How Best To Confront Them

The transatlantic slave trade is so fundamental to capitalism that at least five of the seven men whose faces appear on United States banknotes were slaveholders. There are two arguments against reparations, one execrable and the other unanswerable.

The execrable one is that Britain was barely in the slave trade, made little or nothing out of it, retains no benefit of it, pretty much took it up in order to stamp it out, was successful in doing so, and therefore should not even apologise for it, not least because the slaves were better off than they would have been if they had been kept in Africa.

But the unanswerable one is that the slave trade funded enclosure, so that there has always been One Struggle both before and after that period, with most white British people descended from slaves’ contemporaries who were themselves little more than slaves even in law, and less so again in practice. Thus, Kenan Malik writes:

‘Reparations is conceived as a way to redress historic wrongs, promoting peace and achieving reconciliation.” So suggests the Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice produced by Caricom, a Caribbean intergovernmental organisation, to address the legacy of slavery and colonialism. The issue is likely to surface at this week’s Commonwealth summit in Antigua and Barbuda, which the King will attend.

Caricom’s demands range from “official apologies on behalf of all Africans from former enslaving nations” to “monetary compensation”. Successive British governments – including, now, the current one – have refused to countenance reparations, but it has become an intense political debate in this country.

Conservative commentators reject the demand for Britain to provide recompense, arguing both that slavery has existed throughout human history and that Britain was at the forefront of overthrowing it. “They ought to pay us for ending slavery”, in Jacob Rees-Mogg’s view.

Slavery is certainly ancient and embedded in most cultures. The transatlantic trade was, though, fundamentally different. The industrial scale of plantation slavery was unprecedented. Whereas enslaved people had previously laboured within the societies that regulated their treatment, New World slavers were far less restrained by any sense of morality and custom. And slavery in the Americas was racialised in a way unseen before, turning black people into chattel.

Unfounded, too, is the claim that Britain was largely responsible for ending slavery. Conservatives make much of the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, established in 1808 after parliament had banned the slave trade. Charged with suppressing the trade, it captured in total about 1,600 ships and freed around 150,000 Africans. That amounted to fewer than one in 10 slave ships, and one in 20 of the 3 million Africans transported in that time. A large proportion of the supposedly “liberated Africans” were forcibly relocated to British colonies to work as unpaid “apprentices” or conscripted into the army – unfree labour by another name.

What is missing in the conservative story are the struggles of the enslaved themselves, and Britain’s brutal response to them. The most significant slave revolt was in the French Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue. The 12-year Haitian Revolution began in 1791, forced revolutionary France to abolish slavery in 1794 (though Napoleon subsequently reinstated it) and established the new nation of Haiti in 1804.

Britain intervened in 1793, not to support the fight for freedom but to reimpose slavery and prevent contagion to its own slave colonies. It was defeated by the slave army, finally abandoning its mission in 1798. Contagion there certainly was, with rebellions in British slave colonies too. Among the most important was the Christmas uprising in Jamaica in 1831. Pitilessly suppressed, it was nevertheless seminal in helping accelerate formal emancipation, which finally came with the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act.

Abolition cost the British government £20m (worth at least £2bn today), compensation not for enslaved people but for slave owners for loss of “property”. Bereft of resources, desperation drove former slaves back to the plantations to work in conditions of almost forced labour. This led to many post-emancipation uprisings, all bloodily repressed. Britain’s role in abolition was far more complicated than in the conservative fairytale.

If conservative attempts to rewrite history are risible, liberal arguments for reparations are questionable too. Though largely forgotten today, there is a long tradition of leftwing opposition to reparations, the arguments of which are distinct from those of the right.

“I have neither the right nor the duty to claim reparations for the domestication of my ancestors… Am I going to ask the contemporary white man to answer for the slave ships of the seventeenth century?” Not a conservative voice but that of the Martinique-born Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon, in his 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks.

Fanon recognised that rooting problems faced by black people in intergenerational trauma deriving from enslavement serves largely to racialise political identity, fostering a reactionary romanticism expressed by the Caricom report’s view that “Africa symbolises… liberation” and its demand that Britain facilitates the “repatriation and resettlement in Africa” of descendants of enslaved people. It was such binding of black people to their past that Fanon rejected. “I am not the Slave of the Slavery that dehumanised my ancestors,” he insisted.

Black people don’t form a single community. The needs, experiences and histories of African Americans are distinct from the peoples of Caribbean islands, those of black Britons unlike those from diverse African nations.

The interests of working-class black people, from whichever community, are also distinct from those of the middle class. That distinction becomes erased in the homogenising of the “black family” as one defined by slavery. “People who have political interests in sustaining… a one-size-fits-all way of talking about Black politics”, observes the scholar and activist Adolph Reed, “also have an interest in wanting to make slavery the uniformly shared Black condition”.

What really shapes the lives of black people today, whether in Africa, America or Europe, are more recent developments, from the way the postwar liberal order enchained much of the Global South to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s; from the austerity following the 2008 financial crash to the re-emergence of white identitarian movements; from the demise of working-class organisations to the growing hostility to migrants and Muslims.

Challenging these issues requires the building of cross-racial working-class solidarity, not the racialisation of social and economic problems. The question is not whether transatlantic slavery was an abomination, or whether Britain or other major western nations benefited – it was and they did. It is rather about the issues facing black people today, and how best to confront them.

Expectations? Management?

200 years ago, Poundland was a market leader. It put Guineaworld out of business. Over and above the fact that, having bought it for one pound, Gordon Brothers ought to be grateful to make two pounds out of it, the story grows odder and odder, as Graham Hiscott writes:

Poundland's bosses said the high street chain was enjoying bumper sales just weeks before its American owners triggered its looming collapse into administration. A note to suppliers seen by The Mirror from managing director Barry Williams hailed the 600 store retailer's "encouraging" performance at the start of its new financial year, with a return to growth. Sales had accelerated from 6.7% from September to 8.4% in the three weeks to October 18, with takings and profits "all running comfortably ahead of expectations", Mr Williams reassured the firms in its supply base.

However, the board was forced to throw in the towel last week by filing a notice of intention to appoint administrators, threatened 12,000 direct job losses and the worst retail collapse since Wilko imploded in 2023. Steve Smith, founder of Poundland, has warned its imminent collapse risks triggering 30,000 job losses in total. Mr Smith wrote on social media: "If Poundland closes down it will cost the taxpayers billions of pounds, as up to 30,000 people will have no job." Mr Smith, who no longer owns the company, also claimed he had been trying to buy it back for months – but he said that Gordon Brothers, the owner, refused to negotiate with him.

Mr Williams has said, in separate documents seen by The Mirror, that it was due to the chain being starved of funding by US restructuring firm Gordon Brothers, which bought the business for a nominal £1 just last year. In the message to suppliers, sent on October 21, said the board at the time was "pleased to see out financial performance on an improving trajectory throughout our last financial year and now momentum is continuing to accelerate in the first three weeks of the new financial year. Not only has our like for like sales position strengthened in October, but we are delivering an out-performance of sales, gross profit and margin against our own ambitious plans. "At the start of this busy trading quarter, we trust you will be reassured by our continuing improving trajectory and strong track record to pay suppliers, in full and on time."

Questions are being asked about what Gordon Brothers' motives, with Andy Burnham, in whose Makerfield constituency Poundland has a distribution centre, becoming involved. The MP said the government is "ready to support" Poundland staff as the retailer teeters on the brink of collapse. He also called for answers over why an offer to buy the business from its current owners, which would have protected jobs, had apparently been rejected by Gordon Brothers.

The notice of intention to appoint administrators, filed on Thursday last week, gives 10 working days to try and find a buyer. Poundland's board said: "Over the past two months, initially prompted by interest from several parties, we have been working on a formal sale process for Poundland. Despite enormous efforts it has not been possible to identify an acceptable offer for the business as a whole. The process has however attracted several established retail operators who have made formal offers, collectively these cover a significant part of the business, and we believe offer the best available prospects for shareholders, creditors and to preserve jobs."

Blacklash

From the day after the 1997 General Election, the Daily Telegraph was avowedly in favour of the elected second chamber and the same-sex marriage to which the Blair and Brown Governments were expressly opposed throughout their existence. But if, as Alex Phillips would now have it, the Telegraph really had been taken over by the Communist Party, then it would be unbending both in its support of Brexit and in its opposition to NATO and its war in Ukraine, to all of the wars being waged by Israel, to assisted suicide, to gender self-identification, to prostitution including pornography, and to commercial surrogacy, as well as to any drug legalisation at least as envisaged by the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party, by the SNP and Plaid Cymru, by Nigel Farage and Lee Anderson, or by the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute. Phillips is a GB News insider, so I for one await the new roster of Telegraph columnists with breath so baited that I fear for my life. After all, Axel Springer SE also owns Politico, in which Jonathan Martin writes of a phenomenon that corresponds to the record Arab turnout to remove from power Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir:

The first hint appeared in the 2025 elections, when Democrats won larger-than-expected margins in Virginia and New Jersey. Then, beginning early this year, the turnout numbers in primaries were unmistakable. And now, the story is blaring in neon as early and absentee votes soar. Black voters are fired up, ready to go and poised to turn a good night on Tuesday for Democrats into a Blue Tsunami.

Their motivation can be traced to President Donald Trump’s return to power and then back-to-back events: the White House-led effort to dilute minority-heavy districts to elect more Republicans and the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act. “Trump has tried to neuter them,” former President Bill Clinton told me about Black voters. “You know, he did all that reapportionment, which really infuriated them. And everybody knows that he’s turned the Justice Department into a political operation, not a justice operation.” As Clinton explained, there’s something else at play — an unmistakable and all-too-familiar whiff in the air. “Historically discriminated against groups have an uncanny feel detector to them,” as he put it.

I spoke to the former president — who has been working on or running in Southern campaigns for about 60 of his 80 years — Friday night. He had just addressed the capacity crowd of a Tupelo church-turned-event-center that still bears the stained glass of its old tenant but, unlike most churches, was nearly evenly split between Black and white supporters for Clinton’s appearance. He was there to stump for Scott Colom, a local prosecutor giving a lackluster GOP incumbent, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, a stronger-than-expected challenge. In typical Clinton fashion, he used his speech to joyfully jump on Hyde-Smith’s comment that, instead of confronting high beef prices, voters should consider other proteins. “I don’t believe we need a senator to explain the existence of chicken,” Clinton deadpanned, calling her remark “a shopping tip, not a policy.” 

Since the start of October, I have visited Florida, Texas, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina, states that for the most part I never thought I’d set foot in during a midterm election. Battleground Texarkana was not on my bingo card. Yet the combination of poor or mediocre GOP candidates, better-than-average Democrats and, most of all, the sour national political environment for Republicans has surprisingly thrust these states into play. The biggest driver, for Black people and everybody else, is of course the cost of living. Gas and groceries are the same forbidding price for every voter. Yet the policies making life less affordable can feel targeted at Black Americans, especially in working-class communities.

“The current government has attacked almost every income stream that this community has to survive,” said Eddie Boykin, citing health care cuts and the sting of inflation caused by Trump’s tariffs and the Iran war. Boykin, an Air Force veteran who pastors a Black church in Lancaster, South Carolina, said he sees the strain among his flock: “It’s money — they’re hurting.” There is something deeper going on, though. I began to glimpse it when I visited a Black church with David Jolly, the Florida Democrat running for governor, at the start of the month. And I’ve seen it in every state since: angry but energized Black voters — many surprisingly young — showing up at events.

It’s a shift from 2024, when Trump roughly doubled his share of young Black men. But now, with Trump in office, many of the Black voters I met were voicing frustration with the Republicans in power. The mantra, across dozens of interviews in those states, was a desire for “change.” That word, as clear as it is broad, is also somewhat benign, expressive but safe enough to offer to a white journalist. To press a little more, though, is to find a determination. It’s one borne of history. And it shouldn’t be surprising. In fact, I warned Republicans in a column earlier this year about the unintended consequences, namely galvanizing Black voters, they were tempting with their redistricting push. It was bound to infuriate Black Americans and particularly those community leaders already uneasy with the shift in power in Washington.

“I think they really feel, the vulnerable people, doubly vulnerable because they don’t have the Congress, and because of all these decisions the Supreme Court made,” Clinton told me. In Mississippi, the short-lived effort to draw longtime Rep. Bennie Thompson, the state’s only Democratic lawmaker, out of his seat drew blowback. “It didn’t get much national attention, but it did in Mississippi,” Colom told me. “People were like, ‘Holy moly, why are y’all saying he can’t be our congressman? Why don’t you just beat him? Why you gotta draw the lines up to say that we don’t get to pick our person?’” Walking into a rally outside Atlanta featuring former President Barack Obama, Andre Dickens, the city’s mayor, said the combination of higher prices and seemingly punitive policies had “really made people distrust the Republicans in office — distrust is high.” As dozens of people, many of them Black, were turned away from an event that was at capacity over an hour before it began, Dickens said: “Black folks are fed up.”

Sitting backstage in Tyler, Texas — following a James Talarico event so large I thought people had mistaken it for an Earl Campbell homecoming — a local official put it even more bluntly earlier in October. “The campaign that we have really run is not one that has been in public view, and that’s just the way we want it,” Ralph Caraway Sr., a Smith County commissioner, told me. “We want them to think, ‘Well, [Black Americans] are not going to vote, they’re apathetic about voting.’ And so what we’ve done, we’ve camouflaged it intentionally because they tried to do all they could to keep us from voting.” The camo is gone now. By casting far more ballots than expected by strategists in either party, Black voters are fundamentally shifting the midterm landscape, nudging swing states left and making red states suddenly competitive. With white votes lagging so far, Republicans are confronting an increasingly dire scenario — mobilize their conservative base on election day or face once-in-a-generation losses. 

The GOP’s problem is especially acute across the South, where the electorate is most inelastic. Republican victories there are predicated on driving up turnout among whites and winning them overwhelmingly, to stave off a Black vote that’s almost wholly Democratic but typically ebbs in non-presidential years. But GOP candidates are at risk on all three fronts this year: Early balloting suggests they’re facing a turnout deficit; polls indicate they’re bleeding some white support; and Black participation is overwhelming. In the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida and even Louisiana, Black voters’ early balloting is far exceeding their showing in the last midterm election, which fundamentally changes what percent of each state’s total vote they comprise. “It changes everything because it changes the sea level,” explained James Carville, the Democratic strategist who’s been crowing in his Cajunese about Black turnout trends since the first primaries this spring.

There’s still time for GOP candidates to push their sleepy voters. And a good-enough election day showing by Republicans will likely prevent electoral catastrophe in the most racially polarized Southern states, such as Louisiana and Mississippi. However, it’s likely too late for Republicans in races across Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia and Texas, while South Carolina and Florida are now teetering and hang in the balance. “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said GOP strategist Mark Harris. Harris, who’s working on campaigns to include state legislative races in North Carolina and Florida, called me unprompted Friday because the numbers were so stunning. “We’re looking at the potential of presidential-level Black turnout.”

Six days before the election, over a quarter of Black Southerners had already voted. That’s a rate that was higher than turnout from the overall electorate, according to Harris’ research. At the same point in 2022, Black turnout trailed the overall rate by just under three points; in 2024, it lagged by nearly six. The motivation may have first been on display in the primary season, but it wasn’t obvious in the polling. As Clinton told me about negative or fear-based enthusiasm, “it’s hard to poll that.” Terrance Woodbury, a Democratic pollster, knows that all too well. Woodbury had tried to measure Black engagement in polls and focus groups by asking about enthusiasm but determined that was “not a good proxy for turnout,” as he put it. 

So he asked a different question: “How much power do you think your vote has to make a difference?” Responses to that question began to rise during the initial GOP redistricting push last year and surged after the high court’s voting rights decision. As telling was one memorable focus group for Woodbury, who has coined the term “blacklash.” One Black voter likened casting a ballot to taking out the trash — a vital but not joy-inducing responsibility. “He said something like, ‘If you don’t do it, shit starts to stink around here.’ That doesn’t sound like enthusiasm, but it sounds like he knows the assignment,” Woodbury said.

Black votes could help propel Democrats to the unlikeliest of victories in the South Carolina Senate race and would land even more stunning upsets in Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana, where Democrats have Black Senate nominees. This year could also finally end the country’s longstanding reluctance to elect Black governors. With the certain reelection of Maryland’s Wes Moore, the only sitting African American chief executive, it’s possible there could be as many as six Black governors next year. One of them may be a Republican, should Byron Donalds prevail in Florida, and in South Carolina the Black Democrat running could at least drive turnout to propel Annie Andrews, who’s running for the Senate.

“I knew I’d be the person to excite people, to get them out to vote,” Jermaine Johnson, the South Carolina state lawmaker running for governor, told me — adding with a laugh that if he acts the role of blocking back for Andrews’s electoral touchdown, “they better call me and thank me.” One of them may be Georgia’s Keisha Lance Bottoms, who at a rally last week outside Atlanta recalled riding as a child in her parents’ car past the governor’s mansion and wondering if she could ever live there. “Yes You Can!” a group of Black women in the audience began chanting before the rest of the arena picked up the tune. Roy Cooper and Jon Ossoff are all but locks to win Senate races in North Carolina and Georgia, respectively, and James Talarico is increasingly likely to prevail in Texas, too.

Talarico drew crowds in Texarkana and Tyler that were extraordinary for their size in otherwise conservative East Texas communities and for the racial and generational breadth of the audiences. Yet for the older attendees, memories of Jim Crow weren’t far off. Helen Walker-Spiller said she was “shocked” at the Supreme Court’s voting rights decision and “disappointed” because the franchise had always been sacred in her family. Walker-Spiller lived in Texarkana, but she said her grandmother was a sharecropper in South Arkansas who had never voted even though she was alive to see her children and grandchildren go to the polls. “I can never forget her eyes when she saw we had gone to vote,” Walker-Spiller recalled.

Waiting in line before Talarico’s Tyler rally, Ruby Kendrick, a physical therapist who grew up nearby, said: “I grew up in the Civil Rights era, so I know what voter suppression looks like. And that’s what’s been going on. And I’m not happy with it. I know the drill.” A Talarico win paired with Jolly springing an upset in Florida would represent the most consequential storyline of this midterm, Democrats picking the GOP’s electoral lock on the two biggest prizes of the Sun Belt outside California. And if it happens, it will be because of lackluster Republican performance, pre-Trump Republicans drifting away and Hispanics shifting back to Democrats. But a historic night, or even a good one, would not have happened without the Blacklash. As Woodbury said, 2026 is about to show that “the South got something to say.”

The Empire Sends Its Invoice

So, that Minister who tried to lure Laura Kuenssberg into a threesome? Anyway, Paul Knaggs writes:

Every protection racket relies on the same psychological swindle. The man who breaks your windows in the morning offers to sell you shutters by noon, and by nightfall he expects your gratitude for keeping the street quiet. You are told the cost of his retainer is non-negotiable, that the menacing shadows in the alley leave you no choice, and that to question the invoice is to invite your own ruin.

On Sunday morning, sitting comfortably beneath the studio lighting of the BBC, John Healey looked into Laura Kuenssberg’s camera and told the British public that their shutters would cost them another round of austerity. Kuenssberg laid out the ledger plainly: national debt standing at more than 97 per cent of the entire economy, government departments confronting prospective cuts of up to 6 per cent over coming years, and independent number crunchers at the Institute for Fiscal Studies warning that bringing borrowing down requires real, brutal reductions in public provision.

Healey did not flinch. Swelling with the brittle pride peculiar to modern ministers, he boasted of his recent journey to Bangkok, preening over the International Monetary Fund’s commendation of Britain’s deficit reduction plans, and insisted that the Treasury had already demonstrated it is prepared to make hard decisions.

Notice how casually they reach for that phrase. In Westminster shorthand, a hard decision never means confronting concentrated wealth, taxing excess corporate margins, or telling a foreign superpower where to get off. A hard decision is always an eviction notice served on a youth club, a shuttered public library, or a wage freeze imposed on care workers. It is an act of institutional sadism repackaged as moral maturity.

The official narrative invites us to nod along in sorrowful agreement. We are told the national credit card is maxed out, that our fiscal rules are engraved on tablets of stone, and that the Russian threat perpetually scratches at the door, demanding that ordinary people swallow bitter medicine and tighten their belts. It is a lie, polished by civil service memos and repeated until it sounds like common sense.

The Great Ledger: Who Do We Owe?

Before anyone accepts another round of social butchery, ask the two questions the political class spends its entire career avoiding: what are these sacred fiscal rules, and precisely who do we owe this debt to? The official rules, monitored by the Office for Budget Responsibility, are neither laws of nature nor mathematical inevitabilities. They are arbitrary, self-inflicted dogmas, drawn up by politicians to tie their own hands and insulate macroeconomic management from democratic pressure. They exist to appease the bond markets, institutions staffed by financial managers who extract private yield from sovereign debt.

The Fiscal Rules Are a Choice, Not a Law 

When the British state borrows, it issues gilts managed through the UK Debt Management Office. The bulk of those debt payments are disbursed to private pension funds, domestic financial institutions, and foreign asset managers. We are told the cupboard is bare by the very political class that built the locks, handed the keys to financial speculators, and then declared itself powerless to open the door.

The Empire Sends Its Invoice 

Yet domestic bond markets do not explain the sudden velocity of the coming squeeze. The government is not pushing Britain into departmental cuts because arithmetic demands it; they are doing it because Donald Trump looked across the Atlantic, demanded that NATO partners lift defence spending toward 5 per cent of gross domestic product, and London immediately fell to its knees. We have documented this mechanism of submission before in our investigation into transatlantic trade concessions, where the threat and the protection are issued by the exact same address. 

The government’s own Defence Investment Plan, published this summer, is candid about how little lies behind the headline. It commits £298 billion over four years, reaching 2.7 per cent of GDP by the end of the decade. For the years between 2030 and 2035, it simply leaves the spending unallocated. The money is promised. What it will buy is not. 

The establishment presents this astronomical surge as an unavoidable strategic duty, using Russia as an all-purpose boogeyman to shut down domestic debate. Yet strip away the panic and trace where that money actually travels. It does not go into the wage packets of working-class soldiers or into the hollowed-out coastal communities from which so many recruits are drawn. 

Modern rearmament is an import business. An enormous share of that cash flows directly onto the profit ledgers of American arms giants: Lockheed Martin, RTX (Raytheon), and General Dynamics. It is a state-sponsored subsidy, routed through the British Treasury, to ensure American contractors maintain their double-digit margins.

Armed Derelict: What Security Actually Requires 

To their credit, the defenders of this course do not rely purely on bluster. They argue that we inhabit a hostile and predatory world, where hard power is the only currency foreign autocrats respect. They insist that without a catastrophic military expansion, Britain risks abandonment by its primary superpower ally, leaving trade routes and territorial integrity exposed. 

The argument sounds robust only until you examine the wreckage it creates at home. Real security does not consist of American missile systems rusting in silos while the society they are supposed to protect rots from within. A nation whose hospitals cannot treat the sick, whose children sit in cold classrooms, and whose local councils collapse into bankruptcy is not secure; it is merely an armed derelict. Bevan understood that the true strength of a nation begins in its own body. As we examined when exposing the ongoing plunder of our common wealth, an elite that starves its own people to finance corporate extraction has forgotten the very purpose of the state. 

If you want to see how runaway defence spending creates immediate austerity in the classroom and the destruction of public services, look across the Channel. Look at France. Look at Germany. Look at the riots, the strikes, the rising civil unrest, and the sheer chaos tearing through European societies as continental leaders gut their domestic budgets to pay Washington’s rearmament invoice. Look at the stolen futures of hundreds of thousands of young people, the youth of the European Union pouring out onto the streets weekend after weekend, clashing with riot police and shouting one single, desperate word: ENOUGH! That very unrest is the inevitable harvest of an elite that starves its schools and clinics to finance an arms race it cannot afford. 

Aneurin Bevan understood that the true strength of a nation begins in its own body. As we examined when exposing the ongoing plunder of our common wealth, an elite that starves its own citizens to finance corporate extraction has forgotten the very purpose of the state.

We witnessed this identical pattern when ministers surrendered the National Health Service to Trump’s tariff threats, forcing the state to pay inflated prices for branded drugs. Independent economic analysis published in the British Medical Journal revealed the human cost: hundreds of thousands of excess deaths as frontline healthcare funds were diverted to transatlantic boardrooms. The same managerial logic governs the military ledger. The threat and the invoice emanate from the very same capital. 

This is the grim reality of managed decline under a managerial elite. From Thatcher, Blair, Johnson, Sunak, Starmer and now Burnham, leadership manoeuvres analysed in The King Is Dead: Long Live the King, the priorities remain identical. When foreign power and corporate profit demand tribute, the billions are located instantly. When the people of the heartlands ask for functioning infrastructure, dignity in retirement, or a warm home, they are instructed to study fiscal rules and accept the cuts. 

A sovereign government does not borrow to buy favour from an overseas patron, nor does it cut the lifelines of its own people to inflate the profits of Wall Street defence contractors. The path out of this crisis requires ripping up the self-serving fiscal orthodoxy that treats bond markets as our master, rejecting arbitrary spending targets dictated by Washington, the IMF and subordinating foreign policy to the material wellbeing of our own people. 

Until our leaders fear the cold homes in Doncaster as much as they fear the bond traders in New York, nothing fundamental will change.

Growth Mission?

Hear them whoop and holler in praise of a man in a white poppy, albeit a totally hypocritical one who supports the war in Ukraine, enthusiasts for which ought not to wear the red poppy, either. If they wondered why not, then tell them to look up Stepan Bandera. Zack Polanski is just as much a white poppy hypocrite as Adrian Ramsay, but the environment in Gaza looks pretty degraded to me, and the definition of Zionism as racism is unanswerable when the State of Israel is in existential crisis because ethnically the wrong citizens had dared to vote in an election. If a certain number of people subscribe to a racist ideology, then that many people are racists. If you do not like to be called that, then look to yourself.

But Ramsay’s conduct does not suggest that the Green Party ought to adopt a whipping system. For years, Labour MPs publicly called the then Leader of the Labour Party an anti-Semite, a terrorist, and everything else that happened to cross their minds. Yet it was any criticism of such behaviour, never mind any suggestion of a disciplinary response, that was supposedly bullying and harassment, as it also became when Labour MPs cheered on the genocide of Gaza. And so to Jody McIntyre, who should have been the MP for Birmingham Yardley but who lost by far fewer votes than had been cast for the Green candidate, and who writes:

At the age of 17, David Garrard volunteered for military service with the IDF. According to The Times, the trip was the “start of a lifelong devotion to the state of Israel”. In 2015, Garrard gave Andy Burnham £35,000 as he attempted to take control of the Labour Party. Garrard, who passed away last year [why does no one just die anymore?], was previously an executive director of the Labour Friends of Israel lobby group. Over a fifteen-year period, the former IDF operative donated approximately £1.5 million to Labour. Although born in the UK, Garrard later “acquired” Israeli citizenship.

In 2016, Garrard gave over £10,000 to then Labour MP Ian Austin. Austin also accepted a donation from the Australia Israel Cultural Exchange, a think tank co-founded by Benjamin Netanyahu. He now serves as Burnham’s UK Trade Envoy to Israel. Pat McFadden also received over £10,000 from Garrard. McFadden, a former vice-chair of LFI, has previously been described as “the most powerful Labour politician most have never heard of”. Upon taking power, Burnham promptly appointed him to cabinet. McFadden previously served as a deputy to disgraced Epstein-associate Peter Mandelson. Mandelson’s other deputy at the time was former Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy. In March 2015, Garrard gifted Lammy £7500.

Labour peer and newly-hired Palantir executive Tom Watson received £40,000 from David Garrard whilst serving as an MP. Addressing an Labour Friends of Israel lunch in 2016, Watson said it was a “special pleasure” to have Israeli ambassador Mark Regev in attendance. The Telegraph reported Garrard’s IDF stint as the start of a “lifelong attachment to the Israeli cause”. Labour’s former Chancellor Rachel Reeves received even more, £44,000, from Garrard. Reeves has also been heavily financed by Victor Blank, vice president of the Jewish Leadership Council. Last year, Reeves praised Garrard for his “unsurpassed commitment to Israel”.

Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Garrard said that Labour had been “hijacked by an ultra-left cabal” who wanted to “turn our nation into a socialist republic.” He immediately demanded the return of a £2 million loan. But under Starmer, Garrard rejoined. The year after Burnham’s failed leadership bid, then Labour MP Chuka Umunna received £25,000 from David Garrard. On May 12th of this year, Umunna was spotted entering Downing Street. No. 10 insisted he was there for a “routine” visit. By July, Andy Burnham was Prime Minister. 

Yvette Cooper also received £25,000 from Garrard. Under Keir Starmer, Cooper secured the proscription of Palestine Action. Then, shortly after Burnham took power, and despite her links to private healthcare donors, she was made Health Secretary. Joan Ryan received over £18,000 from Garrard. Whilst serving as a Labour MP, Ryan was revealed to be talking to Israeli spy Shai Masot “most days”. She is now CEO of the UK branch of ELNET, a lobby group which lists the Israeli Foreign Ministry as one of its “partners”. Ex-Labour minister Ivan Lewis received £10,000 from David Garrard. Lewis, a former LFI vice-chair, was suspended from the party in 2017 after allegations of sexual misconduct. According to his LinkedIn profile, Lewis is now a special adviser to the “Africa Israel Partnership”.

Keep that in mind as you read Janet Eastham:

A property development firm run by a close friend of Andy Burnham will be a key beneficiary of a £20m taxpayer-funded “bailout” for a troubled film studios project, The Telegraph can reveal. Tim Heatley, who was invited to Downing Street when Mr Burnham became Prime Minister in July, runs Capital & Centric, the developer contracted to convert Liverpool’s derelict Littlewoods building into a £70m “Hollywood of the North”.

The £20m lifeline, announced in Wednesday’s Budget, has been earmarked for the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority to fund the redevelopment, which the firm is delivering through its subsidiaries. Capital & Centric has confirmed that it expects to benefit financially from the redevelopment, acknowledging that some of the £5.3m already spent on the scheme covered its development management fees. Mr Heatley and his wife hold a combined 50 per cent stake in Capital & Centric which he co-founded with fellow developer Adam Higgins in 2011.

The funding comes despite the loss of the project’s two proposed “anchor” tenants and years of warnings that the scheme could leave taxpayers facing millions in losses. It risks fuelling fresh accusations of cronyism against Mr Burnham, who is already facing scrutiny over £55m in public loans to companies controlled by Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi owner, approved at meetings he chaired as Greater Manchester mayor. 

Mr Burnham and Mr Heatley have a longstanding friendship. The pair co-founded the Greater Manchester Mayor’s Charity in 2019 and have worked together ever since, regularly appearing at fundraising events and Capital & Centric developments. The Telegraph understands that their relationship and charity ties prompted Mr Burnham to declare a potential conflict of interest and step aside from chairing a 2023 meeting at which his mayoral authority approved a £12.6m loan to a Capital & Centric subsidiary. On Saturday, a Capital & Centric spokesman denied that Mr Heatley’s friendship with the Prime Minister had secured the latest funding, insisting neither he nor anyone representing the company sought Mr Burnham’s help or discussed Littlewoods with him during his leadership challenge or since he entered Downing Street.

The £20m award for the Liverpool project came from the Growth Mission Fund, established under Sir Keir Starmer, which is closed to applications from businesses. Only Cabinet ministers can nominate projects. The Chancellor selects recipients without scoring or ranking competing proposals, despite government guidance that grants should normally be awarded competitively to ensure value for money. The Telegraph understands that Mr Burnham was not the minister who proposed the project. Downing Street sources suggested on Saturday that Mr Burnham was not “formally involved” in awarding the £20m capital grant and had kept a “degree of distance”.

However, neither HM Treasury nor No 10 could confirm whether or not the Prime Minister’s relationship with Mr Heatley was assessed as a potential conflict of interest before the award was made. Treasury officials also declined to comment on how the Littlewoods project was selected given concerns over its financial viability. There is no suggestion of impropriety on the part of the developer. Capital & Centric said discussions about funding the project began last year, before Mr Burnham’s leadership challenge. A delegation from Liverpool City Region Combined Authority and Liverpool city council visited No 10 in February to propose grant funding, but nobody from Capital & Centric attended, the company said. A spokesman said the scheme had always required public support to bridge its funding gap, adding: “It isn’t a case of bailing out a previously viable project.”

On Saturday, opposition parties challenged Mr Burnham over the award. Richard Tice, Reform UK’s deputy leader, told The Telegraph: “While working Brits are told to tighten their belts, Andy Burnham is increasingly embroiled in serious sleaze allegations.” He added that: “The Prime Minister needs to explain how his Government came to earmark £20m for a project being developed by a friend’s firm.” Built in 1938 to serve as the headquarters of the Littlewoods football pools empire, the Art Deco building has stood empty since 1994. Liverpool city council owns the freehold, while Capital & Centric (Rain) Ltd holds a 35-year lease. Another subsidiary, Capital & Centric (Regeneration) Ltd, was named in a development management agreement, with construction management fees included in the publicly funded budget.

Combined Authority accounts record £5.3m spent under “Littlewoods C&C” in 2023-24 and 2024-25. A spokesman for the firm said that only a portion of this was paid to the developer in fees, with the majority spent on wider project costs. The council also agreed to write off £1.6m plus interest owed by the developer and reimburse up to £900,000 of its previous project costs. It retains the right to regain control of the leasehold for £1 once the development is finished and contractual obligations are met. Kris Brown, a Liverpool Liberal Democrat councillor who raised concerns about the scheme’s financial risks five years ago while serving on the council’s audit committee, welcomed the cash injection to “finally get this project off the ground”.

However, he added: “Let’s be clear: we are only waiting on this government bailout today because the risks I highlighted years ago were completely accurate.” In 2021, Liverpool city council warned that the scheme had a “greater than usual risk profile” and could require further public money to cover losses. Mr Brown told The Telegraph that public money could disappear into a “bottomless pit of repairs”. “If we’ve got £20m of public funds, money will spiral and spiral,” he said. In an interview published on July 7, Mr Heatley was described as “one of Andy Burnham’s closest associates” and separately named among those believed to be in the incoming Prime Minister’s inner circle. “I’ve worked with him for several years. Working with Andy can be great fun. It can also be infuriating because he’s so persuasive,” he said.

After Wednesday’s Budget, Mr Heatley celebrated the award on Instagram. “It’s been a long time coming as a project,” he told followers. “Now we can finally get cracking.” Capital and Centric said the Government would not release the £20m until further due diligence had been completed and the remaining funding secured. Liverpool city council forecasts the completed development could create 630 permanent jobs and generate £56m in annual economic activity. A government spokesman told The Telegraph: “The Government is continuing to invest in growth and regeneration across the England via the Growth Mission Fund. This includes £20m towards the restoration and redevelopment of the long-derelict Littlewoods site in Liverpool into a 260,000 sq ft creative campus for film, TV, gaming, immersive technology and digital screen industries.” Every Growth Mission Fund project undergoes formal checks, ensuring no conflicts of interest, Ministerial Code compliance and legal risk, and must pass a full business case before any funding is released.

The Correct Word Is “Awareness”

The scenes from Gaza look like environmental devastation to me. If it is not going to equalise the minimum wage in this Parliament, but it is going to lower the voting age, then the Government must be determined to resuscitate the Green Party that the elevation of Andy Burnham, and not anything else, had been doing such electoral harm. Long before the recent conference, and without the slightest suggestion that their views had changed, Councillor Kirsty Knight of Peterborough defected from the Greens to the Conservative Party, while Councillor David Hawley of St Helens defected from the Greens to Reform UK. The Welsh Greens have long been considering independence. If they chose it, then would they retract the definition of Zionism as racism? And who could dispute that definition when for having dared to vote, the Arabs in Israel were accused of having been bribed by Qatar? Bribed to kick out Itamar Ben-Gvir? They would gladly have paid to do it, as Emma Graham-Harrison writes:

Last year, Umm Khaled Fatoun returned from volunteering in a Jewish-Arab support centre for victims of war to find bulldozers tearing into her son’s house in the Bedouin village of Azzarnug. The demolition crew, who arrived under police escort, did not even allow them to remove furniture or solar panels before reducing the home and its contents to a pile of rubble. This week, she took action of her own at the ballot box, targeting the extremist national security minister who ordered – and boasts about – the mass destruction of Palestinian and Arab homes. “I had one goal, to send [Itamar] Ben-Gvir home,” Fatoun said. “There isn’t a single family in the Bedouin community that hasn’t been hurt by his campaign against us.” 

In the weeks before election day, she joined a grassroots campaign to educate other Bedouin women about their rights and potential power. It had spectacular results, with voting rates tripling in some Bedouin villages in the southern Negev region in Tuesday’s election, amid a broader surge in turnout among Bedouin voters. Years of violent, racist government opened the door for change in conservative communities, said lawyer Hanan Alsanah, who founded the Alnashmiat network that led the grassroots programme. “We said that even if all the men go to vote, it is only half the community. You need the power of all your votes, because Ben-Gvir has a lot of power,” she said. Alsanah is also co-director of Itach-Ma’aki, female lawyers for social justice. 

The rise in Bedouin votes came amid a historically high turnout among Arab citizens of Israel. Their votes secured an unprecedented 19 seats in the Knesset for Palestinian-led parties and were critical to stripping the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his allies of their governing majority. This year, the lowest turnout in any Bedouin community was 62%. The highest was more than 93%. With an estimated 180,000 eligible voters, their turnout was key to the Islamist Ra’am party beating polling expectations. Netanyahu has repeatedly used racist fearmongering to try to boost voter turnout among his own base. This year, his attacks included an AI-generated image purporting to show a crowded polling station in a Palestinian area and Bedouin female voters.

In an apparent attempt to undermine the surge in votes for Palestinian-led parties, Netanyahu accused them of fraud and foreign support. “The increase in voter turnout in the Bedouin community in particular, and the Arab community in general, is unprecedented in the history of the state,” said Amit Segal, a pundit and close confidant of the prime minister. The allegations have been rejected by opposition leaders, election organisers and the activists in the Negev. “I am very proud of our turnout. They are talking about ‘corruption’ [as the reason for high voter turnout]. The correct word is ‘awareness’,” said Amira Habdoubi, an organiser from the village of Abu Talul. For a community whose civil rights are policed by racist authorities, the election was a rare opportunity for political expression, she added. “We can’t protest, because they will arrest us. Voting is the only opportunity we have to make a political protest.”

The Muslim Bedouin are part of a marginalised minority inside Israel. Before the state was created, they roamed widely across the Negev desert. Now, although their villages take up only 2.5% of the land in the region, many are deemed “unrecognised”, targeted by the state for demolition and left without basic services including electricity and water supplies. The majority of the Negev has been designated as military training grounds and firing ranges. More than 100,000 people live in about 30 unrecognised communities in the Negev. Another 200,000 live in official towns, or places with some level of recognition. Netanyahu’s pursuit of open-ended regional conflicts also drove Bedouin turnout. War is particularly terrifying in unrecognised villages because the state does not provide them with bomb shelters or warning sirens before rocket, drone and missile attacks. Rockets that hit Bedouin villages without shelters killed six of the 36 child victims of the 7 October attacks. Several adults were also killed that day in the villages and at least four people have been seriously injured by Iranian missiles.

Organised crime is another concern, rising almost unchecked under the current government. “We had clear goals. Stop the home demolitions, stop the hatred, stop the war. Ben-Gvir talks all the time about security, but we feel no security and no one cares about us,” said Mayada Abu Khweida. The activists worked to help women understand their rights and tackle logistical and practical obstacles to voting, as well as cultural ones. “Because [residents of unrecognised villages] can’t vote in the municipal elections, a lot of women don’t know they have a right to vote in national elections,” said Abu Khweida. “We told them: ‘There is a legal way to express your anger and raise your voice.’” 

For similar bureaucratic reasons, there are no polling stations in unrecognised villages, so voters have to travel to nearby towns. Men went any way they could, including on camel, horse, donkey and bike, on journeys that took up to an hour in each direction. Jewish women offered lifts to Bedouin women, but because in 2019 Israel’s election committee ruled that organising transport volunteers was illegal, voters and drivers connected individually. “Hundreds of women volunteers went to help Bedouin women to access the polls, and at the same time about 150 men went to do protective presence at the polling stations,” said Raluca Ganea, the founding executive director of the Jewish-Arab community action group Zazim. “We wanted to have Jewish men standing there to de-escalate, in case there was a rightwing provocation of some kind. So it would not be the Bedouin men in front of the provocateurs, because if the police come or there is violence, they are much more likely to be arrested or worse.” 

Netanyahu’s racist get-out-the-vote campaign on social media included photos of Bedouin women with their faces covered. Some of these women covered their faces to avoid being seen by strangers from outside their own community. In recognised towns, where women could vote in their communities, most did not cover their faces, Alsanah said. Others hid themselves to avoid becoming fodder for Ben-Gvir’s extremist social media feed, which regularly features humiliation of Arab citizens. “The women were worried the extremists would take photos at the polling stations and covered their faces to protect themselves from being exploited on social media,” Abu Khweida said, adding that his campaign of humiliation has affected all of Bedouin society.

The grassroots mobilisation of Bedouin voters aimed in part to give children back their dreams, one reason why women responded so strongly. “In the last election in 2022, turnout among women was around 20%. Now in the unrecognised villages, informal data shows more than 60% turnout among women,” Alsanah said, adding that Israel does not break down voting statistics by gender. The project built on more than a decade of work with Alnashmiat, based in Arab and Jewish solidarity, that could set an example for a new government, Alsanah said. “We learned an important lesson from this election campaign. We should work together, men and women, Arab and Jewish citizens, and we should bring this approach to the Israeli parliament to rebuild the state.”

Degrading and Distressing

Rob Evans, Harry Davies, Louisa Loveluck and Emine Sinmaz write:

Ministry of Defence officials have privately accused a UK police force of wrongly handing over the investigation of an American fighter pilot who strangled a British woman to the US military, according to documents obtained by The Guardian.

Cambridgeshire police allowed the US military police to quickly take control of the investigation into Capt Jacob Wulfson after he had been accused of sexually assaulting Sarah Steele in his Cambridge flat. The decision meant Wulfson was not tried in an English criminal court. Instead he was prosecuted in a military tribunal on a US airbase in neighbouring Suffolk. Ministry of Defence officials said the Cambridgeshire force should “absolutely” not have let the US military police take over the investigation in a clear breach of a long-established agreement with the US. The disclosure of the case by The Guardian in June provoked immediate criticism from Downing Street, which said it was “deeply distressing” and “very concerning” that the UK authorities were not involved in prosecuting Wulfson.

The government is to set up a high-level inquiry to examine how and why police forces have been transferring investigations into serious crimes to the US military police. The Ministry of Defence, which is responsible for handling the military relationship with the US, is one of the key departments taking part in the inquiry. A batch of documents, disclosed via the Freedom of Information Act, revealed the private views of MoD officials about the Steele case, which centres on an obscure agreement signed by the US and the UK decades ago. Under the terms of the agreement, police in the UK have the primary right to investigate alleged crimes by Americans stationed in the country. The MoD officials made it clear the agreement was “pretty unambiguous” and only permitted the US military to acquire jurisdiction over investigations in a “narrow set of circumstances”. These circumstances are: if the offences were committed while the Americans were on duty, or if they were committed against another member of their armed forces or property. 

In a memo written on 8 July, MoD officials based in Washington wrote: “The Steele case does not, on the surface, appear to meet the bar for a visiting force to be awarded jurisdiction.” In the agreement, the US military is formally known as a visiting force. Four days earlier, the MoD officials had referred to the Steele case in an email to colleagues, saying: “The decision-making on this specific case seemed at odds with what is very clear” in the agreement. Another MoD official agreed that “as best as we understand the facts, this should absolutely have been for the UK courts”. An unidentified Greater Manchester police officer wrote in an email to MoD officials on 6 July that Cambridgeshire police had “wrongly, in my view” handed over the Wulfson investigation to the US military. Cambridgeshire police said they were conducting a review of the case with what they called “the assistance of material provided” by US Air Force lawyers. The force said it “remained engaged with the victim”. “We are working with government, wider policing and criminal justice partners to ensure greater clarity of jurisdictional decision making,” they added. 

The US military aims to prosecute as many of its personnel as possible within the boundaries of its agreement with the UK. The Americans often ask police in the UK if they can take over the prosecution of their military personnel – requests the police agree to, even when they have primary responsibility for investigating them. A series of cases uncovered this year by The Guardian have highlighted concerns that British victims are required to give evidence in US courts martial, an unfamiliar legal system that often does not afford the same protections as that of a court in the UK. Wulfson was off-duty when he assaulted Steele in his Cambridge flat in December 2023 after the pair talked on the Tinder dating app. Steele testified at Wulfson’s court martial, which was held on his airbase at Lakenheath, Suffolk in April, that her experience was “degrading and distressing”. The verdict and sentence were decided by an all-male jury of Wulfson’s fellow air force officers. All the lawyers were American. Steele was subjected to invasive and aggressive questioning by Wulfson’s lawyer. Wulfson was convicted of strangling an intimate partner but acquitted of sexual assault. He was dismissed from the US Air Force and confined to a military jail on Lakenheath for six months.

The cross-government inquiry, which includes officials from the Home Office, Ministry of Justice and Foreign Office, is looking at how US military personnel are not being brought to justice in British courts. The inquiry, which also involves police chiefs, is scrutinising a series of cases uncovered by The Guardian this year. In each case, police handed over the investigations to US military police even though the American perpetrators were off-duty and the British victims had no connection to the armed forces. They were tried in US courts martial on American bases. Tyrion Davis allegedly raped two women in Suffolk. He was convicted of one charge of sexual assault, but cleared of 10 further counts of sexual assault and abusive sexual contact. Hannes Marschalek allegedly exposed himself to a 16-year-old girl and four young women in Littleport, Cambridgeshire. He negotiated a plea bargain at a court martial and admitted a charge of indecent conduct. He won an appeal in a US military court that quashed his conviction on technical grounds. This ruling is now being challenged.

The US has more than 12,000 US military personnel in the UK, stationed in at least 15 bases and facilities. The two biggest bases are at Lakenheath and Mildenhall, in Suffolk. Significant numbers of American military personnel live in East Anglia.