That I Might Have The Right To Wear?

Still waiting to march at Drumcree, those old men are in their seventies and eighties. It is time for a medical intervention. I’m serious. Section them if necessary. It would be for their own good. And whatever happened to the dress code? Or, at the very least, to the bowler hats? Without those, then how can they claim to be British as the Russkiye were Russian, and not merely as the Rossiyane were?

We really do seem to moving towards that way of thinking. But with four of England’s seven goals against Croatia having been scored by Jude Bellingham, Bukayo Saka (twice) and Morgan Rogers, then the preposterous Suella Braverman would seem to have had her answer. And stock up on RNLI Christmas cards to send to anyone remanded from Gosport, as well as to Daniel Thomas, A7594DQ, HMP Winchester, Romsey Road, Winchester, SO22 5DF.

Home Stations

Paul Knaggs writes:

The clearest statement anyone has made about the RAF Fairford affair was not made in words. It was made by a dozen B-1B Lancers climbing out of Gloucestershire on Sunday and pointing west. The Pentagon confirmed it afterwards: “While operational security precluded us from confirming the movement of our assets and forces in real-time, we can acknowledge now that all US bombers that were deployed to RAF Fairford have redeployed to their home stations in the United States.”

The move came roughly a week after the arrests near the base, and was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, which also reported that American intelligence officials had held information about an Iran-linked plot to target bombers and personnel at Fairford. That second claim remains an intelligence report attributed to unnamed officials. It is not an established fact, and it has not been tested in any court.

Here is what is established. In the early hours of 27 September, Gloucestershire Constabulary arrested five men at Whelford, a village beside the base, under the Explosives Act 1875 and the Terrorism Act 2006. They were aged between 23 and 25, all British, all from London. Counter Terrorism Policing took over the investigation and further arrested them on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act. The next day, Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor announced that all five had been bailed. A cordon of 400 metres had gone up and around 85 households had been evacuated.

Then the story began to come apart. Taylor later confirmed that no improvised explosive devices were found in the three vans, though a quantity of petrol was recovered. The vehicles carried the livery of a legitimate fuel transit company, which denied owning them. The Times reported that one of the five had himself telephoned 999 about an hour before a local farmer raised the alarm. Two military sources told the local outlet Wiltshire 999s that the men were thieves siphoning fuel, with barrels and equipment found in the vans near a diesel supply. That account has never been confirmed by police, and other sources have dismissed it.

A sixth man, a 25-year-old dual UK-Iranian national, was arrested in Westminster on Thursday and released on bail on Saturday. Vicki Evans, the senior national co-ordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing, called the investigation hugely complex and said her teams were looking at all possible angles, including possible foreign state involvement. Six arrests. Six releases. No charges.

The RAF Fairford Plot Claims Ran Ahead of the Evidence

Into that vacuum walked the people with something to gain. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said there were strong indications that Iran played a part. The Iranian embassy in London rejected what it called unfounded and malicious speculation, and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi accused Burnham of blaming Tehran without cause. Donald Trump went further and faster. “We know everything about them,” the president said of men who have not been charged with anything. “We would not have released them.” He told reporters the suspects had been under view for a long time and were looking to do big damage. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it the work of a foreign actor and said a great many people were disturbed by the bail decision.

On Thursday, Benjamin Netanyahu claimed Israel had passed Britain intelligence about an Iranian-sponsored attack. He made that claim public shortly before Britain announced a ban on trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Readers can draw their own conclusions about the timing. We offer it as a fact about when a claim was made, not as evidence of what it contained. So there are three stories on the table, and every one of them suits somebody. A foiled Iranian operation vindicates the war party in Washington. A fuel theft that triggered a national security panic humiliates the men who shouted first and checked afterwards. A third possibility, popular online, of an operation that did not go as designed, remains speculation without evidence and should be treated as such until that changes. Washington’s reaction is identical under all three versions. The bombers left either way.

The Terms of the Bargain 

RAF Fairford became a forward operating base for American strikes because the previous prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, granted the United States permission to use British bases for what were described as defensive operations against Tehran. In July, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards warned that any base used to launch attacks on their country would be a legitimate target. That was the bargain, stated in the open: Britain would supply the runway and inherit the enemies that came with it. The village of Whelford was not asked. Nor, when the decision to leave was taken, was Britain. The BBC has been told the withdrawal was a military rather than a political decision, settled at operational level in Washington and then communicated to its British counterparts. The Ministry of Defence has said nothing at all.

Defence Secretary Wes Streeting justified the silence by arguing that the more is said about the case, the more insight is handed to those who would do us harm. There is a real principle buried in that, and contempt of court rules genuinely do constrain what can be published about a live investigation. But the principle has been applied with remarkable selectivity. It did not stop the Prime Minister naming a foreign state. It did not stop an American president announcing that he knew everything about six men who have been charged with nothing. The gag operates on the public, and on nobody else.

This is what a client relationship looks like once the paint comes off. We accepted the target. We accepted the threat that came with it. We were not trusted with the reason it was withdrawn, and we are still not trusted with the truth about what happened in a Gloucestershire lane at a quarter to one in the morning. Five men in three white vans, not one of them charged with anything, achieved what forty years of protest outside the wire never managed. The bombers went home.

To Safeguard Our Humanity

As only the Pope could, denouncing AI art by tweeting in Latin:

Hac intellegentiae artificialis aetate, urgens fit humanam artem ab iis distinguere, quae machinis efficiuntur. Ars enim et ea, quae machina ex innumeris alienis imaginibus statisticae ope computationis generare potest, ontologice, prius etiam quam aesthetice, inter se differunt. Algorithmis humani deest favilla. Quapropter Ecclesia cum artificibus et humani cultus institutis foedus renovare cupit: foedus scilicet ad humanum custodiendum.

Oh, go on then:

In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.

Now, if you need to, then look up this one:

There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilization. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains.

The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigor. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustine, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which, a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. 

Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.

Jacob Rees-Mogg would get that reference. Unfortunately, though, he is as poorly instructed a cradle Catholic, and would have been so even if he had attended a Catholic school, as JD Vance is a poorly instructed convert, only too obviously rushed through as a high-profile scalp with a potential appeal to a certain demographic. Time was when the same would have been arranged for Tucker Carlson, but that has become far less likely of late. To anyone who knew the Catholic theology of these things (for example, the Pope), Carlson's view of Hitler and Rees-Mogg's view of Hiroshima are as bad as each other, and that is very, very, very, very bad. Vance, meanwhile, ultimately defers to Peter Thiel, who was himself, as much as anything else, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein. That is perhaps the saddest thing of all about Tom Watson's recruitment by Palantir.

No Noose Is Good News

It has twice failed to kill Christa Pike while doing her every damage short of death, but pentobarbital is used for assisted suicide in the Netherlands, Switzerland, California, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington state, none of which still imposes the death penalty. The legalisation of assisted suicide would give to a High Court judge in the Family Division such power over life and death as no judge in this country had enjoyed since the abolition of capital punishment, the restoration of which would effectively decriminalise murder.

Even if the legislation provided for it, then no judge could conceivably accept a majority verdict in a capital trial. In the Britain of this century, there would always be at least one of 12 randomly assembled members of the general public who would vote to acquit anyone rather than risk an execution. Those who wanted to bring back what they saw as higher qualifications for jurors would, if anything, increase that number. If there were never any realistic possibility of a conviction for murder, then no one would ever be charged with it. Instead, ways would be found of convicting murderers of manslaughter, which already gives rise to resentment. So convicted, they would almost certainly be released earlier than if their records were of intentional homicide. Britain would become a very much more dangerous place.

Who among the people who became judges in today’s Britain would ever sentence anyone to death? Who among the people who became prosecutors in today’s Britain would ever seek that sentence, or chance it by bringing a charge of murder? Elect them, you say? Elected Members of Parliament rejected capital punishment by 403 votes to 159 the last time that the House of Commons divided on it. Under a Conservative Government. 32 years ago.

The remaining proponents of the death penalty would support it only for certain classes of murder. Yet that whole concept was used in 1969 as the definitive argument for making permanent its 1965 suspension. The alternative, it was argued, would have been a reversion to the 1957 Homicide Act, with its intolerable obscenity of, yes, different classes of murder, some of which were capital offences while others were not. Thus was it declared better, or at least not as bad, to murder one person rather than another. Between 1957 and 1965, there were two executions per year, a kind of symbolic blood sacrifice return to which would have been grotesque.

That was the knockdown argument for getting rid of the whole thing forever, and it still is. That, and the suggestion from Willie Ross, Harold Wilson’s only ever Secretary of State for Scotland, that if execution were to be retained, then it ought to be carried out on television. That unanswerable line shocked a number of waverers into the Aye Lobby. A staunch opponent both of devolution and of EEC membership, Ross was no liberal, having tried to ban ITV from carrying advertisements on Sundays, Christmas Day and Good Friday.

Nor was the Home Secretary in 1969 Roy Jenkins, but Jim Callaghan, who had previously been Parliamentary Adviser to the Police Federation. Callaghan pointed out that there had been no increase in the murder rate since the suspension. If the figures for violent crime are much higher today, then that is because all sorts of extreme violence is no longer tolerated, or at least not as much as it was. In the days that half or more of the remaining supporters of the death penalty were coming of age, then those acts might officially have been illegal, although even that was not always the case, but they were treated in most or all ways as if they were perfectly within the law.

People were formed by the brutality of daily school violence (including corporal punishment, which was so ubiquitous that it was obviously a complete failure in its own terms), of socially respectable domestic violence, of regular fights at work, of routine fights of what would now be a very uncommon ferocity in and around pubs, of National Service, and so on, all against the ever-present societal memory of the War and of mass pre-War deaths from poverty-related illnesses or from the lack of workers’ protection. Life was just cheaper.

As it still is in the land of guns in homes, of guns sold in supermarkets, of armed Police, and of popular humour about a level of casual violence in schools that would not be tolerated in prisons in Britain. Huge numbers of Americans have been in their country’s ultra-violent penal system, or in the military that implemented its highly interventionist foreign policy, or both. For all its good points, America is a violent place, and its retention of the death penalty is of a piece with that.

“Centrist” opponents of the death penalty nevertheless have their wars, their self-indulgent refusal to enforce the drug laws, their Police brutality and other street violence, their numerous life-shortening consequences of economic inequality, their abortions, at least putatively their euthanasia, and so on. They must answer for themselves on those points, as must opponents of those things who would support capital punishment, although in my 30-year experience in the pro-life movement that oft-alleged position is practically unheard of. We have no case to answer to either of those charges. Axel Rudakubana had in any case pleaded guilty to something that he had done when he was 17, so he would never have been executed, but the argument that that would have been cheaper was and is Kit Malthouse’s argument for assisted suicide.

Enoch Powell always did oppose the death penalty, and in a quarter-century of dealing with American paleoconservatives, I have found that they were at least as likely to oppose it as to support it. Traditional conservatives may be, with Muslims, the people most likely to think that there were an argument in favour of the principle, but those would also be two of the three groups most likely to be on the receiving end if it were ever brought back. The Old Right may talk about safeguards of this, that or the other variety, but they know that if those had been possible, then there would never have been abolition. They themselves would not have been executed in those days, but that just made them privileged, and they are more and more conscious of being from the other side of the tracks these days. Who among them would not be branded a “misfit” or a “loner” by Keir Starmer?

The third category of likely victims of restored capital punishment would be the Left, a section of which, on this as on the nuclear weapons to which Powell was also implacably opposed, used to be open to the charge of hypocrisy, since it did not seem to mind either of them in countries of which it approved. Still, that was only ever a section of the Left, even if it was quite a large section at one time, and on both points it would be vanishingly small now. There are some Muslims against whom the claim could be made, but the screaming hypocrites about the death penalty are still the liberal supporters of military interventionism, and now also of assisted suicide.

Jury Room?

Although the Government has shelved its plan to abolish most jury trials, it still intends to double the sentencing power of magistrates to two years, to introduce judge-only trials in “lengthy and technical” fraud cases, and to abolish the right to elect trial by jury in either-way cases, thereby greatly restricting access to legal aid. It is not clear whether or not the Government still intended to abolish the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court. Every one of those measures must be resisted without compromise.

I Think I Know The Answer

Peter Hitchens writes:

One day, when even the stupidest people grasp that marijuana is a terrifying, deeply dangerous drug, some may remember that I was one of the tiny few who warned against the unhinged, greedy plan to legalise it. This plan can't be far from success, with all its misery of wrecked families, destroyed minds and mad violence.

And one of the bodies which won't be able to escape blame for this avoidable tragedy is the BBC. Of course, nobody in the BBC is a marijuana user. The organisation is wholly drug-free. So the only explanation for its bias on the issue must be stupidity.

Many times on this page I have documented programmes in which the agenda of the drug legalisers has been advanced in discussion programmes and dramas. But last week the BBC came up with something new, which looks suspiciously like censorship.

Many people are now, far too late, waking up to the link between marijuana use and incurable mental illness. An observant few have begun to grasp the even more frightening instances of crazy violence by mentally ill people whose minds have been overthrown by dope.

I owe what follows to an amazing website called News Sniffer, which tracks changes in stories published on the web and later amended. It found that a BBC website report on a crazy killer began by prominently mentioning the killer's use of marijuana – and then dropped it. The mad killer is called Alexander Lewis-Ranwell. He slew twins Dick and Roger Carter, 84, and Anthony Payne, 80, in Exeter in 2019.

All three blameless men died of severe head injuries inflicted by an insane drug abuser who had (as so often) been allowed by the authorities to roam until he committed a serious crime. He has now been classified as insane and 'detained'. But there will be more like him as marijuana use spreads.

The corporation took three days to come up with this excuse for removing the word 'cannabis' from its report: 'This article was produced during an ongoing inquest… and updated to reflect new information. Reference to cannabis was added as part of the custody officer's evidence but, as Lewis-Ranwell's mother's testimony became the focus, we updated our report to show this while keeping references about "drug-induced psychosis".' It would answer no further questions or I would have asked why it could not have used the word 'cannabis' instead of 'drug' in the new version. I think I know the answer.

There cannot be a “free” market in general, yet not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction. Contrived in the past, that baleful situation is being contrived again today.

We need a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of two years for a first offence, three years for a second offence, four years for a third offence, and so on. No prison sentence should include the possibility of release in less than 12 months; in that case, then your crime was not bad enough to warrant imprisonment, which the possession of drugs is. We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one’s premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. And we need Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought to be taught in schools.

The Reality of Manchesterism

His purported Manchester miracle made Andy Burnham Prime Minister. But adherence to Manchester City Council’s own guidance would have seen Abu Dhabi’s Manchester Life build 294 affordable housing units, 20 per cent of the total, in its redevelopment of East Manchester. It built none. Nought. Zero. And Steve Robson writes:

Andy Burnham’s flagship ‘Number 10 North’ is set to be built on land where Manchester City’s owners had a controversial “sweetheart” property deal, The i Paper can reveal. The findings are likely to put more scrutiny on Burnham’s ties to the club’s Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) owners following the football cheating scandal fall-out.

Burnham was forced to backtrack last week over accusations of political interference in the independent investigation process. He originally said he would be “concerned” if ADUG stopped investing in the UK after City were found guilty of more than 100 charges of financial manipulation from 2009 to 2018, but later said nobody is “above the rules”. City deny all charges and have appealed.

However with reports of United Arab Emirates diplomats exerting pressure over what happens to City, the row has put a renewed spotlight on the extent of their influence in Britain. And nowhere is the web of connections between Abu Dhabi and political leaders more tangled than Manchester, where Burnham was mayor for almost a decade between 2017 and 2026.

City owners’ ‘first refusal’ on prime plots

ADUG, the company set up Sheikh Mansour to buy the football club in 2008, has poured hundreds of millions of pounds into the wider city. This includes the £300m expansion of City’s stadium and its training complex, the £450m Co-Op Live arena and a £60m graphene research facility for the University of Manchester.

More controversial is the joint property venture the group set up with Manchester Council in 2014. Thousands of high-end flats have been built in the city centre under the ‘Manchester Life’ scheme. But rival developers have long complained about what they believe was preferential treatment for the scheme from Manchester council, because of its connections to City’s owners.

ADUG was given “first refusal” on buying development sites across a huge swathe of land in a ‘sweetheart’ deal with the council, documents first reported by The Mill and shared with The i Paper show. The deal covered around two square miles of land between Etihad stadium and Manchester city centre for ten years between 2015 and 2025. But the The i Paper can reveal this includes the former Central Retail Park which has now been earmarked as the long-term home of ‘Number 10 North’.

‘Most controversial site in Manchester’

One property source said they were amazed at the decision to pick what they described as ‘the most controversial site in Manchester’ for Burnham’s flagship project. The Prime Minister has promised to shift power out of Whitehall and towards local leaders in a bid to boost economic development.

The 10.5-acre site was first purchased by Manchester council in 2017 for £42.35m. It is still believed to be the most expensive land purchase in the city’s history. Council leaders said at the time the site was perfect for developing into flats by Manchester Life due to its prime location in the city’s burgeoning Ancoats neighbourhood. ADUG and the council both invested £750,000 each towards the plan, documents shared with The i Paper show, but it never materialised.

However, under the terms of the ‘sweetheart’ development deal with City’s owners, the council was unable to offer the land to any other potential partners – leaving the site undeveloped for around a decade. One property developer in the Northwest of England told the Sunday Times: “This is a sweetheart deal between Abu Dhabi and Manchester City Council.”

A spokesperson for the Weiss Group, a rival developer which has complained about a number of allegedly ‘preferential’ property deals in Manchester, said: “This is a familiar pattern of behaviour. Manchester City Council keeps striking confidential deals with preferred partners that the public only finds out about years later. That is the reality of Manchesterism and it isn’t serving Manchester residents well.”

The developer has also obtained documents via Freedom of Information requests which they say shows the Central Retail Park site purchase by the council in 2017 was “unlawful”. Having assessed the original deal, Christopher Knight KC, a public law barrister instructed by Weiss Group, said this was because of the lack of a sufficient valuation report and the fact councillors weren’t told of any alternative offers.

A review carried out last year by external auditors found “weaknesses” in its joint venture deals – including Manchester Life – particularly around “overage”, extra payments which should have been made to the council when selling its land.

The council’s named contact on the 2015 contract with ADUG was Sir Howard Bernstein, the then chief executive./ Sir Howard, who died in 2024, became a ‘strategic advisor’ at City Football Group shortly after leaving the council in 2017.

The council is now reviewing the terms of its lease with ADUG for the Etihad stadium with a source telling the Local Democracy Reporting Service the relationship between the town hall and club “has changed”.

Site vacant for 10 years

The saga finally began ending under the leadership of Bev Craig, who served as Labour’s council leader from 2021 until replacing Burnham as Mayor of Greater Manchester in August this year. The council agreed a deal in 2024 to sell off half the retail park site to the government which plans to use it for a huge new ‘digital campus’ for almost 9,000 civil servants.

But The i Paper understands even at this point, ADUG were entitled to be consulted and give ‘sign off’ due to the continuing ‘sweetheart’ deal. It was only last year that the deal expired entirely and ADUG’s preferential interest in the land came to an end.

Following his rapid ascent to Prime Minister this summer, Burnham’s team have been looking for a long-term site for Number 10 North. Labour’s deputy Leader Lucy Powell confirmed the Ancoats site had been chosen in July. ADUG has been contacted for comment. A Manchester City Council spokesperson said: “The acquisition of the former Central Retail Park site in 2018 has ensured that the site can complement the wider regeneration of the area.”

On the claims about the purchase being unlawful, they added: “We disagree with the opinion presented about the acquisition. The decision to acquire the site has not been formally challenged and the price reflects the value of a large retail site and key city centre regeneration opportunity. The cost to the Council was agreed on the basis that it would be recovered through the long-term development of the site.”

A No 10 spokesperson said it is “essential” the independent investigation into City “is allowed to run its course and the outcome respected. Wherever wrongdoing is established, those responsible should face the appropriate consequences.”