Record Players

Time was when leaking any content of the Budget or of the then Queen's Speech, before it had been announced to Parliament, was a matter of the utmost gravity. Yesterday, Nus Ghani auditioned well to be the next Speaker of the House of Commons. Should she succeed, then one could only wish her better luck than her predecessor in maintaining even the residue of such standards.

When Parliament matters that little, and when it is prepared to let itself be treated with such disdain, then it attracts the likes of Joani Reed, who was funded by her husband's company until he was arrested on suspicion of spying for China, and who cavorted with the captain of a nuclear submarine either before or after having been drunk and disorderly aboard another such vessel, of which the United Kingdom has only four in total. Now the Political Editor of the Daily Record, Paul Hutcheon, has resigned because he had been having an affair with Reid while planting favourable exclusives about her in his paper.

Hutcheon's media demand the "vetting" of candidates for public office, but Reid had been vetted. There are many things to criticise about Reform UK, but its lack of such vetting is not one of them. Likewise, there are many things to criticise about the Green Party, but they do not include "entryism", which means joining the Conservative Party for anything other than the social life, or joining the Labour Party for anything other than the preferential treatment in public sector employment and in social housing, or joining any other party at all.

£10 Billion For War, £100 For Heating

The people who used to attack criticism of tax cuts with the cry that “You can’t bribe people with their own money”, and many of whom thought that the Trump Dividend was a masterstroke, are spitting tacks at the Healey Hundred, which they assume must herald an early General Election. In 1988, the taxation of wealth at a lower rate than earnings was corrected by Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson. But in 1998, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown put the clock back to the Chancellor of the Exchequer who had gone on, as First Lord of the Treasury, to introduce monetarism to Britain 50 years ago this December. And we are all supposed to be delighted that John Healey has not righted the wrong. Instead, he has done something based on council tax bands, which have nothing to do with income or even wealth, since not everyone owns their home. And Paul Knaggs writes:

There is a deadening monotony that comes with sounding an alarm in an empty square. You shout the warning, the sirens wail, and the crowd merely turns up its collars against the chill, content to carry on toward the precipice. It feels uncomfortably like being permanently cast as Dr Stockmann in Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People: condemned to tell a self-satisfied town that the spa waters are poisoned, only to be branded an enemy for daring to point at the pipe. Today the pipe burst across the floor of the House of Commons.

£10bn Settled by Telephone, £100 by Despatch Box

Before the Cabinet met this morning, Prime Minister Andy Burnham and his Chancellor, John Healey, picked up the telephone to Kyiv. They told Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Britain would commit an additional £10 billion to Ukraine in today’s Budget, bringing total assistance over the last four years past the £35 billion mark. It is the largest single financial package this country has ever pledged to the conflict. Standing at the despatch box a few hours later, Mr Healey recounted the exchange with palpable self-congratulation. “We called him this morning,” the Chancellor announced: “He told us we made his day.” 

A minister delivers a line like that with an easy glow of moral superiority. Keep it firmly in mind, because the domestic ledger tells an entirely different story. For the twenty million households in council tax bands A to D who must underwrite these grand gestures, the Chancellor produced a one-off Household Energy Payment of £100. That single payout will cost £2.6 billion this winter. Mr Healey added, with an air of benevolence, that standing charges on domestic gas bills will be scrapped from next year.

The relief vanishes the moment you inspect the arithmetic. The charge is not being abolished; it is simply being loaded directly onto the unit rate of every therm of gas a family burns. Mr Healey assured MPs that iron fiscal discipline remains his primary duty. He neglected to explain why that discipline binds domestic hardship with chains of steel while slackening into open-ended generosity the instant the subject turns to artillery. Put the two choices side by side. A single payment, roughly sufficient to keep a modest radiator lukewarm for three weeks in January, set against an enduring, multi-year pipeline of state capital. This is not a clerical mishap. It is a deliberate hierarchy of values, and the rest of the Budget elevates it to an economic doctrine.

The Export Credit Scam

Strip away the Westminster rhetoric of solidarity, and the £10 billion package resolves into three component parts. There is £500 million from the Ministry of Defence to patch Ukrainian air defences this winter. There is £7 billion of economic support promised across three years. And there is £3 billion of expanded capacity for UK Export Finance, the government’s credit agency, which Downing Street says will be “prioritised for military support”. 

That last part deserves the closest attention. UK Export Finance does not exist to give money away. Its job is to support British exports by putting the public balance sheet behind deals that the private market will not back on its own. When its capacity is earmarked for military support, public money stands behind the contracts that keep weapons production lines running. Much of this “ten billion” is not a gift at all. It is credit, and a good share of it is designed to come home as orders for arms manufacturers.

The story does not end at Ukraine’s border. Today’s Budget commits Britain to spending 3 per cent of national income on defence by 2030, and it reaffirms the NATO target of 3.5 per cent by 2035. The National Wealth Fund and the British Business Bank were sold to us as engines of industrial renewal. They will now put up to £5 billion over four years into defence and “dual-use” technology. A new Innovative Defence Finance taskforce will look for ways to raise money for the military alongside private investors. Mr Healey told the Commons that the defence industrial base would be expanded and that local areas would be transformed by it.

There is an established economic term for this system: military Keynesianism. When a ruling class loses the political will to invest directly in housing, energy, or human welfare, it uses the production of weaponry to maintain factory output and prop up aggregate demand. It sustained the post-war American economy until Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican soldier who knew the trade intimately, felt compelled in 1961 to warn his citizens against the unwarranted influence of the complex they had created. Britain, having spent four decades systematically shuttering its civilian industries, has stumbled into the same trap. This administration insists it cannot nationalise water, cannot build council homes at scale, and cannot preserve a domestic steelworks without a crisis. Yet it can organise, plan, and subsidise the production of munitions with seamless efficiency. It cannot plan for life, but it plans for war with genuine passion.

Military Keynesianism and the Permanent War Economy 

The Labour movement has walked this miserable ground before. In April 1951, Hugh Gaitskell produced a Budget to finance a rearmament drive for the Korean War. To pay the bill, he introduced prescription charges on NHS teeth and spectacles. Aneurin Bevan, who had built the health service with his own hands, resigned from the Cabinet in disgust, accompanied by Harold Wilson. Bevan’s insight was unassailable: the moment armaments spending is elevated to an unquestioned priority, the social wage of the working class becomes the slush fund raided to pay for it. 

George Orwell, writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in those very same years, grasped the underlying economics with absolute clarity. In Emmanuel Goldstein’s forbidden book, Orwell explained the structural necessity of perpetual conflict. The primary object of modern war, he wrote, is to consume the surplus products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Factories run, labour is extracted, and goods are manufactured only to be consumed by destruction. The abundance that industrial efficiency ought to grant ordinary families is deliberately dissipated. The war is not meant to be won; it is designed to be continuous.

Britain in 2026 is not Oceania, and the war in Ukraine is not a fiction staged to keep a population docile. But Orwell’s insight was never really about propaganda. It was about what happens to a society when destroying goods becomes its most reliable source of industrial demand. And here is that monotony returning. Here am I shouting: “The water is poison.” The Tribune’s argument has always been a simple one. An economy that depends on war will always find a war, and sometimes it will make war too. That is not paranoia. It is the record. In 1935, Major General Smedley Butler, holder of two Medals of Honour, published War Is a Racket. In it he looked back on his three decades in the Marine Corps as service to American business interests from Central America to China. In August 1964 the United States escalated in Vietnam after a second attack in the Gulf of Tonkin that, as the National Security Agency’s own historians later admitted, never happened. In 2003 Britain followed Washington into Iraq. Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry found that the intelligence had been presented with a certainty it did not justify, and that Britain joined the war before the peaceful options had been exhausted. Each time, the industry that profited was already waiting with its order book open.

Nobody needs to claim that Britain manufactured the war in Ukraine to see the danger. The real question is what a country does once its factories, its public investment funds and its regional economies are tied to the demand that war creates. It does not need to start the next war. It only needs to lose interest in ending this one, and to discover threats wherever the next contract needs them. 

The Government’s Two Claims, Separated 

The government’s case rests on two claims, and they need to be separated rather than accepted together. The first is that Russia’s invasion in February 2022 broke international law. It did. The UN Charter forbids any state from using force against the territory of another. In March 2022, the General Assembly condemned the invasion by 141 votes to five. No account of how this war began changes that, and this paper will not pretend otherwise. 

But Westminster likes to start the story in 2022 because that is where it is most comfortable to start. The war began in 2014, when Viktor Yanukovych’s elected government turned from Brussels to a Moscow loan, the Maidan protests drove him out, Russia seized Crimea and war came to the Donbas. Behind all of it lay a decision taken in Bucharest in 2008, when NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members” of the alliance. William Burns, then America’s ambassador in Moscow and later director of the CIA, had warned Washington that Ukrainian membership was the brightest of all Russia’s red lines, and not only for Putin. A decade before that, George Kennan, the architect of Cold War containment, had called NATO’s eastward expansion a tragic mistake that would start a new cold war. None of this excuses an invasion. All of it helps explain one. A political class that refuses even to discuss it is not serious about ending the war. 

The second claim does far more work in today’s Budget. It is the claim that if Putin is not stopped in Ukraine, his tanks will roll on into Poland and the Baltic states. This is the domino theory, and it deserves scepticism. The army we are told threatens Berlin has spent years grinding forward a few miles at a time in eastern Ukraine. Europe’s NATO members together outspend Russia on defence several times over. Threat inflation is not a side issue here. It is the fuel. Every ministerial warning of Russian armour at the Brandenburg Gate justifies another percentage point of national income for the arms industry. It justifies another year in which the money for warm homes cannot be found. 

There is a stronger argument for today’s spending, and this publication should take it seriously. Defence manufacturing provides skilled, unionised, decently paid jobs in exactly the towns that deindustrialisation left behind. A welder at Barrow or a machinist at Belfast is not a war profiteer. For many working-class families, the arms industry is one of the few places left where a trade still leads to a mortgage or paying the rent on time.

£31.7bn of Defence Contracts Went to Foreign Firms 

That argument leans on a word ministers use constantly: British. The order book is less British than it sounds. Under Ministry of Defence rules, a company qualifies as British if it keeps a subsidiary or an office here. Figures released to The Telegraph under freedom of information law show that since 2021, £31.7 billion in defence contracts has gone to foreign-controlled businesses with a UK presence. A further £3.5 billion went to overseas suppliers with no presence here at all. The procurement analysts Tussell, working from the MoD’s own published spending, find that only around 40 to 45 per cent of the department’s spending with private contractors since 2019 has gone to firms headquartered in Britain. Much of the rest has gone to Anglo-foreign joint ventures and to American giants such as Leidos, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, though the balance has lately tilted towards French and other European suppliers. On top of that, the US Department of Defense itself has been invoicing the MoD roughly £700 million a year since 2022, for the F-35 programme among other things.

Foreign ownership does not mean foreign workers. Plenty of those contracts pay wages in British towns, and those jobs are real. But the profits, the intellectual property and the final say over investment and closure sit in Paris, Rome or Virginia. Britain is building a war economy it does not own. The public carries the cost, the state underwrites the risk, and the returns flow to shareholders abroad. It is the same model that gave us foreign-owned energy companies and foreign-owned water. When the order book thins, the decision about whether a British plant survives will be taken in a boardroom that answers to no British voter. That is not an investment in British security. It is dependence wearing a Union Jack. In March 2025 Donald Trump showed what that dependence means when he paused American military aid and intelligence-sharing to Ukraine overnight. A country whose defence runs on foreign-owned firms and American software is one decision in Washington away from finding out how sovereign it really is.

Yet even a British-owned arms industry would not answer the real question. Why is the only manufacturing the British state will plan, fund and protect the kind whose products are built to be blown up? It took an emergency Saturday sitting of Parliament in April 2025 to stop the last blast furnaces at Scunthorpe going cold, after their Chinese owner moved to shut them. The National Wealth Fund was launched to finance clean energy and industrial renewal; today part of it is being pointed at defence instead. Orwell imagined a warship that locked up the labour which could have built hundreds of cargo ships. That is not a fantasy. It is a choice about what skilled hands are for.

Examine the official summary of the Prime Minister’s call to Kyiv this morning. The word “peace” occurs only once, framed as something that punitive sanctions will eventually compel. There is no diplomatic strategy, no peace envoy, and no proposal for negotiations. Instead, the leaders agreed to spend the upcoming European summit pressing other nations for more military hardware. When a nation’s regional industries and public institutions become completely dependent on armaments orders, peace is no longer treated as a relief; it is feared as a loss of industrial demand.

£100 Against a Decade of Falling Incomes 

On Budget day, the only recorded verdict of delight came from Kyiv. Nobody in Britain’s own households had much reason to share it. When Mr Healey announced his £100 payment, he explained why bills are rising. “With the conflict in the Middle East,” he said, “rising energy bills are a real worry.” War, in other words, is pushing up the cost of keeping warm. The government answers the damage war does to working-class households with a one-off payment. It answers war itself with a ten-year spending commitment.

The Chancellor’s own watchdog spelled out the damage. The Office for Budget Responsibility described Britain’s economic and fiscal position as very challenging. It cut its growth forecast for next year from 1.6 per cent to 1 per cent, and named the war in the Middle East as the main reason. It expects no real growth in earnings in 2027, inflation rising to 3.75 per cent early that year and unemployment climbing above 5 per cent. Government borrowing is now £11 billion a year higher than the OBR forecast in March, driven by interest rates and inflation. Most damning of all, the watchdog found that real household income has barely grown in a decade, something Professor David Miles of the OBR said was practically unheard of in this country’s history. “It has been a dismal period in British economic history,” he said.

The independent verdicts were no kinder. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation projects that average household disposable incomes will fall by £450 by 2029 once inflation is counted. It warned that the Budget’s help with living costs, energy support included, does not make up for the hit from rising energy prices. Had incomes grown at their normal rate between 1961 and the pandemic, the foundation calculates, households would be on course to be around £5,000 better off in 2029 than they were in 2024. Chris Belfield, its chief economist, called for bolder action to give families the solid foundation of better living standards. Helen Miller, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, delivered the crispest judgement of all: the Budget had “a raft of fiddly measures but very little that will move the dial on growth.” So this is the shape of the decade. Incomes falling, wages frozen in real terms, and a war overseas driving up the price of gas. Into that, the state pours its ambition and its credit into arms, and offers the household a hundred pounds.

The bills are high for reasons that go deeper than any single conflict. Britain sold its gas in 1986 and its electricity in 1990. We have paid ever since for a system that hands the profits to shareholders and the risk to households. The state will now use the public balance sheet to underwrite arms exports, yet it treats public ownership of energy as unthinkable. Shifting gas standing charges onto unit rates will help some low-use homes. It will also load more onto those who need heat most: the elderly, the disabled, and the family with a newborn who cannot ration the radiator. The government’s own consultation last year acknowledged that households with high energy needs carry more of the cost when charges move to the unit rate. The working class pays twice. It pays through its taxes for the machinery of a war economy, and it pays again through the energy bills that war drives up. The people came last today, and they were told to be grateful for the hundred pounds.

Publish the Contracts, Plan for Peace 

And again, in this monotonous task, I find myself shouting into the square: the water of the spa is poison. None of this requires abandoning Ukraine to its fate. It requires refusing the foundational lie of modern British governance: that the Treasury can effortlessly conjure billions for foreign battlefields while pleading insolvency before the legitimate needs of its own citizens. Parliament must assert itself and demand a full, published accounting of where every single pound of the UK Export Finance military allocation actually terminates, which corporations pocket the contracts, and what profit margins they extract from public credit. The Ministry of Defence rule that generously counts any multinational with a brass nameplate in London as British should be scrapped immediately. Productive industrial capacity built with British public money belongs in Britain, under genuine public ownership wherever possible. The National Wealth Fund must be torn away from weapons procurement and anchored back to the purpose for which it was created: reindustrialising our neglected heartlands, rebuilding our broken infrastructure, and taking control of our energy system. If the British state can plan an armaments boom within hours, it can plan a public steel industry with the same resolve.

Most urgently, British military aid cannot remain an open-ended subscription to slaughter. A government that can conjure an Innovative Defence Finance taskforce in a single Budget has a duty to produce a diplomatic exit strategy with the exact same seriousness. British aid must arrive with strict conditions and explicit political goals attached. Those conditions must start with creating a negotiated settlement to end this war, bringing the parties to the conference table rather than leaving the word “negotiating” stranded at the end of a sentence about economic sanctions. An exit strategy is not surrender; it is the only course that stops the relentless destruction of Ukrainian and Russian lives alike, curbs the lethal cycle of escalation, and removes the darkening risk of a nuclear confrontation that earlier generations laboured for decades to avoid.

Andy Burnham and John Healey must answer to the public that pays their wages, not merely to the cheer on the other end of an overseas telephone call. Mr Healey made a president’s day this morning. His own watchdog called the last ten years a dismal period for the people he governs, yet he found billions for the arms industry’s order books and loose change for them. He might ask himself whose winter he actually warmed. Orwell warned of war that existed to keep the factories busy and the people poor. A country whose economy depends on war will always find one, and sometimes it will make one. Today Britain started building that economy, and handed the people who will pay for it a hundred pounds. Andy Burnham and John Healey have made their choice. A government that can discover endless billions for the battlefield while rationing warmth at home is not defending democracy; it is mortgaging its own people to feed the guns.

Not Separate Developments

At least they are not stealing our valour this time. Between the Conservative Party and the Labour Right, the old South Africa was supported by all British Governments. British opposition was confined to the churches institutionally but not always in the pews, to a few extremely liberal upper-class Tories, to the Liberal Party, to the Labour Left, to the Communist Party, and to the Far Left, all of which were politically marginal beyond the last three's varying degrees of influence in the trade unions and in the student unions. Student politics, eh? And trade unions meddling in matters that did not concern them?

You can have the vote and still be a victim of apartheid. You can be a Member of Parliament and still be a victim of apartheid. You can be a Cabinet Minister and still be a victim of apartheid. For the last 10 years of apartheid South Africa, 42 per cent of its Members of Parliament were Indians or Coloureds, which is most emphatically their name, as my relatives in Mitchells Plain would be the first to tell you. When, on 3 January 1987, the Reverend Allan Hendrickse led a mass illegal swim by Coloureds at the whites-only King's Beach in Port Elizabeth, then he did so as a member of the Cabinet of P.W. Botha.

But like Amichand Rajbansi, Hendrickse held no portfolio, just as Mansour Abbas was Minister Without Portfolio in Israel from 2021 to 2022, and may well be again. Either that, or the Arab-led parties will not be allowed in government, and there was an attempt to ban them from contesting this election. Either way, that's apartheid, as surely as the 2015 raising of the threshold from two per cent to 3.25 to make it more difficult for the Arab-led parties to secure seats, and as surely as the decision of the Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, to do absolutely nothing about violent crime in Arab areas, even sending back to the Finance Ministry the money allocated for that purpose.

At the time of writing, the Israeli Opposition is on 48 without the Arabs, expanded to 67 with them. If that's not funny, I'm Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, whose sentencing on 16 December strongly suggests Christmas in prison. At least he will have made it to his own event on 12 December, "to put Christ back into Christmas." Some of us never put Christ out of Christmas. There should be no such thing as conviction by majority verdict. Anything less than a unanimous conviction should be a full acquittal, complete with protection from double jeopardy. But Yaxley-Lennon is one of us old lags. He knew the score. In the event of his incarceration, then we might all be royally entertained by the "civil war" between his coked up tubs of lard and whatever those creatures were which stood guard in Downing Street for Volodymyr Zelenksy.

Did Yaxley-Lennon have character witnesses? Russell Brand was unable to find any, but it would presumably not have mattered if he had had dozens. I had a parade of past and present members of both Houses of Parliament, senior Catholic and Anglican clergy, distinguished academics, prominent journalists, and others, including several of my supposed victims. But I was not allowed to call any of them in March 2020, when possibly any one, probably any two, and certainly any three of them would have guaranteed enough jurors to prevent a conviction even by majority verdict. I thought of what happened instead when Judge Mark van der Zwart recently described Katie Price as "a dangerous witness", and not only because it was rumoured at two universities, with neither of which I had ever had any formal connection, that I was the true author of Ms Price's autobiography. As ever, I can neither confirm nor deny.

On 8 May 2025, I was declared "exonerated" by His Honour Judge Nathan Adams from the bench of Durham Crown Court. Exonerated of something very specific, but it makes all the difference. Though entirely unconnected to the charges, it had been admitted as "propensity" to secure my first conviction, despite there being absolutely no evidence at all to support the charges themselves and despite a previous trial's having collapsed a year earlier. Thanks to Tony Blair's abolition of the presumption of innocence, that conviction made and makes it effectively impossible for me ever to be acquitted of anything, even publishing blog posts that did not exist and which the only person claiming ever to have seen had first failed to present himself in court, and then been sacked from the Police because of his conduct of my case. I was still left with no option but to plead guilty in order to spare what little remained of my physical and mental health. But I didn't do it. No one did it. As with the previous charges, it never happened.

Hey, ho. Write what you like in some public school gigglerag. Next to no one up here reads it, and it is quite rarely to be seen for sale in the North East. No one, absolutely no one at all, has ever said to my face that they thought that I was guilty. I once again invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, each and every member of the Board of the Catholic Safeguarding Standards Agency, each and every member of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Committee, each and every member of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Team, and each and every bishop, priest or deacon of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty. Factually and morally guilty, in that I had in fact committed any such offence. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero, as it has been since 28 July 2021.

And Yaxley-Lennon, vile though he is, has been convicted only of administering a thimbleful of that which his accusers were paid a small fortune to dish out by the bucketload. I have had very sympathetic and apologetic Police Officers tell me that they could do nothing about any level of harassment of me or mine if it were committed, as it had been, by someone accredited by the State-approved corporate media. That was just "free speech". Don't talk to me about two-tier justice.

Wheels Within Wheels

Is it some sort of variation on the sunk cost fallacy? Then again, perhaps it simply is the sunk cost fallacy? So much has been invested in the Fairford nonsense that there can be no backing away from it. Herewith, 24-year-old Mohmed Ahmad Abdulkarim, whom Iran allegedly paid £70,000 to load the three white vans with metal drums containing petrol, water butts and smart dashcams. Hope for us all yet.

Will this be put before a jury? When last was a case laughed out? Still, if more than 20 Iranian terror plots really had been foiled in the last year, then I for one would not be remotely surprised. But like everyone else who had ever been arrested in relation this matter, both Abdulkarim and his co-accused, Nouman Essghir, have been released on bail, meaning that no one truly suspected them of terrorism. And if the USAF has fled Fairford for fear of Abdulkarim, then our own national security cannot be said to have been endangered by that flight.

We are in far more danger from the USAF, both because of the target that its presence on our soil makes us, and because of the likes of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Morris, to rescue whom the United States Marines were illegally deployed on the streets of London so that he could be flown home before the Police had the opportunity to question him about the possession and distribution of child sexual abuse images. Like the blind wheelchair-users and the octogenarian clergywomen of Palestine Action, Abdulkarim and Essghir are the least of our worries.

Nor is any defence offered by having three of Britain's four nuclear submarines at sea. Anyone whom that was supposed to impress knows all about their test failures, their misfirings, and so forth. We may as well try to deter them (from what, exactly?) with a man in a wheelchair.

Consultation, Exercise

You do not have to be poor to be right. If your pay has not kept pace with your private employer's profits, then you have a legitimate claim. Or if, like the NHS consultants, your pay from the currency-issuing State has not kept pace with inflation, then you have a legitimate claim. By striking for a rate of pay that retained the most committed and engaged staff, they are striking to save the National Health Service.

Strikes are supposed to be disruptive, and arranging them to cause the most disruption is fundamental to them. Strikes in the NHS do not, in themselves, pose a threat to life, as if Aneurin Bevan, of all people, had never thought to put the necessary safeguards in place. I'll give you a clue. He did, so they are. The NHS flourished in the glory days of British trade unionism. Strikes have always been planned for. There is no threat to patient care, and any Health Minister or informed commentator knows that in detail. Even the deliciously demoted Yvette Cooper, who has severely damaged my own already fragile health and that of millions of other people over the past 18 years before targeting me personally last year, so that my support for any action against her is not merely wholehearted, but downright fanatical. However much she said that this strike would cost, what would otherwise have been done with that money? It is clearly available, so use it to settle the dispute.

The existential crisis in the NHS is not being caused by this strike. This strike is being caused by the existential crisis in the NHS, which goes back to the Blair Government's signature domestic policy of privatising it in England. That idea existed only on the fringes of the thinktank circuit until Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan took office in 1997. Since then, it has been the policy of all three parties except under Jeremy Corbyn, and of most Labour MPs and all Labour Party staffers continuously. Only Andy Burnham has ever privatised an NHS hospital, but in September 2009 he modestly proposed that the NHS should be its own preferred provider. Peter Mandelson's and thus Jeffrey Epstein's Progress wrote to Burnham to protest that he was "restricting the use of the private sector in the NHS", and using its eponymous magazine to opine, not only that "With an election approaching, Labour has regrettably adopted anti-market rhetoric on health", but that, "The pro-market principles espoused by Andrew Lansley are the right ones." Was it proscribed? Who was expelled?

Burnham's position was called "profoundly worrying", and its endorsement by Unite was branded "insulting and ignorant", by the Deputy Chief Executive of the Association of Chief Executives. Don't laugh. All right, do. But that person was Peter Kyle, like his former Cabinet colleague Anna Turley a member of the same salon that gave a grateful nation Joe Docherty, Matthew Doyle, Phil Woolas, Dan Norris (whose proxy vote the Labour Whips have pointedly stopped casting since Parliament most recently resumed), and Kyle's close friend, closest ally, former lover, and constituency predecessor, Ivor Caplin. And who was the salonnière? None other than Mrs Corrigan. Think on.

Get On With Doing The Right Thing

At the very, very, very least, if a job paid minimum wage no matter how long you had been doing it, then that should be the same for everyone doing it, regardless of age. If the triple lock did take the state pension over the income tax threshold, then politically that threshold would have to be raised for everyone. Splendid. Now also raise 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. Never mind next year. If there really were to be any backsliding on the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme, then coalfield Labour MPs should seriously consider resigning the whip. And imagine being even more right-wing than Darren Jones (Bristol North West) (Lab):

I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Redditch (Chris Bloore) and for Lichfield (Dave Robertson) and others for securing this important debate. It is a pleasure to speak in it, but I am disappointed we are having to discuss this topic yet again, because we have been here before: the owners of Royal Mail prioritising profits over the public service requirements of the business they bought; the regulator seemingly unable to do anything at all about it; and postal workers once again being treated so badly when they are the ones who go out on the frontline day in, day out. The question we therefore need to answer is: why?

During my time as Chair of the Business and Trade Committee in the previous Parliament, I spent days and days of parliamentary time cross-examining Royal Mail bosses, the then Government and the regulator. I sought to give a voice to postal workers who, more often than not, felt voiceless in the workplace, and I was proud to support the efforts of the Communication Workers Union to give its members more strength in the power games that were being played between management and the workforce, but quite frankly, what good did that do? The then chief executive was asked to move on, albeit with a handsome exit payment, a new owner has taken over the business, and the regulator conducted its reviews, issued its fines and changed the universal service obligation, yet we find ourselves here in Parliament discussing the issue once again. The only conclusion I can draw is that the business model is not fit for purpose. We should not be shy in coming forward to say that the privatisation of the Royal Mail and its separation from the Post Office was a mistake. The coalition Government got that wrong, and I hope that this Labour Government will put that right.

As far as I can see, there are only two real options. The first is to facilitate the end of the public service provided by the Royal Mail, and to let the current owners turn it into a truly profitable business. We should not be surprised that the new owners of Royal Mail want to make the business profitable, and to focus on its profit-making services—that is the business they are in. However, the problem with privatisation of a public service is that profit making comes first. So it falls to us, as the guardians of public services in this country, to decide whether we will protect the public service functions of the Royal Mail or not.

Some might say the issue is not that binary. No doubt regulation of the parcels market to ensure fairer competition would go a long way to help, and the Government should ask the Competition and Markets Authority to conduct a market investigation into parcel deliveries irrespective of what happens next to the Royal Mail. However, the House should be clear-eyed about what it will mean if we continue with the privatised model. It will, in the end, be the end of the universal service obligation as we know it. That is important because, as we have already heard, the universal service obligation is not just about delivering letters: it is about having a human connection with the people of this country, at every doorstep of every house, in every community, across the width and breadth of the nation. The covid pandemic showed why the network of postal workers matters so much, and I believe that will become more, not less, important in the future. To those making an economic case about the drop in letter deliveries being the end of the universal service obligation, let me say this: think carefully about the end of this public service, because once it is gone, it will not come back.

That takes me to the second option. If Ministers agree with me that privatisation of the Royal Mail was a failure, the only other real option is to renationalise it. The House may be surprised to hear me, of all people, say that—I am not a natural fan of the Government borrowing yet more money to nationalise businesses that can be effectively run by the private sector. However, it has been proven that the Royal Mail is an example of a business that cannot be run effectively by the private sector, and an example of a business that I believe the Government can renationalise fairly easily within its fiscal rules.

When the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West and Pudsey (Rachel Reeves), updated the fiscal rules in 2024, the debt definition became public sector net financial liabilities, or “persnuffle” among friends. That allowed the Government to borrow money to invest in assets while maintaining the debt rule target that Government debt should fall in the long term as a share of GDP. In practice, that allows the Government to use so-called financial transactions to pay for equity or debt financing of publicly owned assets. That could be done with the Royal Mail, and it would fall outside the fiscal rules.

That merely leaves the question of how to raise the money to do so. I am very conscious that our national debt has risen to above £3 trillion, and that the cost of that debt is expensive to the taxpayer, costing over £100 billion a year in interest payments alone, but I think there is a way through that Ministers should consider. When the current owners of Royal Mail, International Distribution Services, bought the Royal Mail in 2025, the deal was valued at £3.6 billion. We should therefore use that number for the purposes of today’s debate.

In the spending review that I conducted in 2025, we allocated £23.8 billion for financial transactions alone between 2025-26 and 2029-30, and we are told to expect the Chancellor to increase that budget further this week. However, financial transactions can only be used by Departments to finance deals where there is a suitable public financial institution—or “puFins”—and where the Office for National Statistics agrees that it is a genuine financial transaction, not an attempt to redesign normal Government spending so that it falls outside the fiscal rules. We have several well-established puFins, from the National Wealth Fund to the British Business Bank, which I am sure will spend their budgets well. The Government Toggle showing location of have also committed to establishing several new ones, some of which have yet to be fully established. In short, it is quite hard to spend the financial transactions capital budget and I therefore assume, with some confidence, that there will be underspends that could be reprioritised.

Finally, if that is not convincing enough, I am certain that there will be public interest in a more mutual form of ownership of the Royal Mail and, I would hope, its reintegration with the Post Office. A public share offering and a special scheme for Royal Mail employees could be a nice way to do that, with the Government merely underwriting the risk, while funds are raised by the public in the years it would take to undertake the action. Having looked at this issue for so many years, I believe that this is the only solution to protecting the Royal Mail and its future.

Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op): Even if my right hon. Friend’s suggestion were to come to fruition, there would still be ongoing running costs. We know there is huge competition in this sector, so how would he propose to deal with that? Is he proposing an ongoing subsidy?

Darren Jones: I refer my hon. Friend to my previous comments about how the market needs to be better regulated, whether we own the Royal Mail or someone else does. That is why that work should be undertaken while a debate on ownership may continue with Government.

I believe that the end goal that we all want to see, that our constituents want to see and that the Government have the capacity and the ability to enable is a Royal Mail that is back in public hands, reintegrated with the Post Office network. That would be a tangible example of change in every postcode. I put that option on the table today for the Government to consider. I hope that Ministers will come to the same conclusion that I have and get on with doing the right thing.

Not Gushing In Gratitude

At 7:02 pm today, Baroness Fox of Buckley delivered this speech in the House of Lords:

My Lords, it is rather intimidating following the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, who gave such a compelling and insightful description of the crisis at the heart of criminal justice, but, put quite simply, no matter how bad that crisis is, rolling back jury trials cannot be the solution. In fact, many of us were relieved that the Government listened to the huge outcry against the earlier widespread removal of the jury trial, but if the Prime Minister has given an inch, for which I am a little grateful, forgive me for not gushing in gratitude.

I say this because so many of my Labour friends have told me that the attack on juries has been halted by Andy Burnham. That is just not true. This Bill continues an assault on juries, by removing a defendant’s right to choose a Crown Court trial for “either way” offences. That is not nothing. It means that sexual offences, violence and dishonesty can be treated as summary justice, like parking offences, with no right to appeal. Magistrates’ roles have been completely rewritten, now with expanded sentencing powers to lock up their fellow citizens for up to two years. I see this only as a recipe for miscarriages of justice. The Bar Council calls it a dangerous experiment.

Surely our elected colleagues in the other place would never have nodded through such a dangerous experiment without a comprehensive parliamentary kerfuffle about what is in this Bill. Sadly not. In the spirit of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, I make the complaint that the Report stage in the other place was allotted only 2.5 hours to consider dozens of new government amendments, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, referred to. Given that the Hansard Society considers those changes as fundamentally recasting the Bill’s purpose, that puts real moral pressure on this House to carefully consider whether the Bill is fit for purpose.

The Law Society urges us to judge the Bill by asking whether it will help break the cycle of crisis management or simply shift the problems from one overstretched part of the system to another. It seems to me to mirror how early release to tackle prison overcrowding has created havoc in the Probation Service and put the public at risk. Now we threaten a perfect storm in the magistrates’ courts, which have their own backlog. People have described how their workload has increased by 65% in the past three years and so on, but the Bill is offering them a poisoned chalice, is it not? It is telling people who might be considering being a magistrate or who are a magistrate that they can now lock up more people for longer, assess all the evidence and mitigating factors, write legal explanations and so on, and replace the jury. Does the Minister have any evidence that magistrates who donate their public service want or are attracted to these new burdens? Is it not changing the service completely?

One could have some sympathy with Ministers for harbouring a mistaken belief that removing increasing numbers of jury trials could save time, but it is telling that juries were, and still are, one of the key targets of action, rather than greater urgency in tackling the numerous avoidable inefficiencies and mismanagement that we have heard so eloquently explained.

I worry that the Government seem at ease with sacrificing fundamental rights to patch-up their own administrative failures. Perhaps the Minister can explain why the Government rejected any time-limited sunset clause that would at least ensure that this curtailing of jury trial rights would end once, or if, the court backlog was cleared, as was proposed in the other place. Instead, the Minister, Sarah Sackman KC, justified the erosion of jury rights as part of a “lasting improvement” in the operation of a modernised, fairer justice system. Can the Minister clarify whether the official position is that less use of juries will be fairer? It is hard not to agree with Judge Rivlin, whose recent paper on this Bill states: “I believe the enormous, scandalous backlog of cases has become an ‘opportunity’–some might say, an ‘excuse’–to recycle a long-held antipathy to jury trial”.

It is that implicit antipathy that worries me, particularly about Clause 3. It contains a prejudice that juries are just not up to the job of dealing with complex fraud cases. In case the public find that insulting, the Minister today justified relieving juries of that onerous burden by saying that having to sit on juries for too long is bad for their welfare and their family life. That was insulting in itself, but this bout of kindness towards the public’s well-being might be more convincing if it was not attached to a part of the Bill in which the Secretary of State, outrageously, has conferred on themselves the power to add to the list of complex offences without parliamentary veto. That was passionately opposed by the noble Lord, Lord Howard, and I agree. It is completely anti-democratic to do that.

What is more, the inference that some issues are much better dealt with by judge-only trials, full of clever experts and specialists, not only indicates a disdain for the public’s capacity or intelligence but gives up on the principle of open justice by abandoning the obligation to present cases in an understandable, intelligible way for the judge, jury, defendants and victims, as well as for the media and the public, as is part of the democratic agreement. As Jonathan Fisher KC explains, “Trying fraud without a jury risks the perception of opacity or special treatment”. He worries that it could, “feed the narrative that powerful defendants are judged behind closed professional doors”.

It seems unfathomable that, at this of all times, when there is existential distrust in the establishment and a widespread belief that there is unfair two-tier justice, some members of the establishment are trying to dismantle the one trusted norm of criminal justice, the right to be judged by your peers, and the one civic obligation that millions embrace despite the discomfort or the inconvenience, jury service. Those 12 randomly selected ordinary people with 12 different lifetimes of experience and knowledge create 12 chances for a lone voice to speak up and say, “Wait! Something is not right here”. That crucial voice has historically prevented miscarriages of justice, seen through the lies and denials of perpetrators, however respectable, and checked state overreach. There are no nodding heads or voting fodder there. Juries embody fresh eyes, disinterested questioning and the virtues of persuasion, deliberation and common sense pursuing truth. To be honest, we could do with a lot more of it, not least in Westminster.

Finally, I am very torn on Clause 16 and the plans to remove the law of presumption in relation to parental contact. It has been extremely well explained by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. We are told that removing this presumption sends a clear signal, but to who? I am not keen on using legislation for PR messaging purposes. I was also brought up short by a quote I read from the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, who said: “Being a parent is a privilege, not a right. The only right that matters is a child’s right to safety”. Surely a privilege is something that the state grants and can take away. Is the state saying that it owns parents’ rights? Actually, parents do have rights. I fear this is state overreach that risks making family courts ever more antagonistic. It is an attack on family rights. I hope the review that has been planned in the Bill will extend itself to Clause 16, because a lot of answers are needed there.