Compliance Failure

There is a word for the combination of state and corporate power to the point of physical violence, and of which Paul Knaggs writes:

In early 2023, an undercover reporter from The Times joined Arvato Financial Solutions, a debt collection firm working on contract for British Gas, and went out with its agents. He was there as they forced their way into the home of a single father of three to fit a prepayment meter. Job notes seen by the paper showed it was no one-off. Other forced fittings included a woman whose notes read ‘severe mental health bipolar’, a partially sighted woman with mobility problems, and a mother whose disabled daughter relied on a hoist and an electric wheelchair. The paper reported that the agents were paid bonuses for the meters they fitted. Those agents were not stumbling through paperwork in the dark. The vulnerability was on the file, and the regulator’s rules said the most vulnerable must be spared. The meter went in regardless, because a debt was owed and a bonus was waiting. 

Now the part that should stop every reader cold. None of it was a crime. The agents arrived with warrants from magistrates’ courts, some of which were reported to be granting applications by the hundred in a single sitting. Nobody was charged. When Ofgem finally closed its investigation in May this year, more than three years later, it found that British Gas had breached licence conditions meant to protect vulnerable customers, and that its management had been warned by an external review in 2018 and an internal audit in 2021. The penalty was a £20 million settlement and a debt write-off. A door forced open on a disabled family was, in law, a compliance failure.

So what does the government propose to protect households from the next boot at the door? Ministers will point to tougher powers for Ofgem. Yet in the same bill they propose to widen the gateway, letting the state share household income, benefit, pension and property records with this same industry. These companies already knew which customers were vulnerable, and their contractors went in anyway. And the safeguard on offer this time? Misuse of the data will be a criminal offence. Now we are expected to trust the same industry with an even more detailed picture of our financial circumstances. A file marked vulnerable did not protect people from the debt collectors; they used the information they had and kicked the door in anyway. Why should handing over more of not only their private data, but everyone’s data, make them or us any safer?

A Door Taken Off its Hinges 

The Energy Independence Bill, presented to the House of Commons on 4 November by Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh, arrives under the familiar banner of modernisation. Ministers sell the legislation on grid connections, North Sea licences and a tougher energy regulator. Tucked inside the machinery sits an amendment to sections 36 and 37 of the Digital Economy Act 2017. That was the narrow gateway Parliament opened nine years ago, permitting state departments to disclose data to commercial energy suppliers for a single, tightly restricted objective: assisting households in fuel poverty. This new bill takes that door entirely off its hinges. The statutory gateway broadens to capture anyone facing high energy bills, a hard-to-heat home, or extra domestic expenses arising from a chronic health condition. The approved recipients multiply from licensed domestic suppliers to network operators and, in the energy department’s own words, ‘other bodies involved in designing or delivering energy support measures in the future’. Not one of those outside contractors or intermediaries is named on the face of the statute.

According to reporting by the Press Association, eight separate government datasets are brought within scope. Four draw directly on personal state archives: HM Revenue and Customs income records and child benefit ledgers, Department for Work and Pensions benefit and state pension files, property registers, and domestic energy performance ratings. The information traffic is designed to run in both directions. Once a support mechanism is operational, private energy firms could be compelled to surrender their own internal customer histories back to the state. Ministers will protest that nothing becomes active before the winter of 2028-29, and that Whitehall departments will face no statutory compulsion to share immediately. But a loaded statutory power left lying on the statute book is never made safe by the reassurance that nobody intends to fire it this morning.

The Fox, the Henhouse and the Keys

Energy Suppliers, Insider Leaks and Household Data Risks

The foundational premise of this legislation is that the energy cartel can be trusted with the most intrusive financial dossier of British households ever assembled. The sole safeguard offered to reassure the public is a criminal offence. We already know what a criminal penalty is worth inside this corporate culture, because we have watched one fail in real time. In 2018, Chintan Paida, a call-centre worker employed by British Gas in Coventry, spent six months quietly harvesting private customer records: names, home addresses, dates of birth, and energy consumption patterns across 1,700 accounts. He sold the stolen dossier to commercial brokers for £45,000. His contractual duty was to verify customer identities, meaning every query he launched registered as legitimate on internal audit logs. British Gas discovered the leak only when customers began fielding unsolicited cold calls that matched their internal account data. He pleaded guilty in 2025 under the Data Protection Act 2018 and the Theft Act 1968.

The criminal statute was in force every single day he sold that data. It did not deter him for a second. The law caught up with him seven years later, long after the files had dispersed across the unregulated broker market. That is all a criminal sanction represents in practice: a padlock fitted to an empty stable after the horse has already been traded into an illicit spreadsheet. The courts rarely make the penalty sting, either. When an employee at a car-hire firm sold nearly 28,000 customer records for £5,000, the court imposed a £1,000 fine, prompting the Information Commissioner’s Office to plead once more for custodial sentencing powers that Parliament continues to withhold. Place the two scandals side by side. Arvato demonstrates what the energy monopolies do with records of vulnerability when there is a debt to pursue. Paida demonstrates what an individual insider does with basic customer records when a criminal easy earner is offered.

This legislation opens the door to sharing income figures, child benefit information, state pension records and property data with private energy companies and potentially their contractors. The same industry, the same commercial pressures and the same risks of human failure. We have already seen what basic customer information was worth on the black market: roughly £26 per household. Now imagine the value of a verified salary, matched to a home address, date of birth, pension and benefits history. A criminal wouldn’t need to spend weeks piecing together your personal circumstances. One dishonest insider, one stolen database or one successful cyberattack could potentially hand them the lot in a single transaction.

And spare us the comforting assurances about cybersecurity. Banks, government departments and multinational corporations spend fortunes protecting their systems, yet data breaches still happen. What makes ministers think private energy companies and their contractors are somehow immune? Their servers are not automatically held to the same security requirements as government systems, and even the strongest safeguards cannot eliminate the threat from hackers or corrupt employees. Every additional company given access to sensitive records creates another potential point of failure. The more information held together, the greater the damage when something goes wrong.

We have enough real-world examples to know that no database is impregnable. In 2021 npower shut down its app for good after criminals used stolen passwords to break into customer accounts, taking contact details, dates of birth, addresses and, for some customers, sort codes and part of their bank account numbers. E.ON, which owns npower, had closed its own app after a similar attack only weeks earlier. People’s Energy, a small Scottish supplier, lost the personal details of its entire customer base, around 270,000 current and former customers. None of those systems held anyone’s tax records. Under this bill, the next one might. Every company handed a copy of this data becomes one more target, and sooner or later every target is tested.

DESNZ insists the bill ‘does not change individuals’ privacy or data protection rights’. Strictly, that is true. Your rights stay exactly where they were. What changes is the number of organisations holding your data, the number of desks it can be reached from, and the price it fetches when it walks out of the building. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero insists that the bill ‘does not change individuals’ privacy or data protection rights’. In the narrowest, most sterile legal sense, that is true. Your statutory rights remain printed in the law books. What changes is the number of commercial entities holding your personal files, the number of private computer terminals from which your earnings can be read, and the price those files fetch when they walk out of the building.

A Sharper Instrument, not a Dragnet

The government’s public justification deserves a fair hearing, because it addresses an undeniable social failure. Officials point out that 42 per cent of households living in fuel poverty claim no state benefits at all, and that around half of the poorest families are projected to miss the Warm Home Discount entirely. Support today is rationed either by benefit entitlement or property band, and both metrics leave desperate people behind. A pensioner living on a modest private annuity, in a terraced house bought half a century ago, is asset-rich on paper while freezing in her kitchen. A low-paid worker who never claimed state support, whether out of pride or administrative confusion, simply does not exist on departmental computers. Direct tax data would find those forgotten households. Nobody should pretend otherwise.

Yet the answer to a blunt instrument is a sharper instrument, not a universal dragnet. The sharper mechanism has been functioning for years. Under the Warm Home Discount scheme, the Department for Work and Pensions already matches records against supplier lists. Energy companies submit customer names, addresses and meter serials; civil servants execute the match and return a simple eligibility identifier for each qualifying account. The supplier learns that the household qualifies for a bill credit. It never learns the personal details behind the qualification. That is the architecture Open Rights Group fought for in 2016, establishing the basic civil liberty principle that utility providers need to know only that a customer is entitled to relief.

A binary data flag reaches the hidden poor without surrendering their lives to a corporate ledger. Why, then, has the state engineered a pipeline to hand over the underlying file? Because the file does a second job. The government’s own impact assessments concede that if an energy scheme is funded through domestic bills, its costs will fall ‘principally on those most able to pay’, and that households deemed ineligible are ‘expected to face higher bills’. As Byline Times revealed, departmental documents speak openly of data matching to identify ‘households most able to fund the scheme’. Finding whom to help requires a list of the poor. Finding whom to charge requires an inventory of everybody. And everyone means everyone under the roof. HMRC taxes individuals, not households, and an energy account sits in one name.

If ministers intend to measure who is truly “most able to pay”, a supplier cannot simply check the person whose name happens to sit at the top of the direct debit, or every higher-earning household would put the gas bill in the lowest earner’s name tomorrow morning. To calculate household ability to pay, the state has to pull the tax and benefit records of partners, adult children and every other earner under the same roof. One meter on the wall becomes the hook on which an entire family’s financial file is hung.

The government already knows how this goes wrong. Under the High Income Child Benefit Charge, a couple each earning £59,999 keep the full benefit, while a single earner on £60,001 starts to lose it. Labour dropped the plan to move that charge to household income in 2024, saying it would cost too much; one analyst noted it would have been a huge administrative task for HMRC to assess couples together. The alternative is worse. To measure what a household earns, the state must first decide who lives in it, then pull the tax records of every adult in the house: the partner, the grown-up son on a zero-hours contract, the lodger. None of them signed the energy contract. All of them would be matched. The bill and its factsheets do not say which way ministers will jump. Either the scheme is unfair, or it is a dragnet.

The Tax That Never Faces a Vote 

Strip away the reassuring language of ‘support schemes’ and ‘cost recovery’ and look at the machinery being assembled. Ministers are creating powers to place additional costs on household energy bills, potentially charging some customers more to subsidise others according to their financial circumstances. A compulsory payment, collected through the price of heat and light, necessities no household can simply refuse to buy. Call it redistribution, call it a social tariff, dress it up in whatever Whitehall language you please. If the cost is imposed on one group of households to finance another, it begins to look remarkably like taxation by another name. It is a tax in every respect save one. Taxes are voted on in the House of Commons.

And that is where the democratic problem begins. Taxes face parliamentary scrutiny, yet this Bill creates no actual support scheme, sets no rate and identifies no final list of who will pay. Instead, Sections 104 and 108 hand the Secretary of State broad powers to establish schemes through secondary legislation and determine how their costs are recovered. The government’s own factsheet confirms that energy suppliers must be able to recover those costs in full. More troubling still, Section 114 explicitly places regulations under this chapter within the negative resolution procedure. They can become law without MPs voting to approve them, unless Parliament subsequently intervenes. According to the House of Commons Library, no motion to annul an instrument under that procedure has succeeded in the Commons since 1979.

And as Byline Times notes, the default statutory route is the negative procedure: regulations pass into law automatically unless MPs actively force an objection, meaning most are enacted without a word of debate. The government’s factsheet remains silent on whether a vote will ever take place. Think about what that means. Parliament is being asked to approve the framework now, while ministers retain considerable discretion over who qualifies, who pays, how much they contribute and how the whole arrangement operates. These decisions could be made through regulations that Parliament cannot amend and may never debate. The Chancellor need not announce each charge at the dispatch box on Budget day. The household discovers the consequences when its energy bill arrives. That is the Orwellian danger at the heart of this proposal: financial decisions affecting millions of households could be made with far less democratic scrutiny than an ordinary tax.

Britain has been down some peculiar roads when governments start using household circumstances as a measure of what people ought to pay. In 1696, William III introduced the window tax, treating the number of windows in a property as a rough measure of wealth. People responded by bricking them up, sacrificing daylight and ventilation to escape the charge. The tax survived until 1851, when medical objections to its consequences helped secure its repeal. Then came Margaret Thatcher’s community charge, introduced in Scotland in 1989 and England and Wales in 1990. The poll tax required authorities to identify the adults living at each address. According to parliamentary research, an estimated 350,000 people disappeared from electoral registers during that period to avoid being caught by the system.

This scheme is no flat poll tax. It is graded by income, and its defenders will call it progressive. Yet its machinery rhymes with both of its ancestors. An income-related contribution would plainly differ from Thatcher’s flat-rate charge. But history offers a warning about what happens when governments build financial obligations around the contents of a household. If ministers assess only the named bill payer, what prevents a higher-income household from putting the account in the name of its lowest earner? If they assess total household income, whose earnings count? The husband, the wife, the adult son still living at home, the daughter paying her parents a little board, or a lodger renting the spare bedroom? And does the presence of an earning adult automatically mean their income is available to pay everybody else’s bills?

The Bill does not settle those questions. Yet they are fundamental to whether any income-related scheme could operate fairly. One approach risks people rearranging their accounts to qualify for help or avoid charges. The other raises the prospect of wider financial checks on people who may not even be named on the energy account. The state would have to decide whose income belongs to the household and how much of it ought to be available to pay for energy. That is a considerable intrusion into private family circumstances for something presented as a straightforward reform of energy bills.

Now consider who is being asked to shoulder the burden, and who is being protected from it. Centrica, the parent company of British Gas, reported adjusted operating profits of £1.55 billion in 2024 and £814 million in 2025. Its chief executive, Chris O’Shea, received total remuneration of £4.73 million for 2025, including £3.57 million in variable pay and long-term share awards. Research for the End Fuel Poverty Coalition puts Centrica’s accumulated operating profits since 2020 at more than £9 billion. Those figures cover the wider business, including energy trading, generation and infrastructure, rather than household supply alone. That distinction matters, but so does the sheer scale of the money.

There are already windfall taxes on parts of the energy industry, including North Sea producers and electricity generators. Yet the government’s proposed framework also makes provision for the costs of household energy support to be passed between customers, with suppliers entitled to recover their expenditure. So while one family struggles to heat its home, another may be required to help pay the bill, even as substantial profits continue to be made elsewhere in the energy system. Ministers should have to explain why that is the preferred arrangement, rather than expecting households to accept it as an administrative necessity. 

Even supporters of a social tariff recognise the problem. Simon Francis of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition welcomed the prospect of better targeted help but criticised the decision to put funding through household bills first, arguing that asking households to subsidise other households should be the last resort. He has also warned about the danger of support being withdrawn through secondary legislation without proper parliamentary debate. Nobody should object to protecting pensioners, disabled people or families who cannot afford to keep warm. But Parliament ought to decide openly how that protection is funded, whose income is examined and what safeguards exist against unfair charges. The working class should not be left paying for an energy system whose profits remain private while the burden of making it affordable is passed from one household to another. The companies recover their costs. Ministers retain their powers. The household gets the bill.

The Terms of Parliamentary Resistance 

Protecting the hidden poor does not require opening the nation’s Personal Data to corporate boards. Members of Parliament must refuse to wave this measure through without writing non-negotiable statutory safeguards onto the face of the bill. Write the data flag into primary law: government computers must execute the matching internally, commercial suppliers must receive nothing more than a verification mark beside an eligible account number, and no HMRC income record must ever cross onto a private corporate server. Name every single body permitted to handle this data directly in the statute, closing the open-ended clause that allows ministers to license commercial intermediaries by decree. Require that every support scheme, and every decision dictating who pays for it, passes through the affirmative procedure, forcing ministers to stand before the Commons and cast a recorded vote. Fund targeted fuel poverty relief out of public money through progressive taxation, where rates are openly set by Parliament and tax records remain inside the revenue service where they belong.

Then look past the immediate legislative text to the material question underneath it. A publicly owned energy supply, answerable to Parliament and run for the common good, would never require the state to farm out tax records under threat of the criminal law, because the infrastructure would remain in public hands. Who inspects your wages is, in the final analysis, inseparable from who owns the grid. And here’s a thought. If the government already knows that around 42 per cent of fuel-poor households receive no qualifying benefits, why isn’t it concentrating on using the information held by its own departments to identify those missing out and get support to them? Why does that require widening access to people’s private financial information across the energy industry? 

Why Working-Class Households Pay Twice Under This Bill 

Who actually benefits from this settlement? Not the widowed pensioner, who could have been protected by an anonymous data flag. Not the low-paid worker, sorted into a punitive payment band by a commercial utility she never chose to confide in. The beneficiaries are a Treasury eager to run social welfare off the public balance sheet, and a cartel of private energy monopolies granted an exhaustive financial profile of the population alongside a statutory guarantee that every penny of their costs will be recovered. The working class pays twice: once with their private data, and again at the prepayment meter. This industry once used the law to break down front doors and force meters onto the vulnerable. Parliament is now being asked to hand it the key to the filing cabinet.

A Sympathetic Eye On Poland

A decade and more ago, Peter Hitchens recalled the strange events of the 1980 TUC, when at not quite 29 he would not have been in any room that mattered, and he tried to spin them into a perceived lack of British trade union and Labour support for Solidarity. But there was in fact a whole Solidarity Group of Labour MPs that was heavily backed by the union hierarchy, whereas a very few years later, soon after Polish miners had been gunned down, the Thatcher Government was importing coal from Poland to break the Strike.

At that time, the Provisional IRA was not using the Soviet AK-47 that was ubiquitous in anti-imperialist struggles, but the ArmaLite AR-18 all the way from sunny California. It was Ulster Resistance, both on its own behalf and for divvying up with the UDA and the UVF, that imported the 206 Vz58 assault rifle from Czechoslovakia. But via whom in Lebanon? The Muslims? Or most emphatically the wrong sort of Christians? And it was of course Czechoslovakia that ran the only two British MPs ever known to have been Eastern Bloc agents, the very right-wing Conservative Ray Mawby and the very right-wing Labourite John Stonehouse.

Hitchens also had or has a main character syndrome story about why Margaret Thatcher never banned the trade union political levy to the Labour Party, again when he would have been only in his early thirties. And yet, to give him his due, he writes:

Another dismal gun massacre swung the bright but brief searchlights of news towards Poland a week ago. I could write a whole separate article on these rather frequent murders and the foolish attempts to claim they are political when they usually aren’t. But my point is different. Much more important things are happening in Poland and nobody in Britain pays much attention. The country is locked in a dispute between parties and ideologies which lays bare a new (or more accurately restored) political dynamic of historic significance.

This conflict led Poland’s president recently to abort a foreign trip mid-flight, in order to return home and storm through police lines into a courthouse to protest at what the government of his own country was up to. If Emmanuel Macron had ordered his presidential Dassault to turn back in the middle of a foreign visit to do hand-to-hand battle with domestic opponents, we’d pay attention. But when the same thing happens in a country at least as important to our continent’s security, we ignore it. This is worse than insularity – it is self-harming ignorance.

The political struggle going on in Poland is not easy to understand. But that is because we have forgotten our history and, in our amnesia, lost the ability to see that there are much deeper divisions in politics than economic ones. They can move men in a way that quarrels over interest rates or taxes never can. Poland does not really have a right or a left, as we understand those terms in the modern West. Instead, it has a struggle between two different branches of Polish nationalism.

President Karol Nawrocki is a standard-bearer for the socially conservative nationalists, clustered around the Law and Justice Party, the PiS. Despite the shrivelling of religion in Poland, there is still a powerful culturally nationalist constituency. Its enemy is the government led by the Christian Democrat Premier, the Eurocrat Donald Tusk. He is (comparatively) socially liberal and beloved in Brussels.

The zone of combat between the cultural conservatives and the Europhiles is the country’s Constitutional Court, which both sides have tried to rig in recent years. The quarrel can at times seem like four-dimensional chess, played by people with six-syllable names. There may also seem to be something more than a little self-consciously melodramatic about a president battling riot police to uphold a court’s independence from interference.

But there is also a real dispute. It concerns two different ways in which Poland might pursue its independence, recovered in 1989 after humiliations, mass deportations and partitions which would have destroyed most nations. The easy route is the EU route. Take this, and the subsidies will flow smoothly and respectability in Brussels beckons. The awkward route is the old path of Polish independence, recognising that sovereignty is worth more than respectability.

For anyone who has ever felt the pull of patriotism on his own soil, the hard path is rather appealing. And few peoples have been as brave in recognising how much freedom as a nation matters as the Poles. I will never forget my first brush with Polish courage, an interview in a glum Gdansk hotel on a freezing day in November 1980, with the defiantly Christian, defiantly Polish strike leader Lech Walesa.

Everything he did and said was free. His conscience was free and his speech was free and he was free. It should have been impossible in a communist country, where defiance could get you killed. Yet he did it anyway. Nearly ten years later he would achieve total victory, an outcome I am sure he never doubted. It was like witnessing a true miracle, a mediaeval event bursting into lavish colour on those bald, blank, brownish concrete streets with their communist red banners. I’ve never got over it.

So I like to keep a sympathetic eye on Poland, a country whose spirit is too strong to fit in anybody’s empire, and whose national fire could not even be extinguished when Stalin and Hitler got together to snuff it out. They thought they could dance on its grave, and their armies held a revolting, smarmy joint victory parade in Brest-Litovsk in September 1939. Pictures exist of this event and are not forgotten in Warsaw, though Brest-Litovsk itself is now in Belarus. This, like several such anomalies, is thanks to the bodily shifting of Poland 150 miles to the west, which Stalin achieved in 1945.

So what is the problem? Surely the second world war was the end of empires in this part of the world, and Poland is free? Or is it that a ghostly new empire, modern in appearance but ancient in shape, is slowly solidifying on the Continent? Why should Poland’s leaders be brawling in public about its European future? Is it possible that Poland is more sensitive to such forces than anyone else? Perhaps a significant number of Poles, mainly the old Roman Catholic nation called back into being by Pope John Paul II, do not want to be governed by the flashy secularists who sit in the hideous Berlaymont building in Belgium. Nor do they really see why Poland should be subject to the rulings of EU courts when it has perfectly good courts of its own.

There is another linked problem, the EU’s uncritical relations with Ukraine. Poland would fight to the death rather than let a single Russian soldier cross its frontier ever again. But the old-fashioned nationalists of Warsaw have, even so, fallen out of love with Volodymyr Zelensky. President Nawrocki recently stripped Zelensky of Poland’s highest honour, the Order of the White Eagle. This smack in the face followed Ukraine’s decision to name a modern military unit after the UPA, a nationalist militia (let us try to be dispassionate here) which massacred 60,000 Poles in the Volhynia region in 1943. Many Polish patriots will not accept the idea that Poland’s freedom can only be secured if it goes along with Brussels, especially in foreign policy and the courts. They value highly what they once lost, precisely because they lost it. If we truly treasure our own national freedom, we should pay more attention to theirs.

What A Kerfuffle

For that matter, what a time to be alive. And Nvidia Scandal sounds like a character from Little Britain, while this, for all its extremely misleading methodology and indeed fundamental premise, could be described as a map of the country of that name.

Surrounded by cokeheads and pederasts while far from the ostensible naïveté of Jonathan Ross, Margaret Thatcher either knew that her policies would cause, were causing and had caused massively increased benefit dependency and general moral chaos, in which case she was too wicked to be Prime Minister, or she did not know, in which case she was too stupid to be Prime Minister, which she was not.

Likewise, Tony Blair either knew that his policies would take, were taking and had taken Thatcher’s Britain to its natural conclusion as Russell Brand’s, in which case he was too wicked to be Prime Minister, or he did not know, in which case he was too stupid to be Prime Minister, which it was perfectly possible that he was.

Brand moved effortlessly from the libertarian pseudo-Left to the MAGA coalition without any change in his specific political views, such as they were. Until recent days, David Walliams was a Labour Party member of the sort that wanted Jess Phillips to become Prime Minister. Neither of them was remotely “laddish”. Such is the interchangeability of centrists and of right-wing populists, this time without even so much as the pretence of a culture war.

Thatcherites rarely still defend the 1980s with much vigour, instead concentrating on their own authorised version of the 1970s. But the enormous 2024 intake of Labour MPs is packed with and surrounded by people to whom the Noughties were a Golden Age. Think on.

Weighted Entirely By Class

“With my hero @jessphillips who should be Prime Minister,” tweeted David Walliams on 9 November 2019. On Tuesday 2 September 2025, 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. As Paul Knaggs writes:

There is a grim, reliable rhythm to English public life. When a famous name is accused, the state discovers its limbs. Police forces find resources that were supposedly extinct; detectives scour decades-old diaries; press conferences are summoned, the media springs to life and the machinery of the Crown Prosecution Service whirs into immaculate, high-profile motion. The law, we are invited to believe, is an eagle that strikes without fear or favour. That is how it should be. Justice must not only be done; it must be seen to be done.

This week Britain has been shown what it can do when it decides that something matters. On Monday Russell Brand was jailed for ten and a half years for rape and sexual assault. The women he attacked were believed, and twelve jurors convicted him on their word. And as though this week were determined to drag the secrets of Britain’s celebrity establishment into the daylight, the High Court refused David Walliams’ attempt to prevent the publication of allegations of sexual misconduct involving young women and teenage girls. He denies them, and no court has ruled on them, but the box has been opened, and we all await what comes out before Pandora shuts it closed.

Meanwhile, outside Southwark Crown Court, a Metropolitan Police detective said the Brand verdict proved that no one is above the law, “no matter how famous or powerful they may be”. Yet travel north, through the hollowed-out post-industrial towns of Rotherham, Oldham, Rochdale and Telford, and that proud declaration begins to ring rather hollow. The same justice system that can reach decades into a celebrity’s past somehow spent years failing to see what was happening to working-class girls in plain sight. Police dismissed victims, authorities ignored warnings, and officials shuffled paper while children were groomed, raped and traded like chattel.

The public notices this disparity. They see it with the plain common sense that Westminster considers uncouth. The question ordinary people ask on factory floors, building sites and across kitchen tables is not complicated: if the criminal justice system can summon the forensic determination to investigate and prosecute celebrity figures like Russell Brand, why have so many men involved in the organised sexual exploitation of working-class girls escaped justice? And where is the reckoning for the police officers, council officials and institutions whose failures allowed these crimes to continue for years? 

The question is treated by the political establishment as an embarrassment, an unwelcome intrusion into managed decline. The standard defence, stated as fairly as possible, is that celebrity cases differ fundamentally from street grooming. Famous men leave paper trails, agent correspondence, hotel itineraries, and high-profile witnesses; organised grooming networks, by contrast, rely on coercive silence, unrecorded cash, destroyed phones, and the deliberate targeting of teenage girls whose testimony defence barristers can easily pull apart in court. Gathering evidence against gang networks, authorities insist, requires painstaking, multi-agency intelligence operations spanning years.

That defence would carry weight if the delays were purely operational. They were not. They were political, institutional, and rooted in a deep, rotting class contempt. As Baroness Casey’s audit and Alexis Jay’s landmark Rotherham report laid bare, children were not ignored because the police lacked detective talent. They were ignored because of who they were. They were working-class girls in broken mill towns, children in care, teenagers with chaotic lives whom respectable middle-class officials felt comfortable writing off as “lifestyle choices” or child prostitutes. The institutions of the British state did not fail these children by accident; they sacrificed them to protect institutional peace. Fear of racial tension, bureaucratic inertia, and a toxic cocktail of cowardice meant that civil servants, councillors, and senior police officers preferred quiet council offices to the messy reality of pursuing violent predatory networks.

Even now, after a succession of inquiries, reviews, and belated local trials, the accountability remains an insult. A handful of ringleaders have received hefty sentences, yet hundreds of abusers remain uncharged. Worse still, not a single senior official, chief constable, or council director who turned their back on those girls has ever stood in a criminal dock for malfeasance in office. In modern Britain, failure at the top of a public body is rewarded with an early pension or a quiet consultancies sideways move.

The comparison with celebrity trials cuts to the marrow of what is broken in our state. Celebrities are pursued because prosecuting them flatters the system. It proves the institutions are progressive, modern, and vigilant; it generates glowing headlines and demands minimal self-examination from statutory services. Pursuing the grooming networks of northern towns does the opposite. Every successful prosecution of an organised grooming ring is not a tribute to the state’s vigilance, but an indictment of its prior criminal neglect. It reminds the world that local authorities, social services, and constabularies were complicit in leaving children to the wolves for decades. This is the two-tier reality of British justice: energetic when there are headlines to be harvested, sluggish and evasive when institutional reputation is on the line. They have waited more than twenty years. Most are still waiting.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM

We have to say plainly what happened, because for more than two decades, official language has helped obscure the sheer horror of it. This is just one of the thousands of cases. An 11-year-old girl, already known to police as a victim of sexual abuse, was found in a derelict house with adult men. Who did the police arrest? The child, for being drunk and disorderly. Not one of the men. A police officer described the sexual abuse of a 12-year-old girl by up to five adult Asian men as “100% consensual”. Fathers who desperately tried to rescue their daughters from houses where they were being abused found themselves arrested instead.

These are not rumours or allegations plucked from social media. They are cases raised during a parliamentary hearing into the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal. The clip below is deeply disturbing. But it needs to be heard, because it exposes the horror inflicted on vulnerable children in our post-industrial heartlands, and the appalling failures of the very institutions entrusted with their protection. Children were treated as offenders while the adults exploiting them escaped arrest. Parents trying to protect their daughters found themselves on the wrong side of the law. And when Parliament demanded answers, senior police officers couldn’t even explain who had made some of these decisions. We owe those girls more than another carefully worded apology. We owe them the truth, accountability and the courage to name what happened without hiding behind the language of institutional failure. Those children weren’t failed by a lack of safeguarding terminology. They were failed by adults who had a duty to protect them.

In Rotherham, at least 1,400 children were sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013. In Telford, more than a thousand were abused over three decades. In Rochdale, girls as young as 13 were passed between men above takeaways and in taxis. In Oxford, a judge sentencing one man described how he prepared a 13-year-old girl for gang rape. In Telford in 2000, 16-year-old Lucy Lowe was killed with her mother and sister when the man who had abused her since she was 13, and who had fathered her child, set fire to their home. In Manchester, Victoria Agoglia told the people responsible for her what was happening. In July 2003 she told her social worker that she was using heroin every day and that an older man was injecting her in return for “favours”. A week later she told her drugs worker. No investigation followed. A man already identified as her pimp had been given permission to visit her where she lived three times a week. In September a 50-year-old man injected her with heroin, and she died five days later. She was fifteen. 

When these girls asked for help, the state sent them away, and often it went further. South Yorkshire officers treated them as “consenting” to their own abuse. One parent was told that having an older Asian boyfriend was a “fashion accessory” for girls in Rotherham. Baroness Casey has said that many victims were convicted as “child prostitutes”. When a father in Rotherham went to rescue his daughter from her abusers, South Yorkshire Police arrested him. Katie Lam told the House of Commons about it. These girls were let down once by the men who abused them and again by the institutions that ignored them. Since then they have been let down by every government that has handled their suffering as a problem to be managed rather than a crime to be punished.

A COVER-UP 

The public sees a cover-up, and so does this paper. The evidence for it is on the official record. Operation Augusta, set up after Victoria’s death, identified at least 57 children believed to be victims and up to 97 suspects. Greater Manchester Police closed it in July 2005, citing resources. Baroness Casey’s national audit found that the ethnicity of perpetrators had been “shied away from”, that two-thirds of offenders still had no ethnicity recorded, and that the word “Pakistani” had been removed from archived victim files. In 2020 the Home Office at first refused to publish its own research into grooming gangs, claiming publication was not in the public interest. Taken together, this is not a series of unconnected blunders. It was a choice, made again and again over twenty years by councils, police forces and the Home Office, to protect institutional peace at the expense of children. The authorities were afraid of being called racist and afraid of unrest in towns already divided and already poor. They decided the truth was more dangerous than the abuse. So they managed it quietly, and the girls were left to their abusers. They decided the truth was more dangerous than the abuse.

PROCESS INSTEAD OF JUSTICE

The betrayal did not end when the abuse came to light. The girls’ suffering became a political argument. In January 2025, Keir Starmer rejected a national inquiry and accused those demanding one of jumping on a “far-right bandwagon”. Six months later, after Casey’s audit, he reversed his position. Then it took most of another year to find a chair. During that time four survivors resigned from the victims’ panel, and two of them told this paper’s readers they feared a whitewash. The inquiry did not formally begin until April 2026. Operation Beaconport, the national review of closed cases, has received more than 1,200 investigations that police dropped, and by the summer it had sent eight back to be reopened. Operation Linden investigated 47 South Yorkshire officers, and not one lost their job. Four former Rotherham officers have since been arrested over allegations that they abused children themselves. One was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. None has been charged. The gangs are being prosecuted at last: Operation Stovewood has now jailed 52 men in Rotherham alone. But the state has never prosecuted itself. Victims keep getting reviews, apologies, panels and promises that lessons have been learned. What they keep being denied is consequences.

BURNHAM’S PROMISE 

No politician has made more promises about this than Andy Burnham, and no politician now has more power to keep them. Soon after he became Mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017, Burnham commissioned an independent review of how child sexual exploitation had been handled across the region. When its first report exposed Augusta in 2020, he promised that resources, race and the passage of time would never again stand in the way of justice. To his credit, that report led police to reopen Victoria’s case. What followed was slow and incomplete. The Oldham review, commissioned in 2019, did not appear until 2022. Survivors and campaigners attacked it as limited. The Rochdale report in 2024 found widespread organised abuse between 2004 and 2012 and concluded that many of the abusers had still not been caught. Then, in July 2024, the two reviewers who had led the work for seven years resigned before the final stage. A whistleblower told GB News that they had been blocked from accessing information. The review Burnham promised Greater Manchester ended with his own investigators walking out.

There is a further question that only he can answer. Augusta was shut down weeks after Burnham became a junior Home Office minister in 2005. No published evidence links him to that decision. But Maggie Oliver, the detective who resigned from Greater Manchester Police over Rochdale, says he turned away from victims, and she calls the Oldham review a cover-up. His office denies it. The man who promised Greater Manchester justice now leads the whole government. He should open every file from his own review, and he should give evidence under oath to Baroness Longfield’s inquiry without waiting to be asked.

THE QUESTIONS THAT MUST BE ANSWERED

So who was watching the watchers? These questions must be answered, plainly and publicly. Who decided to shut down or restrict investigations such as Operation Augusta, and why? Who set the limits of the reviews and inquiries that followed, and did any of them have a conflict of interest? Why were victims ignored, disbelieved or sidelined while the men abusing them carried on? If criminal thresholds were not met in the past, will obstruction, suppression or misconduct in public office now be examined. And above all: will victims ever see justice, or only process? Justice is not another review. It is not another apology. It is not another promise that lessons have been learned. Justice means consequences. Until those with power are held to account, survivors will keep turning up in Parliament, on television and in the newspapers with their own evidence, documents and names, because every institution that should have listened failed them.

THE COST OF SILENCE

Every day this stays in the dark, the government loses the argument by default. People are right to want justice. When they see a state that can jail a famous comedian and name a famous author, yet has never charged a single council director or police commander over grooming gangs, they draw the obvious conclusion. When mainstream politics will not tell them the truth, they go to people who claim they will. Reform has made Burnham’s record a campaign weapon. Rupert Lowe raised more than half a million pounds for his own grooming gangs inquiry, saying the political system would not act, and turned that campaign into a political party, Restore Britain. Every closed file and every unanswered question is a gift to both of them.

Sunlight is the only disinfectant. A government that wants to take the anger out of this issue has to tell the whole truth: name the people who failed these girls, open the records and bring the charges the evidence supports. Anything less leaves a stain across the country and lets a bitterness keep rising that will turn very sour. Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. Until the state shows the same relentless fury against the abusers of forgotten children as it does under the cameras of high-society scandals, ordinary people will rightly conclude that in twenty-first-century Britain, the scale of justice is weighted entirely by class.

Where Resistance Is Not Futile

There will be Arabs with ministerial portfolios in Israel before there was a Minister in Dublin who professed allegiance to the 32-County Republic of 1916. A Coloured and an Indian sat in the Cabinet of P.W. Botha before Sinn Féin contested elections to the Dáil. Sinn Féin has never been in government in the 26 Counties, and all the stops have already been pulled out once to ensure that it would not be. That will always be the case, probably successfully.

But in the Six Counties, Sinn Féin has been in government for 27 years and counting, already nearly a quarter of the entire existence of the two states in Ireland, and it always will be, probably always providing the First Minister now that it had assumed the office. Seen from either side, there may eventually come to be a United Ireland, and even a 32-County Republic, but the excuse of how long ago Partition had been will be used to prevent a unitary state both for the sake of the dominant force in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin, and for the sake of its implacable enemies who dominated the present Republic.

Notice that Fine Gael, in particular, has resumed any interest in a United Ireland only now that there is a sizeable presence of Sinn Féiners in the Dáil. They are hardly competing for the same voters, so Fine Gael, or indeed Fianna Fáil, is not trying to see off competitors, but looking for more amenable potential partners. In a word, Unionists. Also notice that Sinn Féin voters in the 26 Counties rarely move to the part of Ireland where their party has been in government for a generation and always will be, not even now that Michelle O’Neill is First Minister. They would rather go all the way to Australia. Yet they would not have to leave Ireland to fulfil their apparent aspiration to become subjects of the King.

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael could live and work with Unionists and ex-Unionists, but they regard Northern Nationalism with the same combination of horror, incredulity and indifference that almost everyone in Great Britain felt towards what the late Queen Elizabeth II called “that silly marching business”, bewildered and disgusted that anyone could think that that were anything to do with them, and in the Southern Irish case (it almost never applies in the Mainland British one) disinclined to dwell on any family connections, much as the denizens of Salt Lake City viewed their distant cousins in the polygamous compounds. Keep all of that in mind as you read Obelisk:

When the history of the reunification of our island comes to be written, the past few days will surely not pass without comment. What I would argue is the most trusted polling organisation in the north, Lucid Talking, continues to show support for reunification against the Union narrowing with a plurality of voters under 55 backing reunification…and that is before the southern state produces even the beginnings of a plan. On that point, both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have moved at last to begin engaging with the practicalities of the unity question. Both parties have begun publicly exploring how they can engage with that debate, but obviously a single unified position will need to be synthesised as the approach of the Irish government. This will begin a process that should culminate with the collapse of the eight million or so united Irelands we deal with whenever the term is mentioned, the differing idea each individual has of what it would be, into a concrete singular proposal that can be contrasted with the failing status quo.

And the status quo is failing. Whilst there has been much talk of Fine Gael’s figure that it could cost up to 25 billion euros annually to fund reunification (in the worst-case scenario) few seem keen to point out that as our divided parties at Stormont unite to ask for more funding for our government on the grounds that we don’t get our fair share, the Secretary of State continually stonewalls them and says ‘there is no more money’. Whilst some would argue that our politicians are reluctant to engage in any revenue raising measures or to see if there are any efficiencies that could be made, that does not mean we are not being underfunded as the Executive parties insist. As Seán Óg put it, leaving aside the debate over whether the south can afford us in future, what about the fact that Great Britain can’t afford us in the here and now?

You would think that this would be an opportunity for the Unionist parties to step forward and make the case that when everything is considered, we are better off in the United Kingdom. Gordon Lyons made an attempt on the 5th November episode of The View when, in response to Chris Hazzard listing off various facts regarding the British economy, such as the fact it is currently the fifth largest in the world, Lyons argued that Hazzard was making a ‘strong case for Unionism. This of course sounds clever on the face of it but ignores the context of Hazzard’s point, which is that the British decision to underfund the north (something Lyons’ own party seems to agree with) is a deliberate choice. Hazzard’s point is that the relative strength of the British economy is immaterial, we are simply not a political priority for Westminster and never will be. Unionist citations of British wealth have all the force of an impoverished family bragging about their sound finances due to their fabulously wealthy miserly uncle who gives them enough to survive upon.

Lyons’ intervention was the only attempt I have heard recently to articulate those still mysterious ‘benefits of the union’ but that is unsurprising. Unionism cannot rise to the occasion right now as it is currently in crisis over the fallout from Drumcree. In his Culture Wars book, the Loyalist activist Jamie Bryson set out his reasoning for reactivating the Drumcree dispute and political Unionism rowed in behind him and the Orange Order. The problem was that Bryson’s book was and is framed around Nationalism being a curiously schizophrenic other…effective and insidious enough to manufacture the situation in which Bryson claims Unionism now finds itself yet passive enough to allow him to enact his plan to turn the tide and rectify the situation via a series of acts that would, from his perspective, restore balance. None of his proposals seemed to account for the possibility that nationalism would react…or that some nationalists would actually read his book (I have admitted I got halfway through before I gave up). Tipping everyone off it was intended as the first act of the Culture War he named his book after might just have stiffened resistance a tad though even if that were missing.

Things did not pan out the way he expected them to do so…or at least what he has claimed in public. If his goal was to instead create a situation that destabilised power-sharing he has succeeded but that is speculative, and so I shall proceed on the basis his goal was what he said, to get the march down the road as part of a plan to re-establish the pre-eminence of the right to march and to come back in future with a bigger parade. Everyone knew the residents would if it came down to it block the road. Everyone knew the choice would then fall to the Chief Constable on whether to clear the road to facilitate the march. And most folks who thought ahead wagered, correctly, that he would calculate it simply wasn’t worth it and refuse to do so. Jamie Bryson and the Order are therefore left with the hollow win of the Order’s legal right to march having been confirmed but the harsh reality that no march will ever go down the road again without the consent of the residents (which I will be surprised to see if it happens in my lifetime) also being confirmed. Unionism is therefore enduring the agony of the consequences everyone foresaw they would face should they go down this route.

I have no sympathy for the travails or frustration they face as a result. They had a choice not to relitigate Drumcree. Instead, they have gone all in and are now suffering the real ‘profound consequences’. For the second time in a decade (with the first being the outworkings of Brexit) Unionism attempts to process a self-inflicted defeat on a matter of enormous psychological importance and it is having tremendous difficulty doing so. As I have argued and will continue to argue, Unionism is not and never has been about the Union. It is about the maintenance of a homeland on the island of Ireland in which Ulster-British identity is privileged. It seems the Union itself is ultimately pointless if the substance of the state their forefathers built is sapped away to placate those outside of the ideology who maybe the arbiters of the north’s constitutional fate and thus when push comes to shove they will risk the future of the Union to preserve the identity of the state as much as they possibly can. Though of course, without the Union, there would be no state at all of course and hence whilst it is not the point of Unionism, it underpins Unionism.

The identitarian impulse is why they went all in on Drumcree even as some, such as the Alliance party or the signatories of the letter from within the Unionist community who begged them to bank the win of having the legal right affirmed whilst not provoking the political disaster that has now befallen Unionism at precisely the moment when the conversation regarding reunification moves onto surer footing. To have not attempted the march would have been at cross-purposes to their underlying philosophy in the first place; this is the Ulster-British homeland. There was simply no chance of them not to trying to proceed once the legal hurdles were cleared, any more than a moth will refuse to fly into a naked flame of its own volition. And now we face the aftermath. This is a self-inflicted defeat for Unionism and there are no upsides though there has been a feeble attempt to confect some kind of moral victory. Such excuses seem to have received scant attention from those in the middle ground. Bryson has tried to argue the legal determination that said the Order had a right to march is a victory in and of itself, something the Secretary of State attempted to affirm when he said he was leaving the original determination permitting the march in place when he ultimately banned the procession on public order grounds. To be blunt, that piece of paper is as much a victory for Unionism as Neville Chamberlain’s piece of paper from Munich was a victory for peace in our time.

Some Unionists have also attempted to argue that the idea of a new Ireland was shown to be a lie on the Garvaghy Road and then talked this up as some sort of silver lining, but the recent Lucid Talk polling discredits that assertion. The vast majority of the middle ground supported the residents in their action in blockading the road, and frankly I would argue the vast majority of folks aren’t going to judge the level of tolerance that can be expected in a united Ireland by Unionism collectively deciding to make the most totemic, ideologically loaded, controversial, tragedy-soaked route out of all of the contentious parading disputes the litmus test. You may genuinely want to live in peace with your neighbour but you may have an issue with them sleeping with your spouse in your bed…and if they called you an intolerant bigot for stopping them from doing so an unbiased observer would have to ask whether they were being serious.

Right now Unionism faces a whole host of options and none of them are good and all lead to different degrees of defeat (it really does feel like Brexit all over again). Many Unionists are screaming for the DUP to remove Michelle O’Neill from office by resigning Emma Little-Pengelly from the Deputy First Minister role, thus forcing the First Minister out as well. Gavin Robinson and Jon Burrows clearly feel this would be a terrible idea as it would play into the nationalist narrative that the north is a failed and unworkable entity. As someone who actually believes the north is a failed and unworkable entity, a further collapse is less something I can pervert to fit my predetermined narrative and more evidence of the fundamental correctness of the diagnosis in the first place. In spite of the patient explanations of both leaders as to why this is a bad idea, the pressure continues regardless.

That’s how bad a position Unionism is in currently. They are badly split over the question of whether to remove Michelle O’Neill from office because it is the one sanction open to them, the one lever they have to pull. The DUP lost an MP over it. Jamie Bryson has split Unionism into ‘O’Neill Must Go’ and ‘O’Neill Must Stay’ wings (employing deliberate terminology to remove nuance and frame those who fear the consequences of removal upon the standing of Unionism at this time as weak and lily-livered) over it. And the worst thing is, for all the torment and agony they are putting themselves through over it, does anyone really believe Michelle O’Neill would be even slightly phased by that action?

Removing O’Neill from office would martyr Michelle O’Neill and lead to even more support flowing to Sinn Féin within nationalism. Drumcree has rescued Sinn Féin from the electoral doldrums and enhanced Michelle O’Neill’s credibility among northern nationalists in a way few events could. The moment she was interviewed on the Garvaghy Road on that morning and said she would always support the residents, she effectively won the coming election within nationalism. Removing her would only feed Sinn Féin’s support and she would be back following the election. Unionism is tearing itself apart over whether to mildly irritate the First Minister.

Some say Gavin Robinson’s hand is being stayed because to remove her now would prevent the enactment of a budget, which would then lead to public sector workers not getting their promised pay rise and thus the blame for that falling on the DUP. The thinking here is that once – if – a budget is agreed the DUP can have Emma Little-Pengelly resign and thus limit the damage they will inevitably suffer for once again scuppering devolution. Though I have to question the efficacy of a strategy that is so blindingly obvious it is a topic of discussion in our local media, that Sinn Féin certainly knows of it and thus you have to ask why Sinn Féin would be minded to agree a budget if the DUP plan to flounce out the door immediately afterwards? Paralysed over the fate of the First Minister and only able so far to cancel photo opportunities as part of their promised punishment of the party, the DUP has turned its ire on another enemy of Ulster-British culture…school-children learning through the medium of Irish. As the BBC reports…

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has tabled a petition of concern in a bid to block proposed legislation on Irish-medium education.

The private member’s bill, brought forward by Sinn Féin assembly member Pat Sheehan, would require Stormont’s Department of Education to prepare a workforce plan on schools in the sector.

And in case anyone thinks this is being opposed on its own merits rather than being petty revenge over Drumcree…

DUP leader Gavin Robinson said the petition was the latest outworking of their response to Sinn Féin’s “arrogance” over the Drumcree parading dispute.

Whilst the BBC cites Alliance deputy leader Eóin Tennyson as saying it was

“yet another petulant swipe and petty stunt intended to walk these institutions to the brink”.

The assembly member said it “punishes no one except the children and young people in Irish-medium schools”.

Everyone recognises this as an outcome of the Drumcree dispute with the exception of UUP leader Jon Burrows, whose party was required to sign on to the petition to enable it to proceed. Burrows as recently as Monday made a pitch for institutionally minded Unionists…the ‘O’Neill must stay’ grouping as Bryson would put it…to coalesce within the UUP. He is quoted in the Newsletter as saying

“This is a defining moment in unionism. I don’t think unionism has been particularly well led over the last two decades. There have been strategic gaffes and crocodile moments that have galvanised Sinn Féin, who I’m afraid are laughing at some of the errors unionism has made. We now need change.

“The Ulster Unionist Party is already showing what that change looks like in government. Robbie Butler is doing tremendous work as Health Minister. He is lowering the bowel cancer screening age towards 50, has delivered a 24/7 thrombectomy service for stroke patients and has invested £1.95 million in endometriosis services.

“I want to see more cooperation across unionism. But I believe a revitalised Ulster Unionist Party can provide the sure-footed leadership unionism needs: making Northern Ireland a success, outsmarting Sinn Féin and securing the Union for the long term. 

“I’m building a team to serve the people of Northern Ireland, and I would encourage anyone who shares that ambition to join us.”

At the time of writing though it appears Burrows plans to ‘outsmart’ Sinn Féin by having a hand in repeating the legendary Unionist ‘victory’ of Arlene Foster’s ‘crocodile’ comments (themselves delivered in the wake of Paul Givan’s decision to remove the Líofa bursary). That would be the election which saw Sinn Féin’s vote share and seat total leap upwards. Burrows has done this by signing the DUP’s petition of concern. His fig-leaf justification is that the bill will prioritise the Irish language sector over other educational sectors. As reported in the BBC…

Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) leader Jon Burrows said Sinn Féin’s conduct over the Drumcree dispute was “reprehensible” but it was not the reason his party had supported the DUP’s petition of concern.

He expressed concern that the private member’s bill gives “preferential treatment to one sector over others”.

“It is an unnecessary bill – it duplicates work that is already taking place.

“It has administrative and financial costs that we don’t need to have,” he told the Nolan Show.

That excuse doesn’t really fly when everyone else is framing it in the context of the Drumcree dispute. I would wager electoral considerations (particularly in his hardline constituency of North Antrim) and the Unionist desire for some form of retribution over Drumcree is the real motive. After all, he publicly undermined his own health minister for electoral reasons a few short months ago, to the point that minister actually resigned.

To do so again would not only be unsurprising, but would also be in keeping with his expressed character if we judge him by his actions rather than his words. And by his actions I once again draw the conclusion that liberal unionism is an oxymoron, though I must admit I have never seen Burrows as a liberal unionist of any sort. In complete fairness to this man this is a term he has never used himself. This is more for the benefit of those who believe him to be such a thing as a ‘liberal’ or ‘moderate’ unionist in comparison to other Unionists. If I see him so described in future, I will be happy to bring up what he has done on this occasion. 

It is my belief that there are two forms of Unionism, those who wish to participate in the structures of the Good Friday Agreement to be as obstructive in the shared governance of the north as possible…and the TUV types who don’t wish to participate at all and would much prefer direct rule so as not to sully themselves with having to compromise with nationalists and ‘the others’. The crisis in Unionism is because the fault line between those two groups runs right through the DUP.

That is where we stand in the aftermath of Drumcree. The reunification discussions are picking up, the southern state is becoming engaged, the middle ground is increasingly curious, the young are looking towards the future of a new Ireland…and Unionism is once again mired in a mess of its own making and determined to make everyone else suffer as a result as it thrashes about, desperate to find a pain free off-ramp that doesn’t exist.

And Owen Polley:

Not very long ago, the DUP seemed an insurmountable force in Northern Ireland politics. The unionist party dominated Stormont for almost twenty years, before being overtaken by Sinn Fein at the 2022 Assembly election. And at Westminster, it won ten seats as recently as 2017, after which it propped up Theresa May’s Conservative government through a confidence and supply arrangement, clearly relishing its role as “kingmaker” and the opportunities it provided to demand more public money. Yet, last week Carla Lockhart’s resignation from the DUP left it with just four seats in the House of Commons. Then, on Saturday, a poll in the Belfast Telegraph suggested that the party’s support had fallen to just 14 per cent. This was half Sinn Fein’s figure. It was also the second survey since Jeffrey Donaldson’s conviction for child sex offences that put the DUP behind its unionist rival, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). And this time, it was level with the harder line Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV). The DUP, in other words, could be heading towards third position among Northern Ireland’s pro-Union parties and fourth in Stormont overall. Ahead of next spring’s Assembly election, the party’s former health minister, Jim Wells, even suggested it could be finished as an electoral force.

Ms Lockhart’s defection was certainly not the average political resignation. She first joined the DUP as a teenager and, by the last election, commanded the party’s biggest Westminster majority by some margin. There were signs that her relationship with the leadership was becoming strained in 2024, after the party struck a deal with Rishi Sunak’s government over the Irish Sea border and restored power-sharing as a result. Lockhart finally resigned over the DUP’s refusal to remove Michelle O’Neill as first minister, due to her role in the Drumcree dispute. This parading flashpoint, Northern Ireland’s most fraught, is in the heart of the MP’s Upper Bann constituency. Sinn Fein ministers are accused of unlawfully blocking an Orange Order march on the Garvaghy Road in Portadown, by taking part in unnotified protests.

The DUP’s deputy first minister, Emma Little-Pengelly, could resign and force O’Neill out, as the first and deputy first ministers’ roles in Northern Ireland form a joint office and the two positions are legally equal. The party’s leader, Gavin Robinson, has so far argued that this would consign the province to months of a “ghost Assembly” and ultimately benefit Sinn Fein in the polls. Ministers in Northern Ireland would remain in post in a caretaker capacity until an election next year, but the executive would effectively be paralysed. This is not just an excuse but a serious concern. The DUP’s difficulty, though, is that it directly threatened “profound consequences” for Sinn Fein over its alleged deployment of “mob rule”. So far, this has amounted only to Little-Pengelly refusing to take part in joint engagements with O’Neill. The party has promised that it will “escalate” the repercussions for the first minister, but it has not explained what this action might comprise or what it might achieve.

The DUP is certainly not in an easy position. If it continues to operate power-sharing more or less as normal, it will be accused of effectively accepting that Sinn Fein is above the law. At the same time, the party has been involved in several sets of negotiations aimed at getting Northern Ireland’s government back, after previous crises. These have usually resulted in republicans making demands and gaining concessions. The executive at Stormont has provided ineffective government for decades, ducking difficult decisions and most recently failing to set a budget. However, on the occasions when it has collapsed completely, successive governments, including the Tories, refused to properly implement direct rule from Westminster. There is every reason to fear that this pattern would be repeated if Little-Pengelly resigned. A panicked decision to bring down the institutions, in response to the poll results, would further galvanise Sinn Fein supporters, while failing to repair the DUP’s credibility.

The party’s overarching problem is that it no longer commands voters’ trust. It invariably tries to appear tough but frequently does not follow through on its rhetoric. The deal over the Irish Sea border was the most flagrant example. The DUP boycotted Stormont for two years in protest at the Northern Ireland Protocol/Windsor Framework. This tactic failed, and there was a strong argument, in the last months of Jeffrey Donaldson’s leadership, that it needed to revive power-sharing to protect support for the Union. Rather than make this case honestly, the DUP claimed that it had effectively removed the Irish Sea border and stopped a ‘pipeline of European law’ to the province, as part of the Safeguarding the Union deal that restored devolution. This may at the time have seemed like a hard-headed sales pitch, but it was also manifestly nonsense. By the time Donaldson was arrested in March 2024, the party was already losing support to the UUP, which had always maintained that a Stormont boycott would damage unionism, and the TUV, which insisted that the DUP was effectively surrendering on the sea border by restoring power-sharing. When he became leader, Gavin Robinson was forced to admit that his party had ‘oversold’ its achievements.

The DUP will face an Assembly election and a council election next spring, while a general election could be coming too. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Police have opened a new investigation into an allegation that Donaldson sexually assaulted a woman at the Palace of Westminster. The former leader has also lodged an appeal against his child sex abuse convictions. There seems little prospect of this grim saga fading from voters’ minds by next May. The DUP is unlikely to be decimated in the 2027 elections, in the way that some pundits are predicting. The party will maintain the advantage of incumbency in many seats, while its rivals in the UUP and TUV may struggle to field a deep enough pool of candidates to capitalise on their encouraging poll results. The most likely outcome is an exacerbated three way split in unionism in Northern Ireland which only benefits Sinn Fein and raises more questions about a potential realignment of parties. While many of its representatives are blameless, the DUP has brought plenty of its current problems on itself, through years of slippery messaging and failures to deal properly with allegations of sleaze. The party may not be finished but it is unlikely ever to be as powerful a force in Northern Ireland politics again.

And Belfast Glenariff:

Today, the 10th November 2026 marks the 40th Anniversary of the formation of Ulster Resistance. Very little is still known about this secretive Unionist/Loyalist quasi political/paramilitary group but what has been revealed is that the guns, ammunition and grenade launchers they received in a Loyalist arms importation in December 1987 were used in over 100 murders, mostly of innocent Catholics. These weapons were never recovered or have ever been decommissioned. Many of the relatives of those killed by them are now calling for a Public Inquiry into Ulster Resistance, it’s umbilical links to the DUP and the role British Security/Intelligence Services played in it all. The DUP says it adheres to “law and order” and is constantly lecturing others to do likewise. Indeed they are on the point of collapsing devolved government because they demand that others “upkeep and hold to the law”. They will surely then not object to the truth coming out and anyone with knowledge of Ulster Resistance, and it’s still hidden weapons, co-operating with the appropriate policing and judicial authorities.

I refer to two media articles published in recent days about Ulster Resistance and the DUP; the first by Brian Feeney in the Irish News on Saturday 07th November and the second by Hugh Jordan in The Sunday World on 08th November. I am quoting primarily from Brian Feeney’s article. Brian Feeney: “On November 10th 1986 about 3000 men, by invitation only, packed the Ulster Hall to be addressed by Ian Paisley and other leading lights including Peter Robinson and Sammy Wilson who chaired the rally…..Paisley told the crowd that Ulster Resistance, his name for the organisation, would take whatever steps necessary to destroy the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the ongoing Republican conspiracy. He then put on a red beret as did Peter Robinson.” Brian goes on to write: “In June 1985, the Irish Ambassador to London, Noel Dorr, reported to Dublin that the Israeli Ambassador to Britain, Yahuda Avner, told him that Paisley had been in touch with him to obtain arms for border protection…..as some of those vehemently opposed to Irish involvement in the North were determined to acquire weapons.”

The story of how these weapons were acquired has already been documented by journalists Peter Taylor, Martin Dillon and the Spotlight programme in various pieces, reports, books and programmes over the years. Brian continues: “The finance (for the weapons) was acquired by a UVF robbery of £300,000 from the Northern Bank in Portadown in July 1987. In December 1987 the weapons arrived in Belfast Docks: 206 Vz58 assault rifles; 94 Browning 9mm pistols; 4 rocket launchers & 62 warheads; 450 grenades and 30,000 rounds of ammunition. The weapons were divided into 3 lots: one for the UDA, one for the UVF and the other for Ulster Resistance.” The UDA’s share of the weapons were seized in January 1988 through an internal informer while most of the UVF’s were also seized, again through ‘leaks’ within. The remaining Ulster Resistance guns were never recovered and some of these were later given to the UDA and UVF. These weapons were used in the Sean Graham’s bookies murders, Michael Stone’s attack in Milltown Cemetery and many other killings.

To quote Brian again: “In a recent carefully researched book, Aaron Edwards, an expert on Loyalist terrorism, recounted how Johnny Adair met Ulster Resistance leaders at a farm in Loughgall in 1991 where Adair convinced them to support his UFF C Company…..Edwards said the Ulster Resistance men were a loose connection of people concentrated in Mid Ulster, North Down and North Derry. Adair and UFF C Company subsequently received a large supply of weapons, grenades and ammunition from Ulster Resistance and for the next decade this murder gang constantly attacked the Catholic community in North & West Belfast and also killed quite a few people within the Unionist/Loyalist community.” Brian says: “In 1996 it was reported that Britain’s Security Services believed that Ulster Resistance continued to act as a quartermaster for all Loyalist paramilitaries and it has never decommissioned it’s weapons….questions now arise.”

And Brian asks: “1. If Adair knew who the leaders of Ulster Resistance were and was able to meet them, why couldn’t the British Security Forces, MI5 and Military Intelligence (apprehend them)? 2. Where are these Ulster Resistance weapons now? 3. Why do the police not question people they suspect were Ulster Resistance leaders and also question those DUP figures who reportedly knew their identities? 4. Why was Ulster Resistance decommissioning never on the agenda? 5. Why the silence and inexplicable impunity?” Ulster Resistance is, and was, a thoroughly ruthless Unionist/Loyalist paramilitary killing machine linked to over 100 murders. It’s on record that senior Unionist politicians, particularly DUP ones, were deeply involved with it. The victims and their families deserve answers and most importantly, a thoroughly independent Public Inquiry must now be called for.

I have mainly quoted Brian Feeny’s article in his piece for the Irish News on November 07th. Hugh Jordan of The Sunday World also has a very revealing in depth interview on November 08th with the Rev. Ivan Foster who was a senior ally of Ian Paisley and who was also involved with Ulster Resistance. From the article: “Over the next 17 years, the VZ rifles were used by loyalists in the murder or attempted murder of 70 people. Ulster Resistance weapons were used the Sean Graham’s bookies shop massacre and the ‘Trick of Treat’ Halloween night killings in Greysteel, Co Derry, as well as the Loughinisland pub shootings in Co Down. In total in these three attacks alone, 19 people died and another 27 were wounded. However, Ulster Resistance kept the bulk of the weapons and stored them in purpose-built dumps that have never been found. And Ulster Resistance remains the only armed group not to engage with the decommissioning process headed by Canadian soldier General John de Chastelain. Loyalists based in Mid-Ulster – who still maintain the weapons – are reported to claim they are being stockpiled in the event of a ‘doomsday’ scenario should the British and Irish governments ever attempt to “bounce” Ulster Protestants into an all-Ireland state.”

And Brian Feeney:

Next Tuesday marks the 40th anniversary of what was the inauguration of Ulster Resistance. On November 10 1986 about 3,000 men, by invitation only, packed the Ulster Hall to be addressed by Ian Paisley and other leading lights of the DUP including Peter Robinson – shortly after his invasion of Clontibret, leading hundreds of loyalists – and Sammy Wilson, who chaired the rally. Paisley told the crowd that Ulster Resistance, his name for the new organisation, would “take whatever steps necessary to destroy the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the ongoing republican conspiracy”. He then put on a red beret, as did Peter Robinson.

Paisley had been planning this for some time, though it was just the latest in a series of attempts he’d made to develop an organisation he could control, unlike terrorist groups he’d associated with and kept contact with from the 1960s like the UVF. Now he sought to harness the unanimous unionist hostility to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. The DUP would later say it “immediately distanced itself from Ulster Resistance and severed all links with it once it became known that it was involved in unlawful activity”. However, Paisley and other DUP figures had been greatly perturbed when rumours of a deal between Dublin and London began to circulate in summer 1985. They didn’t know what the deal was, but the word was it involved some sort of Irish government involvement in the north.

In June 1985, the Irish ambassador to London, Noel Dorr, reported to Dublin that the Israeli ambassador to Britain, Yahuda Avner, told him Paisley had been in touch with him “to obtain arms” for “border protection”. He said Avner told Paisley that “these things could be dealt with only between governments”. Dublin couldn’t make sense of it and didn’t take it seriously. They should have. Some of those vehemently opposed to Irish government involvement in the north were determined to acquire weapons. The story of how they did is documented in many books written by Peter Taylor, Martin Dillon and others and TV programmes like Spotlight. The finance was acquired by a UVF robbery of £300,000 from the Northern Bank in Portadown in July 1987.

Noel Little (Emma Little-Pengelly’s father), ex-UDR and leading Ulster Resistance (UR) figure, had reportedly already supplied a shopping list of weaponry to a representative of South Africa’s Armscor at a meeting in Geneva in early 1987 and knew the sum required. Little denied any involvement in the 1987 arms importation. In 1991, however, he was convicted in Paris over a separate plot to exchange stolen British missile technology for weapons. The cash from the robbery was said to have been brought to Geneva in suitcases by ”respectable unionists”.

In December 1987, the weaponry arrived in Belfast docks: 206 Vz58 assault rifles, 94 Browning 9mm pistols, four rocket launchers and 62 warheads, 450 grenades and 30,000 rounds of ammunition. UR divided the haul into three lots for the UDA, UVF and UR. The RUC seized the UDA’s share in January 1988, most of the UVF’s in February, and a chunk of UR’s in November 1988 after searches in farms near Markethill, Hamiltonsbawn and Armagh. Nevertheless, the remaining weapons imported by UR, some of which later given to the UDA and UVF, were linked to over 70 murders including the Sean Graham bookies murders and Michael Stone’s grenade attack in Milltown cemetery.

In a recent, carefully researched book, Aaron Edwards, an expert on loyalist terrorism, recounts how the infamous loyalist killer Johnny Adair met UR leaders at a farm near Loughgall in 1991 and was able to convince them to supply his ‘C company’ with weapons. Since the RUC had captured the UDA share of UR’s consignment, Adair told Edwards the UDA had “f*** all”. Edwards says the UR men Adair met were “a loose network of people concentrated in places like Mid-Ulster, North Down”, and also north Derry. “They were mostly farmers, businessmen, and members of the UDR.” A few weeks after the meeting they delivered a lorry load of weapons to Adair: assault rifles, rocket launchers and grenades, which enabled Adair to launch his murderous terrorist campaign in Belfast. He described the UR weapons as “a godsend”. In 1996 it was reported that British security forces believed that UR “continued to act as a quartermaster” by organising an “arms pool” for loyalist paramilitaries. UR has never decommissioned its weapons.

All history? Well, yes and no. Questions arise. If Adair knew who the leaders of UR were and was able to meet them, why couldn’t the security forces, MI5, military intelligence? Where are the weapons that UR stores and has occasionally doled out to loyalist terrorists? More importantly, perhaps, when did the PSNI and MI5 stop searching for those weapons cache? Why did they?/ Why do they not question people they suspect are or were UR leaders, and DUP figures who reportedly asserted they knew their identities? Why was Ulster Resistance decommissioning never on the agenda and still isn’t? Why the inexplicable impunity?

Carla Lockhart now wants to ban convicted criminals from becoming or remaining First Minister, but that would have precluded the appointment of Ian Paisley or Peter Robinson. Paisley did time. From 2017 to 2019, the Conservative Government enjoyed an overall majority of one thanks to a deal with the DUP. DUP MPs at the time included, as Chief Whip, Jeffrey Donaldson. They included Sammy Wilson, who had been Press Officer for the DUP when he had chaired the founding rally of Ulster Resistance in his chain of office as Lord Mayor of Belfast. They included Noel Little’s daughter, Emma Little-Pengelly, who is now the Deputy First Minister with powers equal to those of the First Minister, and who had owed her election in 2017, for a somewhat improbable seat, to the concerted efforts of the local Loyalist paramilitary organisations, to whom she extended barely coded thanks in her acceptance speech.

They included Ian Paisley Jr, who like Little-Pengelly has been a company director with Donaldson and his brother, of two different companies in the case of Little-Pengelly, with the second existing mostly or entirely to send Donaldson around the world, at the expense of the Foreign Office, to promote peace deals such as he was opposing at home. And they included Jim Shannon, who in May 1989 had been expelled from the Territorial Army for having been involved in the theft of Blowpipe man-portable surface-to-air missile components from the TA base in Newtownards by Ulster Resistance, of which he had been a founder member and which to this day has never declared a ceasefire. Any one of those could have collapsed the Government. Countries are sanctioned for less. Yet to political Dublin, even such as those would be preferable to anyone from Sinn Féin. Think on.