Commonhold?

The Government is asking 63 local authorities whether they wanted to “delay” the elections that were due in May. If they cancelled your local elections, then do not pay your council tax. Much less join up, even under compulsion. All trials of Ajax armoured fighting vehicles have today been “paused”, so it would be anybody’s guess how you were supposed to sweep across the Steppe. But sweep across it for what?

See also the Leasehold and Commonhold Reform Bill. Or, rather, do not see it, since it is already more than a year late, and on Monday Keir Starmer told the Liaison Committee that it would not be published before Christmas. As a twentysomething recently said to me about the prospect of conscription, “Send my freeholder, he’s the one with a stake in this country.” Try to explain leasehold to anyone from almost anywhere else in the world. Give three cheers for the three-term Labour Government that never abolished it. And note how feudalism has morphed into global capitalism, so that nostalgia for the former does not provide the basis necessary for resistance to the latter.

Leasehold should simply be abolished. People who wonder why I keep up the politics, no one else is saying things like this. Angela Rayner did not help herself, but between the failure to cap ground rents at £250 per year, and the decision that you could not be unfairly dismissed until you had worked somewhere for six months, you do begin to wonder about the throwing of her under the bus. Yet even from down there, she is aiding the 39 Labour MPs who had announced their opposition to the abolition of almost all jury trials and of the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court, and who had made sensible suggestions towards clearing the backlog.

The defence of the presumption of innocence and the promotion of timely justice are no place for the insinuation that the Palestine Action hunger strikes had been convicted of anything, nor for the dismissal of their grievance as to the length of time that they had been held on remand, nor for the erroneous suggestion that they were the same people who were on trial for an incident involving a sledgehammer, and nor for the treatment of those defendants as if they were guilty. The Government’s outriders are doing all of those things. But Britain is neither Russia nor Ukraine, and we want to keep it that way. Then we might begin to create a country for which anyone might want to fight.