A Filter For Prejudice

Kim Johnson MP writes:

In 2017, David Lammy received deserved praise for his landmark review into the criminal justice system, which shone a light on the unequal treatment of minorities. One striking revelation was that jury trials were found to be one of the few parts of the system consistently free from racial bias, overall treating defendants equally, regardless of their ethnicity. In contrast, judges have been found to be significantly more likely to give jail sentences to Black, Asian and mixed ethnicity offenders than to white offenders for comparable crimes. As the then Shadow Justice Secretary concluded, juries were shown to “act as a filter for prejudice”.

Nine years on, Lammy now holds the government role he once aspired to, with the power to address many of the issues he previously highlighted. Yet instead of protecting juries, the Justice Secretary appears determined to sideline them. Under pressure to cut the courts backlog, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is proposing to almost halve the number of jury trials in England and Wales, giving magistrates and lone judges the power to decide the outcome of thousands more cases. Unlike juries, they do not reflect the diversity of modern Britain.

Given the findings of Lammy’s own review, these reforms are highly likely to increase the risk of racial bias, leaving ethnic minority defendants more vulnerable to miscarriages of justice. That is why I have coordinated a letter to the Justice Secretary, signed by ten Black Labour MPs, urging him to remove the plans for jury reform from the Courts and Tribunals Bill.

Frustratingly, the government has already acknowledged the risk of increased racial bias, but this serious concern is being treated as an afterthought. Last month, courts minister Sarah Sackman revealed the MoJ intends to review the impact of judge-only trials on minorities, but only after the reforms take effect. This is a backwards approach: roll out the change nationally, then investigate its harm later. The problems identified in 2017 have not disappeared – if anything, the resurgence of racism makes the lessons of the Lammy Review more relevant than ever.

Ministers keep insisting that these reforms are necessary to tackle the Crown Court crisis. The backlog – now more than 80,000 cases and projected to rise to 100,000 by 2028 – is extremely serious. But, as expert legal charity JUSTICE sets out, juries are not the cause of these delays and cutting juries will make no significant dent in this backlog – rather, it will create a host of new problems.

The true source of the delays lies in brutal justice budget cuts from the 2010s, and successive governments’ failure to repair this gutting of the system. Sitting days have been capped, legal aid decimated, and buildings left to crumble. I welcome the additional resources the government has promised as part of the package of measures to address the backlog, but this is just a first step.

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I’ve seen in my own constituency how trial backlogs can be driven down without curtailing juries. Through pioneering fast-tracks trials and other practical measures, Liverpool crown court has cut the average wait from charge to trial to 206 days, compared to a national average of 321. Undermining the right to jury trial is not a solution to this crisis, it is a diversion from addressing its real causes.

Everyone deserves a fair trial, free from discrimination. Juries remain one of the most important mechanisms we have to protect that right. Any move to remove or restrict them – particularly in the face of persistent racial disparities – risks eroding trust and confidence in our public institutions and damaging the very legitimacy of the justice system.

I urge the government to withdraw these proposals and commit unequivocally to protecting one of our fundamental democratic rights.

Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst MP writes:

Few features of the British constitution command as much quiet respect as trial by jury. It is not merely a legal mechanism, nor simply a tradition preserved for its own sake. It is a living expression of a constitutional principle.

When the state accuses a citizen of a serious crime, guilt must be established not only before officials of the state, but before ordinary members of the public.

That principle deserves careful consideration in the debate now unfolding around the Courts and Tribunals Bill. Amongst its provisions are proposals that would, in certain circumstances, limit the availability of jury trials in order to address the severe backlog within the criminal justice system.

No responsible parliamentarian should deny the scale of that challenge. Victims are waiting too long for justice. Defendants are waiting too long for their cases to be resolved. Confidence in the system is inevitably strained when delay becomes the norm rather than the exception.

However, acknowledging the problem does not absolve us of the responsibility to ensure that the solutions we adopt are the right ones.

Before entering parliament, I practised as a barrister. Whilst I was not a criminal practitioner, I did appear in the Coronial Courts, where juries still sit in certain inquests. Through that experience I saw first-hand how seriously jurors approach their task: listening carefully to the evidence, reflecting on the arguments presented to them, and appreciating the gravity of the conclusions they are being asked to reach.

It is a powerful reminder that justice in this country is not administered solely by the state, but with the participation of the public.

For that reason, proposals to curtail jury trial cannot be regarded simply as matters of efficiency or case management. When the state reduces the circumstances in which it must persuade twelve citizens before securing a conviction, it fundamentally alters the balance between the individual and the power of the state.

Those who propose such a change therefore carry a significant burden. They must demonstrate not only that reform is necessary, but that the particular reform proposed will genuinely address the problem it seeks to solve.

At present, that case has not yet been made.

The government has placed considerable reliance on the recent review conducted by Sir Brian Leveson. Sir Brian is a jurist of immense experience and his work deserves careful attention. However, a review, even one conducted with great care and expertise, cannot substitute for the broader evidential base that a reform of this constitutional significance requires.

In particular, there is a striking absence of clear modelling demonstrating that limiting jury trials will materially reduce delays.

In response to a question in the House of Commons on 3 February this year, the lord chancellor indicated that the government would publish modelling supporting the assumption that these proposals would reduce trial times by around 20%. Yet the impact assessment accompanying the legislation contains no such modelling. Instead, it adopts Sir Brian’s analysis as the basis for its projections.

Analysis is valuable, but analysis is not modelling. When parliament is being asked to scale back a centuries-old safeguard, it is reasonable to expect robust evidence showing that doing so will deliver the promised benefits.

Moreover, the causes of delay in the criminal justice system are neither obscure nor controversial.

The first is judicial capacity. Courts cannot hear cases without judges, yet judicial sitting days have for years been tightly constrained. Courtrooms sometimes sit unused not because juries are unavailable, but because there is no judge available to preside.

The second is the state of the court estate. Across the country many criminal courts operate in buildings that are outdated and poorly equipped. Trials are frequently disrupted by unreliable technology and inadequate facilities. These are not problems created by jury trial, and they cannot be solved by limiting it.

Thirdly, there are continuing operational problems with prisoner transport and custody arrangements. It is now far from unusual for proceedings to be disrupted because defendants arrive late, or occasionally not at all. Juries are left waiting, witnesses are sent home, and valuable court time is lost.

Finally, there is the growing strain on the criminal bar. The system increasingly struggles to secure suitably experienced advocates to prosecute and defend serious cases. Delays arise not from inefficiency but from the gradual erosion of the professional capacity on which the system depends.

Taken together, these factors suggest the backlog is primarily a problem of capacity. In that context, curtailing jury trials risks treating the symptom rather than the cause.

There are also questions about the practical implications of the proposals themselves. Sir Brian Leveson envisaged alternative tribunals including lay magistrates as 'wing members', preserving an element of public participation. The government’s proposals do not adopt that aspect of his recommendation. At a time when magistrate recruitment itself presents challenges, it is legitimate to ask how the system will absorb the additional caseload these reforms envisage.

Trial by jury has endured for centuries not simply because it is ancient, but because it commands public trust. It ensures that the immense coercive power of the criminal law is exercised not only by the state, but with the participation and consent of the community.

If we are to change that balance, we must be confident that the change will genuinely strengthen the justice system rather than merely rearrange its pressures.

Efficiency is essential in any modern justice system. However, efficiency must never come at the expense of the constitutional principles that give that system its legitimacy.

Dominic Casciani writes:

More than 3,200 lawyers including 300 top barristers and retired judges have called on the government to drop a plan to abolish some jury trials.

The letter to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions, says there is no evidence the "unpopular" plan will solve unprecedented delays in criminal courts.

The proposals, which return to Parliament on Tuesday, would replace juries in England and Wales with a single judge in cases where a convicted defendant would be jailed for up to three years.

Justice Secretary David Lammy says changes to jury trials and other reforms can help turn around the Crown Court backlog, which has reached record levels of 80,000 cases.

The delays mean some defendants charged today may not face trial until 2030.

Labour MP Karl Turner, who is opposed to the plan, has told the BBC he held a "constructive" meeting with Lammy in which the deputy prime minister promised a "meaningful" review period to scrutinise how the reforms are working if approved by Parliament.

MPs will debate and vote on the overall principles of the measures in the Courts and Tribunals Bill during its second reading on Tuesday.

While some MPs have voiced concerns, potential Labour rebels may choose to abstain rather than vote against the bill as a whole - seeking to make changes when the bill returns for further debate in the House of Commons on specific amendments.

The bill will still have to clear the House of Lords before it can become law.

The right to jury trial - in which ordinary people decide on the guilt or innocence of defendants brought before Crown Courts - is a cornerstone of the constitution dating back more than 800 years.

The letter organised by the Bar Council, which represents all barristers in England and Wales, says the plan is an attempt "to force through an unpopular, untested and poorly evidenced change to our jury system".

The signatories include:

• Three hundred KCs - top barristers who act in the most complex cases
• Twenty two retired Crown Court judges with first-hand knowledge of the backlogs and their causes
• Former Director of Public Prosecutions Sir David Calvert-Smith
• TV lawyers Rob Rinder, Shuan Wallace from The Chase and two barristers who have featured in The Traitors 

'Bulldozing' jury trials claim

"We have long warned that the criminal justice system is in crisis.... Juries have not caused this crisis," says the letter.

It urges ministers to focus on delivering reforms and steps to modernise criminal justice, set out in a major independent review by former senior judge Sir Brian Leveson.

Sir Brian also called for jury trials to be restricted - but his proposal included volunteer magistrates deciding affected cases alongside a professional judge in order to keep a link to communities.

Kirsty Brimelow KC, the senior criminal lawyer who heads the Bar Council, said: "This letter and its more than 3,000 signatories demonstrate the unequivocal principled and practical opposition to the restriction of jury trials from not only the Bar, but the legal profession as a whole.

"There is very little evidence to support even basic rationality of the government's decision to rush through this legislation which unnecessarily removes jury trials from thousands of people.

"It's not too late for the government to listen to us as experts and as a profession and stop before bulldozing our jury system."

Shadow justice secretary Nick Timothy has urged Labour MPs to join the Conservatives in voting against the changes, adding that juries provide a "safeguard between the citizen and the state".

He said: "Parliament has a clear choice. It can stand up for one of the oldest rights in our justice system or let Labour take a sledgehammer to our constitution."

Speaking to BBC Breakfast on Tuesday, Justice Minister Sarah Sackman said "jury trials will remain a cornerstone of British justice" but argued that there was "no point in having a jury trial if it takes years to get there".

"We have to have all three levers - the reforms, modernisation and investment," she added.

"Only all three will bring down the backlog in our courts."

Study casts doubt on plan

A study of the court backlogs by the Institute of Government, a think tank, projected that cutting jury trials would save less than 2% of court time, assuming that the cases would be dealt with more quickly.

Research carried out by Lammy in 2017, before he was a minister, revealed that juries were particularly trusted by ethnic minority defendants. 

He says many comparable criminal justice systems, including Canada's, have introduced similar reforms to speed up justice with no loss of confidence in the courts.

The Ministry of Justice said that more than 90% of criminal cases were already heard fairly without a jury. 

A spokesman said: "With victims facing unacceptably long waits for justice after years of delays in our courts, we make no apologies for pressing ahead with our plans to reform the system based on Sir Brian Leveson's independent review, alongside modernising it for the 21st Century with record investment."

Sonia Sodha writes:

Later today the House of Commons will have its first opportunity to vote on the government’s plans to cut access to trial by jury. In order to browbeat sceptical backbenchers into toeing the government line, justice secretary David Lammy has entreated us to think of the victims of crime, such as the women who’ve experienced sexual assault. How could we deny them the speedier justice that would supposedly result if we charged a judge rather than jury with deciding on the accused’s guilt? His deputy Sarah Sackman has invoked the career criminals who she says “game the system” by electing for jury trial to delay their reckoning with justice. Meanwhile, the government says removing the right of some defendants to elect for a jury trial will “bring the courts more into line with other public services - where it is the experts… who do that triage.” As if a defendant wrongly accused of a crime is in the same boat as someone who goes to their GP expecting to be referred to the right specialist.

It is a deeply cynical attempt to ram through a rollback of civil liberty safeguards. We are supposed to believe this is at once an incremental reduction in rights for those who stand accused of committing a crime, and that it will also deliver a transformation in outcomes for victims. This is an insult to voters’ intelligence.

Justice needs juries

Trial by jury is the fairest way of determining the criminal liability of defendants whose liberty is at stake. Unlike in civil cases, in which the facts of a case are usually decided on the balance of probability - what is more likely than not to have happened - the criminal standard of proof requires juries to be sure that a defendant is guilty of a crime in order to convict them. Almost certain isn’t enough. This standard means we quite rightly let probably-guilty people walk free. That is the price of minimising the number of innocent people locked up for a crime they didn’t commit.

Putting the decision about whether or not someone is guilty into the hands of one judge increases the risks of miscarriages of justice, because it requires just one person to be “sure” of someone’s guilt rather than twelve (or in the case of majority verdicts, ten). That feels like a significant watering down in how we practically apply the criminal standard of proof. Judges are learned individuals highly expert in the law. But when it comes to deciding the facts of a case, they are as human as the rest of us: there is no such thing as an unbiased individual.

Juries provide a triple safeguard. Ten to twelve fellow citizens, not a single judge, must agree someone is guilty based on the evidence. The process of deliberation helps iron out human bias as jurors can challenge each other’s understanding of the facts. And jurors have not seen case after case in the criminal courts, heard the same defence run over and over, and sentenced countless criminals to prison, like judges have. This helps them put themselves in the shoes of the defendant as well as the victim, and to appreciate just how much is at stake on all sides.

The government’s proposals

Not everyone charged with a crime has the right to a jury trial. The vast majority of criminal charges brought are for minor, “summary” offences that are tried by three volunteer lay magistrates, or a single legally-trained magistrate. For mid-tier “either way” offences such as burglary or intent to supply drugs, defendants pleading not guilty have the right to choose a jury trial or to be tried in the magistrates’ court. The most serious indictable offences, are always tried in the crown court by a jury. Until relatively recently, magistrates were only able to sentence individuals to up to six months in prison; back in 2022, the government extended this to 12 months.

The government is proposing three radical shifts. First, it wants to dramatically increase the sentencing power of volunteer magistrates so they will now be able to send someone to prison for up to two years, a quadrupling of the maximum sentence in just four years. Second, it wants to remove the right of those accused of “either way” offences to choose a jury trial. Instead, a single judge will charged with deciding whether or not to convict someone of a crime that comes with a prison sentence of up to three years. Only individuals charged with crimes that carry sentences of more than three years will have the right to trial by jury. The government estimates that as a result, the number of jury trials in England will halve from 15,000 to 7,000 a year. 

Third, it is planning to remove the automatic right of appeal for people convicted by magistrates, at the same time as extending their sentencing powers. Volunteer magistrates are unrepresentative of the population at large and often have limited experience of the chaotic lives of those before them. More than 40% of appeals against magistrate verdicts and 47% of appeals against magistrate sentences are successful. And while juries are no more likely to convict ethnic minority than white defendants, black women are 22% more likely to be found guilty by magistrates than white women.

Why mess with our civil liberties in this way?

The government has put increasing the efficiency of the courts system, and reducing the backlog of cases that has steadily grown as a result of fifteen years’ of underfunding, front and centre of its arguments for reform. 

The court backlog is indeed terrible for justice: years-long delays in cases coming to trial mean it is less likely to be served, harming not just victims but innocent defendants. But the Institute for Government has assessed the impact of these reforms on court delays, and its verdict is that they would only result in “extremely marginal gains”. It concludes the government would do better to focus on their other, uncontroversial reform proposals, such as increasing the number of court sitting days.

But ministers have also implied that even if there wasn’t a major backlog, they would still be considering these reforms. Sackman has claimed the reforms are “ideological” and part of a “modern justice system”. Lammy seems to intimate trial by jury is somehow antiquated, writing “in Canada, I felt like a visitor from the past as I toured their modern justice system, where judge-alone trials are an everyday occurrence”.

“Old-fashioned civil liberties!” might seem like an odd strapline for a government led by none other than a human rights lawyer. But it hints at a couple of unattractive traits in Starmer’s politics.

The first is about vantage. On a range of issues, Starmer seems to understand the concept of “human rights” from the perspective of those who have more power in society, who are more easily heard, and whom the system is less likely to envelope in Kafkaesque nightmare. We see this not just in his approach to jury trial, but to assisted dying, where the rights of affluent campaigners with excellent social support who want the right to state assistance to end their own lives matter more than the rights of those who are vulnerable to being coerced into asking their doctor to prescribe them lethal drugs. Or in his inexplicable reluctance to make clear before 2023 that allowing men to self-identify into women’s spaces, services and sports would undermine their privacy, dignity and safety.

The second relates to how he sees ordinary citizens. Voters are not especially keen on politicians who they sense looking down on them. It is a bit of a tell when ministers move from promoting judge-only trials on the basis they reduce the backlog, to notions of modernity. It suggests Starmer actively prefers the idea of justice done by the learned judges in his social network over the little people who sit on juries. That plays straight into the anti-elitist rhetoric of populist politicians like Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski.

This is not a government generally characterised by a reforming zeal or a passion for change. It is remarkable to me that two of the most radical - and ill-conceived - shifts backed by Starmer are the risky legalisation of medically-assisted suicide, and curtailing citizens’ rights to jury trial. Are they really what he wants his premiership to be remembered for?

And Matt Dathan writes:

A wrongly convicted sub-postmaster has warned David Lammy there will be “many more miscarriages of justice” if he goes ahead with his plans to curb jury trials./ Jo Hamilton has written to the deputy prime minister, urging him to rethink the controversial change in the law that would replace jury trials in England and Wales with a single judge in cases where the defendant is likely to face up to three years in jail.

She warned that without the “safety net of a jury”, the changes will further erode trust in the establishment and the justice system.

Hamilton, whose story featured prominently in the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, has urged wavering MPs to vote against the government in the House of Commons on Tuesday night, when they will debate and vote on the proposals for the first time in parliament.

Hamilton was one of more than 900 sub-postmasters prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for offences including theft, fraud and false accounting. This occurred as a result of incorrect information from the Post Office’s faulty Horizon accounting system, built and run by the Japanese firm Fujitsu. More than 230 sub-postmasters were sent to prison and 2,800 were asked to pay back money to escape prosecution.

Hamilton said she was coerced into pleading guilty to 14 cases of false accounting in order to avoid the more serious charge of theft and was sentenced in 2008 at Winchester crown court. Her conviction was finally quashed in 2021 by the Court of Appeal after years of torment and campaigning.

In her letter to Lammy, Hamilton, who won an OBE for services to justice last year, wrote: “As one of 900 sub-postmasters wrongly prosecuted by an arm of the state, I feel compelled to write to you about restricting jury trials for criminal cases with a likely sentence of less than three years.

“I was coerced into pleading guilty and was sentenced in 2008 at Winchester crown court. I did not have a jury but having experienced the might of the criminal justice system I can see how this could go horribly wrong.

“There is no trust in the establishment and the justice system, and this will erode things even further. Crimes that would carry a three-year sentence will be serious ones (like mine) and I can see many more miscarriages of justice (like mine).”

She added: “Almost nobody has access to legal aid any more and as such vulnerable people could find themselves in court without the safety net of a jury.

“As somebody who has received an OBE for services to justice, I cannot let this go without telling you how strongly I feel and there are thousands more who feel the same way. I urge you to rethink this and share my letter with anyone who is undecided.”

The government is confident of winning the vote but Sarah Sackman, the courts minister responsible for the reforms, accepted that a significant number of Labour MPs would rebel.

The plans to abolish some jury trials form part of Courts and Tribunals Bill, and the wider provisions have widespread support.

However, Karl Turner, the veteran Labour MP who has led efforts to defeat the changes to juries, said he would attempt to force the government to dilute or scrap the proposals altogether at a later stage of the bill, when it returns to the Commons for its report stage, which is when MPs debate and vote on specific parts of the legislation.

He has told The Times that he already has 67 Labour MPs willing to back his amendments. He would need at least 80 Labour MPs in order to defeat the government’s majority in the Commons.

In a sign of the concern among ministers about the size of the rebellion, Lammy met Turner for last-minute talks in an attempt to quell dissent.

Turner said he would abstain in Tuesday’s vote because Lammy had promised to publish an assessment of the impact the curb on jury trials is having on reducing the court backlogs after a “meaningful review period”, and also offered to give a Labour MP opposed to the reforms a seat on the committee of MPs that will scrutinise the legislation line-by-line.

Turner said he was likely to offer the seat to a female critic as it would be more powerful to have a female voice on the bill committee. However, despite the concessions offered by Lammy in the meeting on Monday night, Turner still intends to table amendments to the legislation when it returns to the Commons in order to protect jury trials.

Sackman said the government was confident of avoiding a defeat in Tuesday’s vote. She told Times Radio: “I know that there will be some MPs that will vote against this, but I also know, as we saw from a letter yesterday containing the signatures of 40 women MPs from the parliamentary Labour Party, that there is strong support. Their message was clear. The changes in this bill cannot come soon enough for women and girls in the criminal justice system. And I’m listening to their voices as we go through the lobbies tonight.”

There is also widespread opposition to the jury curbs in the legal sector. More than 3,200 lawyers, including 300 top barristers and retired judges, wrote a letter to Sir Keir Starmer urging him to scrap the proposals. They argued there was no evidence that the “unpopular” plan would deliver the government’s goal of reducing the crown courts backlog, which stands at 80,000 and is on course to hit 200,000 by 2025, according to Ministry of Justice modelling.

Leadership Responsibilities

Of your charity, pray for the repose of the soul of Father Pierre El-Rahi, the Parish Priest of the almost entirely Maronite town of Qlayaa, where he was killed yesterday while coming to the aid of a parishioner during an Israeli bomb attack in pursuit of the stated aim of annexing, clearing and colonising Lebanon at least south of the Litani. Three days earlier, he had preached that, "None of us carries weapons. The only weapons we carry are peace, love and prayer." But we arm this, and the precious RAF Akrotiri provides intelligence for it. Indeed, it is a front in the war that half of our Epstein Class pretends that we are not fighting, while the other half angrily demands that we fight it harder.

The Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' primary school in Minab was bombed with Tomahawks, which neither the Israelis nor, as if it needed to be said, the Iranians have, but which the Americans do, and components for which are manufactured by Raytheon at Glenrothes. While taking a good, hard look at Prestwick Airport, which the Scottish Government owns, the SNP should also register its firm objection to this arrangement. But it will not. It is an Epstein Class party. Alba may be no more, but that clears the way in May for the Workers Party. On either side of the Border, the Greens are the party politically and personally closest to Noam Chomsky, but do not tell them to stay in their lane when Tehran is under the black smoke of bombed oil depots such as Saddam Hussein inflicted on Kuwait in 1991.

Then there is Oman. It plays host to the three GCHQ bases of Timpani, Guitar and Clarinet, which tap into the undersea cables that pass through the Strait, before obediently passing on their findings to the United States National Security Agency. There is the British military base at Duqm. There is the Omani-British Joint Training Area. There is the training role of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. There certainly used to be a Privy Council featuring Sir Alan Duncan, past and present Chiefs of MI6, past and present Chiefs of the Defence Staff, senior advisers to our own Royal Family, and a former Governor of the Bank of England. And yesterday, His Majesty Sultan Haitham bin Tarik al Said sent Mojtaba Khamenei "best wishes for his success and good fortune in assuming his leadership responsibilities in his friendly country" as the new Supreme Leader of Iran. Think on.

Grounded

Brandan Buck writes:

Ten days into President Trump’s Iran war, what was supposed to have been a swift, Venezuela-style operation has widened into a massive air campaign that the Pentagon reportedly believes could last into September. And as the mission’s ill-defined objectives continue to bloat — from regime change and denuclearisation to “unconditional surrender” — there is growing talk of a ground invasion. Trump himself has refused to rule out dispatching a ground force, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt going so far as to suggest that the administration might re-institute the draft.

It’s not hard to see why. Military history teaches us that airpower alone is insufficient to achieve the kinds of aims the Trumpians have set for themselves. Unless the administration accomplishes what has historically proved impossible, it must either scale back its objectives or attempt a ground invasion of Iran. As a former US Army infantryman, who fought in what used to be called the War on Terror, I know one thing: the latter option shouldn’t even be on the table.

A ground war against the Islamic Republic, on Iran’s own terrain, will send American troops into hell on earth — or about as close as we mortals can get to it.

First, the sheer size of the ground force will be staggering. Any serious American invasion of Iran would likely rival or exceed the scale of Vietnam or the 1991 Gulf War, making it the largest US military undertaking since the Second World War. Iran’s land mass and population size alone would prove a daunting hurdle. The country is nearly four times the size of Iraq, and its population is more than three times larger.

Iran’s terrain is, in a word, punishing. Its topography is dominated by mountains, which by some figures constitute half of its territory. Unlike most nations, Iran’s urban centres are located inland, nestled amid mountains, and buffeted by uninhabitable deserts to the east and the south. This combination of Iran’s built and natural environments would mean that US forces would have to advance through numerous bottlenecks to even reach Iran’s military and population centres. And while Iran is in the middle of the pack in terms of population density, its capital, Tehran, teems with more than 15 million souls; a fight to capture the city against a determined enemy would amount to the largest urban battle in American military history.

The idea of capturing and pacifying Tehran alone illustrates the near-impossibility of such an invasion. Using the troop density employed in the 2004 battle for Fallujah, Iraq, as a point of reference, suggests that it would require more than 600,000 soldiers — roughly the size of the US deployment during the Vietnam War. Hence, perhaps, Leavitt’s talk of reinstituting the draft.

Looking to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a similar invasion of Iran, given its population size, would require as many 1.6 million troops. Those estimates appear more daunting still when compared with the actual force structure of the US military, which boasts about 2.1 million members in active service, reserves, and the National Guard. Of these, only about 20% are combat troops. Simply put, committing 1.6 million personnel would mean using roughly three-quarters of the entire US military, including combat forces America simply doesn’t have.

Such a war couldn’t be undertaken without a massive mobilisation, and a fundamental reordering of American global commitments, requiring the diversion of forces from Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. An invasion of Iran would therefore impel the United States to confront something it has long sought to avoid: hard choices about the limits of its global military footprint. Summing up the scale of the prospect, the columnist Max Boot, not exactly known for his pacifism, described an invasion of Iran as “the mother of all quagmires.”

Then comes the next obvious problem: fighting the war. While Iran’s military would likely lack air superiority and remains less technologically advanced than that of the United States, the Islamic Republic shouldn’t be taken lightly. Before the outbreak of the current war, the country’s regular armed forces were estimated at roughly 420,000 personnel. Iran’s more ideologically committed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps numbered around 190,000, backed by a militia force, known as the Basij, of more than 600,000.

How much of this force could ultimately resist an invasion is speculative: some may defect, and others removed from the battlefield before they can fight. But what is clear is that Iran would likely adhere to its long-standing doctrine of defence in depth. Drawing on lessons from the Iran-Iraq War, Iranian planners have adopted what they call a “mosaic strategy”: decentralised command structures combined with a willingness to trade territory to wear down an invading force through attrition.

Supporting this strategy would be Iran’s still-significant arsenal of rockets and drones. These have already surprised US military officials in recent engagements, and could prove even more dangerous on Iranian soil, where shorter flight times would give the Americans far less warning. Iranian militias in the region, too, are battle-hardened, versed in irregular warfare, and, in many cases, acquainted with American tactics.

US forces would likely find themselves fighting a determined asymmetric opponent armed with effective weapons and operating on difficult terrain. For a military that has not attempted a major invasion in more than two decades, and that remains only partially tested against modern drone warfare, such a fight would be far from easy. In short, Iranian commanders would aim to draw the United States into a long and bloody war of attrition, and they would have the terrain and urban density do it.

Some will argue that the past is not prologue — that the Iranian regime is unpopular and therefore unlikely to inspire serious resistance. It’s telling, however, that American bombing has yet to create fissures in the regime. Nor has the American air campaign inspired the Iranian people to revolt. On the contrary, all available evidence points to regime consolidation, and the closing of the gap between public sentiment and elite opinion.

Then, too, critics underestimate the power of nationalism, particularly in the Iranian case. The “rally around the flag” effect — the well-documented tendency of citizens to unite behind their government in wartime — was most clearly demonstrated in Iran after Saddam Hussein invaded the country in 1980, a move that ultimately consolidated the very regime the Iraqi dictator had hoped to topple.

Even under the most ideal circumstances of state collapse — like those seen in the early days of George W. Bush’s Iraq War — a post-invasion insurgency in Iran would be all but certain. Between the most fervent supporters of the IRGC, and with the potential backing of Shiite militias across the region, it would not take many committed fighters to prolong the conflict. As Washington learned in both Iraq and Afghanistan, even a relatively small but determined insurgent force can sustain a war for years. That force could draw from an estimated “fit-to-service population” in Iran of 41 million, plus the larger Shiite sphere, including warriors from Iraq, Bahrain, Lebanon, and Pakistan, among others. Much like Iraq and Afghanistan, the defeat of the Iranian army would be a fleeting victory assuredly followed by a bloody and open-ended slog with an insurgency.

Finally, an American escalation into a conventional ground invasion would deepen the already daunting regional crisis. Deploying ground troops in Iran would provide an ample opportunity for America’s great-power rivals, Russia and China, to drain Uncle Sam of blood and treasure. So far, the pair have yet to expand their assistance to Tehran beyond diplomatic and intelligence support. But the presence of American forces on Iranian soil would provide Moscow and Beijing with a tempting pressure point against a superpower that is already overextended, indebted, and domestically fractured. Iran, then, could become a bloody site of great-power competition.

Given the totality of Iran’s geography, demographics, military capability, and geopolitical connections, the prospect of an American invasion of the country should be unthinkable. Yet Trump’s ill-considered decision to launch the war, coupled with his vague-but-ambitious goals, has made this impossible scenario a military possibility. Given the horrific costs such an invasion would entail, however, Trump should choose a different path: declare “victory” and de-escalate. Washington must stop throwing good American money after bad — and preserve the lives of the brave men and women who daily underwrite our national security with their blood.

Vicisti, Galilaee

Keir Starmer's Britain is the one in which we woke up this morning to discover that an historic landmark had been destroyed by a fire in a vape shop while we were trying to come to terms with the news that Sister Monica Joan was dead. Meanwhile, Reform UK may be Noah's Ark, but it is no Ark of the Covenant, still less is it any Nonnatus House. Even Boris Johnson had to sack Robert Jenrick as Housing Secretary for his favours to Richard Desmond, so Jenrick is at home in the party of Bonnie Blue. But he spent yesterday morning saying something almost sensible about Iran, leading to feverish backpedalling by Richard Tice of Dubai and by the Christian Zionist Danny Kruger.

The idea that the modern State of Israel would be and now is a fulfilment of Biblical prophecy is a purely nineteenth-century heresy, even if its runaway popularity and consequent political influence from 1917 onwards has made it the real Oxford Movement, since we Dunelmensians must never miss an opportunity to point out that Oxford published the Scofield Reference Bible. That must be by far the most lucrative publication of Oxford University Press.

No Christian should wish for the restoration of animal sacrifice, and Jesus Himself foretold the destruction of the Temple. In 363, Julian the Apostate tried to rebuild it, but it kept blowing up and catching fire, soon after which he died. He was succeeded by Jovian, who restored the Christian Empire, but there has been a continuous, if usually almost invisible, refusal of the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism, and the Roman Empire, by those who cleaved instead to the previously normative practices that have most lately been detailed in the Epstein Files.

Those Files name centrists, right-wing populists, right-wing elitists, and an anarcho-syndicalist libertarian socialist. At least unless Noam Chomsky would not vote either for the Green Party or for the Zarah Sultana wing of Your Party, then their proximity to his views and indeed to him should identify them as Epstein Class parties, and thus no more deserving of our votes than any of the others was.

It is a Class. In October 2016, Princess Beatrice went on a nine-day "charity trip" to Nepal with David Taylor of the alleged Chinese spy ring. With Taylor comes Joani Reid, and with Reid comes the Labour Together of Josh Simons, on whose slate internal Labour Party elections used to be contested by Councillor Mason Humberstone of Stevenage until last year, when he defected to Reform in a parliamentary seat that Reform expected to win. Also of that ring, Matthew Aplin was in Reform more recently than he was in the Labour Party, having passed between them without let or hindrance.

A mark of Epstein Class loyalty is the pretence that Britain was not in the Iran War, or at any rate somehow not quite. In fact, Britain is so much a part of it that, albeit doing no damage and done through a proxy, Iran has already retaliated. Yet one part of the London branch of the Epstein Class lauds Starmer for having "stayed out of it" by going in "only" as hard as he had, while the other berates him for having not gone in hard enough. To the Epstein Class media, that is balance.

Donald Trump now says that Iran's borders might be redrawn, so as much as anything else he is really not returning any calls from Reza Pahlavi. To Paula Smith's golden calf, Trump has sacrificed both the mighty petrodollar and Starmer's beloved BlackRock. Even Switzerland has taken a stand against this war, so Colonel Jacques Baud may yet have his day. Pahlavists in Britain insolently demand that we abrogate our freedom to protest, around the world they make it clear that they would not be returning to an Iran that many of them had never seen except for a few months of the year to holiday palaces, and in London they are going round demanding that restaurants take down Kurdish and Afghan flags to be replaced with their own.

Yet the present effect of this war is that another pro-Western monarchy stands on the cusp of being overthrown in favour of a second Shia Islamic Republic, this time of Bahrain, while Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are all simultaneously reconsidering their entire economic arrangements with the United States. The new Supreme Leader is the even more hardline son of the old one. The popular uprising has entirely failed to materialise.

And Westminster Quaker Meeting House has been raided for the second time. That the Quakers are "the sect that really rules the world" is the thesis of the latest book by Edward Dutton, whom I knew at university, where he once tried to seduce me after Mass, so that I know his little secret. In 2018, Evolutionary Psychological Science published this masterpiece by Dutton, who is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Mankind Quarterly, which he used to edit. Another member is Dr Adel Batterjee of Jeddah, the founder of the Benevolence International Foundation, which was placed under UN sanctions because it was a front for funding al-Qaeda.

On the Editorial Board of Evolutionary Psychological Science is the archetypal Epstein Class academic, Professor Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, although one does have to wonder for how much longer. In 2021, Pinker wrote that, "Oliver Kamm's urbanity, erudition and compassion are raised to the power of two in Mending the Mind. He put them to work in crafting this gorgeous and urgent book, and on every page they remind us of his moral that enviable gifts are no protection against the affliction of depression." Kamm, Pinker, Dutton, Batterjee. Batterjee, Dutton, Pinker, Kamm. Truly, an Axis of Evil. Truly, the Epstein Class.

Largely Bare

Tom Saunders writes:

The “shadow bank” at the centre of an alleged fraud scandal rocking the City hired a tiny accountant with just two employees to work for its £2bn business, The Telegraph can reveal.

Market Financial Solutions (MFS), which collapsed last week amid allegations of fraud, listed Magus Chartered as its main accountants in its most recent annual report.

Magus’s own accounts show it had just two employees in 2025, down from three in 2024. Its offices, down the road from Victoria Coach Station in London, occupy part of a basement floor in an office block also home to charities and high street law firms.

The accountant’s owner, Dipendra Amin, is a director of several companies to which MFS and related entities have issued loans. These were secured against properties across the UK, from Mayfair to Hounslow, according to filings on Companies House.

Mr Amin may have been acting on behalf of borrowers, rather than receiving the loans. Nominee accountants can be appointed to act on behalf of the true owner of an asset, becoming the public-facing name of a business while the actual owner remains confidential.

Magnus did not respond to questions regarding what services the firm provided to MFS, though it did not audit the business.

Established in 2002, Magus’s website says that, as well as providing traditional accounting and tax services, it also provides advice on how to improve and develop businesses.

There is no suggestion of illegality or wrongdoing by the company.

However, the revelation about the business’s size will add to scrutiny of MFS’s corporate relationships. Questions have already been raised about MFS’s use of small auditing firms.

MFS boasted a loan book of roughly £2.5bn as of last March and its customers spanned the breadth of the UK. Its clients included property investors, overseas family offices, as well as prominent businessmen and celebrities in the UK.

Companies of that scale typically use Big Four auditors or those just below them to review their filings and work with accountants on a similar scale.

Private credit ventures usually offer higher returns than most corporate and government bonds. The market is not regulated in Britain or the United States on the grounds that the industry is reserved for institutional investors that do not require government oversight.

Prof Paul Barnes, a consultant in areas of finance and forensic accounting, formerly a professor at Nottingham Business School, said large businesses relying on very small companies for financial and legal services was “extremely odd” and a “classic red flag”. “It signals to the outside world that there is something odd,” Prof Barnes added.

MFS was placed into administration late last month amid what a judge called “very serious” allegations of fraud. The company is accused of double pledging assets to back loans. At least £930m is thought to be missing from its balance sheet.

As a so-called shadow bank, MFS did not take deposits and instead funded its loans by borrowing from itself. A cast of high-profile banks, including Santander, Wells Fargo, Jefferies and Barclays backed MFS.

Its demise not only shocked the city, but has prompted the Bank of England to investigate the circumstances of the collapse.

MFS described itself as a specialist provider of buy-to-let mortgage lending and bridging finance. It was part of a fast-growing crop of so-called bridging lenders in the UK. These firms provide short-term, property-backed loans to borrowers who may not qualify for traditional bank financing and often charge higher interest rates.

Paresh Raja, 58, founded MFS with his wife, Tiba, in 2006. MFS’s website stated that Raja was “committed to supporting property investors who encounter difficulties with – or are simply not suitable for – the high street banks”.

MFS was a keen sponsor of events in the Asian community, and in September last year, the business sponsored Indian singer Arijit Singh to play his first UK arena show in London’s Tottenham Hotspur stadium. The company was also a sponsor of a concert in London by Indian rapper Badshah, which is scheduled to go ahead later this month.

The walls of the company’s London offices in Mayfair were adorned with autographed cricket bats, boxing gloves and signed Pink Floyd albums, according to Bloomberg.

When court-appointed insolvency officials arrived at the UK property lender’s London offices last week to take over after the firm’s collapse, the walls were reportedly largely bare.

Rebuild The Capacity To Coordinate

Yet more Blairites’ remorse from The Guardian:

The future of electric cars arrived this week in China. The world’s biggest car seller, BYD, unveiled a new battery giving its latest electric models more than 600 miles of range. Remarkably, the Chinese motor-maker said 250 miles of range could be injected into its new batteries in just five minutes. If true, the last remaining advantages of petrol cars – long range and quick refuelling – are beginning to disappear.

But such technology requires megawatt charging points. A single charger can draw as much power as a small town in Britain. BYD’s system relies on chargers delivering around 1.5 megawatts of electricity – more than four times the fastest chargers in the UK. China is moving fast, planning thousands of megawatt charging stations within two years.

Britain, by contrast, would struggle to support such a network today. Without upgrades to substations and local networks, the system could not handle the power spikes created by ultra-fast EV charging. This country’s electricity responsibilities are split across many bodies and firms. Improvements are slow and difficult, especially compared with China’s state-directed grid investment. The Chinese model resembles in some ways Britain’s postwar electricity system.

Under the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), as the economic historian Arthur Downing points out, generation, transmission and system operation were integrated within a single organisation that planned the network. Large power stations were linked by a national grid and run as one system, delivering decades of efficiency gains and falling electricity prices.

Electricity abundance in Britain did not emerge because the state withdrew. It emerged because the state created institutions capable of coordinating a complex industry. Britain built its first national electricity grid in seven years. Today some transmission projects take double that just to get planning approval and grid connection. Building the infrastructure for the low-carbon transition requires institutional capacity – not simply deregulation.

Seen by Margaret Thatcher as a relic, the CEGB was broken up and privatised in 1989. Labour warned that prices would rise. They did. The “privatisation premium”, according to an analysis by the Common Wealth thinktank, sees almost a quarter of the average household energy bill – roughly £450 – flow today into corporate profits. Other essential services are similarly hit. Nearly 30% of a water bill in the English privatised system goes to shareholder returns and paying debt. By contrast, publicly owned Scottish Water spends 10% of revenue on borrowing costs.

These costs are not primarily the price of pipes, power stations or grids. They reflect financing and ownership. Public utilities borrowed close to the government rate. Private firms must also reward shareholders – raising the cost of capital that lands up in household bills. Over 30 to 40 years, the cost difference adds up to billions.

Privatisation fragmented Britain’s electricity system, replacing integrated planning with firms, regulators and markets. Yet infrastructure networks depend on knowledge built over decades by engineers in laboratories and operators. When those institutions disappear, much of that capability disappears with them. Britain now faces a choice: rebuild the capacity to coordinate the grid – or watch technologies like BYD’s arrive elsewhere.

While the far from Blairite Rod Liddle writes:

Nothing is real until it’s been fictionalised on TV, preferably with Toby Jones in a starring role. Appalling injustices occur and we read about them — but are somehow incapable of assimilating them until they have been anointed by the producers, rendered into amenable portions, daubed with a little glitz and humour and then piped directly into our skulls via the idiot box in the corner. So it was with ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office — a scandal which had been well known for the best part of a decade but only took on a resonance once it had been made into a docudrama, with Toby Jones’s character ruined and threatened and bullied and then at last triumphant.

I’m not sure why we are roused to indignation only when the subject, whatever it is, has received the imprimatur of light-emitting diodes. A feeling of impotence? That we have no agency in this stuff we read about every day, or see reported, baldly, as “news”? That getting oneself worked up is futile? And then suddenly the issue is transformed for us, as Toby Jones stands with a beaming smile on that lunar everyman’s face, and the thing becomes real, because it has been fictionalised.

You may hope that Channel 4’s excellent docudrama Dirty Business can rouse the same sort of public furore as Mr Bates vs the Post Office, even though Toby Jones isn’t in it. The scandal, after all, is far graver — “almost so awful that people think you’re exaggerating”, as the real-life subject of the films, a retired detective called Ash Smith, told me. Smith and his friend Peter Hammond, a professor of computational biology, had been puzzled by why their local river — the Windrush, in the Cotswolds — was perennially filthy and devoid of fish.

What they discovered, using techniques from their professional lives (yes, only in the Cotswolds!) and the help of an anonymous whistleblower, astonished them: sewage dump followed by sewage dump followed by sewage dump: all the live-long hours. Day in, day out, excrement was pumped straight into this rather fey, bijou little chalk stream.

But of course it didn’t stop there. For the Windrush, read just about every river in the UK. And what Smith and Hammond met, as their investigations progressed, was another wall of noisome effluent from the water companies and even the quasi-government body whose job it is to protect us from the water companies, the Environment Agency: obfuscation, dissembling, denials, obstruction and, they believe, downright lying. A whole industry exploiting one of our natural resources, its statutory responsibilities replaced by venality and deceit. On a national scale. For decades, since the hugely ill-advised privatisation.

Now, I dare say you knew most of this anyway, or could have guessed — and yet like me you still cleave to the view, resignedly, that nothing really can be done. This is simply how it is. Rapacious companies maximising their profits, like the Australian Macquarie group, which owned the basket case Thames Water. It’s simply a function of capitalism.

Smith and Hammond beg to differ and through their campaigning group Wasp have urged criminal prosecutions against all of them, all the companies which have failed to invest in infrastructure and have dumped sewage in our waterways with the kind of louche abandon with which a dog defecates in the street. The rationale is simple. The companies are making money from what look like criminal activities. All of the water companies have a statutory requirement to see that sewage is not dumped illegally into our waterways. But some of them seem to dump sewage rather than pay for the infrastructure to be improved, thus saving themselves millions of pounds. They are making money from this behaviour. QED.

This seems fair enough to me. All the more so when you examine the wages of the chief executives and the grotesque transgressions which took place on their watch and notice that there is no correlation between the two. Does the following not nip at your sinuses, get your goat?

Let’s start with South West Water. Chief executive: Susan Davy, paid £803,000 in 2024-25. Number of monitored sewage dumps in our rivers in 2024, 56,173, lasting a total 544,439 hours. Yay, way to go, Susie. But perhaps Susie is envious of the outgoing Severn Water boss, Liz Garfield who trousered a magnificent £3.268 million in 2024-25, having presided over 62,085 sewage dumps in 2024. Hell, maybe there is a correlation regarding pay and environmental catastrophe. Yorkshire Water? Its boss is Nicola Shaw, who got by on a meagre £689,000 in 2024-25 whose company was responsible for 68,164 sewage dumps in 2024 alone. Is she paid ten quid a dump? What’s the deal there? I could go on and on, down through the list of them. But I’d rather we just sent round the rozzers. Maybe not as many as were sent to arrest the man formerly known as Prince Andrew. One or two would probably do the job.

You know it’s a scandal, and so do I. We know this asset-stripping management of our natural resources has to stop. You’ve seen the film and the thing has been made real. So, how about we prosecute — and then renationalise?

High Readiness?

George Parker and Lucy Fisher write:

Britain has scrapped contingency plans to send the aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales to the Middle East following Donald Trump’s mocking of Sir Keir Starmer for supposedly wanting to join the war with Iran after it had already been “won”.

British officials said that the carrier, currently in Portsmouth, was not being prepared for Iran-related activity and Downing Street said there was “no decision to deploy her”.

The news came after the Ministry of Defence put the ship and its crew in a state of high readiness to set sail within five days, a move confirmed in a statement on Saturday in relation to Britain’s military build-up in the Middle East.

“HMS Prince of Wales has always been on very high readiness and we are increasing the preparedness of the carrier, reducing the time it would take to set sail for any deployment,” the MoD said on Saturday.

Some British officials now claimed there was never any plan to send the carrier to the Middle East and that it is instead being prepared for Nato operations, with a deployment to the Arctic scheduled.

But other UK officials maintained that the sudden change in readiness was ordered last week to give the government an option to deploy the warship to the eastern Mediterranean or beyond, towards the Middle East.

Trump mocked the idea in a social media post on Saturday, writing: “The United Kingdom, our once Great Ally, maybe the Greatest of them all, is finally giving serious thought to sending two aircraft carriers to the Middle East.

“That’s OK, Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer — But we will remember. We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”

Britain’s other carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, is currently being refitted and is therefore unable to be deployed.

Starmer’s aides denied that Trump played any role in changing plans for the deployment of HMS Prince of Wales and insisted that a 20-minute call between the two leaders on Sunday had been “constructive”.

One ally of the prime minister insisted that both leaders were trying to restore relations after a week of criticism from the White House over the UK’s refusal to do more to support US-Israeli strikes on Iran. “I think everyone wants to get back to normal,” the ally said.

Last month the MoD announced the UK would be deploying a carrier strike group — HMS Prince of Wales and escorting warships — to the north Atlantic and Arctic this year to “deter Russian aggression and protect vital undersea infrastructure”.

The deployment will be part of Nato’s new Arctic Sentry mission, established this year to strengthen the alliance’s security in the High North as melting sea ice opens up new routes and the threat of hostile state activity rises. Nato will command part of the UK’s deployment.

The carrier strike group is also due to cross the Atlantic and visit a US port. American jets are expected to operate from the flight deck of HMS Prince of Wales, alongside RAF F-35 jets.

In the meantime France has deployed its aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle to the eastern Mediterranean and French President Emmanuel Macron was in Cyprus on Monday to discuss security for the island, which is the location of two British military bases.

HMS Dragon, a British Type 45 destroyer, is expected to sail to the Mediterranean this week to provide extra protection for British interests in the region and for Cyprus.

Opinion polls show that most Britons back Starmer’s decision to refrain from joining the US-Israel offensive in Iran [he has not in fact done any such thing]; a YouGov survey last week showed that only 8 per cent supported the idea. Just 11 per cent strongly backed the US bombing campaign.

Reform UK, which had supported the UK joining the war, now sounds more cautious. Robert Jenrick, Treasury spokesman, told the BBC on Sunday that he did not think it was “necessary” for the UK “to be deploying British airmen in bombing raids over Iran right now”.

Separately Sir Ed Davey, Liberal Democrat leader, has called on Starmer to push for the cancellation of a proposed state visit by King Charles and Queen Camilla to the US at the end of April in protest over the Iran war.

Downing Street said that no visit had been confirmed. Such royal trips take place only on the advice of the prime minister but so far officials briefed on the visit say planning is continuing “without deviation”.

Cancelling a state visit at such a late stage would be seen as a major insult to Trump and, given the fragile state of political relations, would be a big risk for Starmer.

And Lubna Masarwa writes:

I woke up at 2am, confused about whether the noises I was hearing were air-raid sirens or crowds in nearby synagogues, singing and dancing into the late hours in celebration of the Purim holiday.

Thousands of Israeli Jews came out into the streets of Jerusalem on Wednesday in defiance of instructions from the police and Home Front Command.

On the other side of the city, Al-Aqsa Mosque was closed for the fifth day in the middle of Ramadan, under the pretext that there is a war on and it’s too dangerous to allow prayer in public.

For a brief moment, a carnival atmosphere developed in Israel. Knesset Member Limor Son Har-Melech dressed up as an executioner. Her party is the main backer of a bill currently going through the Knesset that would impose the death penalty on Palestinian prisoners convicted of murder.

Was this a holiday or a war?

Etsiq, who works in a food shop in Jerusalem, has his own theory about why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose this time to bomb Iran: to echo the killing of Haman from the story of Purim in the Book of Esther, which is read during the holiday.

Haman, an official in the court of the Persian king during the Achaemenid Empire, was foiled in a plot to kill the Jewish people of the region, and then put to death by hanging after the intervention of Mordechai.

When I asked Etsiq how he was holding up amid the current crisis, he replied: “We like wars. It’s also good for the food business.”

Changing the narrative

Etsiq is by no means alone. Social media has been filled with images of the late Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, digitally transformed into today’s evil Haman. One image depicts him with the “ears of Haman”, a reference to hamantaschen, the triangular pastries that Jews traditionally eat on Purim.

Many Israeli media sites have also wondered whether history was repeating itself. Avri Gilad, a veteran television personality on Channel 12 News, hosted his programme on Tuesday dressed as a pilot.

Gilad said a new chapter was being written in the Book of Esther: “It’s amazing that it comes after 2,000 years, and it’s really the same thing… the whole story closing on an astonishing historical scale.”

Bit by bit, Israel is changing the narrative that it exists because of the Holocaust. A new language is emerging that uses biblical stories to justify a vision of Greater Israel.

On the eve of Purim, Netanyahu visited the site of an Iranian missile strike in Beit Shemesh, outside Jerusalem, which killed nine Israelis.

Afterwards, he posted on X (formerly Twitter): “We read in this week’s Torah portion, ‘Remember what Amalek did to you.’ We remember, and we act.”

This comparison to the biblical enemy of the Jewish people was also cited against Hamas after the 7 October 2023 attack.

Before the premier appeared, one of the residents of the area discovered a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl, that had survived the missile strike. “Everything here was burned, and only the tallit and the Yalkut Yosef [prayer book] did not burn. It’s a miracle, so let us pray together,” the resident said.

Government ministers have also invoked a religious purpose in attacking Iran. Orit Strook, the minister of settlement affairs, said in a radio interview: “When the prime minister called me… I told him that it was fitting that this was happening on Shabbat Zachor, when we read about the erasure of Amalek.”

Netanyahu reportedly replied: “This time we are not only remembering and reading; this time we are doing.”

Borders crossed

In a coalition propped up by religious parties, other members of Netanyahu’s government have expressed similar views.

Knesset member Michal Woldiger from the Religious Zionism party told an Israeli radio station: “We are making history. We are entering ourselves into the Bible. These are special and holy days for the people of Israel; everything is turning for the better.”

This narrative of the Jewish people taking revenge for a biblical past is so strong that secular politicians are using it, too.

Yulia Malinovsky, a Knesset member from the secular opposition party Yisrael Beiteinu, reacted to Khamenei’s assassination by posting: “The modern Haman has been eliminated.”

And Yair Lapid, the opposition leader who has become a symbol of secularism, supported the idea of Greater Israel by saying: “Zionism is based on the Bible. Our mandate over the Land of Israel is biblical.”

This idea has been given both intellectual and political framing. Eitan Lasri, a former adviser to Netanyahu, said on the Channel 14 website: “The state of Israel once again faces a threat originating from that same historical arena, this time in the form of the regime in Iran.”

Lasri concluded: “The campaign of Purim… is a struggle between the desire to destroy and the right to live. Just as in the days of Mordechai and Esther, the threat turned into victory; so too in our generation we can turn the threat into an opportunity.” 

For 75 years, this struggle was framed as a conflict over land, and as such it had parameters. It had definition and borders. It was a struggle to liberate Palestinian lands from occupation. Land is negotiable; religion is not.

Those borders are now being crossed. If Israelis truly want to turn this into a religious struggle, they must think about the consequences. They should consider the forces in the Islamic world that would rise up to confront them.

The Palestinians are now struggling not just with occupation, but with a growing messianic religious fundamentalism.

To western audiences, Israel still manages to present itself as a western democracy. It claims the religious fanatics are Hamas and Iran. But increasingly, Israel itself is fighting a religious war.