Let’s Try Independence Instead

Britain’s Relationship with the United States is so Special that Pete Hegseth has never heard of the sinking of the General Belgrano. Has he heard of the Falklands War at all? Then again, why should he have? What’s it to him? Yet the people who most loudly objected to the interference of Bill Clinton in Northern Ireland and of Barack Obama in the Brexit referendum demanded with considerable menaces that Britain follow George W. Bush into Iraq and now do so that Britain follow Donald Trump into Iran. But Peter Hitchens writes:

Let’s declare independence from the United States of America. I am sick of them bossing us about and I think they’d treat us better if we stood up to them more.

Sir Keir Starmer is not my friend or ally. I think I can say that I have been ruder about him for longer than almost any other British commentator. He may be a dullard lawyer with a Marxist past and his head may be full of Left-wing porridge, but he is our dullard lawyer, who has been required by our King to form His Majesty’s Government. He is not the governor of one of those easily bullied American states which relies on maple syrup for its economy. He is the head of government of an ancient and famous nation – ours.

So it is our job to say that he is not Winston Churchill, which I am very happy to do. Not that you need to be terribly acute to see this. It is absolutely not the job of the President of the United States.

My tarnished sword springs from its mildewed sheath to defend Sir Keir against the comically sinister President Trump, a man who thinks a baseball cap is suitable attire for declaring the start of World War Three and who probably isn’t wholly sure who Winston Churchill was.

How many people, here and in America, responded to Mr Trump’s attack on Sir Keir by shouting at the TV or the radio: ‘And you certainly aren’t Franklin Delano Roosevelt’? Indeed he isn’t, and I struggle to think of a President of the United States (and they have had some real disasters) with whom Mr Trump could fairly be equated.

But what distresses me is that many Tories, claiming to be British conservative patriots, joined in this foreign mockery of the head of our Government. We have in our midst far too many people who think that being a Trumpoid Republican is the same as being a British Right-winger. It is not.

Here I have to put in a qualification. I lived for two very happy and enjoyable years in Montgomery County, Maryland, in the north-western suburbs of Washington DC. My neighbours were open, kind, generous and friendly. They took me to football games. Our children and theirs ran in and out of each other’s houses and (apart from a small incident involving a retaliatory ambush and a Super Soaker water pistol) there were no diplomatic quarrels.

When I hung a lonely Union Jack over my porch (they all had the Stars and Stripes over theirs), they thought it right and proper that I was as proud of my country as they were of theirs. We were different – and we knew it even more strongly because we spoke roughly the same language.

I didn’t think much of their then President, a certain Bill Clinton, but then nor did most of them. But I learned very early on that American warmth and hospitality turned into freezing resentment if any foreigner criticised any aspect of their country. That was their job. But we got on, and mostly got the joke.

Once, on a trip aboard a US Navy ship off the Florida coast, I declined the offer of a baseball cap to protect me from the strong sun, joking that I might lose my British citizenship if I wore such a thing. They laughed. But they also got the underlying point. We aren’t the same.

When you look into it, the 1776 divorce between Britain and America was a lot more bitter and violent than you might first think. We didn’t burn the White House just for fun when we came back to Washington in 1814. And the two countries are far more different than they appear to be on the surface, politically, religiously, culturally and historically. We are taught to revere different people and different actions.

They mistrust the symbol of the Crown. I am reassured by it, and so should you be. Had I stayed another year, I had planned to hold a July 3rd party to celebrate the last day of British rule.

Which brings me to the idea which I now propose. It is time Britain began the process of asserting full independence from the United States.

Perhaps we could hit back at the famous Boston Tea Party of 1773, an incomprehensible row about taxes in which chests of tea were dumped in Boston Harbour by American ‘patriots’. I suggest that millions of us turn up one Sunday and pour bottles of Coca-Cola, perhaps accompanied by cheeseburgers, into the Pool of London at high water. The great scouring tides of the Thames would quickly carry them away.

I would then suggest a voluntary but total ban, in media and Parliament, on the stupid expression ‘The Special Relationship’. No man has ever seen this relationship. The phrase was first invented 80 years ago as a consolation prize for the end of our time as a world power. It is as elusive as the Loch Ness Monster. And if it existed, I wouldn’t want to appeal to it. Our relationship with any nation should be clear and unsentimental, unclouded by delusions of grandeur or weird imaginings that the US loves us and will always come to our rescue.

Instead an independent Britain should support the US only when it suits us, much as America does.

Churchill had to fight hard for American support. The US squeezed us hard throughout the Second World War. It wanted to end what was left of our empire, so making itself the top nation. By summer 1941, most of our gold reserves were in American vaults and we had been subjected to a sort of bankruptcy audit before the famous Lend-Lease system could begin.

Churchill, often furious and resentful at such treatment, had to bite his tongue. Lend-Lease, it turned out, would be enough to keep us in the war, but not enough to allow our economy to recover from it.

After the war, it did not get better. Those who now complain that we have a feeble naval presence in the Mediterranean are wasting their breath. They should research the bullying and harassment which our ships were subjected to by the US Navy in 1956, during our attempt to capture the Suez Canal. These events ended our naval power there. America’s Sixth Fleet stalked our ships, fouled our sonar and radar, and shone their searchlights at French and British vessels by night.

Admiral Sir Robin Durnford-Slater, second-in-command of Britain’s Mediterranean Fleet, complained: ‘We have already twice intercepted US aircraft and there is constant danger of an incident. Have been continually menaced during past eight hours by US aircraft approaching low down as close as 4,000 yards and on two occasions flying over ships.’ 

General Sir Charles Keightley, commander of Middle East land forces, wrote afterwards: ‘It was the action of the US which really defeated us in attaining our object.’

I can cope with all that. America opposed what we were doing and had the strength and will to stop us. All great powers eventually decline and this was how it happened to Britain. But when we lost our 'first place in the world' position to the US, we did not have to become its subservient colony.

Let’s try independence instead. It hasn’t done the US any harm.

If We Really Care About Democracy

James Kierstead writes:

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend In Defence of Trial by Jury, a panel event co-organised by spiked and the Free Speech Union. The event was a response to UK justice secretary David Lammy’s absurd plans to reduce the number of Crown Court cases that go before juries.

The panel members questioned Lammy’s assumption that jury trials were to blame for the Crown Court’s current backlog of almost 78,000 cases (rather than, say, a lack of funding or the number of spurious claims that now make it to court). And they emphasised the centrality of jury trials to our liberal institutions and to the common law, which has long been a bulwark of liberty in Britain, as in other English-speaking countries.

Yet one thing that struck me about the panellists’ excellent contributions is that they all centred on what philosopher Isaiah Berlin called ‘negative’ liberties – our freedom from coercion by the state – rather than on ‘positive’ liberties – our freedom to participate in decision-making with our fellow citizens. In other words, the contributions had more to say about liberalism than about democracy.

The threat to civil liberties posed by Lammy’s jury-trial plans is not to be underestimated. Especially at a time when Brits can be charged with ‘inciting racial hatred’ for expressing concern about illegal immigration on social media, as was the position of former Royal Marine Jamie Michael last year. Michael, as it happened, was cleared by a jury of his peers after only 17 minutes. It is understandable to wonder what might have happened had a judge from our current legal elite decided the verdict.

But if we are to understand the full extent of the trouble Lammy’s reforms would cause, we need to also start talking about how anti-democratic they are.

Jury trials were a central feature of the first recorded democracy in history, classical Athens. Like us, the ancient Athenians selected jurors randomly from the citizenry (though they excluded women, immigrants and slaves from the draw). These juries were massive, usually involving hundreds of people, and undoubtedly far more powerful than ours today. Their remit included not just determining guilt or innocence, but also sentencing.

Of course, Athenian juries didn’t always get it right – Socrates infamously found himself condemned to death for impiety by a jury in 399 BC. But the Athenians rightly saw juries as the primary means of implementing the law that the people had voted on. They were part and parcel of a democratic system that randomly allotted citizens to other powerful bodies, such as the Council of 500, which handled daily governance. The idea was to ensure that ordinary people (or at least ordinary men) were active participants in the state’s most consequential decisions.

Modern English juries don’t descend directly from the mass juries of ancient Greece. Our system is largely a Norman import, though earlier Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian customs may have helped lay the ground. English juries were initially selected by a sheriff, who would put together a group of local men who might know something about the case on trial. Over time, however, the expectation shifted toward jurors who were strangers to the facts and capable of impartial judgment.

Selection procedures gradually became more regulated in the 18th and 19th centuries, and were eventually standardised under modern statute. This makes our juries one of the few surviving institutions that still entrust ordinary citizens with direct participation in the administration of justice – a principle ancient democracies prized, but which many modern systems have limited.

After all, most modern democracies outside the Anglosphere don’t make use of juries often, if at all. So why stick with them? One answer might be that they provide a crucial channel for more public involvement in our increasingly out-of-touch, elitist politics. This is a principle that senior figures in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party claim to support. Indeed, in 2024, Starmer’s former chief of staff, Sue Gray, came out in favour of citizens’ assemblies: randomly selected groups convened to deliberate on public policy. Curiously, Lammy himself even expressed an interest in the idea in a select committee hearing in 2020.

But if randomly selected assemblies are a good thing, then why not randomly selected juries? If Labour truly believes ordinary people should have a say, why is it itching to remove one of the only institutions that guarantees they do?

Supporters of Lammy’s cuts to jury trials claim that the changes will be minor, with more than 20 per cent of Crown Court cases going before a jury as opposed to around 30 per cent now. But if we really care about democracy, surely we should be increasing the number of ways ordinary people can get involved in decision-making, not stripping them back.

It seems the only conclusion to be drawn here is a simple one: Labour doesn’t care very much about democracy at all.

As Jonathan Black writes to his MP, Catherine West:

Dear Catherine,

I hope you are well.

Much has happened since that sunny Saturday afternoon in June 2024 when you and I were part of a canvassing team knocking on doors with and in support of Sarah Sackman’s election campaign.

What has not changed is the court backlog and aligned multiple pressures on the criminal justice system. On that day in June 2024 complainants in rape cases were expecting to wait months and years for their cases to conclude and defendants were couped up in cells not fit for human habitation waiting to be told that their trial was delayed largely due court capacity issues arising out to backlogs in the crown court. Whilst Haringey was served by a fully functioning Crown Court (albeit until the recent announcement not sitting at capacity), Barnet’s only court, Hendon Magistrates Court had been taken over as a Crown Court centre to host the overflow from Wood green and as of three years ago Harrow Crown Court which had to be closed for essential building repairs. This is still ongoing.

I did not expect that when knocking on those doors I would be indirectly campaigning for an end to the right to trial by jury, arguably a central element to our justice system as we know it.

I know that you are fully aware of the imperfections in our Criminal Justice System. No person navigating the system, whether on a daily basis as a professional or a party to a case should accept the delays. Pointing fingers at defendants gaming the system as justification for removing this fundamental right smacks of tabloid populism; Let’s stop suggesting that it’s the fault of those accused that complainants in sexual assault cases have to wait years; Let’s not ignore the delays in police investigations whereby cases take years from arrest to charge often due to cuts in police budgets. Let’s not ignore the structural failure of a Crown Prosecution Service unable review or at least communicate with counterparts to ensure cases either do not go to court or are truncated.

Last week my client, nearly 19 years old was sentenced for an incident that occurred in November 2024 when he was a17 year old juvenile. This is a relatively short turn around but he pleaded guilty and didn’t ask for the police to take over 12 months to decide to charge.

Yesterday my client who has been on bail since 2022 - on electronic tag - finally saw an end to a case that could have concluded 18 months ago when the representations made and sent to the CPS were drafted. Imagine how much court space could have been opened if they had been considered by someone willing to take hold of the case.

Three months ago, my client, a homeless man was stopped in 2022 with a knife in his rucksack, he told police he was on his way to leave it in a amnesty bin. His case ended after three years on bail awaiting trial when the CPS eventually decided that his defence was credible and that it was no longer in the public interest to prosecute.

I could come up with worse examples than the above but for a desire not to bore the reader and in my haste to ensure you read this before the matter is before parliament on 10th March.

The Government ministers appear almost quite excited in their determination to push these proposals through without assessing the impact of giving true consideration to alternatives.

It is disappointing that main parliamentary proponents of this bill, both of whom sandwich your constituency are two politicians that I have long admired.

They know that if does not need such a drastic step to ensure that complainants in rape serious sexual assault cases get justice. As does the victims’ commissioner Clare Waxman and author of the proposals Sir Brian Leveson. The Criminal Bar Association recently published a helpful fact sheet shows that the impact assessment would reduce workloads in the crown court by 3.5 % ( a wait time of one week less for rape cases).

When I first met you during 2015 election we had been involved in campaigns against the proposed cuts to legal aid and ironically one tied in with the 800 anniversary of the Magna Carta - a charter to ensure that no person should be have justice denied or delayed and that included the right to be by one’s peers.

During that election campaign you were prepared to acknowledge the importance of access to justice and the impact on cuts to legal aid. The current justice team have taken steps to address the issue relating to access to justice but with these proposals many more individuals who are denied jury trial will also suffer an adverse impact on their ability to access legal aid as the narrow means test changes for those facing proceedings in the Crown court. The full eligibility threshold for legal aid in the Magistrates’ court is £22,325 and £37,500 in the Crown court. The removal of cases to the Magistrates court, cuts out a huge swathe of accused individuals being able to access publicly funded legal representation.

This is an important issue not just for the legal profession and those involved in the justice system but for the wider community and that is why in urging you to speak and vote against the bill I am likely to this letter in the hope that others will seek to approach their members of parliament similarly.

Thank you for your time and I hope we can discuss on Monday.

Kind regards.

Yours sincerely,

Jonathan Black

Very Much Correct

Ben Sixsmith writes:

Most British people oppose mass migration. Both Labour and Conservative governments have sent immigration rates sky-rocketing. Most British people want the state to be tough on crime. Both Labour and Conservative governments have neglected prisons and the courts. Reform UK has been presented as the alternative to this inflexible elite status quo.

This message has launched the party up their polls. For their next trick, Nigel Farage and friends have identified another grievance of the British public. British people are sick — yes, sick — of the establishment dragging its feet before participating in ill-considered American wars.

Thankfully, Reform is here to give a voice to popular discontent. “The US used to be our closest ally,” thunders Suella Braverman, “Starmer has let the UK down.” “Starmer is such an embarrassment,” laments Matt Goodwin, “He is destroying the special relationship.” “The Prime Minister needs … back the Americans in this vital fight against Iran!” Nigel Farage cried over the weekend.

Finally, the British public is being represented. Up and down the land, voters have been screaming:

“Why, why are we not helping to attack Iran!?” 

“Please can we join another Middle Eastern war?”

“Doesn’t Keir Starmer know that this could endanger the Special Relationship?”

That Starmer’s indecisiveness has offended Donald Trump is a cause of special horror — Trump being universally beloved among Britons, up there with the late Queen, James Bond and Paddington Bear.

Okay, I’ll stop. Back in reality, about half the British people oppose the war, with about another quarter being undecided. Trump is extremely unpopular.

Whatever you, personally, think about the intervention, in other words, this is the opposite of a vote-winning cause. Granted, politics is not always about doing what voters want. Sometimes voters are wrong. But this suggests that Reform leaders should be making their case — that they should be trying to convince people instead of talking as if they are preaching to the choir.

In a Critic piece following the appointment of the veteran neoconservative Alan Mendoza as Reform UK’s “Chief Advisor on Global Affairs”, James Lachrymose commented:

Farage and the dissident right once celebrated their opposition to foreign entanglements, decrying the interventions in Libya and Iraq. Mendoza’s appointment suggests his metamorphosis from an independent-minded Powellite to an interventionist Atlanticist is now completed. A Reform government is now likely to fit the mould of British foreign policy throughout the twenty-first century: breathless Atlanticism and slavish adherence to the Washington line.

This sounded like a pessimistic diagnosis, but Reform is doing nothing to suggest that it is wrong. One should not expect the party to be anti-American. But if it is going to present itself as being the alternative to the Blairite settlement, it is absurd to promote the “Special Relationship” in unqualified terms — like announcing an alternative to modern art that turns out to be an unmade bed and the preserved corpse of a shark. This is even truer when the current American-Israeli war seems so improvisational and perilous, with various dreadful outcomes being at least possible. Hitching the Reform name to adventure is risky at best.

More broadly, British right-wingers have been fretting that Starmer’s initial unwillingness to assist the US had something to do with his fear of alienating Muslim voters. Harry Cole of The Sun even raised this with Donald Trump. It might be true that demographic change will make British governments less willing to get involved in Middle Eastern wars. As a restrictionist, I can’t think of a less convincing argument against demographic change.

Another thing that should concern Reform is that the Greens have taken such a strong stance against the war. As Alex Yates has pointed out in these pages, the Greens are a lot less radical than they pretend to be. More of an extreme commitment to renewables, more mass migration, and more spending is not an alternative to the status quo — it represents the radicalisation of the status quo. Yet a clear and uncompromising anti-interventionist position when it comes to Middle Eastern war is something different. If, as is very possible — though I accept not certain — the war goes terribly, horrifyingly wrong, the Greens will profit.

Again, I’m not suggesting that Farage should rail against Uncle Sam like the Stock Exchange’s answer to Jeremy Corbyn. But there was no need to take such a full-throated supportive position. I think some right-wingers are at risk of assuming that all of their opinions express that of the silent majority. But foreign policy hawkishness is a niche perspective — that of SW1 think tanks and the shoutier broadsheets. The public is more sceptical — and while this is no guarantee of correctness, it can be very much correct.

Some Hope

I salute the enemy on having made the story, not that Britain had gone to war and thus caused attacks of sorts on British personnel in Bahrain and on a British sovereign base on Cyprus, but that Britain had not gone to war hard enough. Would Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage prefer the full bombing of RAF Akrotiri, and of the United Kingdom Naval Support Facility at Mina Salman, where it was opened by the Duke of York in 2018, 10 years after the conviction of Jeffrey Epstein?

Neither the Iranians nor the Chinese classified the then Ruth Smeeth as “strictly protect”. As Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent, she was yesterday made a Parliamentary Secretary in the Cabinet Office while remaining a Whip. Not bad for having lost her Commons seat to Jonathan Gullis. Even with the departure of Josh Simons, there are now four Parliamentary Secretaries under Darren Jones, and three Ministers of State, including Dan Jarvis, who delivered today’s Commons statement on Chinese spying. That amounts to a Prime Minister’s Department with, including Keir Starmer, nine Ministers, the most of any Department. They must do something. What is it?

As an ultimately successful parliamentary candidate in 2015, Smeeth-Anderson described herself as “the Deputy Director of Hope Not Hate”. When Labour returned to office in 2024, then Anna Turley was both a Director and a Trustee of Hope Not Hate. At committee stage of what has become the Online Safety Act, the evidence of Hope Not Hate was given by Liron Woodcock-Velleman, who was then a Labour councillor in London like Sam Gould. Both are now convicted paedophiles. Gould offended while on the staff Wes Streeting, who would have become Leader when, as expected in 2019, the Conservative majority had been much reduced in 2024 but Boris Johnson had remained Prime Minister. Yes, that was not much more than six years ago.

In 2015, Streeting chaired the Leadership campaign of Jess Phillips. On Tuesday 2 September last year, Phillips told the House of Commons that, “South Yorkshire police should never have been left to investigate themselves in this matter, and moving those investigations to the NCA is absolutely the right thing to do. I would be lying if I said that over the years I had not met girls who talked to me about how police were part of not just the cover-up but the perpetration.” Read again those words of the Minister who refused a statutory inquiry, an inquiry that had been, and still is, demanded by the Muslim candidate whom she had beaten by only 693 votes at Birmingham Yardley, which he intends to contest again, the wonderful investigative journalist Jody McIntyre. Then read the Epstein Files and worry about inferior cultures with no respect for women and with endemic predation on young girls.

Phillips had been supported for Leader by Hilary Armstrong and by Armstrong’s erstwhile staffer, Peter Kyle. Both Joe Docherty and Matthew Doyle were introduced to the House of Lords by Armstrong, whose Whips’ Office in the Commons had included all three of Phil Woolas (did someone say something about electoral fraud?), Ivor Caplin and Dan Norris. All three were made Ministers soon after the vote for the Iraq War, and here we go again. Norris does not turn up to Parliament, but he has one of the best voting records, because despite his own suspension from the Labour whip, his proxy vote is cast every single time by the Labour Whips. Armstrong was the political patroness, both of Turley, and of Caplin’s close friend, closest ally, former lover, and constituency successor, Kyle. Armstrong remains an active Labour member of the Lords, giving it as her institutional affiliation when she endorsed a mercifully ignored book that claimed that the accused of the Cleveland child abuse scandal had been guilty all along. As the young people say, every accusation is a confession.

That right-wing Labour machine gets almost everywhere. Sir Robin Wales, the man who made Newham what it is today, is now Reform UK’s London Director of Local Government, while his close ally, Clive Furness, is that party’s candidate for directly elected Mayor of Newham. When Robert Jenrick promised a high profile defector from Labour, then we had been expecting Peter Mandelson. Still, Jenrick has signed up Reform to Gordon Brown’s surrender of democratic political control over monetary policy, and to George Osborne’s and Nick Clegg’s Office for Budget Responsibility, while Reform is so opposed to the importation of foreign disputes and to their influence over British policy that Richard Tice visits from Dubai to address rallies of émigrés waving foreign flags on the streets of London to demand that Britain invade Iran in support of two foreign powers.

The Epstein Class encompasses centrists, right-wing populists, right-wing elitists, and the world’s only famous anarcho-syndicalist and libertarian socialist. The Greens are probably the party that Noam Chomsky would support in Britain, and he ought to be asked the question. Hope Not Hate has never campaigned against the Green Party. Gorton and Denton has done its work. Now do not vote for any party or candidate for whom anyone in the Epstein Files would vote, or against whom Hope Not Hate would not campaign. And oppose any measure such as digital ID or the abolition of most trial by jury, and supremely oppose any war such as that on Iran, which aligned with the Epstein Class interest. That interest is hate, not hope.

You Break It, You Buy It

If we do not want refugees from Iran, then we should not bomb it. And yes, assuming the regime change that there has not been in Venezuela, the they would indeed be Revolutionary Guard and similar types fleeing the new regime. We took in Nazis after the Second World War.

In Ottawa, the Memorial to the Victims of Communism could not be unveiled as planned on 2 November 2023 and will now feature no names of specific individuals, since it was originally to have borne those of numerous Nazi collaborators and war criminals. The next President of Chile is be José Antonio Kast, the son of Michael Kast, a ratline escapee and political patriarch who had been refused a denazification certificate, and thus the brother of the late Miguel Kast, the Chicago Boy who was President of the Central Bank under Augusto Pinochet, whose regime his little brother enthusiastically supported. The Kast background did not seem to bother Milton Friedman, as it expressly does not bother Benjamin Netanyahu.

And while you do not choose your ancestors, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ nevertheless vet to Kingdom Come those of applicants to their ranks. How, then, can the bullying, fearmongering and manipulative Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service be Blaise Metreweli, whose grandfather, Constantine Dobrowolski, was possibly still alive in 1969 after having been an infamous defector from an Allied Army to collaboration with the Nazi Occupation of Ukraine, such that he had been called “the worst enemy of the Ukrainian people” by the Allies when they had placed on his head a bounty equivalent to £200,000 today? Well, why not? If anything, such a background is a qualification for the job. Indeed, that may well have swung it for her.

The Sonnenrad and the Wolfsangel are displayed by Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Battalion, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, and all the rest of them. Those symbols have only one possible meaning. You may as well wear a swastika, and they sometimes do. These are the factions on whom Volodymyr Zelensky depends, and it is beside the point that he himself is Jewish; most of Hitler’s 27 million Soviet victims were not Jewish, and the post-War Western fantasy that the War had been fought because of the persecution of the Jews is more or less unknown in the former USSR.

The real founders of NATO, as of so very much else after the War, were Nazis. Not overly officious traffic wardens, but real, live, actual Nazis. Before the War in Europe was officially over, the generous political donors in the arms trade decided that the next lucrative enemy was going to be the Soviet Union, which in fact had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe, just as Russia manifestly cannot conquer even Ukraine, much less anywhere else. Therefore, we began to clutch to our bosom the people in Europe who were most anti-Soviet. Guess who? The sky was literally the limit for Wernher von Braun, as recently explored even here, and effectively so for Walter Hallstein, Adolf Heusinger, Kurt Waldheim, and numerous others. None of their pasts had ever been any kind of secret. Operation Gladio was full of Nazis, as were the parallel stay-behind operations in non-NATO countries, operations that had particularly close ties to Britain.

How could the Manchester synagogue attack have happened in the land of the Kindertransport? Having taken in only 10,000 Kindertransport children, Britain took in 15,000 Nazi collaborators, one and half times as many. 1,000 Kindertransport children had been interned as enemy aliens, and some of them had been sent as far as Australia and Canada to get rid of them, but there was none of that for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician). Those were ethnic Ukrainians from a formerly Austro-Hungarian area that had been incorporated into Poland after the First World War, meaning that they were able to claim pre-War Polish nationality in order to enter Britain even though they had massacred ethnic Poles during the War. It had been Churchill who had handed Galicia over to Joseph Stalin, but that did not stop many of the 1st Galician from making their way to Britain. See how very much at home they made themselves.

After all, it was by then Clement Attlee’s Britain. The Attlee Government imposed austerity at home in order to go to war to restore the rule of old Nazi collaborators in Greece. Attlee took Britain into NATO alongside Fascist Portugal from the very start, and NATO has now admitted Finland, which did not drop the swastika from the insignia of its Air Force until 2020, nor from a number of its Air Force flags until last August, meaning that NATO forces had been flying flags with the swastika on them. NATO’s “educational” publications, defining Russia as the eternal enemy, laud the 1940s collaborators as the liberating heroes. Their successors are in government in much of Eastern Europe, legislating for the entire EU.

Another founder member of NATO was Canada, where at that time, just after the War, showing your SS tattoo was a guaranteed way of getting in, because it proved how anti-Soviet you were. As late as the 1990s, old Nazis whom the Americans wanted to deport simply moved to Canada, which let them in, and where they carried on drawing their German military pensions. In Mark Carney’s party and into Carney’s adult lifetime, Justin Trudeau’s father protected thousands of these people as Prime Minister almost continuously from 1968 to 1984, and Chrystia Freeland is the granddaughter of Michael Chomiak, who edited Krakivski Visti, a Nazi paper in occupied Krakow, printed on a press confiscated from a Jewish newspaper.

Whatever the complexities of life in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, there was only one possible reason to join the Waffen SS. Life was complicated in Western Europe during the War, but would you make excuses for the Dutchmen, Frenchmen and Belgians who joined that? Or for its British Free Corps, originally called the Legion of Saint George? There were others besides, and in every case the argument was the same, that the real enemy was the Soviet Union. If Yaroslav Hunka was a hero, then so were they. Including Hunka’s Galician brothers-in-arms who ended up in Britain, which had been planning a surprise attack on the USSR from no later than 22 May 1945, and which therefore needed all the Hunkas that it could find. Hunka himself lived in Britain from the end of the War until 1954, and his late wife was British. In 1951, in Britain, she married an SS veteran.

Germany itself has never had a firewall. Not only had key figures in the foundation of the Federal Republic, of NATO and of the EU very recently been Nazi officers, but one of the East German Bloc Parties, complete with reserved seats in the Volkskammer, was the NDPD, specifically for former Nazi Party members and supporters, although it was often observed that there were in fact more former Nazi Party members in the Communist Party than the entire membership of the NDPD. In 1968, long after East Germany professed to have eradicated all trace of Nazism, the new Constitution still felt the need to commit it to doing so. In 1990, the NDPD took fewer votes than it officially had members, so perhaps that commitment had been met. If so, then it did not last. Look at the voting patterns of the former East Germany now.

No one in West Germany even pretended, not really. The obituaries of Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl were as frank as they themselves had always been. By the early 1960s, more former members of the Nazi Party, a party that had been 8.5 million strong at the end of the War, were on the staffs of many West German government departments than there had been current Nazi Party members on those staffs during the Third Reich. In parts of Austria to this day, you can tell what were the American from what were the neighbouring Soviet zones from the vote for the Far Right, since as early as the summer of 1945 local Nazis fled across the river from the latter to the former. There had been no difference in voting patterns before the War. Old collaborators were often set up, usually in London, as governments-in-exile of Eastern European countries, or at least included in them, while Western spooks aided and abetted their stay-behind networks back home. From 1989 onwards, those emerged blinking into the light, essentially unchanged. And here we are. “We” have been allied to the Nazis for more than 13 times as long as we were ever at war with them.

For example, although in all fairness he himself died in 1939, Kaja Kallas’s great-grandfather, Eduard Alver, was a key figure in founding the anti-Soviet Kaitseliit militia that became the Estonian component of the Forest Brothers, collaborationist exterminators of the Jews. It is no wonder, although it is still inexcusable, that it recently came as “news” to her that Russia and China had been among the victors of the Second World War. Thankfully, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty does not mean what most Europeans, and possibly most Canadians, think that it means, since no United States Senate would ever have ratified that. Ask them in Hungary and Slovakia, whose oil supply non-NATO Ukraine can apparently bomb with complete impunity. It really has been 80 years, has it not? But while there may be no more Iron Cross or Arrow Cross, they will always have Vauxhall Cross.

All Involved Actors

There are only eight thousand people in Pontyclun, so to anyone with local knowledge that 43-year-old arrestee has been identified. Is something about the Ukrainian rent boys about to come out, so to speak? In any event, a Chinese spy ring has been uncovered when the Government needs to manufacture consent for a spot of international hawkishness. Yet it is mostly in small town or very rural Wales, and the whole thing depends on the inclusion of espionage in the definition of terrorism. All in all, this smells fishier than prawn toast.

The arrested partner of an MP is David Taylor, the squeeze of Joani Reid. Taylor is a sole trading lobbyist. In 2023, his company, which is simply himself, had £70,000 in cash and debtors. In 2024, it had more than one million pounds. That year, Reid entered Parliament. Taylor and Reid have both been strong proponents of digital ID, for which the Minister was Josh Simons, who himself ought to have been arrested and still should be, since he tried to frame people under the very legislation that has led to today's arrests.

The Minister who made today's statement to the House of Commons, Dan Jarvis, is also in the Cabinet Office. Even with the departure of Simons, there are now four Parliamentary Secretaries under Darren Jones, and three Ministers of State, including Jarvis. That amounts to a Prime Minister's Department with, including Keir Starmer, nine Ministers, the most of any Department. What do they do? That is not a joke. They do something. What is it?

The Dangerous Martyrdom of Khamenei

Arta Moeini writes:

For many secular Iranians, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was a brutal dictator who ruled with an iron fist, embodying repression and ideological rigidity. Many — especially in the diaspora — celebrated his death with Champagne and dancing on the street. For them, his demise symbolised long-awaited justice and hope for a better future.

Still, if Seyyed Ali Khamenei had choreographed his own death, he could scarcely have designed a more potent political end. After all, he was not merely Iran’s head of state: he was a religious symbol for Shi’ites worldwide. His assassination — by US-Israeli bombs during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, while fasting and overseeing wartime resistance planning — instantly transcended geopolitics and entered the realm of sacred myth. For supporters of the Islamic Republic, the symbolism is nothing short of miraculous, and among the Shiite population worldwide, it instantly resonates within their collective memory.

Most fundamentally, Khamenei’s death during Ramadan evokes the assassination of Imam Ali, the first Imam of Shi’ism and a central figure in the sect’s political theology. Delivered by a poisoned sword during prayers in Ramadan, Ali’s death was the climax of the first Islamic Civil War — the First Fitna — and was viewed by the Shia as deep-seated political conspiracy that led to regime change and the rise of the Umayyad Caliphate. Over nearly four decades in power, Khamenei — a “Sayyid”, or direct descendant of Ali — had carefully cultivated his public persona on this symbolic (and literal) lineage, presenting himself as a custodian of revolutionary piety and personification of resistance. The manner of his death instantly apotheosised that cultivated mythology into something far more transcendent: martyrdom.

With the Ayatollah’s death as powerful as the killing of the Pope during Easter, Khamenei was elevated overnight to the status of Imam-e Shahid — the “martyred saint.” That symbolism matters far more than many Western strategists appear to understand. In Shiite political theology, martyrdom is not loss but transfiguration. It converts political defeat into moral victory and transforms fallen leaders into sources of enduring mobilisation. The assassination has therefore not merely removed a leader; it has mythologised him among his followers. And myth, in revolutionary regimes, is a fount of power and renewal.

Khamenei’s assassination has already proved a mobilising force for his millions of followers. Unmoored from the cultural and religious intricacies of the Middle East, the US and Israel wagered that killing the Supreme Leader would expose the fragility of the regime in Tehran and weaken political resolve across the Islamic Republic, causing defections and perhaps even a popular domestic uprising. Instead, his death has rallied the regime’s active supporters — perhaps a quarter of Iran’s 93 million people — while fomenting strong anti-American sentiment and open revolt among Shi’a from Bahrain and Iraq to Pakistan and Kashmir.

In life, Khamenei was an ardent ideologue whose leadership left Iran isolated and crisis-ridden. One of the last surviving leaders of the 1979 Revolution, he believed it was his divine mandate to preserve the Islamic Republic’s ideological purity: Islamic conservatism, anti-imperialism, self-reliance, and resistance. He systematically conflated Iranian national sovereignty with revolutionary ideology, often sacrificing pragmatic flexibility in service of doctrinal continuity, compromising only when the regime’s survival was at stake. A notable example occurred in 2013, when Khamenei, a stubborn critic of negotiations with the United States, greenlit the talks that led to the Obama nuclear deal, calling it “heroic flexibility”.

As Iran’s relative power declined, sanctions tightened, and domestic legitimacy sank, he leaned ever more heavily into narratives of resistance and victimhood, drawing heavily on Shi’ite mythology — especially Imam Hussain’s martyrdom in the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD, at the hands of the more powerful Umayyad Caliph Yazid. In this way, Khamenei framed Iran as the righteous victim of unjust global powers, especially the United States and Israel, whom he labeled the “hegemonic order”.

Crisis and conflict management became inevitable aspects of Khamenei’s governance style. He steered the country from one crisis to the next, ruling not in spite of emergencies but through them. But government-by-crisis had a paradoxical effect. Under Khamenei, the Islamic Republic evolved from a crude revolutionary state into a highly resilient political system. In close partnership with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — with which he forged deep bonds during the Iran-Iraq War — he oversaw the transformation of the regime into a decentralised, hyper-institutionalised, horizontally organised state with multiple redundancies, overlapping factions, and a pervasive security apparatus. The IRGC branches and offshoots expanded into the civilian space, while religious foundations and quasi-governmental trusts (or Bonyads), mushroomed to create a parallel economy to evade US and international sanctions. The system wasn’t designed for efficiency, but to guarantee survival under relentless domestic and foreign pressure.

Over time, this architecture produced a modern total state capable of absorbing shocks that would shatter other regimes. Power in Iran is disaggregated across clerical bodies, security institutions, economic conglomerates, and parallel chains of command. The Islamic Republic is neither a monolith nor personality-driven. The regime treats individuals — leaders included — as expendable in service of its long-term survival. Indeed, the system is expressly designed to absorb loss, from wartime commanders in the Eighties to nuclear scientists and generals killed by Mossad. Succession mechanisms are embedded in the structure itself.

This structural nature is what Trump and Netanyahu overlook, leading to severe miscalculation. The US-Israeli strike was conceived as a classic decapitation blow: remove the Supreme Leader, showcase the state’s weakness, and trigger either elite fracture or popular revolt. Yet this logic reflects a profound misreading of the Islamic Republic. Buoyed by his success in securing regime compliance in Venezuela by removing Nicolás Maduro, Trump may have become overconfident and overplayed his hand in Iran. Its tactical and intelligence achievements notwithstanding, the decapitation has failed to produce any strategic objectives. Quasi-totalitarian Iran is not Saddam’s Iraq in 2003, or Gaddafi’s Libya in 2011, or even Chavist Venezuela under Maduro.

Under its Islamist and revolutionary garb, Iran is a civilisational state with deep institutional continuity stretching back millennia and a sizable industrial base. It represents a cultural domain shaped by its geography and historical pedigree that goes beyond the Western nation-state model. What’s more, the current regime itself has been forged in decades of war, sanctions, and internal upheaval. Indeed, Iran belongs to an entirely different category of state: a middle power with regional heft and structural resilience.

As such, the systematic destruction of domestic opposition, compounded by hybrid wars and economic sanctions that hollowed out the middle class and tied economic survival to the state, made organic regime change increasingly unlikely absent elite fragmentation and the defection of the security forces. And absent a large-scale ground invasion, an external air campaign was always unlikely to produce systemic collapse — particularly given the dysfunction of the Iranian opposition and their lack of organisation inside Iran.

In this light, Khamenei’s martyrdom offers Tehran a rare strategic windfall, serving as a powerful engine of political solidarity by reenergising the familiar trope of the “righteous victim”: thus overshadowing the regime’s wider legitimacy crisis. In that sense, Khamenei’s death may ultimately strengthen the ideological core of the Islamic Republic more than his decades-long rule ever did. Despite being despised by millions of Iranians who hold him personally responsible for the death of thousands of protestors last month, millions of Khamenei’s own supporters are already occupying the streets in mourning across the country. What the embattled leader struggled to achieve in life — renewed revolutionary fervour — he may now accomplish in death. The regime now possesses a renewed reservoir of spiritual capital — a unifying narrative capable of sustaining elite cohesion through a fraught succession.

That succession is unlikely to produce moderation. If anything, the structural incentives point in the opposite direction. Leadership transitions during conflict, amid national trauma and the fog of war, tend to empower security-first factions with a more nationalist bent. In Iran’s case, the likely outcome is a successor more tightly aligned with the IRGC — the country’s real centre of power — and less constrained by Khamenei’s more cautious and restrained approach to geopolitics. More Western-aligned, reformist factions, already marginalised, will hardly resonate in an atmosphere suffused with martyrdom and a siege mentality against what the Iranians view as unprovoked Western aggression.

Ironically, Khamenei himself may have also been a moderating force in at least one crucial domain: nuclear weaponisation. Despite his revolutionary zeal and ardent support for Iran’s right to (peaceful) nuclear sovereignty, he maintained a religious prohibition — a fatwa — against the bomb. Guided by the IRGC and Iran’s more realist security establishment, his successor is unlikely to adhere to Khamenei’s theological or ideological qualms. Watching a Supreme Leader assassinated by foreign powers will inevitably encourage nuclear deterrence as the ultimate insurance policy. Indeed, the CIA had already concluded as much before the strike. If anything, then, the killing may accelerate the very nuclear option it sought to prevent.

This very possibility reveals how Washington suffers from strategic myopia and a lack of endgame in Iran. Instead of coercing surrender, military pressure may radicalise Iranian elites while narrowing the space for diplomacy. Rather than empowering moderates who would engage the US, it validates the worldview of hardliners who have long argued that compromise invites aggression. The upshot is a hardened security state, narrowing the already limited space for internal pluralism. Instead of instigating regime collapse in Iran, the conflict risks producing the opposite dynamic: an escalation trap with no easy off-ramps.

There are other risks too. The opening days of the conflict have already seen the conflict expand, drawing in Iranian proxies and exposing vulnerabilities among American partners in the Persian Gulf. A mission conceived as a decisive blow could metastasise into another open-ended Middle Eastern conflict — precisely the kind of protracted entanglement successive American administrations have pledged to avoid. While a full-on invasion is unlikely and would be a political suicide for the GOP, the war could still escalate and fester as a quagmire Washington can’t soon escape: risking US blood and treasure and a broken global economy for Israel‘s regional ambitions, without any upside for the United States.

Such a scenario carries wider strategic implications. In an increasingly multi-nodal world, prolonged regional wars impose real opportunity costs. They drain resources, strain stockpiles, and divert attention from higher-order geopolitical interests. For a United States confronted with the end of the unipolar moment, another forever war in the Middle East — even absent US troops on the ground — risks accelerating America’s relative decline instead of strengthening its great power status. Given the already transregional and escalatory nature of the war, Iran could easily become the conflict that completes the “rupture” in the rules-based order.

None of this means the Islamic Republic is invulnerable. It faces deep structural challenges: economic stagnation, demographic pressures, and periodic explosions of domestic unrest. Its population is deeply polarised, and Islamism itself appears an exhausted ideology even within the regime’s own rank and file. But external decapitation strikes are poorly suited to exploiting those vulnerabilities. On the contrary, they consolidate regimes by supplying precisely what they lack in times of internal strain: a unifying external enemy and a mobilising myth.

Ironically, Khamenei’s assassination has handed the Islamic Republic both. It has replenished the regime’s symbolic and spiritual reserves, reinforced elite cohesion, and justified a more hardline security trajectory. In trying to eliminate the man, Washington may have strengthened the system in Tehran.

For a Trump administration that claims to practice hard-nosed realism, this represents a striking miscalculation. It reflects a failure to grasp both the civilisational depth of Iran and the adaptive endurance of the Islamic Republic. Iran is neither a brittle petro-state nor a hollowed-out personal dictatorship waiting to fall. It is a historical power with institutional durability and real material strength. Here, the US-Israeli tactical brilliance — precision strikes, intelligence coups, targeted assassinations — could turn out to be a pyrrhic victory that does not automatically translate into strategic success.

Amid war, destruction, and political discontent, the Islamic Republic will likely endure — less flexible, more defiant, and newly consecrated by the blood of its fallen leader.