Of State

According to the Royal Family's website, "The current Counsellors of State are The Queen, The Prince of Wales, The Princess Royal, The Duke of Edinburgh, The Duke of Sussex, Prince Andrew and Princess Beatrice." Who and Princess Beatrice? And the Privy Council's website still lists Peter Mandelson as a member. Think on.

Not least in view of the fact that the Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain KC, told John Swinney the details of the charge against Peter Murrell, not even last month as previously thought, but nearly a year ago, while we have not even begun to examine the extent of Mandelson's activities while he was a European Commissioner. Ostensibly attractive alternatives are not necessarily any such thing.

Coming Apart?

The day after Ghislaine Maxwell's conviction, her brothers were all over the media in her defence. Would anyone else have been treated like that? Well, this evening, we have Peter Mandelson's claim, read out on air as fact, that he had been arrested yesterday only because he had been about to flee the country. There are things that a lot of us could say about the circumstances of our arrests, and we were not flight risks. I for one have never been required to surrender my passport.

Will either Mandelson, or Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, be given a trial by jury? David Lammy announced today that he was lifting the cap on court sitting days, but Sarah Sackman has made it clear that abolition of almost all jury trials, and of the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court, were ideological, and unrelated to the backlog. All Commons stages are planned for one week, to begin within a fortnight from now. Lammy, Sackman and Keir Starmer clearly have no expectation of being in office long after that.

Today, someone called Louise Sandher-Jones has had to correct the record of the House of Commons because she had claimed that Starmer had never worked with Phil Shiner. Everyone knew that Starmer, with Richard Hermer, had indeed been instructed by Shiner's Public Interest Lawyers. That would now be enough to deprive Starmer of the support both of the Blairites and of the Old Labour Right if they had anyone with whom to replace him, but of course Mandelson has rendered Wes Streeting impossible, so they are stuck with Starmer.

Streeting has brought into the National Health Service the Palantir that is hand in glove with the IDF and with ICE, the Palantir that was a client of Mandelson's and in which Jeffrey Epstein had invested. It has since also been awarded a £240 million contract with the Ministry of Defence, with no competitive process. Today, Lammy announced a massive extension of Artificial Intelligence in the criminal justice system, in which Palantir is already heavily involved, not least in the form of live facial recognition. Say it again, a Mandelson client and an Epstein investment, the IDF and ICE. And the big one is on its way.

The Official Opposition wants to ban social media for the under-16s, a measure that could not work unless we were all required to prove our ages by means of the digital ID for which the Minister was Josh Simons, from whose Labour Together Darren Jones has most disingenuously claimed to have received "not a pound" when in the months leading up to the last General Election, two members of its staff were seconded to his office, at a total value of £57,441.58.

It would be the simplest thing to ban smartphones from schools, which have always called home, or been called, when necessary. But banning social media for under-16s would deny them the formative experience of their generation internationally, together with any ideology other than that of the schools and of the official media. The people who want it in Britain want to lower the voting age to 16, having already raised the school leaving age to 18, when many of them want conscription.

Sexualised images of children are not free speech, nor are non-consensual sexualised images of adults, and any company doing business here has to abide by our laws. All of that said, the threat to the X-Twitter is pursuant to the Online Safety Act that was passed when Kemi Badenoch was Secretary of State for Business and Trade, not the immediately responsible Department but not the furthest removed, and when the Conservative Party still delighted in the membership of several people who were now prominent in Reform UK, including Nadine Dorries, the Secretary of State who introduced the Bill.

At committee stage of that Bill, the evidence of Hope Not Hate was given by Liron Woodcock-Velleman, who was then a well-connected Labour councillor in Barnet, but who is now scandalously out on bail while awaiting sentence for offences including sending naked pictures of himself to a 13-year-old girl. When he committed offences startlingly similar to those of Woodcock-Velleman, Sam Gould was both a Redbridge councillor and a Streeting staffer. And today, Conor McGrath was charged with three offences of taking or making indecent images of a child. He was formerly a Labour councillor in Stevenage and on the staff of the Labour MP there, Kevin Bonavia.

Reform expects to take the Stevenage parliamentary seat from Labour. 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 Labour Together slate. After all, who else is there? Adam Mitula? It will be fascinating to see in what "context" it might have been acceptable for him to have said that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust had been exaggerated.

Not that either Labour or the Conservatives is in any position to comment. Under them, Britain has spent the last four years backing Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Brigade, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, the Freedom of Russia Legion, the Russian Volunteer Corps,  and all the rest of the displayers of the Sonnerad, the Wolfsangel, and the plain old Swastika.

All while matters turned out exactly as some of us predicted from the start in the Ukraine that in Ternopil had named a football stadium after Roman Shukhevych, on a street named after Stepan Bandera; the Ukraine of Andriy Biletsky, to whom "the mission of Ukraine is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival against the Semite-led Untermenschen". Pavlo Lapshyn is still in His Majesty's Prison, and will be for decades yet, because of his 2013 murder of 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham. Lapshyn went on to put bombs outside three mosques in this country. He belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Brigade, being led by its "political ideologist", Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell. If Mitula is anything to go by, then such are essentially the people who would staff the Westminster and constituency offices of Matt Goodwin MP, assuming that he had made it through tomorrow's three-hour hearing in the High Court for alleged electoral fraud. What a way for a candidate to spend the eve of poll.

Nor is Mitula (and what sort of Anglo-Saxon name is that?) Goodwin's only questionable connection. As a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Heterodox Social Sciences, he has links to Aporia Magazine, which is published by the same Human Diversity Foundation that publishes Mankind Quarterly and The Jolly Heretic, the podcast of my university contemporary Edward Dutton, who once tried to seduce me after Mass, so I know his little secret. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Mankind Quarterly, which he used to edit. Another member is Dr Adel Batterjee of Jeddah, the founder of the Benevolence International Foundation, which was placed under UN sanctions because it was a front for funding al-Qaeda. In 2018, Dutton secured the publication of this masterpiece in Evolutionary Psychological Science. On the Editorial Board of that is Professor Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, and ornament of the Epstein Files. Noam Chomsky is a complete outlier both in those Files and on the Left, whereas Jeffrey Epstein, Pinker, Dutton and Batterjee constitute an Axis of Evil with anyone who cited any of them.

The HDF was founded in 2022 by Emil Kirkegaard of OpenPsych. Kirkegaard is noted for his calls to legalise child pornography so as to reduce the number of rapes committed by paedophiles, to lower the age of consent to 13, and to make it even lower if puberty had begun. In 2018, he sued Oliver Smith for calling him a paedophile, but in 2020 he had to drop the action and pay Smith's legal costs, leaving him heavily in debt. The HDF has taken over most of the previous work of the Pioneer Fund, publisher of The Bell Curve and American distributor of Erbkrank. Goodwin has commended Coming Apart, Charles Murray's follow-up to The Bell Curve that applied its racism to class differences among whites. Reform would repeal even what little workers' and tenants' rights this Government had introduced, and reduce everyone's occupational pension schemes to the condition of the worst. Nigel Farage's talk of reindustrialisation feels a lot longer ago than it was.

Trust

"To all those whose parents migrated to obtain a better life for their children. To the economic migrant. The conflict migrant. Those under occupation, dictatorship, persecution, and those experiencing genocide. You matter. Your stories matter more than ever. Your dreams are an act of resistance. To those watching at home, archive your loved ones. Archive your stories yesterday, today, and forever. For Nigeria, for London, the Congo, Sudan. Free Palestine."

Agree or disagree with that, but during a two-hour delay between recording and broadcast, the BBC managed to edit it out. Yet it could not delete one word, the same word that was voluntarily shouted by a convicted paedophile when he lunged at Jennifer Melle, leading to her suspension. While silencing politically black opinion, the BBC reverted to the treatment of the disabled as sideshow freaks. Some of us have long known what everyone now knows to be that Epstein Class.

So light and middle-class that I had grown up thinking that I did not have it, my County Durham accent was mocked at Durham, so heaven knows what Bridget Phillipson had to laugh off at Oxford. But while her claims of childhood deprivation are nowhere near as far-fetched as Wes Streeting's, they do cry out for interrogation. Labour came to power when she was 13. Working for a charity founded by her mother was Phillipson's only job until she entered Parliament at the age of 26. If her council house had no heating upstairs, then why was that matter not addressed by her Labour council? Her mother was on it.

Yet now Phillipson wants all state-funded schools to join trusts. Sometimes, people should be made to have what they had professed to want. In the running of those schools, Phillipson's Liberal Establishment in academia and the media meets her right-wing Labour machine in local government. We ought to be bypassing them both, to secure the representation that had never been afforded by those who had presumed to speak for our people, but never to our people. If that involved doing deals with the Conservatives, then such a deal secured the Leadership of Derby City Council for Chris Williamson. We could not possibly get less out of them than we had ever managed to get out of the Keir Starmers of the world. Sooner the bosses than the scabs.

Cain and Able

If you want Christianity, then go to church. Zia Yusuf's proposal to stop former churches from being converted into mosques presupposes that they would already be redundant. According to Nigel Farage, "More people might go to church, had we had better Archbishops of Canterbury." Dame Sarah Mullally may well retire during the next Parliament, with Farage possibly in a position to choose her successor.

Since Reform's Britain would by then be the principal redoubt of Trumpism, Farage should nominate Paula White. It is historically anomalous that eight of the nine Archbishops of Canterbury in living memory have been Trinitarians, even if the other one was an atheist. Not only would Her Grace correct that, but she would bring refreshing connections to the Unification Church, and through that to the Nation of Islam with which it organises mass events; in turn, the Nation of Islam promotes Dianetics, which is the foundation of Scientology.

As for the prosperity gospel, Donald Trump grew up in the Marble Collegiate Church of Norman Vincent Peale, who even took Trump's first wedding there. The Power of Positive Thinking was the old mainline American Protestant tradition reconfigured by the New Thought movement, and prosperity theology is that reconfiguration of Pentecostalism. It was only to be expected that White should head Trump's White House Faith Office. Now to bring her to Canterbury. Complete with her third and current husband, Jonathan Cain. Yes, the one out of Journey. Don't stop believing, hold on to that feeling.

  

The present arrangements have never been adequate to the task of filling 26 seats in Parliament, three of which carried automatic seats on the Privy Council, with two of those having hitherto led to life peerages on retirement. The Liberal Establishment in the Church of England presumes the right to make those appointments, in one of many examples of the fact that there is far too little direct exercise of the Royal Prerogative by Ministers accountable to the House of Commons.

Like the Police, or the education system, or the BBC, or anything else that is alleged to have become "politicised", the monarchy has always been political, since, like each of those, the very concept of it is profoundly so. The question is whose politics. We ought not to be seeking to abolish the Royal Prerogative, but to exercise it. The whole of it, no matter to which committee or self-perpetuating oligarchy any part of it might have been surrendered. All of it must be taken back, and in most cases that would be perfectly simple to do.

Previous Governments have handed over vast powers to the Deep State. For example, while each generation presumably produces an obvious Astronomer Royal, why hand over the power to appoint Regius Professors, or certain Oxbridge Heads of House, or the Poet Laureate, or the judiciary? Yet those powers have never been legislated away. Almost nothing in Britain ever is quite abolished or repealed. It falls into prolonged desuetude. But it is still there.

A Fatal Catch

Peter Franklin writes:

The Conservatives have been hyperactive this past weekend, clearly desperate to regain the initiative from Nigel Farage and Reform UK’s self-branded “shadow cabinet”.

On Sunday, Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch and Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott launched a bold new policy on student loans. The gist is that the crippling rate of interest on Plan 2 student loans — which Badenoch condemned as a “scam” — should be reduced to the rate of inflation only. The brains behind the proposal, Tory MP Neil O’Brien, explained that it would be paid for by ceasing to fund the provision of low-value courses.

Meanwhile, Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel was on a mission to stop the “disgraceful Chagos surrender”. She’s meeting with “counterparts” in Washington this week to ensure that US President Donald Trump’s evident hostility to the deal translates into an official US roadblock to the transfer of the islands to Mauritius. Also making the news over the weekend was the Shadow Equalities Minister, Claire Coutinho, who was pressing home her campaign against the Government’s puberty blocker trial, which has been delayed by the medical watchdog.

This is all good stuff from the Tories. And yet, politically, there’s a fatal catch, which is that the Conservative Party is running against its own record in government.

Take the student loan policy. Plan 2 loans were offered from 2012 to 2023 — during which time five million people had their finances blighted by these pernicious debt traps. Is it any wonder that Tory support among younger voters collapsed over the same period? It’s great that some saner voices are now shaping Conservative policy, but the time to act was 15 years ago. Instead of reversing the legacy of the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown years, in power the Tories doubled down on it. Or rather, they tripled down — given that they tripled tuition fees while allowing the debt-fuelled over-expansion of the higher education sector to continue.

Badenoch’s pathological aversion to “psychodrama” prevents her from holding her Tory predecessors to account for their manifest failures. As a result, she’s unable to rebuild trust in the Conservative brand and thus gain a fair hearing for her own policies.

And it’s not just on the issue of student loans. For instance, the Chagos surrender can’t be blamed solely on Keir Starmer and his lawyer friends. Negotiations over the transfer of the British overseas territory began before the election, when James Cleverly — now a member of Badenoch’s Shadow Cabinet — was foreign secretary. A process that a Conservative government should have strangled at birth was instead incubated, ready for Labour to take it to its hideous final form.

As for the puberty blocker trial, that too has echoes in the pre-election period. In particular, when Conservative ministers were standing up in the Commons to proclaim that “trans women are women”, and when the Tavistock Clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service (since shut down) was still operating within the NHS.

The impetus for these and other disastrous policies did not come from the Conservative Party itself. Instead, the rot spread from the subverted, dysfunctional institutions which constitute this country’s permanent establishment — universities, for instance, or the Foreign Office or the upper echelons of the NHS. Yet the party failed to recruit talented people who had not imbibed this worldview wholesale. 

Badenoch has boxed herself in. By insisting that Britain is not broken, she’s unable to offer a deeper diagnosis of our national decay. She’s only willing to say that our politics is broken. Judging by the consequences, that’s a distinction without a difference.

And James Lachrymose writes:

Much has already been written about the planned handover of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, and much of it wrong. While the government’s moral and legal arguments for surrendering sovereignty have been persuasively dismantled by others, opponents of the deal have themselves lapsed into occasional nonsense. The teary-eyed pleas on behalf of the so-called Chagossian People have been taken apart in the Pimlico Journal [a bad undergraduate article, written for effect]. Another popular canard is that the newly Mauritian islands would, somehow, come under the control of China. This is a story that reveals more about its proponents than the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean.

The Conservative leadership, having started the handover process under the brainless Liz Truss, have taken up the Chagos issue with the typical zeal of a recent convert. Priti Patel, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, described the arrangement as the “Chagos-China Surrender Bill” and accused Starmer of “kowtowing to China”. Mauritius is so frequently described as a puppet of China that you would imagine its prime ministers were appointed in Zhongnanhai. Exciting as these ideas are, they are deficient in one respect: they are completely untrue.

What is true is that Mauritius is the close ally of a rising Asian republic, deeply suspicious of Britain. Mauritius is dependent for its defence and economy on a nationalist, anti-colonialist regime that wants the Brits kicked out. A rival power does indeed plan to develop bases in the archipelago — but that power is India.

Mauritius’s closeness to India has been neglected in the Chagos discourse, but is hard to overstate. The former Prime Minister, Paul Bérenger, described the relationship as “sacred and umbilical” (two decades earlier, India had planned to invade Mauritius to prevent Bérenger taking office, lest he disadvantage the island’s Hindus; in the end, they simply intervened politically to prevent him taking office). Narendra Modi described Mauritius as “Little India” in 2015 70% of Mauritians are of Indian descent, and a leaked American cable described their relationship with India as “willing subordination”. Mauritius is completely, and explicitly, dependent on India for control of its territorial waters. For decades, Mauritius’s National Security Advisor, the commander of its coastguard, and the head of its helicopter squadron have been Indian citizens and officers in the Indian armed forces. Mauritius has no navy or army, and its police are trained in India. The ships of its coastguard and the aircraft of its airforce are provided by India. When the surrender of the British Indian Ocean Territory further expands Mauritius’s territory, it will be India who is depended on to protect it. In the words of Mauritius’s Foreign Secretary, the expanded Exclusive Economic Zone “needs maritime resources, and to be able to fully develop and exploit those resources, it will need assistance, and India is a preferred partner in providing that assistance”.

China has barely shown an interest in the British Indian Ocean Territory, beyond occasional platitudes. The People’s Republic actually abstained on the 2017 General Assembly resolution which referred the matter to the International Court of Justice (India voted in favour). India has backed Mauritius’s claim from the outset, and Mauritius has promised New Delhi a naval base on the islands since the 1980s. No wonder that Mauritius wants India closely involved in the handover process: as Prime Minister Navinchandra Ramgoolam said last year “We want to visit the Chagos Islands, including Diego Garcia, to plant our flag. The British offered us a vessel, but we said we preferred one from India because, symbolically, it would be more meaningful”.

Indeed, while the claims about China negotiating a lease on one of the islands – expounded by Nigel Farage – were completely unfounded (and seemingly originated from misreading vague speculation in The Times) India has already constructed a base in Mauritius. Indian media have reported on plans to build a satellite monitoring station in the Chagos Archipelago itself, once handover is complete. While Mauritius is not a member of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, it is a key part of India’s comparable MAHASAGAR strategy. 

Keir Starmer’s motivations for supporting a handover are uncomplicated: he is a human rights lawyer. In his own words, there is no version of his life that does not revolve around being a human rights lawyer. He believes international law requires him to follow this course, and all other decisions are rationally downstream of that.

So why then the mass hallucination of Chinese influence? In part, it is psychologically easier to process. Our issues with an authoritarian Communist regime can be smoothly analysed through the old Cold War lens (they just hate our freedom!). Hostility from a democratic republic has more discomforting explanations. We want to forget that much of the third world views us still as a former colonial overlord, to be shaken down for money and territory whenever the chance arises (see also: the rest of the world’s positions on the Falklands and reparations).

But a more important factor is that Chinese nationals and descendants have a marginal position in British elections. Nobody in Britain will lose votes by carping on about the need to confront Beijing. India, however, is a different matter. The Indian diaspora now makes up a noticeable part of our electorate — indeed, some Tory MPs only hold their seats thanks to the Indian vote. Try to imagine, for a moment, a Conservative MP hosting a celebration of Xi Jinping’s birthday in the House of Commons.

To return to Priti Patel, it is hard to understand why our Shadow Foreign Secretary is trying to conjure a Chinese mirage in the Indian Ocean. Why has she overlooked the role of her “dear friend” Narendra Modi, and his outspoken support for the deal? Why does the “India Diaspora Champion” seem ignorant of the influence of India in pushing the matter forward? On this we can only speculate.

Foresight? Communications?

The indefatigable Jody McIntyre writes:

Jess Phillips is the Labour government minister responsible for tackling violence against women and girls. But local advocates in Birmingham claim that she has not spoken out about abusers from her own party. Here’s what they told me.

In 2024, Phillips said that Keir Starmer was “obsessed” with eliminating violence against women and girls. But yesterday, it was revealed that Starmer, whilst head of the CPS, implemented “warning letters to paedophiles” allegedly used “to make investigations go away”. Retired police officer turned whistleblower Maggie Oliver stated that she “worked on a case where we had identified 97 child abusers. That investigation should have led to serious charges...on an industrial scale.” Instead, suspects were given “child abduction warning notices”. Jack Alderton supplied Georgina Boxall with Class A drugs from the age of 15. He received two “warning notices” from police, but no grooming charges. Georgina’s mother, Susan, said: “Starmer has blood on his hands.” 

After being re-elected in 2024 with a majority of just 693 votes [over McIntyre], Phillips insisted that tackling VAWG was a “very firm part of the party’s five main missions for government”. She said that pressure on her to act was “none more so than from a man, and that is Keir Starmer.” Phillips has been consistent in her loyalty to Starmer since Labour’s rise to power. Last July, when Starmer suspended four Labour MPs for rebelling against the government on welfare cuts, Phillips said: “You can’t have everything you want.” Last week, it was revealed that the Labour government have continued to consult Brendan Cox, who was forced to resign from more than one charity in 2018 after claims of sexual misconduct. At the time, Phillips said that she was “disappointed” in her “friend”. Nevertheless, Phillips continued to defend and praise Cox in public. As whistleblower Leslie Francis wrote for openDemocracy: “What made Cox so dangerous was [not just] his power, but politicians, journalists, staff who kept quiet…out of fear of their careers.”

Ivor Caplin is another Labour figure who has publicly praised Phillips. Last January, Caplin was arrested for alleged sexual communication with a child. His Twitter account, full of explicit material, was still being followed by Labour frontbenchers. After quitting as a Labour MP, Caplin took two lobbying jobs at Foresight Communications and MBDA Missile Systems. Foresight was run by Mark Adams, a former aide to Tony Blair. In 2019, Adams was convicted of rape for a second time after forcing himself upon a 19-year-old woman.

Phillips was also surprisingly quiet on the appointment of the now disgraced Peter Mandelson as US Ambassador. Mandelson, a close acquaintance and “best pal” of notorious paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, had his security vetting fast-tracked by the Starmer administration. One Labour MP who was eager to defend Mandelson’s appointment at the time was Wes Streeting. In 2020, Streeting endorsed Phillips for Labour leader and served as her campaign chair. Phillips raised £58k for her leadership campaign before dropping out of the race. Sam Gould, a former aide to Streeting, was convicted of exposing himself to a teenage girl and then following her last April. Streeting has previously described Epstein-associate Peter Mandelson as a “legend” and said that he should not be considered “guilty by association”.

In December, Starmer’s office defended the decision to nominate Matthew Doyle for a peerage, even though he had previously campaigned for ex-Scottish Labour councillor Sean Morton. In 2018, Morton was convicted of possessing indecent pictures of a 10-year-old girl. Before the 2024 general election, Starmer was warned that parliamentary candidate Dan Norris was facing legal action, but let him stand for Labour anyway. Earlier this month, Norris was arrested on further allegations of rape, sexual assault, and upskirting.

Another supporter of Phillips, John Woodcock, resigned from Labour while being investigated for sexual harassment. He described Mandelson’s appointment last year as “an inspired choice”. He was also instrumental in the proscription of Palestine Action, which Phillips voted for. In 2023, Tom Dewey plead guilty to charges of possessing five “category A” indecent images of children. Six days after his arrest, Dewey was re-elected as a Labour councillor. Three councillors who demanded an inquiry were “deselected by Labour HQ”.

Before the 2024 election, Jess Phillips made a big deal about “resigning over Gaza”. Locals tell me she sent leaflets to every Muslim household in the constituency highlighting her achievements on the issue. Why has she not stepped down over the Labour Party paedophile crisis?

Arrested Development?

The BBC will not call them Police Officers. Evan Davis on PM has repeatedly said that Peter Mandelson had been “led away by men with body worn cameras”, who had put him “in an unmarked car”. Pitiful.

A vote for Labour at Gorton and Denton would no longer be a vote for Mandelson. But it would still be a vote for the only British party with a member on Donald Trump’s Board of Peace. Specifically, Tony Blair sits on its Executive Board, and on its Gaza Executive Board.

And never mind Keir Starmer’s ostensibly non-satirical Ethics Adviser. Now the Minister for Digital ID, Josh Simons falsely reported to GCHQ that critical journalists, including Starmer’s Independent opponent at the General Election, were Russian spies. That is as bad as it sounds. Call the Police. And if there were to be a by-election at Makerfield, then let us hope that Labour would not have the wit to field Andy Burnham.

I can still find no defence of Gabriel Pogrund by the Israeli Embassy, the Chief Rabbinate, the Senior Rabbinate, the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Community Security Trust, the Jewish Labour Movement, Labour Friends of Israel, The Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Telegraph, or the Jewish News. But Simons has said that APCO had gone beyond its brief, which it could undoubtedly disprove in court, so let it sue him.

By claiming to be the only party that could beat Reform UK at Gorton and Denton, Labour is really saying that it would rather lose to Reform than to the Greens, of whom I am also no fan. Reform supporters need to ask themselves what that said about their party.

We Cannot Have Justice Without Juries

To have it done before he faced a Leadership challenge, Keir Starmer wants to abolish half of jury trials before the local elections, so see here:

We, the undersigned representative groups of criminal practitioners in England and Wales, are united in our rejection of David Lammy MP’s proposals to curtail the right to jury trial and the automatic right to appeal from the magistrates’ court to the crown court. These are fundamental rights that stand to be stripped from the public. As practitioners in the field, it is our duty to sound the alarm and, with the support of the general public, resist these plans. We call on the other representative organisations which make up the criminal justice sector to join us in our united opposition. The speed with which the government is seeking to advance these reforms requires a swift response. We will soon be calling a day of action to protest the proposals outside the Old Bailey and coordinating our members to take further measures to challenge the reforms.

London Criminal Courts Solicitors’ Association 

Criminal Bar Association

Criminal Law Solicitors’ Association

As Monidipa Fouzder writes:

Criminal law practitioner groups have united to declare war on the government’s plans to curb jury trials at a meeting in which it emerged that a Labour MP vociferously opposed to the reforms is contemplating meeting justice secretary David Lammy halfway by suggesting a pilot.

Representatives for the London Criminal Courts Solicitors’ Association, Criminal Law Solicitors’ Association and Criminal Bar Association confirmed their opposition to Lammy's controversial plan to cut the Crown court backlog at a meeting in London last night.

LCCSA president Jason Lartey told the meeting that Lammy will reportedly be addressing parliament next Tuesday.

Lartey said a meeting took place yesterday at the Law Society with Labour MP Karl Turner, a former shadow justice minister. Solicitors heard that Turner, who has criticised the government’s ‘utterly ludicrous, unworkable policy’ in parliament, might put forward ‘as a last resort’ the idea of piloting a Crown court bench division. He would mention to Lammy whether the Law Society and Bar Council support or oppose a pilot. 

However, University of Exeter’s Rebecca Helm, author of How Juries Work, told the meeting that any benefits from the pilot would be difficult to measure and pilots are expensive to set up.

Helm said juries play an important role democratically by interpreting legal terms in line with societal standards, and bring their collective expertise to make assessments of plausibility. With judge-alone trials, ‘there is a risk you end up holding people to standards that are not the standards of society but a particular person whose experience is detached from society more broadly’. 

CLSA chair Katy Hanson highlighted the importance that justice is seen to be done and said defendants will feel they got a fair hearing if their case is heard by people from their community. Hanson fears the government will try to introduce the reforms quickly ‘because they are aware of the feeling against it’. 

Andrew Thomas KC, vice-chair of the Criminal Bar Association, said the CBA also opposes the removal of the automatic right of appeal from the magistrates’ court to the Crown court. Describing the right as an ‘important safeguard’, Thomas said more than 40% of appeals succeed ‘and they are not a great burden on the Crown court’.

Lammy’s proposals would see jury trials axed for crimes with sentences of less than three years. However, former CBA chair Chris Henley KC said: ‘The idea that receiving a three-year sentence is not a big deal and can be done differently, then why have juries at all? When you’re facing a sentence of imprisonment that can change your life, will end your job prospects, end your marriage, change your relationship with your children, that is something we need to carefully think about.’

During the highly-charged meeting, solicitors raised strike action, declining to take instructions, lobbying MPs and contacting Law Society Council members to voice concern about supporting any compromise. It was also suggested lawyers protest outside the Old Bailey, where there is a plaque commemorating jurors in Bushell’s case. Jurors in the 1670 case refused to give a verdict against the defendants despite being locked up without food for two nights and were fined for their final ‘not guilty’ verdict.

As Matt Foot writes:

Dear Keir,

When you were a criminal defence barrister you were held in high regard as an educator on the importance of human rights. There seemed to be no end to your training sessions and practitioner manuals.

It was a little surprising therefore seeing you travel to China, where according to the latest Amnesty International report: “Human rights defenders were arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to long prison terms”. That you took the opportunity on that trip to announce your support for the removal of the right to a trial by jury was, I suppose, befitting with the setting and the proposal not being in your manifesto.

Your dispatch impelled me to remind you of the compelling arguments you yourself made back in 1992 defending jury rights. You may recall that you even urged their expansion:

“The right to trial by jury is an important factor in the delicate balance between the power of the state and the freedom of the individual. The further it is restricted, the greater the imbalance. Despite the inevitable increase in costs, the Haldane Society urges that there be a right of trial by jury in all criminal cases.”

No doubt your approach back then would have been impacted by your experience, as a budding lawyer venturing out to the magistrates’ court, of its arbitrary nature.

No doubt you represented clients before District Judge Roger Davies at Horseferry Road Magistrates, who had a penchant for bullying young male advocates. Until, of course, he had to resign in 2012 after The People exposed that he had been paying for sex with “rent boys”.

Or there was “Custody Cooper” at Greenwich, a district judge whose moniker needs no explanation as to what was likely to happen in his court, with a smile.

You understood only too well why it was so important to promote jury rights because:

“There is a genuine and deep-rooted feeling by defendants and lawyers alike that discrimination and institutional bias operate throughout the magistrates court system. Certainly, neither stipendiary nor lay magistrates properly reflect or represent the communities over which they preside.”

I suspect you still have JAG Griffith’s book The Politics of the Judiciary on your shelf, which makes clear that the makeup of the judiciary has not improved. And yet now you wish to bestow more power to magistrates.

The argument you put forward today for removing jury rights is that you have a commitment to victims who you rightly identify are stuck in appalling court delays, as are defendants. There is a very straightforward cause of the delays. Between 2010 and 2019 over half the courts across England and Wales were closed.

I will tell you a secret. If you close a court, it can no longer hear cases and an insufferable burden is placed upon those courts who still remain. The PSC union led an excellent campaign against the closures, but it was ignored. I would imagine you too were opposed to the closures of important London courts that you practised in, such as Bow Street, Clerkenwell, and Blackfriars.

Here’s an idea as part of your commitment to victims, alongside or instead of building new prisons, why not reopen the criminal courts that were closed? That would immediately help to reduce the backlog of trials. 

While you’re at it you could reduce the conveyor belt of overcharged defendants in joint enterprise murder cases, clogging up the courts.

The recent court watch report by APPEAL, Joint Enterprise on Trial, looking at 17 trials at the Old Bailey, found 7,000 days (19 years) spent on remand by defendants who were subsequently either acquitted or given a non-custodial sentence.

Finally why not, on your travels abroad, promote with pride the long British tradition of the right to a trial by jury? You could provide them with the argument in your first book, Miscarriages of Justice – Justice in Error written in 1993, made by the contributor John Jackson:

“One advantage of jury trial is that jurors are not privy to inadmissible evidence which may prejudice any tribunal of fact. Another is that the principle of random selection appears to be a better foundation for impartiality and independence than the principle of selection by unaccountable advisory committees appointed by the Lord Chancellor.”

I hope you don’t mind me setting all this out for you. It’s just you seem to have forgotten all that you learnt in your legal practice, and the unique character of the jury in protecting the freedom of the individual. 

Yours sincerely,

Matt Foot 

P.S. On a separate matter, can your government please make progress on scrapping the appalling 2014 law which denies miscarriage of justice victims, like Sam Hallam (alongside 93 per cent of other applicants) any compensation?

Despite being found innocent, they cannot meet a virtually insurmountable test that they must then prove their innocence beyond reasonable doubt and so are left destitute. They too are victims who I’m sure you would also wish to support.

And as Chris Henley KC writes:

Just imagine spending the next three years in a small cold room, with a lidless steel toilet, the meagre furniture secured to the floor or wall, an hour of ‘fresh’ air in a shared high-walled yard with no view, communal showers with randomly violent people, many of them suffering from serious mental health problems. If you ever see your family and children, it will be a humiliating experience, under intrusive observation, with limited if any touching, around small plastic tables with constant menace in the air, and every meal tasteless, tepid and insufficient. Every single day for three years. Imagine enduring this even for a week. The deprivation of liberty is the most significant power the State can exercise.

If we are to do this to our fellow citizens does anyone seriously disagree that this should only happen after a fair, open-minded trial process?

Jury trial gives us confidence that there has been a fair process. Judge-only trials will not. The judges who will replace juries are, much more often than not, privately educated, white men, in late middle age, of very narrow social background and experience. I could be describing myself. This proposed set up is as far away from trial by a balanced cross-section of society as it would be possible to contrive. Judges sentence non-white defendants more harshly and deny bail to non-white defendants more often. Whether the bias is conscious or unconscious, the bias is incontrovertible. A recent example of this was the disproportionately harsher sentences handed out by judges across the country to Asian sub postmasters and sub postmistresses compared to their white colleagues. Seema Misra, innocent and pregnant, who was persuaded to plead guilty in an attempt to avoid prison, was not spared by the judge.

The Church Times has pithily identified the problem:

‘No matter how fair and independent a judge might be, the abstract image alone is devastating. Furthermore, it is likely that judges will gain reputations (deservedly or not) for being hard-line and austere, or for being tolerant and genial, or for being bigoted and prejudiced; and so verdicts and sentences will come down with a patina of scepticism already on them.’

All of us who practise in the criminal courts know this to be true. Three recent trials I have been involved in would not have delivered the same fair outcomes had the judge alone been effectively the jury too. I know this because the judges consistently betrayed their views – in the absence of the jury, of course. In one, the judge even commended the pathologist about the guilty verdicts obtained in a previous trial, using language along the lines of ‘did you hear, we got them’.

I’m afraid that as a judge you very quickly become a creature of the establishment. You instinctively assume the best and sympathise, other than in the clearest cases, with the arms of the state which underpin the prosecution. Judges almost never instinctively empathise with the individual on trial. All the pre-trial information, which a jury is not exposed to, points unerringly one way. Some judges are more benign than others, but it affects almost everyone. This is to be expected and is a pattern of behaviour repeated in so many areas of life.

I have biases, conscious and unconscious. Of course I do. I see the world through my very particular eyes as a result of the life I have lived. The world has served me well. I expect that I will be treated fairly, will be believed, listened to not judged, because that is my narrow, privileged experience. While I might sometimes think I do, I have no special insight into why people behave as they do, particularly young people (although I have children), or people of colour, or the economically disadvantaged, what might be in their minds, or their experience of the world, their frustrations, their perceptions of what might happen in certain situations, based on visceral previous experience, or the impact of peer pressure or social deprivation. But I could easily end up sitting in judgment of them, in a judge-only court.

Some judges are better than others at masking their prejudices, but all of us who practise in the criminal courts know that day in day out they hang heavy in the air. Those barristers who both prosecute and defend will routinely contrast judicial behaviour when prosecuting as ‘like having the wind behind you’. Advocates who defend in the Magistrates’ Courts know how strong the wind blows the other way, for similar reasons. David Lammy, now Lord Chancellor, recognised all of this in his careful and compelling Lammy Review in 2017; judges and magistrates racially discriminate in their treatment of defendants at every stage, when they have the key decisions to make. Reports from this year have reaffirmed this finding. The Children’s Commissioner, for example, reported that ‘there are evident ethnic disparities across the justice system… 56% of children remanded were from an Asian, black, mixed or other ethnic group’. All of this is what David Lammy described in his Review.

The Court of Appeal provides precious little protection when things go wrong. It has a very poor record of correctly identifying miscarriages of justice, effectively a judicial fact-finding exercise. Obvious miscarriages have had to return to that court multiple times before they are finally put right. Andrew Malkinson’s case is an example of this; the Court of Appeal dismissed his first appeal describing the evidence against him as ‘compelling’. This reluctance to acknowledge the mistakes our system is bound on occasion to make, is an establishment default setting in favour of the status quo. This instinct runs very deep. Lord Thomas, then Lord Chief Justice, exemplified this approach in his notorious judgment in Johnson and others [2016] EWCA Crim 1613, in which he did all he could to limit the practical effect of the Supreme Court decision in Jogee a few months earlier. The case of R v Ordu [2017] EWCA Crim 4 is another shocking example of the Court of Appeal refusing to quash a conviction. Leave to appeal out of time was refused even though the prosecution had made it clear they would not oppose the appeal. Imagine if it was a member of one of those judges’ families.

The Supreme Court in the Libor appeal, R v Hayes and R v Palumbo [2025] UKSC 29, an appeal rejected three times by the Court of Appeal, opened its judgment with this first line:

‘The history of these two cases raises concerns about the effectiveness of the criminal appeal system in England and Wales in confronting legal error.’

The trial judges had misdirected their respective juries in August 2015 and March 2019. The jury in each trial had done its job, but the trial judges and the appeal court judges had failed, properly, to do theirs.

This is why we all need the protection of a fair trial, which only a jury can consistently provide. Lammy used to be a passionate advocate of trial by jury. In his Review he examined the consistency of the outcomes, as between ethnic groups. His conclusion was that trial by jury was the shining success of our system. He was not so positive about outcomes in Magistrates’ Courts or decisions by judges; both displayed clear bias.

This is not very surprising, but it is fundamental to the confidence the public has in our system of trial by jury. We are all familiar with the concept of the ‘wisdom of crowds’. There is no concept of the ‘wisdom of one’, for obvious reasons. Trial by jury is the ‘wisdom of crowds’ in practical action. Organisations and businesses do the same. They assemble a panel or refer to a committee when making significant decisions, bringing a range of voices and experiences to the table to ensure that everything relevant is considered and tested. The collective decision is understood to be more robust, and wise, than a decision made by a single person. A single person won’t always get it wrong, but a decision produced and supported by a range of people commands more confidence and will be the result of greater challenge and testing. Just like a jury’s verdict.

Replacing trial by jury with trial by judge alone will change outcomes. It will cause harm to some defendants of different ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds, and some younger defendants, whose truthful accounts will be dismissed by a case-hardened judge but would not be by a jury of greater ‘wisdom’. Any judge will be able to explain, with little difficulty, in a written judgment why they came to the conclusion that they did, highlighting whatever aspects of a witness’s testimony they need to accept or reject to justify their verdict. Any such conclusion will always be subjective; it cannot be anything else. That is the root of the problem. But for certain defendants the dice will have been loaded against them from the start.

The government points, in particular, to Canada and New Zealand to justify the abolition of the right of defendants to elect jury trial, a new judge-only court and the significant expansion of the sentencing power of magistrates. What they fail to mention is that in both Canada and New Zealand lay magistrates have been abolished altogether, such was the lack of confidence in the quality of their decision-making, and the right to elect jury trial has not been abolished as will happen here.

We need judges to do their very important job, which they have been trained to do: to be the legal experts, to apply the law properly, to rule correctly on the admissibility of evidence, to manage trials efficiently and to pass the correct sentence after careful expert reflection. We cannot have trials without judges, but we cannot have justice without juries.

Make Instruments To Plague Us?

If Peter Mandelson's little helper, Wes Streeting, is still in with a shout at becoming Prime Minister, or even if he is not, then consider that on his watch, a 97-year-old woman has died after having been told that she would need to wait 10 days for an ambulance over a suspected hip fracture. Has Streeting resigned over this? Has anyone? Will anyone?

Keir Starmer may sack Streeting, anyway. You come at the king, you best not miss. But as for Starmer's warning notices to suspected paedophiles, is that an old story, or does it just feel that way? Contrast them with the people whom Starmer did insist on prosecuting all the way to custodial sentences. Today, he is off again about the learning disabled brother whom he pretty much allowed to starve to death, just as he insists that his sister bring a packed lunch when she comes to see him. Tell us again how very "decent" he is. As his Oxford contemporary Benjamin Schoendorff has just told Crispin Flintoff, "Keir is no Hitler, in the sense that he is not charismatic, he is not leading anything."

I have spent my entire life first in the Church of England and for the last 27 years in the Catholic Church, around which I also grew up in that my entire secondary schooling was under Her aegis. I spent my late adolescence and my early adulthood in the Labour Party, and I have remained politically active. I have been to prison twice. And like you, I have never knowingly met a paedophile, nor even heard of anyone from back in the day who had turned out to have been one. Yet our lords and masters cannot get out of bed, if that, without falling over them, and they go out of their way to make life as easy as possible for them, not least by appointing their close friends and their political protectors to key positions from the Washington Embassy, to the House of Lords, to, putatively, the Chair of Ofcom. It all suggests an answer to the question of why MPs had school holidays, although when they returned later today, then they should ask why the Privy Council's website still listed Peter Mandelson as a member, just as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was still a Counsellor of State.

For 17 centuries, there has been a continuous, if usually almost invisible, refusal of the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism, and the Roman Empire, by those who cleaved instead to the previously normative practices that have most lately been detailed in the Epstein Files. In a few hours' time, Zia Yusuf will set out his no doubt laughable "patriotic curriculum" ostensibly "based on Christianity", and his plans, which may have some merit, to save church buildings. But while we live in hope, there would appear to be no expectation that he himself will recite the Apostles' Creed and be baptised. Nor, presumably, will Suella Braverman, who has been tweeting her enthusiasm. It is very telling that this mission has not been committed to Danny Kruger, perhaps the most striking of the Reform UK MPs to have been allocated no portfolio when Home Affairs had been allotted to a member of the general public.

Moreover, there will be two further points to Yusuf's programme for the re-evangelisation of the land of Bede, Alcuin, Anselm, Becket, More and Newman. One will be an "outreach programme" that by pledging lower taxes, would attract back those, including Richard Tice, who had decamped to Dubai or Singapore. Yes, really. And the other will seek to force the Police to search the homes of everyone who had been referred to Prevent. Yet not only is Prevent based on a proven hoax, but does Yusuf think that he is already Home Secretary? Or does he think that if Reform came to power, then it would keep it forever? This degree of willingness to empower his successors, known for the time being as his opponents, would suggest that Yusuf really was a professional politician after all. Any remaining doubt would be dispelled if he succeeded in selling himself as the man to re-Christianise Britain when he was the Muslim representative of an Epstein Class party.

Christ Will Never Command Us to Break the Unity of the Church

His Eminence Robert Cardinal Sarah writes:

“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16).

With these words, Peter, questioned by the Master about his faith in Him, sums up the heritage that the Church, through apostolic succession, has preserved, deepened, and transmitted for two thousand years: Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, that is, the only Saviour.

These clear words of Pope Leo XIV on Peter’s faith, spoken the day after his election, still resonate in my soul.

The Holy Father thus summarises the mystery of faith that bishops, successors of the apostles, must never cease to proclaim. 

But where can we find Jesus Christ, the one Redeemer? Saint Augustine answers us clearly: “Where the Church is, there is Christ.” That is why our concern for the salvation of souls is expressed in our solicitude to lead them to the one source, which is Christ, who gives himself in his Church.

Only the Church is the ordinary way to salvation, and therefore it is the only place where faith is transmitted in its entirety. It is the only place where the life of grace is fully given to us through the sacraments.

Within the Church, there is a centre, an obligatory point of reference: the Church of Rome, governed by the Successor of Peter, the Pope. “And I say to you,” said Jesus, “that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).

I would also like to express my deep concern and sadness at the announcement by the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X, founded by Archbishop Lefebvre, that it will proceed with episcopal ordinations without papal mandate.

We are told that this decision to disobey Church law is motivated by the supreme law of the salvation of souls: suprema lex, salus animarum.

But salvation is Christ, and He is only given in the Church. How can we claim to lead souls to salvation by means other than those He Himself has indicated to us? Is it to desire the salvation of souls to tear apart the mystical body of Christ in a way that may be irreversible? How many souls are in danger of being lost because of this new division?

We are told that this act is intended to defend Tradition and the faith. I know how much the deposit of faith is sometimes despised today by those very people whose mission it is to defend it. I am well aware that some forget that only the chain in the unbroken continuity of the life of the Church, the proclamation of the faith, and the celebration of the sacraments, which we call Tradition, gives us the guarantee that what we believe is the original message of Christ transmitted by the apostles. But I also know, and firmly believe, that at the heart of the Catholic faith is our mission to follow Christ, who became obedient unto death. Can we really do without following Christ in his humility unto the Cross? Is it not a betrayal of Tradition to take refuge in human means to maintain our works, however good they may be?

Our supernatural faith in the indefectibility of the Church can lead us to say with Christ, “My soul is sorrowful even unto death” (Matthew 26:38) when we see the cowardice of Christians and even prelates who renounce teaching the deposit of faith and prefer their personal opinions on matters of doctrine and morality. But faith can never lead us to renounce obedience to the Church.

Saint Catherine of Siena, who did not hesitate to rebuke cardinals and even the Pope, exclaimed: “Always obey the pastor of the Church, for he is the guide whom Christ has appointed to lead souls to Him.” The good of souls can never be achieved through deliberate disobedience, for the good of souls is a supernatural reality. Let us not reduce salvation to a worldly game of media pressure!

Who will give us the certainty that we are truly in touch with the source of salvation? Who will guarantee we have not mistaken our opinion for the truth? Who will protect us from subjectivism? Who will guarantee that we are still nourished by the one Tradition that comes to us from Christ? Who will guarantee that we are not preceding Providence and that we should follow it, allowing ourselves to be guided by its instructions?

To these agonising questions, there is only one answer which was given by Christ to the apostles: “Whoever listens to you listens to Me. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained” (Luke 10:16; John 20:23). How can we take responsibility for straying from this one certainty?

We are told that this is out of fidelity to the previous Magisterium, but who can guarantee this to us except Peter’s successor himself? This is a matter of faith. “Whoever disobeys the Pope, who represents Christ in heaven, will not share in the blood of the Son of God,” said St. Catherine of Siena. This is not a matter of worldly loyalty to a man and his personal ideas. It is not a matter of a cult of the Pope’s personality. It is not a matter of obeying the Pope when he expresses his own ideas or opinions. It is a matter of obeying the pope who says, like Jesus: “My teaching is not Mine, but His Who sent me” (John 7:16).

It is a supernatural view of canonical obedience that guarantees our bond with Christ Himself. It is the only guarantee that our fight for the faith, Catholic morality, and liturgical Tradition, will not stray into ideology. Christ has given us no other sure sign. To leave Peter’s boat and organise ourselves autonomously and in a closed circle is to surrender ourselves to the waves of the storm.

I know full well that often even within the Church itself, there are wolves disguised as lambs. Did not Christ Himself warn us? But the best protection against error remains our canonical attachment to the successor of Peter. “It is Christ Himself, Who wants us to remain in unity, and even when wounded by the scandals of bad shepherds not to abandon the Church,” Saint Augustine tells us.

How can we remain insensitive to Jesus’ anguished prayer: “Father, may then be one as We are one” (John 17:22) How can we continue to tear apart His Body under the pretext of saving souls? Is it not he Jesus Who saves? Is it we and our structures that save souls? Is it not through our unity that the world will believe and be saved? This unity is first and foremost that of the Catholic faith, it is also that of charity, and finally that of obedience.

I would like to remind you that Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina was unjustly condemned by men of the Church during his lifetime. Although God had given him a special grace to help the souls of sinners, he was forbidden to hear confessions for 12 years! What did he do? Did he disobey in the name of saving souls? Did he rebel in the name of fidelity to God? No, he remained silent. He entered into crucifying obedience, certain that his humanity would be more fruitful than his rebellion. He wrote, “the Good Lord has made me know that obedience is the only thing that pleases Him; it is for me, the only means of hoping for salvation and to sing victory.”

We can affirm that the best way to defend the faith, Tradition and authentic liturgy will always be to follow the obedient Christ. Christ will never command us to break the unity of the Church.

Essentials

Axel Springer? No, no, no. Telegraph hacks need to know that the Mail paid their wages. They need to be told it wherever and whenever possible. In November, Mike Wood, who as the Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office would not ordinary have been an active participant in PMQs, used it to call for the Telegraph to be nationalised. He had been Parliamentary Private Secretary to Liam Fox, Priti Patel and Dominic Raab, so that was what the Right openly wanted.

I have been laughing for nearly two years. Could anything have been funnier than the Daily Telegraph begging the State for protection from the "free" market? Yes, there was one thing even more amusing than that. A Conservative Government delivered it. By Statute. The press must be so free that you needed the Government's permission to part-own it. If these publications were this important, then they could not possibly be allowed to go bust, so we are going to be picking up the tab when they otherwise would. You read it here first, as you very often do.

Over The Water?

The spectacle of the unkempt Boris Johnson reminds us of the five men alive who had led their parties to overall majorities at General Elections. President Johnson, anyone? President Major? President Blair? President Cameron? President Starmer? There would have to be a nomination process, so candidates would certainly require nomination by one tenth of the House of Commons, 65 MPs, and very probably by one fifth of that House, 130 MPs. In the wildly unlikely event of more than two candidates, then the House would whittle them down to the two who would then be presented to the electorate. Almost certainly, only two parties are ever going to have 65 MPs. Certainly, only two are ever going to have 130. In practice, they would probably arrange to alternate the Presidency between them.

Same as it ever was. Well may Rupert Lowe charge £2500 per annum for membership of his Cromwell Club. Anticipating the bourgeois capitalist revolutions of 1688, 1776 and 1789, 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”. 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. Yet 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.

The former Princess Diana died when she was 36. Princess Beatrice is already older than that, and Princess Eugenie will attain that age next month. They are grown women. Yet it would be a nonsense to cut their father, and thus them and their children, out of the line of succession. That it was determined by Parliament is no longer going to convince very many people, to whom it was either hereditary or it was not. If merit or popularity entered into it, then why have a monarchy at all? There are those who have been saying that for quite some time. The Whig Revolution of 1688 led to very deep and very wide disaffection among Catholics, High Churchmen, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers and others. Within those subcultures, long after the death of the Stuart cause as such with Cardinal York in 1807, there persisted a feeling that Hanoverian Britain, her Empire, and that Empire’s capitalist ideology, imported and at least initially controlled from William of Orange’s Netherlands, were less than fully legitimate. That was to have startlingly radical consequences.

Within that wider context, far more Jacobites went into exile from these Islands than Huguenots sought refuge here. The Jacobites founded the Russian Navy of Peter the Great. They maintained a network of merchants in the ports circling the Continent. Their banking dynasties had branches in several great European cities. They introduced much new science and technology to their host countries. They dominated the Swedish East India and Madagascar Companies. They fought with the French in India. They often ended up either in the West Indies or in North America. There were many Jacobite Congregationalists, such as Edward Roberts, the exiled James’s emissary to the anti-Williamite Dutch republics, and Edward Nosworthy, a gentleman of his Privy Council both before and after 1688. Many Baptists were also Jacobites, while the name, episcopal succession and several other features of the American Episcopal Church derive, not from the Church of England, but from the staunchly Jacobite Episcopal Church in Scotland, which provided the American Colonies with a bishop, Samuel Seabury, in defiance of the Church of England and of the Hanoverian monarchy to which it was attached.

Most or all of the Quakers were at least initially Jacobites. William Penn himself was arrested for Jacobitism four times between 1689 and 1691. My university contemporary Edward Dutton has just published a book blaming the Quakers for everything that his Far Right audience hated, and that is an awful lot. Dutton once tried to seduce me after Mass, so I know his little secret. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Mankind Quarterly, which he used to edit. Another member is Dr Adel Batterjee of Jeddah, the founder of the Benevolence International Foundation, which was placed under UN sanctions because it was a front for funding al-Qaeda. In 2018, Dutton secured the publication of this masterpiece in Evolutionary Psychological Science. On the Editorial Board of that is Professor Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, and ornament of the Epstein Files. Noam Chomsky is a complete outlier both in those Files and on the Left, whereas Jeffrey Epstein, Pinker, Dutton and Batterjee constitute an Axis of Evil with anyone who cited any of them.

Early Methodists were regularly accused of Jacobitism. John Wesley himself had been a High Church missionary in America, and Methodism was initially an outgrowth of pre-Tractarian, often at least sentimentally Jacobite, High Churchmanship. Very many people conformed to the Established Church but either refused to take the Oath or declared that they would so refuse if called upon to take it. With its anti-Calvinist soteriology, it high sacramentalism and Eucharistic theology, and its hymnody based on the liturgical year, early Methodism appealed to them. Wesley also supported, and corresponded with, William Wilberforce, even refusing tea because it was slave-grown; indeed, Wesley’s last letter was to Wilberforce. They wrote as one High Tory to another. Wilberforce was later a friend of Saint John Henry Newman, whose Letter to the Duke of Norfolk constitutes the supreme Catholic contribution to the old Tory tradition of the English Confessional State, in the same era as Henry Edward Manning’s Catholic social activism, and the beginning of Catholic Social Teaching’s strong critique of both capitalism and Marxism.

Whiggery, by contrast, had produced a “free trade” even in “goods” that were human beings. The coalition against the slave trade contained no shortage of Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists or Quakers. Yet the slave trade was integral to the Whig Empire’s capitalist ideology. If slavery were wrong, then something was wrong at a far deeper level. James Edward Oglethorpe, a Jacobite, opposed slavery in Georgia. Anti-slavery Southerners during the American Civil War were called “Tories”. Radical Liberals were anti-capitalist in their opposition to opium dens, to unregulated drinking and gambling, and to the compelling of people to work seven-day weeks, all of which have returned as features of the British scene. Catholics, Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers fought as one for the extension of the franchise and for other political reforms. It was Disraeli, a Tory, who doubled the franchise in response to that agitation. To demand or deliver such change called seriously into question the legitimacy of the preceding Whig oligarchy.

It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of Catholicism, of the Anglo-Catholicism that High Churchmanship mostly became at least to some extent, of the Baptist and Reformed (including Congregational) traditions, and, above all, of Methodism, to the emergence and development of the Labour Movement. Quakerism and Methodism, especially the Primitive and Independent varieties, were in the forefront of opposition to the First World War, which also produced the Guild of the Pope’s Peace, and which had a following among Anglo-Catholics of either of what were then the more extreme kinds, “English Use” and “Western Use”. Each of those included Jacobites among, admittedly, its many eccentrics. Above all in Wales, where Catholic sentiment was still widely expressed in the old tongue well into the eighteenth century, Quakers and Methodists had very recently stood shoulder to shoulder with Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists, including Lloyd George, against the Boer War. 

The campaign against the slave trade, the use of State action against social evils, the extension of the franchise, the creation of the Labour Movement, and the opposition to the Boer and First World Wars, all arose out of disaffection with Whiggery, with the Whigs’ imported capitalist system, with their imported dynasty, and with that system’s and that dynasty’s Empire. A disaffection on the part of, among others, Catholics, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, and High Churchmen, and thus first Methodists and then also Anglo-Catholics, as well as Scottish and therefore also American Episcopalians. Behind those great movements for social justice and for peace was a sense that the present British State was itself somehow less than fully legitimate, a distant echo of an ancestral Jacobitism. Radical action for social justice and for peace derived from testing the State and its policies against theologically grounded criteria of legitimacy. It still does.

Royally Distracted?

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor should convert to Catholicism, then there would be no need of legislation to remove him from the line of succession. Lucky us, that we run no risk of ever being caught up in any of this. The King has seven descendants, and there will be more to come, so the removal of his brother from eighth place is pure theatre. Like the arrest, which is supposed to be made only if a voluntary interview were impractical. In this case, how would it have been?

Meanwhile, Yvette Cooper remains in office despite having unlawfully proscribed Palestine Action, thus ruining people’s lives while wreaking havoc in the criminal justice system. John Healey remains in office despite having lied to Parliament that Britain faced legal challenges over the Chagos Islands. Steve Reed remains in office despite the cancelled and uncancelled local elections, which ended in his not contesting that he, too, had acted unlawfully. Josh Simons remains in office despite having falsely reported to GCHQ that critical journalists, including Keir Starmer’s Independent opponent at the General Election, had been Russian spies, and then having lied about it when he had been caught out. And Peter Mandelson remains as free as a bird.

Advance and Restore

If Nigel Farage thought that Matt Goodwin were even close to winning Gorton and Denton, then he would be there this weekend, and not in the Indian Ocean. Goodwin may yet lose by fewer votes than had been taken by Nick Buckley, who was Advance UK at Close of Nominations, since that was before Restore Britain had become a political party. Restore is growing like Topsy, but it seems to be made up overwhelmingly of very young men who were immensely active online. They are ruining their careers, by no means only in politics.

On Wednesday, North Northamptonshire Councillors Darren Rance and Jack Goncalvez defected to Restore from Reform UK. But by Friday morning, Councillor Rance professed to have been “bombarded with desperate messages from Restore” and to have joined “reluctantly”, only to discover, “From messages I received from both Restore supporters and those opposed, it’s clear that what this organisation stands for is far more sinister than I first thought.” Reform’s Group Leader, Councillor Martin Griffiths, graciously took him back. Expect a lot more of this. Some of us have seen it all before.

Goodwin is banging on that the Green candidate, Hannah Spencer, drives a car. She is a plumber and a trainee plasterer, so of course she does. But having done the Green Party a favour that will never be reciprocated, the Workers Party, which took 10.3 per cent of the vote at Gorton and Denton in 2024, and the closely allied Independent Left need to take on the incompatibility of Green anti-car sentiment with the petrolhead culture of British South Asians. Last month, the Court of Appeal struck down Lutfur Rahman’s attempt to implement his election promise to remove three Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in Tower Hamlets. For good or ill, that is where the votes are.

For well over 20 years, there have been expressions of incomprehension at the perfectly logical alliance between a Left that was thoroughly anti-war, and anti-war Muslims who so agreed with left-wing economic policies that they had overwhelming voted Labour long before Tony Blair came along. But the Greens support the inexorable logic of Thatcherism in such forms as drug legalisation, gender self-identification, “sex work”, assisted suicide, unrestricted immigration, re-joining the EU, the war in Ukraine, and all sorts of other terrible things. Do they regret the defeat of the miners in 1985? That is a yes-no question, and the Greens should always be asked it.

This side of a Zarah Sultana takeover of Your Party, the Greens are the only British party in any significant alignment with the political philosophy of Noam Chomsky, making them as much a part of the Epstein Class as the centrists, the right-wing populists, and the right-wing elitists. George Galloway and the Morning Star may have endorsed them this once. But from Friday onwards, they need to take their gloves off. Some of us have never put ours on.

We March On

Has the latest adventure of Rupert Lowe elicited any comment from Harry Redknapp? And Matt Goodwin has been endorsed by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, so would his election at Gorton and Denton prompt from Keir Starmer anything like the Prime Ministerial statement on the steps of Downing Street that the lifelong Southampton fan Rishi Sunak made when George Galloway won Rochdale? If not, why not?

8,576 votes for Hannah Spencer of the Green Party would match the combined Green and Workers Party total from 2024. If she managed that, and she would need more than that to win, then the Greens would once again be in the debt of the Workers Party and of the closely allied Independent Left, having taken more votes than the margins of victory of Wes Streeting over Leanne Mohamad, of Shabana Mahmood over Akhmed Yakoob, and of Jess Phillips over Jody McIntyre. The Green Party rightly contests every seat on principle, since its supporters are entitled to a candidate. Those voters are not the only ones.

The Most Dangerous Prime Minister Ever

Jody McIntyre writes:

Last night, I was contacted by a former roommate of Keir Starmer. After our conversation, I now believe that he is the most dangerous Prime Minister Britain has ever had. Here’s what he told me. My source lived with Starmer whilst attending Oxford University in the 1980s. At the time, Starmer was involved with the Militant Tendency, an “authoritarian” Marxist group within the Labour Party, even inviting expelled Liverpool councillor Derek Hatton to give a speech. However, my source claims that he found it “surprisingly easy” to “recruit” Starmer to his own Trotskyist group, which was “credibly rumoured to be financed by [Libyan leader] Gaddafi”. He added: “Recent weeks make me think my most conspirational suspicions might not be off.”

Starmer’s former roommate explained that “undercover police officers were around Keir from a young age”. “The Spycop inquiry revealed that there was an undercover officer in every organisation at the time, so now we have to ask: who was ours?” My source believes that the British intelligence link could be an explanation for “how devoid of all political spine he is”. Starmer’s driver and document handler during the McLibel case was outed as a police asset who got into a sexual relationship with one of the defendants. “But,” Starmer’s former roommate told me, “others think he was turned later, when he joined the Trilateral Commission.”

The Trilateral Commission was created in the 1970s by US billionaire David Rockefeller. Starmer is the ONLY person to have joined as a sitting British MP. Rockefeller set up the Trilateral Commission to deal with “an excess of democracy”. Starmer joined whilst serving as Shadow Brexit Secretary under Jeremy Corbyn. Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Mandelson were also members. The Trilateral Commission also includes Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, who has been wooed by several members of the Starmer administration, including Rachel Reeves and Angela Rayner. Palantir, another US giant, has won multi-million government contracts “without competitive tender”.

My source claims that Starmer is “not leading anything”. But since the fall of key allies Morgan McSweeney and Peter Mandelson, Starmer is attempting to reassert his position with two new appointments: Antonia Romeo as Cabinet Secretary, and Margaret Hodge at OFCOM. Romeo met with Palantir’s UK director Louis Mosley in April 2019 and then introduced him to David Prior, chair of NHS England. A year later, during the Coronavirus pandemic, the NHS announced that Palantir would be “part of the country’s response”, issuing an “emergency contract”.

Romeo’s appointment has been condemned by her former colleagues, who formally accused her of bullying behaviour whilst she was working as a diplomat in New York. One said: “The many people she bullied and intimidated, most of them women, will now feel failed for a second time.” Starmer’s former roommate explained: “Keir has this ability to not have any conviction.” Here, his new pick for Cabinet Secretary, the most senior civil servant in the country, is photographed smiling alongside serial rapist Harvey Weinstein.

Of course, this is not the first time Starmer has promoted the associates of sexual predators. Peter Mandelson, the “best pal” of notorious paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, was made US ambassador. Matthew Doyle, a friend of convicted paedophile Sean Morton, was given a life peerage. In September 2021, Starmer said that he “couldn’t believe” that 98% of sexual assault cases did not lead to charges, and that the figure “must change”. Starmer was head of the CPS for five years, responsible for “making independent charging decisions for the public”.

Another Starmer pick, Margaret Hodge, is about to be appointed as head of OFCOM. The head of OFCOM is responsible for regulating media, telecoms, and postal services. Hodge, an old friend of Peter Mandelson, would also be in charge of implementing the Online Safety Act. In the 1980s, whilst head of Islington Council, Hodge dismissed and ignored claims of a paedophile ring operating in children’s homes under her watch. She was later appointed as the Labour government’s Minister for Children. Now, she will be in charge of what you can see online. McSweeney’s 2008-10 campaign to get Hodge re-elected for Labour was supported by “Hope not Hate”. In 2022, Hope not Hate’s Political Adviser Liron Velleman gave evidence at the committee stage of the Online Safety Bill. He is now a convicted paedophile.

Starmer is battling to survive the fallout from his appointment of Epstein-informant Peter Mandelson as US Ambassador. Starmer made Kevan Jones a Labour peer and then appointed him to the Intelligence and Security Committee. Jones will decide which Mandelson files are released. The British Prime Minister is a danger to the country, but he does not have long left in power. My investigations into McSweeney were read more than 20 million times. Now, he’s been forced out of office. Let’s ensure Starmer is next to go.