War Footing

If Britain is not at war with Iran, then why ban the Quds Day march? By, or in support of, which proscribed organisation has it been organised? Yesterday saw that ban, the vote to abolish most jury trials while abolishing the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court, and the further progress of digital ID.

On that last, you may have thought that the People's Panel was called the House of Commons. But since apparently not, where does one apply to be on it? And then again, while the quality of debate on jury trials was very high on the side opposed to their erosion but woefully low on the side of the proponents, it was the proponents who won the vote. Rape will supposedly still be triable only by jury, and juries convict in 76 per cent of rape cases, so what is someone like Natalie Fleet going on about? And has anyone ever bothered to check Fleet's career-making version of her early life story? She was pregnant at 15, but how we do know that that was not by a boy from school?

Yesterday, for the first time since Dan Norris lost the Labour whip, the Labour Whips did not cast his proxy vote, so something about him is about to come out. There were 90 Labour abstentions, and while no one would suggest that, say, Yvette Cooper was making a political statement, no one would deny that about 80 of them were. If there really are several Labour MPs in discussion with the Greens about defection, then one trusts that none of them voted with the Government last night, or to withdraw the Winter Fuel Payment, or to keep the two-child benefit cap, among other examples.

Learn from Reform UK, which is hoovering up veterans of the Government that the electorate massively rejected two years ago, and whose poll lead is already starting to slip, three years before the next General Election. Neither Nigel Farage, nor the former Attorney General and Home Secretary Suella Braverman, turned up to vote to save trial by jury and the right of appeal. At the time of writing, Farage now says that Britain should keep out of the war with Iran, while Kemi Badenoch has the front to claim that she had never called for British involvement in it. British commanders boast nightly on social media about the sheer extent of that involvement. Most jury trials are to be abolished, along with the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court. We are all to be issued with digital ID. And the Quds Day march has been banned. Think on.