Desire The Right

Argentina is on Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, and we have just seen what the American Republic had always and fundamentally believed about European territories in the Americas, entirely regardless of their inhabitants. Indeed, it has always and fundamentally regarded at least the historically British ones as properly States, or initially Territories, of its own Union. Even heading south, one does not have to go all the way to the Falkland Islands. Yet the Americans would go all the way even to South Georgia, carrying all before them. While Javier Milei will have had other considerations, he will also have had this one.

María Corina Machado is earning her Nobel Peace Prize, calling on Trump to invade Cuba and Nicaragua even though he has given her no role in Venezuela, to which she has not returned, suggesting that she was safer under Nicolás Maduro than she would be under Delcy Rodríguez. And Reza Pahlavi has been making his pitch for next year’s Nobel, calling on anyone at all to invade Iran. There is a stronger case to proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps than to proscribe Palestine Action, since there would be a stronger case to proscribe almost anything other than Palestine Action, but if the IRGC were indeed to be proscribed, or even if it were not, then the Mojahedin-e-Khalq should be restored to that status, which it should never have lost.

In view of the spoilt child Volodymyr Zelenksy’s ungrateful screed at Davos today, how about proscribing Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Brigade, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, the Freedom of Russia Legion, the Russian Volunteer Corps, and anything else in similar vein? Pavlo Lapshyn is still in His Majesty’s Prison, and will be for decades yet, because of his 2013 murder of 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham. Lapshyn went on to put bombs outside three mosques in this country. He belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Battalion, being led by its “political ideologist”, Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell.

At the very least, how about proscribing Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Brigade, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, the Freedom of Russia Legion, the Russian Volunteer Corps, and anything else in similar vein? Pavlo Lapshyn is still in His Majesty’s Prison, and will be for decades yet, because of his 2013 murder of 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham. Lapshyn went on to put bombs outside three mosques in this country. He belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Battalion, being led by its “political ideologist”, Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell.

Mock if you will Russia’s ban on Satanism, but however wrong have been its means of going about it, it was and remains right about the need to de-Nazify Ukraine, so why would it not be right, in principle, about the need to de-Satanise it? Palestine Action was proscribed by an all-or-nothing measure that required any MP voting against it to vote against banning both the Russian Imperial Movement, and Maniacs Murder Cult, which is part of the Order of the Nine Angels, itself part of the subculture that gives me most of my grief. Satanism is real, let me assure you. Britain needs to be de-Nazified and de-Satanised, so why should not another “European liberal democracy”?

Now, since they needed to be banned at the same time as the Palestine Action against which the full force of the State had been unleashed, tell us about the progress of what must have been the urgently necessary action against the Russian Imperial Movement and against the Maniacs Murder Cult. And since you liked doing it in threes, put down an all-or-nothing measure to proscribe the IRGC, the MEK, and United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If the storming of churches bothers you, and it should, then overnight between Tuesday and yesterday, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem was yet again invaded and desecrated by the Israeli Defense Forces, as churches in the Holy Land are all the time, whether by the IDF, or by the West Bank settlers on whose parties Benjamin Netanyahu depended to keep him office and out of prison. But we cannot proscribe the IDF, just as a Chief Constable can preside over anything apart from the exclusion of Israeli football hooligans from one stadium on one evening. And anyway, Netanyahu is on the Peace Board.

Persevere?

As we saw from the Government's thumping defeat in the House of Lords last night, it is the Conservatives who are pushing for the nationalisation of everyone's children, and that in such a way as could only work by means of universal digital ID. Anything rather than a commonsensical nationalisation such as that of water.

Why are we even discussing whether the Chief Executive of South East Water should be paid his bonus? His bonus for what? Having failed to supply water in the South East, he should not be paid his salary, much less a bonus. He should not be paid. Nor should you pay.  If you have had no water, then do not pay your water bill. And if they cancel your local elections, then do not pay your council tax.

Might the Greenlanders say something in support of the 5.6 million people whom Steve Reed intended to disenfranchise? But this legislation will pass. The precedent will then be set. All future Governments will be aware of it, just as all future Governments would be empowered by digital ID. That always happens, but incumbents never seem to understand it, even as they exercised the extended and expanded powers that they had inherited.

Still, there will presumably be one election on 7 May, to fill the parliamentary seat of Gorton and Denton. I have my own struggles with mental health, so I wish the very best to Andrew Gwynne, whose account rings true. As to his successor, consider the possibilities. Andy Burnham wins, a nightmare for Keir Starmer. Burnham is not allowed to stand, and Labour loses the seat, and Burnham "would have won", another nightmare for Starmer. Burnham stands, but Labour loses the seat, a nightmare both for Burnham and for Starmer. Or Burnham is not allowed to stand, another Labour candidate holds the seat, and Starmer cannot believe his luck. But that is wildly unlikely.

Bench The Whole Thing

Haroon Siddique and Rajeev Syal writes:

David Lammy’s plans to introduce judge-only criminal trials in England and Wales will save less than 2% of time in crown courts, the Institute for Government (IFG) has said.

In a report that casts doubt on the ability of the changes, which will slash the number of jury trials to achieve their goal of wiping out the courts’ backlog, the thinktank described the gains from judge-only trials as “marginal”.

It said while the number of jury trials would fall by about 50%, there would probably be only a 7 to 10% reduction in total time taken in the courtroom as a result of the entire package of changes, with judge-only trials only contributing to a fraction of that.

Cassia Rowland, who authored the report said: “The government’s proposed reforms to jury trials will not fix the problems in the crown court. The time savings from judge-only trials will be marginal at best, amounting to less than 2% of crown court time.

“Hearing more trials in magistrates’ courts is a stronger proposal and would potentially save more time, but the government has yet to set out specific details of how it would do that and the estimates are highly uncertain. For a bigger and faster impact on the crown court backlog, the government should instead focus on how to drive up productivity across the criminal courts, investing in the workforce and technology required for the courts to operate more efficiently.”

The plans have already faced a significant backlash from the legal profession as well as dozens of Labour MPs and peers from across the upper chamber. The report said judge-only trials “are likely to be highly controversial and to damage public confidence in the criminal justice system”.

Brian Leveson’s government-commissioned review recommended a single judge sitting with two people in a new “bench division” of the crown court but Lammy scrapped the lay element.

The government said it had done its own impact assessment of the changes but would not publish it until the bill containing the proposals was ready.

The IFG said that while the proposals would reduce demand on the crown court, in the number of cases and the total amount of time it takes to hear them, the reductions are “not substantial” for three reasons. It said a lot of court time is spent handling other types of cases and hearings and, second, that trials moving to the bench division or magistrates would be the least serious cases in the crown court, which on average only take half as long to hear as the most serious cases.

Finally, while judge-only trials are estimated to be 20% quicker than jury trials, they would only account for about a quarter of crown court trials, and have an “extremely marginal” impact, according to the report.

In contrast with the planned changes, improving productivity “enjoys broad support across the sector and could begin much faster”, said Rowland. She said the crown court was hearing almost 20% fewer hours per sitting day so far in 2025/26 than it was in 2016/17. “If the crown court had got through an equivalent number of cases per day in 2024 as in 2016, the case backlog would have fallen by at least a few thousand cases. Instead, it grew by nearly 8,000 (10%),” the report said.

Mark Evans, the president of the Law Society of England and Wales, said: “If the UK government is serious about tackling the appalling backlogs in the criminal courts, its focus must be on the investment and reforms that will make the most difference.”

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “We disagree with these numbers. Sir Brian Leveson’s independent review concluded reform could, conservatively, reduce case times by at least 20% and judges in Canada have said in practice it reduced case time by up to half.

“Victims are facing an unacceptably long wait for justice after years of delays in our courts. That’s why – as this report says – only a combination of bold reforms, record levels of investment and action to tackle inefficiencies across the system will get victims the swift justice they deserve.”

The Gravity of This Moment

The United States must now be constitutionally Christian Zionist, since its Ambassador to Israel, in that capacity, feels moved to make the case for Christian Zionism against the leaders of the historic Christian communities in the Holy Land. If those communities are dependent on Israel for their survival, then how did they survive for 1,915 years without it? It is not Christian to give uncritical support to any state, especially one’s own, and even the Vatican in its dealings specifically as a City State. That the modern State of Israel is a fulfilment of Biblical prophecy is simply an heretical proposition. If Christians have to be Zionists, then is everyone in Hell if they died before 1948, or before the Balfour Declaration, or before the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible, or before the ministry of John Nelson Darby? Some people are. As Fares Abraham writes:

On January 17, 2026, the leaders of all the major churches in Jerusalem issued a sobering warning. They released a statement in which they cautioned that “damaging ideologies, such as Christian Zionism, mislead the public, sow confusion, and harm the unity of our flock.” The leaders noted that these efforts have found favor among political actors in Israel and beyond and have led to the advancement of agendas that now threaten the Christian presence in the Holy Land and the wider Middle East.

The statement’s significance lies in its timing and rarity. The patriarchs of Jerusalem last addressed Christian Zionism in their 2006 Jerusalem Declaration, so this pastoral statement is their first comment on the issue in nearly two decades. It is a warning that signals an immediate danger to Christian unity and survival.

It closely followed a summit sponsored by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem last December, a gathering of more than 1,000 U.S. pastors that advanced a Christian Zionist narrative while sidelining Jerusalem’s historic churches.

Those who signed this statement are the patriarchs and senior bishops of the historic churches of the Holy Land, Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant alike. Their offices predate modern nation-states, the Crusades, and even Islam. In matters of religious, communal, and pastoral Christian life in the Holy Land, there is no higher ecclesial authority.

Faithful American Christians should recognize the gravity of this moment. These leaders are the custodians of Christianity’s oldest continuous communities, and when they warn that a modern ideology is harming the Church and threatening its survival, Christians everywhere have a responsibility to listen.

Yet only a few weeks earlier, in a Christmas message from Jerusalem, Benjamin Netanyahu cast Israel as a haven for Christians, claiming it is “the only country in the Middle East where Christians can practice their faith with full rights and in total freedom.” The claim resonates in the West because it trades in a familiar moral binary: safety under Israel, persecution everywhere else. But its power lies less in accuracy than in selectivity. 

That claim does not withstand scrutiny. Leading Israeli human-rights organizations such as B’Tselem and HaMoked document the severe impact of occupation policies on Palestinian civilian life, including restrictions on movement and the denial of basic protections. These conditions affect all residents, including the region’s dwindling Christian communities.

In Jerusalem, the desecration of a Christian cemetery was described as a clear “hate crime” by Anglican Archbishop Hosam Naoum, while the British Consulate said it was part of a broader pattern of assaults on the Christian community.

These concerns are not confined to local testimony. The Associated Press reported that Holy Land church leaders publicly condemned Israeli settler violence during a West Bank visit, prompting U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee to travel to Taybeh and denounce the attacks.

In places like Beit Sahour, historic Christian communities face mounting pressure from recent illegal settlement expansion that threatens their very existence.

Christian life under Israeli occupation is increasingly constrained. In February, the Jerusalem Post reported that the foreclosure of properties belonging to the Armenian Church of Jerusalem threatens Christian communities rooted in the city for more than 1,700 years. Clergy encounter visa and residency restrictions, and Christian communities are steadily pushed out through land confiscation and economic pressure.

The World Council of Churches has repeatedly warned of an existential threat to Christians in the Holy Land, citing unjustified taxation, attacks by settlers, and the killing of Christians in Gaza.

The Jerusalem church leaders’ warning does not stand alone. In December, Andrea Zaki, President of the Protestant Churches of Egypt, issued a public statement distancing all Egyptian evangelicals from Christian Zionism, calling it a political movement rather than a theological conviction and warning that Scripture must never be used to justify war, dispossession, or domination.

These statements by church leaders in Egypt and Jerusalem are not the first of their type. In August 2024, prominent evangelical pastors and leaders from across the Middle East issued “A Collective Call to the Global Church,” condemning all ideologies that lead to injustice and violence. They rejected all attempts to baptize bloodshed with biblical language and called the church back to unity, compassion, and peace.

Taken together, these voices form a coherent and deeply conservative witness. From Jerusalem to Cairo, from patriarchs to evangelical pastors, indigenous Christian leaders are saying the same thing: When Christianity is fused to political movements, military power, or national destiny, it ceases to be faithful and becomes destructive to the very communities it claims to defend.

There is also a strategic reality that Americans should not ignore. A Middle East emptied of Christians will not be more stable, more pluralistic, or more aligned with Western interests and values. Christian communities have long served as moral anchors and cultural mediators. Their disappearance strengthens extremism and accelerates civilizational fracture.

Supporting Israel’s security does not require ignoring Christian suffering, distorting theology, or silencing Christians whose faith predates modern borders and modern politics.

Church leaders in Jerusalem and across the Middle East are not asking Americans to abandon Israel. They are asking them to abandon illusions. They are calling the Church to moral clarity: Faith must not be weaponized, Scripture must not be conscripted, and ancient Christian communities must not be sacrificed on the altar of any political ideology.

American Christian communities now face a choice. They can continue aligning themselves with Christian Zionist activist and political movements that emerged far from the land they claim to defend. Or they can listen to the Christians who have carried the faith in the land of its birth, at great cost, for two millennia.

And my old PostRight colleague Jack Hunter writes:

Last month, more than 1,000 U.S. Christian pastors and influencers traveled to Israel, becoming “the largest group of American Christian leaders to visit Israel since its founding.” According to Fox News, Israel’s government paid for the trips to “provide training and prepare participants to serve as unofficial ambassadors for Israel in their communities.”

This group was composed of Christian Zionists, mostly evangelicals who believe the state of Israel fulfills biblical prophecy, blending contemporary politics with ancient theology. For them, loyalty to Israel is key to their faith. The United States ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, is a leading Christian Zionist.

Last week, a statement from leaders of some of the most ancient Christian churches condemned “damaging ideologies, such as Christian Zionism” that “mislead the public” and “sow confusion” that “have found favor among certain political actors in Israel and beyond who seek to push a political agenda which may harm the Christian presence in the Holy Land and the wider Middle East.”

Certain political actors indeed.

The statement was signed by the “Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in the Holy Land,” can be found on the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate’s website. This group includes the Roman Catholic Pierbattista Cardinal Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and leaders from various Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, non-Latin Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran denominations.

These Mideast Christian leaders are not the only ones who have a problem with Christian Zionism.

In an interview with the evangelical influencer Bryce Crawford this month, Tucker Carlson said “if you think that murdering tens of thousands of children, which the Israeli government has done, is consistent with Christianity, we’re reading a different manuscript. I just don’t see that at all.”

Carlson continued, “What gets me going is watching Christian preachers who are paid by the government of Israel take free vacations to Israel where they stock up on talking points and propaganda and then inflict all of that propaganda on their congregations and then use the Bible to justify it.”

“You’re justifying violence,” he insisted. “Yeah, against innocents.”

Carlson made similar remarks during his speech at the Turning Point USA conference in December.

“But there are people, particularly Christian ministers, I have noticed, who are preaching a political message and pretending that it's the gospel,” Carlson told a large conservative and largely Christian youth audience. “So let me just say, and I think my theology is right, I’m hardly a theologian, God is not on any country’s side. Certain countries can decide to be on God’s side. And that is true for people too. Okay? God doesn’t have a partisan affiliation. He doesn’t have a nationality. And if someone is telling you otherwise, that is just not true.”

He emphasized that killing innocents cannot be merely rationalized within a Christian framework. 

“Because killing people who committed no crime is immoral,” said Carlson, who is Episcopalian. “It will always be immoral. And people who do it will be punished for it. And nations that endorse it will be punished for it. That’s a fact.”

“And you are seeing now, you are seeing now a very intense effort to convince you otherwise. Oh, it’s fine. They deserved it,” Carlson continued, delving into the moral reality of the war in Palestine. “Really, did their children deserve it? If a man commits a crime, do we kill his kids? I don’t care if it’s in Minneapolis or Gaza City. No, we don’t.”

Christian Zionists generally deny that a genocide has been happening in Gaza, and thus appear to prioritize loyalty to Israel over biblical prohibitions against taking innocent life.

“And to see Christian pastors make excuses for that is one of the most—” Carlson trailed off. “And that's not a partisan question. That is not a political question. That is the only question that matters. Do we have the right to murder people?”

“And the resounding answer that Christianity provides us is no,” he said. 

Carlson, as a Christian, clearly has a significant problem with how Christian Zionists seem to justify or just ignore the taking of so many innocent lives in Gaza in the same way the Jerusalem church leaders did in their statement.

Carlson is by no means the only American right-wing figure expressing this frustration. The former Republican representative Matt Gaetz made similar criticisms in a recent interview with Carlson. Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly has long described herself as an Israel supporter but has pushed back against the narrative that criticizing that country and its policies is antisemitic. She has also said that “everybody under 30 is against Israel.”

The influential populist personality Steve Bannon drew a line between these groups of Israel Firsters and America Firsters during his own fiery speech at the TPUSA conference.

And he wasn’t afraid to name names—starting with the most prominent pro-Israel voice at the Daily Wire.

“Benji Shapiro sat up here last night and he was all, you know, I’m going to, you know, it’s all about the truth.” Bannon said. “Ben, you can’t handle the truth.”

Bannon got into the Israel issue and the American right, including the late Charlie Kirk: “What is ‘Greater Israel’? It’s not about Israel itself. It’s about an expansionist Israel, an imperial Israel that Netanyahu and that crowd have thought up. And the Israel first crowd is Ben Shapiro, Tel Aviv Mark Levin, and many others that want to put that ahead of America’s interests. Charlie Kirk fought that.”

He continued: “You know where Charlie Kirk fought it? In the White House. I know, because I was there. When I went back, Charlie Kirk was working with [former Trump White House Personnel Office’s Sergio Gor] to make sure that we didn’t get sucked into a land war, a decapitation of the Iranian elites that would lead to a massive civil war that American troops would get sucked into, because that was Netanyahu's plan from the beginning.”

There is now a line, or a line that continues to develop, pitting American “Israel First” Christian Zionists and neocons against “America First” right-wingers in the U.S. who also find common cause with ancient traditional churches who seek to put their own Christians in Jerusalem first.

The pro-Israel evangelicals and their neoconservative allies seem to insist being zionist is simply part of the Christian package, while those belonging to older Christian churches—the oldest, actually—are saying that’s simply not true. In fact, they believe Zionism is heresy and idolatry.

The rift continued to unfold even on Tuesday when the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, who is Catholic, declared that he is not a Christian Zionist.

“I don’t think the Jews are entitled to the Holy Land because of some religious premise,” Knowles said.

Mark Levin—who is Jewish and yet seems heavily invested in American Christians buying into theological Zionism—shared Knowles’s clip, adding, “No offense but nobody gives a sh*t. Just saying.”

Knowles’ fellow Catholic and Daily Wire colleague Matt Walsh wasn’t having it. Walsh’s response, who is 39, to Levin, who is a longtime talk radio veteran, was brutal.

“It’s pretty clear that a lot of people give a shit what Michael has to say,” Walsh claimed. “On the other hand I’m not sure that I’ve ever met anyone under the age of 70 who cares much about what you say, Mark. Probably best to leave these kinds of insults to people who are far more relevant.”

Expect this debate to get nastier and the gap to widen, including regarding the older Zionist crowd and the America Firsters who veer younger.

But it’s worth noting that if Israel’s government has a certain kind of right-wing Christians as allies in the United States, a very different type of Mideast Christians who still live “in the very land where our Lord lived, taught, suffered, and rose from the dead” have conservative Christian American allies too—including arguably the most popular and influential conservative voice in the United States.

Base Lines

48 hours ago, Donald Trump was a supporter of the Chagos sellout that had been negotiated by James Cleverly and which would have gone ahead if the Conservatives had won the last General Election, in which case Labour would have voted against it. Even now, at Third Reading in the House of Lords, the Conservatives failed to table the fatal amendment that would have succeeded in killing off this Bill that was not in the Labour manifesto, and which indeed directly broke a commitment that was. Since the General Election, Keir Starmer must have fallen under the influence of Andrew Rosindell.

Joe Biden agreed, and until this week so did Trump. Might Rosindell also have a hand in ongoing developments? Twice in recent days, I have written: "Since 1951, the United States has been able to have as many military bases as it pleased in Greenland. There is only one left, but it is the Pituffik Space Base, part of the United States Space Force that Trump created and which is therefore especially close to his heart. A Danish flag is flown there, but Pituffik is 930 miles from Nuuk, with no regular flights and with even the irregular ones taking anything up to four and a half hours, often with stops. Might the US be offered Pituffik, although strictly that and nowhere else such as Qaanaaq, as a sovereign base, perhaps with its name changed to Trump?"

Yet it looks as if there are going to be several American sovereign bases on Greenland. Perhaps the others could be called Don, Ivanka, Eric, Tiffany and Barron? And then there is Trump's insistence that America would not fight for anywhere that it did not own. At least 49 countries, including this one, need to prepare to cede sovereignty over at least 128 bases. Or kick them out while we still can.

Some of us said all of this more than 20 years ago, and of course a lot of people have been saying it a lot longer than that. What a price we have paid. Back then, our persecutors wanted to replace the United Nations, which did and does have plenty of faults, with an invitation-only body. Logically, and they did sometimes say this, the invitations could have been issued only by the White House. Now we do indeed have Trump's Board of Peace, complete with their great hero, Tony Blair, on it. Yet even without the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys", and in the end probably without the Canadians whom they had always so despised for not wanting to be the Americans that they themselves longed to be, they spit on their luck. I sincerely do not understand.

A Rupture, Not A Transition

Mark Carney's Davos speech was indeed monumental. His caste had always known that "the rules-based international order" was a lie, he asserted matter-of-factly to that caste, and now it was time to stop pretending. We told you so, and the nearest thing on the world stage to a perfect personification of your ideology has now confirmed that we had been right all along, even if, when citing Václav Havel, a Prime Minister of Canada might ponder that whatever else may be said of the fall of the Soviet Bloc, that fall was the reason why the binational state of Czechoslovakia no longer existed.

What next, an elite admission that it was possible to have both mass unemployment and galloping inflation? Today, there has been yet further demonstration that Britain had both. From the point of view of the people responsible, that is as it should be. Almost all Labour and other MPs regard it as neither a failure nor an accident, but as something to be engineered and celebrated, as it has been and as it 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.

The Inspection House

Welcome to Shabana Mahmood's Panopticon. The Australian ban on social media for under-16s has been in force for barely a month, yet the Government there has already declared it a roaring success, leading the British Government to launch a "consultation", and we all know what that means, about introducing it here. Well, of course. Such a ban would be impossible without digital ID for everyone who wanted to use the Internet, which is as good as everyone these days. And then there is One Login for all dealings with the State and its contractors.

That State will not take back the water that it should never have sold off, but it will nationalise everybody's children. It will not give those children throughout the United Kingdom the free bus travel that they enjoyed as a basic fact of life in Scotland, but it will deny them the formative experience of their generation internationally, together with any ideology other than that of the schools and of the official media. All while lowering the voting age to 16, having already raised the school leaving age to 18, at which there is ever-louder talk of conscription.

Pity poor Imam Ashraf Osmani of Northampton, who has been handed a suspended sentence of 15 weeks' imprisonment for having performed a nikah, which has no legal status whatever, so that two 16-year-olds could have a perfectly lawful sexual relationship without sinning. While I do not know how he got away with ignorance as mitigation, nor can I see how he had had any case to answer. A nikah is not a legal marriage. But just as a ban on cousin marriage would be pointless unless sexual relations between cousins were also prohibited, so we need a criminal offence of sexual activity with any person under the age of 18 who was more than two years younger than oneself, with a maximum sentence equal to twice the difference in age. That, along with strengthened and enforced drug laws, is what adolescents need. Not social media bans. Not bans on alcohol-free drinks that may look or taste a bit like alcoholic ones. Not conscription. And not the vote.

Not even in view of the fact of those thus enfranchised would divide almost entirely, and pretty much equally, between the Greens or whatever Zarah Sultana ended up doing, and Reform UK or whatever Rupert Lowe ended up doing, confronting the middle-aged teenagers of, especially but not exclusively, the Labour Party and the SNP with their own absurdity. That would be a beautiful thing, but at too high a price. Reform has welcomed Andrew Rosindell, who did not attend Parliament for two years while sexual assault allegations were investigated, and ultimately dismissed without charge. Yet Labour feels entitled to make a cheap point about that even though its Whips cast Dan Norris's proxy vote every time that the House divides.

Reform is courting James Evans, who went into politics specifically to legalise assisted suicide, and who was interestingly made the Conservatives' Shadow Health Secretary in Wales. But if Labour really feared a Reform Government, then it would not be preparing to bequeath it digital ID, facial recognition, and all the rest of it, including the precedent of cancelled elections, and without even the right to trial by jury, or to appeal from the Magistrates' Court. There is talk of a review clause for if the Crown Court backlog fell below a certain level, but that is not good enough. Only full rejection will do. 

Let that victory initiate the repeal of, among very much else, the Trade Union Act, the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, the Nationality and Borders Act, the Elections Act, the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, the National Security Act, the Public Order Act, the Online Safety Act, the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, replacing them with, among very much else, a real Hillsborough Law. Away with the NHS Federated Data Platform, the training in which is provided by Multiverse. Multiverse is Euan Blair, while the FDP is Palantir. Palantir is Israeli intelligence, and Tony Blair is on Donald Trump's Board of Peace. Aided and abetted by Palantir's facial recognition technology, the Tony Blair Institute will be running the digital ID in Britain, and is already doing so. Welcome to Shabana Mahmood's Panopticon.

Warm Homes Plan

Fans of the World Economic Forum and of Tony Blair need to explain why the former was welcoming Nigel Farage (Donald Trump and Javier Milei are Presidents) while the latter had accepted a seat on Trump’s Board of Peace. Trump called Greenland “Iceland” three times, and he did the old “without us, you’d all be speaking German” line in an 86 per cent German-speaking town, of a 75 per cent German-speaking canton, of a 62 per cent German-speaking country that was neutral in both World Wars. He was wrong that China manufactured most of the world’s wind turbines, and wrong that they were hardly used there. One could go on. Trump himself certainly did.

But if I were Wes Streeting, then I would be making the arrangements with Trump to lift the ban on further exploration of North Sea oil and gas while guaranteeing that Trump, not the United States but Trump, would control where they went. That worked for Delcy Rodríguez, who is a hardline Chavista but who did the deal, and it will work for whichever of the present Iranian regime, Reza Pahlavi, or the MEK did the deal, too. Yet Iran is not already blessed with an enormous American military presence, and nor was Venezuela. Streeting could be Prime Minister in less than an hour. Regime change of a sort.

It would, though, be a thoroughly good thing to lift that oil and gas ban. We need to harness the power of the State to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of clean coal technology, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State. There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. In Britain, we must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985. Is Kemi Badenoch? Is Nigel Farage? Is Ed Davey? Is Zack Polanski?

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with it. China manufactures most of the  world’s solar panels, which should be on buildings rather than on farmland and which we need to start making here, but let there be solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, pipelines, or power stations. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners’ Strike. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right. Does Andrew Rosindell, whose constituency office is called Margaret Thatcher House, say that? Does Robert Jenrick, who gave his daughter the middle name Thatcher? Not Margaret. Thatcher.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all the rest of it. Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed. The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs.

The standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. Thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, just abolish them. And thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, let there be an all-of-the-above transport policy based around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on the electricity that public ownership would also supply to charging points in every neighbourhood and village. Astonishingly, and yet not, the fewest charging points for electric vehicles are in the coalfield areas. Also, never forget that, when we can catch them, buses carry far more passengers than trains do, but those passengers tend not to be politicians or the “opinion-forming” sort of journalists. And so on. Let a thousand flowers bloom. In a garden well-tended and well-watered as an expression of democratic sovereignty.

A Victory That Should Never Have Been Necessary

Paul Knaggs writes:

When did it become an act of courage for a nurse to call a man a man? When did stating biological reality transform from common sense into career-ending heresy? And when, precisely, did the institutions claiming to protect working-class women decide their dignity was worth less than an ideological abstraction?

The Supreme Court answered these questions in April 2025. Five judges, unanimous, declared what everyone from your grandmother to the bloke down the pub already knew: in the Equality Act 2010, “woman” means biological woman. “Man” means biological man. The law, at least, still recognises material reality.

Jennifer Melle has just been reinstated. After nine months suspended on full pay. After being escorted from her workplace. After a disciplinary hearing that quietly concluded there was no evidence the patient had been identified. After a national campaign, political intervention, and tens of thousands of petition signatures. She won.

But she never should have had to fight.

Her case, alongside Sandie Peggie’s partial tribunal victory and the Darlington Eight’s landmark win, exposes something rotten at the heart of our public institutions. This is not about compassion, inclusion, or progressive values. This is about power: who wields it, who benefits from it, and who pays the price when working-class women dare to say “no” to those who demand their compliance.

A Victory That Should Never Have Been Necessary 

The facts of Melle’s case are stark. In May 2024, she cared for a prisoner patient at St Helier Hospital: a 6ft male, a convicted paedophile, shackled to guards from a men’s prison, listed as male on medical records. While discussing a catheter with a consultant outside the patient’s room, Melle referred to the patient as “he” and “Mr.”

The patient responded by lunging at her, calling her the n-word three times. She was racially abused by a violent sex offender. The NHS gave her a written warning. When she spoke publicly about this treatment, the trust suspended her for an alleged data breach. Nine months. That is how long this committed Christian nurse, a Black single mother with thirteen years of unblemished service, was kept from doing her job. Nine months while the trust investigated whether sharing details of a patient’s “appearance, diagnosis and treatment” constituted a breach of confidentiality, even though they ultimately admitted there was no evidence the patient had been identified.

The disciplinary hearing that cleared her happened quietly, without fanfare. The trust issued a brief statement saying they were “pleased” to reinstate her and were “sorry” she experienced racial abuse. As though “sorry” covers nine months of suspension. As though “pleased” adequately describes allowing a dedicated nurse back to work after putting her through hell for telling the truth.

Melle herself said she felt “deeply relieved and grateful” following an “incredibly long and painful journey.” But why was there a journey at all? Why did it take Shadow Equalities Minister Claire Coutinho’s intervention, a petition with nearly 10,000 signatures, support from J.K. Rowling and Kemi Badenoch, and months of public pressure for the NHS to do what the law and basic decency demanded from the start?

Her employment tribunal case against the trust still proceeds in April, claiming harassment and discrimination linked to her gender-critical and evangelical Christian beliefs. That case will now be fought from a position of strength rather than from suspension, but the very fact it exists is an indictment.

A Pattern of Institutional Betrayal 

Melle’s reinstatement is the latest in a string of victories for nurses who refused to pretend biological sex does not exist. But each victory has come at devastating personal cost, and each has required women to fight through tribunals, public campaigns, and institutional hostility that never should have existed.

In December 2025, Sandie Peggie won a partial tribunal victory against NHS Fife. For two years, she endured investigation and suspension after complaining about having to share a changing room with a male colleague who identifies as a woman. The tribunal found NHS Fife had unlawfully harassed Peggie, not by allowing a man into the women’s changing room, but by taking an “unreasonable length of time” to investigate her complaints and telling her she needed “to be educated on trans rights.”

She was cleared of all misconduct allegations in July 2025, eighteen months after disciplinary proceedings began. Eighteen months. The evidence against her was found to be “inconclusive or insufficient.” Yet she spent nearly two years of her life fighting accusations that should never have been made, abandoned by the Royal College of Nursing, which refused to support her claim.

Then came the Darlington Eight. On 16 January 2026, an employment tribunal ruled that County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust had unlawfully discriminated against and harassed eight nurses by requiring them to share a female changing room with Rose Henderson, a male operating theatre practitioner. For months, these women raised concerns. Management’s response? The women were told to find somewhere else to change. Hospital bosses suggested Henderson was no different than a larger woman.

Employment Judge Seamus Sweeney found the trust’s “Transition in the Workplace” policy created a “hostile, intimidating, humiliating and degrading environment.” The nurses were forced to change in a temporary office that violated fire regulations. When they formed their own union after the RCN abandoned them, they were painted as troublemakers rather than workers defending basic dignity.

Three cases. Three victories. Three groups of women who should never have had to fight.

The Royal College of Nursing’s Shameful Absence 

What unites these cases is not just institutional hostility but union betrayal. The Royal College of Nursing collects subscriptions from over half a million members. Under General Secretary Professor Nicola Ranger, it has devoted its energy to LGBTQ+ inclusion, hate-crime training, and Pride celebrations. When its members are racially abused and suspended for stating biological facts, it goes missing.

Melle secured a meeting with RCN leadership. Midway through, Ranger took a phone call and vanished, never to return. The RCN later sent Melle a letter acknowledging the “impact” but confirming it would take no action. Perhaps they could interest her in a mindfulness app?

The RCN told Melle it could not act until the Equality and Human Rights Commission produced its code of practice following the Supreme Court ruling. This was bureaucratic cowardice masquerading as prudence. The EHRC had already told service providers to implement the ruling. The law was clear. The RCN simply chose ideology over its members.

Sandie Peggie is now suing the RCN for failing to support her. The Darlington Eight left to form their own union. When nurses are resorting to DIY unionisation because the official body has been captured by ideologues, something has gone catastrophically wrong.

A union’s job is to defend workers against institutional power. Full stop. When a Black nurse is racially abused and suspended for refusing to validate her abuser’s pronouns, her union should be raising hell. When women are disciplined for objecting to male nudity in their changing rooms, their union should be filing grievances and threatening strikes. Instead, the RCN has prioritised the validation of gender identity claims over the material safety of working-class women. It is a disgrace.

Phillipson’s Deliberate Obstruction 

The case of Jennifer Melle is not an anomaly. It is a symptom of an institutional sickness that has infected the NHS, the trade unions, and the Labour movement itself. We have allowed a luxury belief system born in the seminar rooms of elite universities to dismantle the safeguards of ordinary women.

Meanwhile, Bridget Phillipson, Labour’s Minister for Women and Equalities, continues to obstruct implementation of the Supreme Court ruling. The EHRC submitted updated guidance to her in September 2025. It has been four months. She has refused to publish it.

Phillipson has called the guidance “trans-exclusive” and claimed it would prevent mothers from taking young sons into changing rooms. Mr Justice Swift dismissed this as “inconsistent with the legislation” and an attempt to “rewrite” the Supreme Court’s ruling. She has demanded the EHRC calculate the cost to businesses of complying with the law before she will act.

Let that sink in. A Labour minister is calculating the financial cost of women’s dignity. She is delaying implementation of a Supreme Court ruling because it might be inconvenient for Capital.

Baroness Falkner, the former EHRC chair, has repeatedly stated that no one should wait for new guidance: they should comply with the law now. Any organisation clinging to old policies allowing men into women’s spaces cannot claim legal justification. Yet they do it anyway, because they know the government will not enforce the law.

While Phillipson plays politics with guidance that would protect women like Melle, Peggie, and the Darlington Eight, nurses across the country remain vulnerable to the same institutional harassment these women faced. How many more will be suspended before Phillipson does her job? How many more will face disciplinary hearings for stating biological reality? How many more will be abandoned by their unions and forced to fight alone?

Class, Dignity, and Material Reality 

This is not a marginal issue affecting a handful of workers. This is about whether working-class women have any enforceable rights in their places of employment. Nurses do not work in spacious buildings with abundant facilities. They change in cramped rooms between exhausting shifts. They are disproportionately women, disproportionately working-class, disproportionately from minority backgrounds.

Jennifer Melle is a Black Christian single mother. The ideology that suspended her for nine months prioritised a paedophile’s subjective identity over her safety and her right to her own religious convictions. The same ideology has turned the concept of “inclusion” into a weapon against women who lack the social capital to fight back.

Because that is what this is: a hierarchy of victimhood that places the subjective identity claims of any man above the material reality of every woman. It is fine to tell nurses they should find alternative changing facilities when a man demands access to theirs. It is fine to suspend a woman who was racially abused. It is fine to spend eighteen months investigating a woman for the crime of objecting to male nudity in her workspace. But to ask a man to use male facilities? To expect a convicted paedophile to accept being called “Mr”? Unconscionable. Discriminatory. A data breach.

The left used to understand that class struggle meant defending workers against institutional power. It meant standing with a Black nurse being racially abused, not suspending her to protect her abuser’s feelings. It meant ensuring women could do their jobs without being forced to undress in front of men, not lecturing them about “trans rights” when they complained.

But too many institutions calling themselves progressive have been captured by a middle-class ideology that prioritises identity performance over material conditions. The result is not liberation but a new form of oppression: one where working-class women are punished for asserting the boundaries that protect them, while managers and union bosses perform allyship from the safety of their offices. 

What Next? 

These victories should be celebrated, but they should never have been necessary. Every day these women spent suspended, investigated, or fighting tribunals represents a failure of institutions that claim to champion equality and workers’ rights.

Melle’s reinstatement does not undo nine months of suspension. Peggie’s partial victory does not erase two years of hell. The Darlington Eight’s tribunal win does not compensate for months of being forced to change in an office that violated fire regulations while being told they needed “educating.”

The NHS must issue a full apology to these women, not the perfunctory “sorry you had this experience” that treats racial abuse and institutional harassment as unfortunate accidents. Trusts must immediately review and withdraw all policies that allow men into women’s single-sex spaces, as the Supreme Court ruling demands. The RCN must be held accountable for abandoning its members when they needed support most, and nurses deserve better representation than an organisation that prioritises Pride celebrations over defending women from workplace harassment.

Bridget Phillipson must publish the EHRC guidance immediately. Every day she delays is another day NHS trusts can hide behind outdated, unlawful policies. Every day she calculates costs and demands impact assessments is another day working-class women are exposed to the institutional harassment these cases have documented.

And the left must decide what it stands for. Does it defend the material interests of working-class women, or does it genuflect to an ideology that requires them to accept male access to intimate spaces as the price of employment? Does it support workers who stand up to abusive patients and institutional indifference, or does it prioritise the validation of those patients’ self-concepts?

The Socialist Workers Party and similar groups have infiltrated newer left-wing movements with this ideological poison, and the result has been a catastrophic betrayal of the women who form the backbone of our public services. It is time to extract ourselves from this purity spiral and return to first principles: solidarity with workers, defence of sex-based rights, and refusal to accept that women’s dignity is negotiable.

Jennifer Melle has been reinstated. Sandie Peggie won her harassment claim. The Darlington Eight proved their trust’s policies were unlawful. These are victories, and they matter. But the fact these women had to fight at all is a scandal. The law is clear. The only question is whether our institutions will finally enforce it, or whether the next nurse who tells the truth will face the same nine-month nightmare that should never have happened in the first place.

The Right Balance

Ella Whelan writes:

After Australia banned under-16s from using social media last month, the UK government has proposed its own set of restrictions on young people’s social-media use. Keir Starmer’s Labour is considering giving Ofsted tougher guidance to check the use of phones and social media in schools. There could also be restrictions on so-called addictive features and a wider use of age checks, among other measures.

It’s not just Labour. Britain’s other political parties seem to be equally keen on clamping down on kids’ social-media use. Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch took to X at the weekend to claim that the Tories had the idea first, arguing that ‘we need to help parents raise healthy, happy children who go on to make good decisions about their lives’. The Liberal Democrats argue that kids should be allowed on WhatsApp groups, but not on ‘platforms that use addictive algorithmic feeds or host inappropriate content’. What everyone seems to agree on is that it’s a bad thing for kids to use social media, and that legislation is needed to, in the words of Badenoch, ‘help parents’.

Discussions about children’s online experiences and the dangers they might face are nothing new. But in recent months, officialdom seems to have become increasingly concerned about protecting children’s ‘wellbeing’, rather than protecting them from ‘harm’. So instead of concerns about children seeing extreme content or writing nasty things about each other, the current focus is on the amount of time kids spend on social media. Hence much of the detail of the proposed restrictions focusses on ‘infinite scrolling’ and ‘excessive use’.

This focus on the duration of kids’ social-media use is revealing. It shows the extent to which calls for a ban are rooted in a lack of confidence in parental authority – a lack of confidence, that is, in parents’ capacity to control their kids’ behaviour and limit the amount of time they spend on social media.

True enough, it might be tricky for some parents to navigate the online world, to block certain content or monitor which sites their kids are looking at. But keeping a handle on the amount of time children spend online doesn’t take a PhD in computer science. You simply take the phone out of your child’s hand. Much like regulating children’s sweets intake, controlling young people’s access to the online world ought to be seen as just the latest in a long line of parental responsibilities.

But that’s not how the Labour Party has come to see it. This shouldn’t be a surprise given Labour’s history of intervention into family life stretches back to the days of New Labour. Many of today’s policies, from supervised toothbrushing in primary schools to the NHS’s obsessions with kids eating sugar, reveal the influence the Blairite ‘politics of behaviour’ continues to have on today’s Labour government. The somewhat depressing difference is that today the pushback from parents seems to be waning.

There is no denying that in the 20 years since I was a teenager, young people’s access to the internet and social media has changed dramatically. This will continue to pose challenges to parents for whom the sanctity of home life, with its private rules and structures, is challenged by a strange second world on a little screen. But these challenges are not insurmountable. Inviting the state to play guardian when it comes to their kids’ online access undermines the relationship between parents and their children. Secure and safe childhoods are built on the foundation that the people with your best interests at heart are mum and dad, not Keir Starmer.

We need to dial down the hysteria about children’s social-media use. Most children are using socials simply to connect – to post pictures of their pets, talk gaming or even just to have a group chat. It seems rather bizarre that the same government campaigning to give 16-year-olds the vote thinks they’re barely capable of navigating social media.

It’s on parents now to step up, step in, and start taking primary responsibility for their children’s ‘wellbeing’ again. If they don’t, the state will never leave us alone.

And Joe Hackett writes:

“If you’re under 16, you should not be watching this!” thundered Labour MP Jonathan Hinder as he introduced a recent video.

Any alarm that Hinder might have decided to pursue an unusual side-hustle quickly subsided as he launched into a generic call to ban under-16s from social media, which he compared to cigarettes, alcohol, and gambling.

I assume the analogy doesn’t go so far as to wanting us all to pay punitive taxes for our scrolling, or — as in the case of cigarettes — having adults gradually banned from social media over the course of the next century. Those of us deemed old enough to safely consume Hinder’s content will have to wait and see.

But Hinder is not alone. He’s part of a wider campaign, across politicians and the media, to ban — or at least heavily restrict — teenagers’ access to the Internet.

When Australia banned social media for under-16s in December, it was the subject of near-blanket coverage by the BBC, including a liveblog on the day it came into force. Such a ban is now Conservative policy, and Keir Starmer is publicly toying with the idea. The Lib Dems want to go further and ban 16 and 17 year olds from some sites. Meanwhile, Sky News gave a basically unchallenged platform to a campaign to ban smartphones, not just in school, but on the commute to and from school, based on the case of one teenager who was diagnosed with PTSD after being shown a violent video at school.

If it wasn’t obvious at the time (as I argued at the time, it was), it should be clear by now that the so-called Online Safety Act was little more than a gateway to further restrictions on the Internet, generally in the name of keeping teenagers safe.

It’s at this point that I should declare a slight interest: I am 31 years old. And before I entered Jurassic Park, I was, like most teenagers of my vintage (presumably including the 34-year-old Hinder), not kept particularly safe on the Internet. I turned 13 just when broadband got good enough that you could watch videos that consisted of more than eight pixels and didn’t stop every two seconds, so I’m old enough to remember back to simpler, more innocent times. I remember when age verification consisted of ticking a box confirming you were over the ripe old age of 13. I remember a time before paywalls and digital rights management got their teeth, when you’d leave the computer on for hours to torrent, painfully slowly, music you definitely had the right to own. I even remember rapidly working out how to bypass the parental controls that had been installed on my computer — which, and I swear this is true, I needed to do because I was doing a school project on ancient Egypt and virtually any site to do with that subject had been blocked as “occult”. Honest.

In short, when I was a teenager, the Internet really was the Wild West it’s often described as today — and it was great. Did I occasionally encounter age-inappropriate content? Yes. Did some things clearly need more barriers to stop teenagers accessing them? Yes. But did I, and most of my generation, turn out basically fine? I’d at least like to think so.

And I know that’s just my individual experience, but then again, much of the campaign for more restrictions on the Internet is driven by the experiences of individual teenagers and their families. It’s often lamented how, from generation to generation, kids have lost the freedom to explore the world due to safety concerns — which, if nothing else, should debunk Hinder’s ludicrous claim that banning social media for under-16s would lead to them going “outside, enjoying beautiful weather… talking to other human beings again,” instead of watching TV like kids actually did in the 1990s.

My generation saw their physical world compress, but we at least had the online world to explore instead; a bigger world where it was easier than ever to be yourself, try new things, and meet people who shared your interests or came from completely different walks of life.

The Internet gave millennials a freedom which we were stripped of in the real world. I find it sad to see that freedom, that right to roam, gradually being extinguished — this time not by parents but by force of law, usually channelled through big tech firms. This isn’t, of course, just about the Online Safety Act or the myriad efforts to “strengthen” it. It’s a trend that’s been going on for 20 years, driven by a combination of politicians and corporations. A vast array of small message boards catering to various interests have been consolidated into a small number of social media sites, a process ironically accelerated by the Online Safety Act’s regulations prompting a number of long-running message boards to close.

Social media itself was created as a means for ordinary people to communicate with each other, but has increasingly become a place to consume the work of celebrity “creators” the site’s proprietors think you’ll enjoy. They think that because most of what you do online is tracked, giving these companies a file on you that the Stasi could only dream of. Politicians and campaigners might think they’re fighting this shift, and fighting big tech in general, but in practice they’re working hand in hand to lay the final bricks around the walled garden.

What’s most alarming, however, is that this isn’t just a walled garden for the kids, it’s a walled garden for all of us.

The Online Safety Act already requires that, at least in most cases, adults who want to access certain content must supply a big tech company with a selfie or even a copy of their ID. In Australia, where social media users might particularly treasure their anonymity amid the introduction of sweeping speech laws, that applies to accessing any social media site. And we know that this information isn’t always secure.

Even anonymity might not protect your freedom of expression online for much longer. One proposal ultimately dropped from the Act, but very much not dead, is requiring social media companies to censor speech deemed “legal but harmful”. Perhaps the most concerning proposal, however, was buried in Sir Keir Starmer’s anti-misogyny plan, published late last year. The Prime Minister advocated “partnering with tech companies” to make it impossible for children to take, share, or view a nude image — which, of course, sounds great in principle. The problem is that it’s hard to see how this could be remotely possible without requiring basically every device in the country to constantly record what’s on everyone’s screens and cameras, and what’s in their private communications.

Unsurprisingly, tech companies have already been developing software like this for, one suspects, data collection and AI training purposes. Microsoft Recall, launched in 2024 and quietly installed by default as part of Windows 11, takes screenshots of users’ activity every few seconds. An unsurprising backlash forced them to make it an opt-in service (here’s how you can turn it off). But it’s hard to see how Starmer could achieve his vision without bringing it back on a mandatory basis across all operating systems.

Growing up, the Internet was thought of as the information superhighway, a world at your fingertips — and a free, decentralised, relatively privacy-friendly world at that. It’s increasingly becoming a panopticon ruled by a coalition of politicians and a handful of corporations — not just for under-16s, but for adults too.

The impulse to make the Internet safer for teenagers is understandable, but the right balance needs to be struck, and at the moment our leaders appear to have thrown all sense of balance out of the window. That balance urgently needs to be restored, lest the online world become the opposite of what it once promised to be.

And Poppy Coburn writes:

It’s become very unfashionable to enjoy using the internet. What was once breathlessly celebrated as a tool for political liberation – who remembers the Arab Spring? – has since become the go-to scapegoat for all the world’s social ills. You have to be careful if you’re going to counter the dominant narrative in case you inadvertently advertise your support for child bullying, political extremism and AI-generated images of Keir Starmer in a bikini.

Responding to the complexities of the issue in the typically British fashion, politicians have been competing with each other to see who can ban it first. Morgan McSweeney got in early with his censorious Center for Countering Digital Hate. The Online Safety Act followed. Kemi Badenoch pledged that a Conservative government would prohibit the use of social media for under-16s. Labour’s Andy Burnham suggested his own party ought to follow suit, and at time of writing the Prime Minister has refused to rule it out.

I’m part of the first cohort to have spent a significant chunk of my pubescent years blinking at a screen. I know from experience the problems social media can bring: the unwanted exposure to violent and explicit material, the relentless amplification of bullying, the rewiring of the dopamine reward mechanism away from actual work towards simulated achievement. There is a grain of truth in even the most hysterical denunciations of the internet. But those who think they can just pull the plug are simply delusional about the world that young people are actually living in.

Try and remember your teenage years. Could you sum them up in a single word? If you’re being honest, I imagine you’ve chosen “boring”. I grew up in a perfectly pleasant provincial town with very little to do in it and it almost sent me round the bend. It’s hard to accept in hindsight, but it is for most an incredibly tedious period of life – there’s a reason that passing a driving test is such a lifeline. My stepfather once confessed his primary form of entertainment during his childhood in 1980s Romford was bouncing a rubber ball against his bedroom wall. That’s why social media was such a revelation for my generation: there was actually something to do in those long hours between school and bedtime, a way to access friends instantly even when far away.

I’ve noticed that slightly older people will drive themselves into fits of rage over the sight of young people playing on their phones. Why are they not outside, breaking into electricity substations or dancing in the blind spot of a reversing tractor like back in the Seventies? The truth is that the idealised wild childhoods of the like of the Mitfords haven’t existed for some time: the explosion in crime in the latter half of the 20th century put paid to the latchkey kid. With the streets off-limits, the only choice was the home.

Shutting off access to the online world – the ability to communicate effortlessly with friends, pursue niche hobbies without judgment, form soon-to-be embarrassing political opinions – won’t encourage children to go outside. What it will do is leave them at the mercy of the television. This highly-regulated environment provided children with the appropriate entertainment of Gary Glitter on Top Of The Pops. Because there were only four channels before the internet, if you changed the channel you might just end up watching Jim’ll Fix It.

What about other forms of entertainment? Isn’t reading still an option? Despite my online obsession, I managed to read extensively. This was always out of choice. But I worry what it would mean to force children to read who otherwise have no interest. Why should we expect them to pick up Chaucer? The only books that actually sell now are “Romantasy”, a genre about being ravished by fairies or vampires or goblins. This smut is currently marketed under the “Young Adult” categorisation, which makes Instagram better at maintaining childhood innocence than Waterstones. Anyone who knows their Austen ought to know any medium is capable of corrupting a young mind.

Is the use of social media any more objectionable than the creeping infantilism present in modern life, which pens the young in at every corner? The car that once provided much-desired freedom is now out of reach as Labour heaps unfair restrictions on learner drivers. Expressing an interest in Right-wing political issues like immigration might see you forced into the Government’s draconian anti-terror programme Prevent. Even alcohol-free beer might soon be off limits to under 18s, apparently in the worry that even the simulation of having fun might be too damaging.

Parents are twice as likely to spend time with their children than they were 50 years ago, despite a dual-income setup becoming the norm. That means that even as parents spend less time on average in the home, they pry into the lives of their children more than ever before. It’s not surprising that the outcome is endlessly-expanding worry. But it is deeply irresponsible for leaders to stoke these fears for the sake of a cheap political stunt.

Teenage children aren’t ignoring their parents because they’ve been hypnotised by a screen, but because they’re teenagers. Politicians aren’t being bombarded with criticism because of Elon Musk’s algorithm, but because they are widely despised. If you are concerned about wokeness, as Kemi Badenoch is, it makes little sense to agitate for shutting teenagers off from what might be the only alternative source of information in their lives. I certainly wouldn’t hold the political opinions I do today had it not been for the internet.

Parents must set their own boundaries and trust that, given the right support, their children will act responsibly. I can’t say that I was always responsible – quite the opposite – but the online world has enriched my life in ways that far outweigh the bad. If you’re not convinced, nobody is stopping you from logging off.

To Deliver On It

Angela Rayner writes:

At cabinet last Tuesday the prime minister reportedly made a powerful case for a government that serves the interests of those struggling to get by. He is right. The cost of living emergency is the issue of our time.

It is a crisis not months, but years in the making. For more than two decades, living standards have been crushed and there is an increasing sense of a country where people cannot get on, of a system stacked against them.

In the face of this deep-set disillusionment, Labour in government has been at its best when challenging the status quo. By standing firm in the face of established interests who have had it their own way for decades – that’s exactly what the landmark Employment Rights Act and Renters’ Rights Act have done, delivering new protections for millions.

And now, this government has a fresh opportunity to show whose side it is on – by ending the scandal of unregulated and unaffordable ground rents faced by leaseholders, as we pledged in our manifesto. 

Millions of people suffering from this scandal expect action in the imminent draft leasehold and commonhold reform bill. Many of them are young families who have tried to do everything right. They entered the jobs market in the teeth of a great recession; they endured the worst collapse in living standards in generations; and they scrimped and saved and managed to get their foot on the housing ladder.

Yet despite owning their home, they hand out hundreds, and in some cases thousands of pounds a year in ground rents to unaccountable investors, often from overseas, for the right to occupy the land on which the home they live in was built. Unlike service charges, leaseholders get nothing in return for these payments. And for many this is made worse because the rates at which they pay can escalate with total impunity, in some cases doubling every five to 10 years.

In the past, ground rents were of a low or a symbolic peppercorn value. Over recent decades, though, ordinary homeowners have been charged high and escalating amounts of ground rent, leaving them in financial distress and often unable to sell or remortgage their homes.

The Competition and Markets Authority has found that nearly 1m leases have one of these escalating or onerous ground-rent clauses. Where they are replaced, it’s often made even worse, with a formula pegged to inflation, leading to huge and unpredictable increases for hard-pressed homeowners.

All this misery for ordinary homeowners to do nothing more than sustain the unearned income stream of unaccountable investors – it’s not right.

Labour made a promise to leaseholders that we would fix this injustice, but ministers are currently subjected to furious lobbying from wealthy investors trying to water down this manifesto commitment.

There are those who argue we cannot act on our promise as it could risk a backlash from investors, including pension funds. It’s hardly surprising – the system works just fine for them. They get an annual return for doing absolutely nothing, they can raise ground rents and pile up service charges without transparency, with total impunity, regardless of the devastation it causes to families.

But only a very small amount of UK pension fund assets are actually dependent on ground rents. The government’s own figures suggest this could even be below 1% and easily absorbable. They are also niche investments with little risk to wider investor confidence. In any case, this unproductive investment does nothing to grow our economy. Incentivising investors to move towards productive investments – such as infrastructure, technology and capital to help businesses scale up – is exactly what we should be doing to promote growth.

As things stand, this Labour government has a record on leasehold reform we can be proud of. We have already switched on a range of new protections and rights for leaseholders. Our draft leasehold and commonhold reform bill can move us on from the feudal leasehold system – but not without meaningful action to tackle ground rents; at the very least, an annual cash cap.

If Labour cannot fix such an obvious injustice and show families whose living standards have been crushed that we will fight for them, then we shouldn’t be surprised if they lose faith that anything can change.

This battle is a symbol of so much more. It is about whose side we are on, and who we are in government to fight for. Last week the prime minister powerfully made that case at cabinet. Now it is on all of us in government and parliament to deliver on it – so let’s get the job done.