Smoke and Mirrors?

This morning, Roman Lavrynovych, Petro Pochynok and Stanislav Carpiuc will return to Court 2 of the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey. They will do so from HMP Belmarsh, where they enjoy the company and conditions of Hashem Abedi and Axel Rudakubana.

On a charge of arson with intent to endanger life, then you, too, would be remanded in custody. But to Belmarsh? When else might the defendants have been sent there, yet the media have deemed the trial unworthy of attention? Never mind when the case has rested on an intimate knowledge of the private affairs of the Prime Minister?

Fove Precantes Trinitas

Bishop Joseph Vincent Brennan of Fresno is nobody's idea of a liberal, and the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin did not list him with Episcopalians and Lutherans as a co-consecrator of Dr Gregory Kimura. In choir dress as an invited guest, Bishop Brennan stretched out his hand to pray God's blessing upon Dr Kimura while other hands were being laid upon him. A total nonstory. Likewise, Archbishop Flavio Pace was bowing his head and making the Sign of the Cross at the invocation of the Most Holy Trinity by Dame Sarah Mullally. He was not receiving her blessing. What she may have been doing with her own hands at that moment was her own affair. But even if you did not know, then you could guess some of the reactions to both of those occurrences. Set, of course, in a wider, if not exactly deeper, context.

Yet it was in respect of the impossibility of the ordination of women that Pope Saint John Paul II made the most recent assertion of the truth that even the Ordinary Magisterium could sometimes be infallible. In any case, when the Pope, the bishop, or, by the bishop's authority, the parish priest teaches, then that is what he is doing. Teaching. Not "expressing his opinion". And the Church's doctrine on, say, war and peace, or the economic order, is precisely that. Doctrine.

These things are usually open to cautious and qualified reconsideration by the authority that promulgated them or, where applicable, by a higher authority. But they are not suggestions. They are not advice. They are the Teaching of the Church. They are that Teaching as it is ordinarily taught and received. They are the Ordinary Magisterium. Or what do we think that the Pope is giving when he is not defining ex cathedra? Racing tips? What did we think that the minority party at Vatican I thought that all Papal teachings were, never mind their own teachings as bishops? Cocktail recipes? Note also the hallucination that small matters such as war and peace or the economic order were not "faith and morals". O ye of little faith. O ye of little morals. Your longstanding de facto schism is on the cusp of formalisation.

Rights and Power

The Government is not going to fall while the King was on a State Visit to the United States. That would be unseemly. That said, Kemi Badenoch is no soft touch. If she had won tomorrow, then Keir Starmer would have been out. But when she loses, then Labour MPs will be even more tainted with Peter Mandelson than they already were, right in time for the last week of campaigning before the local, Holyrood and Senedd elections. With a working majority of 165, Starmer has had people ringing round backbenchers to save him. He may yet have to impose a whip, perhaps even a three-line whip. And it looks as if there will be Prime Minister’s Questions after all this week. Starmer cannot even arrange a prorogation. He cannot even send everyone home.

On Badenoch’s toughness, she had let go Robert Jenrick’s donations from overseas, because she had beaten him and pursuing the matter would have reflected badly on the party that she therefore led while he remained a member of it. But he has broken that unspoken arrangement and it is now a Police matter. Jenrick, meanwhile, was supposed to have led a fuel protest of lorries, vans and tractors down Whitehall this morning. It was attended by a Reform UK taxi, by a Reform bus, and by no other vehicle whatever. Jenrick, Richard Tice, Sarah Pochin and Laila Cunningham were joined almost exclusively by members of the media, and not even by very many of those.

Still, Lee Anderson may make use of parliamentary privilege tomorrow. Or Zarah Sultana may. At any rate, someone should. Mention the Ukrainian rent boys trial. Pose to Starmer the question that Labour used to deploy, quite deservedly, against Boris Johnson, “How many children do you have?” Mention the junior barrister when he was Director of Public Prosecutions, and since she is a Peer and a Minister, even attending Cabinet, mention Jenny Chapman by name. Probe Lord Alli. Ponder, in view of the fact that Roman Lavrynovych was still only 21 or 22, how old the Ukrainian rent boys were when Starmer lived at his old home or owned his old car, bearing in mind that the age of consent for prostitution was not 16, but 18. Again recalling Johnson, whose “forgotten” pin no one in MI5, MI6, GCHQ or Special Branch has ever been able crack, ask about Morgan McSweeney’s “stolen” phone that did not even have the backup that came with yours or mine.

And ask Starmer how long a generation was, since this evening he told the Parliamentary Labour Party that, “It’s important to see the bigger picture here. They want to stop this Labour Government. And we know why. Because we are the first government for generations to take key parts of the public realm back into public ownership. They don’t like that, but we’re doing it. The first government for generations to give rights and power to workers, to renters, to the less fortunate. The first government for generations prepared to stand against wealth interests, to raise money and put that into public services and fighting child poverty. They don’t like it, they said they’d reverse it. We have a mandate to do all of those things. And they are not going to stop us.”

It would be a stretch to say that it had been a generation since 2010, although I suppose if you thought that the voting age should be 16, a policy hilariously rumoured to have been dropped from the King’s Speech because it would favour the Greens. But “generations”, in the plural? The man who has done more to purge the Left than any other Leader in Labour history is now hoping to rally it against the consequences of his dependence on Peter Mandelson. Who’d be a satirist? But the Stuarts despised the Highlanders until they ended up having to fall back on them, to the utter ruin of both.

In any case, how many of Mandelson’s handpicked PLP would even agree with that repudiation of the Blair and Brown Governments, at least in the sense of thinking that not giving “rights and power to workers, to renters, to the less fortunate” had been a bad thing? Suggesting that those Governments had not invested in fighting child poverty makes Gordon Brown, David Blunkett and Alan Johnson look very silly after their interventions earlier today, when, furthermore, Unite’s talks with Reform forced Birmingham’s parody of a right-wing Labour council to settle the bin strike, long after that strike had cost far more than that settlement. Someone should ask about that at PMQs.

The Loudest Silence In Britain

It turns out that there are no reporting restrictions on the Ukrainian rent boys trial. Yet the only coverage has been in The Borough of Hounslow Herald, and fair play to it, although even that was on Thursday, about the upcoming rather than the ongoing proceedings. What are all the court reporters covering instead this week? The jury was sworn in at 14:26, the not guilty pleas are in, the judge has made his introduction, and everything will begin in earnest on Wednesday. [Correction at 21:30, it now it looks as if everything will begin in earnest tomorrow.] Nothing better illustrates the class system than the existence of D-Notices, as everyone still calls them, the way everyone still talks about Twitter. D-Notices are unenforceable at law, but the Deep State can and does rely on the Epstein Class loyalty of the entire media. Yet there does not seem to be one in this case, and there is certainly no court order. The Epstein Class loyalty has just kicked in automatically. No publication has more of that than Private Eye, which even after this is still never going to publish this, never mind what we were seeing now. Thank heavens for journalists such as Jonathan Wong (and yes, of course I know) and Paul Knaggs:

Three men are in the dock at the Old Bailey. The trial opened this morning. Most of Britain’s press cannot find the space to tell you.

When three men are accused of a coordinated campaign to torch properties linked to the sitting Prime Minister, and the nation’s editors collectively determine there are more pressing matters, you are not living in a free press. You are living in a managed one.

There is a question that every journalist in Britain should be asking today, and almost none of them are. It is not a complicated question. It does not require a security clearance or a well-placed source in Whitehall. It requires only a pair of eyes and a functioning conscience.

The question is this: why, on the morning that Britain’s most politically charged criminal trial of the year opens at the Old Bailey, are the digital front pages of the BBC, the Daily Mail, and even the supposedly insurgent GB News so conspicuously devoid of the names Roman Lavrynovych, Petro Pochynok, and Stanislav Carpiuc?

THE TRIAL THE PRESS WOULD RATHER YOU MISSED 

At 10:30 this morning, those three men took their places before a High Court judge at the Central Criminal Court. They face serious charges arising from three coordinated incidents over five days in north London in May 2025. A car was set alight in Kentish Town on 8 May. Three days later, a fire was started at the front door of a converted flat in Islington. In the early hours of 12 May, another fire at a property in the same Kentish Town street where Keir Starmer had lived before he moved into Downing Street.

Lavrynovych, 21, a Ukrainian national from Sydenham, faces three separate counts of arson with intent to endanger life. Pochynok, 34, also a Ukrainian national, of Holloway Road in Islington, and Carpiuc, now 27, a Romanian national of Ukrainian origin from Chadwell Heath, each face one count of conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life. All three have pleaded not guilty. All three have been held on remand at HMP Belmarsh since their arrests. A fourth man, arrested at Stansted Airport in June 2025, was released without charge. A fifth, a 19-year-old from Harlow, remains released under investigation. 

Counter Terrorism Policing London is leading the investigation, a designation that reflects the nature of the alleged target and not the charge. No terrorism offences have been brought. The Metropolitan Police have made no public attribution to any foreign state. The motive, officially, remains what one court document described as unexplained and opaque. The maximum sentence for the offence of arson with intent to endanger life is life imprisonment.

When a bin fire occurs in a leafy suburb, it makes the local rags. When three men stand accused of targeting properties linked to the sitting Prime Minister, the silence is not an oversight. It is a condition.

Sir Keir Starmer, at Prime Minister’s Questions, described these alleged incidents as an attack on all of us, on democracy and the values that we stand for. He was right to say so. What he did not address, and what the press declines to address alongside him, is what it means for that same democracy when the trial arising from those alleged attacks arrives without fanfare, without gallery reporters filing copy, without the rolling coverage that any dispassionate assessment of the case’s gravity would demand.

THE DSMA DISTRACTION 

Social media has filled the vacuum left by the press with its own theories, many of them coalescing around the idea of a so-called D-Notice. It is worth being precise about this, because imprecision here does the argument no favours.

D-Notices were abolished in 1993. The body that replaced them issues what are now called Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) notices. These are, in any case, advisory. They carry no legal force. Any editor who chose to ignore one would face no prosecution for doing so. Media law consultant David Banks, a leading practitioner in the field, stated publicly and explicitly that this case is not subject to a DSMA notice. There is no public evidence to contradict that assessment.

If there is no DSMA notice, and there is not, then the silence cannot be explained by state compulsion. That is, in some respects, a more disturbing conclusion. It means the silence is chosen.

CONTEMPT, CAUTION, AND THE CONVENIENT EXCUSE

There is a more respectable explanation available, and parts of the press will reach for it readily. The Contempt of Court Act 1981 creates strict liability for any publication that creates a substantial risk of serious prejudice to active legal proceedings. Now that this trial is live, editors will argue that the sub judice rule counsels restraint.

There is something in this. Responsible reporting of an ongoing criminal trial requires care. Speculation about guilt is impermissible. Reporting the identities of defendants, the charges they face, and the fact of the trial itself is not. These are matters of open public record, heard in open court. Restraint and silence are not synonyms. The British press knows the difference perfectly well when the defendant is someone it wishes to pursue. It applies the distinction selectively.

We note, for instance, that this concern for the sanctity of sub judice proceedings did not noticeably inhibit coverage of other high-profile cases in recent memory, cases where the accused commanded less institutional sympathy, less proximity to the circles in which editors and proprietors move. The principle, it seems, is applied with a discretion that happens to align rather neatly with the interests of those who own the platforms on which it is supposedly upheld.

Contempt of court and silence are not synonyms. The British press knows the difference when it wants to.

THE MANAGED DEMOCRACY 

There is a tradition in British public life of what might be called institutional protectiveness: the collective instinct of established organisations, including newspapers with proprietors who lunch with ministers and attend the same charity dinners as senior civil servants, to soften the edges of stories that could prove destabilising to the order from which they all benefit. This is not a conspiracy in any formal sense. It requires no coordination, no room, no memo. It is a culture. It is absorbed rather than instructed.

The result is a press that is ferociously aggressive toward those it has decided are outsiders and reflexively protective toward those it has decided are insiders, regardless of the formal posture of any given outlet. GB News presents itself as an anti-establishment insurgency. Its silence today is as telling as the BBC’s. The establishment is not a building. It is a set of assumptions shared by people who have persuaded themselves that they hold none.

What is being managed, in this silence, is not merely the reputation of a Prime Minister under extraordinary political pressure. It is the public’s right to know that a serious criminal trial, arising from alleged attacks on the head of government’s former home, is proceeding in the Central Criminal Court on their behalf. That is precisely the kind of information that a free press exists to communicate. Its absence is precisely the condition that a managed press is designed to produce.

We are not suggesting that any defendant in this case is guilty. That question belongs to the jury alone, and we have no doubt they will discharge their responsibility with seriousness. We are suggesting that a public that does not know this trial is happening cannot be said to be fully informed participants in the democratic life of their country. And a press that does not tell them is not doing its job.

WHY WE ARE TELLING YOU 

Labour Heartlands covered this case when the charges were first brought. We covered it when the defendants entered their pleas. We covered it when the trial date was set. We are covering it now because it is happening now, and because somebody should.

We are a small, independent publication with no proprietor to please, no government advertising contract to protect, and no dinner invitations that depend on our good behaviour. That is not a boast. It is a structural fact, and it is the structural fact that makes independent journalism possible in conditions where the mainstream press has decided that discretion, comfort, and access are more important than the public’s right to be informed.

Britain’s press will cover this trial when the verdict arrives, if it arrives. They will write it up as news, as though they had been attending all along. They will treat the outcome as information. They will not explain where they were during the preceding weeks.

We will be here throughout. Because this is not merely a criminal trial. It is a test of whether the institutions that are supposed to hold power to account are still capable of doing so, or whether they have become, quietly and without fanfare, another instrument of the power they were meant to scrutinise.

LEGAL NOTICE: These proceedings are now active before the Central Criminal Court. Nothing in this article constitutes a comment on the guilt or innocence of any defendant. That question is a matter solely for the jury. This article examines the conduct of the British press, not the conduct of the accused.

“The press that refuses to cover the trial is passing its own verdict long before the jury does.”

Explosive

Even the damage to property in Dunmurry is unusual these days. Hezbollah, which is probably the most heavily armed non-state actor in the world, supposedly droned RAF Akrotiri without managing to damage anything at all, never mind kill or injure anyone. Just as everyone always knew that the Provisional IRA, the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA were riddled with Police informants, MI5 assets, and such like, so it is widely assumed that the New IRA is a false flag operation, while the “New Republican Movement” has been universally greeted as such. The Loyalist organisations have always been known to be off-the-books arms of the British State. And in March 2023, four Protestants, at least one with known Loyalist paramilitary connections, were arrested in relation to the attempted murder of Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell, for which the New IRA had already claimed responsibility. Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries have always been heavily involved in traditional organised crime, especially drug-dealing, leading to generations of professional and social interaction.

Elsewhere in pyrotechnica, the Daily Mail no longer bothers to call RAF Fairford anything other than a “British air base used by [the] US to strike Iran”. But of course that fire must have been an accident. “Not our war”, and all that. Yet we are to proscribe the Revolutionary Guard Corps, as if the Terrorism Act were to counter the Armed Forces of other sovereign states. Performative proscription is so much cheaper than defence, and no MP should vote against this theatrical display, since that would give satisfaction to Keir Starmer, who has been reduced to whipping the other 402 Labour MPs against referring him to the Privileges Committee for having misled Parliament.

The Iran War, with other questions now following in due course, has thrown into sharp relief the de facto schismatic character of the conservative, or at least the MAGA-minded, wing of the American Church, possibly even complete with one bishop, as would be enough to confer the Episcopate in the manner of Dominique-Marie Varlet. This is far worse than the Western Schism. People on both sides of that have subsequently been canonised as Saints, since neither side, nor eventually any of the three, held any heretical proposition. One, or eventually two, sides merely erred as to who was in fact the Successor of Saint Peter at the given time. Moreover, that error made nothing like the doctrinal or moral difference that it would today.

By contrast, JD Vance’s clear threat to use nuclear weapons against Iran was contrary to everything that the Church had ever taught on the subject, since it was immediately apparent, when such weapons were first developed, that such use could not possibly be reconciled with just war doctrine. That could in fact have been said about the entire war with Iran. As it was. By the Pope. Not for the first time, Vance has demonstrated the inadequacy of his instruction for reception into the Catholic Church. He himself has said that he swam the Tiber because of his political views and at the prompting of his mentor, Peter Thiel, who is many things, but who is not a Catholic. No one else would have been let in on that basis, so someone needs to answer for obvious treatment of the Elegiac Hillbilly as clearly too big a catch to let slip. The hardly ever exercised charism of infallibility does not enter into this. No, the recent and ongoing protestations have been and are against the protestants’ overdue introduction to the Ordinary Magisterium, which is exercised all the time, and to which this Pope has made no addition on the matters at issue. It is just that they cannot ignore an American.

As for proscribed terrorist organisations, the Court of Appeal, which is this week due to hear Shabana Mahmood’s appeal against the High Court’s ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action had been unlawful, has already rejected at least one submission in her support, but has accepted at least three against her, including one from the United Nations. When was anyone last prosecuted for expressing support for the Continuity Army Council, or for Cumann na mBan, or for Fianna na hEireann, or for the Irish National Liberation Army, or for the Irish People’s Liberation Organisation, or for the Irish Republican Army, or for the Loyalist Volunteer Force, or for the Orange Volunteers, or for the Red Hand Commando, or for the Red Hand Defenders, or for Saor Eire, or for the Ulster Defence Association, or for Ulster Freedom Fighters, or for the Ulster Volunteer Force? Last month, Starmer literally gave the red carpet treatment to President Ahmed al-Sharaa of Syria, who is otherwise Abu Mohammad al-Julani in the manner of “Tommy Robinson”, and who is massacring Christians as befits a sometime second-in-command both of Al-Qaeda and of the so-called Islamic State to which Shamima Begum was trafficked such that she was not permitted to return to Britain, even to the point of having been stripped of her British citizenship.

The same has been done to Mark Bullen for nothing more than living in his wife’s and children’s native Russia while disliking British support for what ought to be proscribed terrorist organisations:  Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Brigade, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, the Freedom of Russia Legion, the Russian Volunteer Corps, and anything else in similar vein. Pavlo Lapshyn is still in His Majesty’s Prison, and will be for decades yet, because of his 2013 murder of 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham. Lapshyn went on to put bombs outside three mosques in this country. He belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Battalion, being led by its “political ideologist”, Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell.

Does the proscription of the Wagner Group extend to the Africa Corps, which yesterday joined the Malian Armed Forces in killing one thousand Al-Qaeda and IS terrorists while injuring three thousand more? Would it be a criminal offence to express approval of that outcome? Might it attract something like the treatment to which Professor Robert Skidelsky FBA, Lord Skidelsky, was subjected not long before his recent death at the age of 86? Returning to the Realm of which he was a Peer, the Britain of whose Academy he was a Fellow, he was detained under counterterrorism legislation. I am in no fit state to travel abroad, but it would almost be worth doing so if I could guarantee that on my return, I would be counted in the illustrious company of Lord Skidelsky, Julian Assange, Vanessa Beeley, Craig Murray, Kit Klarenberg, Richard Medhurst, and George Galloway.

Keeping Company

One more sleep. George Galloway has just asked live on air whether there was a D-Notice on the Ukrainian rent boys story. “If I received a D-Notice, I would hold it up and show it to you here and now.” So, is there a D-Notice on the Ukrainian rent boys story?

Then there is Keir Starmer’s flagrant breach of the Ministerial Code by holding an undocumented and unminuted meeting with Palantir in Washington last February alongside the then British Ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson, while Palantir was a client of Global Counsel, which Mandelson had founded and in which he remained a shareholder all the way up to its collapse this February owing £4.6 million, including £600,000 to the taxman.

There is no good outcome for Starmer tomorrow. A trial would be a disaster, even or perhaps especially if it led to convictions. But so would an adjournment, or sudden changes in the pleas, or anything else that stopped the trial from going ahead there and then. One more sleep.

Build Something Brighter

Ructions within the SDLP as it counts down to the existential crisis that would be a border poll. The implementation throughout a United Ireland of the National Health Service and of other social democratic and labour achievements would be an act of solidarity, but a United Ireland without those provisions would be unconscionable to any social democratic labourist. Similar things may be said about the IRSP and the Workers’ Party, but of course that is pretty much academic.

Meanwhile, the withdrawal of Scotland or Wales because of the voting habits of the majority of such people in England as voted at all, if that, would be the antithesis of solidarity, not least in its weakening of trade union negotiating power beyond even that which had already been inflicted by Blairite devolution. And people accustomed to the immensely generous public provision in Northern Ireland should join the Republic if, but only if, they could both preserve that for themselves and extend it to their islemates. Without that, and until it, they should join with comrades with Scotland and Wales to free the English from, for example, the prescription charges that no one else had to pay.