Galatians 6:10

There will be no enduring Christian revival in this or any other Western country without the seed of enormous immigration from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, and increasingly also Asia.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s spiritual guide is Rikki Doolan, and Doolan’s is Uebert Angel, who is a black Zimbabwean immigrant and a naturalised British citizen, as well as a heretic and probably a crook.

But like his excellent Nigerian predecessor, our excellent Nigerian priest in Lanchester is neither a heretic nor a crook. He was one of 15 diocesan priests ordained together 19 years ago, and 12 of them are now missionaries in the West. Twelve Apostles, indeed.

Resistance To The Captivation

In the meantime, a gamer has been raised to the altars by the body that at least two of Calvin Robinson’s former affiliations were forever having to explain why they were not. You can keep your console and still find consolation. And no one has yet raised Robinson to the purple since he expressed his opposition to immigration by moving to another country, his monarchism by moving to a republic, and his integralism-without-the-Pope by moving to the land of Article VI Clause 3 and of the First Amendment. But in January, I wrote:

When Donald Trump was last President, then Calvin Robinson was an ICT teacher at a North London comp, with a sideline in videogames. It is always videogames. Robinson is clearly a tortured soul. Since the Church of England refused to ordain him, then he has joined a different denomination every year. He is in Old Catholic Priest’s Orders, so the late Richard Williamson might have raised him to the Episcopate in 2025. Someone probably will. Then watch Robinson ordain any and every fanboy. It is a story as old as the Church Herself.

The key to understanding Williamson was that he had been existentially a Catholic for only a very few months, if ever. The Authorised Version is that he was received from the Church of England in the usual manner in 1971, and that he was then briefly a postulant at the Brompton Oratory. But he was one of the Society of Saint Pius X’s first ordinations to the Priesthood in 1976, meaning that by then he had completed the six-year seminary course at Écône. The SSPX had lost its canonical status the year before, so that those ordinations resulted in Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s suspension a divinis. And even before 1975, it had always been a thing apart, participation in which was a very different matter from being part of a diocesan parish, or even of being at a mainstream seminary, whether before or after the Second Vatican Council. Yet Williamson really does seem to have gone straight there from the Church of England. In practice, he was always in opposition to the Pope. He was never less than a de facto schismatic, and he was a de jure one most of his life. To him, that was normal.

The rise of the online and populist Right has given an odd political prominence to this particular world of overlapping subcultures. Yet against what does all of that think itself a bulwark? An apostate from the Syriac Catholic Church, Salwan Momika had sought asylum in the Schengen Area, not “the Anglosphere”, on account of the newfound militant atheism that moved him to burn the Quran. That act would have been a straightforward public order offence in this country, yet it is defended by those who screamed about the Nazis when people burned The Satanic Verses. Momika would as gladly have burned the Bible, as his defenders still would. His lies about his terrorist connections on his Schengen visa application made his immigration status questionable in Sweden, and led to his straightforward deportation from Norway. A martyr for something, I suppose. But certainly not for conservatism, or for Christendom, or for Christ.

And now, one of the several alumni of The Lanchester Review who quietly delight me by having gone on to greater things, Fergus Butler-Gallie, writes:

“Tommy Robinson’s Christmas Carol Service” sounds like a cutaway gag from Shooting Stars. 15 years ago it probably would have been just that. Now, it is a reality. Robinson has been inviting his followers to help put Christ back into Christmas and sing, in the words of his advisor-cum-chaplain, Ceirion Dewar, “carols of victory” at an undisclosed central London location. As surreal as it sounds, it is part of a concerted effort which Robinson has made of late to co-opt and promote a specifically Christian angle to his nationalism. The cast of clerical characters he has found to support him in these efforts is predictably bizarre.

Dewar refers to himself as a “confessing Anglican missionary bishop”. It is unclear what the provenance of his consecration was, nor what his ministry involves other than attending Robinson’s rallies and making online content in which he gives stirring exhortations for people to join a movement for Christ. Where he emerged from is lost in the annals of the world of the online right, but we do know that Dewar was subject of a court case in 2012 after a pensioner lent him money to pay a driving fine. He is very present on X, where he puts out videos on a regular basis aimed at those who are or might be Robinson adjacent. His profile has a tagged post of an AI picture depicting him on a very small horse with the word “reconquista” above him.

In his video promoting Robinson’s carol service, he stands in a room that looks like a level from the crystal maze and with an American Christmas carol being played in a harmonica and xylophone arrangement. He makes invocations of strength and courage in a pantomime voice, claiming that the carols will be an act of witness. It is a strange scene, but clearly effective in the world of the very online.

Other figures in this movement include Brett Murphy, who has fallen out with a number of small and fragmented offshoot churches and who also focuses on the production of online content. Over the pond there is the tragicomic figure of Calvin Robinson. Given that all of their ministries seem to have been defined by fallings out with congregations and other clergy, there’s little surprise that the subculture of online hard-right clergy are generally defined by their loathing of each other. There was a major split – with catty tweets galore – with another figure purporting to be a bishop, Matthew Firth, a former CofE vicar who now lives online, challenging people to nominate him to the House of Lords. They are figures who are sad, angry and ridiculous in equal measure.

All of them, however, conform to the type of a very old and recognisable Christian fringe figure: the episcopus vagans or “wandering bishop”. These were clerics who set up their own denomination having fallen out with everyone else. Historically these have, via the rogue ordinations in the 1960s of French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and British Holocaust denier, Bishop Richard Williamson, often had links to far right movements. However these latest wandering clerics seem to combine this ancient pedigree with a closeness to the very new world of online fringe culture and the Americanised Right. This, unsurprisingly, has led to some contradictions.

Christianity may have been co-opted by a number of these movements, but actually very few of them seem to understand it. There is much noise from Robinson and his supporters about saving Christianity as a foundational stone of Western culture. The problem is that they routinely make remarkably basic mistakes about what it is. They don’t seem to know what Christianity actually entails. This is not just in the failure to obey the command to “love thy neighbour” but also from a theological or doctrinal point of view. Neil Oliver, the TV presenter with a history of conspiracy theory promotion, posted on X what he clearly thought was a profound and new thought, challenging the pairing of the Old with the New Testament in the Bible. Oliver mused that, despite the New constantly quoting the Old and indeed presenting itself as a fulfilment of its prophecies, he thought the two an ill-matched pair. Elsewhere, US podcaster Joe Rogan has suggested that Christ could come back as AI because Mary was a Virgin and you can’t have sex with a computer. I suspect some of his listeners might be proof that one can at least try.

What is absolutely fascinating to the Church historian is watching a new generation of grifting, online personalities make all the same mistakes that their equivalents in past ages made. Oliver’s was rejected as heresy by Tertullian in the year 208. Rogan’s brain farts on the nature of the Virgin Birth sound like a sort of steampunk Apollinarianism, a heresy about the mind of Christ rejected by the Council of Constantinople in 381. Early Christianity was filled with different theories about the nature of Jesus – decisions on these were made by a series of councils and gatherings. Almost all Christians have viewed these as settled questions. Not so the faith’s new enthusiasts on the hard right. This ignorance of basic doctrine comes from the fact that they’re often doing this for grift or without actually attending church or have only ever experienced Christianity as an online fringe culture, they fall into the same doctrinal traps that people did thousands of years ago. There is nothing new under the Sun (or Son..) and all that.

So, these warriors for Christ seem to have neither the dignity of order nor the security of orthodoxy. Where, then, does this trend come from? Well, it is in part a response to the Americanisation of the more extreme parts of British politics. Having imported a number of tropes and tactics wholesale from the United States, they now have the incongruous task of tacking on a tradition – the Christian Right – which is alien to British politics, to existing aspects of their movement. Historically, whether Oswald Mosley or the skinheads, the British extreme right has often been very hostile to Christianity. This is perhaps reflected by the fact that these current advocates for a Christianised politics on the British right are not using the traditional methods or organisations. Ironically, their tactics mirror most closely those used by radical Islam. Lengthy, rambling filmed sermons conflating grievances and anger with a doctrinally dubious expression of a global faith is a tactic long used by extremist imams to recruit disenchanted young men. It is perhaps unsurprising then, that the Christian theology on display is dubious.

Yet this movement does pose a problem for the actual national Church. The C of E has made recent attempts to “combat” the pseudo-Christian narrative which Robinson is trying to propagate. What this actually entails is a “rapid response resource pack” and an online page of “brand guidelines and logos”. As far as resistance to nascent fascism is concerned this is less Maximilian Kolbe and more David Brent.

It has a patronisation problem too. Much of the Church’s online output is delivered in a tone reminiscent of Come Outside, the 90s educational series where Pippin the Dog and Auntie Mabel would learn about the production of soap or the breeding of geese. All very nice in its own way but completely inadequate for the missional task it needs to perform on the Wild West of the internet. In the pronouncements of its Bishops, it appears out of touch and hectoring, simply parroting the playbook of a governing class who despise it anyway.

There will be the argument that the Church is showing “another way”, but the precise problem is that it isn’t. For as long as it’s led by people who look, sound and believe that they may as well be running an NHS or multi-academy trust or a medium sized district council, it simply isn’t going to appeal to those who are howling into the void of postmodernity.

If the faith seems to be just another political tool, but for the opposite side, then it will simply only add to the problem rather than help soothe it. Only a coherent communitarian vision of the Church rooted in the particularities of the places it serves will suffice to combat hate. One can see why the bishops don’t want to do this; it would involve focussing on the work done by parishes on the ground, the very parishes which they routinely undermine and deep down would rather defund in favour of vast religious hubs. The response really ought to be two fold – a cold, hard deconstruction of the theologically dubious claims by scholars who actually do know what they’re talking about (and few bishops now do) followed by a more joyous attitude, a positive affirmation of why specific places – the streets and byways that the hard right claims to love more than the people who care for them – do matter in the Christian faith.

Resistance to the captivation of faith by the far right is happening. It is not being done by the official statements and poster campaigns but by priests and communities on the ground, who quietly, faithfully model a love for their communities rooted in the idea that the love of God in Christ might be encountered by anyone, anywhere. At the heart of this quiet resistance is the fact that churches in England remain one of the few places where people with radically different political views, varied racial backgrounds, ages, classes and cultural assumptions still actually do come together, united by something which they believe is bigger and more important than any of those supposedly conflicting identities. Their practical faith – so misunderstood by Robinson and his acolytes, and so dismissed by the bishops – will be the thing that really keeps “Christ in Christmas” this festive season.

Further to the decriminalisation of abortion up to birth, Lord Falconer has given the House of Lords the logically inescapable assurance that “pregnancy should not be a bar” to assisted suicide. Dame Sarah Mullally had already said that she might table an amendment to deny Third Reading to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, and might force a vote on that. She ought now to do so. All of the Lords Spiritual should then take that opportunity to defeat this Bill. Or why are they there? And why should the rest of us maintain any formal relations with the Church of England as such?

Down the corridor, Sarah Pochin voted to give that Bill a Third Reading. Did they know that in the Conservative Evangelical citadel of St Michael, Cornhill? Of course they did. But did the Reverend Henry Eatock-Taylor preach to it? Challenges to “the woke liberati” should be addressed to the woke liberati. Supporters of assisted suicide need to hear challenges to assisted suicide. And “Christian Nationalists” need to hear challenges to “Christian Nationalism”. As for “cancelling Christmas”, I for one have never noticed any such cancellation in any shop owned or managed by Muslims. Have you?

Social Democracy, Indeed

I have never met Milo Yiannopoulos, and I hope never to do so. But although James Delingpole and I have rarely met, when we have, then we gave got on. Yet while I almost never think about my brief and long-ago stint on Telegraph Blogs, it is worth mentioning, every once in a while, that Yiannopoulos and this were kept on when I was let go. On this of all days, James seems determined to make the case for Anthony Albanese’s war on social media. It is almost a relief that no one under the age of 16 could legally have read his tweet in Australia.

Almost. But not quite. The restriction of adolescents’ access to social media would intentionally deprive them of any political perspective beyond the ideology purveyed by the schools and by the official media. In Australia, it is therefore being watched closely by those in Britain who, having raised the school-leaving age to 18, which was not in itself a bad idea, now wanted to lower the voting age to 16, which in that context would be literally preposterous. Moreover, young Australians often study or work abroad, where they will no longer have shared a key formative experience of their peers. In any case, for this to work, then we would all have to prove that we were over 16.

The threats to youth include economic inequality, that capitalist system’s politically chosen “free” market in drugs and pornography with their attendant street and sexual violence, that system’s wars of choice, and the assaults on civil liberties in order to enforce austerity and war, increasingly to include conscription. Social media are part of the global corporate order with its Big Tech projects such as digital ID and facial recognition. Yet they have the potential to be fundamental, not only to the oppression, but also to the resistance.

There is going to be plenty to resist. For example, one among horribly many, this ban is also being considered Denmark, while Tony Blair’s anointed Shabana Mahmood is seeking to introduce Denmark’s “parallel societies”, until 2021 officially called “ghettos”. Race is not the primary indicator in an industrial or postindustrial country such as Britain or Denmark, so Britain is to copy Denmark’s “parallel societies”, and Denmark will return the compliment once we had expanded the scheme. The whole thing will then be adopted in Australia, among a frightening array of other places.

The first criterion for a “parallel society” is that more than 50 per cent of the inhabitants originated or “descended” from “non-Western countries", defined as everywhere apart from “all 27 EU countries, the United Kingdom, Andorra, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, Vatican City, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand”. But the other four are socioeconomic. Once it had met the racist first one, then a community has to meet only two of those four to have all of its children from the age of one upwards required to undergo 25 hours per week of instruction in “Danish culture”, and to be declared liable to mass eviction and demolition in the manner of Sharpeville, District Six, or the West Bank. After a few years, Britain would drop the whitelist and just ghettoise everywhere with two or more of unemployment at 40 per cent or above, criminal convictions more than three times the national average (as if the criminal justice system were class-neutral), 50 per cent or more of over-30s without tertiary qualifications, and an average gross income below 55 per cent of the national average. Adjusting for different education systems, Denmark and elsewhere would follow suit.

Not that the change would be that enormous. It was Durham County Council, then the jewel in the right-wing Labour crown, that imposed Category D status. Even if not in detail, everyone in these parts has always known about Medomsley Detention Centre; we are shocked but not surprised. Parallel societies are nothing new to us. The British State inflicts sexual violence on working-class, predominantly white males as the American State inflicts sexual violence on African-American and Hispanic males, as the Australian State inflicts sexual violence on Aboriginal males, as the Israeli State inflicts sexual violence on Palestinian males, and so on. That, and false allegations of sexual violence. Fear of the black male is fundamental to the capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade, and the slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle.

In The Bleak Midwinter

Flu. Snow. No small boats for four weeks. Winter always surprises the British. But are such foibles alone enough to be worth dying for? “Would you fight for Starmer’s Britain?”, asks GB News. Enoch Powell baffled Margaret Thatcher by telling her that he would have fought in the Second World War even if Britain had had a Communist Government. He would still have fought for his country. With no Tory roots, that was beyond her. With deep Liberal roots, she thought that wars were about “values”. Her view has prevailed, and here we are.

Would you fight for fiscal drag and for a 50 per cent increase in bus fares? For falling Gross Domestic Product, and for galloping food and fuel inflation? For the failure to guarantee employment rights from day one of employment, and for the failure to cap ground rents at £25 per year? Or for increasing employers’ National Insurance contributions so as to destroy charities and small businesses while making it impossible for big businesses to take on staff or to increase wages, and for forcing working farmers of many decades’ standing who formally inherited their parents’ farms to sell them to giant American agribusinesses?

Would you fight for digital ID and for facial recognition? For the cancellation of local elections, and for the denial of self-determination to the Chagossian people? For the abolition of almost all trial by jury, and for the removal of the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court? For the experimental use on children of puberty blockers that had been banned in sheep, and for the haranguing of teenage boys in place of who knows what in the school day while the girls were doing who knows what else? Or for assisted suicide, for decriminalised abortion up to birth, and for Lord Falconer’s therefore logically inescapable assurance to the House of Lords that “pregnancy should not be a bar” to death at the hands of the State?

Would you fight for a State that had conscripted you? Ignore anyone who advocated a military intervention unless you could imagine that person as an 18-year-old in battle. The call for war always comes primarily from the liberal bourgeoisie. That is the class least likely to join the Armed Forces voluntarily, or to see combat even in periods of conscription. Operationally, that is of course just as well. Yet if there is not a strong enough case for conscription, then there is not a strong enough case for war. Unless a country needed to mobilise its entire healthy and able-bodied male population of fighting age, then it is not under sufficient threat to justify going to war at all. But it would take this country 50 years to reindustrialise for war. De facto American withdrawal means that NATO has effectively ceased to exist. And Russia has taken nearly four years to capture 20 per cent of Ukraine, so it is not going to be parking its tanks on anyone’s Atlantic coast anytime soon, an aspiration that in any case it has never expressed.

Wiser Heads

One of these articles is by Peter Hitchens, and the other is an editorial in the Morning Star. Can you guess which is which? Here is the first:

We don't have a Transport Ministry in this country. We have a Ministry of Roads, Cars and Lorries which has for decades waged a dedicated war against trains, trams, pedestrians and cyclists. That does not mean it makes a good job of the roads. Far from it. They are terrible. But it often needs to curry favour with one group of voters by annoying other groups.

This is one of the reasons for the petty, stupid gestures such as 20mph speed limits, congestion charges and ‘Low Traffic Neighbourhoods’, which do no good and annoy so many. By inflicting misery on drivers, the Roads Ministry tries to pretend it is fair to all means of transport. It is not. These measures do nothing to help those without cars or who, like me, prefer not to use them.

The Government assumes that most important journeys will be made by car and that freight will go by road. It ignores 90 years of research which shows that the more roads they build, the more they fill up with traffic. Every motorway, every bypass, every inner ring-road just makes the problem worse and will carry on doing so until the end of the world.

If you want to reduce traffic, build more trains and trams. Meanwhile we have yet to recognise that it was a mistake to close thousands of miles of railway lines and rip up hundreds of miles of tramways, which were far greener, safer and better suited to our landscape than the California-style freeways we keep building.

So from time to time a futile gesture is needed. The latest is to pretend to renationalise the railways. The resulting shambles is to be called ‘Great British Railways’ (GBR) as if it is a TV baking contest.

It is always wisest to let other people decide whether you are ‘Great’ or not. I once worked for a newspaper which boasted for years that it was the world’s greatest, when it was not. This bragging did not save it from shrinking to its current sad level, so sad that I will not name it.

Then there is ‘British’. Thanks to the Blairite folly of devolution, GBR will only run in England. Passenger services remain devolved.

ScotRail stays under Scottish government control and Transport for Wales rail under Welsh government control. Freight trains will stay private but run on taxpayer-funded rails. So will the notorious Rolling Stock Companies (Roscos) which lease carriages and engines to operators. I am not sure the headquarters of these highly profitable bodies are reachable via GBR trains.

This crass mess is beautifully summed up in the garish, cheap red, white and blue livery of the new GBR trains, revealed to us last week.

It looks to me like the railway of some newly-independent Balkan statelet. British trains, when they were great, used to be beautiful and dignified, their engines in glorious shades of green or deep red, their coaches similar. This is not a proper state railway – as the slandered but generally efficient British Rail once was – and I predict it will become another bad national joke.

And here is the second:

‘Russia is already escalating its covert campaign against our societies,’ says Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte. ‘We must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured.’

Why do people say these things? It’s as daft as saying (as people do) that there were ‘pro-democracy protests’ in Kiev in 2014. Actually a key part of these crowds overthrew Ukraine’s freely-elected president in a violent, lawless putsch. People are constantly saying the opposite of the truth and getting away with it.

Those who desired and financed the horrible Ukraine war (don’t get me started) chose it as the battleground precisely because it is not in Nato.

They were pretty sure it would not escalate into a nuclear war, for that very reason.

Nato members remain immune from it and will stay that way as long as they don’t openly join in.

If Mr Rutte and people like him are stupid enough to want the sort of war my parents endured, then they need to be talked out of it by wiser heads. If they don’t, why do they ceaselessly talk like this?

Russia is poor, its armed forces are rusty and crude. In conventional terms, Europe hugely outweighs Russia in money, ships, aircraft and guns.

But nations can fall into danger through self-neglect. It was King Charles II who said: ‘It is upon the Navy under the good Providence of God that the safety, honour and welfare of this realm do chiefly depend.’

In 1667 he quickly found out how true this was when, with the Navy unprepared and neglected, the Dutch stormed up the Medway, towed away the fleet flagship and occupied Sheerness.

Our current Navy, conked out, ancient or immobilised, is not much better, its resources swallowed up in absurd vanity aircraft carriers with no known purpose and in a vast, tottering ‘nuclear deterrent’ that probably does not work.

The sea has for centuries spared us from having to train and pay a giant conscript army, as our continental neighbours often must. But the sea only keeps us safe if we have a Navy to protect and defend it. And we haven’t got one now.

Instead of shouting about war, we should quietly and firmly prepare strong defences, the best way known to man of ensuring lasting peace. Which is surely what we want.

Skripal and Novichok: What Didn't Happen

Even a public meeting in Salisbury last night was almost entirely sceptical of the official story.

A-Leaping Like A Lemming

Labour peerages for having been Keir Starmer's Director of Communications, the Labour Party's Chief of Staff - Operations, Chief of Staff to Rachel Reeves, an adviser to Jeremy Hunt, Leader of Newcastle Council until your local party deselected you, Leader of Southwark Council when it sold an estate worth £150 million for only £50 million and then spent a further £51.4 million clearing the site for the new owner, the Labour candidate who kept Iain Duncan Smith in Parliament and Faiza Shaheen out, and the mother of the Labour candidate against Jeremy Corbyn. And those are among the more distinguished. 14 per cent after another two and half years? Dream on.

Shrink Wrap

Gross Domestic Product fell by 0.1 per cent in the three months to October 2025, and by 0.2 per cent in the three months to August 2025.

I cannot imagine who had been expecting growth of 0.1 per cent.

Services showed no growth, production was down 0.5 per cent, construction was down 0.3 per cent, and no one is remotely surprised.

Footing?

Al Carns was still a serving Royal Marines Commando and thus prohibited from joining any political party when the last General Election was called, yet he came out of it a Labour MP with a majority of 11,537. Not bad for a former adviser to Michael Fallon, Gavin Williamson and Penny Mordaunt. This is plain and simple entryism, and not by a Trotskyist groupuscule in the corner of a backstreet pub.

But to prepare for a war such as these people desired, it would take this country 50 years to reindustrialise. Yet who deindustrialised it? Moreover, on 1 October 2025, the entire British Armed Forces stood at 182,060 souls. Again, whose fault is that? One or more of the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, and the right wing of the Labour Party have been in power forever, and the last Conservatives to have been so are taking over Reform UK, if they have not already done so.

De facto American withdrawal means that NATO has effectively ceased to exist, but even the SNP wants war with Russia, and even the Greens and Plaid Cymru are not against it. Yet the country that has taken nearly four years to capture 20 per cent of Ukraine is not going to be parking its tanks on anyone's Atlantic coast anytime soon even it wanted to, and that is not an aspiration that Russia has ever expressed.

Ignore anyone who advocated a military intervention unless you could imagine that person as an 18-year-old in battle. The call for war always comes primarily from the liberal bourgeoisie. That is the class least likely to join the Armed Forces voluntarily, or to see combat even in periods of conscription. Operationally, that is of course just as well. Yet if there is not a strong enough case for conscription, then there is not a strong enough case for war. Unless a country needed to mobilise its entire healthy and able-bodied male population of fighting age, then it is not under sufficient threat to justify going to war at all.

"Can The Cushite Change His Skin?"

The sanctioning of four commanders of the Rapid Support Forces is welcome as far it goes. Now stop arming the United Arab Emirates. And Saudi Arabia, which arms the other side among other unsavoury characters, by no means all of them three thousand miles from Britain.

While centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences, they do sometimes need to take opposite sides, in the manner of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, to maintain the deception.

British centrists have long supported the Saudi Arabia that supported them handsomely, while the British populist Right is so closely tied to the UAE that it largely resides in Dubai, from which it tweets its hostility to immigration and to Islam. But Britain always arms them both. Such are both main parties in the House of Commons.

Here Is The Harsh Truth

Like Peter Hitchens, I have never understood why people thought that Belgium, Switzerland or Canada was either boring or superfluous, but Belgium no longer has its own free-floating, fiat currency, so this is the risk that it runs:

What you do to others will in the end be done to you. It is true of all life and very true of world affairs. The creditor becomes the debtor. The invader is invaded, the empire falls and its mighty capital echoes to the tread of the troops of a new ruler.

Britain by being an island and by sheltering behind the US, has managed to avoid some of these fates – so far. But strong, cold, hard winds are about to blow across the world we once knew. And I gape in amazement at Sir Keir Starmer’s enthusiasm for stealing Russian money to keep the Ukraine war going a little longer. There is so much wrong with it.

Why, in any case, do the nations of Europe want to buy a used war from Donald Trump? Trump has lost interest in fighting in Ukraine, at least partly because he cannot win, and may actually lose. America once wanted this war. Now, with a new leadership and after years of failure, it no longer does.

Russia, though far from being a superpower, has turned out to care about Ukraine more than Washington thought it did, and to be better at fighting than they expected it to be. As with Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the US will always quit when it decides it is wasting its time and money on any foreign intervention.

Yet the Starmer government, we are assured through leaks, is ready to hand over £8billion of Russian assets frozen in Britain to support Ukraine. Sir Keir seeks to stitch together a deal with the European Union and other countries that could ‘release’ as much as £100billion for Ukraine’s war effort.

For ‘release’ read ‘steal’. This money does not belong to the countries where it was placed by Russia for safekeeping, under the normal rules of law and civilisation. We may claim a ‘moral’ justification for this action, but there is no certainty that the courts will not rule it unlawful. They could even, many years hence, force the countries involved to pay it back.

This would devastate Belgium, where most of the cash is held, and which would almost go bankrupt if compelled to make good on the money. The Euro would suffer greatly as a currency if things went wrong. And behind all this also lies the danger that other countries, especially China, will see and take note – and one day do the same to us at a time when it will hurt greatly.

Challenged, they will smile and say sweetly that they are only following our example. This is how what remains of international law can easily rot away if we choose to let it. And for what?

Advocates of the raid say the money would cover more than two-thirds of Ukraine’s cash needs over the next two years. They cannot seem to make up their minds about what it would be used for. Some think it should be spent to carry on the war. Others say it should be used to rebuild Ukraine’s demolished cities, factories and power grid if a peace deal is agreed.

But what would be the point of that? Even if Russian claims of major advances in the key city of Pokrovsk are false or exaggerated (and they may be), Ukraine’s basic military problems are manpower and weapons. Its casualty figures are secret but appallingly high. Desertion is a major problem, also kept secret. Recruitment is faltering as men of military age hide from press gangs.

Ukraine’s Army, put simply, will carry on shrinking however much money the country has. And the West’s capacity to make the sort of weapons Ukraine needs is still poor. Money will not save it. And how much will just go astray, never to be seen again?

War means chaos, and war mixed with chaos is the ideal condition for corruption, as Ukraine already knows. After Britain and the US invaded Iraq, the distinguished foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn reported that US authorities were investigating senior military officers - he did not specify from which side - over the misuse of up to $125billion (£94billion) in reconstruction efforts.

A lot of this crisis is caused by emotion. The major European countries are embarrassed that they have so little power and can be treated with contempt by Donald Trump. They shrink from admitting there is in fact nothing they can do to change the course of the war – apart from escalating it into a dangerous and possibly nuclear conflict.

They rage a lot against Russia but very few of them could explain how Europe will benefit from them buying this war from Uncle Sam and trying to keep it going. Why can’t they grasp that the Americans have dumped it by the roadside because its big end has gone? The entire purpose of the war, the defeat and removal of Vladimir Putin, has failed. President Trump didn’t even agree with that aim, and he won’t help anyone else pursue it.

Similar folly can be seen in the reaction to the White House’s mischievous new ‘National Security Strategy’, published last week. This peculiar squib seems to have been designed to annoy idealistic Left-wing warmongers, a type now common in the capitals of the EU.

Sandwiched between slices of tripe about the brilliance of Mr Trump, it states some ancient truths about foreign policy – especially these words: ‘The affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests’.

The document asserts that there is nothing inconsistent or hypocritical in refusing to impose ‘democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories’. Righteous voices cry out in wrath at this. But it is, quite simply, true. The US doesn’t actually care about repression in Turkey or Saudi Arabia or China. It invades countries illegally when it feels like it.

Its position is remarkably similar to the policy which, for much of the Victorian age, kept Britain free, prosperous and at peace. Lord Derby, Britain’s then foreign secretary, told the House of Lords in July 1866: ‘It is the duty of the Government of this country, placed as it is with regard to geographical position, to keep itself upon terms of goodwill with all surrounding nations, but not to entangle itself with any single or monopolising alliance with any one of them; above all to endeavour not to interfere needlessly and vexatiously with the internal affairs of any foreign country.’

It was only when we began moralising on the world stage in the years before 1914 that we blundered into the stupid war which swiftly impoverished us, created some of the most beautiful and extensive war cemeteries and memorials ever seen in the history of the planet and reduced our once-unmatched power to a memory in a few decades.

Here is the harsh truth. Ukraine is losing the war into which it was manoeuvred and shoved by others - both from the West and in Moscow - for their own cynical ends. One of those others has lost interest. The other will fight on indefinitely and mercilessly if the conflict goes on.

Much of it is in ruins. Multitudes of its best people have gone for ever, killed in battle or fled abroad. Most of us could not bear to see the legions of maimed and disfigured people which grow daily amid the wreckage.

Yet we lightly support dangerous, tricky, actions which will extend this hell for long years to come. Have we utterly taken leave of our senses?

Scott Free?

With Reform UK projected to gain Blackpool South, Zia Yusuf has had to warn Scott Benton that he would never be permitted to become a Reform parliamentary candidate. Oddly enough, though, his membership application would not simply be rejected.

But Benton has other options. Precisely one sitting Conservative MP has joined Reform; twice as many MPs have left it. In the last Parliament, however, three Conservative MPs joined the Labour Party, at least two of them firmly on the right wing of their original party.

One of those is now a Government Whip, while the other had three years earlier been suspended from Parliament for a day because she had sought to influence the judges in the sentencing appeal of her constituency predecessor, who was then her husband, following his conviction for sexual assault. Compared to that, Benton is an angel.

Who Are They Kidding?

The questioner asked why it mattered that "apparently" one in three children in Glasgow did not speak English as a first language. Fiona Bruce changed that to the child's having "English as a second language". Then the caption was this.

"1 in 3", not "one in three". "Kids", not "children". "Don't" where it should have been "doesn't", although "does not" would have been better. That one child in three must have written this.

Mutated Virus

So Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth can seize "the largest tanker ever seized", but they have to blow fishing boats and their crews to smithereens? Say what you think of that on your social media, and then apply to visit the United States, not with any view to going there, but just to make someone have to read it. Anyone who did wish the place harm should be recruiting early teenagers in the Visa Waiver Program country of Australia, who on their sixteenth birthdays will be able to Waltz like Matilda past Uncle Sam's border guards having left no trace.

Not so Derbyshire County Councillor Stephen Reed, who drew the tumultuous applause of his Reform UK colleagues when he denounced immigration in his Australian accent. Reform was already facing the fury of its own supporters because one of its candidates for Portsmouth City Council was Addy Mo Asaduzzaman, a Bangladeshi who is exercising his rights as a Commonwealth citizen. I had wondered how they would react when a Reform candidate was an Anglo-Australian or a white South African. Over to them. Meanwhile, Advance UK is dependent on Elon Musk, none of whose three nationalities is British.

A certain Britain showed itself at the Unite the Kingdom rally, and will attend Stephen Yaxley-Lennon's carol concert. With the flu running rampant, then nothing would suit that Britain better than another lockdown. I am fully vaccinated, I adhered strictly to the previous lockdowns, and I would adhere strictly to another one. But a lot of people are not, a lot of people did not, and between the unpopularity of this Government and the memory of the Downing Street parties, an awful lot of people would not. They would be ripe for recruitment.

If their violent reactions made them subject to juryless trials, or to Magistrates' Courts from which they had no automatic right of appeal, then their supporters would explode. Town centres and housing estates would burn. Yet on any given day, between 10 and 20 per cent of Crown Courts are sitting idle. On its own, opening them up may not fix the backlog. But it would be a good start. Whereas abolishing almost all juries would make no difference, because they are not the problem.

Of The Willing?

Oh, for pity's sake, Mark Rutte, will your generation never get over having missed the Second World War? The country that has taken nearly four years to capture 20 per cent of Ukraine is not going to be parking its tanks on anyone's Atlantic coast anytime soon even it wanted to, and that is not an aspiration that Russia has ever expressed by any means. Yet even the British Government can no longer pretend that the Parachute Regiment might not already be in Ukraine.

Ignore anyone who advocated a military intervention unless you could imagine that person as an 18-year-old in battle. Can you imagine Rutte as an 18-year-old in battle? Or Keir Starmer? Or Friedrich Merz? Or Emmanuel Macron? The call for war always comes primarily from their liberal bourgeoisie. That is the class least likely to join the Armed Forces voluntarily, or to see combat even in periods of conscription. 

Operationally, that is of course just as well. Yet if there is not a strong enough case for conscription, then there is not a strong enough case for war. Unless a country needed to mobilise its entire healthy and able-bodied male population of fighting age, then it is not under sufficient threat to justify going to war at all. But arms companies are generous donors to politicians, and willing employers of them and of the military and civil service top brass in a retirement in which they would have been very comfortable but which they were too greedy to enjoy.

Like A Shadow, Or Like A Faithful Wife

Bonnie Blue, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has endorsed Reform UK. Our thoughts are with Nigel Farage as he explains to Ann Widdecombe who she is. And with Keir Starmer, who might reasonably have hoped to have raised her to the peerage as Baroness Blue of Bali.

Since there cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling, then there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. But unlike the Conservative Party, which merely thinks that it is and acts as if it were, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are constitutionally committed to the “free” market. Yet enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy.

Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today, both by means of drugs, and specifically among young males by means of pornography. In Ukraine, at the same time as they tore down statues of Alexander Pushkin, and renamed streets that had been named after him, they legalised pornography to help pay for the war. Even before then, some people had already been taking payment to strip on camera via a “charity project” called Teronlyfans, to fund the Armed Forces.

Pornography had been legally prohibited and practically unknown in the Soviet Union. But post-Soviet Russia was flooded with it, to placate the young male population during the larceny of their country by means of the economic “shock therapy” that created today’s oligarchs. The rest is history. That tactic was not new. “Sex work” of various kinds has always been encouraged when the young men have needed to be stupefied, and it still is. The corporate capitalist pornogrification of our own society is no accident. Which side is Reform on?

Wiping Away The Years

If David Lammy wants to wipe childhood criminal records, then someone in his Department must already have pressed the wrong button and done it. Nothing could be more New Labour than that.

Nor than the combination of this level of bleeding-heartedness (what, murder when you were 17?) with the abolition of almost all trial by jury and of the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court, accompanied by digital ID and by facial recognition.

Also firmly in the tradition of the only previous Labour Government in the lifetimes of the majority of the population is increasing the cap on bus fares by 50 per cent and then expecting to be thanked for having "frozen" it when you graciously declined to put it up again. And the beautiful symmetry of this front page. It feels like my twenties again.

Noble Truths

How fabulously on-brand of the Liberal Democrats that 40 per cent of their new life peers should be newly removed hereditary peers. Reform UK should publish the list of the people whom it would have ennobled, and ask what would have been unacceptable about any of them.

Especially since, with Ben Bradley, it has now signed up 22 former Conservative MPs, who no longer even bother to claim that their old party had left them. Rather, their new party has joined them. Bradley was also the Leader of Nottinghamshire County Council until last year. How DOGE was he then? Yet Bradley will still be only 39 in the spring of 2029. And Reform is projected to win Mansfield. Of course.

As for the House of Lords, it has repeatedly rejected even very watered down versions of policies that were in the governing party's manifesto, but woe betide it if it so much as held up a Private Member's Bill that gave effect to a principle that had never been put to the electorate.

That watering down moved Zarah Sultana to vote with Reform in the House of Commons, and this time not to save the Winter Fuel Payment or to lift the two-child benefit cap. In voting to keep every Lords wrecking amendment to the Employment Rights Bill, even on strike ballot thresholds and on trade unions' political funds, Sultana was presumably obeying the "democratic whip" that had been imposed by the Central Executive Committee of Your Party. And was she doing so while drawing only "a worker's wage"? Or have I missed something?

It has been made a commonplace that the seven Labour MPs who lost the whip for having voted to lift the two-child benefit cap that was now going to be lifted anyway had "voted against the Budget". That is a lie. They had voted for an amendment to the Humble Address after the King's Speech, and when that amendment had been defeated, then they had voted for that Address. Withdrawal of the whip used to be the ultimate sanction. But it happens all the time now, in the authoritarian spirit of the Government's treatment of the country at large.

Slick

If the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to a dissident in Saudi Arabia or in North Korea, then would that person have made it to Oslo, even if too late for the ceremony? Yet María Corina Machado has just arrived there. What a fearsome despot Nicolás Maduro clearly is. And did Machado sail into the harbour on the Venezuelan oil tanker that the Americans had hijacked? Or will that be conveying Juan Guaidó to Miami now that he was surplus to requirements at home?

It seems that Britain is to resume arming the Argentina of Machado's ally, Javier Milei. Until the eve of the invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982, Margaret Thatcher had been about to sell the ships that then had to be deployed. At a bargain basement price. To Argentina. But during the Falklands War, Argentina was armed by the Israel that Machado has invited to invade Venezuela in her interests and, once she had her hands on the oil, in its own. Being otherwise engaged, Benjamin Netanyahu is not known to have agreed. Under Milei, though, Argentina is very much in on this. By arming Argentina, so will we be. Well, so will our lords and masters be, anyway. I cannot yet see the specific role of Tony Blair. But he will have one.

Forms The Civic Ethos?

Whatever happened to Juan Guaidó? Was he not supposed to have been the "rightful" President of Venezuela? Oh, well, María Corina Machado has lost an election more recently, if only by proxy, so I suppose that it must be her now. She has been given the Nobel Peace Prize for wanting to privatise PDVSA, the oil and gas company. To that end, Donald Trump has already put a $50 million price on the head of President Nicolás Maduro, and with Pete Hegseth launched a campaign of mass murder. Machado has warmly welcomed these moves, openly coordinating with Trump towards her avowedly detailed plan for the first 100 hours after regime change. If she showed up in Oslo, then Maduro would never again be able to show his face among dictators.

This is not about drugs. Trump has pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, and Machado is a legaliser who, let the MAGA heartland understand, is also in favour of abortion. She is a cookie-cutter liberal Rightist who accordingly echoes Shabana Mahmood in naming Margaret Thatcher as her political heroine. She would be an Establishment Democrat in the United States, or a bog standard Labour MP in Britain. 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, while Fascism is inherent in both of them, only ever arising by their joint enterprise.

Firmly in that tradition, Machado has backed the genocide of Gaza to the hilt, she has called Trump a "visionary", she has invited both Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu to invade Venezuela in order to install her, and she joined Javier Milei and Kevin Roberts in crossing the Atlantic to address February's Make Europe Great Again rally in Madrid, alongside Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Matteo Salvini, Andrej Babiš, Martin Helme, Krzysztof Bosak, and the host, Santiago Abascal. Organised by Patriots.eu, that rally announced that formation's first associate member. Likud. Of course. Ties are also strengthening with the BJP. Of course. Just do not mention the burning churches from Bethlehem to Bishnupur. Not least, though not only, because of his cuts to the listed places of worship grant and his cap on repair costs, Keir Starmer would fit right in, and David Lammy would wonder why they assumed that he was there to serve the drinks. Then again, does he wonder that when Starmer does it?

The Interpretation Has To Change

Did the McCanns have their other two children taken away from them? Those twins were two when their parents left them with their not quite four-year-old sister in a foreign country and went out on the town. People without the McCanns’ advantages lose their children for far less. Yet Gerry McCann is now the face of the campaign to relaunch the Leveson Inquiry, although other signatories would have made for far more sympathetic spokespersons. But less media-savvy ones. Think on.

The Press and the Police ought to have been the starting point of Leveson, and I reproach myself for the fair wind that I gave his first Report, although those who opposed it have since demanded, and obtained, cross-party primary legislation to give the Government the final say on the ownership of newspapers. Three weeks ago, the nationalisation of the Telegraph was called for at Prime Minister’s Questions by Mike Wood, who as the Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office would not ordinary have been an active participant in PMQs, and who had been Parliamentary Private Secretary to Liam Fox, Priti Patel, and Dominic Raab. That was what the Right openly wanted.

But nothing in the European Convention on Human Rights would have precluded the implementation of the original Leveson requirements, nor has anything prevented this novel approach to safeguarding the Free Press. The same is true of David Lammy’s abolition of almost all trial by jury and of the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court, again going back to Sir Brian Leveson. As ever, it will rightly fall to Parliament. Based on today’s PMQs, Karl Turner is obviously planning to table a sunset clause. MPs ought in any case to oppose this Bill at every stage, but without that clause, then any waverers or mere abstainers would have no excuse whatever.

In the last 10 years alone, the ECHR did not prevent the enactment of the Trade Union Act, or of the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, or of the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, or of the Nationality and Borders Act, or of the Elections Act, or of the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, or of the National Security Act, or of the Public Order Act, or of the Online Safety Act, or of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, or of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. Under the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act and the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, nothing that Freddie Scappaticci did would now be illegal.

The ECHR will not save us from digital ID or from facial recognition. It does not protect cash. It is not helping the Palestine Action defendants. It does not preclude the Home Secretary from stripping people of their British citizenship, now without even having to tell them. It presented no obstacle to vaccine passports. It did nothing for Julian Assange, Vanessa Beeley, Craig Murray, Kit Klarenberg, Richard Medhurst, or now George Galloway. Most countries that subscribe to the ECHR already have identity cards. Thus defined, Starmer is indeed a human rights lawyer. When Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick were in office, then there was no section 35 order to prevent Royal Assent of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill that banned nothing for which people were not already being arrested in England, complete with records of non-crime hate incidents on things like DBS checks.

Nothing that had largely been written by David Maxwell Fyfe ever did have anything to do with those of us who sought 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. Not the European Union into which he castigated Anthony Eden for not having taken the United Kingdom at the start. And not the ECHR, either.

There was a reason why the ECHR’s incorporation into British domestic law was never attempted by any Labour Government until Tony Blair’s. It duly proved useless as civil liberties were shredded; it was the House of Commons that stopped the detention of people for 90 days without charge. And it duly proved useless as the poor, the sick and the disabled were persecuted on a scale and with a venom that had not been seen since before the War, if ever. That persecution continued into and as the age of austerity. Long before Brexit, Covid-19, or the invasion of Ukraine, even as Red Cross food parcels were distributed to our starving compatriots, human rights legislation was of only the most occasional use, if any. That has always been the intention.

In May 1948, the pompously self-styled Congress of Europe assembled in the Hall of Knights, in The Hague. Addressing that assembly, Winston Churchill called it “the Voice of Europe”. But in fact it was mostly made up of politicians who had recently been defeated at the polls, of the representatives of Royal and Noble Houses that had fairly recently been dispossessed at least in political terms, of the likes of Churchill who fell into both categories, and of people whose lives’ work was trying to delude themselves that so did they.

In the name of the order that had held sway for a century between the defeat of Napoleon and the First World War, the order to which the Reichsbürger would wish to return, their aim was very explicitly to check the social democracy that was sweeping Western Europe at the time. The material that they produced had that intention, and it has had that effect. Lo and behold, Blair had it written into British domestic law. And lo and behold, the body that he created for its enforcement, when it has not been sacking its black and disabled staff first, and when it has not been failing to find anything wrong with the Government’s handling of the Windrush scandal, played a key role in bringing down Jeremy Corbyn. Not that he helped himself by backing down when he ought to have been fighting back. But “Equality and Human Rights”? What equality, exactly? Which human’s rights?

To make matters even worse, the land of Churchill and Maxwell Fyfe, with comparable figures on the other side, is now the land of Starmer and Lammy, facing only Badenoch and Jenrick. Denmark’s “parallel societies”, until 2021 officially called “ghettos”, are wholly compatible with membership of NATO. They are wholly compatible with membership of the EU. They are wholly compatible with the ECHR. They are the work of a Social Democratic Government, like the social media ban in Australia. And they are wanted here by the Labour Government, likewise. On all five points, of course they are. And on a sixth: race is not the primary indicator in an industrial or postindustrial country such as Britain or Denmark, so Britain is to copy Denmark’s “parallel societies”, and Denmark will return the compliment once we had expanded the scheme.

The first criterion for a “parallel society” is that more than 50 per cent of the inhabitants originated or “descended” from “non-Western countries”, defined as everywhere apart from “all 27 EU countries, the United Kingdom, Andorra, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, Vatican City, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand”. But the other four are socioeconomic. Once it had met the racist first one, then a community has to meet only two of those four to have all of its children from the age of one upwards required to undergo 25 hours per week of instruction in “Danish culture”, and to be declared liable to mass eviction and demolition in the manner of Sharpeville, District Six, or the West Bank. After a few years, Britain would drop the whitelist and just ghettoise everywhere with two or more of unemployment at 40 per cent or above, criminal convictions more than three times the national average (as if the criminal justice system were class-neutral), 50 per cent or more of over-30s without tertiary qualifications, and an average gross income below 55 per cent of the national average. Adjusting for different education systems, Denmark and elsewhere would follow suit.

Not that the change would be that enormous. It was Durham County Council, then the jewel in the right-wing Labour crown, that imposed Category D status. Even if not in detail, everyone in these parts has always known about Medomsley Detention Centre; we are shocked but not surprised. Parallel societies are nothing new to us. The British State inflicts sexual violence on working-class, predominantly white males as the American State inflicts sexual violence on African-American and Hispanic males, as the Australian State inflicts sexual violence on Aboriginal males, as the Israeli State inflicts sexual violence on Palestinian males, and so on. That, and false allegations of sexual violence. Fear of the black male is fundamental to the capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade, and the slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle.

UPDATE 7:23PM

Karl Turner tweets:

I am not planning to table a sunset. I am against this completely because it won’t work and juries are NOT what causes the backlog.

Even better.

Utrinque Paratus

Afghanistan was clearly not worth the bones of one British soldier, and we should never again have any involvement in the place. Or, in that sense, in anywhere else. Whatever their cover story about the death of the Parachute Regiment's Lance Corporal George Hooley in Ukraine, his fate has added to their case that "We are at war", necessitating the "postponement" of the next General Election. Even Ukraine is supposedly now to go to the polls, but the repeated cancellation of local elections in Britain is softening us up. Do not be softened. Be hardened.

At the next General Election, numerous seats would be decided by a handful of votes as the square peg of a good half a dozen parties and many locally strong Independents were forced into the round hole of First Past the Post. Reform UK is facing the fury of its own supporters because one of its candidates for Portsmouth City Council is Addy Mo Asaduzzaman, a Bangladeshi who is exercising his rights as a Commonwealth citizen. Will they react in the same way when a Reform candidate was an Anglo-Australian or a white South African?

Ben Habib has registered Advance UK with the Electoral Commission as the party in which Stephen Yaxley-Lennon would be welcome, but a woman has already had to be removed from one of his meetings of it because she had segued from a well-received attack on Islam to an unwelcome criticism, both of Israeli influence in British politics, and, it must be said, of the Talmud, all while quoting Charlie Kirk. She was a recent Reform activist. Yes, it was only a Ten Minute Rule Bill. But alone among MPs either sitting or elected as Reform, Nigel Farage did not turn up to vote against re-joining the Customs Union, which passed on the Chair's casting vote with 100 votes on each side. The Liberal Democrats are going to make hay with that one. Farage's vote could have deprived them and their fellow-travellers of that. Where was he?

And when Jeremy Corbyn used to vote against the Blair Government, then the Conservatives voted with it. He did not vote with them. But unlike him, Zarah Sultana has voted to keep every Lords wrecking amendment to the Employment Rights Bill, even on strike ballot thresholds and on trade unions' political funds, amendments that had passed with the votes of Green Peers even though Green MPs then voted to overturn them. Sultana argued that the Government's own weakening of that Bill, concessions of which I have been as critical as anyone, had rendered it "inadequate". As with her call to "nationalise the entire economy", she is an infantile ultra-Leftist whom the Labour Party has to explain how and why it ever approved as a parliamentary candidate at all, never mind twice, the second time after a full term as an MP. As a Workers Party voter, I would not vote for a Green or, at least in anything like its present form, a Your Party candidate at the Workers Party's behest. I am not the only one. But we will all vote.

Closer Each Day?

Apparently Neighbours will end again this week. But Star Wars has ended definitively three times, yet we all know that there will be more. And it turns out that Home and Away is still going strong in this and more than 140 other countries. Its characters will henceforth be ridiculous to its viewers, although the actors will be obliged to pretend to have no idea. Or will the central theme be the subversion of the ban on social media, which Anthony Albanese has defended to those affected on YouTube, even though they can no longer legally watch it?

Banning under-16s from YouTube looks like banning them from all popular music that did not enjoy radio airplay at the given time. In its way, and in fact the two are connected, that is as pernicious as banning them from all ideology other than that purveyed by the schools and by the official media. It is no wonder that this experiment is being watched so sympathetically by a British Government that kept people in school until they were 18 while planning to make 16 the voting age.

Fresh Light?

Be Baroness Longfield never so righteous, can they really not see how bad this looks? Her motives may be as pure as the driven snow. But this Government is full of, and surrounded by, utterly cynical and ruthless operators who understand the importance of perception. Yet it does something like this. Still, good luck to her. She is going to need it.

No matter what the Longfield Report ended up saying, you are reading here first, as you so often do, that the Government's response to it will be to propose yet further restrictions of trial by jury, and other such erosions of the presumption of innocence, accompanied by digital ID.

Lily-Liveried?

Next will be the British Rail sandwiches, which such defenders as there are of rail privatisation think is a killer blow. They also think that you have to have an adult memory of the 1970s, putting you in your early sixties as a bare minimum, to remember British Rail. You do not, and in any case most people who do, are in favour of renationalisation.

Yet paint it in any livery you like, but the rolling stock of Great British Railways is to remain in private hands, adding exorbitant rent to every ticket. Rent to whom? See also the private contractors that routinely bring defendants to court late or not at all, a major contributor to the backlog, which is not in any way caused by juries.

And see also the £10.9 billion in Covid-19 fraud even without considering PPE. Why have Michelle Mone and Doug Barrowman not been arrested? I do not agree with Unexplained Wealth Orders without a conviction, but they are the law, so where are the Orders against that pair? Mone and Barrowman are the characters that our present economic arrangements form as a feature and not as a bug.

Another such is Richard Dannatt, who has secured all past, present and future criminal charges against Palestine Action in return for payment by Teledyne, which is not even a British company. Jurors and magistrates should acquit on principle. All other members of the House of Lords should go on strike if its threshold were ever again crossed by Mone, or by Dannatt, or by Peter Mandelson.

Tony Blair's ties to Mandelson and thus to Jeffrey Epstein would have put an end to his scheme to be made Viceroy of Gaza even if he had not been unacceptable to Hamas and to the regimes of the wider Arab and Islamic world. If they will not have him, then why should we have his Institute's digital ID or his family's facial recognition, grifts to make anything arising out of the last pandemic look like cheating at tiddlywinks, with the cost including our liberty itself?

About A Tout

Under the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act and the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, nothing that Freddie Scappaticci did would now be illegal. Everyone always knew that the Provisional IRA, the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA were riddled with Police informants, MI5 assets, and so on. It is widely assumed that the New IRA is a false flag operation. The "New Republican Movement" has been universally greeted as such.

The Loyalist organisations have always been known to be off-the-books arms of the British State. And in March 2023, four Protestants, at least one with known Loyalist paramilitary connections, were arrested in relation to the attempted murder of Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell, for which the New IRA had already claimed responsibility. Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries have always been heavily involved in traditional organised crime, especially drug-dealing, leading to generations of professional and social interaction.

Brutal Repercussions

Rob Marchant writes:

While Westminster has been alight with chatter over whether or not Rachel Reeves misrepresented the facts in the run-up to her Budget, events have been happening in parallel which are likely to have a far longer shadow for Keir Starmer and his crew. Indeed, they are situations which, if left as they are, will continue to have brutal repercussions long after they all leave office.

The first was Wes Streeting’s announcement last month of the puberty blockers trial, due to kick off in the New Year.

When the Cass report landed in April last year, campaigners looking to protect Britain’s children from the harm of untested medicines were surely so overjoyed to see that thousands of lives could be protected from likely sterilisation and severe health problems in later life, that less focus was given to one of the report’s other recommendations, on the smaller number children which it recommended be recruited for a clinical trial, to finally put a stop to any debate on the efficacy of said treatment.

It seemed churlish to complain about this matter of the fine print, when the main battle, over ceasing the general puberty-blocker programme, had already been won. But now the last grain of sand has fallen into the bottom of the egg timer and the trial, which it was easy to blithely assume would never start, is about to begin.

This means that 226 children will be legally taking the same drugs which have been declared illegal for thousands of others diagnosed with gender dysphoria. To recap: these drugs have never been approved for this use; the treatment is experimental, with some horrific side effects; and consent cannot be meaningfully given by minors as young as 10, most of whom are too young to have experienced pubertal changes, let alone sex.

(And if, after Cass, you still truly believe that there is a medical case for using puberty blockers, I direct you to this disturbing video, in which no less a figure than the president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) admits that all children to date who have been treated with them prior to puberty – Tanner Stage 2 – have ended up anorgasmic.)

To say this trial is controversial is something of an understatement. For many, blockers represent a scandalous experiment on minors, at the “extreme risk”, as campaigner and author Helen Joyce put it, of permanently ruining their sex lives and general health; a historic mistake on the part of Health Secretary, Wes Streeting.

Nonetheless, he seems intent on proceeding, in a way that seems emblematic of the government’s somewhat cavalier attitude to the rights of women and children. In the same week, outgoing EHRC chief Kishwer Falkner, interviewed in the Times last week, that the Labour government has “abandoned” women, referencing Bridget Philipson’s blocking of her issuing the EHRC’s guidance on the impacts of the Supreme Court judgement on “sex meaning sex”, as well as its inability to call out Pakistani men as an important factor in the grooming gangs scandal (we might also note that the last time the Labour Party crossed swords with the EHRC, it was over its poor treatment of Jews, and it didn’t end well [for whom?]; it is now women).

This blind spot on women’s issues will cost Labour dear, but nowhere more dear than the harm to be caused to that small cross-section of the country’s children. Former Labour MP Rosie Duffield has also put together a cross-party letter to Streeting, requesting that the trial be pulled. It should be, before the lives of 266 children, not to mention his own career and conscience, are all permanently blighted by this decision.

And then there is Assisted Dying. This last week, proof has come to light of what many suspected, that although formally neutral, Labour figures had actually planned all along to make it effectively a Labour bill by driving the legislation forward “under the radar” as a Private Members Bill, easing its path through the Commons and helping remove obstacles for Kim Leadbeater.

This makes it look grubby and disingenuous but, even before that, the bill has had substantial resistance: not just from those who reject the premise of Assisted Dying on religious or moral grounds but, more importantly, from those who simply think it poorly drafted and lacking in adequate safeguards. The Lords’ review has resulted in an unprecedented 1,071 amendments to the legislation. While supporters of the flawed bill simply dismiss this as filibustering, it is a more convincing argument that this actually the Lords doing its job, in a bill which its critics feel should never have been introduced in this inappropriate, back-door way.

Finally, this week has seen the bombshell news that the Justice Secretary, David Lammy, is going to abolish trial by jury for all but a few, very serious crimes. Critics say it will likely have little impact in terms of reducing the pressure on the British courts system, but see slashing what many see as its jewel in its crown, one which has survived over 800 years, as disastrous (for good measure, Lammy is also now being accused of cooking the books on rape statistics, to justify his point).

For a short-term operational fix, it would be a historic change to the way Britain does things, in a legal system where, for example, rape hardly ever gets to trial in the first place. Labour MPs are already set to rebel, including its former Deputy Leader, Angela Rayner.

In all these cases, whether it be jury trials; the lives of vulnerable adults who might be desperate, broke or coerced; or the long-term mental, physical and sexual health of hundreds of under-18s; there are serious and very reasonable public objections; and all very much cases of “we’ll miss them when they’re gone”.

After David Cameron’s “big idea” of Brexit, many of us were probably hoping that political ideas would be resoundingly pint-sized from hereon in. But these three big ideas are not only major moral disaster areas: they are ones of a magnitude which surely make or break political careers and, quite probably, produce deep regrets into old age among those who pushed them through, in the face of perfectly reasonable objections.

These three things can all be undone: but time is surely running out to do so.

And Karl Turner writes:

David Lammy’s forced announcement last week after the apparent accidental leak of his plans to scrap some jury trials came as a shock to Labour backbenchers.

There was reference in our election manifesto to addressing the Crown Court backlog which grew exponentially under the previous government, but there was never any suggestion that we, the Labour Party, would ever consider doing away with the rights of those accused of serious crimes to be tried by a jury of 12 good men, women and true.

Not least when current justice ministers, including the Lord Chancellor, have made very public statements pleading the case for juries in criminal proceedings, to be maintained. After all, juries have existed in the English (and Welsh) legal system for over 800 years.

Threatening to restrict jury trials is both a dereliction of duty and an ineffective way of dealing with a crippling backlog of cases. The erosion of jury trials not only risks undermining a fundamental right, but importantly, will not reduce the backlog by anything like enough to speed up justice for victims and those that are accused and prosecuted by the Crown.

If this ever comes to the House of Commons, I will rebel and vote against it, and I think the government would be defeated on this issue. The House and the public will not stand for the erosion of a fundamental right, particularly given that there are more effective ways to reduce the backlog.

Sir Brian Leveson is a well-respected figure whose words carry much weight but even Sir Brian is not wedded to this idea. But the outcry from stakeholders in the criminal justice system must not be ignored.

Our system rightly prevents the judiciary from speaking out on such matters, but when you have the Bar Council and the Criminal Bar Association united in their opposition to these destructive plans, then it is easy to work out what judges and recently-retired judges are saying to lawyers when they are speaking privately.

These warnings need to be heard and acted upon before it is too late. Let’s be honest now, the problem (which is massive) was not caused by juries and it will not be solved by their removal. If this is not ditched, then the government risks another embarrassing defeat.

Labour MPs deserve better from the prime minister to have us marched up the proverbial hill to be marched back down again and then have us pretend that we were never asked to do the unthinkable in the first place. Parliamentarians from across the political divide recognise the constitutional importance of trial by jury and the danger of their erosion from public life.

Backbench MPs see this as a step too far, and no responsible parliament can allow a cornerstone of justice and our democracy to be savagely attacked on the basis that the government is actually doing something to fix the problem when in fact anybody that is anybody, practitioners, academics or the judiciary itself know full well that these plans will not do what it says on the tin and will most definitely not protect and promote the interests of victims of crime.

The Lord Chancellor would be better promising less and doing more. There is much to do. The government chief whip is a good and well-respected MP, but he isn’t Paul Daniels - the chief whip’s best magic trickery cannot magic the inevitable rebellion away.

One of the primary causes of the backlog is the restriction on ‘sitting days’, the number of days Crown Courts operate a year. Around 130,000 sitting days are available to the courts, but, despite a capacity crisis, sitting days are restricted by around 20,000 a year.

While the government has rightly announced that it is increasing the number of sitting days by 5000, this is still a substantial shortfall. This inexplicable misuse of court time needs to be rectified.

The parliamentary timetable for these wrongheaded proposals is most likely to be the second half of next year, perhaps October or November. If the emergency is now, then why isn’t the justice secretary arguing for time on the floor of the House now?

Why, if it is so very urgent and just about reducing the backlog, won’t David Lammy put in a sunset clause on the face of the bill so that this policy can be scrapped once the backlog is down to a manageable number? At which time he himself would revert to saying that “criminal trials without juries are a bad idea, you don’t fix the backlog with trials that are widely perceived as unfair”.

And why not start using the promised £550 million for victims support service immediately? The government doesn’t need primary legislation for that. There isn’t a backlog in every court centre. Certain courts have managed to delete any backlog to manageable numbers by proactive case management. Let’s look at the model before we throw out the baby with the bath water. The government should reconsider this now, before lasting damage is done to public confidence in our courts, the justice system and this government.