Colonial Features

Will the people who go on endlessly about the alleged innumeracy of Diane Abbott be equally vocal about the manifest innumeracy of Jim Ratcliffe? Or, indeed, about Darren Jones's assertion that the Titles Deprivation Act 1917 had been aimed at collaborators with Nazi Germany? One of its targets did go on to be a high-ranking Nazi, but if Jones knows that, then I am a taaffeite. Yet this is not the second half of a third term. This is the starting lineup of the first team.

Ratcliffe endorsed Labour at the last General Election, which says it all about both of them. And was colonisation not supposed to have been a good thing? If it gave India its railway network, then bring on some of that here with uncharacteristic speed. The endorsement of Ratcliffe's remarks by Reform UK is almost as creepy as Matt Goodwin's trouser-rubbing about schoolgirls' lady parts. For that matter, has anyone ever tracked down a woman whom Zack Polanski had hypnotised in an attempt to enlarge her breasts? Truly, Britain is Epstein Island.

At Gorton and Denton, even without counting the Conservatives and their candidate who wanted to do things that she had had 30 years to do in the Police, the Right is split at least three ways, between Reform, Advance UK, and the Libertarian Party, and arguably four, with the SDP. Although they are all milk-and-water Zionists compared to the true believers of the Communist League, the British Pathfinders of the American Socialist Workers Party that in turn confuses matters even further by calling its weekly newspaper The Militant.

Fewer than 8,576 votes for Hannah Spencer of the Green Party, or less than 23.5 per cent of the vote, would mean that she had failed to match the combined Green and Workers Party total from 2024. That would make it a proven error for the Workers Party to have stood aside, and to have done so despite having a councillor elected under its banner in Longsight, where he had unseated the Labour Deputy Leader of Manchester City Council. None of the three Greens on that authority, nor any of the five on Trafford Metropolitan Borough Council including Spencer, sits for a ward in Gorton and Denton.

Many of us who had hitherto voted for the Workers Party whenever it had given us the opportunity have had profound misgivings about its decision not to a contest a seat where it had taken 10.3 per cent of the vote at the General Election. We want to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. In the struggle for economic equality, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class, while in the struggle for international peace, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class and the youth.

Social solidarity is an expression of personal responsibility, personal responsibility is protected by social solidarity, international solidarity is an expression of national sovereignty, and national sovereignty is protected by international solidarity. Equality and diversity must include economic equality and class diversity, regional equality and regional diversity, the equal sovereignty of diverse states, and equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law with the presumption of innocence, requiring that conviction be beyond reasonable doubt.

All of this is opposed by and to the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the anti-industrial Malthusianism and misanthropy of the Green agenda, the treatment of identity politics as equal or superior to class politics, the treatment of gender identity as equal or superior to biological sex, the cancel culture of which our people have always been the principal victims, the erosion of civil liberties, the stupefaction of the workers or the youth, the indulgence of separatist tendencies in any part of Great Britain, the consideration of any all-Ireland settlement that failed to preserve the National Health Service and other such achievements, or the failure to recognise that a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency had as much of that currency as it chose to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore needed to be under democratic political control.

Reform has welcomed the endorsement of Bonnie Blue. Richard Tice wants to legalise cannabis, Nigel Farage concurs with the Green Party in wanting to legalise drugs across the board, and Lee Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023. Numerous Reform figures were fanatical supporters of the Prime Minister of Net Zero, of very big spending long before Covid-19, of the highest net migration ever, of Stonewall, of the lifting of the requirement that jobs in Britain be advertised first in Britain, of the lockdowns, of the Northern Ireland Protocol, and of the war in Ukraine.

And Reform's grandee, Ann Widdecombe, was a faithful Junior Minister under John Major, a Minister of State under Michael Howard as he began the shredding of civil liberties in a bidding war with Tony Blair, a Shadow Cabinet stalwart under William Hague, twice a cheerleader for the putative Leadership of Ken Clarke, a scourge of foxhunting, the only Conservative MP to vote with Gordon Brown for 42-day detention without charge, and an autobiographical praiser of Michael Heseltine for having killed off the British coal industry. She is an avowed opponent of the Assisted Suicide Bill only because it contained insufficient "safeguards", and she opines that men who had "undergone extensive surgery" should be sent to women's prisons even though every cell of their mutilated bodies still contained a Y chromosome and they themselves had been socialised as males. That Farage has felt the need to stop courting Ben and Zac Goldsmith indicates how well-advanced that had been. Who needs the Greens?

Transition To Truth

The Supreme Court will uphold Bridget Phillipson’s guidance to schools, because it was always going to uphold whatever Phillipson had put in front of it. When he has not been supporting David Lammy’s attacks on trial by jury and on the right of appeal, then Lord Sumption has been trying to tell you that the Court had permitted separate facilities on the basis of biological sex, but had not required them. 

“You have gender dysphoria,” I used to think, and even say. “I have depression, but that doesn’t mean the doctor should give me something to kill myself, never mind suggest it to me.” Part of resisting the second atrocity, against which Phillipson voted, is reversing the first.

Without a robust material realism, there can be no pursuit of economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, led by those who suffered most as a result of economic inequality, namely the working class, and led by those who suffered most as a result of international conflict, namely the working class and the youth.

Feelings are real, but they are not facts. As poverty of aspiration is a real feeling, but economic inequality is a fact, so gender identity is a real feeling, but biological sex is a fact. Those who failed to hold the first line cannot hold the second, and those who are failing to hold the second line will be unable to hold the first. Demonstrably, then, dialectical materialism has too often failed to provide that robust basis. Nor, in itself, can natural science, which cannot prove the ontological existence of material reality, but rather presupposes it.

What is needed is Thomism, which by definition exists within the wider Augustinian tradition. Fundamental to both is absolute fidelity to the Roman Magisterium, which is itself irrevocably committed to the Thomist metaphysical system, within which its own indispensable role precludes any degeneration comparable to that of much of the ancestrally Marxian Left into gender self-identification. Phillipson knows this. She needs to act on it.

Time To Park On The Yellow Lines

Regular readers of this site may have detected a mild degree of scepticism about the virtues of Keir Starmer, but he did at least use Prime Minister's Questions to remind Ed Davey that the Liberal Democrats had been in government in the days of austerity, when Davey had been in the Cabinet, and when Starmer had first started working on Hillsborough but the Coalition had failed to introduce even what little excuse for a Hillsborough Law that Starmer now proposed.

I had a similar little incident at a hustings in 2019, when the Lib Dem candidate at North West Durham went on and on about the bedroom tax until I pointed out that his party had been in office when it had been introduced. He has never spoken to me since. The Lib Dems complain that, with 72 MPs and with more Council Leaders than the Conservatives, they are not given nearly enough airtime. They have a point, but it is really that they are under-scrutinised, and that during their five years as Ministers they were scandalously so.

Full Account?

What, exactly, did Matthew Doyle do to deserve a peerage? Never mind a Labour one, since Doyle campaigned for an Independent candidate. That is an automatic expulsion from the Labour Party, and a five-year ban from even so much as applying to re-join. Or, at any rate, it is for anyone else. That that candidate was Sean Morton was beside the point, just as the criminal investigations into Peter Mandelson and into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor relate to misconduct in public office with a view to Jeffrey Epstein's financial gain, not to anything else.

If the Government is "a boys' club", then what do the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Foreign Secretary, the Home Secretary, and the nine other women around the Cabinet table do? Harriet Harman has never got over not being made First Secretary of State by Gordon Brown, but if she thinks that the answer to Epstein of all scandals is even her opinion, never mind the return for which she may be angling, then her lack of self-awareness is almost admirable.

Far more probably, Harman wants the new First Secretary of State to be Jess Phillips, the better to position her for the Leadership now that Wes Streeting had rendered himself impossible by criticising Israel, though not so as to have spurred him to any sort of action. Phillips turns out to have been sending out nothing more than pro forma replies to complainants against Mohamed Al-Fayed, so she does sound just the sort to become Prime Minister of this Epstein Island, the country in the world most controlled by the Epstein Class.

The monarchy has proved no protection against that, so the monarchist and the republican arguments are both still rubbish in their own terms, meaning that the case for change has not been made. Starmer's rebranding of His Majesty's Government as "the UK Government" echoes his practice of referring to it as "my Government". Matters are not helped by Prince William's fawning over the Epsteins of Saudi Arabia, whose presence at Premier League events Sir Jim Ratcliffe presumably refuses to acknowledge, just as he presumably does not say so much as "Good morning" to much of the squad of Manchester United. How do the Monégasques react to him as a coloniser?

Managed Process?

Keir Starmer would never have suspended the whip from Matthew Doyle unless he had needed a way to embarrass Anas Sarwar. Sarwar has just suspended the whip from Pam Duncan-Glancy, so job done.

Starmer expects us to sympathise with him because, while he was Prime Minister and despite his considerable family means, his disabled brother had died in poverty. That expectation would have been bad enough even if this Government had had a better record on such issues.

Nothing that may still hang over Angela Rayner can compare to the removal of a career diplomat from Britain's most important ambassadorial posting in order to replace her, knowingly, with the best friend of the world's most notorious paedophile. A Rayner Premiership would have much to criticise. But at least she is not as bad as that.

Nor would we ever be treated to messages that suggested a very close friendship indeed between Rayner and the same Peter Mandelson who had corruptly secured Palantir all manner of British government contracts, including with the National Health Service that had been entrusted to the same Wes Streeting whose partner had worked for Mandelson for three years, which was how they had met.

A Nation Run This Way Cannot Be Sovereign

George Monbiot writes:

History is being rewritten. The story we are told is that an evil man called Peter Mandelson, pursuing his own interests, went rogue to collaborate with a serial abuser of girls and women, undermining the good work of people seeking to defend the public interest. All this is true. But – and I fear many will find this hard to accept – it is only half the story.

The much harder truth is that Mandelson’s disgraceful dealings with Jeffrey Epstein were less a betrayal of his brief than an unauthorised extension of it. In 2009 – just as, we now know, Mandelson was passing sensitive information to Epstein – I argued that the government department he ran, called Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (Berr), “functions as a fifth column within government, working for corporations to undermine democracy and the public interest”.

Berr was a smaller and less chaotic version of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge). Its purpose, I suggested, was to bypass the House of Commons on behalf of capital. It allowed Gordon Brown’s government to create the impression that it was defending the public interest while simultaneously, but more quietly, appeasing powerful lobbyists. In contrast to other government departments, Berr was largely run by unelected lords, who had either been corporate executives, corporate lobbyists or, like Mandelson, members of a concierge class operating on their behalf. I wrote that these ministers, appointed by Brown, “appear to have formed their own lobby group within government”.

Berr sought to part-privatise Royal Mail, breaking a manifesto commitment. It succeeded. It tried to block the EU working time directive: UK government filibusters delayed and weakened it. It attempted, less successfully, to undermine the equality bill, whose aim was to ensure equal pay for women (Mandelson’s simultaneous dealings with Epstein were not the only respect in which he showed disdain for women’s rights). It undermined environmental legislation. It was “quietly building a bonfire of the measures that protect us from predatory corporate behaviour”.

So when Brown, who was prime minister at the time, expresses his shock and betrayal, please forgive me a small gasp of frustration. In his interview on the BBC’s Today programme, Brown claimed that in 2009: “We were solving a major financial crisis … all my thoughts were on how we could save people’s jobs and savings and their livelihoods.” But not only did he allow Mandelson to attack the public interest on behalf of business, he greatly increased Berr’s budget. This was despite the fact that, as I noted at the time, Mandelson “was partly responsible, both in Blair’s government and as European trade commissioner, for promoting the culture of deregulation that catalysed the economic crisis”. On one hand, Brown was trying to solve it. On the other, at the behest of corporate lobbyists, he was setting up the next one.

Brown also told the BBC, in justifying his appointment of Lord Mandelson, that the man had “an unblemished record as the [European] trade commissioner”. An unblemished record of what, exactly? Neocolonialism, perhaps. While Mandelson was in that post, he sought to impose draconian trade provisions on some of the poorest countries on Earth. He put pressure on them to let EU corporations muscle out local firms and make privatisation legally irreversible, threatening people’s access to health, education and water. He sought to force African countries to hand over crucial resources at the risk of widespread hunger.

Yes, when Mandelson was a minister in Brown’s government, he betrayed the national interest. But this is what, by other means, he was appointed to do. His treachery, while it went way beyond his official mandate, was not a bug, but a feature. The corrosion of democratic values was institutional. And this spirit has prevailed ever since. Keir Starmer’s government of all the lobbyists is no exception.

Brown, in proposing remedies for the secretive machinations Mandelson conducted, writes: “Conventions about commercial confidentiality should no longer prevent public service contracts delivered by private companies being subject to reasonable freedom of information requests.” I could scarcely breathe when I read that. It is exactly the demand some of us made when Brown rolled out the private finance initiative (PFI) across the public sector, enabling businesses to get their hooks into every aspect of state provisioning. When we tried to see the contracts, to understand what was being done in our name, Brown’s Treasury repeatedly blocked our information requests on the grounds of “commercial confidentiality”.

The sense of betrayal that Brown quite rightly feels is the same sense of betrayal some of us felt towards the governments in which he served. Yes, Brown had and retains some great qualities, and did much good. But he is also a remarkable escapologist. Almost everyone appears to have forgotten how his PFI programme planted a timebomb in public services, enabling corporations to take the profits while leaving the risks with the state: one of the reasons why they are now in so much trouble. Almost everyone appears to have forgotten his crucial role in the Iraq war: standing with Tony Blair and financing it. He rightly called for Vladimir Putin and his “enablers” to face justice for their crime of aggression in Ukraine. Yet it’s the same crime that Blair and his enablers (including one G Brown) committed in Iraq.

But it is not just Brown who is rewriting history. The media are 50% of any problem, and the story most of it loves to tell is of one bad apple. Heaven forfend that we see the systemic problems. There is a reason why Mandelson kept returning to government, despite sackings for his over-enthusiastic relationships with plutocrats. He was brought in to do the dirty work. The governments in which he served could loudly claim to be doing something, while subtly and simultaneously undoing it.

Mandelson’s treachery is an extreme instance of the dominant mode of UK politics over the past 45 years: the subordination of democracy to the demands of the ultra-rich. Abuse and exploitation – of women and children, of poorer countries and their people, of workers and contractors, renters and customers – are baked into the system.

If you cannot diagnose a problem, you cannot fix it. We urgently need to see this for what it is. Mandelson’s grovelling to the sinister rich is disgraceful, disgusting, deceitful, a crushing of women’s rights and of democracy. But it is not a deviation from the system. It is a manifestation of it.

And James Schneider of GB News writes:

Britain’s political scandals have acquired a peculiar quality. They don’t feel like ruptures in an otherwise healthy system, but small windows thrown open onto the machinery itself. A loan here, a consultancy there, a weekend on an oligarch’s yacht, a minister leaving office on Friday and returning on Monday as a lobbyist for the firms he once regulated. Nothing necessarily illegal. Yet each episode leaves the same impression: that the real life of the British state is conducted elsewhere, beyond the theatre of parliament, in private rooms where wealth and power recognise one another without introduction.

The Epstein-Mandelson affair belongs to this category. It’s shocking because it’s so familiar.

In Peter Mandelson – minister, fixer, envoy, consultant, intermediary between cabinet and capital – one sees the career of Britain’s governing caste in miniature. A stratum that long ago stopped representing the public and instead made politics a form of brokerage: arranging introductions, smoothing obstacles, managing the flows of other people’s money. Mandelson isn’t a deviation from the system. He is its most perfect expression.

As business secretary under Gordon Brown, Mandelson appears to have passed Jeffrey Epstein advance notice of market-moving events: details of a €500bn eurozone rescue deal hours before it became public; a confidential paper outlining £20bn of potential asset sales; and suggestions that Epstein coordinate with JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to pressure the government over taxes on bankers’ bonuses. They were the sort of signals on which currencies swing and fortunes are made.

Mandelson’s actions are best understood as the logical expression of what he’s long represented. His most famous line – that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” – is often remembered as a quip. In fact it was a doctrine. The role of government was no longer to discipline capital or direct investment toward national development. It was to reassure the wealthy that they would grow ever richer, and to manage the political consequences below.

The phrase is sometimes compared to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s “let some people get rich first”. But Deng’s tolerance of inequality was tethered to a project of national development, productive capacity, and strategic state power. Wealth was a means to secure sovereignty. In Britain, enrichment became the end in itself. Industry hollowed out. Finance swelled. The state stopped building and started selling. Where Deng used markets to strengthen the nation, Britain used the nation to service markets.

This settlement required political engineers. Mandelson was chief among them. He worked to modernise Labour’s language and rewire its loyalties – to make the party safe for boardrooms, pliable to lobbyists, and hostile to any revival of its older commitments to trade unions or public ownership. When Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership threatened that order, Mandelson boasted that he worked “every single day” to remove him. The candour was striking. It revealed what had long been true: that the party’s most senior figures felt more answerable to capital than to organised labour.

After office came monetisation. Through lobbying firm Global Counsel, Mandelson sold what really matters in modern Britain – access. Global Counsel’s client list reads like a directory of corporate power: JP Morgan, Accenture, Palantir, Shell, Nestlé, Anglo American. The firm hired him because he knew the wiring of the British state – which minister to call, which rule to soften, which door would open quietly after hours.

In other words: how to translate public authority into private advantage.

Nor was Epstein incidental to this story. At the founding of Global Counsel, the financier reportedly provided introductions and business advice, connecting Mandelson to the wealthy networks the firm would later serve. A man who would later be exposed as a child sex offender and human trafficker moved easily in these circles. This isn’t a quirk of British politics. It reflects an oligarchic logic perfected elsewhere.

In the US, wealth and office interpenetrate and elite interests reliably shape policy while public demands rarely do – as two political scientists showed more than a decade ago. Billions flood elections each cycle. Lawmakers trade shares in the very sectors they regulate. Congressional portfolios routinely beat the market. US Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s disclosed investments, for instance, have produced roughly an 838% cumulative return over the past decade – the sort of outperformance less suggestive of genius than of proximity to power. Britain has adopted the same habits with less spectacle and smaller cheques.

Here, as in the US, newspapers and broadcasters sit in the hands of billionaires and financiers. Around Westminster, politics and journalism have ceased to be adversaries and become parts of the same social world. Scrutiny softens into familiarity; policy dissolves into gossip; public life shrinks to the drama of personalities.

The media rarely treats any of this as disqualifying. On the contrary, it admires the fluency: the contacts, the cosmopolitan ease, the glide from Davos to Washington to Whitehall. It looks like sophistication. What it is is capture.

While this narrow caste circulates between cabinet, consultancy and corporate boards, the country it governs decays: stagnant wages, crumbling public services, foreign takeovers of strategic assets, an economy built on rent and speculation rather than production. Britain grows poorer even as its ruling class grows richer. The state works – efficiently, even brilliantly – for those at the top. For everyone else it pleads constraint.

Contempt for the governed has always been part of the package. Mandelson’s reported remark that working-class voters “have nowhere else to go” captures the emotional core of this regime: if your base is trapped, you are free to govern for someone else. This is what political scientist Peter Mair diagnosed as “ruling the void”: parties hollowed out, participation collapsing, democracy reduced to ritual while policy converges around the interests of capital.

So when we read those emails – a minister apparently passing sensitive state information to a private financier – we should resist the temptation to ask, “How could he?”. If politics has been reduced to managing relationships with wealth, then wealth becomes the real constituency. Everything else is theatre.

A nation run this way can’t be sovereign. Its secrets leak upward. Its wealth flows outward. And its politics are for sale.

Decline and Fall

Whatever the past indiscretions of any one or more of them, we may say with confidence that Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein did not have a threesome with John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May, Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak. Dignum et justum est that they must therefore have done so with Maxwell's old flame from Oxford, Boris Johnson, since he is one of the Gibbons, whose howl or hoot is that Christianity overthrew a superior civilisation.

The extreme depravity did not go underground. It went, as it were, overground, continuing in circles so elite that the rest of us could not usually see them. But we have seen them from time to time, and this is one of those times. Such are both the roots and the fruits of the refusal of the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism, and the Roman Empire.

I am the first to call for the release of Jimmy Lai, since I never went to Epstein Island. Enthroned in the West, in Israel and in the Gulf, by what authority does the Epstein Class presume to criticise the rulers of China or of anywhere else, such as Iran? If Reza Pahlavi is not in the published Epstein Files, then his name must have been redacted.

Iran, like Hamas, turns out to have no links whatever to Palestine Action, no member or supporter of which has been convicted of anything, never mind of anything violent. Any such future trial has been hopelessly prejudiced by Kemi Badenoch, by Chris Philp, and by various interchangeable Labour MPs whose membership of the 2024 intake proves that they were handpicked by Peter Mandelson. The only crime here is contempt of court by those politicians and by the people who, just as they never noticed anything to do with Prince Harry and drugs, also never noticed anything at all to do with the then Prince Andrew, and never noticed anything to do with Mandelson whether as a Cabinet Minister or as a European Commissioner.

After last week's acquittals, Palestine Action remains proscribed only because the present Home Secretary and the one who proscribed it, and who is now the Foreign Secretary, have threatened to resign if that proscription were lifted. Even in the context of this Government's wider travails, let them resign. Shabana Mahmood was already guaranteed to lose her seat to Akhmed Yakoob, and as for Yvette Cooper, Reform UK was already rumoured to be planning to field Lucy Connolly against her, so let the Greens or whoever put up one of the Filton Six.

Palestine Action was proscribed by an all-or-nothing measure that required any MP voting against it to vote against banning both the Russian Imperial Movement, and the Maniacs Murder Cult, which is part of the Order of the Nine Angels, itself part of the subculture that gives me most of my grief. Satanism is real, let me assure you. Now, since they needed to be banned at the same time as the feared Palestine Action, tell us about the progress of what must have been the urgently necessary action against the Russian Imperial Movement and against the Maniacs Murder Cult. They do not sound like blind wheelchair users or octogenarian clergywomen silently holding up signs. They sound like the kind of people who have turned up in the Epstein Files.