Give Them An Inch?

Of the Bayeux Tapestry, Peter Hitchens writes:

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

I cannot find the Hardman quotation, but while this is very on brand from Hitchens, it is quite misleading. Long ago, I was taught that a gentleman drank champagne by the pint. The only Briton ever to have been President of the European Commission was later known for taking a pint of claret to his desk in the House of Lords to get him through the afternoon. But it turned out in 2023 that only 1.3 per cent of people wanted any extended use of the imperial system, so that was assumed to have been the end of that. The peculiarly British compromise between the metric and the imperial systems is the most lasting monument to this country’s bitterest culture war in living memory, the one between scientists and humanities graduates in the 30 or 40 years after the Second World War.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Behind The Masks

In 1840, King Louis Phillipe of the French sought to buttress his precarious claim by repatriating the remains of Napoleon I from Saint Helena and reburying them on 15 December in grand style at the Hôtel des Invalides, where they rest. On 15 December 1940, on the orders of Adolf Hitler, Napoleon II was reburied underneath Napoleon I, although his heart and intestines were kept in Vienna, the heart in the Herzgruft of the Augustinerkirche and the intestines in the Ducal Crypt of Saint Stephen's Cathedral, in accordance with custom of his Habsburg maternal line. But who has asked for the repatriation of Napoleon III, and what would it profit either Nigel Farage or Jordan Bardella? Empress Eugénie built Saint Michael’s Abbey, Farnborough in memory of her husband and of their only son, who had died fighting in the British Army. All three are buried there, in granite sarcophagi donated by Queen Victoria. Does Farage propose a Dissolution of the Monasteries, either to break up that family in death, or to exile in death a man who had died for Britain? Farnborough sings Mass and the Office in Latin and to Gregorian Chant, so how would that play with much of Bardella’s base?

As for the Reform UK conference more broadly, Robert Jenrick has given up on raising the personal allowance to £20,000; from there to £15,000 is a very significant reduction. Still, the Government should match that reduced figure while likewise adjusting the savings limits for Universal Credit claimants, two in five of whom were in work, since those limits had been carried over from the previous benefits system and had not changed since 2006. 20 years ago. Twenty. £6000 in 2006 is hardly £6000 today. Of course, that will not happen. But it should. Jenrick’s theatrical non-resignation resignation recalls those of Labour MPs from positions that they no longer held since the election of a new Leader and which he, Jeremy Corbyn, had never expressed the slightest interest in offering them. In general, though, this has disappointingly not quite been the kind of camp-as-knickers, end-of-the-pier event that Reform usually served up.

Zia Yusuf’s video could not have been more obviously the launch of his Leadership campaign, and the carry on with JL Partners meant that Reform had well and truly fallen out with the duped and deceived Times and Telegraph, an estrangement that has visibly spilled out across the right-wing media at large, and not least to what has been a strikingly critical GB News, several youngish stalwarts of which were in any case universally assumed to have Conservative parliamentary seats and ministerial portfolios as their long-term aims.

Times without number in more than 30 years of political activism, I heckled, I was heckled, and I was heckled for having heckled. That is normal, and even welcome. I have never seen anything like the reaction on the floor in Birmingham today, with serious violence against women by men who normally made much of their urge to protect them, within a notable outpouring of the frequent rage of an astonishingly fortunate generation against those who not very long ago gave up two years of their lives to keep breath in those elders’ bodies. As those disgraceful scenes were unfolding, at Westminster Cathedral a few posh white twentysomethings disrupted Mass for an immensely diverse congregation of more than 2000 to demand something that they already had and which the Church had no power to deny them (perhaps we should have buffer zones?), and the home of the 84-year-old Reverend Sue Parfitt was raided for terrorism because of her opposition to the Gaza genocide, but no one was arrested when hundreds of uniformed and masked men of fighting age closed the Port of Dover, and asserted their control of the town at least as forcefully as any gangster who had moved schools in Middlesbrough to close for a funeral on Friday. Political uniforms are illegal in themselves, the Police must have had prior knowledge but Kent is run by Reform, and Paul Knaggs writes:

Masked men in black closed the Port of Dover this morning. Several hundred of them, faces covered, moved into the A20 before dawn and stayed for the best part of a day, chanting “whose streets, our streets” and “send them back” while four miles of traffic sat behind them and Kent Police, by their own account, did nothing but watch. No placards. No banners. No arrests. By early afternoon most of them had walked to Dover Priory and taken a train out of a town they’d never named a demand for. A local councillor called it what it looked like: several hundred men who had loaded into rental vans overnight and driven to the coast with a plan. Reduce that scene to a policing story and you’ll miss what it actually is. It is the visible tremor of a fault line that has been opening under Britain for twenty years, and the fault line was not put there by the men who stood on the A20 today. 

Small Boat Crossings are Down: But the Change Has Already Happened 

The government’s defence arrived before the roads had even cleared. Mike Tapp, Dover’s own Labour MP, wanted the country to know that small boat crossings are down 40 per cent on last year, official figures confirm it, and that whoever blocked his town’s roads this morning almost certainly didn’t know that. He’s right about the number. He’s wrong about what it proves. A falling rate of new arrivals is not the same thing as an undone change, and the confusion between the two is the single most dishonest trick in this entire debate. Population change is a stock. Crossings are a flow. You can slow the flow to a trickle and the stock, the accumulated decade of arrivals, settlement, hotel contracts and housing allocation that has already happened, does not reverse itself by a single day. Shutting the stable door when the horse has bolted has never once, in the history of stable doors, produced a horse. It has produced a farmer congratulating himself on the door. That is the argument the political class keeps making to itself, and it is the argument that keeps losing. 

Nobody Voted for This 

Here is what should trouble you more than any masked man on the A20: no government in twenty years has told the country the truth about what its own migration policy would do, and every time it has guessed, it has guessed catastrophically wrong in the same direction.

In 2004, when eight former Eastern Bloc states joined the European Union, the Blair government’s own commissioned estimate put likely arrivals from those countries at around 13,000 a year. Roughly half a million came. In January 2010, David Cameron told the BBC’s Andrew Marr he would cut net migration from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands, a promise he repeated in the 2015 Conservative manifesto even after his own director of strategy had warned him it was undeliverable while Britain remained inside the EU’s free movement rules. Net migration that year came in at 333,000, more than three times what he had now promised the country twice at a general election.

Then Brexit, sold on a single phrase, take back control, delivered a post-Brexit points-based system that oversaw the highest net migration figures this country has ever recorded, peaking at 900,000 in the year to mid-2023.  Three governments. Three broken promises. Not one of them Labour’s alone, and not one of them an accident anybody was ever held to account for. That is not a story about racism, and it is not a story about culture. It is a story about consent, asked for repeatedly and betrayed repeatedly, by governments of every colour, while the people doing the betraying kept using the language of control precisely because they knew control was what the country wanted and precisely because they had no intention of delivering it. 

Allocated by Price 

Here is the part almost nobody in Westminster wants to say out loud, because it doesn’t fit either side’s script. The change that followed wasn’t distributed across Britain. It was allocated, and it was allocated by price. Asylum dispersal housing, the flats and terraces where people are settled for the long term rather than parked in a hotel, goes wherever accommodation is cheapest, because the three private contractors who run the system, Clearsprings Ready Homes, Mears Group and Serco, are paid to source it and are answerable to their margins first.

A parliamentary inquiry found they deliberately avoid procuring housing in more expensive areas to protect that margin. The result sits in the numbers: deprived local authorities host an average of 25 asylum seekers for every 10,000 residents, affluent ones host 5.5. Blackpool, England’s most deprived borough, currently houses 230 people in dispersal accommodation. Bath houses two. Cambridge, York and Stratford-upon-Avon host none at all. Analysis of Home Office figures found close to a quarter of all supported asylum seekers concentrated in just ten local authorities, nine of them among the poorest in the country. Andy Burnham said: the poorest parts of Britain cannot be left carrying, alone, a change the whole country was told was a national policy.

This is not an argument about who arrived. It is an argument about who was made to carry it, and the answer, every time, is the same postcode that carried deindustrialisation, and carried austerity, and is now being asked to carry this too, while Windsor, Wokingham and Mid Sussex were largely spared the asking.

It Was Never About Race. It Was About Class 

There is a comfortable liberal answer to all of this, and it is worth stating fairly before it gets dismantled. Migration has contributed real value to Britain in specific, measurable places: the NHS, social care, parts of construction and food processing would each look very different without it. Small boat crossings are, in gross terms, a small fraction of total migration, and people fleeing war are not the same as people undercutting a labourer’s day rate. Treating them as one undifferentiated mass is its own kind of dishonesty. All of that is fair, and none of it answers the question this piece is actually asking, and none of it licenses the lazy, imported line that immigrants built this country. They didn’t. That is an Americanism, borrowed wholesale from a country that tells itself it was built by arrivals because it needs a founding myth that isn’t a monarchy. Britain was built by its working class, by hand and by brain, in coal and steel and cotton and clay, generation after generation, whatever passport its members carried at the time. The credit belongs to the labour, not to the border anyone crossed to supply it.

The question is not whether migration has value. It is who was asked, who benefited, and who was handed the bill without a vote. Andy Burnham’s own answer, that every postcode must take its fair share, deserves to be taken seriously and to be seen clearly for what it actually fixes. It fixes distribution. It does not fix consent. Spreading an unasked-for burden evenly across the country is not the same thing as the country having agreed to carry it, and a fairer division of something nobody voted for is still something nobody voted for. The answer to who paid the bill is not a race, and it was never a race. It is a class. The same working class communities whose factories were exported in the 1980s and whose wages were undercut by free movement after 2004 are the same communities whose towns absorbed the accommodation contracts after 2015, because they were the only postcodes cheap enough to profit from. A grievance that specific, that consistently aimed at the same people for forty years, is not xenophobia looking for an excuse. It is a class correctly identifying that it keeps being asked to pay for decisions it never made, and now being offered a fairer split of the bill instead of a vote on whether to pay it at all.

Saxony-Anhalt’s Warning

Germany votes this weekend in Saxony-Anhalt, and the polling has the AfD on 40 to 41 per cent, potentially enough for an outright majority in that state’s parliament. If it happens, it will be the first time since 1945 that a party Germany’s own domestic intelligence service classifies as confirmed far-right extremist has been handed a state government by the ballot box rather than taken it by force. Not the Bundestag. Not a coup. A regional election, decided by voters, many of them in places that have spent fifteen years watching wages stagnate while a governing class in Berlin managed the politics of migration rather than the substance of it.

That is the honest version of the century comparison, and it doesn’t need Weimar or 1933 to make the point. It needs one plainer fact: a decade of wage stagnation, unlike anything this country has recorded in over two hundred years, combined with a political class that would rather monitor extremism than answer the grievance feeding it, is exactly the vacuum that produces this outcome. Saxony-Anhalt did not elect fascists because German voters woke up cruel. It is poised to elect them because nobody serious offered those voters anything else for long enough that the offer stopped mattering.

Dover, Again 

What happened on the A20 this morning is a symptom, not a strategy, and the men responsible for it were never going to be the ones capable of diagnosing the disease correctly. Women who told a local councillor they felt frightened walking their own streets, and port workers who couldn’t leave a night shift, paid the immediate price for a fault line that has nothing to do with either of them and everything to do with twenty years of dishonesty from people who will never once have to live with what it costs. Frightening a woman on her own street is still frightening a woman on her own street, whatever the men doing it believe they’re defending, and nothing here excuses it.

And some readers will say a frightened woman on a road is a small thing next to a woman actually attacked, and they’ll be right to say it. In April this year, three men, Abdulla Ahmadi, Ibrahim Alshafe and Karin Al-Danasurt, were convicted at Hove Crown Court of raping a woman on Brighton beach while filming it. All three had arrived by small boat and were living in Home Office asylum accommodation. Alshafe’s asylum claim had been refused the day before he committed the attack. Sit with that single fact rather than the horror around it, because it’s the one that actually indicts something. The state had already made its decision. It had already said no. And the man it said no to remained in Britain, in its own accommodation, for a day longer, and used that day to commit a rape. That is not a fact about migrants. It is a fact about a state that processes a refusal and then does nothing whatsoever to enforce it, and calls the gap between those two things a system.

Ask the harder question before you settle for condemning the men on the A20 and calling it a day. A state that broke the same promise three times under three governments, then policed this morning’s result with vans and patience rather than a single arrest, and that had, in Alshafe’s case, already refused a man’s claim and then simply let him stay: what exactly did it think was eventually going to happen, on a road, on a beach, or anywhere else it kept choosing not to act? The absence of a single arrest, on a road blocked for most of a day in Britain’s busiest port, is not evidence of a state that has this in hand. It is evidence of a state that has spent twenty years managing disorder rather than answering the question that keeps producing it, and today it simply managed another one, the same way it has managed every one before it, by waiting for it to leave on the next train.

Of course, there is nothing new about masks or the paramilitary theatre of the street. Britain has already normalised the sight of large masked political crowds taking over public space. The danger is what happens when different factions learn that anonymity, numbers and disruption carry little immediate cost. The saying goes, “Nobody voted for this”. Slamming the door shut now will not bring the horse back to the stable: it will only leave the same political class standing on the threshold, wondering why the voters are no longer listening.

The Godmother of Neoliberalism

When John Stanley Pottinger was running guns with Jeffrey Epstein during the Iran-Contra affair, then he was in a 10-year relationship with Gloria Steinem, of whom Jenny Brown writes:

Gloria Steinem, the establishment’s favorite radical feminist, died on September 2.

The mainstream media has gone all out in praising her, with the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times united in their adulation. The Times called her the “personification of the women’s movement” and credited her with helping to usher in “sweeping cultural transformations across virtually every facet of American life, from the boardroom to the courtroom to the bedroom.” They approvingly quote her self-description as an “entrepreneur of social change.”

For many people, she is the only radical feminist they can name, eclipsing the extraordinary women who planned and launched the successful women’s liberation movement starting in 1967.

Steinem did wield enormous influence. Ms. magazine and the Ms. Foundation for Women, which she cofounded, came to define what was worthy in the feminist project. But to the women’s liberation pioneers she displaced, this meant silencing the radicals and promoting the anodyne. When Steinem described Ms. as “a kind of connective tissue for women all across this country who felt isolated until we came along and let them know they were not alone,” feminist pioneers saw Steinem as taking credit for work already done by the movement.

The women’s liberation movement didn’t need Ms. to publicize it. It had already been on the front page of nearly every mass circulation magazine and had produced ten mass-market anthologies by 1971, selling millions of copies. The movement published one hundred small newspapers and journals, including Off Our Backs, It Ain’t Me Babe, and Woman’s World.

And it had already won substantial victories by the time Steinem emerged on the scene. Thousands of working-class women were suing employers for sex discrimination. Abortion was legalized in New York State in 1970. The Equal Rights Amendment passed the House of Representatives in 1971 and the Senate in March 1972, followed immediately by twenty-two states.

The Rise of Ms. Magazine

So it was with an eye to the market already created by the radicals that Steinem, then thirty-seven and a professional magazine writer, collaborated with New York magazine editor Clay Felker to start Ms. magazine. The inaugural issue appeared as a section of New York in December 1971; it launched separately in July 1972. Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham invested, and Warner Communications put in $1 million but asked only for a 25 percent stake, an unusually generous arrangement.

Some women’s liberation pioneers were at first glad to hear of the new publication. Kathie Sarachild of Redstockings, who coined the phrase “Sisterhood Is Powerful” and authored the germinal 1968 “Program for Feminist Consciousness-Raising,” said she initially though Ms. would act as a feminist muckraker magazine, doing investigative journalism on behalf of women’s cause.

She and other women’s liberation movement founders were soon disillusioned.

It’s not that Steinem didn’t know who had led the movement up to the point she entered. In 1969, writing for New York magazine, she had attended the first-ever Redstockings abortion speak-out. She recalled the scene in her 1983 book, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions: 

A local feminist group had asked women to testify about their real life experiences with illegal abortion. I sat in a church basement listening to women stand before an audience and talk about desperately trying to find someone who would help them, enduring pre-abortion rapes from doctors, being asked to accept sterilization as the price of abortion, and endangering their lives in an illegal, unsafe medical underground. . . . Suddenly I was no longer learning intellectually what was wrong. I knew. I had had an abortion when I was newly out of college, and had told no one.

Yet the women who had taught her so much largely failed to find a place in the pages of Ms. three years later. Ellen Willis, pop music critic for The New Yorker and a Redstockings founder, did manage to make the cut starting in 1973. She resigned after two years, calling Ms. editorial policy “conservative, anti-left feminism.” In her resignation letter, Willis wrote: “No attempt has ever been made to recruit and hire experienced feminist writers, theorists, organizers. . . . Ms.’s politics [include] a mushy, sentimental idea of sisterhood designed to obscure political conflicts between women.”

“Basically, it’s a change yourself line, the women’s magazine line,” Sarachild reflected later. “But the tricky thing about Ms. is that they pretend to be different. I bet there are certain women who wouldn’t bother reading women’s magazines who read Ms.”

The editing reflected the politics, and radicals described Ms. editing as torture. Patricia Mainardi, author of the groundbreaking 1968 manifesto the “The Politics of Housework,” recalled:

They would use a bullshit word instead of a strong word. I had the word “loved.” They changed it to “had a fondness for.” . . . Cindy Nemser wrote in an article about Alice Neel, “Alice Neel is the foremost portrait painter in our time.” In Ms. this became, “She may indeed be the foremost portrait painter of the last 40 years.” It’s sneaky editing, downgrading women’s contribution to art. Ms.’s line is women are no good in art. They have been oppressed and damaged by their oppression. They’re inferior. It’s a goody-goody line: we have to work harder to overcome our oppression.

This made a sad contrast to the radicals, whose daring truth-telling had organized millions on the idea that what appeared to be women’s individual, personal problems were in fact political and rooted in their oppression by men. This was what they meant by the slogan “The Personal Is Political.”

Establishment Feminism

Ms. pioneered the use of private foundation funding to steer feminist movement priorities. The Ms. Foundation dispensed money to approved feminist projects and created a database of feminists around the country and the world. It seeded the founding of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), a Ms.-aligned black women’s group. The NBFO is often cited as the very first black feminist organization in the United States. Repeating the pattern for the women’s liberation movement as a whole, the group blotted out the more radical organizing that preceded it, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Black Women’s Liberation Committee, its successor, the Third World Women’s Alliance, and the Patricia Robinson–led group Poor Black Women, all groups with radical and anti-imperialist politics.

Before the rise of Ms., movement originators had received widespread coverage. Kate Millett was on the cover of Time in 1970. That same year hundreds of feminists occupied the offices of Ladies’ Home Journal editor John Mack Carter, demanding an issue they edited (and free daycare for the magazine’s workforce). They won an eight-page supplement titled “The New Feminism.”

But soon, the media went to Steinem for their “radical” feminism. Redstockings called it the “historic invisibility treatment”: The women who developed the movement’s strategy were written out of the picture. They became anonymous foremothers — while many were still in their twenties and thirties.

Betty Friedan was too well-known to sideline, but the media loved to counterpose Steinem to Friedan, the older, unhip, allegedly less radical feminist who founded the National Organization for Women in 1966. In fact, Friedan’s politics were well to the left of Steinem’s — under her maiden name, Goldstein, Friedan had served as a staffer of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, the union that held out against the demand that US unions expel their leftist leaders.

While Friedan presented herself as reformist to evade red-baiting, she argued astutely for undermining the the basis of men’s power over women by advocating for programs and structures that would give women the economic foundation for independence from men. “Without childcare, it’s all just talk,” she argued.

Steinem, styled as more radical, volunteered for Angela Davis’s bail committee, posed with her fist raised with Dorothy Pittman Hughes in October 1971, and toured the country with radical black lawyer Florynce Kennedy to lecture on feminism.

Steinem loved witty aphorisms that expressed terrible politics. She quoted actress Lee Grant: “I’ve been married to a Marxist and a Fascist, and neither one of them ever took out the garbage.” Aside from garbage being a rare bit of male-coded housework, the quote implies that communists and fascists are equally bad. You wouldn’t expect a fascist to do housework.

Ms. pioneered the use of private foundation funding to steer feminist movement priorities. She liked to quote a woman cab driver in Boston who told her, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” While funny, this gets the causality of women’s oppression backward. Founding radical feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir argued that women are oppressed because we do reproductive labor: if men could get pregnant, they would be the oppressed sex.

Steinem’s concept of a “liberated woman” (who, as she quipped, has sex before marriage and a job after) directly contradicted the the very heart of the radical movement’s argument — that women are oppressed as a class and can’t make themselves free individually. 

Where did her politics come from? She seemed have one foot in the establishment from the start, dating John F. Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen; then Franklin Thomas, who would soon lead the Ford Foundation; and, in the 1980s, real estate developer Mortimer Zuckerman. Vivian Gornick recalled, “Gloria was uptown; we were downtown. She hung out with Establishment figures; we had only ourselves.” 

Steinem and the CIA

In 1967, the left-wing magazine Ramparts exposed the river of secret CIA money flowing into the National Student Association, the United States’ largest student group. After the revelations, Steinem spoke to the press about her role in recruiting anti-communist students to attend and disrupt the World Youth Festivals, which started in the socialist world and planned for the first time to venture outside the iron curtain in Vienna in 1959 and Helsinki in 1962.

She worked full-time as director of the Independent Service for Information on the Vienna Youth Festival, later renamed the Independent Research Service (IRS), a CIA conduit that flooded the festivals with anti-communist and pro-US propaganda. At the Helsinki festival, which drew 18,000 people from 137 countries, the IRS produced a daily newspaper published in three languages, coedited by Steinem and Clay Felker.

One of the 1959 publications with her name on it, A Review of Negro Segregation in the United States, claimed that the problem of racial discrimination had essentially been solved in the United States and that leftover problems were due to black people’s psychology. Low voter registration was because “in many areas of the South there exists a profound apathy among Negroes to the this paramount responsibility of good citizenship.”

The CIA’s goal had been to make the festivals so fraught — by encouraging violent clashes — that the countries sponsoring them would cancel them. As it turned out, the following two were canceled because the planned hosts, Algeria in 1965 and then Ghana in 1966, experienced coups. In Ghana, the CIA was involved, according to agency officer John Stockwell.

In the 1967 interviews, Steinem said the CIA funding was no problem. “Far from being shocked by this involvement I was happy to find some liberals in government in those days who were far-sighted and cared enough to get Americans of all political views to the festival,” she told The New York Times. She also said she was not asked to report on people she met there.

Since Steinem wasn’t well-known at the time, it was eight years later that the New York–based feminist group Redstockings discovered the connection, after Steinem had rocketed to the front of the movement.

Redstockings published an exposé in 1975, suggesting that the substitution of Ms. and Steinem for the “original, authentic activists that started the movement” looked similar to other CIA operations that “create or support ‘parallel’ organizations which provide an alternative to radicalism.” It also pointed out that a report published by Steinem’s organization on the Vienna festival included short dossiers on dozens of student leaders from around the world — contrary to her claim she never reported on attendees.

Steinem at first refused to respond to the charges, but when she did, she again defended her role and that of the CIA at the festivals. However, she did put considerable effort into suppressing the argument made by Redstockings. Random House planned to bring out a mass-market edition of the self-published book Redstockings book Feminist Revolution, which included a chapter on Steinem. Steinem threatened to sue Random House, and the publisher caved and censored the chapter. Steinem’s lawyers also threatened The Village Voice and even sent a threatening letter to every member of the board of the Columbia Tenants Union in New York City when its newspaper, The Heights and Valley News, printed a series on Steinem and the censorship.

Women’s Equality and the Neoliberal Turn

By the late 1980s, Steinem was famous for Ms. and for being the radical feminist but had not yet written a book laying out her vision of feminism (the anthology Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions in 1983 collected her writing in Ms. and elsewhere).

When it finally came, Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (1992) affirmed everything about her politics that had dismayed the radicals who started the movement. The book, which received a six-figure advance, continued the women’s magazine line that women needed to make internal changes.

“Without self-esteem, the only change is an exchange of masters; with it, there is no need for masters,” she wrote. Of course, we don’t have masters because we need them but because they need us. This basic inversion was symptomatic of her politics.

One 1959 CIA publication with Steinem’s name on it claimed that the problem of racial discrimination had essentially been solved in the United States and that leftover problems were due to black people’s psychology. By contrast, women’s liberation feminists argued that women, like other oppressed people, are in constant struggle against our bonds — a concept they called the “Pro-Woman Line” — in fact, we take every bit of space available and find ingenious workarounds even when there is none. It was discrimination, exploitation, punishment, and constant everyday pressure that constrained us. This hard-won analysis was developed through the main program of the movement, consciousness-raising.

Ms. watered down this important organizing tool, publishing a guide to consciousness-raising that used the name and the form but missed the substance, reducing it to a therapy group where women blew off steam and got sisterly support. The original idea was to use the data that emerged in testimony to assess women’s true situation, dig at the root cause, and analyze who benefits. The program was inspired by the Southern civil rights movement’s “tell it like it is” public testifying and had parallels in the Chinese Revolution’s “speak bitterness” sessions. It was not intended as a safe space.

As corporate attacks in the late 1970s and early ’80s destroyed unions and working-class living conditions and wages plunged for all workers, Friedan and feminist radicals alike argued that advancing women’s equality now required confrontation with corporate power to get guarantees of childcare and health care, paid family leave, and shorter work hours for everyone. Friedan called it the “second stage” of feminism in a book by that name. Redstockings called for the abolition of private health insurance companies and a robust social wage, to give women independence from men and employers.

The Ms. wing of the movement fragmented into thousands of nonprofits, competing for grants from rich people by each proposing “winnable” small-bore solutions to the wreckage left by the employer offensive. This blinkered feminist vision was reflected in the Democratic Party establishment. Meanwhile, long hours, low pay, and worsening conditions for raising kids made women vulnerable to a right-wing nostalgia for to the “glorious thirty” postwar years of family-supporting jobs and stay-at-home moms.

In recent years, Steinem dropped all pretense of radicalism. She supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary against Bernie Sanders, and in an interview that year on Real Time With Bill Maher suggested that young women only supported Sanders because “that’s where the boys are; the boys are with Bernie.” She later claimed she misspoke.

Media hagiography of Steinem reached a fever pitch in the last decade with a TV dramatization of her life, The Glorias; a play, Gloria: A Life; and glowing profiles in the The New York Times, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.

This wave of Steinem-mania coincided with a time that young women were questioning the utility of a 1 percent feminism, represented by such figures as Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and Sheryl Sandberg. Had the goal of women’s liberation really been exploitative corporations and a violent US empire run by women? Steinem was again trotted out to steer the discussion into safe channels, but by the time of her appearance with Maher, she was just giving feminists a bad name.

Women’s liberation movement pioneers, to a woman, came out of the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the student left. They believed that consistent feminism leads to socialism, and vice versa. Following Beauvoir, they wanted to dig deep and abolish the exploitation of women and the oppression required to maintain it. Starting in the 1960s, they planned and built a successful radical movement that profoundly changed the situation of women in the United States and reverberated worldwide.

It’s a crime that their movement was for fifty years personified by someone who never shared its goals.

Crash, Coarse

I am going to start giving my ethnicity on forms as “high yellow”, since apparently that is indeed a reference to my sort and not in fact anything to do with the once-popular children’s rhyme, “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, Margolyes”. Yesterday was vintage for car crash television, what with Miriam and then the interviews given to Channel 4 News by Nadine Dorries and to Newsnight by Laila Cunningham.

And taking the term rather more literally, having once holidayed at Holme House, I watched Look North in the hope of spotting old friends. None was apparent, so those boys were clearly nothing like what they thought they were. But by whom was this sponsored? Black & Decker? Jaffa Cakes? The Orange Order and the Royal Black Institution? Or all of the above? Give reasons for your answer.

Ukraine’s Mood Swing

The domestic intelligence SBU and the military intelligence HUR have staged a shootout on the streets of Kiev, leading the HUR to bomb the SBU’s headquarters in an attack ritually blamed on the Russians with no expectation that anyone would believe it, and with the frank admission that the drone was Ukrainian, but with the formal pretence that the HUR was working for Russia. Numerous Ukrainian secondary schools are reporting that few or no boys have turned up at the start of the academic year, having fled to the countries, including Britain, from which their peers were to be conscripted in their stead. Why do Ukrainians not have to stop at the first safe country? And even in Foreign Policy, even Adrian Karatnycky now writes:

For most of his presidency and especially since Russia launched its full-scale war, Ukrainian voters have rallied around Volodymyr Zelensky as a pillar of national resilience and unity. That’s for good reason: He has been an effective wartime leader and helped mobilize the democratic world on Ukraine’s behalf.

But now, after more than seven years in office, four and a half years of war with Russia, and a series of scandals involving his leadership team and close friends, Zelensky appears to have lost the nation’s political support. Indeed, polling published in early August points to a major mood swing among Ukrainians, suggesting that many of them have lost faith in Zelensky and would vote him out of office at the earliest opportunity.

This swing in sentiment is likely to gain further momentum amid a new scandal involving the president’s key staff. Regrettably, Zelensky has spoken little of the alleged misdeeds of those in his inner circle. He highlights that he is not the subject of any investigations by anti-corruption agencies—a deceptive claim, since the Ukrainian Constitution bars such institutions from investigating or bringing criminal charges against a sitting president.

This lack of moral compass is all the more shocking given the extravagant promises that Zelensky made during his electoral campaign in 2019, when he guaranteed prosecutions and convictions of corrupt officials within months of taking office. Yet more than a dozen members of his party’s legislature, numerous government ministers, and members of his presidential office have been implicated or charged with corruption and illegal enrichment.

Recent polling from Ukrainian political research company SOCIS shows that Ukrainians now regard corruption as a greater problem than the war itself, in part because they link Ukraine’s fate on the battlefield to corruption at the highest levels of the state. Fully 90 percent of Ukrainians believe that corruption stands at a high or extremely high level. Most significantly and most emblematic of the shift, nearly 57 percent of Ukrainians blame Zelensky for the prevalence of corruption, nearly double the number in a similar poll by SOCIS in April 2025. The SOCIS polling also projects that three different rivals would beat him in a second-round election, each by a landslide margin of around 2-to-1.

Zelensky’s loss of support is largely a self-inflicted wound, the product of a philosophy of governance based on rule through a small group of functionaries prized for their personal loyalty. For years, Zelensky has touted and defended this highly centralized system of governance, in which nearly all decision-making emanates from the presidential office. In December 2023, he famously declared that he relies on a team of five to six key managers to run the country’s affairs. Such centralization, while in violation of the constitution, was long accepted by the public as necessary amid the wartime emergency.

In the past year, however, numerous scandals inside the heart of Zelensky’s office have shaken public confidence, and his system of rule through close confidants and managers is a shambles. Four of Zelensky’s top managers are implicated in allegations of illicit activities.

Andriy Smyrnov, a former deputy head of the presidential office, was indicted and brought before the High Anti-Corruption Court on charges of illicit enrichment and money laundering. In January, Rostyslav Shurma, a former deputy head for economic issues in the presidential office, was served with a notice of suspicion of involvement in a multimillion-dollar scheme involving state “green tariffs” earned by his brother’s solar power facilities; he now lives in Germany and has not returned to Ukraine.

Oleh Tatarov—a deputy head of the presidential office and perhaps Zelensky’s most influential current aide—likely benefited from the transfer of a bribery case against him from the independent National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) to the prosecutor general’s office, which is firmly in the hands of Zelensky loyalists.

And of course, there is the notorious case of Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s former chief of staff, who was charged by NABU and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) in May with money laundering. He is accused of being part of a group laundering illicit cash and using some of it to build luxury housing. He is currently free on bail.

On Aug. 19, Iryna Mudra was dismissed as deputy head of the presidential office amid an investigation by NABU’s “Operation Forrest Gump” into an alleged $3.3 million money-laundering operation conducted through a state-owned bank to meet the bail requirements of a former government minister.

Mudra’s activities have deeper implications, as they appear to go further up the chain of command. The prosecution has presented evidence of phone conversations in which she says that she worked at the instruction of her “chief” to facilitate the illicit effort to raise bail. Many Ukrainian journalists believe that the chief she refers to is likely the head of the presidential office, Kyrylo Budanov, who is widely believed to have launched the effort to raise the bail funds at Zelensky’s behest.

In addition, a major corruption scandal involves Timur Mindich, a key business partner in Zelensky’s film and TV production company and a business partner of Serhiy Shefir, whom Zelensky entrusted with handling some of his assets after he became president. Recorded conversations and indictments by Ukraine’s anti-corruption agency suggest that Mindich was part of a criminal group that allegedly included a former justice and energy minister, a former deputy prime minister, and Zelensky’s chief of staff. That group is said to have engaged in extortion, benefited from government favoritism, and profited from state institution revenues. The wiretaps also suggest that Rustem Umerov, the man the president just named to run Ukraine’s foreign intelligence, may have worked to advance Mindich’s private business interests.

As the Mindich scandal was emerging, Zelensky’s administration appears to have used the country’s prosecutor general and the Ukrainian Security Service to open more than a dozen investigations of NABU agents and arrest several on charges of treason and trading with the enemy. Some of these charges came against Viktor Husarov, a detective, and Ruslan Mahamedrasulov, a top anti-corruption official, both of whom were investigating Zelensky’s circle of friends, appointees, and aides. These attacks, seen by some as designed to discredit anti-corruption agencies, were coupled with legislative initiatives launched by Zelensky’s office and party to end NABU’s and SAPO’s independence.

After a week of mass protests and pressure from Western donors, Zelensky relented. Eventually, charges of treason were dropped against Husarov, and Mahamedrasulov was released from arrest. His case is believed by most anti-corruption activists to be without foundation.

Zelensky’s descent into public disfavor has also been influenced by his erratic personnel policies. The first significant blow to Zelensky’s popularity came in February 2024 with the dismissal of Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, the popular and successful commander in chief of Ukraine’s armed forces. This was followed by the firing of Dmytro Kuleba, his effective foreign minister, and most recently, in mid-July, the dismissal—after six months on the job—of Defense Minister Mykhaylo Fedorov, who had helped spur Ukraine’s digitalization and shift to artificial intelligence- and drone-centered combat. Each of the dismissed officials enjoyed high levels of public trust and popularity in Ukraine.

The frequent firings of key officials have also eroded support for Zelensky. Under his presidency, there have been eight ministers of defense and seven economic ministers. Prime ministers have fared a bit better; there have been five in all, of which three were quiet and subservient to Zelensky and his top managers.

In the past, Zelensky recovered after dips in support—for example, after Zaluzhny’s dismissal and after the tense public White House showdown at the hands of U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance. But since last summer, public unhappiness with the charges of corruption in the Zelensky inner circle and the recent firing of Fedorov has solidified the public’s turn away from Zelensky.

To be sure, Ukrainian voters understand that conducting an election would be difficult amid a hot war, with its endless Russian attacks on cities and civilian targets. There are strong reasons why the Ukrainian Constitution delays all elections during time of war. But almost two-thirds of Ukrainians surveyed in the SOCIS poll now say that elections should come quickly in the event of a negotiated cease-fire or peace.

And while Zelensky maintains a strong core of loyalists, representing more than 20 percent of voters, few voters backing other candidates say they would support Zelensky if their candidate did not make it into a second round of voting. Thus, it isn’t surprising that the SOCIS polling indicates that in a second round, Zelensky would currently lose to Zaluzhny with 34 percent to the former commander in chief’s 66 percent, Fedorov with 36 percent to 64 percent, and Budanov with 38 percent to 62 percent. Until a future election takes place, what are the implications of Zelensky’s diminishing popularity now?

While the SOCIS polling shows that 55 percent of Ukrainians believe Zelensky is governing ineffectively, the public shows strong unity and understands that it must continue to support Zelensky as the nation’s wartime commander in chief, even as they reject his domestic policies and style of rule.

Moreover, not everything in Ukraine’s war effort is dependent on Zelensky and the state. Ukrainians’ resilience and innovative capacity have been major factors in the turnaround on the battlefield. Civil society answered the initial call to mobilize and added vigor to the country’s resistance. And it was a small group of mainly women activists from nongovernmental organizations who initially trained thousands of combatants in drone operations, thereby creating a market for military drones that was initially supported through crowdfunding and only later by the state.

At the same time, Zelensky’s high levels of public disapproval carry risks. Disaffection with his leadership can affect morale on the battlefield. Moreover, Ukraine already faces serious problems with draft evasion. Growing public cynicism about the country’s rulers could exacerbate this problem. Just as importantly, attacks on civilian targets are on the rise. This winter will challenge Ukrainian morale when, given the scarcity of anti-missile interceptors, Russia is expected to seriously degrade Ukraine’s electricity and heating. Long blackouts and mounting destruction of civilian infrastructure will require civic courage and a leadership team that can—as in the past—inspire the people to hold on. It is unclear how much longer Zelensky can play that role and how effectively.

There are two ways of resolving this problem. The first—a wartime election—has little support among Ukrainians, remains logistically complex, and is currently illegal. The second is to reboot the system of governance by reducing presidential involvement in running the domestic government agenda, creating a government of national unity, and opening the door to a pool of effective and untainted officials from rival parties and the vast pool of effective officials whom Zelensky has dismissed because he saw them as potential competitors.

Unfortunately, nothing suggests that Zelensky can take such a step. He has always had absolute confidence in his decision-making and surrounded himself with a team of loyalists who rarely challenge his judgments. The time for centralized rule through a small group of cronies has long passed, and Western leaders and his own people should press him at every opportunity to take steps to ensure national unity and effective governance. With his own political future in tatters, it is time for him to try something new. A Ukraine at war requires no less.

This Bank and Shoal of Time

Graham Grant writes:

Former Labour MP George Galloway has threatened legal action against the Bank of Scotland after claiming it closed his accounts ‘without explanation or notice’. The politician and broadcaster alleged on X that the bank, which is part of Lloyds Banking Group, was acting unlawfully and attempting to ‘wreck my family life’.

Mr Galloway wrote: ‘Thirty-nine years ago, I opened a personal bank account with Bank of Scotland in Byres Road, Glasgow. Yesterday without explanation or notice they closed my accounts. My parliamentary and old age pensions are paid into these accounts. The mortgage on our family home is paid out of them. The mortgage is with them. They haven’t heard the last of this.’ A few hours later, the 72-year-old said: ‘My solicitor Kevin Winters of KRW Law has sent a powerful letter before action to you [Bank of Scotland]. You are in breach of the law. I will not stand by while you use your usurious power to wreck my family life.’

The dispute comes amid continuing debate over so-called ‘debanking’ after Reform UK leader Nigel Farage claimed in 2023 his Coutts account had been closed due to his political views. The row triggered political controversy, parliamentary scrutiny and a wider discussion about how banks make decisions to withdraw services from customers. A Bank of Scotland spokesman said: ‘Our policy is not to close a customer’s account based on political or personal beliefs and we make customers aware if we make the decision to close an account. We’re unable to comment on individual cases.’ It is understood that the bank’s terms and conditions give it the right to close accounts in certain circumstances. It is also understood the bank believes it has complied with all relevant legal and regulatory requirements.

Mr Galloway, who founded the Workers Party of Britain, has recently been living outside the UK. He was in Russia during the Holyrood election campaign, in which he stood unsuccessfully, and has since posted regularly from overseas, including China. The allegations are not the first claims of ‘debanking’ to be levelled at Lloyds Banking Group. In July, the Left-wing media outlet The Canary said it had also been ‘de-banked’ without explanation. The organisation claimed Lloyds was ‘withholding a substantial amount of our money’ and had ‘not explained why it has taken this action’. Lloyds did not publicly comment on the allegations.

The latest dispute raises fresh questions about banks terminating customers’ accounts and the safeguards available for those who believe that they have been treated unfairly. Dundee-born Mr Galloway was Labour MP for Glasgow Hillhead from 1987 until 2003, when he was expelled from the party following a dispute over the Iraq war. He has long been a controversial figure, attracting fierce criticism over his outspoken views on foreign policy, Russia, the Middle East and British politics. The former MP and his solicitor were contacted for comment.

And The Canary also reports this very day:

The Canary has faced sustained attacks from both the political right and left, alongside repeated attempts to undermine our organisation and restrict our ability to operate. This has resulted in The Guardian publishing allegations against us today (Friday 4 September). At the same time, Canary Media Limited has had another bank account blocked, resulting in yet another financial institution stopping us from accessing our money. We are currently awaiting a response from Metro, the bank responsible, for why it has done this. This has meant that once again, some staff were not paid for August. 

We have seen members of our team targeted through their social media accounts, including accounts being hacked, restricted, or removed. Canary workers have been arrested, with another being assaulted by a far-right Zionist at a protest. Two others were attacked by the Israeli Defence Forces in Southern Lebanon. We have faced significant pressure and repeated attempts to disrupt our work. Yet we have continued regardless. 

However, recent events have created circumstances in which we have been left with no responsible alternative but to suspend The Canary’s operations with immediate effect. This is not a decision we have taken lightly, nor is it a decision caused by any failure of the Canary or its leadership. It is the direct consequence of the debanking of The Canary’s funds, the resulting financial disruption, and the serious internal consequences that followed.

Debanking and financial disruption to The Canary

At the time The Canary was debanked, the organisation’s funds were effectively inaccessible to us. Despite this, we refused to simply walk away. We continued our work while seeking to resolve the situation with Lloyds. The consequences were immediate. Projects that were ready to move forward had to be cancelled. Staff experienced delays in receiving their wages, with some employees waiting several days and journalists working abroad waiting longer.

At one point, The Canary’s website was unavailable for a few hours because the direct debit required to pay for the service could no longer be processed as the bank account had been closed. We had to pause payments to pensions’ provider NEST to ensure staff were paid instead. These were not operational choices made by The Canary. They were consequences of a banking decision over which the organisation had no control. 

The human cost

The financial pressure inevitably created uncertainty and frustration among some members of staff. That pressure subsequently contributed to serious internal misconduct by some staff and significant disruption within the organisation. The financial and emotional strain also resulted in frustration being directed towards Steve Topple, our CEO. That frustration was misplaced. Steve was not responsible for the debanking of The Canary, nor for the financial consequences that followed. Throughout this period, he continued to work to protect the organisation, its staff, and its ability to continue operating. We will not allow the actions of individuals, or circumstances created beyond our control, to rewrite that reality.

We are suspending, not surrendering

The decision to suspend operations is a necessary step to protect what remains of The Canary and to give us the opportunity to rebuild on a stable foundation. We are immensely proud of those members of staff who have remained loyal throughout this extraordinary period. Their solidarity, commitment, and belief in independent journalism have not gone unnoticed.

To those colleagues who have chosen to leave (to be clear, they have not faced any misconduct allegations), we wish them well. But The Canary will not be defined by those who walked away. We will be defined by those who stayed. The Canary was created to challenge established narratives, scrutinise power, and provide journalism that we believe deserves to be heard. Those principles have not changed. Neither has our determination.

Support The Canary

We are therefore asking our members, readers and supporters to stand with the staff who have remained with us during this unprecedented period. If you can, please donate via our website to provide immediate support to those members of our team who continue to stand by The Canary and who have been directly affected by the extraordinary circumstances facing the organisation.

This is not the end of The Canary. It is a moment in which we take stock, protect our people and prepare for what comes next. We have faced attacks before. We have been targeted before. We have been told, directly and indirectly, that our work should stop. We are still here. And we intend to remain here.

A Realistic Public Debate

I am thinking of pitching a remake of Hi-de-Hi! in which the holiday camp was called Putin’s and presided over by Vladimir Putin, of whom Anatol Lieven writes:

Diane Abbott has been subjected to ferocious attacks on her character for claiming on Wednesday that “the imminent threat from Russia is a Nato fiction.” The Labour MP added that the alliance was attempting “to justify their complete capitulation to Trump’s demands for more military spending. The increase should not go ahead.” Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch branded the comments “reprehensible”, while another Tory, Ben Obese-Jecty, labelled Abbott “Putin’s useful idiot”. The Hackney North and Stoke Newington MP even received criticism from her own Labour colleagues.

Many of the responses to Abbott are little more than attempts to shut down public debate on a question of vast importance to the United Kingdom. However, it is also true that she would have been much closer to the facts had she emphasised one word and added another: “The imminent conventional threat from Russia is a Nato fiction.”

Put like this, the argument is persuasive. Any suggestion of a Russian invasion or sustained air campaign in Western Europe is absurd. The Russian military and air force are already occupied with a grinding war in Ukraine: where is Moscow supposed to find a new army with which to attack Nato? How would the Kremlin pay for the resulting war when Nato has practically shut down Russia’s maritime trade?

Had she phrased her statement in these terms, Abbott would have been close to what sensible Nato figures and analysts have been saying. In June, the American Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR), General Alexus Grynkewich, said that “Russia is not looking for a conflict […] They do understand the term ‘defensive alliance’, and they do understand that we have a number of asymmetric advantages.” Really, Russia’s threats have been intended to deter a direct war with Nato in Ukraine, not to start one.

Russian-organised hybrid attacks in Europe and Britain are a much more realistic danger, one which Abbott should have mentioned. Moscow has engaged in cyber warfare, as well allegedly organising arson attacks and the sabotage of railway lines and undersea cables. Last month, explosive drones were discovered close to Ukrainian planes with military supplies at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany. 

So far, however, the effects have been small, suggesting that Russia’s campaign has been either highly incompetent or deliberately restrained. If the latter, this is presumably because the Kremlin still wants to maintain some element of plausible deniability, and because these attacks are meant to be warnings rather than attempts to do serious damage and cause casualties.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has threatened that “the response to Ukrainian strikes using British missiles on Russian territory may become [attacks on] any military sites and equipment of Britain in Ukraine, or beyond its borders.” This would mean making Russian hybrid attacks overt — a strategy Vladimir Putin has thus far avoided, both because of the risk of a radical increase in Western help to Ukraine, and perhaps because his instincts as a former intelligence officer are more geared towards covert operations.

In war, accidents happen. On the first day of the American-Israeli war on Iran, the US unintentionally destroyed an Iranian elementary school, killing 120 children. In 1988, American forces mistakenly shot down an Iranian airliner, killing 290 people. Russian contacts assure me that if a British missile were to destroy a school or an airliner in Russia, a direct response against the UK would be unavoidable.

At present, though, a direct threat from Russia to Britain is far from imminent. What is needed is a realistic public debate about the escalation of British support for Ukraine and its possible consequences, and a serious negotiating strategy rather than one that sabotages US initiatives. Support for Ukraine is legitimate, but it is the interests and security of the British people that ministers should be prioritising.

Sometimes you just have to laugh. As that was the only response compatible with the maintenance of sanity when Tony Blair sent troops into battle in Iraq without the necessary protection against weapons of mass destruction because he knew full well that Iraqi WMD did not exist, so that is the only such response to the news that the Army has ceased “all nonessential training exercises” to save a few quid. Note the lack of reference to the Skripals, although not even in Salisbury had a Russian been alleged to have shed his passport like a snakeskin, to be picked up by whoever found the one in Leipzig.

But Ukraine blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, leading to absolutely no recrimination on the part of Friedrich Merz. It staged the first terrorist bombing in the history of Monaco. It shot dead Andriy Portnov outside his children’s American school in Madrid. It nearly caused an ammonia nitrate explosion when one of its naval drones exploded off the coast of Romania. One of its air defence missiles killed two farmers in a Polish border village, as established by a Polish investigation with which Ukraine refused to cooperate. Its drones’ incursions into Finland and the Baltic states are routine. Germany, Spain, Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are members of NATO. Ukraine is not. And that is before we mention the Ukrainian rent boys who set fire to properties linked to Keir Starmer. Russian troops will not be marching up your street and mine any time soon when Russia cannot launch a drone attack on a commercial plane at a civilian airport in peaceful Germany, and the old East Germany at that, of which Thomas Fazi writes:

Saxony-Anhalt, in the western part of eastern Germany, is hardly the country’s most important state: it accounts for only a fraction of Germany’s GDP and is home to just two million people, half the population of Berlin. It is often described as a no-man’s-land between east and west — the flat, monotonous backdrop to the final hour-long approach to Berlin. Yet Saxony-Anhalt is poised to become the stage for one of the biggest political showdowns in recent German history.

State elections will be held there on 6 September, and the AfD is set for a sweeping victory. The party is currently polling at 43%, on track to secure an absolute majority of seats — though that outcome largely hinges on whether the parties currently polling close to the 5% threshold, primarily the Greens, make it in or not. A handful of votes could tip the outcome in the opposite direction, allowing the establishment parties to keep the AfD out of power once again, as they did in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg after 2024 — if not through a full everyone-minus-the-AfD coalition, which might prove arithmetically difficult, then through a minority government.

In short, the result sits on a knife edge; little wonder that the German political establishment is in a state of panic. For the AfD to win an absolute majority would be a historic triumph and mark the definitive collapse of the “firewall” erected around the party in recent years. Not only would it be the first time the party takes power in a state, but it wouldn’t have to share that power with anyone else — a feat hitherto achieved only by the two main establishment parties, the CDU/CSU and the SPD. Meanwhile, the AfD continues to rise practically everywhere — including in Berlin, where it has doubled its support (in the polls) since 2023 and now runs level with the CDU, behind the frontrunner, the Left-progressive Linke. Berlin votes a fortnight later, as does the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the AfD leads the polling. This makes Saxony-Anhalt all the more important, since a victory there could propel the party forward in the other two contests as well.

Crucially, because of the way Germany’s federal structure is set up, if the AfD were to take control of a state it would inevitably have to be reckoned with at the national level too — precisely what the anti-AfD firewall was designed to prevent at all costs. As state premier, one of the first responsibilities of the AfD’s candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, would be to assume the annually rotating chairmanship of the regular meetings of Germany’s 16 state premiers. The position typically entails a visit to Berlin and a joint press appearance with the chancellor.

To get an idea of the panic gripping the German political establishment, and especially its metropolitan, social-liberal wing, one need look no further than its house journal, the magazine Der Spiegel, which recently featured on its cover a mugshot-like photograph of Siegmund — a former perfume trader — with the caption “Germany’s most dangerous man”. It’s such an outlandishly exaggerated claim that the cover drew criticism even from mainstream corners. Ulf Poschardt, the former editor-in-chief of Die Welt, pointed out that such brazen and caricatural ad hominem attacks simply play into the AfD’s narrative: that they are fighting an out-of-touch political-media elite that views everyone outside their narrow political-ideological spectrum as a “threat to democracy” — including the party that is polling first across the country, well ahead of Chancellor Merz’s CDU/CSU.

Indeed, it is precisely because the establishment has lost control of the narrative — and Germany is hardly an exception in this regard — that, as Politico recently reported, it is now studying an arsenal of extraordinary measures designed, in effect, to prevent a possible AfD state government from exercising its mandate. The first scenario involves excluding Saxony-Anhalt’s representatives from meetings on sensitive matters. In addition to the gathering of state premiers that Siegmund would be expected to chair for a year, Germany’s states regularly coordinate through a network of ministerial “conferences”. Among the most important is the conference of interior ministers, where some of the country’s most pressing security and intelligence matters are discussed. Thus, as several ministers confirmed to Politico, one possibility would be to keep holding the regular meetings of the interior ministers, but also organise separate gatherings for particularly sensitive issues from which the representative from Saxony-Anhalt would be excluded. According to an emeritus professor of constitutional law, the idea is “perfectly conceivable”, though he conceded that it might be challenged by the federal courts.

A second scenario would involve raising a “wall” within shared information systems. The argument is that the AfD, given its alleged “closeness” to Russia, cannot be trusted with sensitive dossiers. The notion that the AfD would act as a pipeline of classified information to Moscow is rather ludicrous — if only because that would amount to political suicide. “We talk to everyone, whether West or East,” said a spokesperson for the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to hand over files. Anyone who claims otherwise is talking nonsense. If and when we get access to such information, we understand our responsibility as a party of government.” Nonetheless, a Social Democrat politician told the magazine that the AfD should be kept away from all intelligence on Right-wing extremism and espionage. In other words, an elected government would be deliberately kept in the dark about dossiers crucial to national security, rendering it effectively incapable of governing. Once again, it is claimed that this would be “legally possible”.

A third scenario, the most striking so far, would involve financially starving the AfD-led state. Saxony-Anhalt receives almost €3 billion a year from federal fiscal equalisation, equal to a fifth of its budget. The threat is to reduce or suspend those funds in order to “make life harder” for a potential AfD government, “or to coerce the party to behave in ways the political establishment finds acceptable”. The finance minister of Baden-Württemberg points out that the system is anchored in the constitution, as though a single constitutional provision could disguise the political motive behind financially strangling a rebellious region.

A final scenario being contemplated is the so-called “nuclear option”: the Bundeszwang, or federal coercion. Under Article 37 of Germany’s Basic Law, the federal government, with the consent of the Bundesrat, the chamber representing the states, may take “necessary measures” to compel a state to fulfil its legal obligations. In other words, Berlin could force a state government to obey federal law, a measure that has never been applied in the history of the Federal Republic, not once since 1949.

The picture that emerges is unmistakable: the same German establishment that is constantly lecturing other countries about democracy and the rule of law is demonstrating that democracy is tolerated only so long as it produces results deemed acceptable. When democratic processes produce an unwelcome government, or risk doing so, ways are sought to circumvent it, to hollow it out or to render it harmless — all in the name of “defending democracy”, of course.

Indeed, it has become increasingly common in recent years in Germany for mainstream parties and media outlets to use the term “Unsere Demokratie” — our democracy. The meaning is clear: only those who hold the “right” positions sit within the perimeter of democracy; those outside it are not opponents within the system but threats to it. In this way, ordinary political disagreement about migration, energy, EU policy or the war in Ukraine can be reclassified as an attack on the constitutional order itself, and the ordinary remedies — debates, elections — can give way to exceptional ones.

In this regard, the German establishment has a formidable ally: the constitution itself. Germany’s postwar order is built on the doctrine of “militant democracy”: the idea, drawn directly from Weimar’s collapse, that a democracy may legitimately refuse to tolerate those who would use democratic means to abolish it. There is a basic logic to the concept, but it is clearly now being stretched to the extreme. One may agree or not with the party’s most radical policy stance, that on remigration — which the AfD itself defines as lawful measures to return foreigners already under removal orders — but that is a policy position, not a programme for abolishing democracy or the constitutional order. Even critics of the party have said as much: writing on Verfassungsblog, one German constitutional scholar noted that the case against the AfD largely rests on its portrayal of German democracy as dysfunctional, and that fundamental criticism of the system is the very thing that distinguishes democracy from dictatorship. Yet the doctrine of militant democracy is no longer merely being invoked against the AfD; it is being used to justify waging war on the party by all means necessary, including extra-legal ones.

In May 2025, the domestic intelligence service formally classified the AfD — by then already the country’s largest opposition party, polling first or second nationally — as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organisation, on the strength of a 1,100-page report the public was not permitted to see, announced by the outgoing interior minister days before leaving office. The designation — which would have unlocked expanded surveillance powers and fuelled mounting calls for a formal ban procedure — did not survive judicial scrutiny: in February 2026 the Cologne Administrative Court barred the agency from applying or publicising it, finding its conditions unmet.

But the episode’s lesson cuts deeper than its outcome: it took a court to halt the state security apparatus’s attempt to brand the principal opposition party an enemy of the constitution. Nor did the judicial setback end the campaign: by summer 2026, a 1,500-page NGO legal opinion had concluded a ban application would probably succeed, and more than 1,000 lawyers, judges and prosecutors had signed an open letter urging ban proceedings. That the prohibition of the largest opposition party in Germany could be seriously entertained, to the routine applause of Brussels-aligned commentary, tells its own story.

The current geopolitical tensions provide another tool in the hands of the political establishment, in Germany and elsewhere: so long as Russia can be framed as an invisible but ever-present threat, anyone who opposes the status quo can easily be delegitimised as a “Kremlin-aligned internal enemy” — an outright national security threat. It has now become commonplace across Europe to blame virtually every unwelcome electoral outcome — including the recent Icelandic EU referendum — on Russian interference, even in the absence of any evidence. Indeed, a number of journalists and analysts, several of them German, have already been sanctioned for “spreading pro-Russian propaganda”.

No wonder the German establishment seems so intent on escalating tension with Russia. This doesn’t just serve EU-Nato geopolitical interests in Ukraine — where Germany is now leading the charge — but also serves the establishment’s domestic aim of cracking down on the opposition. As mentioned already, the AfD is regularly accused of being a tool of Russian interests, though this largely rests on the party’s programmatic positions: opposition to sanctions, to arms for Ukraine, calls to reopen Nord Stream, and dialogue with Moscow — all things that one might argue would serve first and foremost in Germany’s interests. In this light, the German government’s claims that Russia is behind the failed drone attack at Leipzig/Halle airport — for which it has so far failed to provide any concrete evidence — might also be seen as aimed at putting even more pressure on the AfD. The timing of the announcement is noteworthy: four weeks after the alleged attack, but only a few days away from the election in Saxony-Anhalt. Leipzig/Halle airport, incidentally, sits directly on the Saxony-Saxony-Anhalt border, and Halle is Saxony-Anhalt’s largest city.

Finally, the German establishment can count on another formidable ally: Brussels itself. In recent years, the EU has gradually developed a playbook of electoral influence: a dense ecosystem of regulatory, financial, legal and informational instruments capable of shaping electoral conditions and outcomes, which have now been institutionalised through tools like the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Democracy Shield, aimed at the permanent monitoring of electoral processes across all member states — continuous supranational oversight of national elections, without any basis in the Treaties. These are tools that can be — and are — regularly deployed in support of establishment-aligned parties, be they incumbent or in opposition. Though these tools are less useful in the case of state elections, one can be sure that they will be amply deployed in next year’s federal election.

Ultimately, one thing is clear: Germany’s elites are scrambling to shore up their power in the face of collapsing legitimacy and popular consensus. Support for Chancellor Friedrich Merz has plummeted to historic lows, with his personal approval rating now down to 14% — the worst figure ever recorded for any sitting chancellor. This is hardly surprising: his cabinet is presiding over the deepest industrial contraction in the Federal Republic’s history, one that falls hardest on states like Saxony-Anhalt, whose chemical and automotive employers are being squeezed by high energy prices. At the same time, Merz’s cabinet is rolling back the welfare state (such as scrapping early retirement at 63 for long-serving workers) and promoting a highly dangerous — and highly unpopular, especially in eastern Germany — escalation towards Russia, all while suppressing free speech through surveillance, intimidation and even criminal prosecution. This is ultimately what is fuelling support for the AfD: not a renewed taste for “fascism”, but deep-seated hostility towards the establishment. This is particularly true in eastern Germany, or the former GDR, where a long-standing east-west economic and cultural divide has consolidated into a sharp political polarisation, with the AfD capitalising on growing “anti-western” sentiment — “western” here meaning the former West Germany as much as the West at large.

What is at stake in Saxony-Anhalt on 6 September, then, is not really the government of a small eastern state of two million people. It is whether the German establishment still believes it can beat its opponents at the ballot box or whether it has quietly concluded that it cannot, and must therefore win by other means. Every measure now being war-gamed in Berlin is an admission of that second possibility. And each of them, if deployed, would hand the AfD precisely the argument it has been making for a decade: that Germany is governed by a caste which regards the electorate as a problem to be managed, and which is prepared to trample on the most elementary principle of “their” much-vaunted liberal democracy — that whoever wins an election must be able to govern — rather than lose control. The firewall may be crumbling, but the establishment appears intent on laying the foundations for something far more impregnable.

Germany has never had a firewall. Not only had key figures in the foundation of the Federal Republic, of NATO and of the EU very recently been Nazi officers, but one of the East German Bloc Parties, complete with reserved seats in the Volkskammer, was the NDPD, specifically for former Nazi Party members and supporters, although it was often observed that there were in fact more former Nazi Party members in the Communist Party than the entire membership of the NDPD. In 1968, long after East Germany professed to have eradicated all trace of Nazism, the new Constitution still felt the need to commit it to doing so. In 1990, the NDPD took fewer votes than it officially had members, so perhaps that commitment had been met. If so, then it did not last. Look at the voting patterns of the former East Germany now. And no one in West Germany even pretended, not really. The obituaries of Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl were as frank as they themselves had always been. By the early 1960s, more former members of the Nazi Party, a party that had been 8.5 million strong at the end of the War, were on the staffs of many West German government departments than there had been current Nazi Party members on those staffs during the Third Reich.

There has never been a firewall in Britain, either. Thomas Mair, the murderer of Jo Cox, accurately described himself to the Police as “a political activist”. National Fronts come and BNPs go, EDLs come and Britain Firsts go, but certain institutional and organisational manifestations of the Far Right are perennial and even permanent. Mair’s is the Springbok Club, which is run by the people who also run the London Swinton Circle. And that, in turn, was addressed by Liam Fox (born 1961) and by Owen Paterson (born 1956) as recently as 2014. Ah, those old 1980s Tory Boys, in their Hang Mandela T-shirts and all the rest of it. Wherever did they all end up?

In the Thatcher and, to a lesser extent, Major years, there were Ministers who were members of the Western Goals Institute or the Monday Club, which latter had played a key role in securing British accession to the EU. Those crossed over, via such things as the fiercely Eurofederalist League of Saint George, to overt neo-Nazism on the Continent, to the Ku Klux Klan, to apartheid South Africa, to Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, to the juntas of Latin America, to Marcos and Suharto, to the Duvaliers, to Franjo Tuđman, and so on. Nick Griffin’s father, Edgar, was a Vice-President of Iain Duncan Smith’s Leadership Campaign. He answered what was listed as one of its official telephone numbers, in his house, with the words “British National Party”. Then we had a confidence and supply agreement with Ulster Resistance, with Theresa May’s majority of one provided by the daughter for whom Noel Little had proudly campaigned and who had thanked Loyalist paramilitary organisations in her acceptance speech. Then we had Toby Young and the London Conference on Intelligence. Then we had certain members of the 2019 intake. And this afternoon, Jordan Bardella will address the annual conference of Reform UK, of which Paul Knaggs writes:

There is a ritual to British party conferences now, shared alike by the establishment and the insurgents who claim to despise it, though nobody standing at the lectern will ever admit as much. The hall fills and the delegates cheer on cue, so that for a fortnight the party looks larger and more formidable than it really is. Then the cameras leave. The pollsters return to their spreadsheets. The number shrinks.

It happened to Keir Starmer’s Labour, whose collapse in public confidence eventually cost him the keys to Downing Street. It happened to Zack Polanski’s Greens, whose favourability has never recovered from his own ill-judged retweet about the police response to the Golders Green terror attack. It has been happening so quietly, for so long, to the Liberal Democrats that the title they currently hold, Britain’s least disliked party, describes indifference rather than affection. This week it is Reform UK’s turn to test the rule, as Nigel Farage arrives at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham determined to prove that raw defiance can outrun arithmetic. It cannot. In British politics, the closer you look, the less you tend to like what you see, and Farage’s conference is about to demonstrate why.

Reform’s three day gathering, running from Thursday to Saturday, has been billed by the party itself as a dress rehearsal for government, a preview of the first hundred days of a Farage premiership. He is due to tell delegates on Friday that a Reform government would declare a “national emergency” on its first morning in Downing Street, forcing Parliament to sit through the summer “seven days a week” until a backlog of legislation is cleared. Ministers who miss their own hundred day targets will be sacked without ceremony. And to the judges, peers and civil servants who might stand in the way of any of it, the message from the platform will be blunt: obstruct Reform, and you will “discover just how determined we are.”

None of this is simply a pledge to build more homes or clear NHS waiting lists, though Reform will offer plenty of that too. Robert Jenrick, the party’s economic spokesman, wants a budget within a hundred days that cuts £80 billion a year from public spending. Richard Tice says he can strip £250 off household energy bills by scrapping carbon levies on generators, and describes Britain’s high streets as being in “a state of national crisis.” What Farage proposes on top of all that is something else entirely: the suspension of the ordinary machinery that stops any government, of any colour, from simply doing whatever it likes. The late Tony Benn used to say there were five questions worth putting to anyone who wields power. What power have you got. Where did you get it. In whose interests do you exercise it. To whom are you accountable. And how can we get rid of you. Farage’s Birmingham pledges fail the fourth question by design, and in failing it, they quietly answer the fifth as well. A prime minister who can force Parliament to sit on his own timetable, sack ministers on his own say so, and warn off judges and civil servants who resist him, has spent his first hundred days dismantling the very mechanisms the public would need to get rid of him.

Farage has his reasons for reaching so hard for the theatrical. This has been a wretched summer for Reform. YouGov’s voting intention poll of 30 and 31 August put Labour and Reform level at 23 points apiece, a dead heat that would have seemed fanciful to Reform’s own strategists twelve months ago. The underlying numbers are worse. The proportion of Britons who say they would even consider voting Reform has fallen six points over the year to 24 per cent, while those naming it as their first choice are down five points to 16 per cent, both figures back to where they stood before the party’s breakthrough in the 2025 council elections.

Farage personally has fared no better. His net favourability rating now stands at minus 44, down sharply from a peak of minus 27 last summer, and the proportion of Britons who think he is doing a good job leading his own party has collapsed by 51 points in a year, from plus 18 to minus 33. Only 19 per cent of the public now see him as a prime minister in waiting, down seven points since June, and for the first time since YouGov began asking the question, he trails Kemi Badenoch on the same measure. Much of the damage is self inflicted. Farage has spent the summer fending off questions over an undeclared £5 million gift from the Thailand based cryptocurrency entrepreneur Christopher Harborne, and over donations linked to George Cottrell, a former aide and convicted fraudster who served eight months in an American federal prison, and Cottrell’s mother Fiona. Farage denies any wrongdoing and has dismissed the reporting as an “establishment hit job,” but the affair was serious enough that he resigned his Clacton seat and fought a by-election over it, a move most voters told YouGov they opposed. Even inside his own coalition he is under pressure. Rupert Lowe’s breakaway Restore Britain is viewed favourably by 44 per cent of Reform’s own voters, a genuine threat on Farage’s right flank that Richard Tice waved off at conference with a dismissive “Rupert who?”

None of this means Farage’s underlying complaint about Britain is baseless. When he says fourteen years of Conservative government left the country’s basic institutions broken, he is telling the truth. Courts are gridlocked. Councils totter on the edge of bankruptcy. Working class communities have endured a decade in which wages barely moved while public services were stripped to the bone. Parliament often does feel maddeningly slow, weighed down by its own procedure. The diagnosis is sound enough. The prescription is where the danger lies. Paralysis in British public life was not caused by MPs taking weekends off or civil servants secretly plotting against the popular will. It was caused by four decades of deregulation, chronic underinvestment and the steady hollowing out of democratic accountability, and stripping away judicial oversight and parliamentary scrutiny in the name of an emergency will not build a single house or fund a single hospital bed. It will simply hand unchecked power to whoever is standing at the despatch box, and history offers vanishingly few examples of governments that, having acquired such power, ever handed it back.

Farage’s prediction that Andy Burnham “wants 10 more” years of Labour misrule lands at an awkward moment for the Prime Minister, whose own honeymoon shows the first hints of the same disease. Burnham took office on 20 July, succeeding Keir Starmer after two exhausting years in which Starmer’s premiership unravelled amid policy reversals and the row over Peter Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to Washington. His personal ratings since have been extraordinary. YouGov’s tracker, running for a decade, has recorded only one higher favourability score for a serving prime minister than Burnham’s latest figure. Yet even his own side is beginning to ask what lies beneath the popularity. At his first Prime Minister’s Questions on 2 September, it was not Kemi Badenoch who landed the sharpest blow but his own backbencher, the Labour MP Tan Dhesi, who told him bluntly that “vibes alone just isn’t going to be enough.”

Dhesi could have been talking about most of Burnham’s programme so far. The Prime Minister speaks often of “public control” while carefully avoiding the words public ownership. His flagship early policy, a return to the £2 bus fare cap from January, undoing the £3 fare Rachel Reeves imposed in her first Budget, is a genuinely popular move for the millions who depend on buses. But roughly £400 million of its £500 million cost is being met by converting international climate finance from grants into loans, a switch the charity Debt Justice has condemned as “a slap in the face” to countries such as Malawi and Zambia, already burdened with debt and facing a climate crisis they did little to cause. Burnham’s regional charm has been sold to the country as economic transformation. What it delivers, on this evidence, is corporate management with a Manchester accent: careful never to threaten the interests that hollowed out the country’s wealth in the first place, content to manage the decline more gently and with a friendlier face, funded where necessary by quietly moving the bill somewhere the British public will not think to look.

It is precisely this gap, between the scale of Britain’s crisis and the smallness of what mainstream politics is willing to offer, that gives Farage his oxygen. When Labour governs as though public ownership were an embarrassing word rather than a serious policy, when the Greens implode over their own leader’s misjudgements, when the Liberal Democrats settle for being the least objectionable name on the ballot paper, something has to fill the space, and lately that something has been a man promising to rule by decree. Examined honestly and up close, none of these parties survives the encounter with much credit. That is not cause for despair so much as clarity. The trouble runs deeper than any single rotten party. A governing class across the whole spectrum has confused presentation for substance, and the public, given enough time to look properly, keeps noticing.

Britain does not need a prime minister who claims the right to bypass courts and Parliament the moment they become inconvenient. Nor does it need a government content to hand back a pound on the bus fare while the ownership of water, energy and rail stays exactly where the last forty years left it. Real renewal means breaking up the corporate monopolies still extracting wealth from working class communities that have already given everything they have to give. It means returning core utilities to genuine public hands, and subjecting economic power, not only political power, to democratic oversight. Anything less simply adds another chapter to a story British voters already know by heart: a leader arrives promising to be different, is applauded from a safe distance, and is found wanting the moment anyone dares to look closely.

When a politician tells the country he must smash the machinery of accountability in order to save it, ask a simpler question: who is actually being rescued. Not the country. Almost never the country. Just a diminishing man, chasing his own diminishing returns.

And:

There is a scene in the Channel 4 footage that tells you almost everything you need to know about the state of British politics in 2026. Nigel Farage, the man who has spent three decades telling the working class he is one of them, sits over oysters and wine in his own constituency of Clacton, thanking a fictional American businessman for bankrolling his party. “It worked,” he says. “Boom.”

He was right. It did work. The polls his party quietly paid a stranger to fund made headlines in the spring, helped carry Reform into the local elections in May, and were presented to the public as independent evidence of the nation’s mood. What Farage did not know, as he raised his glass in Essex, was that the whole thing was a set-up. “William Lockwood” and his wealthy American father did not exist. They were undercover reporters working for Verbatim, an investigative outfit founded by journalists from the Centre for Climate Reporting, and their footage was verified and broadcast by Channel 4 News on the eve of Reform’s annual conference in Birmingham.

By Friday morning, two of Farage’s closest lieutenants were gone. Dan Jukes, his long-serving media aide, and James Orr, the party’s head of policy, had both stepped down “pending the outcome of an internal investigation.” Reform’s chairman, Lee Anderson, told Sky News there was “no chance” either man would return. The party has been reported to the Metropolitan Police and the Electoral Commission, not only by the Liberal Democrats but by Labour too, over what the Lib Dem MP Lisa Smart described in her letter to the Met’s specialist unit as “the acceptance and concealment of a donation from an impermissible donor.” A former chief executive of the Electoral Commission, Bob Posner, has gone further, telling Channel 4 the evidence points towards “serious criminal offences.”

Oysters, wine, and a £32,500 secret

Strip away the theatre and the facts are straightforward. Earlier this year, Orr and Jukes arranged for a US-registered company to fund three opinion polls commissioned by Reform, at a cost of £32,500. Under British law, that is not a grey area. Foreign companies are not a permissible source of political funding, and that prohibition covers research and polling just as much as it covers cash in an envelope. The public was never told the polls were paid for this way, nor that the party had gone looking for an “off the books” backer to do it. When the undercover team later raised the prospect of a further £500,000 donation, one of them made clear the money would be funnelled through the UK-based “son” so it looked domestic, even though it originated with the American “father.” That arrangement, first proposed by Jukes at an earlier meeting according to the Channel 4 investigation, is exactly the kind of concealment that section 61 of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 exists to catch. Farage’s own reply to the offer, captured on camera, was simple: “thank you,” then “both of you, thank you.” 

Reform’s response has been to attack the messenger. The party has dismissed the story as “a hoax perpetuated by foreign-funded, climate change activists posing as would-be party donors” and insists it operates “a robust vetting process for prospective donors approved by the Electoral Commission.” Farage told LBC on Friday morning that the party had “broken no laws” and had “not taken any dodgy money or anything like that whatsoever,” calling the operation “a clear case of entrapment.” The Metropolitan Police, for its part, has said only that it is “aware of media reporting” of a potential breach of the 2000 Act and will “assess this matter and any information provided.”

It is worth taking the entrapment argument seriously before dismissing it, because a free press does not get a free pass simply because its target is disliked. Undercover journalism using deception is a blunt instrument, and Ofcom has already had cause to examine a previous Channel 4 sting on Reform canvassers in Clacton. Deceiving people into saying things they would not otherwise say is a genuine ethical hazard, and the Tribune does not pretend otherwise. 

But entrapment is not what happened here, because nobody was tricked into breaking a law they did not already understand. Orr and Jukes were not goaded into inventing an illegal funding route on the spot. According to the Channel 4 reporting, Orr had told the undercover team earlier in the year that Farage “would not need to know” about the polling payments. That is the language of a man managing a paper trail, not one confused about the rules. In a separate recording, Orr went further, dismissing the regulator itself as “completely useless” and boasting that the party “could easily get away with it.” Nobody put those words in his mouth. The deception in this story was not the journalists pretending to be American donors. It was Reform’s own officials pretending, to the public and quite possibly to their own leader, that £32,500 of foreign money had never entered British politics at all.

The Party of the People: Funded by the People it Claims to Oppose 

What makes this story more than a passing conference-week embarrassment is who it happened to. Reform UK’s entire political identity rests on the claim that it is the insurgent outsider, the party of the man in the pub against the man in Brussels, of the fishing village against the financier, of Clacton against Canary Wharf. That is the pitch. It is why Farage can stand in a working men’s club in a former mining town and be believed when he says the old parties sold their voters out. 

The trouble is that the money behind the insurgency keeps turning out to be exactly the sort of money the insurgency claims to be against. This is not the party’s first funding controversy of the year. Farage is already the subject of a parliamentary standards investigation into a £5 million gift from the crypto financier Christopher Harborne, received shortly before Farage was elected to the Commons in 2024 and which he insists was a personal security gift that never needed declaring. The Tribune covered that case in July, when Farage compared the scrutiny to trial by ordeal. Since then, Harborne’s giving has only grown. Electoral Commission figures show a further £9 million from him in a single quarter this year, the largest donation ever made to a British political party by a living person, a sum that alone dwarfed the combined quarterly totals of the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Reform was also the first British party to open its doors to cryptocurrency donations, courted Elon Musk over a rumoured nine-figure gift at Mar-a-Lago, and now finds its deputy leader, Richard Tice, fielding separate questions of his own over undeclared gifts.

And then there is the man who just resigned. James Orr is not some council-estate organiser who talked his way into Farage’s inner circle. He is an Oxford and Cambridge-educated philosopher of religion, a former City lawyer at Freshfields and Sullivan & Cromwell, appointed head of policy as recently as February, succeeding Zia Yusuf in a role that has now changed hands twice within a year. Reform sells itself as the party of people who feel unheard by a remote, credentialled establishment. Its head of policy, until Friday, was about as establishment as it is possible to be. 

Tony Benn used to say there were five questions worth asking of anyone who wields power: what power have you got, where did you get it, in whose interests do you exercise it, to whom are you accountable, and how can we get rid of you. Reform’s answer to the second question, on this evidence, increasingly runs through Thailand-based crypto fortunes, offshore financiers and now, however briefly, a fictional American willing to hand over half a million pounds for the right kind of thank you. That is not a smear invented by a hostile broadcaster. It is the party’s own accounts, and its own recorded voice, telling the story.

The Rot in British Political Funding Runs Through Every Party 

None of this should be read as Labour or the Liberal Democrats occupying the moral high ground, and this paper has never pretended otherwise. Labour has taken its own dark money too, most notably £4 million from Quadrature Capital, a tax-haven hedge fund with stakes in oil and arms that insisted the gift was “values-based, not political.” The rot in British political funding runs through every party that has held power or hoped to. What the PPERA foreign donation ban exists to protect is not any one party’s reputation. It exists to protect the basic democratic principle that only people entitled to a vote in this country, or companies genuinely rooted in it, should be allowed to pay for the arguments put in front of the electorate. That is not a partisan demand. It is the same sovereigntist instinct that objects to unelected foreign institutions setting British rules, applied with equal force to unelected foreign money buying British elections. 

The Electoral Commission has said plainly that any attempt to evade the controls on donations is a matter for the police, not for a party’s internal review panel. Reform’s own investigation into itself, launched the same evening the story broke, will not settle what a criminal inquiry now must. Two resignations on the first morning of a conference is not accountability. It is triage. 

There ought to be a donation cap that makes stories like this one structurally impossible rather than merely embarrassing when they surface. There ought to be an Electoral Commission with the enforcement teeth to match its warnings. And there ought to be a political culture, across every party, in which a man who postures as the voice of the overlooked does not need a fictional millionaire to remind him whose money he is actually spending. 

Farage said it himself, on camera, raising a glass to a stranger who did not exist. It worked. Boom. He was talking about the polling. He might just as easily have been describing how the whole system now runs.