to sell their home in order to fund their care home place, even if they are receiving free personal and nursing care.” Scotland has had this policy for twenty-four years and it has not stopped houses being sold. England’s version will not either, and no minister has claimed otherwise when asked directly.

Then there is who the promise is for. After the speech, Downing Street confirmed to Disability News Service that free personal care will apply only to those over 65. Working-age disabled people, who the Institute for Government reckons make up a little over 40 per cent of everyone receiving publicly funded long-term care, get nothing from this announcement. They must wait for Baroness Casey’s final report.

The National Care Service Will Not Start Before 2029 

That report is due in summer 2027. The National Care Service itself will be introduced “in the next Parliament”, which is to say after the 2029 election. The money to pay for it comes from adjusting the state pension triple lock, and that adjustment does not begin until April 2030. Which makes one line from Thursday night worth keeping. “I don’t think we can have another generation of politicians that candidly kicked this into the long grass,” Fahnbulleh said, defending a policy whose first payment, first legislation and first pound of funding all fall beyond the next general election. 

The funding deserves attention too, because it is the most honest and least advertised part of the whole package. Downing Street estimates that trimming the triple lock will cut state pension spending by around £15 billion a year by the end of the 2030s, rising to £50 billion by 2050. Strip the presentation away and the arithmetic is this: older people will pay for their own care out of a smaller pension than they would otherwise have received. There is a serious case for that. It is not a gift, and it should not be sold as one.

Nor does any of it sit in a vacuum. On 29 July 2024, Rachel Reeves cancelled the £86,000 cap on care costs, along with the plan to lift the upper capital threshold from £23,250 to £100,000. That threshold has now been frozen for sixteen consecutive years. Community Care calculates that had it tracked prices since 2010, it would stand at roughly £36,400 today. The party now promising to protect your home is the party that scrapped the one mechanism Parliament had already legislated to limit what your home could be taken for.

The Difference Between Free Personal Care and Free Care 

Be fair to Burnham, because fairness is what makes the criticism stick. He is right that the care system is broken and right that it is dragging the NHS down with it. Free personal care at home is a real improvement on nothing, and it will keep some people out of residential care altogether, which is both cheaper and kinder. He is the first Prime Minister in a generation to touch the triple lock in public, and he said plainly that he may pay a political price for it. He tried this once before, as Health Secretary in 2009, and watched the Conservatives bury it under a poster reading “death tax”. A braver offer than his predecessors managed is still a braver offer. 

But the test of a political promise is not the warmth of the speech. It is the sentence a family can hold you to afterwards. “Free social care” brings a conference hall to its feet. “Free personal care for the over-65s from the next Parliament, with hefty residential accommodation charges still means-tested against your house” does not. Both describe the same policy. Only one of them is true, and it was not the one delivered to the applause. 

Orwell saw the mechanism clearly in 1946, writing in Horizon. Political language, he said, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” / Nothing here is a lie. Every clause in the Downing Street release will survive a fact-check. The deception, if that is the word, lives in the gap between a document written to be defensible and a speech written to be cheered, and in the confidence that only one of them will ever be read. 

So let the Government say the full sentence, in public, with the adjective still in it. Let it publish the Casey timetable, the cost of including working-age disabled people, and the point at which a family home becomes safe. And let every one of us hold on to the small print, because the small print is the only part of this that anyone will ever be made to pay. They have not abolished the care bill. They have only renamed the part they intend to pay.

Fatuous False Flags

Craig Murray writes:

Rather than abandoning the plainly nuts Fairford narrative, Burnham and his government are doubling down on the claim it is an Iranian terror plot. It remains quite possible the men were indeed fuel thieves, simply stealing fuel from farms. They appear to have been equipped for fuel theft and all they were carrying was petrol. It is worth a footnote that there is a very real history of US military personnel, and indeed British personnel, selling military fuel from bases. Stolen red diesel meant for HMS Bulwark fuelled fairground rides throughout England, which I think is rather lovely. But if the Fairford Five were fuel thieves, farms are more probable as the target. We should pause here to acknowledge that USAF Fairford is falsely designated RAF Fairford, itself a propaganda lie, just like “RAF Lakenheath” or “RAF Mildenhall”. The UK is full of US military bases, on which US law applies. (My birth certificate gives my father’s occupation as “Clerk USAF”. He was employed at Mildenhall at the time). 

It is a classic example of state propaganda that the petrol discovered in the Fairford vans was described by counter terror police as a potential accelerant for a bomb. Well yes, petrol is that. It has however, rather more obvious uses too. The same technique was used at the height of the War on Terror propaganda in the Great Easter Bomb Plot, that never was. Police rounded up and arrested many young Muslims across the Manchester region, which was front page news. They were all later released without charge. But at the time of arrest the police announced they had found a potential bomb making ingredient in a kitchen. Well, they had. It was a bag of sugar. Sugar is indeed a potential bomb making ingredient. Yet most of us have a bag in the kitchen. At least it did not take the police ten days to find the bag of sugar in the kitchen, unlike when they searched Charlie Rowley’s flat for a vial of novichok, and it took them ten days to “find” a bottle of perfume sitting on the kitchen counter.

For Fairford, on balance I think a false flag gone wrong is a little more likely than just fuel thieves. We know the men had no bombs and no guns, which makes the terrorist narrative rather hard for the government to sustain. But if they were patsies set up in a false flag, there would be plenty of things already on the base that go bang which could have been used to create the “terrorist incident” around them. Two key points make me think this was a false flag.

Firstly the lady farmer who called 999 was adamant there were more men that the five arrested and bailed. The others would have been the spycops – agents provocateurs – who would have been quietly spirited away from the scene. That also fits with the released information that it was one of the men who phoned in a warning about the “attack”. It looks to me like a false flag spectacular had been planned, with US involvement as claimed by Trump and possibly Israeli knowledge as claimed by Netanyahu. This operation by the security services was viewed as over the pay grade of local police (who might be inconveniently honest) who were not in the picture. It all went horribly wrong for the government when an alert local farmer called the local police, and when a participant also called it in. That could have been one of the recruited “terrorists” who got cold feet, or one of the agents panicked they had lost contact with their line of command.

The use of recruited patsies to carry out false flags is now better understood. I have been writing about it since before the Newburgh bomb plot which was a particularly egregious example. In the United States there has been more awareness of and reaction to agent provocateur incited plots than in the UK. For anyone sceptical, here is a summary of Newburgh. In May 2009 the FBI arrested four poor men from Newburgh, New York, and announced it had foiled a plot to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military planes at Stewart Air National Guard base. The plot, the targets, the inert bombs and the disabled Stinger missile were all supplied by the Bureau. The recruiter was Shahed Hussain, a Pakistani fraudster who had become an informant to avoid deportation after a driving-licence scam. Paid nearly $100,000, he spent more than a year fishing at a Newburgh mosque, posing as a wealthy Jaish-e-Mohammed agent, before latching onto James Cromitie, a Walmart stocker and petty drug dealer.

Hussain offered heavenly reward and as much as $250,000. Cromitie brought in three others: Onta Williams, David Williams and Laguerre Payen. Hussain drove them across a state line to inspect the fake weapons, which federalised the charges and carried a 25-year minimum. They were convicted in 2010. The sentencing judge, Colleen McMahon, said she believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that there would have been no crime except that the government instigated it, planned it and brought it to fruition. In 2023 she ordered the release of three of them, calling it an FBI-orchestrated conspiracy and writing that the real lead conspirator was the United States. She freed Cromitie in 2024 on the same basis, describing him as a small-time grifter with no history of violence and Hussain as a villain who had lured him with promises of both heavenly and earthly rewards.

The Golders Green ambulances arson was a classic of this false flag genre. Four young Muslims were recruited, in this case online rather than in person, by someone they never saw who was almost certainly a Mossad agent. They were offered money to attack the ambulances, which they did. The attack is then blamed on Iran through a claim on a Telegram channel on behalf of an “Iranian organisation”, Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, which is a Mossad fabrication. HAYI first became known to the world through simultaneous press releases on 16 March by five Israeli government outlets in Israel, US and UK (including BICOM) and an article by the Israeli front “Foundation for Defending Democracy”. The FDD’s Nick Stewart travels with Kushner and Witkoff as part of the US negotiating team on the Middle East.

There are numerous reasons for doubting the real existence of HAYI. None of its material is in Farsi. All of its “attacks” have been minor arson attacks on pointless targets that hurt nobody. The grammar, calligraphy and imagery of its materials are all wrong. The UK state itself has now debunked some of the Mossad HAYI narrative. On 29 April, when Essa Suleiman stabbed three men, the entire media blocked out the first Muslim victim and claimed an anti-semitic terrorist attack on the two in Golders Green. The HAYI Mossad run “Iranian” Telegram channel immediately put out a statement claiming responsibility for the attack. But yesterday police and prosecution were forced to drop the claim it was a terrorist attack at all. The stabbing of the Muslim is charged as attempted murder, though still ignored by the media. So “HAYI” claimed responsibility for a non existent terrorist incident.

A false flag can be, but is not necessarily, the state planting a bomb and then blaming someone else. It can be more complex – the state recruiting people to plant bombs. Those people may believe they are genuinely part of an ideological campaign, or may just be doing it for money. The opaque Starmer rent boy arson plot, in which Ukrainian male models burnt property associated with Keir Starmer, remains unclear, largely because any discussion of what lay behind the attacks was banned by the judge in the trial. But the media, with government encouragement, continually relays the story that the arsonists were recruited online by a man known as “El Money”. An interesting twist here is that the media constantly refer to him as Russian-speaking. But the evidence in court is that he spoke both Russian and Ukrainian. Almost all adult Ukrainians can speak Russian. The number of Russians who speak Ukrainian is very small. Yet El Money is now routinely portrayed as Russian. 

Which brings us to the whole question of Russian “hybrid attacks”, where we are asked to believe the narrative of the security services of states whose leaders are openly promoting war with Russia, about desultory and mysterious attacks. The rather sorry Leipzig drone is a good example. We have a more recent claim of Russian arson from Estonia, a state which has instituted massive discrimination against the 29% of its population who speak Russian. Not only has Estonia closed Russian schools, libraries, theatres, churches, cinemas and university courses, it even refuses passports to people born and bred in Estonia, whose parents were born and bred in Estonia, if they cannot speak Estonian. That is totally contrary to numerous UN, Council of Europe and OSCE instruments on protection of minority linguistic rights. It is one thing to insist on language qualification for citizenship for new immigrants. Many countries do. It is quite another thing to deny citizenship to a native linguistic minority. Estonia was part of Russia from 1721 to 1919 and of the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1991. It has Russian speakers. So I decline to believe the Estonian government on Russian “hybrid attacks”.

Which brings us to the amazing “FlyDubai” hijacking and the heroic plumber who knew how to rescue a plane from a death dive because he watched Air Crash Investigation. There are real problems with this narrative. One is that the plane is said to have dived approximately 15,000 feet in about 30 seconds. This is said to be confirmed by independent flight trackers. The force was so enormous that the rudder ripped off the plane. Picture a dive of 500 feet – that is more than a 40 storey building – per second. Picture that. 500 feet in a second. Imagine yourself falling that fast. The forces would be enormous inside the cabin. Anybody not strapped in would be lifted right out of their seats and probably hit the ceiling. Many would be injured. Any unfastened object, including major ones like food trollies, would be hurled about with great force. Baggage lockers would come unlocked as the weight of the bags inside was hurled up. Remember this dive ripped the rudder off. It would be impossible for anyone not strapped into their chair to keep their footing or seat. We have a great many videos from on board the plane but nothing like this is shown. No video shows this kind of extreme situation, and the cabin at the end of the flight is remarkably undisturbed.

There is also a problem with that flight tracking data. As pointed out by this commercial pilot on CNN, a plan can’t easily slow down in mid air. He is disbelieving of how quickly the flight trackers show the plane returning to normal speed. He is also deeply sceptical of the ability to control the plane after the rudder came off sue to loss of hydraulic fluid, and of the chances of the airframe staying together. Now compare that to the lack of cabin tumult. I have seen it argued that if you entered the dive very gently and carefully without sudden change of pitch, and exited it similarly smoothly, then you would avoid extreme G forces and the cabin might be relatively undisturbed. Even if so, it is hard to imagine the kind of smooth transition into the dive in the circumstances we are told were occurring in the cockpit, with the co-pilot deliberately putting the plane in a death dive while fighting with the pilot. The smooth transition out of the dive in the official story was achieved by a plumber who knew what to do from watching Air Crash Investigation. I don’t think I need to comment on that.

We will never find out the truth about FlyDubai. The plane diverted to Saudi Arabia. The copilot who is being painted as an Islamic extremist will be isolated there and tortured by the Saudis. Netanyahu has already said Israel will join the interrogation. Do not believe any confession or evidence from the co-pilot. The plane was a Boeing, so the USA will join the initial investigation alongside UAE, Saudi Arabia and Israel. A more potent coalition of zionist evil does not exist. We will certainly have faked flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder evidence coming from that shower. I do feel something has snapped in people’s willingness to believe official narratives. The Skripal narrative was even more crazy than any of these, but most people still trusted government. Thankfully that faith has been seriously shaken.

Protect The Triple Lock

Jon Trickett MP writes:

Andy Burnham is right to say that Britain needs a serious conversation about how we support people in old age. His proposal for a National Care Service, to provide free personal care, is welcome. But changing the Triple Lock to help pay for it risks creating a false choice between two essential pillars of a decent society.

The Triple Lock was introduced in 2011 after decades in which the State Pension had fallen badly behind average earnings. Under the system, pensions rise each year by whichever is highest: inflation, average earnings growth, or 2.5 percent. This has provided important protection against both rising prices and the long-term erosion of pensioners’ living standards.

That protection still matters. Age UK estimates that 1.7 to 2.1 million older people are living in poverty, while more than 3.4 million — 28 percent — report that they are struggling financially. Nearly half of those struggling have been doing so for three years or more.

Nor is Britain unusually generous by European standards. The OECD estimates a net pension replacement rate of 44.7 percent for an average UK earner, compared with 54.5 percent across the EU27. The figures are substantially higher in countries including Spain, Portugal and Sweden. Pension systems differ, of course, but Britain hardly has an extravagant state pension by any standard.

This is fundamentally a debate about inequality, although you wouldn’t know it from the headlines. In England, healthy life expectancy in the most deprived areas is just 49.8 years for men and 48.2 years for women, compared with 69.2 and 68.5 years in the least deprived areas. Since 2019–21, healthy life expectancy has fallen in the most deprived areas.

Behind those statistics are people who have spent their lives in low-paid and physically demanding work, often in poorer housing and with worse health. They are not simply dying sooner; many are also reaching later life with greater needs and fewer resources.

These are the generations who lived through the war and helped rebuild Britain in its wake. They contributed to the society from which all of us have benefited. To treat them as a convenient source of savings, as the government is now proposing, is to deny them the dignity and security they deserve.

There is much to agree with in the proposed National Care Service. The principle is a straightforward social democratic one: if someone becomes frail or needs help in their daily life, access to care should not depend on their savings or whether they own their home. Britain is one of the richest countries in the world. We can afford this without a raid on the elderly.

The current £84 billion tax relief on pension payments is heavily skewed towards those with higher incomes. The more you earn, the more relief you receive, and so the bigger your pension. Even more striking is that the rich can shelter assets in their pension funds which can grow substantially over a working lifetime, with no need to pay capital gains tax on them. The pensions setup in the UK is nothing less than a scam by the rich. Why not help pay for the National Care Service by correcting this grossly unfair distribution? 

The NHS does not tell cancer patients that they must first spend their life savings before receiving treatment. It pools risk and provides care according to need. So let’s do the same with care, making it a right rather than a commodity. We don’t have to set the young against the old or taxpayers against pensioners. These zero-sum decisions are the stuff of the neoliberal economics that Burnham claims to oppose. A decent pension and free personal care are both possible with a progressive tax system. The left must push the government to build one.

And Nic Cicutti tweets:

Ex-personal finance writer here. For the past few weeks, we’ve a well-seeded, relentless government spin operation AGAINST the triple lock mechanism. Some of it has involved seeming “left-wing” commentators. In this (long) thread, I’m going to argue FOR the triple lock. Andy Burnham announced yesterday plans to end the triple lock to pay for a national care service. From 2030 Labour will scrap the earnings element, applying it “periodically” – but with no guaranteed commitment. It robs Peter to pay Paul. And it punishes pensioners.

Declaration of interest: I’m a former personal finance editor at The Indie and the FT. I’ve covered pensions issues for almost 35 years. And I benefit from a full state pension, as well as occupational schemes. As a Green socialist, I believe decent pensions are a human right. At about 43% of the average UK income, the state pension is already one of the lowest in Europe by income replacement rates. In Germany, for example, the income replacement rate is 55%, Canada is also 55%. In France, it’s 50% of a worker's average salary. In Italy, it’s 83%. The UK is 11th among EU countries for its retirement age – which is increasing to 67 by 2028 and 68 by 2044. The older you stop work at, the less time you have in actual retirement, even if you can afford it.

In any event, we’re not living longer. The UK has fallen behind the EU average and ranks near the bottom for life expectancy at 80.9 years, compared with 81.5 years in Europe. Switzerland, Italy, and Spain have life expectancies between from 84 to 86. We live less in the UK. As significant, “healthy life expectancy” - the average number of years a person can expect to live in good health – has fallen by 2 years in the past decade, to 60.7 years for males and 60.9 for women. The UK has the second steepest decline among 21 countries worldwide. Healthy life expectancy is a CLASS ISSUE. It’s highest in Richmond-upon-Thames at 69.3 years for males and 70.3 years for females in 2022–24 and lowest in Blackpool for males (50.9 years) and Hartlepool for females (51.2 years). Live less, enjoy life less, receive less money.

Most of us know the triple lock guarantees the state pension rises each April by the higher of earnings, inflation or 2.5%. We also know why it was introduced in 2011. It was both a Tory bribe & a recognition that pensioners’ incomes had fallen too far in the previous 15 years. Let’s be clear: this was caused by Tory policies in the 1980s. Thatcher’s 1980 Social Security Act uncoupled annual pension increases from average workers’ earnings. The result was the State Pension steadily lost ground against wages during this period. Labour failed to address the issue. In relative terms, the value of the UK State Pension fell by 11%, from 18% of average earnings in 1996 to roughly 16% by 2011. The Pensions Act 2007 planned to re-link increases with earnings growth. But Labour lost the 2010 GE.

It’s important to understand some of the drivers of that loss: in the 1997 UK general election, voters aged 65+ supported Labour at almost 40%, with Labour performing pretty evenly across all age groups. In the 2010 general election, 31% just of older voters voted Labour. For reference, the standard income from a DC pension is calculated at 4% of the total pot. So a £35k pot buys an annual income of £1,350 a year – before 20% tax, so 20 quid a week. An £8k pot buys you a whopping £320 additional pension a year – before tax, of course. The lowest 5 income deciles of the UK population hold less than 1% of all private pension wealth. For individuals in the bottom 3 deciles, the median pension wealth is £0. If you’re poor you can’t afford to save as much as a rich person. So your pension will be far less.

What about defined benefit (DB) occupational schemes, particularly public sector ones linked to years of service, ones that have disappeared from the private sector? Isn’t there a huge group of cosseted employees who benefit disproportionately from those occupational schemes? Ignore the fact that public sector workers contribute up to 13% of salary into their schemes, that pensions form part of contracts negotiated by unions on behalf of staff and we should always oppose a race to the bottom when it comes to working conditions for anyone. The average length of service in public sector is about 12-13 years, slightly more in the civil service, less in the NHS, local government and teaching. The median public sector annual pension at retirement is worth about £8k - before tax at 20%. Which means 50% of retirees will receive less, some a lot less, than this amount - and in that cohort are millions of part-time workers and those in lower grades. Women. Again. The figure also ignores “opt-outs” whose low pay and family needs means they can’t afford to contribute into their public sector schemes. The number is about 10% & rising sharply, especially among younger staff: 70% of NHS and 67.5% of teacher opt-outs are workers under 40.

What about home ownership & older people not paying down mortgages? Up to 1.7m pensioner households pay rent & do not own their homes. This is about 21% of retirees. The Pensions Policy Institute (PPI) estimates that by 2044, up to 1 in 3 pensioner households will be renters. But those who actually own their homes are OK, aren’t they? Nope. Bank of England and FCA data shows that 42% of all new mortgages run beyond the borrower's 67th birthday (up from 27% in 2019). This number is increasing every year. I’m one of those people. And, unsurprisingly, this affects savings. Savers who anticipate having ongoing housing costs in retirement hold an average pension pot of just £35k. What we have is inequality baked into the system, with working class people and women in particular paying the price.

Even in those terms, any attempt to reform the pensions system might look at the £83bn in tax reliefs for pension contributions, as well as NIC write-offs and income tax foregone on withdrawals. 57% of this is shared by people who are on 40% tax rate, 14% for those on 45%. The rest (29%) goes to the tens of millions of people who are on 20% tax rate and are trying to save into a defined contribution pension – yet benefit the least from the tidal wave of tax relief available to the richest in our society. Imagine what that money could do if it were redistributed among all pensioners, so that reliefs are capped for everyone at 20%. In fact, you don’t need to imagine. A report in 2024 found it would free up £15bn a year. That’s the equivalent of £21.50 a week for every pensioner in the UK.

Far from being the triple lock being unaffordable, the money is there even if you wanted to hypothecate existing tax reliefs. Never mind raising the money in the many other ways suggested by socialists. Like raising IHT tax rates to 50%, abolishing all the reliefs and dropping the nil rate band to £250,000, which would raise another £4bn. Or taxing wealth for 22,000 just 2% on wealth above £10m, which would raise £25bn a year. Yet that’s not what Andy Burnham wants to do.

I’ll finish by saying that what concerns me is the divisive side effect of the “intergenerational fairness” argument, which is starting to turn people against each other. I’m seeing younger self-professed lefties blaming “boomers” not capitalism for what’s happening. They point at voting patterns among the over 65s to “prove” older people are not just “privileged” but irrevocably right-wing. The fact that until the 1980s voting patterns of over-65s broadly (though not universally) reflected younger age cohorts, has been memory-holed. As have the reasons for the changes since then: the decline in trade union organisation particularly after the Miners’ Strike, the atomisation of the working class and the loss of “community” in many parts of the country. In the absence of a strong organised working class, the underlying sense from some is one of score-settling, rather than a genuinely socialist agenda, which would see young & old agreeing on policies within which people of all ages would be treated with dignity & respect.

What Burnham has done, with his band of reformist fellow-travellers around him, has been to legitimise the argument for scrapping the triple lock. Whichever party wins the next election it means other partes will use the cover he provided by getting rid of it themselves. Burnham has made it easier for us to recognise him as the sell-out he is. I didn’t vote for him in 2015 and I’m now out of the Labour Party. It falls on us to argue against the politics of despair, against ageism & for a better life for all, including pensioners.

The Dark Arts of Camden Labour: Part I

Jessica Murray and Paul Holden writes:

As Keir Starmer began his artful conning of the Labour Party membership, presenting himself as a soft-left unifier, socialist members in Holborn & St Pancras constituency party (CLP) were not fooled. They already knew from hard experience that Starmer was a right-wing factionalist.

And they said as much. In mid-January 2020, as Starmer began to pull ahead in the Labour leadership contest, local activist and former African National Congress politician Andrew Feinstein wrote: ‘I’m a member of Starmer’s CLP & can confirm that he has brought division & rancour to the constituency, including attempting to get rid of all left members off branch committees. This is what he’d do nationally if elected leader.’

But Starmer had some doughty local defenders. Foremost among them was Sagal Abdi-Wali, who wrote in response to Feinstein: ‘I can unequivocally state that Keir Starmer has led our CLP from the top and promoted a culture of unity and respect. That’s why we’re so proud to have him as our MP.’

Abdi-Wali is now the Labour Party’s candidate in the upcoming Holborn & St Pancras by-election, triggered by Starmer’s decision to resign. She is facing off against the Green Party leader Zack Polanski — who has taken a major gamble in running for a London seat that is much less favourable for him than others to the east or south, where the Greens have recently thrashed the Labour Party in local council elections.

The daughter of Somali asylum seekers who settled in Camden when she was a child, Abdi-Wali is running on Obama-style optimism. In person, she is much more charming and socially adept than Starmer. She is often pictured beaming and is undeniably warm. Her profile was boosted nationally when she was subject to disgraceful racist attacks from Zia Yusuf, the swivel-eyed Reform spokesman for home-affairs.

The Labour Party has flooded the constituency, and social media, with flyers and videos urging people to vote to bring ‘hope’ back to Holborn & St Pancras. It is a strange framing, considering that Labour has held this constituency at every election since 1983. But the intention is clearly to run Abdi-Wali in the goodwill slipstream of new Prime Minister Andy Burnham; to hint, without saying it outright, that she embodies a renewed, sunnier soft-left Labour Party; to encourage warm-hearted liberals to see in her candidacy a chance to vote against the racism and hate of Reform. Abdi-Wali’s campaign has so far been brilliantly calibrated in this regard: largely devoid of actual policy to be attacked, but heavy on vibes, as well as the short personalised videos prescribed by the Burnhamite digital strategy gurus.

Amid all this, there has been little to no substantial scrutiny of Abdi-Wali; of the Starmerite political project that birthed her candidacy; of what this project has done to Camden Labour and the community of Camden as a whole; or of why the Labour Party is having to work so hard to hold a seat which, not so long ago, returned Starmer with 70 percent of all votes cast and a storming 30,000 vote majority.

Land of Contrasts

The contrasts of Camden (and Holborn & St Pancras in particular) are hard to miss. The borough is ethnically, racially and religiously diverse. About half of all adults living in Camden were born out of the country, drawn from both Western Europe and the Asian subcontinent. The 2021 census recorded an adult population of 210,000, of which 33,000 identified as practicing Muslims and 10,000 as Jewish.

About 35 percent of residents live in social housing; two in five children in the borough live in relative poverty once housing costs are considered. And new data from 2025 shows that Camden is getting more deprived.

There is persistent disquiet at the failure of Camden to repair and maintain its own housing stock. A damning Housing Ombudsman report in 2024 found the Council to be a disdainful and ineffective landlord in handling resident complaints. Private renters face astronomical costs: in 2025, it was found that only 1 percent of one-bedroom flats for private rent were affordable to a resident earning the average local wage.

There is also affluence and wealth in abundance. The borough includes the glamorous and gleaming redevelopment of King’s Cross and Coal Drops Yard, featuring Google’s mammoth ‘groundscraper’ UK head offices. In the north of the borough, Victorian terraced houses in leafy neighbourhoods routinely cost upwards of £2 million, making it the third most expensive borough to buy a house in the country.

This makes it the natural home for a Blairite elite who have long orbited the local Labour Party: a concentration of Labourite political and cultural capital that is perhaps unique in the country. Lord Peter Mandelson lives, for now, in luxury on the Outer Circle ringing Regent’s Park. Sir Trevor Phillips resides in Kentish Town, not far from Starmer himself, while Alastair Campbell lives in Gospel Oak. Closer to the action has been Georgia Gould, daughter of Blair’s top strategist Philip Gould, who led Camden Council from 2017 until 2024, when she was parachuted into the safe seat of Queen’s Park and Maida Vale and fast-tracked into a ministerial post.

Members of the Holborn & St Pancras CLP during the early and mid-2010s recall a sedate, humdrum local party. Branch meetings were not particularly well-attended. The Party frequently had to cast about and twist the arms of the local membership to attend monthly General Council meetings (‘GCs’ in Labour WhatsApp-speak). Those who served as councillors at the time recall a more relaxed atmosphere where dissent and disagreement were managed without significant rancour and threats to remove the Party Whip.

Things changed with Corbyn’s election in 2015. Local branches were flooded with members. Camden Momentum became increasingly influential. Factional friction, always present, became particularly intense after Corbyn’s unexpectedly solid showing in the 2017 election; partly because an emboldened left could now attract more supporters to meetings, and partly because Camden’s Labour right-wingers realised that Corbynism was not going to be a flash in the pan, and might seriously threaten their control of the local party.

By 2018, slate politics dominated and bitter quibbling over arcane rules and procedures ensued, as both sides sought whatever advantage they could find. Long-time members like the genial and mild-mannered Jewish Holocaust-survivor Stephen Kapos suddenly found themselves adrift in this new atmosphere. Kapos, a member since the 1960s in Starmer’s own Kentish Town branch, had been elected as a delegate to the GCs with ease since 2010. At an AGM in 2018 he lost his place to a well-run right-wing slate.

In this cut-and-thrust of local politics (often angry, sometimes unfair, but nevertheless vibrant and dynamic), participants became plainly aware of where everyone’s factional allegiances lay. It was clear, for example, that Starmer was part of the anti-Corbyn right-wing faction: he raised eyebrows when he took time out of his brief as Shadow Brexit Secretary to attend the 2018 AGM of his home branch at Kentish Town at which Kapos lost his GC seat.

Abdi-Wali was part of that same faction, hence her election as the chair of Holborn & St Pancras CLP in 2019. She was particularly close to the married couple Gil Black and Martin Plaut. One of the authors of this piece, Paul Holden, co-authored a book, Who Rules South Africa, with Plaut, published in 2012. Black was Sir Keir’s election agent. Plaut, meanwhile, is a particularly active, effective and pugnacious anti-Corbyn operator, who was for a period listed as a parliamentary researcher for Starmer.

When journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire cast about for local friends to interview for their book on the McSweeney-Starmer project, Plaut obliged with an analysis of Starmer’s politics as foretold by his behaviour on the local football pitches. ‘He’s a completely hard bastard’, Plaut enthused. ‘He plays to the edge of the rules, really hard.’ 

Clampdown

Sagal Abdi-Wali got her start as a Labour councillor as a result of a crass purge that typified how the Starmerite Party machinery sought to erase any opposition to its narrow political outlook.

The withdrawal of the whip from Jeremy Corbyn in late 2020 had shattered any illusion on the left of the Labour Party that Starmer might be a unifier. In Holborn and St Pancras, left-wingers felt unable to voice their opposition to this direction of travel due to what they saw as Abdi-Wali’s factional chairing of CLP meetings. In January 2021, thirteen elected GC delegates and five ordinary and active Labour members wrote a letter to her expressing their ‘dismay’ that the meetings she chaired were not a ‘welcoming environment encouraging a diversity of voices’ but forums where ‘dissent [was] considered unacceptable.’

One complaint alleged that Abdi-Wali had not allowed anyone ‘on the left’ to ask questions of Starmer during a recent meeting. She responded by saying, ‘I do not engage in this rhetoric. . . . I believe everyone in our meeting is on the left, everyone in our meeting is a member of the Labour Party. . . . I can assure you, those of you here are not and were not the only “Corbyn-supporters” in our CLP, are not and were not the only Socialists.’ 

Later that year, the selection of Labour’s candidates for the 2022 local elections got underway. The process of selecting candidates for Camden council was overseen by Mike Katz, chair of the Local Campaign Forum. 

Katz was the National Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) between 2019 and 2025, including during the period in which it threatened to disaffiliate from the Labour Party in response to the ‘antisemitism crisis’ under Corbyn. We now know that Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s future chief of staff, worked closely with JLM during the period at Labour Together in which he was covertly working to destroy the electoral chances of Corbyn’s Labour. 

JLM is an explicitly Zionist organisation and is affiliated with the British subsidiary of the World Zionist Organisation. In 2024, the BBC would reveal that the ‘settlement division’ of the World Zionist Organisation was complicit in facilitating illegal settlements in the West Bank. 

At the time of the councillor purge in Camden, and in addition to his role in JLM, Katz was ‘Head of Policy and Public Affairs’ for FirstGroup, a conglomerate that had bought up swathes of the bus and rail services privatised in the 1980s and 1990s. 

The process to decide who could and couldn’t be a councillor in Camden was thus being overseen by an executive at a private transport company, who was also heading an organisation that sought to police the tone and scope of Labour Party conversations about Israel. 

By the end of the selection process, seven sitting Labour councillors had been blocked from standing for re-election — a purge described as ‘unprecedented’ in local paper of record, the Camden New Journal (CNJ). Some of the councillors purged were explicitly Corbynite, but some were just independent-minded. More still decided to stand down, appalled at the treatment of their colleagues.

One of those blocked was Paul Tomlinson, councillor since 2015 for Somers Town, one of the most deprived wards in the borough, and a persistent critic of the council’s record on affordable housing. 

There was outcry in the Letters pages of the CNJ when Labour’s deselection of Tomlinson was announced. ‘By deselecting Cllr Tomlinson, you silence Somers Town’, wrote one resident. ‘This is a dangerous trend: a curtailment of freedom to voice concerns and tolerate dissent.’ 

Leo Cassarani was another casualty of the deselections. A beloved local campaigner, he had advocated for the community against an imposing Deliveroo ‘Dark Kitchen’ that ‘heaped misery on residents’ in an adjacent housing estate. ‘Until Labour sees the value of people like Leo, and allows a dissenting voice from time to time, I will not be voting Labour again. The party is diminished and its reputation disgraced by Leo’s shameful and forced departure’, a resident wrote to the CNJ.

An 87-year-old who had been a member of the Labour Party since she was 18 wrote to the CNJ explaining that she had just resigned her membership. ‘Many of my friends and neighbours, working class, devoted, Labour Party members for decades, now feel they are no longer wanted, valued or respected by the party,’ she said. ‘People with opposing views are essentially being ostracised for speaking up and asking questions. This is entirely wrong in a democracy.’ The Letters page of the CNJ was filled with dozens of similar letters in late 2021 and early 2022.

Plaut, friend of Starmer and Abdi-Wali who sat on some of the selection panels, responded that he ‘was sorry to see that some neighbourhood organisations were upset’ by the deselections. ‘Based on the system we adopted and the limited sample of cases I participated in, I believe that this procedure was scrupulously fair,’ Plaut wrote. ‘No one should automatically expect to be a councillor if they don’t meet our requirements,’ Mike Katz told the CNJ.

These views were hard to square with the bizarre circumstances around the selection process, which had further inflamed local anger. In June 2019, Cassarani, Tomlinson, Maryam Eslamdoust and other councillors had signed a ‘call-in’ suspending a Labour cabinet member’s decision on redevelopment plans for Camley Street, near King’s Cross, so that it could be subjected to proper scrutiny.

By 2021, this act of diligence had become an unforgivable sin within the world of Camden Labour. The interview panels were provided with a whip’s report written by Lazzaro Pietragnoli, the former Camden Mayor who had served as Chief Whip of the Labour Group. The reports highlighted the call-in decision, using it as the pretext to block the candidates on the basis that it was a de facto decision to break the Labour Whip.

As candidates were being blocked because of Pietragnoli’s reports, the Camden New Journal revealed that he had been secretly running a Twitter account called @phillmum. Pietragnoli pretended to be a mother-of-three in Primrose Hill living in social housing. He used the account to praise his own work and attack left-wing councillors, including Eslamdoust, whom he called a ‘scumbag.’ Eslamdoust was blocked from standing as a councillor on the back of Pietragnoli’s whip’s report about her. Pietragnoli resigned in embarrassment shortly after the revelations.

Despite this, the party nevertheless continued to rely on his reports. Its only response was to send a ‘sample’ to a Labour figure outside of the borough to review, who declared them neither biased nor inaccurate.

This was news to Ranjit Singh, the councillor whose Labour career was ended to Abdi-Wali’s benefit. Singh was a long-time and prominent left-wing member of the local Labour Party who had vocally backed Corbyn. He was told he wasn’t allowed to stand in 2021 following an interview with the panel selected by Katz. He was grilled based on Pietragnoli’s whip’s report, which berated Singh for signing the Camley Street call-in. But Singh had done no such thing; as a Google search would have established. He was nevertheless told he couldn’t challenge the whip’s report in the meeting.

In January 2022, the Labour Party sent out an appeal for more members to apply to be councillors. The CNJ wrote that ‘despite having more than 4,000 members across Camden, the party has not got enough approved names to fill a full slate of 55.’

Abdi-Wali, well known as the chair of Holborn & St Pancras CLP, was selected for the seat vacated by Singh. Izzy Lenga, a prominent member of JLM who had been active in Barnet Labour, was offered a seat in South Hampstead, which had lost all three of its councillors due to deselections and a resignation in solidarity. At the branch meeting, the appointment of Lenga and two others were presented as a fait accompli, prompting attendees to leave the Zoom room en masse in protest. Lenga was made the Chief Whip of the Camden Labour Group immediately on her election.

Prior to her selection, Electronic Intifada had published a photo of Lenga wearing an Israeli military uniform, draped in the flag of Israel and seemingly holding a rifle. Now vice-chair of JLM, it was revealed in 2022 that Lenga did basic training with the IDF. More recently, anonymous campaigners in the constituency have unearthed a photo Lenga posted to Facebook in November 2025, which shows Lenga and Abdi-Wali on holiday at Zion National Park in Utah, both smiling widely into the camera. Lenga captioned the image ‘Twice as Zionist’. 

The Successor

Abdi-Wali’s career has since gone from strength to strength. In October 2023, she was elected as the chair of Labour’s National Women’s Committee. She was endorsed by Labour to Win, which had been formed as a joint enterprise by the Mandelsonian outfit Progress and Labour First, the home of the old Labour right. Labour to Win was headed by infamous Labour organiser Luke Akehurst [no offence, Luke; you know that I think that you are good constituency MP], a role he performed alongside his two days-a-week employed as a lobbyist for Israel. Abdi-Wali was re-elected to the position this year, again with Labour to Win’s backing.

In early 2024, she was made cabinet member for housing. She was elected leader of the Council in May 2026 and then selected as the Labour Party’s candidate for the Holborn & St Pancras by-election in September.

Abdi-Wali’s climb up the political ladder has coincided with a withering of both the Labour Party’s local membership and its popularity with the electorate. The councillor purges of 2021 and 2022 were just a sample of the outrages inflicted on the left-leaning membership in the borough, all the nastier for being carried out under the pretext of resolving the ‘antisemitism crisis’.

Between 2021 and 2024, numerous prominent Jewish Labour Party members in Camden found themselves investigated or suspended for supposed antisemitism. In 2023, Stephen Kapos, the Jewish Holocaust survivor, resigned from the Party in protest. He had been warned by the Labour Party that he would face expulsion if he talked about his personal experience of the Holocaust at a meeting of the Socialist Labour Network (SLN) — on Holocaust Memorial Day. SLN had been proscribed by the Party in March 2022.

Andrew Feinstein was informed by the Party that he was under investigation for antisemitism in 2021. He was only cleared years later, after threatening legal action. Party files show that his complaint was submitted by a non-Jewish member of Labour Against Antisemitism (LAAS), which had played a prominent role in amplifying the despicable ‘dark arts’ campaigns previously run by Morgan McSweeney. ‘He seems to constantly reference his dead family in order to undermine claims of anti-Semitism which is in common with others claiming Jewish heritage who have been expelled from the party,’ the complaint alleged.

But perhaps the most egregious case was that of Riva Joffe.

Joffe, a remarkable and very funny psychotherapist, was prominent on the left of the local party. She was a member of Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL), a non-Zionist group set up as a counterweight to JLM which determinedly defied the mainstream narrative of widespread antisemitism under Corbyn. Her parents had fled persecution in Europe and settled in South Africa in the 1930s. They joined the South African Communist Party and became active in the struggle against the system of racial segregation that would be codified into apartheid. Joffe’s family left South Africa soon after the Second World War to settle in Britain, with their family home becoming a safehouse for anti-apartheid luminaries passing through London.

In 2021, Joffe was sent a Notice of Investigation accusing her of antisemitism. She was at that moment on her deathbed, suffering from a terminal illness. She wrote a stinging response to the charges — the last political act of her life. She shared the story of both her declining health and this last indignity on social media. She died while under investigation for antisemitism. Joffe’s son, Stefan, has described how the Labour Party under Starmer has refused to answer whether it has cleared Joffe of the charges posthumously. Starmer refused to acknowledge — let alone answer — letters sent to him directly about Joffe’s case.

Party files show that the complaint against Joffe — for sharing a post in favour of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, and another on the JVL Facebook group — had been submitted by a person called David Gordstein. But Gordstein was not real — this Jewish-sounding persona was the invention of Euan Phillips, the non-Jewish spokesperson for LAAS. Phillips admitted to Al Jazeera in 2022 that he had created Gordstein; he insisted that ‘he never claimed to Jewish when doing so.’

Five years on, Camden Labour’s grandees — Polly Toynbee, Sir Trevor Phillips, Georgia Gould and her mother Baroness Rebuck, the chair of Penguin Random House — assembled in St Pancras Church, the same venue where Starmer had been first selected as an MP, to pick his successor: Sagal Abdi-Wali. No media was allowed in (neither reporters nor photographers) and no information on how many members had voted was released.

Abdi-Wali declined to speak to the CNJ. In the words of Osley, ‘media outlets elsewhere faithfully shared a generic statement about how happy she was to have been selected.’ The photos of Abdi-Wali’s selection were supplied to the media by Martin Plaut. He had, days earlier, written the first glowing profile of Abdi-Wali on his personal blog. He celebrated her humour and warmth, as well as the ‘tough decisions’ she had made about housing as cabinet member for the portfolio. Gil Black signed as the seconder to Abdi-Wali’s formal nomination with the Electoral Commission.

Plaut’s social media suggests he has since transferred his distaste for Corbynites in the Labour Party to Zack Polanski, the Jewish leader of the Greens and Abdi-Wali’s opponent. In March this year, he shared an article in the Jewish Chronicle, ‘Zack Polanski — the Useful Court Jew,’ written by Stephen Pollard, to his Facebook. Plaut wrote the words ‘Zack Polanski’, following by a line from the article: ‘Under his leadership, the Green Party provides a home not just to Islamists but also to antisemites who were too blatant even for Corbyn’s [Labour Party].’

In response to questions for this article, Plaut said he did not believe that Polanski was a ‘court Jew’ and that he ‘categorically rejected’ this view. He said he did not ‘have a view’ on the membership of the Green Party. He also indicated he did not understand the meaning of the word ‘Islamist’ in his post and commented that ‘Sagal is a ‘Muslim and I strongly support her.’ He did not respond when it was pointed out that his personal website includes the category ‘Islamists’ and that he had used the word over 25 times on his X account. Plaut’s Facebook post remained live at the time of going to press.

Hope Again?

We are faced today with another fraud, this time directed towards the voting public of Camden rather than the Labour membership. In this byelection, the most cynical and diehard Starmerite cadres in the country, leading supporters of Israel among them, are presenting themselves as bearers of the hope that their own man — their own political project — bludgeoned away.

That makes laying out the facts all the more important. Sagal Abdi-Wali’s story is the story of Camden Labour, and the story of Camden Labour is that it was Starmerism’s ground-zero. Here, local democracy was brutally dismantled, with the council subordinated to the interests of housing developers and the imperative to defend Israel. The priorities of the local party mirror those of the national one under Starmer: from complicity in genocide to trickle-down housing policy to what Councillor Paul Tomlinson called ‘social cleansing.’ The Starmerite machine that made Sagal Abdi-Wali now asks voters to send her to Westminster, hoping that in the glow of Burnham’s leftward turn its dark arts — lobbying for Israel, rolling over for exploitative property developers, purging community stalwarts who dared to dissent — will go unseen. That cannot be allowed to happen, not least because Camden Labour and its petty authoritarians represent the highest (and lowest) form of the party culture that the new Prime Minister has promised to vanquish. 

Part II of this article will dig into Camden Labour’s record in power, from blocking divestment from Israel to catastrophic failure on affordable housing.

The Truth About The False Flags

Imagine that one of those released early from prison then did over Andy Burnham's house. Of course, that could never happen. But a "plot" to do it could be "foiled", and then blamed on Russia, or Iran, or whoever. That would be no more believable than either the RAF Fairford or the Flydubai story, but these things are not intended to be believed. Our rulers assert their dominance by forcing us to pretend to believe them. Resist. In particular, laugh at them. They really hate that.

Via the acquisition of Manchester City and its use to fund charities and community projects, Sheikh Mansour has effectively acquired the right-wing Labour elite in Greater Manchester. His brother is the Emir of Abu Dhabi, while his wife's father is the Emir of Dubai. Sheikh Mansour himself controls the UAE National Bank and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, chairs two of the UAE's sovereign wealth funds, and sits on the board of a third. Burnham was right the first time. A conurbation of three million people has been made largely dependent on the Emiratis. As have rather a lot of things in the United Kingdom.

Therefore, Burnham has had to go along with the frequently changing but always fanciful Israeli yarn about Flydubai, while some poor sap from the same notably well-to-do part of London as the Fairford Five has been picked up on account of his Iranian passport, although even he is also a British citizen, to keep up that preposterous pitch for a filmed farce, Five Lions as the sequel to Four Lions. But the connections between these two false flag operations are not incidental. The war in Iran, by planes flown from RAF Fairford and other nominally British "American forts", is the cause of the fuel shortage, and the fuel shortage has sent through the roof the theft of fuel from farms. And Britain is in that war, which it is, because we are governed by financial dependents of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. 

That is also why, in a nauseating act of pure sycophancy, Burnham has supplied a refuelling plane to a Saudi Arabia that already had its own, thereby gratuitously making Britain and British citizens potential targets of the Houthis and of all their many admirers. We must implore the good burghers of Holborn and St Pancras to elect George Galloway.

To Make A Real Difference

Larry Elliott is the best thing about The Guardian:

Andy Burnham does a nice line in nostalgia. His first party conference speech as prime minister was full of fond memories for the Britain of the 1950s and 1960s, when working-class families could sense their lives steadily getting better. The underlying message of his address was that, given time, he could rekindle that optimism and return the country to how it was before Margaret Thatcher wrecked everything.

Much of what Burnham says is true. The 1980s was a decade of deindustrialisation, asset-stripping and financial deregulation that has shaped modern Britain – and not in a good way.

But listen a bit more closely to the speech and it becomes clear that Burnham is struggling to find a way to turn back the clock. For a start, he might not be given time. Energy bills are forecast to rise sharply this winter. John Healey’s first budget, in less than a month’s time, is expected to raise taxes or cut spending – taking money out of an economy that is already struggling.

There’s no question that Burnham and Healey would prefer not to be taking these actions but feel they have no choice. Burnham may well rail against 40 years of neoliberalism. He may think neoliberalism was a dud. But his government is constrained by neoliberal ideas and the language used to express them. Burnham and Healey would never use this language themselves, but that’s irrelevant. To make a real difference, they need to tackle head-on the nostrums of the past four decades. Otherwise they will be forever in thrall to them.

Top of the list is the idea that the UK government is no different from a household. That means it should match its spending to its income as closely as possible, borrowing prudently and within tightly defined limits. Otherwise it will “max out the nation’s credit card” and risk spiralling into unsustainable debt.

This analogy has the benefit of sounding like a statement of the obvious to many voters, but is actually entirely false. There is no such thing as the nation’s credit card, and a country that prints its own currency can never “max out” or face bankruptcy in the way an individual can.

The notion that the government is living well beyond its means is convenient for those on the political right who have an aversion to public spending. The reality is that, as John Maynard Keynes once said: “Anything we can actually do we can afford.” It was that mentality that allowed the Attlee government to create the welfare state when debt was running at more than 250% of national income – more than double today’s level. I don’t know whether Burnham has seen the new play about Keynes in London’s West End, but it seems as if he ought to.

By the same token, it makes no sense to talk about “black holes” in the public finances every time the government looks on course to miss its targets for borrowing as set out in its fiscal rules. These rules are treated as totemic when in reality they can be changed at any time – and are ditched altogether when there is a crisis.

Again, the idea of a black hole is a convenient fiction for those with an interest in shrinking the size of the state. As with “maxing out the credit card”, it forms part of the inquisition every time a minister goes on the TV or radio with a new spending measure: “That’s all very well but how are you going to pay for it?”

Burnham is committed to reindustrialising Britain, but to do so he will have to break with the neoliberal convention that it is not the job of the government to pick winners. As the prime minister should point out, China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea have all built up their manufacturing strength by picking winners, and Britain could do the same. Indeed, the one sector that Thatcher picked out for special care and attention – financial services – has gone from strength to strength. Breaking the taboo on picking winners is central to a successful industrial strategy.

Last but not least, Burnham has to address Thatcher’s famous dictum: you can’t buck the market. A cursory glance back at recent economic history shows that governments buck the market all the time. In 2009, the Bank of England responded to the risk of a second Great Depression posed by the global financial crisis by buying government bonds. This provided money to the banking system while cutting the interest rate – or yield – on bonds. This was bucking the market. In 2020, the then Conservative government spent hundreds of billions on a furlough scheme that paid up to 80% of the wages of workers at risk of losing their jobs during the pandemic. This, too, was bucking the market.

So when Burnham, in his conference speech, harked back to the Britain in the immediate decades after the second world war, he missed out a key part of the reason working people felt things were getting better. Rather than being constrained by fiscal rules, governments were committed to full employment. Capital controls meant that financial markets were tightly controlled.

Before we get too nostalgic, it’s worth remembering that things were far from perfect in the so-called postwar golden age. By today’s standards, growth rates were spectacular, but they lagged well behind those of Germany and France. Even so, managed capitalism certainly delivered more for working people than has been the case in the unmanaged capitalism that has followed.

The postwar status quo has been turned on its head. Then, financial markets were caged to ensure that governments could pursue domestic economic goals. Now, governments are caged and the markets are free. It is a classic case of the tail wagging the dog.

Shifting back to a world where finance is fettered is not going to be easy – but until it happens, governments will remain boxed in. Burnham and Healey will be forced to do things they know will harm the economy because they know any deviation from what is acceptable to the received wisdom risks a backlash from the financial markets.

Some new economic thinking is required, and if ever there were a time for an iconoclast like Keynes, it is surely now. He would certainly have no truck with the wrong-headed economic policies of the past half-century and the seemingly commonsense phrases – such as maxing out the credit card – that have been used to disguise just how nonsensical they are.

All credit to Burnham. His analysis of what has gone wrong has clearly rattled his political enemies. Even so, he risks becoming the nearly man of British politics: the prime minister who asked the right questions but failed to come up with the right answers.