Camp of the Saints

Neither Russell Brand nor the other one has ever claimed to be gay, and straight queens are a thing in themselves.

But not everyone read Theology at Durham, so not everyone can tell the difference on sight.

A Chill of Apprehension

Peter Hitchens writes:

The power in my house died, with a faint groan, like the ghost of electricity trying to tell me something. Was it the boiler, the fridge, or the freezer that made that sad, alarming, desolate sound? Or was it the desktop computer, or the laptop? Or the kitchen fan? It was early morning and just about light, so at least we were not groping for a torch. But almost everything I rely on to live as I do – especially, nowadays, computers – depends utterly on a reliable power supply. I thought the moment I had long feared had arrived.

Britain’s power system trembles all the time on the edge of a disastrous blackout which could take days to repair and could send our economy stumbling over the precipice. Anybody who pays attention knows this. But here I was, like any fool, unable to work, facing who knew how long without the spark of energy which makes our world keep rolling. Soon, all the batteries would run down too. I cursed myself, as I often do, for ignoring my own fears for years.

In Baghdad and Mogadishu I had seen what happens to modern life when the power goes. I knew that the long-running Net Zero attack on what was once a solid and reliable National Grid had left us in danger of darkness and silence. But I still hadn’t done anything about installing a back-up. In Baghdad, war, neglect and looting had made the power hopelessly unreliable, but in my small hotel you could count on the generator snarling into life within seconds of the main system failing. If you were working on a computer you just had to keep saving your stuff over and over again to avoid losing your work. In Mogadishu, those in the darkened, nightmare city who had their own power were aristocrats amid the powerless poor – powerless in both senses of the word.

So what was this? I live in a 1930s suburb of Oxford and I suspect the cabling and substations must be getting a little tired. Perhaps they were just conking out. So I called my power suppliers, who are called something like Welsh and Eastern, though I am nowhere near Wales or the East, and cannot actually remember how I ended up buying my volts amps, watts and ohms from them. Aren’t these privatised utilities supposed to be more helpful than the old state ones? Miraculously, I got through. A voice demanded my postcode. I provided it. Then it demanded the first line of my address. I gave it. Then it wanted my name. Had they, I wondered, only cut off the power of people whose names began with ‘H’? I said I couldn’t see how that could help. I knew that if I asked the voice’s name, he would decline to give it to me under data protection rules.

But after a short pause, he weakened on the name issue and informed me: ‘You have a power cut.’ Well, there, you see – privatisation has definitely made the utility companies more user-friendly. I still don’t entirely know why the power failed. I pursued the matter later, and was told that somebody had cut into a mains cable. Was this just one of my neighbours, digging for potatoes, or perhaps for coal? Or was it one of those broadband cable companies who excavate the streets and pavements almost every day, chewing up the roots of mature trees as they go, providing yet more ways of welcoming trashy streaming channels into my home? I do not know.

As it turned out the power came back on a few hours later. And the closedown was wholly local. But at any time, the British grid is highly vulnerable, far more than it used to be. On June 23, there was definitely a crisis in power transmission in this country. Experts argue about how bad it was, but it was undoubtedly a warning. When a power grid trips and collapses, the effects are huge; when it doesn’t, nobody notices outside the control rooms.

On that date a major nuclear station, Sizewell B, was offline. The amazing ‘electric mountain’ at Dinorwig in Snowdonia – which can produce high power at high speed by pouring millions of gallons of stored water into hydro-electric generators – was partly offline for maintenance. A large chunk of the usually reliable gas generation was struggling because of the same hot weather which was causing high power demand. Some internal power lines were already too heavily loaded, so they could not be used to switch energy from Scotland to the south. Huge batteries, which astonishingly can now provide emergency electricity in large quantities, can supply it only for short periods.

It turned out to be easier, in the end, to avoid a meltdown by importing power under the Channel from France. Some of this was nuclear, thanks to that country’s long-ago decision to build a huge network of nuclear stations, and some of it from French equivalents of Dinorwig’s magic mountain. It worked. But we went nearly all the way through the multiple safeguards and back-ups. What if one more thing had gone wrong, or France had not been able to help? These conditions, or something like them, could happen again. It might not work out so well the next time.

My own view is that this risk is a direct result of dogma. Britain had – until recently – a reliable fleet of coal-fired power stations, much as China, India and America do now. Like nuclear, gas and hydro-power, coal-based generation provides what is called ‘inertia’, a steadiness in current which prevents the power system from tripping and failing when things go wrong. Wind and solar power do not provide this. On August 9, 2019, this problem almost certainly played a part in a serious blackout which cut off a million British customers and halted many trains.

But, driven by the anti-carbon dogma long ago adopted by this country, we have not just mothballed our coal-burning fleet in case we need them one day. We have totally closed and, in most cases, demolished 19 coal-fired power stations, capable of providing 40 per cent of the country’s electricity needs. Several, including Didcot A, not far from where I live, have actually been blown up with high explosives.

I heard the Didcot blast from ten miles away and felt a chill of apprehension which has not left me since. I thought then and think now that this was an act of dogmatic self-harm, meaningless when set against the vast and continuing expansion of coal-burning in China. I will never be surprised to hear that soft, sinister, ghostly groan as my electricity dies and I am shoved out of the modern world into a sort of apocalypse where everything we rely on has become a lifeless piece of plastic or metal. I really must do something about getting that generator.

Beginning with the full exploitation of the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields, let us harness the sovereign power of the State, to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of clean coal technology, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State. There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. We must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985. Is Kemi Badenoch? Is Nigel Farage? Is Ed Davey? Is Zack Polanski?

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with that. China manufactures most of the  world’s solar panels, which should be on buildings rather than on farmland and which we need to start making here, but let there be solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, pipelines, or power stations. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners’ Strike. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right. Does Andrew Rosindell, whose constituency office is called Margaret Thatcher House, say that? Does Robert Jenrick, who gave his daughter the middle name Thatcher? Not Margaret. Thatcher.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all the rest of it. Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed. The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs.

The standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. Thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, just abolish them. And thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, let there be an all-of-the-above transport policy based around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on the electricity that public ownership would also supply to charging points in every neighbourhood and village. Astonishingly, and yet not, the fewest charging points for electric vehicles are in the coalfield areas. Also, never forget that, when we can catch them, buses carry far more passengers than trains do, but those passengers tend not to be politicians or the “opinion-forming” sort of journalists. And so on. Let a thousand flowers bloom. In a garden well-tended and well-watered as an expression of democratic sovereignty.

Pro Bono Publico

After a 14-year-old boy was recently freed from one of them, Dr Valentina Molodaya exposed the network of torture chambers run by the Nazi Azov Brigade on behalf of what, since its constitutional term of office has long expired, can only be called the regime in Ukraine.

She was immediately placed on the obscenely misnamed Myrotvorets list. In 2015, the writer Oles Buzina and the former MP Oleg Kalashnikov were murdered as soon as that website had published their home addresses. And now, Dr Molodaya has been arrested.

George Galloway has just joined Substack.

A Sticking Plaster On The Sewage Pipe

Water privatisation has indisputably failed, and the shares in the companies are monetarily worthless (what would you pay for them?), so bring on lock, stock and barrel renationalisation, leading to the National Grid that was promised by Labour in 1979. Just do it. Now. The Parliament of the United Kingdom may legislate over and above any devolved body, and the people of Scotland and Wales would love this arrangement once they had it. Nothing has weakened the Union, and democratic national and parliamentary sovereignty, more than privatisation. While there are grey areas, if something would obviously have to be rescued by the State rather than allowed to go bust, then it belongs in public ownership, just as if something obviously would not, then it does not. Corner shops? Obviously not. But water? Obviously. As Paul Knaggs writes:

Thursday morning on Times Radio, Stig Abell asked Angela Eagle the question every bill-payer in England wanted answered. What new powers would her eight regional water councils have to hold the water companies to account? The councils, she said, would “hold to account water companies for their prioritisation and their investment decisions.” Abell asked whether they could fine a company or sack a chief executive. “Well, there’ll be a whole range of other issues as well,” she replied, “which will hold companies to account and come up with other ways of holding them to account for their performance as well.” He asked what they were. “I think you’ll have to wait to see the Water Bill when we publish it.” When he pressed again, she said: “I’m not publishing the Water Bill this morning.” This was the government’s main announcement of the day, and the minister fronting it could not describe a single thing it would let anyone do.

The clip that went round afterwards was a different one. Abell asked whether closer alignment with the EU might mean banning smoky bacon crisps. Eagle said: “Oh Stig, I mean really we’ve had EU straight bananas and now we’re talking about banning smoky bacon crisps. I think you should get a life.” His co-presenter Kate McCann wrote that she had never heard an interview like it. The crisps question was less silly than it sounded: Britain is negotiating to follow EU food law as Brussels writes it, and Brussels has banned eight smoke flavourings. A Europhile that has no idea about the EU is common practice, but the real damage had been done ten minutes earlier, when a cabinet minister with a press release in front of her could not explain it.

Eight Councils, Fifteen People, No Legal Basis 

The government’s own words don’t help her. The eight councils will bring together up to fifteen people each, from mayors and council leaders to farmers, customers and business, to “set the priorities for their region” and draw up a plan. Local leaders have until the end of the year to propose how the councils should even be run. There is no opening date and no legal basis. The only powers mentioned are new powers for mayors, not for the councils, and those are promised in a Water Bill nobody has seen. Richard Benwell of Wildlife and Countryside Link, one of the scheme’s supporters, still warned that the councils “must have the powers and funding to deliver.” Even its friends are asking where the teeth are. So the public is being offered a body that can set priorities for companies with no obligation to meet them. “On Thursday, the councils’ strongest power was the right to draw up a plan.”

Eagle Admits Privatisation Failed. Then Offers a Committee 

What makes this worse is that the government understands exactly what has gone wrong. Between the evasions, Eagle said so herself: “People are angry because water companies and the whole privatised system has failed them. And it’s failed our rivers as well.” Under privatisation, she said, customers had “no influence whatsoever” and were “just seen as people to pay bills.” That is a cabinet minister confirming, thirty-seven years on, what this paper and millions of households have known for a long time. Margaret Thatcher sold the regional water authorities in 1989, cleared their debts and threw in a cash “green dowry” from the public purse to tempt the City in. What followed is still flowing into the rivers.

Andy Burnham’s explanation in the press release is that “decisions about their local areas are taken miles away.” It’s an odd complaint from a government that is negotiating to take Britain’s food law from Brussels, where no British voter has a say. On water, though, the government’s own examples point the other way. The sewage damaging Windermere is not discharged because someone in Whitehall cannot find the Lake District on a map. It is discharged by a company run for its shareholders, which has had every chance to spend the money and chose not to. The problem is not that decisions are too far from home. It is that they are made by the wrong people, for the wrong reasons. A committee in Kendal won’t change that, any more than a committee in London did.

This is the sticking plaster. The wound is private ownership of a natural monopoly. The plaster is a public meeting where angry residents can tell United Utilities what they want while United Utilities keeps the right to say no. Meanwhile, Ofwat, which this government has condemned and promised to abolish, carries on regulating until its replacement exists. Communities get a voice, the regulator is on its way out, and the companies keep every power that matters. 

Water Nationalisation: Permission Is Not Ownership 

In Liverpool in September, Burnham promised to repeal what he called “Margaret Thatcher’s ideological ban on public ownership of water companies”, the Water Act 1989’s limits on how many shares government can hold. Eagle told the same conference that “the priorities of people in our communities, not shareholders of water companies” would now decide where the investment goes. Five weeks later “decide” had become “a voice to begin with.”

Repealing the ban is worth doing. But it only gives the state permission; it doesn’t bring anything back into public hands. In June, as a by-election candidate in Makerfield, Burnham said public ownership of Thames Water “is what should be done.” Thames is still in its creditors’ hands, and the government already has the tool it needs. The special administration regime in the Water Industry Act 1991 lets the Secretary of State put a failing water company under public control. No new bill is needed to use it.

Water falls as rain on all of us, gathers in shared rivers and comes through every tap in the country. Nobody can switch supplier when their river is full of sewage. The same reasoning applies to the gas under the North Sea, the wind off our coasts and the grid that carries both. These are common resources and natural monopolies, and handing them to private owners means accepting that something everyone depends on will be run for somebody else’s profit. The working class has paid for that arrangement with every bill since 1989.

Thames Water Special Administration: What Should Happen Now

The demand on the Environment Secretary is simple. Put Thames Water into special administration and keep it in public hands, not as a waiting room before it is sold back to the market. Publish the Water Bill, and make public ownership the destination rather than a theoretical option. If the councils are to exist at all, give them powers in law: to block bonuses, to stop dividends while pollution targets are missed, and to require ministers to consider special administration for a failing company. Then answer, in Parliament, the question she could not answer on Thursday: what can these councils make a water company do? You don’t put a plaster on a burst sewer and call it repaired. You dig it up and replace it. Until this government is willing to take water back, its councils will be eight more places to complain about the smell.

Shifting More Than Vibes

It still feels too good to be true, but we may now dare to dream that both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party might nominate an anti-war candidate for President in 2028. Thomas Massie? Why not? And time was when a pretty boy Governor with unlimited ambitions and whose politics were in the centre of the Democratic Party had to become a supporter of the death penalty that he had previously opposed; he did indeed go on to be a two-term President. But now, Gavin Newsom has commuted all 548 outstanding death sentences in California. Well, if there are not going to be any executions in Texas. As Aditya Chakrabortty writes:

Remember the “vibe shift”? Just last year, columnists and corporate boardrooms alike declared that the second coming of Donald Trump meant the old rules of politics and even everyday civility were roadkill. “I feel liberated,” one top banker told the Financial Times. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.” Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be a billionaire was very heaven. Because in Trump, the tech bosses had a politician who could work magic by forging a forever alliance between them and blue-collar America.

This was the very core of Trumpism, the trick that wowed rightwingers around the world: how he could yoke together minimum-wage workers with the 1%; Latinos and black voters with those happy to dabble in a little light racism; the Epstein-haters with the Epstein class (who can forget Elon Musk’s email to Jeffrey: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”). And he did it by alchemising class antagonism into culture war. Forget about that pay rise – have you have heard about those Haitians eating dogs?

Silicon Valley, Wall Street and east coast media owners all saw Trumpism not as a political strategy but as a turn in the entire culture: a vibe shift to the right. They were wrong. Tuesday night was a comprehensive rejection of the president. Before the midterms, ultra-wealthy donors such as Musk poured billions into Trump’s proxies, but the working- and middle-class base were not having it. The relatively new coalition that put the orange man in the White House has been smashed apart by old-fashioned class politics.

When election analysts observe that the struggle of ordinary Americans to afford the basics of life now “polls in a tier by itself”, that is class rearing its head. It is a response to the record petrol prices in a car-centred society, the huge swings in everything from eggs to mincemeat, the battle to meet the rent. The squeamish, including within the Democratic establishment, might euphemise these as “economic issues” or “affordability”, but remember that this time last year, the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani turned affordability from a meme into a platform for winning elections. In late 2026, and going into the next battle for the White House, the New York mayor now wields national influence. Among Mamdani’s achievements has been his reminder to ordinary voters that when they can’t afford the basics, it’s not just because prices are unreasonably high – it’s also because their pay is unfairly low. He has tied the cost of living to an argument about inequality, and rightly so.

Over decades – through Reagan and Clinton, Bush and Obama – Republicans and Democrats have changed the tax code to reward ownership rather than earning, so the richest 400 households now pay lower rates of tax than the bottom 50% of Americans. As the radical economists Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster show in their new book, Grand Theft Capital: What Workers Should Know About the Affordability Crisis, the share of national income going to ordinary workers has slumped from 30% in the 1960s to 20% today. This is the destruction of working-class lives and dreams in which Republicans and Democrats colluded. This is the American carnage that in 2016 helped propel Trump into the White House. But the most glaring feature of this era of Trumponomics has been its shameless inequality.

 The “hottest country in the world”, as the president calls it, relies on AI for growth. For the first half of 2025, the Harvard economist Jason Furman estimated that spending on AI infrastructure made up 92% of GDP growth. These supposedly national gains are getting raked off by a tiny number of people and funds, based overwhelmingly in one strip on the west coast. In October, the fund manager Apollo pointed out that, of the entire S&P index of America’s biggest 500 companies, only the so-called “magnificent seven” tech firms were flourishing. The other 493 were seeing flat revenues and flat profits. Torsten Slok, Apollo’s chief economist, wrote: “Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America.”

Billions for Sam Altman and Dario Amodei and Jensen Huang; a pittance for those outside Silicon Valley. No wonder the most reviled candidate on so many of this week’s ballots was the datacentre: the energy-sapping, water-sucking, community-destroying datacentre that merely aids the processing of humans into appendages to chatbots. Analysis for The Economist showed that Trump supporters with a datacentre on their doorstep were flipping in droves to the other side.

The politics of this played out most clearly in Texas, which on Tuesday night flipped from red to blue, despite a quarter of a billion dollars for the Republicans in the state from one man: Elon Musk. Texas is the AI overlord’s home and a vital base for his businesses. Over the next few years Texas is expected to become the US’s centre for datacentres. In just two years, it is expected to provide over a quarter of all new computing power to the AI industry.

James Talarico won on a squarely anti-datacentre agenda. As he said after his win: “The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It is top versus bottom … The people at the top divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, by culture, so we don’t notice that they are picking our pockets. But tonight, we sent a crystal clear message to the people at the top, we will not be conquered.”

The Democrats who caught the national and global imagination this autumn were those who most stridently put the case against the US’s grotesque, life-destroying unfairness and for a better politics – just as Mamdani did. Troy Jackson won Maine on a platform to abolish ICE. Abdul El-Sayed took Michigan (Michigan!) pledging Medicare for all. These results suggest a new future for the Dems: anti-corruption, anti-war and anti-billionaire.

In the days of Bill and Hillary, this would have been deemed impossibly leftwing. But mark my words: the Democrat who wants to get on the ticket in 2028 will sound more like Bernie Sanders. For now, rejoice that a corrupt self-dealing bully is heading into two years of ignominy, of being treated even while in power as a back number. And remember that when politicians and journalists claim there is nothing better on offer than the same old rightwing rubbish, they’re usually wrong. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Trump once said. “It’s, like, incredible.” And truly, it wasn’t credible.

On Brand

It’s his padmate I feel sorry for. Cruel and unusual punishment. Now, how about anyone, anyone at all, in the Epstein Files? Still, since Russell Brand applied for bail as a convicted rapist, one trusts that the judge will conclude that he was as arrogant and entitled as ever when sentencing him, remarkably speedily, on Monday. One among several telltale incidents in the infernal My Booky Wook, which I read only during this trial, has Brand amusing himself by teaching his dog not to come upstairs, luring him upstairs, and then kicking him back down the stairs again. He has always shown us what he was.

The treatment of comedians as sages started in earnest in the 1990s, but its roots were in the “satire boom” of the early 1960s. There was of course a connection through Have I Got News for You?, which apparently is still on despite having started the process that made Boris Johnson Prime Minister. For as long as most people have been alive, some public school Sixth Former from 1959 had been telling us all what to think. If that was ever funny, then it no longer is. Spitting Image was largely obsessed with the mere physical features of the mere Royal Family, and all that anyone ever said about that was that it was not as funny as it used to be. Had they considered that never really had been? But that set behind all of that also retains court jesters from the lower orders, who are almost everyone compared to them, and one such was Brand. On which comedy circuit did he cut his teeth? Did anyone ever see him live before he had been on television? He was entirely manufactured, he was not the only one, and he still would not be.

This site has a six figure readership every day. And I do mean every day. For several years, I have checked on Boxing Day and found that I had had that many readers even on Christmas Day. On every continent, too. So it is important to point out here that a lot of Brand’s generation, which is my generation, never liked him. Especially on the Left. I first called him “Toxic Brand” as long ago as 2008, when he had that business with Jonathan Ross and the late Andrew Sachs. Even then, into our thirties, the Blairites thought that they were still my generation’s cool kids. And oh, how they hated me for not falling at his feet. There was nothing #MeToo about New Labour in its heyday. In 2014, I was as critical of Brand’s book Revolution as everyone from Sunny Hundal, through Labour Uncut, via the Daily Mirror, to the Morning Star. We all recognised him as a figure of the libertarian ultra-Right, with views indistinguishable from those of Ayn Rand, a fact gushingly celebrated by Nigel Farage in The Independent. Calling him “Ayn Brand”, I offered to pay Brand’s rail fare to the Durham Miners’ Gala, to see how it would have received him.

Furthermore, I for one recognised a man who was older than I was, who even then was the age of a Cabinet Minister, and who was easily old enough to have had teenage children, yet who thought that 20 lost years of drug-induced torpor made him the voice of youth, or indeed of anything at all. That was how he was treated when, aged 40, he encouraged the young not to vote in 2015, leading Ed Miliband to give what was presented as an immensely important interview to Brand on YouTube. By then, Brand had been favourably reviewed in The Guardian, and he had guest edited the New Statesman, on the back of holding the same views as he held now, views to which his sexual behaviour was and is fundamental. And so back to the Epstein Class.

The jury took its time before delivering its unanimous verdicts of guilty to some charges and not guilty to others. There is no reason to doubt Brand’s guilt of the offences of which he has been convicted. There is every reason to doubt that anyone was remotely surprised, and every reason to note that Brand’s activities bothered no one in power when his unchanging political position moved from being associated with Hollywood, Channel 4 and the BBC, to being part of the coalition behind Donald Trump. Thankfully, those tendencies have both been given an electoral kicking in their shared country of origin. Think on.

Gunpowder, Treason and Plot

Most people think that we are celebrating Guy Fawkes as a folk hero for having tried to blow up Parliament. Even those who know the history enter into that spirit by calling him “the last man to enter that place with an honourable intention” and so on. On 16 October 1834, it burned down anyway. 229 years earlier, most Catholics had had no idea about the Gunpowder Plot, and they would have disapproved of it in the strongest possible terms. But they paid the price for it.

Just as they did for the Spanish Armada, even though the Navy that defeated it was commanded by a Catholic, Lord Howard of Effingham, as loyal to his Queen Elizabeth as I was to mine. Philip of Spain had expected to be supported by a Catholic uprising in England. But there never was one. As anyone who had known anything about the English Catholics could have told him that there was never going to be. Even the early twentieth-century Catholic Encyclopedia, pre-Conciliar and basically Irish-American, has this to say:

Among the many side-issues which meet the student of the history of the Armada, that of the cooperation or favor of the Pope, and of the Catholic party among the English, is naturally important for Catholics. There can be no doubt, then, that though the Spanish predominance was not at all desired for its own sake by the Catholics of England, France, and Germany, or of Rome, yet the widespread suffering and irritation caused by the religious wars Elizabeth fomented, and the indignation caused by her religious persecution, and the execution of Mary Stuart, caused Catholics everywhere to sympathize with Spain, and to regard the Armada as a crusade against the most dangerous enemy of the Faith.

Pope Sixtus V agreed to renew the excommunication of the queen, and to grant a large subsidy to the Armada, but, knowing the slowness of Spain, would give nothing till the expedition should actually land in England. In this way he was saved his million crowns, and spared the reproach of having taken futile proceedings against the heretic queen. This excommunication had of course been richly deserved, and there is extant a proclamation to justify it, which was to have been published in England if the invasion had been successful. It was signed by Cardinal Allen, and is entitled "An Admonition to the Nobility and Laity of England". It was intended to comprise all that could be said against the queen, and the indictment is therefore fuller and more forcible than any other put forward by the religious exiles, who were generally very reticent in their complaints. Allen also carefully consigned his publication to the fire, and we only know of it through one of Elizabeth's ubiquitous spies, who had previously stolen a copy.

There is no doubt that all the exiles for religion at that time shared Allen's sentiments, but not so the Catholics in England. They had always been the most conservative of English parties. The resentment they felt at being persecuted led them to blame the queen's ministers, but not to question her right to rule. To them the great power of Elizabeth was evident, the forces and intentions of Spain were unknown quantities. They might, should, and did resist until complete justification was set before them, and this was in fact never attempted. Much, for instance, as we know of the Catholic clergy then laboring in England, we cannot find that any of them used religion to advance the cause of the Armada. Protestant and Catholic contemporaries alike agree that the English Catholics were energetic in their preparations against it.

This being so, it was inevitable that the leaders of the Catholics abroad should lose influence, through having sided with Spain. On the other hand, as the pope and all among whom they lived had been of the same mind, it was evidently unjust to blame their want of political insight too harshly. In point of fact the change did not come until near the end of Elizabeth's reign, when, during the appeals against the archpriest, the old leaders, especially the Jesuit Father Robert Persons, were freely blamed for the Spanish alliance. The terms of the blame were exaggerated, but the reason for complaint cannot be denied.

It was also on this date that William of Orange landed at Brixham in 1688. An invasion by invitation is still an invasion. In any case, against the Bourbons and thus their Stuart cousins, he was allied to the Papal States. A Papal Blessing was sent to him when he set out for Ireland, and there hangs at Stormont a painting depicting his crossing of the Boyne with, in the sky, a vignette of the Pope with his hand raised in blessing. The Lateran Palace was illuminated for a fortnight when news of his victory reached Rome. His Protestantism was most manifest in the fact that he was married to his first cousin.

Yet now, the King has been installed as the Royal Confrater of the Papal Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, while the Pope is the Papal Confrater of the College of Saint George at Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor, again calling for an installation. No doubt the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead looks forward to welcoming the Democratic Unionist Party, Traditional Unionist Voice, the Loyalist Communities Council, the Loyal Orange Institution, the Grand Royal Arch Purple Chapter of Ireland, the Imperial Grand Black Chapter of the British Commonwealth, the Apprentice Boys of Derry, the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, and Jamie Bryson. All chanting “Not My King! Not My King!” while talking of UDI. That on its own will be worth the television licence fee. In the meantime, Paul Knaggs writes:

Every year, on the 5th of November, we gather around fires that roar against the autumn chill. We chant the same rhyme, throw another effigy onto the flames, and pretend it’s all just a bit of fun. Guy Fawkes, the face of the plot, the easy villain, burns on our behalf whilst we nibble toffee apples and marvel at fireworks. But the story is far deeper than this annual spectacle. It’s a tale of rebellion, desperation, and class struggle. A tale that’s been simplified, sanitised, and handed to us like a gift. But gifts from the state always come with a cost, and it’s always the poor who pay it.

Few people know the real architect of the Gunpowder Plot was Robert Catesby, not Guy Fawkes. Catesby, the gentry firebrand who conceived the plot, funded it with his own wealth, surrounded himself with loyal men, then marched the conspiracy to ruin. The flames we set each November feed a convenient narrative. Fawkes, the foreign mercenary, the Catholic villain, becomes the focus of our collective anger. But Fawkes simply held the match. Catesby, the third and only surviving son of Sir William Catesby of Lapworth in Warwickshire, a direct descendant of William Catesby (1450-1485), the influential councillor of King Richard III, is conveniently forgotten. He fades into the shadows whilst we burn his fall guy. And with that erasure, we miss the larger truth: when elites gamble with powder, it’s always the poor who bear the blast.

I grew up watching Bonfire Night unfold in a wind-scraped farmer’s field behind a council estate. Kids huddled in threadbare coats, sitting on old settees dragged from skips, fiercely guarding the bonfire from rival gangs. There were no tannoy announcements, no health and safety lectures. No fences kept us back from the fire. We threw the occasional banger, held sparklers, the thin streamers of light carving halos in the dark. But it wasn’t just the night that tore open above us. So too did the long-forgotten history of the event and why we were there. No one spoke of anything beyond Guy. “Remember, remember,” we recited, eyes bright with the warmth of flames, but the deeper story went unspoken.

Guy Fawkes was for burning, and that was enough. Catesby and the other plotters were relegated to forgotten corners of history. Why would we care about them when the firelight flickered so brightly on the scapegoat’s face? Why would we question why the state once decreed mandatory sermons be preached on 5 November, instructing the public on their duty to God and King? Why, as smoke rose from our neighbourhood bonfire, would we ever ask why the poorest bore the consequences of a plot hatched in manor houses by the rich? We inherited a celebration, but not the understanding that spawned it. We inherited the ritual without the politics. This is an attempt to remember correctly, to strip away convenient mythology and uncover the story that’s been deliberately obscured.

The Engine of Treason

Robert Catesby was born around 1572 in Warwickshire to Roman Catholic parents, emerging from a dense web of recusant gentry families who’d learned to survive Elizabeth’s England through quiet defiance and clandestine Mass. Charismatic and magnetic, Catesby made friends easily, and many remained loyal unto death. He was wild in youth before religious fervour sharpened him into something more dangerous: a true believer with organisational talent.

By 1601, Catesby had already tested the waters of treason. Alongside the Wright brothers, he threw in his lot with the doomed rebellion of the Earl of Essex against Robert Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s calculating chief advisor. That escapade left him wounded, imprisoned, and financially ruined by punitive fines. From then on, the English government watched him. They had good reason. By 1602, Catesby was already in discussions with the Spanish government about fomenting rebellion. When Elizabeth died in 1603, authorities arrested him as a precaution, a tacit admission they knew exactly what kind of man he was.

After James I dashed Catholic hopes in 1604 by declaring he “detested” their faith and ordering all Jesuit priests to leave the realm, Catesby concluded that peaceful petitioning was finished. He read the political map and drew a violent route across it. The Gunpowder Plot was his answer: a surgical strike to decapitate the state in one spectacular blast, followed by a Catholic rising in the Midlands and the installation of Princess Elizabeth as a puppet queen.

Catesby recruited through kinship networks. In May 1604, at his London lodgings in the Strand, he disclosed the plot to Christopher and John Wright, Thomas Winter, Guy Fawkes, and Thomas Percy. He raised money through gentry patrons like Francis Tresham and Everard Digby, whose wealth paid for property rentals and safe houses. He selected Fawkes not because he was a mastermind, but because he was a hardened soldier who knew black powder, and crucially, because having lived abroad for over a decade, Fawkes was unknown in London. Fawkes mattered, but he wasn’t the strategist. He kept the night watch. He didn’t write the plan. The cellar under the Lords, the timing for the State Opening, the kidnapping gambit, the Midlands flashpoints ready for a rising: these were Catesby’s ideas. The popular story prefers a single villain. That’s how institutions like their morality plays. It keeps the edges smooth. It keeps questions short.

Why the Fuse Was Lit 

Context isn’t excuse. It’s motive. English Catholics had survived decades of fines, surveillance, arrests, and occasional martyrdom. They were classified in legal records as “recusants”, those who refused to attend compulsory Anglican services. Elizabethan law had already established crushing fines for recusancy. Encouraging conversion to Catholicism was treason, punishable by death. The legal machinery for persecution was deeply entrenched.

James arrived with hints of toleration, then swerved hard toward repression once Parliament sank its teeth in. His wife, Anne of Denmark, held Catholic sympathies, which had led many to anticipate relief. James initially appeared conciliatory, stating he wished to avoid mass bloodshed and urging Jesuits to simply leave whilst displaying tolerance toward lay Catholics willing to take the Oath of Allegiance. This was political calculation designed to divide the Catholic community, separating dangerous clerical leadership from the supposedly loyal populace.

The reality of governing England quickly undermined any sustained leniency. The Bye Plot of 1603, a conspiracy to kidnap the King, and the alleged Main Plot to replace him with the Catholic Arabella Stuart, confirmed to the regime that religious nonconformity inevitably translated into threat against the state. The message became clear. Obey, pay, or be crushed. Catesby’s circle believed the constitutional doors were bolted. Their plan was a desperate strike, a coup dressed in piety, as wrong in method as it was lucid in its diagnosis of power.

There’s a necessary counterargument. The plot was terrorism in every plain sense. Killing the King, the Lords, and the Commons in one explosion would have slaughtered pages, clerks, and common servants along with grandees. A Catholic regime birthed in fire would have buried more liberty than it saved. This is true. It’s also true that the regime exploited the failure with equal calculation. Two things can be true at once. The plot was a crime, and the state turned it into a political harvest.

The Discovery That Arrived on Cue

The official story is a miracle of providence. A mysterious letter warned Lord Monteagle to stay away. The Privy Council paused, searched, paused again, then stepped into the cellar at midnight on 4 November and found Fawkes with the powder. The timing was perfect. The effect was theatrical. The monarchy claimed deliverance. Parliament claimed a mandate. The country was given a morality tale that still burns.

Whether the Monteagle letter was a frightened cousin’s warning (Francis Tresham is suspected), a leak coaxed by spymaster Robert Cecil, or an elegant forgery, the political choreography is plain. The regime waited until the last possible moment, then staged an arrest that sealed the narrative. No state record documents where the letter was delivered, an essential detail that would normally be recorded in such a mysterious matter. King James and Cecil decided to hold off on action until maximum theatrical effect could be achieved. The first search of the Parliament cellars was cursory. The decisive search was conducted at midnight, ensuring Fawkes was caught red-handed. This deliberate delay allowed the Crown to claim a “miraculous Delivery” and acquire the necessary moral authority to enact severe repressive measures.

The confession extracted from Fawkes under torture, authorised by James I himself, did the rest. The contrast between his firm signature before torture and his barely legible scrawl on the official confession dated 9 November confirms the state’s calculated use of violence to shape the narrative. This is what states do when opportunity knocks. They open the door very slowly, then make sure everyone sees who’s standing on the threshold.

The Other Man, The Other Death

On news of the discovery, Catesby fled London with several companions. He attempted to rally the Midlands’ Catholic gentry to join him in rebellion, banking on chaos to incite popular revolt. This expectation proved fatally flawed. The plotters, insulated by their wealth and gentry networks, severely misunderstood the political apathy and extreme risk aversion prevalent among ordinary Catholics. The common Catholic, struggling for subsistence and maintaining faith through cautious, clandestine recusancy networks, was in no position and had little inclination to join a high-risk, gentry-led political revolution.

Catesby reached Holbeach House in Staffordshire. There, several conspirators were injured in a gunpowder accident, a bitter irony that underscored the amateur quality of their revolutionary ambitions. When authorities arrived, the conspirators decided to die fighting rather than face the theatrical brutality of a traitor’s execution. The same musket ball hit Catesby and Thomas Percy. Both died soon after, despite efforts to save their lives for interrogation and trial in London.

Catesby’s death denied the state its full spectacle, but they took what they could. His head was cut off and taken to London, to be stuck on the roof of the House of Commons alongside the quartered remains of Fawkes and the other condemned men. The visceral display served as instruction on the penalty for treason. Yet even in death, Catesby’s story was systematically buried beneath the simpler, more useful narrative of Guy Fawkes, the foreign mercenary and solitary villain.

“Gunpowder Treason Day” and the Birth of State Ritual

Bonfire Night didn’t begin as a neutral civic fête. It began as Gunpowder Treason Day, a compulsory act of state memory mandated by law. Parish churches read approved sermons. Bells rang for deliverance. The bonfires weren’t cosy. They were political. The ritual was designed to renew consent through fear and gratitude. The message was simple. The King lives because God prefers him. The enemy is the Catholic across the lane. Report him. Fine him. Deny him office. Seize his cow if he misses church.

The plot cemented James I’s popularity and paved the way for two “particularly savage” statutes in 1606, specifically aimed at repressing Popish Recusants. These laws introduced the Oath of Allegiance and intensified penalties, leading to long-term exclusion of Catholics from public office, the armed forces, and even the right to bear firearms. Through mandated sermons and rituals, the state enforced an annual programme of propaganda, perpetually reminding the populace of the supposed existential threat of “Popery” and the King’s miraculous deliverance. Over time, the edge blunted. Commerce took its cut. The sermon faded to a raffle. Effigies wandered from Fawkes to whatever public figure is unfashionable. The politics drained out and the fireworks remained. We call this progress. Perhaps it’s only amnesia with better catering. 

The Hammer Falls Across the Board

The hammer that fell after the Gunpowder Plot didn’t strike Catholics alone. The 1606 statutes and the atmosphere of fear they cultivated became a cudgel against all religious nonconformity, turning the state’s machinery of repression on Protestant dissenters as well. Just miles from the plotting at Holbeach House, in the villages of Austerfield and Scrooby, another story was unfolding. In 1606, the same year Parliament passed its “particularly savage” laws against Catholics, a sixteen-year-old orphan named William Bradford joined a Separatist congregation meeting secretly at Scrooby Manor. These Protestant dissenters believed their congregations should separate from the Church of England entirely, a position the state regarded as only marginally less treasonous than popery itself.

When Archbishop Matthew Hutton died in 1606, his replacement, Tobias Matthew, promptly began a campaign to purge the archdiocese of all nonconforming influences. The charge was explicit: both Separatists and papists. Disobedient clergy were replaced. Prominent Separatists were confronted, fined, imprisoned, or driven from the country. William Brewster, the congregation’s presiding elder and postmaster of Scrooby, was fined twenty pounds for his non-compliance. By 1607, there was a warrant for his arrest.

William Bradford, writing years later in his journal “Of Plymouth Plantation”, described the persecution in stark terms: “But after these things they could not long continue in any peaceable condition, but were hunted and persecuted on every side, so as their former afflictions were but as flea-bitings in comparison of these which now came upon them.” By 1607 and 1608, the Scrooby congregation had fled to Holland. Twelve years later, in 1620, Bradford and others sailed on the Mayflower, founding Plymouth Colony in what would become Massachusetts. The man baptised in the parish church of St Helena’s in Austerfield would become the second elected Governor of Plymouth Colony and serve for almost thirty years, helping to draft the Mayflower Compact and lay foundations for what would eventually become the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom.

The Gunpowder Plot provided political pretext not merely for crushing Catholic recusants, but for creating a general climate of intolerance the state wielded indiscriminately. The same year that saw poor Catholics robbed of their livestock saw Protestant Separatists hunted from their homes. Both groups paid the price for the desperate gambit of Catholic gentry. The ripples from that failed explosion in a Westminster cellar reached across the Atlantic, helping to populate the American colonies with refugees fleeing the persecution that followed. The irony is profound. A plot meant to install Catholic rule in England ultimately helped seed the most enduringly Protestant nation on earth. Elite Catholic conspirators, misjudging the appetite for revolution among their own community, inadvertently provided justification for a crackdown that scattered both Catholic and Protestant dissenters to the four winds.

Who Paid for the Gentry’s Gamble?

Here’s the part the fireworks drown out. The men who conspired had lands, tenants, patrons, and time. Catesby could finance his treason through gentry networks. Digby could pay for Midlands properties. Tresham brought wealth despite moral qualms about assassination. When the plot failed, Parliament tightened recusancy laws. The wealthy could cushion fines through family networks. The poor could not. In the early 17th century, life for the common subject was defined by existential economic precarity. Most families lacked economic reserves. A failed harvest meant catastrophic destitution. England’s revolutionary safety net, the Elizabethan Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601, mandated local parishes provide relief funded by taxes on landowners. While this system was remarkably effective at preventing widespread famine, it was localised and subject to the biases and political will of the land-owning class who administered it.

After 1605, the “particularly savage” statutes were enforced through direct seizure of assets. Accounts show poor Catholics were “robbed of their animals and furniture”. Parish officers confiscated livestock and tools. Furniture went out the door. For a labourer or small farmer living at the edge of subsistence, the confiscation of livestock or essential household goods wasn’t merely a penalty. It was an act of complete economic stripping, plunging them instantly into absolute destitution. The state weaponised economic vulnerability to enforce religious compliance. 

Catholic women kept the faith by making homes into covert chapels, which invited raids and imprisonment. They used their homes and household staff as havens for priests and maintained the faith for the next generation, often in the face of imprisonment. The hammer meant for a gentry conspiracy smashed the hands of labourers and smallholders. England’s early welfare survived because it suited elites to prevent riot and famine. That relief was rationed by those who collected the taxes and enforced the creeds. If you want to see class politics without euphemism, look there. After the plot, the state used fear to harden a social order that already leaned against the poor. It’s an old story. A crisis becomes a ladder. The top climbs. The bottom is told to be patriotic and pay up. 

Why We Remember the Wrong Man 

So why do we remember Fawkes and not Catesby? Because the fall guy makes a better dummy. You can put him on a pyre and tell children not to play with matches. You don’t have to talk about the country house meetings in the Strand, or the way class networks build conspiracies and survive their collapse. You don’t have to explain that charisma and loyalty among the gentry can be as dangerous as barrels of gunpowder. Effigies are easier than analysis. Catesby died in a gunfight, denying the state its full theatre of punishment, but his story is the one that fits the shape of power. A charismatic son of the Midlands gentry, schooled in rebellion by the Essex disaster, gathered allies through kinship and coin, misjudged the people, and gambled the realm. When he lost, the poor were billed for the losses. That’s the pattern worth remembering.

The Gunpowder Plot was an act of political desperation by a powerful, yet politically marginalised, gentry class. Driven by xenophobia against the new Scottish King (Fawkes had explicitly stated that reconciliation between English and Scots was impossible) and profound disappointment over the end of promised religious tolerance, the conspirators attempted a complex coup d’état. The scheme was flawed from inception, relying on gentry kinship networks for finance and logistics, and utterly misjudging the political appetite of the common Catholic population for uprising. 

The Lessons They Gave and the Reasons We Shouldn’t Forget 

A fair critic will say that England did, through Bonfire Night, memorialise a narrow escape from mass murder. They’ll say that a state must defend itself, that treason deserves punishment, and that national cohesion sometimes requires a simple story. I accept the force of that position. I also ask a simple question. If the story becomes so simple that it hides who led, who profited, and who suffered, then whose cohesion are we talking about? A democracy doesn’t fear complexity. It names its villains accurately. It admits that repression breeds extremism, and extremism breeds further repression. It refuses to ritualise scapegoats whilst sparing architects. It resists the tidy morality play that turns power into providence and poor neighbours into permanent suspects.

The true significance of the Gunpowder Plot lies not in the explosion that never happened, but in how the Jacobean state, guided by Robert Cecil, leveraged the failure. By either controlling the plot’s progress or managing its last-minute discovery (likely via the ambiguous Monteagle Letter), the state generated maximum political shock. This crisis was immediately and effectively weaponised to consolidate royal authority and justify profoundly oppressive legislation. The most damning consequence, through the lens of social justice and class analysis, is the selective implementation of these laws. The spectacular violence attempted by the Catholic elite resulted in generalised, often existential, economic persecution directed at the most vulnerable Catholic poor. The plot serves as a stark historical case study: the catastrophic failure of a privileged few generated political justification for state terror and the systematic destruction of the already meagre economic security of the working class.

Bonfire Night has been appropriated twice. First by the state, which turned a failed coup into an annual catechism of loyalty. Then by commerce, which turned that catechism into a box of rockets and a sponsored display. We took a date heavy with class, creed, and surveillance, then filed it down to “ooh” and “ahh” whilst a council safety officer counts heads. This isn’t an argument to cancel fireworks, nor a plea for sectarian score-settling. It’s an argument to put the politics back in the memory. Teach the children that rituals aren’t neutral. Explain that a government once mandated this celebration to bind a nation to a story that suited the powerful. Name the other man. Say that working people paid for a quarrel they didn’t start.

Remember the 5th, Correctly

Remember the rhyme, but read it properly:

Remember, remember, the fifth of November,

Gunpowder, treason, and plot.

I see no reason the gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot.

Don’t forget the treason. Don’t forget who plotted it, either. Light the bonfire if you must. Enjoy the communal warmth. Then use the glow to see what the ritual tried to hide. Schools should teach the Gunpowder Plot as class politics, not just cloak and lantern. Local councils should accompany displays with short histories that name Catesby and explain the penal laws that followed, including who bore the fines and who wrote them. Broadcasters should stop repeating the providential fairy tale and commission programming that treats 5 November as statecraft, propaganda, and social control.

Most of all, we should reclaim the night for democratic oversight. Use 5 November to ask who’s writing today’s simple stories. Who’s staging today’s discoveries. Who pays when elites gamble and lose. Make the ritual work for truth, not habit. Four hundred years later, we’re still burning the wrong man whilst the architects of our oppression fade into comfortable shadows. Because when the powerful play with fire, it’s always the powerless who get burned.