Skripal and Novichok: What Didn't Happen

Even a public meeting in Salisbury last night was almost entirely sceptical of the official story.

A-Leaping Like A Lemming

Labour peerages for having been Keir Starmer's Director of Communications, the Labour Party's Chief of Staff - Operations, Chief of Staff to Rachel Reeves, an adviser to Jeremy Hunt, Leader of Newcastle Council until your local party deselected you, Leader of Southwark Council when it sold an estate worth £150 million for only £50 million and then spent a further £51.4 million clearing the site for the new owner, the Labour candidate who kept Iain Duncan Smith in Parliament and Faiza Shaheen out, and the mother of the Labour candidate against Jeremy Corbyn. And those are among the more distinguished. 14 per cent after another two and half years? Dream on.

Shrink Wrap

Gross Domestic Product fell by 0.1 per cent in the three months to October 2025, and by 0.2 per cent in the three months to August 2025.

I cannot imagine who had been expecting growth of 0.1 per cent.

Services showed no growth, production was down 0.5 per cent, construction was down 0.3 per cent, and no one is remotely surprised.

Footing?

Al Carns was still a serving Royal Marines Commando and thus prohibited from joining any political party when the last General Election was called, yet he came out of it a Labour MP with a majority of 11,537. Not bad for a former adviser to Michael Fallon, Gavin Williamson and Penny Mordaunt. This is plain and simple entryism, and not by a Trotskyist groupuscule in the corner of a backstreet pub.

But to prepare for a war such as these people desired, it would take this country 50 years to reindustrialise. Yet who deindustrialised it? Moreover, on 1 October 2025, the entire British Armed Forces stood at 182,060 souls. Again, whose fault is that? One or more of the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, and the right wing of the Labour Party have been in power forever, and the last Conservatives to have been so are taking over Reform UK, if they have not already done so.

De facto American withdrawal means that NATO has effectively ceased to exist, but even the SNP wants war with Russia, and even the Greens and Plaid Cymru are not against it. Yet the country that has taken nearly four years to capture 20 per cent of Ukraine is not going to be parking its tanks on anyone's Atlantic coast anytime soon even it wanted to, and that is not an aspiration that Russia has ever expressed.

Ignore anyone who advocated a military intervention unless you could imagine that person as an 18-year-old in battle. The call for war always comes primarily from the liberal bourgeoisie. That is the class least likely to join the Armed Forces voluntarily, or to see combat even in periods of conscription. Operationally, that is of course just as well. Yet if there is not a strong enough case for conscription, then there is not a strong enough case for war. Unless a country needed to mobilise its entire healthy and able-bodied male population of fighting age, then it is not under sufficient threat to justify going to war at all.

"Can The Cushite Change His Skin?"

The sanctioning of four commanders of the Rapid Support Forces is welcome as far it goes. Now stop arming the United Arab Emirates. And Saudi Arabia, which arms the other side among other unsavoury characters, by no means all of them three thousand miles from Britain.

While centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences, they do sometimes need to take opposite sides, in the manner of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, to maintain the deception.

British centrists have long supported the Saudi Arabia that supported them handsomely, while the British populist Right is so closely tied to the UAE that it largely resides in Dubai, from which it tweets its hostility to immigration and to Islam. But Britain always arms them both. Such are both main parties in the House of Commons.

Here Is The Harsh Truth

Like Peter Hitchens, I have never understood why people thought that Belgium, Switzerland or Canada was either boring or superfluous, but Belgium no longer has its own free-floating, fiat currency, so this is the risk that it runs:

What you do to others will in the end be done to you. It is true of all life and very true of world affairs. The creditor becomes the debtor. The invader is invaded, the empire falls and its mighty capital echoes to the tread of the troops of a new ruler.

Britain by being an island and by sheltering behind the US, has managed to avoid some of these fates – so far. But strong, cold, hard winds are about to blow across the world we once knew. And I gape in amazement at Sir Keir Starmer’s enthusiasm for stealing Russian money to keep the Ukraine war going a little longer. There is so much wrong with it.

Why, in any case, do the nations of Europe want to buy a used war from Donald Trump? Trump has lost interest in fighting in Ukraine, at least partly because he cannot win, and may actually lose. America once wanted this war. Now, with a new leadership and after years of failure, it no longer does.

Russia, though far from being a superpower, has turned out to care about Ukraine more than Washington thought it did, and to be better at fighting than they expected it to be. As with Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the US will always quit when it decides it is wasting its time and money on any foreign intervention.

Yet the Starmer government, we are assured through leaks, is ready to hand over £8billion of Russian assets frozen in Britain to support Ukraine. Sir Keir seeks to stitch together a deal with the European Union and other countries that could ‘release’ as much as £100billion for Ukraine’s war effort.

For ‘release’ read ‘steal’. This money does not belong to the countries where it was placed by Russia for safekeeping, under the normal rules of law and civilisation. We may claim a ‘moral’ justification for this action, but there is no certainty that the courts will not rule it unlawful. They could even, many years hence, force the countries involved to pay it back.

This would devastate Belgium, where most of the cash is held, and which would almost go bankrupt if compelled to make good on the money. The Euro would suffer greatly as a currency if things went wrong. And behind all this also lies the danger that other countries, especially China, will see and take note – and one day do the same to us at a time when it will hurt greatly.

Challenged, they will smile and say sweetly that they are only following our example. This is how what remains of international law can easily rot away if we choose to let it. And for what?

Advocates of the raid say the money would cover more than two-thirds of Ukraine’s cash needs over the next two years. They cannot seem to make up their minds about what it would be used for. Some think it should be spent to carry on the war. Others say it should be used to rebuild Ukraine’s demolished cities, factories and power grid if a peace deal is agreed.

But what would be the point of that? Even if Russian claims of major advances in the key city of Pokrovsk are false or exaggerated (and they may be), Ukraine’s basic military problems are manpower and weapons. Its casualty figures are secret but appallingly high. Desertion is a major problem, also kept secret. Recruitment is faltering as men of military age hide from press gangs.

Ukraine’s Army, put simply, will carry on shrinking however much money the country has. And the West’s capacity to make the sort of weapons Ukraine needs is still poor. Money will not save it. And how much will just go astray, never to be seen again?

War means chaos, and war mixed with chaos is the ideal condition for corruption, as Ukraine already knows. After Britain and the US invaded Iraq, the distinguished foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn reported that US authorities were investigating senior military officers - he did not specify from which side - over the misuse of up to $125billion (£94billion) in reconstruction efforts.

A lot of this crisis is caused by emotion. The major European countries are embarrassed that they have so little power and can be treated with contempt by Donald Trump. They shrink from admitting there is in fact nothing they can do to change the course of the war – apart from escalating it into a dangerous and possibly nuclear conflict.

They rage a lot against Russia but very few of them could explain how Europe will benefit from them buying this war from Uncle Sam and trying to keep it going. Why can’t they grasp that the Americans have dumped it by the roadside because its big end has gone? The entire purpose of the war, the defeat and removal of Vladimir Putin, has failed. President Trump didn’t even agree with that aim, and he won’t help anyone else pursue it.

Similar folly can be seen in the reaction to the White House’s mischievous new ‘National Security Strategy’, published last week. This peculiar squib seems to have been designed to annoy idealistic Left-wing warmongers, a type now common in the capitals of the EU.

Sandwiched between slices of tripe about the brilliance of Mr Trump, it states some ancient truths about foreign policy – especially these words: ‘The affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests’.

The document asserts that there is nothing inconsistent or hypocritical in refusing to impose ‘democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories’. Righteous voices cry out in wrath at this. But it is, quite simply, true. The US doesn’t actually care about repression in Turkey or Saudi Arabia or China. It invades countries illegally when it feels like it.

Its position is remarkably similar to the policy which, for much of the Victorian age, kept Britain free, prosperous and at peace. Lord Derby, Britain’s then foreign secretary, told the House of Lords in July 1866: ‘It is the duty of the Government of this country, placed as it is with regard to geographical position, to keep itself upon terms of goodwill with all surrounding nations, but not to entangle itself with any single or monopolising alliance with any one of them; above all to endeavour not to interfere needlessly and vexatiously with the internal affairs of any foreign country.’

It was only when we began moralising on the world stage in the years before 1914 that we blundered into the stupid war which swiftly impoverished us, created some of the most beautiful and extensive war cemeteries and memorials ever seen in the history of the planet and reduced our once-unmatched power to a memory in a few decades.

Here is the harsh truth. Ukraine is losing the war into which it was manoeuvred and shoved by others - both from the West and in Moscow - for their own cynical ends. One of those others has lost interest. The other will fight on indefinitely and mercilessly if the conflict goes on.

Much of it is in ruins. Multitudes of its best people have gone for ever, killed in battle or fled abroad. Most of us could not bear to see the legions of maimed and disfigured people which grow daily amid the wreckage.

Yet we lightly support dangerous, tricky, actions which will extend this hell for long years to come. Have we utterly taken leave of our senses?

Scott Free?

With Reform UK projected to gain Blackpool South, Zia Yusuf has had to warn Scott Benton that he would never be permitted to become a Reform parliamentary candidate. Oddly enough, though, his membership application would not simply be rejected.

But Benton has other options. Precisely one sitting Conservative MP has joined Reform; twice as many MPs have left it. In the last Parliament, however, three Conservative MPs joined the Labour Party, at least two of them firmly on the right wing of their original party.

One of those is now a Government Whip, while the other had three years earlier been suspended from Parliament for a day because she had sought to influence the judges in the sentencing appeal of her constituency predecessor, who was then her husband, following his conviction for sexual assault. Compared to that, Benton is an angel.

Who Are They Kidding?

The questioner asked why it mattered that "apparently" one in three children in Glasgow did not speak English as a first language. Fiona Bruce changed that to the child's having "English as a second language". Then the caption was this.

"1 in 3", not "one in three". "Kids", not "children". "Don't" where it should have been "doesn't", although "does not" would have been better. That one child in three must have written this.

Mutated Virus

So Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth can seize "the largest tanker ever seized", but they have to blow fishing boats and their crews to smithereens? Say what you think of that on your social media, and then apply to visit the United States, not with any view to going there, but just to make someone have to read it. Anyone who did wish the place harm should be recruiting early teenagers in the Visa Waiver Program country of Australia, who on their sixteenth birthdays will be able to Waltz like Matilda past Uncle Sam's border guards having left no trace.

Not so Derbyshire County Councillor Stephen Reed, who drew the tumultuous applause of his Reform UK colleagues when he denounced immigration in his Australian accent. Reform was already facing the fury of its own supporters because one of its candidates for Portsmouth City Council was Addy Mo Asaduzzaman, a Bangladeshi who is exercising his rights as a Commonwealth citizen. I had wondered how they would react when a Reform candidate was an Anglo-Australian or a white South African. Over to them. Meanwhile, Advance UK is dependent on Elon Musk, none of whose three nationalities is British.

A certain Britain showed itself at the Unite the Kingdom rally, and will attend Stephen Yaxley-Lennon's carol concert. With the flu running rampant, then nothing would suit that Britain better than another lockdown. I am fully vaccinated, I adhered strictly to the previous lockdowns, and I would adhere strictly to another one. But a lot of people are not, a lot of people did not, and between the unpopularity of this Government and the memory of the Downing Street parties, an awful lot of people would not. They would be ripe for recruitment.

If their violent reactions made them subject to juryless trials, or to Magistrates' Courts from which they had no automatic right of appeal, then their supporters would explode. Town centres and housing estates would burn. Yet on any given day, between 10 and 20 per cent of Crown Courts are sitting idle. On its own, opening them up may not fix the backlog. But it would be a good start. Whereas abolishing almost all juries would make no difference, because they are not the problem.

Of The Willing?

Oh, for pity's sake, Mark Rutte, will your generation never get over having missed the Second World War? The country that has taken nearly four years to capture 20 per cent of Ukraine is not going to be parking its tanks on anyone's Atlantic coast anytime soon even it wanted to, and that is not an aspiration that Russia has ever expressed by any means. Yet even the British Government can no longer pretend that the Parachute Regiment might not already be in Ukraine.

Ignore anyone who advocated a military intervention unless you could imagine that person as an 18-year-old in battle. Can you imagine Rutte as an 18-year-old in battle? Or Keir Starmer? Or Friedrich Merz? Or Emmanuel Macron? The call for war always comes primarily from their liberal bourgeoisie. That is the class least likely to join the Armed Forces voluntarily, or to see combat even in periods of conscription. 

Operationally, that is of course just as well. Yet if there is not a strong enough case for conscription, then there is not a strong enough case for war. Unless a country needed to mobilise its entire healthy and able-bodied male population of fighting age, then it is not under sufficient threat to justify going to war at all. But arms companies are generous donors to politicians, and willing employers of them and of the military and civil service top brass in a retirement in which they would have been very comfortable but which they were too greedy to enjoy.

Like A Shadow, Or Like A Faithful Wife

Bonnie Blue, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has endorsed Reform UK. Our thoughts are with Nigel Farage as he explains to Ann Widdecombe who she is. And with Keir Starmer, who might reasonably have hoped to have raised her to the peerage as Baroness Blue of Bali.

Since there cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling, then there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. But unlike the Conservative Party, which merely thinks that it is and acts as if it were, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are constitutionally committed to the “free” market. Yet 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, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today, both by means of drugs, and specifically among young males by means of pornography. In Ukraine, at the same time as they tore down statues of Alexander Pushkin, and renamed streets that had been named after him, they legalised pornography to help pay for the war. Even before then, some people had already been taking payment to strip on camera via a “charity project” called Teronlyfans, to fund the Armed Forces.

Pornography had been legally prohibited and practically unknown in the Soviet Union. But post-Soviet Russia was flooded with it, to placate the young male population during the larceny of their country by means of the economic “shock therapy” that created today’s oligarchs. The rest is history. That tactic was not new. “Sex work” of various kinds has always been encouraged when the young men have needed to be stupefied, and it still is. The corporate capitalist pornogrification of our own society is no accident. Which side is Reform on?

Wiping Away The Years

If David Lammy wants to wipe childhood criminal records, then someone in his Department must already have pressed the wrong button and done it. Nothing could be more New Labour than that.

Nor than the combination of this level of bleeding-heartedness (what, murder when you were 17?) with the abolition of almost all trial by jury and of the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court, accompanied by digital ID and by facial recognition.

Also firmly in the tradition of the only previous Labour Government in the lifetimes of the majority of the population is increasing the cap on bus fares by 50 per cent and then expecting to be thanked for having "frozen" it when you graciously declined to put it up again. And the beautiful symmetry of this front page. It feels like my twenties again.

Noble Truths

How fabulously on-brand of the Liberal Democrats that 40 per cent of their new life peers should be newly removed hereditary peers. Reform UK should publish the list of the people whom it would have ennobled, and ask what would have been unacceptable about any of them.

Especially since, with Ben Bradley, it has now signed up 22 former Conservative MPs, who no longer even bother to claim that their old party had left them. Rather, their new party has joined them. Bradley was also the Leader of Nottinghamshire County Council until last year. How DOGE was he then? Yet Bradley will still be only 39 in the spring of 2029. And Reform is projected to win Mansfield. Of course.

As for the House of Lords, it has repeatedly rejected even very watered down versions of policies that were in the governing party's manifesto, but woe betide it if it so much as held up a Private Member's Bill that gave effect to a principle that had never been put to the electorate.

That watering down moved Zarah Sultana to vote with Reform in the House of Commons, and this time not to save the Winter Fuel Payment or to lift the two-child benefit cap. In voting to keep every Lords wrecking amendment to the Employment Rights Bill, even on strike ballot thresholds and on trade unions' political funds, Sultana was presumably obeying the "democratic whip" that had been imposed by the Central Executive Committee of Your Party. And was she doing so while drawing only "a worker's wage"? Or have I missed something?

It has been made a commonplace that the seven Labour MPs who lost the whip for having voted to lift the two-child benefit cap that was now going to be lifted anyway had "voted against the Budget". That is a lie. They had voted for an amendment to the Humble Address after the King's Speech, and when that amendment had been defeated, then they had voted for that Address. Withdrawal of the whip used to be the ultimate sanction. But it happens all the time now, in the authoritarian spirit of the Government's treatment of the country at large.

Slick

If the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to a dissident in Saudi Arabia or in North Korea, then would that person have made it to Oslo, even if too late for the ceremony? Yet María Corina Machado has just arrived there. What a fearsome despot Nicolás Maduro clearly is. And did Machado sail into the harbour on the Venezuelan oil tanker that the Americans had hijacked? Or will that be conveying Juan Guaidó to Miami now that he was surplus to requirements at home?

It seems that Britain is to resume arming the Argentina of Machado's ally, Javier Milei. Until the eve of the invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982, Margaret Thatcher had been about to sell the ships that then had to be deployed. At a bargain basement price. To Argentina. But during the Falklands War, Argentina was armed by the Israel that Machado has invited to invade Venezuela in her interests and, once she had her hands on the oil, in its own. Being otherwise engaged, Benjamin Netanyahu is not known to have agreed. Under Milei, though, Argentina is very much in on this. By arming Argentina, so will we be. Well, so will our lords and masters be, anyway. I cannot yet see the specific role of Tony Blair. But he will have one.

Forms The Civic Ethos?

Whatever happened to Juan Guaidó? Was he not supposed to have been the "rightful" President of Venezuela? Oh, well, María Corina Machado has lost an election more recently, if only by proxy, so I suppose that it must be her now. She has been given the Nobel Peace Prize for wanting to privatise PDVSA, the oil and gas company. To that end, Donald Trump has already put a $50 million price on the head of President Nicolás Maduro, and with Pete Hegseth launched a campaign of mass murder. Machado has warmly welcomed these moves, openly coordinating with Trump towards her avowedly detailed plan for the first 100 hours after regime change. If she showed up in Oslo, then Maduro would never again be able to show his face among dictators.

This is not about drugs. Trump has pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, and Machado is a legaliser who, let the MAGA heartland understand, is also in favour of abortion. She is a cookie-cutter liberal Rightist who accordingly echoes Shabana Mahmood in naming Margaret Thatcher as her political heroine. She would be an Establishment Democrat in the United States, or a bog standard Labour MP in Britain. Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war, while Fascism is inherent in both of them, only ever arising by their joint enterprise.

Firmly in that tradition, Machado has backed the genocide of Gaza to the hilt, she has called Trump a "visionary", she has invited both Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu to invade Venezuela in order to install her, and she joined Javier Milei and Kevin Roberts in crossing the Atlantic to address February's Make Europe Great Again rally in Madrid, alongside Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Matteo Salvini, Andrej Babiš, Martin Helme, Krzysztof Bosak, and the host, Santiago Abascal. Organised by Patriots.eu, that rally announced that formation's first associate member. Likud. Of course. Ties are also strengthening with the BJP. Of course. Just do not mention the burning churches from Bethlehem to Bishnupur. Not least, though not only, because of his cuts to the listed places of worship grant and his cap on repair costs, Keir Starmer would fit right in, and David Lammy would wonder why they assumed that he was there to serve the drinks. Then again, does he wonder that when Starmer does it?

The Interpretation Has To Change

Did the McCanns have their other two children taken away from them? Those twins were two when their parents left them with their not quite four-year-old sister in a foreign country and went out on the town. People without the McCanns’ advantages lose their children for far less. Yet Gerry McCann is now the face of the campaign to relaunch the Leveson Inquiry, although other signatories would have made for far more sympathetic spokespersons. But less media-savvy ones. Think on.

The Press and the Police ought to have been the starting point of Leveson, and I reproach myself for the fair wind that I gave his first Report, although those who opposed it have since demanded, and obtained, cross-party primary legislation to give the Government the final say on the ownership of newspapers. Three weeks ago, the nationalisation of the Telegraph was called for at Prime Minister’s Questions by Mike Wood, who as the Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office would not ordinary have been an active participant in PMQs, and who had been Parliamentary Private Secretary to Liam Fox, Priti Patel, and Dominic Raab. That was what the Right openly wanted.

But nothing in the European Convention on Human Rights would have precluded the implementation of the original Leveson requirements, nor has anything prevented this novel approach to safeguarding the Free Press. The same is true of David Lammy’s abolition of almost all trial by jury and of the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court, again going back to Sir Brian Leveson. As ever, it will rightly fall to Parliament. Based on today’s PMQs, Karl Turner is obviously planning to table a sunset clause. MPs ought in any case to oppose this Bill at every stage, but without that clause, then any waverers or mere abstainers would have no excuse whatever.

In the last 10 years alone, the ECHR did not prevent the enactment of the Trade Union Act, or of the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, or of the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, or of the Nationality and Borders Act, or of the Elections Act, or of the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, or of the National Security Act, or of the Public Order Act, or of the Online Safety Act, or of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, or of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. Under the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act and the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, nothing that Freddie Scappaticci did would now be illegal.

The ECHR will not save us from digital ID or from facial recognition. It does not protect cash. It is not helping the Palestine Action defendants. It does not preclude the Home Secretary from stripping people of their British citizenship, now without even having to tell them. It presented no obstacle to vaccine passports. It did nothing for Julian Assange, Vanessa Beeley, Craig Murray, Kit Klarenberg, Richard Medhurst, or now George Galloway. Most countries that subscribe to the ECHR already have identity cards. Thus defined, Starmer is indeed a human rights lawyer. When Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick were in office, then there was no section 35 order to prevent Royal Assent of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill that banned nothing for which people were not already being arrested in England, complete with records of non-crime hate incidents on things like DBS checks.

Nothing that had largely been written by David Maxwell Fyfe ever did have anything to do with those of us who sought to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. Not the European Union into which he castigated Anthony Eden for not having taken the United Kingdom at the start. And not the ECHR, either.

There was a reason why the ECHR’s incorporation into British domestic law was never attempted by any Labour Government until Tony Blair’s. It duly proved useless as civil liberties were shredded; it was the House of Commons that stopped the detention of people for 90 days without charge. And it duly proved useless as the poor, the sick and the disabled were persecuted on a scale and with a venom that had not been seen since before the War, if ever. That persecution continued into and as the age of austerity. Long before Brexit, Covid-19, or the invasion of Ukraine, even as Red Cross food parcels were distributed to our starving compatriots, human rights legislation was of only the most occasional use, if any. That has always been the intention.

In May 1948, the pompously self-styled Congress of Europe assembled in the Hall of Knights, in The Hague. Addressing that assembly, Winston Churchill called it “the Voice of Europe”. But in fact it was mostly made up of politicians who had recently been defeated at the polls, of the representatives of Royal and Noble Houses that had fairly recently been dispossessed at least in political terms, of the likes of Churchill who fell into both categories, and of people whose lives’ work was trying to delude themselves that so did they.

In the name of the order that had held sway for a century between the defeat of Napoleon and the First World War, the order to which the Reichsbürger would wish to return, their aim was very explicitly to check the social democracy that was sweeping Western Europe at the time. The material that they produced had that intention, and it has had that effect. Lo and behold, Blair had it written into British domestic law. And lo and behold, the body that he created for its enforcement, when it has not been sacking its black and disabled staff first, and when it has not been failing to find anything wrong with the Government’s handling of the Windrush scandal, played a key role in bringing down Jeremy Corbyn. Not that he helped himself by backing down when he ought to have been fighting back. But “Equality and Human Rights”? What equality, exactly? Which human’s rights?

To make matters even worse, the land of Churchill and Maxwell Fyfe, with comparable figures on the other side, is now the land of Starmer and Lammy, facing only Badenoch and Jenrick. Denmark’s “parallel societies", until 2021 officially called “ghettos”, are wholly compatible with membership of NATO. They are wholly compatible with membership of the EU. They are wholly compatible with the ECHR. They are the work of a Social Democratic Government, like the social media ban in Australia. And they are wanted here by the Labour Government, likewise. On all five points, of course they are. And on a sixth: race is not the primary indicator in an industrial or postindustrial country such as Britain or Denmark, so Britain is to copy Denmark’s “parallel societies”, and Denmark will return the compliment once we had expanded the scheme.

The first criterion for a “parallel society” is that more than 50 per cent of the inhabitants originated or “descended” from “non-Western countries", defined as everywhere apart from “all 27 EU countries, the United Kingdom, Andorra, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, Vatican City, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand”. But the other four are socioeconomic. Once it had met the racist first one, then a community has to meet only two of those four to have all of its children from the age of one upwards required to undergo 25 hours per week of instruction in “Danish culture”, and to be declared liable to mass eviction and demolition in the manner of Sharpeville, District Six, or the West Bank. After a few years, Britain would drop the whitelist and just ghettoise everywhere with two or more of unemployment at 40 per cent or above, criminal convictions more than three times the national average (as if the criminal justice system were class-neutral), 50 per cent or more of over-30s without tertiary qualifications, and an average gross income below 55 per cent of the national average. Adjusting for different education systems, Denmark and elsewhere would follow suit.

Not that the change would be that enormous. It was Durham County Council, then the jewel in the right-wing Labour crown, that imposed Category D status. Even if not in detail, everyone in these parts has always known about Medomsley Detention Centre; we are shocked but not surprised. Parallel societies are nothing new to us. The British State inflicts sexual violence on working-class, predominantly white males as the American State inflicts sexual violence on African-American and Hispanic males, as the Australian State inflicts sexual violence on Aboriginal males, as the Israeli State inflicts sexual violence on Palestinian males, and so on. That, and false allegations of sexual violence. Fear of the black male is fundamental to the capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade, and the slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle.

UPDATE 7:23PM

Karl Turner tweets:

I am not planning to table a sunset. I am against this completely because it won’t work and juries are NOT what causes the backlog.

Even better.

Utrinque Paratus

Afghanistan was clearly not worth the bones of one British soldier, and we should never again have any involvement in the place. Or, in that sense, in anywhere else. Whatever their cover story about the death of the Parachute Regiment's Lance Corporal George Hooley in Ukraine, his fate has added to their case that "We are at war", necessitating the "postponement" of the next General Election. Even Ukraine is supposedly now to go to the polls, but the repeated cancellation of local elections in Britain is softening us up. Do not be softened. Be hardened.

At the next General Election, numerous seats would be decided by a handful of votes as the square peg of a good half a dozen parties and many locally strong Independents were forced into the round hole of First Past the Post. Reform UK is facing the fury of its own supporters because one of its candidates for Portsmouth City Council is Addy Mo Asaduzzaman, a Bangladeshi who is exercising his rights as a Commonwealth citizen. Will they react in the same way when a Reform candidate was an Anglo-Australian or a white South African?

Ben Habib has registered Advance UK with the Electoral Commission as the party in which Stephen Yaxley-Lennon would be welcome, but a woman has already had to be removed from one of his meetings of it because she had segued from a well-received attack on Islam to an unwelcome criticism, both of Israeli influence in British politics, and, it must be said, of the Talmud, all while quoting Charlie Kirk. She was a recent Reform activist. Yes, it was only a Ten Minute Rule Bill. But alone among MPs either sitting or elected as Reform, Nigel Farage did not turn up to vote against re-joining the Customs Union, which passed on the Chair's casting vote with 100 votes on each side. The Liberal Democrats are going to make hay with that one. Farage's vote could have deprived them and their fellow-travellers of that. Where was he?

And when Jeremy Corbyn used to vote against the Blair Government, then the Conservatives voted with it. He did not vote with them. But unlike him, Zarah Sultana has voted to keep every Lords wrecking amendment to the Employment Rights Bill, even on strike ballot thresholds and on trade unions' political funds, amendments that had passed with the votes of Green Peers even though Green MPs then voted to overturn them. Sultana argued that the Government's own weakening of that Bill, concessions of which I have been as critical as anyone, had rendered it "inadequate". As with her call to "nationalise the entire economy", she is an infantile ultra-Leftist whom the Labour Party has to explain how and why it ever approved as a parliamentary candidate at all, never mind twice, the second time after a full term as an MP. As a Workers Party voter, I would not vote for a Green or, at least in anything like its present form, a Your Party candidate at the Workers Party's behest. I am not the only one. But we will all vote.

Closer Each Day?

Apparently Neighbours will end again this week. But Star Wars has ended definitively three times, yet we all know that there will be more. And it turns out that Home and Away is still going strong in this and more than 140 other countries. Its characters will henceforth be ridiculous to its viewers, although the actors will be obliged to pretend to have no idea. Or will the central theme be the subversion of the ban on social media, which Anthony Albanese has defended to those affected on YouTube, even though they can no longer legally watch it?

Banning under-16s from YouTube looks like banning them from all popular music that did not enjoy radio airplay at the given time. In its way, and in fact the two are connected, that is as pernicious as banning them from all ideology other than that purveyed by the schools and by the official media. It is no wonder that this experiment is being watched so sympathetically by a British Government that kept people in school until they were 18 while planning to make 16 the voting age.

Fresh Light?

Be Baroness Longfield never so righteous, can they really not see how bad this looks? Her motives may be as pure as the driven snow. But this Government is full of, and surrounded by, utterly cynical and ruthless operators who understand the importance of perception. Yet it does something like this. Still, good luck to her. She is going to need it.

No matter what the Longfield Report ended up saying, you are reading here first, as you so often do, that the Government's response to it will be to propose yet further restrictions of trial by jury, and other such erosions of the presumption of innocence, accompanied by digital ID.

Lily-Liveried?

Next will be the British Rail sandwiches, which such defenders as there are of rail privatisation think is a killer blow. They also think that you have to have an adult memory of the 1970s, putting you in your early sixties as a bare minimum, to remember British Rail. You do not, and in any case most people who do, are in favour of renationalisation.

Yet paint it in any livery you like, but the rolling stock of Great British Railways is to remain in private hands, adding exorbitant rent to every ticket. Rent to whom? See also the private contractors that routinely bring defendants to court late or not at all, a major contributor to the backlog, which is not in any way caused by juries.

And see also the £10.9 billion in Covid-19 fraud even without considering PPE. Why have Michelle Mone and Doug Barrowman not been arrested? I do not agree with Unexplained Wealth Orders without a conviction, but they are the law, so where are the Orders against that pair? Mone and Barrowman are the characters that our present economic arrangements form as a feature and not as a bug.

Another such is Richard Dannatt, who has secured all past, present and future criminal charges against Palestine Action in return for payment by Teledyne, which is not even a British company. Jurors and magistrates should acquit on principle. All other members of the House of Lords should go on strike if its threshold were ever again crossed by Mone, or by Dannatt, or by Peter Mandelson.

Tony Blair's ties to Mandelson and thus to Jeffrey Epstein would have put an end to his scheme to be made Viceroy of Gaza even if he had not been unacceptable to Hamas and to the regimes of the wider Arab and Islamic world. If they will not have him, then why should we have his Institute's digital ID or his family's facial recognition, grifts to make anything arising out of the last pandemic look like cheating at tiddlywinks, with the cost including our liberty itself?

About A Tout

Under the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act and the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, nothing that Freddie Scappaticci did would now be illegal. Everyone always knew that the Provisional IRA, the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA were riddled with Police informants, MI5 assets, and so on. It is widely assumed that the New IRA is a false flag operation. The "New Republican Movement" has been universally greeted as such.

The Loyalist organisations have always been known to be off-the-books arms of the British State. And in March 2023, four Protestants, at least one with known Loyalist paramilitary connections, were arrested in relation to the attempted murder of Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell, for which the New IRA had already claimed responsibility. Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries have always been heavily involved in traditional organised crime, especially drug-dealing, leading to generations of professional and social interaction.

Brutal Repercussions

Rob Marchant writes:

While Westminster has been alight with chatter over whether or not Rachel Reeves misrepresented the facts in the run-up to her Budget, events have been happening in parallel which are likely to have a far longer shadow for Keir Starmer and his crew. Indeed, they are situations which, if left as they are, will continue to have brutal repercussions long after they all leave office.

The first was Wes Streeting’s announcement last month of the puberty blockers trial, due to kick off in the New Year.

When the Cass report landed in April last year, campaigners looking to protect Britain’s children from the harm of untested medicines were surely so overjoyed to see that thousands of lives could be protected from likely sterilisation and severe health problems in later life, that less focus was given to one of the report’s other recommendations, on the smaller number children which it recommended be recruited for a clinical trial, to finally put a stop to any debate on the efficacy of said treatment.

It seemed churlish to complain about this matter of the fine print, when the main battle, over ceasing the general puberty-blocker programme, had already been won. But now the last grain of sand has fallen into the bottom of the egg timer and the trial, which it was easy to blithely assume would never start, is about to begin.

This means that 226 children will be legally taking the same drugs which have been declared illegal for thousands of others diagnosed with gender dysphoria. To recap: these drugs have never been approved for this use; the treatment is experimental, with some horrific side effects; and consent cannot be meaningfully given by minors as young as 10, most of whom are too young to have experienced pubertal changes, let alone sex.

(And if, after Cass, you still truly believe that there is a medical case for using puberty blockers, I direct you to this disturbing video, in which no less a figure than the president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) admits that all children to date who have been treated with them prior to puberty – Tanner Stage 2 – have ended up anorgasmic.)

To say this trial is controversial is something of an understatement. For many, blockers represent a scandalous experiment on minors, at the “extreme risk”, as campaigner and author Helen Joyce put it, of permanently ruining their sex lives and general health; a historic mistake on the part of Health Secretary, Wes Streeting.

Nonetheless, he seems intent on proceeding, in a way that seems emblematic of the government’s somewhat cavalier attitude to the rights of women and children. In the same week, outgoing EHRC chief Kishwer Falkner, interviewed in the Times last week, that the Labour government has “abandoned” women, referencing Bridget Philipson’s blocking of her issuing the EHRC’s guidance on the impacts of the Supreme Court judgement on “sex meaning sex”, as well as its inability to call out Pakistani men as an important factor in the grooming gangs scandal (we might also note that the last time the Labour Party crossed swords with the EHRC, it was over its poor treatment of Jews, and it didn’t end well [for whom?]; it is now women).

This blind spot on women’s issues will cost Labour dear, but nowhere more dear than the harm to be caused to that small cross-section of the country’s children. Former Labour MP Rosie Duffield has also put together a cross-party letter to Streeting, requesting that the trial be pulled. It should be, before the lives of 266 children, not to mention his own career and conscience, are all permanently blighted by this decision.

And then there is Assisted Dying. This last week, proof has come to light of what many suspected, that although formally neutral, Labour figures had actually planned all along to make it effectively a Labour bill by driving the legislation forward “under the radar” as a Private Members Bill, easing its path through the Commons and helping remove obstacles for Kim Leadbeater.

This makes it look grubby and disingenuous but, even before that, the bill has had substantial resistance: not just from those who reject the premise of Assisted Dying on religious or moral grounds but, more importantly, from those who simply think it poorly drafted and lacking in adequate safeguards. The Lords’ review has resulted in an unprecedented 1,071 amendments to the legislation. While supporters of the flawed bill simply dismiss this as filibustering, it is a more convincing argument that this actually the Lords doing its job, in a bill which its critics feel should never have been introduced in this inappropriate, back-door way.

Finally, this week has seen the bombshell news that the Justice Secretary, David Lammy, is going to abolish trial by jury for all but a few, very serious crimes. Critics say it will likely have little impact in terms of reducing the pressure on the British courts system, but see slashing what many see as its jewel in its crown, one which has survived over 800 years, as disastrous (for good measure, Lammy is also now being accused of cooking the books on rape statistics, to justify his point).

For a short-term operational fix, it would be a historic change to the way Britain does things, in a legal system where, for example, rape hardly ever gets to trial in the first place. Labour MPs are already set to rebel, including its former Deputy Leader, Angela Rayner.

In all these cases, whether it be jury trials; the lives of vulnerable adults who might be desperate, broke or coerced; or the long-term mental, physical and sexual health of hundreds of under-18s; there are serious and very reasonable public objections; and all very much cases of “we’ll miss them when they’re gone”.

After David Cameron’s “big idea” of Brexit, many of us were probably hoping that political ideas would be resoundingly pint-sized from hereon in. But these three big ideas are not only major moral disaster areas: they are ones of a magnitude which surely make or break political careers and, quite probably, produce deep regrets into old age among those who pushed them through, in the face of perfectly reasonable objections.

These three things can all be undone: but time is surely running out to do so.

And Karl Turner writes:

David Lammy’s forced announcement last week after the apparent accidental leak of his plans to scrap some jury trials came as a shock to Labour backbenchers.

There was reference in our election manifesto to addressing the Crown Court backlog which grew exponentially under the previous government, but there was never any suggestion that we, the Labour Party, would ever consider doing away with the rights of those accused of serious crimes to be tried by a jury of 12 good men, women and true.

Not least when current justice ministers, including the Lord Chancellor, have made very public statements pleading the case for juries in criminal proceedings, to be maintained. After all, juries have existed in the English (and Welsh) legal system for over 800 years.

Threatening to restrict jury trials is both a dereliction of duty and an ineffective way of dealing with a crippling backlog of cases. The erosion of jury trials not only risks undermining a fundamental right, but importantly, will not reduce the backlog by anything like enough to speed up justice for victims and those that are accused and prosecuted by the Crown.

If this ever comes to the House of Commons, I will rebel and vote against it, and I think the government would be defeated on this issue. The House and the public will not stand for the erosion of a fundamental right, particularly given that there are more effective ways to reduce the backlog.

Sir Brian Leveson is a well-respected figure whose words carry much weight but even Sir Brian is not wedded to this idea. But the outcry from stakeholders in the criminal justice system must not be ignored.

Our system rightly prevents the judiciary from speaking out on such matters, but when you have the Bar Council and the Criminal Bar Association united in their opposition to these destructive plans, then it is easy to work out what judges and recently-retired judges are saying to lawyers when they are speaking privately.

These warnings need to be heard and acted upon before it is too late. Let’s be honest now, the problem (which is massive) was not caused by juries and it will not be solved by their removal. If this is not ditched, then the government risks another embarrassing defeat.

Labour MPs deserve better from the prime minister to have us marched up the proverbial hill to be marched back down again and then have us pretend that we were never asked to do the unthinkable in the first place. Parliamentarians from across the political divide recognise the constitutional importance of trial by jury and the danger of their erosion from public life.

Backbench MPs see this as a step too far, and no responsible parliament can allow a cornerstone of justice and our democracy to be savagely attacked on the basis that the government is actually doing something to fix the problem when in fact anybody that is anybody, practitioners, academics or the judiciary itself know full well that these plans will not do what it says on the tin and will most definitely not protect and promote the interests of victims of crime.

The Lord Chancellor would be better promising less and doing more. There is much to do. The government chief whip is a good and well-respected MP, but he isn’t Paul Daniels - the chief whip’s best magic trickery cannot magic the inevitable rebellion away.

One of the primary causes of the backlog is the restriction on ‘sitting days’, the number of days Crown Courts operate a year. Around 130,000 sitting days are available to the courts, but, despite a capacity crisis, sitting days are restricted by around 20,000 a year.

While the government has rightly announced that it is increasing the number of sitting days by 5000, this is still a substantial shortfall. This inexplicable misuse of court time needs to be rectified.

The parliamentary timetable for these wrongheaded proposals is most likely to be the second half of next year, perhaps October or November. If the emergency is now, then why isn’t the justice secretary arguing for time on the floor of the House now?

Why, if it is so very urgent and just about reducing the backlog, won’t David Lammy put in a sunset clause on the face of the bill so that this policy can be scrapped once the backlog is down to a manageable number? At which time he himself would revert to saying that “criminal trials without juries are a bad idea, you don’t fix the backlog with trials that are widely perceived as unfair”.

And why not start using the promised £550 million for victims support service immediately? The government doesn’t need primary legislation for that. There isn’t a backlog in every court centre. Certain courts have managed to delete any backlog to manageable numbers by proactive case management. Let’s look at the model before we throw out the baby with the bath water. The government should reconsider this now, before lasting damage is done to public confidence in our courts, the justice system and this government.

Numerous Submissions

"The Commission received a large amount of significant written material to analyse on the issue of women deacons, after the Synod had invited anyone who wished to do so to send in their contributions. Although there were numerous submissions, only twenty-two individuals or groups sent in their papers, representing only a few countries. Consequently, although the material is abundant and in some cases skillfully argued, it cannot be considered the voice of the Synod, let alone of the People of God as a whole."

And so has ended the tiny but noisy, and therefore obviously very well-funded, women's ordination craze that, although theologically always doomed, had exercised such institutional power within the Church in those "only a few countries" around the turn of the century. Its remnant is clutching at straws, but so is the Co-Redemptrix cult, which will go the same way, probably in about a quarter of a century's time. On This Rock, brothers and sisters. On This Rock.

Just This?

On the Continent, depending on the jurisdiction, they have things like wider rights of appeal, and the automatic right to a retrial. In Scotland, they have things like the requirement of corroboration of evidence, and until recently the not proven verdict.

Here in England and Wales, we have things like the right to trial by jury, and the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court. And David Lammy proposes to keep juries for rape, so why do he and his supporters keep bringing it up? Is there something that they are not telling us?

Advance Notice

So few votes are going to decide so many seats that it is worth noting that not only has Ben Habib registered Advance UK with the Electoral Commission as the party in which Stephen Yaxley-Lennon would be welcome, but a woman has already had to be removed from one of his meetings of it because she had segued from a well-received attack on Islam to an unwelcome criticism, both of Israeli influence in British politics, and, it must be said, of the Talmud, all while quoting Charlie Kirk. She was a recent Reform UK activist. Watch that space.

But what if there really were to be a thumping great overall majority for Reform in 2029? What if those hundreds of Reform MPs went about introducing and passing Private Members' Bills? What would be the view of those who were currently inventing the constitutional novelty that the House of Lords was obliged to pass even a Private Member's Bill if the House of Commons had done so, and that even if it gave effect to something that had been in no party's manifesto?

People say that I criticise Labour and Reform too much, but one is the Government and the other is ahead in the polls. When the need arises, then I also have a go at the rest of them. I am a Workers Party voter, but I have never been a member, and I would not vote for a Green or, at least in anything like its present form, a Your Party candidate at the Workers Party's behest. I am not the only one. And we will all vote.

An Honest Conversation

No, Helen Whately, there are not “millions” of people on Motability. And you need to look up acne fulminans. But no one is on PIP, never mind Motability, for ordinary acne, nor for mild anxiety, nor for tennis elbow, nor for any of the other conditions that you and your like suggest. Everything that a claimant has will be on the paperwork, but that does not make all of it grounds for the award. Find someone with each, or even all, of those common complaints, but with no other medical problem, and see how such a claim would be received. Every constituency Conservative association will contain someone with tennis elbow, and Reform UK will be awash with acne. Nor is Motability “a free car”. These are not mistakes. They are lies.

As is Pat McFadden’s claim that you can just self-certify onto benefits for mental illness. Try it, McFadden, you who claimed £40,000 in parliamentary expenses to rent the house next door to the one that you owned, and which you let out for more than you were paying in rent. It is also a lie that a working couple with three children would have to earn at least £71,000 to be at the same level of income as a claimant couple with three children. Not only are those not mutually exclusive categories, but those numbers are impossible. The benefit cap outside London is £22,020 per year for families, or £14,753 for single adults. In London the figures are £25,323 and £16,967. The moment that you hit the cap, then down goes your Universal Credit. No one household could claim all of the benefits necessary to reach anything remotely approaching £71,000. Produce the award letter of anyone in receipt of that much. And attend to Frances Ryan:

Months before the government used the budget to launch plans to tackle Motability – the scheme that leases subsidised vehicles with some disability benefits – a website started quietly spying on disabled drivers. Motability Check – run by an unknown third party and now offline – allowed members of the public to type in any number plate and (largely incorrectly) see if it was a car provided by the firm. The purpose appeared simple and disturbing: spot that neighbour who says they have a bad back and check with a few clicks if they are milking the taxpayer. 

From the spring, the idea that Motability was offering disabled people “free” BMWs and Mercedes began to spread. While the right-wing press suggested someone could get a vehicle for “bed wetting” and acne, blue tick accounts on X gleefully argued the only car available to claimants should be cheap, ugly and “have MOTABILITY written on it, preferably in neon”. By October, the narrative had gone mainstream as the supposed scam of free cars was leapt on by the Conservatives and Reform UK.

Fast forward to this winter and Labour has set out plans to end £300m a year of tax breaks and remove premium brands from the scheme. Rachel Reeves even mimicked right-wing memes with her language when she announced it: Motability “was set up to protect the most vulnerable, not to subsidise the lease on a Mercedes-Benz”. Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch said this week the Tories would ban conditions such as anxiety and ADHD outright from being eligible. 

If 2025 has been the year “welfare reform” reentered the lexicon of British politics, few events sum it up more than the assault on Motability, a policy that has been a lifeline for disabled people for almost 50 years with little fuss.

This is partly a story about valid scrutiny of a multibillion-pound body handling public money. There has been a large growth in Motability recently – with the customer base rising by about 200,000 in two years to 815,000 as the nation’s health has declined and disability benefit claims increased. Similarly, it is fair to question high executive pay and the company’s reportedly large cash reserves.

But it is far more a story about how a mix of misinformation, prejudice and insecurity has reignited an all-too-familiar fire: when living standards are stalling and public services failing, society turns on a minority said to be having it easy at taxpayer expense.

From asylum seekers staying in hotels while locals struggle to pay the rent to benefit claimants driving a new car as workers miss the bus, this year has seen a fixation on what certain – notably marginalised or disadvantaged – groups supposedly get.

We are in an era that is in many ways defined by a sense the state no longer provides what the public needs: not just the NHS and schools but libraries, social care, parks and so much else. Add in the fact the squeezed middle is being taxed more and millions of others continue to struggle for the basics, and the idea that there are disabled people getting luxury cars handed to them naturally fuels resentment. That’s only compounded when large sections of the media and political class propagate the now common idea that many of those in receipt of support are not really disabled (or for that matter, tax-paying workers).

But is any of it actually true? I spoke to experts about the popular claim that the Motability scheme is easy to exploit. “Accessing Motability requires extensive applications, medical evidence, invasive examination, testing and proof of your impairment, and reapplication for support every few years,” said Sophia Kleanthous from Transport for All. “We support many disabled people who have been wrongly denied support, because they’ve struggled to prove that they meet this high bar.”

What about the idea someone can get a car because of allegedly minor conditions, such as acne? “Government data shows there are just five people claiming enhanced mobility [of the gateway benefit, personal independence payments] for acne,” says James Taylor from Scope. “The stats don’t show co-conditions, so those people could have multiple other disabilities too.” That means the handful of people with acne who are eligible for a Motability car – but are not necessarily leasing one – could have, say, arthritis as well.

The British Association of Dermatologists also confirmed to me that there are ways acne might impact mobility, including rare forms that can cause joint pain. GB News pundits, funnily enough, aren’t medically qualified.

That disabled people should not get a luxury car on the scheme might similarly sound reasonable at first. But take a look at the data and only 6% of Motability’s fleet is made up of non-economy brands, while the cost to the taxpayer is exactly the same due to the fact disabled people already pay the extra fee themselves.

“We all choose a car that meets our requirements – say, one that fits the kids. Disabled people do that too,” says Kleanthous. “We might need an adapted car with enough height to carry us in our wheelchair or a boot that self closes. Some accessibility features are only on higher-spec vehicles. But the biggest issue is choice. Motability allows us to have a car we need, but we should still be able to choose to pay more to have the car we want.”

Look ahead to the new year and more of this is on the horizon, from the government’s plan for special educational needs and disabilities (Send) amid talk of parents abusing the system, to Wes Streeting’s review of the supposed “overdiagnosis” of mental health issues in light of rising sickness benefit claims.

Such ideas appear to be salvation to Keir Starmer’s ailing administration, but it may well find that these only add to its problems. Just as with immigration, capitulating to critics of Motability will never be enough. The goalposts always move: first the issue is said to be disabled people having luxury cars, then tax breaks, then any car at all.

There is a way out of this: raising living standards, well-funded public services, and a spirited defence of the safety net and those who rely on it. It will also require an honest conversation about why we are collectively getting sicker and addressing the underlying causes rather than stubbornly assuming there is an epidemic of healthy people faking. That is not a quick fix, but it is the only one that will help heal an increasingly broken social fabric. Making it harder for a disabled person to leave the house is a dark and false solution to a genuine crisis.

As John Harris writes:

Wes Streeting is a politician whose keen interest in the zeitgeist is only matched by his seeming drive to be as close to the heart of it as possible. It is, therefore, not much of a surprise that the secretary of state for health and social care should end the year by announcing what the official blurb calls an “independent review into mental health conditions, ADHD and autism”. Many of the resulting headlines put it more pithily: in keeping with an increasingly deafening media din, this will seemingly be an investigation into “overdiagnosis”.

Candidates for 2025’s word of the year have so far included “rage bait” and “parasocial”, but overdiagnosis is surely the term that perfectly captures the intellectual and political fashions of the past 12 months. The mess of ideas it crystallises now has a set text, published back in March: The Age Of Diagnosis by the neurologist and epilepsy expert Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan. Having been pronounced on, with his usual belligerent ignorance, by Nigel Farage, overdiagnosis has become an obsession of the Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice, who now holds forth about why some children with special educational needs shouldn’t be entitled to dedicated school transport, and claims that the sight of kids with sensory issues wearing ear defenders at school is “insane”.

News of an official review first broke in October, and its terms of reference seem comparatively reasonable. In The Guardian, Streeting wrote last week about a focus on “support for mental health conditions, autism and ADHD”, and “how the NHS can meet the needs of all”. The review’s launch document makes mention of “prevalence, drivers, early intervention and treatment”.

But clearly, its work has been commissioned partly for political reasons. There is a queasy whiff about its basic remit that – with strong echoes of what we hear from “overdiagnosis” merchants – clumsily mixes questions about mental illness (anxiety, depression) with autism and ADHD, which are neurodevelopmental. As mentions of “economic inactivity” prove, there is a clear sense of pitch-rolling for the return of so-called welfare reform. There are also telling uses of the word “medicalisation”, a term usually favoured by people who think that many conditions do not need any diagnosis at all.

And as is becoming its habit, the government has decided to speak to different audiences in contrasting tones of voice. In the front-page splash that first announced the review, The Times said the health secretary was “concerned” about rising rates of diagnosis of both mental illness and what we now understand as neurodivergence, and there was also mention of ordinary feelings and stresses being “overpathologised”. All this sounds worryingly like a polite manifestation of a very familiar kind of thinking, reflective of a country in which questioning other people’s needs is almost becoming a national sport.

Answers to questions the new inquiry asks might be less complicated than they seem. There are more people being diagnosed with anxiety and depression because of an education system and model of work that are so harshly competitive and inherently precarious, and the still-overlooked effects of the pandemic. ADHD – which, just to reiterate a very important point, is not a mental illness, but a matter of neural wiring – is something we are only just starting to understand, but it is worth recalling official reports that put the number of children and adults in England who are affected at 2.5 million, though only 800,000 currently have a formal diagnosis. Those numbers, moreover, are evidence of something that is not going to go away: our ever-growing understanding of the sheer complexity of our minds and brains, and how much our institutions still lag behind.

That is also true of rising autism diagnoses. We live in the long aftermath of diagnostic changes that happened in the 1980s and 1990s, when the definition of autism was widened to include people without an intellectual or learning disability, reflecting the basic – and incontestably correct – idea of a spectrum. The next stage of those shifts arrived only a relatively short time ago, when the different and often complex ways autism presents among women and girls finally began to be discussed. A new level of autism awareness fostered by the internet, meanwhile, had alerted people to the fact that they need not put up with constant misunderstanding and bullying; these days, they can find out who they – or their children – really are, what help they may need, and how to thereby live a life that is more settled and fulfilling.

That prospect ought to be exciting and liberating. Unfortunately, our economy is flatlining, and public spending is constantly squeezed. So, amid lengthening waiting lists, how do we deal with all that increased need? Overdiagnosis offers a simple answer: you tell people – not least those who can be classified as “mild” or “moderate” cases – to be more resilient, and wave them away. 

There is one very convenient article of faith that seems to be increasingly fashionable in Westminster: the idea that diagnoses can do more harm than good, which is the key contention that defines O’Sullivan’s book. “The stigma of autism has been associated with low self-esteem among children,” she writes, while blithely feeding those same negative perceptions by referring to autism as a “brain disorder” and an “illness”. An autism diagnosis, she claims, runs the risk of being “a self-fulfilling prophecy, as some will take the diagnosis to mean they can’t do certain things, so won’t even try”. But unless we can specify who people are and what broad psychological category they fit into, how do we know how to help them: what educational methodologies to use, how to adjust their learning environment and what aptitudes and talents can be developed?

Over the past eight months, I have had hundreds of conversations about all this, at events put on to promote Maybe I’m Amazed, the memoir I’ve written about my autistic son James, and how, ever since he was a toddler, music has been a massive part of how we connect. From Jersey to the Yorkshire Dales, one insight has come up countless times: the fact that the autistic spectrum is not nearly as linear as some people think, and that the relevant traits occur with such wildly different intensities that crudely labelling people as “mild”, “moderate” and “severe” is sometimes all but impossible. That blurs into another regularly voiced point: how the plain fact that human beings’ brains work in completely varied ways rather makes a mockery of a basic method of education – standing in front of 30 kids and shouting at them for an hour – that is now decades out of date.

There is another thing that people always talk about. Autism often reflects traits that run through people’s family trees – something they tend to become aware of in retrospect. Past flickers and flashes of eccentricity, obsessiveness or social awkwardness will suddenly take on new meanings. More painfully, people suddenly become aware of relatives who had frustrating and broken lives, because so little was known about things that many of us now take as a given – not least the fact that autistic minds are as complex and sophisticated as any other kind, and in most cases, they need careful support and nurturing. And in that context, theories and pronouncements about overdiagnosis sound to many people like a nightmarish turning-back of the clock.

They are not wrong. Human psychology is complicated. Politics and power, by contrast, tend to be crass, cruel and prone to coming up with completely the wrong questions. Which brings me to one question I’d like to ask the health secretary: however much he prettifies it, why is he picking over the number of diagnoses, when he could be focusing on why our systems of work, education and care are still so closed off to the people who get them?

Tota Pulchra Es, Maria

Et macula originalis non est in te.

Close Protection

Prince Harry’s protectors would be as much use as they were before. If Donald Trump’s piracy in the Caribbean really were against drugs, then Harry’s fraudulently obtained United States visa would already have been revoked. During one of Harry’s frequent returns to these shores, why has he never been arrested for his Class A drug offences?

But then, in December 2021, cocaine was found in 11 out of 12 powder rooms in the Palace of Westminster on the same randomly chosen evening. Mr Speaker Hoyle promised “full and effective action”. Then nothing happened. Drugs-based blackmail is fundamental to political power in this country. In May 2022, Michael Gove was described in edited Fleet Street copy as having been on “a cocaine binge”. Like Prince Harry, Gove and Boris Johnson, who is no longer an American citizen, have lied on their United States visa applications. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng was obviously off his face at the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. The Truss Government was so awash with cocaine that it scandalised the servants.

Likewise, when Prince Harry was so out of it that he thought that he was having conversations with a pedal bin, then he was surrounded by some of the most carefully vetted Police Officers in the world. They often are. The then Prince Andrew may have sought to persuade his close protection officer to commit, say, malfeasance in public office, but Prince Harry’s really did so. It is no wonder that drug poisoning deaths hit a record high last year, the fourteenth consecutive annual increase. Junkie Britain is rotting from the head down.

The Greens are trying to corner the pro-drugs vote, but that is not really where the gap is. Rather, we need a party that understood that there could not be a “free” market in general, but 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, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today.

Unlike the Conservative Party, which merely thinks that it is and acts as if it were, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are constitutionally committed to the “free” market. Richard Tice wants to legalise cannabis, Nigel Farage concurs with the Green Party in wanting to legalise drugs across the board, and Lee Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023. Are those now the views of Ann Widdecombe and Danny Kruger?

Instead, 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. I no longer believe in prison sentences that included 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. Peter Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought should be taught in schools, as pro-drugs propaganda is. And as surely as the former Prince Andrew and any Police Officer whom he might have corrupted, Prince Harry and the Police Officers whom he indisputably compromised should be pursued to the full extent of the law.

Complete, Unfettered Access

“Grooming gang monsters and their relatives could be exploiting a devastating child protection loophole that would give them “complete, unfettered access” to vulnerable young girls”? I bet. In May, Shabana Mahmood tried to give nonces “chemical castration” instead of prison, where that proposal was received, not only by the inmates, as well as one might have expected. As an old lag, the word “nonce” is part of my culture. In that culture’s citadels, nonces are given the suspended sentences that we were not, or they are given the cushiest jobs inside, they are housed in the newest or the most recently refurbished wings, they have gym when ours has been cancelled, and so on. Why?

Well, like you, I have never met a paedophile. I mean, we may have done, in the way that we may have met a Muggletonian. But we are wholly unaware of having done so, you and I both. I apologise to any Muggletonian reading this. Yet this country’s cultural and political elite cannot get out of bed, if that, without tripping over one or more nonces. And every single time, our betters had had no idea. Or so we are invariably expected to believe. If we ever did, then we no longer do, even stripping Peter Mandelson of the Freedom of the Borough of Hartlepool. The Labour-controlled Borough Council was unanimous. But while Mandelson has stopped attending the House of Lords, he could go back whenever he pleased, and there is no sign that he has stopped using his title. The former Prince Andrew has relinquished his membership of the Order of the Garter, but Tony Blair retains his despite having been Prime Minister when he met Jeffrey Epstein. Like illegal drug use, the sexual abuse of children is fundamental to power in this country, both in itself and as a pretext for blackmail.

Margaret Thatcher knew about Cyril Smith when she arranged his knighthood. Jimmy Savile’s knighthood was rejected four times by the relevant committee, until she absolutely insisted upon it for the man with whom she spent every New Year’s Eve, and on whose programmes she was so obsessed with appearing that her staff had to ration those appearances. Her closest lieutenant was Peter Morrison. She would have had sight of every file on Laurens van der Post. Smith was a highly eccentric and largely absentee MP for a tiny minority party, but he was a Thatcherite avant la lettre, who had left the Labour Party when he had started to see cars outside council houses. Thatcher’s father was also a Liberal until all of that fell apart between the Wars, and he was never a member of the Conservative Party. He, she and Smith were politically indistinguishable. That the Radical Right put out pamphlets demanding the legalisation of paedophile activity was mentioned in Our Friends in the North. That Thatcherite MPs were likely to commit sexual violence against boys with the full knowledge of the party hierarchy formed quite a major subplot in To Play the King, the middle series of the original House of Cards trilogy.

As Home Secretary, Mahmood has the power to revoke the citizenship of anyone whom she thought ought to be eligible for another nationality, whether or not they were. Bangladesh has consistently and understandably refused to have anything to do with the London-born Shamima Begum. Undoubtedly with the full cooperation of its British counterparts, Canadian intelligence was trafficking British girls to Syria to join the side that we were aiding and abetting there while bombing it across the Sykes-Picot Line in Iraq, where our intervention had created it in the first place. The 15-year-old Begum was married almost immediately upon her arrival in that country, and pregnant almost immediately after that. “She wanted it” is not an argument that would normally be admitted under such circumstances.

All of this had the enthusiastic support of the Liberal Democrats, of the Labour Party until 2015, and of more than 90 per cent of Labour MPs, as well as the whole of the party’s staff, to the very end, if it is not still going on. Both economically and internationally, and the connection between the two has never been more glaring, Labour is now far to the right of the Conservatives. Begum ought to be tried by a jury that, unless it were unanimously convinced beyond reasonable doubt of her guilt, ought to deliver a verdict of not guilty, which should be an enduring verdict, affording lifelong protection from double jeopardy. In the event of such a conviction, then like a 15-year-old runner for county lines, she would not be blameless, but like a 15-year-old runner for county lines, she would not be the most to blame.  If Nigel Farage is not answerable at all for things that he did when he was of voting age, then why is Begum so singularly deserving of punishment?

It bears repetition that even while bombing the IS that it had created in Iraq, NATO was so committed to the victory of IS in Syria, as has since been won, that via the NATO member state of Turkey, it trafficked British schoolgirls to Syria to hand over to IS. In at least one case, a 15-year-old was pregnant almost immediately, having been married so soon after her arrival that the arrangements had clearly been made in advance. Via the NATO member state of Turkey, IS fighters have been brought into Ukraine, carrying out the suicide bombing of the Kerch Bridge under British direction. Russia has long been bringing in Assadists against them. IS is now part of the side that we are backing in Ukraine. Do we know that our girls are not being smuggled into Ukraine, which is itself a global centre of sex trafficking, in order to be handed over to IS? Or our boys, to be sent to the front line?

The war in Afghanistan was in defence of the endemic abuse of boys, to which, whatever else may be said of the Taliban, they had been very actively opposed and not without success in seeking to eradicate, whereas the regime that we installed in their place actively colluded in it as surely as in the heroin trade. There is no minimum age for marriage either at federal level in the United States or at all in Saudi Arabia. Along line of child molesters has fled from the United States and elsewhere to Israel, which also has a huge child rape problem of its own, especially in the precious West Bank settlements.

Underage groupies have always been integral to rock and roll. We all know what at least used to be endemic at public schools. Popular entertainers slept with underage girls at the youth conferences of the political parties. And so on. Reading about the role in grooming gangs of fast food outlets, minicab offices, and other such establishments, I am not alone in asking to be told something that I did not already know from towns and villages that were still overwhelmingly white, and which were literally or practically 100 per cent so in the 1990s, when it was effectively less illegal than underage drinking for men in their twenties, or even older, to have sex with girls of 15, 14, or even younger.

White men who commit certain offences are “lone wolves”, black men who do so are “gang members”, and brown men who do so are “homegrown Islamist terrorists”, yet the crimes are the same. Likewise, a certain type of organised crime syndicate is a “grooming gang” or a “rape gang” when the members are South Asian, or Muslim, or both, but a “paedophile ring” when they are not, and most emphatically when they are all white and non-Muslim. But again, they are the same thing.

Earlier this year, Radio Four broadcast a series on the Paedophile Information Exchange, a story known to readers of this blog throughout its 19 years of existence. If PIE was not a grooming gang and a rape gang, then what ever has been or could be? It was at the very heart of the Establishment, and this year, it will be 40 years since the Thatcher Government secured a judicial fiat that, without bothering to ask Parliament, abolished the age of consent altogether. Gillick competence ought instead to be called Thatcher competence. The Major Government did write Thatcher competence into the Age of Legal Capacity (Scotland) Act 1991. But it is applied in Northern Ireland on no apparent authority. Even in England and Wales, it has never been subject to a parliamentary vote. Let there be one now.

PIE’s Patricia Hewitt took over Greville Janner’s seat. Then she passed it on to Liz Kendall, so it is obviously a right-wing Labour fiefdom. Britain is internationally known for the prevalence of kiddy-fiddling, but even within that, the right-wing Labour machine is something else. Having inherited his father’s seat, a man whose proclivities were common knowledge for 70 years handed it on to a PIE lady, who served in Tony Blair’s Cabinet before handing it on to the most overtly right-wing candidate for the Labour Leadership since 1994.

As Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Kendall will now administer digital ID. At least that will no longer be Peter Kyle. One could almost admire his sheer gall in attacking Farage by comparing him to Savile. Like Anna Turley, Kyle was given his big break in politics by the Chief Whip whose Whips’ Office contained both Kyle’s close friend, closest ally, and sometime lover, Ivor Caplin, and Caplin’s close friend, Dan Norris. Along with the subsequently adjudicated and disqualified electoral fraud Phil Woolas, such was the Whips’ Office that forced through the Iraq War. Caplin, Norris and Woolas were all made Ministers a few weeks later. Up behind them has come Kyle, among others. And Alastair Campbell had cut his teeth under Robert Maxwell. There is that Epstein connection again.

This year, one of Epstein’s closest friends, with no diplomatic background, was made the British Ambassador to Washington while we guffawed at the then Prince Andrew and at Sarah Ferguson. Also as part of the restoration, Stephen Fry was knighted. He has never retracted his statement that, “It’s a great shame and we’re all very sorry that your uncle touched you in that nasty place – you get some of my sympathy – but your self-pity gets none of my sympathy.” When Fry’s novel The Hippopotamus was filmed, then the central character had to be aged up to 16. But he is younger than that in the book. The Liar has never been filmed. Sir Stephen is very much in the line of Sir Jimmy Savile and his close protector, Sir Keir Starmer.

Kyle joined his old boss in supporting the brief Leadership campaign of Jess Phillips. “I would stab Jeremy Corbyn in the front,” said the woman who was now “Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls”. She has accused British Pakistanis of importing wives for their disabled sons. She claims to have been rude and abusive towards Diane Abbott, although it is possible that she has built her reputation on lying about having used gutter language towards a woman who was old enough to be her mother. Phillips laughs at male suicides, at male cancers, at other men’s health issues, at violence against men, at problems in boys’ educational attainment, and at fathers denied access to their children. She has said that attacks of the kind that were seen in Cologne on the New Year’s Eve of 2015-16, “happen every week in Birmingham.”

 

And on Tuesday 2 September, Phillips told the House of Commons that, “South Yorkshire police should never have been left to investigate themselves in this matter, and moving those investigations to the NCA is absolutely the right thing to do. I would be lying if I said that over the years I had not met girls who talked to me about how police were part of not just the cover-up but the perpetration.” Read again those words of the Minister who refused a statutory inquiry, an inquiry that had been, and still is, demanded by the Muslim candidate whom she had beaten by only 693 votes at Birmingham Yardley, which he intends to contest again, the wonderful investigative journalist Jody McIntyre.

Phillips’s Leadership Campaign was chaired by Wes Streeting, who would have become Leader when, as expected in 2019, the Conservative majority had been much reduced in 2024 but Boris Johnson had remained Prime Minister. Yes, that was only six years ago. If he were still an MP, then Streeting would certainly become Leader after the defeat of Labour by Reform UK in 2029, and he would do so unopposed because the nomination process now made a contested Labour Leadership Election effectively impossible. Streeting may then be Prime Minister within 18 months, since almost all Reform MPs will be freshers. The only thing stopping this is the high likelihood that Streeting will lose his seat to Leanne Mohamad. But although the Greens came fifth at Ilford North last year, they took well over three times more votes than Streeting’s margin of victory.

Meanwhile, the Chief Whip of Caplin, Woolas and Norris has had the gall to endorse a mercifully ignored book that claimed that the accused of the Cleveland child abuse scandal had been guilty all along. False allegations of sexual violence are fundamental to the demonisation of working-class and nonwhite males, which leads to violence that is not restricted to, but which undoubtedly includes, sexual humiliation such as at Medomsley Detention Centre, and such as the United Nations Human Rights Council, in a June 2024 report that was also highly critical of Hamas, found to be inflicted on Palestinian men and boys by the Israeli Defence Forces. A month later, the unrepentant Sde Teiman rapists held a defiant press conference, and their supporters rioted, among them Members of the Knesset and men in the uniforms of the IDF’s Force 100. Fear of the black male is fundamental to the capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade, and the slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle.

Was Rolf Harris a Pakistani? Was Chris Denning? Is Stuart Hall? Is Paul Gadd? There were and are Pakistani grooming gangs. But they were and are far from the only ones, and far from the most powerful. Boris Johnson was a pupil at a private school when Paedophile Action for Liberation, which later merged into PIE, said without challenge that it could shut down both the private school system and the youth criminal justice system by calling its members out on strike. As Prime Minister, Johnson described the money spent on investigating Medomsley as having been “spaffed up the wall”. Clearly, he could not see the problem. He had been groomed.

Of the same generation is Starmer, late of Reigate Grammar School, the Sunday Times Independent School of the Year 2025. Yes, it was private when Starmer was there. In the words of Doughty Street Chambers, on its page about Starmer, now amusingly removed from public view: “He was Director of Public Prosecutions and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008-2013. As DPP, Keir was responsible for all criminal prosecutions in England and Wales.” Therefore, Starmer would have been responsible for the decision not to charge Savile even if he had never seen the file. But that is in any case inconceivable. We are talking about Jimmy Savile here. That Starmer took the decision not to charge Savile has been repeated all over the place, far beyond parliamentary privilege. Starmer has never sued. Again, he could not see the problem. Again, he had been groomed.