National Intelligence?

It is amazing, and yet somehow not, how many people are fooled when, sanctions or blockades having led to economic collapse and to all of its consequences, those who had imposed such measures felt able to say that they had been proved right all along, with regime change to follow. But the United States has tried before to take Cuba, which on paper ought to be easy. We do not, though, live on paper. And Tulsi Gabbard has finally had enough, as Donald Trump prepares for a war with Cuba to distract from the war with Iran, which failed to distract from the war with Venezuela, which failed to distract from the Epstein Files.

With too few stamps to qualify for the lowest pension in any comparable country, Sarah Ferguson is angling for some sort of royal income to keep her mouth shut. She is four years too young to be a WASPI woman, but lower-upper-class women will and can do pretty much anything to keep the show on the road. Casting herself as a woman wronged by the Establishment, and allying to other such of her own generation, would be in character both for her and for her sort.

Andy Burnham is courting the WASPIs, thereby courting Labour MPs. For all the convulsions in the Parliamentary Labour Party between 2015 and 2024, the one thing on which they all agreed was WASPI. Did even the seceders to Change UK dissent from that? Even if each of the 3.6 million WASPIs had been paid the full £2,950, then that would have added up to £10.62 billion, most of which would have rapidly made its way into the consumer economy that employed the young. Now keep an eye out for everything that cost more than that.

As for the trans thing, no one seriously doubts that the 56-year-old Burnham has always really thought what the 42-year-old Bridget Phillipson has just confirmed. There was not a whiff of anything else when Burnham was Health Secretary. For that, you had to wait for a Conservative Government that was really quite aggressive about it, complete with the then Jamie Wallis, Britain's first and so far only transgender MP, though not Britain's first transgender parliamentarian, since that was Nikki Sinclaire, elected as a Member of the European Parliament as long ago as 2009 under the Leadership of Nigel Farage, having twice sought election to the House of Commons under that banner after having left the Conservative Party.

Reform UK has welcomed the endorsement of Bonnie Blue, and its grandee, Ann Widdecombe, 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. 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, an autobiographical praiser of Michael Heseltine for having killed off the British coal industry, and an avowed opponent of the Assisted Suicide Bill only because it contained insufficient "safeguards".

And why not? Richard Tice wants to legalise cannabis, 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. Although Anderson changed sides having initially supported assisted suicide, Tice and Sarah Pochin voted for it all the way to Third Reading. That Farage felt the need to stop courting Ben and Zac Goldsmith indicated how far that courtship had advanced. Who needs the Greens? 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. If the line is now that "immigration hasn't gone down, it's emigration that's gone up", then not only is that factually incorrect, but emigration was around double its current level when the Minister responsible was Robert Jenrick.

Jenrick was so bent that even Boris Johnson felt obliged to sack him, but their differences were not political. Nor were those between Johnson and Scott Benton, whom Reform nevertheless refused to take, and who is therefore now running Restore Britain's by-election campaign at Makerfield, where he is telling canvassers to move on if anyone told them that they intended to vote Labour, since the point was to take votes from Reform. Extremely right-wing gay men with Theology degrees are of course routine, and among Old Testament specialists arguably especially so, but Benton came out to his parents just before his wedding to one Harry Symonds. Perhaps they had assumed until that point that he was going to be marrying Carrie Symonds? Indeed, have Harry and Carrie ever been seen together?

Imaginary Polity

Now that everyone is saying what some of us had always said about what colour a snowflake was, who had always been doing the cancelling, and whose was the omnicause, Sohrab Ahmari articulates our long-latent view that the Epstein Class Right’s hysterical nightmare of Britain mirrored the Epstein Class Left’s hysterical nightmare of America:

In November 2014, several hundred protesters marched through London’s West End before gathering in front of the old US embassy on Grosvenor Square. They were there to vent anger at a police killing that had taken the life of a black teenager, Michael Brown, nearly 5,000 miles away in Ferguson, Missouri. Their arms raised in the air, they chanted, “Hands up, don’t shoot!”, echoing a slogan of the then-nascent Black Lives Matter movement in America.

For the British Left in the “peak-woke” era, America was less a concrete place than an imaginary polity: not a constitutional republic with an admirable history of overcoming its shortcomings, but a hellhole of racist, capitalist tyranny that delighted in killing men who looked like Michael Brown and George Floyd.

Nowadays, the mirror image is taking shape on the American Right and spreading through the influence of Elon Musk: an imagined Britain lorded over by Comrade Starmer and his totalitarian minions, bent on enabling migrant and minority criminality and silencing patriots who dare to resist.

For Musk & co., the case of Henry Nowak — the Essex student allegedly stabbed to death by a Sikh man, Vickrum Digwa, late last year — epitomises this state of affairs. Digwa claims he acted in self-defence after Nowak racially abused him; Musk’s crowd are insisting that, for this reason, the police withheld medical aid to Nowak as he bled to death on the pavement. In other words, they are constructing a reverse mythos around Nowak well before the complexities are fully understood, and with the same ideological frenzy that characterised the British Left’s understanding of American conditions in an earlier era.

With “post-woke” hindsight, it’s easy to mock the British Left’s imaginary America, where cops beholden to “systemic racism” snuffed out black lives for the kicks. But to the Britons who took up BLM, their Manichaean picture of the United States was no joke — it lent an epochal importance to their local causes.

As one observer noted at the time, the Metropolitan Police officers assigned to escorting the London protesters “seemed in no mood to hassle anyone”. They kept a polite distance and ensured that everyone could exercise their freedom of speech and assembly. Indeed, most of the London police wouldn’t have been carrying guns — a fact that lent a ludic aspect to the importation of the BLM slogan.

Even so, the London progressives seemed to identify, at an intense emotional level, with the racial oppression suffered by black folks in the American Midwest. “The London Metropolitan Police move around this city like an occupying force,” one white trade unionist complained to Vice. Just like in America, with its “system that is predicated on the oppression of black people — institutionalized racism”.

The London protesters couldn’t have known that less than a year later, the Obama Department of Justice would exonerate the police officer who killed Brown after “the most definitive account yet of the shooting”, as The New York Times reported. The testimony of some 40 witnesses belied the claim that Brown had innocently raised his arms; and the DOJ, like a Missouri grand jury earlier, couldn’t contradict the officer’s assertion that he was put in reasonable fear after Brown “leaned into his patrol car, punched him, reached for his gun, and then, after running away, turned and charged at him”, as the Times put it.

When, half a decade later, another racially charged police killing took place — George Floyd’s in Minneapolis — the entire UK establishment recalled that America is a terribly, terribly racist place. They took the knee, published columns, tabled a Black Lives Matter resolution in the House of Commons, and so on. With his bureaucratic piety, Keir Starmer intoned that Floyd’s death had “shone a light on racism and hatred experienced by many in the US and beyond”.

The upshot was more “Hands up, don’t shoot!” protests in front of police officers without guns, and vandalism targeting the Cenotaph and Churchill’s statue at Westminster. Americans moved on; the cult of Floyd didn’t survive subsequent scrutiny of his life; and the Democratic Party quietly concluded that police officers are good and necessary, actually, and that defunding their departments is a dangerous — not to mention unpopular — thing to do.

Yet the tendency of America and Britain to fantasise and jump to conclusions about each other didn’t go away. It merely shifted in direction, geographically and politically. Over the past year or so — ever since Musk decided that no one had heard of the grooming-gangs scandal until he publicised it — American Right-wingers have come to develop a picture of Britain that is no less distorted than the one that the UK Left entertained of the United States.

In the US Right’s imaginary Britain, all-too-real crises are similarly magnified to monstrous scale. This Britain isn’t a constitutional democracy, blessed with an ancient and robust tradition of rule of law, in which individual and institutional actors sometimes make mistakes and sometimes act badly, even as society as a whole attempts to uphold freedom and justice. No, this Britain is a conspiracy writ large — against its white citizens, by Leftist authorities in cahoots with malevolent foreigners.

Musk’s treatment of the Nowak case is telling. As I write on Thursday, the Tesla and SpaceX boss has published no fewer than four X posts or reposts on the case in a matter of two hours: several asking why the likes of Starmer and Angela Rayner, who took the knee for Black Lives Matter, have failed to do the same for Nowak, or even to mention his name. Another post asserts that the killing of “this innocent English boy” was “aided by police”.

Musk also pledged to fund a wrongful death suit against “these disgusting excuses for law enforcement” — that is, the police officers who initially responded to the scene. Musk’s framing of the case, hourly amplified to his quarter of a billion followers, seems to rest upon accounts offered by those such as Tommy Robinson, who insists that the police “left [Nowak] to die because they heard the word ‘racism’”. Replied Musk: “Unconscionable.”

Yet this simplistic telling — oi, you were racist, mate? Then I guess we’ll let you bleed! — is being cast into doubt as the alleged killer’s trial unfolds at Southampton Crown Court.

Nicholas Lobbenberg, the prosecutor, noted that the police did initially handcuff Nowak “and started giving him first aid when he then collapsed”, as the BBC summarised his statement. “Shortly afterwards,” the prosecutor told the court, “Henry became unconscious, then police began to set to work to give him first aid and summon an ambulance, a doctor flew in by helicopter but there was nothing that could be done to save Henry and he was declared dead.”

The prosecution’s account still leaves many questions unanswered, not least why the police handcuffed Nowak. But what we know so far — first-aid application, a physician flown in — makes it hard to believe that police “left [Nowak] to die” because they thought he was a racist.

The far more plausible interpretation is that the police initially misunderstood what was happening as they were trying to make split-second decisions amid a chaotic scene. Is it possible that progressive police training played some role in their decision-making? Maybe. The responding officers should face questioning about all of this, and no doubt will. And if ideology was a factor in their conduct, they should face consequences, and reforms must be instituted.

But that’s just the thing: very little of this has been carefully examined and analysed, while already, Musk and his local allies like Robinson are jumping to a stark conclusion: white lives don’t matter in modern Britain. Much as, a decade or so ago, British progressive activists and too many in the liberal establishment permitted a similarly ideologised lens to distort their perception of justice, race, and policing in America.

Will the reductive passion plays and martyr cults of the racial Right prove any less destructive — of institutions and truth procedures — than did those of the Left? Either way, Musk won’t be the one paying the price.

Report Card

In the last days of the Blair Government, and in the prose style of one still not quite 30, I wrote of "a unifying tradition, which has come down from the ultraconservative Colbert through the Liberal Keynes via FDR, which has come down from the ultraconservative Bismarck through the Liberal Beveridge, which was epitomised by Lloyd George in his heyday, and which flowered must fully in government under Attlee."

A highly ambitious hanger-on of that dying regime found that the most hilarious gotcha moment, accusing me of believing that Stephen Colbert's character on The Colbert Report was a real person. At that point, I had never heard of Stephen Colbert. I have still never seen more than a few minutes of him in anything. But in gratitude for that perfect anecdote alone, I wish him the most blissful of retirements.

The Hiding Is Over

Paul Knaggs is rightly delighted:

The EHRC Code Ends Eight Months of Confusion: But Will Labour Act?

After eight months of delay, the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s statutory Code of Practice has been formally laid before Parliament. For every NHS trust, council, charity and quango that has spent years hiding behind confusion, the hiding is over.

The code of practice is not a pamphlet. It is not a recommendation. It is not a consultation exercise or a diversity working group’s output. Laid before Parliament on 21 May 2026, it is statutory guidance, approved by the Secretary of State, carrying the weight of the Equality Act 2010, and grounded in the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers. Courts and tribunals must take it into account. Lawyers must advise their clients by it. Service providers ignore it at their legal peril.

This publication should not require celebration. It should have been obvious from the moment of the Supreme Court judgment more than a year ago. But in a country where obvious things are routinely made obscure when they inconvenience the right people, it is worth stating plainly: “The law has been confirmed, the Code has been laid, and the age of institutional excuse has ended.”

Every organisation that spent the last year hiding behind “confusion” now has nothing left to hide behind. That is not a culture war. That is the law.

WHAT THE CODE ACTUALLY SAYS

The Code runs to more than three hundred pages. Its core meaning fits in a paragraph. Sex, in the Equality Act 2010, means biological sex. Not certificated sex. Not self-declared identity. Biological sex: the material, observable, unchosen fact of what a human being is. The Code states plainly that a person’s sex remains their biological sex whether or not they hold a Gender Recognition Certificate. A trans man is, in Equality Act terms, female. A trans woman is, in Equality Act terms, male.

Service providers can lawfully provide single-sex services where doing so is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. The Code gives examples: a women-only hospital ward, a women-only changing room, a domestic abuse refuge. It sets out the factors a provider must weigh: whether users may be undressed, whether they can leave or access an alternative, whether the service is connected to male violence against women, whether physical differences between the sexes are relevant to the delivery of that service.

On sport, the Code is equally clear. Sex-based rules in gender-affected activities should be applied on the basis of biological sex. Trans people should not be included in single-sex competitions for the sex with which they identify.

And on the question many providers have been quietly banking on, the Code is blunt. If a provider admits trans people to a service intended for the opposite sex, that service can no longer rely on the Equality Act’s single-sex exceptions. A women-only service that admits males is not a women-only service. The legal fiction collapses. The exception evaporates.

A women-only service that admits males is not a women-only service. The Code does not say this diplomatically. It says it legally.

THE COST OF EIGHT MONTHS 

The Code was not published in September 2025, when the Supreme Court’s judgment was already settled law. It was not published in October, or November, or through the winter months that followed. For eight months, public bodies were left in a state of manufactured uncertainty, and a good many of them used that uncertainty as cover to maintain policies that had no legal foundation.

The Watershed Arts Cinema in Bristol told the BBC it had already installed gender-neutral facilities with full floor-to-ceiling cubicles. Its chief executive described the long wait for guidance as “confusing and toxic,” adding that changes would be costly for organisations like theirs. That is a candid admission, and it deserves a candid response: the cost of confusion is always borne by someone. In this case, as in most cases, it has been borne by women.

The organisations that used the delay as cover are not all arts centres trying to be inclusive. Some are NHS trusts that placed biological males in female wards. Some are local councils that gutted the single-sex character of their services in compliance with Stonewall’s now-discredited Workplace Equality Index. Some are universities. Some are charities, including domestic abuse charities, funded by the public to serve women who have survived male violence, which opened their services to men on the basis of self-declaration alone.

Those organisations were not confused. They made choices. They will now have to answer for them.

THE CLASS DIMENSION THAT NEVER GETS NAMED 

There is something that the gender ideology debate almost never confronts, something that Labour Heartlands has consistently placed at the centre of its analysis: this is a class question.

The women most affected by the erosion of single-sex spaces are not the women with platforms, not the women who can afford private healthcare, not the women who work in organisations progressive enough to offer multiple facility options and enough staff to enforce them. They are the women who use public changing rooms because they cannot afford a gym with private cubicles. They are the women who depend on NHS wards because they have no private health insurance. They are the women in prisons. They are the women in refuges. They are the women at the bottom of the income distribution, who cannot opt out of shared spaces because they have no alternative.

For those women, the principle is not abstract. The changing room, the hospital ward, the refuge room: these are not theoretical rights. They are the material conditions of ordinary life. And when institutions strip those spaces of their single-sex character in the name of inclusion, the cost is not distributed equally. It falls on the women who can least afford to bear it.

The women who can least afford to bear the cost are the ones who have been made to bear it. That is not progress. That is a betrayal dressed in progressive language.

LABOUR’S RECKONING WITH ITSELF 

This publication has made no secret of its view that the Labour Party under Keir Starmer failed women on this question. The failure was not accidental. It was ideological, in the precise sense that word deserves: a preference for the comfort of certain political networks over the material interests of the working-class women Labour claims to represent.

Starmer’s equivocation over whether trans women are women was not a clumsy answer in a difficult interview. It was a studied response calibrated for a particular political audience. His government’s delay in publishing EHRC guidance was not administrative slowness. Baroness Falkner, Chair of the EHRC, made public what she observed: that the government was dragging its feet, that there was reluctance at ministerial level, that the pressure of trans rights organisations was being weighed against the Supreme Court’s unanimous judgment.

This is what ideological capture looks like in practice. Not jackboots. Not a single dramatic betrayal. A series of reasonable-sounding delays, all pointing in the same direction, all serving the same interest, and none of them serving working-class women.

The Code is now before Parliament. Labour MPs will have 40 days to pray against it if they choose. Any attempt to dilute, delay, or discard the Code through the parliamentary process will be a public act, on the record, attributable to named individuals. Women will be watching. 

TRANS RIGHTS AND MATERIAL REALITY: THEY ARE NOT THE SAME ARGUMENT 

Labour Heartlands has said this before and will say it again, because it bears repetition in a debate that generates more heat than light. Nobody serious argues that trans people should be harassed, abused, or left without facilities. Trans people have rights in law. Those rights are real and they should be protected.

What the gender lobby has demanded, however, is not equal provision. It has demanded access to women’s provision. The Code now makes the distinction explicit. Where trans people cannot access a service as currently constituted, providers are expected to consider whether a third or gender-neutral option can be offered. The BBC’s own broadcast coverage of the Code’s publication stated this plainly: providers should ensure trans people are not left without services, while single-sex services must operate on the basis of biological sex.

That is the balance. It is not complicated. It requires only that institutions stop pretending the law says something it does not say, and start applying the law as it actually stands. 

PARLIAMENT’S CHOICE 

The Code now sits before the House of Commons and the House of Lords for a statutory period of 40 days. If neither House rejects it, the Secretary of State can bring it into force. This is the parliamentary process working as it should: transparency, scrutiny, accountability.

What it requires of Parliament is something in increasingly short supply: the courage to let a plain legal reality stand without hedging, qualifying, or manoeuvring around it for the benefit of lobby groups with more social media presence than democratic legitimacy.

Women’s rights campaigners, who won the Supreme Court case and have waited patiently while institutions dithered and ministers equivocated, have said it themselves: organisations that have been holding on to their old policies have been breaching the law. There is no reason to delay further. That includes employers and service providers alike.

The Code confirms that providing only mixed-sex services, without any separate or single-sex option, could amount to direct or indirect sex discrimination against women, and unlawful harassment in contexts involving undress, vulnerability, privacy, dignity, or male violence. That is not a political opinion. It is a legal finding, set out in statutory guidance, laid before Parliament. 

Parliament now faces a simple choice: let the law stand, or explain to the women of this country why it should not. 

THE FAILURE OF THE UNIONS

The arrival of the Code is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of a new phase: enforcement, litigation, and institutional accountability. The organisations that spent years running policies incompatible with the law will now face legal exposure. Women who were excluded from services they were entitled to will have clearer grounds for complaint and legal action. Employers who maintained self-identification policies as if the Supreme Court had never spoken will need to reckon with what they have been doing.

Nowhere has the betrayal been more complete, or more instructive, than in the trade union movement. Unions exist to protect workers. That is their single, irreducible purpose. Yet when women workers needed them most, many chose ideology over membership. The Royal College of Nursing did not defend Sandie Peggie, the Scottish nurse suspended by NHS Fife after she objected to changing alongside a biological male colleague: her own lawyer argued the RCN had contributed to her mistreatment across an eighteen-month disciplinary ordeal that cost Peggie her health and her livelihood, and which NHS Fife ultimately resolved by conceding there was insufficient evidence of any misconduct.

Peggie is now suing the RCN for that failure. The same RCN had, tellingly, written to County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust to inform the trust it was breaking the law by failing to provide single-sex changing facilities for its female staff, after eight nurses at Darlington Memorial Hospital were left sharing a changing room with a biological male who allegedly watched them undress. The union found its voice in England while staying silent in Scotland.

The incoming General Secretary of Unison, the largest healthcare union in the country with half a million NHS members, then announced she would not feel comfortable representing a member with gender-critical beliefs; a legal expert noted that such a refusal would itself constitute unlawful discrimination under the Equality Act.

And in Leeds, a Muslim woman and senior programme manager at NHS England, who holds gender-critical beliefs and suffers from PTSD resulting from male sexual violence, has just won an employment tribunal against her employer after NHS England’s 2017 Trans Equality Policy required her to share single-sex toilet and changing facilities with biological males.

The tribunal found the policy amounted to indirect sex discrimination; NHS England had itself acknowledged that Muslim women, women with PTSD, and women in general suffered a disadvantage as a result. The Code now lays down what unions should always have defended. The question is whether they will defend it going forward, or continue to privilege the demands of trans activist networks over the elementary rights of their female members.

The answer to those questions has never changed. The Code simply makes it harder to pretend otherwise.

Non Sanz Droict?

Despite having received a tax-free gift of five million pounds either for his security or as his reward for Brexit, Nigel Farage has managed to acquire a County Court Judgment for an unpaid bill of £9,400. He claims that until Channel 4 News approached him about it, then he had not known. He had not known that he had a CCJ against his name, and that for nearly 10 grand? Pull the other one. Or he had not known that he had ever owed the money? Pull the first one again.

Thankfully, Reform UK has a positive embarrassment of talent. Last year, Reform's George Finch became the Leader of Warwickshire County Council, with its budget of two billion pounds. Two weeks ago, he was also elected to Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council. Last week, he became Leader of the 15-strong Reform Group, which had become the largest on the council. And yesterday, he became the Leader of Nuneaton and Bedworth, while remaining Leader of Warwickshire. He is 19 years old. Nineteen.

Five Go Adventuring Again?

Labour in these parts has periodically been running decoy candidates since time immemorial. If dominant parties in other parts of the country have not also been doing so, then my respect for them has been diminished accordingly. But there is no danger of that in Tameside, as Alec Herron writes:

The Mill can reveal that five arrests have been made following our investigation into claims that fake independents were put forward by Tameside Labour in May’s local elections, in order to split opposition votes.

Four men and a woman aged between 23 and 47 were arrested this morning in the Ashton-under-Lyne area, as a result of what the police are calling ‘illegality and criminality’ in the run up to the St Peter’s ward election on May 7th. The arrests were made on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud, and police investigations are ongoing.

Our investigation heard that internal messages had been circulated in Labour WhatsApp groups leading to the election, discussing the tactic of planting stooge Independents in order to split the vote of opposition candidates who could benefit from defecting Labour supporters. The messages were allegedly instantly deleted by other group members, and instructions sent to not discuss the topic in that forum. The Mill investigation linked three of the four official backers of alleged ‘fake’ Independent candidates in St Peter’s – Marie Fairhurst and Muhammad Ali – to the campaign launch party of Labour candidate Atta Ul-Rasool.

Read our full investigation here.

As Daniel Martin, Gordon Rayner and Genevieve Holl-Allen write:

Angela Rayner has become embroiled in a row linked to alleged electoral fraud at her local council.

Four men and a woman, all aged between 23 and 47, were arrested on Thursday morning on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud, Greater Manchester Police said.

It follows claims that fake independent candidates were entered on the ballot for Tameside borough council, in the heart of Ms Rayner’s constituency of Ashton-under-Lyne, to split votes for opposition parties.

The alleged plot was reportedly carried out by people associated with Tameside Labour group, with one discussion said to have taken place in Ms Rayner’s kitchen.

Labour candidate Atta ul-Rasool, the former vice-chairman of the Ashton-under-Lyne Labour branch, was elected after beating the second-placed candidate, Ahmed Mehmood, an independent, by 177 votes.

The two alleged fake candidates received 291 votes between them. St Peter’s ward was the only one in Tameside to return a Labour councillor on May 7, with the remaining 18 being won by Reform UK, resulting in no single party having overall control of the council.

The Telegraph understands that the former deputy prime minister says the developments have nothing to do with her, and that any suggestion she has been involved in or aware of any alleged wrongdoing is baseless.

The arrests come at a critical time for the Labour Party in Manchester. It is less than four weeks before a crucial by-election in Makerfield in which Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, will seek to become the MP and then challenge Sir Keir Starmer for the party leadership.

An investigation by the Manchester Mill website reported claims that the fake independents were put forward by people associated with the Tameside Labour group. Philip Wilson-Marks, the former vice-chairman of the Ashton-under-Lyne Community Labour Party, allegedly told the Mill that he was approached twice to propose the fake independent tactic, with one of these approaches taking place in Ms Rayner’s kitchen.

A woman in the area with the same name as one of the alleged fake candidates had no idea she was on the ballot paper, according to the Tameside Correspondent, a local media outlet, which approached her.

Fake candidates ‘discussed on WhatsApp groups’

Manchester Mill reported allegations that internal messages had been posted in WhatsApp groups connected to the Labour Party, discussing planting fake independent candidates on the ballot paper.

The tactic would split the votes going against the Labour candidate. The messages were allegedly deleted instantly by other members of the group, with instructions not to discuss the topic in the chat.

A spokesman for Greater Manchester Police said: “This morning, officers in Tameside arrested five people on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud as part of an investigation into alleged offences committed leading up to the local elections.

“In the days leading up to and following the election on May 7, we received reports surrounding concerns about candidates within the St Peter’s ward.

“Following initial enquiries last week, we have launched a full investigation into the allegations.

“The work is specifically investigating the process of how candidates were put forward and represented in the ward, and if this adhered to the relevant legislation and electoral procedures.

“The five people – four men and a woman aged between 23 and 47 – were arrested at addresses in Tameside this morning. They remain in custody for questioning.

“We are working closely with the Electoral Commission and local partners as part of our enquiries.”

The Telegraph understands that Labour is not aware that any of the individuals arrested are party figures.

A Labour Party spokesman said: “No evidence has been presented of any Labour Party involvement in these allegations. We categorically reject any suggestion that the party was involved.

“The local Labour team is focused on what really matters – delivering for residents and protecting services, not playing political games. We are unable to provide any further comment while police inquiries are underway.”

While Sundus Abdi writes:

Five people have been arrested as part of a police investigation into allegations that fake independent candidates were used to influence the outcome of a local election in Tameside.

Greater Manchester police said four men and a woman, aged between 23 and 47, were arrested on suspicion of fraud offences on Thursday morning in the Ashton-under-Lyne area.

The force said the arrests related to the “process of how candidates were put forward and represented in the ward, and if this adhered to the relevant legislation and electoral procedures”.

The Mill, a Manchester-based publication, had investigated claims that individuals were encouraged to stand as independent candidates in the St Peter’s ward election in May to split opposition votes and benefit Labour.

Atta Ul-Rasool, the Labour candidate, won the St Peter’s ward seat with 177 votes more than Ahmed Mehmood, an independent candidate, and was the only Labour candidate to win a seat in Tameside.

Two other independent candidates, Marie Fairhurst and Muhammad Ali, received a combined 291 votes. The Mill reported that both candidates had little visible campaign presence and did not respond to attempts to contact them during the election campaign.

After the result, the Tameside Correspondent reported that Fairhurst said she had not been aware she was standing as a candidate.

Kaleel Khan, a councillor who managed Mehmood’s campaign, told The Mill he intended to challenge the election result at Tameside council.

No charges have been brought. The police investigation continues.

A Wealth of Opportunities

In 1988, the taxation of wealth at a lower rate than earnings was corrected by Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson. But in 1998, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown put the clock back to the Chancellor of the Exchequer who had gone on, as First Lord of the Treasury, to introduce monetarism to Britain 50 years ago this December. Now, though, even Wes Streeting wants to tax capital gains at the same rate as earnings.

Yet Thatcher must never have seen a banknote, since she thought that the State had no money of its own. In reality, the issuing of currency is an act of the State, which is literally the creator of all money. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control. The responsibility of the Government is to ensure the supply of goods and services to be purchased with that currency.

It is impossible for the currency-issuing State to run out of money. Money “lent” to the Treasury by the Bank of England is money “lent” to the State by the State; such “debt” will never be called in, much less will bailiffs be sent round. Call this “the Magic Money Tree” if you will. There is no comparison between running the economy and managing a household budget, or even a business. There is no “national credit card” to “max out”. “Fiscal headroom” is only the gap between the Government’s tax and spending plans and what would be allowed under the fiscal rules that it sets for itself and changes frequently.

That is what both fiscal policy and monetary policy are for: to give the currency its value by controlling inflation to a politically chosen extent while discouraging certain politically chosen forms of behaviour, and while encouraging others, including economic equality, which is fundamental to social cohesion and thus to patriotism. If there were “no such thing as society”, and Thatcher really did say that, then there could be no such thing as the society that was the family, or the society that was the nation. But there is no debt. It is an accounting trick. The Treasury, which is the State, has mostly issued bonds to the Bank of England, which is the State. Even when those bonds were held by the big scary “bond markets”, then the State could simply issue itself with enough of its own free-floating, fiat currency to redeem them. Say it again that there is no debt. There is no debt. There is no debt.

The money can always be found for wars. But taxation is not where the State’s money comes from. Nothing is “unaffordable”, every recession is discretionary on the part of the Government, and there is no such thing as “taxpayers’ money”. Within and under that understanding, a tax of one to two per cent on assets above £10 million could make up the abolition of the two-child benefit cap 17 times over, while merely taxing each of Britain’s 173 billionaires down to one billion pounds per head would raise £1.1 trillion, an entire year’s tax take. And so on. With the Gulf looking a lot less attractive, the tiny numbers of people directly affected would not get a better deal anywhere that they might ever wish to live. Even the putative Iranian nuclear cloud has a silver lining.

There was never any case for retaining the two-child benefit cap or for withdrawing the Winter Fuel Payment from anyone, and there is none for cutting the benefits of the sick and disabled as if that would cure them or find them jobs,  or for increasing workers’ bus fares by 50 per cent, or for failing to freeze Council Tax, or for threatening to abolish the single person discount, or for increasing employers’ National Insurance contributions so as to destroy charities and small businesses while making it impossible for big businesses to take on staff or to increase wages, or for forcing working farmers of many decades’ standing who formally inherited their parents’ farms to sell them to giant American agribusinesses, or for any other form of austerity.

There is an unanswerable economic and moral case for the full compensation of, among others, the victims of Orgreave, Grenfell Tower, the Windrush scandal, the Post Office scandal, and the contaminated blood scandal, as well as the nuclear test veterans, the WASPI women, and those, such as Andrew Malkinson, who had been wrongfully imprisoned. All while renationalising the railways, the water companies, the Royal Mail that pretty much seems to have given up, and the energy companies that have tripled their standing charges since 2021 while their captive “regulator” increased their cap to order.