Canopy Growth?

Donald Trump’s piracy in the Caribbean is obviously not against drugs, Tony Blair may still turn out to be his man in Gaza, and Trump never tires of telling us that Keir Starmer is his man in Britain, but he does provide some grounds for the unrequited infatuation of Richard Tice who wants to legalise cannabis, of Nigel Farage who wants to legalise drugs across the board, and of Lee Anderson who signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023:

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing the Justice Department to accelerate the reclassification of marijuana, a move framed as expanding medical research without federally legalizing the drug.

The order follows weeks of sustained lobbying by cannabis industry executives, including Trulieve CEO Kim Rivers, and would shift marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, easing federal restrictions while leaving recreational use and criminal penalties unchanged. Shares of major U.S. cannabis companies rose on the announcement, with firms like Canopy Growth climbing nearly 12 percent in one day. Canopy Growth is up more than 60 percent this month since Trump began to weigh rescheduling.

The move follows steps taken under President Joe Biden, who issued mass pardons and ordered federal records for marijuana possession offenses be expunged, while stopping short of broader legalization.

At the signing, Trump said he had been inundated with calls urging the change, citing its potential to help patients. “We have people begging for me to do this. People that are in great pain,” he said.

The journalist Saagar Enjeti alleged Thursday that the administration privately undercut its public rationale for the move, claiming officials on an internal call acknowledged weak evidence for medical marijuana while conceding the rescheduling would deliver a significant tax benefit to large cannabis donors.

The Fightback Starts Here

Richard Bratby reviews Someone Else’s Music by Alexandra Wilson:

When Martin Graham died in April this year, a light went out in the world of opera. You might have read the obituaries: Graham was the Gloucestershire music-lover who staged Wagner’s Ring cycle in his chicken shed and created one of England’s most ambitious country house opera festivals in his back garden at Longborough.

Except Longborough isn’t a country house, and Graham wasn’t some Glyndebourne-style landed toff. He was self-made: an autodidact who left school at 17 to labour on a building site and listened to the Third Programme on his transistor as he heaved bricks. “Building an opera house is easy,” he liked to say. “You just go into a field and start digging.”

Martin Graham’s story doesn’t appear in Alexandra Wilson’s new book, but it doesn’t need to. Wilson is our pre-eminent living expert on the history of opera-going in Britain, and she has many, many testimonies like it. The two typist sisters who saved for three years in the 1920s for the chance to hear the soprano Amelita Galli-Curci sing live; the queues of clerks and factory workers who slept on the pavement outside Covent Garden to buy cheap tickets in the 1950s. 

Most surprising (to me, anyway), the British soldiers who occupied Italy during the Second World War then took a love of opera back home — packing out performances of Rigoletto and Tosca in a post-war Britain where no political party seriously disputed the idea that great art should be available to all.

And now: well, here we are. Like Wilson, I write as a beneficiary of that postwar vision. My father began his career in Wills’s cigarette factory in Newcastle; he blew his first pay cheque on Solti’s recording of the Ring, and discovered a lifelong passion (indeed, it’s why I’m called Richard). The teenage Alexandra Wilson discovered the art through Opera North in Leeds. My first taste of the genuine article came from Welsh National Opera, on tour at the Liverpool Empire.

It couldn’t happen now. Today, the Arts Council has turned on the art of opera with vindictive and devastating ideological fury — hiding behind the skirts of indifferent governments (whether red or blue) and lying about “levelling up” whilst it dismembers the touring programmes and regional companies that have worked hardest to take opera to the nation.

For the first time in a century, my home city of Liverpool now has no regular professional opera, and it is far from alone. The message to my low-income, opera-curious teenage self — if he were around now — is plain. This isn’t for you. It isn’t “relevant”. Stick to what you know, and above all, know your place.

You’re probably wondering how we got here, and Someone Else’s Music provides an answer. It’s “the e Word”, elitism — the myth, as unkillable (and as dishonest) as Rasputin, that opera “is expensive and exclusive; ergo the people who enjoy it must be social and intellectual snobs”.

“The very word ‘opera’ has become a form of shorthand in the contemporary imagination for a mishmash of anxieties about money, class, dress, privilege and social status,” laments Wilson, acknowledging that the prejudice (at least in Britain) has deep roots. Antipathy to opera’s expense and (above all) its perceived foreignness dates back to the 18th century. Tabloid stereotypes about fat Italians in tights still come easily to opera’s enemies on the philistine right and the progressive left alike.

The puzzle Wilson tries to untangle is why, cockroach-like, that myth persists. And it really is a myth: Wilson deploys a century’s worth of evidence to demonstrate that between the wars, opera was a classless, widely-enjoyed form of mass entertainment. Then as now, the lavish productions and bejewelled audiences at Covent Garden were an exception rather than the norm — a source of aspiration, as well as resentment.

Yet this was still an era (and Wilson has a lively eye for human detail) when East End schoolboys could perform The Magic Flute, and when Dido and Aeneas was a classroom staple. Incredibly, all this happened long before surtitles (introduced in the 1980s) removed opera’s supposed “incomprehensibility” or, indeed, the massive post-war investment in outreach schemes, music education and accessible new companies such as Sadler’s Wells (now English National Opera), Scottish Opera and Opera North. In 1988 alone, Wilson points out, Channel 4 broadcast 17 operas.

In short, the “elitism” myth simply doesn’t stand up. But if it’s satisfying to watch it shrivel in the face of Wilson’s research, the gruesome truth is that it’s back and more damaging than ever. Wilson dates its re-emergence — like so many bad ideas — to the 1960s, and the radical-chic dogma of cultural relativism. Great art? Says who?

It metastasised into a more deadly form (let’s call it the Cool Britannia variant) after 1997 under New Labour. John Major had admired Dame Joan Sutherland; Blair preferred to hang out with Oasis. Coming after the mid-1990s PR disaster of the Royal Opera’s BBC documentary The House, this was the moment when opera’s fortunes in the United Kingdom were forced into sudden (possibly terminal) reverse.

The ideological toxins began their long march through the nation’s cultural organisations like some slow-growing autoimmune disease, until the scholars and institutions that were supposed to nourish opera in Britain began attacking it.

Audiences (and they’re still abundant, diverse and passionate) must be re-educated. Find yourself weeping as Cio-Cio San sings “Un bel di”? You’re sexist, racist and colonialist. As Wilson points out, under the Arts Council’s risible new “Let’s Create” strategy, even the word “Art” itself has been cancelled. It’s just too problematic.

This isn’t an optimistic book, then, but it’s certainly an energising one. With any study of this scope, there will be omissions: perhaps inevitably (and she’s far from the worst offender) Wilson occasionally gives the impression that the whole of British opera comprises two London theatres plus an outstation at Glyndebourne.

There’s a Gilbert and Sullivan-shaped hole in her narrative, echoing the notion (weirdly prevalent amongst British opera buffs) that G&S somehow doesn’t count as opera. Exhibit A, surely, in any study of the relationship between opera and class in these muddle-headed isles?

But Wilson already has an Armada of ignorance to fight, and Someone Else’s Music is a broadside of objectivity and intelligence in a battle that currently hangs by a thread. No art form is more subtle, more visceral, more preposterous and more life-affirming than opera; for my money, none is more entertaining, too.

Civilisation-wise, this is what peak performance looks (and sounds) like, and British defenders of that ideal will find a formidable intellectual arsenal in these pages. “To talk endlessly about opera being elitist is, it turns out, just about the most elitist thing one can do,” Wilson concludes. “It is time to change the conversation about opera.” The fightback starts here.

Why The Brussels Money-Grab Will Fail

Thomas Fazi, of course, writes:

Belgium’s prime minister learned the hard way that one does not need to be a rabble-rousing populist to incur the EU’s wrath. Until recently, the moderate conservative Bart De Wever had largely stayed out of the European spotlight. This was relatively easy, given that his party belongs to the centre-right European Conservatives and Reformists group in the European Parliament, which has strongly aligned with Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission on Ukraine. Yet in a matter of months he became the Brussels establishment’s public enemy number one.

His offence? Opposing Brussels’s plan to seize Russia’s frozen assets held in Europe. The overwhelming majority of them are parked at Euroclear, a Brussels-based clearing house that sits at the heart of global securities settlement. For Europe’s pro-war lobby, led by France and Germany, confiscation was presented as the only way to continue financing Ukraine’s war effort — or, failing that, to force member states to assume the burden collectively through other, increasingly extraordinary means.

Belgium, however, had compelling reasons to resist. Confiscating — or functionally expropriating — Russian central bank assets would violate one of the most sacrosanct principles of international finance: the neutrality and inviolability of sovereign reserves. Breaching that principle would not only set a dangerous precedent, but would also expose Belgium to potentially severe legal, financial and geopolitical consequences — as Euroclear is domiciled there.

As Robert Volterra, one of London’s most respected international lawyers, warned, confiscating Russian assets would be “absolutely illegal” and would haunt the EU for generations. The legal fallout could be enormous. Russia had multiple avenues for challenge and had begun to explore them, already filing a lawsuit in Moscow against Euroclear.

From there, Russia could pursue litigation in Belgian courts, potentially all the way to the supreme court. Belgian judges would be forced to determine whether Russian property rights under domestic law had been violated and whether the principle of sovereign immunity had been breached. On both counts, Russia’s case would be strong. Were Russia to prevail, Euroclear itself would be liable. Given the sums involved, the clearing house would almost certainly be rendered insolvent, triggering national and EU-level deposit guarantee mechanisms.

In such a scenario, Euroclear would in turn be compelled to sue the Belgian state, which would have ordered the effective expropriation of client assets. The prospects of such a claim would be far from negligible. Beyond Belgium, Russia could also bring cases before the European Court of Justice, the International Court of Justice and multiple international arbitration forums. Even setting litigation aside — one might argue that in the current context it would be hard to find a Western judge willing to rule in Russia’s favour — it is difficult to see how Belgium could justify refusing to unfreeze Russia’s reserves if and when a peace settlement is eventually reached.

It is therefore hardly surprising that Belgium emerged as one of the most vocal opponents of the plan. De Wever has bluntly warned that confiscation would amount to “an act of war”, likening it to entering a foreign embassy, stripping it of its contents and selling them off. One might reasonably conclude that he is simply defending his country’s interests by upholding international law. And yet, for this, he has found himself subjected to a smear campaign by the EU’s political and media establishment. He has been accused of acting under Russian intimidation — or worse, of being a Russian asset himself. At the same time, Brussels threatened to “treat Belgium like Hungary” if it continued to oppose the plan. That’s what happens when even loyal pro-EU governments dare to step out of line.

Despite the massive pressure, De Wever stood his ground. And he was joined by a growing front of dissenters. Hungary and Slovakia openly rejected the scheme, with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán accusing the Commission of “systematically raping European law”. Italy, Bulgaria and Malta also expressed reservations.

The economic and financial implications of confiscation, after all, would extend far beyond Belgium. Once the assumption that sovereign reserves held abroad are immune from political seizure is broken, there is no telling what the consequences may be. Countries would begin to view euro-denominated assets not as a safe store of value, but as a political liability — one that can be confiscated at Brussels’s discretion. The message would be unmistakable: your assets are safe only as long as you remain politically compliant. The result would almost certainly be that capital would start to flee Europe — even faster than it already is.

Nonetheless, faced with growing resistance, Brussels last week resorted to invoking emergency powers under Article 122 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union to indefinitely freeze the Russian assets, claiming this would allow it to act by qualified majority rather than unanimity. Yet this represents a blatant distortion of the Treaty. Article 122 applies strictly to emergency economic measures in response to natural disasters or severe economic disturbances. It does not apply to foreign policy, which unequivocally requires unanimity. The fate of Russia’s frozen sovereign assets, however, is self-evidently a foreign policy matter. Claiming otherwise is an extra-legal sleight of hand.

This is another example of a Brussels power grab. If Article 122 — or any other provision — can be stretched to justify the seizure of foreign sovereign assets and the imposition of massive liabilities on unwilling member states, it can be used to circumvent unanimity across a wide range of foreign policy decisions.

The threat, however, worked. On Friday, at the European Council meeting, the Commission failed to secure an agreement on the use of the frozen Russian assets. Instead, it secured agreement on a separate €90-billion loan, backed by the EU budget and underwritten by all member states except three (Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic), which were granted opt-outs. In effect, the political obstacle was bypassed not by changing strategy, but by shifting the financial risk directly onto European taxpayers. As von der Leyen made clear in advance of the summit, there was little room for dissent: “No one will leave the EU summit until the issue of Ukraine’s financing is resolved.”

Incredibly, the deal foresees that the loan will have to be repaid by Ukraine only if and when Russia agrees to pay war reparations — effectively transforming hypothetical future reparations into immediate financing. This idea is, at best, wishful thinking. It is highly unlikely that Russia would accept binding reparations even in the event of a peace deal, meaning that there is little chance Ukraine will ever repay the loan. This is all the more striking given how much Europe has already spent: EU parliaments have approved at least €187 billion in support for Ukraine, on top of massive indirect costs.

This episode illustrates how the EU operates: by manufacturing false binaries that foreclose genuine political choice. Member states were presented with a stark alternative — either agree to confiscate Russia’s frozen assets or be prepared to collectively underwrite a massive new loan. What was never seriously considered was a third option: to stop pouring money into a demonstrably failed strategy and instead work to bring the war to an end through negotiations.

Yet it’s easy to see why the EU can’t afford to confront the failure of its Ukraine strategy — one that has inflicted immense economic damage on Europe while delivering nothing on the battlefield, and that has left Ukraine in a worse position than at the start of the war. Acknowledging this reality would carry enormous political costs for EU elites, particularly those most invested in the victory-at-all-costs narrative — hence their determination to keep the war going at all costs. This is why, even after failing to agree on confiscation, Brussels pushed through a massive, budget-backed loan as a substitute. The consequences will be dear: Ukrainians will continue to suffer and die in an unwinnable war, while Europe will remain entrenched in a permanent state of economic warfare and military-by-proxy confrontation with Russia, with a constant risk of escalation into direct conflict.

If there is a silver lining to this grim trajectory, it is that the recklessness of these choices will only exacerbate the contradictions of a project that is pushing the continent to the brink, ultimately forcing a reckoning — within member states and among Europe’s citizens alike. Indeed, the Commission may have succeeded in avoiding a catastrophic humiliation, but in doing so it exposed the increasingly authoritarian nature of the Union, willing to override national interests and discard legal constraints, democratic norms and basic economic rationality in pursuit of ideological crusades. Meanwhile, the enormous financial burden imposed by the latest deal will only deepen internal fractures and push national budgets to the breaking point — especially when it becomes clear that it will entail yet more resources diverted from Europe’s own crumbling infrastructure, underfunded hospitals and overstretched schools.

And Ukraine is far from the only flashpoint. Brussels is also struggling to secure backing for the Mercosur free-trade agreement with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Here, too, resistance is growing. France has long led the opposition, with Emmanuel Macron reiterating recently that the deal lacks reciprocity on production standards, pesticide rules and food safety. The front broadened significantly this week, when Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni described the deal as “premature”, citing inadequate safeguards for European agriculture. Italy’s stance is pivotal, as it raises the prospect of a blocking minority in the Council that includes Poland, Hungary and Austria too.

Protests have added to the pressure. On Thursday hundreds of tractors converged on Brussels as farmers from across Europe denounced what they see as unfair competition. Proposed safeguards have done little to calm opposition — leading to the ratification of the deal to be postponed once again at the European Council.

And so, as the contradictions within the EU continue to accumulate, it is increasingly difficult to see how Brussels can manage the backlash for much longer. The Union is beginning to resemble a crumbling empire, reliant not only on repression, censorship and electoral manipulation to maintain control, but also on ever more aggressive tactics directed even against pro-EU governments themselves. By forcing through ever more reckless commitments in the name of unity, it is simply setting the stage for an even more catastrophic implosion down the road.

Civilisational Erasure

Excerpted from The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East by Sean Mathews:

Walking from the Austrian Hospice in Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter to Jaffa gate, you can spot the flags of Israeli settlers dangling out of windows and above rooftop water-tanks.

The hospice was constructed 150 years ago by another empire which was devoured by the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian. Like the Ottoman one, it was of the East and cosmopolitan. The hospice was built for Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. Its halls are tiled in cemento and the gardens are manicured but not overdone.

The Austrian Hospice is the only place I know in the Muslim Quarter where you can sip a glass of wine, which I needed after being in ideological and suspicion-riven Jerusalem, but some of the customers are also pious Muslims. The takeaway is that no one here cares if you are Jewish, Muslim, or Christian.

Even the Israeli settlers haven’t gone after the hospice yet. In that sense, it reminds me of Cairo’s Greek Club. It is not a coincidence that these Levantine redoubts are where local authorities’ oppressive rule and stifling social and religious codes subside.

I left this sanctuary after a morning coffee to meet George, the leader of the Greek community in Jerusalem’s Old City, at Samaras Cafe next to Jaffa Gate. The Petra and Imperial Hotels that the settlers had seized were above us. Jaffa Gate is the Old City’s meeting point. It was crowded with people, even though tourists were staying away due to the war.

George told me that like the Palestinians, Greek Jerusalemites face the same problem of being non-Jews in an increasingly intolerant Jewish state:

“The Jews have decided they don’t want anyone but them left in Jerusalem. Doesn’t matter if it’s Christians or Muslims. But they especially don’t like us Greeks because we aren’t Palestinians, but have been here for generations. There were literally thousands of Greeks here. We kept Christianity alive in the Holy Land. The last of us are a thorn in their side.”

There are different statistics on the exact number of Greeks who once lived here. Michael Vatikiotis, a journalist and son of the late Greek-Jerusalemite scholar PJ Vatikiotis, who wrote a book about his Greek and Jewish-Italian family in the Levant, said Jerusalem was home to at least 8,000 Greeks, in addition to those in trading ports like Jaffa. The statistics I obtained from the Greek Consulate in Jerusalem put the number higher from 1922, with almost 20,000 Greeks residing here.

What can be stated with certainty is that a century ago, Greeks were a part of Jerusalem’s cosmopolitan fabric.

In fact, by the early twentieth century, the community was blossoming so much that it had outgrown the Old City and established the Greek Colony between the present-day neighborhoods of Katamon and Baqa in upscale West Jerusalem. Fewer than 100 Greeks still live in Jerusalem, George told me.

Since its founding, Israel has been arguably as intolerant as Atatürk’s Türkiye toward Christians, and as intolerant as Nasser’s Egypt toward the Greeks.

In 1922, Christians accounted for twenty-three per cent of Jerusalem’s population. That was twenty-six years before the creation of the state of Israel. At the time of writing, they number barely two per cent, despite Jerusalem being home to at least six major churches.

In Stratis Tsirkas’ World War II trilogy, Drifting Cities, Greeks jump off the pages of his main character, Manos’ sojourn in Jerusalem when it was part of mandatory Palestine. This is how one Greek resident of the city described the political maneuverings of Jerusalem’s communities during the early days of the Second World War:

“Never mind the local authorities, the Allies, the Arabs and the Bedouins, who all have their own organizations; never mind the Knights, the Protestants, the Catholics, the Armenians, the Russians, our own Greeks and all the missions who won’t stop at anything when it comes to winning souls ... it’s the Jews who are organized best. They’ve really set their minds to getting Palestine for themselves ... the Haganah, the Irgun, who collect the arms for after the war ... the Hadassah, who scoop up boatfulls of American dollars.”

It was a rainy late-November afternoon. Samaras Cafe was drafty and our jackets were damp. The Near East is at its finest during winter when the olive-toned terrain is blanketed in grey and wet-cold. We devoured our hummus, labne and mutabbal, washing the assortment of mezze down with hot mint tea.

“When the 1948 war started, the inhabitants of the Greek Colony fled the Jewish militias and took refuge at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They crowded into the Old City for the Arab Legion to protect them. Everything you see here became part of Jordan,” George said, motioning out the window of the cafe to the bustling crowd outside.

George spoke with an American accent. He had spent more than twenty years in the United States, where he told me he worked for Las Vegas star Wayne Newtown. I asked him whether he feels Greece advocates for its few remaining nationals here.

“Athens doesn’t care about us. Most Greeks don’t even know we exist, so if we get destroyed, it won’t matter to the politicians,” he said.

George, like many Greeks I met in the Middle East and Greece’s borderlands, believed the destruction of Greeks in Jerusalem is part of a subtler, centuries-old effort to Europeanise the Greek state and uproot them from the lands of Byzantium. This might sound far-fetched, but east of Thessaloniki it is widely believed.

He told me:

“We were the first nation-state in Europe. But Europe never wanted us to be independent. They were scared of a Greek democracy and our ambitions. The first thing they did was erase thousands of years of Roman and Byzantine history and telling us to be like ancient Greece. The same thing is going on here. Erasing the Greek presence.”

George wanted to talk to me about the United States. He was flabbergasted by the Evangelicals’ rise within the Republican Party and their messianic support for Israeli settlement-building and annexation. “These people have hijacked the Republicans’ foreign policy on Israel,” he said. “I don’t understand what is going on. American Christians have abandoned the Christians here in Jerusalem: Greeks, Armenians and Palestinians. Do they realise what this Israeli government is allowing to happen to the Christians?”

The Evangelicals’ diehard support for Israel’s expansion in the occupied Palestinian Territories is tied to their literal interpretation of Bible passages where God promises a homeland for the Jewish people and the so-called end-of-times prophecies. One strand of evangelical theology states that the end of the world will be ushered in when Jews return en masse to the Holy Land. After that, an Antichrist will come to earth and rule for seven years until this empire is destroyed in Armageddon. Then, Jesus Christ will return to earth and establish his Kingdom in Jerusalem.

I was curious about the evangelical Christians myself. Tens of thousands come each year to visit the Holy Land. I asked George if they ever meet the Greeks or Palestinian Christians in the Old City. “They want nothing to do with us. We don’t see them at the church or at restaurants in the Christian Quarter. They have Jewish or American tour guides. Besides, the Israelis don’t want them to hear from us,” he said. “They go to the Jordan River to get baptised and outside the Old City,” he added. “Where they think Jesus was buried.” 

Evangelicals believe Jesus was buried at the Garden Tomb, which has become a major pilgrimage site for them. Other Christian denominations believe Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre sits in the Old City.

Custodianship of the sprawling, cavernous church is shared among six denominations: Roman Catholics, Armenian Apostolics, Syrian Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox, Copts, and the most powerful of all, the Greek Orthodox. Saladin, the Muslim leader who conquered Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187, entrusted two prominent Sunni Muslim families with the keys to the church and the duty of opening and closing it each day. That tradition continues. It’s a good way to keep the Christians from killing each other. At times, bearded priests at the Holy Sepulchre get into fistfights over who has right of way in small corners of the church. I personally saw a group of Coptic and Greek priests get into a brouhaha over where a candle holder was placed.

I walked to the Greek Colony a day before meeting George. It is now Greek in name only. It’s an oasis where bougainvillaea and pine trees spill out of Levantine gardens. The handsome limestone villas and apartment buildings that once housed Greeks were settled by Jewish refugees after 1948. I wanted to find the Lesky. This is the Greek club where the characters in Drifting Cities dance late into the night, drinking and listening to tango records.

The club was built in 1902, in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. It is made of Jerusalem limestone, with a red-tiled roof and painted shutters. It is set back in a verdant garden behind a wrought iron gate. When we arrived, the club was closed. I learned later from a Greek diplomat that the Greek community - fewer than 100 of them - were in a bitter dispute over the club and fighting over the keys.

The Lesky’s status fit too well with the mood in half-occupied Jerusalem. Shuttered and unapproachable, it symbolised the withering Greek presence here.

Ordinary Members Are Taking Control

It is no small deal that the largest trade union has elected a General Secretary who has been, and remains, expelled from the Labour Party. But to everyone who has been in touch from among my Unite comrades, while I am terribly flattered, we are going to have to find someone match fit for next year. We should, though, on a commitment to disaffiliate both from the Labour Party and from the ILGA. Join Unite Community here. As Andrea Egan writes:

I started my working life as a low-paid children’s residential care worker supporting vulnerable children, and I am still a registered social worker today. I discovered the labour movement through the powerful women who mentored me and showed me that working-class people will only win the dignity we deserve if we join together in our workplaces.

On Wednesday, I was elected general secretary of Britain’s biggest union, Unison. Trade unions are meant to be vehicles for workers to collectively organise, represent and lead ourselves, so my election should be an unremarkable event.

Yet I will be the first ordinary member to lead my union in its history. This represents a huge opening for the democratic renewal of the labour movement. The fact that my election is so unprecedented tells its own tale.

It is the blows inflicted upon us by Thatcherite politicians and employers over the decades that explain the enduring weakness of trade unions – clear to see in our industrial impotence and stubbornly low member engagement.

But some at the top of our movement have contributed to its decline, too, by creating cultures where workers, ordinary members, are consistently disregarded by their own organisations. Defending our class interests, the core work of unions, has been an afterthought, at best. Careers and cosy Westminster clubs have come first.

Not any more. That’s the one simple reason I was elected by such a decisive margin to lead Unison: members want our union to put our people first.

Ordinary members are taking control. With my clear mandate, I will work relentlessly to implement the industrial, political and organisational changes necessary to turn our union into the incredible, member-led force it should be. That’s the hopeful project we need the whole union to unite around.

Industrially, I am putting all the employers we bargain with – from Reform UK-run local councils to Wes Streeting’s Department of Health and Social Care – on notice: Unison will be fighting without hesitation to win for members. Our size and resources are without parallel among trade unions in this country. From this point on, those great assets will be geared towards transforming the lives of public-sector workers.

That begins with building on and properly scaling up the “organising to win” strategy introduced in 2021, after a motion by ordinary members at Unison’s conference. This was a member initiative, from the grassroots. Now I will work for it to be fully supported and resourced at the centre.

I will, on top of this, strive to reverse Unison’s industrial underachievement. We are the biggest and best-resourced union in the country; there’s no reason for us not to be among the most industrially formidable.

This will include a wide-ranging strategic review of taking strike action across the labour movement, leading to our adoption of the best methods to win. I will also launch a new strike-ready conference, convening workplace reps from across Unison to forge new organising approaches in the fight for better pay.

Politically, with ordinary Unison members giving a clear mandate for change, our union will defend the interests of the working class as a whole without apology and without exception. I am in no doubt – that requires being unbowed in our support for the Palestinian people’s freedom struggle, and proud of our internationalism and opposition to war. I am also clear that Unison on my watch will not sit idly by while this Labour government allows imprisoned Palestine Solidarity Campaign activists to starve while protesting for their basic rights. Keir Starmer must act now.

So it should be clear that putting members first doesn’t mean relegating or turning away from politics. That would be an abdication of responsibility. But it does mean bringing Unison’s support for the destructive right wing of the Labour party to an end.

We will call time on our union’s inexcusable habit of propping up politicians who act against our interests, undermine our fundamental values and make our lives worse. Like colleagues across the movement, I have, in recent weeks, been appalled by Streeting’s attacks on resident doctors and their union. It is simply unacceptable for a Labour politician to describe striking workers as “morally reprehensible”.

I will, of course, engage open-mindedly with the health secretary as I would with any other employer or government minister. But given the likelihood of a Labour leadership election in 2026, it’s important for me to be clear: swapping Starmer out for Streeting or anyone else from the right wing of the party would be no solution to the gigantic challenges facing the country. What’s needed is a radical change in approach based on the labour movement’s core values.

My victory is no individual matter. It is a collective triumph for ordinary Unison members who have voted to take charge of their own union at long last. Public sector workers keep this country running. We are disrespected, overworked and underpaid. That must change. It will change. With everyone from members to branch reps and our union’s staff pulling together, Unison under my leadership will make sure of it.

Lobby Terms

Lobby briefings are to be replaced with press conferences in Number 9 Downing Street. Inside No. 9. One of the best is on tonight. But what will be the twist to this one? The reaction of the Lobby, it would appear.

Boris Johnson moved the briefings to Number 9 from the House of Commons. That was an Executive usurpation of Parliament. As will be the announcements made in this new manner rather than to the House.

And who are to be the "sector journalists and content creators" invited by Keir Starmer? Or by Nigel Farage? Or by Zack Polanski?

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.

Bold and Essential

Christopher Kinch KC, resident judge at Woolwich Crown Court from 2013 until 2024 writes:

Ministers and MPs with legal qualifications have been trotting out the line that the Lammy reforms restricting right to jury trial are bold and essential.

“To restore trust. To prevent collapse. To uphold the rule of law,” as Alex McIntyre put it last week.

Those who oppose the reforms are characterised as traditionalists who cannot be allowed to stand in the way of doing what is right. Given my 11 years as a Resident Judge at a busy London court, I hope I know a bit about managing a crown court list.

For me, the government argument falls short both on evidence and analysis. It also deliberately and cynically ignores practical answers that would do much more to “restore trust” and “prevent collapse.”

Public trust lies at the heart of the government’s argument, yet juries remain one of the most trusted elements of the criminal justice system at a time when confidence in public institutions is in short supply.

Removing the responsibility for deciding verdicts from juries in a large category of cases risks undermining that trust. Despite ministerial rhetoric, the reforms would not be confined to minor offending but would extend to burglary, most offences of assault occasioning actual bodily harm, and even cases involving death or serious injury caused by careless driving.

Transferring these decisions to judges may be described as “bold” but it is unlikely to strengthen confidence in the system.

The claim that the reforms are essential is also questionable. The Leveson Review suggested that judge-only trials might reduce trial length by up to 20 per cent, but acknowledged that such projections are inherently uncertain.

That optimism may underestimate the time judges will need to produce reasoned decisions clear to everyone involved and capable of surviving scrutiny in the Court of Appeal criminal division.

During that period, courtrooms would lie empty rather than being used for other trials. Any marginal saving in time is unlikely to make a significant impact on the backlog. If we are to sweep away a substantial part of the jury system which has provided the crucial and unique link between the courts and the communities they serve, then a far more compelling and rigorous justification is required.

A more credible solution lies in supporting judges, court staff and advocates who already work within the crown courts. After the pandemic, these professionals demonstrated that, with determination and cooperation, they could keep the system functioning even under extreme conditions. With adequate resources, they can do so again.

The experience of Woolwich Crown Court provides a clear illustration. 

By October 2022, the backlog at Woolwich had reached around 1,200 cases. To operate efficiently, the court needed a “reservoir” of roughly 750 to 800 cases to keep its 12 courtrooms fully listed. Once the total exceeded 1,000, it became increasingly difficult to list cases within a year. The post-pandemic surge therefore required urgent intervention.

Judges and staff devised an intensive case-management strategy aimed at eliminating weak cases and reducing the number of trials that collapsed on the day they were due to begin. Every case was listed for a mandatory pre-trial review four weeks before trial. One or two courts each week were devoted to reviewing up to ten cases at a time, with all parties required to attend in person.

Judges rigorously tested the prosecution and defence on the viability of their cases and their readiness for trial. The process was demanding and often unpopular. Advocates had to take time away from other work or ensure substitutes were fully briefed, often for limited remuneration. The administrative burden on the list office was significant and the workload on those conducting the reviews was heavy. Judges had to prepare each case in depth, to a level at least matching that of the advocates.

Nevertheless, the results were immediate and striking. Fundamentally flawed cases were resolved early, compromise pleas were negotiated, and defendants were encouraged to plead guilty by the prospect of a final, meaningful sentence discount. Trial dates were also adjusted to accommodate advocates’ availability, improving efficiency.

Over seven months, the backlog steadily reduced. By May 2023, outstanding cases had fallen below 1,000 and there was genuine optimism that acceptable levels could be restored within a year. Progress stalled only when two judges moved to other courts and were not replaced, making it impossible to sustain the effort.

Of course that is only one court, but with proper funding for courts and advocates, the dedicated teams working in the crown courts could manage a short term offensive that would make huge inroads into the existing backlog.

Looking to the long term, there needs to be a sensible discussion about categorisation. Governments have the right to determine where the line should be drawn between summary trial and trial by jury.

The irony is that successive governments have spent the last 30 years expanding the range of offences which should carry a right to elect trial while simultaneously reducing court capacity. The Leveson Review lists many of these cases.

Consultation on a sensible approach to recategorisation would identify suitable cases without threatening long-held rights to jury trial.

It Is Reasonable To Worry

Iain Macwhirter writes:

Britain’s medicinal cannabis industry is predicted to be worth over half a billion pounds by 2029, and is expanding wherever marijuana consumption is decriminalised. That and most other drugs have been effectively decriminalised in Scotland, so it’s not surprising that a Sydney-based multinational, Breathe Life Sciences, is expanding into the country with a factory making medicinal cannabis products. It promises to employ up to 100 people in a new plant located in Melrose in the tranquil Scottish Borders.

In recent years, cannabis has been widely puffed in the media as the latest wonder drug, a salve for all ills. Many take it for chronic pain, while others use it to ease discomfort arising from conditions such as epilepsy and multiple sclerosis. Others just take it for fun.

Concrete evidence for the drug’s medical effectiveness is hard to find, but there is a considerable cultural investment in cannabis being not just safe but positively beneficial. At least that seems to be the view of the Scottish government. Cannabis remains a controlled drug in Scotland, but police rarely prosecute those in personal possession and medical cannabis has been fully legal since 2018. In 2021, the Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain, announced that police should not prosecute those in possession even of Class A drugs such as heroin, turning Scotland into a hard-drug tolerance zone.

It is often difficult to determine whether medical cannabis is being consumed purely for medical reasons, or for recreational purposes, or both, since it is taken essentially for relaxation and mood enhancement. But most clinicians seem to think it is low-risk.

However, Scotland is not a country which has had a positive experience of substance decriminalisation. It notoriously has the worst drug death rate in Europe, mainly from the abuse of benzodiazepines (“street benzos”) and heroin. Three times as many Scots die of drug abuse as English people. In response to the problem, Glasgow earlier this year opened a “safe” consumption room. There are no accounts yet of substantially decreasing drug abuse, but locals have reported drug paraphernalia littered in the streets and an increase in addicts in the area.

It is not easy to isolate the effects of cannabis, because it is often taken as part of a cocktail of drugs by so-called “polydrug users”. But buried in the statistics there are signs of an increasing rate of psychotic disorders arising from cannabis use. Public Health Scotland says the rate of hospital stays from cannabinoid-related conditions has increased roughly eightfold over the past 25 years. The Scottish Mental Health Census 2024 detailed that cannabis is now the most common substance used by psychiatric inpatients who report using drugs. Figures collated from Public Health Scotland appeared to show that, in 2023, cannabis was a greater cause of psychiatric hospital admissions even than opioids.

These are generally young people buying street cannabis, of course. The owners of Breathe Life Sciences insist that its own cannabis products are rigorously tested, quality assured, “and of course fully legal”. These products can only be purchased with a prescription and do not appear in Edinburgh’s “head” shops along with the bongs and Rizla papers.

The evidence for the effectiveness of medical cannabis is mixed, to say the least, and is still based on small-scale studies and anecdotal evidence. The lack of randomised clinical trials, nearly a decade after medical cannabis was legalised in Scotland, has worried many clinicians and even advocates of legalisation.

It is reasonable to worry that the wider use of medicinal cannabis, combined with decriminalisation, is leading to a much broader acceptance of the drug generally by people who think it is entirely safe. Indeed, it is hard to avoid the reek of pot in areas such as Glasgow’s bohemian West End. The Scottish government, however, is always anxious to be at the leading edge of progressive policymaking and has been pressing Westminster to follow its lead and fully decriminalise cannabis and harder drugs. The main thrust of Scottish drug policy is to “de-stigmatise” the drug user, rather than criminalising them.

Naturally, Breathe Life Sciences has received a government grant of £350,000 and a loan of half a million for its happiness factory. Taxpayers can only hope these funds are well spent, and not more public money vanishing in a puff of smoke.

Until That New Foreign Policy Vision Emerges

Philip Cunliffe writes:

With US warships menacing Venezuela amidst rumours of regime change in Caracas, it seems that the neoconservatives, champions of regime change, are back. While they reached the peak of their influence under the administrations of US president George W. Bush from 2001-2009, they have long haunted the swampland of Beltway think tanks and research institutes, with columns and sinecures aplenty. Even when they have not been in office, they have often been in power, as their views on US foreign policy formed part of the bipartisan consensus across the thirty years prior to Donald Trump’s first term in office from 2016-2020. This consensus was that the US was, in the words of Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the “indispensable nation.”

Despite their ideological affinity with globalist liberalism, not to mention the disastrous record of adventurist wars in the Middle East, some neoconservatives have now — remarkably — joined forces with the populist insurgency that was fuelled in part by the failure of the very policies they championed. All this despite the fact that Trump himself said his greatest regret over his first term in office was how much leeway he gave the neocons. How is it that we find ourselves here again?

Historically, neoconservatism was an unabashedly globalist vision, committed to spreading liberalism and democracy through military might, trampling over the rights of independent states in the process. The major point of difference with their Democratic opponents was how much multilateral support was needed for the forever war. While leftist liberals fretted over the need to secure the benedictions of the UN and preferred deploying Blue Helmets, the neocons were happy to shrug off international law and deploy squads of Marines. But these were disagreements about means rather than ends. The ultimate aim was the same — forever wars to defend global liberalism and nation-building.

It is the Florida neoconservatives that have been the most prominent converts to national populism. Congressman Michael Waltz and Senator Marco Rubio, the latter appointed Secretary of State by Trump, have undergone the most dramatic conversions from the worship of American power abroad to personal loyalty to Trump. John Bolton, a Bush-era neocon who briefly served as national security adviser during Trump’s first time, has since been the target of Trumpian lawfare, currently facing federal charges for having allegedly mishandled classified materials.

Even stranger, however, than the Floridian converts are the British neoconservatives joining the populist bandwagon. Douglas Murray, author of the 2005 book Neoconservatism: why we need it, was spotted slinking around the celebrations at Mar-a-Lago that followed Trump’s electoral victory last year. More recently, Alan Mendoza, leader of the London-based Henry Jackson Society — named for one of the original neoconservative cold warriors, the American Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson — was appointed chief adviser on global affairs to Nigel Farage’s Reform party in November.

The neocons have form when it comes to failing upwards. Their ideological origins famously lie in Trotskyism, named for the Ukrainian communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky who notoriously lost to Joseph Stalin in the battle to decide who would lead the early Soviet Union after Lenin’s death in 1924. Stalin’s vision of “socialism in one country” triumphed over Trotsky’s internationalist vision, which nonetheless enamoured a coterie of New York intellectuals in the middle of the last century. Defeat did not hold them back. While the neocons’ forebears abandoned communism in the aftermath of the Second World War, they retained and transmitted some of the ideological moulds formed in the heat of internecine Bolshevik feuding of the 1920s — notably the hostility to the national interest. Although Trotsky’s vision was rooted in the prospect of a chain of coordinated proletarian revolts more than spreading communism by invasion, his wayward ideological offspring were happy to swap in the armed might of the US state for the revolutionary working class. Unsurprisingly however, the effort to spread liberal democracy by force has been no less successful than the effort to spread global communism.

For all the litany of failure, there is some logic to Floridian neoconservatives joining Trump. The US is still the most powerful country in the world, even if its margin of supremacy is significantly eroded since the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, the peak of neoconservative influence in foreign affairs. With Trump’s sabre-rattling against Venezuela, Rubio may yet get the opportunity to practice neoconservatism in the Americas. Neoconservatism in one hemisphere may not be quite as alluring as global neoconservatism, but neocons have rarely seen a war they did not want to send others to fight in, especially if it involves regime-change.

The effort to graft British neoconservatism to populism is significantly stranger than Floridian conservatives seeking regime change in Caracas. While Farage has had to distance himself from the pro-Russian leanings of his Reform base following the conviction of Reform leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, for accepting Russian bribes, Britain is not especially alluring from the neoconservative viewpoint — unlike the American war machine, Britain’s enfeebled military can hardly swap in for the might of the revolutionary proletariat to spread freedom.

For all its drawbacks, at least Britain’s geopolitical weakness means there is no chance of British power being embroiled in more foolish wars. This offers at least one check on neoconservative globalism. Second, and more importantly, Britain voted for Brexit — and neocons are deeply hostile to national sovereignty, seeing it as an offence to liberal globalism, only fit to be pulverised by sanctions and bombing campaigns. Third, and most decisively, Trump is breaking up the Western alliance. The most recent leaks coming from the White House even suggest that Trump aims to set up a new global power directorate dubbed the C5 (“Core 5”) encompassing the US, China, India, Russia and Japan — a vision for global leadership in which the larger Western world no longer figures. The supposed “Free World” that was the centrepiece of neocon crusading for decades no longer exists. Neoconservatives remain trapped in the twentieth century, fixated on transnational ideological crusades and vast strategic alliances in which the national interest is suppressed and forgotten. A fluid, multipolar world with no permanent friends or allies is alien to this way of thinking.

As with Trotskyism’s hostility to socialism-in-one-country, so too neoconservatism could never be satisfied with liberal freedom-in-one-country. Neoconservatism is especially ill-suited to a middling power such as Britain whose voters support national sovereignty and that does not have the power to spread freedom by force, especially when it cannot rely on the US. Despite the fact that the neoconservative-populist alliance will find itself largely impotent without US power, neoconservative efforts to latch themselves onto populism tells us that the Anglo-populists themselves have few independent ideas of their own, reliant as they are on neocons for any ideological charge. Until that new foreign policy vision emerges, the countries of the former West like Britain, will remain trapped in the politics of the last century.

And Mary Dejevsky writes:

Another day and another warning to the UK and to Europe that the Russians are coming to get us and that, as a country and a continent, we should be preparing for war.

At the start of this week, the new head of MI6, Blaise Metreweli, and the head of the UK armed forces, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, took to public podiums to sound twin alarms about the threat, as they see it, presented by Russia, and the need for the country to be prepared – including being prepared to lose lives. Last week, a similar warning came from NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte, addressing a meeting in Berlin.

Here’s a flavour of what they had to say. Metreweli made no apology for focussing on Russia, because, as she went on: ‘We all continue to face the menace of an aggressive, expansionist and revisionist Russia, seeking to subjugate Ukraine and harass NATO.’ She accused Russia of ‘testing us in the grey zone’, listing cyberattacks, drones buzzing near airports and bases, ‘state-sponsored’ arson and sabotage, as well as information warfare, all of which added up to Russia ‘exporting chaos’.

The chief of the defence staff said that the threat was more dangerous than he had ever known it, and called for a ‘whole-of-nation response’. Directly countering the view of his predecessor from a year before that ‘the chance of a significant direct attack or invasion by Russia on the UK’ would be ‘remote’, he said that ‘other than proximity’, the threat in the UK ‘isn’t really any different to the threat in Germany’. He warned that we ‘will all have a part to play… [and] if necessary, to fight’, with more families coming to know ‘what sacrifice for our nation means’.

And so to Rutte, who warned: ‘Russia has brought war back to Europe. And we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured.’ To prevent this, he said, we need to be crystal clear about the threat. ‘We are Russia’s next target. And we are already in harm’s way.’ What is happening in Ukraine ‘could happen to Allied countries, too’, he said, making it imperative to ‘shift to a wartime mindset’.

Amid all this alarm, we are still not quite at the point where schoolchildren are practising hiding under their desks for fear of a nuclear strike (as many of a certain age may remember from the height of the Cold War). And the British public, for one, seems largely unmoved by this supposedly imminent Russian threat. After all, Russia’s advances in Ukraine have been distinctly limited over the best part of four years. There is a noticeable mismatch between the claims that Russia is too weak to win in Ukraine yet also strong enough to threaten London or Berlin.

Public responses to similar alarms in France and Germany have been – a little – more vocal, though no more cooperative. In France, Knighton’s opposite number, Fabien Mandon, found himself facing a storm of objection when he warned that all of France was at risk if it was not ready ‘to accept losing its children’. In Germany meanwhile, government plans to reintroduce conscription on a voluntary basis have prompted big street protests by young people raised on the evils of militarism and the benefits of peace.

Responses in the UK and Europe have spanned a scale from apathy to opposition (which has been condemned, of course, by those sounding the alarms as reflecting the complacency of the ignorant masses). But one country has certainly been paying attention – and that is Russia. Now it may be that these warnings were directed also at the Russians, as another strand of Western deterrence, although they seemed to be primarily intended for the home audiences.

Whatever the intent, however, the warnings, and calls for a new military readiness on the part of Europeans, are being heard loud and clear in Moscow – which presents a big risk. If, as I would argue, Russia views NATO as a bigger, more powerful enemy poised on its western flank and supporting Ukraine as a proxy, how might it interpret this sort of Western war talk, with all its appeals to citizens to prepare for an armed conflict with Russia within, well, five years or less?

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, gave a clue when he said recently that, ‘We are not going to fight with Europe, I have said this a hundred times already’. He also added that, ‘If Europe suddenly wants to fight and starts, we’ll be ready at a moment’s notice’. What then happened, of course, was that much of the UK and other English-language media headlined only the second part – about Russia’s preparedness for war – relegating the non-intention of fighting with Europe to the small print.

What Putin’s response showed, however, was that the notion of one or more European countries picking a military fight with Russia is in the Kremlin’s sights, and that the various European alarms about Russia’s current actions and intentions are mirrored in Russia. Trepidation is not only on the European side.

It should additionally be noted that, while Putin appears secure in his position, any internal political pressure on Ukraine policy comes not from doves wanting the war to end, but from hawks, such as former prime minister and president Dmitry Medvedev, who heads the Security Council of the Russian Federation.

And there is a risk here that needs to be recognised and taken a lot more seriously than it appears to be at present. If Russia becomes convinced that the Europeans, together or separately, are mobilising their citizens for a war with Russia, then it could conclude that its best prospects – as the weaker party, as it sees itself – lie in pre-emptive action. If it is not careful, NATO and the more vocal of its member states run the risk of provoking the very outcome they profess to want to deter.

As to the reasons for the current spate of anti-Russia alarmism from NATO and European states, there are many to choose from. In the UK, the spies and the top brass want more money from a cash-strapped government that gave them nothing in the latest budget and seems nowhere near likely to reach the Trump-ordained five per cent of GDP by 2035. Across Europe there is widely shared emotional sympathy for Ukraine which professional policymakers have allowed to cloud their judgement of the national interest. There is also an underlying paranoia about Russia left over from the Cold War and rekindled by the invasion of Ukraine. Regardless of motivation, however, this sort of war talk risks being highly inflammatory, and wise political leaders would do well to start reining it back before it is too late.

The UK and Europe face many threats to their security, of which Russia is but one. For the UK alone, you could list the daily border breaches by unauthorised Channel crossings, the penetration of Chinese technology into critical infrastructure, costly mistakes in military procurement, and continuing dependence on complex supply lines for strategic goods. To narrow the focus to Russia carries the risk both of an insecure, nuclear-armed state lashing out, in the mistaken belief that it faces a threat to its survival, and of ignoring a host of other, perhaps even graver, threats that loom on the near horizon.

Around The Gills?

No one is surprised to see Jamie Driscoll join the Green Party. It is also hoovering up councillors in the London where it will hoover up councils next year. Zack Polanski is the most trusted Leader, with Kemi Badenoch ahead of Nigel Farage, although Badenoch should consider that William Hague also used to knock it out of the park at Prime Minister's Questions, while Farage should ponder that Labour had the most members of any political party in Europe under Jeremy Corbyn.

Jamie's record in office is a lot better than the record in office that the Greens already have in Scotland, Bristol and Brighton. Green MPs voted to overturn the Lords wrecking amendments to the Employment Rights Bill, but Green Peers had voted in favour of them. So there are two answers to those who pine for the old Greens. First, they are still there. And secondly, their party was nowhere near as popular when they ran it, as is no doubt what centrist commentators miss.

Like Polanski, Jamie will now be forbidden to correct a woman. But either of them could of course get round that by declaring himself to be one. Watch out for that as a way of avoiding conscription. And what of the haranguing to which teenage boys were to be subjected in school by the State for which they would then be expected to risk their lives and to take other people's? Would announcing that they were girls enable them to step into the next room and get on with whatever item of the academic curriculum that those sessions were going to replace?

Nisi Dominus Frustra

Of what has the undeniably unlovely Roman Abramovich been convicted? As the war in Ukraine heads towards its only ever possible conclusion, with no role for preening European dowagers, Keir Starmer is lashing out. Would he be doing this if Abramovich owned Arsenal? I wish that that question were a joke. But not with Starmer, it isn't. Oh, well, I do not agree with Unexplained Wealth Orders without a conviction, but they are the law, so where are they against Michelle Mone and Doug Barrowman? When are those two going to be arrested?

Employers' National Insurance contributions have been hiked to pay for the Ukraine War, leading to 5.1 per cent unemployment, with a rate of 16 per cent among the youth who would be expected to fight. Hear the talk of conscription. "They have no jobs, anyway"? Could it be that cynical? What do you think? When Rishi Sunak suggested conscription during last year's General Election campaign, then it was laughed out so forcefully that he ended up claiming only ever to have meant weekend litter-picking or some such. He still lost. Yet here we are.

Here we are. NATO's land border with Russia has been more than doubled by the accession of Finland, which did not drop the swastika from the insignia of its Air Force until 2020, nor from a number of its Air Force flags until this August, meaning that NATO forces had been flying flags with the swastika on them. Sweden has sacrificed its worldwide reputation in aid work and in conflict resolution, which depended on its neutrality. And the other great light of armed neutrality, in Switzerland, is also going to be extinguished while the EU sanctioned the great Colonel Jacques Baud. The war in Ukraine is about to end, but they are not going to let the war end in Ukraine.

Come On Down?

"Falling inflation" means only that prices are going up by less than the last time that anyone officially checked. In this case, prices are going up by 3.2 per cent rather than by 3.6 per cent. Let joy be unconfined.

All this, and 5.1 per cent unemployment, too. Tell us again how there cannot be both mass unemployment and galloping inflation. There can be, there is, and from the point of view of the people responsible, there is supposed to be. Almost all Labour and other MPs regard that as neither a failure nor an accident, but as something to be engineered and celebrated, as it has been and is being, since the fear of destitution is fundamental to their control of the rest of us. They are the Heirs to Blair, whom Margaret Thatcher identified as her greatest achievement.

They Also Serve?

Not even Ukraine wants to be in NATO anymore, so why should anywhere else? De facto American withdrawal means that it has effectively ceased to exist. But membership has always negated the concept of "fighting for your country". You could be fighting for practically anywhere. Explain to me how Russia would invade Britain, an aspiration that in any case it has never expressed. Heaven forfend that Rich Knighton might have his eye on future employment by the arms companies that funded the Royal United Services Institute.

Eagle-eyed viewers of Knighton's RUSI lecture will have noticed that his only medals were Jubilee ones, the Coronation one, and the Long Service and Good Conduct Medal, while there were no wings among his braids. In 37 years, his only combat tour has been as an engineering support officer in Italy during the Kosovo War. To have risen to his present eminence, appointed in the end by Keir Starmer of all Prime Ministers, he is obviously a spook. Someone has to be, but it is a different matter to make public pronouncements on policy. Like Blaise Metreweli, who elected Knighton? And as the RAF veteran Tony Benn would have put it to either of them, "How can we get rid of you?"

Broken Covenant

Danny Kruger welcomed the endorsement of Bonnie Blue. Is that also the view of Sarah Pochin? Of Tim Montgomerie? Of Ann Widdecombe?

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. Reform UK has picked its side.

Grotesque Chaos

Liverpool City Council did not sack anyone when it hired taxis to hand out redundancy notices “to its own workers”, as if it might have handed them out to anyone else. Those notices were an accounting device. No job was lost.

Today, though, 60-year-old George Wilson has become the first binman to suffer compulsory redundancy after he had refused to accept a pay cut of around £7,000. By Birmingham City Council. A Labour council. A Labour council.

Since March, that council has been breaking the ILO Convention on Private Employment Agencies by using agency workers to break a strike, in this case a strike by the members of a trade union affiliated to the Labour Party. Since November, those agency workers have also been on strike.

Medical Matters

You do not have to be poor to be right. If your pay has not kept pace with your private employer's profits, then you have a legitimate claim. Or if, like the resident doctors, your pay from the currency-issuing State has not kept pace with inflation, then you have a legitimate claim. Since this situation has been 18 years in the making, then all three parties that have been in government during that period need to explain how things have reached this stage.

Strikes are supposed to be disruptive, and arranging them to cause the most disruption is fundamental to them. Strikes in the NHS do not, in themselves, pose a threat to life, as if Aneurin Bevan, of all people, had never thought to put the necessary safeguards in place. I'll give you a clue. He did, so they are. The NHS flourished in the glory days of British trade unionism. Strikes have always been planned for. There is no threat to patient care, and any Health Minister or informed commentator knows that in detail.

The Frontline Is Everywhere

Certainly, the Diaspora gets everywhere. In Ottawa, the Memorial to the Victims of Communism could not be unveiled last month and will now feature no names of specific individuals, since it had originally borne those of numerous Nazi collaborators and war criminals. The next President of Chile is be José Antonio Kast, the son of Michael Kast, a ratline escapee and political patriarch who had been refused a denazification certificate, and thus the brother of the late Miguel Kast, the Chicago Boy who was President of the Central Bank under Augusto Pinochet, whose regime his little brother enthusiastically supported. The Kast background did not seem to bother Milton Friedman, as it expressly does not bother Benjamin Netanyahu.

And while you do not choose your ancestors, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ nevertheless vet to Kingdom Come those of applicants to their ranks. How, then, can the bullying, fearmongering and manipulative Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service be Blaise Metreweli, whose grandfather, Constantine Dobrowolski, was possibly still alive in 1969 after having been an infamous defector from an Allied Army to collaboration with the Nazi Occupation of Ukraine, such that he had been called “the worst enemy of the Ukrainian people” by the Allies when they had placed on his head a bounty equivalent to £200,000 today? Well, why not? If anything, such a background is a qualification for the job. Indeed, that may well have swung it for her.

The Sonnenrad and the Wolfsangel are displayed by Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Battalion, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, and all the rest of them. Those symbols have only one possible meaning. You may as well wear a swastika, and they sometimes do. These are the factions on whom Volodymyr Zelensky depends, and it is beside the point that he himself is Jewish; most of Hitler’s 27 million Soviet victims were not Jewish, and the post-War Western fantasy that the War had been fought because of the persecution of the Jews is more or less unknown in the former USSR.

The real founders of NATO, as of so very much else after the War, were Nazis. Not overly officious traffic wardens, but real, live, actual Nazis. Before the War in Europe was officially over, the generous political donors in the arms trade decided that the next lucrative enemy was going to be the Soviet Union, which in fact had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe, just as Russia manifestly cannot conquer even Ukraine, much less anywhere else. Therefore, we began to clutch to our bosom the people in Europe who were most anti-Soviet. Guess who? The sky was literally the limit for Wernher von Braun, as recently explored even here, and effectively so for Walter Hallstein, Adolf Heusinger, Kurt Waldheim, and numerous others. None of their pasts had ever been any kind of secret. Operation Gladio was full of Nazis, as were the parallel stay-behind operations in non-NATO countries, operations that had particularly close ties to Britain.

How could the Manchester synagogue attack have happened in the land of the Kindertransport? Having taken in only 10,000 Kindertransport children, Britain took in 15,000 Nazi collaborators, one and half times as many. 1,000 Kindertransport children had been interned as enemy aliens, and some of them had been sent as far as Australia and Canada to get rid of them, but there was none of that for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician). Those were ethnic Ukrainians from a formerly Austro-Hungarian area that had been incorporated into Poland after the First World War, meaning that they were able to claim pre-War Polish nationality in order to enter Britain even though they had massacred ethnic Poles during the War. It had been Churchill who had handed Galicia over to Joseph Stalin, but that did not stop many of the 1st Galician from making their way to Britain. See how very much at home they made themselves.

After all, it was by then Clement Attlee’s Britain. The Attlee Government imposed austerity at home in order to go to war to restore the rule of old Nazi collaborators in Greece. Attlee took Britain into NATO alongside Fascist Portugal from the very start, and NATO has now admitted Finland, which did not drop the swastika from the insignia of its Air Force until 2020, nor from a number of its Air Force flags until this August, meaning that NATO forces had been flying flags with the swastika on them. NATO’s “educational” publications, defining Russia as the eternal enemy, laud the 1940s collaborators as the liberating heroes. Their successors are in government in much of Eastern Europe, legislating for the entire EU.

Another founder member of NATO was Canada, where at that time, just after the War, showing your SS tattoo was a guaranteed way of getting in, because it proved how anti-Soviet you were. As late as the 1990s, old Nazis whom the Americans wanted to deport simply moved to Canada, which let them in, and where they carried on drawing their German military pensions. In Mark Carney’s party and into Carney’s adult lifetime, Justin Trudeau’s father protected thousands of these people as Prime Minister almost continuously from 1968 to 1984, and Chrystia Freeland is the granddaughter of Michael Chomiak, who edited Krakivski Visti, a Nazi paper in occupied Krakow, printed on a press confiscated from a Jewish newspaper.

Whatever the complexities of life in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, there was only one possible reason to join the Waffen SS. Life was complicated in Western Europe during the War, but would you make excuses for the Dutchmen, Frenchmen and Belgians who joined that? Or for its British Free Corps, originally called the Legion of Saint George? There were others besides, and in every case the argument was the same, that the real enemy was the Soviet Union. If Yaroslav Hunka was a hero, then so were they. Including Hunka’s Galician brothers-in-arms who ended up in Britain, which had been planning a surprise attack on the USSR from no later than 22 May 1945, and which therefore needed all the Hunkas that it could find. Hunka himself lived in Britain from the end of the War until 1954, and his late wife was British. In 1951, in Britain, she married an SS veteran.

Germany itself has never had a firewall. Not only had key figures in the foundation of the Federal Republic, of NATO and of the EU very recently been Nazi officers, but one of the East German Bloc Parties, complete with reserved seats in the Volkskammer, was the NDPD, specifically for former Nazi Party members and supporters, although it was often observed that there were in fact more former Nazi Party members in the Communist Party than the entire membership of the NDPD. In 1968, long after East Germany professed to have eradicated all trace of Nazism, the new Constitution still felt the need to commit it to doing so. In 1990, the NDPD took fewer votes than it officially had members, so perhaps that commitment had been met. If so, then it did not last. Look at the voting patterns of the former East Germany now.

No one in West Germany even pretended, not really. The obituaries of Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl were as frank as they themselves had always been. By the early 1960s, more former members of the Nazi Party, a party that had been 8.5 million strong at the end of the War, were on the staffs of many West German government departments than there had been current Nazi Party members on those staffs during the Third Reich. In parts of Austria to this day, you can tell what were the American from what were the neighbouring Soviet zones from the vote for the Far Right, since as early as the summer of 1945 local Nazis fled across the river from the latter to the former. There had been no difference in voting patterns before the War. Old collaborators were often set up, usually in London, as governments-in-exile of Eastern European countries, or at least included in them, while Western spooks aided and abetted their stay-behind networks back home. From 1989 onwards, those emerged blinking into the light, essentially unchanged. And here we are. “We” have been allied to the Nazis for more than 13 times as long as we were ever at war with them.

For example, although in all fairness he himself died in 1939, Kaja Kallas’s great-grandfather, Eduard Alver, was a key figure in founding the anti-Soviet Kaitseliit militia that became the Estonian component of the Forest Brothers, collaborationist exterminators of the Jews. It is no wonder, although it is still inexcusable, that it recently came as “news” to her that Russia and China had been among the victors of the Second World War. Thankfully, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty does not mean what most Europeans, and possibly most Canadians, think that it means, since no United States Senate would ever have ratified that. Ask them in Hungary and Slovakia, whose oil supply non-NATO Ukraine can apparently bomb with complete impunity. It really has been 80 years, has it not? But while there may be no more Iron Cross or Arrow Cross, they will always have Vauxhall Cross.

Galatians 1:8

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. The probable crookery need not detain us here. But what of the heresy?

Donald Trump grew up in the Marble Collegiate Church of Norman Vincent Peale, who even took his first wedding there. The Power of Positive Thinking was the old mainline American Protestant tradition reconfigured by the New Thought movement. The practically indistinguishable Word of Faith movement is that reconfiguration of Pentecostalism, and is exemplified by Trump’s close ally, Paula White. As the prosperity gospel, although there are also plenty of other things wrong with it, it is preached both by White and by Angel.

The mainline has become the oldline by turning to secularism and paganism, very much in the liberal Catholic mould of agreeing with whoever it was talking to by sending different people to different encounters. But it is White who has ties to the Unification Church that the Tokyo District Court recently ordered to liquidate its assets because of its role in the assassination of Shinzo Abe, and through that to the Nation of Islam, with which the Unification Church organises mass events and which promotes Dianetics, the basis of Scientology. Such is the sea in which Angel swims. Pulling Yaxley-Lennon behind him. But there is a better way. He is the Way, the Truth and the Life.