Fightback

In view of the Bank Holiday, if Wes Streeting were still a Minister on Tuesday morning, then Keir Starmer would be too weak to sack him, and thus unfit to be Prime Minister. Of course, we already knew that. But of course, he is very well-protected. Nick Robinson offered no pushback to the dismissal of Zack Polanski as unfit to lead a party by the man who made Peter Mandelson Ambassador to the United States.

What might fall with Starmer? The attack on the right to trial by jury, and on the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court? Graham Linehan exercised that latter, and like more than 40 per cent of the people who did, he won. Britain has had enough of bullying by half of one per cent of the population.

Therefore, we have hit back at the false reports that Essa Suleiman had been charged with two murders rather than three. We openly wonder, if £25 million were available for Jews, why it had not been invested in the mental health service, and whether there would be £12.5 million for Muslims, or Somalis, or however one wished to identify Ishmail Hussein. While the Metropolitan Police Commissioner says that Jews need their own police force, the rest of us look at Shomrim and wonder how it was even legal, never mind invited by the Police to participate in kicking the head of a suspect who had already been Tasered.

The claim that Suleiman had to be giving a kicking because he might have been carrying a bomb is risible, since some explosives could be detonated by impact even if that were administered by trained Police Officers, never mind by a member of the general public. That member of the general public was an enforcer for the local "community leaders" to whom Sir Mark Rowley wanted to cede the policing of "their" streets, which was something that the IRA used to demand. The very gates of Downing Street have been graced with a vigil for people who were still alive, and even then for only two of the three. Golders Green has been accorded a sort of State Visit by Nigel Farage, whose antisemitism until he was at least 18, and he is far too young to have been a child until he was 21, has been recalled publicly by 34 schoolmates. Rightly but even so, Rowley has never issued any rebuke of Farage or of any other figure on the Right for their talk of two-tier policing.

On and on it goes. A house fire near a synagogue has been reported as if it were another Kristallnacht, with no mention of the house's equal proximity to a mosque, not even on the day that a man had pleaded guilty to setting fire to another mosque in one of 22 attacks on such in 2025. The 3200 attacks on Muslims last year did not lead to the declaration of a national emergency. Nothing did. Now as the Minister responsible, Jess Phillips shows characteristic self-awareness by continuing her annual practice of reading into the record of the House of Commons the names of every woman killed by men in the United Kingdom since the previous International Women's Day. Ask her when the COBRA meeting was going to be. Of acts of anti-Christian violence, "In England and Wales alone, 702 incidents were recorded between April 2023 and March 2024, representing a 15 per cent increase compared to the previous year," and the trend continues, so when is the COBRA meeting, David Lammy, former member of the Archbishops' Council of the Church of England? If the perpetrators were overwhelmingly Muslims, then there would already have been one.

In the next few days, we shall either succeed in calling out all of this and a whole lot more, or Polanski, Jeremy Corbyn, and the Left, the Greens, the peace movement and the Palestine solidarity movement in general, will have been blamed directly for the Golders Green attacks and, again, for a whole lot more. That would directly threaten our own physical safety while dragging our country even further into the wars with Iran and others. Those wars would be funded by cuts to the means of life at home, with both the cuts and the wars enforced by the destruction of even such civil liberties as we had managed to retain through the sustained period of assault that stretched back at least to the Premiership of the BBC's venerable sage, John Major.

Give Him A Wide Birth

When Boris Johnson's most recent marriage was solemnised in Westminster Cathedral while he was Prime Minister, then some of us held out hope that he, a cradle Catholic, was on the way back. Well, here we are instead. What does his old Political Secretary, Danny Kruger, say about this?

Johnson has at least nine children. Since he clearly does not include himself, then he should be made to explain precisely which people should save the world by dying out, and precisely why it should be those people rather than him and his.

Greens are Malthusians, so their members and supporters cannot oppose Johnson's view on this, while the Conservative Party and Reform UK are both crawling with veterans of his Government.

Really Troubling

Areeb Ullah and Simon Hooper write:

The organisers of the pro-Palestine marches that take place in central London have strongly criticised remarks by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley, accusing him of spreading “dangerous misinformation” about the intentions of the marches calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Earlier on Friday, Rowley responded to intense questioning over how his police force is keeping the Jewish community safe after a man stabbed two people in Golders Green, a predominantly Jewish area of London.

Rowley told Good Morning Britain that he was “really troubled” by claims that protest organisers intended to march near synagogues.

“I’m really troubled by what we have seen. Many of these marches set out with an intent to march near synagogues, and every single time we have put conditions on to prevent that,” said Rowley.

“Even that intent causes me concern that they repeatedly ask to do such things.”

He added that the police had imposed conditions to prevent marches approaching Jewish places of worship.

But leading figures from the Palestine Solidarity movement pushed back on these claims, describing the commissioner’s comments as “dishonest and frankly dangerous”.

Ryvka Bernard, deputy director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, said Rowley’s intervention risked heightening tensions.

“It’s shocking that Rowley would make such dishonest and reckless comments in a moment when his police force should be focused on protecting vulnerable people,” she said.

“We have repeatedly rejected any conflation of Jewish people with the horrific actions and policies of the state of Israel,” said Bernard. “This dangerous misinformation … will only serve to create more fear and anxiety.”

“Our marches for Palestine are about showing solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle against apartheid and genocide, and to protest against British government complicity in Israel’s crimes against them,” said Bernard.

“Our upcoming march on 16 May will be no different.”

She rejected the suggestion that demonstrations had targeted Jewish sites, stating: “None of our marches or proposed march routes has ever targeted a synagogue or even directly passed one along its route, and the Met Police knows that.”

Lindsey German, convener of the Stop the War Coalition, similarly dismissed Rowley’s claims as “simply untrue”.

“We have never set out with intent to march near a synagogue and we have never intentionally held a demonstration outside or near to one,” said German. “We keep our routes well away from them.”

She pointed to a previous dispute with police over a march in January, when organisers were blocked from assembling near the headquarters of the BBC because of a synagogue several hundred yards away.

This incident led to the organisers being forced to hold a static march near parliament and the main protest organisers being arrested for walking towards the headquarters of the BBC to lay a wreath for Palestinian children.

German said organisers had proposed multiple compromises, including altering the timing and route, to avoid disrupting worshippers.

'No connection'

The controversy comes amid heightened scrutiny of pro-Palestine protests in the UK after the UK's independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall, called for a “moratorium” on pro-Palestine marches because of recent antisemitic attacks in London.

"It pains me to say this, but I think we may have reached a point where we need to have a moratorium on the sorts of marches that have been happening," Hall told Times Radio.

On Friday, a senior rabbi in north London rejected any connection between the pro-Palestine marches and Wednesday’s stabbing attack.

“It is certainly not the marches that caused the tragic stabbing attacks on Wednesday in Golders Green,” Herschel Gluck told Middle East Eye.

He said that banning the marches over antisemitism concerns would be an own goal because of the large number of Jews who regularly took part in the protests.

“There are many Jews who participate in the marches. Pro rata, there are more Jews than any other community. And the idea of banning speech is something that is a very un-Jewish thing to do.”

Gluck, who is also president of the Shomrim neighbourhood patrol group in North and East London, said police on the ground were “engaging very well” with the Jewish community and taking its concerns seriously.

But he said he believed they were facing political pressure to take firmer action over the marches, and accused Labour, Conservative and Reform politicians of using antisemitism to distract from issues such as the economy, the cost of living and the fragile security situation in the world.

“They are just using the situation for their own ends and not really caring for the Jewish community. They are using the conflict to create more conflict.”

Jewish voices

He called on political leaders to listen to all Jews, including those speaking out against Israel’s actions in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East.

“They’re not marginal, but sadly, certain politicians choose not to listen also to these Jewish voices. And I think that again borders on antisemitism, when they decide not to listen to the concerns, feelings, and strong sentiments of a very large segment of the Jewish community.

“We need to enable and foster a more peaceful and harmonious atmosphere.”

Since the start of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in 2023, large demonstrations have drawn hundreds of thousands of participants, while also prompting political debate over public order, community relations and freedom of expression.

Campaigners argue that Rowley’s comments risk undermining trust between protest organisers and authorities, as well as fuelling narratives that conflate pro-Palestinian activism with hostility towards Jewish communities.

Despite the row, organisers say the march planned for 16 May will proceed as intended, with a continued emphasis on peaceful protest and opposition to racism in all forms.

And Imran Mulla writes:

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been criticised for linking pro-Palestine marches to antisemitic violence after saying that "if you stand alongside people who say 'globalise the intifada', you are calling for terrorism against Jews and people who use that phrase should be prosecuted".

The prime minister made the comments in an address to the nation following the stabbing of two Jewish men, aged 34 and 76, in Golders Green, a neighbourhood of northwest London with a large Jewish population.

A 45-year-old Somali-born British national was arrested on Wednesday afternoon after the attack. He had left a psychiatric hospital just days before the attack, Channel 4 reported on Thursday.

On Friday, London's Metropolitan Police announced that Essa Suleiman had been charged not with terrorism offences, but with two counts of attempted murder and one count of possession of a bladed article in a public place.

Suleiman is also accused, according to the BBC, of attempting to murder Ishmail Hussein, whom he had known for about 20 years, on the morning of the Golders Green attack.

There have been no recorded incidents in the UK of an antisemitic attack involving the phrase "globalise the intifada". However, in December, the Metropolitan and Greater Manchester police forces announced they would arrest people for chanting "globalise the intifada" or holding placards displaying the phrase.

In January, three pro-Palestine protesters were charged for allegedly chanting "intifada" at a demonstration.

On Friday, it emerged that the Met is reviewing implementing a possible ban on upcoming pro-Palestine marches.

The Stop the War Coalition is planning a demonstration in London on 16 May to mark Nakba Day, which commemorates the forcible displacement of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948.

Meanwhile, Green Party leader Zack Polanski has accused the government of "using the pain of the Jewish community to restrict our right to peaceful protest".

Polanski said on Thursday afternoon: "I am the only Jewish leader of a major political party, and I suffer antisemitic abuse every single day. For other politicians to use antisemitism as a political football, especially after these appalling attacks, is utterly appalling and should be beneath them.

"We must also be clear that any response to these abhorrent attacks that curtail our civil liberties would be wrong."

Surge in antisemitic attacks

Starmer said on Thursday evening: "Antisemitism is an old, old hatred. History shows that the roots are deep, and if you turn away, it grows back. Yet far too many people in this country diminish it.

"They either don't see it or they don't want to see it. Take the marches that happen regularly across Britain.

"Of course, we protect freedom of speech and peaceful protests in this country. But if you are marching with people wearing pictures of paragliders without calling it out, you are venerating the murder of Jews."

Three women were found guilty of a terror offence in February 2024 for having displayed images of paragliders on their clothes in a march on 14 October 2023, shortly after the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel.

It has not been common for attendees of pro-Palestine marches to display images of paragliders.

On Thursday evening, Starmer called on "everyone decent in this country to open their eyes to Jewish pain, Jewish suffering and Jewish fear".

There has been a large surge in antisemitic attacks in recent months, including numerous arson attacks and incidents investigated by the Met as antisemitic hate crimes in the past month.

In 2020, Suleiman was referred to the Prevent counter-extremism programme.

Calls for ban on pro-Palestine marches

An obscure group that first appeared online on 9 March, Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia (Hayi), claimed responsibility for the attack on Wednesday afternoon.

The claim has not been verified or substantiated. No details have emerged to suggest how a middle-aged British-Somali man who had been in a psychiatric hospital could have taken instruction from such a group.

Hayi has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks across Europe in the past two months. 

The Israeli government has said the group is linked to Iran, but British police have not established any such connection, although they are understood to be investigating its possibility.

Activist groups have criticised attempts to link pro-Palestine protests to antisemitic attacks.

Pro-Palestine activists have strongly denied that "globalise the Intifada" is antisemitic or a call for violence, and British Jews have been prominent in pro-Palestine marches in the UK.

Intifada comes from the Arabic root word nafada, which means "to shake off" or "to rise up", and translates to "uprising".

On Thursday, the UK's independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall, called for a "moratorium" on pro-Palestine marches because of recent antisemitic attacks.

Hall said on Times Radio: "It pains me to say this, but I think we may have reached a point where we need to have a moratorium on the sorts of marches that have been happening.

"It’s clearly impossible at the moment for any of these pro-Palestine marches not to incubate within them some sort of antisemitic or demonising language."

In response, the Stop the War coalition criticised Hall's remarks as "unacceptable".

The coalition said: "We condemn unequivocally these attacks, as we do all forms of antisemitism and racism. No one should be attacked for their race or religion.

"However, the attempts by Hall, sections of the media and some politicians to connect such attacks with the Palestine marches are wrong."

Stop the War added: "These marches are supported by many Jewish people who attend. They are not the ‘hate marches’ described by right-wing politicians but expressions of solidarity and support for those under attack."

The left-wing outfit Your Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, said: "Politicians are weaponising the abhorrent stabbings to take away our civil liberties and baselessly attack the Palestine movement."

The Vision To Foresee The Disaster

Peter Day-Milne writes:

Earlier this year, the House of Lords debated an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill that would have stopped it from fully decriminalising self-induced abortions. The Archbishop of Canterbury, to her credit, spoke in favour of this amendment, and she and the nine other bishops who were present voted for it. This is good. Too few people, however, remember that her episcopal forebears had a large role in the making and passing of the Abortion Act in the first place, and so helped bring about the present nightmarish, dystopian reality in which we kill one third of children in the womb. A number of facts from the public record suggest themselves here, and may, one hopes, move – or, indeed, shame – the Archbishop and her colleagues to greater firmness on this issue.

The parliamentary campaign for legal abortion began with two bills put forward in the Commons in 1961 and 1965, but both failed before reaching the Lords. The first abortion bill to come before the bishops and their temporal colleagues was Lord Silkin’s Abortion Bill of 1965, which proposed to permit abortion on the grounds of ‘grave risk’ of ‘serious injury’ to the mental or physical health of the mother; risk of deformity; maternal incapacity for childrearing; or if the mother conceived the child when under the age of 16, or as a result of rape.

Two bishops spoke on the second reading of this bill. First, the bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, ‘deplored’ attempts to scupper it, and praised its author’s effort to treat abortion ‘intelligently, as befits an adult society’. Later, the bishop of Exeter, Robert Mortimer – sometime Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford – also spoke, arguing ‘It is possible to say that the foetus, the unborn baby, is not a member of the human race in the ordinary sense of those words, but that it has a potentiality of so becoming… Where there is a grave threat to her life, to her physical health or to her mental health, we maintain that abortion may be legitimate.’ If we recall that the majority of Britain’s approximately 250,000 annual abortions are now performed on ‘mental health’ grounds, we will have reason to be suspicious of this muddled, cod-Thomistic argument.

At the end of this second reading debate, the bishops voted three to none in favour of the bill’s moving to the committee stage, joining sixty four non-Catholic lords temporal in the ‘Content’ lobby. Only eight peers voted against the bill, seven of them Catholics. One of these was the 9th Baron Vaux of Harrowden, better known as the Rev Dom Gabriel Gilbey OSB of Ampleforth Abbey. Throughout the Lords’ debates on abortion, his speeches ensured that the House heard at least one genuine priestly voice (‘[The bill] … opens up vistas of the wholesale slaughter of unborn babies… [do not] add your voice to the voice of the primeval tempter by saying to the whole medical profession: “Ye shall be as gods”.’).

Dom Gabriel’s warnings were not heeded, and this bill of 1965 proceeded to the committee stage. There the bishops of Exeter and Southwark expressed cautious support for abortion on the grounds of foetal deformity. Southwark said of his visit to a ward for seriously deformed children: ‘Whether or not they were human is a theological problem beyond my understanding. All I can say is that if it were possible to know in advance that one could prevent the birth of those children, I am sure that one should have prevented it.’ The Bishop of Leicester took a more straightforward view: he declared himself willing to support a clause allowing abortion where deformity was, in his words, ‘more likely than not’.

The bishops of Southwark and Leicester also voted to retain the clause in Lord Silkin’s bill that would have made conception under the age of 16 an automatic ground for abortion. Leicester said of such cases: ‘Whether we have an abortion or whether we have an adoption, there will probably be in both cases some traumatic experience, but, for myself, I feel that the shorter of two processes is more likely to be beneficial than, or at any rate not so harmful as, the longer.’ The Lords sent Lord Silkin’s bill to the Commons in March 1966, just before the prorogation of Parliament, and the Commons had no time to consider it. Yet in the debate on second reading in November 1965, the bishop of Exeter had already made a very pregnant suggestion. The Church of England, he said, had produced a draft Abortion Bill; would Lord Silkin consider asking some of the bishops to help him put forward a fresh bill along its lines?

Exeter was referring to the draft bill included in the report Abortion: An Ethical Discussion, which the Church of England’s Committee for Social Responsibility had just published. This report, written by a group of ten ethicists and medical doctors, of whom four were in Anglican orders, recommended that abortion be allowed in cases of ‘serious threat’ to the ‘psycho-physical well-being’ of the mother. This threat was to be assessed in terms of the ‘total environment’ of the mother, including factors such as her number of children, her finances and the like. The report and its attached draft bill were greatly to influence the parliamentary efforts that culminated in the Abortion Act 1967, and many echoes of its wording appear in that legislation.

To return to the Lords in 1966: Lord Silkin’s first bill ran out of parliamentary time in March of that year. One month later, in the next session of Parliament, he introduced a new bill, replicating the final text of the first as amended and passed by the Lords. This bill, too, received strong support from the Lords Spiritual, which was not surprising given that they had done much to shape the earlier version.

Nonetheless, Lord Silkin’s second bill also failed to pass through the Commons. The next bill, that of 1967, was the one that became law as the Abortion Act 1967. It began in the Commons, where it was introduced by David Steel. Having passed through the Commons, it progressed swiftly through its readings in the Lords. In its final form, it permitted abortion when two doctors agreed either that:

(a) the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman, or injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or any existing children of her family, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated; or

(b) ‘there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped’.

As Lord Vaux observed, this would, in practice, soon become a licence for abortion on demand.

Towards the end of the bill’s passage through the Lords, the bishops voted four to none against a wrecking amendment. By this time, Ian Ramsey, sometime Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford and co-author of Abortion: An Ethical Discussion, was sitting in the Lords as bishop of Durham. In the debate on the successful bill he said of the human foetus: ‘I do not talk about its life; I think that is semantically as scandalous and problematic as things can be.’

Such being the attitude of the established church, which had in fact drafted no little part of it, the Abortion Act 1967 passed through the Lords and became law. Now, fifty-eight years on, approximately a quarter of a million abortions are performed in Britain each year under the very same Act. Today, Anglican bishops generally avoid talking about abortion, for they are afraid of upsetting the now powerful conservative evangelical wing of the Church of England, which took up the pro-life cause in the late 1970s and is now strongly committed to it. But today’s episcopal silence should not make us forget that the bishops of the 1960s developed, supported and voted for the very legislation that has enabled our civilisation to destroy itself with a self-inflicted genocide. At the time, when so little was known about abortion and its effects, only the Catholic peers – blind slaves of dogma in Anglican eyes – had the vision to foresee the disaster. 

The Archbishop of Canterbury is to be commended for her speech and vote on 18 March. The question is – can the Church of England be prophetic about abortion today in a way that it utterly failed to be in the 1960s?

Starmer Arson Trial: Day Three

Paul Knaggs writes:

Judith Alexander Tells Court: Daughter Slept Above Flames in Starmer Arson Trial

There is a moment in every serious criminal trial when the proceedings cease to be abstract. When the paperwork and the legal architecture fall away, and what is left is simply a human being describing the worst night of their life. Thursday at the Old Bailey was that moment.

Judith Alexander, the sister-in-law of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, told the court how she had been lying awake in bed in the early hours of 12 May 2025, scrolling on her phone, her partner and her daughter asleep, when the silence of a Kentish Town street was broken by two bangs. Loud bangs. She described the sound, with the particular precision that terror produces, as being like two wheelie bins thrown at the front door.

When she looked out of the window, she saw smoke the colour of soot and an orange glow where the door should have been. She called the fire brigade. She tried frantically to reach her sister Victoria, Sir Keir’s wife. The smoke thickened. It began to climb the stairs.

“The fact that her room was right above the fire, and if I did not wake up, what might have happened. I was awake all night.”

Her daughter’s bedroom was directly above the fire. Alexander, who has asthma, described handing out Covid masks as the household tried to manage the spreading smoke before the fire brigade arrived. The firefighters were there in ten minutes or less. It was ten minutes of a particular kind of helplessness that any parent will understand without being told.

WHY THIS TESTIMONY MATTERS 

The prosecution’s case against Roman Lavrynovych, 22, Petro Pochynok, 35, and Stanislav Carpiuc, 27, has always depended upon the distinction between criminal damage and something considerably more serious. Three men are not charged merely with setting fires. Lavrynovych faces counts of arson with intent to endanger life. Pochynok and Carpiuc face conspiracy to commit arson with the same aggravating element.

That distinction matters enormously. It is the difference, in sentencing terms, between years and decades. And it is the element that Thursday’s testimony was specifically designed to illuminate. Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson KC put the logic to the jury in the opening days of the trial with a directness that bears repeating: why would you set fire to the front door of a house unless you intended to endanger the lives of the people inside? A fire at the front door does not just destroy property. It blocks the primary means of escape.

What Judith Alexander’s testimony supplied was not legal argument but lived experience. A child sleeping above the flames. A mother with asthma, reaching for masks in a smoke-filled house, unable to get through to her sister. The jury needed to understand not just what the prosecution alleges was done, but what it meant in human terms. On Thursday, they were told.

THE THREE NARRATIVES 

As the trial moves into its third day, three distinct accounts of what happened across those five days in May 2025 are beginning to crystallise. They cannot all be true. Eventually, twelve people will have to decide between them.

The prosecution’s account is the most fully developed. Three men, it says, were recruited via encrypted messaging on Telegram by a Russian-speaking contact using the pseudonym ‘El Money’. They were offered payment in cryptocurrency. The fires, targeting a car formerly owned by the Prime Minister, a converted flat in Islington, and the Kentish Town house where Sir Keir’s family still lived, were not random. They were planned, coordinated, and executed over five days with an operational discipline that included instructions to delete messages and the use of white spirit as an accelerant. Lavrynovych’s phone, the prosecution told the jury in the opening days, placed him at the location of all three fires. It also contained photographs taken before and after each incident.

The principal defendant’s account is still emerging. Lavrynovych’s defence has indicated that he was acting under coercion, that he feared for his safety, that he was not a willing participant but a man under threat. The prosecution disputes this reading forcefully. In earlier sessions, the court heard messages in which Lavrynovych pressed his contact for payment with some urgency, explaining that the money was needed for his father’s medical treatment. Duncan Atkinson KC noted that this was, in his framing, pretty forceful language for someone acting purely out of fear.

All three defendants deny every charge put to them. The defence has not yet presented its full case. Nothing reported here should be read as any indication of guilt or innocence. The jury will decide what the evidence means.

The organiser sits in shadow while three men in the dock carry the entire weight of the proceedings. That is not a legal anomaly. It is the arrangement the court has formally endorsed.

THE QUIET THUNDER: EL MONEY 

There is a third narrative operating in this trial that belongs to nobody in the dock, because the person at its centre has not been charged with anything and has not appeared before the court. He is known to the proceedings only by a pseudonym: El Money.

Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson KC addressed the jury on this point with a clarity that deserves to be quoted in full. He told them: it is no part of your considerations to decide who El Money is, and what reason he might have had to coordinate the actions of these defendants against these properties and this car associated with the prime minister.

That instruction is legally conventional and entirely necessary. The jury is being asked to decide whether the three men in the dock are guilty of the offences charged. They are not being asked to solve an intelligence puzzle. That is not their function. The court’s instruction is correct.

And yet the instruction cannot make the question disappear. It simply moves it out of the courtroom and into the minds of everyone watching.

We know that El Money allegedly communicated in Russian, despite Lavrynovych’s own communications typically being in Ukrainian. We know that payment was offered in cryptocurrency. We know that the targets were not random but specifically associated with the sitting Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. We know that Counter Terrorism Policing London is leading the investigation, not because terrorism charges have been brought, but because the nature of the target warranted it.

The Metropolitan Police have made no public attribution to any foreign state. No terrorism offences are before the court. The motive, officially, remains, in the language of early court documents, unexplained and opaque.

El Money paid, allegedly, for fires to be set at properties linked to Britain’s Prime Minister. El Money has not been identified in open court, is not in the dock, and, as far as the public record goes, remains entirely at large. Three men in Kentish Town and Islington face the possibility of life imprisonment. The man who allegedly orchestrated and funded the operation is, for the purposes of this trial, explicitly beyond consideration.

That is not a criticism of the prosecution, or the court, or the legal process. Criminal trials are bounded by what can be proven beyond reasonable doubt against identifiable defendants. The principle is sound. But it leaves a door ajar that neither the court, nor the press, nor the government can simply push shut.

Who is El Money? On whose instruction, and for whose benefit, were properties linked to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom set on fire? Those questions are not before the twelve people sitting in Court Two at the Old Bailey.

They are, however, 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.

WHAT COMES NEXT 

The trial is expected to continue for a further two weeks. The defence case has not yet been presented in full. Evidence on the alleged coordination between the defendants, the cryptocurrency payment trail, and the Telegram messaging chain will continue to be tested. Lavrynovych’s coercion defence will eventually be put before the jury with whatever evidence supports it.

What will not be put before the jury, by explicit instruction, is the question of who gave the order. That question will leave the Old Bailey with the same status it arrived with: unanswered, officially out of scope, and louder for having been formally set aside.

All three defendants deny every charge against them. The defence has not yet presented its full case. 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. Labour Heartlands will continue to follow proceedings at the Old Bailey.

The men in the dock face the full weight of British justice. The man who allegedly pulled the strings faces nothing at all.

A Complete Insult to the Rule of Law

Harriet Williamson writes:

The Metropolitan police will not be opening an investigation into the ten British nationals accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity while fighting with the Israeli military in Gaza.

A landmark 240-page report of evidence was delivered to the Met’s War Crimes Team in April last year by a team of legal experts on behalf of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) and the Public Interest Law Centre, which are representing Palestinians in Gaza and the UK.

After repeated attempts to follow up, Novara Media can now reveal that the Met will not be opening an investigation, despite more than 70 legal and human rights experts signing a letter of support urging the police to take action in accordance with international law.

A spokesperson for the Met told Novara Media: “The dossier and information provided to us on 7 April 2025 was assessed by specialist officers within the Counter Terrorism Policing War Crimes Team in line with the joint police and CPS guidelines. Based on the information provided, we will not be opening an investigation into this matter and the referrer has been informed of this outcome.”

Top human rights barrister Michael Mansfield KC – who was part of the legal delegation that initially delivered the dossier – called the Met’s decision “shocking” and “a licence for people, essentially, to get away with murder”.

“It’s utterly disgraceful that they should take a whole year to decide not to even open an investigation,” Mansfield told Novara Media. “That means that they had, in fact, decided from the beginning that they weren’t going to bother. The Met is unfit for purpose. I think it’s a complete insult to the rule of law, and to anybody who wants to try and get to the truth of what’s been happening.

“This sets such a poor example to the rest of the world, that we don’t bother with our own citizens potentially transgressing international law.”

According to the Public Interest Law Centre, the dossier contained a detailed overview of alleged crimes committed across Gaza between October 2023 and May 2024 by ten British nationals – including dual citizens – who are accused of involvement in the targeted killing of civilians and aid workers, indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas such as hospitals and schools, the forced transfer and displacement of civilians, and coordinated attacks on historic monuments and religious sites.

The Public Interest Law Centre maintains that the referral provided credible material warranting a full investigation and that the Met’s refusal risks creating an “accountability gap” for alleged international crimes committed by British nationals or residents overseas.

Paul Heron, a Public Interest Law Centre solicitor, told Novara Media: “We reject the Metropolitan police’s conclusions. In our view, the wrong legal test has been applied. This was not a charging decision for prosecutors at the end of an investigation; it was a decision about whether serious allegations of core international crimes should be investigated at all.

“The police appear to have demanded, at the pre-investigation stage, evidence capable of establishing a realistic prospect of conviction. That is the wrong approach. The very purpose of an investigation is to obtain and test evidence, including evidence not available to victims, lawyers or civil society organisations.”

Human rights lawyer and PCHR director Raji Sourani accused the Met of selectivity and of “politicising international law and the rule of law, and providing legal cover to suspected criminals”.

Sourani told Novara Media that the report was handed to the Met so the “establishment would have no excuse not to hold accountable” those Brits accused of participating in ongoing crimes. “This is a clear message that the UK is not only supporting Israel politically and with arms, but covering up legally for British participants,” he added.

The Met’s failure to open an investigation into the dossier comes after the Guardian reported last month that the Foreign Office unit tracking potential breaches of international law by Israel in Gaza and Lebanon has shuttered due to departmental cuts, and that the head of the War Crimes Team had raised the importance of the unit in helping the Met consider war crimes allegations.

More than 2,000 Brits with dual and multiple nationalities have served in the IDF during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, according to Freedom of Information data revealed by Declassified in February.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza has killed at least 72,000 Palestinians since October 2023, including 20,000 children.

The Met has been approached for comment.

An Apology For A Leader

Is Ishmail Hussein Jewish? Essa Suleiman, who has not been charged with any terrorism-related offence and who is if anything a Sunni rather than a Shia Muslim with no connection to Iran, was having the latest of his many, many, many violently psychotic episodes. There was no racial, religious or political motivation, just as there never had been. Let us hear nothing about concern for Suleiman’s alleged victims from those who will not say Hussein’s name, or even mention him at all.

They can stick their calls for yet further expansion of their wars and yet further erosion of our civil liberties. In that struggle, Zack Polanski is a sellout. He should change his name again, this time to Neil Kinnock. What would those gloating over his grovelling say if, for example, Rupert Lowe criticised the Police handling of another summer like last year’s, but then backed down when some Mr Plod threw a tantrum?

The Green Party is indeed Labour as it used to be. It is Labour as it was during the Miners’ Strike, which was why the miners lost. Ideologically, the Greens have to rejoice in that defeat. And does anyone doubt that Suleiman has a history with the drugs that the Greens wanted to legalise? Several arms of the State have failed in his case. One of them is the British party for which Noam Chomsky would vote, making it an Epstein Class party. As Polanski has demonstrated today.