The Empire Sends Its Invoice

So, that Minister who tried to lure Laura Kuenssberg into a threesome? Anyway, Paul Knaggs writes:

Every protection racket relies on the same psychological swindle. The man who breaks your windows in the morning offers to sell you shutters by noon, and by nightfall he expects your gratitude for keeping the street quiet. You are told the cost of his retainer is non-negotiable, that the menacing shadows in the alley leave you no choice, and that to question the invoice is to invite your own ruin.

On Sunday morning, sitting comfortably beneath the studio lighting of the BBC, John Healey looked into Laura Kuenssberg’s camera and told the British public that their shutters would cost them another round of austerity. Kuenssberg laid out the ledger plainly: national debt standing at more than 97 per cent of the entire economy, government departments confronting prospective cuts of up to 6 per cent over coming years, and independent number crunchers at the Institute for Fiscal Studies warning that bringing borrowing down requires real, brutal reductions in public provision.

Healey did not flinch. Swelling with the brittle pride peculiar to modern ministers, he boasted of his recent journey to Bangkok, preening over the International Monetary Fund’s commendation of Britain’s deficit reduction plans, and insisted that the Treasury had already demonstrated it is prepared to make hard decisions.

Notice how casually they reach for that phrase. In Westminster shorthand, a hard decision never means confronting concentrated wealth, taxing excess corporate margins, or telling a foreign superpower where to get off. A hard decision is always an eviction notice served on a youth club, a shuttered public library, or a wage freeze imposed on care workers. It is an act of institutional sadism repackaged as moral maturity.

The official narrative invites us to nod along in sorrowful agreement. We are told the national credit card is maxed out, that our fiscal rules are engraved on tablets of stone, and that the Russian threat perpetually scratches at the door, demanding that ordinary people swallow bitter medicine and tighten their belts. It is a lie, polished by civil service memos and repeated until it sounds like common sense.

The Great Ledger: Who Do We Owe?

Before anyone accepts another round of social butchery, ask the two questions the political class spends its entire career avoiding: what are these sacred fiscal rules, and precisely who do we owe this debt to? The official rules, monitored by the Office for Budget Responsibility, are neither laws of nature nor mathematical inevitabilities. They are arbitrary, self-inflicted dogmas, drawn up by politicians to tie their own hands and insulate macroeconomic management from democratic pressure. They exist to appease the bond markets, institutions staffed by financial managers who extract private yield from sovereign debt.

The Fiscal Rules Are a Choice, Not a Law 

When the British state borrows, it issues gilts managed through the UK Debt Management Office. The bulk of those debt payments are disbursed to private pension funds, domestic financial institutions, and foreign asset managers. We are told the cupboard is bare by the very political class that built the locks, handed the keys to financial speculators, and then declared itself powerless to open the door.

The Empire Sends Its Invoice 

Yet domestic bond markets do not explain the sudden velocity of the coming squeeze. The government is not pushing Britain into departmental cuts because arithmetic demands it; they are doing it because Donald Trump looked across the Atlantic, demanded that NATO partners lift defence spending toward 5 per cent of gross domestic product, and London immediately fell to its knees. We have documented this mechanism of submission before in our investigation into transatlantic trade concessions, where the threat and the protection are issued by the exact same address. 

The government’s own Defence Investment Plan, published this summer, is candid about how little lies behind the headline. It commits £298 billion over four years, reaching 2.7 per cent of GDP by the end of the decade. For the years between 2030 and 2035, it simply leaves the spending unallocated. The money is promised. What it will buy is not. 

The establishment presents this astronomical surge as an unavoidable strategic duty, using Russia as an all-purpose boogeyman to shut down domestic debate. Yet strip away the panic and trace where that money actually travels. It does not go into the wage packets of working-class soldiers or into the hollowed-out coastal communities from which so many recruits are drawn. 

Modern rearmament is an import business. An enormous share of that cash flows directly onto the profit ledgers of American arms giants: Lockheed Martin, RTX (Raytheon), and General Dynamics. It is a state-sponsored subsidy, routed through the British Treasury, to ensure American contractors maintain their double-digit margins.

Armed Derelict: What Security Actually Requires 

To their credit, the defenders of this course do not rely purely on bluster. They argue that we inhabit a hostile and predatory world, where hard power is the only currency foreign autocrats respect. They insist that without a catastrophic military expansion, Britain risks abandonment by its primary superpower ally, leaving trade routes and territorial integrity exposed. 

The argument sounds robust only until you examine the wreckage it creates at home. Real security does not consist of American missile systems rusting in silos while the society they are supposed to protect rots from within. A nation whose hospitals cannot treat the sick, whose children sit in cold classrooms, and whose local councils collapse into bankruptcy is not secure; it is merely an armed derelict. Bevan understood that the true strength of a nation begins in its own body. As we examined when exposing the ongoing plunder of our common wealth, an elite that starves its own people to finance corporate extraction has forgotten the very purpose of the state. 

If you want to see how runaway defence spending creates immediate austerity in the classroom and the destruction of public services, look across the Channel. Look at France. Look at Germany. Look at the riots, the strikes, the rising civil unrest, and the sheer chaos tearing through European societies as continental leaders gut their domestic budgets to pay Washington’s rearmament invoice. Look at the stolen futures of hundreds of thousands of young people, the youth of the European Union pouring out onto the streets weekend after weekend, clashing with riot police and shouting one single, desperate word: ENOUGH! That very unrest is the inevitable harvest of an elite that starves its schools and clinics to finance an arms race it cannot afford. 

Aneurin Bevan understood that the true strength of a nation begins in its own body. As we examined when exposing the ongoing plunder of our common wealth, an elite that starves its own citizens to finance corporate extraction has forgotten the very purpose of the state.

We witnessed this identical pattern when ministers surrendered the National Health Service to Trump’s tariff threats, forcing the state to pay inflated prices for branded drugs. Independent economic analysis published in the British Medical Journal revealed the human cost: hundreds of thousands of excess deaths as frontline healthcare funds were diverted to transatlantic boardrooms. The same managerial logic governs the military ledger. The threat and the invoice emanate from the very same capital. 

This is the grim reality of managed decline under a managerial elite. From Thatcher, Blair, Johnson, Sunak, Starmer and now Burnham, leadership manoeuvres analysed in The King Is Dead: Long Live the King, the priorities remain identical. When foreign power and corporate profit demand tribute, the billions are located instantly. When the people of the heartlands ask for functioning infrastructure, dignity in retirement, or a warm home, they are instructed to study fiscal rules and accept the cuts. 

A sovereign government does not borrow to buy favour from an overseas patron, nor does it cut the lifelines of its own people to inflate the profits of Wall Street defence contractors. The path out of this crisis requires ripping up the self-serving fiscal orthodoxy that treats bond markets as our master, rejecting arbitrary spending targets dictated by Washington, the IMF and subordinating foreign policy to the material wellbeing of our own people. 

Until our leaders fear the cold homes in Doncaster as much as they fear the bond traders in New York, nothing fundamental will change.

Growth Mission?

Hear them whoop and holler in support of a man in a white poppy, albeit a totally hypocritical one who supports the war in Ukraine, enthusiasts for which ought not to wear the red poppy, either. If they wondered why not, then tell them to look up Stepan Bandera. Zack Polanski is just as much a white poppy hypocrite as Adrian Ramsay, but the environment in Gaza looks pretty degraded to me, and the definition of Zionism as racism is unanswerable when the State of Israel is in existential crisis because ethnically the wrong citizens had dared to vote in an election. If a certain number of people subscribe to a racist ideology, then that many people are racists. If you do not like to be called that, then look to yourself.

But Ramsay’s conduct does not suggest that the Green Party ought to adopt a whipping system. For years, Labour MPs publicly called the then Leader of the Labour Party an anti-Semite, a terrorist, and everything else that happened to cross their minds. Yet it was any criticism of such behaviour, never mind any suggestion of a disciplinary response, that was supposedly bullying and harassment, as it also became when Labour MPs cheered on the genocide of Gaza. And so to Jody McIntyre, who should have been the MP for Birmingham Yardley but who lost by far fewer votes than had been cast for the Green candidate, and who writes:

At the age of 17, David Garrard volunteered for military service with the IDF. According to The Times, the trip was the “start of a lifelong devotion to the state of Israel”. In 2015, Garrard gave Andy Burnham £35,000 as he attempted to take control of the Labour Party. Garrard, who passed away last year [why does no one just die anymore?], was previously an executive director of the Labour Friends of Israel lobby group. Over a fifteen-year period, the former IDF operative donated approximately £1.5 million to Labour. Although born in the UK, Garrard later “acquired” Israeli citizenship.

In 2016, Garrard gave over £10,000 to then Labour MP Ian Austin. Austin also accepted a donation from the Australia Israel Cultural Exchange, a think tank co-founded by Benjamin Netanyahu. He now serves as Burnham’s UK Trade Envoy to Israel. Pat McFadden also received over £10,000 from Garrard. McFadden, a former vice-chair of LFI, has previously been described as “the most powerful Labour politician most have never heard of”. Upon taking power, Burnham promptly appointed him to cabinet. McFadden previously served as a deputy to disgraced Epstein-associate Peter Mandelson. Mandelson’s other deputy at the time was former Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy. In March 2015, Garrard gifted Lammy £7500.

Labour peer and newly-hired Palantir executive Tom Watson received £40,000 from David Garrard whilst serving as an MP. Addressing an Labour Friends of Israel lunch in 2016, Watson said it was a “special pleasure” to have Israeli ambassador Mark Regev in attendance. The Telegraph reported Garrard’s IDF stint as the start of a “lifelong attachment to the Israeli cause”. Labour’s former Chancellor Rachel Reeves received even more, £44,000, from Garrard. Reeves has also been heavily financed by Victor Blank, vice president of the Jewish Leadership Council. Last year, Reeves praised Garrard for his “unsurpassed commitment to Israel”.

Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Garrard said that Labour had been “hijacked by an ultra-left cabal” who wanted to “turn our nation into a socialist republic.” He immediately demanded the return of a £2 million loan. But under Starmer, Garrard rejoined. The year after Burnham’s failed leadership bid, then Labour MP Chuka Umunna received £25,000 from David Garrard. On May 12th of this year, Umunna was spotted entering Downing Street. No. 10 insisted he was there for a “routine” visit. By July, Andy Burnham was Prime Minister. 

Yvette Cooper also received £25,000 from Garrard. Under Keir Starmer, Cooper secured the proscription of Palestine Action. Then, shortly after Burnham took power, and despite her links to private healthcare donors, she was made Health Secretary. Joan Ryan received over £18,000 from Garrard. Whilst serving as a Labour MP, Ryan was revealed to be talking to Israeli spy Shai Masot “most days”. She is now CEO of the UK branch of ELNET, a lobby group which lists the Israeli Foreign Ministry as one of its “partners”. Ex-Labour minister Ivan Lewis received £10,000 from David Garrard. Lewis, a former LFI vice-chair, was suspended from the party in 2017 after allegations of sexual misconduct. According to his LinkedIn profile, Lewis is now a special adviser to the “Africa Israel Partnership”.

Keep that in mind as you read Janet Eastham:

A property development firm run by a close friend of Andy Burnham will be a key beneficiary of a £20m taxpayer-funded “bailout” for a troubled film studios project, The Telegraph can reveal. Tim Heatley, who was invited to Downing Street when Mr Burnham became Prime Minister in July, runs Capital & Centric, the developer contracted to convert Liverpool’s derelict Littlewoods building into a £70m “Hollywood of the North”.

The £20m lifeline, announced in Wednesday’s Budget, has been earmarked for the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority to fund the redevelopment, which the firm is delivering through its subsidiaries. Capital & Centric has confirmed that it expects to benefit financially from the redevelopment, acknowledging that some of the £5.3m already spent on the scheme covered its development management fees. Mr Heatley and his wife hold a combined 50 per cent stake in Capital & Centric which he co-founded with fellow developer Adam Higgins in 2011.

The funding comes despite the loss of the project’s two proposed “anchor” tenants and years of warnings that the scheme could leave taxpayers facing millions in losses. It risks fuelling fresh accusations of cronyism against Mr Burnham, who is already facing scrutiny over £55m in public loans to companies controlled by Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi owner, approved at meetings he chaired as Greater Manchester mayor. 

Mr Burnham and Mr Heatley have a longstanding friendship. The pair co-founded the Greater Manchester Mayor’s Charity in 2019 and have worked together ever since, regularly appearing at fundraising events and Capital & Centric developments. The Telegraph understands that their relationship and charity ties prompted Mr Burnham to declare a potential conflict of interest and step aside from chairing a 2023 meeting at which his mayoral authority approved a £12.6m loan to a Capital & Centric subsidiary. On Saturday, a Capital & Centric spokesman denied that Mr Heatley’s friendship with the Prime Minister had secured the latest funding, insisting neither he nor anyone representing the company sought Mr Burnham’s help or discussed Littlewoods with him during his leadership challenge or since he entered Downing Street.

The £20m award for the Liverpool project came from the Growth Mission Fund, established under Sir Keir Starmer, which is closed to applications from businesses. Only Cabinet ministers can nominate projects. The Chancellor selects recipients without scoring or ranking competing proposals, despite government guidance that grants should normally be awarded competitively to ensure value for money. The Telegraph understands that Mr Burnham was not the minister who proposed the project. Downing Street sources suggested on Saturday that Mr Burnham was not “formally involved” in awarding the £20m capital grant and had kept a “degree of distance”.

However, neither HM Treasury nor No 10 could confirm whether or not the Prime Minister’s relationship with Mr Heatley was assessed as a potential conflict of interest before the award was made. Treasury officials also declined to comment on how the Littlewoods project was selected given concerns over its financial viability. There is no suggestion of impropriety on the part of the developer. Capital & Centric said discussions about funding the project began last year, before Mr Burnham’s leadership challenge. A delegation from Liverpool City Region Combined Authority and Liverpool city council visited No 10 in February to propose grant funding, but nobody from Capital & Centric attended, the company said. A spokesman said the scheme had always required public support to bridge its funding gap, adding: “It isn’t a case of bailing out a previously viable project.”

On Saturday, opposition parties challenged Mr Burnham over the award. Richard Tice, Reform UK’s deputy leader, told The Telegraph: “While working Brits are told to tighten their belts, Andy Burnham is increasingly embroiled in serious sleaze allegations.” He added that: “The Prime Minister needs to explain how his Government came to earmark £20m for a project being developed by a friend’s firm.” Built in 1938 to serve as the headquarters of the Littlewoods football pools empire, the Art Deco building has stood empty since 1994. Liverpool city council owns the freehold, while Capital & Centric (Rain) Ltd holds a 35-year lease. Another subsidiary, Capital & Centric (Regeneration) Ltd, was named in a development management agreement, with construction management fees included in the publicly funded budget.

Combined Authority accounts record £5.3m spent under “Littlewoods C&C” in 2023-24 and 2024-25. A spokesman for the firm said that only a portion of this was paid to the developer in fees, with the majority spent on wider project costs. The council also agreed to write off £1.6m plus interest owed by the developer and reimburse up to £900,000 of its previous project costs. It retains the right to regain control of the leasehold for £1 once the development is finished and contractual obligations are met. Kris Brown, a Liverpool Liberal Democrat councillor who raised concerns about the scheme’s financial risks five years ago while serving on the council’s audit committee, welcomed the cash injection to “finally get this project off the ground”.

However, he added: “Let’s be clear: we are only waiting on this government bailout today because the risks I highlighted years ago were completely accurate.” In 2021, Liverpool city council warned that the scheme had a “greater than usual risk profile” and could require further public money to cover losses. Mr Brown told The Telegraph that public money could disappear into a “bottomless pit of repairs”. “If we’ve got £20m of public funds, money will spiral and spiral,” he said. In an interview published on July 7, Mr Heatley was described as “one of Andy Burnham’s closest associates” and separately named among those believed to be in the incoming Prime Minister’s inner circle. “I’ve worked with him for several years. Working with Andy can be great fun. It can also be infuriating because he’s so persuasive,” he said.

After Wednesday’s Budget, Mr Heatley celebrated the award on Instagram. “It’s been a long time coming as a project,” he told followers. “Now we can finally get cracking.” Capital and Centric said the Government would not release the £20m until further due diligence had been completed and the remaining funding secured. Liverpool city council forecasts the completed development could create 630 permanent jobs and generate £56m in annual economic activity. A government spokesman told The Telegraph: “The Government is continuing to invest in growth and regeneration across the England via the Growth Mission Fund. This includes £20m towards the restoration and redevelopment of the long-derelict Littlewoods site in Liverpool into a 260,000 sq ft creative campus for film, TV, gaming, immersive technology and digital screen industries.” Every Growth Mission Fund project undergoes formal checks, ensuring no conflicts of interest, Ministerial Code compliance and legal risk, and must pass a full business case before any funding is released.

The Correct Word Is “Awareness”

The scenes from Gaza look like environmental devastation to me. If it is not going to equalise the minimum wage in this Parliament, but it is going to lower the voting age, then the Government must be determined to resuscitate the Green Party that the elevation of Andy Burnham, and not anything else, had been doing such electoral harm. Long before the recent conference, and without the slightest suggestion that their views had changed, Councillor Kirsty Knight of Peterborough defected from the Greens to the Conservative Party, while Councillor David Hawley of St Helens defected from the Greens to Reform UK. The Welsh Greens have long been considering independence. If they chose it, then would they retract the definition of Zionism as racism? And who could dispute that definition when for having dared to vote, the Arabs in Israel were accused of having been bribed by Qatar? Bribed to kick out Itamar Ben-Gvir? They would gladly have paid to do it, as Emma Graham-Harrison writes:

Last year, Umm Khaled Fatoun returned from volunteering in a Jewish-Arab support centre for victims of war to find bulldozers tearing into her son’s house in the Bedouin village of Azzarnug. The demolition crew, who arrived under police escort, did not even allow them to remove furniture or solar panels before reducing the home and its contents to a pile of rubble. This week, she took action of her own at the ballot box, targeting the extremist national security minister who ordered – and boasts about – the mass destruction of Palestinian and Arab homes. “I had one goal, to send [Itamar] Ben-Gvir home,” Fatoun said. “There isn’t a single family in the Bedouin community that hasn’t been hurt by his campaign against us.” 

In the weeks before election day, she joined a grassroots campaign to educate other Bedouin women about their rights and potential power. It had spectacular results, with voting rates tripling in some Bedouin villages in the southern Negev region in Tuesday’s election, amid a broader surge in turnout among Bedouin voters. Years of violent, racist government opened the door for change in conservative communities, said lawyer Hanan Alsanah, who founded the Alnashmiat network that led the grassroots programme. “We said that even if all the men go to vote, it is only half the community. You need the power of all your votes, because Ben-Gvir has a lot of power,” she said. Alsanah is also co-director of Itach-Ma’aki, female lawyers for social justice. 

The rise in Bedouin votes came amid a historically high turnout among Arab citizens of Israel. Their votes secured an unprecedented 19 seats in the Knesset for Palestinian-led parties and were critical to stripping the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his allies of their governing majority. This year, the lowest turnout in any Bedouin community was 62%. The highest was more than 93%. With an estimated 180,000 eligible voters, their turnout was key to the Islamist Ra’am party beating polling expectations. Netanyahu has repeatedly used racist fearmongering to try to boost voter turnout among his own base. This year, his attacks included an AI-generated image purporting to show a crowded polling station in a Palestinian area and Bedouin female voters.

In an apparent attempt to undermine the surge in votes for Palestinian-led parties, Netanyahu accused them of fraud and foreign support. “The increase in voter turnout in the Bedouin community in particular, and the Arab community in general, is unprecedented in the history of the state,” said Amit Segal, a pundit and close confidant of the prime minister. The allegations have been rejected by opposition leaders, election organisers and the activists in the Negev. “I am very proud of our turnout. They are talking about ‘corruption’ [as the reason for high voter turnout]. The correct word is ‘awareness’,” said Amira Habdoubi, an organiser from the village of Abu Talul. For a community whose civil rights are policed by racist authorities, the election was a rare opportunity for political expression, she added. “We can’t protest, because they will arrest us. Voting is the only opportunity we have to make a political protest.”

The Muslim Bedouin are part of a marginalised minority inside Israel. Before the state was created, they roamed widely across the Negev desert. Now, although their villages take up only 2.5% of the land in the region, many are deemed “unrecognised”, targeted by the state for demolition and left without basic services including electricity and water supplies. The majority of the Negev has been designated as military training grounds and firing ranges. More than 100,000 people live in about 30 unrecognised communities in the Negev. Another 200,000 live in official towns, or places with some level of recognition. Netanyahu’s pursuit of open-ended regional conflicts also drove Bedouin turnout. War is particularly terrifying in unrecognised villages because the state does not provide them with bomb shelters or warning sirens before rocket, drone and missile attacks. Rockets that hit Bedouin villages without shelters killed six of the 36 child victims of the 7 October attacks. Several adults were also killed that day in the villages and at least four people have been seriously injured by Iranian missiles.

Organised crime is another concern, rising almost unchecked under the current government. “We had clear goals. Stop the home demolitions, stop the hatred, stop the war. Ben-Gvir talks all the time about security, but we feel no security and no one cares about us,” said Mayada Abu Khweida. The activists worked to help women understand their rights and tackle logistical and practical obstacles to voting, as well as cultural ones. “Because [residents of unrecognised villages] can’t vote in the municipal elections, a lot of women don’t know they have a right to vote in national elections,” said Abu Khweida. “We told them: ‘There is a legal way to express your anger and raise your voice.’” 

For similar bureaucratic reasons, there are no polling stations in unrecognised villages, so voters have to travel to nearby towns. Men went any way they could, including on camel, horse, donkey and bike, on journeys that took up to an hour in each direction. Jewish women offered lifts to Bedouin women, but because in 2019 Israel’s election committee ruled that organising transport volunteers was illegal, voters and drivers connected individually. “Hundreds of women volunteers went to help Bedouin women to access the polls, and at the same time about 150 men went to do protective presence at the polling stations,” said Raluca Ganea, the founding executive director of the Jewish-Arab community action group Zazim. “We wanted to have Jewish men standing there to de-escalate, in case there was a rightwing provocation of some kind. So it would not be the Bedouin men in front of the provocateurs, because if the police come or there is violence, they are much more likely to be arrested or worse.” 

Netanyahu’s racist get-out-the-vote campaign on social media included photos of Bedouin women with their faces covered. Some of these women covered their faces to avoid being seen by strangers from outside their own community. In recognised towns, where women could vote in their communities, most did not cover their faces, Alsanah said. Others hid themselves to avoid becoming fodder for Ben-Gvir’s extremist social media feed, which regularly features humiliation of Arab citizens. “The women were worried the extremists would take photos at the polling stations and covered their faces to protect themselves from being exploited on social media,” Abu Khweida said, adding that his campaign of humiliation has affected all of Bedouin society.

The grassroots mobilisation of Bedouin voters aimed in part to give children back their dreams, one reason why women responded so strongly. “In the last election in 2022, turnout among women was around 20%. Now in the unrecognised villages, informal data shows more than 60% turnout among women,” Alsanah said, adding that Israel does not break down voting statistics by gender. The project built on more than a decade of work with Alnashmiat, based in Arab and Jewish solidarity, that could set an example for a new government, Alsanah said. “We learned an important lesson from this election campaign. We should work together, men and women, Arab and Jewish citizens, and we should bring this approach to the Israeli parliament to rebuild the state.”

Degrading and Distressing

Rob Evans, Harry Davies, Louisa Loveluck and Emine Sinmaz write:

Ministry of Defence officials have privately accused a UK police force of wrongly handing over the investigation of an American fighter pilot who strangled a British woman to the US military, according to documents obtained by The Guardian.

Cambridgeshire police allowed the US military police to quickly take control of the investigation into Capt Jacob Wulfson after he had been accused of sexually assaulting Sarah Steele in his Cambridge flat. The decision meant Wulfson was not tried in an English criminal court. Instead he was prosecuted in a military tribunal on a US airbase in neighbouring Suffolk. Ministry of Defence officials said the Cambridgeshire force should “absolutely” not have let the US military police take over the investigation in a clear breach of a long-established agreement with the US. The disclosure of the case by The Guardian in June provoked immediate criticism from Downing Street, which said it was “deeply distressing” and “very concerning” that the UK authorities were not involved in prosecuting Wulfson.

The government is to set up a high-level inquiry to examine how and why police forces have been transferring investigations into serious crimes to the US military police. The Ministry of Defence, which is responsible for handling the military relationship with the US, is one of the key departments taking part in the inquiry. A batch of documents, disclosed via the Freedom of Information Act, revealed the private views of MoD officials about the Steele case, which centres on an obscure agreement signed by the US and the UK decades ago. Under the terms of the agreement, police in the UK have the primary right to investigate alleged crimes by Americans stationed in the country. The MoD officials made it clear the agreement was “pretty unambiguous” and only permitted the US military to acquire jurisdiction over investigations in a “narrow set of circumstances”. These circumstances are: if the offences were committed while the Americans were on duty, or if they were committed against another member of their armed forces or property. 

In a memo written on 8 July, MoD officials based in Washington wrote: “The Steele case does not, on the surface, appear to meet the bar for a visiting force to be awarded jurisdiction.” In the agreement, the US military is formally known as a visiting force. Four days earlier, the MoD officials had referred to the Steele case in an email to colleagues, saying: “The decision-making on this specific case seemed at odds with what is very clear” in the agreement. Another MoD official agreed that “as best as we understand the facts, this should absolutely have been for the UK courts”. An unidentified Greater Manchester police officer wrote in an email to MoD officials on 6 July that Cambridgeshire police had “wrongly, in my view” handed over the Wulfson investigation to the US military. Cambridgeshire police said they were conducting a review of the case with what they called “the assistance of material provided” by US Air Force lawyers. The force said it “remained engaged with the victim”. “We are working with government, wider policing and criminal justice partners to ensure greater clarity of jurisdictional decision making,” they added. 

The US military aims to prosecute as many of its personnel as possible within the boundaries of its agreement with the UK. The Americans often ask police in the UK if they can take over the prosecution of their military personnel – requests the police agree to, even when they have primary responsibility for investigating them. A series of cases uncovered this year by The Guardian have highlighted concerns that British victims are required to give evidence in US courts martial, an unfamiliar legal system that often does not afford the same protections as that of a court in the UK. Wulfson was off-duty when he assaulted Steele in his Cambridge flat in December 2023 after the pair talked on the Tinder dating app. Steele testified at Wulfson’s court martial, which was held on his airbase at Lakenheath, Suffolk in April, that her experience was “degrading and distressing”. The verdict and sentence were decided by an all-male jury of Wulfson’s fellow air force officers. All the lawyers were American. Steele was subjected to invasive and aggressive questioning by Wulfson’s lawyer. Wulfson was convicted of strangling an intimate partner but acquitted of sexual assault. He was dismissed from the US Air Force and confined to a military jail on Lakenheath for six months.

The cross-government inquiry, which includes officials from the Home Office, Ministry of Justice and Foreign Office, is looking at how US military personnel are not being brought to justice in British courts. The inquiry, which also involves police chiefs, is scrutinising a series of cases uncovered by The Guardian this year. In each case, police handed over the investigations to US military police even though the American perpetrators were off-duty and the British victims had no connection to the armed forces. They were tried in US courts martial on American bases. Tyrion Davis allegedly raped two women in Suffolk. He was convicted of one charge of sexual assault, but cleared of 10 further counts of sexual assault and abusive sexual contact. Hannes Marschalek allegedly exposed himself to a 16-year-old girl and four young women in Littleport, Cambridgeshire. He negotiated a plea bargain at a court martial and admitted a charge of indecent conduct. He won an appeal in a US military court that quashed his conviction on technical grounds. This ruling is now being challenged.

The US has more than 12,000 US military personnel in the UK, stationed in at least 15 bases and facilities. The two biggest bases are at Lakenheath and Mildenhall, in Suffolk. Significant numbers of American military personnel live in East Anglia.

The One About Matthew Perry

Peter Hitchens writes:

When I failed to worship and flatter Friends actor Matthew Perry live on the BBC, I became hated by large numbers of people. Since he died, those numbers have grown. My crime, before the court of modish public opinion, was to say that he could, if he wished, stop taking the drugs which wrecked his life and eventually killed him. Anti-social media are infested with articles and remarks about how cruel and unfeeling I was. A new Netflix series on Mr Perry's sad life will make this worse. I have now decided to say to his supporters that he might now be alive if he had listened to me.

I do not mean to be hurtful. But the best defence against drugs and drink is human will. That was why I took a deep breath and risked years of loathing and derision. Here's a mild and stately example of the attacks I face. The remnant of the once-mighty Independent newspaper last week proclaimed that my opinions on drugs 'are maddeningly, cruelly wrong'. Well, that's interesting. But wrong in what way? Nice, fashionable views on 'addiction' indulge drug-taking. They seem to me to mean more misery and death.

We have had nearly 60 years of liberal treatment of drugs and drink. The numbers of drug abusers have grown hugely. The mass abuse of painkillers has become an especial problem, which engulfed Mr Perry. Yet the dedicated buffoons responsible for this mistake continue to claim that drug abusers get a hard time from society and the police. No, they don't. It's all rehab, 'diversion', 'treatment' and sympathy.  That's what Mr Perry got from his friends - he also spent $7million on rehab. And now he has gone. I am sorry for the loss suffered by his family and friends. Though he was rude and dismissive to me (I am used to that), I rather liked him. He had a sense of humour and a quick wit. He could take it as well as dish it out. If I could have spoken to him away from his Presidential-sized entourage, I think we might have got somewhere.

But let me note these things about 'addiction', the all-purpose excuse for drug abuse of all kinds. I have known many people who have given up cigarettes, which I suspect are among the hardest drugs to abandon. I also recall, in the Fleet Street of 40 years ago, several colleagues who, warned by their doctors that they must act or die, gave up alcohol. Those who ignored these warnings died soon afterwards. During the Vietnam war, 60 years ago, more than 60,000 US soldiers became 'addicted' to heroin. When they got home, all but about 3,000 gave up without difficulty. I'll say it again. Telling people they are powerless to stop poisoning themselves is not a good, kind or generous act. Now you can yell abuse at me again.

There cannot be a “free” market in general, yet not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction. Contrived in the past, that baleful situation is being contrived again today.

We need a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of two years for a first offence, three years for a second offence, four years for a third offence, and so on. No prison sentence should include the possibility of release in less than 12 months; in that case, then your crime was not bad enough to warrant imprisonment, which the possession of drugs is. We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one’s premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. And we need Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought to be taught in schools.

Meanwhile, the latest bans on certain categories of pornography, bans that prove the technical possibility of a total ban and categories that boggle the mind of this 49-year-old ex-con, are being vehemently resisted on Twitter by the vociferous transactivist ally, plausible new Telegraph columnist, and practically certain future Conservative Cabinet Minister whatever he may say at 30, Tom Harwood. Pornography is now being legalised in Ukraine to pay for the war. It had been legally prohibited and practically unknown in the Soviet Union, but post-Soviet Russia was flooded with it, to placate the young male population during the larceny of their country by means of the economic “shock therapy” that created today’s oligarchs. “Sex work” of various kinds has always been encouraged when the young men have needed to be stupefied, and it still is. The corporate capitalist pornogrification of our own society is no accident. In welcoming the endorsement of Bonnie Blue, Reform UK has picked its side, the same side as the Green Party on this as on the war.

A Proper Split

Sinn Féin has never been in government in the 26 Counties, and all the stops have already been pulled out once to ensure that it would not be. That will always be the case, probably successfully. In the Six Counties, by contrast, Sinn Féin has been in government for 27 years and counting, already nearly a quarter of the entire existence of the two states in Ireland, and it always will be, probably always providing the First Minister now that it had assumed the office. Seen from either side, there may eventually come to be a United Ireland, and even a 32-County Republic, but the excuse of how long ago Partition had been will be used to prevent a unitary state both for the sake of the dominant force in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin, and for the sake of its implacable enemies who dominated the present Republic.

Meanwhile, Enoch Powell, Jim Molyneaux, David Trimble and Ian Paisley were all more than familiar with highly ambitious young men who were utterly convinced of themselves. Each of them had been one. Yet each of them in turn saw something particular in Jeffrey Donaldson. Whatever might that have been? Northern Irish politicians are surveilled up to their eyeballs both at home and in London, so the suggestion that “nobody knew” is unworthy of serious attention. Was Donaldson blackmailed first to take over the DUP and then to lead it into full compromise with Sinn Féin, itself riddled with touts? The full story will be more complicated than that. But it is quite clearly along those lines, as Patrick Murphy writes:

Brendan Behan was only half right. He said that the first item on a republican agenda was a split. The other half of his observation might have been that a split is also high up unionism’s agenda, as evidenced by the three unionist parties currently tearing strips off each other. n fairness, Behan died in 1964, a few years before the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association created the deep divisions in unionism by saying, “If we are British, give us British rights.” That demand exposed unionists’ confusion as to what exactly unionism was. Unionists were British, but not so British as to accept British laws and values. It was as if unionists had looked across the Irish Sea and said, “You think you’re British? We’ll show you Britishness”, as the RUC batoned civil rights marchers off the streets. 

Had it not been for Rev Ian Paisley, unionist confusion might not have been so acute. He wrote a new agenda for unionism by creating the concept of a politico-religious heaven, where intransigent unionism and hardline Protestantism would fuse seamlessly to form a promised land which he called Ulster. Paisley’s ghost still haunts unionism today. Its culture of competitive sanctity reflects the split between the UUP, the DUP and the TUV. Each party regards itself as more unionist than the other two, based on what might be termed the Paisley scale of unionist purity.

That makes unionism a bit like gravity – we all know how it operates, but it is hard to find anyone who can explain what it is. Despite its political nature, unionism lacks a political theory which might define an agreed ideology. Its loyalty to the crown sits in the middle of a political vacuum and while it proclaims a unionist culture, there is a limited body of literature, music or art to justify that belief. Most political organisations plan where they would like to be in five or 10 years’ time.

Unionism’s long-term goal appears to be to return to where it was 70 years ago. It knows where it has been, but appears unsure of where it is going. As a result, it reacts to events rather than setting its own agenda. That comes from an intellectual laziness, fostered by having 50 years of guaranteed power in the old Stormont. When Stormont fell, unionists had no idea what unionism stood for. They still have that problem today, as evidenced by the three-party split. The UUP and DUP are further seriously splintered.

The UUP is unionism’s comfort blanket, offering reassurance that the union is safe. Someone once said that the Church of England is a social organisation with God as an optional extra. The UUP is a bit like that – the sort of place where political realities rarely interfere with the primacy of the union. The DUP is different. Paisley appears to have founded it on the belief that God was a unionist and that the Protestant Reformation began somewhere near Ballymena. It has shed some of its religious overtones, but it is still the most religiously righteous of our political parties. It was unfortunate then that its former leader turned out to be a criminal. Jeffrey Donaldson worked for the British government overseas. That apparently gave his political masters in London sufficient control to require him to claim that the government had abolished the Irish Sea border. He may have been unionism’s equivalent of Stakeknife. Has London been running the DUP?

Meanwhile, the TUV has become the new DUP, still believing in a unionist heaven. Three-party unionism will not survive. It needs to abandon its narrow right-wing base and embrace, for example, anti-monarchists, left-wingers, Gaeilgeoirí, a healthy sprinkling of atheists and, heaven forbid, Catholics. Otherwise it will become a historical enclave, isolated from a changing world in Ireland and Britain. Sixty years ago Ian Paisley launched his “O’Neill must go” campaign, to oust Terence O’Neill from the office of Prime Minister. This week, some in the DUP said O’Neill must go as First Minister – a different O’Neill, but the same antiquated reaction to events.

Unionism has yet to learn that reaction is not a strategy. Its best way forward is to become a broad political movement, embracing progressive social and economic ideas and down-playing constitutional issues to gain the widest possible support. However, New Unionism is unlikely to emerge. Rather than uniting to form Stormont’s biggest party and ousting Michelle O’Neill, unionists prefer to remain divided over something which none of them has ever defined. Now that’s what Brendan Behan would have called a proper split.

We Have A Right To Know

Ricky Hale writes:

The Metropolitan Police are arresting peaceful protesters outside the US Embassy in London today. They’ve once again shamed themselves by carrying away pensioners by their arms and legs for holding up signs they don’t like. To make matters worse, some of those arrested were carrying blank placards and some weren’t holding signs at all. Yes, even saying nothing is a crime now. In fact, it’s terrorism. The Met Police began making arrests before any signs were on display, arresting volunteers like this woman for supporting people holding signs, and arresting people for having blank placards.

The demonstration was organised by the group Defend Our Juries. A Section 35 dispersal order was in force, but around 400 people gathered anyway to protest against the proscription of Palestine Action and the genocide in Gaza. In the UK, expressing support for Palestine Action is a terror offence, so I’m not encouraging anyone to do that. The protesters could face up to 14 years in prison for acting according to their conscience. Even if they’re not imprisoned, simply being charged with a terror offence will hang over them for the rest of their lives. It’s a matter of weeks since members of Andy Burnham’s government were telling us that no one wants to see old ladies being carried away, and now they’re going further than ever.

Prior to the demonstration, Met Police Commander Adam Slonecki stated that those “providing logistical support will very likely be committing an offence and face enforcement action.” It appears police have made it a crime to support people who support Palestine Action, even if they don’t support the group themselves! This is stupid on so many levels, not least that Palestine Action doesn’t exist anymore. Journalist Claire Hymer contacted the Met and asked them to clarify what is meant by logistical support. Does it mean giving someone a lift? Handing out a bottle of water? A few snacks? The Met refused to clarify. Police can’t explain what counts as criminal behaviour because they’re making it up as they go along. They’re making up secret laws, threatening you with arrest if you break them, and refusing to tell you what those laws are, or what you can do to stay within them! This is textbook fascism.

Not only are grannies and wheelchair users terrorists for expressing opinions the government doesn’t like, but anyone who is nice to those grannies and wheelchair users is also a terrorist. It gets even stupider when you consider the dispersal order meant police could force people to leave parts of central London on the assumption they might break the made up laws. That means we have pre-crime to go with the assault on free speech. Where do we draw the line? Are we gonna arrest people for saying they support the right of these people to protest? Are we gonna arrest people for saying they oppose the proscription of Palestine Action on free speech grounds? It’s McCarthyite nonsense to protect a state that’s committing genocide with weapons made in our country.

And whose interests is the State protecting? Peter Geoghegan and Jenna Corderoy write:

More than 30 senior Conservatives are named in newly released records of companies referred to the government’s controversial Covid PPE ‘VIP lane’ back in 2020, following a five-year fight by Democracy for Sale to force the government to divulge the information. The documents identify hundreds of businesses – and the politicians, ministers, senior civil servants and other figures who recommended them for the ‘VIP lane’ to lucrative government Covid contracts. Among those named are eight members of Boris Johnson’s cabinet, Sarah Ferguson and the banking giant Santander.

Four of those cabinet ministers in the documents had not previously been named: then foreign secretary Dominic Raab, justice secretary Robert Buckland, Welsh secretary Simon Hart, and housing secretary Robert Jenrick, who is listed only as a ‘possible’ referrer. Companies referred to the VIP lane were ten times more likely to secure contracts, according to the National Audit Office. Around £1bn of the £1.7bn spent on PPE from VIP suppliers was wasted on supplies later deemed unfit to use. 

The release of the records brings to an end a fight for transparency that began in February 2021, when now Democracy for Sale reporter Jenna Corderoy submitted a Freedom of Information request seeking the names of every company referred to the so-called ‘VIP lane’ and those who had recommended them. The government resisted disclosure for more than five years. In February 2025, a tribunal ordered it to name the unsuccessful suppliers and rejected its argument that identifying their referrers would cost too much.

The Cabinet Office still withheld the referrers’ names until Democracy for Sale appealed to the Information Commissioner’s Office, who ruled last month that they should be disclosed. They were finally published on Thursday. The Cabinet Office has warned that it cannot completely verify the accuracy of the reconstructed referral data, and some individuals are identified only as ‘possible’ referrers. There is no suggestion that making a referral was itself improper. Among other things, the documents show:

• Raab recommended a Cambridgeshire toy maker who had only a single employee at the start of the pandemic. Jenrick, now Reform UK treasury spokesman, is listed as ‘possibly’ referring an export packing firm.
• Graham Brady, then chair of the 1922 committee of backbench Tory MPs, referred an interior design company near his Altrincham and Sale West seat. Brady told Democracy for Sale that he had “no recollection of this but given the location, I assume I was passing on an approach from a constituent. I have no involvement with the company and never have had.” Owen Paterson, who later left parliament after a lobbying scandal, referred a Birmingham biotech firm working on pregnancy complications. None of these firms were given contracts.
• Then health secretary Matt Hancock is named against 27 companies, three of them marked ‘possible’. Former Conservative party chairman Lord Feldman is recorded against 21 (three ‘possible’) and Cabinet Office minister Lord Agnew against 14 (four ‘possible’). Grant Shapps and Michael Gove also referred firms, including, in Gove’s case, Meller Designs, run by donor David Meller, which received £164m in Covid contracts.
• Sarah Ferguson, then the Duchess of York and ex-wife of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, referred Biz Trading Ltd, a small London-based pharmaceutical company that was dissolved in 2022, according to Companies House. The Covid Inquiry previously heard that she had approached the government’s PPE adviser, Lord Deighton, about supplies from China, but the company was not named.
• A Cabinet Office official referred an offer recorded as ‘Greentech Labs on behalf of China Aerospace & NORINCO’. Norinco, China’s main state weapons manufacturer, has been sanctioned by the US. Huawei Technologies was referred by an NHS official in 2020, while the government was reviewing Huawei’s role in 5G, and No 10 policy chief Munira Mirza referred two Chinese firms. 
• Santander is named as the referrer for four suppliers and as the possible referrer for eight others, including two gin distillers.

In total, 415 suppliers were channelled down the VIP lane, according to documents supplied to the Covid Inquiry and seen by Democracy for Sale. Conservative politicians referred 119 of them, and 25 went on to win contracts. Politicians from other parties referred just five, none of which landed a deal. 

Transparency International chief executive Duncan Hames said that the government should not have fought against disclosing the details of the VIP lane. “The public have a right to know who was fast-tracked and on whose say-so. Five years of resisting disclosure has been a prolonged and unnecessary failure of transparency, and it has only deepened the damage to public trust,” Hames said. Jo Maugham, executive director of the Good Law Project said that “contracts for cronies remains one of the greatest stories never told. The Cabinet Office, which ‘administered’ the bonanza, successfully diverted the attention of an easily distracted Labour Government. So it’s so reassuring that Democracy for Sale refuses to take no for an answer. It’s our money, it was vast fortunes, and we have a right to know.”

During Covid, normal procurement rules were suspended and contracts could be awarded without competition. The ‘VIP lane’ was a way for well-connected people to bring potential suppliers to the attention of the government. The government never explained how MPs and other individuals and organisations were made aware of the existence of the VIP lane and allowed to make referrals to it. The Covid Inquiry concluded that the scheme ‘was inherently biased towards those with connections to the UK government’ and ‘should not be repeated’. Last October, the High Court ordered PPE Medpro, the company led by the husband of Conservative peer Michelle Mone, which she referred to the VIP lane, to repay £122m. Mone and her husband Doug Barrowman deny wrongdoing.

Democracy for Sale contacted all the individuals named in this story. Former justice secretary Robert Buckland said: “I have no recollection whatsoever about this referral. I have never heard of the company and have had no connection with it whatsoever. “If there had been any connection between me and the company I would have declared it and if there had been a conflict of interest I would have asked another colleague to deal with the request.” Munira Mirza said that she referred “far more than two offers of help” listed in the Cabinet Office’s release. “I didn’t know any of the people or companies I passed on personally or I’d remember that. I certainly didn’t have any interest in any of them,” Mirza told Democracy for Sale.

A government spokesperson said: “This relates to matters under the previous government,” adding: “we are relentlessly pursuing those who defrauded taxpayers during the pandemic, determined to recover as much as possible of the billions lost - money that should have been funding our teachers, police officers, and vital public services.” Labour MP Lloyd Hatton told us that while referring a company is not improper in itself, “I am shocked that Conservative politicians referred 119 contracts - and 25 then went on to receive taxpayers’ money, most of which was wasted. “The public deserves to know who referred what, who benefited, and why. Every pound of taxpayers’ money must deliver value for money.” It took Democracy for Sale more than five years to get these names released. Know more about the companies or referrals? Get in touch at info@democracyforsale.uk.