Otherwise Concerned

Stanislav Carpiuc has been deported, although it matters as to where, but when the latest Ukrainian rent boy turned up at Downing Street on Wednesday, then Andy Burnham greeted him with guards out of Gilbert and Sullivan or a Disney cartoon set in London, their costumes based on the cheap dolls that were sold near Buckingham Palace. It matters not that they were, or purported to be, the King’s Guards, since no one could be more pro-war than the King, in line with his general agreement with the Green Party, and since the claim that the monarchy existed “to stop partisan politicians posing alongside soldiers, taking salutes or riding about in horsedrawn carriages,” then it has had no such effect in my lifetime, if ever, any more than First Past the Post served “to represent the real divisions in our uniquely free country and to stop leaders getting too big for their boots.” The arguments either for the monarchy or for First Past the Post are rubbish in their own terms, but so are the arguments either for a republic or for Proportional Representation, meaning both that the case for change had not been made, and that the change itself would not be the end of the world.

If those were real soldiers, then they were a large proportion of the Army, and its best available specimens to intimidate Vladimir Putin while impressing Donald Trump. But if they were reassuringly as bogus as Katie Zacharia, Esquire, then as Trump sends Zacharia back to the shop, what about the fake lawyer still sitting in Burnham’s Cabinet? Then again, Volodymyr Zelensky is a fake President. During the Second World War, Prolongation of Parliament Acts were passed annually until the 1945 General Election was held while the War was still being fought. American Congressional and Presidential Elections were held on the constitutionally appointed dates even during the Civil War. By either standard, Zelensky has been a usurper since 20 May 2024. Well may we have proscribed the Wagner Group. Now how about 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?

Theirs is the Ukraine that destroyed three of the four Nord Stream gas pipelines, to ongoing catastrophic effect all over Western Europe, including here. The Ukraine that in Ternopil has named a football stadium after Roman Shukhevych, on a street named after Stepan Bandera. The Ukraine that in its third-largest city of Odessa is poised to ban from the public sphere the Russian first language of two thirds of that city’s population. 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”.

And 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. That is a lot more than arson of a warehouse storing satellites bound for Ukraine, which is the worst that Wagner has done in Britain if it really did even that. Never mind of Keir Starmer’s former homes and his old car by his disgruntled catamites.

And since there is to be no further action against Sarah Helm, who is married to the National Security Adviser, after she had expressed her support for Palestine Action, then why should there be any against anyone else? Indeed, how could there possibly be? Nor has Sally Rooney ever said, either that she was funding Palestine Action, or that she had any intention of doing so. Well may we have proscribed the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but that proscription and numerous others are dangerously devalued by the ludicrous comparison with Palestine Action. Sergeant Kate Evans walked unaided out of Accident and Emergency. When a small hairline fracture to her transverse process was identified, then she was advised to take paracetamol. It took two attempts to convict Samuel Corner of having assaulted her, and even then only by a majority verdict and only of grievous bodily harm without intent. Yet that is the worst thing of which anyone associated with Palestine Action has ever been accused. Yvette Cooper had proscribed it in order to prejudice that case, and she committed contempt of court by justifying that decision in The Observer. Outside the sentencing hearing, the Police arrested about half of the white, middle-class and largely elderly people who were holding up placards in support of Palestine Action, before giving up because there were so many of them. Then there were the supposedly Iranian or Iranian-backed attack on empty and decommissioned ambulances but not on the synagogue next to which they were parked, and allegedly on two Jews in Golders Green but not on a Muslim in Southwark by the same man on the same day.

Away with this nonsense. Instead, along with the near-formality of deproscribing Palestine Action, and along with the proscription of the Foxtrot Network whether or not the Iranian Kurd Rawa Majid really was in league with Tehran, let there be the proscription of the organisation that on 1 April 2024 killed James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman, unarmed British veterans who were delivering humanitarian aid, whom it bombed three times to make sure that they were dead, as could not have been an accident. That atrocity, which no more triggered NATO’s fundamental yet redundant Article 5 than the Nord Stream attacks did, is given rare media treatment here. The outfit that perpetrated it was formed in 1948 out of the Irgun, the Lehi and the Haganah. Those three had plotted to kill Winston Churchill, they had murdered his friend Lord Moyne, they had sent letter-bombs to the White House of his ally Harry S. Truman, they had contracted the Haavara Agreement, they had fought against Britain throughout the Second World War, they had allied with Fascist Italy, they had twice sought an alliance with Nazi Germany on the grounds that it was a lesser evil than Britain, they had hanged the boobytrapped bodies of Sergeants Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice and photographed them, and they had bombed the King David Hotel.

The parties that they founded now govern Israel, having armed Argentina during the Falklands War. They love the Land so much that they burn its olive trees, and we continue to arm Israel even as it continues to support the sabre-rattling of Javier Milei. In Khirbet Abu Falah, they have injured 12 Palestinians, of whom four, one third of the total, were American citizens, as was Heidi Levine, the 63-year-old, Jewish, and of course female photographer for The Washington Post, who was wearing a vest identifying her as a journalist when they gave her multiple lacerations, a broken rib, four broken vertebrae, and a ripped finger, and when they stole her passport, phone, wallet and equipment. In Taybeh, the last entirely Christian village on the West Bank, they have attacked with clubs the visiting Archbishop Vincent Dollman of Cambrai, the French Consul General in Jerusalem, his wife, other French diplomats, the Polish Consul, the Belgian Consul, and Bernard Badoux, who was wearing his red, white and blue sash of office as the Mayor of Taybeh’s twin town of Aulnoye-Aymerie.

Again, though, no Article 5, perhaps because the perpetrators were very probably also American citizens. The least that we can do is proscribe the Israeli Defense Forces. Moreover, since 21 September 2025, the United Kingdom has recognised Palestine as a sovereign state. That state is at peace with His Majesty, and the State of Israel is at war with it. Enlistment by a British citizen in the IDF is therefore a criminal offence under the Foreign Enlistment Act 1870. Any policy of not prosecuting dual nationals who had been conscripted would still not be the law, and anyone else would be bang to rights. Or do we have two-tier justice? Britain has named and condemned the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, an ideology that gave rise to ethnic cleansing must by definition be racist, Britain has welcomed the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, Pillay chaired the Commission of Inquiry that found Israel to be committing genocide in Gaza, and an ideology that gave rise to genocide must by definition be racist.

“Do you regret the defeat of the miners in 1985?” is a yes-no question to which the correct answer is, “Yes.” But the Green Party will never be able to give that answer. With deep reactionary roots, it is a party of anti-industrial Malthusianism and misanthropy, and therefore of NATO and the EU, of their war in Ukraine, of the conscription to which that is leading inexorably, of Scottish and Welsh separatism, of gender self-identification, of drug legalisation, of licensed prostitution, and of Peter Tatchell. It was all of those things on the day before its recent conference, yet just as the Old Greens are not making a fuss about its hugely significant abandonment of opposition to nuclear power, so there was no talk of a firewall until it passed a resolution stating the view of most of the relatively few people in Britain who had much of an opinion on Zionism. No political party has to take dictation from its opponents as to what was or was not its proper concern, nor is any British political party answerable to any foreign state.