Restore What?

At all three previous elections for a Mayor of Greater Manchester, the Conservative candidate had come second. But this year, that candidate came fifth, behind Reform UK, the Green Party, and Restore Britain. Yes, Restore Britain. In Manchester. Where Reform beat the Greens.

But just as we always knew that Reform was a grift, even if not quite to the extent that was now becoming more apparent by the day, so Restore has raised nearly five million pounds, the same sum that initially got Nigel Farage into so much bother, to fight the next General Election to win it, on the understanding that Reform both needed to be destroyed and, with the right resources, easily could be.

Yet now Rupert Lowe wants a deal with Reform, so where will that money be going? It ought to be returned. And after Lowe and Farage had kissed and made up, then, backed by Lowe, there would be another of Farage's deals with the Conservative Party. His last one meant that he himself did not vote in the 2019 Election.

Lowe and Restore are backed by John Cleese. Monty Python in general, and The Life of Brian, still ubiquitous in school RE lessons, in particular, did more than any other single phenomenon to destroy a basically Christian culture in this and several other countries, to the point that most people would no longer get the jokes because those assumed mass familiarity with the Gospels.

If it is not Cleese that the supposed guardians of Western civilisation lionise, then it is Boy George, who chained a male prostitute to a radiator in London and beat him, and in whose New York apartment cocaine was found after he had falsely reported a burglary due to being off his face, yet who has continued to perform both in the West End and on Broadway among other places, including in Australia, for which, as for the United States, he has no difficulty obtaining a visa.

Speak What We Feel, Not What We Ought To Say

No matter how much they disagreed with Rod Liddle, no one who knew him can find a bad word to say about him. How many of us will have a death like that? He used to say that Julie Burchill had never been wrong about anything except that her criticism of Madonna was not harsh enough. He applied for a job on the NME, but she pipped him at the post, and the rest is history. He could have married Tony Parsons. Now stop telling people that Rod had converted to Islam on his deathbed, or no one will believe you when Douglas Murray really did.

The Question Time clip that has been doing the rounds today is from 27 September 2018 in Bishop Auckland, when Rod, Ian Lavery and Jacob Rees-Mogg were all on the panel. That evening, I saw Sir Ian McKellen give his Lear, and then I watched that. To my dying day, I shall never be sure when the first ended and the second began.

Early in 2010, and yes it really was that long ago, we in what was then the economically left-wing and socially conservative underground were holding out hope that Rod was going to be made Editor of The Independent. No doubt like a number of people, I received a lovely message from him when the campaign against him succeeded. More than ever after today, we remain talked about rather than heard from.

And after today, whither the SDP? There are those who are in the SDP because of Rod, and there are those who have always said that they would never join it while he was in it. Pointedly, it is contesting the Clacton by-election against the floundering Nigel Farage despite the fact that it and Reform UK had stood aside for each other in six constituencies at the last General Election while fielding around twice that number of joint candidates. All this, and Restore Britain, too? Maybe it’s you, Nigel. Maybe it’s you.

Rod Liddle RIP

Rod Liddle made his name opposing the Iraq War. Economically, he never left the Left. There was a passage in Selfish, Whining Monkeys in which he pointed out the similarities between Frankfurt and Chicago as a way of explaining why the Frankfurt School and the Chicago School blended so well. That was the work of a real intellect. To the best of my knowledge, there is now no one with what would once have been called three Fleet Street columns, by which I do not mean three per week on the same paper. One would love to see Rod’s go to voices of the anti-woke Left, but who? No one who could write like him, that’s for sure.

I only knew Rod slightly, after he had moved back to the North East in recent years. But no matter how wrong I thought that he was, he was always a glorious read, and very friendly in person. I once sent him a pamphlet to ask him to give it an endorsement to print on the cover. His reply was, “I don’t agree with it.” So that was what went on the cover: “I don’t agree with it.” Rod Liddle. When I told him that (after a debate at which he had been speaking alongside Richard Holden and Tom Harwood; it was quite a night), he laughed so hard that he spat out his drink. He will be missed terribly. He already is.

But Now Is Black Beauty’s Successive Heir

“For every man who stands for Leader and gets to be a Leader, he has pushed a woman into second place behind him,” says Harriet Harman, who is characteristically wrong in fact. Since the move away from election by the MPs alone, second place has gone to Roy Hattersley in 1983, to Tony Benn in 1988, to Bryan Gould in 1992, to John Prescott in 1994, to David Miliband in 2010, to Andy Burnham in 2015, to Owen Smith in 2016, and only then to Rebecca Long-Bailey, whom Harman would not have wanted, in 2020. In 2010, did Harman support Diane Abbott, whose critics would have left the Labour Party if they believed that it had readmitted the person whom they alleged her to be?

Hey ho, that’s Eurocommunists, Pabloists and Shachtmanites for you. But the only thing even funnier than the vanguard elite is the master race. They shriek for a new General Franco to rescue Spain from the Moroccans of whom the old one deployed tens of thousands as his fearsome Regulares, largely recruited from the Rif Mountains where Ceuta and Melilla were also located, such that at least some of the recent tourists to Ceuta must have been descended from those, the men who provided even the Guardia de Su Excelencia el Generalísimo, which was therefore known as the Guardia Mora.

In May 1940, Winston Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini, whom he had called “the greatest living legislator”. Gibraltar is still under British sovereignty only because Labour won the 1945 Election. After Franco had refused to let Hitler use Spain in order to invade Gibraltar and thus seize control of the Strait, Churchill had promised him Gibraltar once the War was safely won. That would have been just another colonial transfer in those days. But Churchill lost at the ballot box. In the meantime, over one thousand Spanish Republicans had fought the Second World War in the British Army. What do Churchill’s noisiest partisans think of that? It ranks with last September, when Konstantin Malofeev and Aleksandr Dugin played host to the Falange Española de las JONS, annual wreath-layers in memory of the Blue Legion.

Franco saw off Hitler’s designs on Gibraltar, on which he did then impose from 1969 a blockade that lasted until seven years after his death, by making unfeasible military and territorial demands in North Africa, thereby again illustrating that the idea of the Strait of Gibraltar as a civilisational frontier was rooted in the most perfect ignorance, as much on the part of those to whom it was self-evident that there should not be parts of Spain on the African mainland, as on the part of those whom it genuinely discombobulated to learn that Britain had had any role in the slave trade except to end it. In fact, our engagement in the slave trade lasted longer than the period since abolition.

Yet at the 2024 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, Keir Starmer refused even to apologise for slavery. Not pay reparations. Britain is never going to pay trillions of dollars, and no court is ever going to make even a paper order for it to do so. Starmer did not understand opening negotiations by asking for far more than you would ever get, in order to get anything at all. So much for his legal background. And so much for a party in hock to the trade unions, mention of which raises the questions of reparations to whom and from whom. Are the descendants of the Peasants’ Revolt, of the Levellers, and of those who were massacred at Peterloo, to pay the present rulers of Africa and the Caribbean? Certainly not. The slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle. Moreover, large and growing numbers of us are descended both from these Islands’ immemorial working class and from African slaves.

The continuation of slavery in parts of the Commonwealth even today, including in parts of Africa that did not become independent until the second half of the twentieth century, establishes that the British Empire’s suppression of it was largely a legislative statement of aspiration, while the argument that the white working class could not possibly be held responsible for slavery is an observation of the effects of events in the eleventh century, never mind between the sixteenth and the nineteenth. Keep those and many other things in mind as you read the wise words of the great Paul Knaggs, which I myself read in the knowledge of my own family background in Fife and the Lothians, meaning that I may well be descended from slaves on both sides.

The loan to compensate the slaveholders was so enormous that every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom was still paying it off until 2015, 182 years after it had been taken out. Yes, not until 1833. Not 1807. It was only 2023 that saw the two hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the British Anti-Slavery Society. The ban on the slave trade in 1807 had done nothing to stamp out slavery itself, and indeed victory over Napoleon had given Britain additional slave colonies such as Demerara and Mauritius. In 1833, it was time to open the Bible again. The claim that Scripture did not condemn slavery as such was made by the defenders of that institution, who generally had a pecuniary interest in it. That included the Church of England, as Dame Sarah Mullally is quite right to point out. William Wilberforce was an outlier. He was not the only one. But he was one. The one religious body that can claim always to have been opposed to slavery in principle, and vigorously in practice, is the Quakers, although even they had their issues with cocoa from São Tomé and Príncipe.

But the idea that everyone thought that slavery was at least not contrary to Scripture for the first 16 centuries of Christianity’s existence, with most people doing so for the first 18, is simply false. Abolitionists were castigated and mocked specifically for taking the Word of God too seriously. By taking it so, they were unable to believe that the different “races” were different species with different origins, as was widely believed by the theological conservative-liberal elitists of the day. The suggestion that until some very late date no one had thought that slavery was unbiblical and un-Christian is bound up with the suggestion that there was no opposition to it in its heyday, but that simultaneously England and then Britain had taken it up purely for the pleasure and honour of stamping it out. In fact, though, we were not even the first country to abolish slavery, since that was Haiti, after the only successful slave revolt in history. We have still not yet been free of it for as long as we practised it. And while it is true that it could never officially exist in the Imperial Motherland because “the air of England was too pure” for it, from where did English Common Law arrive at that conclusion? Out of that thin air itself? Or from Christianity?

As late as the 1860s, Britain had been widely expected to intervene in the American Civil War on the Confederate side, which even had an Episcopalian bishop among its generals, but the proponents of that intervention had reckoned without the Lancashire cotton workers. The beneficiaries of the slave trade remain at the heart of the British elite, since the Atlantic slave trade was the foundation of capitalism, and there is no doubt that the monarchy, the Supreme Governorship of the Church of England, was heavily involved in it for, it bears repetition, longer than the period from its abolition to the present day. Therefore, rather than give the usual answer about Britain’s having stamped out slavery, Starmer had to say that there had never been anything wrong with it, or at least not when Britain had done it. To say otherwise would have been to raise almost endless questions, beginning with why the water of England should be so impure, yet at the same time so expensive. There is a mounting case for the kind of tactics that were employed against the slave trade. What if we all just refused to pay the exorbitant water and fuel bills that went straight out in dividends?

Clear Water

The same part of the Labour Party is bending Andy Burnham's ear, both to turn England's water companies into not-for-profit co-operatives, and to give the United Kingdom a written Constitution.

On water, that is already the model in Wales, where there is a drought. It would transfer corporate debt to co-ops that would borrow for investment at commercial rates. The answer is public ownership, as in Scotland, in Northern Ireland, and indeed in every other country apart from Chile, where privatisation was bequeathed by General Pinochet.

More than 70 per cent of our water supply is owned in, and not uncommonly by, foreign states that themselves have water owned by the State. So no new desalination plant since 2010, no new reservoir since as long ago as 1992, no National Grid for water, and the impossibility of the Government's signature housebuilding programme because the areas in question were the ones with water shortages.

When the water companies were privatised, then they were debt free, since they were, and would remain, the necessarily monopoly suppliers of an absolutely indispensable commodity of which the raw material fell out of the sky for free. They are now claiming that they would be unable to invest in infrastructure if they were renationalised, since they would be competing for funding against education, defence, the NHS, and so on. But that is a lie. Over the next five years, they will spend £91 billion. Of that, £90 billion will come from the bill payers, not from the shareholders. So why are there shareholders? What are they for?

There are grey areas, but if something would obviously have to be rescued by the State rather than allowed to go bust, then it belongs in public ownership, just as if something obviously would not, then it does not. It is therefore perfectly clear where water belongs. There should be no bailout of the water companies. If there must be compensation for this renationalisation (as there must be ordinarily, but there is nothing ordinary about this), then the money should be spent on that. As much as the shares would fetch on the open market, and not a penny more.

At most, and as would therefore also apply to other renationalisations, there might be a case-by-case assessment of individual interests. Pension funds? We really would see what we could do. Private equity? We would need an awful lot more persuasion. Transnational corporations? We would be pleased to show you out. Sovereign wealth funds, being foreign states as such? You could show yourselves out.

Had Britain been given a written Constitution by nineteenth-century Liberals, or by Interwar Conservatives, or by Margaret Thatcher, or by Tony Blair, and at least the first and last of those seriously considered it, then such measures would have been impossible. As would the domestic programme of the Attlee Government, which, although it wobbled a bit by signing up to NATO, otherwise fiercely guarded the absolute sovereignty of the House of Commons against Conservative and Liberal enthusiasm for what was always intended to become the European Union, in which all of the above would be illegal just as Buy British and the abolition of VAT on electricity would be, and for the British Conservative-written European Convention on Human Rights, with which all of the above would be ruled incompatible. Think on.

Points Mean Prizes?

Newsnight managed to cut to the weather right as the result was being announced, but if next to no one voted in Greater Manchester, then why did it take so long to count the votes? And that failure to declare the first round totals before moving on was not standard practice.

But Reform UK picked up hardly any second preferences from people whose first preferences had been either for Restore Britain or for the Conservative Party, which managed fewer votes than Restore in a conurbation that also showed little appetite for the Greens and none for the Liberal Democrats. Neither Kemi Badenoch nor Ed Davey merits the hype, while Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski are outright liabilities.

Nationally, the latest approval ratings are +1 for each of Badenoch and Davey, -20 for Polanski, and -24 for Farage. Westminster voting intentions are 12 per cent for each of the Greens and the Lib Dems, 17 per cent for the Conservatives, and 23 per cent for Reform. For Labour, the figure is 27 per cent, an increase of five points, and for Andy Burnham it is +16, an increase of 20 points. Twenty.

The bitter Starmerite rump has joined the long line of people who screamed abuse at Diane Abbott, although they are unable to name any sitting Labour MP who agreed with them. If you truly believed that your party had extended its whip to an anti-Semite, then you would leave it. More and more people would agree with her views on Ukraine, and most people in Britain who knew anything about Syria would regard her statements on that as pure common sense.

We Stand With Rajiv

Here:

The fight for truth and justice can too often be a hard and long struggle. Navigating the law is complex, and justice depends on lawyers who we can trust – lawyers who listen to our voices, stand up for us, and pursue the truth on our behalf.

Rajiv Menon KC is an experienced and highly respected barrister who has spent his career representing people like us. At some of the most traumatic times in our lives he has represented us with professionalism, integrity and compassion, ensuring that our voices were heard in inquests, inquiries and criminal trials.

We are all deeply shocked that Rajiv is facing contempt proceedings. As clients we must have confidence that our lawyers can represent us fearlessly and independently. This case risks undermining the fundamental relationship of trust and confidence between clients and their lawyers without which meaningful participation in the justice system is impossible.

We stand with Rajiv and believe that these proceedings must be dropped immediately.

Tariq Ali, witness, undercover police inquiry

Margaret Aspinall, mother of James Aspinall, who died in the Hillsborough disaster

Sue Roberts, sister of Graham Roberts, who died in the Hillsborough disaster

Marieha Hussain, protester acquitted over “coconut” placard

Tippa Naphtali, cousin of Mikey Powell, who died in police custody

Selma Taha, Divina Riggon and Danae Thomas, the King’s Cross Three

Security? Service?

Kit Klarenberg writes:

Leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone show both a current and former MI5 director secretly lobbied for the British government’s move to label the IRGC a terrorist entity as well as the UK’s adoption of the draconian National Security Act.

The correspondence reviewed here offers extraordinary insight into how the MI5 influences Downing Street and manipulates public perceptions of dubious or non-existent threats.

On July 13, the government of former Prime Minister Keir Starmer officially listed the IRGC as a terrorist organization, citing supposed kidnapping and assassination plots by the Iranian military branch. Now, merely publishing Iranian-supplied casualty figures could be categorized as “terrorism,” potentially landing British citizens in prison for up to 14 years.

Leaked correspondence reviewed by The Grayzone reveals that when first proposed in 2023, the push to proscribe the Iranian military branch was coordinated among the former heads of British intelligence agency MI5. Those plotting the designation included the MI5’s current Director General Ken McCallum and previous Director General Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller – who was privately credited with the passage of Britain’s draconian National Security Act.

The spymasters appeared to view Labour’s then-Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper as a key ally in constricting civil liberties and convincing government officials to formally designate the IRGC a terrorist entity.

In private discussions, McCallum acknowledged the “direct operational benefit” of proscribing the IRGC was likely to be “modest.” The MI5 chief nonetheless considered it “sensible to contemplate” such powers, and potentially extending them to include a ban on supposedly state-affiliated factions such as the now-defunct Russian private military company Wagner.

McCallum’s behind-the-scenes lobbying of Cooper and Starmer was the culmination of a wider effort by veteran MI5 officials who’d sought to “help the opposition to be ready to govern” once they took office in July 2024.

Starmer and his shadow cabinet proved highly receptive to clandestine approaches from McCallum and his veteran MI5 forebears. Meanwhile, McCallum deployed scaremongering about the supposed threat of China, Iran and Russia – frequently coordinated with Manningham-Buller – to justify ratcheting up budgets and powers for the spy agency, whose ultimate targets appear to be domestic dissidents.

Keir Starmer ‘realises he needs to understand more about Whitehall’ British intelligence’s infiltration of Starmer’s administration can be traced back to a January 2023 email in which Labour’s former long-serving Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell emailed Manningham-Buller, informing her he was “thinking hard about how we help the opposition to be ready to govern if they win the next election.”

O’Donnell lamented that Starmer’s office was “full of people who are, understandably, totally focussed [sic] on how to win the next election,” rather than collaborating with British intelligence officers. However, O’Donnell wrote that the Labour leader realized “he needs to understand more about how Whitehall operates” in advance of attaining power.

“I hope they have reached out to you already but if not would you mind me suggesting that they do?” O’Donnell enquired.

Manningham-Buller promptly forwarded his query to her latest successor as MI5 Director-General, Ken McCallum, who responded that “funnily enough,” he’d made a similar suggestion to then-shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper when they’d last met privately. “I was conscious they’d doubtless be starting to get their heads around governing/structures etc.,” McCallum explained, before declaring “there might be some value” in O’Donnell “nudging” Labour’s leadership to “approach” either the current or former MI5 top spy.

Subsequent emails between the pair reveal the extent to which the former MI5 chiefs coordinated privately to shape the outcomes of their meetings with leading British politicians. A message by McCallum regarding a planned conversation between Manningham-Buller and Cooper shows the current MI5 leader asking his predecessor: “any sense of what she might be thinking/prioritising in my space?”

In an email sent July 3rd, 2023, the former MI5 chief asked her predecessor, McCallum, to “let me know what you might like me to mention” in her conversation with Labour’s shadow Home Secretary. A day later, Manningham-Buller would again ask MI5’s current Director General for his input, in an email titled “Any steer for [Yvette Cooper] on Thursday?”

McCallum noted that he’d “had what felt like a pretty good conversation” with Cooper, “surveying our threat landscape, drawing out the big trends etc.” They also conducted “a deeper dive on the proposed reform of the Investigatory Powers Act,” a sinister mass surveillance law which was under review at the time. Cooper reportedly pushed back, apparently believing “we needed a much sharper political/public narrative to convince sceptics that any dialling-down of safeguards was desirable/necessary.”

The Investigatory Powers Act reform under consideration introduced what was billed as a “lighter touch” framework for bulk data collection by GCHQ, compelling tech giants to coordinate with the British government to ensure uninhibited “lawful access” to select user data, and effectively ending encryption for specific content. The highly controversial amendments finally came into effect in April 2024.

According to McCallum, the future Home Secretary was decidedly more receptive to other MI5 initiatives, however. Cooper, he wrote, “showed particular interest” in “IRGC proscription” – even as he acknowledged it was a “genuinely difficult choice” whose “direct operational benefit” was “likely modest.”

At the time, debate was raging in Britain over whether to deem the Iranian military branch an official terrorist threat, spurred largely by McCallum’s questionable public claims that the IRGC had sought to assassinate 10 British citizens in 2022. In January 2023, McCallum’s dubious allegation led the UK’s House of Commons to unanimously vote to urge the Crown to slap the Iranian military group with a terror label. But the government was apparently unconvinced, perhaps worried that such an action would lead to a complete breakdown in diplomatic relations between London and Tehran.

In her meeting with McCallum, Cooper was also curious as to whether MI5 was constructing a “convincing” system for dealing with “state threats,” in the vein of the British government’s CONTEST counter-terrorism strategy.

The MI5 chief wrote that he told Cooper “it would be good for her and I to spend a bit more time together over the next year, for obvious reasons,” and “she seemed amenable.” McCallum revealed to his aging predecessor that he’d conveniently neglected to mention he would be seeking an extension of his contract in 2024. “Depending on election timing,” the question of whether to keep McCallum in post “may be an early decision facing [Cooper] should she become [Home Secretary]” – one which he no doubt hoped to influence in his favor.

McCallum concluded by celebrating the newly-approved National Security Act and personally crediting Manningham-Buller with its passage. “Many thanks for your support (and stamina) in getting the NS Act over the line,” McCallum wrote, adding: “Phew!”

The highly controversial legislation is explicitly designed to prevent and deter “unauthorised disclosures” of British state secrets. In parliamentary debates on the National Security Act, MPs openly stated their objective was to prevent “WikiLeaks-type” disclosures of grave crimes committed at home and abroad by the British state. One senior Conservative lawmaker fulminated, “none of us [in Parliament] wants to see Julian Assange and his type carry sway here.” British press association lawyers involved in drafting the legislation themselves have openly stated it’s “inevitable” that the Act will have a “chilling effect” on legitimate journalistic activity.

MI5 chief stokes Iran threat to boost agency budget

The strangely intimate relationship between the former and current MI5 chiefs would continue to develop for years to come. In October 2024, Manningham-Buller emailed McCallum with the subject line: “Very proud of you.” She referred to a widely-publicized “threat update” recently given by the MI5 chief, in which he made a number of breathless declarations about alleged dangers posed to Britain by China, Iran and Russia. He accused the Islamic Republic of orchestrating “plot after plot… at an unprecedented pace and scale” since January 2022. McCallum claimed 20 separate “potentially lethal” Iranian schemes had been foiled by his agency during this time.

McCallum thanked his dear mentor, stating he was “feeling the benefit of having done a few years in the job now,” which he wrote had granted him “inner confidence and externally-perceived authority.”

Commenting with approval on the unquestioning coverage his “threat update” had received among mainstream media outlets, Manningham-Buller gushed, “You couldn’t have hoped for fuller coverage. Hope it helps with SR,” she wrote, referring to the government’s next spending review. As desired, six months later Starmer increased Britain’s domestic and foreign spying budget by seven percent.

Lurid allegations of supposed “Iranian state aggression” against Britain became a staple of McCallum’s public speeches thereafter. In October 2025, the MI5 Director General gave another “threat update” in which he bombastically claimed “MI5 and the police have disrupted 19 late-stage attack plots” and forestalled “many hundreds of developing threats” since 2020. McCallum asserted that over the past year, the number of individuals under investigation by MI5 for “state threat activity” had increased 35%, while 20 further “potentially lethal Iran-backed plots” were allegedly busted.

These dramatic figures once again reinforced a core justification for legislation designed to rein in British civil liberties – this time, the National Security (State Threats) Act. An official factsheet accompanying the legislation referred to his October 2025 speech, as did a House of Lords briefing paper on the legislation. Yet, despite McCallum publicly professing MI5 has “one hell of a job on its hands” battling apparently relentless “Iranian state aggression,” basic details of these cases, let alone prosecutions of alleged perpetrators, have failed to publicly materialize.

In his 2024 “threat update,” McCallum sought to cement his narrative of a Tehran-directed terror campaign on British soil by claiming that the previous December, “a man was jailed for reconnaissance he had carried out against the then-headquarters of the Iran International media organisation.” A Chechen with Austrian citizenship was indeed convicted for taking photos of the London offices of Iran International, a shady Saudi and Israeli-funded propaganda outlet that openly supports anti-Islamic Republic Sunni Arab extremist militants tied to ISIS.

However, the prosecution was unable to present any evidence whatsoever the individual had any connections or contacts with anyone or anything Iranian. The claim that he was an agent of Tehran hinged entirely on the state’s insistence that as a Chechen, he was probably acting on Iran’s behalf due to the country’s geopolitical alliance with Russia. One can only speculate as to whether this feeble narrative was cooked up specifically to lend credence to McCallum’s otherwise unsubstantiated claims of ubiquitous “Iranian state aggression” against Britain. 

Ex-MI5 chief on Peter Mandelson’s appointment: “Never let a good crisis go to waste”

As the push to label the IRGC a terrorist group once again gained traction, the current and former MI5 leaders were well-prepared. On January 13, 2026, Manningham-Buller tipped off McCallum, who was due to privately brief members of the House of Lords, telling him in an email: “when you come and talk expect questions on banning social media for those under 16, [and] proscription of IRGC and Chinese Embassy.”

When the House of Lords debated proscribing the IRGC, members unanimously supported the ban, with one Lord directly citing MI5’s supposed “revelation of more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots.” 

Other leaked correspondence strongly suggests Manningham-Buller has abused her privileged position as chair of the House of Lords conduct committee, to the benefit of MI5. In early February, she boasted to McCallum how she was exploiting the chaos created by disgraced Labour political honcho and House of Lords member Peter Mandelson being appointed Starmer’s US ambassador, despite British security and intelligence services raising grave concerns about his suitability for the role. His close personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein loomed large in their considerations. “Never let a good crisis [go to waste],” she crowed. 

Manningham-Buller revealed the Mandelson fracas meant she was “pressing to change the law” so her Lords’ Conduct Committee “can recommend… eviction” of members who have fallen victim to scandal, or behaved improperly. “I have a list,” she bragged to McCallum, ominously. 

Manningham-Buller concluded that at least parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) “will be out of your hair for a bit.”

The ISC had been tasked with conducting a wide-ranging investigation into Mandelson’s appointment. Its attention, she wrote, would thus be distracted from MI5’s activities. 

At that stage, ISC chair Lord Beamish had spent much of the past year warning the Committee’s work was underfunded, and its work “being undermined by continued interference by the Cabinet Office” – the British government’s most powerful component, within which the ISC is based, but also meant to scrutinize. While Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government promised an “emergency uplift” in ISC funding, Starmer’s administration had “declined to implement it” following their landslide victory in July 2024. 

In a shock public intervention, Beamish cautioned how the “extraordinary rate” at which British spying services had grown in recent years meant “around £3 billion of public money” was being spent on GCHQ, MI5, and MI6 operations “for which there is no oversight capability.” Since then, the ISC’s budgetary woes have continued, but so has the expansion of financing and special powers for British intelligence agencies.

As the files show, even after MI5’s preferred policies are adopted, the agency retains assets within government departments and parliament to ensure the passage of repressive laws without opposition. In one leaked email to Manningham-Buller, McCallum referred to “the scale and complexity” of what MI5 “need to do” on China.

Even if the war on Iran subsides, the exchange suggests the MI5 still retains ample sources of fear-mongering. As Manningham-Buller counseled, the agency must “never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Look To Her, Moor, If Thou Hast Eyes To See

Migrants bring their belongings, invaders carry weapons, and even refugees will often hold whatever they had been able to grab as they fled. The away day visitors to Ceuta were clearly none of those things. Accordingly, they have gone home, which is not characteristic of migrants, invaders or refugees, or at least not well within 48 hours. Morocco staged another of these incursion excursions in 2021, when Spain played host to Brahim Ghali while he recovered from Covid-19.

Beginning in 1786, the United States and Morocco have the longest continuous treaty relationship in American history. The day before his arrest, Jeffrey Epstein tried to buy a multimillion dollar palace in Marrakesh as a bolthole. The new billion dollar expressway in Western Sahara has been named after Donald Trump, who has supported Morocco’s claim to that, the last colony on the African continent, all the way up to the United Nations Security Council last year, in return for Moroccan normalisation of relations with Israel.

The Strait of Gibraltar is now the only way for Israeli shipping to leave the Mediterranean, making the United States and Israel desperate to wrest control of it from pro-Palestinian Spain. Benjamin Netanyahu and his son Yair have been calling on “Arabs and Muslims” to “liberate” Ceuta and Melilla from “occupation” since at least 2019; Ceuta is in fact 50 per cent Catholic and 60 per cent Spanish-speaking, while Melilla is 65 per cent Catholic and de facto bilingual in Spanish and Tarafit, the Vulgar Latin and the Berber that Saint Augustine would understand were he come again to earthly life, as well as having the largest permanent Jewish community in Spain.

That is all far too much like the old Palestine. So on 15 July, the House of Representatives authorised funding for a Moroccan takeover. Thomas Massie was the only Republican to vote against it, with Jared Golden the only Democrat in favour. And Juan David Rojas writes:

Sixty thousand people — roughly the population of Loughborough. That is how many migrants just forced their way into the Spanish town of Ceuta, a coastal enclave on the Moroccan side of the Strait of Gibraltar. Dozens died climbing over barbed wire fences, even as Spain’s armed forces hastily started mobilising. In a sense, none of this is new: Ceuta and its sister enclave Melilla have long been a source of tension between Madrid and Rabat, with Morocco claiming the territories as its own. Yet though Morocco has also used its control over migration flows into Ceuta to extract concessions from Spain and the EU before, the scale this time is remarkable.

Some analysts suspect that Morocco’s sudden lapse in enforcement may be in response to deepening ties between Spain and Algeria — the latter alleged to have sponsored Sahrawi separatists in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara. In 2021, Morocco similarly waved through some 8,000 migrants to punish Madrid for hosting a Sahrawi leader. But a related — more insidious — reason for the latest breach is that Rabat is leveraging an increasingly close relationship with the Trump administration and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel.

MAGA has branded Spain Public Enemy No. 1 over its government’s strident posture towards the US and Israel during the Iran war. The socialist government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has refused to allow Washington access to its Rota and Morón military bases, its consistent failure to meet Nato defence-spending targets also fuelling MAGA ire. In March, the centre-right American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin wrote a policy brief calling on the White House to formally recognise Ceuta and Melilla as occupied Moroccan territory. True to the spirit of Third-World decolonialism, Rubin wrote that Spain was “a colonial power running colonies across the Strait of Gibraltar”.

Within days, neoconservative congressman Mario Díaz-Balart had entoned Fidel Castro, stating that the enclaves were “not in the geographic territory of Spain” and should be “established, negotiated, and discussed between friends and allies”. Similarly, Reuters reported in April that a Pentagon email outlined options against Spain, including Nato suspension; the treaty states explicitly in Article 6 that territories in continental Africa are exempt from collective defence obligations.

For its part, Rabat has since transformed into a vital partner of Washington and Tel Aviv under the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords, which normalised relations between Israel and several Arab states, including Morocco, in 2020. Ironically, Rabat proceeded to leverage the development in the service of its own expansionist aims, with the first Trump administration recognising Rabat’s sovereignty over Western Sahara.

The dispute over Western Sahara traces back to Spain’s 1975 withdrawal from what was then called Spanish Sahara. Under the Madrid Accords, Spain handed administration of the territory to Morocco and Mauritania; Mauritania withdrew from its share in 1979 after heavy losses to Sahrawi guerrillas. A 16-year war followed, pitting Moroccan forces against the so-called Polisario Front. Rabat eventually built an extensive sand wall — fortified with landmines and troops — partitioning the territory. In November 2020, Moroccan troops entered the UN-patrolled buffer zone to disperse Sahrawi protesters, prompting the Polisario to declare an end to the three-decade truce and a return to armed struggle. The two sides have since traded sporadic strikes along the sand wall.

Rabat has since made inroads on virtually every diplomatic front. Following normalisation through the Abraham Accords, Morocco signed a security agreement with Israel in 2021, proving vital for the conflict in Western Sahara; in January, the two nations signed an additional joint military work plan. Then, in February, secret talks chaired by the US brought Moroccan, Algerian, Mauritanian, and Polisario delegations together for the first time since 2019.

In true Trumpian fashion, Morocco announced on Monday that it was naming the Dakhla-Tiznit highway, which runs through Western Sahara, after the US President. Ecstatic, Trump exclaimed on Truth Social: “Thank you to Highly Respected Mohammed VI, the King of Morocco — Such a Great Honor! I look forward to traveling the entire length of this Great Highway someday, hopefully soon!”

All of this comes as a royal headache for Sánchez ahead of a general election in 2027. His record of raising wages and opposing US and Israeli war crimes has boosted his standing both at home and abroad. Yet a slew of corruption scandals, and a lax immigration policy, have seen his party, PSOE, as well as allies in Sumar and Podemos, consistently trail the Right-wingers of Vox and the People’s Party (PP) in polls.

In recent years, the bulk of low-skilled immigration to Spain has overwhelmingly come from Spanish-speaking Latin America. As a result, negative attitudes towards immigration are rather less pronounced in Spain than other European countries. At the same time, though, Spaniards overwhelmingly oppose illegal migration — especially from Arab and Subsaharan African countries.

In January, Sánchez’s government issued a blanket amnesty for virtually all illegal immigrants living in Spain. The move, while laudable for granting labour rights to millions of workers, provoked an outcry, with roughly 60% of Spaniards expressing disapproval. Barring overwhelming enforcement on new arrivals, the issue with any such move is that it inevitably incentivises further illegal immigration.

Sánchez now faces a quandary: clamp down in Ceuta and risk alienating affluent progressives in his coalition, or do little and suffer at the hands of the Spanish Right and the broader public. The former, naturally, is the sounder course. There is, moreover, room for the Prime Minister to maneuver geopolitically while outflanking the progressive Sumar and Podemos’ fantasies of an open-border utopia. After all, Sánchez can credibly accuse Morocco of acting at the behest of the US and Israel against a Nato member. At the same time, he could make a case in favour of overwhelming enforcement against illegal immigration precisely because of the March amnesty.

There is some reason to think that Spain’s famously sly Prime Minister could opt for just such a path, particularly as support for Sumar has collapsed from roughly 13% to 6%, and with Podemos in the doldrums too. The Socialist leader has defied the odds at consecutive elections, favouring high-stakes gambits against his Right-wing adversaries. Nonetheless, the PSOE and its allies have consistently failed to win more voters than the PP and Vox, instead relying on minor, regional parties to govern.

As both Denmark’s and Slovakia’s Social Democrats have shown, the key to Leftist success rests largely on a tough but humane immigration policy. In the wake of the surge in Ceuta, a member of PSOE’s youth wing made a surprisingly sensible plea. “The truth is, I hope this crisis pushes the PSOE to look at the immigration policies of its Northern European sister parties and realize it’s time to move away from what I see as an open-borders approach influenced by the more radical left,” they wrote. “That means protecting those who genuinely need asylum, maintaining secure borders, and avoiding mass regularizations.”

It seems Sánchez has opted for this course at least in part. Yesterday, he described the surge in Ceuta as “an attack on Spain’s territorial integrity” and stressed a stiff response: Al Jazeera subsequently reported that more than 37,500 of the 60,000 or so who entered Ceuta had been returned to Morocco. It remains to be seen if the Spanish Left ultimately benefits from the crisis. As for Morocco and the Trump administration, it seems that MAGA’s talk of “Third-Worldism” is more inclusive than many of its supporters might think.

Then Your Children Will Be Next?

Where next? Whitley Bay? The appalling Danny Danon, who tried to have African immigrants to Israel transported to Australia, has now come out in favour of Moroccan annexation of Ceuta and Melilla, just as Israel, having armed Argentina during the Falklands War, has come close not only to recognising Argentine sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, but also to securing such recognition from the United States, likewise always officially neutral on the question.

Since entry to Ceuta does not guarantee entry to mainland Spain, and in any case you would have to get from one to the other, half or more of the day trippers have already gone home, and most or all of the rest soon will. They were encouraged to make their excursion as an assertion of the Moroccan claim, to the point that some of them were transported in government trucks. Morocco is now, if not quite allied to Israel and the United States, then certainly aligned with them, whereas the present Spanish Government has opposed the Israeli genocide of Gaza and the American-Israeli war on Iran.

50 years ago and exploiting the power vacuum after the death of General Franco, Morocco likewise used external actors, again including the United States, to turn Western Sahara into what is now the last real colony on the African continent. Here we are again. You laughed at Jeremy Corbyn for his knowledge of, and active interest in, the Sahrawi cause, just as you laughed at him for his knowledge of, and active interest in, the cause of the Chagossians. You are not laughing now.

Indefinite No More?

Imprisonment for Public Protection was introduced by Andy Burnham’s mentor, David Blunkett, who now takes a very different view. Alex Croft and Amy-Clare Martin write:

The UN has condemned the detention of UK prisoners trapped on indefinite jail terms as “arbitrary” and accused the British government of presiding over a form of psychological torture.

In a scathing 16-page document, the Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has lashed out at Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) jail terms as “inhumane treatment” due to the “mental anguish of being subjected to continuous uncertainty of a release date”.

It follows a complaint made by campaigners last year on behalf of five men who have served a combined total of 84 years incarcerated under IPP terms, including for minor crimes, as reported by The Independent.

The document stated that all five individuals are entitled to compensation and other reparations as a result of their unjust confinement.

The IPP jail terms fail on the principle of lex certa - a core principle of the Rule of Law which mandates that criminal laws must be clear, precise, and unambiguous - because it “authorized indeterminate detention without specifying any criteria that could make its endpoint foreseeable to the sentenced person or the court”, the document said.

The case was lodged in September 2025, and included a bombshell letter from former justice secretary David Lammy showing he agrees the jail term is a “grave injustice” which causes “simply horrendous” mental trauma - a letter he wrote while he was shadow justice secretary in 2021.

Although the IPP sentence was scrapped in 2012 following a damning ruling from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), it was not abolished retrospectively, and successive governments have resisted calls to resentence more than 2,500 still languishing without a release date.

The five tragic cases being sent to the UN, which have all been highlighted by The Independent over the past 18 months, include:

• Leroy Douglas, 43, who has served almost 19 years without release for street robbery of a mobile phone
• Abdullahi Suleman, 42, is still in jail 20 years after he was handed an IPP for a laptop robbery, having been recalled for missing a hospital appointment
• Shaun Anton Lloyd, 39, who has been hauled back to prison four times and served 12 years and four months for two street robberies committed when he was 18 
• Wayne Williams, 37, has spent more than 19 years in prison without release for a 23-month jail term for attempting to injure a police officer in a fight
• Joshua Mcrae died in his cell last year, aged 34, having served more than 16 years for a four-year tariff for grievous bodily harm

The document states that the detentions, even if there were a domestic legal basis, fail the requirements set out by the UN’s Human Rights Committee as regards on liberty and security of person.

“The causal link between the original conviction and the continued detention has been broken by the disproportion between the gravity of the index offences and the duration of detention,” it wrote.

It notes that parole reviews are not truly independent of the government, given the power of the justice secretary to intervene. The recall system, it adds, means prisoners are being returned into indefinite custody for minor breaches, with 70 per cent of recalls concerning non-compliance or poor behaviour rather than new serious offences.

The original claim, brought by campaign group IPP Committee in Action, alleged the open-ended jail term is irredeemably flawed and the length of the prisoners’ incarceration bears no relation to the original crimes.

It further alleged that England and Wales are breaching international law because of the mental anguish for prisoners and their families, after 94 prisoners have taken their own lives after losing hope of being freed.

Shirley Debono, who founded the campaign group after her son, Shaun Lloyd, was handed an IPP sentence for stealing a phone, previously said: “This is the greatest miscarriage of justice. Our loved ones are suffering psychological torture, locked up in arbitrary detention.

“Our government condemns such treatment in China and Russia, yet is committing the same act here in the UK.” 

The family of Mr Mcrae, who died last year, said urged the government to act.

“Josh's suffering is over, but ours continues, as does the suffering of thousands of other prisoners and families still trapped by this injustice,” they said in a statement.

That was echoed by Bernadette Emerson, partner of Mr Suleman, who said: “My hopes on what I would expect to see from the government to resolve the IPP crisis, would be for them to urgently resentence IPP prisoners and urgently implement independent aftercare provision for them in the community. This grave injustice needs to be put to and end once and for all.” 

The UN special rapporteur on torture, Dr Alice Edwards, has previously condemned the jail terms as “psychological torture”. 

The complaint also alleges the UK remains in breach of the 2012 ECHR decision, which resulted in the sentence being abolished, with many IPP prisoners still waiting months to access courses needed for their release or facing a chaotic system of Parole Board delays. 

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “It is right that these sentences were abolished, and as the IPP annual report shows, we have significantly improved support for these offenders, with greater access to rehabilitation and mental health support.

“We are determined to make further progress towards safe and sustainable releases for those on this sentence, but not in any way that undermines public protection. We will respond to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention formally in due course.”

Normal, Healthy, Ordered, Living

David Lammy’s punishment was the sack, but Sarah Sackman’s is to keep her job. There is nothing yet on the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court, but see here:

The Chair of the Bar Council has welcomed Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s indication that he may scrap controversial plans to reduce access to jury trials.

Speaking at an event at a leisure centre in Sheffield on Friday, the new Prime Minister said he wants to “look in detail” at the proposals - but that his instincts are “not to reduce access to jury trial”.

He said he has drawn on his own personal experience, particularly relating to the Hillsborough disaster, and indicated that he is “probably looking for changes” on the plan he inherited from former PM Sir Keir Starmer.

Kirsty Brimelow KC, Chair of the Bar Council, said: “Relying on a bit of my own Northern bluntness, it is encouraging if common sense is prevailing. One of my first actions was to write to the Prime Minister urging him to back away from the jury reduction course of the previous administration.

“Examination of the evidence shows that reducing jury trials is not required to reduce the backlog of cases and, in fact, could be counter-productive.

“The Prime Minister’s recent comments give me hope that he is listening. Disappointingly, a letter to the previous Prime Minister, signed by 3,200 barristers and retired judges, went unanswered.

“Trial by jury is one of the defining features of our justice system and a constitutional safeguard that has stood the test of centuries. It embodies the principle that justice is not administered by the state alone but with the participation of 12 citizens. They bring independence, collective wisdom and a diversity of experience to their deliberations, helping to ensure that verdicts command public confidence.

“The Bar Council stands ready to work constructively with the Prime Minister and his government to reduce the waiting for those in the criminal justice system.

“Crucially, the passage of time is showing that our proposals, including opening empty courts and targeted listing by judges, are reducing the backlog of cases.

“The indications from the new Prime Minister give me optimism that our voices will be listened to.”

The Bar Council of England and Wales - which represents more than 18,000 barristers - launched its ‘Justice needs juries’ campaign in response to the previous government’s plans to curtail jury trials through the Courts and Tribunals Bill.

As part of the campaign, working with the Criminal Bar Association and circuit leaders, the Bar Council has submitted written and oral evidence to the Public Bill Committee, drafted and tabled 28 amendments to the Bill, and have been mentioned at least 73 times during parliamentary debates on the topic.

In March 2026 the Bar Council coordinated an open letter calling on Sir Keir Starmer to stop planned restrictions to jury trials. The letter was signed by more than 3,200 lawyers including more than 300 KCs, 22 retired judges, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, and current and former politicians.

Still, the fight goes on, as George Monbiot writes:

No more resistance in the US. The era of human rights is over, and dissent is once more forbidden. This is what certain billionaires and their concierges want, and this is the model they’re also seeking to project across the world. If we fail to resist, if our new prime minister is as weak and suggestible as the last one, this is what we will get. In fact, we are halfway there already.

Why? Because successive governments in the UK have succumbed to a global campaign to cancel our fundamental freedoms, a campaign led by oligarchs and corporations, the media they own and the junktanks they fund. A campaign that has become definitional for the second Trump presidency.

At a global summit convened by the US government earlier this month, the Trump administration officials Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller and Scott Bessent explained that they were redirecting counterterrorism efforts away from Islamic jihadism and towards “the political left”. Most of the examples they cited to justify this shift were more than 30 years old. Several times they had to dig down to the 1970s to find a sufficiently menacing threat. You could hear the barrel being scraped.

Without producing a shred of evidence, Rubio, the secretary of state, claimed that the Cuban government is “inextricably linked to the far-left groups and movements across and beyond the west”. The following week, his department sought to justify this claim with a report containing a long list of leftwing legislators, journalists and activists that attempted to link them to Cuba in ways that ranged from the tenuous to the hilarious. This is a well-honed tactic, used prolifically by the Nazis among others: they claimed dissenters, by definition, were part of an international communist conspiracy. They insisted, as Rubio did, that “it is time to crush this evil for ever”.

That wasn’t the only crude reminder. Miller, Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, maintained that when you see antifascist protests, “not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way – in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism … their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.” I’m just surprised he didn’t say “untermenschen”. The US government, by contrast, promotes “normal, healthy, ordered living”.

But what hit me even harder was Miller’s attack on “jury nullification”: jurors acquitting people who, he said, were “obviously guilty”. Shutting down this possibility has been an aim of illiberal governments and conservative judges around the world. We saw it in the UK in the prosecution of Trudi Warner and others for holding signs that state an ancient principle in English law: “Jurors have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to their conscience.”

We see it in the astonishing prosecution, being pursued at the moment, of Rajiv Menon KC, who reminded jurors of this right at the trial of the Palestine Action campaigners he was defending. He became, as a result, the first lawyer in English history to be charged with contempt of court for a closing speech. If convicted, he faces up to two years’ imprisonment and will be struck off. Prosecuting lawyers for defending their dissident clients is more or less the definition of authoritarianism.

We also saw it in the assault Keir Starmer launched on jury trials as a whole, greatly curtailing, without any coherent justification, our strongest defence against injustice.

Starmer was a weak man, without a clear vision of his own, who was rolled by any powerful state or corporate lobby. He was no match for a well-funded and highly effective international campaign. A network of groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, funded by corporations and billionaires, has been producing “model legislation”. The groups test these laws in sympathetic jurisdictions. If they are found to work, they then press for their adoption elsewhere. The result is a sustained assault on our rights to protest, to political equality and to a habitable planet.

The globalisation of this attack on our fundamental rights is a key conservative aim. As capital operates everywhere, so should its ability to crush our objections. The long series of vicious anti-protest laws in the UK is an outcome of sustained lobbying by junktanks, the media and other governments. The result is a country that now keeps hundreds of political prisoners, a country in which you can get six months in jail for marching slowly down the street.

These oppressive laws have culminated – so far – in an act of parliament passed in April that enables the police to shut down any protest they deem to have a “cumulative” impact on the community. The only protests that have ever succeeded are those with a cumulative impact. Protest is acceptable as long as it’s useless. Let the people have their say, but only if we can’t hear them.

The new laws have been accompanied by that age-old trick, traditionally associated with fascist regimes, of smearing leftwing dissidents as terrorists. As the rights group Liberty has pointed out, the definition of terrorism here has greatly expanded, to incorporate tactics formerly regarded as civil protest. This is what enabled Starmer’s government to ban Palestine Action.

The judge who referred Menon for contempt, Mr Justice Johnson, was also the first – at the same trial – to use the extraordinary powers quietly inserted by the Conservatives into the Sentencing Act 2020. These enable someone tried for one crime to be sentenced for another. The four Palestine Action protesters were convicted of ordinary crimes. But, without informing the jury, Johnson marked the case as having a “terrorist connection”. He then sentenced them for terrorist offences, which means much more prison time.

Already, his example has been followed by another judge: a different group of pro-Palestine protesters, who sprayed red paint and broke some windows of a branch of Barclays Bank, are about to be sentenced as terrorists, though neither they nor the jurors were told of this possibility during their trial for criminal damage. This means, of course, that they were unable to defend themselves against this far more serious charge.

Nothing is safe from the billionaire assault on humanity. None of our rights, however ancient and familiar, are impregnable. Fight for them now or lose them, perhaps for ever.

False Choice

Even the Fabian Society, for which Rhoda Grant writes:

My Labour colleague Lauren Edwards has announced that she intends to revive the assisted dying bill in parliament this term. I believe that would be a mistake. Several Labour MPs have already warned that reopening the issue now would create unnecessary division, and others who previously supported the bill have made clear they do not back any attempt to force it through using the Parliament Acts.

When I, alongside 16 of the other 19 Scottish Labour MSPs, voted against assisted dying in Holyrood, it was because of our left-wing values, not in spite of them. Too often this debate is lazily framed as compassionate progressives on one side and socially conservative opponents on the other. That caricature bears little resemblance to the debate we had in Scotland. Some of the strongest opposition came from people shaped by the Labour tradition: solidarity, equality, disability rights and the duty to protect vulnerable people from economic and social pressure.

Assisted dying forces us to confront an uncomfortable question: what happens when the state offers death in a society that still struggles to guarantee dignity in life?

The Labour movement was built on the belief that people are not truly free when hemmed in by poverty, insecurity, isolation or structural disadvantage. That belief underpinned the creation of the NHS: a moral declaration that dignity and basic rights should never depend on wealth, status or perceived productivity.

Assisted dying risks undermining that principle.

Supporters often present these laws as empowering choice. But choice does not exist in a vacuum. A decision made by someone with excellent care, secure housing, strong family support and financial stability is not the same as a “choice” made by someone who feels like a burden, unable to access adequate care, fears loneliness or believes their needs are exhausting their family.

That is why so many disability campaigners remain deeply uneasy about assisted dying legislation. In unequal societies, pressure does not always look like coercion. It can be cultural, economic and emotional. The absence of real support can quietly narrow a person’s sense of what choices are available.

During Scotland’s debate, many of us became concerned that assisted dying was being presented as progressive simply because it expanded autonomy in theory. But the left has always understood that freedom means little without protection behind it. In Canada, reports have emerged of disabled and vulnerable people seeking assisted death amid poverty, insecure housing or inadequate support. Even where formal safeguards exist, the broader message can become dangerous: that some lives are too costly, burdensome or lacking in dignity to sustain.

Marie Curie Scotland’s report, Dying in the Margins, shows the reality of terminal illness and poverty. It reminds us that the priority should be ensuring people can live their final days with dignity, care and support, regardless of personal wealth. Those days are precious to individuals and their loved ones. Our task should be to improve them, not to make death easier to access because life has been made harder to endure.

The pandemic offered a warning. Elderly and disabled people were encouraged in some cases to sign ‘do not resuscitate’ declarations amid fears that the NHS could be overwhelmed. That experience should make us cautious about assuming our systems can always provide the careful governance such a profound legal change would require.

I understand that many who support assisted dying are motivated by compassion and a desire for autonomy. Some have the financial security and personal support to make that feel like a genuine choice. But many do not. When we make law, we must make it for the whole of society, not only for the fortunate few.

Many Scottish Labour MSPs concluded that assisted dying sits uneasily beside the founding values of the welfare state. A society committed to equality and collective care should be wary of laws that may, however unintentionally, place pressure on vulnerable people to end their lives. Those of us who want a society of equals should support legislation that promotes life, care and hope rather than death and despair. I urge Labour colleagues in Westminster to follow Scotland’s lead and resist attempts to bring back this bill.

The Root Causes

Here:

The union representing the UK's 35,000 Prison Officers is calling for urgent action to address prison violence. The call came following the publication of the latest Safety in Custody statistics from the Ministry of Justice in England and Wales.

New figures show that an average of 27 assaults on Prison Staff are recorded each day, with 9,833 incidents representing 230% increase since 2010’s 2,977 figures.

While the number of deaths in custody fell by 42 to 359 deaths in custody in the year to June 2026, the number of serious assaults has risen to 3,419 in the past year - an average of 14 serious assaults a day - an increase of 141.8% since 2010 when 1,414 serious assaults were recorded.

All recorded Prisoner-on-prisoner assaults reached 21,245 (58.2 a day), up 3.3% on the year to March from 20,574. This is an 81% increase since 2010, which recorded 11,736 prisoner-on-prisoner assaults. 

POA General Secretary Steve Gillan said:

“The level of violence in prisons across the country is completely unacceptable - it is endemic.

“It is being fuelled by drugs and contraband, the influence of organised crime gangs and a prison system that is overcrowded and understaffed.

“The POA will continue to campaign for urgent action from the Government and the Ministry of Justice to address the root causes of high levels of violence in our prisons.”

Mark Fairhurst, POA National Chair said:

“Prisoner-on-prisoner and prisoner-on-staff assaults are making the UK's jails one of the most hostile working environments in Europe.

“The POA has repeatedly called on the UK Government to take preventative action to protect both prisoners and Prison Officers.

“The introduction of stab-proof body armour, taser trials and PAVA in the youth estate are a result of the POA’s campaigning work. Every time we meet the Secretary of State, Civil Servants and Prison Service officials we raise the issue of prison violence and the need to protect our members. We will step up that campaigning work until we see lasting, positive change.”

As Mark S. Gold M.D. writes:

If you carry a genetic or neurobiological vulnerability to psychosis, using cannabis may increase the likelihood that psychosis will emerge, particularly during adolescence and young adulthood. Cannabis-induced psychosis is not always temporary. Numerous studies have shown that many affected individuals develop schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.

Few investigators have done more to shape contemporary thinking about cannabis and psychosis than Deepak D’Souza, M.D., the Vikram Sodhi ’92 Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine. His work demonstrated that delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the principal psychoactive component of cannabis, can induce transient psychotic symptoms in healthy volunteers and worsen existing symptoms in patients with schizophrenia. For more than two decades, D’Souza’s research, scientific publications, and public statements have challenged assumptions about the psychiatric safety of cannabis.

D’Souza’s trailblazing research helped move the field beyond the simple observation that cannabis use and psychosis are associated. The more important question became whether cannabis could cause psychotic disorders. His studies also found that abstinence reduces relapse risk, whereas continued cannabis use is associated with poorer clinical outcomes and a diminished treatment response.

Today, D’Souza is asking a different question. Amid concerns about increasingly potent commercial cannabis and unprecedented levels of THC exposure, he’s raised the possibility that cannabis may trigger a lifelong psychosis in some individuals. Recently, D’Souza and colleagues published a study comparing patients hospitalized with first-episode psychosis who had documented cannabis exposure with similar patients who had no evidence of cannabis exposure.

The study examined 119 men hospitalized with first-episode psychosis, including 66 with toxicology-confirmed cannabis exposure and 53 without cannabis exposure. Patients in the cannabis-associated group exhibited fewer negative symptoms, such as affective flattening and loss of motivation, while showing comparable levels of hallucinations and delusions. They also displayed more depressive and manic features, denoting a clinical presentation differing from classic deficit-form schizophrenia.

While both groups entered the hospital with similar levels of cognitive impairment, only the cannabis-associated group demonstrated significant cognitive improvement after four weeks of treatment and cannabis abstinence. The investigators also detected distinct EEG patterns that may reflect differences in cortical excitation and inhibition. Together, these findings suggest cannabis-associated psychosis may differ from non-cannabis-associated psychosis in ways that extend beyond clinical symptoms alone.

D’Souza summarized the evolution of his thinking in a recent conversation with me:

“Schizophrenia (SCZ) or, as Bleuler in 1911 appropriately coined, the “group of schizophrenias”, is heterogeneous on a number of levels, including its phenomenology and clinical manifestation, environmental risk factors, micro-scale molecular genetics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and macro-scale alterations in brain structure, function, and connectivity. Several attempts have been made to identify and tease apart SCZ subtypes based on clinical manifestations, genetics, and biomarkers. It is a bit too early to make any definitive conclusions, but our findings raise the fascinating possibility that there may be a cannabis subtype of psychotic disorders.”

D’Souza’s study, however, included only men and followed patients for just four weeks. The long-term trajectory of cannabis-associated psychosis remains unclear. Some cases may evolve into schizophrenia-spectrum or mood disorders, whereas others may not. Whether cannabis-associated psychosis represents a distinct subtype of psychotic illness remains an open question.

No single research finding has yet proven that cannabis-associated psychosis is biologically distinct. However, stellar investigators at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, including Marta Di Forti and Robin Murray, have provided clear evidence linking cannabis exposure to psychotic disorders. Their studies demonstrated that daily use of high-potency cannabis is associated with markedly increased odds of developing psychosis and showed that a substantial proportion of first-episode psychosis cases are attributable to exposure to potent cannabis products.

What is becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss is the possibility that cannabis-associated psychosis represents more than a temporary drug-induced syndrome. It may, in some individuals, constitute a persistent psychotic illness triggered by cannabis exposure. As D’Souza told me:

“Our findings need to be replicated. Furthermore, it is important to collect longer-term follow-up data to understand whether the long-term course and prognosis of this proposed subtype is distinct.”

Earlier debates about cannabis and psychosis regularly revolved around polarized positions. One camp argued that cannabis merely unmasked schizophrenia in genetically vulnerable individuals. Another viewed cannabis-induced psychosis as a transient intoxication-related phenomenon fundamentally distinct from schizophrenia. Increasingly, the evidence suggests neither formulation is entirely adequate. Nevertheless, the convergence of clinical, cognitive, and somatic differences raises the possibility that cannabis exposure may be associated with a recognizable psychosis subtype rather than simply serving as a trigger for conventional schizophrenia.

Several high-quality epidemiologic studies support D’Souza’s concerns and challenge the longstanding belief that cannabis psychosis is usually benign and self-limited. A Danish registry study found cannabis-induced psychosis had one of the highest conversion rates to schizophrenia-spectrum disorders among substance-induced psychoses, with approximately 41 percent of affected individuals later receiving a schizophrenia diagnosis. Meta-analyses have similarly demonstrated substantial progression rates from cannabis-induced psychosis to chronic psychotic illness.

Individuals with substantial cannabis exposure regularly develop psychosis at younger ages than non-users. Some studies have found fewer negative symptoms and better cognitive functioning than in patients with non-cannabis-associated schizophrenia. Reviews by Yücel and colleagues and Løberg and Hugdahl suggest the pathway to psychosis in cannabis-exposed patients may involve less severe neurodevelopmental impairment than typically seen in primary schizophrenia. Cannabis-associated psychosis may not be ordinary schizophrenia.

The strongest epidemiologic support for a novel cannabis-related psychosis pathway comes from the fact that high-potency cannabis is associated with markedly increased odds of psychotic disorder, meta-analyses documenting a dose-response relationship between cannabis exposure and psychosis risk, evidence that abstinence reduces relapse risk, and continued cannabis use is associated with poorer clinical outcomes and diminished treatment response.

What psychiatry currently labels “schizophrenia” may represent a final common clinical pathway reached through multiple genetic and environmental routes. Cannabis could plausibly be one of those routes. If so, the key question becomes whether cannabis-associated psychosis differs meaningfully from schizophrenia occurring without cannabis exposure.

D’Souza’s findings are particularly relevant today, with earlier cannabis initiation, more frequent use, and commercial products containing THC concentrations far higher than those available in the past. Complementing these observations, studies from the London groups have shown that daily use of high-potency cannabis is associated with substantially increased odds of developing psychosis. These findings raise concerns that modern cannabis products are contributing to the increasing incidence of psychotic illness.

The treatment implications are equally important. Existing evidence suggests cannabis-associated psychosis responds to antipsychotic medications as primary psychosis does. However, continued cannabis use substantially increases the risks of relapse, rehospitalization, medication nonadherence, and treatment failure. These findings also underscore the importance of cannabis cessation and treatment of cannabis and other co-occurring substance use disorders.

Cannabis use is consistently associated with an increased risk of psychosis and with exacerbations of psychotic symptoms in both healthy individuals and people with psychotic disorders.

Rather than asking whether cannabis can produce psychosis, we may need to ask what kind of psychosis it produces, in whom, and under what circumstances. Psychiatry must also move beyond the simplistic question of whether cannabis “causes” schizophrenia. The more important questions concern cannabinoid-system mechanisms, individual vulnerability, and timing of exposure. Cannabis may not create an entirely separate disease entity, but growing evidence suggests it can dictate the timing, expression, and long-term course of psychotic illness in vulnerable individuals.

The Drug Report has seen the future, and indeed the present:

For a century, the daily cigarette smoker was the face of American addiction. According to the federal government’s own data, he has just been replaced.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration released the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health on Monday, and buried in its appendix tables is a milestone no federal survey has ever recorded: 21.4 million Americans now use marijuana daily or almost daily. That is more than the 19.9 million who smoke cigarettes daily, and well more than the 17.2 million who drink daily or almost daily.

The agency’s press materials led elsewhere, with encouraging trends among adolescents. The daily-use figures appear nowhere in the 157-page national report. They sit in Section 9 of the detailed tables, where the survey’s own significance testing marks nearly every marijuana measure that matters as a statistically significant increase since 2021.

The Numbers

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The trend lines are moving in opposite directions. Since 2021, daily cigarette smoking has fallen by 7.6 million people and daily drinking by 5.3 million, the continued payoff of decades of public health work. Daily marijuana use rose by 3.7 million over the same four years. Nearly half of everyone who currently uses marijuana (48.8 percent) now uses it daily or almost daily.

America’s Second-Largest Addiction

The survey counted 19.3 million Americans meeting clinical criteria for marijuana use disorder in 2025, roughly one in three past-year users. That places marijuana second only to alcohol (25.7 million) among the nation’s substance use disorders, and nearly five times ahead of opioid use disorder (4.0 million).

The gap at the top is closing. Alcohol addiction has declined by 4 million since 2021; marijuana addiction has grown by 2.7 million. Both shifts are statistically significant. Four years ago the distance between America’s first- and second-largest addictions was 13 million people. It is now 6.4 million.

Among young adults aged 18 to 25, one in seven (14.1 percent of the entire age group) has marijuana use disorder.

The Teen Story Has Two Halves

Adolescent marijuana use fell again: past-year use among 12-to-17-year-olds dropped from 10.9 percent in 2021 to 8.7 percent in 2025, a significant decline that legalization advocates promoted within hours of the release.

The same tables complicate that story in two ways. First, the decline is not marijuana-specific. Teen alcohol use fell at a statistically indistinguishable rate over the same window, down roughly 20 percent, alongside nicotine, tobacco, and prescription-drug misuse. Youth use of virtually everything is falling.

Second, the teens still using marijuana are using it far more intensively. The share of adolescent past-year users consuming daily or almost daily jumped from 9.5 percent in 2023 to 14.7 percent in 2025, with every earlier year in the trend window significantly below 2025. More than one in three current teen users (36.8 percent) used daily or almost daily in the past month. And because heavy use held steady while casual use fell, the raw count of teen daily users, 327,000, is the highest in the five-year window. Half of teens who used marijuana in the past year already meet criteria for marijuana use disorder.

Perception is moving the other way: just 36 percent of adolescents see great risk in smoking marijuana weekly.

Elsewhere in the Survey

Past-year marijuana use reached 61.6 million Americans (21.2 percent), up significantly from 2021 though down from its 2024 peak. Adults 26 and older remain the engine of growth, up 24 percent since 2021, with daily use in that group up 33 percent. Past-month use among pregnant women rose from 5.1 percent to 6.7 percent, a change that did not reach statistical significance but will bear watching. And 10.3 million people reported driving under the influence of marijuana in the past year, approaching the 12.6 million who drove under the influence of alcohol.

The 2025 survey, drawn from interviews with roughly 70,000 Americans, is the fifth consecutive year of comparable data since the survey’s 2020 redesign, making this the first release in which four-to-five-year trends can be tested with confidence across the board. What those tests show is consistent: every major indicator of heavy marijuana use and marijuana addiction is significantly higher than in 2021.

The milestone itself required no test at all. The national report never mentions it; Table 9.38A states it plainly: in 2025, America’s most common daily drug habit is no longer tobacco.