Duty of Candour

No Hillsborough Law today after all. Not even Keir Starmer's watered down one, with no legally enforceable duty of candour. Hillsborough is a persistent stain on Labour Governments. Tony Blair refused to hold an inquiry, as a favour to Rupert Murdoch. What is Starmer's excuse?

Today, the man who made the Labour Party constitutionally committed to the economic system that has brought the cradle of the Industrial Revolution to the brink of having no steel industry has emerged from wherever it is that they keep him, to play another of his greatest hits. Identity cards have been the solution in search of a problem at least since Michael Howard was Home Secretary, Shadowed by Blair. Ever since, British politics has been largely defined by the unseemly bidding war between them. Now calling for digital ID, Blair is still at it.

Blair did in fact secure passage of the Identity Cards Act 2006, but so little came of it that when it was repealed by the Identity Documents Act 2010, then that was unamended and unopposed, without even any compensation for those who had forked out for the cards. Did you ever see one? It was supposed to have been about terrorism, as everything was in those days, but the latest excuse is the boat people, as it is for everything these days. Yet just as all the 9/11 bombers had had genuine identity documents, and just as identity cards had done nothing to prevent the Madrid bombing, so the small boats are coming from France, which already has identity cards. The fallback option will be to argue that this was necessary to keep under-18s off social media, and thus to preclude events such as those depicted in Adolescence. Again, though, even in its own terms, does that work on the Continent?

The real targets are elsewhere. Both traditionalist conservatives and the populist Right have at last woken up to the fact that they were as much enemies of our rulers as the rest of us were. They would be constantly ordered to show their digital ID as surely as would be, say, pro-Palestinian demonstrators, or trade unionists. The latter need not, and do not, imagine that funding the governing party would make any difference. The Government has picked its side in Birmingham, and no one is remotely surprised. A day on strike is a day without pay, so a month on strike is a month without pay. No one does that for a lark. But an eight thousand pound pay cut is this unacceptable.

It ranks with Hashem Abedi's assaults on Prison Officers, who are unjustly precluded from striking, meaning that all other trade unionists should act against the danger that their unsafe workplace posed to every workplace in the country. Stab vests were deemed necessary in order to arrest me, so how can they possibly not be issued to those who had been charged to control Abedi for, realistically, the rest of his life?

Successive British Governments turned Manchester into the world centre of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group that went on to bomb the Arena. Britain invaded Libya to install such people as its new regime. From the ensuing civil war, the Royal Navy rescued both Abedi and his brother Salman, who went on to carry out that bombing, killing himself in the process. And now, this. A reckoning is long overdue.

Yet what do we have instead? David Lammy, Gordon Not of Khartoum, with no Sudanese at his vanity conference. Six years ago, I told you to keep an eye on Sudan. The Wagner Group takes a close interest in the diamonds, gold, uranium, and thus government of that country, which in February 2023 agreed to host a Russian naval base on the Red Sea. Accordingly, an American-backed coup was staged so that the United Arab Emirates could have those resources instead. 

The Emiratis are deemed fit to own P&O, the Port of Southampton, and much of Thames Water, but the Statute Law had to be changed to stop them from buying two small circulation newspapers and a tiny circulation magazine because the writers on those moved in the same social circles as both front benches, although one of those writers has since moved to Dubai, from which she now files her copy. After all, a few months after having been placed under that statutory ban, that country, in which trade unions and political parties were illegal, was declared one of the souls of moderation in the Middle East.

Throughout, Britain has armed it while it has armed the Rapid Support Forces, as is now before the International Court of Justice. Lammy, who expressed outrage when Ukraine was not invited to peace talks but who is not politically black, famously thought that Henry VII had succeeded Henry VIII, so no one expects him to know any of this. Other people should, though. And do. Denial is a river in Sudan.