Safety and Security

Reform UK "investigated" Dan Jukes and James Orr, and it magically cleared them. Anyone who welcomed that should welcome the Green Party's internal exoneration of Lubna Speitan, which ought to happen on the principle that sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander.

Five days after the Green Party conference vote on Zionism, no broadcaster has been able to find a Palestinian to interview. But far from downgrading the British Consulate General in Jerusalem, which is 188 years older than the State of Israel in which it has never been located, that mission should have been upgraded to the British Embassy to the British-recognised State of Palestine. It still should be.

As has been the case for over a year, the United Kingdom recognises Palestine as a sovereign state. That state is at peace with His Majesty, and the State of Israel is at war with it. Enlistment by a British citizen in the Israeli Defense Forces is therefore a criminal offence under the Foreign Enlistment Act 1870. Any policy of not prosecuting dual nationals who had been conscripted would still not be the law, and anyone else would be bang to rights. Or do we have two-tier justice?

The unrealistic people are the proponents of a two-state solution, the borders of which will never be agreed. Ultimately, the only viable option is a single democratic and nonracial state at least from the River to the Sea if not throughout the former British Mandate, with constitutional rights, including the right of all of its citizens to live anywhere on its territory, upheld by an independent judiciary and by vigorously free media. That is undeniably remote now. But so what?

Spiritual Readiness

Harold Wilson’s only ever Secretary of State for Scotland was Willie Ross. A staunch opponent both of devolution and of EEC membership, Ross was no liberal. He tried to ban ITV from carrying advertisements on Sundays, Christmas Day and Good Friday. And in 1969, he suggested that if the death penalty were to be retained, then executions ought to be carried out on television. That unanswerable line shocked a number of waverers into the Aye Lobby to make permanent the 1965 suspension of capital punishment, a measure that there has never been any serious attempt to reverse, nor any at all since 1994.

By the starkest contrast, Pete Hegseth, he of the Jerusalem Cross tattoo and of the Office of Religious Affairs, has decreed that the execution by firing squad of Dr Nidal Hasan is to be livestreamed from Fort Hood. Thank goodness that the seventh arrestee in the case of the now abandoned USAF Fairford has been bailed like the first six and therefore cannot be a suspected terrorist. And as for the two “Latvians” at USAF Molesworth, trespass is a civil matter. You can be arrested only for aggravated trespass, and for that you need to be obstructing or deterring a lawful activity, or intimidating people so as to deter them from engaging in it. Coming into force in 1994 as part of the Act that the last of the hangers and floggers had failed to amend, the whole thing was devised to hit hunt saboteurs. It is heard in the Magistrates’ Court, and it carries a sentence of up to three months in prison (so out in six weeks), or of a fine up to Level 4 on the standard scale (so a maximum of £2500), or of both. That would hardly impress Donald Trump, so another outpost of the Occupation may be about to be evacuated in the dead of night, back to the land of livestreamed executions. The very, very, very best of riddance.

Viam Inveniam Aut Faciam?

One of my cellmates was from Peterlee, where he was recently murdered. His name was Dean Fishwick, and his death made it onto to Look North. But the panel on Question Time recalled Peter Kay in Phoenix Nights, or Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, or Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets. Except that those characters, though played by the same actor, could easily be told apart.

All right, I’ll give you Kevin Maguire, with whose late cousin I used to go to Mass, just as I used to go to Mass with Dean. But otherwise, Question Time went to Grahame Morris’s constituency and to Darren Grimes’s county, yet that was the only panel that could be assembled? Annabel Denham is on everything. You probably cannot travel 20 miles in Britain without some change in the accent. You certainly cannot travel 30. Yet four out of five panellists had the same accent as each other and the presenter. It was not an East Durham accent.

Meanwhile, it was all kicking off on Newsnight, with Caroline Lucas not holding back. Andrew Feinstein and the Greens took 29.3 per cent between them at Holborn and St Pancras last time. Any less than that this time, and Zack Polanski should resign.

And The Opportunity Is This

Paul Knaggs writes:

It was five months ago that the leader of Camden Council lost his seat… Not narrowly, and not quietly. On 7 May, the Greens took all three seats in Holborn and Covent Garden, a clean sweep in a ward that had returned Labour councillors without interruption since 2002, and Richard Olszewski finished outside the places in his own patch. Labour lost fifteen seats across the borough that night and clung on with a majority of three. The Greens became the largest opposition group on a council Labour has controlled for all but four years since 1971. Keir Starmer was still Prime Minister when that happened. The leadership crisis had not yet broken. The Burnham era had not begun.

Hold that date in your mind when the Holborn and St Pancras result is declared on Friday morning, because Westminster has already decided what the by-election means, and Westminster is wrong. The woman who inherited the wreckage of that council, Sagal Abdi-Wali, confirmed as Camden’s leader on 20 May, is Labour’s candidate today. She is defending the seat Starmer vacated on 1 September, when he left the Commons to pursue a role in “international affairs”. I confess, even writing that sentence feels faintly absurd. British politics has a remarkable habit of taking men who have ‘failed spectacularly’ at home and finding them a larger stage abroad from which to continue influencing the rest of us whether we want them or not, and it’s usually not.

Altogether, fifteen candidates are on the ballot. However, the press has decided it is a two-horse race between Abdi-Wali and the Green leader, Zack Polanski. And the entire political class has agreed, in advance, on what the contest is for. Remove Starmer. Insert Burnham. Call the defectors back to the polls and see whether they come home. A controlled experiment, conducted in public, with one question: was the problem Labour, or was the problem the man at the top?

What Burnham actually inherited 

The numbers explain why Labour was frightened in the first place. In July 2024, Starmer took Holborn and St Pancras with 18,884 votes, 48.9 per cent of the total. The independent Andrew Feinstein, campaigning hard on Gaza, took 7,312. The Greens took another 4,030. Labour’s majority was 11,572, and the two insurgent candidacies behind it added up to 11,342. You cannot shunt votes between candidates like counters on a board. But Feinstein has endorsed Polanski, and that makes the arithmetic politically live rather than merely academic. Then came May, and the ground moved under Labour’s feet in the places that matter. In Camden Town ward, Labour took 43.4 per cent to the Greens’ 35.8. In Kilburn the Greens took two of three seats. In Bloomsbury and Highgate they broke through. In St Pancras and Somers Town the Camden People’s Alliance, standing on an explicitly pro-Palestinian and anti-Starmer ticket in alliance with the Greens, took a seat after a recount.

Burnham’s inheritance, when he took the leadership unopposed on 17 July and the premiership on 20 July, was not simply an unpopular government. It was a coalition in pieces. Reform was taking one slice of Labour’s old working-class vote, the Greens another slice of its younger metropolitan left, independents had proved what Gaza could do to a Labour majority, and the Liberal Democrats were still perfectly capable of relieving Labour of affluent progressives. His first task was never just to be more likeable than his predecessor. It was to put Humpty Dumpty back together. Within the next twenty-four hours we find out how many pieces he has found. Except that we do not, because of what happened in Brighton.

The weekend the Greens handed it over 

Zack Polanski saw it coming. That is what makes it remarkable. On 18 September, The Guardian’s Peter Walker reported that Polanski had asked the party’s ruling executive to postpone its annual conference so the Greens could throw everything at Holborn. The executive refused. The venue was booked, members had taken leave and paid for hotels, and roughly three thousand people were expected at what would be the party’s largest gathering ever. So the Greens spent the final weekend of a parliamentary by-election campaign in Brighton, eighty miles from the doorsteps they needed to knock.

Polanski also wanted the motion on the agenda amended. He is Jewish, and he pushed for protections for Jewish members and for the removal of language calling for a single democratic Palestinian state. Conference rejected three amendments, including one that would have shielded Jewish members from being reported or disciplined over their association with synagogues or community organisations identifying as Zionist. Then, on Friday, he gave his keynote speech and left for London. On Sunday 4 October, in his absence, members voted by 1,022 to 813 to make the Green Party of England and Wales formally anti-Zionist, defining Zionism as an ethnonationalist political project and declaring that anti-Zionism should not be equated with antisemitism. 

Set aside, for one moment, what you think of the motion itself. Look instead at how it was made. Fewer than one per cent of the Green membership voted on it. The campaign to pass it was driven by Greens for Palestine, a group with no official affiliation to the party, which had spent months urging supporters to join specifically in order to vote for it. The majority of the party’s MPs opposed it. The chair of Jewish Greens, Vivien Lichtenstein, a member of twenty-nine years who has worked on Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives since the 1980s, told the BBC’s Today programme that “It is quite possible that I will leave the party.” The deputy leader of the Wales Green Party resigned on Tuesday after seven years. The European Green Party condemned the decision. The Board of Deputies of British Jews called the Greens “an extremist party.” Israel’s foreign ministry has barred Polanski from entering the country.

A leader cannot control every decision a democratic membership makes, and should not try. That is the honest defence, and the Greens are entitled to it. Member-led policymaking is not a scandal; it is the thing the Greens have always said distinguishes them from Labour’s stage-managed conferences and Reform’s wholly owned subsidiary of one man’s opinions. But there is a difference between a party making its own policy and 1,835 people in a hall in Brighton making it for a membership that was not there. A movement that spent a year demanding the democratic renewal of British politics has just handed its most consequential decision to a fraction of one per cent of itself, after an outside faction recruited for the vote, while the leader who had asked for the whole weekend to be cancelled was ninety minutes up the line canvassing. Polanski wanted to lead a national insurgency. On the day his party took the most divisive decision of his leadership, he was somewhere else. That absence has allowed everybody else to decide what it meant. He went into the final week needing to explain why Holborn should send him to Parliament. He has spent it being asked what his own party believes. 

Enter Galloway, from several thousand miles away 

As though the left required another dividing line, George Galloway announced on 14 September, on his own podcast, that he would contest the seat for the Workers Party unless the Greens made him an offer he could not refuse. They did not. He is on the ballot. He is also abroad. Galloway has remained outside Britain in what he calls self-imposed exile since being detained by counter-terrorism officers in late 2025. At the time he declared his candidacy he was living in Moscow. By 22 September he had relocated to South Africa for a political tour, saying he will return when the Home Office confirms he will not be detained on arrival. His campaign is being fought remotely while activists canvass Camden on his behalf.

His stated reason for standing against Polanski is not Gaza. It is Ukraine. Galloway says the Green leader is “a supporter of NATO” and of Volodymyr Zelensky, and the Workers Party, responding to the row, attacked the Greens for what it called their support for Zelensky’s NATO spearhead. It cost him his deputy. Chris Williamson, the former Labour MP for Derby North, resigned from the Workers Party in protest, posting that he had quit because “I profoundly disagree with the decision to stand” and calling on his party to get behind Polanski instead. He was the only senior figure to say publicly what the arithmetic has been saying all along. Galloway does not need to win Holborn to shape the result. He needs only to take enough votes from people who dislike Labour but would otherwise have voted Green. That is the cruelty of first past the post. You do not always have to beat your enemy. Sometimes you merely have to beat your enemy’s enemy.

Labour has watched this film before and knows how it ends. In Ilford North in 2024, Wes Streeting survived Leanne Mohamad by 528 votes while the Green candidate took 1,794. In Birmingham Yardley, Jess Phillips held off the Workers Party’s Jody McIntyre by 693 while the Greens took 1,958. Those Green voters would not all have gone elsewhere, and it is dishonest to pretend otherwise. But Labour held both seats because the opposition to it could not combine, and that is the whole of the lesson. The Greens, the Workers Party, the independents and the assorted fragments of the anti-Labour left agree with real passion that Labour must be punished. They have never managed to agree which of them administers the punishment. Get the Tories Out once gave the left a single organising instruction. Get Labour Out gives it nothing but a grievance.

The recovery is thinner than it looks

Now the steelman, because Labour deserves one. Burnham’s revival is real. Ipsos, fielding between 10 and 15 September, put Labour on 27 per cent against Reform on 23, the Conservatives on 21 and the Greens on 13, a four-point Labour lead going into conference season. Opinium’s poll of 2 October had Labour on 30, Reform 25, the Conservatives 17 and the Greens 11. More in Common this week has Burnham’s net approval at plus 16, up five points. Professor Sir John Curtice told Left Foot Forward that Labour is a great deal more popular than it was on 7 May and the Greens considerably less so, which makes Holborn a “substantial challenge” for Polanski. That is a genuine turnaround and it would be churlish to deny it.

Now look underneath. The approval figures do not agree with each other, and the disagreement matters. More in Common has Burnham comfortably positive. Ipsos, asking about satisfaction with his performance as Prime Minister rather than general favourability, found 31 per cent satisfied and 44 per cent dissatisfied. Both can be true. People can like the man and distrust the government, which is precisely the condition Labour was in before it changed leaders. Ipsos also found that seven in ten Britons remain dissatisfied with how the country is being run, and its own analysts warned, in terms, that Labour’s lead is narrow, that Burnham’s ratings are nothing to write home about by historical standards, and that Labour should not take its advantage for granted. Opinion polls are promises whispered down a telephone. Ballot boxes count. And what the ballot box will record is not how far Labour has climbed, but how far everybody else has fallen.

Have the Greens peaked? 

Almost certainly, and not because of Andy Burnham. The Green high-water mark was February, in Gorton and Denton, where Hannah Spencer overturned a Labour majority of 13,413 to take the seat, one of the largest Labour majorities ever lost at a by-election. YouGov polling around that contest had the Greens above 20 per cent and contending for second place nationally. In March, 28 per cent of Britons said they would consider voting Green and Polanski’s net favourability stood at plus five. 

The average now has the Greens at 11 per cent, down more than five points on the spring peak and lower than a year ago. YouGov, publishing on 30 September, found Polanski’s net favourability had fallen to minus 19, that half the public view him unfavourably, that only 21 per cent think he is doing a good job, and, most damaging of all, that fewer Britons will now consider voting Green than before he became leader. More in Common, polling on the eve of the by-election, put him at minus 28, the least popular leader of any major British party, below Nigel Farage. 

The decline began before Burnham arrived. Curtice traces the sharpest fall to Polanski’s response to the Golders Green attack in April, when he shared a post criticising the police, and observes drily that there have been one or two moments in the past year when the leader’s thumbs should not have twitched quite so quickly. This is the ceiling every insurgency meets, and it is never where the insurgents expect. It is not reached when voters desert. It is reached when the movement acquires the apparatus of a party: factions, conferences, standing orders, members who would rather be right than be in government, and a leader who must either face them down or be absent when they vote.

The Greens found their ceiling at their own conference, not at a ballot box. Polanski has told The Guardian he does not need to win Holborn to remain leader, calling the race “50/50”. He has said he will stay whatever happens. He may well be right that he can. The more serious question is what he would be leading. A party of 11 per cent with five MPs and a policy platform set by 1,835 people, bleeding its Jewish members and its European sister parties, is not an insurgency. It is a pressure group with a parliamentary delegation.

Why this points towards an early election 

Here is where it gets interesting, and here is where the public interest lies. Burnham has denied, publicly and repeatedly, that he will go to the country early. In a round of regional interviews on Friday 25 September he told ITV Calendar that the next election would be in 2029 and that of the speculation “I can knock that dead”. He told BBC East Midlands a flat no when asked about May. Downing Street had already dismissed the talk. That denial cannot simply be waved away because an early election makes a better story. Neither can what The i Paper reported last week. Caroline Wheeler, citing multiple sources close to the Number 10 operation, reported that a May election has not in fact been ruled out, and that some of Burnham’s closest advisers privately concede there is still a chance he goes to the country. The reported motive is straightforward: a mandate of his own for social care reform, and room to raise taxes without being accused of breaking someone else’s manifesto. 

Parliament dissolves automatically in July 2029, with the last possible polling day in August that year. Prime Ministers do not choose election dates according to vows made in September. They choose them according to opportunity. And the opportunity is this. Labour is not more popular because it has resolved anything. It is more popular because Reform has slipped, because the Conservatives remain becalmed, and because the Greens have spent the autumn arguing with themselves in Brighton while the Workers Party argues with the Greens from Johannesburg. Every one of those conditions is temporary. None of them is in Labour’s gift. All of them could be gone by the autumn of 2027. If Labour wins Holborn comfortably today, Burnham’s strategists acquire the one thing they do not currently possess: evidence, from a real ballot box, that changing the leader changed behaviour. If Labour scrapes it, the celebration will require rather more champagne than mathematics.

And if Polanski takes the former Prime Minister’s seat after Labour changed leaders specifically to stop him, then Burnham has not healed the wound. He has put a barm cake over it. But the majority will matter more than the winner, and the turnout more than either. A comfortable Labour hold tells Burnham that Starmer really was a substantial part of the problem. A narrow one tells him the anaesthetic is working but the patient is still on the table.

What should happen next

The case for scrutiny here does not rest on partisanship. It rests on consent. A government that goes to the country because its opponents are temporarily in pieces is not seeking a mandate. It is buying one at a discount, and it will spend the following five years treating a fractured opposition as though it were an endorsement. That is how we got the last decade: governments elected on narrowing slices of a shrinking turnout, each one louder than the last about the will of the people.

So three things are owed to voters before any of this proceeds. Burnham should be held precisely to what he said on 25 September, and asked, repeatedly and on the record, to reconcile it with what his own advisers are briefing. The Greens, having discovered that a thousand people in a conference hall can set the policy of a national party, should be asked whether they regard that as democracy or merely as procedure. And the rest of the left, which has now twice in two years handed Labour seats it had no business keeping, might note that the arithmetic of first past the post is not a moral position. It is a machine, and it does not care how sincere you are.

Fifteen candidates will fight over one London constituency today while the party system that governed this country for a century carries on coming apart. The old instruction was simple: keep the Tories out. For millions it has become something emptier. Keep Labour out. Keep Reform out. Keep the Greens out. Keep the lot of them out. The electorate has not yet worked out what replaces the old system. It has simply stopped believing the old one is owed its obedience. Labour is not winning the argument. It is merely the last party left standing. And a government that mistakes its rivals’ collapse for the consent of the governed will always call the election it has not earned.

How We Will Pay For It

Here:

Larry Elliott’s column on the rightwing economic myths constraining Andy Burnham’s government should be required reading before John Healey’s budget.

I spent 20 years trading bonds, and agree that the household budget analogy bears no relation to how the UK state finances itself. Parliament votes on the spending, the Treasury instructs the Bank of England, and the Bank credits accounts in the private sector. Taxes withdraw money afterwards.

The same accounting exposes the “black hole”: every pound of government borrowing ends up as a financial asset held by households, firms and pension funds. That money hasn’t disappeared into any hole, black or otherwise.

The triple lock is debated as a question of whether Britain can afford its pensions, yet a government that issues sterling cannot run out of sterling to pay them. John Maynard Keynes and Clement Attlee understood this, and so did an unlikely ally. Asked in 2005 whether US pay-as-you-go pensions were secure, Alan Greenspan, then chair of the Federal Reserve, told Congress that there was “nothing to prevent the federal government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody”.

The same is true of sterling. The real question, he added, was whether the economy creates the real assets those pensions are used to buy. Deciding how to provide the care workers, homes and medicines is a political and moral question of the kind democracies exist to settle. 

Elliott warns that Burnham risks becoming the prime minister who asked the right questions without finding the answers. Ending Treasury-Induced Decline, a report that I co-wrote, sets out the institutional reforms he needs. He could start by dropping the wrong question: “How will we pay for it?”

Vince Gomez

The 99% Organisation

Larry Elliott is right: Burnham’s government needs to challenge neoliberal ideas, “the nostrums of the past four decades”, like the one about the government being like a household, if it is to repair the damage done to our social services by the Tories. There are others which Elliott didn’t mention.

The Laffer curve cannot be accepted by a government when chronically underfunded public services are crumbling, and the richest 1% in the UK own 36.5% of all financial assets, with a value of £1.8tn. We must reject arguments against equalising capital gains and income tax and imposing wealth taxes – and of course increasing income tax when fiscal rules allow – which use this old and long-disproved Tory economic myth.

The same applies to the silly notion of trickle-down economics when tackling the excessive profits of banks and companies cashing in on the effects of war. That leads to the Bank of England’s inevitable blaming of wage increases for inflation, ignoring the relatively recent research in the US showing that that most price inflation comes from “companies seeking to maintain profit margins”.

Bernie Evans

Liverpool

Grateful thanks to Larry Elliott for demolishing the conditioned belief that we must not “max out the nation’s credit card”. Producing and spending is fundamentally important to the ultimate revival of the UK economy and the restoration of industrialisation. My late husband always insisted that we could afford what we needed to and I didn’t believe him. I do now.

Val Bynner

London

Slippery No More

As a 49-year-old ex-con, I thought that I had heard it all. But eels? Eels? Eels? I cannot begin to imagine, I do not wish to know, and if that is what goes on these days, then it is no wonder that a 15-year-old would know what a rent boy looked like, even before considering his active involvement in Reform UK. The 15-year-old, that is. Not the rent boy. Although then again. Apparently, a rent boy dresses like a Conservative councillor. My goodness, but I am learning a lot.

Yes, the Police have better things to do than to arrest a 15-year-old Reform activist for likening a Conservative councillor to a rent boy. And yes, I have just written that sentence. The Police also have better things to do than to arrest octogenarian clergywomen for holding up placards in support of an entirely peaceful organisation that ought not therefore to be proscribed, or to chase after the Green Party for having resolved that Zionism was racism. The failing Labour Leader of Brighton and Hove City Council, Bella Sankey, is trying to distract from her own deficiencies by banning the Greens from the Brighton Centre, but anti-Zionism is a protected belief, and in any case look at all the other things that the Green Party has said or done without anything like this reaction. No, though, those of you who say it, you did not "like them when they were just environmentalists".

In banning Zack Polanski as if he would care, Israel is denying a Jew his Right of Return, thereby undercutting the whole basis of Zionism. Our rulers do not half know how to pick allies in the Middle East. Ties to the Emiratis have already compelled a change of permanent location for Number 10 North, while one version of the Flydubai story was or is that the plane had eventually been landed in Saudi Arabia, where a 24-year-old Sri Lankan faces the death penalty for a blasphemous Facebook comment. Such is the front line of freedom and democracy.

While the nerve centre is of course the United States, where it is perfectly possible that a third attempt is going to be made to execute a woman who had survived the first two and who had now regained consciousness. At least Canada has suspended its plan to extend assisted suicide to people whose sole condition was mental illness. We must dare to hope that we might be seeing the beginning of the end of capital punishment in half of North America and of assisted suicide in the other half. And faith without works is dead.

That Is Spain’s Housing Crisis

Paul Knaggs writes:

There is a flat on Calle Alcalde Sainz de Baranda, in the Retiro district of Madrid, with an old woman’s possessions still in it. She is not coming for them. Maricarmen Abascal died on Wednesday afternoon in the Hospital Gregorio Marañón, a fortnight after police officers and a crew of paramedics carried her out of the home she had lived in since 1956. She was 87. The agreement that was supposed to let her return has died with her, and the keys revert to Urbagestión Desarrollo e Inversiones, which may now let the place at whatever the Madrid market will bear. It wanted €2,650 a month from her. It will probably get it from somebody else.

Nine days before she died, that fight had been won. On 28 September, after a four-hour negotiation in the offices of Madrid’s municipal housing company, her lawyer Beatriz Duro and the tenants’ union agreed terms with the owners: a new eight-year lease, rent capped at thirty per cent of her net income, which came to roughly €435, a little below the €500 she had been paying before the building changed hands. Her cousin Vicente carried the news to her hospital bed. Duro told reporters she was delighted. The contract was never signed. Documents were outstanding, and her return depended on a discharge that never came. So the state and the market between them took eight years to arrive at a number an 87-year-old pensioner could pay, and arrived nine days late.

“THEY KILLED HER,” SAYS THE UNION. NO ONE WILL BE CHARGED.

The Sindicato de Inquilinas was blunt within hours. Its spokeswoman, Alicia del Río, said speculation and rentierism had “finished killing” their colleague. The union’s social action secretary, Álvaro Ferreira, went further and called it murder, the consequence of institutional mistreatment. Andrea Zayas of the Sindicato Comisiones de Base named three defendants: the vulture funds, the rentiers, and a government that did nothing in eight years. By evening, the Puerta del Sol camp had held a minute’s silence and marched on the Congress, chanting that these are not deaths but killings.

Let us be careful here, because the truth is colder than the accusation and does more damage. There will be no charge. There is no coroner’s finding that an eviction killed her, and an 87-year-old woman with a recognised fifty per cent disability may die in October for reasons that have nothing to do with September. Her own lawyer put the honest version on Cadena SER: the deterioration in her health over the past year of proceedings was plain to see, and had the eviction been suspended as they asked, we would not be here. That is a clinical judgement offered by someone who watched it happen, not a verdict. It should be read as what it is.

What requires no verdict at all is the mechanism. Nothing unlawful occurred on 23 September. The door was opened with an angle grinder, the woman was taken out on a stretcher, and every step of it conformed to Spanish law. The instrument was the leases act of 1994, passed by Felipe González’s Socialist government, which set a clock running on Spain’s old protected tenancies and permits a second inheritance of one only where the tenant’s recognised disability reaches sixty-five per cent. Hers was assessed at fifty. Fifteen percentage points, and a home of seventy years. A dictatorship’s view of who counts as a householder burned half of Maricarmen’s legal inheritance before she was old enough to know it existed, and a Socialist statute of 1994 collected on the balance.

There is a further detail that deserves a moment, because it tells you how long the dead hand reaches. Her father signed the original tenancy in 1956 and died four years later. Under Franco’s rules, only men could hold such contracts, so the tenancy transferred first to her mother, who died in 2005. That transfer consumed one of the two inheritances the law allows.

THE COMPANY PICKED UP THE PHONE. THE MINISTRY COULD NOT.

The right has an argument worth stating properly, and it is not the one about rental supply. It is this: in the end it was Urbagestión that moved. Her lawyer said so herself, and said it bitterly, complaining that the administrations had no alternative to offer and that it fell to the firm which evicted her to produce one. The company’s directors sent condolences to the family on Wednesday, expressing profound sadness.

Set against that is the record of the preceding months, as Duro described it to Cuatro. The ministry tried to make up the difference in rent from housing plan funds, which the law permits. The company never took that forward. At a certain point it stopped answering the telephone. A well-known writer offered to cover the shortfall. Nothing. Four eviction attempts were made in a single year. The firm negotiated only after the images of a stretcher went round the country and tents appeared in the Puerta del Sol, which is a statement about public pressure rather than corporate conscience.

And the sharpest indictment of this government was delivered by the woman herself. In an interview recorded by TVE in the hours before she was carried out, Maricarmen was asked about Pedro Sánchez. He has no idea how many evictions happen every day, she said, or he does not want to have one. On Wednesday the prime minister posted that the country felt her loss as its own.

A DECREE NAMED AFTER A DEAD WOMAN 

The sequence of the last nine days is a documentary record of political reflex. Congress threw out the government’s emergency housing decrees on 2 October. Sánchez called an election for 29 November on the Monday. On Tuesday, the Council of Ministers simply approved the decrees again, with modifications, to be sent to the standing committee that functions once parliament is dissolved and where the Basque Nationalists’ support makes at least one of them likely to pass. The text was in the official gazette on Wednesday morning. The first decree took effect on Thursday, suspending the eviction of vulnerable tenants until 2030 and guaranteeing automatic renewal for leases expiring up to 2029. The Spanish press had already given it a name. They call it the Maricarmen decree. She was alive when it was approved and dead when it came into force. 

CCOO, UGT and the tenants’ unions have now called a twenty-four hour general strike for 11 November, the first in Spain since 2012, the first of Sánchez’s premiership, and eighteen days before the country votes. Pepe Álvarez of the UGT has told employers it is absolutely constitutional. He is right, and it will change nothing on its own, because the polls still put the Popular Party and Vox comfortably past a majority, and the Popular Party’s regional governments signed a joint document in 2024 refusing to apply the rent controls already on the statute book.

Here is what should happen, and it is not complicated enough to require another commission. The sixty-five per cent threshold in the 1994 act should be deleted and the remaining protected tenancies secured for the lifetime of the tenant. That is one clause. It could have been tabled in any of the eight years Sánchez has governed, and it was not, and an emergency decree rushed through a standing committee eighteen days before an election is not the same thing as a law. Decrees expire. Statutes have to be repealed in daylight, by people who must then explain themselves to voters.

Infobae reports that Maricarmen said, in the days before she died, that she had not managed to defend her own home but had fought so that others would fight for theirs. She did that much. The rest is owed, not earned. Somewhere in Retiro tonight there is a flat with a dead woman’s belongings in it and a price on it that nobody who ever lived there could pay. That is Spain’s housing crisis. Everything else is a campaign.

All The Warnings We Know That Netanyahu Got

From the mighty Haaretz:

Israeli security agencies and senior officials in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates repeatedly warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, according to a Haaretz investigation and a series of reports in The New York Times, Yedioth Ahronoth, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic. Several of the warnings explicitly concerned the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu rejected the reports, denying that he had received explicit warnings. The prime minister places responsibility for the attack – which claimed the lives of more than 1,100 soldiers and Israeli and foreign civilians and sparked a prolonged war in the Gaza Strip – on the security chiefs who were subordinate to him at the time: Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, IDF Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi and Military Intelligence chief Aharon Haliva. All four have since left their posts.

The first of these warnings was received in early 2023, when thousands protested across Israel against the Netanyahu government's push to reform the judiciary. In March, Netanyahu dismissed former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant after he called to halt the judicial overhaul. Thousands took to the streets overnight, blocking major highways. Between March and July 2023, the IDF's Military Intelligence Directorate gave Netanyahu four reports, warning that enemy states and terror groups view Israel as vulnerable because of the polarization in Israeli society and the country's military.

The head of the directorate's Research Division wrote to Netanyahu on March 19 – a week before the first attempt to pass the judicial overhaul legislation and before the attempt to dismiss Gallant – and again on July 16, a week before a key Knesset vote advancing the judicial overhaul. He attached an appendix of raw intelligence reports to each letter, combined it into a brief analysis warning of a looming military confrontation.

"All the actors in the system point to Israel being in a severe, unprecedented crisis that threatens its cohesion and weakens it. ... For our main enemies – Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas – this weakness is part of a linear process ending in Israel's collapse, and the current situation is an opportunity to accelerate and deepen its distress."

An excerpt from one of the IDF's intelligence reports

In May, then-Shin Bet security service chief Ronen Bar told Netanyahu that war against Hamas was "unavoidable." In their meeting on May 21, 2023, following the conclusion of the IDF's operation against Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Bar told the prime minister that the operation was "the first round against the Shi'ite axis. We should prepare for an opening blow, for a round of targeted assassinations. Hamas is the next challenge at our doorstep." Netanyahu rejected the admonition, arguing that Hamas was deterred and telling Bar that Israel had "a strong balance of fear with Hamas."

According to a Yedioth Aharonoth report published in 2024, Bar held another meeting with Netanyahu in July 2023, this time warning that war was imminent. The report states that Bar held a meeting with Netanyahu on the eve of the vote to forbid judges from invoking the reasonableness clause in cases – one of the key elements in the Netanyahu government's judicial overhaul plan. Bar told Netanyahu that he couldn't say the exact day and time the war would begin. Bar received Netanyahu's permission to share this intelligence with Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, and subsequently gave him a similar message.

The opposition leader recounted meeting Bar the night before the reasonableness clause was canceled, when he received "unprecedented warnings about the security risks and internal divisions caused by the judicial overhaul." Last week, Bar said he "warned Netanyahu of an impending disaster, and he ignored me." He added, "After three years in which he refused to acknowledge his responsibility and did everything in his power to prevent the establishment of a state commission of inquiry, he is now trying to deflect blame by hurling accusations at those who warned him in real time."

22 days before the attack

In mid-September 2023, former senior Fatah official Sufian Abu Zaida, who mediated between Israel and Hamas, met with Israeli officials after receiving an explicit threat from Yahya Sinwar, then Hamas' leader in Gaza, to cause an "earthquake" if negotiations don't come to fruition. A Haaretz investigation published last month revealed that Israel and Hamas were close to a prisoner exchange deal during the summer of 2023, but Netanyahu postponed a committee session that would approve it. "All that was required at this stage was the approval of the ministerial committee for hostages and missing persons, whose consent is needed for the release of prisoners, especially those serving life sentences," a security source told Haaretz. After the intelligence officials' meeting with Abu Zaida on September 15, Bar briefed Netanyahu in a phone call arranged by Netanyahu's then-military secretary, Avi Gil. Two days later, on September 17, Israel's military and intelligence officials held an urgent discussion on Sinwar's threat, but didn't make any concrete decision.

11 days before the attack

Last month, The Atlantic reported that Egypt's intelligence chief, Abbas Kamel, came to Israel 11 days before Hamas' October 7 attacks and delivered a warning that the armed group in Gaza was preparing for a major attack and that the window of opportunity to prevent a disaster was closing. According to the report, which cites Israeli, Egyptian, Arab, U.S. and European officials briefed on his visit, Kamel recommended that Israel grant Hamas economic concessions to prevent a confrontation. He warned that if Israel did not change its course, "Gaza is going to blow up in your faces," the report said, citing a former Israeli official later briefed on the visit.

According to the Haaretz investigation, UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed called Netanyahu about 10 days before October 7, warning him that Hamas was planning a "major attack" and urging him to take it seriously. After the Haaretz exposé, The New York Times reported that Sheikh Mohamed mentioned his conversation with Netanyahu in a discussion with William Burns, then CIA director. He told Burns that during the call, he had spoken with Netanyahu about a "looming threat" from Hamas in the West Bank or Gaza. A transcript of a meeting Netanyahu convened with senior Israeli security officials on October 1, 2023, reportedly shows that he told the officials that any Israeli action in Gaza could undermine the prospects of Saudi Arabia establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, a deal he believed was close to being finalized.

48 hours before the attack 

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Egyptian intelligence chief Kamel called Netanyahu days before the attack to warn him of signs of an impending assault from Gaza after earlier Egyptian warnings went unheeded. Kamel then called Netanyahu days before October 7 after the earlier warnings failed to produce a change in Israeli policy, according to the Journal. Egyptian officials continued to warn Israel until as late as 48 hours before the attack, the report said. None of the warnings contained specific information about the timing or scale of the planned assault. Netanyahu denied the reports and said he has instructed to file a libel suit. "In the months preceding October 7, Prime Minister Netanyahu did not meet or speak with Abbas Kamel, who was then head of Egypt's General Intelligence Service, and no Israeli intelligence source conveyed an Egyptian warning to the Prime Minister," he wrote on X.

Lobby Terms

Daniel Tester and Peter Geoghegan write:

The head of a lobbying firm paid by the United Arab Emirates to promote its interests in Westminster is also advising the UK government on how Britain can use sport and culture to project influence overseas, Democracy for Sale can reveal. Roland Rudd, founder and chair of FGS Global, sits on the UK Soft Power Council, which advises the Foreign Office and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. 

FGS has been registered to lobby British politicians on behalf of the UAE embassy since October 2025, including arranging meetings, calls and emails with MPs, their staff and senior civil servants.  According to its registration, FGS is paid “to promote awareness of the UAE-UK bilateral relationship”. The stated targets for this “political influence” include members of the Commons and the Lords and politicians in the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish parliaments. 

Rudd’s position puts the boss of a lobbying firm representing the UAE on a government advisory body whose remit includes sport - at the very moment that the UAE’s role in British football is facing unprecedented scrutiny. Manchester City faces the prospect of major sporting sanctions after being found to have breached football’s financial rules over 100 times. The club’s Abu Dhabi owners reportedly held talks with a UK government minister last week, while opposition politicians have raised questions about prime minister Andy Burnham’s dealings with the UAE as Manchester mayor. 

The Gulf state also has a direct stake in UK foreign policy. Britain continues to license arms exports to the UAE, despite widespread allegations - which it denies - that it has supplied weapons to the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group that has committed mass killings in Sudan’s civil war. 

The UK’s Soft Power Council was launched in January 2025 and is co-chaired by the foreign and culture secretaries. It meets quarterly to offer advice on how to harness soft power “through international interventions in support of foreign policy priorities”.  The council’s two dozen members include representatives of the Football Association, the British Council, Universities UK and Historic England. FGS is the only lobbying firm on the council. 

Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Calum Miller MP told Democracy for Sale that “allowing anyone on a foreign government’s payroll to sit on an advisory body shaping UK foreign and sport policies would present a blatant conflict of interest.”

“The public has a right to know whether Roland Rudd raised the UAE’s interests with Ministers and what commitments they gave him. The Government must come clean about what was discussed and agreed behind closed doors,” the MP added.

FGS said Rudd’s position at the consultancy was “always declared in relation to his unpaid public roles”. The Foreign Office said “all appointments to government bodies are subject to an appropriate due diligence process.” 

No record of what was said 

Official records show that FGS has entertained some of the most senior figures in government since it began lobbying for the UAE, including Rachel Reeves, then chancellor, the prime minister’s chief business adviser Varun Chandra, and Antonia Romeo, now the UK’s most senior civil servant. FGS also wined and dined Lord Stockwood, then investment minister, and Jonathan Reynolds, then chief whip and now business secretary, as well as officials at the Treasury and the Department for Business and Trade.

Every occasion was logged as hospitality rather than as a meeting, so no minutes were taken and there is no public record of what was discussed. There is no suggestion that the UAE or any other FGS client was raised. “The rules are clear: hospitality that includes a meeting must be recorded as a meeting, with a description of the purpose given,” said Kamila Kingstone, senior policy and campaign lead at Spotlight on Corruption. Until there are meaningful consequences for non-compliance, the public will not have a clear picture of who is influencing their politicians.” 

Tom Brake, chief executive of Unlock Democracy, said: “if senior ministers and officials are sitting down with lobbyists, the public has a right to know what was discussed - especially when the firm involved is working on behalf of a foreign government.” A government spokesperson said ministers and officials “meet and engage with a wide range of external organisations”, and that transparency data “is published in line with the Ministerial Code and transparency guidance.” 

Rudd’s world 

Rudd is one of the best-connected figures in British public relations. He founded the City PR firm Finsbury in 1994, and it later merged into FGS Global. His sister, former Conservative home secretary Amber Rudd, was criticised in 2015 for not declaring her brother’s lobbying business while energy secretary, after her department approved a gas storage project represented by his firm.

FGS, majority-owned by the private equity giant KKR, describes itself as a ‘strategic leadership advisory’ and does not publish a full list of its clients. Transparency disclosures show it has lobbied for KKR, the trading platform Robinhood and Oracle, the US tech company that has won millions of pounds in UK government contracts. FGS has also hired a number of staff from Global Counsel, the now defunct lobbying outfit co-founded by Peter Mandelson. Rudd declined to comment personally. The Soft Power Council did not respond to questions.

Unique Genius?

Nathan Cofnas held a United Kingdom visa when he was at Cambridge, and possibly still does, yet Paul Holden writes:

A Byline Times review of Dr Nathan Cofnas’ social media output has found that he posted comments about “Jewish IQ”, racial purity and miscegenation that appear to be racist and antisemitic, and shared an essay arguing that the “emptying” of Gaza should be seen as “a realistic option”. Cofnas, a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University in Belgium, published a Substack article in July 2026 that accused Professor Jason Arday of plagiarism and “academic fraud” and implied that Arday had invented aspects of his personal biography. The piece set off weeks of media coverage of Arday, Cambridge University’s youngest black professor, who resigned on 5 August and was found dead on 14 August.

Cofnas’ posts on Facebook and X could undercut his claims to be engaged in academic inquiry into the role of race and IQ in society. They also raise serious questions about why the media took their cues and framing on Arday from Cofnas despite his objectionable views. In one post about Jewish IQ in August 2024, Cofnas approvingly cited the work of “Nazi psychologists” who “acknowledged Jewish intelligence”. In other posts, Cofnas complained about how “sh*tlibs” in Israel were facilitating “nonwhite immigration” into the country. He also dismissed a “huge %… of US Jews” as Mischlings, a derogatory German term meaning ‘mixling’ or half-breed that was adopted as a legal term by the Nazis to describe individuals with mixed Jewish and Aryan ancestry. Cofnas is Jewish.

Cofnas Saved by Trump

Cofnas was suspended by Ghent University on 20 August, six days after Arday’s death. In a post to X, Cofnas said the university was investigating him “for discriminating against Arday”. However, Ghent lifted the suspension after the Trump administration intervened publicly on Cofnas’ behalf. The day after the suspension, the US Ambassador to Belgium, Bill White, publicly condemned it in a lengthy post on X. White said it was an exercise in “scapegoating” and “punish[ed]” Cofnas’ “accurate journalism unearthing academic dishonesty”. “Dishonest, corrupt institutions that engage in, or reward, scapegoating mob behaviour are not desirable partners for us,” White said.

White announced that the US Government would be “reviewing any relationships we have with Ghent University”. Public records show that the US Department of Defense funded research projects at Ghent valued at $869,000. His post was shared by Elon Musk, who responded with an American flag emoji. On 27 August, Cofnas posted to X that Ghent’s rector, Petra De Sutter, had allowed him to “stay”. He said he wished to “personally thank” White, citing White’s “great support which helped bring about a just outcome. I am proud of my country.” The university also clarified that Cofnas’ case remained under disciplinary investigation, and that he would be barred from teaching and required to work remotely for three months.

Byline Times has discovered that Cofnas’ claims against Arday were either flatly incorrect or seriously dubious. Cofnas, for instance, questioned Arday’s claim to have run 30 marathons in 30 days, but evidence from the time, since unearthed, suggest that Arday did. Byline Times has also shown how media coverage of allegations of plagiarism were heavily skewed and ignored the possibility raised by several academic observers that they may have resulted from unintentional errors. Cofnas was dismissed from Emmanuel College at Cambridge in July 2024 after he published a blog post, ‘A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution’, that argued for “anti-woke” politics and said “there must be some barriers set up between races in order for each one to express its own unique genius”. Cofnas has denied advocating racial segregation.

Posts on Jewish IQ and racial purity

Cofnas is a prolific poster online, including on X and Facebook. A review of his Facebook, in particular, reveals that Cofnas has posted inflammatory and bizarre commentary about Jewish IQ, racial purity and other matters. In August 2024, Cofnas posted a rebuttal to an article and video made by the influencers Simone and Malcolm Collins, in which they argued that it was a “myth” that Jewish people had higher than average IQs. “If you think Jews don’t have higher average IQ, what planet are you living on?” Cofnas asked. “Even Nazi psychologists acknowledged Jewish intelligence.” In November 2023, Cofnas posted a lengthy thread about the IQ scores of Ashkenazi Jews and “Jewish success”. Cofnas argued that the stereotype of Jews as “shrewd”, long treated as an antisemitic trope, was proof that there are genuine “obvious personality differences” between Jews and non-Jews. “We know that stereotypes generally have a basis in reality,” Cofnas wrote.

In a post in June 2024, Cofnas argued that the “reported intermarriage rate among non-Orthodox Jews is 72%, and it’s been that level for two generations. Huge % of US ‘Jews’ are 1st or 2nd degree Mischlings who identify as Jewish for oppression points (e.g. Tim Wise), fake Reform converts, or Kanye-style Israelites.” He later identified Tom Steyer, the businessman and failed California gubernatorial candidate, as a “Mischling Democrat”. Mischling was adopted as a legal category by the Nazis for people with mixed Jewish and “German-blooded” or Aryan ancestry under the Nuremberg Race Laws. The German word can mean ‘mongrel’ or ‘half-breed’. In a post from November 2023, Cofnas dismissed Tim Wise, an anti-racist and anti-Zionist campaigner with Russian Jewish heritage, as “one quarter Jew Tim Wise”. Cofnas compared Wise (and other liberal Jews) to “full-blooded Jews” who were “increasingly likely to be orthodox or Stephen Miller-type Trump voters”.

Cofnas also posted about the share of recent immigrants to Israel who are “halachically” Jewish, meaning recognised as Jewish under traditional religious law. “Sh*tlibs in Israel want to do to Jews and Israel what their ideological counterparts in America and Europe want to do to whites and the West,” he wrote in February 2026. “Left-wing politicians like [Ehud] Barak constructed an immigration policy under which the majority (according to one report, 86%) of recent immigrants to Israel are not halachically Jewish.” Later in the thread, Cofnas wrote that “its the same philosophy as ‘anyone can be an Englishman, let’s bring in 20 million Pakistanis because they’ll become English.’”

Posts on Gaza and Zohran Mamdani

In late November 2023, Cofnas shared an essay by the right-wing commentator Richard Hanania titled ‘Israel must crush Palestinian hopes’. Cofnas highlighted a passage claiming that the “international community cares more about the sins of Israel than everyone else in the world combined”. Hanania ended his essay by writing that “eventually I think we can get to a place where emptying Gaza becomes seen as a realistic option both within and outside the region”. 

In November 2025 Cofnas responded to a post featuring an Associated Press photo showing destruction in Gaza City from Israeli bombardment. Cofnas wrote that “for the first time in 2000 years, there are consequences for killing Jews. With that image in their brains, people will think twice before they try to do it again.” In June 2025, Cofnas wrote about Zohran Mamdani, now Mayor of New York: “Mamdani just won the Dem mayoral primary in NYC on the promise to be more anti-white/Jewish and to nationalize grocery stores and housing.”

Interviews with Noah Carl and Amy Wax

In 2024, Cofnas interviewed the British academic Noah Carl on his podcast, The Cofnas Podcast. Carl lost a fellowship at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, in 2019 following widespread outcry from academics who accused him of publishing “ethically suspect and methodologically flawed” studies that amounted to “racist pseudoscience”. In October 2024, Cofnas said on social media that YouTube had removed all episodes of The Cofnas Podcast for violating its “hate speech policy”. Cofnas filmed two interviews with Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, in 2024. In October 2025, he posted a photo of himself with his arm around Wax, with the comment “Jewish race realist singularity”.

The university sanctioned Wax in September 2024, stripping her of her named chair and halving her salary for a year, after a faculty hearing board found that she had engaged in “flagrant unprofessional conduct” including a “history of sweeping, blithe, and derogatory generalisations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status”. On a podcast in 2021, Wax said that “as long as most Asians support Democrats and help advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration”.

Almost Nailed On

Peter Carlyon writes:

In theory, there could be few better candidates for a London constituency than Sagal Abdi-Wali. The newly minted boss of Camden council also spent two years as cabinet member for housing, a time in which she told The Londoner “we’ve changed the culture of the council”. But some of her former colleagues aren’t so sure. “I’ve never heard a bigger load of bollocks in all my life,” scoffed one former Camden official who’s worked extensively with Abdi-Wali, when we put this claim to them. 

On Thursday, the 42 year-old Somali refugee is hoping to see off a scandal-hit Zack Polanski to become Holborn and St Pancras’ new MP. Bookies put her as almost nailed on to succeed. Since she looks to be on the brink of victory, we wanted to get to know Labour’s candidate for Holborn and St Pancras — to understand more about who she was beyond the somewhat timid PR drive seeking to propel her into parliament.

We found those keen to praise her sunny personality and commitment to her area. But over days of reporting, and in conversations with over half a dozen current and former colleagues, we also found many people questioning her track record — both at Camden council and in her widely vaunted image as a local charity worker.

Abdi-Wali and I meet in a Costa Coffee near Euston. It’s raining, and with her team in full campaigning mode we have just 15 minutes to speak. She arrives wearing a bright pink and purple hijab and white Adidas trainers. She sits down, smiles warmly, and sets out her offer to the people of Camden: “I know this community really well. I’ve seen the issues that people have here. That’s what made me get involved in local politics, and I’ve been affected by them myself.”

It’s a solid pitch, and one which Camden Labour hope will be enough to overcome any squeamishness over Abdi-Wali’s close ties with Keir Starmer. As chair of his local party for four years, she worked alongside the former Prime Minister and can be seen embracing him upon his arrival at Downing Street in 2024.

Abdi-Wali has spent almost two decades working in and around Camden council. She became a local government officer in the 2000s upon completing her degree in political science from Leeds University. She spent the next 15 years bouncing around different departments before eventually landing in digital services — a role she gave up in 2022 to become the councillor for Camden Square. It’s been – as former housing minister Steve Reed phrased it in an interview with her earlier this year – a “meteoric rise”. In the view of her opponents, though, such a rapid ascension has not necessarily been a good thing.

‘It’s difficult for me to have an opinion about her, because she didn’t turn up to trustee meetings’ 

Andrew Feinstein was a local Labour activist (and before that a member of the African National Congress in South Africa) before spinning out to launch his own party, the Camden People’s Alliance in 2024. This time around though, he’s backing Polanski.

“The idea is to move away from careerist, mendacious politicians,” he tells me — that’s Keir Starmer — and with the former MP for Holborn and St Pancras playing such a prominent role in elevating Abdi-Wali up the Camden Labour Party ranks, he sees many of the same qualities in her. “I don’t think she sees the value in engaging with people except at election time.” 

She frowns when I raise Feinstein’s criticism that she’s being careerist. “I think anyone who’s seen my life and my track record and my career wouldn’t say anything like that,” she says strongly. Abdi-Wali first came to the UK as a child refugee fleeing the Somalian civil war and speaks powerfully about her gratitude to the borough that granted her family sanctuary. “I’ve literally dedicated my life to community service and giving back.” 

While Abdi-Wali’s political career is well-documented, there isn’t much readily available information about her volunteering and community work. On Companies House, she is listed as having previously been a director at two organisations: the Council of Somali Organisations and Voluntary Action Camden (VAC). Her role at the latter, from 2021-23, was to help connect charity workers with potential sources of funding — exactly the kind of community-rooted work her reputation suggests she’d excel at. But, according to one senior figure of the charity, she was hardly ever there. 

“It’s difficult for me to have an opinion about her, because she didn’t turn up to trustee meetings,” this person says. When she did attend, Abdi-Wali would often sit through the online meetings without saying anything. “It’s the regular commitment bit for her that was challenging,” they say reluctantly. By 2023 there was a “restructure” of the trustees and Abdi-Wali left. Of course, that’s only one charity. But one local Labour party insider we spoke to questioned just how much Abdi-Wali really has worked in the local voluntary sector: “I don’t think too many people on the ground see that. Who can back that up? Who’s saying that apart from her?” 

In response to a request for comment, the Labour party refused to provide a list of charities Abdi-Wali has worked with. Instead, a spokesperson said that “Sagal’s 20-year long record of volunteering in her community is commendable. If anyone would like to challenge that, they should say so on the record.” They also provided a quote from Danny Silverstone, a school governor at Primary Hill alongside Abdi-Wali and a fellow volunteer at VAC. “I’ve seen first-hand the substantial time, care and energy Sagal Abdi-Wali has put into her voluntary work, including at Voluntary Action Camden and as a school governor at two local schools.” 

How about housing?

Asked to outline her priorities for Camden, Abdi-Wali tells me that “the thing I’m most passionate about is housing”. She took on the role of housing boss shortly before the housing ombudsman found Camden to have one of the highest rates of maladministration in the country, with council properties plagued by chronic leaks and pitiful response times. Why, I ask, should the people of Holborn and St Pancras elect someone from the same party responsible for these failings? Former Labour MP Emma Dent-Coad announced that she would be backing Polanski over Abdi-Wali, telling the Camden New Journal that “there are huge problems at Camden council” and that “Holborn and St Pancras needs an MP who understands that the current housing model has failed”. 

Abdi-Wali is resolute that she’s changed the culture of the council since taking over. “The number one thing is that we’ve increased the number of residents panels,” she says, though admits that this is “just the start” of what’s needed. However, two former colleagues expressed skepticism about her housing credentials.

“She was a terrible housing chief,” one former official told us, overseeing a surge in the number of households in temporary accommodation — like many London boroughs in that time — and an increase in the number of tenant complaints to the housing ombudsman. A separate former employee in the housing department remembered Abdi-Wali as a “very peripheral figure” who they were surprised to see appointed as the council’s housing lead. 

In the run-up to the election, housing campaigners have also been sharing their dissatisfaction. As we have previously covered, leaseholders in her ward complain that she didn’t respond when they wrote with concerns about their defective homes. Over the weekend, housing safety campaigner Fiona Garrett shared a similar experience in a blog post. Garrett, who set up No More Falls after her son Joshua fell to his death in Holborn due to a faulty railing, said her emails asking to meet the Labour candidate had gone unanswered for weeks — in contrast to candidates from the Greens, Conservatives and Lib Dems – only getting an answer as her case attracted more media attention.

The ming vase lives on

It’s been observed multiple times in this short, frantic election campaign that Labour’s strategy seems not dissimilar from the “ming vase” approach that propelled Starmer into Number 10: keep your head down and stay out of trouble. Despite granting The Londoner an interview, Abdi-Wali’s team repeatedly rebuffed our requests to go out canvassing with her — normally a bread and butter piece of political coverage, at least for a party confident in their candidate’s ability to talk with people on the doorsteps. 

The Green Party has been running a far bolshier campaign, mobilising a small army of eager young door knockers, who have been seen everywhere from Somers Town to Primrose Hill pounding the concrete. Janice, a woman in her 50s who lives in Camden Square, told me that the Greens had posted three flyers through her door and that she’d probably vote for them. She’d received just one from Labour. A stall at the Green Party conference even instructed attendees to hightail it back to Camden to fight the good fight.

Labour’s social media strategy, too, has been restrained. It mostly consists of photos with cabinet members and Abdi-Wali’s straightforward, selfie-shot video diaries cataloguing each day of campaigning. Polanski’s Mamdani-esque approach, it is not. Despite this, several people praise her warmth and down-to-earth demeanour.

Even a scathing article about Camden Labour published by Tribune last week titled ‘The Dark Arts of Camden Labour’ admitted she is “much more charming and socially adept” than Starmer. “She’s this warm person with strong local roots” agreed local Labour party activist and former BBC journalist Martin Plaut, who has been out campaigning with Abdi-Wali. “She’s a Camden girl,” he said, when pressed for more substance. “She’s Camden… she’s just Camden normal.”

Will this be enough? Frankly, it would be astonishing if not: Labour has held onto Holborn and St Pancras ever since it was established in 1983. The borough also has a sizeable Muslim population, with whom Abdi-Wali’s story is said to be going down well at the doorstep. And the election comes right when an ascendant Andy Burnham is battening down voters who may otherwise have swung Green. Punters on online prediction market Polymarket put her chances of winning at over 90%.

The only insight of any personal depth came on the streets of Camden Square — Abdi-Wali’s home turf — when I approached a guy wearing a beanie and asked whether he knew her. “I went to Quran class with her!” he said excitedly. “She’s a good person. A good footballer as well. She used to play attacking mid and she’d bully all the boys off the ball in the playground. She was a baller, you know.” Unfortunately for Abdi-Wali, this fellow doesn’t vote.

Routine Rotation

There is going to be digital ID after all, as the only way to enforce the ban on under-16s from social media, a ban devised as the latest excuse to impose the identity cards and then the digital version that have been the solution in search of a problem since Michael Howard was Home Secretary in a tabloid bidding war with his Shadow, Tony Blair.

They have had identity cards in France since time immemorial, but then we are presumably no longer complaining that dinghy-catchers from there were fleeing a safe country. Britain must also be desperately unsafe now that the USAF has withdrawn from USAF Fairford, raising the question of what that base was any longer for. After all, the American military presence on our shores was supposed to be as vital to our security as the intelligence relationship with Israel that sanctioning the West Bank settlements has apparently destroyed. Not so long ago, the Dukedoms of Edinburgh, York and Sussex were all effectively vacant, leaving the east of this island in fear of an imminent Viking invasion. But this is far worse, extending to the whole Realm.

Although you never know, it may be too late for all of the American bases to be closed by Thanksgiving, which would therefore have become an annual holiday in celebration. But there is plenty of time to make that happen by the Fourth of July. After all, we are to have the Britannia Shield, as Blair would have called it. I mean, really? Kemi Badenoch cannot think of a better name than that? Oh, well, it looks as if it is going to be a literal shield, no doubt with Britannia on it and probably made out of plastic, to be carried around the country and held up theatrically to the sky as if in defiance of some enemy or other, thereby providing an item for the difficult middle of local news bulletins, between the big story and the weather forecast. All very That's Life. Perhaps it should instead be called Esther's Shield?

August Hanning seems to have passed on everything that the BND knew about Russia or Iran, and the Germans are professionals rather than James Bond or Johnny English wannabes, so the fact that we are all still here would seem to blow out of the water both the existence of the threat and the efficacy of its supposed deterrents such as Trident, NATO, and indeed the erosion of civil liberties by such means as digital ID. In that last, what will be the role of the Artificial Intelligence to which were to ascribe personhood while denying it to the unborn child, or to the terminally or chronically ill, or to the inconveniently old or disabled, or to the schoolgirls of Minab, or to anyone at all in Russia, or to Christa Pike, whom God has kept in this life to call the United States, and those elsewhere in West who would restore the death penalty, away from the capital punishment for which the only ever theological argument was that it was permissible if there were no other way of protecting public safety, as is clearly no longer the case, if it ever was?

The Fragrance And The Stink

The Observer carries one obituary per week, and this week’s was of the novelist and screenwriter Peter Prince. Thoroughly deserving, but not the vastly more famous poster girl for assisted suicide, Dame Esther Rantzen. Her death has been underreported compared to the saturation coverage that might have been expected, and which was accorded to that of Sir Jimmy Savile. I hope that the Sunday People will look into the present state of the man known variously as Mark Standish, Alex Standish and Alex Cavendish, and who was once prolific on Twitter as @PrisonUK. The media should also check in on Ben Fellows. When Rantzen supposedly discovered that at least one of her homes had been used at least once for the sexual abuse of at least one child, a girl of five, then her only concern was for her house. Either all is about to be revealed, or every sinew is being strained to ensure that nothing was. Similarly, A.N. Wilson writes:

A nice radio presenter, Kate McGann of Times Radio, said on the morning after Jeffrey Archer’s death that he had his sins and faults but he was not a man to deny this.

She is very young, and clearly was not aware of the fact that in 1986, a Sunday newspaper splashed a headline, “Tory boss Archer pays off vice girl”. (Archer was Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party). The “vice girl” was a woman called Monica Coghlan. Archer had been seen on a London railway station being given £2,000 hush money by one of Archer’s buddies. Archer denied the claims of the News of the World and The People. He sued for libel and got over half a million pounds in damages. The judge in the trial was so besotted by Mrs Archer, a pretty, rather snooty chemistry don, that he told the jury that it was unthinkable that a man with a “fragrant” wife like Mary could ever dally with the likes of poor Coghlan.

It was a deeply ugly episode not only in Archer’s life, but in that of the sleazy Conservative Party. Everyone knew that Archer was lying, and he was eventually had up for perjury. I was Literary Editor of the Standard at the time and he came to one of our Lit Lunches at the Dorchester to promote a book only days before his trial. I introduced him to the audience by saying he did not need to say anything but that anything he did say might be taken down and used in evidence. He was absolutely furious and began to denounce me from the podium, shouting, perfectly accurately, that his books sold in far greater numbers than my own! I am sure this was true, but at the same time, I remain very sceptical about the claims made by Archer that his books sold in tens of millions. 

I attended every day of his trial for perjury. The judge, Mr Justice Potts, said that it was the worst level of perjury he had ever encountered and he warned ‘Lady’ Archer that the things she had said in the witness box were themselves demonstrable falsehoods. While the trial was going on, Archer laid on a weird stage show at the Haymarket Theatre called The Accused. At the end of the play, in which he was standing trial, the audience had to vote whether he was guilty or not guilty. The night I went to the show, he was found guilty by the miserably small audience. I went back to his dressing room and he apologised for the small audience. ‘It’s this rail strike,’ he explained. ‘We had a full house booked but all the trains from the suburbs have been cancelled.’

There was no strike happening that week. Like many of the things he said, it was completely untrue. When we parted, in the Haymarket, I followed him up the street. He darted down a dark alley near Leicester Square. I felt I was in a spy novel, as I quickened my pace as he turned one dark corner, then another. It was clear that he knew all the dingy, sad, dark places where the likes of Coghlan stand in the shadows hoping for business. Next day, I was in court again, as was he, listening to the evidence.

This was a man who had trained as a gym instructor in Oxford and been permitted to use the gym at Brasenose College. This went down in Who’s Who as a man who had been to Brasenose College, Oxford. He also claimed to have attended Wellington College, but he had in fact lived in a village called Wellington which happened to have a school.

Almost everything about Archer was fraudulent. His editor at Hodder and Stoughton, Richard Cohen, told me that his ‘books’ would arrive in the form of a few exercise books full of semi-literate scrawls. Cohen employed a team of English graduates to write the books. Archer had a good idea for plots but was all but incapable of writing. When he died, his editor at HarperCollins spoke of the number of times he tolerated his books being ‘edited’. Evidently, he had learnt to write since leaving Cohen, but it sounds as if what others would call editing others would call rewriting.

Back to the libel and perjury trials. Archer was sent down for four years. The claims made by him and his wife that they had given away the half million of damages to charity was proven in court to be quite untrue. A few very modest donations had been made to the likes of Ely Cathedral restoration fund. No actual charity, ie money given to help people, rather than insure the Archers invitations to concerts, was ever demonstrated.

As for Coghlan, the story is much, much sadder. Archer and the Fragrant Chemist continued to live in the Old Vicarage at Grantchester and to be beloved by Tory Grandees. It had been clear that Coghlan was telling the truth at the libel trial. She told the jury that he had a spotty back, and a decent judge would at that moment have asked Archer to take his shirt off. Archer, and the Establishment, were determined to silence her and when a few thousand used notes in an envelope did not work, she mysteriously died in a car crash. I have no doubt in my mind that Archer was responsible for meddling with the brakes. He was a bad, bad man. Michael Crick asked, ‘The big puzzle is not how Archer gets away with it time and again, but why he is allowed to.’

Yet the Leader of the Conservative Party described herself as heartbroken that he had died. Does she spend even half a minute thinking of Coghlan, a woman whose life was absolutely wretched and which ended violently because of Archer’s criminality? Stig Abell on Times Radio said that Archer’s books had helped many people to love literature. But the books are rubbish. Trash. Archer’s whole life was an uninterrupted series of frauds, lies, deceptions and crimes, including murder. I was reminded of old Malcolm Muggeridge saying that the British so loved old men, that had Oscar Wilde lived to 86, they would have made him Chief Scout.

To Understand British Complicity

Half of one per cent of the population told the census that it had a gender identity different from its sex, no one elected the black or Asian “community leaders”, and the United Kingdom has diplomatic relations with 196 other entities. Some dates are sensitive to transgender people, or to an ethnic minority, or to another country. But half of one per cent of the population does not own the date, much less do its self-appointed voices, never mind a foreign state.

Terrible things happened on 7 October 2023. Those did not include 40 beheaded babies, a baby in an oven, babies and children hanged in a row on a clothesline, babies cut from their mothers’ wombs (in reality an old IDF trick in Lebanon), mass rapes, or the “raped babies” whom David Lammy invented on live television off the top of his twisted head. The world was told that the genocide of Gaza would end when the hostages were released, but all survivors were freed by 13 October 2025, and even the last body was recovered on 26 January this year, yet the genocide continues, not least thanks to British arms and intelligence. Yes, genocide. In 1993, the former President of Bolivia, García Meza Tejada, was convicted of “genocide” for the deaths of fully eight people. Those may or may not have been the only people whom he killed. But they were the only victims of his “genocide”. Even Benjamin Netanyahu accepts that the death toll in Gaza is more than double that. Indeed, he and his supporters positively revel in it.

Netanyahu at least pretends to think that Hitler had only ever planned to deport the Jews until the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had persuaded him to gas them instead, but in fact Haj Amin al-Husseini was holed up in Berlin with no practical influence in the Middle East, being instead a kind of mascot for the recruitment of Balkan, Caucasian and Central Asian Muslims into the predecessor organisations of those which now controlled Ukraine and of those for which the New Right campaigned during the collapse of Yugoslavia. Having deployed the Black and Tans to Ireland, Winston Churchill redeployed them to Palestine in that Zionist cause, yet the Zionists later expressed their gratitude by plotting to kill him and by murdering his friend, Lord Moyne, as well as sending letter-bombs to the White House of his ally, Harry S. Truman. In the meantime, they had contracted the Haavara Agreement, fought against Britain throughout the Second World War, allied with Fascist Italy, twice sought an alliance with Nazi Germany on the grounds that it was a lesser evil than Britain, hanged the boobytrapped bodies of Sergeants Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice and photographed them, and bombed the King David Hotel. The parties that they founded now govern Israel, having armed Argentina during the Falklands War.

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher had not initially wanted to meet Menachem Begin in London, since her generation remembered what he was, and afterwards she expressed her regret at not having stuck to her guns. In 1980, she signed the Venice Declaration of nine European countries against Israeli settlements on the West Bank. In 1981, she denounced the Israeli bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, calling it illegal. In 1982, she responded to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon by imposing an arms embargo on Israel that remained in force until 1994; when Begin wrote to ask her to reconsider, then she did not even reply. What says Melanie Phillips, in whose ideological odyssey that war looms large? In 1988, Thatcher expelled two Israeli diplomats and closed the London Mossad station when one of its double agents had been convicted of terrorism in Britain and when that station had been caught for a second time forging British passports, a practice that was to resurface, with similar but notably less severe consequences, in 2010; no Israeli diplomat had ever before been deported from a friendly state. That all of this was to her credit would not be the view of her flamekeepers.

Normally mild-mannered, my late father could not look at Yitzhak Shamir. No less forthright on such matters was his old Army comrade whom I met again as my Senior Tutor and who is somehow still alive. Had the Irgun, the Lehi and the Haganah succeeded, then my father would never have got his 1939-1945 Star, his Africa Star with 8th Army Clasp, his Italy Star, his France and Germany Star, or his War Medal 1939–1945. There would have been no liberation, first of Italy, and then of France, the Low Countries, and what became West Germany. Enough of the men to have made a difference would have been dead. In 1948, the Irgun, the Lehi and the Haganah formed the Israeli Defense Forces, no Commonwealth spelling there, which on 1 April 2024 killed James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman, unarmed British veterans who were delivering humanitarian aid, and whom the IDF bombed three times to make sure that they were dead, as could not have been an accident. Yet Peter Oborne writes:

Twenty-five years have passed since sociologist Stanley Cohen asked a question that remains just as urgent today as it was when he first posed it. How is it that institutions, governments and ordinary people can know about atrocities, mass killing and human rights abuses, but simultaneously manage to put them out of their minds? His brilliant study, States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering, drew on Cohen’s own reporting of cover-ups, disappearances and torture in his native South Africa. Yet its examination of the ways in which we pretend to ourselves that terrible events are not taking place was broader, taking in Latin America, the Rwanda genocide, the Holocaust, the Middle East and other examples.

Cohen distinguished between the different ways in which politicians, journalists and others have suppressed knowledge of the truth. He identified what he called “literal denial” - the unblinking assertion that crimes are not taking place. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech to the United Nations contained numerous examples of literal denial. He said that the ratio of civilian casualties to combatants in Gaza was exceptionally low, that Israel did not block aid to Gaza, and that Hamas should be blamed for shortages.

He also made the nonsensical assertion that settler violence in the occupied West Bank was down to a “handful of young juvenile delinquents”. A Palestinian proverb, Yaktheb al-kithbah wa yusadikaha, roughly translates as: “He tells a lie, and then he believes it.” It describes the mental state of someone who has repeated the same falsehood so many times that eventually he or she has come to regard it as fact. This may explain not just Netanyahu but also the army of apologists who blindly repeat what he says. Cohen also paid attention to a more sophisticated form of denial which does challenge basic facts, but instead sanitises them in ways that seem reasonable or acceptable. He called this phenomenon “interpretative denial”.

Export licences

Channel 4 recently published an hour-long documentary exploring how British ministers have employed the technique identified by Cohen as “interpretative denial”, to sanction Israel’s destruction of Gaza. It is obvious to most people that Israel regularly commits crimes against humanity, with the newest Google Maps imagery showing total devastation across the enclave. Yet throughout this period, British ministers have denied Israeli war crimes. How have they managed this level of cognitive dissonance? The Channel 4 film, Britain’s Gaza Secrets Exposed, went a long way to providing the answer. Over the past three years, British firms have exported millions of pounds worth of weaponry to Israel while it flattened Gaza and slaughtered civilians.

All those weapons need export licences. Under both domestic and international law, Britain is not allowed to export weapons to any country which it has reason to suspect commits war crimes. This explains why, for the last three years, the Foreign Office unit that investigates potential breaches of humanitarian law has been busy assessing Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Channel 4 reporter Ramita Navai obtained internal Foreign Office assessments of Israel’s conduct during the early stages of the war, dealing with hundreds of notorious cases. Her investigation shows that again and again, the British Foreign Office failed to hold the Israeli army to account.

Take the case of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old girl trapped in a car with her dead family after they were shot by Israeli soldiers. She spent three hours on the telephone asking for help. Eventually, permission came for rescuers, but when they did, soldiers shot dead both the rescuers and Hind herself. Unspeakable and hideous - but the Foreign Office assessors cited insufficient evidence to conclude that Israeli soldiers had breached international law. Or take the air strike on Al-Fakhoura school in Jabalia refugee camp in November 2023, which killed dozens of people, including women and children. The Foreign Office did not label this a war crime, even though the United Nations had clearly marked the school as a shelter for displaced civilians, and its coordinates had been given to the Israeli military.

British officials managed to reach the same conclusion after 48 members of the Elian family were slaughtered in Nuseirat, and after Israel targeted a Medical Aid for Palestinians compound housing four British doctors. In only one case did the Foreign Office conclude that even a “possible” breach of international law had taken place. This was the Israeli strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen charity workers, including three British citizens. Dispatches revealed that even as Israel pledged an “full, urgent and transparent” enquiry into the World Kitchen tragedy, then Foreign Secretary David Cameron was signing off yet another batch of approvals for arms exports - without waiting for the Israeli investigation to be completed.

Convenient findings

There’s little question that these repeated Foreign Office judgments were convenient. Throughout this period, Britain was an enthusiastic ally of Israel, and unwilling to offend the United States. So was the British legal process twisted in Israel’s favour? Channel 4 suggests it might have been. It secured an interview with Mark Smith, the only British official to have resigned over Gaza. His comments were devastating: “We’ve all seen the aerial footage of entire neighbourhoods literally flattened to the ground. They’ve destroyed the vast majority of all residential buildings in Gaza. I’ve never seen anything like it in my career, in my life.”

Smith went on: “So, even without being on the team and having access to the assessments being made, I could see, on the news, in broad daylight, with the naked eye, the most appalling attacks taking place on a daily basis. I mean, almost every single school, and almost every single hospital, in Gaza, has been damaged, or destroyed. How are we justifying our arms exports? If there is even a question whether domestically or internationally that a state that you are selling arms to might be conducting a genocide, then the time to be discussing whether they might be in breach of IHL is way gone.” Smith says he stepped down after witnessing “illegality and complicity with war crimes” at the heart of government.

Channel 4 asked William Schabas, a leading human rights expert who comes from a family of Holocaust survivors, to comment on the Foreign Office’s judgement in the Hind Rajab tragedy. He replied: “When a child is killed in this manner, I think there has to be a very strong presumption that normally there cannot be any military justification or explanation for it.”

Channel 4 also spoke to Dearbhla Minogue, a lawyer with the Global Legal Action Network, which alongside the Palestinian NGO Al-Haq, took the UK government to court over its weapons exports to Israel. The groups lost, but the case led to the disclosure of the Foreign Office assessments analysed by Channel 4. Minogue says that the British government used a rigged methodology which made identifying Israeli violations almost impossible. According to her, the Foreign Office legal team created a Catch 22 situation. In order to prove that a strike violated international humanitarian law, it required exact information on Israeli intentions. Since Israel refused to provide this information the Foreign Office was unable to reach a conclusion on any incident, meaning that arms sales could continue. 

This brings me to a final point. The Channel 4 investigation has brought into the public domain a mass of fresh information that helps us to understand British complicity in the destruction of Gaza. Yet I have not found a single mainstream media outlet reporting its revelations. The explanation for this media omerta is simple: it’s not just the British government that is guilty of Cohen’s interpretative denial when it comes to the annihilation of Gaza. Most of the British media is equally complicit.