No Longer Theoretical

Although he oddly does not mention the reduction to zero of the rate of VAT on domestic electricity, and I almost dare the Government to put that back up again in April, Brendan Chilton writes:

Britain’s debate about Europe has been trapped between two competing stories. One says Brexit liberated Britain from an inflexible political and economic structure. The other says Brexit inflicted lasting economic damage that can only be repaired through much closer integration. We voted to leave the European Union, and some of the strongest support for leave was in Labour constituencies.

The Prime Minister Andy Burnham has firmly challenged the first account. At the Party conference he argued that Brexit had done “more harm than good” and that Britain needed to determine its long-term relationship with its largest market, however, on many indicators we have performed better than France and Germany, outside the EU. Some within the Labour family are nervous about opening that debate again. Lucy Powell expressed concern that going beyond Keir Starmer’s reset plans was not “possible or desirable” and the Business Secretary has warned that renegotiating would lead to significant uncertainty for businesses.

Those arguments deserve serious consideration. But there is another question Labour should examine equally seriously: What would Britain lose by rejoining?

The freedoms acquired outside the EU are no longer theoretical. Labour is exercising them. Britain now operates an independent trade policy. The government has agreements with 74 countries. We have the best trading relationship with the EU of any non-member state. Britain has joined the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, while Labour concluded the UK-India agreement negotiated in 2025. The Government estimates the latter could eventually increase trade by £25.5 billion annually and UK GDP by £4.8 billion. These are enormous achievements and have only happened because we are outside the EU.

The CPTPP is particularly significant. It gives British businesses preferential access across an 11-country partnership whose economies, including Britain, were worth almost £13 trillion in 2025 and growing fast. These agreements do not compensate automatically for barriers to Britain’s largest neighbouring market. Geography matters in trade, about 46 percent of UK trade is with the EU. But UK trade with non-EU countries now accounts between 54 percent and 59 percent of our exports. Our trade with non-EU countries is growing. This cannot simply be ignored.

There is similar freedom over industrial policy. EU membership did not prohibit our having an industrial strategy, and several EU countries demonstrate that. Britain nevertheless now operates its own subsidy-control system rather than the EU state-aid regime. It allows public authorities to provide subsidies subject to domestic principles and Britain’s international commitments. The government has established streamlined routes covering areas including local growth, research and development, housing and energy use. That matters as Andy Burnham’s government seeks to reindustrialise Britain. A recent example is the excellent decision to determine that defence contracts will only be awarded to British firms and ports for naval procurement. Security, defence and growing the economy all in one.

The government is changing public procurement. Around £400 billion passes through government contracting annually, and ministers are developing procurement policy to strengthen strategically important industries including steel, shipbuilding, energy infrastructure and AI while improving access for smaller businesses. Leaving the EU does not magically produce good industrial policy. It simply changes where decisions can be made and British governments can determine policy that best suits our needs.

Regulation provides another example. Recent economic growth in the UK has largely been underpinned by huge innovations and investment in tech, AI, and professional services. The UK’s light regulatory framework has resulted in the UK leading in Europe in this field. Meanwhile, the EU has been rigid and top down, compared to the UK’s sector specific guidance. Returning to the EU would result in these crucial areas for future economic growth being constrained and the excessive regulation could deter investment.

Britain also possesses greater autonomy over tariffs. Since leaving the EU, businesses have been able to request UK-specific tariff suspensions on imported inputs, with more than 300 implemented following previous application round. We have also been able to escape some of the tougher sanctions placed on the EU by the US. Our agility in this area is crucial. Businesses have adapted to the new norm and are taking advantage of the best trading relationship with the EU, with customs checks completed online, minimising any border friction.

Sometimes common rules are preferable. A manufacturer selling into European markets may value one regulatory standard more than Britain’s theoretical freedom to devise another. Labour’s developing approach implicitly recognises this: align where alignment brings worthwhile economic benefits, retain autonomy where divergence serves a strategic purpose. This does not require us to rejoin the EU or tear up our trade deals by entering a customs union, or to lose control of our borders by accepting free movement in the Single Market. This third way is a more sophisticated stance than, “diverge from Brussels everywhere” or “follow Brussels everywhere”. Its British pragmatic.

Instead of seeking to re-open the Brexit debate, which was the most divisive and polarising period in British politics lets focus on being the best of allies, in cooperation but without membership. Labour’s 2024 manifesto offered precisely that settlement and provided business with the confidence that we would not return to the uncertainty of Brexit arguments. Our manifesto promised that Britain would stay outside the EU, Single Market and customs union while seeking to reduce unnecessary trade barriers and strengthen European security cooperation.

Brexit did not guarantee prosperity and progress. Nor does EU membership. Across Europe, the far right is on the march and economies are struggling. The AfD in Germany, Le Pen in France, Wilders in Holland and the populist parties of Eastern and Central Europe. If we were to rejoin, we would not be joining a progressive trading bloc, but one dominated by the hard right.

We have been outside the EU formally just six years. Before reopening the enormous constitutional question of membership, this Labour government should at least establish whether we can make a success of it as a serious nation, rather than create uncertainty, division and polarisation by re-opening a debate largely settled in the country.

After all, as Rokhaya Diallo writes:

As a secondary school pupil in 1994, I took part in protests against a reform that would have allowed French employers to pay young people below the minimum wage. Our campaign was successful, but if we had had to face the terrifying police response unleashed on student protesters in France over recent weeks, I would have stayed at home.

A 14-year-old boy, Eden, suffered a fractured jaw and had teeth knocked out after a police tear gas grenade struck him in the face. Sixteen-year-old Maël lost the sight in one eye allegedly after being struck by a shot from an LBD, a form of rubber-bullet launcher. Evan, 15, had his hand blown off in an explosion involving a police stun grenade. And in Dunkirk, a police SUV is alleged to have driven repeatedly at groups of secondary school pupils, as an officer could be heard saying: “Come closer, we’ll smash their fucking faces in.” Accounts from children left terrified by brutal treatment in police custody describe traumatic experiences with severe psychological and physical consequences.

France, the self-styled home of human rights, is now attracting the kind of international legal scrutiny you would expect if this were an authoritarian regime gone mad. The human rights organisation Ligue des droits de l’Homme has condemned the alarming “brutalisation of young people”, and the threat to their freedom of expression.

A UN special rapporteur has called on the French authorities to respect the physical safety of protesters. The UN human rights office says it is following incidents surrounding the protests in France “with concern”. Amnesty International has called for the suspension of rubber-bullet launchers at school protests, condemned the disproportionate use of force and reminded the authorities of their duty to protect children. The Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, whose activism increasingly encompasses struggles against oppression and state violence, travelled to France this week to support school pupils.

It is often argued that France is broke, and that crippling debt levels make the student demand for €10bn of investment to improve their learning conditions a non-starter. But even in our difficult fiscal position, public spending is a political choice: to reduce debt you can cut public spending or you can raise revenue.

Economists Élise Huillery and Romane Paris have come up with a credible proposal for investing an additional €11.8bn a year in education, funded through tax reform targeting large inheritances, raising €12.7bn in 2026 and increasing taxes only for the wealthiest 1% of heirs. This would make money available to raise teachers’ pay, improve support for pupils, student grants and housing, and expand university places.

But the debate about public spending does not invalidate the legitimate grievances of pupils, teachers and parents, which are not new. Nor does it justify a vicious law and order response. Learning conditions in some of the most disadvantaged schools have been deteriorating to shockingly poor levels for a long time. I highlighted school conditions in France in the Guardian three years ago, arguing then that the state education system was among the most unequal in the developed world. The lack of resources assigned to such basic things as teaching vacancies has been glaringly apparent for years, with jobs in some districts sometimes left unfilled for months.

More than 20m teaching hours were lost in state secondary schools in 2024-25, equivalent to almost one in 10 lessons. More than 15m of those hours were lost because no replacement teachers were provided. Schools in designated priority education areas, which serve disadvantaged communities, have been particularly affected, according to France’s National Audit Office.

In Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest part of mainland France, two-thirds of school doctor posts were vacant in 2023. As early as 2022, the Créteil education authority reported a shortfall of 60 school nurses and 20 social workers, with 90% of the unfilled posts in Seine-Saint-Denis. In 2025, 49 suicides were recorded among staff in the national education system. While these deaths cannot all be attributed to work, it is hard to avoid thinking of the severe deterioration in working conditions across the sector.

Then there are the schools that are physically falling apart: water that is unsafe to drink because of bacterial contamination, pupils reporting rats and cockroaches, filthy toilets, and in one case, a septic tank that overflows when it rains. There are power cuts, missing furniture and some classrooms are so poorly insulated that temperatures fall below 14C in winter and hit 40C during heatwaves.

In Mayotte, where protests began, a secondary school built for 900 pupils is accommodating 2,300. The protests then spread to mainland France through a school in Créteil that began the academic year short of 13 teachers and other staff, as well as a deputy headteacher.

Another issue at the core of pupils’ anger is Parcoursup, the system through which school leavers apply for higher education. Seen as discriminatory, it has left 126,000 applicants – many from disadvantaged backgrounds – without a place this year.

Rather than deal with this crisis as justified social protest based on legitimate demands, the government has invoked a doctrine set out in its Operational Guide to Urban Violence. It has treated school pupils as internal enemies to be neutralised. This sets up a coercive response, disregarding the possibility of resolving the conflict through constructive measures.

By 8 October, 6,877 people had been taken into police custody, about 80% of them children. On 1 October alone, police made 1,949 arrests, exceeding the highest single-day total recorded since 1961, says the historian Éric Anceau. According to the Syndicat de la magistrature, a French judges’ leftwing union, the numbers reflect a clear determination to crush the movement. So overwhelming has the police deployment been that teachers and parents have had to form human chains to protect children.

The police operations are also driven by a focus on arrests, which encourages forceful confrontations and fuels the escalation. This in turn draws more people into rioting. About 700 police officers and a number of teachers have been injured since the start of the unrest.

The sociologist Olivier Fillieule points out that policing protests requires an assessment of risk. If the swift break-up a blockade exposes teenagers to serious injury, you have to consider alternatives. Temporarily accepting a degree of disorder when immediate intervention risks creating more of it should remain a guiding principle of policing protests, Filleule says, noting that the French authorities know how to apply restraint when farmers stage blockades.

Yet while the police have opened internal investigations into 36 allegations of officer violence, the interior minister Laurent Nuñez said he had given the forces “no instructions to exercise restraint”. This is a shameful and contemptuous way to respond to young people’s healthy expression of dissent. Such violence towards citizens has no place in a democracy.

While the great Thomas Fazi provides the bigger picture:

It started with diesel. In late September, truck drivers in Calabria and Sicily began blocking motorway junctions with their lorries. Fuel prices had been climbing since the US and Israel attacked Iran in February, disrupting oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. By late September, diesel cost more than €2.30 a litre. When the government’s latest fuel tax cut expired on 5 October, prices rose further. For truckers, filling a tank that once cost €1,500 could now cost closer to €2,500.

Within weeks, the protests had spread across southern Italy, with thousands of farmers, fishermen and lorry drivers blockading roads. Street vendors, small shopkeepers and ordinary families, squeezed by the cost of living, soon joined them. A national demonstration has been called in Rome for 27 October. “We are not at war with anyone,” said one Calabrian farmer. “They are waging war against us.”

So far, the government’s response has ranged from indifference to paralysis. It allowed the fuel tax cut to expire and never issued the decree that would have returned the state’s additional VAT revenues to motorists. Requests for meetings with Matteo Salvini’s transport ministry went unanswered.

Italy is not an isolated case. In France, students at hundreds of high schools have taken to the streets to demand better funding, infrastructure repairs, and educational reforms. In Spain, rising rents and speculative investment funds have set off mass protests over housing. And in Belgium, anti-austerity protests have swept through the country. The triggers, the people involved, and the demands all differ: students, tenants, small haulage firms, farmers. But they are all reacting to the same thing, which is the steady increase in the cost of living.

Both of those come from the geopolitical choices of Europe’s governments. First they cut themselves off from cheap Russian energy. Then they went along with a US-made war in the Middle East that has driven oil prices up again — issuing performative denunciations but, in fact, allowing Washington free use of its bases in Europe in support of military operations against Iran, as Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte acknowledged.

On top of that, they have committed to huge increases in military spending, all while complying with the EU’s notoriously rigid fiscal rules. The mechanism is straightforward: money for the warfare state has to come from the welfare state.

Giorgia Meloni’s recent address to parliament was revealing. She restated her firm support for Kyiv and blamed the fuel spike mainly on the war in Iran, without saying a word against the government that started it.

It is hard to think of a better illustration of the self-defeating Atlanticism of Europe’s leaders. At Washington’s urging, Europe now uses more expensive American LNG, and bankrolls a war in Ukraine that has done enormous damage to Europe’s own economies. Now they are so committed to that course that they are doubling down on it, even as Washington relaxes the pressure on Moscow and starts buying its diesel.

That position will become harder to hold, in Italy and across Europe. Of all the regions locked into the West’s confrontations with Russia and Iran, Europe pays the highest price: it imports its energy, it is losing industry, and its budgets are tightly constrained. For decades, aligning with Washington was sold to Europeans as the price of prosperity. Now the prosperity is gone, and the bill remains.

The tractors on the Autostrada 14 and the boats stuck in Calabrian harbours show that this bargain is coming apart. Governments that keep supporting a forever war in Ukraine, and deferring to Washington in the Middle East, should expect many more of them.

Leading the peerless Paul Knaggs to write:

The core of Jeffrey Sachs’s warning to the European Parliament fits on a postcard, which is presumably why so few people in power will repeat it. You do not corner a nuclear state. Sachs reaches back to the Cuban Missile Crisis and to John F. Kennedy, who had looked over the edge and come back from it. In his American University address of June 1963, Kennedy warned that nuclear powers must avoid confrontations that force an adversary to choose between humiliating retreat and nuclear war. He put the words “above all” in front of that sentence. He had earned the right to. Russia has roughly 1,600 strategic warheads deployed today. Europe’s political class discusses humiliating it the way other people discuss a football result. Sachs names the people doing it, which is more than most commentators will risk, and then makes the point that ought to end the argument: the pundits assuring us the nuclear threats are a bluff will not be available for comment afterwards if they are wrong.

The War Economy Comes at an Economic Price 

Then comes the section that should trouble anyone who pays a gas bill. Sachs is a development economist by trade, and what he sees in Europe is not a strategy at all. He sees a continent that cut itself off from its nearest supplier of cheap energy, watched its industrial base buckle under the price of American liquefied natural gas, and then announced that the answer to all of it is rearmament. Hundreds of billions for weapons. Keynesian militarism, as he calls it, with the quality of life it was supposed to deliver nowhere in sight. He is blunt about what that buys. Britain cannot keep its health service open. Schools across the continent are failing the children sitting in them. We propose to run a war economy on top of public services we have already proved we cannot fund.

Strip away the flags and it is a transfer, and not a complicated one. The arms manufacturers take the contracts. The politicians take the applause. The working class takes the bill, in taxes now and potentially in blood later, should anyone be reckless enough to finish what the rhetoric starts. You do not build prosperity by building missiles. You build it with a productive economy, secure work, affordable energy and the unglamorous business of investing in people. Europe needs an industrial strategy. What it is being handed is a procurement programme with a grievance attached.

Keynesian Militarism and the Decay of European Public Services 

This is the most damning charge in the hour, and Sachs lands it almost in passing. Europe’s leaders no longer have an economic vision. There is no answer to the closing factories, no answer to energy costs strangling the firms still standing, no plan for what this continent makes or sells or builds in twenty years. Into that vacuum has gone rearmament, and rearmament is now spoken of as though it were a strategy rather than an admission that nobody has one. 

Sachs is careful to say he is no enemy of Europe. He thinks its quality of life is the highest in the world and that this is an achievement worth defending and exporting. He simply cannot understand why the people running it have decided the thing to do with it is spend it on missiles. Nor does he accept the public asked for any of this. He points to the young people on the streets of France. He is right, and the detail is worse than he had time to say. 

France has been in revolt since September, over the state of its schools. Students walked out, and the protests pulled in parents, teachers, student unions and universities behind them. By 5 October, between 400 and 500 schools across France were partly or entirely closed. More than 6,500 people have been arrested since it began, most of them minors. The Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has told his ministers to come back with proposals by the end of October. The same anger over crumbling classrooms and rising costs has since surfaced in Belgium, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Germany and Austria.

That is not a tantrum. It is a verdict. These are children telling a government that it has no future to offer them, and the government’s only answer is to promise them one with a uniform in it. Because in Germany, the young have gone straight to the point. On 25 September, organisers of the School Strike against Conscription put around 45,000 pupils onto the streets of some 100 towns and cities, against a government whose Military Service Modernisation Act now requires eighteen-year-old men to complete a questionnaire on their willingness and suitability for military service. Broadcaster DW headlined its report with the pupils’ own answer: they are not cannon fodder. They have called the next national strike for 20 November. 

Two countries, two grievances, one budget behind both. French teenagers are in the street because the money is not in their schools. German teenagers are in the street because they can see where it went instead, and they have worked out who is expected to carry it. Neither set was consulted. One of them is being asked to fight. So let us hear less about apathetic youth. They are not apathetic. They are doing the only thing available to people whose opinion has no route onto a ballot paper, because on rearmament there is no serious disagreement between the parties permitted to win. The consensus was assembled above their heads and handed down as inevitability. Then we are invited to tut at the turnout figures. Voter apathy is not a disease of the public; it is a rational response to a political class that offers different coloured ties for the exact same set of economic outcomes.

OCEANIA HAD ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA 

And here is where Orwell walks into the room, because the most effective weapon deployed in this war has not been a missile. It has been the memory hole. Before February 2022, Ukraine had a different history and a different seat in the world. It was not a shining democratic martyr awaiting rescue. Transparency International ranked it among the most corrupt states in Europe. It had a documented record as a source country for human trafficking, and a banking and political system that made it a byword for laundered money. None of that was controversial to say in 2019. All of it has been quietly deleted. 

And there was a war. From April 2014 until the full invasion, the Donbas burned. United Nations monitors put the dead at around 14,000. Eight years of shelling, of ceasefire lines, of OSCE monitors counting violations, of civilians in Donetsk and Luhansk living in cellars. That war is now very nearly unmentionable, because to mention it is to concede the thing the official narrative cannot concede: that something was happening before 2022 which the word “unprovoked” was designed to erase.

OSCE Special Monitoring Mission 

Whether it should be called a civil war is a fair fight, and I will not pretend otherwise. Russian equipment, Russian money and at times Russian regular units were in the Donbas from 2014, which is more than a domestic quarrel. But the question of what to call it is not the scandal. The scandal is that we have agreed to behave as though it never happened at all. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. The same erasure covers what came before it. On 21 February 2014, the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland brokered a deal between Viktor Yanukovych and the opposition: a unity government and early elections. Within a day it was dead, Yanukovych had fled, and Washington recognised what followed without a murmur about constitutional process. Sachs calls that a coup. Others call it a revolution of dignity. What is not in dispute is that a signed European agreement was overtaken within twenty-four hours and the European powers who witnessed it said nothing.

Jeffrey Sachs Europe Warning: How to Avoid Nuclear War 

Sachs says Victoria Nuland handed out five billion dollars to bring it about, and here he overstates his case, which does his argument no favours. The five billion was a figure Nuland herself used in a December 2013 speech for cumulative American assistance to Ukraine since 1991, not a fund for regime change. But the evidence that did not need exaggerating was already on the record. Weeks before Yanukovych fell, a leaked telephone call between Nuland and the US ambassador in Kyiv, Geoffrey Pyatt, caught the two of them allocating posts in a government Ukraine had not yet got, and disposing of the European Union’s objections in two words. That call is real, it was never denied, and it tells you precisely who believed they were choosing Ukraine’s next administration. 

Then Minsk. Sachs is right that Minsk II was not a Russian land grab. It required Ukraine to devolve power to the eastern regions, and the Security Council endorsed it unanimously in Resolution 2202. It was never implemented. And we no longer have to speculate about why, because the architects told us. Angela Merkel told Die Zeit on 7 December 2022 that Minsk was an attempt to give Ukraine time, and that Ukraine had used the time to become stronger. François Hollande, asked by the Kyiv Independent whether Merkel was right, said that she was, and that the merit of the agreements was the opportunity they gave the Ukrainian army. 

Read that again. The two European leaders who guaranteed the peace deal later described it in public as a device for buying time to prepare for war. They were not quoted by Russian state media. They said it in Die Zeit and to a Ukrainian newspaper, under their own names, and nobody in Brussels has explained it since. If you want to know why Moscow treats European security guarantees as worthless, you do not need a theory about Russian paranoia. You need only their own signatures and their own interviews.

Foreign Policy Double Standards and the Vetoed State 

Sachs saves his bluntest language for Gaza, and he is not careering off topic when he does. He is making the same point about the same institution. He calls it genocide. He is in considerable company: the United Nations Commission of Inquiry reached that finding in September 2025, as did the International Association of Genocide Scholars, while the case brought by South Africa remains before the International Court of Justice. One year into the American-brokered ceasefire, the UN’s acting Special Coordinator told the Security Council this month that for Palestinians living along the Yellow Line the ceasefire exists in name only, and that Israeli operations since it took effect have killed some 1,500 Palestinians, including more than 320 children, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Washington remains opposed to Palestinian statehood.

And Sachs offers one detail that ought to be taught in every politics department in Britain. The slogan that gets students suspended and arrested here, the one about the river and the sea, was Likud’s formulation first. It is in the party’s 1977 platform, declaring that between the sea and the Jordan there would be only Israeli sovereignty. The words are policed when Palestinians use them and ignored when the governing party of Israel wrote them down. That is not a debating point. It is the whole machine on display: who is permitted to speak, whose history is retained, whose dead are counted.

The Price of a Phone Call: Why Europe Refuses Diplomacy

Which brings us back to the detail from this talk that has stayed with me. Asked what Europe should actually do, Sachs did not call for a summit, a framework, a facility or a process. He said a European leader should pick up the telephone to Moscow. He then offered his own Zoom account, and said he would pay the bill himself. Four and a half years into this war, with the Americans announcing ceasefires that neither belligerent confirms, that remains the most serious proposal anyone has made. They have found hundreds of billions for the shells. They cannot find the price of a phone call. So ask yourself who in all of this is actually speaking for peace. Then ask who decided you were not allowed to.

On Stream?

No livestreamed execution after all, Trumpians. It has become a bad idea at the mere breath of Donald Trump. Such is also your approach to Benjamin Netanyahu, who as much as anything else supports the Argentine claim to the Falkland Islands as surely as Menachem Begin did. And such is your approach, appropriately since your position is reminiscent of Peronism in this if in nothing else, to Javier Milei, who has shared a post by his chief adviser, Santiago Caputo, asserting that Argentina needed to take the Falklands in order to prevent the "interference of an Islamic state" in the region, as evidenced by the election of Sagal Abdi-Wali as the MP for Holborn and St Pancras.

On this as on Trump's support for a United Ireland, what says Nigel Farage? What says Rupert Lowe? What says Gavin Robinson? What says Jim Allister? What says Jamie Bryson? What says Stephen Yaxley-Lennon? What says Daniel Thomas? What says Nick Tenconi? What says Thomas Moffitt? What says Montgomery Toms? And what says Kemi Badenoch, membership of whose party still extends to Liz Truss?

As so often, there is nothing to call between the two sides to this one. At 63, Enoch Powell's protégé, Northern Ireland's most powerful Unionist politician of his generation, a sometime Assistant Grand Master of the Orange Order, and the man whose vote gave Theresa May an overall majority of one in 2019, is beginning at least seven and a half years in HMP Maghaberry, which is in Lagan Valley, where he spent 27 years as the Member of Parliament. That is before we start about the circle of Lola Salem and the already convicted Henry Hopwood-Phillips.

Meanwhile, Abdi-Wali remains the Leader of Camden Council, which in 2021 oversaw the investigation of Vincent Chan by Bright Horizons nursery, where, having been cleared by that investigation, he committed the 56 sexual offences against children for which he was now serving 18 years in prison. MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip since 2024, Danny Beales was then a member of Camden Council's Cabinet. And the then Leader of the Council was Georgia Gould, who is now the Minister for Schools. Even I have to say this for the right-wing Labour machine here in the North East, it is merely, if Olympically, corrupt. In London, that machine is something else, from the future Minister for Children Margaret Hodge in Islington, which was what made her an enemy of Jeremy Corbyn, to this on Keir Starmer's patch.

A Gap In Institutional Nerve

In 1530, England was an extravagantly Catholic country of many centuries’ standing. Yet by 1560, it had become the country that would define itself as fundamentally anti-Catholic for the next 400 years. Just as we are on the cusp of consigning Brexit to the same memory hole as the Commonwealth of England, so we are on the verge of taking the period from 16 April 2025 to some date in the near future, and filing it alongside the reign of Mary I. In each case, that would be because the wrong people had been given responsibility for holding the line, people who never used to believe it, who still did not quite believe it, and who had no real idea why they should. We urgently need to move them aside in favour of those who always had, who truly did, and who knew exactly why. For example, Paul Knaggs:

At three in the morning on an acute medical ward, dignity is not an abstraction. It is a curtain that closes properly. It is a nurse who knocks. It is the knowledge, as you lie in a backless gown with a cannula in your arm and no strength to argue, that the person on the other side of the thin partition is not a man. Women have understood this forever. It took the National Health Service the best part of a decade, two employment tribunals and a Supreme Court to catch up.

Yesterday, NHS England published two guidance documents, one covering same-sex accommodation for patients and one covering physical facilities for staff, confirming that single-sex provision must follow biological sex. Trusts are told to audit their estates for gender-neutral and single-occupancy alternatives, to record in writing any departure from the rule, and to report it as a breach through the Strategic Data Collection System. Letters have gone to every trust and integrated care board in England, requiring chief executives and boards to respond. It arrives eighteen months after the Supreme Court held, in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers, that “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 means biological sex, and ten weeks after the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s updated statutory code of practice came into force on 5 August 2026.

The guidance is right. It should have been written years ago. What deserves scrutiny is not the decision but the journey to it, because that journey tells you almost everything about how this institution now treats the people who use it and the people who staff it. 

Start with the inconvenient fact that none of this was ever legally mysterious. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 have required separate changing facilities for men and women for more than thirty years. The NHS Operating Framework committed every provider to eliminating mixed-sex sleeping accommodation back in 2012, and breaches have been centrally reported since April 2011. The Royal College of Nursing itself wrote to County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust on 27 March 2025, telling it plainly that its changing-room policy breached the 1992 regulations. There was no gap in the law. There was a gap in institutional nerve.

Darlington Nurses Tribunal: The Cost of Defiance

Which is why the job fell to eight nurses from the day surgery unit at Darlington Memorial Hospital. On 16 January 2026, Employment Judge Seamus Sweeney found that the trust had harassed and indirectly discriminated against them by requiring them to share a female changing room with a male colleague and then treating their complaints as a nuisance.

The tribunal found the environment created for them was “hostile, intimidating, humiliating and degrading”. Allegations the nurses made about their colleague’s personal conduct were dismissed, and so was their claim of victimisation. The finding that mattered was against the employer, and it stands: the trust confirmed it would not appeal.

Now count the money, because this is where the story stops being about ideology and starts being about stewardship. Chief executive Steve Russell reported to his own board that the trust had spent around £603,000 defending the case. In June 2026 it paid the nurses £187,000 in damages, apologised, and committed to separate changing facilities. Seven of them went back to the Newcastle tribunal in September seeking roughly £400,000, being ninety per cent of their own £443,000 legal bill. Judge Sweeney has reserved his decision. Should the application succeed, an NHS trust will have burned something close to £1.2 million of public money losing an argument about who gets to use a locker room. That is a consultant nurse’s salary for fifteen years. It is beds. It is a night shift fully staffed for a year.

And it is not finished with them yet. Four of the claimants, vindicated by a tribunal, still face potential investigation by the Nursing and Midwifery Council. In Fife the pattern repeated: on 8 December 2025 a tribunal found that NHS Fife had harassed the nurse Sandie Peggie after she objected to sharing a changing room with a trans doctor, while dismissing her other claims and all claims against her colleague. The judgment required two rounds of corrections.

In August 2026 the Employment Appeal Tribunal granted her leave to appeal on all thirteen grounds, with a hearing expected early next year. Fife’s legal costs had passed a quarter of a million pounds by the middle of last year, and the meter is still running.

Bethany Hutchison, one of the Darlington nurses and now president of the Darlington Nursing Union, put the point about the new guidance better than any policy document could. “Enforcement cannot continue to depend on the courage and personal sacrifice of individual nurses,” she said. She is right, and her phrasing carries an accusation the labour movement ought to feel in its stomach. Those women had to constitute their own trade union in order to be represented. Peggie is separately suing the RCN, alleging it failed to support her because of her gender-critical beliefs, a claim the union denies and which has not yet been determined. Meanwhile the TUC congress voted unanimously to reject the Supreme Court’s judgment, and in August eight unions with a combined 3.6 million members, including Unite, the GMB, the BMA and the UCU, publicly opposed the EHRC’s statutory code. Unison says it complies with the judgment while holding to its policy that trans women are women. So the most powerful institutions of organised labour in Britain arrayed themselves against a ruling that protects the privacy of a workforce that is overwhelmingly female and largely low-paid, and into the vacuum stepped the Christian Legal Centre, the litigation arm of a hard-right religious campaign group, which funded the Darlington case. When socialists abandon the field, somebody else occupies it. We do not get to complain afterwards about who turned up.

NHS Patient Sex Records and the Risks to Care

Then there is the clinical argument, which is the strongest of all and the least discussed. Sex is not a courtesy. It determines laboratory reference ranges, drug dosing, cardiovascular risk algorithms, screening recall and differential diagnosis. The independent review of data on sex and gender led by Professor Alice Sullivan of University College London, published in March 2025, found that sex is missing altogether from the NHS patient demographic database, and recommended that the health service stop issuing new NHS numbers and altered markers, because losing sex data endangers clinical care, screening and safeguarding. Wes Streeting, then health secretary, ordered a halt to changing children’s gender markers within days. Eighteen months on, the record as a whole remains what Maya Forstater of Sex Matters called it yesterday: “NHS patient data is a mess.”

The consequences of that mess are not hypothetical. In May 2019 the New England Journal of Medicine published the case of a 32-year-old patient at a United States hospital who arrived with severe abdominal pain. The electronic record said male. The triage nurse logged an obese man who had come off his blood pressure medication, and the case was not treated as urgent. The patient was pregnant, and had developed pre-eclampsia. By the time the error was understood, the baby was dead.

The lead author, Dr Daphna Stroumsa of the University of Michigan, said of the record: “that classification threw us off from considering his actual medical needs.” Stroumsa’s conclusion was not that trans patients should be disbelieved. It was that a medical record which cannot hold both sex and identity is a dangerous instrument. That is precisely the argument, and it is worth noticing that it comes from clinicians with no stake whatever in Britain’s culture war.

NHS Single-Sex Wards Need More Than a Policy 

The objections deserve a fair hearing. TransActual and the Trans+ Solidarity Alliance warned that the guidance “will not survive contact with reality in resource-strapped hospitals”, leaving staff unsure how to care safely for trans patients. On the operational point they are very nearly right, and the evidence is NHS England’s own. In July 2026, providers reported 5,431 breaches of the mixed-sex accommodation rules, against 4,259 in the same month of 2025. General and acute bed occupancy has sat above ninety per cent since September 2021. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine calculates that around thirteen thousand beds are filled at any moment by patients medically fit to leave but with nowhere to go, because social care has been stripped to the bone. A hospital running at that pressure cannot reliably deliver single-sex sleeping accommodation to anybody, trans or otherwise.

But notice where that argument actually lands. It is not a case against the principle. It is a case against fifteen years of deliberate underfunding, against the social care collapse no government since 2010 has had the courage to fix, and against a management culture that would rather rewrite a definition than build a wall. Privacy is a material good. It requires money, estate and staff. When the state refuses to provide those, institutions discover that language is cheaper than bricks, and the people who pay are always the same: the woman on the trolley, the healthcare assistant on Band 3, the patient with no private insurance and no second option. 

Which brings us to the body that issued yesterday’s guidance, and will not exist to enforce it. The Health Bill, now in the Lords, abolishes NHS England by April 2027 and folds its functions into the Department of Health and Social Care. 

The same Bill mandates the creation of a Single Patient Record. That is not a technicality. It is the single best opportunity in a generation to put biological sex back into the clinical record as a permanent, non-overwritable field, alongside, not instead of, a patient’s recorded gender identity. Yvette Cooper has been Health Secretary since 20 July. Andy Burnham came into Downing Street promising a national care service and a social care settlement built on the NHS principle. Those two commitments, properly funded, would do more for the privacy of women in hospital than any number of letters to chief executives, because they would free the beds that make single-sex accommodation possible. 

So the test is not whether the guidance exists. It is whether Cooper will write sex into the Single Patient Record while the Bill is still amendable, publish trust-level compliance alongside the monthly breach figures, and fund the capacity that makes dignity physically achievable rather than merely declared. It is whether the NMC will drop its pursuit of nurses the courts have already vindicated. And it is whether the trade unions will remember, before another group of women has to incorporate themselves to be heard, whose side they are supposed to be on. 

The NHS has just spent six years, two tribunals and the better part of a million pounds in public money learning what any woman waiting on a corridor trolley at three in the morning could have told it for nothing.

Repairing Bridges?

During the Second World War, Prolongation of Parliament Acts were passed annually until the 1945 General Election was held while the War was still being fought. American Congressional and Presidential Elections were held on the constitutionally appointed dates even during the Civil War. By either standard, Volodymyr Zelensky has been a usurper since 20 May 2024. Andy Burnham greeted him with a children's picture book tableau to send a signal to Donald Trump, who has plenty of other things to worry about, such as the fact that his new Press Secretary, Katie Zacharia, was quite clearly misrepresenting herself as a lawyer. Who does she think she is? Jonathan Reynolds?

Since the United States is now buying Russian diesel, however little of it, then to bomb oil refineries in Russia is now to attack the United States. Therefore, Ukraine is no longer permitted to use Starlink. Well, of course not. And although Britain is supposedly unable to afford even one of the lowest pensions in Europe, "President [sic] Zelensky won't be going away empty-handed." You could get either or both of 14 years and an unlimited fine if you expressed support for the Houthis, whose blockade of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, without entering into the debate around it, undeniably contributes to the cost of living crisis. But there could not be a more different attitude to the state that no one doubted blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, with Serhii Kuznetsov, indicted as "acting by order of Ukrainian state agencies", arguing in court in Hamburg, not only that he himself had not perpetrated those attacks, but also that in themselves they were perfectly legitimate. Think on.

Indecent Exposure

With Reform UK at third place in the polls, its Leadership Election is in full swing. Rishi Sunak’s sometime Immigration Minister, Robert Jenrick, has had to be slapped down for saying that he would allow, if not order, the Royal Marines to shoot to kill the passengers of the migrant dinghies. Zia Yusuf has blamed the boats on “everybody” in the previous Conservative Government, including Jenrick as well as Suella Braverman, twice Home Secretary, whom Yusuf has criticised for her suggestion that British Asians were not English. The parliamentary report into Nigel Farage’s five million pounds will be with us any day now. And Daniel Hewitt writes:

An undercover investigation by ITV Exposure into Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has found multiple elected councillors and party candidates expressing racist views and using offensive language, calling Muslims “parasites” and describing black children as “animals”. One undercover reporter recorded a Reform councillor from South London calling for King Charles to be decapitated because he “is a Muslim”, while another senior Reform councillor from Solihull said of Asian people: “drag them out of their homes, stick them on planes and f*** them off to Pakistan.” 

The ITV investigation has obtained secretly recorded footage showing elected Reform officials from across England and Wales using violent, racist and sexist language. When speaking about a female Reform candidate, one male councillor said “if she was my daughter, it would still be bath night on a Thursday”, and that he would sexually assault another female candidate if he was given the chance to hug her. Reform UK told ITV News investigations have commenced into the findings by ITV Exposure, and while “a handful of individuals who do not share our values will initially make it through vetting. This is the same for all organisations.” 

In September 2024, Reform’s leader Nigel Farage promised he would professionalise the party, and improve its vetting process for selecting candidates. “We don’t want extremists, we don’t want bigots, we don’t want people who think that way, because we represent the silent, decent majority of this great country that we live in,” said Nigel Farage at Reform’s annual party conference in Birmingham.

In a documentary for ITV Exposure, reporters went undercover with Reform UK candidates and councillors across England and Wales during the May local elections and four by-election campaigns in 2025 and 2026. In April and May 2026, ITV’s undercover team were in Birmingham as Reform hoped to make big gains in the local elections.

The ITV reporters joined Reform Councillor Alan Feeney in Solihull, where he was campaigning to retain his seat on the council, having defected from the Conservative Party in 2025. Over several days of canvassing, Councillor Feeney was secretly recorded expressing racist views about Asian people, and Muslims in particular. He told undercover reporters the area has been “infested” with Asian families, and called them “absolute parasites”. 

When out knocking on doors, Councillor Feeney said “if it’s an Asian name, I’m not even knocking at the door, they’re not voting Reform and I ain’t wasting my time”. He calls his approach to campaigning “Alan’s racist canvassing”. Speaking of Muslims in Britain, Councillor Feeney said “they’re in our judiciary, they’re in our schools, they’re in our healthcare, they’re everywhere, and they are not working on our side, they’re against us”.

He said he believed that “no more than one percent of British population can be non-white”. “When a house comes up for sale, white people need to be in there,” he told ITV’s undercover reporter. “You almost need to out-Muslim the Muslims. You’d need a proper nuclear option, like literally drag them at their homes, stick them on planes and f*** them off to Pakistan. Which you’ll never do in a month of Sundays.”

ITV’s undercover team also filmed with two other Reform candidates in Solihull – Jamie Campbell and Chris Whelan. In a conversation between Campbell, Whelan and Alan Feeney, they discussed speculation that a mosque may be built in Castle Bromwich. “There’s got to be a way of stopping that, like go and buy some pork chops,” said Campbell. “We’ll bury it in the ground.” “Unfortunately this is a pig cemetery mate,” replied Feeney. 

The men then go on to discuss a female Reform candidate from Solihull, using sexist and sexually aggressive language. “That’s reminded me, I need to buy an orange in a sock,” said Councillor Feeney. “If she was my daughter, it would still be bath night on a Thursday. I’ll wash you properly this time,” added Whelan. In a separate conversation, Chris Whelan complains his comments online are being moderated. “Once one was mouthing off at me, some Asian lad, and I just put - it was struck off almost immediately – ‘I’ll tell you one thing, I’ve never been put on my arse by a f****** p***,’” said Whelan. 

Whelan then discussed another female Reform candidate in Birmingham, saying that he “would have been sniffing that seat as soon as she got up. If she’d have given me a hug I’d have f****** fingered her”. At the local elections in May, Alan Feeney, Jamie Campbell and Chris Whelan were all elected as Reform councillors. Alan Feeney was appointed deputy Mayor of Solihull Borough Council. 

ITV Exposure’s findings were put to Councillor Feeney, Councillor Campbell and Councillor Whelan by ITV News. They have yet to respond. On Monday evening, Councillor Feeney said he had “mutually agreed” to resign from Reform UK, citing “personal reasons”, and would be continuing as an Independent councillor. Councillor Whelan has also resigned from Reform for personal and health reasons. 

In a video posted on X, Reform Deputy Leader Richard Tice accused one of the people filmed by ITV of working for the Conservative Party as a “Tory plant” to make the party “look bad” and said they knew they were being recorded. He did not name the person, but his description of them suggested he was referring to Alan Feeney. ITV News has approached Councillor Feeney for a response. 

Reform UK made significant gains in the May local elections, and now have more the 2,300 local councillors. They have an outright majority on 23 local councils, and are the largest party on a further 12. In July 2024, Reform leader Nigel Farage acknowledged his party had “a few bad apples” but promised they “will be long gone, and we will never have any of their type back in our organisation. You have my 100% promise on that.” 

Two years on, ITV Exposure’s investigation secretly filmed inside the Reform campaign in Makerfield in Greater Manchester. In June 2026, the party were competing with Labour in the parliamentary by-election that Andy Burnham would go on to win. The undercover reporter met Dean Miller, a Reform Councillor in Bromley, South London, who was in Makerfield campaigning for the party. In one recording, Councillor Miller claimed: “We’ve been ethnically cleansed out of London.” “Because you never used to get any blacks over in Bromley, and now Bromley [has] massive Nigerian communities there,” he said. 

In a separate conversation, Councillor Miller’s language became more extreme when he claimed local children have been committing vandalism in Bromley. “Like all the ethnic f****** kids, they’re not white, they’re all f****** black, and they’re like f****** animals. It’s horrible to say it. I’m not racist.” Councillor Miller, who was elected as Reform councillor in May 2026, claimed that King Charles is secretly a Muslim. “The Muslim thing is going to be that thing that takes over everything and then everyone just has one religion. Apparently King Charles is a f****** Muslim. Someone from the inside saw a f****** prayer mat and all that in one of his f****** rooms. I think that’s f****** traitorous. Cut the c***’* head off, sorry.” Councillor Miller told us he was heavily medicated at the time due to a chronic pain condition, and he has now resigned from Reform UK. 

In October 2025, Reform had vowed to “throw everything” at a by-election in Caerphilly for the Welsh Senedd. ITV’s undercover reporter joined the party knocking on doors and handing out leaflets. He met Martin Roberts, who was a Reform branch treasurer in Pontypridd, who has twice stood as a Reform candidate. The ITV reporter told Roberts he was from Leicester, which he said had changed. “Lots of d******, is it?” Roberts replied. “Say what you want around me man.” 

When the discussion turned to the Conservative Party’s prospects, the reporter said he didn’t believe they would be successful with Kemi Badenoch as leader. “What, because she’s black?” laughed Roberts. “I used to hear all these comments as I was growing up you know, like ah look at that f****** four-door over there. I’m like what’s a four-door? Four-door saloon, c***.” In response, Martin Roberts told ITV News he was trying to be humorous and informal, but accepts and regrets he used language that he describes as inappropriate. He denies being a bigot or an extremist.

ITV Exposure’s investigation did not just uncover racist language and extreme views being expressed by Reform councillors and candidates approved to stand for the party, but councillors talking of how they will conceal those views from voters in order to win power. During the Gorton and Denton by-election campaign in February 2026, ITV’s undercover reporter spoke with then-Reform councillor Alan Feeney. “You’ve just got to be a bit savvy to get the broad appeal, then once you're in you can do what you want,” Councillor Feeney said. 

In Makerfield, ITV’s undercover reporter also spoke with two Reform councillors from Hounslow in West London. “We’re not f****** stupid enough to p*** off the entire woke south or centrist south really of the country,” said Councillor David Kerr. “You need to seem palatable to everyone to get them, to get [the majority].” “The stuff that people feel uncomfortable with, don’t even announce it just do it,” said Councillor Adam Parkins. “We just need to get f****** elected, that’s all that really matters. We won’t necessarily say what we are doing, part of the point is to not [say].” Councillors Kerr and Parkins have been approached for comment.

So what could that “uncomfortable” stuff be? In Makerfield, ITV’s undercover reporter joined a different group of Reform campaigners on polling day in June. He met Raymond Dunning, a Reform councillor in Tameside, Greater Manchester and aspiring MP, who said he had been asked to stand as a parliamentary candidate. Later in the pub, Councillor Dunning talked through what he would want a Reform government to do. “So first of all, I’d deport every other motherf***** in this country that doesn’t deserve to be here and their children as well. First thing, you're f****** gone, bang,” he said. “And then I’ll pick up the pieces after that.”

Asked by the undercover reporter if he meant legal migrants too, Councillor Dunning replied: “Even the legal ones, because there’s nothing wrong with legal immigration as long as it’s done right, but there are certain people who have been granted permission to stay in this country who shouldn’t [have]. 18-30 year old young lads, train them up in the army in insurgency tactics, so they can go street-by-street, house-by-house picking the c**** up.” Responding to Councillor Dunning, a Reform official is heard saying that plan “would create massive civil unrest”. “We’re going to have civil unrest if we don’t deal with it,” replied Dunning. Councillor Dunning has been approached for comment. 

In response, Reform UK told ITV News: “Where members, activists and councillors have clearly behaved inappropriately, investigations have commenced. In some cases, there have been suspensions and due process must be followed. Reform UK has improved and prioritised its vetting procedures, but from time to time, a handful of individuals who do not share our values will initially make it through vetting. This is the same for all organisations.” You can watch ITV Exposure - Undercover: A Year in Reform on Sunday, October 18 at 10:20pm on ITV1 and ITVX.

Extending Beyond The Allegations Themselves

In June 2013, Michael Gove allowed Geoffrey Bettley to be reinstated as a teacher after Bettley had been cautioned for child pornography. Far more recently, Gove told Times Radio that Peter Mandelson and Ghislaine Maxwell were “collateral victims” of Jeffrey Epstein, deserving of sympathy. While she was living with Gove, Lola Salem was charged alongside Henry Hopwood-Phillips, who is now a convicted child pornographer, and on whom see here from back in the days when Jacob Rees-Mogg would still be seen with ethnonationalists, or indeed they with him. Naming their salon after that of Madame Verdurin was no word of a lie. Welcome to a Proustian demimonde, at the root of which is the old Fascist favourite, also articulated, if that was quite the word, by Boris Johnson, that Christianity had overthrown a superior civilisation, a civilisation to which pederasty had been fundamental. As had slavery, which provides an important context to this, from Feminegra:

Dr Lola Salem, a 33-year-old lecturer in French and music at Oxford University’s Oriel College and the former girlfriend of Conservative politician Michael Gove, is facing trial over allegations that she possessed indecent images of children. Salem, who taught French and music at Oriel College, has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Her trial is scheduled for March 2028 at Oxford Crown Court. According to the BBC, the allegations concern three Category B images and one Category C image, allegedly possessed between 2021 and 2023. Category B is the second most serious classification used for indecent images of children. Oriel College confirmed that it suspended Salem in June 2026 after learning of the charges, pending the outcome of legal proceedings. Salem entered her not-guilty pleas on July 23.

These are allegations, not findings of guilt. Salem is entitled to the presumption of innocence, and the charges must be proved in court. The case has nevertheless attracted attention for reasons extending beyond the allegations themselves. Salem was until recently in a relationship with Gove, the former Conservative Cabinet minister who now edits The Spectator. The Daily Mail reported their separation on October 2, describing a relationship that had lasted approximately two years. But what happened after several British newspapers published reports about Salem’s charges deserves closer examination. Some of those articles disappeared. And the contrast with the treatment of another British academic, the late Professor Jason Arday, is difficult to ignore.

Why Did the Daily Mail and Telegraph Remove Their Reports?

On October 10, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and GB News published reports concerning Salem’s criminal charges. By October 12, those articles were no longer available at their original addresses. Journalist Mic Wright documented the removals in his October 12 Substack investigation, Michael Gove, Lola Salem, and a Sudden Silence, linking to archived versions of the original reports. The Daily Mail has since published another article about Salem’s charges, although questions remain about why its original report disappeared. Wright also reported that LBC subsequently removed its article, although the BBC continued reporting the case. The Oxford Mail likewise published coverage of Salem’s charges and suspension.

Why would several news organisations publish a legitimate court report and then remove it? There may be explanations involving legal advice, editorial decisions or reporting restrictions. But the removal of an article does not, by itself, establish that an editor acted improperly or that anyone intervened to suppress the story. What readers deserve is transparency. If the reports were removed because of a court order, that would be an important explanation. If they contained inaccuracies, appropriate corrections could explain their disappearance. Without that information, questions about the decisions remain unanswered. The situation becomes more interesting when Salem’s connections to established publications are considered.

Wright reported that Spectator Life published an article by Salem on October 9, the day before the initial reports concerning her charges appeared. That article subsequently disappeared, along with her author page. Salem also previously contributed to the Catholic Herald, whose articles and author page bearing her name were reportedly no longer accessible. Meanwhile, her earlier Telegraph columns remained available at the time Wright examined the publications. There is an important distinction here. A publisher removing a contributor’s work is not necessarily the same decision as removing a factual court report. The reasons could differ considerably. But the concentration of removals warrants questions about how these outlets handle controversial news involving people connected to their own organisations. And Gove’s position makes those questions especially relevant.

Michael Gove’s Connection Raises Questions

Michael Gove held several senior positions in Conservative governments before becoming editor of The Spectator in 2024. He was previously married to Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine, with whom he separated in 2021 after 20 years of marriage. Gove’s relationship with Salem was publicly reported in 2024, including photographs of the pair attending events together. On October 2, the Daily Mail’s Richard Eden reported that their relationship had ended and that Gove had moved out of the London property they previously shared. The report stated that the separation had occurred some time earlier. The timing has prompted speculation online, particularly because Oriel College says it learned of Salem’s charges in June. However, there is no established evidence that Gove influenced the removal of any newspaper article, directed editorial decisions concerning Salem or knew about the charges before they became public. Nor does his former relationship with Salem implicate him in the alleged offences. Nevertheless, it is legitimate to question whether prominent media organisations apply the same standards of transparency and scrutiny to people within their professional circles as they do to those outside them. 

Professor Jason Arday Faced Hundreds of Articles And He Was Never Criminally Charged

Professor Jason Arday became the University of Cambridge’s youngest Black professor in 2023. In July and August 2026, he faced intense media scrutiny over allegations of plagiarism, questions about his academic work and disputed claims about his personal achievements. Arday denied the plagiarism allegations. Liverpool John Moores University investigated concerns about his doctoral work and maintained that his PhD remained valid, reaffirming that position after his death. He resigned from Cambridge on August 5. Nine days later, on August 14, he was found dead at his home in London, aged 41. Arday had not been charged with a criminal offence. The scale of the coverage was extraordinary. According to media-analysis organisation NewsCord, British news outlets published 229 articles about Professor Jason Arday during the 22 days before his death. A subsequent, broader audit identified 274 articles across 26 publications.

NewsCord documented the methodology and the individual articles included in its analysis. The figures provide a measurable picture of how extensively British newspapers pursued Arday’s story. By comparison, the initial reporting about Salem’s criminal charges was relatively limited, and several articles subsequently disappeared. The allegations are different, and criminal reporting can involve legal restrictions that do not apply to academic misconduct investigations. Nevertheless, the contrast raises an unavoidable question. Why did some newspapers sustain weeks of intense scrutiny of a Black academic accused of professional misconduct, while reports about a well-connected white academic facing criminal charges disappeared within days? This question does not require assuming Salem is guilty. It requires asking news organisations to explain their editorial standards.

Jason Arday’s Death Makes These Questions More Urgent

Arday’s family criticised what they described as a sustained campaign of misinformation and harassment directed towards him. Following his death, Cambridge announced an investigation into the circumstances surrounding his resignation and the support available to him. More than 40 senior Cambridge academics subsequently challenged the proposed investigation’s scope, arguing that it lacked sufficient transparency and accountability. An inquest into Arday’s death has opened. In the final weeks of Professor Jason Arday’s life, British newspapers published hundreds of articles scrutinising his academic career, personal history and credibility. People who knew Arday warned that the relentless accusations and public commentary had taken a profound toll on him and his loved ones. Arday’s family subsequently described a sustained campaign of misinformation and harassment.

These warnings cannot be separated from any serious examination of his final weeks. Although the inquest has not established the circumstances of his death, the documented pressure he experienced, and the media’s contribution to that pressure, deserve rigorous scrutiny. Accountability requires examining not only whether individual reports were accurate, but also the cumulative impact of the coverage. Although the inquest has yet to establish the circumstances of his death, the media’s role in the pressure surrounding his final weeks deserves serious scrutiny, not dismissal. Its potential contribution to his distress must be examined as part of any meaningful reckoning with what happened.

The racial dimension also deserves examination. Arday was a Black academic whose professional achievements and personal history became subjects of extensive national scrutiny. Salem is a white academic who contributed to several prominent conservative publications and had a publicly reported relationship with a former Cabinet minister. These differences do not, on their own, prove racial discrimination or preferential treatment. But they provide legitimate grounds for asking whether race, professional connections and institutional status influence editorial decisions. A consistent media standard would require fair, proportionate and accurate reporting in both cases.

British Newspapers Must Explain Their Editorial Decisions

The fundamental issue is not whether Salem deserves hostile treatment comparable to Arday’s. She does not. Nobody should face a media pile-on, and everyone accused of wrongdoing deserves fair treatment. The issue is why some publications appear willing to maintain extensive coverage of one academic while removing straightforward reports about another. There may be lawful and legitimate reasons for those removals. If so, the publications should explain them where they can.

NewsCord has called on the Telegraph and Daily Mail to clarify whether their decisions followed court orders or other legal concerns and, if not, to explain why the reports disappeared. That is a reasonable request. Readers should not have to rely on archived webpages and independent journalists to establish that a major newspaper previously reported a case heard in court. Nor should an accused person’s professional connections determine whether the public receives accurate information about legal proceedings.

A Genuine Outrage

Paul Knaggs writes:

Earlier this month, Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the Warsaw Security Forum that Ukrainian strikes on the data centres of the Russian technology company Yandex had made the internet a calmer place. Fewer bots, he said, and so less hate and fewer provocations. The story travelled at the speed of wish fulfilment. A Polish political scientist posted that support for the AfD online had collapsed by 56 per cent. A Czech politician observed that German patriotism had gone quiet the moment the Russian connection went down. Millions of people saw it. It felt like the first good news in a decade of bad news about the internet.

It was not true. The traffic that fell was web crawler traffic, the automated indexing that keeps search engines fed, and Cloudflare’s own public data showed exactly that. The researchers who actually track Kremlin information operations said so at once. Antibot4Navalny reported no drop in the activity of the Russian troll networks it has monitored for years. The Vatnik Soup account said plainly that nobody had demonstrated any effect with solid data. A Scandinavian consultancy, Common Consultancy, took 76 AfD politicians and 136 MAGA accounts and compared each post against that account’s own normal for the same weekday and hour. The variation was a few percentage points either way. Ordinary noise.

Renée DiResta of Georgetown University explained to Mother Jones why the fiction flew. A strike that silences the fakes is a victory over a shared enemy, and it feeds a far more comfortable belief: that your political enemies aren’t even real. Hold that sentence. It explains almost everything that happened in British politics this week, and a good deal of what has happened to our public argument over the last ten years.

Burnham’s Brexit Russia Claim and His Commons Retreat 

On Sunday, in an interview with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart for The Rest Is Politics, Andy Burnham became the first serving Prime Minister to say that Russia interfered in the 2016 referendum. He had asked the question on arriving in Downing Street in July, he said, and had been given the clear answer that yes, there was. He named nobody. He cited no assessment, no document, no date, no finding. He added that it mattered to put this on the record so that voters in France and Germany would understand that some of their politics is instigated by our enemies, a remark that follows his meeting in Berlin with Friedrich Merz about the AfD. 

By Monday morning the government was reversing at speed. The Foreign Office minister Stephen Doughty spent a round of broadcast interviews avoiding the question before conceding the only thing that mattered: nothing Russia attempted had succeeded. The Prime Minister’s own spokesman told reporters it was inconceivable that Moscow had not tried to turn the referendum to its advantage, agreed that it had not worked, and stressed that Burnham accepts the result. Nigel Farage, at a press conference in Dover, called the Prime Minister a liar. Boris Johnson surfaced to say he had asked the same question as Foreign Secretary and been told there was no evidence of any successful interference. 

Then came the Commons. Kemi Badenoch asked Burnham to publish the evidence that Russia swung the result of the 2016 referendum, reminding the House that the head of MI5 had said in 2018 he had seen nothing to show Russia influenced the outcome. The Prime Minister replied that he had implied no such thing, told her to go back and look again, said he was not reopening the referendum and respected the result, and moved the conversation on to Russian activity around the 2019 general election. 

Thirty hours. That is the whole life cycle, from revelation to disavowal. And the disavowal is the tell. A Prime Minister who believed he held intelligence that a hostile state had corrupted the largest democratic exercise in British history would not retreat from it under questioning from Kemi Badenoch. He would publish. He did not publish because there is nothing to publish, and he knew that when he said it.

Russian Bots and Brexit: The 17.4 Million Voters Smeared 

Strip away the theatre and almost everyone in this row agrees on the facts. Russia runs influence operations against this country. It did so in 2016, as it does every year, because that is what it does. Because that is what we do and that is what they all do. Burnham’s own speech to the UN General Assembly on 22 September set out the government’s case in more detail than anything he has said since: bots, fake websites, falsified newspaper articles, the forged branding of 28 British institutions including universities and the BBC, far right narratives amplified from abroad, and evidence of attempted interference in the 2019 election. None of that is in dispute between the front benches.

What is in dispute is a single adverb. In Moscow in December 2017, standing beside Sergei Lavrov as the Russian Foreign Minister claimed Britain had conceded there was no interference, Johnson cut in with two words: not successfully. That has been the official British position ever since, under four prime ministers. Burnham has not contradicted it. He simply dropped the adverb on a podcast, let the louder version run for a day, and picked it back up at the despatch box.

Russian Bots: When Political Dissent Becomes Propaganda 

Here is why that one dropped adverb matters more than a Westminster scuffle, and why this publication is not prepared to treat it as a gaffe. The remainers were fed their line, and they are using it. Whatever the Prime Minister did or did not imply, the formulation he reached for has a life of its own out in the country, and it has had for years. It is no longer an allegation about foreign intelligence services. It is the cheapest available method of refusing an argument.

Question the wisdom of arming one more war and you are a Russian bot. Say the quiet thing about energy prices, about NATO expansion, about why the yards closed, about why your town has three vape shops and no bank, and somebody will tell you which troll farm you work for. The accusation requires no evidence and survives any amount of contradiction, because it is not really a claim about the world. It is a permission slip. It allows a person to feel they have won an exchange they never entered. 

The irony, which the political class never quite reaches, is how much of this is done by people who imagine themselves the defenders of truth. They are not countering astroturf. They are producing it. And there are a great many people on this side of the propaganda line who have found that withdrawal extremely comfortable. 

We know this is not theoretical, because the British state has done it and been caught. In April 2018, after Salisbury and after Douma, Whitehall briefed the press that there had been a 4,000 per cent rise in Russian bot activity. Newspapers ran the figure and named accounts. One of them, @Ian56789, turned out to belong to Ian Shilling, a man in Yorkshire with a borrowed photograph for an avatar and strong opinions about chemical weapons, several of them wrong and some of them actively Kremlin friendly. He went on Sky News and said so himself.

Another named account, @Partisangirl, was verified by Twitter as a real identity, and its owner posted a video stating that she was not a robot but a human being. Channel 4’s FactCheck went through the claims and found the accounts had been wrongly labelled; government sources then conceded that their analysts had been monitoring a broad range of accounts, not merely automated ones. Say what you like about the views of either person, and this publication would say a good deal. They were British civilians, and the state told the national press they were machines operated by Moscow.

That same year brought the Integrity Initiative. The Institute for Statecraft, a charity working out of a mill in Fife, was found through leaked documents to have received around £2.2 million from the Foreign Office to counter Russian disinformation, while its associated Twitter account circulated material attacking the leader of the Opposition, including the charge that Jeremy Corbyn was a useful idiot for the Kremlin. The then Foreign Office minister Sir Alan Duncan ordered an investigation on the Today programme. Chris Williamson, then a Labour MP, called for a public inquiry. There never was one. Public money, routed through a charity, aimed at domestic politics, under the banner of defending us from exactly that.

None of this means Russian operations are imaginary. It means the label has never been applied carefully, and that the people with the most power to apply it have the least incentive to be careful. Researchers at Indiana University found in 2023 that people routinely overestimate how many bots there are and believe everyone else is more gullible than they are, and that the word had become a way of dismissing accounts holding opposing views. We are now watching that habit scaled up from a timeline to a country, with a Prime Minister doing the labelling.

Orwell understood the mechanism exactly, and put it in Winston Smith’s mouth in 1984. The Party’s demand was not that you believe a particular falsehood. It was that you reject what your own eyes and ears had told you. It was their final, most essential command. Set that beside a man in Leigh being informed that his vote was a Russian output, or a man in Yorkshire reading in the national press that he is a machine, and the distance between the fiction and the practice is not as great as we would like.

The 2020 Russia Report and the Inquiry Britain Never Had

There is a genuine outrage buried in this story, and it is not the one either front bench is shouting about. In July 2020, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee published its Russia report. Its central finding was not that Russia swung the referendum. It was that no British government had ever bothered to find out. No assessment of Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 campaign was ever commissioned. When the committee asked MI5 for written evidence on the question, it received six lines. The report was completed in March 2019, handed to Johnson that October, and kept from the public until after the general election. The absence of evidence had been manufactured by a refusal to look.

Six years on, nothing has changed except the party in office. Johnson would not look because the answer might have embarrassed him. Burnham will not publish because vagueness suits him better than any finding could. If the Prime Minister truly received a clear answer in July, a document exists, and the Intelligence and Security Committee exists precisely to see it. Send it. Let them report to Parliament. Anything less is not candour about the last decade, it is the management of an impression.

How the Russian Bot Narrative Dismisses Leave Voters: But that’s the Aim

This publication campaigned to leave the European Union, and did so from the left. Not from Moscow, and not from Mississippi. From the Bennite argument that those who make the laws must be removable by those who live under them, and that a treaty structure locking in competition policy, state aid rules and the free movement of capital is not a neutral referee but a constitution for neoliberalism. That case was made here for forty years, by Benn, by Shore, by Castle, by Skinner, in pit villages and union halls, long before anyone in St Petersburg had a troll farm.

So when a Labour Prime Minister suggests the referendum was shaped by hostile foreign actors, he is not only insulting 17.4 million people. He is telling his own party something far more dangerous, which is that it need not account for why it lost them. If Leigh and Grimsby and Stoke voted as they did because of bots, there is no reckoning to be had over Iraq, over the pits, over the yards, over thirteen years in office that left wages flat and the heartlands hollow. If Reform’s rise is a Kremlin operation rather than a bill coming due, nobody in Labour has to read the bill.

The timing is not subtle either. This arrives as the Prime Minister prepares a difficult argument for closer alignment with Brussels, a month after he mused that Britain could one day consider rejoining, while Emily Thornberry floats the idea that a manifesto line could do the work of a second referendum. If the vote was tainted, the vote is lighter. Nobody has to say the result was illegitimate. The impression does the work, and the retraction keeps the fingerprints clean.

QUANTIFY IT 

Set the question of whether Russia tried to one side, and grant the Prime Minister everything he implied. Then answer the question that follows at once. How much? Influence has never been a quantity anyone has learned to measure. There is no unit for it, no baseline to measure against, and no way of separating a mind changed by a foreign account from a mind changed by a neighbour, a newspaper, a closed factory or thirty years of being ignored. The researchers who do this work for a living are candid about it. That is why Common Consultancy had to build a control from each account’s own posting history before it could say anything at all about the AfD, and why the honest finding was that nothing measurable had happened. 

Then look at who actually decided it. Lord Ashcroft’s referendum-day polling found 73 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds voting Remain, a majority of every age group over 45 voting Leave, and 60 per cent of the over-65s. The vote was carried by the oldest cohort in the country. These were people who had been arguing about Europe since the 1975 referendum, through Maastricht, through the ERM, through the Lisbon Treaty that no one was permitted to vote on. Their position was thirty years in the making, and they were the group least present on the platform where the troll farms are said to live. The suggestion is that a reply from a fake account changed minds that four decades of British politics had failed to change. 

Suppose, though, that it could be counted, and the answer came back at three per cent, or half of one. What then? There is no mechanism in British law that subtracts foreign influence from a result. The only coherent remedy is to annul the vote and hold it again, which is precisely the thing that nobody who raises this will say out loud. The claim is not made in order to be acted upon. It is made in order to hang there. 

And when a case does come with the receipts attached, the picture is not the one Westminster expects. In October 2020, Twitter under its former ownership blocked the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, locked the newspaper’s account and stopped the link being shared in private messages. Jack Dorsey later accepted the decision was wrong. The internal exchanges published as the Twitter Files showed staff could find no evidence the material had been hacked, which was the stated ground for suppressing it. Fifty-one former intelligence officials signed a letter saying the affair carried the marks of a Russian information operation. Michael Morell, the former acting CIA director who organised that letter, later told the House Judiciary Committee that the idea had been prompted by Antony Blinken, then an adviser to the Biden campaign. The material was authentic. The Russian operation was the letter. 

That is as documented as information control ever gets: named people, dated emails, a public apology. And still nobody can tell you what it was worth in votes. Not its authors, not its critics, not this paper. If the best evidenced case of suppression in the social media era cannot be converted into a margin, the ghost in the 2016 machine certainly cannot. Influence is the one charge that can never be disproved. That is exactly why it appeals to people who have lost an argument.

WHAT FOLLOWS THE STORY 

At the UN, Burnham announced a National Centre for Information Defence, a new state body to counter hostile information attacks. Be clear about the sequence. An unevidenced claim about the last referendum, abandoned by its author within two days, forms part of the public case for permanent machinery to police the information space before the next one. Nobody has explained who decides what counts as a hostile narrative, who audits that judgement, or what happens when the people being defended from disinformation turn out to be the people the government finds inconvenient. Ask Ian Shilling. Ask the Institute for Statecraft. Those are not technical questions. They are the whole question.

Russia does real harm to this country, and a serious government would fight it with published evidence, named findings and institutions that can be held to account. Burnham had that chance on Sunday. Instead he offered a rumour with a red box around it, and when the country asked to see the working, he told Parliament he had never meant it. Publish the assessment or withdraw the claim. Send it to the Intelligence and Security Committee, where it belongs, and let them tell Parliament what the security services actually said in July. Until then this was not a revelation about Moscow. It was an alibi for Westminster, and a licence for every lazy partisan in the country to answer an argument they cannot win by telling a working man he does not exist. They would sooner you believe that the heartlands were hacked than admit that they were abandoned.