Friday, 14 February 2025

Hearts and Flowers

What is all the fuss about having "booked a table" for this evening? How do you know that she even likes snooker? And why send flowers to women who were still alive? In any case, not all roses are red. And violets are violet. So there.

The Flower-Crowned Skull of Saint Valentine may be venerated at the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, in Rome. Far more edifying than anything else today, as I am sure that we can all agree. Ora pro nobis.

Thursday, 13 February 2025

Stand With Chris Nineham

Chris Nineham's bail restrictions were lifted today, so he will be on Saturday's march in London. Be there if you can.

Chris will also be at Newcastle University's Herschel Building LT2, opposite Haymarket Metro, this coming Tuesday from 5:30 to seven o'clock, as one of several speakers on Ukraine. All welcome, no need to pre-book. I have a heavy day, but I shall be there if at all possible.

Happy Birthday, Rachel Reeves

Yes, really. 46 today. Blaming the staff is cheap, but technically five and a half years is "the better part of a decade". Take out Rachel Reeves's study leave, though, and she was at the Bank of England for less than five years, so her repeated and sometimes scripted use of the term was a lie. Her claim to have "spent a decade" there was plainly and simply false. Once she had moved to HBOS, from late 2008 she was required to account for her expenses every month, in person. In May 2009, she was sacked. Her CV claimed that she had left HBOS that December, but in fact she appears to have been unemployed for a year before her election to Parliament in May 2010. Once there, her parliamentary credit card was suspended because she had overspent by four thousand pounds. She is now the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is no wonder that the British economy grew by only 0.1 per cent in the final quarter of 2024, that Britain is probably in recession now, and that the crucial measure of GDP per capita has just fallen for the sixth time in the last eight quarters. Reeves is still in office because there is no one else.

After all, look at the First Lord of the Treasury. Under Keir Starmer, the Crown Prosecution Service withheld from the Criminal Cases Review Commission the evidence that would have freed Andrew Malkinson 13 years before his conviction was quashed. There is no doubt about that. It is a matter of record. Why, then, has Starmer not been arrested? Does someone have to call the Police? If so, then Mr Malkinson should do it now that his compensation threatened to deprive him of his social housing. Since he took it in public, when shall we see the results of Starmer's HIV test? Has such a test been taken by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Latin America and the Caribbean, Baroness Chapman of Darlington, with whom Starmer has a child?

Then there is Starmer's close friend ally, and constituency neighbour, Tulip Siddiq, who remains in receipt of the Labour Whip despite the United Nations Human Rights Office's devastating report into the Awami League, her aunt's political party, which Siddiq has represented officially at and to the UN. Right-wing Labourites are normally very particular indeed about having links only to narrowly defined "sister parties" abroad. The Awami League is not one of those. It is not even nominally Socialist, or anything like that. If Siddiq is a member of it, then how is that compatible with membership of the Labour Party? The Awami League has huge influence over the Labour Party in Camden.

Not that foreign influence over British political parties is particularly unusual. The one that today's polls would give an overall majority sells itself quite explicitly as the way to vote for Donald Trump. That said, Nigel Farage, flanked by Richard Tice, yesterday called for NATO membership for Ukraine. Vote for Reform UK, and you would be voting for that. Its parting of the ways with Rupert Lowe can only be a matter of time now that he has not only agreed that Stephen Yaxley-Lennon was a political prisoner, but also turned out to have solar panels on his farm. Reform's preferred guest of His Majesty would be Pavlo Lapshyn, who in 2013 murdered 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham, before putting bombs outside three mosques in this country. Lapshyn 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.

Uniquely entitled to Universal Credit from the moment that they set foot here, these people would certainly not be easier to integrate than Palestinians, among whom even the Hamas supporters are enemies of the al-Qaeda and so-called Islamic State entities that committed acts of Islamist terrorism in Britain. Yesterday in the House of Lords, the Government's ban on citizenship for refugees who "had made a dangerous journey", and its introduction of that change without reference to Parliament, proved too much even for David Blunkett. As we pondered our peace dividend of three billion pounds per year for the next 100 years from the end of the Second Crimean War, think on.

We Can Also Get It Back In A Generation


Perhaps only England could make its politician of the moment a woman who died more than a decade ago. Yet turn on Channel 4 and watch Margaret Thatcher: the drama. Radio 4 offers Margaret Thatcher: the play, while soon you can enjoy Thatcher: the opera. For those who can’t wait, there’s Thatcher: the news story, as the British media celebrates 50 years this week since she was crowned Tory leader. 

Such pieces are reliably more fascinated by how she looked (Shoulder pads! Handbag! Blond halo!) than what she did. So let me tell you a story about one of Thatcher’s deeds that shapes how we live today. Rather than some dusty tale dug out of the archive, it’s unfolding right now. And you won’t have seen it in any other newspaper.

At its heart is that flagship of Thatcherism: the right to buy. Her single biggest privatisation, it allowed tenants of homes built and owned by the public to buy them at a bargain price. Launched in 1980, the policy remains in force today – although its heyday was thought to be long past. Until, that is, Keir Starmer became prime minister.

Among the first acts of Starmer’s government was to slash the discount available to council tenants wanting to buy their homes. In London, the cut is especially sharp: before the deadline of 21 November 2024, the markdown could be as much as £136,400; now it is £16,000. It’s a good move, squeezing demand and all but choking Thatcher’s policy to death. It’s also a dramatic move – but just how dramatic is not public. To find out, I sent freedom of information requests to every London council.

You may think you know what’s coming next. Perhaps you figure that, as the deadline loomed, there was a stream of interest. Wrong: there was no stream; there was a deluge.

Of the 32 London boroughs, 27 responded. After analysing their results, I can reveal:

  • Brent saw a more than 7,000% rise in right-to-buy (RTB) applications in November over the month before; in Lambeth and Camden, it was more than 2,000%, for Southwark, 1,500%.
  • November’s flood of applications means Lewisham is dealing with more bids this financial year than it received in the previous four years put together, while Hackney is managing the equivalent of more than three years’ worth of would-be buyers.
  • Islington got 922 RTB applications in November alone, where it would normally expect closer to 200 over an entire year.
  • With months still left of this financial year, London authorities have together already received 3.5 times the RTB applications they got last year.

Whether north or south of the river, inner city or outer suburb, the pattern is unmistakable and stark. Battered by years of cuts, besieged by the spending pressures local authorities now face, as I heard on phone call after phone call, there has been “an explosion” in applications; a “staggering” number of bids; “unprecedented” demand. Just look at this chart, and the map, showing right-to-buy applications over the course of this year. They basically flatline until November – then they rocket.

At London’s largest council landlord, Southwark, where more than 1,300 bids flooded in over the first three weeks of November, they’re drafting in extra staff to handle the fraud checks and other formalities, so the team can swell to twice its usual size. Despite that and the legal deadlines, they told me they estimate it will take more than 19 weeks simply to get through the first stages.

What these boroughs are describing is low-level chaos, and it is by no means confined to London. In other big cities, councils are facing the same thing: a blizzard of paperwork too large for staff to handle, a good proportion of dodgy or flawed bids, and no certainty at all about how many council homes are flogged off at the end of it all. Take as an example Lewisham where, over the past couple of years, about half of all RTB applications have resulted in sales. Apply that same ratio to bids received last November alone, and at a stroke the borough will lose almost as many council homes as the total it has built since 2020.

Call it Thatcher’s hangover: the good times, if that’s what they were, wore off long ago and now all that’s left is a dusty thudding in the head and costs that never stop rising. Her most famous policy, right to buy, shows how the hangover never stops. Public money was spent on building those homes; public money was lost through giving them away cheap; and public money is now funnelled in housing benefit to the landlords who let them out.

Last November’s gold rush exposes how cynical those homilies about a property-owning democracy always were. Property owning? For some, but for others try: property flipping, property renting, property accumulating – done on the cheap with taxpayers’ cash. While the private sector keeps raking it in, the public sector is deprived of rental income and forced into ever more desperate measures to house tenants. In my own London borough of Enfield, families with nowhere else to live are now shipped off to ex-mining villages in County Durham.

At Southwark, they reckon they’ve lost 16,000 homes over the decades through right to buy. About half of those are now rented out privately to tenants who might otherwise have got them from the council, with cheaper rents and more secure contracts. “By depriving councils of homes, right to buy takes away the security that allows kids to finish school or their parents to keep their jobs,” says Southwark council’s leader, Kieron Williams. “The rise in homelessness is more or less a direct result of right to buy.”

Starmerism is a small and ever-shrinking puddle of ideas, but it retains an emphasis on building stuff: infrastructure, homes, new towns. Ministers talk big numbers about housebuilding, yet they refuse to set targets on council housebuilding. Starmer focuses on housing supply, about which the far more politically savvy Thatcher didn’t give a monkey’s. She cared only about demand – demand from her people, her voters, who in turn rewarded her with three election victories. Without the aid of a focus group, Starmer’s team barely know who their people are. They won’t come out and argue for more council homes. At best, they’ll do the right thing, but by stealth, in the small print, where they’ll hope GB News never finds it.

But you need more than this comedy of errors – shoving a terrible policy off-stage, sparking yet another huge selloff in the process and inducing another drop in council housing. You really need an alternative. At Wandsworth council, Aydin Dikerdem is the cabinet lead for housing. While not opposing right to buy, he talks about the need to build council homes, to expand notions of what the public realm can provide.

“My mum and dad lived on a council estate, and my mum was a teacher. Today that would be totally utopian,” he says. “But it wasn’t a generation ago. Within a generation, we’ve lost a sense of public assets and public housing. But that means we can also get it back in a generation.”

Stark Strategic Realities


So now we know. Washington is intent on decoupling from Europe and reconnecting with Russia. America’s stance was reaffirmed yesterday, in Brussels, by the newly minted Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, who was there primarily to discuss the Ukraine conflict. We already knew the top lines: Nato membership for Ukraine is “unrealistic”, he said, and the war “must end” through diplomacy. Kyiv must abandon aspirations of reclaiming pre-2014 borders — that includes Crimea — and prepare for a negotiated settlement with Russia.

But Hegseth’s message extended beyond Ukraine. “Stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe,” he continued, stating that European forces should assume responsibility for providing post-war security guarantees for Ukraine, explicitly ruling out US troop involvement. This aligns with Trump’s broader push for Nato allies to increase their defence spending. He clarified that these troops would not be part of a Nato-led mission and would not be covered under the alliance’s Article 5 guarantee, underscoring America’s disengagement from European security affairs.

While these statements didn’t come as much of a surprise to European leaders, given Trump’s previous rhetoric, they did reinforce a fundamental shift in US Ukraine policy, one which prioritises diplomacy over continued military engagement. While this represents a welcome departure from Biden’s more confrontational stance, the path to peace remains fraught with obstacles.

Hegseth did not outline specifics for a possible peace deal between Ukraine and Russia. But, according to a leaked version of Trump’s proposed peace plan, reported by Ukrainian media, the territories seized by Russia would be ceded in exchange for security guarantees. Kyiv would be expected to renounce military and diplomatic efforts to reclaim lost land and officially recognise Russian sovereignty over these regions.

Regardless of this plan’s veracity, it is clear that it reflects Russia’s main condition for peace — something of which Trump is fully aware. His administration’s recognition of this geopolitical reality, coupled with the improbability of Ukraine regaining those territories, signals an important shift toward realistic diplomacy. Further reinforcing this new diplomatic approach, Trump announced on Truth Social that he had held a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s nations… We will begin by calling President Zelensky, of Ukraine, to inform him of the conversation, something which I will be doing right now”.

Re-establishing direct dialogue between Washington and Moscow is undoubtedly a positive development. However, the biggest near-term risk is that Trump may attempt to pressure Putin into a ceasefire without a fully developed peace framework. This is bound to fail.

For Moscow, we know, will not compromise on its key demands, which include the complete withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from four Russian-occupied regions. We know from Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov that any ultimatums from the US would be ineffective and that any negotiations must recognise the “reality on the ground”.

A major problem here is the proposal to have European-led peacekeeping forces in Ukraine, which is almost certain to face strong resistance from Moscow. Regardless of whether they are Nato-affiliated or not, Russia would see them as a Nato proxy force — an unacceptable scenario. As Anatol Lieven put it: “This is just as unacceptable to the Russian government and establishment as Nato membership for Ukraine itself. Indeed, the Russians see no essential difference between the two”.

Another complicating factor is that America’s security decoupling from Europe — the Europeanisation of Nato — also risks becoming an obstacle to peace, insofar as it is, paradoxically, emboldening a more hawkish stance from key European leaders.

Within the European Union, an influential pro-war coalition has emerged, primarily driven by Poland, Estonia, and Lithuania. The new European Commission has placed these countries in key foreign policy and defence roles, further solidifying their influence. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, in his inaugural address as European Council President, stated: “If Europe is to survive, it must be armed”.

Similarly, Kaja Kallas, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, has insisted that Europe must significantly increase its defence spending in response to the US disengagement, while maintaining the position that Russia must be defeated at all costs. Meanwhile, Andrius Kubilius, the new European Commissioner for Defence, has called for a “Big Bang approach” to ramp up European defence production.

Beyond the EU, the UK is equally belligerent and is doubling down on its military support for Ukraine. On January 16, Starmer signed a bilateral defence partnership in Kyiv, pledging an additional £3 billion in annual military aid, on top of the £12.8 billion already provided. The deal also reaffirms Britain’s backing for Ukraine’s Nato membership.

Nato Secretary-General, Mark Rutte, echoed these sentiments on Wednesday, stating that he “agrees” with Trump on the need to “equalise security assistance to Ukraine” but warned that “to truly change the course of the conflict, we must do even more”. His remarks follow recent statements advocating for Nato to “adopt a wartime mindset”.

Underlying this growing military buildup is the belief that Russia poses an existential threat to Europe, despite Moscow lacking both the capability and intent to attack Nato. What might be dismissed as European posturing in response to US disengagement actually represents a significant obstacle to peace. As long as European leaders continue to escalate militarily, the chances of a diplomatic resolution to the Ukraine war diminish.

The real danger is that by persistently predicting an inevitable war with Russia, and preparing for it, Europe may ultimately bring that very war into reality. Faced with a rapidly growing European arms buildup and entrenched anti-Russian sentiment, Moscow may conclude that waiting is no longer an option. If European Nato members continue escalating tensions, Russia could decide to strike pre-emptively rather than risk allowing Nato’s military capabilities to reach a critical threshold. Even in a less extreme scenario, Europe’s increasingly aggressive posture is fundamentally incompatible with a lasting peace in Ukraine.

In other words, while the Trump administration’s pivot away from Europe and push for diplomacy may appear to be a step toward de-escalation, it risks unintentionally achieving the opposite. Rather than restraining Europe’s military ambitions, US disengagement is emboldening key EU and Nato actors — particularly in Eastern Europe — to pursue an increasingly confrontational stance toward Russia.

The Europeanisation of Nato, framed as a necessity following US withdrawal, has accelerated the continent’s militarisation and its leaders’ demonisation of Russia, perpetuating the very conditions that caused the conflict in Ukraine in the first place. Instead of using this moment to engage in diplomacy, European leaders view the US retreat as a reason to escalate militarily. In this sense, Washington’s decoupling from Europe is at odds with Trump’s stated aim of achieving peace in Ukraine.

Unless European leadership acknowledges Russia’s security concerns, the prospects for a long-term settlement will remain bleak — and the risk of a larger war will continue to loom over the continent. Ironically, the US’s attempt to distance itself from European security affairs may ultimately pull it back into an even larger conflict — one that it will have far less control over.

Strictly Off The Record: Day 115

If you are Douglas McKean, then Oliver Kamm is convinced that you and I are one and the same. I hate to have to tell you that I have never heard of you. He first contacted me about this at lunchtime on 4 July, so General Election day was obviously slow on The Times, and he has promised to involve the Police, from whom I have heard nothing. Anyone with news of any developments, do please contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Strictly off the record, of course.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 580

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be imposed either to incite my suicide or, if custodial, to facilitate my already arranged murder in prison.

That purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Board of the Catholic Safeguarding Standards Agency, currently Nazir Afzal, Amanda Ellingworth, Wesley Cuell, Bishop Paul Mason, Sarah Kilmartin, Jenny Holmes, Sir David Behan, and Sr Una Coogan IBVM.

That purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Committee, currently Gail McGregor, Paul Weatherstone, Fr Christopher Hancock MHM, Canon William Agley, Catherine Dyer, Canon Martin Stempczyk, Canon Peter Leighton VG, Maureen Dale, and Tony Lawless.

And that purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Team, currently Meriel Anderson, Ian Colling, Andrew Grant, Kirsty McIntyre, Lisa Short, Yvonne Brown, and Scott Glazebrook.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The CPS Challenge: Day 580

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of its organised persecution of the opponents and critics of Keir Starmer, which is its principal national priority. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from seeking the position of General Secretary of Unite the Union on a programme including disaffiliation from the Labour Party, a proposal that would be hugely popular two years into a Starmer Government. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a thinktank to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually also a fortnightly satirical magazine. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from taking journalistic, political or other paid work for fear of losing my entitlement to Legal Aid. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service out of the same racism that has caused it to refuse to prosecute the Police Officers in the case of Stephen Lawrence. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point.

And I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to incite my politically motivated murder, a murder that the CPS has already decided would never lead to any prosecution. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point, and if custodial, would be imposed in order to facilitate that murder in prison, a murder that in that case would demonstrably already have been arranged.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Board, currently Monica Burch, Stephen Parkinson, Simon Jeffreys, Dr Subo Shanmuganathan, and Kathryn Stone.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the CPS senior leadership, currently Tristan Bradshaw, Dawn Brodrick, Mike Browne, Steve Buckingham, Matthew Cain, Gregor McGill, Grace Ononiwu, and Baljhit Ubey.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Audit and Risk Assurance Committee, currently Simon Jeffreys, Stephen Parkinson, Michael Dunn, Deborah Harris, and Dr Subo Shanmuganathan.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Nominations, Leadership and Remuneration Committee, currently Kathryn Stone, Stephen Parkinson, and Monica Burch.

And each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the 279 members of staff of the CPS North East Area, by definition including, but not restricted to, Chief Crown Prosecutor Gail Gilchrist, and the Area Business Manager, Ian Brown.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 1283

I invite each and every bishop, priest and deacon of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if he thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me.

Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 1283

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

And I invite each and every Member of Parliament whose constituency fell wholly or partly in County Durham to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Wednesday, 12 February 2025

National Intelligence

If it had been explicit three years ago that Ukraine would never be let into NATO, then there would never have been a Russian invasion. If Russia kept what it had captured, then that would prove that it was no threat, unable to capture more than one fifth of Ukraine, never mind to invade Western Europe, much less the United States.

Pete Hegseth has not departed from "the rules-based international order", which has only ever been the right of the United States, and by extension also of the State of Israel, to behave in absolutely any way that they pleased. What we saw today was that order in action. Also today, the United States Senate confirmed Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. She is on the Myrotvorets list. States with the United States Director of National Intelligence on their kill lists are indeed unlikely to attain membership of NATO.

The Active Club Network turns out to have a growing presence in Britain, where it is planning to take over should the opportunity arise, and these things can happen even in the unlikeliest of places. Through the Atomwaffen Division, that Network crosses over with the Russian Volunteer Corps of Denis Kapustin, otherwise White Rex, and thus with the likes of 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, and the Freedom of Russia Legion, although whereas that last was begun and still largely consists of defected prisoners of war, the RVC is a body of true believing neo-Nazis who are fighting for Ukraine on that basis.

Of sitting MPs this century, Islamists and the Far Right have murdered one each. Yet while Prevent is coming in for some grief, and perhaps deservedly so, over the murder of Sir David Amess, MI5 turns out to have been employing a neo-Nazi who took a machete to his girlfriend, and lying about it to three different courts of law. How many more of those does it have? And what is it doing about Active Club England and the rest of its world? What is Prevent doing? What is anyone doing?

The Ukrainian refugee scheme would not appear to have been intended for Palestinians, but it has turned out to allow for them, and the blame for that can be attached only to the people who devised it. There is no point blaming the judge. The only reason to object in principle to Palestinians rather than to Ukrainians is that Palestinians are brown while Ukrainians are white. Not all Ukrainians are supporters of the organisations listed above, with their links to proscribed terrorist organisations in this country such as National Action, but then not all Palestinians are supporters of Hamas, and even that is an enemy of the people who perpetrate acts of Islamist terrorism in Britain, with a history of rounding up and killing anyone who attempted to get al-Qaeda or the so-called Islamic State up and running in Gaza. We were all supposed to have been delighted when those people, the ones who had bombed Britain, had taken over as much of Syria as Israel did not yet want. But that is not the view of Director Gabbard.

From Syria, the IS bombers of Britain have been sending fighters for Volodymyr Zelensky because Bashar al-Assad was allied to Vladimir Putin. Refugees from Gaza are fleeing the devastation wrought by an IDF that had been supplied, free of charge, with invaluable intelligence from nightly spy flights out of RAF Akrotiri, which is British sovereign territory. But those who promised to "stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes", yet with no definition of "it", now look even sillier than those who opposed a ceasefire in Gaza, although of course they were mostly the same people. Why is any of them still in public life?

Profoundly Alert To This Danger

Sarah Ditum writes:

Where are women in the assisted dying debate? Leading the charge: a female MP, Kim Leadbeater, is the one piloting the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill through parliament. Practically, however, women’s interests have been consistently disregarded in this legislation. It is a law that has been written as though male violence and coercive control do not exist.

Supporters of assisted dying often make the argument that legalising it would “remove the need” for terminally ill individuals to “take matters into their own hands”. So let’s take a closer look at some of those individuals. In 2022, a man named Douglas Laing wrote an emotional letter to the Sunday Times, describing how he had given a fatal injection to his wife Christine in 1998 when she was terminally ill with ovarian cancer.

After Laing was contacted by police, the campaign group Dignity in Dying – which supports Leadbeater’s bill – accused law enforcement of wasting public money and causing unnecessary distress. It seemed, on the face of it, to be a perfect example of the humanitarian case: a suffering wife, a loving husband. Laing was never charged over Christine’s death.

But he was an unfortunate poster boy for the assisted dying cause. In 2017, he had been convicted of wounding with intent (downgraded from attempted murder) after bludgeoning his second wife, Susan, with a hammer – an attack that she said had left her “not living… just existing”. (Dignity in Dying distanced itself from Laing’s subsequent conviction.)

Then there’s the 2019 killing of 79-year-old June Knight, who was terminally ill and had Alzheimer’s. She was pushed from the first-floor fire escape of her care home by her son Robert. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and received a suspended sentence, with the judge describing June’s death as a “mercy killing”. But it is very hard to imagine those frightening, confusing and catastrophically painful last moments feeling “merciful” to her.

Or there’s the case of Stuart Mungall, who in 2011 smothered his wife Joan with a pillow, then took an overdose which failed to kill him. Joan had the degenerative condition Pick’s disease and only months to live, but, prosecutors said, she had never expressed a wish to die. The day before Mungall killed Joan, she was said to have told a nurse that she was “taking it all in her stride”. Like Knight, Mungall represented his actions to the court as a “mercy killing”; like Knight, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and was given a suspended sentence.

I don’t highlight these cases to question the verdicts. But there is a pattern: a man kills a sick woman and her sickness makes the killing more understandable, despite a later incident of domestic violence (Laing) or brutality of method (Knight).

As a November 2024 report by the think tank the Other Half puts it, what are described as “mercy killings” are “very frequently the violent domestic homicide of elderly, infirm or disabled women by men”. Women are the majority of unpaid carers – 80 per cent, according to the King’s Fund. But, strangely, they appear much less likely than men to become “mercy killers”.

This discrepancy is impossible to separate from the wider belief in society that women are a kind of property owned by men. It is seen as a woman’s natural obligation to look after a man, but when a man has to look after a woman, it becomes an unreasonable imposition.

Hence the sympathy a man can draw on if he kills his wife while feeling overwhelmed by her needs. Mungall claimed to have seen an expression in his wife’s eyes “like an animal who needs to be put down and cannot say it” – a comparison that makes him the owner and her the pet.

Are we really supposed to believe that a man who feels that way about his wife is incapable of pressuring her into applying for a medically assisted suicide? In response to concerns from critics of the bill about this possibility, supporters of the bill have pointed to what they regard as its extensive safeguards. Simon Opher MP, a former GP and a member of the bill committee, has even said it is “judging doctors harshly to say that they will not spot coercion”.

Personally, I find Opher’s statement less reassuring and more indicative of a disturbingly blasé attitude to the possibility of abuse. In the limited window of a consultation, it is all too easy for a doctor to miss the signs. A YouGov survey for the charity SafeLives found that half of healthcare professionals felt unable to identify domestic violence. Sometimes, the doctor in question might even be actively untrustworthy: think of Harold Shipman, whose victims were predominantly elderly women.

The more common scenario, though, is the patient who, through lengthy cruelty and coercion from a partner or carer, becomes genuinely convinced that she (or sometimes he) is a burden who would be better off dead. Such a person may even refuse treatment, causing a curable disease to become terminal and placing them within the purview of the bill.

Legislators should be profoundly alert to this danger. Left unaddressed, it could place the state in the grotesque position of becoming a lawful accomplice to abusers. Yet unaddressed it remains. Of the nearly 50 individuals who gave oral evidence to the Public Bill Committee, not one was an expert in male violence or coercive control. (Jane Monckton Smith, an academic who studies femicide, was called but unable to attend; the committee did not attempt to find a substitute for her.)

From the start, the Terminally Ill Adults Bill has been a rush job – in the words of one former Labour adviser, “a quick-and-dirty policy development process that wouldn’t be close to good enough for 99 per cent of the laws made on our behalf”. If it becomes law, Labour risks turning the healthcare system into an executioner for those most in need of protection.

Donald Trump’s Economic Masterplan


Faced with President Trump’s economic moves, his centrist critics oscillate between desperation and a touching faith that his tariff frenzy will fizzle out. They assume that Trump will huff and puff until reality exposes the emptiness of his economic rationale. They have not been paying attention: Trump’s tariff fixation is part of a global economic plan that is solid — albeit inherently risky.

Their thinking is hard-wired onto a misconception of how capital, trade and money move around the globe. Like the brewer who gets drunk on his own ale, centrists ended up believing their own propaganda: that we live in a world of competitive markets where money is neutral and prices adjust to balance the demand and the supply of everything. The unsophisticated Trump is, in fact, far more sophisticated than them in that he understands how raw economic power, not marginal productivity, decides who does what to whom — both domestically and internationally.

Though we risk the abyss staring back when we attempt to gaze into Trump’s mind, we do need a grasp of his thinking on three fundamental questions: why does he believe that America is exploited by the rest of the world? What is his vision for a new international order in which America can be “great” again? How does he plan to bring it about? Only then can we produce a sensible critique of Trump’s economic masterplan.

So why does the President believe America has been dealt a bad deal? His chief complaint is that dollar supremacy may confer huge powers on America’s government and ruling class, but, ultimately, foreigners are using it in ways that guarantee US decline. So what most consider to be America’s exorbitant privilege, he sees as its exorbitant burden.

Trump has been lamenting the decline of US manufacturing for decades: “if you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country.” But why blame this on the dollar’s global role? Because, Trump answers, foreign central banks do not let the dollar adjust downwards to the “right” level — at which US exports recover and imports are restrained. It is not that foreign central bankers are conspiring against America. It is just that the dollar is the only safe international reserve they can get their hands on. It is only natural for European and Asian central banks to hoard the dollars that flow to Europe and Asia when Americans import things. By not swapping their stash of dollars for their own currencies, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, the People’s Bank of China and the Bank of England suppress the demand for (and thus the value of) their currencies. This helps their own exporters boost their sales to America and earn even more dollars. In a never-ending circle, these fresh dollars accumulate in the coffers of the foreign central bankers who, to gain interest safely, use them to buy US government debt.

And there’s the rub. According to Trump, America imports too much because it is a good global citizen which feels obliged to provide foreigners with the reserve dollar assets they need. In short, US manufacturing has been in decline because America is a good Samaritan: its workers and middle class suffer so that the rest of the world can grow at its expense.

But the dollar’s hegemonic status also underpins American exceptionalism, as Trump knows and appreciates. Foreign central banks’ purchases of US Treasuries enable the US government to run deficits and pay for an oversized military that would bankrupt any other country. And by being the linchpin of international payments, the hegemonic dollar enables the President to exercise the modern-day equivalent of gunboat diplomacy: to sanction at will any person or government.

This is not enough, in Trump’s eyes, to offset the suffering of American producers who are undercut by foreigners whose central bankers exploit a service (dollar reserves) America provides them for free to keep the dollar overvalued. For Trump, America is undermining itself for the glory of geopolitical power and the opportunity to accumulate other people’s profits. These imported riches benefit Wall Street and realtors but only at the expense of the people who elected him twice: Americans in the heartlands who produce the “manly” goods such as steel and automobiles that a nation needs to remain viable.

And that’s not the worst of Trump’s concerns. His nightmare is that this hegemony will be fleeting. Back in 1988, while promoting his Art of the Deal on Larry King and Oprah Winfrey, he bemoaned: “We are a debtor nation. Something’s going to happen over the next number of years in this country, because you can’t keep on losing $200 billion a year.” Since then, he has become increasingly convinced that a terrible tipping point is approaching: as America’s output diminishes in relative terms, the global demand for the dollar rises faster than US incomes. The dollar then has to appreciate even faster to keep up with the reserve needs of the rest of the world. This can’t go on forever.

For when US deficits exceed some threshold, foreigners will panic. They will sell their dollar-denominated assets and find some other currency to hoard. Americans will be left amid international chaos with a wrecked manufacturing sector, derelict financial markets and an insolvent government. This nightmare scenario has convinced Trump that he is on a mission to save America: that he has a duty to usher in a new international order. And that’s the gist of his plan: to effect in 2025 a decisive anti-Nixon Shock — a global shock that cancels out the work of his predecessor by terminating the Bretton Woods system in 1971 which spearheaded the era of financialisation.

Central to this new global order would be a cheaper dollar that remains the world’s reserve currency — this would lower US long-term borrowing rates even more. Can Trump have his cake (a hegemonic dollar and low-yielding US Treasuries) and eat it (a depreciated dollar)? He knows that the markets will never deliver this of their own accord. Only foreign central banks can do this for him. But to agree to do this, they need to be shocked into action first. And that’s where his tariffs come in.

This is what his critics do not understand. They mistakenly think that he thinks that his tariffs will reduce America’s trade deficit on their own. He knows they will not. Their utility comes from their capacity to shock foreign central bankers into reducing domestic interest rates. Consequently, the euro, the yen and the renminbi will soften relative to the dollar. This will cancel out the price hikes of goods imported into the US, and leave the prices American consumers pay unaffected. The tariffed countries will be in effect paying for Trump’s tariffs.

But tariffs are only the first phase of his masterplan. With high tariffs as the new default, and with foreign money accumulating in the Treasury, Trump can bide his time as friends and foes in Europe and Asia clamour to talk. That’s when the second phase of Trump’s plan kicks in: the grand negotiation.

Unlike his predecessors, from Carter to Biden, Trump disdains multilateral meetings and crowded negotiations. He is a one-on-one man. His ideal world is a hub and spokes model, like a bicycle wheel, in which none of the individual spokes makes much of a difference to the functioning of the wheel. In this view of the world, Trump feels confident that he can deal with each spoke sequentially. With tariffs on the one hand and the threat of removing America’s security shield (or deploying it against them) on the other, he feels he can get most countries to acquiesce.

Acquiesce to what? To appreciating their currency substantially without liquidating their long-term dollar holding. He will not only expect each spoke to cut domestic interest rates, but will demand different things from different interlocutors. From Asian countries that currently hoard the most dollars, he will demand they sell a portion of their short-term dollar assets in exchange for their own (thus appreciating) currency. From a relatively dollar-poor eurozone riddled with internal divisions that increase his negotiating power, Trump may demand three things: that they agree to swap their long-term bonds for ultra-long-term or possibly even perpetual ones; that they allow German manufacturing to migrate to America; and, naturally, that they buy a lot more US-made weapons.

Can you picture Trump’s smirk at the thought of this second phase of his masterplan? When a foreign government acquiesces to his demands, he will have chalked up another victory. And when some recalcitrant government holds out, the tariffs stay put, yielding his Treasury a steady stream of dollars which he can dispense with any way he deems fit (since Congress controls only tax revenues). Once this second phase of his plan is complete, the world will have been divided into two camps: one camp shielded by American security at the cost of an appreciated currency, the loss of manufacturing plants, and forced purchases of US exports including weapons. The other camp will be strategically closer perhaps to China and Russia, but still connected to the US through reduced trade which still gives the US regular tariff income.

Trump’s vision of a desirable international economic order may be violently different from mine, but that gives none of us a licence to underestimate its solidity and purpose — as most centrists do. Like all well-laid plans, this may, of course, go awry. The depreciation of the dollar may not be sufficient to cancel out the effect of tariffs on prices US consumers pay. Or the sale of dollars may be too great to keep long-term US debt yields low enough. But besides these manageable risks, the masterplan will be tested on two political fronts.

The first political threat to his masterplan is domestic. If the trade deficit begins to shrink as planned, foreign private money will stop flooding Wall Street. Suddenly Trump will have to betray either his own tribe of outraged financiers and realtors or the working class that elected him. Meanwhile, a second front will be opening. Regarding all countries as spokes to his hub, Trump may soon discover that he has manufactured dissent abroad. Beijing may throw caution to the wind and turn the BRICS into a New Bretton Woods system in which the yuan plays the anchoring role that the dollar played in the original Bretton Woods. Perhaps this would be the most astonishing legacy, and comeuppance, of Trump’s otherwise impressive masterplan.

How The British Media Went To War With Russia


An accepted difference between a despotism and a democracy is that in the first there is a single opinion while the second allows a variety of opinion.

The great exception is wartime. In the Second World War, Britain, Germany and the Soviet Union spoke with single voices — in Britain without overt censorship. In war the world is divided into friends and enemies; to show any partiality for the enemy is treason.

Britain is not currently at war. As a consequence, Britons are said to have access to truth, while the Chinese and Russians are fed disinformation and fake news. Yet on the subject of Ukraine Britain speaks as though it is at war with Russia — that is, with one voice. Any contrary view is regarded as, if not quite treasonable, as beyond the pale. Moreover, of the NATO allies, Britain has been the most consistently bellicose on the subject of Ukraine.

Why this should be so is something which historians will long discuss. Here my purpose is simply to document the existence of a single opinion. I do so by citing the editorials on the Russian-Ukraine war in the Times newspaper from the Russian invasion on 24 February 2022 to the end of 2024, about 120 of them, or just under one a week, by far the most attention given to any single topic in this period.

From 2022 to 2024 The Times framed Ukraine’s war as the West’s war, with Ukrainian victory, defined as the full withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine, payment of reparations and accountability of the Russian leadership for war crimes, as being essential for European security and preservation of a “rules-based order”. Only in the last half of 2024, when Russia seemed to be gaining the military advantage, was talk of the need for a full Ukrainian victory dropped.

The Times editorials, in their unstinting condemnation of the Russian invasion, their insistent demand that Britain and its allies supply Ukraine with the sinews of victory, and their equation of a negotiated peace with appeasement of dictatorship constitute a representative sample of mainstream British opinion. The same phrases, the same sentiments were on display in every mainstream newspaper and political magazine. More “nuanced” voices like those of Simon Jenkins in The Guardian, John Gray and Wolfgang Münchau in the New Statesman and Owen Matthews in the journal Spectator were drowned by the massed war-drums. I myself was effectively cancelled, with the notable exception of one article in Prospect and a couple of co-signed letters to the Financial Times. In the House of Lords I was joined by Richard Balfe and Dale Campbell Savours. That was about the sum of the parliamentary opposition. Nigel Farage has been the one front-line British politician openly critical of the official view, but he has not made peace in Ukraine a political cause.

The Times started with the headline “Slava Ukraini!” (Glory to Ukraine) of 25 February 2022, following it up with calls for maximum Western help to repel the invader (24 March, 6 April, 16 27, 31 May, 24 August). Typical is this from 16 May: “The West must do all it can to help President Zelensky’s forces defeat the Russians and not worry about humiliating Putin”.

From the start, The Times set its face against “siren voices” calling for peace (27 May, 6 June, 1 August 2022). The Kremlin’s justifications for its invasion were “baseless”; Putin’s policies founded on “lies [and] deceit” (9 May, 26 September 2022). It was “foolish” to trust any peace offers made by an “inveterate liar” (25 February 2022). Any appeasement of Putin would only embolden his further aggression (27 May 2022).

Putin and other Russians had to be held to account for their war crimes (28 March, 5 April 2022). The West must resist Russian nuclear blackmail (21 September 2022). “The path to peace lies in Russia’s military defeat” (25 February, 27 June, 4 July, 1 August, 21 September 2022).

Russian military reverses in the summer of 2022, plus the “grotesque farce” of sham referenda in the four provinces occupied by Russia, prompted The Times to argue for “more weapons, more military training”, more economic sanctions against Russia till the dragooned provinces were liberated by “force of arms” (7 September, 26 September, 10 October 2022). In the face of Russia’s expected winter offensive the West, The Times said, must hold firm till Putin lost his nerve (9, 12 December 2022).

So it continued. Editorial comment in 2023 was dominated by the need to provide Ukraine with “unwavering” military and economic support, criticism of tardiness in supplying it and attacks on Russian sympathisers and war crimes.

Kyiv must be given “game changing weapons” (30 January 2023); the success of Ukraine’s summer offensive depended on large-scale delivery of advanced weapons and air defences (30 May 2023); delay in supplying them would only prolong the war (10 July 2023); NATO must “act decisively to provide the resources Ukraine needs for victory” ( 15 September 2023); the “knee-capping” of Kyiv by restricting supplies risked a “forced peace” (4 December 2023). The Times welcomed the impending accession of Finland and Sweden as strengthening European security (4 April 2023); and advocated a “clear path” to NATO membership for Ukraine (5 June, 10 July 2023).

At the same time, Russia must be held fully accountable for its war crimes (10 April, 6 June 2023). Specifically “Britain should lead the efforts to sanction those responsible and hold Putin’s regime accountable for its human rights abuses” (17 April 2023).

In 2024, following the failure of Ukraine’s 2023 counter-offensive, advocacy of arms for victory gradually changed to advocacy of arms to avoid defeat. Thus Europe must “pony up” if Ukraine was to prevail (25 January 2024); in withholding a $60 billion aid package, America was “starving an embattled nation of the means to fight a ruthless invader” (10 April 2024). The Times approvingly cited Britain’s hawkish Defence Secretary Ben Wallace to the effect that “Germany is pretty much infiltrated by Russian intelligence” (4 March 2024). Viktor Orbán of Hungary, the “Trojan horse” of 5 April 2022 and the “enemy within” of 23 October 2023, was further castigated as “the maverick Kremlin stooge” holding up European war supplies to Ukraine (12 February 2024).

The Times now started to demand an end of restrictions on deploying Western-supplied missiles to hit targets deep in Russia (3 May, 25 July, 9 August 2024); “hollow” Russian threats of escalation should be ignored (13 September 2024).There was a case for giving Ukraine atomic weapons, if only as a warning against appeasing peace deals (14 November 2024). As the end of the third year of war and the start of the Trump presidency approached it was “crucial for Europe, led by Britain, to maintain unwavering support for Ukraine to prevent the emboldening of authoritarian aggression” (17 December 2024).

The purpose of this recital is not to criticise the Times narrative still less to endorse the Russian version of the same events. Its purpose is twofold. First, to exhibit the lack of variety of opinion. It is simply not the case that there was no other story to be told. That NATO was not quite the defensive alliance it was cracked up to be; that its eastward expansion had provoked Russia; that Ukraine was not quite the guiltless victim of Russian aggression; that Putin was not Hitler; that it was imprudent to supply Ukraine with war-escalating weapons; that it was morally obnoxious to trade Ukrainian blood for Europe’s freedom — these reasonable objections to the dominant policy stance succumbed to a debilitating self-censorship. Once Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had been framed as an attack on British security and values and the “rules-based” international system, the space for dissent vanished and with it the search for truth.

My second purpose is pragmatic. To get a durable peace we have to insist that there is another story to be told, perhaps not as good as ours, but not negligible. Then we can have a proper debate about the contours of a just peace. Otherwise we will stagger to a “transactional” deal à la Trump with the old stories unquestioned and likely to reignite at the next provocation.

Strictly Off The Record: Day 114

If you are Douglas McKean, then Oliver Kamm is convinced that you and I are one and the same. I hate to have to tell you that I have never heard of you. He first contacted me about this at lunchtime on 4 July, so General Election day was obviously slow on The Times, and he has promised to involve the Police, from whom I have heard nothing. Anyone with news of any developments, do please contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Strictly off the record, of course.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 579

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be imposed either to incite my suicide or, if custodial, to facilitate my already arranged murder in prison.

That purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Board of the Catholic Safeguarding Standards Agency, currently Nazir Afzal, Amanda Ellingworth, Wesley Cuell, Bishop Paul Mason, Sarah Kilmartin, Jenny Holmes, Sir David Behan, and Sr Una Coogan IBVM.

That purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Committee, currently Gail McGregor, Paul Weatherstone, Fr Christopher Hancock MHM, Canon William Agley, Catherine Dyer, Canon Martin Stempczyk, Canon Peter Leighton VG, Maureen Dale, and Tony Lawless.

And that purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Team, currently Meriel Anderson, Ian Colling, Andrew Grant, Kirsty McIntyre, Lisa Short, Yvonne Brown, and Scott Glazebrook.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The CPS Challenge: Day 579

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of its organised persecution of the opponents and critics of Keir Starmer, which is its principal national priority. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from seeking the position of General Secretary of Unite the Union on a programme including disaffiliation from the Labour Party, a proposal that would be hugely popular two years into a Starmer Government. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a thinktank to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually also a fortnightly satirical magazine. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from taking journalistic, political or other paid work for fear of losing my entitlement to Legal Aid. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service out of the same racism that has caused it to refuse to prosecute the Police Officers in the case of Stephen Lawrence. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point.

And I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to incite my politically motivated murder, a murder that the CPS has already decided would never lead to any prosecution. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point, and if custodial, would be imposed in order to facilitate that murder in prison, a murder that in that case would demonstrably already have been arranged.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Board, currently Monica Burch, Stephen Parkinson, Simon Jeffreys, Dr Subo Shanmuganathan, and Kathryn Stone.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the CPS senior leadership, currently Tristan Bradshaw, Dawn Brodrick, Mike Browne, Steve Buckingham, Matthew Cain, Gregor McGill, Grace Ononiwu, and Baljhit Ubey.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Audit and Risk Assurance Committee, currently Simon Jeffreys, Stephen Parkinson, Michael Dunn, Deborah Harris, and Dr Subo Shanmuganathan.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Nominations, Leadership and Remuneration Committee, currently Kathryn Stone, Stephen Parkinson, and Monica Burch.

And each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the 279 members of staff of the CPS North East Area, by definition including, but not restricted to, Chief Crown Prosecutor Gail Gilchrist, and the Area Business Manager, Ian Brown.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 1282

I invite each and every bishop, priest and deacon of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if he thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me.

Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 1282

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

And I invite each and every Member of Parliament whose constituency fell wholly or partly in County Durham to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Anomalous Phenomena

In addition to probing the Kennedy assassinations and that of Martin Luther King, Representative Anna Paulina Luna's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets will be going after Jeffrey Epstein's client list, which could cause a magnificent diplomatic incident with the United Kingdom, and I am not talking about Prince Andrew.

The pursuit of the truth about 9/11 is also welcome in principle, although whether it will be a pursuit of the Saudis or of assorted wild geese is not clear from the decision also to investigate unidentified ariel phenomena (which used to be called UFOs), unidentified submerged objects, and the origins of Covid-19. Still, over to President Trump to order the release of all the files. Let us see whom that would satisfy.

But why does Donald Trump not move the Palestinians of Gaza to the largely Arab, and especially Levantine, swing state of Michigan, himself become legally resident there, and prepare for his third act as its Governor thanks to their grateful votes? The answer to that is the answer to why this Task Force will not be investigating the attack on the USS Liberty, or the activities of Jonathan Pollard.

Tuesday, 11 February 2025

Of Pegs and Holes

I no longer understand the world when Beth Upton is the tranny but Sandie Peggie is the one with the drag name. Today in the House of Commons, Rosie Duffield asked, "Does the Minister believe that the NHS should expect biologically female nursing staff to get changed in front of biologically male colleagues who identify as female?" "No," replied Karin Smyth, Minister of State for Secondary Care.

Yet the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Public Health and Prevention, Ashley Dalton, is of an altogether different view. In any case, Dr Upton professes to be biologically female, and victory at the ongoing employment tribunal would effectively confirm that as the law even if not as the science. Employment law for Great Britain is not devolved. Parliament needs to grasp the nettle.

The Kindest Thing To Do

So what will it be? A social worker, a psychiatrist, and a sitting or retired High Court judge? Or a social worker, a psychiatrist, and a lawyer appointed by a sitting or retired High Court judge?

And in either event, would they all have to agree to an assisted suicide? What if one of them said no? Would it matter which one it was?

The Assisted Suicide Bill needs to be put out of everyone's misery.

Scrap Iron

50 years ago today, Margaret Thatcher became Leader of the Conservative Party. In the Budget of December 1976, Denis Healey and Jim Callaghan delighted her by blindsiding the critics of monetarism on the Conservative benches, and the rest is history. The basis of the lockdowns was the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. Who was the Prime Minister in 1984? For having publicly set fire to the Quran, Martin Frost was charged under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. Who was the Prime Minister in 1986?

The Single European Act, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the Children Act, the replacement of O-levels with GCSEs, the destruction of the economic basis of paternal authority in the stockades of male employment, the massively increased benefit dependency, the rise of Political Correctness, the general moral chaos of the 1980s, the legalisation of abortion up to birth, the fight against Victoria Gillick, and that is just the start. Her humble origins are greatly exaggerated. She was the daughter of a major local businessman and politician who ran most of the committees and charities for miles around. Even the people who love Thatcher can see why the people who hate her do so; they just do not agree. But why the people who love her do so is, in their own terms, a complete mystery.

Was Thatcher “the Iron Lady” when, in early 1981, her initial pit closure programme was abandoned within two days of a walkout by the miners? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she had Nicholas Ridley negotiate a transfer of sovereignty over the Falkland Islands to Argentina, to be followed by a leaseback arrangement, until the Islanders, the Labour Party and Conservative backbenchers forced her to back down? Was she “the Iron Lady” when, within a few months of election on clear commitments with regard to Rhodesia, she simply abandoned them at the Commonwealth Conference in Lusaka? Was she “the Iron Lady” when, having claimed that Britain would never give up Hong Kong, she took barely 24 hours to effect a complete U-turn? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she took just as little time to move from public opposition to public support of Spanish accession to the Western European Union? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she gave up monetarism completely during her second term? And so on.

The middle classes were transformed from people like Thatcher’s father into people like her son. She told us that “there is no such thing as society”, in which case there cannot be any such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation. All in all, she turned Britain into the country that Marxists had always said that it was, even though before her, it never had been. Specifically, she sold off national assets at obscenely undervalued prices, while subjecting the rest of the public sector, fully 40 per cent of the British economy, to an unprecedented level of central dirigisme. She continued public subsidies to private schools, to agriculture, to nuclear power, and to mortgage-holders. Without those public subsidies, the fourth would hardly have existed, and the other three, then as now, would not have existed at all. So much for “You can’t buck the market”. You can now, as you could then, and as she did then. The issue is not whether private schools, agriculture, nuclear power or mortgage-holding is a good or a bad thing in itself. The issue is whether “Thatcherism” was compatible with their continuation by means of “market-bucking” public subsidies. It simply was not, as it simply is not.

It is thanks to Thatcher that the Conservatives have been the party of Net Zero for 40 years. Svante Arrhenius first theorised about anthropogenic global warming in 1896, and Thatcher was briefed about it by Sir Crispin Tickell, the then Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs at the Foreign Office. Thatcher always credited Tickell with having convinced her, leading to her speech on the subject to the Royal Society in 27 September 1988, the point at which the agenda of his 1977 Climatic Change and World Affairs entered the political mainstream. Tickell’s briefing of Thatcher was in 1984, tellingly the year that the Miners’ Strike began. Although she began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, she was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. By the time of her speech to the UN on 8 November 1989, she had made Tickell the British Ambassador to it, and the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative on its Security Council. Boris Johnson described Thatcher’s destruction of the British coal industry as “a big early start” towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for many years.

Thatcher ludicrously pretended to have brought down the Soviet Union merely because she happened to be in office when that Union happened to collapse, as it would have done anyway. But she did make a difference internationally where it was possible to do so, by providing aid and succour to Pinochet’s Chile and to apartheid South Africa, and by refusing to recognize either the Muzorewa-Smith Government or Joshua Nkomo, thereby paving the way for Robert Mugabe. Known as “the Peking Plotter”, she never saw a Maoist whom she did not like, from Mugabe, to Nicolae CeauÈ™escu, to Pol Pot. She even sent the SAS to train the Khmer Rouge. And it was she who issued what amounted to the open invitation to Argentina to invade the Falkland Islands, followed by the starved Royal Navy’s having to behave as if the hopelessly out-of-her-depth Prime Minister did not exist, a sort of coup without which those Islands would be Argentine to this day.

Strictly Off The Record: Day 113

If you are Douglas McKean, then Oliver Kamm is convinced that you and I are one and the same. I hate to have to tell you that I have never heard of you. He first contacted me about this at lunchtime on 4 July, so General Election day was obviously slow on The Times, and he has promised to involve the Police, from whom I have heard nothing. Anyone with news of any developments, do please contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Strictly off the record, of course.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 578

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be imposed either to incite my suicide or, if custodial, to facilitate my already arranged murder in prison.

That purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Board of the Catholic Safeguarding Standards Agency, currently Nazir Afzal, Amanda Ellingworth, Wesley Cuell, Bishop Paul Mason, Sarah Kilmartin, Jenny Holmes, Sir David Behan, and Sr Una Coogan IBVM.

That purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Committee, currently Gail McGregor, Paul Weatherstone, Fr Christopher Hancock MHM, Canon William Agley, Catherine Dyer, Canon Martin Stempczyk, Canon Peter Leighton VG, Maureen Dale, and Tony Lawless.

And that purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Team, currently Meriel Anderson, Ian Colling, Andrew Grant, Kirsty McIntyre, Lisa Short, Yvonne Brown, and Scott Glazebrook.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The CPS Challenge: Day 578

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of its organised persecution of the opponents and critics of Keir Starmer, which is its principal national priority. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from seeking the position of General Secretary of Unite the Union on a programme including disaffiliation from the Labour Party, a proposal that would be hugely popular two years into a Starmer Government. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a thinktank to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually also a fortnightly satirical magazine. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from taking journalistic, political or other paid work for fear of losing my entitlement to Legal Aid. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service out of the same racism that has caused it to refuse to prosecute the Police Officers in the case of Stephen Lawrence. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point.

And I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and I have been pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to incite my politically motivated murder, a murder that the CPS has already decided would never lead to any prosecution. Any sentence beyond an absolute discharge would be further proof of that point, and if custodial, would be imposed in order to facilitate that murder in prison, a murder that in that case would demonstrably already have been arranged.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Board, currently Monica Burch, Stephen Parkinson, Simon Jeffreys, Dr Subo Shanmuganathan, and Kathryn Stone.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the CPS senior leadership, currently Tristan Bradshaw, Dawn Brodrick, Mike Browne, Steve Buckingham, Matthew Cain, Gregor McGill, Grace Ononiwu, and Baljhit Ubey.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Audit and Risk Assurance Committee, currently Simon Jeffreys, Stephen Parkinson, Michael Dunn, Deborah Harris, and Dr Subo Shanmuganathan.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Nominations, Leadership and Remuneration Committee, currently Kathryn Stone, Stephen Parkinson, and Monica Burch.

And each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the 279 members of staff of the CPS North East Area, by definition including, but not restricted to, Chief Crown Prosecutor Gail Gilchrist, and the Area Business Manager, Ian Brown.

This post will appear daily until further notice.