Newcastle United?

If, as Ed Davey would have it, Reform UK and the Green Party were both "extreme populists", then will the 25 Liberal Democrats who were once again the single largest Group on Newcastle City Council be refusing any arrangement either with the 24 Greens or with the 24 members of Reform? Or if a deal were struck with either of those, then how would Davey discipline such errant Lib Dems?

Far be it from me to advise the Green Party, but it should insist that any deal with anyone in Newcastle were conditional upon making Jamie Driscoll Leader of the Council. Which other councillor, exactly, would be better qualified?

Et Nos Credidimus Caritati

When the Society of Saint Pius X ordained its new bishops, then will it just miss out the bit that asked by what authority those men were being ordained? In fact, who has chosen them, and by what means? 

The SSPX believes Robert Prevost to be Pope Leo XIV, and thus believes him to be a bishop, validly ordained in the Modern Roman Rite. As part of the Latin Church, why would it need its own bishops?

And Pope Francis granted the SSPX faculties to hear Confessions. In principle, would they welcome other priests to do so for their congregants? If so, then there is no state of necessity for these ordinations. If not, then the SSPX is already in schism.

Scores On The Doors

There are now two Labour members of Newcastle City Council. Two. That is the same number as on Surrey County Council. Surrey. In his infinite wisdom, Keir Starmer has abolished that authority in his native land, which will be succeeded next year by the East Surrey and West Surrey councils that were elected on Thursday, both under Liberal Democrat overall control and each with no Labour representation whatever. Still, until the appropriate date of 1 April, there will be exactly as many Labour members of Newcastle City Council and of Surrey County Council. The number of Labour councillors in Surrey is of course greater when the 11 boroughs and districts are included, with Spelthorne alone having seven, the same number as Newcastle City Council and Durham County Council put together.

In Starmer's constituency of Holborn and St Pancras, the Leader of Camden Council fled from impending Lib Dem defeat to a supposedly safer seat that he has lost to a Green. Another Green has unseated the Conservative Andy Coles from the Felston and Woodston ward of Peterborough, with Reform UK pushing Coles into third place, so if the Green Party were what it claimed to be, then may we hope that Councillor Ed Murphy (I used to know a Labour one who went by Eddie) will do something to publicise the spycops scandal? The 31 Labour and 31 Conservative councillors in Barnet will carve things up between them rather than work with the one Green because, well, you know this one. If they were suggesting that Councillor Charli Thompson was herself one of those, then she should sue.

Also tied, on 17 each, are Reform and Labour at Holyrood. Since neither is going to put up one of its MSPs as Presiding Officer so that the other could become the Official Opposition, then they are looking at all manner of fun and games over who sat where, who got to ask the first question at First Minister's Questions, and so forth. Labour MSPs used to say that defeated constituency candidates who had been elected on the list had "got in by the back door". They are now as glad as Starmer of the provision for rear entrance. And it was in fact a Workers Party candidate, Shehryar Kayani, who unseated the Leader of Birmingham City Council at Glebe Farm and Tile Cross, but in Birmingham, Bury, Rochdale, and possibly also elsewhere, the BBC cannot even bring itself to mention the Workers Party, listing it under "Independents and Others". Yet we await news of Reform's only councillor in Bootle, the newly elected Jay Cooper, who posted on Facebook last September that the Holocaust had been "a hoax" since "there wasn't even 6 million Jews in Europe at the time". I am hearing that Reform has already expelled him, but that is unconfirmed, and it did adopt him in the first place.

Starmer Arson Trial: Week Two Round-Up

Paul Knaggs writes:

He did not know the name of his own Prime Minister. He knew Boris Johnson, he said. Keir Starmer meant nothing to him.

This was the detail that hung in the air of Court 2 at the Old Bailey this week, simultaneously the most improbable and the most revealing thing uttered in these proceedings so far. A 22-year-old Ukrainian man, charged with setting fire to property linked to the sitting head of the British government, sat before a jury and told police he had never heard of Keir Starmer.

The jury, you may suspects, will decide what weight to give that claim. The rest of us are left with a question it raises but cannot quite answer: if Roman Lavrynovych did not know who Starmer was, then who did?

WHERE THE TRIAL STANDS 

The Old Bailey trial into the alleged arson campaign against property linked to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has now moved from the prosecution’s architecture of the case into the first serious test of the defence narrative. It is the shift from accusation to account, and the jury is being asked to judge the difference.

At the centre of proceedings are three men. Roman Lavrynovych, 22, a Ukrainian national from Sydenham; Petro Pochynok, 35, also Ukrainian, of Holloway Road, Islington; and Stanislav Carpiuc, 27, a Romanian national of Ukrainian origin from Chadwell Heath. All three deny the charges. Lavrynovych faces allegations of arson with intent to endanger life. Pochynok and Carpiuc face conspiracy allegations connected to the fires.

The case concerns three fires: a Toyota RAV4 formerly owned by Starmer in Kentish Town on 8 May 2025; a residential property in Islington on 11 May; and Starmer’s former Kentish Town family home on 12 May. The prosecution, led by Duncan Atkinson KC, argues this was not a random sequence of vandalism but a planned set of attacks, allegedly directed by a Russian-speaking Telegram contact known only as ‘El Money.’ Three fires. Five days. One cluster of Starmer-linked targets.

He knew Boris Johnson, he said. Keir Starmer meant nothing to him.

THE POLICE INTERVIEW: A SURREAL RECKONING

The week’s most striking moment came not from live testimony but from a transcript. On Wednesday, jurors were read the record of Lavrynovych’s police interview, conducted on 13 May 2025, the morning after his arrest. Counter-terrorism officers had broken down the door of a property in Sydenham in the early hours and found him in bed. His Fila trainers tested positive for accelerant. A petrol can and a bottle of white spirit, both carrying his DNA, were recovered from the same address.

In interview, a detective asked him directly: ‘I just want to ask you about our prime minister. Do you know who that is?’ Lavrynovych said he did not. The detective tried again: ‘You don’t know who the UK prime minister is? Alright, have you heard of Keir Starmer?’ Again, no. He was then asked about Boris Johnson. He said yes, he had heard of Boris Johnson.

There are two ways to read this. Either Lavrynovych is telling the truth, in which case we are dealing with a man recruited to burn property linked to a political figure he could not name, a hired hand operating in complete political ignorance, which is precisely how modern deniable operations are structured. Or he is lying, and the claim of ignorance is part of a constructed defence designed to sever any suggestion of political motivation. Either reading, if accepted, carries consequences that extend well beyond Court 2.

THE DEFENCE NARRATIVE: COERCION, POVERTY AND FEAR

This week, Lavrynovych’s account began to take shape before the jury. According to earlier reporting from The Times, he told the court he was first contacted on Telegram while looking for work in Ukrainian job groups. The early work, he said, was simple: putting up posters, checking locations, easy money for a young man with debts and a sick father. The tasks escalated. The handler, El Money, used Russian and Ukrainian interchangeably.

By Friday, Lavrynovych had gone further. He admitted setting fire to the Toyota RAV4 once owned by Starmer. He said he had initially refused the offer of 3,000 pounds in cryptocurrency, because he feared being caught. El Money’s response, he told the jury, was not to negotiate. It was to threaten. He claimed the handler told him he knew where Lavrynovych lived and that it might become dangerous for him and his family.

That is now the pivot point of the trial. The prosecution presents Lavrynovych as an active participant: a man who sought money, recruited help, filmed evidence at the scene, complained that the video ‘came out badly,’ and pressed for payment to fund his father’s medical treatment. The defence presents him as a frightened, financially desperate young man drawn in by a shadowy handler and then coerced into completing what he had started. The jury must decide whether what they are looking at is fear, opportunism, or a combination of both from which no clean moral line can be drawn.

The prosecution presents a man who filmed his own crime. The defence presents a man too frightened to refuse. Both things may be true.

THE PRIOR TASKS: GRAFFITI, PROPAGANDA AND THE GREY ZONE 

The evidence about Lavrynovych’s work for El Money before the arson campaign complicates the picture further. He told the court he had previously sprayed offensive graffiti on an Islamic community centre in south London at El Money’s direction. He was also asked to put up anti-mosque posters in Southall, though he said he did not complete that particular job because he suspected it was propaganda and feared being caught.

This matters. It establishes that the alleged relationship with El Money did not begin with the Starmer-linked fires. It may have begun as paid nuisance work, low-level political agitation, or simple criminal errand-running. The targeting of a Muslim community centre is not random background colour. It is consistent with a pattern of operations designed to sow social division: anti-mosque propaganda, community provocation, and then, at the top of the escalation ladder, fires at the home of the British Prime Minister.

That is precisely the grey zone in which modern destabilisation operates. Not tanks at the border. Telegram handles, cryptocurrency payments, deniable proxies, and disposable men. The architecture is designed so that the man holding the lighter takes all the legal risk, while the man who lit the fuse from the other end of an encrypted channel walks free.

THE FORENSIC RECORD: WHAT THE PHONES AND THE FIRES REVEAL 

The prosecution’s forensic and digital case has not been shaken this week. The jury has already absorbed a considerable volume of material: phone location data placing Lavrynovych at all three fire sites; CCTV footage; recovered images and video; encrypted Telegram messages; and cryptocurrency-linked payment trails. His phone contained an image of turpentine substitute and similar flammable materials, a circled photograph of the Toyota RAV4, a cryptocurrency QR code, and a map showing the car’s location.

At least 320 messages between Lavrynovych and El Money were recovered, beginning months before the fires with lower-level paid tasks and allegedly escalating towards arson. The operational discipline the prosecution has described includes instructions to delete messages, cleaned phones, proof-of-work videos sent to the handler, and a return to the scene to document the damage. In one exchange, Lavrynovych allegedly instructed Carpiuc to delete Instagram and SMS messages before ‘the job.’ In another, he allegedly discussed with Pochynok whether the car was still present and the need to ‘take a video.’

The most striking piece of evidence in the prosecution’s case remains the alleged ‘geranium’ instruction. After the second fire, and before the third, El Money allegedly warned the defendants that they had attacked the home of ‘a very high-ranking individual in Britain,’ told them to leave the city, and instructed them to use the word ‘geranium’ if detained by police. That is not the operational vocabulary of ordinary criminality. It is the vocabulary of a handled intelligence operation.

THE HUMAN EVIDENCE: A FAMILY IN A BURNING HOUSE 

The jury heard earlier in the trial from Judith Alexander, the sister-in-law of the Prime Minister. She described being woken in the early hours of 12 May 2025 by a sound she compared to two wheelie bins being thrown at the front door. She saw smoke and an orange glow at the entrance to the Kentish Town house. Her daughter’s bedroom was directly above the fire. Smoke spread through the property. Masks were handed out while the family waited for the fire brigade.

That testimony goes to the legal heart of the case. Lavrynovych has admitted setting fire to the car. He denies the full extent of his involvement in the property fires. But the prosecution’s logic is direct: why do you set fire to the front door of a house unless you intend to endanger the people inside, or at minimum have no regard for whether you do? A fire at a front door does not merely destroy property. It blocks the exit. It can turn a home into a trap. The endangerment element is not an academic distinction.

THE GREAT ABSENCE: EL MONEY IS NOT IN THE DOCK 

By Friday evening, then, the trial stood at a crucial stage. The prosecution has laid out a case built on digital evidence, movement data, forensic traces, recovered messages, and alleged payment arrangements. The defence has begun to build a counter-narrative of coercion, poverty, manipulation, and fear. Lavrynovych has admitted one act, denied the broader criminal intent, and attempted to shift the moral centre of gravity onto a figure who is not present to answer.

That is the great absence in Court 2. Three men sit before the jury. Behind them, according to the Crown, is a handler with no confirmed name, no face, no nationality, and no public explanation. The jury has been told, by explicit instruction from prosecutor Duncan Atkinson KC, that it is not their task to determine who El Money is or why he may have targeted Starmer-linked properties. That question is formally outside the scope of the proceedings.

The law may be content to try the men it has. Politics cannot be so easily satisfied. The questions El Money’s existence raises are not legal questions. They are national security questions. Who directed these operations? On whose behalf? Why were men of Ukrainian background allegedly recruited to target the British Prime Minister? Was this criminal outsourcing, personal vendetta, foreign interference, or the kind of hybrid operation that intelligence agencies have been warning about for years? Those questions are not before the twelve people in Court 2. They are before all the rest of us.

They should be before a parliamentary committee. They should be before the intelligence agencies, if they are not already. They should be before every journalist in Britain who claims to take democratic accountability seriously, and who has instead spent these two weeks largely ignoring a trial without reporting restrictions at the Central Criminal Court.

The trial is expected to continue for a further week. The defence case has not been fully heard. The prosecution will have the opportunity to challenge Lavrynovych’s account under cross-examination. Nothing in this report should be read as any indication of guilt or innocence. Roman Lavrynovych, Petro Pochynok, and Stanislav Carpiuc are innocent unless and until proven guilty. The jury will decide what the evidence means.

The men in the dock face the full weight of British justice. The man who allegedly pulled the strings faces nothing at all. That is not a legal anomaly. It is the arrangement the court has formally endorsed, and the question it leaves behind will outlast whatever verdict is returned.

Exoneration Day 2026

I had already pleaded guilty, but on 8 May 2025, from the bench of Durham Crown Court, His Honour Judge Nathan Adams described me as having been "exonerated" of the allegation that had formed the basis of the propensity evidence that, in the absence of anything else and after the Crown Prosecution Service had briefed the local media that it was going to drop the charges, had been introduced on the first day of my second trial, leading to my first conviction, which was by a jury that the judge, who was not Judge Adams, had specifically instructed to "disregard" the concept of conviction beyond reasonable doubt.

That had led in turn to a suspended sentence, breach of which, itself dependent on the truth of that utterly baseless allegation, led to my first imprisonment and to the restraining order, likewise so dependent, breach of which led in turn, one year ago today, to my second imprisonment. There was literally no evidence of that breach, and the Police had sacked the investigating officer for his conduct of my case, but my barrister told me that my record made me unacquitable by a jury that anyway just would not have liked a defendant who dressed well, spoke well, and read books, so I was going to have to go guilty even though the whole thing depended on blog posts that did not exist, purportedly detected by a policeman who had been drummed out.

I once again invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, each and every member of the Board of the Catholic Safeguarding Standards Agency, each and every member of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Committee, each and every member of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Team, and each and every bishop, priest or deacon of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty. Factually guilty, in that I had in fact committed any such offence. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero, as it has been since 28 July 2021.

If asked, Police Officers, Prison Officers and Probation Officers have always said that it was not their question to answer, and they have never, ever volunteered a belief in my guilt. To say the least, I have known them to volunteer that about other convicts. In fact, I have repeatedly been told by people in each of those three categories that I was obviously innocent. And not only by them. Whereas no one, absolutely no one at all, has ever said to my face that they thought that I was guilty. Write what you like in some public school gigglerag. Next to no one up here reads it, and it is quite rarely to be seen for sale in the North East. Moreover, even after this, it is never going to publish this.

In Illo Uno Unum

One year of Pope Leo XIV, the first American Pope.

He should do the most American and the most Papal thing ever, and excommunicate the German Synodalists and the Society of Saint Pius X on the same day, as well as anathematising certain errors that, quite by chance, happened to be sayings of JD Vance and the like.

Those who would object to that last would have at most one bishop, and he would be most unlikely to go through with formal schism.

Anomalous Phenomena?

The FBI has released files that described “four foot tall beings” emerging from UFOs, so at last we know where Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron came from. Of course Donald Trump is using Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, as UFOs are now known, as a distraction. But you are never going to change the minds of the people who took the most interest. We cannot know that there is not extraterrestrial life, but we have no evidence that there is, much less that it has ever visited Earth. As we have begun to see, any release of files would confirm that, thereby satisfying no one who did not already know it. The rest would only scream about another coverup.

Saint Paul’s elemental spirits are Saint John’s fallen angels, and the human race worships them in the absence of Abrahamic monotheism, not as worthy of worship, which they are not, but as deserving of fear, which to an extent they are. They are real, and the startlingly similar accounts and depictions of demons on different sides of the world arise from different people’s and different peoples’ encounters with the same ones, often misidentified as alien visitations. The court of Tony Blair featured Carole Caplin and her clairvoyant mother, the Temazcal of Nancy Aguilar and the stone circle of the wonderfully monikered Jack Temple, Cherie’s BioElectric Shield that had been given to her by Hillary Clinton, and much else besides, just as Ronald Reagan had been heavily dependent on Joan Quigley. The demonic basis of the Epstein Class is undeniable and undenied, and that class includes any political party unless Jeffrey Epstein could not have voted for it, and Peter Mandelson could not vote for it, and Peter Thiel could not vote for it, and Noam Chomsky could not vote for it. This is Epstein Island.

And insofar as Epstein Island is Treasure Island, then that Treasure is Sir David Attenborough, one hundred years old today. Now, I love his programmes as much as anyone, but his unretracted 2013 words to Hannah Furness are worth reproducing in full:

Attempting to solve famine in Africa by simply sending flour bags is “barmy”, Sir David Attenborough has said, as he argued it was nature’s response to too many people and not enough land.

Sir David, who is soon to present a programme on human beings, said population control was a “huge area of concern”, adding the world was “heading for disaster unless we do something”.

He warned if humans do not act soon, the “natural world will do something”, as he argues famine in Ethiopia is about “too many people for too little piece of land”.

He suggested humans are “blinding ourselves” to the problem, claiming: “We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That’s barmy.”

In an interview with the Telegraph, ahead of new programme David Attenborough’s Rise of Animals, he admitted the issues had “huge sensitivities” but insisted it was important to “just keep on about it”.

When asked about comments he made on population control earlier this year, when he said human beings were a “plague on the Earth, Sir David agreed they could be considered “blindingly obvious” but claimed nobody else had made the point publicly. “Just keep on about it. Just keep on about it,” he said, when asked about the next step to solving the problem. “You know and I know that there are huge, huge sensitivities involved in this.

“To start with, it is the individual’s great privilege to have children. And who am I to say that you shan’t have children? That’s one thing.

“Then the next thing is that there’s a religious one, in the sense that the Catholic Church doesn’t accept this. That you should control the population.

“So that’s another huge area of concerns. And the last sensitivity - and the most tricky of all - is the fact, when you talk about world population, the areas we're talking about are Africa and Asia, you know.”

He agreed it could be construed as just being about “poor people”, adding: “And to have a European telling Africans that they shan't have children is not the way to go around things.”

When asked how to get around the sensitive issues to solve the problem, he said: “We keep on talking about the problem without putting names on it in that sense. And getting it on the agenda of people.

“Because - you obviously can see it just as I can - you know, that we are heading for disaster unless we do something.

“And if we don’t do something, the natural world will do something. And you say that, but of course they've been doing it for a long time, the natural world.

“They’ve been having... what are all these famines in Ethiopia, what are they about? They’re about too many people for too little piece of land. That's what it's about.

“And we are blinding ourselves. We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That’s barmy.”

The Greens have always been like that, since long before they became a party. That is why the Royal Family, or at least the Philip-Charles-William line that mattered and which has so far produced nine children, would vote for them if they could. Instead, though, let us celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. That means growth, industry, what someone once nearly called “the white heat of technology”, and the equitable distribution of their fruits among and within the nations of the world, for everyone to enjoy at least the standard of living that we ourselves already enjoyed. Not the least part of that is space exploration.

Ours is an improbably dominant species. Far from having been seen off by something much bigger, and endowed with fangs, or claws, or talons, or venom, or what have you, we alone have been to the Moon. Within two generations of that, though, we are afraid of words. Either we go to back to the Moon, and then to Mars and beyond, or we accept that we have entered our decline, the endpoint of which could only be extinction. Space is being both privatised and militarised, a very common combination but always a lethal one, and that by the country that does not recognise it as a common resource for all humanity. There needs to be a return to President Eisenhower’s proposal, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 22 September 1960, for the principles of the Antarctic Treaty to be extended to Outer Space.

If God had not intended us to be a spacefaring species, then He would never have put anything up there for us to find. People who think that these missions impoverish anyone, even as an initial outlay, do not understand how the money supply works. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, Britain has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect.

Why, though, spend that currency on this? Welcome to the Anthropocene, that is why. Life is the geological force that shapes the Earth, and the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere, not least by the uniquely human phenomenon of economic growth, so that human mastery of nuclear processes is beginning to create resources through the transmutation of elements, enabling us, among other things, to explore space and to exploit the resources of the Solar System. Vladimir Vernadsky and Krafft Ehricke will yet have their day. They may be having it now.

“To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man,” said Leon Trotsky. “Dominion,” says the God of the Bible. Dominion over the beasts, thus over the land, and thus over everything on and under the land. Dominion over the fish, thus over the waters, and thus over everything in and under the waters. And dominion over the birds, thus over the sky, and thus over everything in the sky, as far up as the sky goes, and the sky goes up a very long way. That dominion is entrusted so that we might “be fruitful and multiply”.