Explosive

Even the damage to property in Dunmurry is unusual these days. Hezbollah, which is probably the most heavily armed non-state actor in the world, supposedly droned RAF Akrotiri without managing to damage anything at all, never mind kill or injure anyone. Just as everyone always knew that the Provisional IRA, the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA were riddled with Police informants, MI5 assets, and such like, so it is widely assumed that the New IRA is a false flag operation, while the “New Republican Movement” has been universally greeted as such. The Loyalist organisations have always been known to be off-the-books arms of the British State. And in March 2023, four Protestants, at least one with known Loyalist paramilitary connections, were arrested in relation to the attempted murder of Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell, for which the New IRA had already claimed responsibility. Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries have always been heavily involved in traditional organised crime, especially drug-dealing, leading to generations of professional and social interaction.

Elsewhere in pyrotechnica, the Daily Mail no longer bothers to call RAF Fairford anything other than a “British air base used by [the] US to strike Iran”. But of course that fire must have been an accident. “Not our war”, and all that. Yet we are to proscribe the Revolutionary Guard Corps, as if the Terrorism Act were to counter the Armed Forces of other sovereign states. Performative proscription is so much cheaper than defence, and no MP should vote against this theatrical display, since that would give satisfaction to Keir Starmer, who has been reduced to whipping the other 402 Labour MPs against referring him to the Privileges Committee for having misled Parliament.

The Iran War, with other questions now following in due course, has thrown into sharp relief the de facto schismatic character of the conservative, or at least the MAGA-minded, wing of the American Church, possibly even complete with one bishop, as would be enough to confer the Episcopate in the manner of Dominique-Marie Varlet. This is far worse than the Western Schism. People on both sides of that have subsequently been canonised as Saints, since neither side, nor eventually any of the three, held any heretical proposition. One, or eventually two, sides merely erred as to who was in fact the Successor of Saint Peter at the given time. Moreover, that error made nothing like the doctrinal or moral difference that it would today.

By contrast, JD Vance’s clear threat to use nuclear weapons against Iran was contrary to everything that the Church had ever taught on the subject, since it was immediately apparent, when such weapons were first developed, that such use could not possibly be reconciled with just war doctrine. That could in fact have been said about the entire war with Iran. As it was. By the Pope. Not for the first time, Vance has demonstrated the inadequacy of his instruction for reception into the Catholic Church. He himself has said that he swam the Tiber because of his political views and at the prompting of his mentor, Peter Thiel, who is many things, but who is not a Catholic. No one else would have been let in on that basis, so someone needs to answer for obvious treatment of the Elegiac Hillbilly as clearly too big a catch to let slip. The hardly ever exercised charism of infallibility does not enter into this. No, the recent and ongoing protestations have been and are against the protestants’ overdue introduction to the Ordinary Magisterium, which is exercised all the time, and to which this Pope has made no addition on the matters at issue. It is just that they cannot ignore an American.

As for proscribed terrorist organisations, the Court of Appeal, which is this week due to hear Shabana Mahmood’s appeal against the High Court’s ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action had been unlawful, has already rejected at least one submission in her support, but has accepted at least three against her, including one from the United Nations. When was anyone last prosecuted for expressing support for the Continuity Army Council, or for Cumann na mBan, or for Fianna na hEireann, or for the Irish National Liberation Army, or for the Irish People’s Liberation Organisation, or for the Irish Republican Army, or for the Loyalist Volunteer Force, or for the Orange Volunteers, or for the Red Hand Commando, or for the Red Hand Defenders, or for Saor Eire, or for the Ulster Defence Association, or for Ulster Freedom Fighters, or for the Ulster Volunteer Force? Last month, Starmer literally gave the red carpet treatment to President Ahmed al-Sharaa of Syria, who is otherwise Abu Mohammad al-Julani in the manner of “Tommy Robinson”, and who is massacring Christians as befits a sometime second-in-command both of Al-Qaeda and of the so-called Islamic State to which Shamima Begum was trafficked such that she was not permitted to return to Britain, even to the point of having been stripped of her British citizenship.

The same has been done to Mark Bullen for nothing more than living in his wife’s and children’s native Russia while disliking British support for what ought to be proscribed terrorist organisations:  Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Brigade, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, the Freedom of Russia Legion, the Russian Volunteer Corps, and anything else in similar vein. Pavlo Lapshyn is still in His Majesty’s Prison, and will be for decades yet, because of his 2013 murder of 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham. Lapshyn went on to put bombs outside three mosques in this country. He belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Battalion, being led by its “political ideologist”, Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell.

Does the proscription of the Wagner Group extend to the Africa Corps, which yesterday joined the Malian Armed Forces in killing one thousand Al-Qaeda and IS terrorists while injuring three thousand more? Would it be a criminal offence to express approval of that outcome? Might it attract something like the treatment to which Professor Robert Skidelsky FBA, Lord Skidelsky, was subjected not long before his recent death at the age of 86? Returning to the Realm of which he was a Peer, the Britain of whose Academy he was a Fellow, he was detained under counterterrorism legislation. I am in no fit state to travel abroad, but it would almost be worth doing so if I could guarantee that on my return, I would be counted in the illustrious company of Lord Skidelsky, Julian Assange, Vanessa Beeley, Craig Murray, Kit Klarenberg, Richard Medhurst, and George Galloway.

Keeping Company

One more sleep. George Galloway has just asked live on air whether there was a D-Notice on the Ukrainian rentboys story. “If I received a D-Notice, I would hold it up and show it to you here and now.” So, is there a D-Notice on the Ukrainian rentboys story?

Then there is Keir Starmer’s flagrant breach of the Ministerial Code by holding an undocumented and unminuted meeting with Palantir in Washington last February alongside the then British Ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson, while Palantir was a client of Global Counsel, which Mandelson had founded and in which he remained a shareholder all the way up to its collapse this February owing £4.6 million, including £600,000 to the taxman.

There is no good outcome for Starmer tomorrow. A trial would be a disaster, even or perhaps especially if it led to convictions. But so would an adjournment, or sudden changes in the pleas, or anything else that stopped the trial from going ahead there and then. One more sleep.

Build Something Brighter

Ructions within the SDLP as it counts down to the existential crisis that would be a border poll. The implementation throughout a United Ireland of the National Health Service and of other social democratic and labour achievements would be an act of solidarity, but a United Ireland without those provisions would be unconscionable to any social democratic labourist. Similar things may be said about the IRSP and the Workers’ Party, but of course that is pretty much academic.

Meanwhile, the withdrawal of Scotland or Wales because of the voting habits of the majority of such people in England as voted at all, if that, would be the antithesis of solidarity, not least in its weakening of trade union negotiating power beyond even that which had already been inflicted by Blairite devolution. And people accustomed to the immensely generous public provision in Northern Ireland should join the Republic if, but only if, they could both preserve that for themselves and extend it to their islemates. Without that, and until it, they should join with comrades with Scotland and Wales to free the English from, for example, the prescription charges that no one else had to pay.

Documented and Measurable

Neil Kinnock? Seriously? By definition, no. But as Péter Magyar, whose elevation was greeted with shrieks of joy by our own Rejoiners, builds momentum to make Viktor Orbán the next President of the European Commission, remember that EU membership subjected us to the legislative will of everyone who could make it onto the Council of Ministers, including Orbán then or Magyar now, while the European Court of Justice had just ruled that Hungary’s law to protect children from gender ideology violated “European values”. As ever with the fake Rightist-liberal duopoly, reject both sides.

The stocks are sold, the Press is squared, the middle class is quite prepared for the only thing even worse than being back in the EU, namely being bound by its rules without having so much as the tiniest say over their content. We are to be a colony, a satrapy, a vassal state, back in the Customs Union and in Margaret Thatcher’s Single Market. If Switzerland is indeed to be the model, then we are even going to be joining the Schengen Area. There will of course be no referendum. We are ruled by people to whom the vote is a nice thing to have, but who got their way by other means every day, so they did not really need it. If 60 per cent of the laws to which they were subject were made without the formal participation of their elected representatives, well, those were still going to be the laws that they themselves wanted, because that was how the world worked. We have been telling you this forever.

Guilt Yields

I was going to save this for Exoneration Day on 8 May, the anniversary of my having been declared "exonerated" by His Honour Judge Nathan Adams from the bench of Durham Crown Court. Exonerated of something very specific, but it makes all the difference. Although there will be a lot to discuss on 8 May, be here for that, too.

Meanwhile, since it has once again come up in the comments, I once again invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, each and every member of the Board of the Catholic Safeguarding Standards Agency, each and every member of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Committee, each and every member of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Team, and each and every bishop, priest or deacon of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty. Factually and morally guilty, in that I had in fact committed any such offence. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero, as it has been since 28 July 2021.

If asked, Police Officers, Prison Officers and Probation Officers have always said that it was not their question to answer, and they have never, ever volunteered a belief in my guilt. To say the least, I have known them to volunteer that about other convicts. In fact, I have repeatedly been told by people in each of those three categories that I was obviously innocent. And not only by them. Whereas no one, absolutely no one at all, has ever said to my face that they thought that I was guilty. Write what you like in some public school gigglerag. Next to no one up here reads it, and it is quite rarely to be seen on sale in the North East. Moreover, even after this, it is never going to publish this.

In Our Prime?

No male product of a mixed secondary school has ever become Prime Minister, and Wes Streeting would not change that. He should be more concerned that that no one from a state school had led a party to an overall majority at a General Election since 1992, and that there had not been a Prime Minister from Cambridge since 1935.

Angela Rayner did herself no favours, but her tax affairs could easily have been put right, and it soon became obvious that she had been thrown under the bus to ensure far less extensive legislation than was necessary and had been promised on the rights both of workers and of tenants. It also looks increasingly as if her removal was clearing the way for the attack on trial by jury and on the right of appeal.

Rayner and Rishi Sunak were both born, less than two months apart, in 1980. Both were first time voters in 2001, the high water mark of Tony Blair. Sunak had been Head Boy of Winchester, and had still yet to do a day's work in his life. Rayner had left school with literally nothing fully five years earlier, and was to make her way through her trade union. Make what you like of either of those backstories, but the fact that he was the first member of Generation Blair to become Prime Minister while she may well be the second makes Blairism a spectacular failure in its own terms even before considering the fact that Kemi Badenoch, who was also born in 1980, never did a day of school in this country until she was 16. Education, Education, Education, indeed.

Absolute Resolve

The King's State Visit to the United States should be under the flag of Canada, which Donald Trump ceased to seek to annex when he was made aware, in his second term, of who was its Head of State.

Trump's designs on Greenland seem to have gone by the by, so Javier Milei knows better than to rely on him to take the Falkland Islands for Argentina. But the fundamental principle of the American Republic is the expulsion of the British Empire from the Americas. Therefore, that Republic has only ever recognised de facto British administration of the Falklands, but never British sovereignty over them. The Reagan Administration was little or no help in 1982, when it was closely allied both to Margaret Thatcher and to General Galtieri, and the Trump Administration is closely allied to only one of Milei and Keir Starmer.

Oh, but I am laughing. Liz Truss said that she would have endorsed Milei as a candidate for Leader of the Conservative Party. His Argentina is the latest Promised Land of the British Right, which always needs a Fatherland somewhere away from the NHS. And that is before we get to Trump. Echoing Labour in the Blair years, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage have both spent the Iran War insisting that Britain simply had to follow the Americans into any war that they happened to wage. What if Trump followed up his American-Israeli attack in Iran with an American-Argentine attack on the Falklands? 

Watch the betting markets. In late December, Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke of United States Army Special Forces bet $33,000 that Nicolás Maduro would be removed by the end of January, netting him nearly $410,000 when that came to pass in an operation in which he himself participated. That operation was cheered to the rafters by everyone who had hailed the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to Washington. We remember.

For all practical purposes, there is no NATO if the United States is not in it. If the Americans would no longer defend, say, Spain, then Spain is effectively no longer a member of NATO. But why is Spain being singled out when Britain is not? Did not our dear Prime Minister tell us that Iran was "not our war"? What more might there be to the matter? I did not hear any mention of opposition to Reform UK's line on Iran in that Labour election broadcast, into which a single syllable of post-watershed language had been slipped so that Labour could claim that the broadcasters had tried to censor it. Delivered by a youngish, middle-class woman in London who might otherwise vote Green.

The next shot against the Greens, the Left, and possibly even Rupert Lowe, will be the proscription of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation, challenging anyone to vote against it and unleash the Epstein Class media. No one should give Starmer the satisfaction. Nevertheless, the Terrorism Act was not designed to counter or deter the Armed Forces of other sovereign states, even if proscription is a lot cheaper than rebuilding the real means of doing so. But as the proscription of Palestine Action was an all-or-nothing measure that also banned the Russian Imperial Movement and the Maniacs Murder Cult (and how are the presumably urgent battles against those progressing?), so the proscription of the IRGC should be an all-or-nothing measure that also banned ICE and the IDF. Why not?