Within Three To Nine Years?

On control of where the oil and gas went, the present regime in Iran must have offered Donald Trump a worse deal than either or both of the absolute monarchist but fake royal, Reza Pahlavi, who is almost a complete stranger to Iran, and the Mojahedin-e-Khalq of Islamo-Marxist terrorists whose collaboration with Saddam Hussein was up to and including fighting for Iraq in the war with Iran, a country where it, too, has now been almost completely unknown for two generations. Watch out for those Westerners who wanted to abolish the constitutional monarchies in their own countries while sending their compatriots to die to defend the absolute monarchies in the Gulf, which are in the Epstein Files, and to restore the absolute monarchy in Iran, under a man who, if he is not in them, must have been redacted.

The Revolutionary Guard Corps has vast interests in energy, engineering, construction, shipbuilding, automation and telecommunications, and enormous influence over the bonyads, which are fabulously rich and economically pivotal religious charities. If it had made the most attractive bid, then the United States would now be attacking Iran to keep it in power. But after the war, someone will still have to run those things, and a limited number of people have the training or the experience. Who else could drill the oil for Trump? That is how these things work. See the Eastern Bloc after 1989. See Austria, Japan and both Germanies after 1945. See Venezuela now.

Every one of these Epstein Class wars has ended in disaster, yet still there are those who will cheer on another one. It is time to start listening to the people who have been right. Right about Kosovo, which is the distribution centre for most of the heroin on British streets. Right about Afghanistan. Right about Iraq. Right about Libya. Right about Syria. Right about Ukraine. Right about Venezuela, where there has been no regime change, but only a resources grab. And preparing to be proved right about Iran. Not that it gives us any pleasure.

Ignore anyone who advocated a military intervention unless you could imagine that person as an 18-year-old in battle. The call for war always comes primarily from the liberal bourgeoisie, the Epstein Class. That is the class least likely to join the Armed Forces voluntarily, or to see combat even in periods of conscription. Operationally, that is just as well. Yet if there is not a strong enough case for conscription, then there is not a strong enough case for war. Unless a country needs to mobilise its entire healthy and able-bodied male population of fighting age, then it is not under sufficient threat to justify going to war at all.

The result at Gorton and Denton deprived Keir Starmer of the political authority to go to war with Iran, among other things. In principle, that would also have been true if Reform UK had won, but today Nigel Farage has backed British intervention. Ben Habib and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon are also pro-war, but Rupert Lowe is not. Therefore, having been disowned on air by David Bull for his views on Britishness, and of course for losing, Matt Goodwin has the issue on which to decide whether to join Advance UK or Restore Britain.

Douglas Murray has declared for Pahlavi, so we must assume that that is also the position of Oliver Kamm. I was once sent review copies of Kamm’s and Murray’s respective books as a kind of job lot; as essentially a single work. We have always known that centrism and right-wing populism were con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war, while Fascism was inherent in both of them, only ever arising by their joint enterprise. We have always pointed out that they constituted a single milieu. But we have been proved right beyond our worst nightmares. Whereas QAnon hallucinated that God had raised up a deliverer in the person of Trump, the Epstein Class is made up of centrists, right-wing populists, right-wing elitists, and the world’s only famous anarcho-syndicalist and libertarian socialist.

But never mind Noam Chomsky. Is Bernie Sanders an anarcho-syndicalist and a libertarian socialist? Is Jean-Luc Mélenchon? Is Jeremy Corbyn? Is Zack Polanski? Is George Galloway, whom Starmer believes to be electorally the most influential man on Britain, despite no longer being in Britain? No, the archetypal Epstein Class academic is Professor Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard. In 2021, he wrote that, “Oliver Kamm’s urbanity, erudition and compassion are raised to the power of two in Mending the Mind. He put them to work in crafting this gorgeous and urgent book, and on every page they remind us of his moral that enviable gifts are no protection against the affliction of depression.”

Pinker is on the Editorial Board of Evolutionary Psychological Science, which in 2018, a very short time before 2021 in the life of a quarterly journal, published this masterpiece by Edward Dutton, whom I knew at university. He 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. Kamm, Pinker, Dutton, Batterjee. Batterjee, Dutton, Pinker, Kamm. Truly, an Axis of Evil. Douglas Murray, indeed. Murray was a great friend and mentee of Christopher Hitchens, whom Gore Vidal famously named his “dauphin or delfino” before outliving him, and whose dauphin or delfino Kamm comically purports to be.

As a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Heterodox Social Sciences, Goodwin has links to Aporia Magazine, which is published by the same Human Diversity Foundation that publishes Mankind Quarterly and Dutton’s podcast, The Jolly Heretic, linking it to Pinker, and thus to Kamm. The HDF was founded in 2022 by Emil Kirkegaard, otherwise William Engman, 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.

It is a big club, and we are not in it. Nor would we wish to be. Yet there are those who have to be removed from it, or at least put at some remove from it. There have been high table rumours about Joe Docherty for years. Like Matthew Doyle, he was introduced to the House of Lords by Hilary Armstrong, whose Whips’ Office in the Commons had included all three of Phil Woolas (did someone say something about electoral fraud?), Ivor Caplin and Dan Norris. All three were made Ministers soon after the vote for the Iraq War, and here we go again. Norris does not turn up to Parliament, but he has one of the best voting records, because despite his own suspension from the Labour whip, his proxy vote is cast every single time by the Labour Whips. Armstrong was the political patroness, both of Anna Turley, and of Caplin’s close friend, closest ally, former lover, and constituency successor, Peter Kyle. Armstrong remains an active Labour member of the House of Lords, giving it as her institutional affiliation when she endorsed a mercifully ignored book that claimed that the accused of the Cleveland child abuse scandal had been guilty all along. As the young people say, every accusation is a confession.

Kyle joined his old boss in supporting the brief Leadership campaign of Jess Phillips. “I would stab Jeremy Corbyn in the front,” said the woman who was now “Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls”. She has accused British Pakistanis of importing wives for their disabled sons. She claims to have been rude and abusive towards Diane Abbott, although it is possible that she has built her reputation on lying about having used gutter language towards a woman who was old enough to be her mother. Phillips laughs at male suicides, at male cancers, at other men’s health issues, at violence against men, at problems in boys’ educational attainment, and at fathers denied access to their children. She has said that attacks of the kind that were seen in Cologne on the New Year’s Eve of 2015-16, “happen every week in Birmingham.”

Phillips’s Leadership Campaign was chaired by Wes Streeting, who would have become Leader when, as expected in 2019, the Conservative majority had been much reduced in 2024 but Boris Johnson had remained Prime Minister. Yes, that was barely six years ago. Streeting’s then employee, Sam Gould, was a sitting councillor when he committed offences startlingly similar to those of Liron Woodcock-Velleman, who sent naked pictures of himself to a 13-year-old girl while asking her to “show me your bra”, whether she was “at home alone”, and whether she was a virgin. Woodcock-Velleman was also a Labour councillor in London, and he was such a cog in the right-wing machine that he gave the evidence of Hope Not Hate at committee stage of what has become the Online Safety Act.

And on Tuesday 2 September, Phillips, that machine’s first choice for Streeting’s stopgap, told the House of Commons that, “South Yorkshire police should never have been left to investigate themselves in this matter, and moving those investigations to the NCA is absolutely the right thing to do. I would be lying if I said that over the years I had not met girls who talked to me about how police were part of not just the cover-up but the perpetration.” Read again those words of the Minister who refused a statutory inquiry, an inquiry that had been, and still is, demanded by the Muslim candidate whom she had beaten by only 693 votes at Birmingham Yardley, which he intends to contest again, the wonderful investigative journalist Jody McIntyre. Then read the Epstein Files and worry about inferior cultures with no respect for women and with endemic predation on young girls.

Still, Ann Limb will not be taking up her peerage, and Josh Simons has resigned as a Minister. Good. Now send round the rozzers. They should already have been by now. Limb obtained several positions by fraudulent means, it looks as if she also cooked the books, while Simons tried to frame people for offences against the Official Secrets Act and the National Security Act. Why has anyone been waiting for some investigation by his own Cabinet Office? If you are unfit to be a Minister, then you are unfit to be an MP. And with his Harvard, Silicon Valley and Beltway connections, Simons is a flight risk. On him as on Limb, call the Police. Even if they are the same Police who failed to notice the detailed defacement of the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, one of the most policed and surveilled places in the world at any hour of day or night. On the same night that a previously unheard of outfit alleged a previously unheard of form of electoral malpractice, a man with “asset” written all over him waved the false flag, again to discredit the result at Gorton and Denton, and also to justify the continued proscription of Palestine Action while, as we now see, manufacturing consent for Operation Epstein Fury against Iran.

Without Reservation

When Hannah Spencer arrives at Westminster on Monday, then will Keir Starmer know who she was? His letter to all Labour MPs does not mention her. It names three people, Angeliki Stogia once, Zack Polanksi once, and George Galloway three times.

Apparently, "The Greens were able to capitalise on an endorsement from George Galloway to win over enough voters to push them over the line." Labour went into the by-election 13,413 votes ahead of Reform UK. It came out of it 1213 votes behind Reform, and 5615 behind the Greens. That was quite some capitalisation on an endorsement from a 71-year-old on the other side of the world. It also explains George and Gayatri's arrest at gunpoint, which has led them to leave the country for the safety of their children. Andy Burnham would have won Gorton and Denton. Except against George. See them both at Makerfield?

George now says that the Greens therefore owe the Workers Party a clear run in the three constituencies where it came second last time, as well as wherever it had councillors by the time of the next General Election. That is complicated by the fact that it has a councillor in Gorton and Denton, but more broadly, if the Prime Minister is to be taken seriously, then it is asking for too little. The Workers Party and the closely allied Independent Left, not least since Jeremy Corbyn campaigned for Spencer, deserve clear runs wherever they were either first or second in 2024, and wherever they had councillors in 2029.

Starmer does not really do dignity, but even blaming George manages to maintain more of it than the idea that Muslim women who had been all ready to vote for Matt Goodwin were coerced out of doing so by their husbands who instead  insisted on a white woman with a gay Jewish Leader. "My husband deals with that" is one of those things which women say to men when they want us to go away. Sam Coates must have had it before, and he must have known that a woman reporter would have elicited a very different response.

Hardly mentioned is that the Conservatives dropped from 2,888 to 706 and lost their deposit. But if Muslims were integrated when they voted Labour yet are sectarian now that they do not, then why not anyone else who got uppity? Why not Hindus who stopped voting Conservative? In 2024, the Conservatives' only gain was Leicester East, Bob Blackman at Harrow East received the highest vote share for any Conservative candidate in the country, he was the only Conservative elected with an absolute majority, and he was one of only three Conservative MPs to be re-elected with increased majorities. Blackman has repeatedly been sworn in as an MP on the Bhagavad Gita, and at the House of Commons he hosted Tapan Ghosh, who was at least as violently opposed to Christians in Bengal as he was to Muslims.

Don't go off the reservation, Indians. If Muslims need to know their place, then so do Hindus. So do Jews. So does everyone. But the Muslims are clearly ignoring that nonsense, as must we all. For a start, the result at Gorton and Denton has left Starmer with no political capital to subject us to digital ID and to live facial recognition, or to take away our rights to trial by jury and to appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court, or to go to war with Iran.

False Flags and Red Paint

Paul Knaggs gets it, of course:

Does the British state truly lack the capacity to protect a twelve-foot bronze icon in the most watched square mile on earth, or does it simply find the alternative more politically useful?

Shortly after 4:00 a.m. on Friday, 27 February 2026, the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square was found dripping in red paint. The slogans were unambiguous: “Zionist war criminal,” “Stop the Genocide,” “Globalise the Intifada,” “Never Again is Now.” the fourth face of the plinth was tagged in Dutch: “Groeten uit Den Haag”, Greetings from The Hague.

That last line is not incidental. The Hague is the seat of the International Criminal Court, which in November 2024 issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity in Gaza. It is the ICC’s city. The message was pointed, knowing, and international in scope.

By dawn, the Metropolitan Police had arrested a 38-year-old Dutch national at the scene. He had already published a pre-recorded, seven-part Instagram statement under the name Olax Outis, a deliberate pseudonym. In Homer’s Odyssey, Outis means “Nobody”: it is the name Odysseus gave the Cyclops to escape without being identified.

The man chose the alias of someone who disappears. Instead, he walked directly into arrest.

The Dutch group Free the Filton 24 NL claimed responsibility. The reference is to the 24 Palestine Action activists charged over a break-in at an Elbit Systems weapons facility in Filton, near Bristol, in August 2024. Elbit is Israel’s largest arms manufacturer. The activists destroyed drone components they believed were being used in Gaza.

The Question of Timing 

Palestine Action activists Jordan Devlin, Charlotte Head, Zoe Rogers, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio and Fatema Zainab Rajwani pose for the camera the night before they smashed up an Elbit arms factory in August 2024. 

Here is the detail your morning television did not dwell upon: nine days before the Churchill vandalism, on 18 February 2026, a jury at Woolwich Crown Court acquitted the first six Filton defendants, the “Filton 6” of every charge put to them, including aggravated burglary, which carried a potential life sentence. They had admitted destroying the drones. The jury acquitted them anyway.

In the same fortnight, the High Court ruled that the government’s proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation had been unlawful. The state’s entire legal architecture, built to crush this movement, was collapsing in open court. Government ministers were furious. The Crown Prosecution Service, within days, announced it would seek a retrial.

And then, nine days after that acquittal, a Dutch activist in a red boiler suit with “I Support Palestine Action” written across his back in large letters walked up to the most photographed monument in Britain and spent an extended period painting it, before being arrested in under two minutes.

We are not asserting the Home Office handed him the paint. We are asking why the door was left open long enough to get a result.

The Panopticon’s Convenient Blind Spot 

Parliament Square is ringed by some of the highest concentrations of CCTV cameras in the world. The Metropolitan Police’s “ring of steel” around Parliament is a point of institutional pride. The Met states its officers were “on scene within two minutes of being alerted.” Two minutes. Yet the man completed what appears to be an extensive, multi-sided mural before a single officer intercepted him.

The question is not whether the police can respond. Clearly, they can. The question is why pre-emptive monitoring, routine in this specific location, did not flag a man in deep red overalls approaching a Category A monument at 4:00 a.m.

There are three possible answers. The first is institutional incompetence, which those who built the surveillance state around Westminster will find it difficult to argue with a straight face. The second is that the cameras saw, the system logged, and a decision was made to let the act complete itself. The third the most structurally important, is that it does not matter which of the first two is true.

False Flags and Red Paint 

The charge filed is “racially aggravated criminal damage.” This is not a coincidence of phrasing. It is a legal instrument. The “Zionist war criminal” slogan triggers the racial aggravation element; “Globalise the Intifada”, which both the Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police declared a chargeable offence in December 2025, appears on the plinth as if placed for the purpose. 

This man did not merely vandalise a statue. He gift-wrapped a prosecution, a news cycle, and a pretext.

The Home Office called Churchill “a figure of great national pride.” Within hours, the Jewish Leadership Council called the act “disgusting.” The Board of Deputies invoked the Holocaust. Political figures across the spectrum rushed to condemn Palestinian solidarity protesters as a whole, not the individual, not the act, but the movement.

Nine days after the movement had won in court, it was back in the dock of public opinion.

The Verdict 

We are not in the business of conspiracy for its own sake. We are in the business of structural analysis, and the structure here is clear. Whether this individual acted from pure moral conviction, whether he was a “useful idiot” for forces he could not see, or whether the state’s security apparatus made a very deliberate choice about what it would and would not stop, the result is identical.

The paint dries. The arrest is made. The Filton acquittals are buried beneath outrage about Churchill. The High Court’s ruling on Palestine Action is crowded out by photographs of a defaced monument. The government, losing the legal argument, wins the emotional one.

It is not quite the burning of the Reichstag. But it does not need to be. The modern state has learned subtlety. It no longer needs to burn buildings. It needs only to leave a door ajar and wait for someone filled with the righteous passion of indignation or reckless enough to walk through it.

Greetings from The Hague, indeed. The question is whether the message arrived, or whether it was simply repainted into something more useful to those who were already watching.

Not Conducive To The Public Good

I know all the problems with Searchlight, but this, now this is a story:

Restore Britain has admitted a high‑profile American white supremacist as a member, despite the fact he is banned from entering the UK for his extremist views.

Jared Taylor, founder of the neo‑nazi‑aligned American Renaissance, announced on X that he had successfully joined the party.

Banned from Britain

He posted: “I just joined Restore Britain. Apparently you can become a party member without being a British citizen. You can be a member even if you are banned from Britain, as I am!”

His declaration came as Restore Britain MP Rupert Lowe claimed the party had surpassed 90,000 members and was on track to reach 100,000 within two weeks of its launch.

Taylor was excluded from the UK in 2015 due to his promotion of neo-nazi views and his longstanding advocacy of white supremacy. The Home Office at the time described his presence in the country as “not conducive to the public good”. 

Back route

Since then, however, he entered the country last year to speak at the Patriotic Alternative annual conference, travelling the ‘back route’ from Ireland.

Despite Searchlight writing that he was making the trip, the Home Office appeared to make no move to find and deport him while he was here.

Then we described in November how he now appeared to be able to travel freely in Europe despite being banned from entering the Schengen area in 2019.

Extensive ties

His organisation, American Renaissance, has for decades acted as a hub for the US far right, hosting conferences attended by neo‑nazis, Ku Klux Klan figures and European identitarian activists.

Taylor himself has repeatedly argued that Black people are inherently less intelligent than white people, a claim rooted in discredited eugenics.

Searchlight has previously documented Taylor’s extensive ties to the British far right. He has collaborated with UK extremists, published their work, and platformed them at American Renaissance events.

His writings have circulated widely among British white nationalists, and in the past he has maintained contact with activists linked to the BNP, the London Forum and other hard‑right networks.

More recently, he has been closely linked with Patriotic Alternative, and spoke at their conference last October, along with another restore Britain member, Steve Laws, who is now a leading voice in the ‘Rupert Lowe is our leader’ neo-nazi faction on the far right.

Joining Restore shows how closely Taylor now likes to associate with the young neo-nazi online scene including the likes of Steve Laws.

Flood of nazis

Restore Britain’s decision to allow non‑citizens – including, it appears, individuals barred from entering the country – to join the party raises further questions about the flood of neo-nazis, extreme racists and holocaust deniers into its ranks.

Taylor’s public celebration of his membership will put more pressure on Rupert Lowe, who is already facing the dilemma of what to do about the likes of outright fascists and neo-nazis like Homeland Party refugees Steve Laws, Callum Barker and ‘Zoomer Historian’ Sam Wilkes, given that he has previously criticised Nigel Farage for vetting Reform candidates and members.

Open War

Electoral communications in English and which appealed specifically to Christian solidarity ought to feature the bogeymen of Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi, but each of those is more ambivalent towards Muslims, and towards the most hardline Islamists at that, be that Netanyahu towards the Gulf despots, or Modi towards the Taliban.

Just as Modi will not extradite Sheikh Hasina, the convicted war criminal and aunt of the fugitive Tulip Siddiq MP, so he has used the Taliban to take colonial possession of Afghanistan, the better to squeeze Pakistan. The Durand Line is as meaningless as the Sykes-Picot Line. The P in Pakistan is Punjab, the a is Afghania, the k is Kashmir, the i was added "for ease of pronunciation" (in other words, to sound more Urdu and less Punjabi), the s is Sindh, and the tan is Balochistan. But of those, only Sindh has ever been wholly in Pakistan. Part of Bolchistan is in Afghanistan, while rather more of it is in Iran.

And Afghania is the Pashtun homeland. Most of its area is in Afghanistan, but there remain two and a half times as many Pashtuns in Pakistan, which does not see itself as meddling in Afghanistan. Rather, Pakistan sees its present territory as whatever could be won and held in 1947. Leaving enormous unfinished business in Kashmir, in Punjab, in Balochistan, and in Afghania. It is fundamental to Pakistan that Amritsar, Srinagar, Zahedan and Kandahar and are all naturally and rightfully Pakistani cities. To get the whole of Afghania, then Pakistan would take the whole of Afghanistan. And to get the whole of Afghania, then the Taliban would take the whole of the country where they were ṭālibān, Pakistan. But that would bring its own complications with India. "Keep a bit of India," said Winston Churchill. But it was the Attlee Government that did it. That Government's foreign policy record was rarely as admirable as its record in domestic policy.

The Muslim League initially opposed independence altogether, and it was duly cultivated by the same British authorities that had directly created the Muslim Brotherhood in order to oppose Egyptian independence. The Brotherhood has enjoyed good Foreign Office contacts ever since, and for most of the period since 1947 Britain has at least broadly sided with Pakistan. After all, the British military top brass had enthusiastically supported the creation of Pakistan as a seat for British military bases, and not least for new airbases, in strategically the most important part of the Subcontinent, right where the Great Game had been played out in the nineteenth century.

Pakistan was the first state ever to have been founded specifically for the sake of Islam, and it was hoped that it would become the focus of global Muslim allegiance and aspiration, all the while within the British Commonwealth and retaining the British monarch as Head of State. Pakistan retained the monarchy longer than India, so that, in her time, the late Queen was Queen of Pakistan, having sworn at her Coronation to govern its people (and, indeed, those of apartheid South Africa) "according to their respective laws and customs".

The scholars at Deoband had opposed Partition, arguing that the idea of a "Muslim nation" in India was contrary to the universal mission of Islam. But Partition severed the Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan from the influence of Deoband itself, making them prey to the Pakistani Army in its role of reinforcing the most hardline definition of the country's Islamic identity in order to keep the feud with India going, and thus consolidate the power of the Army. That suited the Americans in the Afghanistan of the 1980s and 1990s, just as it had suited the British in earlier times, and just as it had suited them both when the Thatcher Government and the Reagan Administration had enthusiastically supported the regime of General Zia-ul-Haq.

Darul Uloom Deoband, though, is still there, surrounded by Hindus. Nearly 80 years after Partition, the "Muslim nation" is divided almost equally among three countries. Bengal was not even mentioned in the acronym that gave rise to the name of Pakistan, but East Bengal had to be included initially on the balance of populations. No one ever expected all of India's Muslims to move to Pakistan. Indeed, that would have been impossible to manage. But neither of those things was at all germane to Britain's support for its creation.

But No Cigar

As soon as the polls closed at Gorton and Denton, an organisation of which no one had ever heard complained of a practice of which no one had ever heard, and which on the figures cited would have made no difference to this result even if it had really been going on. Just as “Democracy Volunteers” materialised out of thin air seconds after 10 o’clock last night, so too did “family voting”, a new one on the rest of us, and a term that does not occur in the legislation. Nor does the definition of it, “Where two voters either confer, collude or direct each other on voting.” There is an offence only where there is influence over someone else’s vote. And that should have been reported at the time.

Also in the early hours of this morning, the same forces behind that clump of astroturf staged a false flag attack both to discredit that result, and to assist the Government’s appeal against the ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action had been unlawful. Like Marinus van der Lubbe, Olax Outis is Dutch. In the Netherlands, he has repeatedly asked the authorities to euthanise him. He has previously been active in Extinction Rebellion. His vulnerability to the spooks is written all over him, and its source is equally obvious, mirroring the fact that, in relation to the attack on Manchester Central Mosque, Darren Connor has been charged, not only with possession of an offensive weapon, but also with possession of a Class B drug. Guess which one.

As to who might wish to deface a statue of Winston Churchill, the American Old Right has never had much, if any, time for him, but nor did the British New Right when it was still New. Andrew Roberts devoted much of Eminent Churchillians to criticising Churchill’s Indian Summer Premiership of 1951 to 1955 as a period of betrayal on immigration and on relations with the trade unions, by a Government with scarcely a proper Tory in it, effectively a continuation of the Wartime Coalition. Rightly or wrongly, that was the view of the intellectual founders of the post-Thatcher Conservative Party.

In Great Contemporaries, published in 1937, two years after he had called Hitler’s achievements “among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world”, Churchill wrote that, “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” That passage was not removed from the book’s reprint in 1941. Great Contemporaries was reissued in 2024.

In May 1940, Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini, whom he had called “the greatest living legislator”. Gibraltar is still under British sovereignty only because Labour won the 1945 Election. After Franco had refused to let Hitler use Spain in order to invade Gibraltar and thus seize control of the Strait, Churchill had promised him Gibraltar once the War was safely won. That would have been just another colonial transfer in those days. But Churchill lost at the ballot box. In the meantime, over one thousand Spanish Republicans had fought the Second World War in the British Army. What do Churchill’s noisiest partisans think of that? It ranks with last September, when Konstantin Malofeev and Aleksandr Dugin played host to the Falange Española de las JONS, annual wreath-layers in memory of the Blue Legion.

So much for those who would use Churchill to make the case for continued support of the Ukraine of 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, and all the rest of them, including the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps. The Ukraine that in Ternopil  has 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”. The Ukraine of Pavlo Lapshyn, who is still in His Majesty’s Prison, and who will be there 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. 

All sorts of things about Churchill are simply ignored. Gallipoli. The miners. The Suffragettes. The refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. His dishonest and self-serving memoirs. The truth about the catastrophic humiliation at Dunkirk. The other one, at Singapore, for which Australians and New Zealanders have never forgiven Britain. The Lancastria. The men left behind in France. Both the fact and the sheer scale of his 1945 defeat while the War with Japan was still going on, when Labour won half of his newly divided seat, and an Independent did very well in the other half after Labour and the Liberals had disgracefully refused to field candidates against him. His deselection by his local Conservative Association just before he died. And not least, his carve-up of Eastern Europe with Stalin, so very reminiscent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He borrowed the phrase “the Iron Curtain” from Goebbels and used it to mean exactly what Goebbels had meant by it. Broken by the War, the Soviet Union had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe, or the Red Army would have carried on marching in the summer of 1945. Still less was the USSR willing or able to cross either the Atlantic or the Pacific.

The electorate was under no illusions while Churchill was still alive. His image was booed and hissed when it appeared on newsreels. He led the Conservative Party into three General Elections, he lost the first two, and he only returned to office on the third occasion with the support of the National Liberals, having lost the popular vote. In the course of that Parliament, he had to be removed by his own party. It comfortably won the subsequent General Election. We have not forgotten the truth about him in the old mining areas. Nor have they in the places that he signed away to Stalin, including the country for whose freedom the War was fought. Churchill coined the nickname “Uncle Joe” for Stalin.

Churchill presided over the famine in Bengal. His views on race shocked his younger colleagues even in the Conservative Party of the 1950s. He wanted to transport the Jews to Palestine, since he saw them as not really British. Having deployed the Black and Tans to Ireland, he redeployed them to Palestine in that Zionist cause. The Zionists later expressed their gratitude by plotting to kill him and by murdering his friend, Lord Moyne, as well as sending letter-bombs to the White House of his ally, Harry S. Truman. In the meantime, they had contracted the Haavara Agreement, fought against Britain throughout the Second World War, allied with Fascist Italy, twice sought an alliance with Nazi Germany on the grounds that it was a lesser evil than Britain, hanged the boobytrapped bodies of Sergeants Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice and photographed them, and bombed the King David Hotel. By contrast, before anyone brings him up, Haj Amin al-Husseini was holed up in Berlin with no practical influence in the Middle East, being instead a kind of mascot for the recruitment of Balkan, Caucasian and Central Asian Muslims into the predecessor organisations of those which now controlled Ukraine and of those for which the New Right campaigned during the collapse of Yugoslavia.

In such circles, the great cause of the moment is withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. Yet in May 1948, when the pompously self-styled Congress of Europe assembled in the Hall of Knights in The Hague, then it was Churchill who dubbed “the Voice of Europe” that assembly of politicians who had recently been defeated at the polls, of the representatives of Royal and Noble Houses that had fairly recently been dispossessed at least in political terms, of the likes of Churchill who fell into both categories, and of people whose lives’ work was trying to delude themselves that so did they. In the name of the order that had held sway for a century between the defeat of Napoleon and the First World War, their aim was very explicitly to check the social democracy that was sweeping Western Europe at the time. The material that they produced had that intention, and it has had that effect. It was written into British domestic law by Tony Blair, whom Margaret Thatcher identified as her own greatest achievement.

The famous dipping of the cranes for Churchill’s coffin occurred only because the London dockers, who despised him, had been paid to do it. Churchill’s cult seems to have begun only once he was dead, or at least so old as to have been politically as good as dead. It never translated into votes. But it is equally true that once the Attlee Government had a record on which to be judged, then it was barely reelected in 1950, and although it did win the popular vote, it lost office in 1951. For 74 years and counting, the Labour Party has dined out on a mere six years that did not impress the electorate at the time. If Churchill and Attlee were the twin giants of the Golden Age, then that was lost on the voters who lived through it, and who did not think much of either of them.

Sour Charity

Imran Mulla writes:

The UK’s Charity Commission has found “mismanagement” in the administration of the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) over a statement attacking the Labour government for a partial arms embargo on Israel.

The CAA is a UK-based charity that describes itself as combating antisemitism through advocacy, legal action and public awareness efforts.

It has faced controversy over allegations that it conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism, raising concerns about its impact on political debate regarding Palestinian rights.

In November 2024, The Guardian reported that the regulator was assessing a statement made that September by the CAA in which it criticised the UK government’s decision to suspend 30 arms export licences to Israel as “obscene”.

The statement, apparently since withdrawn from the CAA’s website, said the “British government is broadcasting that western allies should not be supplying Israel with the arms that it needs to fight to save the hostages and defeat Hamas. This is obscene.” 

The regulator’s review followed a complaint in October by Labour MP and former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, who accused the CAA of engaging in “highly political and contentious public attacks on the government and individual government ministers”.

McDonnell told Middle East Eye on Thursday: “I have been worried about the activities of the CAA for some time and so I am pleased that the Charity Commission has responded to some of my concerns and taken action against them.

“I am hoping that any others who are offended by this organisation’s behaviour refer their concerns to the Charity Commission.”

In a letter to McDonnell on 29 September last year, not previously reported on and seen by MEE, the Charity Commission said it had “determined that it is appropriate to provide advice and guidance to ensure that the trustees comply with their legal duties and responsibilities and the law”.

The regulator said it was not clear that all the content within the CAA statement “furthered the charity’s objectives” and that the charity’s trustees had not provided “sufficient documentation” relating to the decision to publish the statement.

“The Commission views failing to retain records relating to this decision making as mismanagement in the administration of this charity,” it said.

The regulator said it had issued the CAA with a “remedial Action Plan” requiring trustees to “improve the administration, management and governance of the CAA in light of the concerns raised and our findings set out above”.

Further complaints

The Charity Commission also told McDonnell it had “received further complaints about the charity that were unrelated to your complaint about the article [statement].

“This included a second complaint you shared in April 2025 regarding the manner in which complaints were submitted by the charity about Dr Campbell to his employer Goldsmiths University in 2023.”

In August 2023, Goldsmiths, University of London launched an investigation into Ray Campbell after receiving a complaint from the CAA accusing him of posting antisemitic content on social media.

Campbell, an associate lecturer in theatre and performance at Goldsmiths and a teaching fellow at Royal Holloway, was suspended for five months during the investigation.

But in February 2025, Goldsmiths dismissed all allegations against Campbell and apologised, acknowledging that the five-month investigation caused him distress.

The regulator said it had “assessed the additional concerns raised about the charity as part of our case to ensure all the matters of concern were considered”.

MEE also understands that this week McDonnell raised fresh concerns with the Commission over a recent statement by the CAA attacking the High Court for ruling that the government’s ban on direct action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation was “disproportionate”.

The CAA had said: “It is appalling that a court would be prepared to decriminalise an organisation whose sole purpose is to engage in criminal activity. It demonstrates that law and order has not only broken down in this country, but that the criminal justice system is not fit for purpose.”

It added: “This shocking verdict is only the latest in a long series of injustices that the legal system has permitted against British Jews.”

Jewish Voice for Liberation

In April 2020, Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL), which last year changed its name to Jewish Voice for Liberation, filed a complaint with the Charity Commission against the CAA, accusing it of acting as a “highly politically partisan organisation which does not deserve charitable status”.

In September 2021, the CAA described JVL as an “antisemitism-denial group” and a “sham Jewish representative organisation” – a characterisation JVL strongly condemned.

JVL submitted another complaint in April 2022 to the Charity Commission, which then said in January 2023 that it was “assessing concerns” about the CAA and that it had opened a regulatory compliance case against the organisation.

In May 2024, the Charity Commission closed the case, saying that JVL “has not demonstrated it has the required legal standing to make such an application”.

But in November, it emerged the regulator was assessing a statement made in September by the CAA criticising the Labour government’s decision to suspend 30 arms export licences to Israel.

Jenny Manson, co-chair of JVL, told MEE: “We at JVL are pleased that the Charity Commission is taking some action against the CAA and it is good to see them explaining their recent decisions to John McDonnell.”

Manson said she and McDonnell had benefited from the advice of British Jewish lawyer Sir Geoffrey Bindman, the founder of Bindman & Partners, who died last November.

McDonnell quoted Bindman’s opinion in his initial letter to the Charity Commission in 2024. He said: “CAA is, according to its website, ‘a volunteer-led charity dedicated to exposing and countering antisemitism through education and zero-tolerant enforcement of the law’.

“There being no evidence of antisemitism by the UK government or others targeted by CAA, the Charity Commission should consider afresh whether the actions of CAA violate its charitable status.”

MEE contacted the CAA for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

How Lowe Can They Go?

On Wednesday, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon switched his endorsement at Gorton and Denton from Reform UK to Advance UK, which yesterday took fewer votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party, so the Outer Right is clearly coming to the end of its latest attempt to enter the parliamentary process. But it will still be active in other ways, as Katherine Denkinson writes:

A well-known white supremacist linked to a neo-Nazi group flagged by the UK Government as a “serious concern” has been volunteering for Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain movement since last November, Byline Times can reveal.

Chris Mitchell, the former East of England organiser for the antisemitic far-right group Patriotic Alternative (PA) and a self-described “Nazi-Buddhist”, has been recruiting fellow ethno-nationalists to join Restore Britain since becoming a member of ‘Great Yarmouth First’ – Restore Britain’s flagship local organisation – last November.

His social media profiles have been used to promote his work delivering party leaflets. On Facebook, he has tagged Rupert Lowe in multiple posts, and Lowe has responded and praised him in the comments.

At an outdoor conference held by Great Yarmouth First in mid-February, Mitchell posed for a selfie with Lowe and shared the image on both his Facebook page and Telegram channel. Mitchell claimed he had asked Lowe whether his extreme nationalist views would be a problem and that Lowe told him they would not, as it was a matter of “free speech”. Byline Times reached out to Lowe to verify this claim, but he has not responded.

Neo-Nazi organiser Chris Mitchell (left) with Restore Britain founder Rupert Lowe (right)

Lowe announced in February that he would register Restore Britain as a political party. On X (the platform formerly known as Twitter), the MP has declared that the word “racist” has “lost all meaning” and insisted there is “NOTHING neo-Nazi” about wanting the mass deportation of “illegal immigrants”.

The party’s stated policies include “low tax, small government, secure borders, national pride, Christian principles, free speech and direct democracy”.

The announcement has divided the right. Many who have backed Reform UK see Restore Britain as splitting the vote, while others – including several former Reform councillors – have joined Lowe. But the movement has also attracted several high-profile figures from the organised far right, who see Lowe as their best prospect for mainstreaming ethno-nationalist beliefs.

Mitchell’s White Supremacist Record

Mitchell makes no secret of his political views. On Facebook, he has posted the “14 words” – the most widely used white supremacist slogan in the world, coined by a convicted far-right terrorist, declared that diversity means “white genocide”, and claimed that “Jewish control over our people WILL be coming to an end.”

His followers and supporters, many of whom have ‘liked’ these posts, include other white nationalists, members of the neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative, and his own mother.

Screenshot from Chris Mitchell’s Facebook posting the 14 words

On 1 December 2025, Mitchell reposted an announcement by Lowe regarding Great Yarmouth First, writing: “… finally something we desperately needed. Sign me up!” Rupert Lowe responded to him directly: “Welcome to the team mate!”.

The Telegram Channel

Mitchell recently renamed his Telegram channel – previously called Patriotic Chats – to Restore Britain War Room. Its avatar was changed to an image of Rupert Lowe pushing a wheelbarrow full of guns, superimposed on a picture of Auschwitz with a sonnenrad – a symbol associated with Nazism – rising behind it.

The group has approximately 160 members, including various members of the neo-Nazi PA as well as former soldier Alek Yerbury, a former PA member who left to found the fascist National Rebirth Party.

Screenshot from Chris Mitchell’s Telegram chat

While Yerbury has criticised Restore Britain for not being extreme enough on Israel, other group members have expressed support for the party, writing that they should back Restore to “get wider reach” and “representation”.

Plans for ‘Groyping’

Elsewhere in the channel, members have made and posted memes depicting Rupert Lowe dressed as Hitler and suggested they resume “groyping” – a tactic popularised by US far-right commentator Nick Fuentes, who along with his followers attended US conservative conferences to present nationalist arguments. The aim is to draw organisers into debates that end up promoting ethno-nationalism.

In the UK, groups such as PA have adopted the same approach on radio station phone-ins and in online comment sections. Mitchell is well-known as a groyper and has posted examples on his TikTok channel, including a secret recording of him asking Rupert Lowe at a 2024 Reform UK conference what his plans were to prevent white Britons from becoming a minority.

Lowe did not answer the question directly but said he “feels for” Mitchell because his home town of Birmingham is “in bad shape”.

On Telegram last week, Mitchell advised followers that Restore supporters “have to hit Reform events and get back on the radio stations… promoting Restore Britain”.

Patriotic Alternative Endorsement

Mark Collett, founder of Patriotic Alternative, told far-right channel Unity News Network that he “really likes” Lowe and believes him to be the “greatest sitting MP since World War Two, including Enoch Powell”.

Repeating the long-held nationalist belief that white people will “be a minority” in the UK within their lifetimes, Collett added that the formation of Restore Britain had created “a lot of happy people” among his friends and a “renewed positivity that maybe we can mainstream our message”.

A Telegram post in which Collett urged members of PA to join Restore Britain was subsequently shared by Mitchell on the Restore Britain War Room channel.

Lowe’s Links to the BasketWeavers Network

Restore Britain has also been promoted online by Mark Houghton and Luca Johnson of the Lotus Eaters podcast. Fellow Lotus Eaters contributor Charlie Downes has been on the campaign trail with Rupert Lowe promoting the party.

Both Johnson and Houghton are members of the BasketWeavers, a secretive far-right group founded by Houghton.

Exposed after a year-long undercover investigation by Hope Not Hate [but don’t let that put you off], the BasketWeavers were revealed as white supremacists dedicated to building a whites-only society and driven by antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Their members include PA contributor Michael Wright (also known as Morgoth), who has recently published a lengthy blog post declaring his own support for Restore Britain.

The growing presence of white nationalists in Restore Britain appears to have had little effect on other supporters of the party. While Lowe has responded to allegations of white supremacist ties with legal threats, his more extreme supporters see him as a way to unite the far right.

Rupert Lowe did not respond to request for comment.

Blamelessly Taking His Name In Vain?

Hamit Coskun appealed from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court, which quashed his conviction. Keir Starmer and David Lammy want to abolish that right. Today, the High Court rejected the Crown Prosecution Service's appeal to reinstate that conviction. But this was about a blasphemy law only if you worshipped Margaret Thatcher.

What has a blasphemy law ever achieved? There was one in England and Wales until 2008, there was one in Scotland until 2024, and there is one in Northern Ireland to this day. To what effect? Rather, the success of Coskun's first appeal was a good result against the Public Order Act 1986. Who was the Prime Minister in 1986? A couple of years later, her supporters wanted to use that very Act to prosecute people who had set fire to copies of The Satanic Verses. They are very recent converts to free speech, and very selective about it.

Similarly, the basis of the lockdowns was the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. The following year, the Thatcher Government secured a judicial fiat that, without bothering to ask Parliament, abolished the age of consent altogether. Now the authority for puberty blockers and for child castration, Gillick competence ought instead to be called Thatcher competence. The Major Government did write Thatcher competence into the Age of Legal Capacity (Scotland) Act 1991. But it is applied in Northern Ireland on no authority that is apparent to anyone. And even in England and Wales, it has never been subject to a parliamentary vote. Let there be one now. 

Not that we ought to hold out hope for such an outcome, any more than anyone should have done then. As the House of Commons voted last year to decriminalise abortion up to birth, so that House had voted under Thatcher to legalise abortion up to birth for "severe fetal abnormality" that did not have to be specified, and that was in the original text of a Government Bill, not a backbench amendment.

Somewhere Else To Go

Peter Mandelson once said that left-wing voters had “nowhere else to go”. First at Caerphilly, and now also at Gorton and Denton, Labour has said that voting for it was “the only way to beat Reform”. First at Caerphilly, and now also at Gorton and Denton, Labour has dropped from first place to third, with the winner being a party to its left. Highly problematic ones from the point of view of many of us, but even so.

Will there be a ward-by-ward breakdown of the Gorton and Denton result? At any rate, even if each of the 32 families purportedly observed by the previously unheard of Democracy Volunteers had had 10 members, then that would still have been only 320 people, whereas Hannah Spencer’s majority is 4,402. If Muslim women’s votes were cast by their husbands, then that did not begin yesterday, so the 2024 Labour majority of 13,413 must have been illegitimate. And nothing says Matt Goodwin’s “dangerous Muslim sectarianism” quite like Muslims voting for a white woman whose party was led by a gay Jew.

Down To Business

At Gorton and Denton, Labour has dropped from first place to third. The SDP has finished behind the Monster Raving Loony Party for the second time in history. Advance UK was also behind the Loonies. And the combined Advance, SDP, Libertarian and Conservative votes were less than the Green margin of victory over Reform UK.

Now over to Hannah Spencer MP to do something about the Dirty Business that has somehow not attracted the attention of Mr Bates vs The Post Office, perhaps because it made an unanswerable case for the renationalisation of water. We cannot be having talk like that, can we? Well, between this result, and the success of Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters inside Your Party, we can now.

The Green Party is still wrong about a hell of a lot, though.

How Iron The Bars?

Ian Huntley's assailant was Anthony Russell. A triple murderer who raped a pregnant woman, he is serving a whole life order.

Who did you think was in HMP Frankland? But that is why this sort of incident should be impossible there, in what is also people's workplace.

Yet less than a year after Hashem Abedi attacked Officers with hot cooking oil and makeshift weapons, Russell has wielded an iron bar in a workshop. He could have wielded it at anyone.

Smoking Astroturf

After several hours of wailing about fraud, Reform UK is now saying that it may have won Gorton and Denton. Take as long as you need.

John Ault is a veteran Liberal Democrat activist and a sometime Lib Dem parliamentary candidate, and his previously unknown Democracy Volunteers organisation turns out to be funded by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. I am no Green, but this was how it started against Jeremy Corbyn, not with the Far Right, but with centrist astroturfers such as Labour Together. This was already in The Guardian at 12:22.

We are seeing how the last outburst of that sort of thing has ended up, with Peter Mandelson on bail and having been ordered to surrender his passport, with even the European Commission also now investigating him, with Josh Simons waiting for the knock on the door, with an Interpol Red Notice having been issued for Tulip Siddiq, and with even the Clintons possibly facing their comeuppance at last.

Simons tried to frame people for offences against the Official Secrets Act and the National Security Act. Why are they waiting for some investigation by his own Cabinet Office? With his Harvard, Silicon Valley and Beltway connections, he is a flight risk. Call the Police.

As for Siddiq, did this Government mention international law? Negotiated by Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, and by Dominic Raab, Liz Truss, James Cleverly and David Cameron as Foreign Secretaries, will the Gibraltar deal be put to a referendum there? If so, then the previous Government's Chagos deal, for so it was, should also go to a referendum of the Chagossians. Or if not, since the British Overseas Territories were neither independent, nor constituent parts of the United Kingdom, then the same is true of the Crown Dependencies.

The Assisted Suicide Bill in England and Wales is effectively dead, David Lammy has always been opposed to it, and it is within his power to refuse Royal Assent to the comparable legislation in Jersey and in the Isle of Man. He should do so. As with the closure of all tax havens in the British Overseas Territories and in the Crown Dependencies, anywhere that did not like it would be free to become independent.

The Most Urgent Questions of Our Time

Thomas Fazi writes:

Yesterday, Russia, Ukraine and the US met for yet another round of peace talks in Geneva. At around the same time, scores of missiles and hundreds of drones pummelled Ukrainian infrastructure, causing chaos across eight regions and injuring dozens of people. And, in a sense, both these events are connected: as the war in Eastern Europe enters its fifth year, a peaceful resolution seems no closer than it did a year ago, when Trump began his second term promising a swift end to the conflict. If anything, in fact, peace seems to be receding ever further from reach.

On the surface, the explanation appears straightforward: Russia and Ukraine remain deadlocked over territory. Moscow insists on full control of the eastern Donbas region — of which it holds only a portion — as well as of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. On both counts, Zelensky has refused to budge, despite Russia’s relentless attacks on Ukraine’s dwindling power grid.

But framing the impasse as a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia obscures a deeper reality: this has always been, at its core, a proxy war between Russia and the United States — one which can only be resolved through an agreement between the two powers. The Ukrainian military, after all, is effectively kept on life support by Washington, particularly through the satellite intelligence that has become indispensable to modern drone warfare. Both Moscow and Washington are aware of this, which is why over the past year they have repeatedly privileged bilateral talks from which Ukraine and Nato allies were excluded.

Last August’s summit between Putin and Trump in Anchorage marked the high point of the new US-Russia détente. It was the first face-to-face meeting between the US and Russian presidents since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, and the first such encounter on American soil in nearly two decades. The substance of the talks was never officially disclosed, but the symbolism was unmistakable. From the red-carpet welcome, to Trump calling Putin warmly by his first name, everything was choreographed to signal a turning point in relations, which, since 2022, had sunk to levels of hostility not seen since the Cold War.

Since then, Russian officials have frequently invoked the “spirit of Anchorage” to describe the framework of understanding purportedly reached between the two leaders. In practice, we can surmise that this sought to reconcile Trump’s transactional instincts, in the form of economic arrangements beneficial to US companies and Trump’s own prestige, with Putin’s insistence on the need to address the “primary roots of the conflict”: namely the need for a new security arrangement in Europe. This agreement, however, always rested on very shaky grounds, precisely because the two parties invested Anchorage with two very different meanings. From Moscow’s standpoint, what is at stake is nothing less than a fundamental renegotiation of the rules underpinning European and global security; Washington, by contrast, sees the matter in narrower terms: a specific conflict to be managed and contained, without disturbing the broader structure of international power that suits Washington just fine.

Russia has sought to manage this tension through what might be called a double-track approach. On the one hand, it has tasked Kirill Dmitriev — the Harvard-educated financier who heads Russia’s sovereign wealth fund — with negotiating a large-scale economic deal with the US. Meanwhile, senior diplomats, above all the veteran foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, have worked in parallel on the broader geopolitical settlement. This approach has so far failed to yield concrete results, prompting the diplomatic track to ratchet up its rhetorical pressure on Washington. The clearest sign of this came in a recent interview in which Lavrov spoke of the Trump administration in unprecedentedly harsh terms.

Lavrov openly challenged the idea that the US is working towards the cooperative framework meant to emerge from the Anchorage talks. He claimed that Russia had accepted Washington’s proposals on resolving the war in Ukraine, only to find the US backing away from them in practice. “They made an offer, we agreed — the problem should have been resolved. Having accepted their proposals, we believed we had fulfilled the task of resolving the Ukrainian issue and could move on to full-scale, broad, mutually beneficial cooperation. But in practice everything looks the opposite”.

Lavrov accused the US of not only failing to take concrete steps to rein in Kyiv — most likely an implicit reference to Ukraine’s continued drone strikes on Russian territory, which could not be carried out without US intelligence and satellite support — but, more fundamentally, of actively intensifying its economic war on Moscow. He cited new sanctions, Washington’s campaign against Russian tankers in international waters, and efforts to pressure India and other partners into abandoning Russian oil. “This is pure ‘Bidenism’”, Lavrov remarked, offering it as proof that the US’s true objective remains that of “achieving economic domination”.

At the same time, Lavrov framed all this as part of a broader “neo-imperial” strategy on Washington’s part that extends well beyond Russia. “The West,” he said, “is reluctant to relinquish its formerly dominant positions… With the arrival of the Trump administration, this struggle to constrain competitors has become particularly obvious and explicit” — a reference to the White House’s hyper-bellicose posture over recent months, including the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the escalation of US pressure on Cuba, and the growing threats against Iran.

It remains unclear whether Lavrov’s remarks signal a genuine rift — within the Kremlin’s corridors of power and more broadly between Moscow and Washington — or whether they are simply a manifestation of the double-track approach: pairing backroom diplomacy with calculated public pressure. What is clear, though, is that the current deadlock is emboldening the more hawkish elements within the Russian security establishment.

In a recent article, Sergey Karaganov, who heads the influential Council for Foreign and Defence Policy think tank, openly criticised the Kremlin’s “muffled responses to open aggression” by the West: especially the Europeans. Karaganov argues that Russia’s excessive restraint to date — its refusal to retaliate against Nato for Western-backed attacks on Russian territory, or to launch decapitation strikes against Kyiv’s political and military command centres — has in fact increased the risk of all-out war between Russia and Nato, by emboldening the West to keep escalating, in both practical and rhetorical terms.

Karaganov’s prescription is stark. Europe, he argues, is preparing for a future confrontation with Russia, and will likely deploy the reconstituted remnants of the Ukrainian army to prosecute it. The only way to stop this, in his view, is for Russia to demonstrate a genuine willingness to strike the command centres, infrastructure and military bases of those European countries most actively involved in operations against Russia. Should conventional strikes prove insufficient, he argues, Russia must be prepared to escalate to strategic nuclear weapons. His conclusion pulls no punches: “At present, [the Europeans] only give the appearance of fearing us, so as to build up their military strength. But they should actually fear us. They should be in terror of us. They should understand that escalating or even continuing the conflict risks their immediate physical destruction, and that a military buildup is pointless, as it will entail an obliterating nuclear response”.

One might dismiss this as mere sabre-rattling — and it is quite possible that such options would never be seriously entertained by the Kremlin — but the mere fact that these scenarios are being openly debated in Russia ought to send a shiver down the spine of every European. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Ukraine war, fringe ideas have a way of becoming mainstream when conflicts drag on and frustration mounts; the longer this one continues without end, the louder and more influential radical voices are likely to become.

There is, moreover, a deeper danger that operates independently of any deliberate choice Russia might make. By allowing tensions with Moscow to keep rising, we are constructing a situation whereby a single miscalculation — an errant strike, a misread signal, an escalatory move that spirals beyond anyone’s intentions — could set off a chain of events that no single actor would be able to arrest. How long, for instance, before the Russian Navy starts providing armed escorts to its oil fleets, and treating any seizure of its tankers as an act of war? Or taking similar action against Western tankers? The gravest wars in history have not always begun with conscious decisions; they have begun with incidents that spun out of control. That possibility grows more real with every week the conflict remains unresolved.

Yet if that’s partly true of Russia itself — what with the hawkish language of its outriders, and its continued assaults on Ukrainian soil — European leaders appear reckless themselves. At the recent Munich Security Conference, the assembled Brussels elites and their attendant apparatchiks took turns stoking the drumbeat of war, ramping up their own hawkish rhetoric while offering little in the way of serious strategic reflection. Politico captured the prevailing mood with uncomfortable precision. “Western countries see World War III coming”, it said, a headline that glossed over the inconvenient fact that many of those sounding the alarm are themselves among the most vigorous advocates for continued escalation. As Nato’s Secretary General Mark Rutte recently put it, Europeans “must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents and great-grandparents endured”. There is something deeply troubling about a European political class that cultivates war hysteria while remaining seemingly indifferent to where that hysteria might lead.

The situation is particularly disconcerting when set against the backdrop of Europe’s ongoing industrial decline. One might expect a weakening continent to seek accommodation and de-escalation; instead, European leaders continue to think in rigidly unipolar terms, dismissing Russia’s security concerns as illegitimate while remaining blind to the material reality of a world that is rapidly becoming multipolar — a shift that is already translating into Europe’s own economic and geopolitical marginalisation. In this, however, they are simply mirroring Washington’s broader posture.

As the Indian strategist C. Raja Mohan recently argued in Foreign Affairs, we are living through a hybrid and deeply unstable geopolitical moment: one marked by growing multipolarity in economic terms, yet remaining largely unipolar in military terms, with the United States still uniquely capable of projecting force across the globe with impunity. The consequences of this asymmetry, Mohan suggests, have been paradoxical. Rather than ushering in a more balanced international order, the rise of economic multipolarity has, if anything, emboldened Washington to shed the constraints that once tempered its behaviour and to project its power ever more aggressively — a dynamic that the Trump administration has made more explicit than ever.

This raises difficult questions. Can a world in which the US remains free to engage in repeated acts of military and economic aggression — unchecked by other powers — truly be called multipolar in any meaningful sense? And can a transition to a genuine multipolar order, one in which unrestrained US military primacy gives way to a world based on sovereign equality for all, occur without the world first passing through a period of acute and potentially catastrophic confrontation? These are not abstract theoretical puzzles. Given the trajectory of events in Ukraine and beyond, they are among the most urgent questions of our time.

Deeply Concerning, Indeed

Who the hell are Democracy Volunteers? I have been politically active since the Norman Conquest, and I had never heard of them an hour ago. Is Matt Goodwin going to stick to this line if has won?

Anyone who spots electoral malpractice should report it to the staff at the polling station. If these Volunteers knew anything about Democracy, then they would already know that.

Due Diligence

From the Bar Council:

The government is due to introduce a new court reform bill which is set to include removing the right to jury trial for cases that carry a likely sentence of less than three years. The reforms are set to apply retrospectively to cases that are in the system.

This week, the government has also accepted some of the proposals put forward in Part 2 of Sir Brian Leveson’s review of criminal courts, including ‘Blitz Courts’, an intense approach to court scheduling which enable judges to deal with cases more swiftly.

The government has also announced that it will allow courts to run at maximum capacity next year which the Bar Council has also welcomed as it has long called for the limit on the number of days that courts can sit to be removed.

Bar Council Chair Kirsty Brimelow KC said: “Juries have not caused this crisis, and we have seen no evidence which validates curtailing them. That is why we fundamentally disagree with the restriction of jury trials. The objection is principled and pragmatic and the mantra of modernisation in relation to juries is a Trojan horse to hack at a deep-rooted constitutional principle.

“Indeed, we support modernisation of the criminal justice system - such as working in buildings that function and with technology that operates. We suggested moving the threshold of cases tried in the magistrates’ courts and we provided a list of offences which should not be in the Crown Court to Sir Brian Leveson's Review. We also recommended the tried and tested ‘Blitz Courts’ proposal which we are pleased to see the government is taking forward from part 2 of the Leveson Review.

“Practically, there is little evidence to support the government’s decision to rush through legislation which unnecessarily tampers with the right to be judged by one’s peers. The application of this proposal retrospectively inevitably will face a constitutional challenge. The Criminal Bar Association estimates that up to 30,000 cases will be affected. Not only is this extraordinarily unfair to those who have already elected the Crown Court, understanding that it is a jury trial, it interferes with legal certainty and runs the risk of tying the courts up in appeals, further increasing the backlogs.

“We give a voice to victims, complainants and defendants. We work on the frontline of the criminal justice system and are well aware of the detrimental impact delays are having so we will continue to champion reforms we know will work.

“We urge the government to give efficiency measures time to work rather than drain time and resource on a proposal that carries substantial risk for negligible gain.”

Monidipa Fouzder writes:

Justice secretary David Lammy’s proposed reforms to curb jury trials could see defendants facing prison who earn less than £37,500 priced out of free legal support, the government’s equalities statement has revealed.

Defendants whose cases are heard in the Crown court are currently eligible for legal aid if their annual salary is below £37,500. However under the Courts and Tribunals Bill more cases will be heard in the magistrates’ court, where defendants are entitled to legal aid only if they earn less than £22,325.

Lammy’s bill would lead to more cases being retained in the magistrates’ court because it removes the right of a defendant charged with a triable either-way offence to opt for a trial in the Crown court. It also removes the requirement for the defendant’s consent if the Crown court remits the case back to the magistrates’ court and increases magistrates’ sentencing powers to 18 or 24 months.

The £37,500 income threshold would apply to defendants whose cases are heard by judge alone in the new Crown Court Bench Division.

The equalities statement adds: ‘When considering the demographic makeup of legal aid clients who may be particularly affected by this policy change, there is a high proportion of unknown ethnicity data for legal aid clients. The data therefore does not allow us to draw conclusions as to whether any ethnic group is under or over-represented in the legal aid client population, and whether they will be more impacted by this change. We are working with partners across the [criminal justice system] to improve the availability of ethnicity data from underlying administrative systems to ensure that ongoing analysis is robust.’

Suzi Ring writes:

The UK government will review whether judge-only trials result in an increase in racial bias after jury trials in England and Wales are abolished for thousands of defendants.

David Lammy, deputy prime minister, will propose the review in an attempt to prevent any increase in racism from the biggest shake-up of courts in modern times, the courts minister Sarah Sackman told the FT.

The review is an attempt to appease some Labour backbench MPs who have been sceptical of the government’s decision to remove juries from thousands of criminal cases in England and Wales where the maximum sentence would be three years or less. The legislation will also increase the sentencing powers of magistrates.

“The deputy prime minister is intending to propose a review — it needs to be over a sensible length of time — but a review into if there are any differential impacts of the reforms on particular groups,” said Sackman, shortly before the bill was laid in parliament on Wednesday.

She added: “We know that racial bias is a feature of our justice system, as it is a feature of our society. Our job is to seek to address that.”

The government is seeking to push through the court reforms this year in an attempt to tackle the rising backlog of criminal cases, which stands at a record 80,000 cases and is set to rise to 100,000 in the next two years. The government is aiming to bring the reforms into effect from 2028.

However, one of the criticisms Lammy has faced over the proposals comes from his own conclusions in a 2017 review into the treatment of people from ethnic minority backgrounds in the criminal justice system.

In the review, Lammy said people from ethnic minority backgrounds were more likely than white defendants to receive prison sentences for drug offences and cited public comments that ethnic minorities “had more confidence in the fairness of juries than they had in the fairness of magistrates’ courts”.

Sackman said: “If a judge is demonstrating bias, that is quickly going to become apparent in their reasoning. They are going to know that they are, if you like, being watched by the public.”

The bill would also introduce audio recordings of magistrates’ courts for the first time for transparency, she added.

The legislation follows an independent review by retired High Court judge Sir Brian Leveson into the criminal justice system, the recommendations from which the government has largely adopted wholesale.

Line chart of UK caseload (000s) showing Investment and reform will be needed to get the caseload back to sustainable levels Sackman said judges would be given training to support them with determining verdicts in the criminal court for the first time and that she had spoken to the Judicial College — the body responsible for training judges — about strengthening the training requirements around unconscious bias.

However, the proposals have been criticised by the Law Society and the Bar Council, which claim the jury reforms have over-reached. “The government’s proposals go too far in eroding the longstanding right to be judged by a jury of our own peers,” Richard Atkinson, the former president of the Law Society, said this week.

“They allow a single judge to determine guilt in serious, life-changing cases which could significantly affect people’s liberty and reputations.”

Sonia Sodha writes:

Why should those accused of mid-tier wrongdoing be allowed to choose a trial by jury? According to justice minister Sarah Sackman, this ancient right allows drug dealers and career criminals to “game the system” and evade justice.

It’s a grubby sleight of hand from a government headed by a human rights lawyer, designed to dupe us into cheering on this trampling of our civic rights. Ministers want us to think only of criminals and victims as they move to radically restrict access to jury trial. But there is a third group the criminal justice system is designed to serve that’s missing from the government’s analysis: the innocent. For those wrongfully accused by police and prosecutors — and it really could one day be any of us — jury trial is the key step that stands between them and wrongful conviction.

The justice secretary David Lammy claims his proposals are a marginal incursion into an ancient right that is desperately needed to save a creaking criminal justice system. The reverse is true: this is a full-frontal attack on our civil liberties that will deliver pathetically incremental efficiency gains.

It is the mark of a civilised society that we occasionally let the probably-guilty walk free to avoid locking up the innocent. In a criminal trial a defendant will only be convicted if a jury is sure they are guilty — although horrible mistakes happen: look at Andrew Malkinson, who served 17 years for a rape he didn’t commit. But there is comfort for a defendant knowing they can choose trial by 12 fellow citizens in a crown court for any offence carrying a prison sentence of more than six months.

That right has already been eroded a little: magistrates’ powers were recently extended to cover crimes with sentences up to 12 months. The government wants to extend them further: people facing sentences of up to two years if found guilty would be tried by three lay volunteers or a single legally trained magistrate. Individuals accused of “either way” offences such as burglary or intent to supply drugs (tried either in a magistrates’ court or a crown court) will no longer have the right to choose jury trial: a single judge will instead decide whether to send them down for up to three years. This is forecast to cut the number of jury trials in half.

If I were innocent and stood accused of a crime that came with a hefty prison sentence, I would always opt for trial by jury. The law might be the same either way but the people applying it to the facts of the case are very different. I would trust 12 peers to do this more fairly than a judge or magistrate.

That’s not because judges aren’t highly learned individuals who strive to be just. But while experts in the law they are hardly reflective of the nation; magistrates even less so. Like scientists and doctors, they are not above human bias or error. After all, cases get overturned on appeal because judges make mistakes. If you are innocent, would you risk your plight with them or 12 randomly selected people who more broadly reflect life in Britain today?

Jurors of course have their own biases but the whole point of the jury system is that the numbers involved and the process of deliberation work to filter them out. Juries are the only proper way to judge someone’s guilt in the context of society’s cultural norms, such as deciding whether someone charged with rape reasonably believed a complainant had consented.

Under the government’s reforms, people convicted by magistrates will no longer have an automatic right to appeal. This is extraordinary, given that more than 40 per cent of appeals against magistrate verdicts (and 47 per cent of appeals against magistrate sentences) are successful. Those most likely to volunteer for the bench may be well-intentioned but are far from infallible and often have limited experience of the lives of those over whom they pass judgment. While ethnic minority defendants experience similar conviction rates before juries, black women are 22 per cent more likely to be found guilty by magistrates than white women. Little wonder a much greater proportion of black than white defendants opt for jury trial. It is nonsensical for the government to reduce the checks and balances on magistrates at the same time as expanding their powers.

The Institute for Government says these reforms would bring only “extremely marginal gains” in cutting the courts backlog. It thinks the amount of time to hear cases would fall by less than 10 per cent, and that ministers would do better by simply lifting the cap on court sitting days. Which begs the question, why on earth is Starmer gambling with our freedoms like this — especially when populists are looking for any excuse to attack elites?

It is symptomatic of a desperate failure of imagination by successful people for whom the system has always worked, and who are used to being heard. Justice is better cleanly administered by the learned friends from their social group than messily doled out by the little people who serve on juries. It is a worldview that characterises much of Starmer’s politics and is evident in much of his positioning: pro-assisted dying, a lukewarm defender of protections for women’s services and sports, and ambivalent about jury trial. And I think it is this gilded outlook that explains why he so often appears out of touch with voters.

And as David Lammy seeks to hand the criminal courts over to Artificial Intelligence, Robert Booth and Mark Wilding write:

Police arrested a man for a burglary in a city he had never visited after face scanning software deployed across the UK confused him with another person of south Asian heritage.

Alvi Choudhury, 26, a software engineer, was working at the home he shares with his parents in Southampton in January when police knocked on his door, handcuffed him and held him in custody for nearly 10 hours before releasing him at 2am.

Thames Valley police had used automated facial recognition software which matched him with footage of a suspect of a £3,000 burglary 100 miles away in Milton Keynes, according to documents shared with The Guardian by Liberty Investigates.

But the CCTV footage showed a noticeably younger man with different features apart from similar curly hair, said Choudhury, who was left confused about why he had been arrested.

“I was very angry, because the kid looked about 10 years younger than me,” said Choudhury, who wears a beard. “Everything was different. Skin was lighter. Suspect looked 18 years old. His nose was bigger. He had no facial hair. His eyes were different. His lips were smaller than mine.

“I just assumed that the investigative officer saw that I was a brown person with curly hair and decided to arrest me.”

UK police forces use an algorithm procured by the Home Office from Cognitec, a German company. It runs about 25,000 monthly searches against around 19m police mugshots held on the UK-wide police national database. Facial matches should be treated as intelligence, not fact, according to the National Police Chiefs’ Council. Thames Valley police said the decision to arrest Choudhury was made after a human visual assessment as well.

But the technology was revealed in December to produce a far higher rate of false positives for black (5.5 %) and Asian (4.0 %) faces than for white faces (0.04 %) at certain settings, according to Home Office commissioned research. Police and crime commissioners warned of “concerning in-built bias”, and said that while “there is no evidence of adverse impact in any individual case, that is more by luck than design”.

Since December, Thames Valley police has also been deploying live facial recognition technology to scan the public in locations in Oxford, Slough, Reading, Wycombe and Milton Keynes. It has captured about 100,000 faces, leading to six arrests.

Given the differences between the man on the CCTV and his own face, Choudhury assumed he would be quickly freed. He offered evidence of work meetings in Southampton on the day of the crime but he was instead taken into custody.

Choudhury is claiming damages against Thames Valley police and Hampshire constabulary, which executed his arrest. His neighbours saw him being led away in handcuffs, his father was very anxious about him being held and he was unable to work the following day, he said. He is also calling for greater transparency about the number of wrongful arrests involving facial recognition technology.

Choudhury’s mugshot was held on the police system only because he had been wrongly arrested in 2021 when he had been attacked on a night out while at university in Portsmouth. The police released him with no further action. Now he has had a second mugshot taken he is afraid the automated system could trigger more wrongful arrests.

“In my head, if a brown person in Scotland robs a bank are they going to come and arrest me?” he said.

He sometimes needs security clearance to work for government clients and he is asked about arrests and said: “This makes me look dodgier and dodgier.”

Thames Valley police admitted to Choudhury the arrest “may have been the result of bias within facial recognition technology”. But an officer told him that “as the use of facial recognition is already subject to review at a strategic level, I do not feel the need to raise this issue as part of wider organisational learning”.

A Thames Valley police spokesperson denied the arrest was unlawful and said: “While we apologise for the distress caused to the complainant in this case, their arrest was based on the investigating officers’ own visual assessment that the individual matched the suspect in CCTV footage following a retrospective facial recognition match, and was not influenced by racial profiling.”

But Choudhury said officers at the Hampshire police station laughed when he asked: “Does this look anything like me?” And he said the Thames Valley police officers who arrived to interview him said “they knew I wasn’t the suspect after looking at footage of the suspect and looking at my picture”.

Warnings have been repeatedly raised about the use of automated facial recognition technology. In December 2024 the UK’s biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner, William Webster, voiced concern that police continued to retain and use images of people who, having been arrested, were never subsequently been charged or summonsed. Last month, South Wales police paid damages to a black man who was wrongfully arrested and held for 13 hours after facial recognition technology.

Choudhury’s lawyer, Iain Gould, a partner at DPP Law, said police “must ensure that artificial intelligence is not substituted for human intelligence and due diligence, but instead is used in careful partnership with it”.

The Home Office said guidance and training to minimise error and maintain public confidence in retrospective facial recognition was under review by the Police Inspectorate. It said a new national facial matching system is under development, with an improved, independently tested algorithm.