Files and Classifications

Of the two principal British characters in the Epstein Files, one has been a significant political figure for more than 30 years, while the other is receiving all the attention. Andrew Notwithstanding-Thefact has never been European Commissioner for Trade, or First Secretary of State, or British Ambassador to the United States.

The King never met Jeffrey Epstein, but Tony Blair met him as Prime Minister. Andrew has had to give up his Garter, so what about Blair's? Blair and Peter Mandelson both have Labour Party membership cards, and Mandelson has its whip. Why does anyone else retain either? Why would anyone vote for someone who did, or who wanted to? For example, the Labour candidate at Gorton and Denton, Angeliki Stogia?

And what of her day job? "As the lead of Arup's advisory services stakeholder engagement team, I design, deliver, and evaluate stakeholder and community engagement strategies for infrastructure, transport, energy, water, and sustainability projects." Yes. Yes, it does. A Labour councillor. Trying to become a Labour MP. Of course.

In fact, that sort of thing is one of the last aspects of British politics that still make sense. "Britain is broken," says the Government. "Britain is not broken," says the Official Opposition. "Britain is broken, so fix it by bringing back ever more of the people who broke it," says the party that is leading the polls. The Daily Express campaign to "Give Us a Proper Brexit" is backed by Boris Johnson. And so on, and on, and on.

Of the 20 councillors who joined Reform UK on the fourteenth of this month, five had been Independents, but 14 had been Conservatives 24 hours earlier, and one had been in the Green Party. And why not? The Greens have increased Brighton Council's surplus by the same £60 million that they have cut from services. Across the country, their councillors vote for austerity. A Portsmouth City Councillor of 30 years' standing, Jason Fazackarley, who had sat both as a Green and for Labour, moved in November from the Liberal Democrats, who had made him Lord Mayor, to Reform, following at least one other sitting Lib Dem councillor, Jeff Sumner of Burnley. From Labour to Reform defected, among at least five others nationwide last year, Councillor Mason Humberstone of Stevenage, who contested internal Labour Party elections on the slate of Morgan McSweeney's Labour Together. Reform expects to take the Stevenage parliamentary seat from Labour.

Green and Reform councillors both vote for austerity, just like, and indeed alongside, Labour, Conservative, and Lib Dem councillors. Just like, and indeed alongside, Conservative and Lib Dem parliamentarians, Green and Reform parliamentarians vote against even such limited workers' rights as Labour can be bothered to propose. If you vote Green, then you may as well vote for Nigel Farage. If you vote Reform, then you may as well vote for Zack Polanksi. Vote against austerity. Vote for workers' rights. Vote for the Workers Party.

Life Goes On

By causing the media to mention David Alton, the lifting of Chinese sanctions reminds us of the sheer gall of the pro-death movement in complaining that the Assisted Suicide Bill had been filibustered.

Today in the House of Lords, the Government Chief Whip emphatically ruled out the Government's taking up that Bill if the Parliament Act were invoked, as has never been done in relation to a Private Member's Bill, and which Lord Falconer would have no right to do.

In any case, Falconer offered to amend that Bill on the same day as he had made that empty threat. Falconer's offer was of amendments that Kim Leadbeater had also promised, but had never tabled.

There are rules about citing either House in the other, but Falconer's attempt at bullying was made on the Today programme. In the House of Commons on Monday, a Point of Order would be in order.

Against Satan’s Wiles

First Bambie Thug, and now some nonsense about Saint Brigid’s Day and a pagan goddess who merely happened to have the same name. Honestly, Ireland, we get it. You have changed. Changed from what, anyway? Yeats and Synge put on record the Ireland the Catholic topcoat of which was very ancient, but was nevertheless that, a lick of paint on a profoundly pagan culture.

Catholic Ireland as most people think of it did not begin to emerge until about 1870, or reach its fullest form, never complete, until 1890 or thereabouts. From then, it did not last 100 years. It never produced a Catholic intellectual of any international importance. There is no Irish Newman; in fact, he briefly spent the least successful period of his life there. All in awe of him, and therefore with a strong sense of England as a bastion of the Faith, priests from the Church's new heartlands of the Global South are often unaware that Ireland was ever considered anything special in Her life. Perhaps it never was?

But Saint Paul’s elemental spirits, which are Saint John’s fallen angels, are real, and they are what the human race worships in the absence of Abrahamic monotheism, not as worthy of worship, which they are not, but as deserving of fear, which to an extent they are. The startlingly similar accounts and depictions of demons on different sides of the world arise from different people’s and different peoples’ encounters with the same ones. They are always there, remaining prominent in Ireland, as anywhere, for many centuries until the Faith reached its zenith, and returning to the fore, as anywhere, now that it is in retreat.

The Green King Is Not Sea-Green

Sometimes the only incumbent of a Durham pit village to sit in quire at the Miners’ Gala service in the Cathedral, my father was an Honorary Chaplain of the Royal Martyr Church Union, assiduously attending its events on or about this anniversary of the Royal Martyrdom in 1649. The regime that executed Charles I also persecuted the Levellers and the Diggers for their appeals to “the Ancient Constitution” and to “time out of mind”. That regime anticipated the bourgeois capitalist Revolutions of 1688, 1776 and 1789. Our own Radical tradition does not derive from those Revolutions. Rather, it predates them, and it opposed them and their consequences, making common cause with Tories for the abolition of slavery (by very specific appeal to the Ancient Constitution), for factory reform, for the extension of the franchise, for action against substance abuse and gambling, and so on.

On this day in 1661, the corpse of Oliver Cromwell was dug up, tried, convicted and hanged. Today, his statue appears to guard the entrance to Parliament. But as Alex Nunns, the Labour Left’s preeminent present chronicler of itself, once said to me, “John Lilburne himself would pull down the statue of Cromwell, if he were not 350 years dead.” The proposal to erect it nearly brought down the Liberal Government of the day. It went up only because the Liberal Unionists decided that making a point against the Irish Nationalists was even more important than making a pro-Tory one. So they voted for it against the ferocious opposition both of the Irish Nationalists and of their own Tory allies. It is pointedly not inside the Palace of Westminster, and not a penny of public money was spent on putting it up even where it is. In fact, it exists only because of a donation by the Liberal former Prime Minister, Lord Roseberry. He then gave an address at its unveiling. But almost no one knew that that was why he was the speaker. His donation had had to be made anonymously.

But the Whig oligarchy has prevailed to the point that the next King will be a half-Spencer, continuing the highly profitable Malthusian mission of his father and grandfather. As Paul Knaggs writes:

The Crown’s Green Windfall: How the King Profits Millions from Your Energy Bills

On a cold Wednesday night at Windsor Castle, the stars aligned, not in the heavens, but in the Waterloo Chamber. Benedict Cumberbatch, Judi Dench, and Rod Stewart gathered for the first-ever film premiere in a royal residence. The feature? Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision, a ninety-minute hagiography of King Charles III’s lifelong environmental crusade.

As the credits rolled on this cinematic ode to nature, narrated by Kate Winslet, a more grounded reality remained hidden beneath the waves of the British coastline. It is a reality where “harmony” looks less like a spiritual connection to the earth and more like a balance sheet. The King’s devotion to the planet is, conveniently, one of the most profitable business ventures in the history of the House of Windsor.

A Royal Claim on the Waves

For centuries, the monarch’s ownership of the British seabed was a matter of dusty convention. Sovereignty stopped at the low-water mark. However, in 1962, Queen Elizabeth II reportedly observed that the Crown Estate should take over “rights on land under the sea.” The catalyst was the North Sea oil boom. By 1964, the Continental Shelf Act formalised this grab, ensuring that while the government managed the drilling, the Crown held the title.

Then came the “Green Revolution.” In 2004, Tony Blair’s government gifted the Crown the right to collect royalties from wind and wave power. It was a masterstroke of neoliberal policy: taking a public necessity, renewable energy, and anchoring its exploitation to a feudal relic.

The financial implications of this are staggering. The Crown Estate, acting as the King’s property manager, recently oversaw a seabed auction that brought bidding to record highs. These “option fees”, payments made by energy giants just to reserve a patch of sea, have pushed the Crown Estate’s net profits to a record £1.1 billion for two consecutive years.

The Mathematics of “Harmony”

Under the current Sovereign Grant formula, these profits are handed to the Treasury, which then returns a percentage to the Royal Household.

Financial Year; Crown Estate Net Profit; Sovereign Grant (Approx.) 

2021/22; £312.7m; £86.3m 

2023/24; £1.1bn; £86.3m (due to 2-year lag) 

2025/26 (Projected); £1.1bn; £132m

While the government recently lowered the percentage from 25% to 12% to account for the offshore wind “windfall,” the King is still set to receive a massive increase. In 2025/26, the grant is expected to jump to £132 million, a £45 million raise funded by the very energy crisis squeezing the pockets of his subjects.

The counterargument is simple: “But 75 to 88 percent goes to the Treasury! It funds public services!” This is a classic bait-and-switch. We are asked to be grateful that the public receives the majority of the revenue from its own natural resources, while a private family receives hundreds of millions for “upkeep” and “palace reservicing” simply because they happen to “own” the sea, not even by by birthright, but by decree from Tony Blair.

The Price of a Green Conscience 

Orwell warned us about the use of “meaningless words” in politics. “Harmony” is one such word. In the documentary, the King speaks of a vision where humanity and nature exist in balance. But in the material world, this balance is skewed.

We are currently witnessing the enclosure of the commons on a maritime scale. The seabed is not a royal garden; it is a vital national asset. Why should a transition to green energy involve paying a tithe to a monarch? If the climate crisis is indeed an existential threat, every penny of that £1.1 billion should be reinvested directly into lowering energy bills for the 7 million homes these turbines power, not into refurbishing the East Wing of Buckingham Palace.

The King is undoubtedly sincere in his love for the environment. It is easy to be a visionary when the vision pays so well. But true environmentalism requires the dismantling of the very power structures that allow one man to profit from the wind that blows across a nation’s shores.

The monarchy’s “green” vision is a luxury the British public can no longer afford to subsidise.

A King’s vision is a fine thing, but a people’s sovereignty is better.

One Exception: Gaza

On the day that, with minimal coverage, Israel accepted the Gaza Health Ministry’s figure of 70,000 war dead that had hitherto dismissed as “Hamas propaganda”, Peter Oborne writes:

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer entered office in July 2024 with a single strategy: blame the Tories.

He blamed them for the faltering economy; for National Health Service failures; for the state of prisons. Labour, he insisted, would sort out the mess.

But the new prime minister made one exception: Gaza.

Although Starmer’s government embarked on a course correction on some key issues, he’s never uttered a word of criticism over the Tory sale of arms to Israel, or the previous government’s refusal to call out Israeli war crimes.

As I explained in my book Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza, Labour entered into an informal pact with the Tories over Gaza while in opposition - and they weren’t going to break it once in power.

Incredibly, the Starmer government has now taken this cross-party collaboration a step further.

We now have troubling evidence that Starmer’s Foreign Office may be protecting David Cameron, the former prime minister who returned as foreign secretary in the final months of Rishi Sunak’s outgoing Tory government.

No denials

Some context is necessary here. In its dying days, the Sunak government engaged in a desperate struggle to defend the reputation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he embarked upon what most experts now view as a genocide.

Leading this struggle was Cameron. When South Africa accused Israel of committing genocide, bringing its case to the International Court of Justice, Cameron trashed it as “wrong” and “unhelpful”. He then suspended British aid to Unrwa, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees.

Britain also formally objected as the International Criminal Court (ICC) pondered war crimes charges against Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

But Cameron went further than that. Thanks to an investigation by Middle East Eye, we now learn that he personally threatened Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the ICC, by warning that Britain would defund the court and withdraw from the Rome Statute unless it dropped plans to issue arrest warrants for Israeli officials.

To his credit, Khan ignored the British foreign secretary, and the court duly charged Netanyahu and Gallant with crimes including “starvation as a method of warfare” and “the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”.

There have been no denials from either Cameron or the Foreign Office. When I engaged with friends of Cameron while writing my book Complicit, they privately admitted that the call took place and was “robust”.

But they insisted that rather than making a threat, Cameron pointed out that strong voices in the Conservative Party would push for defunding the ICC and withdrawing from the Rome Statute. If true, this could nonetheless be considered an attempt to interfere with the court’s judicial process.

That is an incredibly serious matter, especially for a country that claims to support international law. Yet the Starmer government has repeatedly refused to comment, still less investigate, Cameron’s extraordinary intervention.

To be fair, there has been little pressure. As so often when it comes to Israel and Gaza, the story has been ignored in Britain’s establishment media.

But now comes a bombshell development - one that the Starmer government surely cannot ignore.

Misleading reply

The Foreign Office has for the first time confirmed, in response to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, that a phone conversation between Cameron and Khan did indeed take place.

But the revelation was more interesting than that. The FOI request, filed by Unredacted, a research unit based at the University of Westminster, asked which ministers or officials were present when Cameron spoke with Karim Khan.

In response, the Information Rights Unit at the Foreign Office stated: “The then Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, was the only person present on the call on 23 April 2024 with Karim Khan.”

This in itself was of chief importance. Foreign office minders generally sit in on all calls made in an official capacity by ministers. The fact that Cameron apparently made this call without an official present, suggests that he was acting in a freelance capacity - ie, outside the formal Foreign Office structures - when he allegedly threatened Khan.

But there is more to it. We now know that the Foreign Office’s reply to Unredacted was at best misleading.

MEE has established that - according to numerous sources with knowledge of the matter, including former staff in the prosecutor’s office - there was indeed another person on the call: a Tory peer, Baroness Liz Sugg. 

Baroness who? Sugg was elevated to the peerage after serving as a senior official in Cameron’s Downing Street. The former prime minister later recalled her to his side as a special assistant - a political appointment - when he became foreign secretary.

The Foreign Office information was thus wrong. There was someone else present, but that person was not an official.

Urgent questions

All kinds of questions need urgent answers after this latest revelation. Why did the Foreign Office issue a false statement? Will it correct the record and apologise?

Why was no official present on the line to record minutes of the foreign secretary’s conversation with the chief prosecutor for the ICC? Did Sugg take minutes in the absence of an official?

Was the Foreign Office aware at the time that this conversation had taken place? Did Sunak know about it?

Finally, did Cameron seek advice from government lawyers before making a call that could be seen as an attempt to interfere with the course of justice?

So far, the Foreign Office, Cameron and Sugg have all refused to comment. This is unacceptable, since Cameron’s apparent readiness to resort to private menaces to protect suspected war criminals places Britain among a group of gangster nations for whom might is right.

Other members of this group include Netanyahu’s Israel, President Donald Trump’s United States and President Vladimir Putin’s Russia (which itself issued an arrest order for Khan in 2023, in response to an ICC warrant against Putin).

It’s not hard to imagine the reaction had Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, rather than a British foreign secretary, been caught red-handed in a similar attempt to pervert the course of justice. The story would have been front-page news everywhere - and Britain might well have called an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council.

This Whitehall omerta stinks. At the very least, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, chaired by Labour grandee Emily Thornberry, should call Cameron (and Sugg) to give evidence, alongside the Foreign Office permanent secretary.

This also raises also a troubling question for Starmer: why has a prime minister who loves to blame the Tories been so happy to let them off the hook over Gaza?

This Is A Developing Story

As Jim Pickard and Peter Foster masterfully understate:

Jeffrey Epstein sent thousands of pounds to Lord Peter Mandelson’s husband, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, according to emails published by the US Department of Justice, raising fresh questions about the friendship between the disgraced financier and the former UK ambassador to Washington.

The emails published on Friday show da Silva emailing Epstein in September 2009, asking for £10,000 to fund an osteopathy course and other related expenses. “I will wire your loan amount immediated’y [sic],” Epstein replied that day.

A few days later, da Silva sent Epstein an email saying “thank you for the money which arrived in my account this morning”.

Mandelson married da Silva in 2023 after a relationship of three decades.

At the time of the first payments Mandelson was business secretary and de facto deputy prime minister to then UK prime minister Gordon Brown. Mandelson served in that role until May 2010.

Epstein was in prison from 2008 until July 2009 after pleading guilty to charges of soliciting prostitution.

In April 2010, da Silva messaged Epstein again, sharing his bank details, the emails show. Epstein forwarded the email to his accountant, adding: “send 13k dollars”.

In subsequent correspondence, Epstein instructs his accountant to “send 2k per month to reinaldo”. His accountant, Rich Kahn, asks if this is “in addition to the 13k” and to confirm the currency is US dollars. Epstein replies that “after rethinkoing [sic] send 4000 dollars only”.

The FT was first told about payments from Epstein to da Silva by an individual who claimed to have knowledge of the matter last year.

In September a person close to Mandelson described the allegation as “inconceivable”, adding there had been “no relationship” between da Silva and Epstein, and that the pair had not liked each other. The person denied that Mandelson had ever received money from Epstein, either directly or via his husband. 

At the time da Silva did not reply to an FT request for comment asking him whether — and if so why — he had accepted money from the convicted paedophile.

Starmer was forced to sack Mandelson from his most recent role as US ambassador in early September last year after revelations that he had called Epstein his “best pal” in a 50th birthday tribute book.

The emails released by the Justice Department reveal other aspects of the Mandelson-Epstein relationship, including the UK politician asking for advice on purchasing an apartment in Brazil.

In March 2011 he wrote to the financier about a scheme to minimise tax, involving setting up an offshore company in Panama which would partner with a new Brazilian company managed by da Silva.

What About Safeguarding, Indeed?

Like the Bishopric of London, the Archbishopric of Canterbury is a seat both in Parliament and on the Privy Council. To hold it is to be in politics, and part of politics is heckling.

Now, Dame Sarah Mullally, do as you promised and table in the House of Lords the fatal amendment, so to speak, to deny Third Reading to the Assisted Suicide Bill. Or what a Cantuar.

And The Lash No More?

No more rum in the Royal Navy, which commanded the seas when it ran on the stuff, mostly before nuclear weapons existed, and long before Trident. And in nuclear deterrence's own terms, there must no more be nuclear weapons in Iran than there were in Iraq, or Iraq would never have been invaded and Iran would not be facing an armada even as defined by Donald Trump. Iran under the present regime is no democracy, yet it is still more democratic than it would be under either of the actually existent alternatives. Iran will go to whichever of three contenders gave Trump total control over where the oil and gas went.

One of his suitors is the absolute monarchist but fake royal, Reza Pahlavi, who is almost a complete stranger to Iran. Another is the Mojahedin-e-Khalq of Islamo-Marxist terrorists whose collaboration with Saddam Hussein was up to and including fighting for Iraq in the war with Iran, a country where it, too, has now been almost completely unknown for two generations. And the third is the present regime, just as Trump kept the regime in place in Venezuela, where it is not doing too shabbily. That may be the least worst option. What a world.

Mint Condition

The last Government struck the wretched Chagos deal. And in 2018, it was Boris Johnson who sold Royal Mint Court to the Chinese for £255 million, specifically in order to turn it into a giant new embassy.

Johnson's party is back in government, while much of his entourage has taken over the party that is leading in the polls. Kemi Badenoch was a Minister under Johnson, as were 25 per cent of Reform UK's MPs, while another of them was his Political Secretary. Think on.

The Arithmetic of Contempt

Even before considering how many WASPIs would have died before compensation were paid out of a scheme that had been announced today, Paul Knaggs writes:

When does betrayal become policy? When 270,000 women have already died waiting for justice. When £10.3 billion for British pensioners is “unaffordable” while £13 billion for Ukrainian weaponry flows without parliamentary debate. When Labour MPs who stood beside placards reading “Justice for Waspi Women” now occupy ministerial cars and vote to deny them compensation. Again.

On Thursday, Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden confirmed what Waspi campaigners had feared since November: the government’s “review” of compensation for 3.6 million women robbed of adequate pension notice was political theatre. After months of deliberation, ministers reached precisely the same conclusion they announced in December 2024. No compensation. Not £10.5 billion. Not £3.5 billion. Not one pound.

The decision exposes something more corrosive than routine political dishonesty. It reveals the material priorities of a political class that has abandoned any pretence of serving working people. The sums involved make the hierarchy explicit: Ukraine receives £3 billion annually “for as long as it takes.” Waspi women, who paid National Insurance contributions for decades, receive apologies and consultations with no conclusion but refusal.

The Personal Cost of Priorities 

Linda McCarthy from Bolton, born in 1953. She worked as a care assistant for 38 years, contributing to National Insurance expecting retirement at 60. She received notification of her pension age rising to 65 when she was 58, leaving her insufficient time to adjust financially. She worked five additional years with chronic arthritis, paying tax and National Insurance she’d never planned to contribute. By the time she finally received her state pension, she’d lost £44,070 in pension payments and five years of retirement she’d earned.

Linda is not unique. She represents 3.6 million women whose “awareness” of pension changes the government now claims was “considerable.” Yet the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman spent five years investigating precisely this question and reached the opposite conclusion: maladministration by the Department for Work and Pensions meant women were not adequately informed. The Ombudsman recommended compensation between £1,000 and £2,950 per woman.

Ministers rejected the recommendation twice. First in December 2024 under Liz Kendall. Then again in January 2026 under Pat McFadden, after a review that served no purpose except postponing the inevitable refusal.

The Historical Machinery of Dispossession

The 1995 Pensions Act, introduced by John Major’s Conservative government, established that women’s state pension age would gradually rise from 60 to 65 between 2010 and 2020. The stated purpose was “equalisation” with men, though notably equalisation always meant raising women’s retirement age rather than lowering men’s.

The 2011 Pensions Act, introduced by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, accelerated this timetable. Women born in the 1950s would now reach pension age by November 2018 instead of April 2020. Some women saw their expected retirement age increase by six years with as little as twelve months’ notice.

The Department for Work and Pensions possessed evidence of communication failure. A 2007 internal evaluation showed that automatic pension forecast letters were ineffective at informing women of changes. The department’s response was not to improve communication. It was to stop sending the letters entirely.

This document was buried. It resurfaced only during judicial review proceedings brought by Waspi in 2025, forcing McFadden to announce his November “review.” The government then spent two months examining evidence it had deliberately concealed for 18 years before reaching the same conclusion it announced before the review began.

Between 2015, when Waspi was founded, and January 2026, approximately 270,000 affected women died. The Parliamentary Ombudsman calculated that in 2023 alone, one Waspi woman died every 13 minutes. They died waiting for compensation the government always intended to refuse.

The Investigative Reality: Follow the Money 

The £10.3 billion compensation figure represents approximately one year of UK military assistance to Ukraine. Since February 2022, the UK has pledged £13.06 billion in total support to Ukraine, including £10.8 billion in gifted military assistance. The Labour government, elected in July 2024, committed to £3 billion annually “for as long as it takes,” with Chancellor Rachel Reeves announcing this would continue indefinitely.

In October 2024, the government announced an additional £2.26 billion loan to Ukraine, funded through frozen Russian assets. In her autumn budget, Reeves increased Ministry of Defence spending by £2.9 billion for 2025/26. Defence spending now totals £62.2 billion annually, projected to reach £73.5 billion by 2028/29.

The government can identify £3 billion annually for Ukrainian military equipment. It located £2.26 billion for an additional loan within weeks. Yet £10.3 billion for 3.6 million British women who paid National Insurance for decades is, according to Reeves, “not the best use of taxpayers’ money.”

The National Audit Office confirms that UK military procurement for Ukraine benefits domestic arms manufacturers through “non-competitive procurements with reduced oversight requirements.” The Ministry of Defence spent £2.7 billion replacing equipment donated to Ukraine from UK stockpiles in the first two years of the war alone. Defence Secretary John Healey described Ukraine aid as “a platform for the UK defence industry.” Foreign Secretary David Lammy called the defence relationship “key to our growth and security by creating jobs.”

War spending subsidises British arms corporations. Pension compensation does not. The hierarchy could not be clearer.

Addressing the Government’s Defence 

Ministers offer three justifications for refusing compensation. Each collapses under minimal scrutiny. 

First, McFadden claims “the vast majority of 1950s-born women already knew the state pension age was increasing” through public information campaigns. Yet the Parliamentary Ombudsman investigated this precise claim over five years and found it false. The 2007 DWP evaluation, which the government buried, demonstrated that women were not sufficiently aware despite publicity campaigns. Three of six sample complainants examined by the Ombudsman did not recall receiving letters, despite DWP records showing correct addresses.

Second, ministers argue that targeting compensation only to women who genuinely suffered injustice “would not be practical” because it would require verifying individual circumstances for millions of women. This is administrative cowardice dressed as fiscal responsibility. The government administers tax credits, Universal Credit, and pension systems for millions of people based on verified individual circumstances. It has chosen not to establish such a scheme for Waspi women because it does not want to pay them.

Third, the government claims women “suffered no direct financial loss” from communication delays. This is semantic evasion. Women who planned retirement at 60 and learned at 58 their pension age was 65 lost years of retirement and worked additional years they’d never planned. Some lost homes. Some exhausted savings. Some worked through serious illness because they had no alternative income. The Ombudsman’s recommended “Level 4” compensation explicitly recognises “significant and lasting injustice that has affected someone’s ability to live a relatively normal life.”

The government’s position is that systematic maladministration occurred, causing lasting injustice, but compensation would be unfair because… most women already knew? The circular reasoning insults basic intelligence.

Labour’s Specific Culpability 

This is not merely a Conservative legacy Labour inherited. Labour MPs, including current ministers, actively courted Waspi support before the 2024 election.

In 2019, Angela Rayner, now Deputy Prime Minister, stated Labour would “right the injustice” within five years of taking office. She described the women as having a “contract with the state that had been broken” and promised full support for compensation. Rachel Reeves, now Chancellor, served as Shadow Pensions Minister and campaigned alongside Waspi women. Keir Starmer appeared on platforms with Waspi campaigners, implicitly endorsing their cause.

The 2024 Labour manifesto deliberately avoided any compensation commitment. In June 2024, weeks before the election, Reeves told journalists that while she recognised the injustice, “the state of the public finances and the dire need in our public services means that we won’t be able to do everything that we might like to do.”

After Labour’s landside victory in July 2024, the new government had four months before rejecting compensation in December. Ministers knew before the election they would refuse. They courted Waspi support knowing they would betray it. They posed for photographs they knew would become evidence of bad faith.

On 29 January 2026, ten Labour MPs rebelled and voted with the SNP for compensation. The rebellion included Brian Leishman, who told journalists: “I campaigned with them and I shared a platform with them. I’m not going to swap my views from being in opposition to being in government.” His integrity highlights the dishonesty of colleagues who made identical campaign commitments but abandoned them upon taking office.

Former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell warned: “The government shouldn’t underestimate the anger there will be amongst large numbers of women who will feel betrayed.” Labour MP Rebecca Long-Bailey, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on State Pension Inequality for Women, stated: “It is frankly wrong that the Government has once again chosen to reject compensation.” Her colleague Andy McDonald called it “a very bitter pill to swallow.”

These statements come from Labour MPs describing their own government’s actions. The betrayal is internal, conscious, and documented.

The Broader Pattern: Elite Consensus on Austerity for Workers, Largesse for War 

Waspi compensation refusal forms part of a consistent pattern of cuts and U-Turns. The Labour government has:

• Cut winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners
• Maintained the two-child benefit cap, keeping 1.6 million children in poverty
• Refused to increase statutory sick pay
• Declined to abolish university tuition fees
• Committed to “iron fiscal discipline” on welfare spending

Simultaneously, it has:

• Guaranteed £3 billion annually for Ukrainian military assistance indefinitely
• Increased defence spending by £2.9 billion in one year
• Announced plans to reach 2.5% of GDP on defence spending (£87 billion by 2030)
• Signed a “100-year partnership” with Ukraine prioritising defence industry collaboration
• Committed to 3.5% of GDP on core defence requirements by 2035

The pattern is not contradiction. It is coherence. Austerity for workers, expansion for military contractors. Refusal of £10.3 billion once for pensioners, commitment of £3 billion annually forever for weapons. This is not competing priorities resolved in favour of defence. This is a political class that views working people’s welfare as expendable and war spending as essential.

The Parliamentary Ombudsman exists to provide redress when government bodies commit maladministration. Ministers have now twice ignored its recommendations. In doing so, they undermine the institution itself. If governments can reject ombudsman findings whenever politically convenient, the ombudsman becomes decorative rather than functional. Labour has established that official investigations, five-year studies, and documented maladministration carry no weight when elite priorities dictate otherwise.

Democratic Deficit and the Illusion of Accountability 

Waspi women did everything the system demands. They worked for decades. They paid National Insurance contributions. When wronged, they followed official complaints procedures through the Department for Work and Pensions. When those failed, they approached the Independent Case Examiner. When the ICE summarily closed complaints in 2018, they escalated to the Parliamentary Ombudsman. The Ombudsman investigated for five years, examined thousands of pages of evidence, interviewed complainants, and issued findings in 2023.

The government rejected the findings. Waspi pursued judicial review. During legal proceedings, buried evidence emerged forcing a ministerial “review.” After two months, ministers reached the same conclusion they’d announced before the review.

The system is designed to exhaust rather than deliver justice. Each stage provides the appearance of accountability while ensuring the same elite gatekeepers make final decisions. The Ombudsman investigates but cannot enforce. MPs vote but ministers ignore. Courts review but governments delay. The process is the punishment.

Approximately 100 Labour MPs are reportedly “deeply unhappy” with the compensation refusal. Ten voted against the government. Yet 401 Labour MPs hold parliamentary seats. The rebellion is token. The parliamentary majority ensures ministers face no meaningful accountability until the next election, by which time thousands more Waspi women will have died.

The Moral Reckoning

This is not complex policy requiring expert adjudication. Three questions suffice:

Did the Department for Work and Pensions commit maladministration in communicating pension age changes? The Parliamentary Ombudsman, after five years’ investigation, says yes. The government accepts this finding.

Did this maladministration cause injustice to millions of women? The Ombudsman says yes, recommending compensation. The government disputes the severity but acknowledges harm occurred.

Can the government afford £10.3 billion to compensate 3.6 million women? Yes. It commits £3 billion annually to Ukrainian military assistance indefinitely. It increased defence spending £2.9 billion in one year. It can afford compensation. It chooses not to pay it.

The choice reveals priorities. War spending serves elite interests through arms industry profits and geopolitical positioning. Pension compensation serves no elite constituency. Waspi women are working-class and lower-middle-class women in their 60s and 70s. They have limited economic leverage and declining lifespans. They represent no profitable market and threaten no boardroom. Their interests conflict with fiscal consolidation targets Labour shares with Conservatives.

They are, in the government’s calculation, expendable.

Where This Ends 

Waspi campaigners have confirmed they are taking legal advice and “all options remain on the table.” Angela Madden, Waspi chair, stated: “We stand ready to pursue every avenue in Parliament and in the courts to secure the justice that has been so shamefully denied.” The judicial review will likely proceed. It may succeed. It may establish legal grounds compelling compensation.

But legal victories require years. Waspi women in 2026 are, on average, aged 70-75. Mortality tables are unforgiving. By the time courts rule, tens of thousands more will have died without receiving compensation they were owed. The government understands this. Delay is policy.

The broader lesson extends beyond pensions. When elite priorities conflict with working-class welfare, elite priorities prevail. When independent ombudsmen investigate government maladministration and recommend redress, governments ignore findings that cost money. When Labour MPs make pre-election promises to working-class constituencies, those promises evaporate upon contact with Treasury orthodoxy. 

This is not aberration. This is system behaviour. The triumvirate operates: Conservative, Labour, Reform represent competing managements of the same class interests. The Waspi betrayal is one performance in an ongoing production. The script never changes. Only the actors rotate.

Waspi women were useful when Labour needed votes. Photographs with campaigners, speeches at rallies, commitments to justice. Once elected with a 174-seat majority, Labour MPs discovered that justice costs £10.3 billion the Treasury has allocated elsewhere. The women who trusted their promises became inconvenient. Maladministration became complexity. Injustice became impracticality. Compensation became unaffordable.

This is governance in late-stage managed democracy. Rights exist until they cost money. Justice is available until elite interests object. Promises bind until power is won.

Waspi women understand this now. The question is whether anyone else is paying attention.

Every cheque to Kyiv is a pay packet for an arms executive and a refusal to British pensioners. That’s not foreign policy. That’s class warfare.

Ethically Corrosive

In 2015, Keir Starmer nominated Andy Burnham for Leader of the Labour Party. But today, Burnham says that Labour never gave him any help in a mayoral election, meaning that he must have won all on his own three times, including in every ward but one of Greater Manchester last time, when he took 63.4 per cent of the vote.

The Police have laughed out Matt Goodwin, but Reform UK has said that it would sue Kemi Badenoch if, by four o'clock tomorrow afternoon, she had not apologised to Suella Braverman, whose hen night Badenoch organised in 2018. Was Jacob Rees-Mogg the stripper?

To want to be Leader of the Opposition is in principle to want to be Prime Minister, to want to be Prime Minister is to think that you should be Prime Minister, and to think that you should be Prime Minister is to be more than a little bit funny in the head.

Stinging

For all the convulsions in the Parliamentary Labour Party between 2015 and 2024, the one thing on which they all agreed was WASPI. Did even the seceders to Change UK dissent from that? Even if each of the 3.6 million WASPIs had been paid the full £2,950, then that would have added up to £10.62 billion, most of which would have rapidly made its way into the consumer economy that employed the young. Now keep an eye out for everything that cost more than that.

The issuing of currency is an act of the State, which is literally the creator of all money. It says so on the banknotes. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control, since the responsibility of the Government is to give that currency its value while ensuring the supply of goods and services to be purchased in it. Alongside his adoption of Bernie Sanders’s cap on credit card interest, Donald Trump has begun the end of the anti-democratic era of central bank “independence”.

It is impossible for the currency-issuing State to run out of money. Money “lent” to the Treasury by the Bank of England is money “lent” to the State by the State; such “debt” will never be called in, much less will bailiffs be sent round. Call this “the Magic Money Tree” if you will. There is no comparison between running the economy and managing a household budget, or even a business. There is no “national credit card” to “max out”. “Fiscal headroom” is only the gap between the Government’s tax and spending plans and what would be allowed under the fiscal rules that it sets for itself and changes frequently.

That is what both fiscal policy and monetary policy are for: to give the currency its value by controlling inflation to a politically chosen extent while discouraging certain politically chosen forms of behaviour, and while encouraging others, including economic equality, which is fundamental to social cohesion and thus to patriotism. There is no debt. It is an accounting trick. The Treasury, which is the State, has issued bonds to the Bank of England, which is the State. Even if those bonds were held by anyone else, then the State could simply issue itself with enough of its own free-floating, fiat currency to redeem them. Taxation is not where the State’s money comes from. Nothing is “unaffordable”, every recession is discretionary on the part of the Government, and there is no such thing as “taxpayers’ money”. Say it again that there is no debt. There is no debt. There is no debt.

Golden Brown?

No, Gordon Brown did not deprive the Exchequer of £50.7 billion in revenue were it to have sold its gold reserves now. A sovereign state with its own free-floating fiat currency has no need of such reserves, no one objected at the time, none of this could have been predicted then, Labour won the next two General Elections, Brown became Prime Minister in that third term, and he might have remained so if he had been properly supported by those on his own side who instead refused to accept the legitimacy of any Leadership or Premiership except that of Tony Blair, but who would settle provisionally for David Cameron.

The issuing of currency is an act of the State, which is literally the creator of all money. It says so on the banknotes. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control, since the responsibility of the Government is to give that currency its value while ensuring the supply of goods and services to be purchased in it. Alongside his adoption of Bernie Sanders’s cap on credit card interest, Donald Trump has begun the end of the anti-democratic era of central bank “independence”.

It is impossible for the currency-issuing State to run out of money. Money “lent” to the Treasury by the Bank of England is money “lent” to the State by the State; such “debt” will never be called in, much less will bailiffs be sent round. Call this “the Magic Money Tree” if you will. There is no comparison between running the economy and managing a household budget, or even a business. There is no “national credit card” to “max out”. “Fiscal headroom” is only the gap between the Government’s tax and spending plans and what would be allowed under the fiscal rules that it sets for itself and changes frequently.

That is what both fiscal policy and monetary policy are for: to give the currency its value by controlling inflation to a politically chosen extent while discouraging certain politically chosen forms of behaviour, and while encouraging others, including economic equality, which is fundamental to social cohesion and thus to patriotism. There is no debt. It is an accounting trick. The Treasury, which is the State, has issued bonds to the Bank of England, which is the State. Even if those bonds were held by anyone else, then the State could simply issue itself with enough of its own free-floating, fiat currency to redeem them. Taxation is not where the State’s money comes from. Nothing is “unaffordable”, every recession is discretionary on the part of the Government, and there is no such thing as “taxpayers’ money”. Say it again that there is no debt. There is no debt. There is no debt.

Snowflake Season Is Here

We all know what colour a snowflake is. The Labour video hit job on Matt Goodwin is called politics, and his crybaby response to it makes him even more ridiculous than he already was after the narrowness of his definition of being British had been matched only by the breadth of his definition of being Mancunian. Why did Reform UK not simply submit that it thought that Goodwin ought to be a Member of Parliament, by definition including the constituency responsibilities, and was presenting him at the available opportunity to the judgement of the electorate? A party that will not recognise voters as responsible adults would not fight to the last ditch to save jurors, either.

There are so many funny Goodwin quotations, but the best to have come out so far has been when he asked whether the United Arab Emirates would tolerate mass immigration. The foreign 88.4 per cent of the population of the UAE includes the Deputy Leader of Reform and the Telegraph columnist to whom that Deputy Leader is engaged. Nigel Farage himself is in Dubai. A few hours ago, he gave a keynote speech at a private party hosted by GB News and attended by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the UAE's Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology. On Tuesday, Farage hosted a lunch backed by a local resident, the Indian billionaire Sunny Varkey.

At 10:30 on Saturday morning, Labour will choose its candidate from four Manchester City Councillors and the Leader of Bury Borough Council. The cost of filling the winner's seat does not worry the National Executive Committee, but councillors sitting as MPs is a grand old British tradition, Dan Jarvis did so for all four of his years as Mayor first of Sheffield City Region and then of South Yorkshire, Boris Johnson remained Mayor of London for a year after he had returned to the House of Commons, Ben Bradley spent four years both as an MP and as the Leader of Nottinghamshire County Council, and so on.

The Labour selection meeting will be at the Jain Centre in Denton. I am no pacifist myself, but I am shocked that the Jains would have this on their premises. Would the Quakers? And which lot of Jains owns this temple? Does it enforce the Digambara undress code? Whether or not it did, there is a sense of having no clothes, in that three of these six candidates have had companies struck of compulsorily, putting them in the same position as Reform's candidate for Mayor of London.

Andy Burnham has never had a company struck off compulsorily. In 2015, he was nominated for Leader by Keir Starmer, with subsequent and ongoing events being another sign to Goodwin that politics was not for the squeamish. To want to be Leader of the Opposition is in principle to want to be Prime Minister, to want to be Prime Minister is to think that you should be Prime Minister, and to think that you should be Prime Minister is to be more than a little bit funny in the head. That does give some context to the progress of the Conservative Party's reactions to this month's defections to Reform, from "good riddance" to Robert Jenrick, through "never heard of him" to Andrew Rosindell, to "well-known fruitcake" to Suella Braverman, who stood for Leader while the party was in office, and thus directly for Prime Minister, because she had thought that she was worth it.

In excluding Burnham at Gorton and Denton, Labour has not only said that he would have won, which absolutely nobody is saying about his party in his absence, but also that any other candidate would lose it the Greater Manchester mayoralty, which again is not being disputed, and that the aspiration to the Premiership was an absolute disqualification. Sorry, David Lammy, despite your "memorable" performance at this week's Prime Minister's Questions. Has anyone ever been represented in court by Lammy? That would be one for the Sunday papers.

Perhaps because Starmer himself was in China, no one at PMQs bothered to raise the story of him, Lord Hermer, and the veterans. That that one seems to have gone by the by is a fascinating insight into the morale and the influence, or lack of it, of factions such as Labour First and Blue Labour. Labour First has a particularly strong commitment to nuclear weapons, so Starmer cannot have endeared himself to it by undertaking, pursuant to an agreement struck by the previous Conservative Government, to transfer the Chagos Islands to a signatory to the Pelindaba Treaty. Consider that while Donald Trump may not know what that is, the State Department always has, and it backed this transfer until last week, if not still. And consider that, in nuclear deterrence's own terms, there must no more be nuclear weapons in Iran than there were in Iraq, or Iraq would never have been invaded and Iran would not be facing an armada even as defined by Trump.

Iran will go to whichever of three contenders gave Donald Trump total control over where the oil and gas went. One of his suitors is the absolute monarchist but fake royal, Reza Pahlavi, who is almost a complete stranger to Iran. Another is the Mojahedin-e-Khalq of Islamo-Marxist terrorists whose collaboration with Saddam Hussein was up to and including fighting for Iraq in the war with Iran, a country where it, too, has now been almost completely unknown for two generations. And the third is the present regime, just as Trump kept the regime in place in Venezuela, where it is not doing too shabbily.

But what of the Islamo-Marxist alliance that was supposedly running rampant through Britain 20 years after the last time that that was suggested by the suggestible? If the Green Party did win Gorton and Denton on "the Muslim vote", then that vote would have elected the candidate of a party whose Leader, already highly prominent in the campaign, was a gay Jew. Well, yes. The Gorton part, which as I understand it is the more Muslim, elected eight times an MP who could not have been more obviously both gay and Jewish, and who died in office with a majority of 24,079, having taken 67.1 per cent of the vote.

The Greens, though, are a party of anti-industrial Malthusians whose latter-day opposition to the two-child benefit cap can only be seen as opportunistic in the extreme. Their councillors vote for austerity as if they were Labour ones, and their parliamentarians vote against even such workers' rights as Labour can be bothered to propose. They support the war in Ukraine, and Zack Polanski himself said that he could never vote for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour "as a pro-European Jew". It is all too telling that the Zarah Sultana section of Your Party has endorsed the Green Party at Gorton and Dalton, where the baradari endorsement of that party of drug legalisation, "sex work", and gender ideology is as opportunistic as that party's tactical support for fecundity. But arguably the heaviest ever electoral blow to the baradari system was landed at Bradford West in 2012. It can be done.

Those machines are most typically enmeshed with the municipal right wing of the Labour Party, so those who take them on are generally taking on that, which is not for the fainthearted. See, for example, Shockat Adam MP, who defeated Jonathan Ashworth only to see Ashworth all over the airwaves while he himself is ignored. Or see the Birmingham City Council candidate Shahid Butt, likewise talked about but never spoken to. In 1999, having been tortured to confess, he was convicted of "terrorism" in Yemen under Ali Abdullah Saleh, the sponsor of al-Islah, the party through which the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrated every institution, including a judiciary that was already profoundly corrupt and subject to heavy regime control. And how did Butt ever enter a world in which he might have attracted such attention? He did so via the Lynx Gang, which was at least initially constituted to defend his community from the White Power skinheads.

This month, the sitting Councillor Lillith Osborn of Glastonbury has had to be suspended from the Conservative Party because she was on WhiteDate, a whites-only dating site on which she described her political orientation as "pro-white" and stated that she was seeking a partner interested in "indigenous European spirituality", Paganism being one of the most significant features common to the Far Right and to the Green-inclined. In Councillor Osborn's dating pool were members of the frankly neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative, a sewer of street thugs, white genocide conspiracy theorists, and Holocaust deniers, one of whom once called in and coaxed Starmer into endorsing the Great Replacement theory on LBC. Since 2023, Patriotic Alternative has been somewhat eclipsed by the breakaway Homeland Party, which plays down the Nazism in order to promote remigration, and of which, while formally Independents, at least nine sitting councillors are members. Yet there will be no parliamentary or media scrutiny of any of that. Imagine the reaction. We all know what colour a snowflake is.

At This Critical Time

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 Rifat Kassis writes:

Last week, the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem, the leaders of the historic churches in the Holy Land, issued a momentous statement clearly expressing their rejection of Christian Zionism. The statement was remarkable not only for its clarity but also for the moment of its release and the response it provoked from U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, a vocal Christian Zionist. The episode highlights an emerging threat to the work and witness of the Palestinian church, as well as steps Christian Zionists are taking to erase our political voice.

The Patriarchs’ statement read, in part:

The Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in the Holy Land affirm before the faithful and before the world that the flock of Christ in this land is entrusted to the Apostolic Churches, which have borne their sacred ministry across centuries with steadfast devotion. Recent activities undertaken by local individuals who advance damaging ideologies, such as Christian Zionism, mislead the public, sow confusion, and harm the unity of our flock. These undertakings 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.

What does this mean?

The statement is a response to disturbing developments taking place in Palestine that threaten the integrity, unity, and historical authority of the Christian Churches in the Holy Land. What specifically stirred the Patriarchs appears to be a growing pattern: the promotion of self-appointed local individuals or groups, welcomed at official political levels, who claim to represent Christians in Israel or the Holy Land while advancing Christian Zionist theology. Such initiatives have happened in the past and have gone unnoticed. But recently, such meetings have involved senior U.S. and Israeli officials, including Ambassador Huckabee, and increasingly pose a direct threat to the historic authority of the Heads of Churches and the integrity of the Christian faith. They undermine the centuries-old ecclesial structures (known as the Status Quo) that have maintained the unity of Christian communities in Palestine throughout a history of empire, colonialism, and occupation.

This is why Ambassador Huckabee felt compelled to publicly comment on the Patriarchs’ statement. He wrote in part, “It’s hard for me to understand why everyone who takes on the moniker ‘Christian’ would not also be a Zionist.” The importance he gives the statement points to the serious stakes that issues of representation and power hold for Christians in the Holy Land and the degree of political interference Israel and its supporters are willing to exert to undermine anti-Zionist Christian voices.

It is worth asking why a U.S. representative would intervene at all in an internal matter of the Churches of Jerusalem. After all, the Patriarchs’ statement is not a political manifesto. It is a pastoral affirmation from those who legitimately represent Christian communities in the Holy Land. Huckabee’s response, therefore, reveals more about the political sensitivities exposed by the statement than about the statement itself. His reaction underscores precisely the concern the Patriarchs raise: certain political actors in Israel and abroad seek alternative Christian voices that are more aligned with their ideological and geopolitical agendas.

Huckabee’s interference cannot be separated from the broader political context. In recent years, we have witnessed systematic efforts by Israel and its allies, particularly the United States, to delegitimize official Palestinian representation. This process began with the weakening of the Palestinian Authority, criminalizing our resistance and our political parties. It continued with the designation of respected Palestinian NGOs as “terrorist organizations.”

It now appears this interference and repression is extending into the Christian sphere. Creating or empowering a local Palestinian Christian Zionist group provides a convenient alternative—a useful narrative—that allows political powers to bypass church leaders, silence prophetic Palestinian Christian witness (Kairos Palestine, Sabeel, Bethlehem Bible College, and others), and cast doubt on the legitimacy of long-established Palestinian institutions.

This is especially alarming at a moment when Palestinian Christians, alongside Muslims, have been among the most consistent and moral voices confronting genocide, mass displacement, and grave violations of international law in Gaza and beyond. Our advocacy has exposed not only Israeli policies but also the direct complicity of the United States. In this light, the emergence of a politically endorsed “Christian” voice that blesses occupation and its violence is not accidental. It serves a clear strategic purpose.

The Patriarchs’ language in their statement is also significant. Their critique of Christian Zionism and their emphasis on unity, representation, and pastoral responsibility closely echo the theological clarity of Kairos Palestine, particularly in its recently released document, Kairos II, A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide. Kairos II unambiguously names Zionism as a political ideology rooted in injustice and calls Christians worldwide to reject theological distortions that tolerate oppression.

For years, the Kairos movement has sought deeper alignment with church leadership, sometimes from the margins. In this statement, the Heads of Churches appear not only to defend the historical significance of their office but also to offer a practical and positive response to the Kairos call, affirming what is ultimately at stake: the future of Christian presence in Palestine. Their statement signals that the churches’ shepherds in Jerusalem increasingly recognize that neutrality in the face of political theology is impossible, and that safeguarding Christian unity today requires naming false theologies and resisting political manipulation. The Patriarchs are not merely protecting their institutional authority. They are defending the integrity of Christian witness in the land of Christ.

In this sense, Huckabee’s intervention confirms the urgency of the Patriarchs’ message. The struggle is no longer only about land or politics. It is also about who speaks for the Christian community, whose theology shapes—or helps to shape—global Christian understanding, and whether the churches of the Holy Land—and beyond—will be sidelined in favor of voices connected to Israel’s hegemonic and genocidal policies.

The Patriarchs’ statement is not defensive. The statement is prophetic. It draws a clear line between authentic church representation and politically manufactured alternatives. It reminds both the global church and the world that the Christian presence in Palestine cannot survive if it is severed from truth, justice, and the lived experience of its people, whose ancestors first claimed the faith and brought it to the world.

At this critical time, we are all encouraged to support our church leaders, helping to ensure that this clarity is preserved and strengthened, as the Patriarchs declare, “in the very land where our Lord lived, taught, suffered and rose from the dead.”

We Have Arrived In Paranoid Corner

Professor Robert Skidelsky FBA, Lord Skidelsky proffers, “as promised, a feature which I hope will be fairly regular, called Paranoid Corner. The motivation behind it is alarm at the use of vastly exaggerated threats to spread panic and alarm, and to justify increasing restrictions on freedom of speech, opinion, and assembly in the name of national security. Please let me have your reactions, and tell me whether you think I’m guilty of the paranoia myself”:

Recently, some Russian nuns were sighted selling holy trinkets in Swedish churches. Soon, Swedish newspapers were awash with headlines about pro-Putin spies engaged in “funding the Putin war machine”. Not just that: Russian Orthodox priests had allegedly infiltrated Swedish churches suspiciously close to military bases and airports. The Rector of Täby, Michael Ojermo, tried to quell the alarm. Not only was there no evidence of ecclesiastical espionage, but “a few trinkets cannot fund a war” (James Rothwell, Sunday Telegraph, 18 January 2026).

We have arrived in Paranoid Corner. Paranoia is the mental delusion that one is being threatened, persecuted, deceived, or targeted, based on the consistent misinterpretation of others’ actions as hostile or malicious. This is reinforced by a psychological mechanism known as confirmation bias. Starting with a wrong or lunatic premise (“Russia is at war with us” — Fiona Hill, The Guardian, 7 June 2025), every Russian action is interpreted in ways that confirm the premise. A close cousin is conspiracy theory: the belief in hidden causes. These psychological conditions form the holy trinity of paranoia.

Britain’s ruling elites are well entrenched in Paranoid Corner. Not long ago, Russia was the obsessive focus of Westminster’s fears. Now the fixation has shifted east. The recent uproar over plans for a vast new Chinese embassy in London is not merely a planning dispute. It is a symptom. Headlines ring with warnings of spies behind every lamppost and Trojan horses inside every app.

Russia’s ally China offers low-hanging fruit for the conspiracy theorist. It is a dictatorship and therefore almost by definition malevolent. Its media are part of state propaganda and therefore not to be trusted. Its reach into global trade, technology, finance, and infrastructure is extensive and therefore threatening. 

The former Deputy Prime Minister, Oliver Dowden, declared in Parliament on 11 September 2023 that China represented a “systemic challenge to the United Kingdom and to its values.” Notice here the elasticity in the concept of threat as it moves effortlessly from physical to mental harm.

The “Mega-Embassy” Spectacle

Nothing illustrates Britain’s China panic more vividly than the drama over the proposed Chinese “mega-embassy” at Royal Mint Court. China purchased the site in 2018 with plans to bring its UK diplomatic operations together. Its scale was immediately politicised: “the largest embassy in Europe” became a symbolic provocation.

Critics seized on the proximity of the site to communications infrastructure in the City to conjure the image of Beijing tapping directly into Britain’s financial nerve centre. The Daily Telegraph (20 January 2026) talked of “208 secret rooms” in basement plans. Perhaps torture chambers?

High-profile politicians turned planning meetings into proxy battles against the Chinese Communist Party. Tom Tugendhat, former security minister, called the embassy “a base for hostile activity inside the United Kingdom” (Reuters, 20 January 2026). Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel denounced the plan as a “colossal spy hub” (The Guardian, 20 January 2026). Sir Iain Duncan Smith framed the decision as “an invitation for interference” (X, 21 November 2025). In the Lords, Baroness Helena Kennedy warned against reinforcing the dangerous notion that Britain would make concessions “without reciprocity or regard for the rule of law” (LA Times, 20 January 2026).

In fact, Britain’s security services assessed the risks as manageable. MI5 and GCHQ advised that while no system can eliminate “each and every potential risk,” a package of proportionate mitigations could manage the site safely (LA Times, 20 January 2026). In a joint letter, MI5 head Ken McCallum and GCHQ head Anne Keast-Butler noted an operational advantage: consolidating seven separate Chinese sites into one could make surveillance and counter-intelligence more efficient (UK Government, 20 January 2026). The Home Office and Foreign Office reportedly concurred that no specific security objection, including fears about cables, warranted blocking the development (The Guardian, 20 January 2026).

But when, on 20 January 2026, the government finally gave the go-ahead, critics complained of capitulation. The Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, joined protests chanting “No China mega-embassy!” (ITV, 17 January 2026).

Spies, Students, and the New Red Scare

The embassy saga forms part of the wider narrative that China is waging clandestine warfare against Britain, infiltrating institutions, and suborning elites. This draws energy from a sequence of incidents, real and alleged, each magnified into proof of an overarching plot.

One episode was the arrest of parliamentary researchers Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry in 2023 on suspicion of spying for Beijing (Jurist, 22 April 2022). When prosecutors later dropped the charges, the correction could not reverse the imaginative work the story had done. The idea of a Chinese fifth column was planted. MI5 has issued alerts to Parliament about approaches linked to Chinese intelligence (The Guardian, 19 November 2025). There were reports of LinkedIn profiles being used to offer promising MPs consultancy arrangements and trips — a classic pattern of recruitment (The Guardian, 19 November 2025).

Paranoia has infected the universities. With large numbers of Chinese students contributing substantially to the finances of British higher education, concerns have been raised that Beijing’s leverage may chill research — or, worse, that many students are Chinese spies (The Times, 4 August 2025).

The Chinese social media platform TikTok provides a further example of alleged malicious influence. The platform’s ownership structure and the legal environment in which its parent company operates raise questions about data access and influence, as they do for many technologies. MPs have been forbidden to download TikTok on their parliamentary devices — and thus to access Chinese views — due to fears of data harvesting, surveillance, and potential exploitation by the Chinese state (PoliticsHome, 23 March 2023).

Media Hype and Political Incentives

How has this paranoid narrative gained such traction? Given the basic premise that China has malevolent intentions towards Britain, there is a political incentive to talk tough on China and to accuse opponents of appeasement. Conservatives framed the Labour government as weak; Labour felt pressure not to appear naïve; and both sides discovered that hawkishness brings short-term benefits without cost.

The media, too, has been willing — often eager — to amplify the drama. Stories of covert rooms, “police stations,” and secret agents sell. They supply intrigue, moral certainty, and a ready villain. The result is a classic feedback loop: politicians issue dire warnings that become headlines; headlines create pressure for stronger gestures; gestures become further stories of a nation “standing up” to China. The public is left with a sense of permanent siege — a mood that can be mobilised but rarely resolved.

Conclusion: Shadow-Boxing with Beijing

Britain today is engaged in an imaginary war with China. This is not to deny that China poses challenges. Authoritarian practices, human-rights abuses, cyber capabilities, and influence operations are real issues requiring clear-eyed policy. But the feature of paranoia is that it collapses the distinction between fact and fantasy, leading to a dangerous escalation of mutual threat.

In The Times (15 January 2026), Juliet Samuel wondered “what exactly will the US do … if we allow its main adversary [China] to build a vast operational hub slap-bang in the middle of the Western alliance and its critical infrastructure?”. To which former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw replied: “It’s long been a fact of life that nations engage in espionage against each other”, and sensibly suggested that we should rely on intelligence advice rather than speculation to assess the severity of the threat.

Present On The Call

Imran Mulla writes:

Fresh questions have emerged over the British government’s response to reports that the previous Conservative government threatened to defund the International Criminal Court if it pursued arrest warrants against Israeli leaders.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has released apparently misleading information about a phone call in which then foreign secretary, David Cameron, allegedly made the threat to the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, Middle East Eye can reveal.

Details of the 23 April 2024 phone call between Cameron and Khan were first reported by MEE in June last year, but the foreign office has repeatedly refused to comment on the matter, despite growing political pressure.

Last week MEE reported that the Foreign Office had been forced for the first time to confirm that a phone conversation between Cameron and Khan took place in response to a Freedom of Information request filed by Unredacted, a research unit based at the University of Westminster.

Unredacted asked which ministers or officials were present on the call to Khan. In response, the Foreign Office said: “The then Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, was the only person present on the call on 23 April 2024 with Karim Khan.”

But according to numerous sources with knowledge of the matter, including former staff in the prosecutor’s office, Cameron’s special assistant, Baroness Liz Sugg, was also present on the call.

When MEE put this to the foreign office, it declined to comment and pointed MEE to Cameron, who sits as a Conservative peer in the House of Lords.

Neither Cameron nor Sugg, also a member of the House of Lords, responded to requests for comment.

Cameron served as foreign minister under then prime minister Rishi Sunak in the previous Conservative administration, which was replaced by the current Labour government following Keir Starmer’s general election victory in July 2024.

But the failure of the current government to comment on the allegations has prompted calls, including from some Labour MPs, for an investigation.

'The UK must come clean' 

Humza Yousaf, who was the first minister of Scotland when Cameron made the call to Khan, told MEE: “The UK Government must come clean. The more they try to obfuscate and obstruct, the clearer it becomes they have something to hide.”

Yousaf urged Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper to “release all the correspondence in relation to the call that took place between Lord Cameron and Karim Khan, and instigate an independent investigation into what took place at the time.”

He added: “To, allegedly, threaten prosecutors at the most senior court in the world would be unacceptable. To do so in defence of a man who has led the genocide in Gaza, is simply unforgivable. Lord Cameron should make an urgent statement to the Lords clearing up this matter once and for all.”

MEE can further reveal that the government refused to comment on the matter in response to a letter sent in July by Labour MP Andy Slaughter to then foreign secretary David Lammy, asking whether the allegations against Cameron would be investigated.

Middle East minister Hamish Falconer responded on 26 November. In his letter, seen by MEE, he said: “It is not the practice of this Government to comment on the actions of previous Governments on such matters. The UK Government’s position is that it respects the role and independence of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is the primary international institution for investigating and prosecuting the most serious crimes of international concern.”

On Wednesday Labour MP Kim Johnson told MEE: “The public deserves honesty, not a culture of secrecy at the heart of government. If reports are accurate that senior Tories threatened to defund the ICC - and that the Foreign Office has since given false information about who was present on that call - then this is an issue of the utmost seriousness.”

Johnson added: “Ministers cannot stand at the despatch box or on the international stage claiming to uphold international law while refusing to answer basic questions about whether the UK sought to undermine the ICC.

“The foreign secretary must urgently address these reports, and we need a full and transparent investigation into what transpired. The British people have a right to know the truth.”

Cameron warned UK would defund ICC

Sam Raphael, professor in International Relations and Human Rights at the University of Westminster and a member of the Unredacted research unit, said that “full transparency from the Foreign Office is an absolute must.

“That means releasing a full and final list of who was on the call in question, as well as a transcript of the conversation and any accompanying material.”

Cameron, a former prime minister who was appointed foreign secretary by Sunak in November 2023, phoned Khan in April 2024 while the prosecutor was on an official visit to Venezuela.

During the call, according to sources with knowledge of the matter, Cameron told Khan that if the ICC issued warrants for Israeli leaders, the UK would “defund the court and withdraw from the Rome Statute”.

In an account of the episode in MEE journalist Peter Oborne’s book, Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza, a source close to Cameron said that the call with Khan did take place and was “robust”.

But the source said that rather than making a threat, Cameron pointed out that strong voices in the Conservative Party would push for defunding the ICC and withdrawing from the Rome Statute.

In a submission to the ICC last month, Khan - who is on a leave of absence pending the outcome of a UN investigation into misconduct allegations against him - alleged that a senior British official had threatened that the UK would defund and withdraw from the court if he pursued warrants for Israeli leaders.

Khan submitted applications for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then defence minister, Yoav Gallant, as well as for Hamas leaders, the following month. The warrants were approved and issued by the court in November 2024.

Possible criminal offence

Leading international law experts have told MEE that Cameron’s alleged behaviour could constitute a criminal offence under Article 70 of the Rome Statute, which prohibits interference with the administration of justice.

Now cross-party pressure is mounting on the Labour government to investigate Cameron’s call to the ICC prosecutor.

Labour MPs Richard Burgon and Imran Hussain wrote to the government in December saying the seriousness of the allegations demanded a “clear, transparent and independent examination” of whether ministers or senior officials sought to interfere with the ICC.

On Wednesday, Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader and Your Party MP, told MEE: “Threatening to defund the ICC would amount to direct state interference in judicial independence, a flagrant breach of Britain's obligations under the Rome Statute. There needs to be a full investigation - and ministers need to be held to account.

“That investigation should not just include Conservative ministers, but Labour ones too, who have failed to shield the ICC from ongoing interference or condemn the outrageous sanctions against it by the United States.”