The Truth About The False Flags

Imagine that one of those released early from prison then did over Andy Burnham's house. Of course, that could never happen. But a "plot" to do it could be "foiled", and then blamed on Russia, or Iran, or whoever. That would be no more believable than either the RAF Fairford or the Flydubai story, but these things are not intended to be believed. Our rulers assert their dominance by forcing us to pretend to believe them. Resist. In particular, laugh at them. They really hate that.

Via the acquisition of Manchester City and its use to fund charities and community projects, Sheikh Mansour has effectively acquired the right-wing Labour elite in Greater Manchester. His brother is the Emir of Abu Dhabi, while his wife's father is the Emir of Dubai. Sheikh Mansour himself controls the UAE National Bank and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, chairs two of the UAE's sovereign wealth funds, and sits on the board of a third. Burnham was right the first time. A conurbation of three million people has been made largely dependent on the Emiratis. As have rather a lot of things in the United Kingdom.

Therefore, Burnham has had to go along with the frequently changing but always fanciful Israeli yarn about Flydubai, while some poor sap from the same notably well-to-do part of London as the Fairford Five has been picked up on account of his Iranian passport, although even he is also a British citizen, to keep up that preposterous pitch for a filmed farce, Five Lions as the sequel to Four Lions. But the connections between these two false flag operations are not incidental. The war in Iran, by planes flown from RAF Fairford and other nominally British "American forts", is the cause of the fuel shortage, and the fuel shortage has sent through the roof the theft of fuel from farms. And Britain is in that war, which it is, because we are governed by financial dependents of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. 

That is also why, in a nauseating act of pure sycophancy, Burnham has supplied a refuelling plane to a Saudi Arabia that already had its own, thereby gratuitously making Britain and British citizens potential targets of the Houthis and of all their many admirers. We must implore the good burghers of Holborn and St Pancras to elect George Galloway.

To Make A Real Difference

Larry Elliott is the best thing about The Guardian:

Andy Burnham does a nice line in nostalgia. His first party conference speech as prime minister was full of fond memories for the Britain of the 1950s and 1960s, when working-class families could sense their lives steadily getting better. The underlying message of his address was that, given time, he could rekindle that optimism and return the country to how it was before Margaret Thatcher wrecked everything.

Much of what Burnham says is true. The 1980s was a decade of deindustrialisation, asset-stripping and financial deregulation that has shaped modern Britain – and not in a good way.

But listen a bit more closely to the speech and it becomes clear that Burnham is struggling to find a way to turn back the clock. For a start, he might not be given time. Energy bills are forecast to rise sharply this winter. John Healey’s first budget, in less than a month’s time, is expected to raise taxes or cut spending – taking money out of an economy that is already struggling.

There’s no question that Burnham and Healey would prefer not to be taking these actions but feel they have no choice. Burnham may well rail against 40 years of neoliberalism. He may think neoliberalism was a dud. But his government is constrained by neoliberal ideas and the language used to express them. Burnham and Healey would never use this language themselves, but that’s irrelevant. To make a real difference, they need to tackle head-on the nostrums of the past four decades. Otherwise they will be forever in thrall to them.

Top of the list is the idea that the UK government is no different from a household. That means it should match its spending to its income as closely as possible, borrowing prudently and within tightly defined limits. Otherwise it will “max out the nation’s credit card” and risk spiralling into unsustainable debt.

This analogy has the benefit of sounding like a statement of the obvious to many voters, but is actually entirely false. There is no such thing as the nation’s credit card, and a country that prints its own currency can never “max out” or face bankruptcy in the way an individual can.

The notion that the government is living well beyond its means is convenient for those on the political right who have an aversion to public spending. The reality is that, as John Maynard Keynes once said: “Anything we can actually do we can afford.” It was that mentality that allowed the Attlee government to create the welfare state when debt was running at more than 250% of national income – more than double today’s level. I don’t know whether Burnham has seen the new play about Keynes in London’s West End, but it seems as if he ought to.

By the same token, it makes no sense to talk about “black holes” in the public finances every time the government looks on course to miss its targets for borrowing as set out in its fiscal rules. These rules are treated as totemic when in reality they can be changed at any time – and are ditched altogether when there is a crisis.

Again, the idea of a black hole is a convenient fiction for those with an interest in shrinking the size of the state. As with “maxing out the credit card”, it forms part of the inquisition every time a minister goes on the TV or radio with a new spending measure: “That’s all very well but how are you going to pay for it?”

Burnham is committed to reindustrialising Britain, but to do so he will have to break with the neoliberal convention that it is not the job of the government to pick winners. As the prime minister should point out, China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea have all built up their manufacturing strength by picking winners, and Britain could do the same. Indeed, the one sector that Thatcher picked out for special care and attention – financial services – has gone from strength to strength. Breaking the taboo on picking winners is central to a successful industrial strategy.

Last but not least, Burnham has to address Thatcher’s famous dictum: you can’t buck the market. A cursory glance back at recent economic history shows that governments buck the market all the time. In 2009, the Bank of England responded to the risk of a second Great Depression posed by the global financial crisis by buying government bonds. This provided money to the banking system while cutting the interest rate – or yield – on bonds. This was bucking the market. In 2020, the then Conservative government spent hundreds of billions on a furlough scheme that paid up to 80% of the wages of workers at risk of losing their jobs during the pandemic. This, too, was bucking the market.

So when Burnham, in his conference speech, harked back to the Britain in the immediate decades after the second world war, he missed out a key part of the reason working people felt things were getting better. Rather than being constrained by fiscal rules, governments were committed to full employment. Capital controls meant that financial markets were tightly controlled.

Before we get too nostalgic, it’s worth remembering that things were far from perfect in the so-called postwar golden age. By today’s standards, growth rates were spectacular, but they lagged well behind those of Germany and France. Even so, managed capitalism certainly delivered more for working people than has been the case in the unmanaged capitalism that has followed.

The postwar status quo has been turned on its head. Then, financial markets were caged to ensure that governments could pursue domestic economic goals. Now, governments are caged and the markets are free. It is a classic case of the tail wagging the dog.

Shifting back to a world where finance is fettered is not going to be easy – but until it happens, governments will remain boxed in. Burnham and Healey will be forced to do things they know will harm the economy because they know any deviation from what is acceptable to the received wisdom risks a backlash from the financial markets.

Some new economic thinking is required, and if ever there were a time for an iconoclast like Keynes, it is surely now. He would certainly have no truck with the wrong-headed economic policies of the past half-century and the seemingly commonsense phrases – such as maxing out the credit card – that have been used to disguise just how nonsensical they are.

All credit to Burnham. His analysis of what has gone wrong has clearly rattled his political enemies. Even so, he risks becoming the nearly man of British politics: the prime minister who asked the right questions but failed to come up with the right answers.

Factual Scrutiny

The first mention on this site of Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt and the Paedophile Information Exchange was 20 years ago this month, and this site first mentioned the close connection between Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein on 16 August 2019. So it is as a very accomplished rat-smeller that I hope that the Sunday People will look into the present state of the man known variously as Mark Standish, Alex Standish and Alex Cavendish, and who was once prolific on Twitter as @PrisonUK. The media should also check in on Ben Fellows. When Esther Rantzen supposedly discovered that at least one of her homes had been used at least once for the sexual abuse of at least one child, a girl of five, then her only concern was for her house.

Nor is my record of rat-smelling restricted to the detection of guilt. See Cardinal Pell, Julian Assange, Alex Salmond, Ched Evans, and the victims of Freya Heath, whose conviction was merely set aside on a procedural technicality. This has nothing to do with liking anyone. The beatification will presumably be the occasion of a Papal Visit to Australia, but if possible I shall be in Rome for the canonisation of Cardinal Pell. To keep Assange’s work going, I would have died in his stead. While I am opposed to the marrow of my bones to the political cause to which Salmond devoted his life, I expect that he and I would have got on. But Evans and I would find little to talk about, while Heath’s victims and I would have a very heated discussion indeed.

I am sure that would be able to stand no more than a few seconds in the company of Andrew Tate, and with two brothers I can scarcely find the words to describe the idea of any of the three of us as a fanboy of either of the others in the manner of Tristan Tate. But I cannot imagine that the United States would allow a white liberal American citizen to be treated as the Tates are being, and I would not be at all surprised if little or nothing came of this. Moreover, since no charge or even arrest has followed the alleged allegation against Bishop Robert Byrne CO, then it is fair to assume that there has never been a Police investigation into His Lordship. He should now sue every media outlet that had suggested that there was one. An Oratorian does not take a vow of poverty, and the English Oratories have friends who could afford any lawyer in London. I alone have publicly defended Bishop Byrne. I have done so from the very start, and I shall do so to my last breath. With all of that in mind, I am proud to bring you the words of the excellent Sohrab Ahmari and Valerie Stivers, to which the excellent Nikos Mohammadi contributed reporting:

May 15, 2025, was a bright day in New York. But all Scott Kretzschmar could see was the social and institutional black hole threatening to swallow his future. Kretzschmar, then a 20-year-old junior at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, was trying to tell his side of the story before a Zoom-based university disciplinary panel that had charged him with some of the most heinous violations on the books: the rape and sexual exploitation of a female student at his fraternity house, the Xi Chapter of Chi Phi — part of a case that has now garnered global headlines.

Kretzschmar’s lawyer, Jeremy Saland, spotted something curious: Savannah Bao, one of the panel members, was in a car, seatbelted, and apparently driving (since the shadows playing over her face were shifting). Saland immediately emailed a flurry of complaints to Lauren Branchini, the university’s Title IX coordinator — who was involved in the case because the allegations implicated the federal antidiscrimination law. Here was a university adjudicator apparently carrying on with her various casual life activities while being presented with evidence in a case that could destroy a young man’s life, branding him a “rapist” forever.

“Shame on Cornell,” Saland fumed in one email. “I certainly hope none of you, from the General Counsel to anyone on that panel, is wrongfully accused of wrongdoing or has a child wrongfully accused, and has an adjudicator so cavalier and flippant towards the rule of law.” Branchini, the Title IX coordinator, coldly acknowledged that Saland’s protests had been entered into the record, and that Cornell would preserve records for a possible appeal. In the end, Kretzschmar was exonerated of rape and sexual exploitation but found guilty of attempted sexual exploitation, a charge Cornell hadn’t notified him of, despite its legal obligation to do so.

The written record of the day’s hearing, reviewed by UnHerd and first reported here, opens a window onto the one-sided procedures used by universities to impose after-the-fact accountability on one group and only one — accused young men.

The case — popularly dubbed the “Cornell 7” after the seven accused men, including Kretzschmar — has gone viral since the accuser filed a civil suit against a host of defendants in mid-September. The young woman, referred to as “Jane Doe” in her complaint, is suing Cornell and several of its officials, three bodies associated with the young men’s fraternity, the sorority to which she belonged at the time, a bar in Ithaca, and the seven young men.

A manic rush to judgement has followed, one that is all too reminiscent of episodes such as the 2006 Duke lacrosse case and the controversy sparked by a 2014 Rolling Stone essay that alleged a heinous, hours-long gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity. Both of those earlier narratives ultimately unravelled under factual scrutiny, but not before upturning the lives of the accused and contributing to an atmosphere of paranoia and accusation on campus. 

The Cornell case has yet to be fully adjudicated. Yet already, the staff of The Cornell Daily Sun, the university’s main student publication, published an editorial headlined, “Cornell Won’t, We Will”, and doxxed the students. They wrote, “We refuse for this victim to be reduced to just another story. Cornell has failed to protect its students. Cornell has failed to address the growing issue of sexual assault on campus with its pathetic task force. Cornell has failed the student allegedly raped by those seven men at Chi Phi in October 2024. Cornell has failed her. Cornell has failed us.” The accused students’ likenesses have been shared as well on social media, often with instructions to “make their images and names known”, or even to “remove their heads in a public setting” (the latter post has received more than 140,000 “likes” on Instagram as of the time of writing).

According to Jane Doe’s civil suit, it all went wrong on the evening of October 19, 2024. That’s when the 20-year-old Cornell student headed, alone, to the Chi Phi Xi Chapter fraternity house after a night of drinking that had begun in her sorority house and continued on Ithaca’s downtown strip. There, Doe’s suit claims, she was “drugged and raped by multiple members of Chi Phi National’s fraternal organization”.

The allegations are appalling: at the Chi Phi Xi Chapter house, two Cornell fraternity brothers, Matthew Ingalls and Johnathan Newell, allegedly pressured Doe into snorting ketamine and engaged her in a threeway sexual encounter without her consent. Another young man, Gillio Lopes, allegedly dropped by and joined in the rape. Then, at 1:42 a.m., Newell sent a message to the fraternity Snapchat advertising “free pussy” and providing the girl’s location — a bedroom at the frat called “alumni room” — thus allegedly encouraging other young men to come and rape Doe. Four more young men — Diego Sarabia, Winston Lee, Scott Norris, and Kretzschmar — are alleged to have entered the room at some point in the evening and had various degrees of contact with Doe. In the most lurid detail, Newell allegedly forced Doe to snort ketamine off his erect penis; the other young men, including Kretzschmar, are accused of snorting lines of ketamine off her naked body.

Kretzschmar’s side of the story can be gleaned from an administrative appeal he lodged this year, challenging his disciplinary conviction for attempted sexual exploitation on procedural grounds. UnHerd reviewed, for the first time, documents from the appeal, which haven’t been posted to the New York court system’s online docket. He asserts that when he saw the “free pussy” message on the group chat, he stopped by the alumni room to make sure nothing “bad” was afoot. He also insists that, when he stepped in, Doe was in bed but under the covers. Kretzschmar’s legal team apparently also provided the school with the results of a hair-follicle test, which turned up negative for ketamine. (Hair-follicle tests generally detect drugs, including ketamine, up to four months after use.)

Eventually, most of the young men allegedly departed the scene, and Doe was allegedly removed to another room in the fraternity house, where she claims she was raped until 5:45 a.m. by two remaining men.

Several weeks later, Doe says, she went to the Cornell Police Department (a private force) to file a complaint about the incident. The Tompkins County District Attorney’s office, however, declined to prosecute. Cornell instituted Title IX disciplinary proceedings against the seven men, two of whom were eventually expelled; five others received consequences that included suspension, sexual-assault training, and essay-writing.

Doe herself left the school some time after the incident, which had become widely known on campus, according to a Cornell student who spoke to UnHerd on condition of anonymity. Doe didn’t complete her degree at Cornell.

The sexual activities described in the lawsuit — if they were non-consensual — are horrifying. Yet the same activities, conducted consensually, amount to a more complicated matter. And evidence, emerging in the days since the story of Doe’s lawsuit broke, has painted a much murkier picture than the one presented in her civil suit.

A statement provided to The New York Times by Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten summarises a “six page, single-spaced, typewritten statement”, amended with “more than 20 hand-written notations”, that was originally made by Jane Doe to campus security. Van Houten maintains that, based on the young woman’s statement, there were no legal grounds for criminal proceedings. Doe’s behaviour met the legal standards for consent in the state of New York, including voluntary consent to consume alcohol and drugs. Since then, and in response to the media brouhaha, his office has reopened a criminal investigation.

There are also many mitigating factors that cut in favour of the accused in Doe’s original complaint to Cornell police. The statement described “male number 1” — revealed in the later civil suit to be Ingalls — as her friend, with whom she had plans to meet. She rated her level of intoxication as “5 out of 10” upon arrival at the frat; said she agreed to the original threesome; agreed to take ketamine; and consented or declined consent to various sex acts. She snorted the line of ketamine off of the penis of “male number 2” because it was “implied” that he wanted her to; and she verbally consented to having other lines of ketamine snorted off her body. By the end of the evening, she reported, her level of intoxication was “8 out of 10”, and she found herself having sex with male number 1 and one other man, but couldn’t remember “how it started”.

The condition of the young men is not the focus of the statement, but the inability of “male number 1” to maintain an erection and need for a “nap” during the threesome, not to mention dry-heaving by “male number 2”, suggest that both of the original men in the scenario were also deeply impaired.

Other hallmarks of consent have also come to light, including a text message from Doe to one of the men in the days following the incident, in which she conceded that “non[e] of the sexual stuff was illegal” and suggested that they get together again, “but like leave out the extra 5 billion men and ketamine”. Doe’s attorney, Thomas Giuffra, confirmed to CBS News that she exchanged texts with a defendant, and suggested that her friendly tone was because she “was trying to find out what happened”. (Giuffra didn’t return UnHerd’s requests for comment.)

What happened to Doe was a tragedy. There is no question about that. The legal situation, however, is fairly clear: barring facts still to come to light, she was not sexually assaulted, not according to the legal definition under state law. Attempts to reopen the case would seem to be motivated by the eruption of public outrage. And Doe’s own civil claim makes the weak argument that she was “incapable of consent” due to intoxication, without presenting any of the standards of proof required, which go well beyond the simple fact of intoxication.

Even so, a young woman was involved in group sexual acts that she subsequently regretted, finding them alienating and degrading. In other words, Doe is mostly a victim of a campus sexual ethic that rests upon bare consent as its sole criterion of right and wrong. Try as they might — and they clearly did in this case, as will be seen, anon. — university and Greek-life officials can’t stop a student like Doe in her determination to drink away her own inhibitions and to place herself in sexually risky circumstances.

And Cornell did try. In 2022, the university established a special office that implements anti-sexual-violence training in fraternities. Four years earlier, it prohibited the consumption of hard alcohol in fraternity and sorority houses entirely. 

Doe managed to drink anyway. Even before she left her own sorority for the evening, according to her own suit, she drank Tito’s vodka. This, in blatant violation of both the campus prohibition against hard alcohol in Greek houses and the sorority’s own rules. Then, at the two events that she later attended in Ithaca, the private vendors took measures to identify her as underage, marking X’s on her hands and giving her an under-21 bracelet.

At one of the events, Doe’s sorority had designated “sober monitors” to surveil “their fellow sorority sisters for signs of excessive intoxication”, according to the civil suit. Once again, Doe continued to drink. We can implement ever stricter measures: this week, Ithaca’s mayor moved to ban Cornell student-event permits altogether. However, in a more or less free society, those who want to get intoxicated and have sex will find a way to do so; decades of efforts to prevent this have so far been in vain.

Which is why the solution is not law, but judgement: among the young men, yes, but also the young women and the wider culture. Our narrow view of sexual morality holds that anything goes as long as there is consent. According to both our cultural values and the law, a young woman can engage in sexual activity with seven frat boys, provided it’s what she wants. Bonnie Blue, to some, is a feminist icon. As a standard for sexuality, this shows extremely poor judgement, and it’s no wonder both young women and young men make terrible errors. 

Given this ethical culture, all the system can do is mete out after-the-fact punishment to young men. But the unfairness of these processes only compounds the aggregate injustice. 

Savannah Bao, the Cornell adjudicator, was driving for at least 45 minutes, according to Kretzschmar’s appeal of the panel’s decision. This, he charges, was during a crucial portion of the Zoom hearing, in which another of the accused Cornell men, Scott Norris, was offering testimony that Kretzschmar saw as exculpating him. 

Yet her driving was far from the only procedural defect in the hearing. Earlier that day, Saland complained in another email to the Title IX coordinator that Bao’s “glasses clearly reflected a blue box with a white background on her screen as her head and eyes moved back and forth” — that is, she was surfing other windows, rather than focusing on the matter at hand. (Cornell didn’t reply to UnHerd’s request for comment; nor did Bao.) 

An even more serious procedural defect was that Cornell struck Kretzschmar with a disciplinary conviction related to a charge he didn’t even know he was facing. The original charges against him, recall, were rape and sexual exploitation. These charges arose from Doe’s allegation that Kretzschmar had seen her naked and snorted ketamine off her body, both without her consent. 

But Kretzschmar insisted, and the hearing panel implicitly agreed, that he hadn’t taken either step: Doe was fully covered with sheets when Kretzschmar entered the alumni room. And the hair follicle test indicated that Kretzschmar hadn’t taken any ketamine, whether snorted from a woman’s body or otherwise. Thus, he was exonerated of both rape and sexual exploitation. 

But Cornell wasn’t done. In the end, as noted, the school convicted Kretzschmar of attempted sexual exploitation solely because he had visited the alumni room after seeing the Snapchat messages and because of his own message to the group (“the alumni shit is not a bit. . . .”). Kretzschmar, the panel contended, “understood that a female was likely nude and/or engaged in sexual activity in the alumni room . . . and entered the room on that basis, intending to observe the same.” 

But Kretzschmar wasn’t, beforehand, apprised of the attempted charge, which is its own separate offence category in the university’s policies. Therefore, neither he nor his counsel could have prepared for or attempted to refute it: “attempt”, after all, has elements other than exploitation proper. Under Cornell policies, the attempt charge involves conduct “tending toward completion of the prohibited conduct”. As Saland, his lawyer, argued in the administrative appeal of the panel’s determination, “had Cornell informed [Kretzschmar] that he was being charged with Attempted Sexual Exploitation, … he would have focused his defense, arguments, questions as to witnesses, and review of the investigative file towards” disproving attempt. 

But Cornell denied him such notice, leaving him and his counsel helpless before what amounted to a legal switcheroo. This was, without a doubt, a grave violation of his right to due process and even of Cornell’s own rules — with which, courts in New York have repeatedly held, the university was obligated to comply. 

This is not a failure of any one institution, but of all of them. The university kangaroo court trampled on procedure and possibly the truth to achieve an ideological vision of justice. The court of public opinion has done the same. The police and prosecutors held firm at first, but since a new criminal case has been opened, we don’t know what the future holds. Both the young woman and the young men were ill-served by a culture that told them that in some situations, their behaviour was desirable. Both have had their college experience and lives derailed. 

The American university — and, indeed, US society writ large — desperately needs a new sexual ethic. It won’t do to punish only one side of the sexual equation, young men, especially not in procedurally deficient quasi-trials that bring shame to a rule-of-law society. The public is angry for reasons that no criminal process, no lawsuit, and no administrative hearing can fix.

The baleful influence of cultural pornogrofication is just as pronounced on this side of the Atlantic, as Ben Rumsby writes:

David Sullivan is suing the BBC for £150m over accusations of sexual misconduct made against him in a Panorama documentary. Telegraph Sport can reveal West Ham United’s co-owner is on the brink of lodging a High Court claim for libel and aggravated damages almost three months after the airing of Predator: The Billionaire Football Boss.

Sullivan revealed two days before the programme that he would be “suing the BBC for libel” in a statement in which he also announced his resignation as co-chairman and director of West Ham. The 77-year-old, who made his fortune in the porn industry, continues to own 38.8 per cent of the club shareholding. The BBC was already facing a $10bn (£7.56bn) lawsuit from Donald Trump over a 2024 episode of Panorama that edited together two different sections of a speech he gave before the 2021 Capitol riots. The corporation has previously apologised for the edit but denied it was grounds for defamation.

In the June 8 programme about Sullivan, seven women – six of them anonymous – accused him of abuses of power against vulnerable people in a “casting couch” style situation. Panorama had been working with The Times newspaper for two years before broadcasting. It reported on allegations made by former models who were in their late teens or early 20s seeking work at Sullivan’s Daily Sport and Sunday Sport newspapers. According to its reporting, Sullivan pressured women into having sex or oral sex by promising it would help their careers. Prior to the programme, Sullivan issued a statement calling the accusations against him “entirely false” and the reporting of them “sensationalised”.

“I have not been provided with any proper explanation as to how these individuals or their claims were independently verified or assessed for credibility prior to publication,” he said. “I believe that the entire process has been fundamentally unfair and completely lacking in any due impartiality.” He added: “I am stepping down to apply my full energy and attention on fighting these false allegations. I have officially engaged my legal team and we are preparing to issue legal proceedings in respect of each and every false complaint that has been made against me. I will be seeking full redress, legally and publicly, on every single front.”

After the documentary aired, Telegraph Sport reported that police investigations going back 18 years into sexual misconduct claims against Sullivan had been dropped without charge. Separate claims raised with detectives in 2008, 2021 and 2023 failed to yield any prosecutions after investigations primarily involving Essex Police. Telegraph Sport previously disclosed how the Football Association had taken safeguarding action against Sullivan three years earlier, preventing him having contact with West Ham’s women’s and youth teams. Sullivan denied the measure amounted to a “disciplinary ban” and described it as a “temporary agreement” pending the resolution of an “anonymous complaint regarding an event in 1981”. “The complaint had nothing to do about my time in football and it never happened,” he added.

Also named in the Panorama programme was Tony Livesey, who left the BBC last month. Livesey, who was editor-in-chief of the Daily Sport and Sunday Sport and subsequently had a 16-year career at Radio 5 Live, temporarily stepped down in June. The 62-year-old did so after Panorama said he had set up a meeting between a glamour model and Sullivan in the 1990s. Livesey said he had “no recollection” of introducing the young woman to Sullivan, who also denied any wrongdoing. The programme additionally claimed that Livesey had come up with the idea of “Countdown to 16”, a Sport feature chronicling how long before a teenage model turned 16, the age at which they could legally be pictured topless for the first time.

Last month, Sullivan ignored pleas to stay away from the London Stadium when he took his seat in the stands for West Ham’s Carabao Cup first-round win over Portsmouth. Venue operators and the West Ham Fan Advisory Board had both asked Sullivan not to attend amid fears over supporter unrest. Sullivan and the BBC have been approached for comment.

There Is A Better Path

If Brexit had changed anything, then Paul Knaggs would now be one of the best-known and most respected commentators in the country:

On 18 May, a month before the Makerfield by-election, Andy Burnham stood at the Great North summit in Leeds and made a promise aimed squarely at the Leave-voting seat he needed to win. “I am not proposing that the UK considers rejoining the EU,” he said. He went further: “I respect the decision that was made at the referendum”, adding that failing to respect that vote would undermine everything he had said about strengthening democracy. It was a good promise. It had the ring of a man who had spent ten years watching Westminster treat the largest democratic vote in British history as a clerical error awaiting correction, and had decided he wanted no part of it. It lasted a little over four months then Any picked off the Brexit Scab.

On Tuesday in Liverpool, the Prime Minister told conference that “Brexit has done more harm than good” and promised to lay out “the different options” for Britain’s long-term relationship with Europe. On Wednesday morning, Radio 4’s Today programme asked him plainly whether he wanted Britain to rejoin. He would not say. He listed the choices instead: stay as we are, a customs union, the single market, “or we could go all the way.” Asked whether an in-out referendum could appear in Labour’s next manifesto, he said it would not be right now, then added: “Yes, things are possible.”

So what changed between Leeds and Liverpool? Not the referendum. Not the people of Makerfield, who live where they lived in May. Not Europe’s economy, which has not improved. What changed is that their votes are banked. Burnham won the seat with 24,927 votes; four days later Keir Starmer resigned, and Burnham was elected unopposed to the Labour leadership. In his speech, Burnham praised the working-class aspiration of his own family, a desire “to get on and give back, never pulling up the ladder.” Makerfield was his ladder. Nobody there should be surprised to hear it creaking as it is hauled up behind him. Nor was the May promise a conviction suddenly abandoned. It was a pause. At the previous year’s conference, he had told a Guardian podcast that he hoped to see Britain rejoin the European Union in his lifetime. The Makerfield pledge was not a change of heart. It was a change of audience.

THE BEST SPEECH IN YEARS, WITH THE WRONG ENDING 

Be fair to what came before the Brexit passage, because most of it was the most serious socialist programme a Labour leader has put to conference in a generation. Burnham promised to repeal Margaret Thatcher’s ban on public ownership of water companies. He announced a publicly owned Great British Grid to take on the private operators. He pledged the biggest council house programme since the post-war era, with Right to Buy stripped from new homes so they stay public for good. He promised councils the power to seize empty homes and those left to rot by absent landlords living off housing benefit. He promised to change government procurement “so that it backs British business, as our trade unions have rightly pushed us to do,” and spoke of “the re-industrialisation of our regions.”

He also delivered the best line of the week: “The British Right talk about ‘taking back control’. Never let them forget, they are the ones that gave it away in the first place.” He was right, and more right than he knew. Water, energy, rail, housing: all sold, and all under Conservative governments that preached national sovereignty while auctioning off the nation. But the Right gave control away twice over. It was Edward Heath’s Conservative government that took Britain into the Common Market on 1 January 1973. Labour opposed it, although 69 Labour rebels led by Roy Jenkins trooped through the lobby with Heath. It was Margaret Thatcher who signed the Single European Act that built the single market. And it was John Major who signed the Maastricht Treaty that turned the Common Market into the European Union in 1993.

Each time, the Labour left said no. Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Barbara Castle, Peter Shore and Dennis Skinner fought the 1975 referendum on the side of Out. When Maastricht came before the Commons, Benn, Shore and Skinner voted against it. They were not little Englanders. They were the people who built the welfare state, ran the nationalised industries and understood something the modern party has forgotten: the privatisations at home and the treaties abroad were two halves of the same project, moving economic decisions beyond the reach of the voter. This publication was founded on their argument. Burnham has quoted the first half of it to conference. He has yet to learn the second. Every promise in his speech rests on one assumption: that a British Parliament, answerable to British voters, is free to make it. Free to own, to subsidise, to plan, to favour home production, to tell a failing monopoly it has had its chance. Burnham spent most of an hour making the case for that freedom. Then, in the final minutes, he put it on the table.

THE CASE FOR GOING BACK, STATED FAIRLY 

The Rejoin argument deserves a fair hearing, because parts of it are true. The frictions are real. Small exporters who once traded easily with Europe now face paperwork, border checks and qualifications no longer automatically recognised. That was the complaint put by a Liberal Democrat panellist on BBC Question Time, who cited Frontier Economics estimates that closer ties could return £20 billion to £27 billion a year to the economy. The Office for Budget Responsibility still assumes Brexit will leave productivity around 4 per cent lower in the long run. And the deal Boris Johnson signed was a Tory Brexit, deregulatory and careless, not the Brexit the North voted for. Burnham adds immigration, claiming that control weakened when Britain lost its collaboration with European partners. Of course, no one seems to remember the boats started crossing while we were in the EU, just after improvements ended the illegal entry via lorries. But let’s grant much of this. Then look at what the remedies actually require.

Trade frictions can be eased by agreement: a veterinary deal, mutual recognition of qualifications, cooperation on energy and research. None of it requires surrendering the right to make our own laws. And on immigration, Burnham’s own speech demolishes his argument. He told conference that small boat arrivals are down 40 per cent on last year and that net migration has fallen by more than 80 per cent since the peak of the Johnson era. That fall happened outside the European Union, through decisions taken by a British government. The surge before it was also a British decision, taken in Whitehall under Johnson’s points-based system. Control was never lost. It was misused, and then it was used again. That is what sovereignty is: the power to get things wrong, and the power to put them right, both answerable at the ballot box.

THE EUROPE WE WOULD BE REJOINING 

On Question Time, Andrew Neil put the point the Westminster class keeps dodging. British politicians, he said, talk as if the Europe we left in 2016 were the Europe of today. It is not. In 2016, François Hollande was president of France, Angela Merkel was chancellor of Germany and Matteo Renzi was prime minister of Italy. “That’s a different Europe,” Neil said, and he was right. Italy has been governed since 2022 by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. In Germany, the AfD remains the strongest party in YouGov’s September poll on 29 per cent, while the CDU/CSU has fallen to a historic low of 18 per cent. In France, the National Rally leads the race for next spring’s presidential election; Ifop polling put Marine Le Pen on 32 per cent in the first round and Jordan Bardella on 35 to 37 per cent.

Neil overstated the economics. The year-by-year record is patchier than he suggested, and the euro area as a whole, carried by Spain and others, has grown a little faster than Britain since the pandemic. UK GDP in the second quarter of 2026 was 6.3 per cent above its pre-pandemic level, against 7.6 per cent for the eurozone. But his central point holds where it matters. Germany, the industrial engine Burnham wants us hitched to, is just 1.9 per cent above its pre-pandemic level, the lowest in the G7. For 2026, the OECD forecasts UK growth of 1.1 per cent, equal with Germany, with France lowest in the G7 at 0.4 per cent. Whatever is holding Britain back, it is not a shortage of access to a German economy that has barely grown in six years. Since the referendum, real GDP growth has been:

UK +13.2% 

France +12.8% 

Italy +10.7% 

Germany +7.8% 

Spain +21.5% 

Some will say Britain has its own insurgent Right, and it does. Reform leads many of our polls. But that is exactly the point. Whatever you think of Nigel Farage, British voters can remove him. They cannot remove a government in Berlin, Paris or Rome that helps write the laws Britain would live under. Tony Benn put five questions to anyone who holds power. What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you? Michael Foot made the same argument in 1975. You could vote out the government here, he warned, but you would not be voting out all the governments that meet in Brussels to decide what happens to us. The people who fought for the vote, for the unions and for an elected Commons did not do it so that the Commons could become one voice among twenty-eight.

THE LEVERS LABOUR WOULD GIVE AWAY 

On the Today programme, Burnham read out his options like a man reading a menu with the prices torn off. Each option costs something, and each costs something different. A customs union means accepting the EU’s common external tariff and giving up the freedom to strike trade deals elsewhere, without regaining the vote Britain once had over EU trade policy. Single market membership means aligning with a vast body of rules on goods, services, subsidies and procurement, written in rooms where Britain no longer sits. Full membership restores a seat at the table, but a seat is not a veto. Most single market law is decided by majority, so Britain would be bound by decisions it voted against, along with the Common Agricultural Policy and a trade policy run from Brussels. Every option trades market access, national discretion and shared decision-making against one another. For a Prime Minister who has made restoring public control the centrepiece of his programme, that trade-off should have been the first thing he explained. He did not mention it.

Rejoiners will reply that EU law does not forbid public ownership, and in the narrow sense they are right. The treaties are neutral on who owns a company. What they are not neutral about is what a publicly owned company may do. Single market law exists to keep markets open to private competitors, and a public enterprise that closes one is a problem to be corrected. France learned this with EDF, the public electricity giant built in 1946 from 1,700 private firms. From 1999, Brussels directives forced its monopoly open in stages until the whole market was liberalised in 2007. When private rivals still could not compete with the price of nuclear power the French public had already paid for, France was pressed into a law forcing EDF to sell up to 100 TWh a year, around a quarter of its nuclear output, to rival suppliers at a regulated price. In the 2022 energy crisis that cap was raised to 120 TWh while nuclear output collapsed, forcing EDF to buy power at up to €1,000 per megawatt hour to supply its own competitors. The public owner carried the losses. The private rivals kept the cheap power. Paris renationalised EDF in 2023 and it made no difference: the scheme ran to the end of 2025.

Rail is worse. Under the EU’s Fourth Railway Package, the option to directly award public service rail contracts ended in December 2023, with competitive tendering becoming the norm, and the Commission is now taking the Netherlands to the Court of Justice for handing its core network to the state operator, NS, without a tender. Labour’s Great British Railways is doing exactly what the Dutch did: bringing services back into public hands as contracts expire. Inside the Union, that would be an infringement case waiting to happen. In energy, the EU’s unbundling rules separate ownership of the grid from generation and supply, so a Great British Grid that generated its own power to undercut the private suppliers would be fighting its own regulator. Water is the exception, because Brussels never liberalised it. Everything else Burnham promised runs into the same wall. The state may own. It may not prefer.

The same logic reaches into the procurement promise Burnham credited to the unions. In 2008, the European Court of Justice ruled on a prison built for the German state of Lower Saxony. The state’s law required contractors on public works to pay at least the local collectively agreed building wage. The contractor engaged a Polish sub-contractor, which paid below that rate. When the state cancelled the contract, the court found it had not been entitled to impose the collective-agreement wage on contractors from other member states. That judgment followed the court’s rulings in the Viking and Laval cases months earlier, which set limits on unions’ right to strike against employers moving work across borders. Freedom to provide services outranked the rate for the job. The single market was built for the market, not the public.

Brussels itself has lately discovered the virtue of buying local. In March, the Commission presented its Industrial Accelerator Act, introducing “Made in EU” procurement preferences, faster permitting and new investment controls for strategic sectors. Inside the Union, Britain would get a preference for European goods, not British ones, under rules shaped by the bloc’s dominant economies. Clement Attlee, whom Labour invokes so readily, warned the House of Lords in August 1962 that by marrying into Europe we would be marrying “a whole family of ancient prejudices and ancient troubles.” He would rather, he said, work for an Atlantic organisation, or a world one. He was the man who built the welfare state, and he understood that you cannot plan an economy whose rules are written elsewhere.

Reindustrialisation, which Burnham rightly calls for, means building here the things we use here. For forty years we have been told that cheap imports are a gift to the consumer. They are cheap for the retailer and the importer, who pocket the margin, while the making is done by poorly paid workers abroad and the bill is paid in towns like Ashton-in-Makerfield and Hindley, where the factories used to be. Reversing that takes a state willing to favour home production, to plan, and to hold its nerve. It does not take permission. Aneurin Bevan saw the trap in 1957. He described the Common Market as an escapist conception, one in which the play of market forces would take the place of political responsibility, “A political malaise following upon the failure of Socialists to use the sovereign power of their parliaments to plan their economic life.”

Rejoining is the modern version of that escape: reaching for Brussels rules as a substitute for the political will to plan at home. And the terms would not be the old ones. Even the Liberal Democrats’ own Europe spokesperson, Al Pinkerton, conceded last week that Britain would be treated as a fresh entrant. No rebate. No opt-outs. The euro is a treaty obligation for every state that has joined since Maastricht; only Denmark has a formal exemption, and Britain’s died the day we left. Sweden avoids it by never quite meeting the criteria. That is the best a rejoining Britain could hope for: a currency it does not want, deferred by fudge.

FOM 

Then there is freedom of movement, which no customs union or single market deal comes without. The people who miss it most are the people it cost least. For the professional classes it meant a cosmopolitan Europe of easy weekends and cheap au pairs. For the North of England it meant something else: a labour market where a builder in Wigan, a van driver in Leigh or a waiter in Ashton was put in open competition with workers from countries where wages were a fraction of ours, and told to celebrate it. The Bank of England’s own research found the effect on pay was small overall and fell hardest on semi-skilled and unskilled service jobs. That is a polite way of saying it fell on the people who were not asked. The Polish builder was never the enemy. The system that set him and the Wigan builder racing each other to the bottom was, and the people who built that system called anyone who objected a bigot. 

Whose definition of a woman?

There is one more divergence that the middle-class Remain campaign never mentions, because it embarrasses them. On 16 April 2025, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in For Women Scotland that the words “sex”, “woman” and “man” in the Equality Act mean biological sex. A woman is an adult human female. A refuge, a changing room, a hospital ward or a prison wing marked “women” can once again mean what it says. That judgment was the fruit of years of work by women, many of them Labour and trade union women, who were vilified by their own parties for saying what every one of their grandmothers knew.

Brussels has gone the other way. On 11 February this year, the European Parliament adopted a resolution by 340 votes to 141, with 68 abstentions, which among other things urged the Council to “emphasise the importance of the full recognition of trans women as women”, describing their inclusion as essential to any gender equality or anti-violence policy. A month later, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that member states cannot refuse to amend a citizen’s recorded gender where doing so interferes with free movement rights, and trans campaigners hailed it as a precedent that recognising gender identity is a fundamental right within the EU. Legal scholars at Bristol have since argued that the understanding of sex in the Equality Act, as a binary biological characteristic, is diametrically opposed to the approach adopted under EU law, and that the Court’s rulings can be read as its answer to our Supreme Court.

The Parliament’s resolution is not binding, and Remainers will say so. But that misses how the Union works. EU equality law is supreme over national law wherever it applies, and the Court of Justice, not the Supreme Court, would have the final word on what “sex” means in the directives that govern pay, work and access to goods and services. A Labour government that took Britain back inside would be asking the women who fought and won at the Supreme Court to submit their victory to a court in Luxembourg and a parliament in Strasbourg that have already told them they lost. The Tribune has never hedged on this. Women’s rights and dignity rest on biological sex, and the women who defended that principle inside the Labour movement, against their own leadership, their own executive committees and in some cases their own unions, deserve better than to have the ground taken from under them by a treaty. They are still fighting. The Supreme Court did not end the argument in the party; it only proved the women were right. Rejoining would reopen it with the other side holding the whip hand.

REOPENING THE WOUND

Burnham opened his speech with a promise: “Today we draw a line on a decade of division.” In May, he warned that Britain would be stuck in a permanent rut if politicians kept rerunning the old arguments. He was right both times. He has now done the opposite of what he promised. He has not proposed rejoining, which would at least be honest. He has proposed an options paper, a search for a “consensus” he has not defined, and a referendum that is not right now but possibly later. It is the worst of every world. Business gets the years of uncertainty he warned against. Leave voters get proof that their vote was only ever provisional. 

And Nigel Farage gets the gift of a lifetime. He will have felt the sense of betrayal rippling through the Labour constituencies of the North the moment Burnham said “all the way,” because he has built a career on it. These are seats that voted Leave by margins Westminster still cannot fathom, and they did not do it out of nostalgia. They did it because forty years of membership had failed them, and they knew it. Wigan, Barnsley, Doncaster, Hartlepool, Mansfield: the mines, the steelworks and the mills closed while Britain was inside the Common Market and the single market, and neither stopped a single closure. Regional grants arrived with the EU flag on them, and the towns still emptied. When those voters were finally asked, in 2016, whether the arrangement had worked for them, they answered honestly. Burnham, who represents one of those seats, has just told them the question is open again. Farage will not need to write a leaflet. Burnham has written it for him. 

There is a better path, and it runs through the rest of Burnham’s own speech. Take back the water. Build the grid. Build the council homes. Rewrite procurement so that public money builds British industry and pays the rate for the job. Negotiate practical cooperation with Europe on trade frictions, energy and research, on its merits, as a sovereign neighbour rather than an applicant. And if the Prime Minister truly believes Britain should rejoin, he should say so plainly, put it in a manifesto, and go back to Makerfield to explain why the promise he made there no longer holds.  Labour MPs in Leave seats should be asking him that now. So should the trade unions that fought for a procurement system that backs British workers, because that is exactly the power this debate puts at risk. Burnham told conference that the Right gave control away, and he was right. The test of a socialist is not whether he can say so. It is whether, having finally won that control back, he can resist the urge to give it away again. Makerfield kept its side of the bargain. Four months on, it is entitled to ask whether Burnham ever meant to keep his.

March Heirs?

Last night, the return of Blue Lights showed the Loyalists teaming up with Tricolour-waving Rightists from Dublin, to attack an immigration centre in Belfast. What integration. But of course it was made when such alliances really were in full swing. Down in Drumcree, three dozen bowler-hatted octogenarians have set the whole thing back 30 years.

Are those old boys still there, waiting to march? Will Jamie Bryson guarantee the future of such events by joining the Orange Order? It struck and awarded Siege of Drumcree medals last time, so would anyone criminally convicted of participation in the Garvaghy Road protests wear that, too, as a badge of honour, perhaps literally?

And straight into Stormont, might Breandán Mac Cionnaith be the first Éirígí candidate elected to anything and the first to try since 2019, with Bryson as the initially Independent focal point for a wholesale realignment of Unionism? The Drumcree medal was presented to Bryson on 25 August, although he was a small child during the Siege and he is not a member of the Orange Order. Think on.

A Talking Dog, An Obscene Vegetable

While I always opposed the release of Myra Hindley, I always thought that if she did have to be freed, then that should have been on the day after Lord Longford had died, but not a day before; in the end, she predeceased him. Similarly, while I could not be more strongly opposed to the legalisation of assisted suicide, if that had to be done, then it should be done now that Esther Rantzen was already dead.

Rantzen tried to pull the oldest trick in the manipulator’s book, that of being at death’s door for years on end. It was a fitting end to her life. At least one of her homes was used at least once for the sexual abuse of at least one child, a girl of five, while if you look at the sheer number of media, and especially BBC, figures to have been found to have committed such offences, then it beggars belief that none such was ever reported to Childline. With whom was that Information Exchanged?

And So Has Potency

I have never taken any illegal drug, yet I still have all and sundry wrong with me. Hey ho, having supported William Hague for Leader, under that Leadership the Daily Telegraph supported the legalisation of cannabis, along with same-sex marriage and a fully elected second chamber, all three of which were fiercely ruled out by the Labour Government of the day. But now, Sarah Knapton writes:

Cannabis users are twice as likely to carry out violent acts, a review by King’s College London has found. An analysis of 63 studies, involving more than 265,000 people, found a strong link between violence and cannabis, with users both more likely to physically harm others and suffer abuse themselves. The research showed that cannabis users were also three to four times more likely to have committed violence that led to a criminal conviction compared with non-users.

Experts said the Government should be aware of the drug’s links to violence in light of ongoing pressure to legalise cannabis, including support from Lord Khan, the Mayor of London, and Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader. Although the review cannot prove that cannabis is the definite cause of the increased violence, experts from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) said the drug may induce paranoia, which could lead to feelings of anxiety and threat.

Prof Sir Robin Murray, of the IoPPN at King’s, said: “If cannabis does play a causal role, the most likely mechanism is that, as we know, heavy use of cannabis is associated with paranoia. Users are therefore more likely to misinterpret the actions or speech of others and conclude that they have bad intentions towards them. They may then attack people, believing they are protecting themselves. As cannabis becomes more commercialised and legalised around the world, the conversation about its risks has focused mostly on the person using it. This review shows that violence, both committing it and experiencing it, needs to be part of that conversation too.”

Lord Khan, Mr Polanski and Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, have all backed the decriminalisation of cannabis for personal use. Countries including Canada, Austria, Italy, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Estonia, Germany, Israel, South Africa, Switzerland, Malta, have all legalised, or decriminalised, cannabis for personal use, as well as 31 states of the United States. Many believe legalisation disrupts the criminal market, allows the drug to be taxed and encourages greater regulation and safety, while freeing up the police. However, opponents warn that there is little evidence that making cannabis legal stops black market suppliers and argue it tends to lead to stronger drugs, which can trigger mental health issues, including psychosis and schizophrenia.

Legalisation ‘makes drug stronger’

In parts of the US where cannabis has been legalised, it is now possible to obtain the drug with more than 80 per cent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) – the active ingredient. In the UK, average street cannabis has about 16 per cent. “My personal view is that wherever cannabis has been legalised in the Western world, use has increased, and so has potency,” added Sir Robin. The new research showed that people who used cannabis were also around one and a half times as likely to be victims of violence. The link was stronger for women than for men. The team’s definition of violence included physical, sexual and psychological violence towards another person, both within relationships and outside them.

For those in psychiatric care, cannabis users were around two and a half times as likely to be violent as other psychiatric patients who did not use cannabis. Dr Marta Di Forti, co-author of the study, said: “As a clinician, I’ve seen how heavy cannabis use can be a factor in violence. We’ve been cautious for a long time about how far we could go in describing this link, but a review of this size lets us speak with more confidence about the risks, while being careful not to stigmatise people who use cannabis more broadly.” 

Britain allows the legal use of cannabis on medical prescription for certain conditions. Some experts warned that the link between cannabis and violence may be caused by the environment that users often lived in, rather than the drug itself. Prof Simon Moore, director of the violence research group at Cardiff University, said: “The review cannot say whether cannabis itself or the environments in which it is used explain the violence. Because cannabis remains illegal in most jurisdictions, and illegal markets bring users into contact with people and places where violence is more likely, this omission is notable.” The research was published in the journal Psychological Medicine.

There cannot be a “free” market in general, yet not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today.

We need a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of two years for a first offence, three years for a second offence, four years for a third offence, and so on. I no longer believe in prison sentences that included the possibility of release in less than 12 months; in that case, then your crime was not bad enough to warrant imprisonment, which the possession of drugs is. We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one’s premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. And we need Peter Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought to be taught in schools.