À La Carte Before The Horse?

They are only stating the obvious about what the deal would have to be, and in any case, Leo Varadkar and Michel Barnier are the least of our worries. Those who would welcome the victories of Marine Le Pen and the AfD are a thoroughly international lot, sitting very light indeed on borders as surely as the royal and aristocratic elites of old, or indeed of the present day. They believe in a Western civilisation that transcends such matters. If they thought that that were getting a hearing in Paris, in Berlin, and thus in Brussels, then they would be as enthusiastic for rejoining the European Union as the Monday Clubbers Geoffrey Rippon and Jonathan Guinness were for joining it in the first place. Present affections for Donald Trump would easily be transferred.

The centrist affection for the EU would be baffling if we did not know that centrism and right-wing populism were con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage culture wars, and that Fascism was the shield and sword of the liberal bourgeoisie, which for a century had always chosen it when the choice had to be made. But even so, and not least because they were only stating the obvious about what the deal would have to be, Leo Varadkar and Michel Barnier are the least of our worries.

Like Trying To Play Chess With A Squirrel

Peter Hitchens writes:

I'll never forget the night Russell Brand offered to kiss me. He had been busy losing an argument about drugs on the BBC Newsnight programme, back in 2012. I already knew him of old. During our first encounter, at a London debate on drugs chaired by Emily Maitlis, I had teased him about his silly hat and referred to him as an 'alleged comedian' (I think the jury is still out on that).

I thought that a person who enjoyed mocking others, such as poor Andrew Sachs, might not be used to it himself. I tried to get him to say if he had been responsible for his own drug-taking. But instead I received a verbal explosion about how I was bigoted, about how The Mail on Sunday was bigoted, about how I 'peddled hatred' and lacked love for other human beings. Then there was the usual accusation of racial prejudice. The audience at that debate loved it, and the encounter ended with the unmistakable sound of North London liberals baying for more.

Now here we were again, debating drugs and the law, this time under the chairmanship of the BBC's Stephanie Flanders. Not that it mattered that he was losing the argument: Mr Brand was the one who had been asked to make a series of programmes on the subject, and I wasn't. I was the one who had written and published a critical history of British drug laws since the 1960s, and he had written a volume called My Booky Wook. He was also the one who knew how to rip his shirt (or on this occasion, I think, his jeans).

Not long before, Mr Brand had been invited to give evidence — cowboy hat, ripped shirt and all — to the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee. I had the strong impression that its members were keener to hear from him than they were from me and my two colleagues Mary Brett and Kathy Gyngell, increasingly lonely opponents of the weakening of the drug laws.

Mr Brand, remember, had in 2008 distinguished himself with his horrible, creepy prank, alongside Jonathan Ross, that he played on the actor Andrew Sachs. Remember what he did. He left three messages on Mr Sachs' answerphone, making repeated lewd and graphic claims about his granddaughter. These were then broadcast by BBC Radio. The BBC was fined £150,000 over the so-called Sachsgate scandal. It cost Brand his job at Radio 2, and led to the suspension of Ross and the disciplining of executives. Yet four years later the same Russell Brand was commissioned by another part of the BBC to make a major documentary series about drugs, apparently because he had once taken them.

Brand, in my view, is not stupid, though he is ill-informed and very bad at arguing. He makes much use of his teeth, baring them as he jeers. His voice, if you challenge him, is very strange. It is a sort of rising hedge-trimmer whine when he is trying to talk over you. Then it is a disturbing baby-talk simper (disturbing because it is issuing from a grown man), when he is trying to ingratiate himself either with you, the presenter or the audience. He may be conscious of this. He once called me, without any obvious justification, a 'peculiar child', but I remember thinking the term applied much more to him. 

He is especially contemptuous towards anyone older than him. I was struck, during his appearance before the Home Affairs Committee, by his attitude towards the oldest member, the very spry and sharp David Winnick, then aged nearly 80. Mr Winnick very properly rebuked Mr Brand for being flippant, saying: 'It is not quite a variety show, Mr Brand.' The supposed comedian slashed back like an irritated cat, displaying an unpleasant smirk and once again demonstrating that he was not as nice as he looked.   He chose a direct sneer about Mr Winnick's age, saying: 'You are providing a little bit of variety, though. You are making it more like Dad's Army.' 

Mr Brand jumped into the discussion and emitted the following: 'Being arrested isn't a lesson. It is just an administrative blip. You need to demonstrate an awareness of the situation. Yes, of course, in many ways the disease or the condition of addiction does exacerbate, and if you start taking drugs it is likely you will take worse drugs, and if you are taking expensive drugs you will end up committing crime. But again, mate, what we need to identify is a degree of authenticity and compassion in the way we deal with this problem, otherwise you just seem like you don't know what you are talking about.'

It is gibberish. Note the mixture of long, pretentious words and the pseudo-friendly use of the word 'mate'. Arguing seriously with such a person is like trying to play chess with a squirrel, which might move the occasional piece without any real idea what it was doing, but at the next moment will overturn the board, scattering the pawns, kings and queens, and chattering shrilly as it does so. But I have seen him taken seriously. I meet people quite often who do take him seriously. And that is why I am a bit proud that, on that August night, Brand tried so hard to put me off my stride, and failed. Once again there was the molasses-like sentimentality about how we should feel more compassion, calling me 'mate', then the patronising dismissal, calling me antiquated and accusing me of 'foghorn madness from bygone times'.

Then it came. The baby voice was fully deployed, the teeth fully displayed: 'I have learned to love you, Peter, and in a minute I am going to give you such a kiss on the lips. I am going to challenge you on a few other of your prejudices.' He never got near me, I am pleased to report. I asked then as I ask now why such a person is given such a powerful place in the national debate. The answer, I think, lies in the astonishing power of celebrity over those deprived of any real hope in life. In our society, what would once have been a comfortable, secure way of life is incredibly hard to obtain. Education has failed, the economy offers little but low pay and high rents. Celebrities are like us, yet they are rich. The more like us they are, the more we love them for their success, and the more we listen to them. The older voices of education, research, skill, experience are just crabby, Victorian and outdated. Unless we can do something pretty radical about it, the future belongs to Russell Brand, or someone very like him.

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

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

Sharp

The events in Kraków are a reminder that 10 years ago, the targets were the Poles. But now, the fallen hero is a boy with the most common surname in Poland, his father’s native land. Shabana Mahmood is many things, but she is not a fool, so she knows exactly how it would be received if the kirpan were to be banned or severely restricted by a Muslim Home Secretary of Pakistani parentage. And from a Right that now wanted to replicate the American Second Amendment, whatever happened to blaming the assailant rather than the weapon?

The exemption of the kirpan from the ban on bladed articles in public places is one of the expressly intended effects of section 139 (5) of the Criminal Justice Act 1988. Who was the Prime Minister in 1988? And the weapon used by Vickrum Digwa to murder Henry Nowak was not a kirpan. Digwa was also wearing a real one at the time. In this country, they are far smaller than that weapon, and usually dull-edged.

Rather, Digwa’s murder weapon was just one of his and his family’s extensive collection of non-ceremonial bladed articles. Families like that are not peculiar to any one community. That said, the family does belong to the Akali-Nihang warrior order within Sikhism, though not at all essential to it. With its obvious attraction to Digwa’s type of weapons-obsessed young man such as might accrue to Active Clubs and the like, many members of that order reject the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee’s 2001 ban on shaheedi degh, their traditional drink to aid meditation and, interestingly, to make them fiercer in battle. Interestingly, because its base is cannabis, the hashish taken by the members of the Order of Assassins when they set out to murder the enemies of the Alamut state.

Proscribe that order under the good old Terrorism Act 2000, while introducing 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. And we need Peter Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought to be taught in schools, as pro-drugs propaganda is routinely.

Proportionate and Lawful?

Timandra Harkness writes:

A day is a long time in immigration enforcement technology. On 4 November, The Guardian and campaign group Liberty reported on new Home Office plans to deploy Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology as part of a massive expansion in immigration enforcement.

Following a trial at the ferry port in Holyhead, where passengers enter the UK from the Republic of Ireland, LFR will now be deployed more widely. Cameras in public places and transport hubs will seek to identify visa-overstayers, as well as those already due for removal — or who were removed once, and are trying to return.

But on 5 November, the relevant Home Office documents had mysteriously vanished, leaving only a “410 Gone” message. A new page on LFR in Immigration Enforcement provides almost no information, just a couple of links — one to the Holyhead trial deployment data (three arrests in nine days), and the other to standard operating procedures.

Instead, the Home Office was keen to promote its new legal framework for using LFR in law enforcement, to be included in the Police Reform Bill. Taking into account the results of a large public consultation, the UK Government is finally making laws to control the use of AI camera systems that turn everybody’s face into an ID card. The Policing Minister promises that, in future, an independent regulator will oversee use of LFR and other biometric technology by law enforcement, to ensure that it is used proportionately and lawfully.

Nothing in this new framework would rule out using the technology to identify anyone wanted by Immigration Enforcement (IE). Indeed, an industry explainer written in early October spells out how the new Home Office IE policy will apply rules to ensure proportionate and lawful use of LFR.

Meanwhile, travellers through major UK airports are being told to look forward to passport-free travel. Soon, even putting your passport into an e-gate will be unnecessary, as the same cameras that currently match your physical face to the mugshot on your travel document will go straight to the biometric passport database.

Like the redundant road tax discs and parking permits that no longer sit on a driver’s windscreen because the traffic warden can put their vehicle registration straight into a computer, the paper passport will be a quaint relic of the pre-digital era. The entire passport database will be accessible directly for matching with your weary, post-flight features, a boon for convenience and a nightmare for cybersecurity.

It seems obvious that the Live Facial Recognition technology which enables paperless entry points can also be used for checking our faces against watchlists of criminals and recidivist deportees. Many will ask why it’s taken so long, given the vagueness of official records about who is in the country, and when they arrived.

Why, then, is the Home Office suddenly so coy about its plans to apply the same technology within, not just at, our borders? Could it be that the new, long-overdue legal framework governing the use of LFR on the public is primarily “designed to improve public confidence”? That confidence could be undermined by reports of its use in immigration enforcement.

Expanding its use beyond dangerous criminals and vulnerable runaways to include people who entered Britain on a student visa and took a cash-in-hand job rather than returning home does raise questions of proportionality. Many immigration breaches are civil, not criminal. If the threshold is set that low, could I be spotted by a camera and hauled off the street for non-payment of a parking fine, or letting my dog foul the pavement, or simply breaching a Respect Order forbidding me to feed the birds?

Perhaps the Home Office is right to rethink “we will have cameras everywhere to recognise irregular immigrants” as a selling point for ever-expanding surveillance.

Russell Brand’s Secret Injunction

Groypers? Is that they call themselves? In any event, if they want Russell Brand as their living martyr, then they can have him. He was always one of theirs anyway, a Randian without ever having read her. Lucky him. And you really do learn something new every day, when it is possible to be injuncted from talking to the Police about having been a victim of crime, as Dan Neidle writes:

In 2014, a massage therapist called Sylvie Berki accused Russell Brand of assaulting her. The police took no further action. Mr Brand and his then girlfriend, Jemima Goldsmith, sued her. Ms Berki had no lawyer, and there was no trial. But the High Court issued an extraordinary injunction that silenced her for the rest of her life. This week Mr Brand was convicted of rape and three sexual assaults.

We have obtained a copy of the injunction, which has never previously been published. It was supposed to prevent harassment, but it went well beyond that. It prohibits Ms Berki from telling anyone what she says happened to her – not journalists, not friends, not family, and not even the police. The court also ordered Ms Berki to pay £50,000 in legal costs within two weeks (which she couldn’t afford) and authorised her bankruptcy.

We don’t know whether Ms Berki’s allegations were true, and Mr Brand’s convictions don’t establish that they were. But whilst nobody established that Ms Berki was lying, the High Court made an order that prevents her from ever speaking about what she says happened to her.

This September, a Court of Appeal judge acknowledged concerns about the extraordinary breadth of the injunction, but it remains in place. We think the injunction should never have been granted in these terms. It’s a disturbing example of what happens when wealthy, powerful people take an unrepresented defendant to court.

What happened

In June 2014 Ms Berki told Thames Valley Police that Mr Brand had assaulted her. The police found no case to answer.¹ She also took her allegations to the press and Twitter, and Mr Brand and Ms Goldsmith sued. The claim form initially included libel, for which it is in practice almost impossible to obtain an injunction, but the claim they ended up pursing was for harassment.²

The interim judgment thought the claimants would probably show her allegations were false, but said their truth was “not the ultimate issue”.³ In October 2015 Mr Justice Jay gave summary judgment, a month before the trial was due to start. Ms Berki represented herself.⁴ He refused permission to appeal, and the Court of Appeal has since turned her down three times.

We don’t know if her allegations were true; none of the parties gave evidence to the court, and there was never any finding of facts.Mr Brand’s convictions this week for rape and sexual assault don’t tell us what happened in 2014. But we don’t think Ms Berki should be silenced for life.

The order

Here’s the final injunction order:⁵

This was a harassment injunction. So, given the judge’s findings, it would have been appropriate for the court to injunct Ms Berki from harassing Mr Brand and Ms Goldsmith. Paragraph 3(a) is perhaps what one would expect:

But that introduction to paragraph 3 talks about harassment by communicating “about” the Claimants. And paragraph 3(b) prohibits contact with journalists. If a journalist called Ms Berki today about Mr Brand, and she spoke to them, Ms Berki would be breaching the injunction (and so would the journalist if they knew about its terms).

The order then goes much further, constraining Ms Berki’s private speech. She cannot disclose “any information” about the events in question, to anyone. In no sense is a private discussion with friends or family “harassment”. But it’s prohibited:

There’s an exception, but it is extremely narrow:

The obvious omission: she can’t speak to the police.⁶ The police are expecting more of Mr Brand’s victims to come forward, but Ms Berki can’t: if she even answered the phone, she’d be prohibited from speaking to them.

The Court of Appeal’s order this year records that the doctors named in (i) and (ii) no longer treat Ms Berki. Those exceptions are now useless. Short of an emergency, she cannot mention the incident to any doctor or therapist.

None of this seems necessary or proportionate in an harassment injunction.

The overall impression is that in substance this wasn’t a harassment injunction at all. It was a libel injunction in disguise. That’s an attractive strategy for a claimant because libel defendants can raise the defence of truth; harassment defendants cannot (and libels injunction are hardly ever issued). The courts have, therefore, been rightly sceptical about attempts to dress up libel as harassment. Mr Justice Jay was not.

The specifics of Ms Berki’s accusations are contained in a Confidential Schedule, which we have seen but cannot publish because of the reporting restriction in the order:

and:

The claimants’ lawyers then obtained permission to bankrupt Ms Berki if she didn’t pay £50,000 within two weeks (although that was just the initial payment; we expect total costs would have been £100,000 or more):

Mr Justice Jay had said Ms Berki was “probably impecunious”, so there was no prospect of her paying this.

How did this happen? 

The summary judgment, by Mr Justice Jay, explains the reasons for granting an injunction, but does not discuss the terms of the injunction order itself, or explain why it was so draconian.

We’d expect the judgment would contain the discussion of whether these restrictions were necessary and proportionate, and whether they were compatible with the exclusions in the Protection from Harassment Act. It does not. A lawyer would surely have raised these arguments, but Ms Berki of course had no lawyer.

It’s not obvious why this was susceptible to summary judgment at all. Mr Justice Jay didn’t find that Ms Berki was lying. There was a two-hour pre-trial review, with a trial of four to five days scheduled for a month later. The judge said the dispute about what happened that day was “likely to be resolved in the claimants’ favour, but I cannot say that the defendant has no real prospect of success”. He then decided it didn’t need resolving, because her motive was to harass “regardless of the rights and wrongs of what occurred on 7 June”.⁷

When a person is not represented by a lawyer, a judge is supposed to make allowances. The rules say so. The overriding objective requires the court to ensure that “the parties are on an equal footing”, and from 1 October 2015, four weeks before this hearing, the court has had an express duty in any case with an unrepresented party to “adopt such procedure at any hearing as it considers appropriate to further the overriding objective”.⁸ Lady Justice Falk, who read the available transcript this year, thought “some of Jay J’s comments could have been put in more muted terms”, but that Ms Berki “was properly heard, and had a full opportunity to put the points she wished to make”. Being heard on whether you harassed someone is one thing. Settling the terms of a lifelong injunction is another – and there’s no evidence Ms Berki’s interests were protected when those terms were settled. We think the judge should have scrutinised the form of the order (which was likely drafted by Mr Brand’s lawyers). It seems he did not.⁹

Mr Justice Jay does not have a good record of dealing with litigants-in-person. Two years later, in a different case, he behaved so poorly that the Court of Appeal and then the Supreme Court found that he’d bullied a litigant-in-person. The Supreme Court found that he had aimed a “barrage of hostility” at the litigant-in-person, and “harassed and intimidated him in ways which surely would never have occurred if the claimant had been represented”.

The appeals 

Ms Berki tried to appeal, still without a lawyer. In August 2016 Lady Justice Arden refused permission on the papers: the skeleton argument was too long, too general, and had no proper grounds of appeal (the result we’d expect if a layperson tried to conduct an appeal). But she had read the judgment herself, and set out what troubled her. Mr Justice Jay “did not give any reasons” for concluding that Ms Berki had no defence. He “appears to have made findings about the appellant’s motives on the basis of her submissions (and not on evidence given in her witness statements or in the witness box)”, and it was “not clear that the appellant had an opportunity to deal with these matters”. If Ms Berki tried again, the claimants’ lawyers were to answer those points:

Ms Berki tried again. In March 2017, after a 52 minute hearing at which she represented herself against the claimants’ barrister, Lady Justice Arden refused permission and ordered her to pay another £2,000. The order gives no reasons:

This year, now with a pro bono lawyer, Ms Berki asked the Court of Appeal to reopen that refusal. In September Lady Justice Falk declined to do so. We think that was inevitable. The court reopens a final decision only in “exceptional cases, where the integrity of the earlier process has been critically undermined”.

Lady Justice Falk said that the concerns in the 2016 order “must be taken to have been addressed to her satisfaction” when Lady Justice Arden refused permission in 2017. But we don’t know if the concerns were ever actually addressed, and it’s not clear Lady Justice Falk if knew that either.

Lady Justice Falk seemed uncomfortable with the terms of the order, though. It “on its face appears to prohibit”, she said, “further communication to the police, communication with other claimants in relation to civil claims, and disclosures to treating physicians or therapists”. And:

While I quite see the concerns about the breadth of the order, the proper way to deal with those concerns would be to apply to the High Court to amend the scope of the injunction based on changed circumstances.

That must be correct: as she said, “It is not a matter for this court.” We understand that Ms Goldsmith has indicated she is amenable to the injunction being varied. Presumably Mr Brand will not be, so a court application is required.

The responsibility of the lawyers 

The firm acting for Messrs Brand and Goldsmith was Archerfield Partners LLP. We think they have serious questions to answer.

How could lawyers justify asking a court to prohibit speech that couldn’t conceivably constitute harassment – including private conversations with friends and family, and reports to the police?

There are also questions for the judiciary: how could Mr Justice Jay grant an order of such breadth against an unrepresented defendant, without a trial, and without determining whether her allegations were true? Did he consider the proportionality and necessity of the order?

Then there’s a bigger question. Was this a one-off? Or have other injunctions been granted, supposedly to prevent harassment, but actually silencing people even in private conversations with friends, family and the police?

Interested Persons

Always answer them with this. John McEvoy writes:

A pre-inquest review opened on 21 September into the killing of three British citizens working as security consultants for World Central Kitchen (WCK) in Gaza. James ‘Jim’ Henderson, 33, James Kirby, 47, and John Chapman, 57, were among seven aid workers killed in a series of Israeli drone strikes on 1 April 2024. Then UK prime minister Rishi Sunak told Benjamin Netanyahu he was “appalled” by the incident while current foreign secretary Ed Miliband described the killings as “cold-blooded”. Nochi Mendel, the colonel who ordered the strike, said he is “not sorry” and the Israeli military recently announced it would not pursue any criminal investigations.

At Avon Coroner’s Court in Bristol, lawyers for the aid workers’ families demanded a full investigation into the incident including the actions and policies of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) as well as the munitions used. They want the inquest to establish whether the aid workers were unlawfully killed and whether the strikes were conducted in accordance with Israel’s targeting and deconfliction policies, with the coroner already indicating she will include the IDF and Mendel as interested persons. The families have also requested that enquiries be made to Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) amid questions about intelligence sharing with Israel, with a view to also including that department as an interested person.

This comes after Declassified revealed a British surveillance aircraft overflew Gaza shortly before the attack, with the UK government refusing to release the footage or even disclose the aircraft’s flight path. In a statement outside the court, the Kirby family said: “The coroner told us today that Colonel Mendel, the Israeli military and the Israeli government are going to be made interested persons in this inquest. We also have questions for the British government. An RAF surveillance plane was flying over Gaza on the day James died. The Ministry of Defence has the footage from that flight but will not tell us whether it shows the area where the convoy was hit. We think the coroner should be given it. We are now asking the Government to give the Coroner whatever it has, and to keep pressing Israel for the drone footage and the other evidence. If Israel says no, people should be told that. There is no other independent investigation into James’ death. This inquest is all we have, and we are going to see it through.”

The massacre 

Over the past two years, an Australian government investigation alongside various media and firsthand accounts have shed light on what happened the night of the attack. Shortly after 11pm local time, the aid workers were targeted by three Israeli drone strikes launched roughly four minutes apart while travelling in a WCK convoy towards Rafah. Earlier that evening, the convoy had escorted aid trucks from a makeshift pier to the WCK welcome centre in Deir el-Balah, where locally contracted security guards boarded the vehicles, according to the Australian investigation. Some of those local guards were armed, according to IDF officers who were monitoring the operation from above with surveillance drones, with one allegedly firing a gun into the air.

The IDF claimed the presence of the local guards indicated a hijacking by Hamas, despite the convoy continuing along its planned route and unloading the aid at a WCK warehouse some three miles south. After unloading the aid, IDF drones continued to watch from the skies as the WCK convoy departed west towards the coastal road while a car carrying the local guards drove north. The WCK convoy was supposed to return via the welcome centre, but a decision was made to travel directly to the accommodation in Rafah due to the operation being delayed, according to the Australian investigation.

While this amounted to a modification in the route, it did not impact the decision to target the convoy because the IDF only became aware of this diversion later on. The IDF says it then “mistakenly believed that the vehicles” travelling south “contained Hamas military operatives and therefore struck the vehicles”, with one account suggesting a bag put into one of the WCK vehicles was erroneously thought to be a weapon. When the airstrikes were launched, the WCK convoy was nowhere near any Israeli troops and posed no reasonable threat to the IDF. In written submissions to the coroner’s court, lawyers for the Henderson family argued the IDF’s narrative is “contradicted by all of the available evidence”.

“At its highest”, they wrote, “there was an alleged mistaken identification of a bag being placed into one of the cars being a gun or containing a gun”. Pete Weatherby, representing the Henderson family, noted how the lawyers were “piecing together from open source material either from Mendel or the Israeli official position different and not entirely consistent narratives”. He said it would therefore be useful for the Israeli government to finally outline “what they say actually happened factually as a starting point for the investigation”. The strikes were “intentionally lethal”, lawyers added in written submissions, “and the postmortem finding shows that Jim’s injuries were so severe they resulted in his immediate death”. When asked about WCK, Mendel previously said: “Unfortunately, they aren’t really a neutral organisation. Not really an organisation you can say is innocent and completely clean… It has ties to Hamas”.

Scope of the inquest

Given Israel’s failure to provide a full account of the incident or pursue a criminal investigation, lawyers for the families have requested that the coroner launch a thorough and independent investigation into how the deaths came about. The investigation, they contend, should go beyond the immediate circumstances of the incident to the IDF’s policies on targeting and deconfliction with the goal of determining whether the aid workers were killed unlawfully. This is particularly important within the context of the IDF carrying out a pattern of strikes on aid convoys and premises during the six months prior to the WCK massacre.

“It appears prima facie that this is a case where three British citizens (and others) were unlawfully killed by the military of an allied nation”, the Hendersons’ lawyers argued in written submissions. They pointed to a recent investigation in The Guardian which found the WCK strikes were “in line with a general policy employed by the Israeli military of… ‘incrimination’, which gives commanders in the field wide discretion on designating someone as a ‘terrorist’.” The coroner’s court also heard that the strikes were launched with a Hermes 450 drone, alleged by Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) to be powered by UK-made engines.

“There has been a great deal of public concern around the possibility that UK manufactured components or UK based research and development contributed to the killing of Jim and his colleagues”, the lawyers submitted. Establishing the source of weaponry used in the attack is therefore “central” to understanding how the aid workers came to their death and “should be investigated”. The lawyers also pointed to how an inquest jury previously found Tom Hurndall, another British national who died in Gaza in 2006, had been “unlawfully and intentionally killed” by the IDF.

Surveillance footage

The lawyers also requested that Britain’s MoD disclose whether it holds relevant surveillance or intelligence data relating to the incident. The MoD previously informed Declassified that it holds video surveillance footage of Gaza from the day of the aid worker massacre but is refusing to publish the tape. The footage was taken by a RAF surveillance plane which spent approximately five hours above the strip that day, returning to base shortly before the airstrikes took place. The MoD may therefore have collected footage of events leading up to the tragedy, which could provide clarity over Israeli claims regarding Hamas “gunmen” near the convoy.

To this end, lawyers submitted that “the British Ministry of Defence… should be given the opportunity to be interested persons in these inquest proceedings”. The lawyers specifically noted how any footage taken over Gaza that day “is obviously potentially relevant, and may show the progress and actions of the convoy”. The coroner suggested that initial questions will be put to the MoD before deciding whether to include the department as an interested person. Further information was requested from the Foreign Office with regard to what measures were in place to keep British aid workers in Gaza safe prior to April 2024, and what additional actions have been taken since the incident.

Elbit Systems has also been recommended as an interested person given the company could provide a witness statement confirming “whether any part of the [drone] originated in the UK”. “As you know Elbit operates 16 facilities in the UK, the centrepiece is very close to where we are now in Bristol,” the lawyers said today. In terms of allaying public concern we would say this is a key part of this particular inquisitorial process and therefore evidence should be obtained from Elbit and they should be invited to take part in the process.”

In addition, the coroner has been requested to seek disclosure of IDF drone footage and audio, the IDF’s investigation file, IDF policy and procedures documents, and internal material from WCK. The Foreign Office recently announced: “The World Central Kitchen attack is one of countless incidents in Gaza where there has been no accountability. In Gaza, humanitarian workers continue to work tirelessly to support civilians in desperate need, risking their lives whilst working in the most perilous conditions. Yet despite the fragile ceasefire, Gaza remains the deadliest place to deliver aid, with 186 humanitarian workers killed in 2025. Israel must comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law, and must do more to ensure that humanitarian staff can carry out their work safely. Lessons must be learnt from this tragedy”. The coroner is now expected to seek disclosure from interested persons as well as other relevant parties before a second pre-inquest review takes place on 5 March 2027.

Put The Fear

It has taken them since the Cameron Government, via the ferocious support of Theresa May and of Boris Johnson, but they have got round to it, as Janet Eastham, Amy Gibbons and Daniel Martin write:

Labour’s controversial new trans law risks criminalising prayer, the Church of England has warned. The Anglican Church said the legislation must not “unintentionally criminalise” providing prayer and pastoral support, and that it must allow for discussion and disagreement. A spokesman told The Telegraph that Church leaders would raise these concerns with MPs and peers scrutinising the draft Conversion Practices Bill. Leaders of the Roman Catholic Church have also voiced concerns about the bill and called for it to be abandoned.

The legislation threatens people with five years in prison for trying to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The bill would cover parents, meaning mothers and fathers risk arrest for asking their child whether they really want to change gender. The Telegraph has launched a campaign for the proposed legislation to be scrapped amid warnings that it would have a chilling effect on family relationships. Opponents have said the bill could also apply to prayer. The warning from the Church will be seen as a blow by ministers who have touted the Church’s support for the controversial law. On Friday, Cabinet Office officials told The Telegraph that there was “support for our draft bill from the Church of England” and cited an earlier endorsement from the Bishop of Manchester.

However, in a statement, a spokesman for the Church of England said: “We believe that everyone is made in the image of God and should be cherished for who they are. In 2017, the General Synod voted overwhelmingly to call on the Government to bring forward a ban on conversion therapy with respect to sexual orientation, which has since been echoed by senior leaders. It is, however, important to ensure that any legislation does not unintentionally criminalise providing appropriate prayer and pastoral care to those who seek it, and we will reflect this concern in our evidence to the pre-legislative scrutiny process. Of course, pastoral care and prayer should never be coercive. A ban on conversion therapy must still allow space for discussion and disagreement. We want to prevent abuses of power and coercive practices, which should be the focus of any legislation.”

Parents and religious leaders ‘at risk of criminalisation’

The vote at General Synod – the Church’s legislative body – was passed before the proposed law was expanded to include attempts to change someone’s gender identity. Ministers insist the legislation is needed to close loopholes that leave gay and transgender people vulnerable to abuse, while setting “high bars which protect freedom of expression”, including for religious leaders. However, opponents argue that abusive practices such as assault, threats and harassment are already illegal, and warn that the new offence could criminalise concerned parents, as well as therapists and religious leaders providing pastoral care.

Leaders from the Catholic Church have also revealed they oppose the bill. John Sherrington, the Archbishop of Liverpool and the chairman of the department of social justice of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, said that the bishops “recognise that it is important for governments to use appropriate legislation to protect people from abuse”. But he added that they believe “current legislation already covers such abusive practices and makes them illegal”.

He said: “There is a danger that this legislation will create uncertainty around lawful pastoral care by the Church, family life and the legality of open conversations that might take place in a range of social settings. There are clearly a range of scenarios under this proposed legislation in which legal action of various types may be taken against individuals or organisations, including parents of children who express well-informed opinions and make well-intentioned statements. We are concerned that this legislation will challenge the Church’s ability to fulfil its calling to proclaim an authentic understanding of the human person with clarity, simplicity, love and respect. People of faith must remain free to express their beliefs through speech and prayer. We call on politicians to abandon this bill and focus instead on enforcement of existing protections and accessible support for anyone facing abuse or coercion.”

Law’s ‘overreach into normal family life’

Bishop Brian McGee, the vice-president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Scotland, echoed these concerns, telling The Telegraph: “Nobody should fear violence, abuse, or coercion, and the law must do all it can to make sure everybody is protected from such behaviour. This law, however, appears to go far beyond the protection of citizens, overreaching into normal daily family life, pastoral conversations and everyday teaching.”

Some religious figures told The Telegraph they feared that liberal campaigners would use the law to silence people with more traditional views on issues such as marriage and gender. Simon Calvert, the deputy director of the charity The Christian Institute, said it was “quite clear” that the legislation could “criminalise parents praying for their children”. He told The Telegraph: “It is a bizarre new approach to the criminal law which makes all kinds of legitimate speech vulnerable to police investigation. Lawyers are lining up to condemn the way it’s drafted. And the activists the Government are trying to placate are quite open that they really do want the law to ‘put the fear’ into parents over their family prayers.”

Mr Calvert added: “Elizabeth I famously declined to make windows into men’s souls. This bill makes a window and will force police, prosecutors and courts to peer through it to decide if your intentions, your beliefs, mean your conversation with your gay or trans friend was a criminal offence.”

On Monday, MPs scrutinising the draft bill were told that it should include a ban on prayers aimed at changing someone’s gender identity or sexuality. Giving evidence to the bill committee, Jayne Ozanne, a gay evangelical Christian and the founder of the Ban Conversion Practices Coalition, insisted the practice should be illegal. Asked whether such prayers should be criminalised, including in a family setting, she said: “I think we need to be clear about what is wrong and right. Stealing is stealing. Whether you steal a sweet or a car, it is still stealing.”

Ms Ozanne, who said she had been traumatised by people praying for her to be straight, said the issue lay with “the impact on the individual in front of you”. She added: “A lot of prayer will be directed – somebody will have their hand on you and pray. It is the fact that they are trying to pray for you to be changed to a thing that they think you ought to be as opposed to praying for you to find a point of peace. You might say that that is too subtle a difference, but they are worlds apart. Helping me come to a place where I know who I ought to be is very different from telling me that I have to be straight.”

A Government spokesman said: “Our draft bill would outlaw a specific form of abuse, setting high bars which protect freedom of expression, including for religious leaders, while ensuring no one is free to commit abuse. LGBT+ people should never, without exception, have to suffer coercion or abuse in an effort to change who they are. Successive governments have agreed for almost a decade that conversion practices have no place in modern Britain. This Government is clear that freedom of belief, whether faith-based or wider, will be respected by the ban, while our draft bill has already been welcomed by religious groups.”

The Double-Sided Flag

In Uruguay, Holy Week is officially called Tourism Week and Christmas Day is officially called Family Day. But people feel the need for more. The Pope has arrived there to a rapturous reception.

Meanwhile, in staunchly Catholic Paraguay, President Santiago Peña has been impeached and placed under house arrest after the people took to the streets because of the overnight collapse of Ueno Bank, leaving 60 per cent of Paraguayans without access to their money.

Peña is closely allied to Javier Milei, and this cashless nightmare is what the Nationalist International has in mind for all of us. But the Pope, so robust both on the opportunities and on the dangers of Artificial Intelligence, will be going next to Argentina. On This Rock.

When Will We Learn?

No less than fiscal policy, monetary policy needs to be under democratic political control, as it used to be, and as no Government was ever elected with a mandate for it not to be. We now see the alternative, if it can be so described, as identified by Richard Murphy:

The Bank of England has raised interest rates to 4%, supposedly to tackle inflation. There is just one problem with this decision. The Bank knows that much of the inflation we are suffering is being driven by rising oil and energy prices, largely resulting from conflict in the Middle East. It also knows that raising interest rates cannot reduce those prices.

So why is it doing this? The answer is that the Bank believes it must suppress demand elsewhere in the economy to compensate for rising energy costs. In other words, it is deliberately making mortgages more expensive, increasing business borrowing costs, discouraging investment and reducing household spending power. And all this when people are already struggling with higher energy bills. That is problem number one.

There is, however, another problem. Higher interest rates increase costs for businesses, which can then feed through into higher prices. They can, in that case, add to inflation rather than reduce it. The Bank is imposing economic pain to address a problem its chosen policy cannot directly solve. That is not sound economic management. It is the consequence of an economic dogma that refuses to recognise the difference between inflation caused by excessive demand and inflation caused by supply shocks. When will we learn?

Instead of this, anyone wishing to emulate Nigel Lawson, who never did it, should be calling for the taxation of wealth at the same rate as earnings, which he restored 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 50 years ago next month. On that as on Bank of England “independence”, Blair and Brown were much less social democratic than Lawson or, therefore, than Margaret Thatcher. Must the same be said of Andy Burnham and John Healey?

Family Values, Indeed

There has been whining that certain mind-boggling categories of pornography had today become illegal in England and Wales, a ban that proved the technical possibility of a total ban. There cannot be a “free” market in general, yet not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction. Contrived in the past, that baleful situation is being contrived again.

For example, pornography is now being legalised in Ukraine to pay for the war. It 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. “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. In welcoming the endorsement of Bonnie Blue, Reform UK has picked its side, the same side as the Green Party on this as on the war.

One complaint from people with the indignity to make them is that “incest porn” has been criminalised while marriage between first cousins was legal, and we all know who goes in for that, eh, eh, eh. But in point of fact, sex between first cousins is not incestuous under the law of this land. Although earlier this year, Dr Luke Evans presented the First Cousins (Prohibited Relationships) Bill, which would ban not only marriage and civil partnerships between first cousins, but also sexual relations between them. At last, someone in this debate has got to the point. Cousin marriage is unconditionally legal in 18 of the United States plus the District of Columbia, and conditionally legal in a further six. Proponents of a ban here should ask themselves why there was not one already. There did used to be. Until the Reformation, the Late Roman ban on marriage to the fourth degree of consanguinity had obtained, extended to affinity because in marriage, “the two shall become one flesh”. Catholic Canon Law has therefore always banned cousin marriage, at one time to the seventh degree, although with possibilities of dispensation since the ban was not in the Bible.

Such dispensations did the Habsburgs no good, but our own Royal Family would agree with NHS England that cousin marriage, not least where one party was an immigrant, had “benefits” that included “stronger extended family support systems and economic advantages”. Queen Victoria and the immigrant Prince Albert were first cousins. By descent from that marriage, the King’s parents were third cousins, while they were also second cousins once removed through a different line. Prince Philip was not only an immigrant, but an asylum seeker who took refuge in Britain because he had relatives here, one of whom he married. Britain intervened militarily in his native land to restore his family to the Throne. Talk about bringing their troubles to our door.

It was not a happy marriage between Victoria and Albert’s granddaughter, Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and their grandson, Grand Duke Ernest Louis of Hesse and by Rhine, although rather more successful was the union between Ernest Louis’s sister, Princess Irene of Hesse and by Rhine, and another of Victoria and Albert’s grandsons, Prince Henry of Prussia, even if two of their three sons were haemophiliacs. The other one did not die until 1978. Did Queen Elizabeth II never meet him? At any rate, cousin marriage was the most uncompromisingly Protestant thing about her public life. Ernest Louis and Victoria Melita were known in the Royal Family as Ernie and Ducky, but she was not the only ducky in the marriage, which was dissolved after only six years in 1901.

That brings us to the fact that the legality of marriages between first cousins was a product of the Reformation. Its prevalence until the First World War, and as recently as that, was a badge of Protestant honour, since Henry VIII had legalised it when he had wanted to marry Catherine Howard, who was Anne Boleyn’s first cousin, and since although William and Mary never had children (there’s that Ducky thing again), the intention had been that they would, and they were first cousins whose marriage would not ordinarily have been possible in the Catholic Church. Does the Orange Order, named after a fruit, now wish to ban a marriage such as William of Orange’s? Would the four stripes of Northern Irish Unionist in the House of Commons vote for that ban? We may be about to find out.

This seems to be about the Two Cultures. Although Charles and Emma Darwin were first cousins who had 10 children, and although Albert and Elsa Einstein were both maternal first cousins, and paternal second cousins such that her maiden name was Einstein, the mere thought of this practice is profoundly shocking to scientists. But to people formed by the study of literature and history, then, while that is where it belongs, that is where you will find it routinely. Mainstream British society was educated out of it, and not very long ago, so that can obviously be done. South Asians are hardly unreceptive to education.

Anglo-Saxons and Scotch-Irish still regularly marry their first cousins in several of the parts of the United States that voted for Donald Trump, and they did so as a matter of course into the very recent past. But if the argument is that this was something that certain other ethnic groups did, then it may be better to treat the matter as one of health education rather than of criminal law. After all, that was what worked with everyone else. Nineteenth-century novels are full of marriages between first cousins as the most normal thing in the world.

In HMS Pinafore, Sir Joseph Porter marries his adoring Cousin Hebe. Between 1979 and 1981, the makers and viewers of To the Manor Born took it as read that Audrey fforbes-Hamilton’s late husband had been her cousin. Although Coronation Street does not, both Emmerdale and EastEnders still feature such arrangements between white characters whose families were supposed to have lived in Emmerdale or Walford since time out of mind, and that seems to raise no eyebrows. Still, the King is a last great hurrah of that sort of thing. His mother was one of the least inbred monarchs ever, and his son and grandson are not at all inbred. Educate people, and it will mostly or entirely die out. That worked with everyone else. Even the Royal Family.

Yet since the intention would apparently be to prevent genetic defects, which is not the only reason to oppose cousin marriage, then it would be pointless without the criminalisation of sex between first cousins. So be it, but we have already raised the age of marriage to two years above the age of consent, a literally preposterous arrangement. It is now legally impossible to do the decent thing, but not to do the indecent thing. Pity poor Imam Ashraf Osmani of Northampton, who in January was handed a suspended sentence of 15 weeks’ imprisonment for having performed a nikah, which has no legal status whatever, so that two 16-year-olds could have a perfectly lawful sexual relationship without sinning. The second time as farce.

Something similar applies to polygamy. As you could marry your cousin by nikah, with no legal standing, and the two of you could then have children perfectly legally as you could have done anyway, so you can take three more wives alongside your legal one by nikah, with no legal standing, and have children with all of them. Or you could take all four wives by nikah alone. In fact, any man can have children with four different women simultaneously if they will let him. Doing so with two, often in arrangements that lasted decades, has never been especially uncommon, and nor has sending the bill to the DWP or its predecessors. Whatever else that may be, it is certainly not un-British.

Batch Cooking

At Alton Towers, did The World of David Walliams feature Sebastian Love? If not, why not? Whatever Thomas Markle or Russell Brand may have done, neither of them handpicked the enormous 2024 Labour intake of MPs, nor did either of them conduct the 2025 Ministerial reshuffle as the de facto Deputy Prime Minister for the third time. On the man who did both of those, Kate Whannel writes:

The government is preparing to publish more documents about the appointment of Lord Mandelson as US ambassador. Batches of papers were published in March and June - but others were withheld because they were part of a Metropolitan Police investigation. The Cabinet Office has now said a number of extra documents will be published, likely before Christmas. Some will still be withheld at the request of the Met. Cat Little, permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office, said that some of the documents could "now be published without prejudicing their investigation".

The Met Police had launched an investigation over allegations that, while he was serving as a government minister, Lord Mandelson had passed on market-sensitive government information to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Writing to the chair of Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, Little said: "The Cabinet Office is now beginning the process to prepare these documents so that they may be laid before the House in response to the humble address motion as soon as possible." She said the documents would be reviewed and in some instances may need to be redacted "for the purposes of avoiding prejudice to national security or international relations". 

The process is expected to be completed before Parliament rises for the Christmas recess on 17 December. Lord Mandelson was arrested on 23 February on suspicion of misconduct in public office. He has repeatedly let it be known that he believes he has not acted criminally, did not act for personal gain and is cooperating with the police. "Our investigation into alleged misconduct in public office is ongoing," the Met Police said in a statement.

The lifelong Labour politician became the British ambassador to the US in February 2025, but was sacked in September after Downing Street said new information about the extent of his relationship with Epstein had emerged. After his sacking, the government - then led by Sir Keir Starmer - was heavily criticised for giving Lord Mandelson the job and in February MPs voted to force the government to publish papers relating to his appointment. Mike Wood, shadow Cabinet Office minister, said: "We still haven't got to the bottom of the Mandelson scandal. "Labour did their utmost to hold this information back and it was only released because of the Conservatives' humble address."

While Connor Stringer and Benedict Smith write:

Democrats will try to force the department of justice to hand over the unredacted Epstein files needed by Scotland Yard to prosecute Lord Mandelson, The Telegraph can reveal. The party plans to use its forthcoming control of Congress to compel the Trump administration to release the documents that may help bring a charge. There have been calls to charge Lord Mandelson with misconduct in public office. Democrats also want to make a “renewed push” to hear evidence from the peer after he declined invitations to speak to Congress as part of their investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, sources said. The move could be a lifeline for the Met’s case against the peer, which has stalled because the department of justice has delayed handing over the unredacted files.

A senior source on the House oversight committee, which has been investigating Epstein’s links to the rich and powerful, said it might also provide the London force with never-before-seen documents from the late paedophile’s estate. “We would be pushing the DoJ to be at least cooperative to the UK law agencies as a minimum,” the source said. Lord Mandelson was sacked as Britain’s ambassador to the US last year over his relationship with Epstein. He was later placed under criminal investigation for misconduct in public office after the files appeared to show that he passed market-sensitive documents to Epstein during the 2008 financial crisis. He has always denied any wrongdoing.

The original files are considered crucial for any prosecution case because Lord Mandelson’s lawyers could argue that the partially redacted emails published online lack context and do not tell the full story. Neither the DoJ nor the FBI has responded to the Metropolitan Police’s request for the documents, which was initially made under an informal agreement to share information between the law-enforcement agencies. The Met escalated the request through the formal mutual legal assistance process, but this could take years. It is widely believed that the impasse has come about, in part, because the US administration is reluctant to release files that may embroil Donald Trump further in the Epstein saga and set a precedent for other cases that could reignite the scandal.

Democrats swept to control of Congress in the midterms on Tuesday, giving them expansive legal powers through control of the committee system, including the powerful house oversight committee. The party concedes that its power to force cooperation between the DoJ and the Crown Prosecution Service is limited, as the decision ultimately lies at the discretion of Todd Blanche, the US attorney general. While they can push for the files to be handed over, they do not have any guarantee of success. They could, however, hold hearings into why the DoJ had limited its cooperation with British police, subpoena communications between the US and Britain, and demand explanations from top officials. 

Democrats are also hoping for cooperation with other foreign police forces once they take control of Congress from January, as they intend to scrutinise Epstein’s inner circle and connections with Mr Trump’s allies. “We would want people to cooperate with us ... if we needed documents from the UK, France or the Virgin Islands,” the senior official added. Lord Mandelson declined the request to appear before the House oversight committee last year. His lawyer responded to politicians, saying it was impossible while he was under police investigation in Britain. He cannot be legally compelled to testify before Congress because he is not an American citizen.

Lord Mandelson resigned from the Labour Party and quit the House of Lords in February after the files appeared to show he leaked information to Epstein while a minister under Gordon Brown. His arrest followed a tip-off shared by Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons, suggesting that Lord Mandelson planned to fly to the British Virgin Islands. Lord Mandelson’s lawyers dismissed the claim as baseless. He has never been charged, and denies any wrongdoing.

We Do Not Want Or Need A British FBI

The Morning Star editorialises:

Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley’s demands for an FBI-style National Police Service are in line with plans set out by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood in January. Like the fact Mahmood remains in office, this reflects a worrying continuity with the repressive agenda of the Starmer government — and even a failure of imagination. Some fresh thinking is required if Andy Burnham’s government is to attempt the reshaping of the British state and economy he promised. Like Mahmood before him, Rowley presents centralisation as a necessary modernisation, citing rapidly developing cross-border-organised and cyber crime. Yet the Met already wields a range of national powers to tackle such crimes — and it is not obvious that further centralisation is the best defence against them.

Last month’s cyber attack on supermarket freezers across 11 European countries, seeing their temperature controls overridden remotely and spoiling tons of food, was only possible because food retail is too centralised — corporate supermarkets outsourcing control of in-store functions to large third-party providers to cut labour costs and increase profit margins. That’s outwith the scope of policing powers, but like Rowley’s complaint that police resources are diverted to tackle mental health problems, it illustrates the need to approach the question of security — which does include resilience of food and energy supplies disrupted by climate change and war — with a wider eye to increasingly urgent social and economic reform. Our government cannot think beyond military and policing “solutions.” 

For policing that solution is no neutral response to technological change (even if the application of new technologies were neutral, which it isn’t) but political. Mahmood’s January white paper tied the proposed national police service to “the largest-ever rollout of facial recognition” technology and increased use of AI, despite privacy, accuracy and race-bias concerns. Advocates of greater surveillance and repressive power for state agencies seek support from popular exasperation at neighbourhood crime and anti-social behaviour, though the causes lie less in an underpowered police than a hollowed-out public realm: the lack of conductors and guards on public transport, the reduction of staffing in retail and public services, remove barriers to problematic behaviour itself rooted in the Thatcherite destruction of community.

Nor should we ignore the records of those advocating major restructuring of the British police when considering their motivation. Rowley has been a very political Met Commissioner, imposing unprecedented restrictions on the mass mobilisations for Palestine — regularly obstructing planned routes, for example — on the basis of lies, such as the claim that organisers sought to march past synagogues. He also consulted pro-Israel lobby groups on the policing of such protests while refusing to meet the Palestine Coalition that organises them. And the connections of US surveillance-tech firm Palantir to violent racist repression in the United States through its use by the Ice agency in mass arrests and deportations, and to war crimes by the Israeli military, did not deter him from contracting it to help police British citizens — until blocked by the mayor of London, something likely impossible in a national police service set-up.

Mahmood’s plans explicitly include giving the home secretary the power to sack chief constables — a further politicisation of policing by a minister who helped force the resignation of West Midlands Chief Constable Craig Guildford for entirely political reasons. His ban on fans of an Israeli football club with a history of violent disorder, Maccabi Tel Aviv, attending a match against Aston Villa could conveniently serve the government’s strategy of smearing Israel critics as antisemites, so Labour ministers led a character-assassinating witch-hunt. We do not want or need a British FBI. The rationale for one does not withstand scrutiny, and its advocates are demonstrably enemies of our civil rights. Nor does such centralisation tie in with Burnham’s stated ambition to devolve and localise power. He should face pressure to disown this Starmer-era scheme.

Camp of the Saints

Neither Russell Brand nor the other one has ever claimed to be gay, and straight queens are a thing in themselves.

But not everyone read Theology at Durham, so not everyone can tell the difference on sight.

A Chill of Apprehension

Peter Hitchens writes:

The power in my house died, with a faint groan, like the ghost of electricity trying to tell me something. Was it the boiler, the fridge, or the freezer that made that sad, alarming, desolate sound? Or was it the desktop computer, or the laptop? Or the kitchen fan? It was early morning and just about light, so at least we were not groping for a torch. But almost everything I rely on to live as I do – especially, nowadays, computers – depends utterly on a reliable power supply. I thought the moment I had long feared had arrived.

Britain’s power system trembles all the time on the edge of a disastrous blackout which could take days to repair and could send our economy stumbling over the precipice. Anybody who pays attention knows this. But here I was, like any fool, unable to work, facing who knew how long without the spark of energy which makes our world keep rolling. Soon, all the batteries would run down too. I cursed myself, as I often do, for ignoring my own fears for years.

In Baghdad and Mogadishu I had seen what happens to modern life when the power goes. I knew that the long-running Net Zero attack on what was once a solid and reliable National Grid had left us in danger of darkness and silence. But I still hadn’t done anything about installing a back-up. In Baghdad, war, neglect and looting had made the power hopelessly unreliable, but in my small hotel you could count on the generator snarling into life within seconds of the main system failing. If you were working on a computer you just had to keep saving your stuff over and over again to avoid losing your work. In Mogadishu, those in the darkened, nightmare city who had their own power were aristocrats amid the powerless poor – powerless in both senses of the word.

So what was this? I live in a 1930s suburb of Oxford and I suspect the cabling and substations must be getting a little tired. Perhaps they were just conking out. So I called my power suppliers, who are called something like Welsh and Eastern, though I am nowhere near Wales or the East, and cannot actually remember how I ended up buying my volts amps, watts and ohms from them. Aren’t these privatised utilities supposed to be more helpful than the old state ones? Miraculously, I got through. A voice demanded my postcode. I provided it. Then it demanded the first line of my address. I gave it. Then it wanted my name. Had they, I wondered, only cut off the power of people whose names began with ‘H’? I said I couldn’t see how that could help. I knew that if I asked the voice’s name, he would decline to give it to me under data protection rules.

But after a short pause, he weakened on the name issue and informed me: ‘You have a power cut.’ Well, there, you see – privatisation has definitely made the utility companies more user-friendly. I still don’t entirely know why the power failed. I pursued the matter later, and was told that somebody had cut into a mains cable. Was this just one of my neighbours, digging for potatoes, or perhaps for coal? Or was it one of those broadband cable companies who excavate the streets and pavements almost every day, chewing up the roots of mature trees as they go, providing yet more ways of welcoming trashy streaming channels into my home? I do not know.

As it turned out the power came back on a few hours later. And the closedown was wholly local. But at any time, the British grid is highly vulnerable, far more than it used to be. On June 23, there was definitely a crisis in power transmission in this country. Experts argue about how bad it was, but it was undoubtedly a warning. When a power grid trips and collapses, the effects are huge; when it doesn’t, nobody notices outside the control rooms.

On that date a major nuclear station, Sizewell B, was offline. The amazing ‘electric mountain’ at Dinorwig in Snowdonia – which can produce high power at high speed by pouring millions of gallons of stored water into hydro-electric generators – was partly offline for maintenance. A large chunk of the usually reliable gas generation was struggling because of the same hot weather which was causing high power demand. Some internal power lines were already too heavily loaded, so they could not be used to switch energy from Scotland to the south. Huge batteries, which astonishingly can now provide emergency electricity in large quantities, can supply it only for short periods.

It turned out to be easier, in the end, to avoid a meltdown by importing power under the Channel from France. Some of this was nuclear, thanks to that country’s long-ago decision to build a huge network of nuclear stations, and some of it from French equivalents of Dinorwig’s magic mountain. It worked. But we went nearly all the way through the multiple safeguards and back-ups. What if one more thing had gone wrong, or France had not been able to help? These conditions, or something like them, could happen again. It might not work out so well the next time.

My own view is that this risk is a direct result of dogma. Britain had – until recently – a reliable fleet of coal-fired power stations, much as China, India and America do now. Like nuclear, gas and hydro-power, coal-based generation provides what is called ‘inertia’, a steadiness in current which prevents the power system from tripping and failing when things go wrong. Wind and solar power do not provide this. On August 9, 2019, this problem almost certainly played a part in a serious blackout which cut off a million British customers and halted many trains.

But, driven by the anti-carbon dogma long ago adopted by this country, we have not just mothballed our coal-burning fleet in case we need them one day. We have totally closed and, in most cases, demolished 19 coal-fired power stations, capable of providing 40 per cent of the country’s electricity needs. Several, including Didcot A, not far from where I live, have actually been blown up with high explosives.

I heard the Didcot blast from ten miles away and felt a chill of apprehension which has not left me since. I thought then and think now that this was an act of dogmatic self-harm, meaningless when set against the vast and continuing expansion of coal-burning in China. I will never be surprised to hear that soft, sinister, ghostly groan as my electricity dies and I am shoved out of the modern world into a sort of apocalypse where everything we rely on has become a lifeless piece of plastic or metal. I really must do something about getting that generator.

Beginning with the full exploitation of the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields, let us harness the sovereign power of the State, to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of clean coal technology, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State. There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. We must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985. Is Kemi Badenoch? Is Nigel Farage? Is Ed Davey? Is Zack Polanski?

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with that. China manufactures most of the  world’s solar panels, which should be on buildings rather than on farmland and which we need to start making here, but let there be solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, pipelines, or power stations. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners’ Strike. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right. Does Andrew Rosindell, whose constituency office is called Margaret Thatcher House, say that? Does Robert Jenrick, who gave his daughter the middle name Thatcher? Not Margaret. Thatcher.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all the rest of it. Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed. The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs.

The standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. Thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, just abolish them. And thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, let there be an all-of-the-above transport policy based around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on the electricity that public ownership would also supply to charging points in every neighbourhood and village. Astonishingly, and yet not, the fewest charging points for electric vehicles are in the coalfield areas. Also, never forget that, when we can catch them, buses carry far more passengers than trains do, but those passengers tend not to be politicians or the “opinion-forming” sort of journalists. And so on. Let a thousand flowers bloom. In a garden well-tended and well-watered as an expression of democratic sovereignty.