Transverse Process?

At Woolwich Crown Court yesterday, Judge Andrew Lees discharged the jury in the trial of Kamran Ahmed, Zahra Farooq, Moiz Ibrahim, Liam Mullany, Heba Muraisi and Qesser Zuhrah, the third batch of the Filton 25 activists against Elbit Systems to be put in the dock. Having spent 15 months on remand, during which they nearly died on hunger strike to demand as little as a trial date, they were released on bail before sitting through the seven week trial that has ended like this. Yet the Crown Prosecution Service intends to force a retrial, no doubt this time without the unusual decision of Judge Lees to allow the Defence to discuss the reasons for the action, and certainly without any mention of the absolute right of a jury to acquit no matter what.

At the same time, over at the Supreme Court, extremely hostile judges were making it effectively impossible for learned counsel to argue against the proscription of Palestine Action, a proscription ostensibly for having sprayed paint onto planes at RAF Brize Norton, planes that were simply repainted and used as normal. Hardly any charge that has been brought against any Palestine Action defendant has ever resulted in a conviction, and the most serious, ever, was that of Samuel Corner, only by a majority verdict, of grievous bodily harm without intent, since the same jury had acquitted him of GBH with intent after Sergeant Kate Evans had walked unaided out of Accident and Emergency. When a small hairline fracture to her transverse process was identified, then she was advised to take paracetamol. It took two attempts to convict Corner of having assaulted her at all. Take a sledgehammer to that.

Yet that is the worst thing of which anyone associated with Palestine Action has ever been accused. Contrast it with already rearming Argentina in anticipation of the next Falklands War. Or with the events of 1 April 2024, when James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman, unarmed British veterans who were delivering humanitarian aid, were bombed three times to make sure that they were dead, as could not have been an accident. Yvette Cooper proscribed Palestine Action in order to prejudice the first court case, and she committed contempt of court by justifying that decision in The Observer. But she is right-wing Labour royalty, so Andy Burnham has observed convention by demoting her first rather than just sacking straight away. Therefore, he feels obliged to contest this appeal rather than risk her resignation, after which she might not even stand down in 2029 and end 32 years in which she had cut her own majority from 15,426 to 6630. Meanwhile, though, Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters have held only 53 seats in the Knesset to 48 for his opponents, of those 48 the powerbrokers are the record 19 members of the Arab-led parties, even JD Vance is calling for a changed relationship with Israel, and even Donald Trump has announced the impending end of aid to it. The caravan moves on, even while the dog still barks.

The Boy Who Fell Over The Wall

No, not a cancelled attraction at The World of David Walliams. Rather, Paul Knaggs writes:

A boundary wall is an instructive piece of architecture. It does not exist merely to keep people out. It exists to conceal what happens inside, and to ensure that when violence occurs, only one side owns the official record. On the evening of Monday 2 November, a fourteen-year-old boy climbed the fence of a rented house in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka, a commuter village on the western edge of Kyiv, and fell into the yard. A day later, by his own account, he was in Kyiv Regional Hospital with painful ribs, cut fingers and difficulty walking. Between the fall and the hospital bed lies the question this whole affair keeps returning to: what happens behind that wall, and who gets to say?

We now have three irreconcilable versions of what took place behind that wall. The first account, which caught fire online on Monday afternoon, claimed armed men held forty captives in a cellar, tortured them, and left one dead. That internet panic is false. The available chronology contradicts it entirely. The second belongs to the Ukrainian state. In that version, the house was merely an ordinary military billet where twenty-two servicemen were housed, four of whom needed medical care, and the crowd at the gate had simply been duped by an outside provocation. Senior officials insist the child merely slipped from the fence, was carried inside by soldiers to protect him from stones thrown by protesters, wrapped gently in a blanket, given first aid, and released. National Guard commander Oleksandr Pivnenko insisted his men never touched him. Interior Minister Ivan Vyhivskyi went further still, asserting with immaculate bureaucratic calm that nothing at all had happened to the boy.

The third story belongs to the child himself. On the evening of 3 November, a video recording surfaced and began circulating across Ukrainian media, reported the following day by the outlet Subota Online. From his hospital bed, the teenager does not deny climbing the wall. He admits joining the disturbance outside, being sprayed with a fire extinguisher, running home to fetch a gas mask, and returning before falling into the compound. But he alleges that after he landed, approximately ten men in dark clothes, unmarked military fatigues, and balaclavas dragged him inside. He says they pulled him by his hair, forced him upstairs, made him lie face down, cut his clothes with knives, and beat him repeatedly with fists, boots, and shovels. Footage of a boy climbing a fence does not disprove an assault after he landed. The state asks the public to believe that a teenager broke ribs and cut his hands simply by falling into the arms of protective guards. The boy alleges a calculated, gang-handed beating by masked men. The physical trauma is confirmed. The hospital bed is confirmed. The first story was a rumour; the second keeps altering; the third has yet to face an independent investigation. And that unanswered allegation is where an entire system stands on trial and what was revealed on the other side of that wall.

Borshchahivka, Kyiv: A Plot Nobody Can Agree On 

The hostage story ‘officially’ fell apart within hours or so, they say: Police denied any death and any unlawful detention. Kyrylo Budanov, head of the Presidential Office, climbed the fence himself and counted fourteen people inside, not forty. The woman who raised the alarm, Valentina Molodaya, introduced herself as the owner of a private ambulance service. Slidstvo.Info found the company had not operated since 2023, and that she runs a plastic surgery clinic. She and her driver have been detained, and the Security Service (SBU) says the action was planned in advance. So it was a plot. Whose plot, the state cannot yet say. Budanov spoke of “outside influence” without naming anyone. Interior Minister Ivan Vyhivskyi said Molodaya’s own husband had gone AWOL and that she was trying to free him. On Wednesday, the commander of the unit that runs the house, Pavlo Kurchenko of the Azov Corps’ unit 3121, gave Ukrainska Pravda a different account. He says that the day before the riot, the mother of one detained man offered a guardsman a bribe of about $7,000 to release her son, that she normally lives in occupied territory, and that the man’s relatives provoked the unrest. He also suggests Russia may have been involved. You would be right to think a state that is certain it faced a conspiracy should be able to say whose it was.

National Guard House in Kyiv: What the State Admits 

Strip away everything allegedly false and look at what remains, on the state’s own account. The house was real, and it was rented. National Guard commander Oleksandr Pivnenko said men mobilised by the recruitment centres were brought there to be processed and checked before training. The Guard explained that men can no longer be held hundreds at a time in one place, because Russian missiles would find them. That is a real military problem. Its answer was a private home in a commuter village, holding men who had not chosen to be there. Even the basic facts will not stay still. Budanov counted fourteen people inside. The Guard’s figures added up to twenty-two. Kurchenko now says twenty-six. On Monday night Pivnenko said the four injured men were deserters who had been caught and returned to their unit. Kurchenko now says only two of the twenty-six were AWOL returnees.

The Dossier on the Four Injured Men 

What happened to the four men, the alleged deserters, is still the central question, and on Wednesday the unit gave its answer. It came in the form of a dossier. According to Kurchenko, one man injured his back during an air-raid alert at basic training. A hospital in Lutsk diagnosed a healed fracture of the ninth vertebra. Later he was discharged for drinking and urinating on the ward, and sent to the house with a note saying he should remain lying down; he was given medication and put under the unit medic’s supervision. A second man, mobilised on 30 October, tested positive for drugs, tried to attack the unit’s medic, was isolated in a separate room and there, Kurchenko says, began to harm himself.

A third was brought to the house to stop him encouraging other soldiers to desert, and Kurchenko says he was not injured at all. The fourth was being held in “quarantine” after going AWOL. Reports of the interview add that his name appears on Myrotvorets, a private website listing people accused of acting against Ukraine, because he crossed into occupied Donbas, and that his brother lives in occupied Donetsk. The unit says it has documents to back all of this. 

It may all be true. But this is the account of the commander whose unit is under investigation, published before the investigators have said anything. It answers the question of how the men were injured by putting the injured men on trial. Their drinking, their drug tests, their families and their names on a nationalist blacklist are now in the national press. The boy’s allegation, meanwhile, has not been examined at all. Even on the commander’s own terms, the account damns the system it is meant to defend. A man with a fractured vertebra, whose discharge note said he should be lying down, was sent to a rented house. A man in drug-induced crisis was locked in a room until he began to harm himself. A soldier was moved to a different house to stop him talking about desertion. None of that amounts to a torture chamber. None of it is how a lawful state looks after men in its custody. And the official count of the injured has quietly dropped from four to three.

The Boy and the Men in Balaclavas 

The official account of the fourteen-year-old is simple. Pivnenko says the boy climbed up during the disturbance and fell, and that soldiers carried him indoors to protect him from the protesters’ stones. Footage on Telegram shows him moving along the fence and jumping into the yard. Other clips show him shouting and, according to the outlets that published them, throwing stones at the windows. He was no captive and no conscript. He was a local teenager who joined a riot. On Tuesday evening, a video appeared on TikTok in which a boy says he is that teenager, speaking from hospital. He does not deny climbing the fence or falling into the yard. His allegation is about what happened after he landed. He says about ten men in black clothing and balaclavas dragged him inside and beat him with fists, feet and shovels. He says they took him upstairs, made him lie face down while they questioned him, cut his clothes with knives and filmed it. The National Guard denies that anyone beat him.

The Tribune has not verified the video, and no medical evidence about the cause of his injuries has been made public. His account may be exaggerated or wrong. But footage of the fall cannot settle the matter, because the fall is not what he disputes. The men he describes wore balaclavas. Ukrainian soldiers often cover their faces, and Kurchenko says his unit tries to move unnoticed. But Dmytro Lubinets, the parliamentary human rights commissioner, has warned that officials covering their faces is a serious violation, precisely because it makes them impossible to identify. Someone in that house knows who was in the room with the boy. So far, the state’s most visible response has been aimed at his family. Vyhivskyi has said the boy’s parents could face administrative penalties, and children’s services have been to the home to talk to them about keeping children out of danger. When a citizen comes out of the state’s machinery bruised, the first file to be opened is on his family.

Three Cases Against the Crowd, One Against the Guards 

The crowd was angry, and it had reason to be. This village, like every village in Ukraine, has watched its men taken off the streets for four years, and some have not come home. When word spread that men were being beaten behind a garden wall, people went to the gate. Some threw stones. Some rocked the bus carrying the very men they had come to free. Ukrinform reports sixteen guardsmen hurt, and the military ombudswoman, Olha Reshetylova, says some of those attacked had survived Azovstal and Russian captivity. That belongs in the record, and The Tribune reports it. But the anger did not come from nowhere. The state now calling it sabotage is the same state that produced it: through 6,127 complaints in a single year, through deaths in recruitment centres, and through a house where injured men were kept from hospital. Near midnight, masked young men, still unidentified, appeared and broke up the crowd. 

The state’s response to the crowd has been swift. Within a day the SBU said it had identified about a hundred participants, and it has opened three criminal cases: obstructing the armed forces, revealing military locations, and mass unrest. It is searching homes and weighing arrests. The state’s response to the house has been one case, opened by the State Bureau of Investigation (DBR) for suspected abuse of authority by a serviceman, and a request that everyone avoid premature conclusions. That request has not stopped a commander publishing the detained men’s medical and family histories. A state that can identify a hundred protesters in a day has not yet said whether a fourteen-year-old’s allegation of assault is being investigated as a crime in its own right.

Why the Village Believed It: The 6,127 Complaints 

A rumour spreads on fertile ground or not at all. A woman outside told reporters that recruitment officers had seized her son on his way to work and taken him to that house. Perhaps she was wrong about where he was. She was not wrong to believe it could happen, because in Ukraine it does. None of what follows proves anything about Borshchahivka. It explains why a hundred people believed the worst within hours. Complaints to Lubinets’s office about the recruitment centres and the military police rose from 18 in 2022 to 6,127 in 2025. In July, he reported four deaths inside recruitment-centre premises. In Uzhhorod, his monitors found people handcuffed to a ladder, and the acting head of the district centre has since been named a suspect for unlawful detention. In Odesa, the DBR alleges that recruitment officials and civilian “activists” held men captive and tortured them to hit their targets. Lubinets has said that fewer than one per cent of violations ever become public. He has also supplied the sentence that should hang over every recruitment office in the country.

Ukrainian Desertion Figures and the Silence Around Them 

Then there are the men who run. Between January 2022 and September 2025, Ukrainian prosecutors registered 235,646 cases of soldiers going absent without leave and 53,954 cases of desertion. Cases are not people, since some men leave more than once, but the scale is undeniable. In December 2025, the Prosecutor General’s Office stopped publishing the figures, saying they could lead to false conclusions about the army’s morale. A government that hides its desertion figures, holds men in rented houses with no published legal status, and publishes detainees’ medical files while leaving a child’s allegation unexamined is not protecting morale. It is protecting itself from the obvious question: why are so many men walking away, and why will their families go to such lengths to bring them home?

Who Benefits From the Borshchahivka Story? 

Moscow benefits, and wasted no time. Dmitry Peskov’s response was that anyone unwilling to fight for “the Kyiv regime” could surrender to Russian troops. Kyiv’s commanders benefit from a story about saboteurs and disreputable detainees, because it lets them avoid talking about the house. The cost falls where it always falls: on working-class men stopped on their way to work, on soldiers dragged back to units they fled, on families who learn where their men are from a rumour on Telegram, and now on a boy in hospital whose account the state has so far met with a warning to his parents. Britain cannot treat this as somebody else’s business. British governments have been among the loudest backers of this war and have spent heavily on it. Ministers who sign the cheques and speak of shared values owe the public more than silence about what those values mean behind that wall.

Register the Boy’s Allegation, Publish the Figures

Independent forensic specialists should examine the fourteen-year-old. His allegation should be registered and investigated as a possible assault, separately from the riot inquiry, and everyone who was in that room should give evidence, including the woman he says stopped the beating. The four men should be interviewed by civilian investigators, away from their chain of command, and the DBR, not the unit, should say how they were injured. The identities of the masked men, both those inside the house and those who cleared the street, should be established. Every site used to hold mobilised men or recaptured soldiers should be placed on a clear legal footing, publicly registered and open to the ombudsman without notice. The desertion figures should be published again. And British ministers should ask, out loud, what happens in houses like this one. The boy did not fall into a void. He fell into a house rented with public money, money the UK public provides; it was run by men sworn to uphold the law. They failed. The hostage story fell apart within hours. The state’s explanation has not stopped moving since.

It’s The War, Stupid

The Republican Party would have done better if it had been led by Melania, whose Nobel Peace Prize would be well-deserved. Donald Trump said to vote as if he were on the ballot, so they did. Hispanics made it clear what they thought of the President who had unleashed ICE, which through Palantir was enmeshed in the IDF and thus in the forces behind the war in Iran. Young men made it clear what they thought of a President who was in practice as deindustrialising and as warmongering as any other. Pro-lifers made it clear what they thought of a President who opposed a national ban on abortion, supported the mailing across state lines of the pills that were used in 70 per cent of them, and supported the IVF that depended on them. And Catholics made it clear what they thought, both of a Protestant President who spewed random abuse at the Pope like a drunken Klansman, and of a Catholic Vice President who thought that he was a better theologian than the Pope, and specifically a better-informed Augustinian than the former Prior General of the Order of Saint Augustine. Still, JD Vance has joined Trump in making himself ineligible for membership of the Labour Party that had spent today congratulating people whom it would have expelled years ago:

One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was “composition”—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.

So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we’re going to shock the world? “No,” he told me. “We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us.”

Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.

There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.

But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.

Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:

1) End the war

2) Focus on cost of living/inflation

3) Put America First

4) Change our relationship to Israel

Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)

In the next few months, there’s going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I’m open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.

The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.

If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.

But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.

I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.

As Sohrab Ahmari writes:

An all-too-common analytic error is to reduce complex problems to simplistic causes (sancta simplicitas, “holy simplicity”, as Nietzsche mockingly referred to this tendency, particularly among religious believers). But there is also the reverse error: a deliberate seeking out of complexity when simple explanations suffice.

In the wake of the Democratic blowout in Tuesday’s midterms — South Carolina, Kansas, and Texas have gone blue — beware the preachers of holy complexity bent on obfuscating the obvious: President Trump and the GOP broke their pledge of peace, launched an ill-conceived war with Iran, and thus exacerbated an affordability crisis they’d been elected to solve.

To be sure, other failures marked the first two years of the Trump administration: the chaotic tariff regime, the grotesque corruption, the performative cruelty of ICE, Trump’s own descent from mere reality-TV vanity to ballroom-obsessed, Neronian caprice. But the Iran war — given both its inflationary effects and galling betrayal of one of Trump’s core pledges — looms largest.

The preachers of holy complexity have good reason to avoid this bare truth. Because it indicts their entire project: a hawkish foreign policy that sees US and Israeli interests as identical or nearly so. Its advocates have for years underwritten Israeli maximalism at great cost to American global prestige and domestic well-being. After the ballot-box shellacking wrought by the Iran war, that project faces a bleak future in mainstream American politics.

Voter polling — what actual voters tell pollsters upon leaving the precinct — is rarely this unambiguous. Nine of 10 voters identified the cost of living as a major concern as they headed to the polls. Only a quarter of voters described the condition of the US economy as “excellent” or “good”, while three-fourths described it as “not so good” or “poor”. And a staggering 87% of voters said they were very or somewhat concerned about the price of gas and diesel.

Most telling: about 60% of voters told the Associated Press that the Iran war was a mistake. Yes, fewer identified the Iran war as a “crucial” factor than did the cost of living. Then again, the war itself is a cost-of-living issue.

It’s also true that, as political economist Justin Vassallo noted in these pages, the current inflation is partly structural, having to do with the general trend toward de-globalization. But since energy prices ramify through the economy, the Islamic Republic’s (predictable) closure of the Strait of Hormuz in response to the US-Israeli invasion has unquestionably aggravated the affordability crisis.

As one senior Trump official told me recently, the administration shouldn’t have been “adding the short-term energy shock” of the Iran war to the structural inflationary trends.

Or take it from outgoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who recently said: “Some of these Republicans are saying, “Oh, well, the gas, don’t worry. It’s no big deal.” . . . No, no. Listen, we’ve just got to be honest. Gas is higher. It hurts people, working-class people, and it’s higher because of the Iran conflict. That’s just the fact. If you can’t admit that to voters, then you’re gaslighting them, and they’re not going to listen to you on other things.” Even Fox News pundits — yes, them — openly lamented the war’s baleful effects on GOP campaigns Tuesday night.

This matters because, ever since Jerusalem demanded that Washington join its 12-Day War, the hawks and neoconservatives insisted that a military intervention in Iran would be popular, or at least not unpopular. “There is no US downside to striking the Iranian regime,” counseled the former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen in January, a month before the full invasion. A few weeks into the war, he cheered: “The Trump Doctrine is here. It ends forever wars” (the Iran quagmire has now entered its ninth month).

The hawks also went out of their way to pooh-pooh the economic downsides of the war. John Podhoretz of Commentary (where, full disclosure, I once served as senior writer) reassured a radio host that “I don’t think the American people care very much, they’re very uninvested in this. Unless gas prices go up to $250 a barrel, and suddenly it costs $9 a gallon at the pump, what cost is being inflicted on any individual American by this conflict? There is no cost. There is no cost!”

News Nation host Batya Ungar-Sargon said: “The markets seem to have … a kind of anti-Trump Derangement Syndrome, in which Trump can do no wrong. It seems that no matter what he does, the markets love it. … Even while the US blockade was on, the markets seemed totally oblivious.”

Never mind that the blockade is still on, and that Gulf oil is transiting with great difficulty and at high expense. Ungar-Sargon identifies as a populist of sorts, and thus knows well that what happens to equity prices often has very little to do with the economic conditions of ordinary people. Indeed, in March 2025, she wrote in praise of Trump’s plan to shift the US economy away from finance and toward manufacturing. The headline: “Trump vs. Wall Street”. (But when there’s an unpopular war to defend, one reaches for the nearest non sequitur.)

And when, over the summer, there was a chance at a negotiated settlement in time to extricate the GOP from the Persian Gulf mess, the hawks assailed the talks — relentlessly. “Mr. President, Give Up on a Nuclear Deal With Iran”, urged The Free Press. Which also published the following not-at-all-uniformly-hawkish opinions: “America Will Regret Withdrawing From Iraq”, “Houthi Defeat Is Closer Than We Think”, “The Dangerous Pause in Iran”, “Danger Lurks in JD Vance’s Negotiations With Iran”. You get the idea.

“Trump’s Iran strategy is working,” argued Thiessen. “His vice president isn’t.” (Why the opprobrium targeting JD Vance? Because the Vice President had taken the lead on negotiations with the Islamic Republic.) Ben Domenech slammed Vance as “Hillbilly Obama” for trying to clinch the deal. The hawkish elements of the religious Right dutifully stepped up to claim a just-war case for preemption and against diplomacy; papal teaching suggested otherwise.

These voices, to be clear, weren’t marginal or irrelevant to Trump’s decision-making. Far from it. Although many of them began as Never Trumpers, and even prayed that the Trumpian chalice might pass from them in 2024, these pundits and outlets rebranded themselves as MAGA true believers (or respectably Trumpian, in the case of The Free Press). More than that, they took it upon themselves to police the Right’s boundaries, framing the movement’s antiwar dissidents as unrepresentative at best and traitors at worst.

Trump listened. As several administration sources have told me — including both hawks and restrainers — the President in his second term ignored the usual executive-branch processes. The “deep state” had throttled him during his first term, in his view, and he now preferred to hear from loyalists only. He watched a lot of Fox News, and heard directly from pro-Israel mega-donors such as Miriam Adelson.

One consequence was the lack of foresight and lousy planning that marred the operation, not least Team Trump’s disregard of the Hormuz threat. The echo chamber of yes men and women also, paradoxically, led 2024’s “peace” candidate to realize a long-cherished goal of the more hawkish elements of the deep state he once denounced.

In the event, the results are disastrous. Trump is hemmed in at home, and while he will retain greater scope for action abroad, his ability to keep waging the Iran war will depend upon congressional Democrats’ power of the purse. The deeper tragedy is the collapse of the remarkable coalition he put together that, by 2024, encompassed the multiracial working class, including half of Hispanic men and a fifth of African-American men. The Iran war, as I warned in these pages in September, was driving a re-realignment favoring Democrats.

But the outcome is worse still for the hawks themselves, especially those who had come to treat American and Israeli interests as one and the same, and to take the aspirations and tone of Israel’s hard Right as an unimpeachable guide for US policy. It had gone too far. At one point last year, US State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce described the United States as “the greatest country on Earth” before pausing to correct herself: …next to Israel.” (Cleanliness, recall, is next to godliness, not the other way around.)

Where will they go now? The Middle East hawks still enjoy tremendous institutional power. But their worldview can no longer be considered to be in the American mainstream. Republican elected officials no less than Democratic ones can read polls, and foreign policy must enjoy some degree of domestic buy-in. Even before the GOP’s Iran-war rout, the polling was clear: Israel — at least, in its current, maximalist iteration — is massively unpopular among Democrats, Independents, and younger Republicans.

Probably, as a number of Trump World sources told me on Tuesday, the hawks will remain part of the broad conservative coalition. But it’s hard to imagine them in the cockpit of Republican governance going forward. Negotiating their long-overdue demotion, however, will prove far from simple.

In For A Pound?

Supermarkets’ Christmas advertisements never used to be events. The media decided to report them as such, meaning that then they were. That kind of thing happens a lot. And if John Lewis was going to use a Rolling Stones track covered by a children’s choir, then it should have been Sister Morphine. One for Poundland, perhaps?

Sonny Leong is a highly accomplished businessman. But in answering John Redwood, I suspect that he misspoke, and that he was really trying to rule out the nationalisation of Poundland. Still, thank or blame Robert Jenrick if that happened. If it was not quite his suggestion, then he did pose the question to which Government’s reply might be, “Nationalisation?” What would be his response, and why? What would be his alternative proposal, and why?

If the Conservatives had anything about them, then they would point out that it had been their Finance Act of 2017 that had begun the abolition of the tax relief on interest payments for corporations, and that the last Prime Minister to have called for worker-elected directors on the boards of large companies had been Theresa May, so that the first should be completed while the second was revisited. And a publicly owned chain of low cost, fully unionised supermarkets that bought only British produce if at all possible, and only local produce if at all possible? If that is not a brilliant idea, then it is barking mad. There may be only one way of finding out which it was.

The Poundland crisis results in no small part from the fact that even Britain’s merely middling level of welfare spending by OECD standards still translated into near-bottom individual benefit generosity and value. For example, by international standards the triple lock delivers a pitifully low pension from a shockingly high age, but it puts money in the pockets of the people who spent it, thereby injecting it into the consumer economy and thus employing the young.

40 per cent of people on Universal Credit are in work, including 60 per cent of those who benefit from the lifting of the two-child cap, so the problem is low pay. Most of the rest are medically unable to work, an extremely difficult status to attain. If you doubt that, then try it. You can have any job you like on PIP, which you do not get for having a specific condition, but for how your conditions affect your life. You most certainly cannot self-certify onto it. Again, try it. By giving money to people who spent it, PIP stimulates our consumer economy, as sickness and disability benefits in general do, as the triple lock does, and as the lifting of the two-child benefit cap does, all while declaring the social and cultural value of the direct beneficiaries.

There is a case for Motability to buy only vehicles manufactured in the United Kingdom, but show me a PIP claimant who had been bought a BMW or a Mercedes on Motability. And you may have constipation, or tennis elbow, or whatever, while also on Motability, and that would be listed among your conditions on the paperwork. But nothing like that could be grounds for the award. The cost of leasing your vehicle is deducted from your PIP, costing the State no more than you would in any case have received. If you did put that towards a “premium” car, then you yourself would have to pay the difference. For a vehicle that you still would not own.

Without Motability, far fewer physically disabled people would be able to work. While as a Brexit benefit the vehicles themselves ought to be British-made where at all available and the industry thus stimulated, it is a cause for joy that Motability buys and then owns one in five new cars purchased in this country and that Motability Operations Ltd was therefore the largest fleet operator in Europe, since that also translates into a lot of people’s jobs and some of those people are on PIP. Yet Alex Ross writes:

A driver who had his Motability lease terminated after taking an attack victim to hospital demanded £35,000 in compensation from the company after “31 days of hell”, a financial ombudsman heard. The man, known only in papers as Mr H, had his vehicle seized by police for forensic investigation after he drove the injured man to hospital in October last year. Shortly after, Motability issued a termination notice after telling the customer it had received conflicting information on the matter, before a week later reversing the decision after police said the man was not suspected of any crime.

However, Mr H was then told he’d have to pay more than £800 for the car to be cleaned before getting it back, and in the meantime was given a hire car, which he complained had a smell which gave him headaches. After disputing the cost of the clean, Motability offered to pay the difference of a quote from a local company he provided, but this did not stop the man filing a complaint with the financial ombudsman with a demand for £35,000 in compensation. He said the company had caused him “severe stress” and said it was “discriminating against him as a disabled person acting as a “Good Samaritan”. Later, he told the ombudsman he had been through “31 days of hell” during the period.

Ombudsman Hannah Dunkley, however, declined his demand, instead ordering Motability to pay Mr H £400 in compensation “to reflect poor customer service and support”. She wrote: “There were several times Mr H contacted Motability by email and made comments about his mental wellbeing I think were concerning. Motability acknowledged these emails but I can’t see that it reached out to check Mr H was safe or provide details of services able to support him with his mental wellbeing. So, I think Motability let Mr H down here.” Ms Dunkley wrote that Motability took the decision to terminate the man’s rental agreement after receiving “an error or inconsistency” of information from police investigating the initial incident.

She also recognised that under the terms and conditions, Motability was allowed to end a contact if a car had been seized by police. But she wrote: “I think Motability ought to have considered whether it was fair to continue with the termination process given the uncertainty about the situation with the car. The circumstances in this particular complaint were unique and highly sensitive, so I think Motability needed to step away from normal processes and consider whether it needed more information before starting the termination process.” She said a £400 compensation award was fair given previous cases considered. She also said that she understood it had been a stressful time for Mr H, but that a lot of it was due to events that led up to the car being seized by police. “I’m only looking at the things Motability was responsible for,” she wrote.

Motability provides car lease agreements to those with a qualifying mobility allowance, such as personal independent payment (PIP). As of March last year, there were 860,000 customers, with the average age 52. It claims to have a 9.4 out of 10 customer satisfaction score. A spokesperson for Motability Operations, the company that runs the Motability Scheme, said: “We recognise this was a difficult experience for Mr H and we’re sorry we didn’t handle every aspect of his case as well as we should have. We have a responsibility to protect the scheme and take concerns about misuse seriously. In this case, we acted in line with our terms and conditions based on information from the police. Once it was confirmed Mr H was not involved in the criminal investigation, we quickly arranged for his vehicle to be returned and provided a hire car in the meantime.”

Stop The Standstill

Ethan Shone writes:

Coalfield MPs will force a debate on the broken miners’ pension promise if it is not resolved within weeks, openDemocracy understands. Labour MPs in former mining heartlands have been “lobbying hard behind the scenes” since the government quietly dropped a promise to release more than £1bn from the Mineworkers Pension Scheme (MPS) from last week’s Budget.

Sources involved in government discussions told openDemocracy that a last-minute technical bungle within the Treasury was to blame for John Healey removing the measure, which would cost taxpayers nothing but provide more than 100,000 ex-miners with an extra £20 per week in their pensions. The government has now pledged to release the money “within weeks, not months” – meaning it could still reach miners before Christmas as planned – after more than 40 MPs wrote to the chancellor to complain.

Jon Trickett told openDemocracy that MPs have warned the Treasury they will table an amendment to the Finance Bill if ministers fail to meet this timeline. “After an apparent blunder the day before the Budget, it is clear that the Treasury didn’t understand the strength of feeling their decision would provoke,” Trickett said. “But I am hopeful that we will see justice for the miners in the coming weeks and I, along with my colleagues, will continue to fight hard for this. Speaking for myself, and, I am sure, for others, I will not rest until justice is done.”

When British Coal was privatised in 1994, John Major’s Tory government struck a much-maligned deal to guarantee the two primary miners’ pensions if they ever fell into deficit. In exchange, the Treasury demanded 50% of any investment surplus. The funds performed well enough that the government never had to pay a penny into them, but still got access to the reserves. Miners have lost out on more than £4.4bn as a result, according to the National Union of Mineworkers.

As chancellor, Rachel Reeves released one of the MPS’ funds in 2024, and the sole fund for the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme, whose members were generally better-paid, non-mining staff, last year. After months of discussions and assurances from ministers, campaigners and coalfield MPs expected Healey to release the final pot of money, the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme, this week, freeing up £1.2bn according to MPs’ estimates. Instead, former miners were left furious when the Budget left them without a timetable to receive the money – and no explanation for the government’s last-minute U-turn.

openDemocracy understands there was a technical misunderstanding relating to the source of the cash. While the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme guarantor’s fund is not taxpayer money, but a share of an investment surplus generated and held by the pension fund, the government’s claim to it still needed to be accounted for in the fiscal headroom under certain accounting standards, according to Treasury sources. MPS trustees who have held meetings in coalfield areas in the week since the Budget report that many members feel “distraught” and “betrayed”. The government initially offered no timeline for resolving the issue, prompting significant concern about a prolonged process. openDemocracy understands the trustees have invited the chancellor to a meeting in his South Yorkshire constituency, home to around 2,200 MPS members, later this month. A trade union source said they worried the political damage had “already been done”, with miners feeling “angry they’d had something taken away that they’d been promised”.

Gary Saunders, chair of the trustees, said: “The trustees welcome the chancellor’s commitment to resolve the issue of the Guarantor’s Fund in weeks rather than months. But our members need action within days. Every week, 100 of our members pass away. For them, delay cannot be undone. The Trustees have worked with the government in good faith throughout this year, and an agreement is ready to sign today. Signing it would allow us to start making payments to our members by the end of this year. We ask the chancellor to come to the table now and resolve the issue in the coming days so that more members can receive these payments during their lifetimes.”

Opposition MPs have also pushed for the Treasury to release the funds. Reform said if it wins the next general election and the funds have still not been released, it would transfer them within the first 100 days in office. Chris Kitchen, the general secretary of the NUM, welcomed the chancellor’s commitment to release the funds within weeks, not months. “We are pleased that the government has recognised the injustice and committed to resolving this, and releasing the money. Weeks are better than months, but days would be better than weeks, as time is working against our members. At the budget, the chancellor rightly took the other steps to make right the historic injustice of the miners’ pensions, and we are confident he will put right this final issue.” Healey did use the Budget to end the 50:50 split of future surpluses between the government and members, telling MPs: “For ex-mineworkers, I’m guaranteeing that every penny of the pension fund surplus now goes to miners. I know the job’s not done, and I will go on to ensure the full transfer of the guarantors’ fund.” The chancellor also abolished the “standstill” rule, under which bonus pensions could be frozen if the scheme fell into deficit.

Dark Blue, Indeed?

Baroness Falkner of Margravine and Akua Reindorf KC tear to shreds the draft Conversion Practices Bill. Still, perhaps they are just more delicate flowers at Oxford, or perhaps it is because his students are scientists, but Matt Rattley would have been only moderately eccentric if he had been teaching an arts degree at Durham in better days.

I have never set foot in the City of Oxford, and although I visited the City of Cambridge a few times when an aunt and uncle lived nearby before retiring back to Saint Helena, they had no connection to the University. So I have no boat in the race. I merely observe that Nathan Cofnas, whose only field is not the study of race realism but the thing itself, is obviously trying to relaunch himself at Oxford, where he shows no sign of being rebuffed, specifically by the college from which Lola Salem was suspended. Her story was suppressed over the summer by the distraction of attention to Jason Arday, whose only serious error turns out to have been that he called the Police and Carter Ruck. That was hardly a reason to hound him to his death.

If Cofnas can get in at Oxford, then so can James Orr, sacked as Head of Policy for Reform UK and removed from anything very responsible at Cambridge. Although the restrictions that Orr’s compound is alleged to breach would have been laughed out or met with bemusement even at Durham back in the day. No such strictures existed when most undergraduates were not possessed of the age of majority. How do the Oxbridge authorities think that their colleges originated?

Not that the infantilisation is to stop there. Not only are parliamentary candidates to be “vetted”, bearing in mind that every member of the gigantic 2024 Labour intake had been vetted by Peter Mandelson, but elected MPs and their choices of staff are to be given Enhanced DBS checks, so every morsel of malicious gossip that the Police had ever heard and every anonymous allegation ever sent through the post, before being subjected to “anti-harassment training”. What would count as “harassment”? Stating the reality of biological sex? Insisting on the presumption of innocence in rape cases? What if you failed?

The more pressing need is for drug testing, since in December 2021 cocaine was found in 11 out of 12 powder rooms in the Palace of Westminster on the same randomly chosen evening, Mr Speaker Hoyle promised “full and effective action”, and then nothing happened. But they will not rest until they have a lanyard class HR Department that managed MPs, including by allocating their staff out of a central pool of the socially and politically monolithic. Resist.

Enough To Tell You How This Case Is Going To Go

Craig Murray writes:

I am in London at the UK Supreme Court for Huda Ammori’s appeal against the proscription of Palestine Action. Three Jewish groups have been granted intervention rights by the Court (two of them pro-genocide) but no Palestinian group. One of the strongest grounds to contest the proscription was that it entails discrimination against Palestinians. That ground was dismissed at the permission stage and appeal on that ground has been denied throughout.

So the Court will refuse to hear any argument on anti-Palestinian discrimination, a key part of the case, but will hear argument on alleged anti-semitism, which was never in the case and has been brought in by the Court. That, I think, is enough to tell you how this case is going to go. There is in any event almost no chance of a win in the Supreme Court as at present constituted under the right-wing Lord Reed. He has made no secret that he does not believe the courts should contradict the Executive and has excluded from the Court for the last eight years any judge who did not share this view. Forgive my immodesty if I say that my article on this is absolutely essential reading.

I am not sure I will get into the court to report. As the petitioner in the parallel Scottish case which is sisted pending this decision, I applied to the Court that I need to be there to hear the arguments, and asked them to reserve me a seat in the gallery. I received a very dusty reply telling me to stay at home and watch the livestream. I shall try to arrive early to queue for the public gallery, but have been told there may be no seats allocated to the public. If this appeal fails, the government will go ahead with its plans to process the 4,000 people facing terrorism charges for holding placards or wearing T shirts supporting Palestine Action, through juryless kangaroo courts in batches of five, with 36 minutes allotted to each individual, including process and the prosecution case. The UK is bringing more terrorist charges per head than any other country in the world, the majority against aged pacifists. This is absolutely a choice by the Labour Friends of Israel government. Burnham does not have to do this. They do not have to fight the Supreme Court case tomorrow. The interests of the people are utterly subordinate in the UK State to the interests of the State of Israel.

We are still short of money for the Scottish leg of the judicial review. I am sorry to have to keep asking, but I have no choice. The legal bills currently exceed the amount raised to date, largely due to the government succeeding in having our legal crowdfunder closed down. Other donation methods are currently still available even though the CrowdJustice route has been closed. Obviously we now need funds more than ever to carry on.