Collectively Endorse

Reform UK voters are far more likely to lack photo ID than are voters for Labour, the Liberal Democrats or the Greens, so what if that cost Reform the Runcorn and Helsby by-election? Telegraph writers and GB News contributors, how would you get out of that one?

For the hard of thinking, neither that nor the following is a prediction. If this were going to be published at all, then it would have been published today, so do please let me know if you saw it anywhere:

Whatever our individual views of the Workers Party of Britain, we collectively endorse the candidacy of Peter Ford at the forthcoming Runcorn and Helsby by-election.

David Lindsay, writer and activist, Lanchester, County Durham

Professor Steve Hall, Emeritus Professor of Criminology, Teesside University; Newcastle upon Tyne

David John Douglass, writer and activist, South Shields

Relief and Works

The Settlers will be on BBC Two again at 11:30. There is no comparison with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who is neither in the Cabinet, nor possessed of the hotline to the Prime Minister of which Daniella Weiss accurately boasted to Louis Theroux. Nor is there any comparison with Hamas, which Britain does not arm, still less does the RAF fly nightly reconnaissance missions for it at all, never mind free of charge.

Weiss was shown listening attentively and approvingly to a rabbi who opined, "To my mind, there was never peace with these savages. There is no peace and there never will be. All of Gaza and all of Lebanon should be cleansed of these camel-riders." On the same day as that was first broadcast, Israel launched a massive airstrike on Beirut.

The International Court of Justice is being treated to another outing for the ritual lies against UNRWA, to which please donate here, and which exists at all at the insistence of the Israelis. With their powerful connections in the United States, on display again today, they refused to allow the nascent United Nations High Commission for Refugees to deal with the Palestinians, as that would have sullied those whom it was spiriting to Israel. It was a racial purity thing.

All of this matters a lot more than a rap group that had said nothing worse than Loyalists had said about Margaret Thatcher after the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and will say about all sorts of people in word and symbol on and about the Twelfth of July this year, as every year. A group about whom no one cared until they criticised Israel.

British Open?

This afternoon, the shareholders approved the sale of the Royal Mail to Daniel Křetínský, who still pumps Russian gas into the EU with its approval. Yet the British State approved this acquisition, explicitly on national security grounds, as long ago as December, and it will retain a golden share such that Křetínský will now be the British Government's business partner as well as the Russian Government's. The only truly golden share is public ownership. Anything that needs this, needs that. And you have not been told the truth about Ukraine. Well, you have been told it on here and in a few other places. But not in general.

After well over three years, none of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk or Zaporizhzhia has been wholly captured by Russia, which is being offered, and looks set to accept, only the bits that it had managed to take as well as Crimea, which is no more Ukrainian than Algeria was French, with Ukraine told in no uncertain terms that there would be no more American support if it fought on after that, meaning that it could not possibly do so. Thus will end the war that had brought North Korean troops into combat for the first time since 1953. Alas for the poetic of soul that it could not have ended today, the fiftieth anniversary of the Vietnamese capture of Saigon, and the eightieth anniversary of the death of Adolf Hitler. Dare we hope for Victory Day, which has not been kept in Ukraine since 2015? Think about that.

Yet still we are expected to believe that the Russian Army, which has been unable to enter the Russian-speaking city of Kherson less than 20 miles from the border, was poised to park its tanks on the Atlantic coast of every European country that had one. In the midst of this nonsense, yet showing no sign of being aware of it, Donald Trump is doing what he does, and arranging for himself, his relatives and his associates to coin it in from the oil, gas and minerals of Ukraine. His designs on Canada, Greenland and Panama are of the same order.

20 years ago, the desperate wannabe Americans of British centrism and rightism, which are in fact different cultural codes for the single political position of a single social circle, were spectacularly unable to contain their contempt for Canada, which had refused to participate in the Iraq War. At the start of this month, the centrists were calling for Britain to offer asylum to American refugees from Trump. But the law in Britain has been found to be that sex meant biological sex, and Keir Starmer is lobbying for the 2028 British Open to be held at Turnberry. It is they who are going to have to flee. Presumably to Canada.

D'you Wanna Be In Their Gang, Their Gang, Their Gang?

On the eve of the local elections, Kemi Badenoch's weaponisation of child sexual abuse was cheap. But politics is not for the squeamish. Jess Phillips is on course to lose her seat to the Muslim candidate of the Workers Party, which has called for an inquiry into the grooming gangs. Yet who is a grooming gang, and who is not?

Like you, I have never met a paedophile. I mean, we may have done, in the way that we may have met a Muggletonian. But we are wholly unaware of having done so, you and I both. I apologise to any Muggletonian reading this. Yet this country's cultural and political elite cannot get out of bed, if that, without tripping over one or more nonces. And every single time, our betters had had no idea. Or so we are invariably expected to believe.

The truth is that like illegal drug use, the sexual abuse of children, especially but not exclusively adolescent males, is fundamental to cultural and political power in this country, both those practices themselves and the opportunities that they presented for blackmail. That in turn crosses over with the endemic sexual harassment and assault of male staff who are barely, if at all, into adulthood.

It has all come out about Margaret Thatcher's friends. She knew about Cyril Smith when she arranged his knighthood. Jimmy Savile's knighthood was rejected four times by the relevant committee, until she absolutely insisted upon it for the man with whom she spent every New Year's Eve, and on whose programmes she was so obsessed with appearing that her staff had to ration those appearances. Her closest lieutenant was Peter Morrison. Unlike the then Prince of Wales, she would have had sight of every file on Laurens van der Post.

Smith was a highly eccentric and largely absentee MP for a tiny minority party, but he was a Thatcherite avant la lettre, who had left the Labour Party when he had started to see cars outside council houses. Thatcher's father was also a Liberal until all of that fell apart between the Wars, and he was never a member of the Conservative Party. He, she and Smith were politically indistinguishable.

That the Radical Right put out pamphlets demanding the legalisation of paedophile activity was mentioned in Our Friends in the North, which was broadcast in 1996. Our Friends in the North is so integral to subsequent popular culture that one of its four stars went on to play James Bond, another was the first Doctor of this century’s revival of Doctor Who, and neither of the others is exactly obscure.

That Thatcherite MPs were likely to commit sexual violence against boys with the full knowledge of the party hierarchy formed quite a major subplot in To Play the King, the middle series of the original House of Cards trilogy. To Play the King was broadcast as long ago as 1993. Of the generation that was now in its pomp, every politician and commentator saw every minute of that trilogy.

Moreover, anyone who came to political maturity in what were then the newly-former mining areas will have been made fully aware that the miners in the dock, all the way back in 1984 and 1985, routinely made reference to the proclivities of the Home Secretary of the day, Leon Brittan. Those proclivities were common knowledge from Fife and the Lothians, to County Durham and the southern part of Northumberland, to South Yorkshire, to Derbyshire, to South Wales, among other places. Nothing was carried in the papers or included in the court reports, but the pit villages never needed Twitter in order to circumvent that kind of censorship.

Yvette Cooper has a former mining constituency. Yet she thinks that those grooming gangs which were currently attracting attention should be investigated only by the Police. She should tell that to the veterans of the Battle of Orgreave, along with the Hillsborough families, the victims of the spycops, and numerous others, including Doreen Lawrence, on whose reputation Keir Starmer had long traded. Ah, yes, Starmer. With no diplomatic background, one of Jeffrey Epstein's closest friends has been made the British Ambassador to Washington. Who is a grooming gang, and who is not?

Underage groupies have always been integral to rock 'n' roll. We all know what at least used to be endemic at public schools. Popular entertainers were known to sleep with underage girls at the youth conferences of the political parties back in the day. And so on. Reading about the role in grooming gangs of fast food outlets, minicab offices, and other such establishments, I am not alone in asking to be told something that I did not already know from towns and villages that were still overwhelmingly white, and which were literally or practically 100 per cent so in the 1990s, when it was effectively less illegal than underage drinking for men in their twenties, or even older, to have sex with girls of 15, 14, or even younger.

White men who commit certain offences are "lone wolves", black men who do so are "gang members", and brown men who do so are "homegrown Islamist terrorists", yet the crimes are the same. Likewise, a certain type of organised crime syndicate is a "grooming gang" or a "rape gang" when the members are South Asian, or Muslim, or both, but a "paedophile ring" when they are not, and most emphatically when they are all white and non-Muslim. But again, they are the same thing.

Earlier this year, Radio Four broadcast a series on the Paedophile Information Exchange, a story known to readers of this blog throughout the 19 years of existence. If PIE was not a grooming gang and a rape gang, then what ever has been or could be? It was at the very heart of the Establishment, and this year, it will be 40 years since the Thatcher Government secured a judicial fiat that, without bothering to ask Parliament, abolished the age of consent altogether. Gillick competence ought instead to be called Thatcher competence.

The Major Government did write Thatcher competence into the Age of Legal Capacity (Scotland) Act 1991. But it is applied in Northern Ireland on no authority that is apparent to anyone. Even in England and Wales, it has never been subject to a parliamentary vote. Let there be one now. And if there were to be an inquiry into the grooming gangs, then Victoria Gillick should be on it, along with Lisa McKenzie and the distinguished criminologists in the Workers Party, for a start. But we all know that British inquiries take years on end to exonerate the lifelong friends who had appointed them.

Digital ID would be administered by the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle. Like a serving Government Whip, Kyle was given his big break in politics by the Chief Whip whose Whips' Office included both Kyle's close friend, closest ally, and sometime lover, Ivor Caplin, and at the same time Dan Norris, who was also notably close to Caplin. Along with the subsequently adjudicated and disqualified electoral fraud Phil Woolas, such was the Whips' Office that forced through the Iraq War. Caplin, Norris and Woolas were all made Ministers a few weeks later. Up behind them has come Kyle, among others. Would you trust him and his ilk with your children's and grandchildren's photographs and contact details?

Was Rolf Harris a Pakistani? Was Chris Denning? Is Stuart Hall? Is Paul Gadd? There were and are Pakistani grooming gangs. But they were and are far from the only ones, and far from the most powerful. Boris Johnson was a pupil at a private school when Paedophile Action for Liberation, which later merged into PIE, said without challenge that it could shut down both the private school system and the youth criminal justice system by calling its members out on strike. As Prime Minister, Johnson described the money spent on investigating Medomsley Detention Centre as having been "spaffed up the wall".  Clearly, he could not see the problem. He had been groomed.

Of the same generation is Starmer, late of Reigate Grammar School, the Sunday Times Independent School of the Year 2025. Yes, it was private when Starmer was there. In the words of Doughty Street Chambers, on its page about Starmer, now amusingly removed from public view: "He was Director of Public Prosecutions and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008-2013. As DPP, Keir was responsible for all criminal prosecutions in England and Wales." Therefore, Starmer would have been responsible for the decision not to charge Savile even if he had never set eyes on the file. But that is in any case inconceivable. We are talking about Jimmy Savile here. That Starmer took the decision not to charge Savile has been repeated all over the place, far beyond parliamentary privilege. Starmer has yet to sue anyone for having made that claim. Again, he could not see the problem. Again, he had been groomed. Who is a grooming gang, and who is not?

Fossil, Fuel

Silence as beautiful as Bach from those who usually cheerlead for Tony Blair. Blair never put Ed Miliband in the Cabinet, to which he was appointed immediately by his patron, Gordon Brown. The Blairites wanted The Other One as Leader in 2015, so that David Miliband, Peter Mandelson and Andrew Adonis could have continued to attend Cabinet in order to see off any backsliding from privatisation, austerity and war. As it was, the Liberal Democrats did that job for them.

But 2024 was the first General Election in 19 years at which Blair voted Labour. Unless in 2019 he happened to have a candidate of Change UK or whatever it as calling itself by then, he has voted for the party that has come out with the single largest number of seats every time since 1997. You just know it. The faltering Keir Starmer is already 62, so Blair wants to take out any potential rival to Wes Streeting, who would be the most right-wing Leader of either main party since the War.

Blair's idolaters now have to oppose Net Zero, and from this evening or tomorrow, once the shock had dulled a bit, they will do so, since that is how cults work. Until today, those of us who were resistant to anti-industrial Malthusianism and misanthropy were called Flat Earthers, and compared to Holocaust deniers, by exactly those individuals. Miliband has been something of a disappointment; I remember his addressing the Durham Miners' Gala that Blair had always refused to attend even though his constituency had begun less than a mile from the venue, and promising a role for coal in future energy policy. But Miliband, though now wrong, is at least sincere. His mind might never have changed if he had become Prime Minister 10 years ago.

The Tony Blair Institute is funded by the Saudis, so Blair does not mean capturing the carbon from fuel produced in this fuel-rich country. And whoever will be doing the capturing will also no doubt have paid him, or be paying him, or both. Likewise, someone in or around the Government is being paid by whoever would be supplying the drones to track down fly-tippers, whom I vigorously deplore, and destroy their valuable property for a civil offence with a maximum fine of £400, although let me repeat that I despise fly-tippers. Watch out for how all of this will somehow be deemed to necessitate universal and compulsory digital ID. Supplied, of course, by generous paymasters of politicians past and present. Perhaps the trade unions should get in there? But the thing would still be wrong in principle, as well as doomed to inflict chaos in practice. And in any case, they won't.

Closely connected is the Government's refusal to protect the right to use cash. This is not about being against cards or apps. Of course I use mine all the time. This is about vulnerable people, local circular economies, and civil liberties. In France, Article 642-3 of the penal code bans traders from refusing cash payment. We need that here. No, the legal tender thing does not cover it. You are not in debt to the vendor until you have the goods. A suspicious number of those who decry us sceptics of the cashless society also claim that we are under constant threat of cyberattacks, and a surprising number of those who are forthright against the cashless society are enthusiasts for cryptocurrencies, about which the clue is in the name.

Masterful and Consciousness-Changing

There is no comparison with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who is neither in the Cabinet, nor possessed of the hotline to the Prime Minister of which Daniella Weiss accurately boasted to Louis Theroux. Nor is there any comparison with Hamas, which Britain does not arm, still less does the RAF fly nightly reconnaissance missions for it at all, never mind free of charge. Peter Oborne writes:

In February, the ultra-right Spectator magazine launched a sudden and unexpected hatchet job on filmmaker Louis Theroux.

The magazine, edited by former cabinet minister Michael Gove, told readers: “Theroux is once again making a film about Jews in Judea and Samaria - the region known as the West Bank - focusing on so-called ‘settlers.’”

Spectator writer Jonathan Sacerdoti presumably used these scare quotes to signal scepticism about the mere use of the word “settler”.

He then laid into Theroux’s previous film on Israeli settlements, The Ultra Zionists, released in 2011. He described it as a “documentary criticised by some for cherry-picking the most extreme and controversial voices from the settler movement to create a caricature of violent, religious fanatics. Many felt it ignored the historical and security-driven reasons behind Israeli settlement policies, overlooked the very real threats posed by Palestinian terrorism, and failed to present any real balance.”

For good measure, Sacerdoti also launched an attack on Theroux’s wife, Nancy Strang, on the basis that her views on Israel “appear to be anything but impartial”.

The Spectator’s pre-emptive strike was followed by a chorus of attacks in Britain’s right-wing press. According to the Telegraph, whose reporting on Israel cannot be described as remotely impartial, the Theroux film is “surplus to requirements”.

The Daily Mail accused Theroux of a “deep streak of cynicism”, adding: “His interviewees are carefully chosen, to reinforce the BBC narrative that Israelis are the oppressors and Palestinians their victims.” The knives are out for Louis Theroux.

Supported by the state

All three papers attack, directly or by implication, the BBC. They argue that Theroux has set out to attack Israel by picking on a fringe group of extremists and that, in the words of the Telegraph, “moderate Israelis regard the settlers as a national embarrassment”.

The argument that settlers are a fringe movement is based on an invincible ignorance that is wholly characteristic of mainstream British media when it comes to Israel. The West Bank settlers who Theroux chronicles in his film are supported in every conceivable way by the Israeli state.

Their numerous crimes against Palestinians are rarely prosecuted. In parts of the occupied West Bank, the settlers and security forces have effectively merged. Theroux’s documentary provides a vivid case in point when he finds himself trapped with a group of Palestinians under assault from settlers.

These settlers enjoy full civil rights, along with other government benefits, including soft loans. Meanwhile, Palestinians have virtually no rights at all, having been subject to a system of arbitrary military government since 1967.

This is why all serious human rights organisations, including Israel’s B’Tselem, call Israel an apartheid state.

This ought to have political consequences. Why hasn’t Britain sanctioned settler leaders Itamar Ben Gvir, Smotrich and many others?

The settler movement is today more powerful than ever before. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing Likud Party’s founding charter declares: “Between the sea and the Jordan [River] there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

In other words, it makes an explicit claim to Israeli ownership of more and more land in what Israel now regularly calls Judea and Samaria. Likud is moreover in coalition with two settler parties: the Religious Zionists and Jewish Power.

Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionists and a self-proclaimed fascist, is also the finance minister and civil administrator across the occupied West Bank. For the last two years, there has been a surge in settlement activity - and associated settler violence - across the territory.

The suggestion made in mainstream British newspapers that Theroux has cherry-picked a group of weirdos in order to stigmatise Israel carries zero credibility.

Savagery understated

Note, however, that this film tells us nothing new about the situation in the occupied West Bank. Theroux’s art is to allow the settlers themselves to set out their ethno-nationalist programme in their own terms, explaining their inhumanity and racism in their own words. The settler project is there for all to see.

Theroux tells us nothing that every diplomat, human rights expert and journalist who bothers to do the research has not known for years. What Theroux has done - and three cheers to the much-criticised BBC for screening this film - is to bring the moral horror and savagery of the settlements to a much wider audience. Thanks to his work (along with the outstanding and wrongly overlooked new ITV documentary Our Land), ordinary people have seen with their own eyes what the settlements are like.

From time to time Theroux pulls his punches. He fails to use the term apartheid, even though that is exactly what he is showing the viewer. He understates settler savagery. Take his account of the Evyatar (translation: “God is Great”) outpost overlooking the neighbouring Palestinian village of Beita.

While he does show the shrine of the brave American-Turkish activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, shot dead last year by an Israeli sniper, he makes no mention that before her assassination, 15 Palestinians had already died struggling for their land in the same village in recent years. One was a 41-year-old water engineer, Shadi Alshurfa, shot dead while dealing with the village water main.

Still, Theroux’s achievement is profound. His film enables a much wider understanding that Israel’s barbaric settler-colonial project is incompatible with the much-vaunted proposition that Israel shares western values and is the “only democracy in the Middle East”.

This ought to have political consequences. Why hasn’t Britain sanctioned settler leaders Itamar Ben Gvir, Smotrich and many others? How on earth does Prime Minister Keir Starmer get away with claiming that Israel is not an apartheid state? Why does his government refuse to recognise a Palestinian state?

It is also high time that Starmer told his foreign secretary, David Lammy, that Britain must insist Israel follow the International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s provisional ruling in the ongoing Gaza genocide case. Britain has not bothered to responded to the ICJ’s landmark affirmation last summer that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal. Why not?

Meanwhile, Britain has not even followed the example of Canada in sanctioning Daniella Weiss, the gruesome settler leader and ethnic cleansing enthusiast who features so largely in BBC and ITV films. Many Britons will wonder why not.

As matters stand, Starmer’s Britain is colluding with the illegal settler barbarism and land theft laid out so skilfully in Theroux’s masterful and consciousness-changing documentary.

At The Checkout

The highest grocery inflation in a year, so Kemi Badenoch floats the idea of scrapping the triple lock. Two days before local elections at which half or more of those who voted will be pensioners. 

But what alternative do they have? The party that has stripped most of them of the Winter Fuel Payment? When Labour councillors were being disciplined for having decried and denounced that withdrawal, then they were advised that it was not a hill worth dying on, since no one would remember it in the spring. We shall soon see about that.

Pensioners might have taken heart from the doubts about Net Zero that were being expressed by one of their number, Tony Blair. But they have known him quite long enough. Whom would he have doing the carbon capture and the nuclear power? And how much are they paying him?

Unsettling

Unless tomorrow's Prime Minister's Questions were dominated by The Settlers and its imperative that Britain stop arming Israel, then the hierarchy would be on full display. A BBC documentary in which people spoke for themselves? Crickets. But an ITV dramatisation of real events? Insufficient progress, yet still more than nothing. And a work of total fiction on Netflix? Forced showing in schools, and huge changes in public policy such as would necessitate compulsory digital ID.

The nature of their society is such that West Bank settlers were unlikely to be incels or even volcels. (I had expected the computer to tell me that there was no such word, but it turns out that there is, and that it means what I had meant. What a time to be alive.) But social media do play a role in their movement. What a missed opportunity, that The Settlers was not a drama about that. Someone should pitch it to Netflix.

As it is, PMQs is likely to be dominated by Kneecap, who could not buy publicity like this, and about whom no one cared until they had the temerity to criticise Israel. But has Jess Phillips apologised for having "joked" about bombing Glastonbury because it had played host to Jeremy Corbyn, as well as for having stated in all seriousness that she would stab him in the front? Has Dan Hodges apologised for having called, complete with an illustration, for Corbyn to have a stake driven through his heart? Has the Parachute Regiment apologised for having used Corbyn's face for target practice? Has Keir Starmer apologised for having caused Zarah Sultana to receive death threats that branded her "Putin's whore"? Has anyone spoken to Sir Paul McCartney CH about his response to Bloody Sunday? Has anyone spoken to the King?

Prescription

Freezing prescription charges is all well and good. But England is the only part of the United Kingdom that still has them, and the Conservatives in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (where there are a few) are no more in favour of their reintroduction than anyone else is. Similarly, England outside London will soon be the only place without universal free school meals, and the same thing will apply. 

Labour now wants to reintroduce prescription charges in Scotland. The Conservatives do not. But Labour does. As on the Winter Fuel Payment, the jobs tax, the farm tax, the cap on bus fares, and so much else, Labour is now the greater evil, worse than the Tories.

That would be demonstrated again if the Government failed to honour the recommendations of the pay review bodies, whose "independence" has hitherto been proverbial even though they were in fact appointed by the Ministers who set their terms of reference. Never accept a pay rise below the rate at which your private employer was profitabile, nor a pay cut greater than any fall in that, or your employer does not have a business model. And never accept anything less than a pay rise at the rate of inflation from the currency-issuing State.

What If Everyone Could Vote?

At the 2021-22 census, there were 10.7 million people who had been born abroad. But they were not all Wera Hobhouse, née von Reden. They would have included Cliff Richard until he decamped to the Republic of Barbados. They included Boris Johnson. They included Daniel Hannan. They included Peter Hitchens. They included me.

We are all British citizens, but the thing about allowing only British citizens to vote is that Britain has never done it. Almost no other country allows any category of non-citizen to vote. In the United States, you cannot become President unless you were born there. Imagine suggesting there or in Israel that any non-citizen should have the vote. National Conservatives have picked the wrong laboratory here, where an Irish or Commonwealth citizen could in principle become Prime Minister. Is anyone still sitting in the House of Commons for an English, Scottish or Welsh seat without being a British citizen, or for a Northern Irish seat without being British or Irish? That may now be an open goal for rivals to be First Past the Post. Yet it is perfectly possible.

The Migrant Democracy Project is merely stating the obvious when it calls this country's qualifications for voting "colonial". Britain has a long, recent, and arguably ongoing imperial history. It was in the EU for two generations. It is mercantile. De Gaulle was right to call us "maritime", but not to call us "insular". Citizens of countries that were in the French Empire when he said that now have the vote in Britain as citizens of the Commonwealth. We already enfranchise the Commonwealth citizens of Rwanda, Mozambique, Gabon and Togo, none of which was ever in the British Empire. Why let a Gabonese or a Togolese vote, but not an American or an Israeli?

Extending suffrage to citizens of countries with which we had a connection is so British that it is positively Burkean, like the National Health Service. And Britain is now globally noted for its superdiversity, a so far unique combination of having people from every inhabited territory on Earth, of having some level of ethnic diversity down to every neighbourhood and village, and of having a huge and exponentially increasing mixed-race population in the society that accepted mixed-race people and couples more than anywhere else. So, since there would seem to be no remaining example to the contrary, require parliamentary candidates to be British citizens in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens in Northern Ireland. But let everyone vote.

No Place In Our Society?

Despite wanting to be Prime Minister, Kemi Badenoch is apparently unaware that it is not for a politician to demand a criminal prosecution. She is scared of Robert Jenrick, so she is simply not a serious person.

And in a sign of what her Premiership would be like, she is pursuing a feud with popular entertainers who happened to be among the daily-lengthening list of people who had made her look silly.

"The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP" is a bit strong, like a lot of Kneecap's output. Yet only when they criticised Israel did anyone apart from the humiliated Badenoch see a problem with them.

Earlier this month, hundreds turned out, and 30 marching bands played, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Wesley Somerville of the proscribed Ulster Volunteer Force. "UVF" adorned many of the wreaths laid in honour of a man who had accidentally blown himself up while perpetrating the Miami Showband massacre.

Last year, those same elements rioted side by side with the Tricolour-wavers who returned their hospitality in Dublin on Saturday. They even brought their own flags, as their hosts had done as guests.

Such are the connections formed in and by the overlapping worlds of British intelligence and organised crime. All cultures have wrong 'uns. Are these new ones muscling in on carefully carved up turf?

One of the speakers was Dublin City Councillor Malachy Steenson, a Planter surname like McDonald or McGregor. A Special Criminal Court convict, Councillor Steenson has been associated with the proscribed Official IRA, with the proscribed Continuity IRA, with the proscribed Real IRA, and with the proscribed INLA. He boasts that, "I was never a member of the Provos." Nor was DJ Próvaí, who with his bandmates is the least of any credible politician's worries. Though not of Badenoch's.

Something Defective

Natalie Elphicke is being paid £600 per day to chair the Defence Homes Strategy Review. Defecting MPs do well, and they almost always defect in one direction. It has been 48 years since a Labour MP last joined the Conservative Party, and that was only the third time that it had ever happened. Both of the earlier cases had been in 1948, and both had been over the nationalisation of steel. Yet eight Conservative MPs have joined the Labour Party in the last 30 years alone, an average of one every four years, always without having recanted any part of their previous records. That said, Elphicke has always supported the two-child benefit cap, so she has had nothing to recant there.

In 2013, Dan Poulter had been the Minister who had sold 80 per cent of Plasma Resources UK to an American private equity firm. Yes, that was as part of the Coalition, for every aspect of which both parties to it remain responsible. But even so. In 2012, Poulter had resigned from the BMA because it had voted to strike. Last year, the Labour Party welcomed him with open arms. "My party has left me" never, ever leads to the follow-up question, "Yes, that may have been why you left your old party, but why have you joined this one?" Five Conservative MPs got away with that as they defected to Labour in the Blair years, in one case the night before Gordon Brown became Prime Minister.

Elected to the last Parliament as a Conservative, Christian Wakeford was rapidly made a Labour Whip in it, and remains so in this one. Peter Temple-Morris was ennobled. Shaun Woodward was put in the Cabinet. Alan Howarth had been an architect of the Poll Tax, but it was like Howarth before him that Quentin Davies was made a Minister and then a Peer. Brown rapidly made Davies a Minister for the first time in his life, but he had been elected as a Conservative MP at all five of the 1987, 1992, 1997, 2001 and 2005 General Elections, and he had served in the Shadow Cabinets of Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard. The Conservative Party had taken an awfully long time to leave him. On defecting from Howard's party to a warmly welcoming Tony Blair's, Robert Jackson stated that he wanted to be in a party that was led by a Christian. Did someone say something about anti-Semitism? And Keir Starmer has put Elphicke on the equivalent of a £156,000 per year. Groaning under Kemi Badenoch, people will have noticed.

97 Weeks On

Nominations have been closed for 97 weeks, so when is the election?

If I sought election to any other public position now, then I would rapidly find myself just another death in custody under a Starmer or post-Starmer Government, and most especially if Labour had also taken back control of Durham County Council this week.

But I was a public governor of County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust from 2017 to 2020, having been elected unopposed, an extremely unusual occurrence. Unopposed among the 90,000 or more people in the part of County Durham that I was elected to represent. I failed to be re-elected by three votes, on a recount. Yet I was again elected unopposed not far off two years ago, a double feat that I am not aware that anyone else has ever managed, and which has caused the position to be kept vacant ever since. I am determined to have it for at least as long as I was elected to it. Do your worst. As, now under both parties, you are already doing to far better than I.

The Settlers

Watch it while you can on iPlayer. 

The BBC has form.

Pony and Trap

In the end, the place for a one-trick pony is always the knacker's yard.

The gender-critical feminists are having a moment, but they could do only so many victory laps before people wondered whether they had anything else to say. Either they did not, or it would be intolerable to their latter-day audiences, or they were never really left-wing at all.

Reform UK is having a moment, but what if it woke up on Friday morning and found that it had to deal with hundreds of thousands of people's bins, potholes and social care for the next four years? Any party that wanted to privatise the National Health Service but renationalise British Steel might politely be described as incoherent.

And Sharon Osbourne is having a moment, but how did a man with Ozzy's history of illegal drug use obtain a United States visa? How did she retain hers, after she had sent her own faeces to critical journalists?

In the end, the place for a one-trick pony is always the knacker's yard.

Initial Observations

In its new form, The Observer is off to a good start, not least by interviewing my old comrade, Maurice Glasman. Dare we hope for a regular voice of the fight 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? In the struggle for economic equality, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class, while in the struggle for international peace, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class and the youth.

Social solidarity is an expression of personal responsibility, personal responsibility is protected by social solidarity, international solidarity is an expression of national sovereignty, and national sovereignty is protected by international solidarity. Equality and diversity must include economic equality and class diversity, regional equality and regional diversity, the equal sovereignty of diverse states, and equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law with the presumption of innocence, requiring that conviction be beyond reasonable doubt.

All of this is opposed by and to the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the anti-industrial Malthusianism and misanthropy of the Green agenda, the treatment of identity politics as equal or superior to class politics, the treatment of gender identity as equal or superior to biological sex, the cancel culture of which our people have always been the principal victims, the erosion of civil liberties, the stupefaction of the workers or the youth, the indulgence of separatist tendencies in any part of Great Britain, the consideration of any all-Ireland settlement that failed to preserve the National Health Service and other such achievements, or the failure to recognise that a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency had as much of that currency as it chose to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore needed to be under democratic political control.

The names of potential contributors are available. Ask around.

Full of Something

At yesterday’s “Ireland Is Full” march in Dublin, why did the counter-demonstrators allow Sinn Féin to tag along? As those same organisations know better than most, there is nothing in that party’s long record in office in Northern Ireland to suggest that it was remotely left-wing. Quite the reverse, in fact. And why did Sinn Féin want to be there? Its electoral base in the Republic is staunchly anti-immigrant. Unlike its voters in Northern Ireland. Oddly enough, since one in five adults in the 26 Counties is a first generation immigrant, and one in five births there is to a non-national. What do the Six Counties mean to them? So much for the cry from Boston, Brisbane, Birmingham, Buenos Aires or Belfast that “Ireland belongs to the Irish” rather than to people whose ancestors had arrived a mere 400 years ago.

Not originally for that reason, but increasingly because of it, the Republic has perhaps the most impregnable cordon sanitaire in the democratic world. Wake up and hear The Hum when even Michael Healy-Rae may be a Minister, but never, under any circumstance, may any member of Sinn Féin, the party of the First Minister of Northern Ireland. Up there in the Six Counties are almost all the members of the Provisional Army Council that Sinn Féin believes to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland as the legitimate successor of the Second Dáil, although that Parliament’s only surviving member in 1986, Tom Maguire, conferred legitimacy on the Continuity Army Council, so that it was the Continuity IRA that provided a firing squad at his funeral in, almost unbelievably, 1993, and so that it has been Republican Sinn Féin that has held commemorations at his graveside. Anyway, that is what Sinn Féin believes. That the Army Council is the sovereign body throughout Ireland as the legitimate successor of the Second Dáil.

With Michelle O’Neill as First Minister and with Mary Lou McDonald (a Planter surname, like Conor McGregor’s) as Taoiseach, then who would need a border poll? Why would the IRA want one? No referendum would ever endorse rule by the Army Council. Once that were established across the whole of Ireland, then the beneficiaries would never wish to give it up, and everyone else would find it practically impossible to make them. That is what everyone who matters in Dublin is determined to stop.

How The Anti-Woke Won

Professor Umut Özkırımlı writes:

I knew exactly what I was walking into when I set out to write a book challenging the prevailing orthodoxy on identity politics — or to use a phrase now dripping with scorn, “wokeism”.

Sure, my leftist credentials were unimpeachable: a hefty publication record, a scholarly trajectory steeped in constructivist epistemologies, and a well-honed disdain for nationalist dogma. The book wasn’t some right-wing hatchet job produced in the dank basement of a Heritage Foundation outbuilding.

Cancelled was meant to be a warning and a call to action. What passed as progressive politics was anything but. The left thought it could beat the right by mimicking its ways and playing the culture war game on the right’s turf — a strategic error of catastrophic proportions, doomed from the start by a lack of resources to fulfill its ambitions. In the meantime, it systematically eliminated dissenting views, alienated potential allies, and destroyed any chance of building the broad coalitions necessary for actual, you know, winning — which last I checked was still the point of politics rather than hollow virtue-signalling and algorithmically curated rage.

But none of this mattered. The book landed with a thud. Part of that was our own doing. The title, Cancelled, was market-friendly, yes, but also misleading. It gave the impression of a personal memoir of cancellation, or worse, an opportunistic rant against cancel culture. Readers who never got past the cover assumed I was lamenting the loss of dinner party invitations, not proposing a political overhaul. My publisher, Polity, also made a spectacular marketing blunder, publishing Susan Neiman’s book on the same topic at the same date. The two books, Cancelled and The Left is Not Woke, couldn’t have been more different. Mine: a nuanced critique of identity politics drawing on Black feminist thought, particularly the groundbreaking activism of the Combahee River Collective. Hers: bland Enlightenment universalism — the intellectual equivalent of non-dairy creamer.

But most of the response wasn’t our fault. The book was systematically ignored by mainstream media and liberal/left outlets such as The Guardian and openDemocracy — publications I had contributed to for years and which apparently developed collective amnesia about my existence overnight. I found myself accused of cosying up to the far right at best, or being a straight-up fascist at worst.

Two years on from its release on 31 March 2023, two things have become clear.

First, everything the book warned about has come to pass. The culture war was lost — not just a battle here or there, but the entire theatre of operations. The huge backlash helped bring the reactionary right to power not only in America with Trump’s return, but also saw the surge of the far right across Europe — from Marine Le Pen’s ascendancy in France to the AfD’s gains in Germany to Wilders’ victory in the Netherlands — making the far right, if we are to believe The Economist, “Europe’s most popular family of political parties by vote share … for the first time in modern European history”. Meanwhile, from Turkey to Hungary, authoritarians have entrenched their power through elections — history’s favorite plot twist, where democracy becomes the midwife of its own undoing.

The left? Decimated. It has become nearly impossible to speak up, as the reaction to campus protests in the wake of October 7 has shown — whether it’s voicing solidarity with Palestinians without being labelled antisemitic, or calling out censorship without being accused of endorsing violence.

Yet curiously, the woke left itself didn’t suffer the blow. Its leading figures simply migrated to Bluesky, or relocated to Canadian universities (take Jason Stanley, the self-appointed “fascism expert”, who announced he was leaving his job — as in tenured Ivy League professor, not factory-floor dissident — because the US is at risk of becoming a “fascist dictatorship”). They lit the match, but only others burned: the deported students and immigrants, for example, or the federal workers targeted by DOGE.

Not that the woke activist gives up. Turns out, privilege is easier to theorise than to forfeit. Consider the double standards at play vis-à-vis rule of law. Marine Le Pen is fined €100,000 and sentenced to four years in prison for embezzling public funds. Rule of law. Victory for democracy. A U.S. federal judge blocks Trump’s attempt to revoke legal protections for 500,000 immigrants. Rule of law. Victory for democracy. Italian courts stop Meloni’s plan to detain asylum seekers in Albania. Rule of law. Victory for democracy.

But when the UK Supreme Court rules — precisely, and in full accordance with the legal framework — that the term “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex, while still protecting trans people under the category of gender reassignment, the reaction is delirium. Suddenly it’s not about rule of law, but about — again — “genocide” and “fascism”. Unaware that their world crumbled, they updated their bios, sidelining solidarity for metrics, for ego, for the illusion of moral clarity.

Second, the views expressed in Cancelled have become conventional wisdom for the few who can spot both a trend and a revenue stream. The ambassadors of moral purity have become anti-woke overnight, executing ideological pirouettes that would make Olympic gymnasts envious.

Examples abound. California’s former woke poster-boy Gavin Newsom now podcasts with right-wing provocateurs like Turning Point USA’s co-founder Charlie Kirk and MAGA mastermind Steve Bannon, railing against LatinX, and questioning the fairness of “trans athletes” participation in women’s sports”. Arch-woke Novara Media contributor Ash Sarkar speaks of class and material analysis in her debut book as if she just discovered The Communist Manifesto behind a stack of Jeremy Corbyn posters.

And not only individual social justice warriors. According to a recent timeline published by Forbes, companies who rolled back DEI programmes include, Warner Bros. Discovery, Goldman Sachs, Paramount, Citigroup, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, NPR, PBS, among dozens of others. The New York Times set the tone of the “vibeshift” in the media by publishing an article titled “In Shift From 2020, Identity Politics Loses Its Grip on the Country”, followed by similar editorial changes in other former cathedrals of liberal piety — Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, even The Guardian which asked on March 30, 2025, whether #MeToo was an epic failure?

What I feel now is akin to what the mythological character Cassandra must have endured: the gift of prophecy, poisoned by the curse of disbelief — that peculiar mix of vindication and despair that comes from having been right when it no longer matters. The ideas that got me — and scores of others, notably gender-critical feminists who’ve been fighting for years against the erasure of of biological sex as a legally meaningful category — labelled a fascist sympathiser are now repeated by the same people who did the labelling, without so much as a footnote acknowledging their about-face.

I personally take no pleasure in this vindication. What use is being right when the damage is already done? The far right didn’t need my help to rise; it needed exactly the kind of strategic malpractice I warned against. And now those warnings, once deemed heretical, are repeated as received wisdom by the very same heresy hunters who would have happily lit the pyre beneath me.

History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it rhymes with remarkable precision. And the rhyme scheme here is bitter indeed — a sonnet where every line ends with the same word: “too late”.

No Woolly Thinking

So much for nuclear deterrence, but we already knew that. For a solution in Kashmir based on the self-determination of its people, our nuclear-threatened species obviously needs both India and Pakistan.

For India, we need its "special and privileged strategic partner", Russia. And for Pakistan, we need the country to which it relates as Israel does to the United States, China. This is the real world.

All Kinds of Everything?

I have been saying for years that in order to confuse what was now an almost entirely English-language Eurovision Song Contest, Britain should enter something in Welsh.

But this year, having already entered something in English, if Ireland did not pull it out and substitute Kneecap, then they should just turn up anyway and perform outside the venue. Very, very, very loudly.

A Plot Without Precedent

Richard Sanders writes:

In Get In: The Inside Story of Labour under Starmer, like its predecessor Left Out, which chronicled Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire have grasped the core reality of Labour’s history over the past decade.

For all their portrayal as ruthless Stalinists, the left were hopelessly ill equipped for the life and death struggle Corbyn’s unexpected 2015 victory plunged them into.

They lacked organisation, coherence and, above all, the cold bloodedness that the battle ahead required.

It is the right who have behaved like a ruthless Trotskyist sect.

The first sentence of the first chapter states Jeremy Corbyn was destroyed by a “conspiracy.” Thereafter the book is an exposé of what the authors (who work for The Times and Sunday Times) call “the great deception …. a plot without precedent in Labour history.”

The astonishing story Get In tells would probably lead to a left wing member of the party being suspended for peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories if they articulated the bare outlines in a speech.

It revolves almost entirely around one man, Morgan McSweeney, the founder of Labour Together, the organisation that propelled Starmer to power, and now his Chief of Staff.

Labour Together

The bald facts, in Pogrund and Maguire’s telling, are these.

Established in 2015, Labour Together claimed it existed to bring different parts of the party together.

In fact it was a ruthless, factional grouping which aimed, the authors say, “to use any means necessary to delegitimise and destroy” Jeremy Corbyn, “to ensure he lost badly” and restore the right to power.

“The imperative: don’t get caught.”

The key weapon they alighted on was allegations of antisemitism.

Labour Together aimed, McSweeney wrote in an early confidential strategy paper, to cultivate “seemingly independent voices to generate and share content to build up a political narrative and challenge fake news and political extremism.”

One of these was the campaign group Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN), which later morphed into the Centre for Countering Digital Hate.

One of its first targets was The Canary, a pro-Corbyn website that was achieving 8.5 million hits a month.

Working closely with the anti-Corbyn Jewish Labour Movement, the book says McSweeney secretly recruited Countdown co-presenter Rachel Riley to front a campaign targeting The Canary’s advertisers with claims the outlet was antisemitic.

The Canary was later cleared by the independent regulator Impress (a fact Pogrund and Maguire don’t mention), but the damage was done. The Canary “went down from 22 staff to one member of staff within a few months of us targeting it,” SFFN crowed.

“Bye bye Birdie!!!” tweeted Rachel Riley.

‘Destroy Corbynism’

Simultaneously, McSweeney and SFFN devoted enormous resources to scouring huge pro-Corbyn Facebook groups for incriminating posts.

“McSweeney ensured the most disturbing examples found their way to the Sunday Times” where they were published on 1 April 2018 under the headline: “Exposed: Jeremy Corbyn’s Hate Factory.”

“McSweeney revelled in Corbyn’s misery and did everything he could to exacerbate it”, all the while posing as “smilingly compliant with Corbynism,” the authors say he secretly organised hecklers to hound the Labour leader as he travelled the country. 

The money to finance Labour Together came from hedge fund manager Martin Taylor and from Trevor Chinn, “a multi-millionaire Jewish philanthropist” who “had great concerns about the election of an outspoken opponent of the Jewish state as Labour leader.”

This money was not declared, as required by law, to the Electoral Commission – an “oversight” that served Labour Together’s “strategic interests”.

“It kept the secret … The result was that nobody caught [McSweeney] amassing the data he used to understand and destroy Corbynism.”

Morgan McSweeney

McSweeney spent hundreds of thousands of pounds commissioning polling which provided vital insights into how the Labour Party membership, post-Corbyn, could be persuaded to vote for a candidate who would advance the interests of the right.

The answer, of course, was to lie.

The candidate McSweeney eventually alighted upon was Keir Starmer, whose great virtue was that he had served loyally under Corbyn.

Indeed, for the membership he had the additional virtue that, as Shadow Brexit Secretary, he had been the chief proponent of a second referendum.

Corbyn knew the policy was far less popular with Labour voters than Labour members and Starmer’s position undermined him as he sought desperately to cobble together a compromise that would keep both on board.

In Pogrund and Maguire’s telling Starmer was acutely aware of this. Starmer “had succeeded not only in securing his own future, but in binding Corbyn’s hands behind his back.”

At the December 2019 election the pro-Brexit Red Wall was duly lost — the blame for which Starmer, with the help of a compliant media, succeeded in foisting on Corbyn.

Antisemitism

The story of how Starmer stood on a continuity ticket and then subsequently broke every pledge he had made to the membership has already been told many times.

What emerges here is how central Israel/Palestine and antisemitism was in propelling the leadership rightwards, and how on this issue it was Starmer rather than McSweeney that was the driving force.

It was he who insisted on dismissing Rebecca Long-Bailey as Shadow Education Secretary after she re-tweeted a post claiming the American police who killed George Floyd, sparking the Black Rights Matter movement, had learned their techniques from the Israeli secret services.

And it was he who insisted on including in his response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report on antisemitism in the Labour Party the words: “Those that deny this is a problem are part of the problem.”

“We essentially set a trap that [Corbyn] leapt into,” says a shadow cabinet minister.

Responding to the report, Corbyn stated: “One antisemite is too many but the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons.”

It was “little more than a statement of the obvious”, the authors write, but set in motion a train of events that would lead to Corbyn’s expulsion from the Labour Party.

Instinctive vassal

A deep commitment to Israel meant Starmer resisted mounting calls for a ceasefire in Gaza following Hamas’s incursion into Israel, calls that came from allies as well as political opponents.

McSweeney, for whom a three-month stint on an Israeli kibbutz at the age of 17 was a formative life experience, was firmly behind him, genuinely bewildered by why solidarity with Israel should be viewed any differently from solidarity with an ally like France.

“They see Palestinian activism as a creature of the hard left,” says one shadow cabinet minister.

The book reveals that the apparent indifference of the leadership both to the suffering of Palestinians and the anger of British Muslims reduced the justice minister, Shabana Mahmood, the only Muslim in the shadow cabinet, to tears.

Starmer also saw Gaza as “nothing less than his audition for statesmanship.”

Like Blair before him he had concluded “that Britain’s interests, and his own, were best served by hewing close to whatever line was set by the Americans.”

An instinctive vassal, like Blair he quickly discovered his influence in Washington was, in fact, almost zero precisely because the imperial power knew his support could be taken for granted.

While still in opposition Starmer’s team pleaded for a meeting with President Biden but were ignored.

Fobbed off with secretary of state Antony Blinken they were dismayed to discover he was entirely uninterested in their views on Gaza.

Starmer’s energy over Israel is striking precisely because elsewhere in the book he is an absence – “an HR manager, not a leader,” as McSweeney himself is quoted as saying.

His portrayal as a hapless pawn in McSweeney’s hands is positively humiliating.

Smash Labour

McSweeney himself appears to be driven above all by a visceral loathing of the left. He is “seized by an almost millenarian zeal for destruction” and a desire to “pick the Labour Party up and smash its head open,” the authors say.

“His world view” is marked by “a certain fanaticism, paranoia and moral certitude.” McSweeney’s supporters would point to the 2024 election result as vindication. 

But the most serious failing of Get In is that it fails to probe the fundamental question of whether McSweeneyism really has succeeded in repairing Labour’s relationship with the electorate.

In 2019 Jeremy Corbyn, hamstrung by Brexit, confronted by a united opposition and facing ferocious hostility from the entirety of the press and most of his own parliamentary party, obtained 10,269,051 votes.

In 2024 Keir Starmer had a united party, faced a disgraced and discredited government undermined by a resurgent Reform Party, and enjoyed a largely compliant press. He obtained 9,708,716 votes.

In his own constituency Starmer’s vote halved to 18,884. You would have no idea this was the case from reading Get In.

Operating in the shadows

McSweeney’s achievement was to distribute the Labour vote with hyper-efficiency, pulling off a conjuring trick that enabled the party to obtain two thirds of the parliamentary seats with one third of the votes – a distortion without precedent in British parliamentary history.

Since then Labour’s support has plummeted. Reform now leads in the polls.

And McSweeney’s performative cruelty to the remnants of Corbynism has achieved the remarkable feat of opening up a meaningful political space to the left of the Labour Party.

It may be that McSweeney himself has already decided Starmer is a busted flush. Why else collaborate – as he clearly has – with a book so damaging to his boss?

McSweeney is frequently compared to Dominic Cummings, the man who foisted Boris Johnson on the country and within months decided he was an idiot, began referring to him as the “trolley” and worked behind the scenes to destroy his premiership.

If history is repeating itself then serious questions need to be asked about how it is our destinies came to be governed by unelected middle-aged men, operating in the shadows, whose only virtue seems to be an unshakeable faith that their own absurdly reductive understanding of the world constitutes a wisdom so profound that it frees them from the constraints of democracy and common decency that bind lesser mortals.

Demand The Truth

Peter Hitchens writes:

In my trade I have long grown used to the way governments lie and get others to lie for them. It is what they do. But I have seldom seen such a cloud of lies as we face now.

Hardly anyone in this country knows the truth about Ukraine. There has been nothing like it since we were all lied to about the Iraq invasion, with bilge about fictional ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’. The liars were caught out. And they learned from it. They learned to lie more skilfully.

Meanwhile, many of those in our society who knew how to challenge such lies died off or retired and were not replaced.

We have never had a debate about the Ukraine crisis which started from the beginning. Did anyone in power ever tell you truthfully how, when or why this war began? No. Did anyone in power explain why Britain, crime-blighted, decrepit, rubbish-strewn, rat-infested, broke Britain, had to get involved in it? Never.

You have just been fed propaganda rubbish about ‘democracy’, freedom and an invented Russian menace. Here are some of the lies you have repeatedly been told.

The war, they say, was not provoked. Seldom in history has a war been more provoked.

Russians, nice ones like the liberal, democratic politician Yegor Gaidar, and nasty ones like the bloody despot Vladimir Putin, begged the West to stop trundling its military alliance, Nato, eastwards towards Russia.

All Russians, including the great anti-Communist author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, had been shocked and angered when Nato in 1999 abruptly gave up its defensive posture and launched attacks on Yugoslavia – which had not attacked a Nato member.

These protests reached their peak in February 2007, when Putin made a dramatic speech in Munich. He said Nato expansion was ‘a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. We have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?’

Look, if someone as gaunt as Putin spoke to you like that in a pub late in the evening, you’d take it as a warning that he was seriously riled. And unless you wanted a fight, you’d back off. But we didn’t back off.

US President George W. Bush, the genius who invaded Iraq, deliberately raised the temperature the following year. Can it be that Bush likes wars

In April 2008, Bush said that Ukraine should be placed on the path towards joining Nato. Even The Guardian, the Liberal Warmonger’s Gazette, conceded that this was ‘likely to infuriate the Kremlin’. And so it did. I suspect we were on the path to war from that moment.

I am always accused, when I say that, of making excuses for Putin. I am not. I think he was stupid as well as wrong to be provoked. Wise men ignore provocations. But to claim he was not provoked is just to lie.

Another lie we are repeatedly told is that Russia attacked Georgia later in 2008. But anyone can find, on the web, a 2009 Reuters news agency story headlined ‘Georgia started war with Russia: EU-backed report’.

The dispatch summarises an inquiry by the respected Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini. She had been asked by Brussels to look into that war. That is what she said. But, somehow or other, a lot of Western media outlets failed to find space for it. I still meet supposedly informed people who have never heard of Ms Tagliavini or her report.

And then there is the claim that this is about democracy and freedom. It isn’t. The more the West claims to care for these things, the less it does to help them.

Some examples: Ukraine’s elected president was lawlessly overthrown by a mob in 2014. Britain and the USA condoned this shameful event because they preferred the illegal rebels to the elected government. You just can’t do that and pretend to be the guardian of democracy. But then, we aren’t anyway.

You will search in vain for protests against the treatment of Romania’s presidential candidate, in a country that is in the EU and Nato.

Călin Georgescu’s election was annulled by judges in December when he looked like winning the first round. And he has been banned from standing in the second round – all because he has the wrong kind of politics. And if that’s not enough, look at the West’s deep, shaming silence over the frightening, thuggish behaviour of Turkey’s President Recep Erdoğan.

A few weeks ago, this Turkish Putin arrested and jailed Ekrem İmamoğlu, an opposition politician who looked likely to beat him at the polls.

Mr İmamoğlu joined the many journalists and democrats who already rot in Turkish prisons.

Erdoğan has crushed free media, free speech and the freedom to protest. But his country is still allowed to stay in Nato, and Western states have made less noise than an angry vole guarding its nest. They’re scared of Erdoğan.

I won’t even try to explain how Germany recently recalled its old, dead parliament to push through laws the newly elected parliament would not pass. This was done to allow the spending of extra billions on the Ukraine war. But I hope you get my drift.

Demand proper debate. Demand the truth. Don’t be dragged into more stupidity, or we will end up with bomb craters as well as potholes.

And:

I am grateful to my eagle-eyed colleague Andrew Preston for spotting this lonely notice, below, displayed last weekend in London’s Hyde Park.

For you, last Sunday was Easter, but for worshippers of the cruel god Marijuana, it was their annual feast day, when they invade Hyde Park (and many other places) in significant numbers to defy the law.

Note the feeble wording, saying drug criminals ‘can’ be arrested, not that they will be.

Scotland Yard explained its policy: ‘Using cannabis… is illegal. Officers intervened and used enforcement options where proportionate and necessary.’ What did that mean in practice? Four people were arrested.

Officers also issued 45 ‘community resolutions’, seized five sound systems, issued 27 ‘dispersal notices’ and six ‘penalty notices’.

Day by day, evidence pours in linking marijuana use with incurable mental illness, and also with violent, crazy crime.

The maximum penalty for marijuana possession is still five years inside and an unlimited fine.

When did Parliament tell the police that they do not have to enforce the law?

Interim Guidance?

Yesterday was quite the day in the House of Commons, with the SNP, in its call for separate immigration visas for Scotland, having to be told to accept the verdict of one referendum by those who, in seeking to introduce a youth mobility scheme with the EU, were attempting to subvert the result of another, and indeed more recent, referendum.

How would those ruses work? Why, by universal and compulsory digital ID, of course. As would also be required for social media curfews and such like. Those measures are preferred to a healthy insistence that parents should act like parents, since by these means teenagers would be starved of access to any alternative to the ruling ideology. Less than a fortnight ago, that ideology still included gender self-identification, although not only would gents etiquette preclude anyone's passing comment, but a man in drag, for example on a stag night or having lost a bet, would shock no one, much less place him under any threat.

Like the digital ID that was already being introduced ostensibly to combat underage drinking and what have you, the electronic means of the intimate control of adolescents would be administered by the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle. Like a serving Government Whip, Kyle was given his big break in politics by the Chief Whip whose Whips' Office included both Kyle's close friend, closest ally, and sometime lover, Ivor Caplin, and at the same time Dan Norris, who was also notably close to Caplin. Along with the subsequently adjudicated and disqualified electoral fraud Phil Woolas, such was the Whips' Office that forced through the Iraq War. Caplin, Norris and Woolas were all made Ministers a few weeks later.

Up behind them has come Kyle, among others. Would you trust him and his ilk with your children's and grandchildren's contact details, or with their photographs? The same applies to trusting the Government with assisted suicide, and vice versa. And the Moscow car bomb that killed General Yaroslav Moskalik was effectively, if not literally, planted by British intelligence, which has no meaningful dividing line from the factions that intended to disregard any peace treaty and pursue forever Andriy Biletsky's mission for Ukraine, "to lead the white races of the world in a final crusade against Semite-led Untermenschen."

Such are the people who would issue and monitor, not only your compulsory digital ID and mine, but also that of your children and grandchildren, including the sons and grandsons whom they wished to conscript. Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war. Fascism is inherent in both of them, and it never arises except by their joint enterprise.

What Integrity

Feel free to provide your own punctuation to this post's title.

East of the Irish Sea, has there ever before been a set of local elections at which not a single candidate was elected unopposed? Yet that will be the case on Thursday, when the average number of candidates per ward will be six, and the average number of parties will be five. Parties. Five. On average. And no one, anywhere, elected unopposed.

Such is the utterly changed polity in which Ben Habib has let it be known that he did not intend to lead his new party, hinting at the sitting MP Rupert Lowe, but that Stephen Yaxley-Lennon would be welcome to join it. A party with Yaxley-Lennon as a member in good standing is set to be launched on the floor of the House of Commons.

Belfast Vital

One of Kneecap is called DJ Próvaí, and one of their songs is called Get Your Brits Out, but they became "terrorists" only when they criticised Israel. Bring this to trial, and see how the British public truly felt.

Even Sarah Bunting, leader of the DUP on Belfast City Council, and Jim Rodgers, one of only two remaining Ulster Unionists among the 60 councillors, have made Israel their reason for objecting to a forthcoming concert by Kneecap and Fontaines D.C. on the council-owned Boucher Playing Fields. Today, tickets sold out in 35 minutes.

Kneecap are hip hop boys while Fontaines D.C. are indie rockers, but some things do seem to transcend even that tribalism. Speaking of tribalism, though, Sharon Osbourne is not Jewish. Her father was, but her mother was an Irish Catholic. She clearly has things going on.

Perhaps managed by Mrs Osbourne, Councillors Bunting and Rodgers should organise a tour of Great Britain by Orange flute bands, to appear in each town or city where Kneecap were playing. Surely that would be more popular than Fenian C**ts, since it would be instantly recognisable as a vital expression of the same culture as obtained in England, Scotland and Wales?

I have also long advocated for the DUP to contest seats throughout the United Kingdom. The Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster has congregations in Bridlington, Bristol, Gardenstown, Lewes, Liverpool, Merthyr Tydfil, Oulton Broad, Rutherglen, South Grove, and Tavistock. Each presumably contains at least 11 adults, one to be the candidate and 10 to sign the nomination papers, so there are 10 Commons seats in Great Britain, twice its present tally in Northern Ireland, that the DUP ought to contest, and let us see how well it did.

A Fundamental Principle

Neil Duncan-Jordan writes:

Labour won last year’s general election on a promise to reverse the damage done by the previous Conservative governments, offering a politics that would, in the memorable words of the prime minister, “tread more lightly on our lives”. I won a historic victory in Poole for Labour last July on the basis that things would change – and change for the better.

But my constituents, already fearful of plans for the largest cuts to disability support in a generation, have been getting in touch with me about new legislation that might be news to you: the government is resurrecting Tory proposals for mass spying on people who receive state support.

The powers contained in the public authorities (fraud, error and recovery) bill quite rightly seek to tackle organised crime and online fraud, but they also usher in new powers for the banks to trawl through bank details of individuals – even where there is no suspicion of wrongdoing.

This legislation would compel banks to carry out financial surveillance of welfare recipients. Given the volume of accounts involved, this will be completed by an algorithm. If the software flags a possible overpayment, whether due to fraud or error, the bank will report the individual to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for further investigation.

Why should someone in receipt of benefits have fewer rights to privacy? And why are we asking banks to become an arm of the state?

These new powers strip those who receive state support of a fundamental principle of British law: the presumption of innocence. By default, welfare recipients would be treated as suspects, simply because they need support from the state.

The risk of a Horizon-style scandal on a massive scale is glaringly obvious when millions are being monitored. It will be disabled people, carers, pensioners and the very poorest people who are impacted by wrongful investigations and forced to endure burdensome appeals to prove their innocence.

It has been suggested that the powers would help identify overpayments more quickly, but the DWP already has ample data-sharing and data-matching powers at its disposal. The carer’s allowance scandal, when unpaid carers were plunged into debt and prosecuted for fraud because of the DWP’s own overpayments, provides an example of where the department was failing to use the access to real-time alerts of carers’ earnings they already had to stop overpayments. The government admits that if fraudsters spread assets across multiple accounts, they won’t be flagged.

The bill also grants the DWP draconian powers to apply to a court to have people stripped of their driving licences if they have outstanding debt, where all other attempts at recovery have failed. The government claims this will be a last resort where the debtor fails to engage with the DWP. In practice, it means officials will first attempt to deduct funds directly from their bank account. To do this, they must secretly request at least three months of bank statements from a bank without informing the individual, to assess whether the deduction would cause “hardship”. If it would, the person would eventually face the threat of losing their licence. That’s not justice – it’s a poverty penalty.

The so-called safeguards for vulnerable debtors are also inadequate, relying heavily on court oversight and the ability of individuals to make personal representations. This overlooks the fact that these powers only apply to those deemed not to have “engaged” with the DWP – a standard that fails to recognise how non-engagement is often a symptom of genuine hardship and the circumstances in which people find themselves, rather than any wrongdoing.

Many benefit recipients live with mental health conditions, disabilities, or have caring responsibilities that make navigating complex bureaucracy extremely difficult. All these challenges will only be made worse if the government proceeds with its planned cuts to disability benefits, which will affect over 3 million families and force many disabled individuals into crisis and destitution.

I have proposed amendments to this bill to ensure that only those suspected of fraud are subject to surveillance, allowing the government to target criminality without monitoring the public. I have also proposed removing the power to apply to a court to strip people of their driving licences due to debt. There are fairer and more effective ways to enforce the law.

We must prevent the corruption of our welfare state into a punitive system, where the price of accessing support is the sacrifice of privacy and exposure to the uniquely cruel sanction of being stripped of mobility.

The welfare state needs to wrap its arms around those who need it. It should be there for everyone, but this approach undermines public trust in the system. The change we promised must mean a more compassionate and caring society, one that enables rather than penalises. These values are what makes us different from the previous government – and we shouldn’t forget that.