See Front

Angela Rayner is the most disappointing British politician of her generation, which is my generation. To secure disaffiliation from the Labour Party and then to build what came next, join Unite Community here. But a family home, a tied cottage and a holiday flat are not "a property empire", although the question of how Rayner had come to be worth £4.5 million is pertinent to a long list of politicians of all stripes. 

And no one becomes Deputy Prime Minister by accident. Rayner is to introduce legislation to ban directly elected Mayors from standing for Parliament, thereby keeping out Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham as potential rivals for the Premiership, by no means necessarily at a time of Keir Starmer's choosing. If, like Starmer or like Wes Streeting, you did not go to school with girls like that, then you will never understand.

Streeting is one of the oddest characters to have emerged in British politics in a very long time. Like Bridget Phillipson's, his hard luck origin story tastes over-egged. Why do we never hear from any of his six siblings or his stepsister? His claim to have left the Labour Party over the Iraq War would have been laughable even if his having done so would not have been an absolute bar to his subsequent employment.

And in a crowded field, no section of the British electorate is more viscerally anti-Labour than the working-class Tory subculture in London and in the post-War Cockney diaspora. Yet as the heir to his conveniently dead paternal grandfather, Streeting presents himself as that tradition's torchbearer. In and through the Labour Party. What?

Recall This

No matter what Lucy Connolly said or did, she could never be recalled to prison, because not only would there be riots, but they would be whipped up by the Official Opposition, by the party that was ahead in the polls, by at least one entire Freeview television channel, and by most of the national newspapers. Those papers have not lately gone lawless. Consider their coverage of Hillsborough at least until 2017, and of the Miners' Strike to this day. Not for nothing has Kelvin Mackenzie taken to Twitter and to the airwaves in support of Connolly, even suggesting that she had been singled out for "harsh and violent" treatment in prison on the orders of Keir Starmer.

But no one on The Times has any business criticising The Sun. Its pre-tax losses are 21 times those of its stablemate, and that The Sun would always be there to subsidise The Times has been fundamental to the continued existence of The Times for 44 years and counting. "We pay your wages," Sun hacks used to shout at their public school contemporaries down the corridor on The Times. So they did, and so they do. Connolly looks highly likely to contest Yvette Cooper's seat. If The Sun gave her a column, then who would resign from The Times?

Clear and Consistent?

“President Trump has been very clear and consistent, he’s prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible to justice,” says White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. Yet Prince Harry’s fraudulently obtained United States visa has not been revoked.

When Donald Trump Visits this State next month, then he might mention that in December 2021, cocaine had been 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, at least as much as in Venezuela.

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 the late Queen. The Truss Government was so awash with cocaine that it scandalised the servants. Yet CPAC loved Liz Truss.

On none of his frequent returns to these shores is Prince Harry ever arrested for his Class A drug offences. When he 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. And now we are back under the rule of the Blairites. Some of us remember them the first time.

Gloria al Bravo Pueblo

If Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation, then anything could be. Compared to that, Cartel de los Soles or Tren de Aragua is IS, except that our lords and masters would not welcome its takeover of Syria. But as to what Cartel de los Soles really is, see here. Tren de Aragua, meanwhile, is in the United States at all only because its members are so violently opposed to and by President Nicolás Maduro. Nor is Donald Trump seeking to defend Commonwealth Guyana’s sovereignty over the Essequibo. But Venezuela does have the world’s largest proven reserves of crude oil. That fact keeps coming to the front of my mind.

There may be 1.7 billion barrels of oil in the Falkland Islands, but Navitas Petroleum has bought up most of the rights, so most of the money will be going to the Israel that armed Argentina during the Falklands War. We must remain dependent on the Gulf despots and on the likes of the Nord Stream pipelines, about the attacks on which it looks as if we were right all along. Western European leaders who paid court to Trump on behalf of Ukraine, Ukrainian commandos have staged a major terrorist attack against Western Europe. We told you so.

At the very least, how about proscribing Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Brigade, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, the Freedom of Russia Legion, the Russian Volunteer Corps, and anything else in similar vein? Pavlo Lapshyn is still in His Majesty’s Prison, and will be for decades yet, because of his 2013 murder of 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham. Lapshyn went on to put bombs outside three mosques in this country. He belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Battalion, being led by its “political ideologist”, Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell.

Mock if you will Russia’s ban on Satanism, but however wrong have been its means of going about it, it was and remains right about the need to de-Nazify Ukraine, so why would it not be right, in principle, about the need to de-Satanise it? Palestine Action was proscribed by an all-or-nothing measure that required any MP voting against it to vote against banning both the Russian Imperial Movement, and Maniacs Murder Cult, which is part of the Order of the Nine Angels, itself part of the subculture that gives me most of my grief. Satanism is real, let me assure you. Britain needs to be de-Nazified and de-Satanised, so why should not another “European liberal democracy”?

The people who believe most strongly in both needs, to defeat the Far Right and to counteract the objectively real forces of supernatural evil, are often the same people. Such is the background of Marcus Rashford, Raheem Sterling, Bukayo Saka, Eddie Nketia, Eberechi Eze, Joe Willock, and ever more others. On flying Saint George’s Flag, see here. The England football teams need to reclaim what their predecessors brought back into the cultural mainstream 29 years ago. The Three Lions Banner is also increasingly conspicuous at such events. With cultural dominance comes responsibilities.

As for the Union Flag, fly it in memory of the Britons killed by the Irgun and the Lehi, of those killed in Menachem Begin’s pursuit of vengeance for Dov Gruner, and of those killed by the Israeli Defense Forces, including James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman, British military veterans who were unarmed aid workers in Gaza until 1 April 2024, when the IDF bombed them three times to make sure that they were dead. The British Government refuses to deny that the nightly RAF reconnaissance flights over Gaza, for which the Israelis are not even required to pay, provided the intelligence for that multiple murder. So, that is a confirmation, then. To its great credit, the RAF at every level dissented so fiercely from having to fly those missions that the Government has recently had to contract them out to Sierra Nevada Corporation instead. Ignore any other version of events. The spirit of 1946 lives. In that spirit, fly the Union Flag. Raise the Colours.

Interview With The Devil?

No one is interviewing Ricky Jones, an elected Councillor whom a jury found not guilty. Yet if it is not Lucy Connolly, then it is Ghislaine Maxwell. Why would any intelligence agency seek to recruit or influence Prince Andrew, or Sarah Ferguson? Beyond considerations of taste, what difference would it make if there were sex tapes of either? But with Ghislaine Maxwell comes Robert Maxwell. With Robert Maxwell comes Alastair Campbell, de facto Prime Minister from 1997 until at least 2003. With Campbell comes Peter Mandelson, three times a Cabinet Minister, for four years European Commissioner for Trade, and now British Ambassador to the United States as well as a legislator for life. And with Mandelson, we are back to Jeffrey Epstein.

With Campbell also comes the dodgy dossier, and thus the Whips’ Office that forced through the Iraq War. Along with the subsequently adjudicated and disqualified electoral fraud Phil Woolas, that Office included Ivor Caplin and Dan Norris, who was notably close to Caplin. All three were made Ministers a few weeks after the Iraq vote. Caplin was and is a close friend and the closest ally of his sometime lover, Peter Kyle. Like a serving Government Whip, Kyle was given his big break by the then Chief Whip. As the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Kyle would administer digital ID. Would you trust him and his ilk with your children’s and grandchildren’s photographs and contact details? Would you trust the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which is on course for the contract?

As for Connolly, was she a political prisoner? I have been one twice, the second time indisputably. Although we have yet to see the details, Yvette Cooper may have made good on Theresa May’s promise of a statutory inquiry into Orgreave. But I was refused on 23 June the tag that I had twice been promised in writing, the decision of a Home Office headed by that close ally of the former Labour Leadership of and then on Durham County Council, and I was released on 7 August only because the judge had specified that I must be, every effort having been made to keep me banged up at least until 7 November. Still, the message of Connolly’s case, always to plead not guilty, will have been heard loud and clear by, for example, the ever-lengthening list of people who were apparently to be brought before the courts charged with having expressed support for Palestine Action. Jury trials for every single one of them, Yvette. Never plead guilty. I know whereof I speak.

Having publicly called for hotels with human beings in them to be burned down, hotels and human beings that have since been attacked, Connolly was made to serve only 40 per cent of her sentence. Whereas after I had been due to be tagged, this guilty-pleading convict of non-violent, non-sexual, non-domestic, non-terrorist, and non-drugs-related offences watched that close ally of the former Labour Leadership of and then on Durham County Council tag wifebeaters, drug-dealers, and ringleaders of last year’s race riots. The Leadership of what little Labour Group remains on that authority has passed to the old NUM Left from the Strike; to the last of the five Councillors who were suspended from the Labour Party in 2008. But the mere electoral will of the people is irrelevant to these matters. Nevertheless, let Cooper feel it when an acquitted Palestine Action defendant contested what she had already turned from her safe into her marginal seat. Will Reform UK, which is predicted to win it, field Connolly as its candidate? If not, why not? The law on local elections is tighter in this as in many other ways, but I had been sentenced to 12 months in 2021, and although I had to withdraw due to ill health, my nomination to contest the 2024 General Election was accepted without difficulty.

Board of Reform UK

The three elected positions on the Reform Party Board have been filled predictably enough. But what of the three seats reserved for appointees of Nigel Farage? Zia Yusuf, Paul Nuttall and Andrea Jenkyns are all former Conservatives, if a long time ago in Nuttall’s case. Yusuf and Jenkyns left that party only last year. “My party has left me” never, ever leads to the follow-up question, “Yes, that may have been why you left your old party, but why have you joined this one?”

No such question is being asked of Jenkyns, who was a Minister under, and a fanatical supporter of, the Prime Minister of Net Zero, of very big spending long before Covid-19, of the highest net migration ever, of Stonewall, of the lifting of the requirement that jobs in Britain be advertised first in Britain, of the lockdowns, of the Northern Ireland Protocol, and of the war in Ukraine. Nor of Tim Montgomerie, who was a spear-carrier for that Prime Minister. Nor of Jake Berry, who was a Net Zero enthusiast and a Remain campaigner, and who last year lost to Labour a seat that was now expected to be won by Reform UK.

And nor of Reform’s grandee, Ann Widdecombe, faithful Junior Minister under John Major, Minister of State under Michael Howard as he began the shredding of civil liberties in a bidding war with Tony Blair, Shadow Cabinet stalwart under William Hague, twice cheerleader for the putative Leadership of Ken Clarke, scourge of foxhunting, only Conservative MP to vote with Gordon Brown for 42-day detention without charge, autobiographical praiser of Michael Heseltine for having killed off the British coal industry, avowed opponent of the Assisted Suicide Bill only because it contained insufficient “safeguards”, and opiner only this month that men who had “undergone extensive surgery” should be sent to women’s prisons even though every cell of their mutilated bodies still contained a Y chromosome and they themselves had been socialised as males.

Not Hitler’s Pope

My latest for Catholic365.

The Illusion of ‘Safe’ Marijuana

I have never taken any illegal drug, but I stunned the young’uns in the clink with how much I knew about them. I’m from the Nineties, and it’s all true. Kevin Sabet writes:

In 2018, 27-year-old Bryn Spejcher, an inexperienced marijuana smoker in California, killed her boyfriend Chad O’Melia by stabbing him 108 times, a crime the local district attorney described as “horrific” and “one of the worst our medical examiner has ever seen.” A jury found Spejcher guilty of involuntary manslaughter, but she received only probation at sentencing because of a compelling presentation of her defense of cannabis-induced psychosis. Prior to the violent incident, Spejcher had taken two hits of legal marijuana from a bong, and claimed that she began “seeing things that weren’t there” and lost touch with reality. She also stabbed herself repeatedly in the neck, and stabbed her own dog. Law enforcement agents called to the scene had to break her arm with a metal baton to get her to let go of the knife; multiple Taserings had no effect.

Cases like Spejcher’s illustrate the stakes involved in the federal reclassification of marijuana. If President Trump follows through with such a move, the drug would remain illegal on the federal level, but would receive an imprimatur of being safer and face fewer restrictions, with significant commercial and social implications.

Yet voices across public discourse persist in asking: why should anyone care if President Trump does just that?

Celebrities like Mike Tyson and Joe Rogan and hedge-fund bosses like Andrew Lahde tell us that marijuana is no big deal. Numerous states have already legalized it for medical and recreational usage, and they claim to be regulating it well. If we are to believe the advocates, marijuana is a miracle cure for PTSD, anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder [I have three of those four] — not to mention an unbeatable salve for the pain suffered by cancer patients.

So what sense does it make for this drug to sit in the same federal category as PCP and heroin? Isn’t marijuana’s placement in Schedule I, the most serious category, merely a relic of discredited thinking from the bad old days of the War on Drugs? It isn’t. To understand why it isn’t, and why a Trump move to reclassify weed would risk unmitigated harm to American health and safety, it’s first important to clear up some common misunderstandings around how and why drugs end up classified as they do.

Under the Controlled Substances Act of 1971, a five-part schedule was established for classification of potentially dangerous drugs. This schedule is emphatically not an index either of a drug’s “hardness” or a kind of unofficial charging and sentencing guide for prosecutors and judges. Placement is earned specifically through consideration of a drug’s accepted medical use and its abuse risk. Drugs with no accepted medical use and a high risk of abuse get placed in Schedule I.

That’s the commonality between marijuana and heroin; under federal law, the relevant agencies necessarily view them that way.

Neither has an accepted medical use, though both drugs have approved medicines derived from them that remain in lower schedules (the medicine dronabinol, for example, is synthesized THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, and is in Schedule III). Both have high risks of abuse. The argument that one is a “hard” drug and the other is not — which is debatable, especially given today’s ultra-high-potency weed — simply doesn’t come into play.

Nor does the criminal-justice question. Keeping marijuana in Schedule I isn’t, as critics have it, a carceral strategy; conversely, moving it into Schedule III isn’t a de-carceral one. Under a move to Schedule III, the drug would remain federally illegal, still subject to the enforcement power of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Justice. No low-level offender would see his sentence commuted. This is sort of beside the point anyway, since most low-level marijuana users never receive a sentence for anything.

But how can it be, another objection runs, that the drug has no medical use? Most US states currently allow doctors to recommend it.

That, again, is technically correct. But the decisions those states made to allow doctors (and in some cases, “designated caregivers”) to recommend marijuana to treat pain and other issues were political decisions, not medical or scientific ones. Voters stated a preference; that has no effect on how federal agencies are required by current law to view the question. The facts of just how those recommendations get handed out drive home that political aspect. In 2022, Pennsylvania saw some 132,000 medical-marijuana certifications, a third of the state’s total for that year, issued by only 17 doctors.

Those decisions, taken in the aggregate, don’t constitute an accepted medical use. Or at least, they didn’t until October 2022. That was the month the Biden administration directed its Department of Health and Human Services to look into a possible reclassification of the drug.

Again, history is important here. Before the Biden process, the federal government had used an eight-factor test to determine how to schedule various drugs. Those factors focus on what the current and historical patterns of its abuse look like, as well as what that means for individual users, what risk it presents to public health, how likely it is to cause dependence (either physical or psychological), the state of the science around the drug and its pharmacology, and whether it’s a chemical precursor or “analogue” of another controlled substance.

By these metrics, marijuana is precisely where it belongs in Schedule I. The best science shows that it isn’t an effective medical treatment. One of the most frequent conditions it’s used to treat is chronic pain. But the 2017 study cited to prove its efficacy there has seen dozens of subsequent meta-analyses and reviews fail to support its conclusions; a 2022 study of a decade’s worth of surgical records from a Cleveland hospital even found that using marijuana actually increases pain after surgery.

The data also demonstrate that marijuana poses a significant risk of dependency: addiction rates are around 30% of all users and rising. Addiction in this case means exactly what it does for other substances: inability to quit, a need for ever more of the drug to achieve the same effect, and even withdrawal symptoms. Given the recent avalanche of data cataloging marijuana’s harms specifically to cardiac and mental health — like a June British Medical Journal review connecting it to a two-fold risk of cardiovascular death or the massive Danish study from 2023 suggesting that as much as 30% of schizophrenia cases among men between 21 and 30 were linked to cannabis-use disorder — its wider public-health risks are glaringly clear.

The Biden administration supplanted the eight factors with a new system seemingly designed to push the drug into a less restrictive schedule. The Biden recommendation — likely a political compromise between the status quo and full legalization, timed just before Joe Biden’s re-election bid — also incorporated the shaky argument that because so many states have made political decisions to allow medical marijuana, that constitutes an accepted medical use.

An incisive article in JAMA Neurology, by the Harvard addiction scientist Bertha Madras, took a hard look at the process and found disturbing evidence of politicization. This included the fact that a high-ranking Biden DOJ official, Acting Assistant Attorney General Peter Hyun, argued that “cannabis has not been proven in scientific studies to be a safe and effective treatment for any disease or condition” — six months before the rescheduling directive appeared. Yet the science Hyun cites certainly had not changed in the interim.

The federal government has long held the position Hyun laid out. Under the Obama administration, Jay Inslee and Gina Raimondo — then the governors of Washington and Rhode Island, respectively — petitioned the federal government to reclassify marijuana. The administration’s response made clear that federal drug schedules reflect what the science says, not “danger” or “severity.” Obama’s then-DEA chief, Chuck Rosenberg, announcing the denial of the petition, used language Hyun would later echo: “This decision isn’t based on danger. This decision is based on whether marijuana, as determined by the FDA, is a safe and effective medicine . . . and it’s not.”

But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Trump reverses years of federal precedent to follow the logic of the rescheduling argument. What happens then?

The truth: no one knows.

It’s clear that the marijuana industry believes that rescheduling will be an enormous benefit to its shareholders. In one sense, that’s likely correct. Businesses selling substances in Schedule I face severe commercial restrictions under the tax code. A provision of the tax code prevents any such business from taking normal deductions at tax time on expenses like advertising. Lifting those restrictions seems sure to provide an enormous boost to revenues and reach for businesses selling marijuana products.

The impact on society is a different matter. The available evidence suggests that this will be a significant negative for society, especially given the research around how the young start using the drug: data published in June by researchers from the University of Southern California and Rutgers University show that exposure to marijuana social-media content plays a huge role in teens initiating use.

But there are other externalities in play.

If marijuana moves into Schedule III, it will be the only substance there without Food and Drug Administration approval. Will that play out in a similar way to the case of opium-poppy straw (i.e., the entirety of the plant, as it exists prior to the processes that turn it into heroin or opium)? Poppy straw is listed in Schedule II, but it also lacks an FDA approval — and it’s regularly seized by drug and border authorities, with a massive shipment grabbed up just in May. Though weed entrepreneurs clearly expect smooth sailing after a reclassification, they may well be in for a rough ride.

Then there’s the fact that substances listed in Schedule III face additional regulatory and enforcement power: Not only from the DEA and DOJ, but also from the FDA. There are strict rules around what sellers of Schedule III substances can and can’t say in advertisements. They’re forbidden from advertising off-label uses — and since marijuana lacks an FDA approval, all therapeutic uses are off-label. It’s easy to imagine another operator in the Schedule III space filing a lawsuit demanding precisely that kind of enforcement.

In other words, rescheduling opens the door to regulatory chaos, even as it seems certain to add commercial firepower to an industry whose products, on the evidence, are extraordinarily harmful. How this combination will produce the benefits promised by proponents of rescheduling also remains unclear.

The federal government shouldn’t signal to the American people that a drug that lacks medical or scientific imprimatur somehow possesses such approval. Others disagree — and vocally. They have a lot of money riding on it. But we should be crystal clear about what their preferred policy would actually mean for American society — nothing good.

There cannot 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 wants to legalise drugs across the board, and Lee Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023.

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 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 Peter Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought should be taught in schools, as pro-drugs propaganda is routinely.

Confinement?

It may be Your Party, but as Just Stop Oil's, it is very unlikely ever to be Mine. Yet all six of the MPs who are now in the Independent Alliance voted against assisted suicide.

And ought Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana not to be associating with MPs who had opposed the decriminalisation of abortion?

Those saying that must also believe that John Smith would have been unfit to become Prime Minister, and that they themselves would have made a pariah of Christopher Hitchens.

Speciality Steel UK, Indeed

If something is so important that the Government could never allow it to go bust, then it ought not to be in the private sector at all.

How is that statement remotely controversial?

Normal Courtyard Exercise

As an old lag, the word “nonce” is part of my culture. In that culture’s citadels, it is very much still in use. Nonces are given the suspended sentences that we were not. Nonces 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.

The truth is that like illegal drug use, the sexual abuse of children, especially but not exclusively adolescent males, is fundamental to cultural and political power in this country, both those practices themselves and the opportunities that they presented for blackmail. That in turn crosses over with the endemic sexual harassment and assault of male staff who are barely, if at all, into adulthood.

It has all come out about Margaret Thatcher’s friends. She 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. Unlike the then Prince of Wales, 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, which was broadcast in 1996. Our Friends in the North is so integral to subsequent popular culture that one of its four stars went on to play James Bond, another was the first Doctor of this century’s revival of Doctor Who, and neither of the others is exactly obscure.

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. To Play the King was broadcast as long ago as 1993. Of the generation that was now in its pomp, every politician and commentator saw every minute of that trilogy.

Moreover, anyone who came to political maturity in what were then the newly-former mining areas will have been made fully aware that the miners in the dock, all the way back in 1984 and 1985, routinely made reference to the proclivities of the Home Secretary of the day, Leon Brittan. Those proclivities were common knowledge from Fife and the Lothians, to County Durham and the southern part of Northumberland, to South Yorkshire, to Derbyshire, to South Wales, among other places. Nothing was carried in the papers or included in the court reports, but the pit villages never needed Twitter in order to circumvent that kind of censorship.

Yvette Cooper has a former mining constituency. Yet she thinks that those grooming gangs which were currently attracting attention should be investigated only by the Police. She may no longer be telling that to the veterans of the Battle of Orgreave, but she should still try it on the Hillsborough families, the victims of the spycops, and numerous others, including Doreen Lawrence, on whose reputation Keir Starmer had long traded. Ah, yes, Starmer. With no diplomatic background, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s closest friends has been made the British Ambassador to Washington while we allow ourselves to guffaw at Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson as if they mattered in the least. Who is a grooming gang, and who is not?

As Home Secretary, Cooper 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.

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 in principle it remains, 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 are now being brought in as part of NATO's side in Ukraine, where they carried 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, while, yet again, everyone who knows anything at all about the subject is pointing out that our position is suicidally insane.

And 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, come to that, to be sent to the front line? If you are brown and working-class, then at 15 you can be trafficked to IS. If you are black and working-class, then at 15 you can be strip-searched at school. If you are white and working-class, then at 15 you can very possibly be trafficked to something like the Azov Battalion. But if you were posh, and probably white although that is not quite the point, then at 15 you could in 2022 vote on who the Prime Minister should be, even if she did not remain the Prime Minister for very long.

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. Tom Alexandrovich is only the latest in a long line of child molesters to have 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 were known to sleep with underage girls at the youth conferences of the political parties back in the day. 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 the 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 authority that is apparent to anyone. Even in England and Wales, it has never been subject to a parliamentary vote. Let there be one now. And if there were to be an inquiry into the grooming gangs, then Victoria Gillick should be on it, along with Lisa McKenzie and the distinguished criminologists in the Workers Party of Britain, for a start. But we all know that British inquiries take years on end to exonerate the lifelong friends who had appointed them. Jess Phillips is on course to lose her seat to the Muslim candidate of the Workers Party, which has called for an inquiry into the grooming gangs. Yet who is a grooming gang, and who is not?

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. Kendall’s support for assisted suicide, though sincere in its desire to reduce spending on sickness and disability benefits by having the State kill off the sick and disabled, is also a useful positioning of herself as an alternative to the hitherto undisputed crown prince, Wes Streeting, of whom we should nevertheless still be very, very afraid.

Speaking of crowns and princes, Stephen Fry delivered Channel 4’s “Alternative Christmas Message” in 2023 despite having attended not only the Coronation, but also the King’s wedding. He was the alternative to what, exactly? And now, a K. 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.

Digital ID would be administered by the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle. One can almost admire his sheer gall in attacking Nigel Farage by comparing him to Savile. Like a serving Government Whip, Kyle was given his big break in politics by the Chief Whip whose Whips’ Office included both Kyle’s close friend, closest ally, and sometime lover, Ivor Caplin, and at the same time Dan Norris, who was also notably close to Caplin. 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. Would you trust him and his ilk with your children’s and grandchildren’s photographs and contact details? And Alastair Campbell had cut his teeth under Robert Maxwell. There is that Epstein connection again.

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 Detention Centre 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 set eyes on 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 yet to sue anyone for having made that claim. Again, he could not see the problem. Again, he had been groomed. Who is a grooming gang, and who is not?

We need a criminal offence of sexual activity with any person under the age of 18 who was more than two years younger than oneself, with a maximum sentence equal to twice the difference in age, and the abolition of different rules for “positions of trust”. We need to ban abortion and contraception for those under 18 at least without parental knowledge and consent, just as they thankfully cannot now be given puberty blockers. What sort of parent would want to put his underage daughter on the Pill? There is only one possible reason for doing so. And we need to rule out the legal possibility of being a specifically sexual assailant below an age of consent that had been raised to 18, thereby correcting the anomaly that had existed since 2003.

In that year, a male heterosexual age of consent of 16 was created by default due to political horse-trading among the feminist and gay groups around Harriet Harman, of all people, which insisted that both sexes and all acts be treated in exactly the same way. Yet the age of criminal responsibility remains 10, meaning that boys can be prosecuted for rape, itself significantly redefined in 2003, six years before they can legally have consensual sex. And they are. Indeed, boys who allege abuse by women are routinely accused of rape.

We need the replacement of the existing categories of sexual assault with aggravating circumstances to the general categories of offences against the person, such that the sentences could be doubled. There should be no anonymity either for adult defendants or for adult complainants. Either we have an open system of justice, or we do not. We need to specify that intoxication was a bar to sexual consent only insofar as it would have been a bar to driving. We need to end the blocking of progress into paid or voluntary work even though one had been acquitted. C5 notices should be outlawed.

And we need to make it a criminal offence for anyone aged 21 or over to buy or sell sex, with equal sentencing on both sides. The Universal Basic Income, the Jobs Guarantee, and the dividends from public stakes in the FTSE 500 companies, distributed equally to everyone, would remove any conceivable excuse for prostituting oneself. This would of course include filmed or photographed prostitution. We need to define obscenity as material depicting acts that were themselves illegal or which was reasonably likely to incite or encourage such acts, with sentencing the same as for the illegal act in question in each case, and with the law enforced equally in relation to both sexes. If age verification really has halved British traffic to pornographic websites, then I have been told since time immemorial that that was impossible. By the political tendency that was now in government.

Many of us ended up as exasperated critics of Jeremy Corbyn’s last time. But we were not and are not his enemies. When it came to those, such as Margaret Hodge of Islington children’s homes infamy, then nothing struck more fear into their hearts than his popularity with young men. Alongside a collapse in male employment that had in any case largely happened by the time that they had come along, the defining experience of their own politics had been to have grown up under Governments, of all three parties, that had harvested young men in wars with a sheer pointlessness that had not been since 1918. Hence their attraction and attachment to a politician who had opposed every single one of those wars, just as he had opposed the collapse in that employment. Think on. Including, if you are reading this site as you have done in the past, Jeremy Corbyn.

Budget Responsibility? Fiscal Transparency?

Another day, another clutch of disastrous stories about the economy. The New Economics Foundation rightly describes the Office for Budget Responsibility as "not fit for purpose", and calls for its "wholesale reform". But who would be the Foundation's proposed Office for Fiscal Transparency? Whom might Rachel Reeves realistically appoint to it?

Giving up democratic political control of monetary policy has been a disaster. Without a manifesto commitment, Labour farmed out monetary policy. To make austerity permanent, the Liberal Democrats forced the creation of the OBR, although they were pushing at an open door with George Osborne. The Conservatives created the Economic Advisory Council out of thin air. Yet on none of those occasions have the salaries of the First Lord of the Treasury, of all other Treasury Ministers, and of all senior Treasury civil servants, been halved, as in each of those cases they should have been. It is difficult to see why those people should be paid anything at all once the Budget Responsibility Bill had become an Act and given the OBR the last word on everything. The same OBR, that is, that Reeves would have us believe had kept her in the dark about the "black hole".

The annual tax take is more than one trillion pounds. £20 billion is not a "black hole". This is just an excuse not to do things, although quite possibly while putting up taxes at the same time. And which taxes? A tax of one to two per cent on assets above £10 million could abolish the two-child benefit cap 17 times over, while merely taxing each of Britain's 173 billionaires down to one billion pounds per head would raise £1.1 trillion, an entire year's tax take. But neither of those is going to happen. Keir Starmer thinks that if anything could be done about child poverty, then it would have been done by now. He has said that.

Labour Rightists shrieked for months about the need to withdraw the Winter Fuel Payment and to cut benefits to the sick and the disabled. Yet no Labour MP voted against the partial and inadequate, but nevertheless substantial, reversal of those measures. Outriders such as Lewis Goodall are now making shrill calls for 100 per cent inheritance tax. Is he looking for a seat? Is he angling for a Downing Street job? Or is he just ridiculous? In any event, expect a lot more of this.

Bye, Convention?

I write this while putting on record my immense respect for Graham Stringer. As you will see, I do not think that he is wrong in principle.

In 2016, a second referendum on EU membership was Owen Smith’s signature policy for Leader, and Jeremy Corbyn wiped the floor with him. Yet Keir Starmer unilaterally announced that policy from the platform of the 2019 Labour Party Conference, Corbyn failed to sack him, and Boris Johnson, unable to believe his luck, called a General Election. In 2024, withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights was Robert Jenrick’s signature policy for Leader, and he not only lost, but lost to Kemi Badenoch. Yet Badenoch is predicted to announce that policy from the platform of the 2025 Conservative Party Conference, and the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and to a lesser but not negligible extent the Labour Party, cannot believe their luck.

The ECHR is written, both into the Good Friday Agreement, and into the United Kingdom’s trade agreement with the European Union. No more than 50 Members of the last Parliament would have voted to withdraw from it. But I cannot understand why those who rejoice in that do so. 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.

The ECHR will not save us from digital ID. 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. Most countries that subscribe to the ECHR already have identity cards. Thus defined, Keir Starmer is indeed a human rights lawyer. When Badenoch and Jenrick were in office, 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 EU 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 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?

Back To The Future, Indeed

The directors and senior executives of United Utilities should be imprisoned for five years for what they had done to Windermere. That dumping should be known to future generations as one of the last acts of the lunatically privatised water companies, before the emergency renationalisation of Thames Water for nothing, since no one on the open market would have paid a penny for the shares, had set off the chain of events that had finally restored both sanity and sanitation.

If, as indubitably applies to the water companies, something would have to be nationalised rather than ever be allowed to go bust, then it does not belong in the private sector. Most of the world accepts that axiomatically. England is one of only two countries with privatised water. At the point of privatisation, the water companies were debt free, as befitted the monopoly suppliers of something that everyone had to have, and the raw material of which fell out of the sky for free. The money that those companies paid out in dividends would easily cover any infrastructure costs. Yet leakage is out of control, and raw sewage is being pumped into our rivers, our lakes and our seas. In 2022, Thames Water, typically of the sector, declared a billion pound profit in order to pay dividends, despite being £12 billion in debt.

So we are all expected to bail it out, at whatever rate happened to be demanded by the shareholders, themselves largely foreign states as such, which are allowed to own our vital infrastructure. They should be told to forget it. Those shares are worth what anyone else would now pay for them. How much is that? More broadly, since dividends are supposed to reward investment, then they should be limited by the Statute Law to the Bank Rate plus risk on the capital provided by the original share issue, with customers awarded shares for all capital converted from their payments.

Yet even if we could not get away with renationalisation without even further compensation, there is plenty of money for that or anything else. What is lacking is the political will. The exemption of primary residences from capital gains tax will one day look as bizarre as mortgage interest tax relief, which was also sacrosanct once. As will the taxation of wealth at a lower rate than earnings. Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson corrected that in 1988. But in 1998, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown put the clock back to the Chancellor of the Exchequer who had gone on, as First Lord of the Treasury, to introduce monetarism to Britain and vice versa.

That was very much their style. The fortieth anniversary of Back to the Future is an opportunity to remind ourselves that Thatcher’s absolute ban on all government work for Andersen in view of its role in the DeLorean fraud lasted until the General Election of 1997, when the position of Secretary of State for Trade and Industry was given to Patricia Hewitt. Hewitt had secured employment from Neil Kinnock by writing him a gushing letter of support during his Leadership campaign, exactly the same as the one that she had sent simultaneously to Roy Hattersley. She went on to help found the Institute for Public Policy Research, and then, soon after Blair became Leader, to become Head of Research at Andersen Consulting, a position for which she had no qualification beyond her closeness to the next Prime Minister.

In 1997, Hewitt entered Parliament, Blair entered Downing Street, and the Labour commitment to regulate such companies was dropped. Andersen paid just over £21 million of the £200 million that Thatcher and John Major had demanded, barely covering the Government’s legal costs. It went on to write, among other things, a report claiming that the Private Finance Initiative was good value for money. That was the only report on the subject that the Blair Government ever cited, since it was the only one to say that ridiculous thing. Hewitt and Blair tried to give auditors limited liability. It took the Conservative Opposition and the Bush Administration to see them off. On this as on tax equity, Thatcher was a far better social democrat than Hewitt or Blair.

And what of Keir Starmer? In 1980, Thatcher signed the Venice Declaration of nine European countries against Israeli settlements on the West Bank. In 1981, she denounced the Israeli bombing of Iraq’s Osiraq nuclear reactor, calling it illegal. In 1982, she responded to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon by imposing an arms embargo on Israel that remained in force until 1994. When Menachem Begin wrote to ask her to reconsider, then she did not even reply. She had not wanted to meet that unrepentant anti-British terrorist when he had visited London, and having done so, then she said that she wished that she had stuck to her guns. Speaking of guns, he still hated Britain enough to arm Argentina during the Falklands War. Benjamin Netanyahu may be his father’s son, and the Leader of the party that Begin founded, but he would have no reason to do that to Britain under Starmer.

Yet Thatcher must never have seen a banknote, since she thought that the State had no money of its own. In reality, the issuing of currency is an act of the State, which is literally the creator of all money. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control. The responsibility of the Government is to ensure the supply of goods and services to be purchased with that currency.

It is impossible for the currency-issuing State to run out of money. Money “lent” to the Treasury by the Bank of England is money “lent” to the State by the State; such “debt” will never be called in, much less will bailiffs be sent round. Call this “the Magic Money Tree” if you will. There is no comparison between running the economy and managing a household budget, or even a business. There is no “national credit card” to “max out”. “Fiscal headroom” is only the gap between the Government’s tax and spending plans and what would be allowed under the fiscal rules that it sets for itself and changes frequently.

That is what both fiscal policy and monetary policy are for: to give the currency its value by controlling inflation to a politically chosen extent while discouraging certain politically chosen forms of behaviour, and while encouraging others, including economic equality, which is fundamental to social cohesion and thus to patriotism. If there were “no such thing as society”, and Thatcher really did say that, then there could be no such thing as the society that was the family, or the society that was the nation. But there is no debt. It is an accounting trick. The Treasury, which is the State, has issued bonds to the Bank of England, which is the State. Even if those bonds were held by anyone else, then the State could simply issue itself with enough of its own free-floating, fiat currency to redeem them. Say it again that there is no debt. There is no debt. There is no debt.

Taxation is not where the State’s money comes from. Nothing is “unaffordable”, every recession is discretionary on the part of the Government, and there is no such thing as “taxpayers’ money”. Within and under that understanding, a tax of one to two per cent on assets above £10 million could abolish the two-child benefit cap 17 times over, while merely taxing each of Britain’s 173 billionaires down to one billion pounds per head would raise £1.1 trillion, an entire year’s tax take. The taxation of unearned income at the same rate as earnings could easily abolish the two-child benefit cap as advocated by Nigel Farage and Suella Braverman, restore the £20 per week uplift to the Universal Credit two in five claimants of which were in work, and extend that uplift to disability benefits, all of which would inject money directly into the consumer economy. And so on.

In asserting that “the rider is as big as the horse”, Kemi Badenoch had already demonstrated her perfect ignorance of the fact that all state benefits were taxable income, that the state pension was a benefit, that two in five Universal Credit claimants were in work, that Personal Independence Payment was an in-work benefit, and that if half of adults were not paying income tax, then, apart from a few very wealthy tax avoiders or evaders, half of adults had gross annual incomes of less than £12,570. Now she rejoices to inform us that, “Hardworking taxpayers are funding subsidised cars for constipation and tennis elbow”, in which case she should try to get one, and that “If you’re on benefits, you should make the same responsible choices about having children as everyone else. We must keep the two-child benefit cap”, as if no one on benefits were in work, nor did parents ever lose their jobs and have to sign on. She cannot believe a word of her criticism of Net Zero, since she is a thoroughgoing Malthusian.

There is no case whatever for cutting the benefits of the sick and disabled as if that would cure them or find them jobs, for retaining the two-child benefit cap, for withdrawing the Winter Fuel Payment from anyone, for increasing workers’ bus fares by 50 per cent, for failing to freeze Council Tax, for threatening to abolish the single person discount, for increasing employers’ National Insurance contributions so as to destroy charities and small businesses while making it impossible for big businesses to take on staff or to increase wages, for forcing working farmers of many decades’ standing who formally inherited their parents’ farms to sell them to giant American agribusinesses, or for any other form of austerity. There is an unanswerable economic and moral case for the full compensation of, among others, the victims of Orgreave, Grenfell Tower, the Windrush scandal, the Post Office scandal, and the contaminated blood scandal, as well as the WASPI women and those, such as Andrew Malkinson, who had been wrongfully imprisoned. All while renationalising the railways, the Royal Mail, and the water companies.

10 Years On

This was published in The Times, at least one contributor to which has never got over it. We were right then, and this is still right now:

We do not all hold British nationality or reside in the United Kingdom, although some of us do. We are not all members or supporters of the British Labour Party, although some of us are.

However, we are united in rejecting the charge of “economic illiteracy” against Jeremy Corbyn, and in recognising that his economic analysis and proposals are, at the very least, superior to those of the current British Government, as well as being more comprehensive and coherent than those of any other candidate for Labour Leader.

Yours faithfully,

David Lindsay, Lanchester, County Durham

Professor Victoria Chick, Emeritus Professor of Economics, University College London

Professor Alfredo Saad Filho, Professor of Political Economy, Department of Development Studies, The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Professor John Grahl, Professor of European Integration, Middlesex University Business School

Professor Stuart Holland, Visiting Professor, Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra, Portugal; Senior Scholar of the Institute of Social and European Studies, Köszeg, Hungary; Member of Parliament for Vauxhall, 1979-1989

Professor Christopher May, Professor of Political Economy and Faculty Associate Dean for Enterprise, Lancaster University

Professor Ozlem Onaran, Professor of Workforce and Economic Development Policy, University of Greenwich

Professor Prem Sikka, Professor of Accounting, Essex Business School, University of Essex

Professor Pritam Singh, Professor of Economics, Department of Accounting, Finance and Economics, Oxford Brookes University

Professor Robert H. Wade, Professor of Political Economy and Development, Department of International Development, London School of Economics; Leontief Prize in Economics 2008

Dr David Harvie, Senior Lecturer in Finance and Political Economy, School of Management, University of Leicester

Ismail Ertürk, Senior Lecturer, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester

Ewa Karwowski, Lecturer in Economics, Kingston University, London

Blocked From Engaging?

Zarah Sultana is right that the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn sold out by adopting the IHRA Definition, among several other examples, and I hope that she is looking forward to a very nice holiday or new car at the expense of Oliver Kamm, who has now repeatedly libelled her. Meanwhile, I am informed that, “@OliverKamm has blocked you. You can view public posts from @OliverKamm, but you are blocked from engaging with them. You also cannot follow or message @OliverKamm.” As if I might have had any desire to do so.

The only other tweeter to have done that to me is Edward Dutton, @jollyheretic. I knew him at university. He once tried to seduce me after Mass, so I know his little secret. Dutton is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Mankind Quarterly, which he used to edit. Another member is Dr Adel Batterjee of Jeddah, the founder of the Benevolence International Foundation, which was placed under UN sanctions because it was a front for funding al-Qaeda.

In 2018, Dutton secured the publication of this masterpiece in Evolutionary Psychological Science. On the Editorial Board of that is Professor Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard. In 2021, a very short time indeed from 2018 in the life of a quarterly journal, Pinker wrote that, “Oliver Kamm’s urbanity, erudition and compassion are raised to the power of two in Mending the Mind. He put them to work in crafting this gorgeous and urgent book, and on every page they remind us of his moral that enviable gifts are no protection against the affliction of depression.”

Kamm, Pinker, Dutton, Batterjee. Batterjee, Dutton, Pinker, Kamm. Truly, an Axis of Evil. Corbyn and Sultana may have their imperfections. But they are better than that.

Raise The Colours

To access a range of political views, the Online Safety Act constantly requires that we prove that we are at least two years older than the Government wants the voting age to be. This is not due to a lack of joined-up thinking. On the contrary, it is intended that in 2029, the 12-year-olds of 2025 will be enfranchised having been exposed to no politics other than those rammed down their throats in school.

Behind all of this is the spectre of digital ID. Tony Blair treated us to his view on the small boats when he had the effrontery to comment on the twentieth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks that he had caused. His solution was digital ID because of course it was. Identity cards have been the solution in search of a problem at least since Michael Howard was Home Secretary, Shadowed by Blair. Ever since, British politics has been largely defined by the unseemly bidding war between them. Now calling for digital ID, Blair is still at it.

Blair did in fact secure passage of the Identity Cards Act 2006, but so little came of it that when it was repealed by the Identity Documents Act 2010, then that was unamended and unopposed, without even any compensation for those who had forked out for the cards. Did you ever see one? It was supposed to have been about terrorism, as everything was in those days, but the latest excuse is the boat people, as it is for everything these days. Yet just as all the 9/11 bombers had had genuine identity documents, and just as identity cards had done nothing to prevent the Madrid bombing, so the small boats are coming from France, which already has identity cards. The fallback option will be to argue that this was necessary to keep under-18s off social media, and thus to preclude events such as those depicted in Adolescence. Again, though, even in its own terms, does that work on the Continent?

The real targets are elsewhere. Both traditional conservatives and the non-Establishment populist Right are at last waking up to the fact that they are as much enemies of our rulers as the rest of us. They would be endlessly ordered to show their digital ID as surely as would be the working class and the youth from which they were in any case largely drawn, as surely as would be trade unionists and anti-cuts campaigners, as surely as would be environmentalists and peace activists, and as surely as would be ethnic minorities and the religious minorities that all religions now were.

The Liberal Democrats were in office for all five years of a Government that, if largely for ill, got far more done than any of its successors, none of which has yet lasted anything like as long. Yet to say the least, the erosion of civil liberties under John Major, Blair and Gordon Brown was not reversed. We remain subject to the infamous Criminal Justice Act 2003, which admitted hearsay evidence, removed the protection against double jeopardy, provided for Crown Court trials by a judge without a jury (the first ever such resulted in a life sentence), and effectively made it possible to be convicted of having previously been convicted. While you cannot go wrong with Sheridan Smith as an actress, the forthcoming I Fought the Law will no doubt be shameful propaganda for double jeopardy, and thus for the demands by Conservative and Reform UK politicians that the jury’s acquittal of Ricky Jones be overturned. I hesitate to ask, but how, exactly?

Still, the message of that case, always to plead not guilty, will have been heard loud and clear by, for example, the ever-lengthening list of people who were apparently to be brought before the courts charged with having expressed support for Palestine Action. Jury trials for every single one of them, Yvette Cooper. Although we have yet to see the details, Cooper may have made good on Theresa May’s promise of a statutory inquiry into Orgreave. But I was refused on 23 June the tag that I had twice been promised in writing, the decision of a Home Office headed by that close ally of the former Labour Leadership of and then on Durham County Council, and I was released on 7 August only because the judge had specified that I must be, every effort having been made to keep me banged up at least until 7 November.

After I had been due to be tagged, this guilty-pleading convict of non-violent, non-sexual, non-domestic, non-terrorist, and non-drugs-related offences watched that close ally of the former Labour Leadership of and then on Durham County Council tag wifebeaters, drug-dealers, and ringleaders of last year’s race riots. The Leadership of what little Labour Group remains on that authority has passed to the old NUM Left from the Strike; to the last of the five Councillors who were suspended from the Labour Party in 2008. But the mere electoral will of the people is irrelevant to these matters. Nevertheless, let Cooper feel it when an acquitted Palestine Action defendant contested what she had already turned from her safe into her marginal seat.

John Healey has asserted that the RAF reconnaissance flights over Gaza, provided to the Israelis free of charge, were solely in support of hostage rescue, with intelligence shared only for that purpose. If that were true, then this would be one of the least successful missions that the RAF had ever undertaken. The truth is that, to its great credit, the RAF at every level dissented so fiercely that the Government has had to contract this out to Sierra Nevada Corporation instead. Ignore any other version of events. The spirit of 1946 lives.

There was of course a Labour Government in 1946. Britain’s best ever, but that is only a relative statement, not exclusively, yet nevertheless especially, where Abroad was concerned. As the Chagos deal unravels in terms that would force the resignation of a Prime Minister who ever really had been a human rights lawyer, remember that both of the previous betrayals of the Chagossians also happened under Labour Governments, and were indeed perpetrated by those whom the Right regarded as its two greatest lost Leaders since Hugh Gaitskell, Denis Healey and David Miliband. As a fighter for the Chagossians, Alex Salmond ranked with Tony Benn, Tam Dalyell, George Galloway and Jeremy Corbyn, so the calumnies against him continue to come thick and fast. Justice for his name is not a secondary consideration.

Nor is justice for Palestine Action, whatever one may think of its tactics or its strategy. Not that free speech has ever been especially robust in Britain. Last November, D-Notices were extended to counterterrorism policing. They are not the law, but they attain their desired end because the entire media have the necessary class loyalty, the same loyalty that permits the rest of us to guffaw at the inconsequential Prince Andrew and at the even less significant Sarah Ferguson, but never to mention Jeffrey Epstein’s links to the three times Cabinet Minister, plus a spell as European Commissioner for Trade, who was now the British Ambassador to the United States. In that spirit, the truth about the flights was hidden behind a D-Notice until the incident with the spray paint made that unsustainable even in the age of the Online Safety Act. Lo and behold, that incident was duly classified as an act of terrorism. As a result, the criminal justice system, which is already on the brink of collapse, could and should be brought to a standstill.

The only people even funnier than the vanguard elite are the master race, and they are engaged in a classic display of their superior intelligence by hoisting Saint George’s Flags while tearing down Palestinian ones. If they knew anything at all, then they would be hoisting Saint George’s Flag in the Palestinian cause, including in solidarity with the Palestine Action defendants, as well as, not unconnectedly, against the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, the Nationality and Borders Act, the Elections Act, the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, the National Security Act, the Public Order Act, the Online Safety Act, the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, together with the prospect of digital ID. The rest of us ought to do precisely that. Not least to identify licensed premises that, while mindful of their responsibilities as at present, would never ask for digital ID. And to identify businesses that would never refuse cash.

It is amazing how many people assume that because there is a legend about Saint George, then he himself must be a purely legendary figure. He is not. The Tomb of Saint George has become a shadow of its former self in his maternal hometown, which is now known as Lod, and which is the location of Israel’s principal airport. But at what those involved insist is also his birthplace against the stronger claims of Cappadocia, it was once a major focus of unity between Christians and Muslims in devotion to the Patron Saint of Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt before, and as much as, the Patron Saint of England and a very large number of other places. Three quarters of those who practised that devotion were violently expelled in 1948. On what remains, see here.

Saint George’s Flag goes back to the fourteenth century in England, although it is far older than that in many other places, having been the ensign of the Republic of Genoa from perhaps as early as the tenth century. The King of England had to pay an annual tribute to the Doge of Genoa for the protection that flying it afforded to English ships in the Mediterranean. But in England, it had long fallen into almost complete desuetude until 29 years ago.

Before Euro 96, although nearly everyone incorrectly called it something else, the English regarded the Union Flag as their national flag without complication. It was not even a question. In my childhood, no one would have had any idea what Saint George’s Flag was outside certain ecclesiastical circles that were obscure even in the 1980s, but around which I did happen to grow up. The 1966 World Cup Final is probably on YouTube. Check which flag most of the English fans were waving. The present Medieval revival was initiated 30 years later, which was in my adult lifetime, to sell bad beer to football’s new middle-class audience, who were the only people who could still afford the tickets. Or the beer. It predates devolution or anything like that. But we do have it now. It can be used to advantage.