Severe

If every stabbing that arose out of untreated mental illness were a terrorist act, then the threat of such might very moderately be called severe. Watch out for yet further attacks on what few civil liberties we retained, accompanied by absolutely nothing in relation to the real problems. Can you march against the banning of a march? I suppose so. Until they banned that, too. Prevent is based on a proven hoax. And the name that rhymes with “Harmer” is the gift that keeps on giving.

Now, was there a Prime Ministerial statement when three flag-waving supporters of Reza Pahlavi, at least one of them an asylum seeker, stabbed a British citizen of Iranian background near Downing Street on 22 April, so only one week ago yesterday? Or over John Ashby, sentenced last week? Or after the Southport attacks, which had resulted in three deaths? Make your own list, because everything on it would be legitimate. For example, the repeated kicking in the head of a Tasered suspect with known mental health problems, by two Police Officers and a passing member of the general public, even though the Tasering had made it impossible for him to open his hands due to muscle contraction. Or the cosy interaction over this incident between the Twitter account of the Metropolitan Police and those of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and other such characters.

The national emergencies in this case are knife crime and the lack of mental health provision. A man who would once have been institutionalised, and who was well-known locally for his violent outbursts, stabbed two random strangers in the street. Since that street was in Golders Green, then there was a high chance that one or even both of those strangers would be Jewish, and so they were. Take out that detail, though, and this kind of thing happens all the time, except that the victims did not always survive, as thankfully they have in this case. Keir Starmer should attend to that. As should Wes Streeting, who has been doing the rounds today ostensibly to talk about mental health, and who has initially been asked instead about Golders Green, yet whom no interviewer has invited to make the connection.

We must not conflate British Jews with Israel, so why must criticism of Israel be antisemitic? And has not our darling Prime Minister told us that Iran was “not our war”? Why, then, would Britain be a target for retaliation by Ashab al-Yamin, previously noted for talking both in English and in Arabic about “the Land of Israel” and for using the very specifically Zionist Hebrew word “aliyah” for immigration to that Land? Schoolboy errors, lads. Here as in relation to late night teenage arson attacks on North London’s decommissioned ambulances and its empty buildings, as if the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps had nothing else to do. Those suggesting such involvement do not believe it, but they do expect us to. They think that little of us, which is why they also imagine that we would be open to the suggestion that the FSB, the GRU or the Wagner Group called itself “El Money” on Telegram so as to transfer cryptocurrency to Ukrainian rent boys in return for their setting fire to Keir Starmer’s private house, to his old home, and to his old car. All in response to the codeword “geranium”. Geranium!

I suspect that El Money is in fact La Money. Louise Haigh? Angela Rayner? Emily Thornberry? Victoria Starmer? It could be any of them. There is an assumption that among the clothes purchased for Sir Keir by Lord Alli, the lady’s undergarments were for Lady Starmer. But buying lingerie for one’s kept man’s estranged wife? No, no, no, there is a far more plausible explanation. Ponder what might lie beneath those dull suits as, like Lord Alli, you called him Lady Alli. Or Geranium.

Elsewhere in the courts today, the jury has been deliberating in the trial of the Filton Six, following yesterday’s barnstorming closing statements. It has sent to the judge for several clarifications, and it has now gone home having yet to reach a verdict. See also the Royal Courts of Justice, Court of Appeal (Civil Division), Court 68, with Court 71 being used as an overspill court. Until the conclusion of the Filton Six trial, then nothing more had better be said. But if this were still on tomorrow, then there should be 65 or so seats in the public gallery.

And then to the long overdue libel actions that should at last be brought by Jeremy Corbyn. The most basic of checks would have confirmed that the mural, and the wreath, and the “not understanding English irony”, and the “friends from Hamas and Hezbollah”, and all the rest of those, were complete dross, as everyone who did bother to check did find out. The Equality and Human Rights Commission found precisely two cases of anti-Semitism in its entire report into the Labour Party, neither of them involved Corbyn or indeed anyone who was still a member of that party, and even in relation to those, it was found in court that it was, “arguable that the Defendant [the EHRC] made an error of law in relation to Article 10 ECHR.”

Rather than defend that at judicial review, the EHRC settled with Ken Livingstone, whom it had continued to pursue despite knowing that he had Alzheimer’s disease, and with Pam Bromley. As a matter of record, “Labour anti-Semitism” never existed. But it does now. Labour has expelled more Jews under Starmer than under all its previous Leaders put together, most or all of them for what has been found to be the protected characteristic of anti-Zionism.