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.