Good Form?

Josh Babarinde wants to change the law so that nonwhite people would be able to identify as English on the census form. But anyone can already identify as any ethnicity that they pleased on the census form. Has anyone ever checked up on yours? Well, there you are, then.

Nigerians in Sunderland might tick the English box in order to avoid being melted down and used to fill in the potholes, although that Glenn Gibbins became a councillor only because he fancied a bit of extra income had nothing to do with his being a member of Reform UK.

And Kashim Chowdhury might have done better if he had been a member of Reform, a party funded by Short Money, which until recently had a full-time Head of Policy who was also a full-time Associate Professor at Cambridge, a directly publicly funded position.

But if the State could not tell that a job applicant was already a civil servant several times over, then it would certainly not be able to ascertain that everyone who said that they were English really was.

A Valued Public Space

So this is the end of neoliberalism, is it? The Guardian editorialises:

It holds two copies of Magna Carta, the charter that set limits on royal power in 1215. It has the sole surviving manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf and notebooks by some of the most beloved authors in the English language: Jane Austen, William Blake, Virginia Woolf. Also in the British Library’s red-brick London building is the original, illustrated version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – given as an early Christmas gift to Alice Liddell in 1864. On handwritten drafts of Wilfred Owen’s tragic poem Dulce et Decorum est, visitors can see suggestions made by his friend Siegfried Sassoon.

But neither display cases filled with treasures such as these nor vast digital archives, basement storage rooms, six cafes and a shop have been sufficient to arm the library against a sea of troubles that first threatened it three years ago, when hackers raided its computers for personal data and demanded a £600,000 ransom. Its long-serving chief executive, Roly Keating, took the decision to step down once the worst of the cyber-attack – one of the most serious in the UK’s history – had been dealt with. His replacement, Rebecca Lawrence, lasted less than a year before resigning in the middle of a strike over pay. Now, a new row has broken out over plans to rent out three of the library’s reading rooms and outsource security.

The British Library is, of course, not alone in seeking novel ways to generate revenue from its open-access public building. Private and corporate private views are routine at blockbuster exhibitions; the early weeks of the British Museum’s Bayeux tapestry show were marred by a row about an ill-judged invitation to Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire. But reading rooms are unlike temporary exhibitions in that they are permanent. These are spaces designed for people to read and study in. Handing three of them over to a private contractor to operate commercially, as the British Library proposes, would change the character of a cherished institution.

Its new boss, Dr Paul Bate, has been in post for less than a week. He urgently needs to grip the situation and give a fuller account to staff, users and the public of what is going on. As an arm’s-length body, the library is overseen by a board. But since 84% of its £170m annual budget comes from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, ministers too should be constructively engaged. 

It is widely accepted that the damage to finances and morale caused by the hackers, following the Covid pandemic, lies behind the current woes. A report this summer from the public accounts committee of MPs blamed the government for the lack of a strategic approach to cybersecurity. Politicians must take responsibility for past mistakes and help England’s national library to avoid a protracted crisis.

As trade unions have pointed out, outsourcing the library’s security staff would be contrary to the government’s commitment to insourcing. Privatising sections would undermine a valued public space that is both open to all, and an essential component of a neglected higher‑education ecosystem. The British Library – formerly part of the British Museum – was established more than 50 years ago; the St Pancras building is approaching its 30th anniversary. As a national institution, it is a place in which everyone has a stake. The government must get behind it, and look for an alternative solution.

Thomas Massie’s Revenge

One last time, off splutters Donald Trump about electoral fraud. More significantly, of the man who ought to announce his own Presidential candidacy the next time that he spoke on the floor of the House of Representatives, my old PostRight colleague Jack Hunter writes:

“The reason we lost is the war,” Vice President J.D. Vance admitted Wednesday on X, explaining the Republicans’ disastrous midterm election loss the day before. He listed the top four things the GOP could do, according to a pollster with whom he spoke, to win back voters who had defected to the Democrats. These were:

1) End the war 

2) Focus on cost of living/inflation 

3) Put America First 

4) Change our relationship to Israel

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) replied to Vance’s post, “Thanks for acknowledging these things. Better late than never.” Massie included an image of a red, MAGA-style hat. Instead of “Make America Great Again,” it said “Massie Was Right About Everything.” “I’ll send you the hat,” he added. Massie had a point. “Donald Trump will put Americans first by securing our liberties at home and preventing needless wars abroad,” declared Massie in his endorsement of President Donald Trump in October 2024.

At the time, Massie’s praise for Trump expressed the most basic hope of many in the original MAGA movement, and certainly of its ideological core. After his inauguration, Trump’s early promises of radical DOGE spending cuts and a break from interventionist foreign policy withered more quickly and completely than even his political adversaries had expected, and by March 2026, the administration had launched a war with Iran that seemed to serve Israel’s interests, first. That war cost Americans at home, at the gas pump and beyond. So did massive federal spending. So did the other wars.

Massie resisted all of this. He has remained a fiscal hawk throughout the entire Trump era, which has enraged Trump in both terms. And he has been a stalwart “America First” Republican, one who is not afraid to challenge Israeli influence and question policy (which also irked the president). Massie understood that financial and foreign policy restraint were related, something many Americans are now experiencing firsthand. The Kentucky congressman never abandoned the old MAGA message from his original Trump endorsement. He refused. For that reason, Trump teamed with pro-Israel billionaires to defeat Massie in his primary this May—the most expensive House primary in U.S. history.

This week Republicans suffered one of the most humiliating defeats in modern American political history. And it was a loss that differed in important respects from prior reversals. “Past midterm blue waves largely involved angry Democrats and independents beating up on jittery swing-seat Republicans who weren't totally comfortable with what their president was doing, with a few genuine upsets sprinkled in,” observed Jim Antle of the Washington Examiner. “This one hit the GOP’s center of gravity.” Indeed.

Massie tried to warn his party. After the off-year 2025 elections in which Democrats did exceptionally well, he told Republicans what they might need to do to survive the 2026 midterms. “To avoid a repeat of last night’s shellacking in the 2026 midterms,” Massie urged, “Republicans should: quit covering for pedophiles; put America before Israel; put farmers before corporations; quit funding wars abroad; reduce spending to control inflation; quit attacking independent voices.”

Take out Massie’s efforts for more transparency on the Epstein Files, also a part of original MAGA, and this sounds like Vance’s midterm postmortem list. In fact, in this election a number of Democrats ran with the “America First” message sounding more like Trump from two years ago than the president today—and sounding more like Massie on any day than the current Lindsey Graham–ified MAGA. Resharing his November 2025 warning post, Massie wrote on Wednesday, “Instead of correcting course, the GOP chose to shoot the messenger and double down on stupid.”

Trump’s Republican party did shoot Massie the messenger, and it definitely doubled (tripled? quadrupled?) down on stupid. But now, who looks stupid? In the broadest sense, the America First message still remains viable and has been largely untried. That isn’t due to Thomas Massie’s lack of trying. But judging by the midterm results, the voters believe it’s due to Trump’s.

The Great British Sell Off

John Gapper, Clara Murray and Jason Ma writes:

The City of London has always taken pride in being open to international business. But in recent years, it has become a raiding ground. FT analysis of four decades of deals shows the current wave of takeovers of UK public companies by foreign acquirers is unusually fierce. Over the past 10 years alone, more than 300 companies with a combined price tag of over half a trillion pounds at today’s prices have been snapped up by overseas buyers. The traffic in the opposite direction has been far more modest by comparison. This year’s multibillion-pound takeovers of companies — which include testing business Intertek, real estate group Segro and the low-cost airline easyJet — show the continuing vulnerability of UK plc. So far in 2026, announced foreign acquisitions of whole UK-listed companies, including debt, have reached £73bn, the highest level since 2018.

“London has become a clearing house for companies. The UK grows them and then another country acquires them,” says Patrick Sarch, leader of the UK public mergers and acquisitions practice at the US law firm White & Case. A weak domestic institutional shareholder base, the low valuations of British companies compared with their US peers, the barriers to scaling up and the financial incentives to sell up are sustaining the trend — and creating a growing economic problem for the UK. “There is a feeding frenzy and the more that it happens, the more it will. We are in effect exporting economic growth, tax revenue and wealth creation,” says Charles Hall, head of research at the UK investment bank Peel Hunt.

Often, it is foreign private equity groups doing the feasting. The Swedish private equity firm EQT led the £10.7bn Intertek buyout in June, while easyJet accepted a £5.7bn takeover by Apollo after resisting a rival private equity bid. “The UK market is very efficient. Capital moves quickly when there is an opportunity,” says one adviser. Bankers and lawyers in the City are being rewarded. According to London Stock Exchange Group data, the takeover of Segro by Prologis of the US is expected to generate fees totalling $116mn for banks including Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Cazenove. “We make a good living from the car boot sale of UK companies, but it is sad,” says one City adviser.

The FT analysis of LSEG data shows how the sale of UK companies is a long-term phenomenon, often the outcome when boards cannot find a way to grow faster, or a foreign acquirer is looking for an entry to the market. Governments have avoided blocking deals, except on grounds of national security, and big companies are less shielded by family shareholdings than in Europe, where countries such as France and Germany have experienced lower rates of foreign acquisition. The City of London itself was one of the first targets. In the aftermath of the so-called Big Bang liberalisation in 1986, venerable London names such as Morgan Grenfell Asset Management, SG Warburg, Smith New Court and others were acquired by US or European rivals. The City was increasingly compared to Wimbledon: a place that hosted championships dominated by foreign players.

The millennium brought the next wave of deals, with takeovers of companies such as supermarket chain Asda, acquired by Walmart for £6.7bn in 1999. But this was also a period when UK companies, from the energy group BP to the mobile operator Vodafone, were acquiring foreign businesses. They had high valuations and investors, enthused by the dotcom boom, backed rights issues to raise capital. The contrast with this year, where acquisitions of UK companies have far outweighed outward-bound deals such as Shell’s $16.4bn purchase of Arc Resources, is stark. WPP, the marketing group, was one of the most voracious acquirers under Sir Martin Sorrell, acquiring a series of big US rivals during the 1990s and 2000s. “I would probably move to the US today if I wanted to build a global business, but there’s an even greater need for the UK to repeat what we did then,” says Sorrell.

Another wave of activity came around 20 years ago. Cadbury was acquired by US food group Kraft for £11.6bn after an acrimonious stand-off that raised political concerns about foreign ownership. The mobile telecoms group O2 was acquired by Telefónica of Spain, and banking group Abbey National by Santander. But the high point for worries about UK companies being undervalued and vulnerable came in 2016. Arm Holdings, the Cambridge-based group that had become a global leader in chip design, was taken private by Japan’s SoftBank for £24bn following the Brexit vote. Along with the £400mn private acquisition of DeepMind, the AI start-up, by Google in 2014, the Arm deal offered clear evidence that businesses emerging from the UK’s technology start-up ecosystem, linked to world-class universities, were being picked off before they had fully developed. Saul Klein, co-founder of the venture capital group Phoenix Court, calls the opportunity cost to the UK of Arm being acquired “harrowing”.

AstraZeneca, for a time Britain’s most valuable listed company, was one of a very few to successfully defend itself, fighting off a £69bn takeover bid from Pfizer of the US in 2014. Its market value has since tripled. The appetite for UK companies offers a riposte to those who question the country’s entrepreneurial culture. “We beat ourselves up that we are not good at producing great companies, but the rest of the world obviously disagrees,” says Andy Haldane, president of the British Chambers of Commerce and an FT contributing editor. But these companies are not valued as highly, relative to profits, revenues, assets or cash flow, as they would be in the US, and the differential has widened in recent years. That reflects the US economy’s higher growth rate and the willingness of investors there to pour huge sums into risky ventures, particularly in the technology sector. The UK market has traditionally been more cautious and focused on dividends, making it harder for businesses to invest in growth.

“[Companies] cannot buy their way out of it. They are waiting to be bought,” says one banker of the valuation gap. The gulf in valuations has been exacerbated by the retreat of investment institutions from the stock market. UK pension schemes have switched heavily into government bonds after accounting rules changed in the early 2000s, and now hold only about 3 per cent of their assets in UK-listed equities. The lack of such a core long-term shareholder base makes it less likely that investors will reject takeover bids and back executives to expand the business instead, as they did with AstraZeneca. In other markets, including the US and Australia, domestic institutions have retained more of a presence, and Goldman Sachs has established a correlation between the level of domestic investment and valuations.

That is set to change. From 2028, UK ministers will have the legal power to force certain pension funds to invest up to 10 per cent of their funds in UK companies and private assets. Hall of Peel Hunt argues that there should be a default allocation of pension savings to UK equities, with members able to pick a different strategy if they choose. Listed company executives cannot wholly blame a lack of support from UK investors for unsolicited takeover bids. Private equity firms have often tracked them for years, looking for companies that could grow faster with more capital investment, a stronger focus and fewer of the distractions that a public listing brings. “Some of the companies have made themselves vulnerable,” says an adviser.

But the UK has moved from having an open capital market that encouraged inward and outward corporate investment into experiencing a one-way flow. Klein, at Phoenix Court, remarks that the country is “one of the best places in the world to buy a team and one of the hardest to build an owner”. Foreign investors are increasingly capturing the investment returns from UK businesses, and there is little sign of it easing — or reason to believe it will. Whether through the City’s openness to bids, the country’s lack of trade barriers, a paucity of domestic investment or lack of corporate ambition, the banquet of British listed companies continues. “This is not happening in France because it does not put its companies up for sale,” Hall says. “We let it happen, and we’ll look back with regret.”

The biggest deals

Morgan Grenfell | Deutsche Bank

The merchant bank that helped fund Britain through the first world war was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1986, but its share price fell during the crash of 1987 and because of its involvement in the Guinness share-trading fraud. That allowed an expansionist Deutsche Bank to acquire it for £950mn in 1989. It was later renamed Deutsche Asset Management, killing off a hallowed name in the history of world finance.

Asda | Walmart 

In 1999, the Leeds-based supermarket chain was all set to crown an impressive turnaround by merging with B&Q owner Kingfisher when Walmart swooped in to snap up the group for £6.7bn. But the US retail giant’s plan to use Asda as a bridgehead to Europe never really succeeded, while an attempt to merge it with J Sainsbury in 2018 was blocked by regulators. In 2021 it sold most of its holding to TDR Capital and the petrol station billionaires Zuber and Mohsin Issa, returning Asda to UK ownership.

Cadbury | Kraft 

Founded by John Cadbury in 1824, Cadbury was as famed for its Quaker principles and the factory town it built for its workers in south-west Birmingham as it was for its chocolate and cocoa. It was bought by US processed foods group Kraft for £11.5bn in 2010 after an unusually rancorous takeover battle. Kraft was later censured by the Takeover Panel for making misleading statements and criticised by politicians for closing a factory it had pledged to keep open.

O2 | Telefónica 

Spun out of former state monopolist BT in 2001, mobile operator O2’s chances of survival were initially seen as shaky. But clever marketing and rapid rates of customer acquisition allowed it to pay a maiden dividend in 2005. Later the same year, Telefónica snapped it up for £17.7bn. By the 2010s, the heavily indebted Spanish group was hawking O2 around potential buyers, and it returned to semi-British control in 2021 when it merged with Liberty Global’s Virgin Media.

Arm Holdings | SoftBank 

Founded in 1990 by a dozen British computer scientists, Arm became a world leader among so-called fabless chip companies, which design chips for others but do not actually manufacture them. Aided by a weak pound in the aftermath of the Brexit vote in 2016, Japan’s SoftBank bought the UK’s leading tech company for £24.3bn in a deal that then prime minister Theresa May called a “vote of confidence” in the UK. But when the time came to relist Arm, SoftBank chose Nasdaq, where its valuation is now almost six times its purchase price.

Shire | Takeda 

Founded in 1986 by married couple Harry and Caroline Stratford above a shop in Basingstoke, Shire started as a maker of calcium supplements for osteoporosis. But it gradually shed its Britishness as it looked for markets and products abroad, starting with its 1997 acquisition of US-based Richwood Pharmaceuticals, which made ADHD medication Adderall. A series of acquisitions followed before Shire itself was bought by Japan’s Takeda for £46bn in 2019.

EasyJet | Apollo 

British-Cypriot entrepreneur and shipping scion Stelios Haji-Ioannou built easyJet from two leased aircraft in 1995 into one of Europe’s largest budget airlines, though he clashed with its management along the way. Apollo beat out rival asset manager Castlelake to buy the carrier after offering more and pledging to continue paying royalties to use the easy brand. The deal could result in Haji-Ioannou and his family increasing their stake to 49 per cent.

Segro | Prologis

While many commercial real estate groups focus on shops and offices, Segro’s speciality was ready-to-use warehouses that appealed to large corporations. For many years it was known as Slough Estates due to its base west of Heathrow airport, a location that also gave it proximity to fibre optic cables connecting North America to London and helped make it the world’s second-largest cluster of data centres. American logistics and real estate investor Prologis agreed to pay £14bn for Segro in August.

Schroders | Nuveen

Although its origins were German — it was founded in 1804 by Johann Heinrich Schröder, a banker from Hamburg — Schroders became a famous British name in global finance by arranging bond issues for the Confederates in the American civil war and becoming the first foreign lender to Japan. But it struggled to compete with the giant US institutions that muscled their way into the City after the Big Bang. Having sold its investment bank to Citigroup in 2000, it agreed a takeover by Chicago-based asset manager Nuveen in February, robbing the FTSE 100 of its last British asset manager.

UK companies that bought abroad

Vodafone | Mannesmann

Vodafone was launched in 1985, after its parent company Racal won one of the two UK cellular radio licences being sold by the Thatcher government. Under chief executive Chris Gent, it became Britain’s biggest company and pulled off what was for many years the biggest buyout in corporate history: the $183bn takeover of Germany’s Mannesmann. The group later acknowledged it had overpaid. Its empire-building phase is also over; current boss Margherita Della Valle has sold off Spanish and Italian businesses to refocus on the UK.

WPP | Young and Rubicam

Wire and Plastics Products, better known by its initials WPP, was bought up by British businessman Martin Sorrell in 1985 as a listed vehicle he could use to build an advertising empire. A three-decade run of acquisitions included Madison Avenue giants J Walter Thompson, Ogilvy & Mather, and Grey, reaching its peak in 2000 with the £3bn purchase of Young & Rubicam. By 2018, when Sorrell resigned amid allegations of bullying and the improper use of company funds, which he denied, the company controlled over 450 entities.

Move On From Palantir

Ben Coleman writes:

Next March, Palantir’s £330m contract to run NHS England’s federated data platform (FDP) ends. Ministers must decide by Christmas whether to extend it. They should move on from Palantir, and transition to new suppliers that put the NHS in full control of its technology and patient data.

I sit on the health and social care committee. In June, we recommended no extension – people don’t trust Palantir, its benefits are contested and other tools could deliver the same or similar advantages. The debate so far has been whether to drop Palantir. The harder question is what replaces it. The tempting solution is to hire a single British firm. But that would not give the NHS the control it lacks: the freedom to switch supplier without losing what it has built.

Currently, NHS teams build applications on Palantir’s software platform. The NHS owns the applications and rents the platform. The aim is to join up hospital data to manage waiting lists, plan operations and get patients home. We need clarity about what will happen if the Palantir contract ends. How easy would it be to move the applications to another supplier? Will there be disruption that affects patient care?

Ministers assure me the NHS is not locked into Palantir’s service. Local NHS data teams, British tech firms and thinktanks tell me they are not convinced. A ministerial response to the committee in August left questions open. It said the NHS owned, or had a right to use, the applications built on the platform, but that some arrangements would end with the contract. It did not say which. Owning your applications is useless if they won’t work elsewhere. It also said the government would explore how to move the applications on to a different platform only if the contract ended, and it declined to audit which Palantir tools hospital trusts depend on. Surely ministers need to know this now?

The NHS’s dependence on Palantir worries the national data guardian, too. She told ministers this month that “concerns about interoperability, vendor lock-in and data sovereignty must be addressed”, including by considering open standards. Open standards are shared, published rules for how health information is recorded and labelled, so that software from different suppliers can work together, much as any UK plug fits any UK socket.

In an FDP based on national open standards, regions could choose their own suppliers to build the software they need, from in-house NHS developers to small British firms. Data would stay with each region and be shared only under strict permissions. Suppliers could be swapped without starting again. Britain has the skills to do this. Nigel Shadbolt, co-founder of the Open Data Institute, told our committee there is “nothing to suggest that the UK lacks the talent or capability to produce an equivalent to what Palantir offers”. For example, Greater Manchester’s integrated care board already runs its own analytics platform, while NHS OneLondon joins up patient records across the capital.

It is not too late to reverse the dependence on Palantir. The Guardian reported recently that 16 trusts and health boards say they do not use the platform. Some tried it and reverted to old systems. The British Medical Journal says a third of signed-up trusts have never logged in and many barely use it. The case for change is about more than avoiding lock-in. A data platform works only if patients trust it, yet mistrust of Palantir means opt-outs are growing.

The FDP’s benefits are also uncertain. Palantir claims a 14% fall in discharge delays, but the Health Foundation has found no noticeable change. Just one trust, Chelsea and Westminster in my constituency, accounts for 84% of the claimed national cut in outpatient waiting lists. Even NHS England now says cause and effect are unproven. I’ve asked its chief executive, Jim Mackey, why it lets Palantir claim otherwise. A full evaluation is not due until 2029. Mackey told our committee that an independent review now would be “helpful and necessary” but could not be done before the decision.

Then there is sovereignty. Britain needs to be able to build and control its own health tech, including AI, and not leave the NHS dependent on a US company. Could an open system be ready by March? Probably not. So ministers should agree only a short transition, on new terms, while it is built. That transition should do four things. Freeze new applications on Palantir’s platform. Run it for at most two years, with leaving made easier over time. Publish what the FDP does and costs, which tools trusts depend on and how an exit would work so others can bid. And make Palantir prove there is no lock-in by moving one application off the platform within a year.

Beyond the FDP, the planned single patient record, which will bring each person’s health records together, must be open, too, or it will tie the NHS to a single supplier on a far larger scale. Data sovereignty means more than keeping health data on British soil. If Britain wants sovereign AI in health, it needs a system it controls. A British Palantir would not give it that. Open standards would.

Taking The Street Anyway

Paul Knaggs writes:

On a cold November night in Nottingham, a small group of women gathered at Sneinton Market to walk through their own city. They carried banners against male violence, domestic abuse and street harassment, under an old and honourable name: Reclaim the Night. Among them, the organisers say, were survivors of abuse in the home. They were asking for nothing more radical than the unmolested use of the pavement.

Before the march could find its stride, the pavement was blocked. It was not blocked by drunks stumbling from pub doorways, or by the casual street harassers whose entitlement has poisoned city centres after dark for generations. It was blocked by a counter-demonstration called by the Revolutionary Communist Group. Footage of the evening shows a crowd made up largely of men bearing down on the march. Marchers say they were called “genocidal murderers” and “fascist scum”, and told, “you’re not feminists.” Scuffles broke out as protesters tried to stop the procession, and police officers had to put their own bodies between the two groups and escort the women through the city. Several women, facing that kind of hostility for the first time, were left shaking.

The provocation was two words: female only. The march was organised by Nottingham Reclaim the Night, a grassroots group of sex-based rights campaigners, and joined by members of the Women’s Rights Network from Derbyshire and Staffordshire. It was open to women and girls, defined by sex.  For the RCG, that was enough. In its call to arms before the march, it said the organisers had “co-opted Nottingham’s Reclaim the Night women’s march and turned a historically trans inclusive event into a hate march.” It urged supporters to make sure Sneinton Market “remains TERF free”, and to bring flags, megaphones and drums. It added, without apparent irony, that “people of all genders are welcome.” 

Read that again. A women’s march against male violence was announced, and a revolutionary party sent out a public invitation for men to come and stop it. It also helps to check the word “co-opted”. Nottingham’s march had been run for years by Nottingham Women’s Centre and its partners, and in recent years it was explicitly trans-inclusive. That much of the RCG’s claim is true. The truth is no one could stop any man claiming to be a woman from marching; that was before the Supreme Court judgment. This year those organisations cancelled it. The women who marched last Saturday did not hijack anyone’s event. They picked up a banner the city’s own institutions had put down, and walked with it.

The RCG should look further back before it lectures anyone on history. Reclaim the Night was not born as an exercise in gender theory. It began in Leeds in November 1977, organised by women for women, while the man later unmasked as Peter Sutcliffe was murdering women across Yorkshire. It was a furious reply to police advice that women should stay indoors after dark, a de facto curfew on the hunted while the hunter owned the night. Women marched with placards demanding a curfew on men instead. Their point was plain: public space belonged to them by right, and male violence was a physical fact that could not be solved by locking women in their homes. A decade of one charity’s admissions policy is not the history of a movement. The founders of Reclaim the Night were not marching against a state of mind. They marched against violence done by male bodies to female bodies. That boundary is not an abstraction; women’s safety has been organised around it for half a century.

The RCG’s Argument That Collapses on the Pavement

The counter-argument deserves a fair hearing, because knocking down a straw man persuades nobody. The counter-protesters would say that trans people face real harassment and violence in public, that street safety is not one group’s property, and that a march defined by sex in 2026 divides people when solidarity against bigotry is badly needed. They believe any line drawn on biological sex is a refusal of human dignity. The danger trans people face is real, and no socialist worth the name wants any vulnerable minority harassed. But the argument collapses the moment it reaches the pavement. One group’s need for safety cannot be met by abolishing the right of another to organise as itself. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in April 2025 that “sex” in the Equality Act means biological sex. The reason that matters is concrete: you cannot fight the oppression of a group you are forbidden to name.

And what kind of socialism shows its solidarity by bullying women on a dark street? There is something grotesque about watching men draped in revolutionary slogans shout down a women’s march as fascist. That spectacle does not belong to the history of the labour movement. It belongs to the long history of male entitlement dressed in moral righteousness. A woman who asks for a space, a meeting or one march a year for her own sex is not attacking anyone. She is drawing a boundary. The man who cannot tolerate that boundary, who insists that his presence or his blessing is required before women may assemble, is not a radical. He is an authoritarian who cannot stand an event that is not about him.

Nor does the RCG speak for the communist left. It is a fringe organisation at best. When the Supreme Court ruled, Britain’s Communist Party and the Young Communist League issued a joint statement welcoming it. They said the judgment upheld women’s right to single-sex spaces, and they commended For Women Scotland for bringing the case. That is the materialist tradition: politics grounded in bodies, wages, housing and physical safety. The RCG attacked that position as incompatible with socialism. On Saturday night we saw what its alternative looks like in practice: a left that spends its energy screaming at working-class women outside a market in Sneinton while the people who run Britain’s broken services sleep soundly.

And let’s be honest, the RCG is in a curious position to lecture women on what feminism requires. In October 2017, it announced on its own website that it had suspended a member over “a historic allegation of sexual harassment” and opened an internal inquiry. Within three months he was back. The group’s update said he had been reinstated from 1 January 2018, that he understood his actions were “unacceptable for a communist”, and that his consciousness and behaviour had changed. Nothing suggests that man was in Nottingham on Saturday, and The Tribune does not say he was. But an organisation that judged a harassment complaint against its own comrade in-house, and readmitted him within weeks, now claims the authority to decide which women may march against male violence. It has drawn its own lines rather differently.

The deeper problem is not one sect disgracing itself; fringe groups have embarrassed themselves on street corners for decades. The problem is a wider progressive culture that has let this intimidation become normal. When political parties, trade union leaderships and women’s charities will not defend the principle that women are a sex with the right to organise as one, the street enforcers take the hint. They decide the women are fair game.

Yet the marchers did not disperse. Despite a frightening start, they held together, leaned on each other and finished their route. By the end, the organisers say, fear had given way to elation. Courage in defence of a plain truth outlasts the performative fury of a crowd. The officers who stood between the marchers and their tormentors did their duty that night. But women’s civic freedom cannot depend on a permanent police line. The Home Secretary and Nottingham’s civic leaders should say clearly that a peaceful, lawful women’s march is protected by the right of assembly, and that no counter-protest has a right to stop it. Anyone who uses physical intimidation to shut one down should expect to answer for it.

A society that cannot guarantee women the right to walk down a street without male harassment has failed in its first duty. A movement that screams at women in the dark to prove its purity has given up any claim to the name of the left. Reclaiming the night was never about asking men for permission to walk. It was about taking the street anyway, and no chorus of shouting men is going to push women off it now.

Brand Loyalty No More

Rolf Harris really did have his art and his music. Although Jimmy Savile had no such accomplishments, he had made his way up as a disc jockey and a manager. But Russell Brand was, well, what, exactly? Nothing special as a comedian, and with little sign of having performed as one before he was famous, he was no great shakes as a television presenter and he was arguably not an actor at all.

No one, or so few people as to amount to the same thing, ever dressed like Brand, or sought to imitate his voice or his mannerisms, never mind his hairdo. Far from being part of “Noughties lad culture”, he was cultivated to counteract it. No one from that would have been considered presentable in political circles, by no means only the ones in which he moved in those days, much less treated as a sage.

In hindsight, the move to MAGA was inevitable, although it involved no identifiable change in Brand’s opinions, such as they had ever been. And what of that now? Will Pete Hegseth’s “You’re fired” moment be livestreamed, as Hegseth had wanted to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan? Who knows what has had to be given to Jason Reding Quiñones to secure the resignation of the US attorney for the Southern District of Florida, responsible for Mar-a-Lago and highly likely to be called in over anything serious in the US Virgin Islands, including Little Saint James, otherwise known as Epstein Island?

Just as Donald Trump planned to veto practically everything that was sent to him by the new Congress, which in turn planned to refuse him a red cent for almost anything, his only hope of the confirmation of anyone whom he might realistically nominate to any position is to have it all done and dusted before Christmas. Yes, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton dealt with Congresses controlled by the other side. But Trump is neither Reagan nor Clinton, and the incoming Congressional leadership is also very different from either of those eras.

The Republican Party has just spent north of half a billion dollars on losing Texas at gubernatorial and senatorial level, so it would be looking at a full billion for the 40 Electoral College votes there, which are winner-takes-all on at-large basis, and without which it could not win the Presidency. Ever again. Every one of those dollars would not be spent in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. And then there are the people who will write in Trump because they refused to vote for anyone else.

Now stop wittering about how anything like the Democrats winning Texas or Mississippi was unimaginable in Britain. I was on the platform when Richard Holden won North West Durham, the same night that the Conservative Party took Bolsover from Dennis Skinner. The first local authority that Labour ever won was Durham County Council, which it led for more than a century, but it lost control in 2021, and Reform UK won it by a landslide last year. In 2019, at a General Election, more people in County Durham voted Conservative than voted Labour. Yes, that really happened. A mere seven years ago.

Over the water in Hexham, they have had since 2024 their first Labour MP in history, and their first non-Conservative technically since 1953, but really since 1924, when Douglas Clifton Brown returned as the Unionist MP before becoming Speaker in 1943. Several other seats also have their first ever Labour MPs, with the Liberal Democrats and the Greens having also furnished many places with their first non-Conservatives in anything from several decades to all time. No Conservative MP remains in Oxfordshire, only one out of nine in Berkshire, only two out of eight in Buckinghamshire, and so on. The London commentariat knows a lot about the United States, but not about the United Kingdom, or even just about the South of England.