Public Confidence

As if John Healey did not have enough to worry about, he and Pat McFadden have been clad in bikinis by Grok. In the House of Commons yesterday, Healey confirmed that Britain could never say no to the United States. But no one asked why the Americans would ever order us to tag along. It is not because they need us. It is to make the point. That was what happened in Iraq, and here we are again.

Even the Axis of Evil is back. Tom Tugendhat was officially deployed to Afghanistan as a TA schoolie before being openly acknowledged as a spook 13 days later. When he was "helping to set up the National Security Council of Afghanistan and the government in Helmand Province", then he was classified as a civilian. He has the strong whiff of Captain Darling in Blackadder Goes Fourth. Therefore, it is on Tugendhat that we are supposed to rely for the assurance that Venezuela and Iran had been practically a single country.

In that case, then they must still be, because Venezuela's regime has not changed, and it is clamping down hard on those who have had the bad manners to celebrate the removal of Nicolás Maduro, the indictment of whom features almost nothing that is being alleged against him by the people on a time delay. In fact, that indictment contains very little at all, and should it ever make it beyond a grand jury, then 12 randomly assembled members of the general public would be most unlikely to be unanimously convinced of it beyond reasonable doubt. But none of that has ever been what any of this was about. JD Vance has told Jesse Watters straight that this intervention had been only for the oil and to assert hemispheric dominance. Delcy Rodríguez is said to have swapped Maduro's Cuban bodyguards for Russians. María Corina Machado and Edmundo González should catch the next available flights to Copenhagen or anywhere else that would take them.

Would that Reza Pahlavi and Maryam Rajavi were so irrelevant. Rajavi may be banned from the United Kingdom, but she had an op-ed in yesterday's Daily Telegraph, so some things must indeed have changed since 2003. We were all "Islamo-Marxists" then. Now the world's leading Islamo-Marxist is writing for that. Poor old Pahlavi. If he cannot depend on the Telegraph to support an Imperial client absolute monarchy as the correct form of government for the fuzzy-wuzzies, then on whom or what could he possibly depend? And he is backed by Israel. What does he have to do? Then again, like the founders of the Tudeh Party, Rajavi, who wears the hijab the casting off of which is supposed to epitomise the revolt, is a member of the old Imperial House of Qajar that the Pahlavi parvenus overthrew in 1925. So yes, very much on brand for the Telegraph. The other right-wing papers, though, should ask themselves why they were not mocking the Red Princess this time. The same goes for everyone who had kittens over Andrew Murray in the Corbyn years or Susan Michie in the pandemic.

Rajavi's PMOI/MEK is all over the Iranian dissident networks that have emerged onto the streets of London. Here we go again. Successive British Governments transformed Manchester into the world centre of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group that went on to bomb Manchester Arena. Britain invaded Libya in order to install such people as its new regime. From the ensuing civil war, the Royal Navy rescued both Salman Abedi, who went on to carry out that bombing, killing himself in the process, and his brother Hashem, who went on to be a key figure in the planning of that bombing, and who in April of this year threw hot cooking oil over, and stabbed with makeshift knives, three Prison Officers at HMP Frankland, members of our community here in County Durham. Having cultivated the Abedis and El-Fattah, MI5 and MI6 have just been granted new powers to spy on Members of Parliament without the permission of the Prime Minister. All right, they have always done that. But even the formal propriety has been removed. It is no wonder that the Manchester Arena families want MI5, MI6 and GCHQ to be covered by the Hillsborough Law, but no one would rate their chances. MI5 lied to the public inquiry into the Manchester Arena attack, and the relevant agencies will lie to any public inquiry into an attack in Britain by their pet Iranians.

Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani are still cheerleading for the PMOI/MEK. So much for worrying about the fusion of Marxism and Twelver Shiism in and by Giuliani's latest successor as Mayor of New York City. Like the PMOI/MEK, Zohran Mamdani really presents little or no challenge to neoconservative foreign policy. Moreover, he can never be President. Jacob Frey could, but he is even less to write home about, although he has at least responded to the murder of Renee Nicole Good by the ICE that the supporters of Ron and Rand Paul used to want to abolish. In comparable circumstances, what would Sadiq Khan have to say? Or Susan Hall? Or Laila Cunningham? And who will put up against Cunningham from the right? Catherine Blaiklock, with her Afro-Caribbean second husband, and with her two mixed-race children by her South Asian first husband? Right of that, then? Hall, who is a close associate of Rupert Lowe, and who is active in the Pink Ladies of Patriotic Alternative and the Homeland Party, ties that do not preclude her Leadership of the Conservative Group in the London Assembly? Will it be the Conservative Party that contested the London Mayoralty from Advance UK's right and from Reform UK's far right? After all, the Leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party looks set to pass to Jon Burrows, who addressed the Conference of Traditional Unionist Voice last March but who has since decided that it was too soft for him.

That said, Jim Allister gave an excellent speech in yesterday's Commons debate on trial by jury, pointing out the far greater public confidence in juries than in Diplock courts in Northern Ireland, the automatic right of appeal from Diplock courts, and the falsehood of the Government's claim that its changes would save time. David Lammy was in Mount Vernon with Vance, who no doubt reminded him of the importance of jury trials while Lammy reminded Vance of the Fourth Amendment that precluded just sending ICE door-to-door. So Sarah Sackman answered for the Government, and she said what we had all known, that the Government was doing this on principle and would therefore be doing it even if there were no backlog in the courts. There were 115 Labour abstentions. Of Labour MPs, while only Karl Turner voted against the Government, only 285 voted with it.

Plus the two tellers, who were of course Whips such as also cast, as they always do, the proxy vote of Dan Norris. Norris was a Whip with Ivor Caplin, and they were known to be close, under a Chief Whip who was the political patroness, both of Anna Turley, and of Caplin's close friend, closest ally, former lover, and constituency successor, Peter Kyle. Caplan is no longer on bail and has moved to Hemel Hempstead, while Kyle was responsible until September for the Online Safety Act, at the committee stage of which the evidence of Hope Not Hate was given by Liron Woodcock-Velleman. Having carried Nigel Farage's Bonnie Blue, The Spectator features Jeffrey Epstein's Peter Mandelson. I was blocked from its website soon after I was sacked from the Telegraph that now gave a platform to Rajavi. Like being banned for life from the Labour Party, those achievements are on my CV.

Will Mandelson now be turning up to the House of Lords, along with Michelle Mone, Ann Limb, and another nonce's best mate, Matthew Doyle? On Monday, they would be able to vote for Third Reading of the Government's sellout of the Chagossians, on the same day as the High Court's repeatedly delayed consideration of a judicial review. Will the Lords division be held only after that judgment? If not, why not? A future Government could not just "tear up" the deal. But this side of ratification, this U-turn could still be effected. Look at everything that has been absolutely sacrosanct until it wasn't, up to and including the increased business rates on pubs. May we have a national database of the ones from which Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves were still barred, and a sticker in their windows to advertise that happy fact?

Then there was the two-child benefit cap, Second Reading of the lifting of which will also be on Monday, this time in the House of Commons. All five Reform MPs abstained on trial by jury yesterday, but despite having previously called for that lifting, they are all going to vote against it. This time next week, the supposedly natalist Danny Kruger will have voted for that cap as a member of two different parties. Might he still be a member of both of them? Zia Yusuf materialised out of thin air to become Chairman of Reform in July 2024, a month before he even formally left the Conservative Party in which he had made no mark, but which still had to kick him out because he had never resigned and presumably never intended to. Immediately upon his appointment, he was never off the airwaves, and he never has been since. These things do not just happen. See also Zack Polanski.

Lowe, though, both spoke and voted against the abolition of almost all trial by jury, and would undoubtedly do so if legislation to that effect were ever tabled. Alas, he is favour of the two-child benefit cap even while he says that "MPs should focus on Britain not other countries like Venezuela", a false dichotomy yet with a sound underlying point, except when he demands that Britain "support Israel however we can", although he does not treat "What about kosher slaughter?" as a showstopping rhetorical question. Instead, he confirms that he would ban that, which never involves pre-stunning, along with halal slaughter, which in Britain usually does.

Lowe understands the trend that was manifest at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest, when platform speaker after platform speaker was floored from the floor as the rising generation demanded answers about Israeli influence in American politics, about anti-Christianity in the Talmud, about violence against Christians on the part of West Bank settlers and the IDF, and about the USS Liberty. In September, there were Israeli flags all over the Unite the Kingdom rally. But by December, a recent Reform activist had to be removed from one of Ben Habib's Advance meetings because she had segued from a well-received attack on Islam to an unwelcome criticism, both of Israeli influence in British politics, and, it must be said, of the Talmud, all while quoting Charlie Kirk. Lowe still would not take her, but she will go somewhere, and so will everyone else in Britain who was downstream of the AmericaFest audience.

In scores of seats, the difference between a Reform gain and not will come down to a tiny number of votes, but the Right is looking as fractious as the Left. On 20 January, the electors of the Horsley division of Derbyshire County Council, and of the Amber Valley Borough Council ward of Codnor, Langley Mill and Aldercar, will have the opportunity to vote for Advance's Alex Stevenson, who was drummed out of the Conservative Party for having supported Andrew Bridgen's description of the Covid-19 vaccines as "the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust", and who was a mere 3,334 votes short of winning the Amber Valley parliamentary seat for Reform in 2024. If Stevenson's showing, projected across the constituency, were half that, then Reform would be in serious trouble there. Expect a very great deal more of this sort of thing. The Conservatives, Reform, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon's Advance, the supporters of Lowe, and the keepers of the Kirk flame, are set to field at least five right-wing candidates in dozens of constituencies, mostly marginals.

Lowe does not want anyone who was not a British citizen to have the vote in the United Kingdom, but would that extend to dual nationals? If not, then there would be those who most certainly would say that. But if so, then the question of kosher and halal slaughter would recur as the question of people whose other nationality was Israeli. MPs are free to campaign for anything they liked, but Britain is not in fact funding an airport in Mirpur. It is funding things elsewhere, though. And the real issue in Birmingham has nothing to do with that. It is that the Labour council has allowed the bin strike to go on for a year. Even the agency workers who had been brought in to break it are now also on strike. Birmingham's only non-Labour MP is Ayoub Khan, who is also a city councillor, and who must therefore be discredited at all costs.

Like Adnan Hussain, Khan made a strong Commons defence of jury trial against a Government that was smearing Lord Wolfson by identifying him with his client. Starmer's status as a KC is a key part of his image, so this kind of thing could do immense damage. After trial by jury, will they come for the cab rank rule? Labour has already, on Tuesday, voted down a Lords attempt to release, where appropriate, the IPP hostages in the class and race war. Although David Blunkett has admitted on the floor of that House that he had been wrong about IPPs, he did not turn up to vote for justice, or indeed at all. Will he turn up to save his fellow disabled people and mine from the assisted suicide for facilitating which Miles Cross had been jailed for 14 years?

The Bill is being timetabled to prevent Jewish Peers from opposing it, but if in extremis Jewish doctors may save life on the Sabbath, then might the same apply to Jewish legislators? The safeguarding allegations against Dame Sarah Mullally would have driven out anyone other than a liberal with a liberal background. But she has said that she would table an amendment to deny Third Reading to the Assisted Suicide Bill, and that she would force that amendment to the vote. Had she failed to do so, then that failure would have been the price of her protection. If she is no longer in need of such, then over to her.