Out Loud, In The Street

Those teenagers do not need to be told to integrate. There is nothing more French than a riot. Paul Knaggs writes:

It began with an absence. On 18 September, pupils at the Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, in the Val-de-Marne, walked out because several teaching posts in their school had nobody standing in them. Not a slogan, not a manifesto. A timetable with holes in it.

Two weeks later, on Thursday 1 October, the French interior ministry reported 1,949 arrests in a single day, most of them teenagers aged between fifteen and eighteen. It put the number of injured police and gendarmes at 305. By its own count, 1,027 schools were affected, with blockades at 222 of them. Around 400 lycées were ordered to shut on the Friday and teach at a distance, and every prefect in France signed an order banning people from gathering outside the gates of a closed school. Nearly 3,000 pupils have been detained since the movement began. That is what happened to a complaint about missing teachers.

Let us be clear about the other half of the ledger, because the easy version of this story is no use to anyone. The violence has been real and some of it has been vile. In Nantes, fire destroyed the entrance hall of the Lycée Nelson-Mandela. In Marseille, at a different school that happens to share the Créteil lycée’s name, Saint-Exupéry, hundreds of young people surrounded a fire engine that had arrived to deal with a blaze, drove the crew off and set the vehicle alight. Headteachers have been assaulted. The education minister, Édouard Geffray, said 65 staff and 170 pupils had been hurt since the movement started. Burning a school is not a demand for a school. Nobody on the left should pretend otherwise, and those who torched that fire engine have handed the government the only argument it had.

But a government is judged by what it does with the grievance underneath, and here the timing is almost insolent. On the same day that Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu convened his emergency crisis cell at the interior ministry, his government presented the 2027 finance bill. Education spending rises by about 1.2 billion euros. And 1,588 teaching posts are removed.

Geffray’s defence is not stupid, and it deserves to be stated properly rather than sneered at. Pupil numbers are falling. He argues that posts are being cut more slowly than enrolment, so average class sizes come down rather than up; that the primary ratio drops from 20.9 pupils per teacher to 20.6; that once the new recruitment reforms are counted, the overall staffing schema is positive by more than 3,200 posts; that last year’s cut was 4,000 and this year’s is far smaller. The government is not making savings on the young, he told reporters. The children are not complaining about a national average. They are complaining about an empty chair.

This is the thing successive French governments have refused to measure honestly. In Seine-Saint-Denis, the parents’ federation FCPE calculated in 2019 that pupils lost around a fifth of their teaching hours to absences that were never covered, which across a school career adds up to something close to a full year of schooling. That was not a pressure group’s wild guess sitting on its own. The 2018 parliamentary report by François Cornut-Gentille and Rodrigue Kokouendo on the state’s performance in Seine-Saint-Denis described the same pattern of institutional retreat. Eight years on, the pupils of the Créteil academy are telling the Republic what the Republic’s own deputies already wrote down. The crisis is not headcount arithmetic. It is non-replacement, dilapidation, and the quiet national decision that some postcodes get a lesser version of the public service.

THE SEARCH FOR A CULPRIT 

Faced with that, the government chose a different argument. Within hours of the crisis meeting, Lecornu’s entourage briefed that the intelligence services regarded the movement as a manoeuvre organised by La France Insoumise and what it called its ultra-left proxies. Le Figaro reported a note from the Paris police prefecture describing a strategy of inflaming the situation by the most radical union and political structures ahead of national elections. Journalists noted LFI figures at the gates: Louis Boyard at Créteil from 21 September, Bastien Lachaud at Aubervilliers, Antoine Léaument elsewhere. Jean-Luc Mélenchon rejected the charge flatly, insisting his movement backs non-violent methods and that the mobilisation is self-organised. The pupils’ union that actually called the blockades, the Union Syndicale Lycéenne, says through its president Ryad Rani that it is acting against the institutional and social violence young people have endured for nine years. 

Both things can be true. Left-wing MPs turned up at a protest, which is what opposition politicians do, and the anger they turned up to was not manufactured by them. It was manufactured in a classroom with no teacher in it. An intelligence assessment relayed anonymously by the prime minister’s office is not evidence that thousands of sixteen-year-olds were conjured out of nothing by a party polling in the twenties. 

Then came the part that should trouble anyone who cares about liberty rather than about which tribe is currently misbehaving. Bruno Retailleau, the Republicans’ presidential candidate and a former interior minister, told BFMTV-RMC that the question of banning LFI now arises, adding that it would be very difficult in law but that he was putting it into public debate. Marine Le Pen wrote on X that these were riots organised by professionals and supervised by LFI deputies. Eric Zemmour offered that impunity is the fuel of the riot. François-Xavier Bellamy called the movement a laboratory of chaos rather than a schools protest.

THE EMERGENCY NOBODY HAD TO DECLARE 

Out on the English-speaking internet, the demand has escalated further into calls for martial law in France, circulated alongside unverified clips of burning buses and masked youths, amplified by accounts such as Visegrád24 and Remix News, and framed around the ethnic origins of the children involved. 

Two things need saying about that. The first is that martial law does not exist in French law. What exists is the state of siege under Article 36 of the Constitution, descended from the law of 1878, which hands civil authority to the military, and the state of emergency under the law of 3 April 1955, written to hold down Algeria and later used in 2005 and after 2015. Neither has been declared. 

The second is that the state did not need them. Without any emergency being proclaimed, prefects have banned assembly outside schools nationwide, the justice minister Gérald Darmanin convened the senior prosecutors by video link to coordinate the penal response to the arrests, the Paris police prefect referred the elected politician Bally Bagayoko to the courts for incitement, and close to 3,000 minors have passed through police custody in a fortnight. France has reached the destination without needing the vehicle. That is the lesson of the past twenty years of French emergency legislation: exceptional powers do not stay exceptional, they get absorbed into ordinary administrative practice until nobody notices they were ever extraordinary. 

As for the claim that this is a riot of foreigners rather than a revolt of French schoolchildren, watch how fast a story sets like concrete. In Marseille, the regional authority initially stated that the head, his deputy and two colleagues at the Lycée Victor Hugo had been assaulted and doused with petrol. Le Figaro and France 24 subsequently reported that the two were splashed inadvertently while protesters were filling containers near a bin they were trying to ignite. Still ugly. Still not what went round the world. The corrected version never travels as far as the original, which is precisely why the original gets published.

WHAT WOULD COUNT AS AN ANSWER

So here is the test, and it is not complicated. The interior ministry has already opened internal investigations into the handling of three pupils, which is the minimum, not a favour. The education ministry met the pupils’ organisations and the parents’ associations on Friday, which should have happened a fortnight ago at Créteil. What follows must be measurable: publish the non-replacement figures school by school, so that parents can see exactly how many hours their children have lost; staff the schools where the hours are actually missing rather than congratulating the national average; and drop the talk of outlawing an opposition party, which in a country seven months from a presidential election is not a security proposal but a political one. 

The teenagers who blockaded their gates in September were not asking for a revolution. They were asking who was going to teach them on Monday morning. They still have not been told. A state that can find a riot squad for every school gate but not a teacher for every classroom has already made its choice. The children simply read it back to them, out loud, in the street.

And:

On Friday, as the largest conference in the Green Party’s history opened in Brighton, two of its members gave an interview from outside the building. Zoe Hatch and Jude English, directors of the Green Women’s Declaration, had been refused entry. Hatch said they had all been suspended or expelled, and that what they believed amounted to agreeing with the Supreme Court about single-sex provision for women, which she thought most of the British public did too. Saying it inside the Green Party, she said, is no longer allowed.

Shahrar Ali, the party’s former deputy leader, was outside as well, telling GB News he had been barred from attending and intended to go back to court. Inside, the party was holding what its own spokesperson had called, a fortnight earlier, the most democratic conference of any political party in Britain. Two days before any of this, the party issued its members a glossary.

What the Green Party Terminology Guidance Says 

The Inclusive Terminology Guidance instructs members to stop using words and phrases including “elderly”, “female politician” and “mothers and fathers”, and recommends replacing gendered job titles with gender-neutral terms wherever possible. “Homosexual” and “transsexual” are to be treated with caution, the latter because it does not encompass non-binary people. “Sexual preference” is listed as unacceptable because it implies attraction is a choice. “Bame” is discouraged on the ground that many people are uncomfortable grouping diverse experiences under a single label. “Lunatic” and “nutter” fall foul because they reinforce negative stereotypes and stigma about mental health. 

This is not advice. The guidance warns that wrong terminology can create unwelcoming or exclusionary environments and contribute to bullying and harassment, that getting it wrong occasionally is forgivable if members are trying, and that repeated behaviour may be deemed harassment and so breach the party’s code. Members face sanction under that code if they fail to comply. The party’s response was that it is a guide and nothing else. It would not say when the guidance was published. A guide and nothing else, with a disciplinary procedure bolted to the end of it. 

Words do land. That is the point. 

Part of this document is defensible, and The Tribune is not going to pretend otherwise. “Nutter” and “lunatic” are not neutral descriptions. They are what people shout at someone in the middle of the worst week of their life, and a political party telling its members not to use psychiatric abuse as a punchline is behaving decently. Nobody serious objects to that. Nobody is meant to. 

That is what the opening entries are for. If you want people to swallow something indefensible, you bolt it onto something nobody could disagree with and present the whole as a single act of courtesy. By the time the reader reaches “mothers and fathers”, the document has established its own good faith at the expense of words nobody will defend. The glossary moves, in a few lines, from insults to descriptions. “Nutter” is something you call a person. “Mother” is something a person is. 

J K Rowling, describing herself as an elderly mother of three who had not had a sex change and knew many homosexuals, offered the able-bodied and sexually-preferred opinion that the Greens were turning into total nutters. One sentence, nearly every forbidden term, and a demolition the party will find harder to answer than any of the lawsuits. 

Orwell’s Warning Was About the Gap Behind the Words 

Half the press has reached this week for the word Orwellian, and meant Newspeak: the vocabulary shrinking, the range of available thought shrinking with it. That is the right book and the wrong chapter. The chapter is the essay he wrote two years before the novel, where he set out how the thing actually happens, and it has nothing to do with dictionaries. 

Bad language, he argued, is the symptom of a gap. When what someone is really doing and what they say they are doing have come apart, the euphemism arrives on its own, unbidden, to cover the distance between the two, and he reached for the image of a cuttlefish spurting out ink. The words do not get muddier because people have become careless. They get muddier because clarity would expose the aim.

So apply the test to this document. The declared aim is kindness, and the party has said so: members are being protected from environments that feel unwelcoming. The real aim is visible in who was standing outside the Brighton Centre on Friday. “Mother” has not been added to a list because the word wounds anybody. It has been added because it is the word in which an argument the party has lost in court is made, and a word that cannot be used is an argument that cannot be put. The glossary is not the cause of anything. It is the ink.

Why Sex-Based Language Matters for Women’s Rights 

In June 2025, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, presented report A/HRC/59/47 to the Human Rights Council. Its central assertion was that the shift away from clear, sex-based language in law, policy and service provision is undermining the tools needed to protect women and girls from violence. She told delegates that erasing women’s specific language and needs based on their sex is not only wrong, it is also demeaning. “Simply put, you cannot protect what you cannot define,” she said. Read that back and sit with what it took. A United Nations official had to formally argue, in 2025, in front of the assembled representatives of the world’s governments, that women are a category defined by sex.

This is why the entry for “mothers and fathers” is not a question of manners. Maternity provision, refuge funding, prison allocation, the collection of crime statistics and the design of every service built for one sex all rest on a word that names a material fact. Replace the word with an administrative euphemism and you have not removed an offence. You have removed the hook the protection hangs on. A refuge cannot be funded for a category the funder cannot name. A pattern of violence cannot be measured in data that has stopped recording sex. The Greens, of all parties, understand this argument perfectly. They have made it for fifty years about something else.

Shahrar Ali, the Green Party and the Equality Act

Gender-critical belief is a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010, settled in Forstater and reinforced by the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling of 16 April 2025 that “woman” and “sex” in that Act mean biological sex. The Act does not only cover employers. Sections 100 to 103 cover associations, which is what a political party is. 

The Greens know this, because they have already been through it. On 9 February 2024, Judge Hellman found that the party had discriminated against Shahrar Ali because of his protected belief, contrary to section 101 of the Equality Act. The Mayor’s and City of London County Court awarded him £9,100. The court found the party had failed to identify any misconduct. The Greens said they acknowledged procedural shortfalls in how they had deselected one of their spokespeople, and apologised for failing to live up to the standards that both they and the court expect. 

Hold that apology against what followed. In September 2024, Ali was excluded from the party altogether, told that readmission would depend on publicly retracting tweets and undertaking safeguarding training. In October 2025, the party cancelled the Green Women’s Declaration’s conference stall, and GWD began legal action, its pre-action letter alleging the decision discriminated against members holding the protected belief that biological sex is immutable. This year the Green Party Executive, which includes Polanski, ruled that the group could not have a presence at conference at all. Two years after a court told the party what the law required of it, the party is being asked the same question again, by more people, in more courtrooms. The apology was not a change of heart. It was a change of audience. 

The EHRC Code and the Green Party’s Legal Position 

The Greens’ defence is not stupid and deserves stating properly rather than sneered at. Good Law Project, acting for the party, argues that the Greens recognise the right to hold gender-critical views, but that a party’s right to organise and operate in line with its own manifesto and code of conduct is protected by Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and that parties must be able to keep all their members safe. The Ali judgment itself upheld the right of political parties to dismiss spokesmen whose views differ from party policy. That is a real argument and it wins part of the ground. The Green Party urged the EHRC to withdraw its earlier guidance as ill-considered and impractical, and Polanski, on the Telegraph’s account, has called the single-sex guidance deeply regressive. A party is entitled to say all of that, loudly, and to campaign to change the law. 

Here is where the two things come apart. Choosing your spokespeople is party business. Disciplining your members for a belief Parliament protected is not, and no Article 11 right to organise has ever included a right to do it. The Code that came into force on 5 August 2026 covers services, public functions and associations, does not create new law, and explains the law as it stands. The Greens are an association. They are inside the document they are calling regressive, not outside it filing objections. You may campaign to change a law. You may not punish your own members for agreeing with it while it is in force.

Room 101: When Green Party Terminology Becomes Disciplinary

What makes a glossary into something else is the sentence at the end about the code of conduct. A style guide tells you what reads well, and you are free to ignore it. A list of unacceptable words attached to a complaints system tells you what you may think out loud, and the cost of finding out where the line is falls entirely on you. In the cell, the point was never the number. The point was that the man holding up four fingers decided what the number was, and that you would be the one to pay for getting it wrong.

Nobody in Brighton will be dragged anywhere. That is not how it works, and Orwell knew it was not how it works, which is why he spent more pages on the essay than on the cell. It works by attrition. A member with thirty years’ service reads the list, notices that two of the words describe her own life, and says nothing in the meeting. Multiply her by a membership that has grown threefold under this leadership to more than 220,000, and you no longer need a tribunal. You have a party in which the dissent has gone quiet and the leadership has mistaken the silence for agreement. We have watched this done to other people in other rooms, and it ends the same way every time. 

The party that became the Greens was founded in 1973 out of an argument made the year before, in Blueprint for Survival: that the numbers were what they were, that the curves pointed where they pointed, and that no amount of political discomfort would move them. That is the whole moral authority of environmentalism. It tells you the thing you do not want to hear and refuses to soften it, because softening it is how the thing gets away from you. It is why Caroline Lucas spent years pushing Parliament to stop saying “climate change” and start saying “climate emergency”. The milder word was the lie. 

So put it to the floor. The party’s own spokesperson calls this the most democratic conference in British politics, and the Green Party’s conference is sovereign over its policy in a way no other party’s is. Then publish the Inclusive Terminology Guidance in full, name the committee that wrote it and the date it was issued, and let the members vote on whether “mother” stays on the list. Restore the Green Women’s Declaration’s stall. Readmit the members suspended for a belief the courts have twice confirmed is protected. And answer the question the party has now declined to answer for three years, which the Tribune puts to it again here: which word in “mother and father” is the harm, and who is harmed by it?

Nobody is going to be forced to stop saying, mother. They will simply notice, each time, that they were the only one who did. The Green Party’s one unanswerable argument has always been that reality does not take instruction. In Brighton this week, it issued some anyway: “Follow the science when it commands obedience. Rewrite the science when it demands dissent.”

And:

The richest industrial nations on Earth, reduced to something resembling client kingdoms before the imperial court in Washington, while Donald Trump receives them as the benevolent supplier who may, or may not, keep the fuel flowing. That isn’t quite the diplomatic language, of course. The official G7 statement says its members have agreed to release 100 million barrels from emergency stocks, with diesel front-loaded into the first 20 days. But that agreement came after the Trump administration threatened France and Germany with restrictions on US diesel exports unless Europe released stocks.

That is not how the official communiqué puts it. The G7 statement speaks of implementing commitments through a co-ordinated release of 100 million barrels, beginning immediately over four months, with a front-loaded substantial diesel release within the first twenty days. Sober, procedural, collegiate. What it omits is the fortnight of arm-twisting that produced it. Through Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Washington had told France and Germany to release 120 million barrels of diesel over six months or face a US export ban aimed squarely at them, according to Reuters. Politico reported the administration was readying a ninety-day ban. When Paris and Berlin folded, Trump announced it himself on Truth Social: Europe, he wrote, had just agreed to release a massive amount of its heavily stocked diesel oil.

Note what Europe emptied its reserves to fix. American diesel had passed six dollars a gallon, then six and a half. The midterms are in November. Stockpiles built against war and blockade were opened to steady the price at an American pump before an American election. And Britain? Diesel has hit a record £2 a litre, while roughly 30 per cent of our supply comes from the United States. The transport minister, Keir Mather, went out to assure the country there is no shortage, which is the sort of reassurance that makes people check the forecourt on the way home. Now, the honest objection, and it deserves answering rather than shouting down. None of this is Britain’s doing. After being attacked by the US and Israel, Iran has choked the Strait of Hormuz, a response every strategist understood except apparently the US and Israel. Refineries across the Middle East, damaged by Iran, and across Russia, by Ukraine. No British government can conjure a ceasefire in the Gulf, and in Ukraine…well, it’s still feeding the arms dealers, so no real movement there either. And all beside the point. War is an excuse to set the price. What our own country did over forty years has set your exposure to it, and decided whether you sit at the table or wait outside it.

How Britain Built the UK Diesel Crisis: 4 Refineries Left 

This is what decades of selling off, closing down and outsourcing national capacity eventually looks like. Sovereignty doesn’t mean much when somebody else owns the refinery, controls the supply and names the price. In the early 1970s Britain had eighteen operating oil refineries. We now have four. Grangemouth stopped processing crude in April 2025, ending more than a century of refining in Scotland, and became an import terminal by July. Prax Lindsey collapsed into administration in June 2025 and shut for good by October when no buyer could be found. Two gone in a single year, treated throughout as a commercial matter rather than a national one. Of the four that survive, three are run by American companies: ExxonMobil at Fawley, Valero at Pembroke, Phillips 66 on the Humber. Read that again, then read the export ban threat again. We are asking the Americans not to turn off a tap that American firms already hold.

Trump never hid any of this. In his State of the Union in February he told Congress that American oil production was up by more than 600,000 barrels a day and that natural gas production stood at an all-time high because he had kept his promise to drill, baby, drill. He boasted of receiving more than 80 million barrels of oil from what he called a new friend and partner, Venezuela, weeks after American special forces seized its president. Crude. Also unmistakable. A state that owns energy, refining and reserve has leverage. A state that sells them has prices. You don’t have to admire Trump, or agree with his politics, to understand the lesson his administration is demonstrating. A state possessing energy, industry, refining capacity and control over strategic resources has leverage. A state that deliberately gives those things away eventually discovers what dependence costs.

The diesel crisis did not expose a shortage of fuel. It exposed forty years of selling the things that made Britain sovereign. And here is the part nobody in Westminster wants to say aloud. It worked. A thumb pressed on the arteries that feed the machine brought Washington a capitulation from its two largest European allies inside a fortnight, at no cost and no risk. Nothing in politics that cheap and that effective is ever used only once. Whoever sits in that building next, of whatever party, now has a proven instrument and every incentive to reach for it again. Planning on the assumption that they will not is not optimism. It is negligence.

UK Energy Security: Rebuild Storage, Ownership and Leverage 

Time is running out to make choices we should have made a decade ago, starting with the glaring vulnerabilities. Start with storage, because it is the thing we can still do. Britain, almost alone among comparable states, holds no government strategic petroleum reserve. The Americans have the SPR. Germany has the EBV. We meet our obligation under the Energy Act 1976 and the Oil Stocking Order 2012 by directing private companies to hold stocks on our behalf, which is why, when the G7 opens the taps, other nations open their own tanks and we make telephone calls. Our obligation currently sits at 67.5 days of consumption rather than ninety, a 25 per cent discount granted because we were an oil producer. That concession is a relic of a country we no longer are, and it will go. Build the tanks and fill them while there is still fuel in the world to buy, because the hour to build a reservoir is not the one in which the drought arrives.

Then the harder question, which is ownership. In 1975 a Labour government created the British National Oil Corporation to give the public a direct stake in the oil under our own seabed. It was broken up and floated as Britoil in 1982, the last state shares sold in 1985, the lot swallowed by BP in 1988. Norway, facing the same geology in the same decade, kept two-thirds of Equinor in public hands and built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. We took the one-off cheque. They took the asset and generational wealth

Understand what is and is not being argued here. The row at Westminster is between a government that bans new exploration licences and an opposition that wants the windfall tax scrapped, and neither side is talking about ownership at all. One offers less extraction by private firms, the other more. Ministers are quite right that extra licences would not cut a single penny off the pump price, because oil is sold on world markets and we are price takers, not price makers. But we are price takers precisely because we own none of it. A public stake in what remains of the North Sea, in storage, and in the refineries that convert crude into the diesel that moves our food, is not a demand to burn more. It is a demand to stop handing over the keys and then complaining about the rent.

Meanwhile the bill lands where it always lands. On the van driver and the haulier, in the weekly shop, in the heating and the bus fare and the small firm that cannot pass the cost on. Our lives enter the calculation only when an election nears and someone in London notices the numbers glowing above a petrol station. For anyone still waiting for things to get better, understand that they rarely do. They change. The days of plenty were real, and they were squandered by people who called the selling of a nation’s assets efficiency and called the buying of them back ideology. That era is finished. What is left is a cold, clear question about what we still hold and whether we intend to keep it. Britain is not short of diesel. Britain is short of vision and leverage. And both, unlike oil, are not something we ran out of. We sold it.