Bonded Labour?

If you had a vote in a Labour Leadership Election, then vote for whoever Peter Mandelson would less or least want. Wes Streeting would not be a candidate at all except as Mandelson’s proxy, so that rules him out, but there was no talk of reigning in the bond markets from Andy Burnham when he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury. The people who used to have to pay tax are now allowed to lend the State the money, and of course the lender sets the terms. Yet why does the State issue bonds in the currency of which it was the sole issuer, and which it issued precisely by spending it? The best Chancellor of the Exchequer that the Conservative Party never had was Sir Peter Tapsell. As Keynesian and as Eurosceptical as Peter Shore, he identified the money markets, along with the media moguls and the intelligence agencies, as the heirs of the nabobs and of the Whig magnates whom past generations of Tories had made it their defining cause to cut down to size and to subject to the sovereignty of Parliament.

But instead, yields are now even higher than they were under Liz Truss. That ought not to surprise anyone, and it will not surprise regular readers of this site. Labour opportunistically pretended to oppose the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, the only mini-Budget measure that had not been in Truss’s prospectus to Conservative Party members, but it supported every single one of the others. Had Kwasi Kwarteng’s loony list ever been put to a Commons vote, then the Labour whip would have been to abstain, and any rebellion in favour of it might very well have been larger than any against. The Streeting juggernaut has not come out of nowhere. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell were derided for exploring the possibility that their policies might have led to a run on the pound, but Truss and Kwarteng obviously never even considered it, and nor have Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves. The City did not like many of Corbyn’s and McDonnell’s agenda, voted against them, and gave plenty of money to the other side, but had those agenda become Government policy, then the City would have factored them in, because that is what it does.

People who had always held the absolute infallibility of the Bank of England, the City, the money markets, and the American Administration of the day, have now spent nearly four years bewailing those forces’ removal of the worst British Prime Minister that they had ever seen even as a realistic possibility, never mind as an actual fact, although how little they knew what lay ahead. Those same individuals had considered it an unanswerable argument against Corbyn and McDonnell that those forces would never have stood for them. If their expectations in relation to Truss were anything to go by, then they would have been wrong about that. The Bank, the City and the markets have been wargaming a Labour Left Government forever. They would have got by, as they still would, not that a Left Government could ever now come from the Labour Party. It was the mini-Budget that they could not countenance. Now, though, they have it a second time. If Trussonomics had been accompanied by spending cuts, then the markets’ reaction would have been even worse. The fantasies of the Walter Mittys on Tufton Street and on the former Fleet Street bear no resemblance to the views of the Masters of the Universe. Since October 1997, when I was a fresher at Durham, City types have been telling me that I “would be surprised” at the real political centre of gravity there. I believe them. Ken Livingstone worked very effectively with it for eight years, his office largely staffed by the Socialist Action that Tariq Ali’s International Marxist Group had become.

As Shadow Shadow Chancellor for decades, and then on the frontbench, McDonnell cultivated all sorts of links that Truss, Kwarteng and the rest of the Tufties simply never did. They assumed that they had the Square Mile on side, when in fact nothing could have been further from the case. The City might not have liked any of McDonnell’s fiscal events awfully much, although it is rarely all that keen on anyone’s, but it could and would have lived with them all. It simply could not live with Kwarteng’s only one, to the point of forcing first his removal from office and then Truss’s. At 35, Kwarteng was making so little in the City that he could afford to become an MP instead. Truss managed nine years there before being unemployed for three, and then spent two as Deputy Director of some Westminster Village thinktank while she slept her way into a safe seat. She may be known only for a speech about pork markets and cheese, but as a disciple of Professor Patrick Minford, she wants Britain to have no agriculture, as would be the “free” market in action. In 2024, she was effectively made to defend that position on the stump in South West Norfolk. But what do we have now? Reeves, who presents her time on a bank’s complaints desk as experience as a banker and an economist. Yet with whom would any candidate for Labour Leader replace her?

Teenage Dreams, So Hard To Beat?

Since September 2000, someone has never forgiven me for having acquired a second school governorship a couple of weeks short of the age of 23. By April 2003, I was being told that at 25 I was 30 years too young to be a Labour District Council candidate, although there still had to be no selection meeting for fear that I might have carried it.

But how the world turns. Last year, George Finch of Reform UK became the Leader of Warwickshire County Council, with its budget of two billion pounds. Last week, he was also elected to Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council. And yesterday, he became Leader of the 15-strong Reform Group, which is now the largest on the council, putting him in pole position to become Leader of a second local authority. He is 19 years old. Nineteen. I feel 102. How about you?

King's Speech, Free Speech, Hate Speech

We must fight to our last breath against digital ID, against any attack on trial by jury, against any loss of the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court, against rule-taking EU vassalage, and against any criminalisation of efforts to dissuade children from embarking on drastic and irreversible hormonal and surgical treatment. We must fight no less vigorously to make up the deficiencies in the legislation that had already been enacted on workers' and tenants' rights, which had been watered down to the point of homeopathy in breach of the Labour Party's successful manifesto.

Speaking of homeopathy, making a 77-year-old cancer patient read out that rubbish, in public and on television, was nothing short of elder abuse. But next time, the King might at least enjoy the rarity that the drivel had been written by another Cantabrigian. Either Andy Burnham or Wes Streeting would give Cambridge its first Prime Minister since 1937, and Labour its first from a comprehensive school (the Conservatives have already had Theresa May and Potty Betty), but Streeting would not change the apparently constitutional rule that no male product of any mixed secondary school, state or private and comprehensive or selective, should ever become Prime Minister. No, that really has never happened. Look it up. Still, while St Aelred's Catholic High School may sound like a boys' grammar, at least by Burnham's time it was a mixed comp. Burnham was born in 1970.

Immediately behind the Chief Whip, Barry Gardiner was holding a copy of Paul Holden's The Fraud, a devastating study of Morgan McSweeney, Labour Together, and all that. Labour is a party of extremely right-wing people who lack the social connections to make it in the Conservative Party, and whose two defining experiences were being brought up to spit on everyone below them, which was everyone else where they grew up, and discovering in their first 36 hours at university that they were nowhere near the top of the class system, a discovery that embittered them for life. Like Keir Starmer, Burnham is really one of them. But Streeting is their distilled essence.

At 68, the venerable Afzal Khan was always on for a peerage sooner rather than later. Bringing that forward by a couple of years would indeed make it possible for Burnham to contest the ensuing by-election at Manchester Rusholme. But in 2024, the Greens and the Workers Party came second and third there, with a combined vote of 36.1 per cent. Next door, Gorton and Denton was far safer for Labour. It is not now. The Greens acknowledged that the Workers Party's standing aside had got them over the line, so if they did not return the favour, then the Workers Party should go very hard indeed.

Zack Polanski rents one room in a building the sale of which would net his and several other people's landlord two million pounds, but these days that is London, and increasingly also elsewhere. Polanski, however, could not possibly have believed, either that the Council Tax on his houseboat was covered by his mooring fees, since it would have said so on something that he had signed, or that he was not liable to pay Council Tax on what was clearly his main residence, since he was registered to vote there. Indeed, he has apologised. But unlike you or me if something so basic did not turn up, he never asked the council where his bill was. For years. While sitting on a London Assembly to which he was not paying the precept. Oh, yes. Hit the Greens hard.

Next up, Clacton. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards is going to find Nigel Farage in breach of his duty to register Christopher Harborne's gift, so tax-free, of five million pounds. Farage's prominence and the sheer sum of money, as well as Harborne's being based abroad, will lead, not only to Farage's removal from the House of Commons even if that required the first formal expulsion since 1954, but also to his disqualification. The death of Shirley Porter created a vacancy for Britain's most corrupt living politician. Farage and Boris Johnson have been giving each other a run for Harborne's money. Johnson is already banned from applying for a former MP's parliamentary pass, a shocking censure of a former Prime Minister.

Time was when Farage could have threatened to bring his boys out onto the streets, but they are increasingly sick of him, and the powers that be are growing less frightened of them. Using bladed articles that they had brought for the purpose, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon's drunken and coked up supporters attacked the Police at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day 2023, leading to the second sacking of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary, that time because she had encouraged them. That was the first Zionist terrorist attack in London in many decades, but it was not the first ever. Anything comparable in the Palestinian cause would have led to the imposition of martial law. But, with the Met perhaps stung by criticism of its recent online love-in with Yaxley-Lennon, the Unite the Kingdom march and rally on Saturday is going to be policed like the Right had not experienced since the 1930s, if ever.

This event is so remote from the mainstream of working-class male culture that it clashes with the FA Cup Final, but then for which England team do the Yaxley-Lennonists cheer? The one full of blacks? Or the more successful one full of lesbians? At least five foreign nationals have been banned from entering this country in order to use the Unite the Kingdom platform to call on Donald Trump to invade the United Kingdom and effect regime change, for which numerous guests on our shores had the effrontery to call from that platform last time. Three of those five are from EU member states, so their prohibition is a Brexit benefit. In March, Starmer literally gave the red carpet treatment to President Ahmed al-Sharaa of Syria, who is otherwise Abu Mohammad al-Julani in the manner of "Tommy Robinson", and who is massacring Christians as befits a sometime second-in-command both of Al-Qaeda and of the so-called Islamic State. Al-Sharaa should not have been given houseroom, and nor should Filip Dewinter, Valentina Gomez, Ada Lluch, Joey Mannarino or Eva Vlaardingerbroek. Whoever radicalised Moses Edwards, it was not "al-Julani".

Starmering On

Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting can get it done in 16 minutes. They are old hands. Did Starmer say anything, or did he keep Streeting in silence until he felt like uttering, “You may go now”? We do know that Starmer was too weak to sack Streeting, thereby giving not the first proof that he was unfit to be Prime Minister.

The remnant Labour Left is an exercise in sentimental folly, but no one could any longer accuse it, should this be regarded as an accusation, of being somehow the Labour Party’s Enemy Within. No would could any longer deny that the Labour Party was now on its fourth successive Leader to have been treated as that Enemy by the entryist Blairite Right, with its limitless funds and with its peerless media connections. While the unions um and ah instead of disaffiliating, their bitterest foes display no such squeamishness.

From The Throne To The Thrown Out?

The Government's majority is less than 184, and the latest tally of Labour MPs who have called on Keir Starmer to resign is 92, so to whom will the King really be giving his Speech? It will begin "My Lords and Members of the House of Commons", but one of the former, whose effective usurpation of the position of Jess Phillips undoubtedly contributed to Phillips's resignation, is Harriet Harman, who tweeted the offer of a peerage to Arooj Shah following her resignation as Leader of Oldham Council because Labour had lost overall control.

Shah is up to her neck in Oldham's mishandling of the rape gangs, but she is clearly ideal ennoblement material from the point of view of Starmer's Adviser on Women and Girls. Also heavily implicated is Shah's predecessor but two or four, depending on how you counted it, Jim McMahon MP, who is expected to be knighted in the King's Birthday Honours List. Shah is very close to Mohammed Imran Ali, known as "Irish Imy", who is a convicted heroin trafficker and the convicted getaway driver of the convicted cop killer Dale Cregan, but who has since set up vigilante patrols on the streets of Oldham.

Mind you, most parties have such types. Reform UK's initial candidate for Leeds Central and Headingley at the 2024 General Election was Jack Denny, who had done time both for fraud as a bent copper, and for possession of indecent images of children. If Labour raised Shah to the ermine, then why should Reform not elevate Denny? After all, Shaun Davies has just been made an Assistant Government Whip in place of someone who resigned for Wes Streeting before Streeting did not resign, and Davies was Leader of Telford Council when he actively campaigned against a national inquiry into the rape gangs.

The Labour Whips' Office has been a cesspit at least since Phil Woolas, Dan Norris and Ivor Caplin were all in it under Hilary Armstrong, who went on to introduce both Joe Docherty and Matthew Doyle to the House of Lords, and who in those days was advancing both Anna Turley, and Caplin's close friend, closest ally, sometime lover, and now constituency successor, Peter Kyle. Norris has lost the Labour whip, yet his proxy vote is still cast religiously by the Labour Whips. Armstrong and Kyle went on to support the brief 2015 Leadership campaign of Phillips, a campaign chaired by Streeting, who recently accompanied Kyle to The Devil Wears Prada 2. But they will not have been joined by Al Carns, who registered this domain name as long ago as February. And his supporters do not come with puns. They come with guns.

Equity

Excellent news from Haroon Siddique:

A leading human rights barrister has won an appeal against his referral for contempt of court over his closing speech during a trial of Palestine Action activists.

Rajiv Menon KC was accused of breaching the judge’s directions in the trial of six people for a 2024 direct action protest at an arms factory of the Israeli subsidiary Elbit Systems UK in Filton, near Bristol.

The proceedings against Menon – who previously worked on the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, the inquests of victims of the Hillsborough disaster and the Grenfell Tower inquiry – were believed to be the first brought against a barrister in respect of a jury speech in living memory, possibly ever. On Tuesday, the court of appeal allowed the barrister’s challenge to them.

Menon’s solicitor, Jenny Wiltshire, from Hickman & Rose, said: “Rajiv is delighted that the court of appeal has found in his favour and decided that the Filton trial judge did not have the power to refer him directly to the high court to be prosecuted for contempt of court and that the high court did not have the power to accept the reference in the absence of an application by the attorney general in the public interest.”

She said he was grateful to his lawyers and others who supported him during a difficult time and “hopes that this is now the end of the matter. This unprecedented attempt to criminalise lawyers for doing their job and representing their clients fearlessly should never be repeated”.

The trial judge, Mr Justice Johnson, referred Menon because he considered that the barrister had contravened his ruling in which he forbade lawyers from inviting the jury to disregard the court’s rulings of law or to apply the principle of jury equity – the right of a jury to acquit on the basis of conscience regardless of the judge’s directions – or to inform the jury of it.

None of the defendants were convicted of any offence but they were retried and four were convicted last week.

The high court had directed that a summons for contempt be drawn up and served on Menon after a referral from Johnson. The court of appeal said Johnson should reconsider the matter in the light of its ruling.

Defend Our Juries said the fact that contempt proceedings were ever brought against Menon “should deeply concern everyone who cares about the rule of law”.

And from Joshua Carroll:

A prominent barrister who represented a Palestine Action activist has won his appeal against contempt of court proceedings, which began after he allegedly defied a judge’s orders by telling a jury they could acquit based on their conscience.

The attempt by Mr Justice Johnson to penalise Rajiv Menon KC for comments he made in his closing speech is believed to be unprecedented in British history.

Johnson had previously told Menon that he was barred from mentioning the principle of jury equity, under which a jury can acquit someone on the basis that their actions were moral – even if they believe the defendant broke the law.

Four activists were found guilty of criminal damage last week after they took part in a 2024 break-in at a facility near Bristol owned by Israeli weapons company Elbit Systems. Despite being found guilty of criminal damage, they are set to be sentenced under terrorism law, something that was kept secret from the jury.

The contempt of court proceedings stemmed from Menon’s closing comments at a previous trial, in which the activists were acquitted, prompting prosecutors to pursue a retrial.

At the earlier trial, Menon recited an inscription from a plaque at the Old Bailey that highlights a case from 1670 that “established the right of juries to give their verdict according to their convictions”.

The court of appeal on Tuesday ruled that Johnson had no jurisdiction to refer Menon directly to the high court to be prosecuted for contempt, and that the high court had no jurisdiction to consider the allegation against Menon without an application by the attorney general.

A spokesperson for campaign group Defend Our Juries said: “For over 350 years, the right of a jury to follow their conscience has been a cornerstone of British justice, and the last safeguard ordinary people have against the abuse of state power.

“Rajiv Menon KC did what every defence barrister should be free to do in discharging his duty to his client: he told a jury the truth about their own rights. Today the court of appeal has ruled Judge Johnson followed an unlawful process, in directly referring his complaint to the high court, while bypassing the attorney general.”

And from Katherine Hearst:

A leading human rights barrister who represented Palestine Action defendants in the UK has won an appeal against a contempt of court case.

Rajiv Menon KC was accused of breaching the judge’s directions in a closing speech he delivered at the conclusion of the first trial at Woolwich Crown Court involving six Palestine action defendants accused of causing criminal damage to weapons at an Israeli army factory outside Bristol.

The defendants were subsequently cleared of charges of aggravated burglary. They were then retried, with four of them convicted of criminal damage last week.

The proceedings against Menon are thought to be unprecedented in English legal history.

During the trial, the presiding judge, Justice Johnson, directed lawyers that their closing speeches could not invite the jury to disregard the court’s ruling or law, and barred them from reminding the jury of its right to acquit on conscience - known as the principle of “jury equity”.

In his closing remarks, Menon, who has 30 years of experience and who represented defendant Charlotte Head in both trials, read out an inscription on a plaque at the Old Bailey commemorating Bushell’s Case of 1670, which first “established the right of juries to give their verdicts according to their convictions”.

Menon told jurors that the defendants had been “restricted” when giving evidence about their knowledge of Israeli arms company Elbit Systems' role in Israel's war on Gaza, and that it would be “ridiculous” for jurors to ignore that wider context and its impact on the defendants.

He also told the jury that the judge could not direct them to convict.

Justice Johnson said that the effect of Menon’s speech “was to invite the jury to disregard my directions that they should put views of the Middle East and the war in Gaza, and emotion, to one side”, and referred him to the administrative court.

Menon’s lawyers launched an appeal on the grounds that the High Court lacked jurisdiction to handle the case against him without an intervention from the attorney general.

On Monday, the Court of Appeal agreed with Menon’s team, finding that Justice Johnson wrongly initiated proceedings and should have either dealt with the issue himself at the time or referred the matter to the attorney general.

Menon’s solicitor, Jenny Wiltshire, from Hickman & Rose, said that Menon “is delighted that the Court of Appeal has found in his favour”, adding that he “hopes that this is now an end to the matter”.

The case is referred back to the trial judge. It will be halted unless he refers it to the attorney general, Lord Hermer.

Stalking Horses?

Even Buckingham Palace is briefing against Keir Starmer because of the position in which he will be putting the King in a few hours’ time. Even sooner, though, Starmer will either sack Wes Streeting, or he is too weak to do so and thus unfit to be Prime Minister. No one should take the job of Health Secretary unless Starmer guaranteed to support the uncompromising removal from the NHS of the Palantir of Jeffrey Epstein’s Peter Thiel, the Palantir that was a client of Epstein’s Peter Mandelson, the Palantir with which Mandelson and Starmer had off-the-books meetings in Washington while Mandelson, under whom Streeting had learned so much, was Ambassador there.

In 2015, Streeting chaired the Leadership campaign of Jess Phillips. For months, Natalie Fleet, whose politically useful version of her past is taken entirely at face value, has been telling people that she was going to replace Phillips. Tonight, she has. Graveyards are full of the indispensable. But does Fleet also want the access to every camera phone in the country that Phillips resigned for having been denied, right when Sovereign AI was being placed in the tender hands of Suzanne Ashman, the daughter-in-law of Tony Blair of the Tony Blair Institute, not to say of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace?

“I would stab Jeremy Corbyn in the front,” said Phillips, only now out of the office of “Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls”. She has accused British Pakistanis of importing wives for their disabled sons. She claims to have been rude and abusive towards Diane Abbott, although she may have built her reputation on lying about having used gutter language towards a woman who was old enough to be her mother. Phillips laughs at male suicides, at male cancers, at other men’s health issues, at violence against men, at problems in boys’ educational attainment, and at fathers denied access to their children. She has said that attacks of the kind that were seen in Cologne on the New Year’s Eve of 2015-16 “happen every week in Birmingham”, so the wonder is that it took until last week for there to be no Labour councillors in her constituency.

And on Tuesday 2 September, Phillips told the House of Commons that, “South Yorkshire police should never have been left to investigate themselves in this matter, and moving those investigations to the NCA is absolutely the right thing to do. I would be lying if I said that over the years I had not met girls who talked to me about how police were part of not just the cover-up but the perpetration.” Read again those words of the Minister who refused a statutory inquiry, an inquiry that had been, and still is, demanded by the Muslim candidate whom she had beaten by only 693 votes at Birmingham Yardley, which he intends to contest again, the wonderful investigative journalist Jody McIntyre. Then read the Epstein Files and worry about inferior cultures with no respect for women and with endemic predation on young girls. On a chilly spring day, poor Jenny Chapman was not only made to wait behind with Starmer after Cabinet, but she has been running around in what appeared to be only her slip, having not even been permitted the time to dress herself. What a burden it is that, as Beth Rigby put it, “she probably knows him better than most”.