The Law Is The Law

Paul Knaggs writes:

Seventeen months ago the Supreme Court told the country what the Equality Act means. Since then a Government, the largest unions in Britain and now an entire political party have decided that the ruling is a suggestion. On Monday night the Liberal Democrats made it official, and the woman who stood up to tell them what they were doing was answered from the chair with “that motion is clearly carried”.

Start where the law is supposed to bite: a hospital changing room. Last week two of the Darlington nurses who beat their NHS trust at tribunal sat down with Health Minister Karin Smyth. Bethany Hutchison and Annice Grundy asked for a date for national NHS guidance on single-sex facilities, and whether it would bind trusts or merely advise them. According to the Express, Smyth gave no date when asked twice, questioned what difference guidance would make, and told them “the law is the law”. The Department denies she said anything inconsistent with her line to MPs, which is that guidance is drafted and coming “imminently”. It has been imminent since Wes Streeting promised it “within weeks” in April 2025.

Take the minister at her word. The law is the law. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on 16 April 2025 that “sex”, “woman” and “man” in the Equality Act mean biological sex. Smyth herself told Parliament on 30 April 2025, in a written answer quoted in the Lords: “This is the law, and we expect all public service bodies to comply.” Seventeen months on, the NHS’s own guidance from 2019, which tells trusts to accommodate people by their presentation rather than their sex, still sits under review with no publication date. The Government agrees with the law, states the law, and will not write it down for the 1.5 million people who work in the NHS.

That is how Darlington happened. The nurses raised concerns in July 2023. Twenty-six signed a letter in March 2024. The Trust told them to change elsewhere. In January a tribunal found it had created a hostile, humiliating and degrading environment for them: not through any conduct by their transgender colleague, who was cleared of personal wrongdoing, but through the Trust’s policy and its contempt for women who complained. It paid seven nurses £187,000 and spent a reported £603,000 of public money losing. Hutchison’s verdict on the meeting with Smyth was blunt: “It shouldn’t be our responsibility or fight. We don’t get paid enough to do that, and nobody is taking any responsibility for it.” Nobody is. And this week we learned why.

REPEAL BY MOTION

On Monday evening in Brighton, Liberal Democrat conference passed motion F33a, “Restoring Trans Rights”, submitted by LGBT+ Lib Dems, moved by Artie Khovanov and summed up by Jennie Rigg. It is now party policy. Read what it says. Conference “believes” that “trans women are women, trans men are men”. It declares the EHRC’s statutory code of practice, in force since 5 August, to be “discriminatory and unworkable”. It calls for a cross-party committee to propose “amendments to legislation where necessary”, a new code that is “inclusive”, and a veto for the Women and Equalities Committee over who chairs the regulator, whose current chair the motion complains was appointed against that committee’s advice.

Start with the title, because the sleight of hand begins there. “Restoring” implies that something was taken. Nothing was. The Supreme Court did not change the Equality Act; it ruled on what the Act had meant since 2010. In the same judgment it said, in terms, that trans people keep their full protection from discrimination and harassment under the characteristic of gender reassignment. No trans person lost a legal right on 16 April 2025. The only rights the ruling touched were women’s, and it upheld them. Hollowood put it in five words from the floor: “They have lost none.” A motion to “restore” trans rights is therefore a motion to take women’s rights back, under a title chosen so that nobody has to say so.

Sir Ed Davey told Radio 4 he wanted the motion to pass and would vote for it. A year ago he accepted the Supreme Court judgment. Now he says it “created something that we didn’t expect”. Zoe Hollowood, who chairs Liberal Voice for Women inside his own party, stood up in the hall and told delegates what they were about to do. “This motion is a Trojan horse,” she said. “It is not about restoring trans rights. They have lost none. It is about ripping out rights from women and destroying the clarity of the Supreme Court ruling. Taking aim at the guidance that supports the ruling is just smoke and mirrors, a pretext to amend the law.” Earlier, on GB News, she had said of her leader: “He’s dragging us backwards and I’m not clear who has been at him.”

Then she told them about Karen Danson. Danson was one of the Darlington nurses, a survivor of child sexual abuse. She told the tribunal that Rose Henderson, the male colleague who identified as a woman, repeatedly asked her why she was not getting changed, and that when she complained she was told to broaden her mindset. When she later needed a hysterectomy and found Henderson was due to assist, she explained her history and asked for a woman. The theatre manager, she said, replied: “You are not my concern. My concern is Rose.” Hollowood let it land. “Let that sink in. You are not my concern, to a victim of child sexual abuse asking for female intimate care.” Then she set out the choice: “On the one hand, you have women’s rights, including victims of sexual abuse. Our privacy, dignity, our safety, our right to say no. And on the other hand, you have the feelings of some men and maybe an awkward conversation at the gym. If we pass this motion, we are telling women we think they are second-class citizens.” The chair checked the online vote. “That motion is clearly carried.”

Hollowood also saw the politics. Twenty years ago, she said, Europe was nobody’s priority, “and then along came a man called Nigel”. Reform, she noted, has been handed £72 million and a leaflet that writes itself: nurses who could not get undressed without a man in the room, and a party that voted to make it harder to stop. The people who will pay for that are not in the conference hall.

But the clearest takeaway from the day was Hollowood herself. She stood in her own party’s conference, faced down its leadership and put the case in plain English when it would have been far easier to stay quiet. She spoke about women’s privacy, dignity and safety, tied the argument to the Darlington nurses and challenged her own leader directly. Whatever anyone thinks of the wider politics, that takes courage. In an age when too many politicians wait to see which way the room is leaning before deciding what they believe, it matters that there are still women prepared to stand up, say no, and refuse to be bullied into silence. “He’s dragging the party backwards. I’m not sure who has been at him.” 

NOT ONLY THE LIB DEMS 

The Lib Dems are not the loudest, nor are they the only ones. The Greens are beating this drum louder than the Clarion call for the environment. Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, then Green co-leaders, demanded last year that the EHRC withdraw its interim guidance. On 14 September, delegates at the TUC carried Motion 17 opposing the code without, as The Tribune noted, once using the word “woman”. Unison’s Andrea Egan has pledged to “take the fight to every workplace” against employers who comply. And the Royal College of Nursing, whose members are overwhelmingly women, is in a Dundee tribunal this week facing Sandie Peggie, suspended by NHS Fife for objecting to a male doctor in the women’s changing room. She won her central claim, has been off sick for eighteen months, and says of the union she paid for nearly thirty years: “They’re blinded by trans activists just now.” The Darlington nurses formed their own union because the ones they belonged to would not fight for them.

Here is the question none of them will answer. Since when did political parties, trade unions and government departments get to pick which laws apply? The EHRC did not invent the code. Its statutory job is to describe the Act as the courts read it, and the courts have read it. The High Court threw out the Good Law Project’s challenge to the interim guidance in February. The code was laid before Parliament for forty days; more than 160 MPs backed a motion to reject it, and it went nowhere. Every legitimate route has been tried and lost. What remains is refusal dressed as principle: a minister who recites the law and will not enforce it, unions that pledge to fight employers for obeying it, and a party that resolves to rewrite the regulator until it says something else.

So here is the position of the British state and the parties that claim to be its progressive conscience. The court has ruled. The regulator has codified. Ministers agree in principle and act on nothing. And the Lib Dems, the Greens and the largest unions in the country are campaigning to have the ruling reversed, while the women who enforced it through the courts, alone and at their own expense, are told the matter is unclear. It is not unclear. A man who declares himself a woman does not stop being a man, and no policy built on pretending otherwise can protect women, because the pretence is exactly what a predator needs. Anyone who doubts that should read what happened in a McDonald’s toilet in Bavaria in August 2025. A 55-year-old German federal police officer, a biological male identifying as a woman, befriended a teenage girl through her mother, took her on a motorcycle ride, followed her into a cubicle and locked the door. The officer has now confessed at Traunstein Regional Court under a plea arrangement, after child abuse material and a Kalashnikov were found at home and at the police station. On arrest, that officer was placed in the women’s section of a prison. Nobody is arguing that this is typical. The point is simpler and worse: a system that takes self-declaration at face value has no way to tell the difference until it is too late, and the people who pay for the experiment are girls and women.

That is what the Darlington nurses meant when they said they were fighting for every woman and girl in the country. That is why Peggie says she is fighting an ideology, not a person. And it is why the metropolitan left’s continuing deference to the loudest activist voices is not kindness. It is a betrayal of the working women who clean the wards, lift the patients and change at the end of a twelve-hour shift, and whose goodwill has been spent, in their name, on their own dignity. It is a betrayal of every woman and feminist who fought for what this generation inherited: equality, safety, dignity, and the right to gather as women, for women, without asking anyone’s permission. Hollowood opened her speech in Brighton with the question every delegate who voted the other way should have to answer: “In 2026, are women allowed rights? Rights to dignity. Rights to safety. The right to say no.” Of her own leader she said that his support showed “Ed does not care about our rights and is wholly unwilling to fight for them.” The last time a Liberal leadership decided that women’s objections could wait, it was Asquith’s, and the women were in Holloway.

WHERE THE TRIBUNE STANDS

The Tribune’s position is not complicated and never has been. Women have a right to single-sex spaces. The law says so. The court says so. The regulator says so. A right that women must sue to enforce, one hospital at a time, at their own expense, while ministers say “imminently” and parties vote to repeal it by motion, is not a right. It is a privilege extended to those who can find a KC. Publish the NHS guidance, date it and make it binding. Tell every trust that a policy allowing access by self-identification cannot survive the Supreme Court judgment, because Darlington has already shown what happens when one tries. Tell the unions that their duty is to their female members, not to a campaign against a ruling.

The Greens, Sir Ed Davey and the Liberal Democrats remain perfectly entitled to argue that Parliament should change the Equality Act. Trade unions are entitled to campaign for the same thing. That is democracy. Until Parliament changes the statute, however, organisations governed by it do not acquire an exemption because they dislike the judgment interpreting it. You may campaign to change the law. You may not pretend it is not there. The law is the law. Women had to win it in the highest court in the land. They should not have to win it again in every changing room in Britain.

Priority

Today is Saint Matthew's Day. That erstwhile tax-collector is the Patron Saint of Bankers, while that strange and increasingly unfashionable thing, Biblical criticism, purports to read the Bible "as if it were any other ancient text", yet in fact subjects it to a series of methods that would be laughed out in any other literary or historical discipline. Those methods are carefully constructed to "prove" the presuppositions of that strange and increasingly unfashionable thing, liberal theology.

Thus, if two Biblical books are word for word alike, as Matthew, Mark and Luke certainly are in parts, then they must have been copied from each other, since there is no way that God could have inspired them all and, funnily enough, done so in such a way that they confirmed each others' accounts. Hence the theory of Markan Priority, that Saint Mark's Gospel was the first to be written, and that Saint Matthew and Saint Luke copied out great chunks of it word for word. And hence the theory of Q, the compendium of the material found in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark; no copy of Q exists anywhere. Jesus simply did not claim divinity for Himself, so that rules out John at a stroke. Miracles simply do not happen, a position not even compatible with agnosticism. Style simply does not develop (seriously), so Saint Paul cannot have written several of the Epistles beginning with the words, "From Paul". And so on, and on, and on.

Perhaps a gentle fillip from the wider culture might be in order? Although they differ in length, the different structures of the Gospels mean that they could each be dramatised in 12 episodes of one hour apiece, perhaps running from January to March, i.e., more or less from Christmas to Easter. The order ought to be as in the Bible – Matthew, Mark, Luke, John – exactly as if any other ancient text were the subject. That might even provide an opportunity to do some taking apart of the ridiculous theories of Markan Priority, of the interpolation of Mark 16, of "the Gospel of Thomas" and other such Dan Brown drivel, and of the historical unreliability of Saint John's Gospel on the grounds that Jesus "never claimed to be divine", the "proof" of which is held to be the historical unreliability of Saint John's Gospel.

All of these pieces of nonsense continue to be peddled by half-formed schoolteachers, and by clergy too old to have been part of the traditionalist revival among Catholics or the Evangelical revival among Protestants. Markan Priority was disproved a very long time ago by the Holy Father's spiritual father, Saint Augustine, whose Wikipedia pages in Portuguese and Slovene are significant source of traffic to this site, as is the page on U and non-U English. Make of those facts what you will. Acts could also be dramatised in this way, and it has some great stories in it. But it looks as if they would do the Ramayana first, and stick to the text if they did. That is not treating the Bible as a work of world literature, which is what they would claim that it was, and which, among other things, it is. Why not dramatise the Ramayana, exactly as it is? Why not dramatise the Odyssey, exactly as it is? And why not dramatise the Four Canonical Gospels and Acts, exactly as they are? Of what are the television companies afraid? Of what, in practice even though not in principle, would anyone be afraid?

Forgotten Soon Enough?

The Liberal Democrats are the third largest party in the House of Commons, and they lead more councils than the Conservatives, so they obviously do not need the publicity. Rather, the media blackout of them is a failure to subject them to proper scrutiny. It continued even during the five years of the Coalition. All in all, a dereliction of responsibility.

Country Whigs, Patriot Whigs, Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, National Liberals, Alderman Alfred Roberts's daughter, the founders and funders of the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Orange Bookers, and Liz Truss, have successively taken over the largely bovine Tory machine so completely that almost all Conservatives now assume "free" market economics and a foreign policy of military interventionism to be "traditional Tory values" that their party had always held. Nothing could be further from the case. More indirectly, the strands of Liberalism that accrued to the Labour Party and then seceded to the SDP have provided key, if mostly unseen, players around every Conservative Leader since John Major. Not for nothing do the ostensibly Tory papers call the King "Charles" but Earl Spencer, whose name is also Charles and who publishes under it, "Earl Spencer".

Only one Earl Spencer, the seventh, sat in the House of Lords as a Conservative. Both of his successors sat as Crossbenchers, and all of his predecessors were Liberals and before that Whigs. The first Earl Spencer was created only in 1765, but he was a member of the Whig oligarchy, of which the Spencer dynasty was a pillar. The first Baron Spencer was created in 1603, when he was already the richest man in England. He had been born in 1570 at Althorp, which the Spencers had owned since 1508 and where they had lived since 1486.

The old aristocratic families do look down on the Royals as jumped up, but they are really only nouveaux to this country, sufficient though that is for the purpose. They can call themselves whatever they please, but in point of fact the late Queen Elizabeth was the last British monarch of Prince Albert's House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. That House still occupies the Throne of Belgium, making it the last reigning branch of the House of Wettin, of which the earliest traceable member, Theodoric I, died in 976. Queen Victoria's House of Hanover, its accession in Britain five generations earlier having been largely engineered by the Spencers, was a branch of the House of Welf, and Welf I died around 825, having been, in 819, of such standing that his daughter Judith had married the Frankish Emperor Louis the Pious. Stick that in your 1486.

But these things are patrilineal, so the King is an Oldenburg. Prince Philip's House was, and therefore his son's is, the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, the senior surviving branch of the 925-year-old House of Oldenburg. Charles III can hold his own with any of them, even if he does still have to call himself Windsor for a reason that it is within his power to change. "Mountbatten" is his paternal grandmother's maiden name anglicised to a form that she herself never bore. There has never been a Principality of Battenberg, and the name indicates descent from a morganatic marriage. Leave the former Prince Andrew in that Hessian gap and move on. "The House of Windsor and Edinburgh" could be useful in this reign or the next. Meanwhile, the last great battle with Whiggery demands to be fought, with every member of the Privy Council and of either House of Parliament invited to declare which Charles he or she believed.

Into That Hollow

Paul Knaggs writes:

On 18 September, as voting opened in Russia’s parliamentary election, Vladimir Putin told his Military-Industrial Commission that some European leaders were “openly stating that they are preparing for war with Russia”. Of European drills in the Baltic that include practising the seizure of civilian ships, he said Russia would rather be friends, “or we will have to respond”. In a clip carried by RT, he added that, in his opinion, “rising military tensions are being used to distract from falling approval ratings and domestic economic failures.” Weigh the source. The man making the accusation was addressing a body whose business is arms production, while his army fights in Ukraine. Putin’s charge is self-serving, and it was Russia’s invasion in 2022 that sent European budgets climbing. Nothing that follows excuses it.

But ledgers do not explain how nations march to war. Fear does, and pride, and memory, and the mistakes of men who believe they are acting in self-defence. Consider who is now sounding the alarm. Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, has told the Bundestag that Germany must be war-ready by 2029, and warns that Russia could be capable of striking NATO by 2029 or 2030. In June 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and by the Soviet reckoning some 27 million of its people died. In 1955, days after West Germany joined NATO, Moscow answered with the Warsaw Pact.

Germany’s defence budget has since climbed from about €32 billion in 2014 to more than €108 billion this year, and Chancellor Friedrich Merz wants the strongest conventional army in Europe. Putin knows exactly which history he is invoking when he says of that ambition: “Good. We listen carefully, understanding what is meant.” It is hard not to hear in all this a prelude to something worse. History does not point one way. Poland and the Baltic states remember Soviet tanks, and that memory drives their fear as surely as any spreadsheet. None of this begins in 2022. In February 1990, Secretary of State James Baker told Mikhail Gorbachev three times that NATO would move “not one inch eastward” if a united Germany stayed in the alliance. It was never written into a treaty, and historians dispute how far it was meant to reach, but the declassified record shows the words were spoken.

In 2008 the American ambassador in Moscow, William Burns, later head of the CIA, warned Washington that Ukrainian membership was “the brightest of all redlines” for the Russian elite. Two months later, at Bucharest, NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia would become members, with no date and no path. Add Kosovo in 1999, the first time NATO used force without the Security Council’s endorsement, and Libya in 2011, a mandate Moscow says was stretched into regime change, and it is not hard to see why Moscow stopped believing the alliance was only defensive. None of that made the invasion lawful. Europe’s human rights court has found that Russia controlled the separatist areas from May 2014, and Ukrainian support for NATO, 18 per cent in 2013, reached 62 per cent by 2022 because of what Russia did.

The West built the tinder. Russia struck the match

Each side has its own version of the last twelve years. In February 2023 NATO’s then Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, said “The war started in 2014”, and that since then NATO Allies had given Ukraine training and equipment, so that its forces were much stronger in 2022. He meant it as a defence of Ukraine, and he dated the start to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its move into the Donbas. Read from Moscow, the same words describe eight years of an alliance it already regarded as hostile preparing its neighbour’s army. Britain alone trained 22,000 Ukrainian troops. Washington’s steps were incremental: Barack Obama declined to send lethal weapons in 2014 for fear of escalation, and Donald Trump approved Javelin missiles in 2018.

Read from Kyiv and Warsaw, the same years look like a country whose territory had been seized, with Russian-backed forces in the Donbas that Europe’s human rights court has since found were under Russia’s effective control from May 2014. Moscow calls the change of government in Kyiv that February a coup, and Ukraine calls it the Revolution of Dignity. A leaked call in which a senior American diplomat weighed who should lead the next government gave Moscow’s version its best evidence. But the Ukrainian parliament voted 328 to nil to remove a president who had fled the capital, and I have seen nothing to show that Washington organised the uprising. Both accounts are sincerely held. Each is fed by events the other cannot forget.

That is the action and reaction I mean. Every defensive step is read by the other side as an aggressive one. In August Putin threatened to seize European ships in retaliation for boardings of Russian “shadow fleet” tankers, and this week Finland practised boarding a suspicious vessel near undersea infrastructure. Each side describes itself as responding to the other. That is how it always sounds.

And we are not at war. Before the invasion, Russia’s military spending sat just below Britain’s in SIPRI’s rankings. Last year NATO’s members spent $1.58 trillion, 55 per cent of the world’s total. Yet the Chancellor’s statement announcing the extra £15 billion for the Defence Investment Plan speaks of moving Britain towards “warfighting readiness”. A country that says it wants peace, and prepares in the language of war, should not be surprised when the language becomes the plan.

In January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower used his farewell address to say that America had been compelled to create “a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions”. He was no pacifist. He had commanded the Allied armies in Europe, and he insisted that arms must be mighty enough that no aggressor is tempted to risk his own destruction. His fear was “unwarranted influence” by the military-industrial complex, sought or unsought. The danger was never that defence is unnecessary. It was what happens when permanent military spending becomes embedded in the economy itself.

Now look at what Britain still makes. Manufacturing accounted for 8.5 per cent of UK economic output between April and June, while services make up about four-fifths of the whole. In 2025 the country ran a £221 billion deficit on trade in goods, offset in part by a £203 billion surplus in services. Trade is not the enemy. But there is a difference between trading with the world and surrendering the capacity to make things.

GDP disguises the loss. It still counts the lorry, the warehouse, the loan and the till, while the making happened somewhere else. But an economy that works for the few is a closed circuit, and it goes stale. A wage earned making something is largely spent back into the economy that paid it. A wage lost when the factory shut is spent nowhere, and every job we export takes a customer with it. Cheap imports lower the price for people who no longer earn the money to meet it. The saving is shared between the shopper and the retailer, and the cost lands on the worker. We have called this efficiency. Sooner or later the buyers have no jobs, and the shelves are full of things nobody can afford.

Into that hollow comes the one order book the state will fill without argument. On 30 June the Government published its Defence Investment Plan: £298 billion over four years, including an additional £15 billion. The then Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, said it would deliver a “defence dividend” and almost 60,000 jobs. His successor has gone further. Andy Burnham has pledged half a million defence and aerospace jobs by 2030.

I will not sneer at those jobs. But the dividend is not paid from nowhere. The Government’s own explainer says the extra money is funded primarily by reallocating budgets from across government departments, with £10.3 billion identified now and £4.7 billion still to be confirmed at the Budget. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says around half of the increase comes from cuts to other departments’ capital budgets, with larger cuts to transport and energy. The state is taking investment in trains and the grid, which also employ people, to pay for missiles. When an economy has been stripped of so much of its productive base, war itself begins to look dangerously like industrial policy.

Nor is defence the only sector that profits from a world on edge. After US and Israeli strikes on Iran, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, which carries a fifth of the world’s oil, came to a near halt. In the second quarter Exxon made $14.5 billion and Chevron $12.1 billion. The Bank of England projects that a little over five million households will see mortgage repayments rise by the end of 2028, up from nearly four million in December, after markets repriced following the war. Barclays, meanwhile, reported first-half pre-tax profit of £6.1 billion, up 17 per cent, on trading revenue from volatile markets.

None of this proves that anyone manufactures wars to enrich arms makers, oil producers or banks. That claim goes beyond the evidence. The problem is structural: a system in which crisis has profitable constituencies. There is always a balance in geopolitics, and history shows how quickly it can tip the wrong way. Governments can convince themselves that military spending is deterrence, that escalation is controlled and that every new weapons programme simply buys security. Sometimes they are right. The lesson of the 1930s is that weakness invites aggression. The lesson of 1914 is the opposite one, that mobilisation timetables, once running, can leave diplomacy with nothing to negotiate with. That is A.J.P. Taylor’s case in War by Timetable, and historians still argue over it. A serious country holds both lessons at once. 

What it cannot afford is an economy that holds only one. The constant beat of the war drum has consequences. Sooner or later, rhetoric becomes mobilisation, mobilisation becomes confrontation, and the drumbeat is drowned out by something far more real: the crunch of boots on the battlefield. When ministers promise defence jobs in every region, when capital is taken from energy and transport to pay for them, and when oil companies and trading floors profit from the tension, those with an interest in it continuing are organised and well placed. Those with an interest in it ending are scattered across the country, paying the bill. I am not claiming anyone orders a war. I am saying that an economy built on the drum has no natural brake.

The test is coming. Chancellor John Healey, who resigned as defence secretary over funding before returning under Burnham, delivers his first Budget on 28 October, where the plan’s remaining gap must be closed. Do not pay for missiles by cutting the capital budgets that also build things. Tax the war profits of the oil majors, as European lawmakers and Democrats in Congress are already demanding. Attach conditions to every defence pound: British production on British payrolls, recognised unions, public equity where the public pays for the plant. And keep talking. To arm for deterrence is prudent. To treat every attempt to de-escalate as betrayal is how drums become boots. 

There is a better precedent than a bigger arms budget. In January 1976, workers at Lucas Aerospace published an alternative plan in response to the company’s announcement that thousands of jobs were to be cut, and it included over 150 designs for alternative products such as wind turbines, hybrid cars and heat pumps. Nearly half of the company’s business was related to military matters. Management rejected the plan, but it was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. Tony Benn called it “one of the most remarkable exercises that has ever occurred in British industrial history”. Its logic was simple: put the working people of this country to work on what the country needs. A state that can order missiles by the thousand can order heat pumps, turbines, trains and steel, and pay the people who make them. We must produce more than arms. Eisenhower warned where that road could lead. Perhaps the most disturbing thing is not that his warning failed. It is that we built the economy he warned us about.

Growing Up

For a decade, I have been telling you that we all knew what colour a snowflake was, and that “cancel culture” was only given a name at all when it started happening to the people who had been practising it since time immemorial. As Kenan Malik now writes:

For many on the right, “cancel culture” is a terrible thing – unless it becomes necessary to cancel views they deem unfit for public consumption. Step forward Macklemore, the US rapper brusquely evicted from Ed Sheeran’s US tour.

Macklemore is well known for his political songs. In 2012, his hit Same Love celebrated gay marriage and took aim at hip-hop’s homophobia. Two years ago, he released Hind’s Hall, in support of Columbia University students who organised pro-Palestinian protests and renamed the hall they occupied in honour of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old girl killed by Israeli forces in distressing circumstances.

The opening act for Sheeran at New Jersey’s MetLife stadium, Macklemore introduced Hind’s Hall with a two-minute speech demanding a “Free Palestine”. It was greeted with applause in the stadium but generated outrage outside. Robert Kraft, owner of the Gillette stadium near Boston, where Sheeran and Macklemore were due to play, and a close friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, fronted a campaign for venues to cancel the rapper.

The Israeli American Council organised a petition insisting that “Macklemore has the right to hold political views” but “the line should be drawn when an opening act uses a global concert platform to advance a one-sided political agenda”. The idea that Macklemore has the right to express his views to a small audience but not to a large one, and only if he carefully delineates all sides of a debate, is, frankly, absurd. The right to free speech is predicated neither on the size of one’s audience nor on the nuance of one’s take.

Interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme, IAC’s chief executive Elan Carr claimed the phrase “Free Palestine” was a call “for the extermination of the state of Israel and the Jewish people”. There are certainly antisemites within the pro-Palestinian movement, and some who would like to exterminate Jews. What Carr is seeking to do, though, in common with many supporters of Israel, is delegitimise any call for Palestinian freedom or a Palestinian state, or even for full rights for Palestinians in an Israeli state whose Basic Law reserves the “right of self-determination” solely for Jews.

Carr claimed also that Macklemore had “hijacked” the stage. Macklemore and Sheeran are friends, the two having collaborated on Growing Up, a song about the rapper’s newborn daughter. Macklemore’s views and repertoire would have been well known to Sheeran and to promoters. He was not engaged to sing My Favourite Things.

Others argue that the issue is not what Macklemore said on stage but his previous antisemitism. This refers largely to a performance in 2014 in which Macklemore sported a black wig, beard and a huge fake hooked nose – the classic antisemitic caricature of a Jew. The Anti-Defamation League accepted his subsequent apology and his claim that the costume was not intentionally antisemitic, a claim which, in truth, was not very convincing.

Many have pointed out that Macklemore’s outfit was no more acceptable than if he had worn a blackface costume, which is true. Yet, celebrities from David Baddiel to Jimmy Fallon have worn blackface and not been cancelled. We should not ignore Macklemore’s grotesquely antisemitic costume, or what it might say about his views, but neither should we wield it as reason for cancellation, especially a decade later.

At least two stadia that have banned Macklemore – the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, and the Raymond James stadium in Tampa, Florida – have been willing to host Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, who last year released a song called Heil Hitler, promoting it with $20 T-shirts emblazoned with a black swastika. The objection to Macklemore seems less about antisemitism than about his criticism of Israel.

Critics point out also that owners of stadia (like publishers of books) have the legal right to exclude people they don’t wish to platform. Few would deny that. The issue, rather, is that such cancelling has become today a major means of policing speech – as the Macklemore case reveals.

Spectator columnist Stephen Daisley mocked the left for being “suddenly, and unusually, vocal about freedom of speech” in the wake of Macklemore’s cancellation. Equally, though, many on the right have been unusually silent about it (Daisley himself, to be fair, opposed Macklemore’s ousting).

The Free Speech Union, normally thunderously supportive of free expression, could not bring itself to oppose Macklemore’s cancellation, but only feebly ask how far owners or promoters should “dictate what an artist can or cannot say on stage?” It was, however, “alarmed” by the “cancellation” of Sheeran for not holding “the ‘correct’ opinions strongly enough”. Gad Saad, a Canadian academic popular on the reactionary right for his acerbic hostility to immigrants and Muslims, and who coined the term “suicidal empathy”, defended Ye’s right “to be an idiot” but appeared to endorse Macklemore’s cancellation. Some have even likened Macklemore’s performance to a “neo-Nuremberg rally”.

Rightwing cancel culture is not new. Two decades ago, the country band Dixie Chicks faced a furious backlash for opposing the Iraq War and telling an audience, “We’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” Thousands of radio stations banned them and DJs were suspended for playing their songs. For conservatives, this was not censorship but patriotism. The policing of speech always comes armed with its own excuses.

Cancel culture is usually seen as the product of “woke” activists wielding power in the culture industries. What the Macklemore case exposes is that those with economic power are even more able to police speech. They should be fiercely resisted.

A Wise Litmus Test

Frances Ryan writes:

Disabled people are being barred from leaving the country. This isn’t the first line of a dystopian novel but a scandal quietly happening across swathes of England. For the past six months, myself and my colleague Patrick Butler have spoken to disabled people who have effectively been blocked from going abroad on a holiday or to a work event by their local care provider. 

There’s 38-year-old Lucy from Oxfordshire who needs to travel internationally as the president of the European Spinal Cord Injury Federation. And Chelsea from Lancashire, a 25-year-old with cerebral palsy who dreams of swimming in Spain again. Then there’s 40-year-old Joel, whose name has been changed, who has a muscle weakness, and who works for a global marketing brand but hasn’t been able to leave the UK for nine years.

Some have live-in personal assistants (PAs) via NHS continuing healthcare, the non-means-tested home support for people with high needs. Others have 24/7 social care through their local authority. But when they try to leave the country, all hit the same wall: they are told they are not allowed to use their care package abroad, sometimes even if they pay any extra costs themselves.

Here’s the plot twist. Some areas of the country are permitting care users to go on holiday or travel for work – while disabled people just a few miles down the road can be stopped. Others are told they can travel but have to pay any extra expenses – effectively still barring them financially from going – while some care boards offer to cover the cost. As there is limited to no national guidance on the issue, disabled people’s right to travel depends on a postcode lottery, with local care officials inspecting their plans for a trip away and having the power to rule “go” or “stay”.

This week, MPs and peers called for national guidelines to end this injustice. Figures such as the work and pensions select committee chair, Debbie Abrahams, the crossbench peer Jane Campbell and the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn told The Guardian that the government must guarantee the rights of disabled people to travel and ensure they have the support they need to do so.

You can practically hear the right preparing to oppose the move with a cry of “Free holidays on the NHS!” But care users going abroad doesn’t cost the taxpayer anything extra in care bills. Disabled people who need 24/7 support for everyday activities already have care funding in place, and in many cases use their own money to pay PAs’ travel expenses, such as accommodation and plane tickets (on top of the already extortionate price of accessible travel). When Lucy was told by her care board she couldn’t take her PAs to a spinal cord conference in Germany this spring, her employer had already offered to pay any additional costs.

The question, then, is why would authorities want to stop disabled people going abroad? If it’s not just about tight budgets, why should it matter to them how an adult chooses to use their care package? You could say that it’s about practicalities: it’s easier not to worry about insurance or visas (disabled people largely sort this themselves for their PAs anyway). But it seems naive not to think there’s some prejudice lurking under the bureaucracy. Blocking disabled people from going on holiday or working abroad goes to the heart of cultural assumptions about disability: that we don’t have careers or families or friends like other, “normal” people.

Sixty years after disabled people left institutions and were able to live independently, alongside the vast gains, the stain of paternalistic control still lurks in disability services. It’s the social worker who suggests you get a commode next to your sofa because it’s cheaper than an accessible bathroom. It’s the care worker who speaks very slowly to you and picks your clothes out on your behalf. It’s the occupational therapist who suggests you get a hospital-style bed that your husband can’t fit in (and is visibly surprised you have a husband).

We’re not supposed to talk about this stuff. There’s an unwritten rule that says disabled people should be just grateful for what they’re given by the state, lest we appear to be scroungers or burdens. I say “unwritten”. It’s written in some newspapers most weeks.

It is uncomfortable, I suppose, in part because it is so ordinary. This isn’t the sort of prejudice that comes with an ableist slur or a violent push. It is the gentle, everyday belief that certain kinds of lives – certain kinds of people – come with low expectations.

Just look at the way much of the political and media class discuss social care. In the rare instances that younger disabled people are mentioned alongside elderly people, social care is still solely spoken about in terms of personal care – say, help to wash or prepare a meal. As Andy Burnham has put reform of the care sector on the agenda in recent months, it’s notable there has been little talk of its role in supporting a disabled person’s family role or career: whether that’s help to drop the kids off at school on the way to the office or to get to the pub to celebrate a friend’s birthday.

That’s understandable. Under the current system, as many as 1.5 million disabled people in England are left without access to even the most basic help. If you are suffering the indignity of sitting in soiled clothes because a care worker hasn’t arrived to assist you to the bathroom, it can feel pointless – delusional, even – to mention you’ve not seen the sea in years.

But to settle for this state of affairs forces disabled people to accept a half-life, to be relieved to at least be clean and fed, and to try to forget the colour that defines being human. It diminishes not only our humanity but the principle that disability campaigners fought for decades for and underpins the modern care system: for disabled people to have choice and independence over our lives, just like everyone else.

When I recently spoke to Campbell, who has 24/7 PAs herself, about the care abroad scandal, she said something telling: “It’s as if those controlling [these decisions] believe disabled people don’t deserve the same experiences they enjoy.” 

As pressure for national guidelines mounts, I can’t help but think that is a wise litmus test. Would you expect a non-disabled person to live like this? And if not, why do you think it’s OK for disabled people?

The Real Numbers

Paul Knaggs writes:

Donald Tusk did not set out to tell us anything. He stood up in the Sejm on 17 September to warn Poles about drones and a hard winter, and in passing he gave the world a figure Kyiv has spent four years keeping to itself. Ukraine, he said, has recently been losing 27,000 killed and wounded each month, a record for this war. He said it came from Ukrainian officials.

Now do the sum Kyiv would rather you didn’t. In July, Zelensky told Fox News that Ukraine has about 50,000 dead and about 400,000 wounded, with a significant number missing on top. That is roughly 450,000 casualties over some fifty months, or about 8,500 a month. Tusk’s figure is more than three times that. In February, Zelensky said the officially confirmed dead were at least 55,000. By July it was about 50,000. Either the figures are loose, or someone is rounding in the wrong direction.

Independent estimates say what you would expect. CSIS puts Ukrainian dead at between 125,000 and 150,000, and total casualties at 525,000 to 625,000, from February 2022 to June 2026. That is two to three times Kyiv’s figure for the dead.

There is a second number. Zelensky told The Economist in February 2025 that Ukraine mobilised 30,000 people a month in 2024, and its commander-in-chief has since said that is the figure to stick to. Put Tusk’s 27,000 beside Kyiv’s 30,000 and you have one figure seen from both ends: a country conscripting as many men as it is losing. That is my inference, but it is hard to read it any other way.

Ukraine’s defenders will say Russia is bleeding faster. CSIS’s work suggests Russian casualties of 30,000 to 34,000 a month in 2026, probably more than Moscow can recruit (same summary). I don’t doubt it. That is not comfort. It is what attrition means.

Kyiv has its reasons for silence. It does not want to hand Moscow a picture of its strength or shake morale at home. Fair enough. But the secrecy covers more than the enemy. It covers the people paying for the war.

Britain has committed £25 billion to Ukraine since 2022, £16 billion of it military, some of it guarantees and loans rather than cash. The aid budget is being cut from 0.5 per cent of national income to 0.3, while BAE Systems reports a record order backlog of £84 billion. We are told this is about standing with Ukraine. We are not told what standing with Ukraine costs Ukrainians.

Tusk says this winter could be catastrophic. If he is right, Ukrainian conscripts will find out first, and the rest of us will be asked to pay for more of it. Neither group has been shown the real numbers.