Burning Questions

Thank you, one and all. This site had 370,757 readers yesterday. That was far higher than the last published circulation figure of The Times or the Daily Telegraph. Keep coming back and keep telling your friends. We all need to do our bit now that the Summer Riots have begun with the customary burning of a bus. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is an Irish citizen, but the Union Flag-waving mob in Belfast could not walk down the street where the initial attack was committed, since it is in a staunchly Republican area where many people would regard them as Planters, with no more right to be in Ireland than a Sudanese. The victim was saved by one Maitiu Mág Tighearnán, using his son's hurl.

No such cultural confidence is evident elsewhere, with the Royal Marines having renamed 3 Commando Brigade "UK Commando Force". Yes, another one. It all started with the Yookay Independence Party, and now we are on the brink of rule by Reform Yookay. Never mind what the trade unions have predictably made of Reform UK's invitation to affiliate, as was of course Nigel Farage's intention. What do the people who had hitherto accrued to Reform make of that prospect? What say you, Richard Tice? What say you, Nadhim Zahawi?

Reform is also the party of Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick, the Home Secretary and the Immigration Minister under whom the Belfast assailant was granted leave to remain. Ministerial responsibility does not depend on having seen the particular case file. Have you accepted the comparable excuse from Keir Starmer in relation to Jimmy Savile? No, of course not. Nor should you. And nor will we accept this.

The attack in Belfast does not appear to have had anything to do with Islam, but it is notable that the assailant had chosen to move to the only one of England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic that still had the blasphemy law that they all had 20 years ago, so that whatever else may be said of such a law, it is no more un-British than cousin marriage, or than having children with two or more women simultaneously while sending the bill to the State.

As the already exonerated Karim Khan KC is suspended as Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, then not only Belfast is burning again tonight. So is Taybeh, the last entirely Christian village on the West Bank, at the hands of the people whom Khan was being lynched to protect, and on whom the British Government had imposed sanctions that were welcome enough as far as they went, but which did nothing to remove the IDF, via Palantir, from the NHS and from a vast, ever-expanding array of other public activities in this country.

Not least in the Ministry of Defence. That is why we shall have to check the small print very carefully, although it is obviously welcome both economically and strategically that the MoD should buy British, and a clear Brexit benefit that it should be free to do so. Let that be only the start. BAE Systems should be renationalised as the monopoly supplier to our own Armed Forces, with a ban on all sale of arms abroad, and with a comprehensive programme of diversification in the spirit of the Lucas Plan. And instead of Trident, an extra £70 billion should be given to each of the Royal Navy, the British Army, and the Royal Air Force. That would not entail depriving anything else of funding. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with the fiscal and monetary means to control inflation, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control in both cases.