Resist Yielding

Is the licence payer footing the bill for Raffi Berg to sue Owen Jones? Will the Telegraph retain Lobby access now that it had ultimate overlords who had pledged allegiance to a foreign state, and that not even their own? The IDF has dropped the criminal charges against its soldiers who filmed themselves gang-raping a male Palestinian detainee, charges that had prompted riots in Israel by those who did not deny that the offences had been committed, but instead regarded the rapists as national heroes precisely as rapists; Chairman Mao used to have soldiers who had done that disciplined in the villages where they had committed their crimes, and then he would have them executed, since he regarded even a Nationalist or Japanese soldier more humanely than Israel regards a Palestinian civilian.

Speaking of Japan, the United States has today redeployed Marines from there to the Middle East to which, earlier this week, it had redeployed its THAAD and Patriot interceptors from South Korea. Whatever the reason for war in Iran, it is clearly not to deter China or North Korea. Since 2017, hosting THAAD has cost South Korea its relations with China, including billions of dollars in exports and billions more in tourism. China banned K-Pop. Kia and Hyundai and Kia lost their market share in China after they had been made to close their factories there. And it was all for nothing. Imperial Britain was said to buy its enemies but sell its friends. Perhaps the American imperium really is it successor after all?

Still, Fr Pierre El-Rahi is being hailed as a martyr in a classic example of the popular cultus that is the first step to canonisation. Unless I am very much mistaken, then he would be the first to be raised to the altars for having been martyred at the hands of the State of Israel, in his case during one of its trademark double taps, which are a war crime. While they were unarmed and delivering humanitarian aid, the IDF bombed the British veterans James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman were triple tapped, bombed three times to make sure that they were dead. Put them on the banknotes. Certainly put them on the stamps In their honours, always fly the Union Flag and the Palestinian flag alongside each other. Raise a glass of Arak to Fr El-Rahi while invoking his intercession. And make ubiquitous the products of the Taybeh Brewing Company, as Roberto Cetera writes:

Violence by Jewish settlers in Palestine has now also struck the residents of Taibeh, the only entirely Christian Palestinian village. Taibeh is the ancient Ephraim, the location mentioned in the Gospel of John where Jesus took refuge after the resurrection of Lazarus (Jn 11:54), and where the Christian community has extremely ancient roots. The village is home to three churches—Latin, Greek Orthodox, and Melkite—whose pastors, Fathers Bashar Fawadleh, Jack Nobel Abed, and Daoud Khoury, issued an appeal last night calling on Israeli authorities to prevent further settler violence, which so far has largely occurred in the presence of passive Israeli soldiers.

The attack on Taibeh

Yesterday, a group of Jewish settlers set fires near the Byzantine Christian cemetery and at the Church of Al-Khader (St. George), dating back to the 5th century and one of the oldest and most venerated places of worship for Christians in Palestine. These arson attacks follow a series of violent acts against the town’s Christian residents, which have been escalating in recent weeks. The settlers have also damaged olive groves—Taibeh’s primary source of income—and are preventing farmers from accessing and working their land.

Appeal to the International Community

The eastern part of the town, the three priests lament, "has become an open target for illegal Jewish settlement outposts that are quietly expanding under the protection of the Israeli army." The priests are calling on the international and Church communities to send missions to the area to document the damages and the progressive deterioration of the situation.

Israel’s economic interests and the threat of annexation

In recent weeks, settler terrorism has targeted not only Taibeh but also several other Palestinian villages near illegal settlements, such as Ein Samia and Kufr Malik, where settlers have set fire to homes, vehicles, and crops. At the end of June, four young Palestinians trying to resist the violence were brutally killed. In Ein Samia, located along the Jordan Valley, settlers attacked and destroyed the local aqueduct—the spring that, through a Roman-era canal system, still provides water to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, all the way to Ramallah.

Risk of new land confiscations

Taibeh is located in the central Ramallah highlands at 850 meters above sea level, where both the lights of Jerusalem and Jordan’s Al-Salt mountains are visible at night. The Christian residents of Taibeh live peacefully alongside Muslims from neighbouring villages. Their troubles began in 1977 when the Israeli government confiscated dozens of hectares of nearby land and illegally established a settlement called Rimonim. Large agricultural areas were taken from Taibeh’s farmers to build roads connecting various Jewish settlements. In the days leading up to yesterday’s attacks on Christian sites, settlers had already targeted the village outskirts, setting fire to a house and several cars. Hundreds more hectares of Palestinian land are at risk of confiscation to further expand settlements.

The greatest concern of Taibeh-Ephraim’s Christian residents today is that—with global attention focused on the immense tragedy in Gaza—the increasingly serious threats to the survival of the world’s oldest Christian community may not be fully grasped by the international community.

And the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem has issued this statement:

The recent decision by the Israeli Police to ban Christian worshippers from participating in the sacred services of the Feast of the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, citing the absence of requisite government approvals and licenses, has led to the regrettable closure of this holy site to thousands of faithful congregants.

This decision, reminiscent of last year's similarly timed disruption, has left the Patriarchate of Jerusalem with little recourse. The recurrent Israeli portrayal of Christian prayers and religious ceremonies as private events necessitating security measures-an approach distinctly detached from the spiritual essence of these occasions-serves as a persistent excuse to impede Christians from exercising their faith. Such actions dismiss the integral role of Christians within the societal fabric, imposing undue restrictions rather than fulfilling the state's duty to facilitate the practice of religious practices.

This regrettable stance is not isolated; comparable obstructions have also marred other sacred events, including Saturday of the Holy Light in Jerusalem. It is incumbent upon the Israeli authorities to uphold the inviolable rights of freedom of worship, access to holy sites, and the unimpeded performance of religious ceremonies-rights that are both inherent and guaranteed by international law to the indigenous Christian community in the holy land.

In anticipation of avoiding a repetition of last year's events during the Feast of the Transfiguration, the Patriarchate had proactively communicated with the Israeli Minister of Interior over a month ago. However, the police's decision has unexpectedly thwarted the natural right of believers to worship. The Patriarchate earnestly hopes that Israeli authorities will reassess their stance towards non-Jewish religious practices, affirm the fundamental rights of Christians, and resist yielding to dominating radical tendencies.

The Bathrobes and The Beast

Every banknote should bear the recently uncovered image of Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Mandelson and the then Prince Andrew, with both the old Establishment and the metropolitan liberal elite in a state of undress. Those depicted may be classed as wildlife, since they are feral. That photograph should silence both proponents and opponents of the removal of the hereditary peers from Parliament, and stay the tongues both of monarchists and of republicans. Like the monarchy, that removal is now the status quo in the context of two sides whose arguments were each rubbish in its own terms, meaning that the case for change had not been made. And even by the standards of the great Paul Knaggs, this is outstanding:

A photograph of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Peter Mandelson in bathrobes alongside convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein has been released from the US Department of Justice files. It is the first known image of all three men together. It is also a portrait of a system that believed it would never face a reckoning.

Is there anything more revealing than the sight of an English prince and a British statesman lounging in towelling robes, sipping from star-spangled mugs in the easy company of a monster?

The image unearthed from the latest tranche of Epstein files released by the US Department of Justice is not merely a photograph. It is a document. It is the first known image of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Lord Peter Mandelson together with the late Jeffrey Epstein.

Three men around a wooden table on a deck in Martha’s Vineyard, understood to have been taken between 1999 and 2000. They look relaxed. They look comfortable. They look like men who believed, with complete confidence, that the world inhabited by the girls Epstein trafficked could never possibly reach their private decking.

They were wrong. And the unravelling, which has been long in coming, is not yet complete.

“This is not a story about individual moral failure. It is a story about a system that was designed, consciously or not, to protect powerful men from consequences.”

THE ARCHITECTURE OF INTIMACY

Mandelson submitted a claim for severance pay of £547,201

The photograph sits alongside a cascade of revelations that have arrived, in the past week alone, with the force of a tide that can no longer be held back.

On Wednesday, the UK government released 147 pages of documents covering the appointment of Lord Mandelson as British Ambassador to the United States in December 2024. What those papers show is not the portrait of a man who deceived a trusting Prime Minister. They show a Prime Minister who was handed a clear warning and chose to proceed anyway.

A due diligence report prepared by senior civil servants flagged what it described as a “general reputational risk” arising from Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein. The relationship, the report noted, ran from 2002 to 2019, spanning Epstein’s conviction, his imprisonment and his death. It noted that Mandelson had stayed at Epstein’s New York home while the convicted sex offender was serving his sentence. It cited a JPMorgan report from 2019 that identified Epstein’s “particularly close relationship” with both Mandelson and the then-Prince Andrew.

Keir Starmer was given this document. He read it, or his advisers read it for him. His communications director was, in the language of the files, “satisfied” with Mandelson’s responses to questions about Epstein. The appointment went ahead.

When the full scale of the relationship became unmistakable, Mandelson was sacked. He then submitted a claim for severance pay of £547,201, the remainder of his four-year contract. He settled, in the end, for £75,000 of public money. A Foreign Office official noted approvingly that the settlement had been negotiated “down this low with minimal fuss.” The phrase deserves to be read slowly. A man arrested on suspicion of misconduct in a public office, a man who allegedly shared sensitive government information with a convicted paedophile, received seventy-five thousand pounds of taxpayers’ money to go quietly. And the official responsible was praised for keeping the fuss to a minimum.

“The bathrobe is a fitting garment for these men. It is a state of undress. A studied informality that signals power too secure to need a suit.”

THE WEIRDLY RUSHED APPOINTMENT

Note to PM says communications chief was ‘satisfied’ with responses over Epstein contact

The documents reveal something else that deserves attention. Mandelson was given access to high-tier classified briefings before his security vetting was even completed. On 23 December 2024, an email from the US and Canada department told him he would be briefed “at higher tiers” from 6 January onwards. Confirmation that he had passed security clearance did not arrive until 30 January.

Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister’s National Security Adviser, later described the appointment process as “weirdly rushed and unusual.” He told Starmer’s lawyer he had raised concerns about the individual and his reputation. He raised these concerns after Mandelson had already been appointed. After he had already been briefed into classified material. After he had already, it seems, met the King.

This is not competence. This is not oversight. This is the British establishment operating on the assumption that men of a certain standing simply do not require the scrutiny applied to everyone else.

Mandelson, it has now emerged, also facilitated a meeting between Epstein and the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair in May 2002. The Architect of New Labour, as he was known with a mixture of admiration and dread, was apparently the bridge between the most powerful politician in Britain and the most dangerous predator of the age. How many other bridges he built, and for whom, remains a question the documents have not yet answered.

THE PRINCE AND THE PEDOPHILE

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s association with Epstein has been public knowledge since his catastrophic Newsnight interview in 2019. What the Epstein files have revealed is that the relationship was far more corrosive to the public interest than previously understood.

Emails released by the Department of Justice show that Andrew forwarded confidential reports from his work as the UK’s trade envoy directly to Epstein. One email, from November 2010, was sent to Epstein five minutes after Andrew received it from his special adviser. It contained details of official visits to Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore. On Christmas Eve 2010, Andrew shared a confidential briefing on investment opportunities in the reconstruction of Helmand Province in Afghanistan, a region where British soldiers were actively fighting and dying, and where UK government money was funding rebuilding efforts.

The Official Secrets Acts of 1911 and 1989 are explicit. The duty of confidentiality for trade envoys applies during their tenure and after it ends. Andrew forwarded classified material to a man who had been convicted in 2008 of soliciting prostitution from a minor.

He has consistently claimed he cut off contact with Epstein in December 2010. The emails show contact continuing well beyond that date, including a message from February 2011 in which he told Epstein he had “thought of you” after visiting a private equity firm. The correspondence also includes an invitation for Epstein to dine at Buckingham Palace, and a photograph that appears to show Andrew kneeling over an unidentified woman on a floor.

Andrew’s name appears at least several hundred times throughout the released documents. He was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in a public office in February 2026, released on bail and, despite being stripped of his titles, remains eighth in line to the throne. An Act of Parliament would be required to remove him from the succession permanently. That Act has not been introduced.

“No crime is being committed within the frame of the photograph. But it is evidence of something the British establishment has spent two decades trying to obscure: a relationship of sustained intimacy between two of its most prominent figures and a convicted paedophile.”

THE DEFENCE OF THE INDEFENSIBLE

The standard response from the Mandelson camp has been the “unequivocal apology.” Say the words, accept the criticism, wait for the story to move on. It is a technique that has served him well across a career marked by three resignations, two comebacks and an apparently inexhaustible capacity for reinvention.

This time, the technique has failed. The law has followed him.

The defenders of these men reach for the argument of “guilt by association.” They suggest that high-flying social circles are not governed by the moral credentials of every host. They claim these were fleeting encounters, historical relationships, the errors of a different era.

This is a nonsense. In any other walk of life, a man who maintains close friendship with a child abuser after his conviction, who stays in his house while he is in prison, who urges him to “fight for early release” and promises that his friends “stay with you and love you,” does not survive professionally. He does not receive honours. He is not appointed to the country’s most important diplomatic post, with access to classified intelligence, by a Prime Minister who has been shown a dossier of his connections.

The question of Starmer’s own conduct cannot be avoided. He told Parliament he did not know the depth of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein. The documents suggest he was given a detailed summary of that relationship before the appointment was made. On 12 March, in Northern Ireland, he admitted: “It was me that made the mistake.” The admission is welcome. It is not sufficient.

WHAT THE PHOTOGRAPH TELLS US

The photograph released today is not evidence of a crime. No law is broken in the sitting of three men around a table in bathrobes. But what it does, with quiet and devastating clarity, is place these men in the same frame. It makes the relationship undeniable. It gives the public something concrete where before there were only allegations, emails and denials.

The British establishment has always relied on abstraction. On plausible deniability. On the blurring of timelines and the multiplication of qualifying clauses. “I was wrong to believe him.” “I regret that association.” “I did not know the full extent.” The photograph cuts through all of it.

It is a record of intimacy. It is proof of comfort. These were not chance encounters at charity galas or brief handshakes at international summits. These were private mornings with a man who was, at the time the photograph was taken, already regarded in some circles as deeply problematic, and who would go on to be convicted of the sexual exploitation of a child.

The women and girls Epstein trafficked did not have bathrobes or star-spangled mugs or private decks in Martha’s Vineyard. They had no protection whatsoever. Not from Epstein’s network. Not from the institutions that were supposed to hold power to account. Not from the men in the photograph.

Mandelson has resigned from the Labour Party and the House of Lords. Andrew has been stripped of his titles and exiled, in effect, to a cottage on the Sandringham estate. Both have been arrested and bailed. Multiple police forces, including the Metropolitan Police, are examining the evidence within three million pages of documents. More files will be released. More names will emerge.

The investigation continues. The reckoning is not complete. And the question for the rest of us remains the one it has always been: will we pay attention long enough to insist that the outcome matters?

THE SYSTEM, NOT JUST THE MEN 

It would be a mistake, and a convenient one for the establishment, to frame this story as one of individual moral failure. Two men made bad choices. Two men kept bad company. Two men face the consequences. Move on.

The story is not that simple, and the working class of this country cannot afford to pretend that it is.

What the Epstein files reveal, in accumulation, is the operating logic of the British elite: that power is a network before it is anything else. That the network protects its members. That due diligence is a form that must be completed, not a principle that must be applied. That apology is a tool of survival, not an act of genuine accountability.

Mandelson was given classified briefings before he was cleared. Andrew shared state secrets with a convicted sex offender. Starmer was warned of reputational risk and chose to proceed. Jonathan Powell, a career establishment figure, described a process as “weirdly rushed” only after it had already been completed and the damage already done. A public servant congratulated a colleague for keeping a controversial payout “down this low with minimal fuss.”

These are not individual failures. They are the normal operations of a class of people who have never genuinely believed that the rules of public life apply to them. They are the operational reality of a system in which the gatekeepers and the gated are, too often, the same people.

The English radical tradition, from the Levellers to Orwell to Benn, understood this truth in its bones. The powerful do not surrender their privileges willingly. They do not restructure broken institutions unless they are compelled to. They do not extend accountability to themselves unless the alternative becomes worse than the cost of accepting it.

We are at that juncture now. The photograph exists. The files exist. The arrests have been made. The apologies have been delivered. What has not yet been delivered is the structural change that would make it impossible for this pattern to repeat.

We need a fundamental restructuring of the processes by which power is appointed, vetted and held to account. We need transparency requirements that cannot be circumvented by “weirdly rushed” timelines. We need a public interest test for the award of public money to disgraced former officials. We need, in short, a state that serves the people who pay for it, rather than the people who have always assumed they are entitled to run it.

The men in the photograph thought they were safe. They thought their bathrobes, their mugs, their comfortable deck in Martha’s Vineyard would remain private. They were wrong.

What we are witnessing is the total erosion of the gatekeeping class. When our princes and our politicians share bathrobes and mugs with the likes of Jeffrey Epstein, they forfeit the right to demand our deference. This is not just a story about individual deviance; it is a story about the failure of British institutions to police themselves.

The British public has been governed for too long by a class of people who believe that rules are for the “little people” and that power is a private club. We do not need more apologies. We need a fundamental restructuring of public office that ensures no individual, no matter how many titles they hold or how many elections they have “spun,” is ever again allowed to operate in the shadows of such profound moral darkness.

The bathrobe is a fitting garment for these men. It represents a state of undress, a lack of professional rigour, and a shameful comfort in the presence of evil.

Finesse?

Watching Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, it occurred to me that no one who had called himself HSTikkyTokky would have been taken remotely seriously by us inmates of my County Durham comprehensive school in the 1990s. The greater media savviness of the younger generation is greatly overstated.

Not that the decline has been only among the captive. According to a teacher in this week’s Question Time audience, “My pupils wouldn’t know who the people on the banknotes were,” or words to that effect. Then how about you, oh, I don’t know, teach them?

Nigel Farage: Crypto-Globalist

A crypto launched by a Kwasi is funny in itself. But other than Nigel Farage, who could possibly think that anything involving Kwasi Kwarteng were an investment opportunity? Why would you want anyone of that mind as First Lord of the Treasury? And when Farage and Kwarteng launched their product, then would it make some sort of reference to Winston Churchill, or would that invite retaliation from those insurance people with the dog? As Jonny Ball writes:

In 2009, as the global financial system teetered on the edge of oblivion, a pseudonymous coder known as Satoshi Nakamoto released a piece of open-source software: the first Bitcoin. Buried within its blocks of code was a message referring to a contemporary front page: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”. This was no accident. Here, after all, was a new means of payment and exchange, a new store of value, one free from failed central banks, incompetent governments and collapsing commercial lenders. The old model had been thoroughly discredited, and the principles behind Bitcoin were simple — and radically libertarian.

Most importantly, this new “crypto” would be decentralised. Transactions would remain anonymous, carried out directly and without intermediaries, between digital wallets across the world. And while advanced liberal democracies were busy printing money and injecting it into an insolvent banking system via quantitative easing, the total amount of Bitcoins would always be limited to a hard cap of 21 million. Where over-spending governments could stimulate hyperinflationary spirals, the new software would act as a “digital gold”, strictly rationing tokens to “miners” who used their computer processing power to create new Bitcoins.

In the midst of a financial crisis unmatched since the Wall Street Crash, a new techno-utopian movement was born. And it’s perhaps no surprise that Nigel Farage became an evangelist. An instinctive iconoclast, the Reform leader is temperamentally attracted to anything that’ll shake up our fusty old institutions. At a crypto conference last year, he told delegates he was “your champion”, promising to “bring crypto in from the cold”. 

Lately, though, Farage has gone from fanboy to investor, putting £215,000 into a crypto startup headed by the former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng (of mini-budget and Trussonomics fame). Kwarteng quickly claimed that the Farage link would help his firm gain “institutional credability” (sic), a useful asset in a crypto world that remains murky, unregulated, and dogged by associations with tax avoidance and money laundering.

Quite apart from his general enthusiasm for crypto, this isn’t Farage’s first foray into unorthodox financial schemes. A former City metals trader, he’s spent years touting the benefits of commodities investments as part of his partnerships with Fortune and Freedom, a financial advice outfit, as well as doing ads for something called Direct Bullion.

With Farage now getting more involved in the crypto game, advocates doubtless hope their man will help Bitcoin disrupt finance just as he did British politics. Or, if we believe the naysayers, the crypto craze is a symbol of our intellectually decrepit age, a modern-day Tulip bubble inflated either by the dangerous or deluded, eager to sell assets with no underlying value beyond providing dark web services and anonymity for illicit activity. In this reading, the flow of money into Bitcoin and other digital currencies is less a sign of frontier innovation and more an emblem of our era: a damning indictment of the decline of productive, patient, long-term investment in favour of speculative gambles in unproductive assets.

Ultimately, though, Farage’s enthusiasm for cryptocurrency exists at the intersection between grift, personal self-enrichment, and an inchoate political ideology. Nor, of course, is he alone here. Bitcoin and the broader crypto phenomenon has become indelibly associated with the populist Right, from Javier Milei in Argentina to Marine Le Pen in France, who lately performed a screeching U-turn on her party’s opposition to what she once called a tool of the “ruling elite”. For his part, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele instructed his fellow citizens that businesses large and small must accept Bitcoin as legal tender. Farage has promised he’ll let people pay taxes using crypto, and has committed to setting up a sovereign wealth fund of digital currency assets.

If a vague libertarianism is part of the appeal here, there are other draws too. “Drain the swamp” was the rallying cry of Donald Trump, who netted a large fortune through the launch of his own crypto memecoin on the eve of his second presidency. The slogan most obviously referred to Washington’s insider networks, the liberal think tankers, corporate lobbyists and the captured elites in the Republican old guard. But it might just as well have been aimed at MAGA’s other adversary: the finance capital establishment, whose donations allowed Kamala Harris to outspend Trump by three-to-one in 2024.

Wall Street’s cliques sit atop the apex of the world’s dollar-denominated reserve system. They may have been tempted by Trumpian tax cuts, but not at the expense of losing those most valuable of commodities: predictability, stability, and borderless, frictionless open markets. Then there’s the Federal Reserve top brass, who Trump has wasted no time in attacking once back in the White House, not for their money-printing splurges, but for their parsimony, and their refusal to run the economy on hot at the President’s behest.

The crypto world serves as a strange mirror to the traditional Wall Street-Fed nexus. It’s the wayward brother, the rebellious trustafarian that nonetheless remains committed to sharing in the outputs of an over-financialised service economy, reliant on the proceeds of what Marx liked to call “fictitious capital”. The embrace of the technology by an ascendant Right-populist wave reveals an emptiness and superficiality at the heart of their projects. These are Janus-faced movements. On the one hand they feed off popular resentment at the ruling classes — the deracinated, ultra-rich “citizens of nowhere” — and instead promise nationalist, patriotic revivals. Yet all the while, they advocate for the further entrenchment of an unrestricted, borderless world, one facilitated by new financial technologies.

The collapse of the postwar Bretton Woods system, over half a century ago, preceded a new phase of globalisation, with the expansion of consumer credit and financialisation replacing industrial exports as the engines of the global economy. But whatever they might imply, the populists don’t propose to reverse these trends. Rather, they want to deepen them, with the further sublimation of national boundaries and the coherent economies they imply for digitised, globalised transactions. They rail against a globalist elite while promoting a technology that facilitates and smoothens global economic integration. They promise to halt national decline while actively boosting digital assets — assets that undermine the capacity of nation-states to fully control their own fiscal and monetary destinies.

For Farage, then, this is less “Take Back Control”, and more “Cede More Control” — to software that has an anti-statist, anti-national ethos embedded into its very code. All the while, crypto involves not the replacement of globalised capitalism, but merely its rejuvenation. And how will this be achieved? By pushing deregulation-on-steroids, turbocharged market liberalism without the mediating forces of the Federal Reserve to shore it up. That’s what’s at the very heart of the crypto phenomenon: the desire for a peer-to-peer currency functioning without the oversight of banks, legislators or indeed law enforcement. And, again, this isn’t so surprising. Faragism has always focused its ire on the free movement of people, of labour, while the transnational nature of capital mobility was taken as a given, or even an unalloyed good. And what all this shows, under proper scrutiny, is that the most mainstream of populisms can operate as a vehicle for intra-elite, rather than anti-elite, competition.

In Reform’s case, meanwhile, its leader’s crypto moment also speaks to a profound identity crisis. Yes, the party wants to stop small-boat crossings. Yet as Nigel began growing his collection of failed Tory ministers, his outfit has lost its outsider edge. We saw another symptom of its ideological confusion in its flip-flopping over Iran: should it remain attached to Trump’s transnational ambitions at all costs, or should it focus on the blunt economic fears of voters back in Britain.

All the while, the party is caught between pledges of reviving industry, rebuilding state capacity, and reorienting the economy towards manufacturing on the one hand — and its roots in the free-market, Austrian School dreams of City-based eccentrics on the other. In a world of burgeoning protectionism, and massive state-capitalist subsidies and aggressive mercantilism practiced by both the Americans and Beijing, the idea of reconciling both approaches is a fantasy. Industrial revival will require an active, agile state that shapes and directs market forces towards strategic, long-term goals.

Perhaps most of all, though, Farage’s crypto mania looks out of step with the times. Where the promise of bitcoin was a future of prosperity driven immaterially, with newfound wealth accrued in the digital ether, conflict in the Gulf reminds us of the centrality of hard goods: energy, steel, secure trading routes, and military-industrial capacity. In a world returning to the politics of production, Farage’s crypto evangelism feels less like a rebellion than strange nostalgia for a fading, borderless age.

Having taken £12 million from Christopher Harborne, Reform UK’s ties to cryptocurrencies are very much current and very far from cryptic. There is being right-wing, and then there is having two kings. But do you have to take a Thai name to be naturalised in Thailand? If not, then why does Harborne have “Christopher Harborne” on his British passport, but “Chakrit Sakunkrit” on his Thai one? Harbone’s generosity has made Nigel Farage the political spokesman for cryptocurrencies, and specifically for Harbone’s Tether.

Yet the speculative value of cryptocurrencies is hurtling towards their intrinsic value of zero. A suspicious number of those who decry us sceptics of the cashless society also claim that we are under constant threat of cyberattacks, and a surprising number of those who are forthright against the cashless society are enthusiasts for cryptocurrencies, about which the clue is in the name. In the cashless economy, every penny that we spent would be tracked. Cryptocurrencies are beyond democratic political control. The combination of the two would be, and increasingly is, that level of tracking by those who were thus unaccountable.

Unaccountable not least because Tony Blair and Gordon Brown surrendered democratic political control over monetary policy, a surrender for which they had no electoral mandate but which they had plotted in Opposition, just as Keir Starmer and his cronies plotted fiscal drag, assisted suicide, puberty blockers, digital ID, facial recognition, the abolition of trial by jury, the taxation of family farms to the point that they would have to sell up to giant American agribusinesses, and much more to which we have yet to be made privy. At least Brown did keep us out of the euro. Much to the chagrin of Peter Mandelson, who now enjoys the hospitality of George Osborne. Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin have vital information, with a book due out this year, about the Epstein network’s connections to cryptocurrencies. Osborne has written in the venerable pages of the Financial Times that Britain risked being “left behind” by stablecoins.

All that, and digital ID and facial recognition, too? Starmer has said that to access our own money, we would need the digital ID that the Tony Blair Institute would have linked to facial recognition. Expect it to be illegal to fail to produce whichever form of it a state functionary demanded, and impossible to make or receive payment without it. There is a word for the merger of state and corporate power to the point of the physical violence on which that merger depended. Not that it would be anything new in this country. If the spycops inquiry received anything like the coverage that it deserved, then digital ID would have public approval below 10 per cent. Facial recognition probably already does. Reform wants to hold the line against them. But it already has 12 million reasons why it cannot.

If You Call Everything Terrorism

In the year to 31 December 2025, there were 3034 arrests for terrorism-related activity, a 1114% increase on the 248 in the previous year. 2779 of those 3034 arose out of the proscription of Palestine Action, without which there would have been only 255. Who has Palestine Action ever killed? Or robbed? Or anything? If you proscribe even that as a terrorist organisation, then this is what happens.

Yet this is why we are to lose almost all jury trials, and the right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court. And as the proscription of Palestine Action was an all-or-nothing measure that also banned the Russian Imperial Movement and the Maniacs Murder Cult, so the Courts and Tribunals Bill contains excellent provisions while forcing any MP who wanted to vote for them to vote for its evisceration of trial by jury and of the right of appeal, which was not in Labour’s manifesto, unlike the abandoned commitments on workers’ rights, on an equal minimum wage, and on the abolition of leasehold.

What Reputation To Damage?

Keir Starmer lied to Parliament about how much he had known of Peter Mandelson's continued to ties to Jeffrey Epstein, David Lammy lied to the media about having opposed Mandelson's appointment, and we all paid Mandelson £75,000 even though he had had no contractual entitlement to a penny, and even though he had demanded more than half a million. Starmer now claims to take full responsibility for having appointed Mandelson. When Morgan McSweeney was said to have been responsible, then he had to resign. At A4.13.15, the Ministerial Code specifies that, "Departments shall not treat special severance as a soft option, for example to avoid management action, disciplinary processes, unwelcome publicity or reputational damage."

Mandelson could not have gone to an Employment Tribunal, since he had not been discriminated against on grounds of sex or race, nor had he been victimised for trade union activity, and he had not been employed for a minimum of two years. Anyway, he had been dismissed for having lied during the interview process, and his contract had specified that he could always have been sacked at will, so a Tribunal would have laughed him out even if he could have found a solicitor to have taken his case, as, unlike barristers, solicitors are not obliged to do. There is a huge story behind this payment. Huge.

Today, the King has finally removed Mandelson from the Privy Council. I had repeatedly told you that he was still on it. And today, Labour has dropped its manifesto commitment to empower workers to go to law over race and disability pay gaps. Think on.

Noteworthy

Historical figures have been on the banknotes only since 1970, and Winston Churchill only since 2016. That’s right. 10 years. Ten. If he is to be replaced with wildlife, then let it be the grey squirrel. That would make GB News worth the licence fee on its own, whether for the contributors who insisted that it was an Atlanticist, Anglospheric and Canzukian beast, or for the absence of such, as the case may be. But there is no comparison between a refreshment of the banknote design, and the removal of the hereditary peers, or the assault on trial by jury, or the move towards digital ID, or the ban on the Quds Day march.

Between Peter Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, each side of the debate on the hereditary principle ought to keep quiet for its own good. The Government has always been free to appoint as many life peers as it pleased, and many an hereditary peerage was bought and paid for in the first instance. None of the constitutional changes since 1997 has made Britain any more equal economically or any more peaceable internationally, but before then the hereditary peers had proved no obstacle to Michael Howard’s attacks on civil liberties, and from 2010 to 2024 the remaining 92 of them were no more use against such erosions than they had been from 1997 to 2010, so there is no reason to think that they would have defended trial by jury.

On jury trials, Rosie Duffield voted against the Government, and I have been unable to find outside Parliament any of the feminist clamour that was expressed by the likes of Natalie Fleet. For the first time since Dan Norris lost the Labour whip, the Labour Whips did not cast his proxy vote, but they did yesterday on the Finance (No. 2) Bill, so who knows what is going on? If we abolished almost all jury trials, and the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court, then might Donald Trump be persuaded to impose tariffs?

Then again, those measures are very much integral to the takeover of Britain by the likes of Palantir. Wes Streeting and Bridget Phillipson may be refusing to hand over key data to the digital ID scheme, but their successors will give way, and the consultation paper itself says that the whole thing will feed into facial recognition by the Police who, having been spooked by the reaction to their fully justified ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv, by the ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action had been unlawful, and by the decision, which they will have been advised to expect, to uphold the dismissal of the case against Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, have demanded and obtained a ban on a march that had been held for 47 years. They have surrendered control to self-appointed “community leaders” who did not understand liberty and democracy.

The proscription of Palestine Action was an all-or-nothing measure that also banned the Russian Imperial Movement and the Maniacs Murder Cult. Similarly, the Courts and Tribunals Bill contains excellent provisions while forcing any MP who wanted to vote for them to vote at the same time for its evisceration of trial by jury and of the right of appeal, which was not in Labour’s manifesto, unlike the abandoned commitments on workers’ rights, on an equal minimum wage, and on the abolition of leasehold. I am proud to say that yesterday, on the anniversary of the Birmingham bin strike that has now cost far more than it would have taken to have settled the dispute, my union, Unite, cut its Labour affiliation by 40 per cent, to the tune of £580,000:

“Unite has made it clear that the actions of Labour against the Birmingham bin workers will not continue to be tolerated. As well as an escalation of the strike in Birmingham, Unite has voted to cut its Labour affiliation by £580,000. This move is unprecedented and shows the anger of Unite members. As streets fill with rubbish in every corner, residents and workers suffer, while the council dither around a deal already scoped out at conciliation service Acas. A deal blocked by government backed commissioners on £1,200 a day. Labour’s incompetent behaviour in Birmingham has come on the back of a failed economic strategy, that has left our industrial base fighting for its life. Oil and gas workers facing decimation, buy British defence promises broken, the public sector undervalued and the elderly and disabled under attack. Prior to the rules conference next year (which decides affiliation) Unite has made the decision to substantially cut its affiliation and will now formally consult with its members to see whether they want to remain in the Labour Party.”