Beyond The Line

Since 21 September 2025, the United Kingdom has recognised Palestine as a sovereign state. That state is at peace with His Majesty, and the State of Israel is at war with it. Enlistment by a British citizen in the Israeli Defense Forces is therefore a criminal offence under the Foreign Enlistment Act 1870. Any policy of not prosecuting dual nationals who had been conscripted would still not be the law, and anyone else would be bang to rights. Or do we have two-tier justice? Britain has named and condemned the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, an ideology that gave rise to ethnic cleansing must by definition be racist, Britain has welcomed the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, Pillay chaired the Commission of Inquiry that found Israel to be committing genocide in Gaza, an ideology that gave rise to genocide must by definition be racist, and Hamza Yusuf, Dania Akkad, Shaimaa Marwan and Phil Miller write:

A British man fought for the Israeli army in Gaza when war crimes appear to have been committed, a four-month investigation by Declassified has found. Jonathan Burman, who is in his mid-20s and from Manchester, posted photographs on his Instagram account showing him fighting in Khan Younis early in the conflict. Newly discovered images show Burman standing in front of a primary school in Gaza that had been set on fire, as a fellow soldier smiles beside him. They were posted on his private Instagram account in January 2024, six weeks after the Israeli army violently occupied the school.

The photographs were shared exclusively with Declassified by a source seriously concerned by Burman’s behaviour. It comes as a UN commission said that any Israeli soldier who fought in Gaza after October 2023 should be considered a war crimes suspect. Analysis of Israeli army documents links Burman to a unit that repeatedly destroyed residential buildings in Gaza. A former Israeli soldier who served in the same battalion as Burman and left Gaza on ethical grounds told Declassified that it was an “absolute apocalypse”.

“You could just go and do whatever you want…You could burn down those houses and have no consequences whatsoever,” he said. Under the fourth Geneva Convention, which Israel has ratified, the “extensive destruction…of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” constitutes a war crime. An Israeli military spokesperson claimed that weapons were found in the school in Burman’s photographs but could only produce video footage from a raid on a different school in Gaza. Burman did not respond to a request for comment.

The burning school

Burman’s photographs are believed to have been taken at Al-Farabi primary school in the Bani Suheila district of Khan Younis, southern Gaza, according to six witnesses and experts interviewed by Declassified. Palestinian civilians who sheltered at the school early in the war told Declassified they believed it would provide safety as it was run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Satellite imagery from November 2023 shows the school’s playground covered in white tarpaulins and the initials “UN” clearly visible on the roof.

However, the civilians said they had to flee the site in mid-December 2023 when the Israeli army moved in. Ayman Sahmoud, 56, said he and his family sought shelter at the school that month after being forced to flee their home under relentless bombardment and Israeli evacuation orders. “We left our home with nothing,” he recalled. “We abandoned everything behind us. When we arrived at the school, it was already overflowing with displaced families…We could barely find a place to sleep.”

Sahmoud described the days he spent inside the school as among the hardest of the war. The bombardment, he said, never ceased. The force from repeated airstrikes at a plot adjacent to the school constantly shook the building. Satellite imagery shows the area around the school was systematically demolished. “After some time, the Israeli military bombed the school’s main gate,” he said. “Two people were killed right before our eyes. At that moment, we understood the message was clear: we had to evacuate the school completely.”

He said Israeli aircraft dropped leaflets ordering all displaced residents to leave immediately, forcing his family and many others to flee once again, this time toward the city of Rafah, leaving behind most of their belongings. According to Sahmoud, some families had nowhere else to go and remained inside the school until Israeli forces surrounded the area and compelled them to leave.

‘Survived by a miracle’ 

Randa Abu Assi, 42, remained inside the school until the very last moments in December 2023, despite the intensifying bombardment around it. She said the airstrikes targeting the nearby plot of land were so intense that shrapnel tore through the school building, injuring several displaced people sheltering inside. “My foot was struck by shrapnel,” she said. “My son, Bahaa, 21 years old, was also wounded by shrapnel that remains lodged in both of his legs to this day.” Randa explained that many families gradually left the school, while she and a small number of displaced people remained until staying there became impossible. “We fled under fire and survived by a miracle,” she said, adding that they later learned Israeli forces had stormed the school on 12 December 2023.

Arabic news reports corroborate her account of Israeli troops entering the school on that date. Al Jazeera journalist Ismail Abu Omar wrote on Telegram the following day: “Last night, [Israeli] occupation forces released the citizens they had detained and arrested from Al-Farabi School in Bani Suheila, east of Khan Yunis, while keeping three individuals in custody. “Those released had been subjected to heavy gunfire inside the school and recounted the brutality and harshness of the occupation soldiers’ treatment; they were blindfolded, forced to strip off their clothes in the cold weather, made to walk long distances barefoot, and subjected to insults and profanity.” Another journalist, Muthanna Al-Najjar, reported on Telegram that Palestinians detained in the school described “atrocious and brutal treatment” by Israeli soldiers. 

Geolocation 

The school is beyond the ‘Yellow Line’ in Gaza, meaning it is still occupied by the Israeli military following last year’s ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. This made it too dangerous for Declassified to visit the school in person, however Sahmoud, Abu Assi and a third witness all confirmed that the building seen in Burman’s photograph was Al-Farabi School. The third witness, Duha Abu Assi, 28, said her family sheltered there later in the conflict, until they were forced to evacuate in May 2025. Her brother, Hamada, was killed by Israeli forces as he left the school while trying to find food as a famine unfolded in Gaza. She provided a photograph taken of her brother before his death. The background shows part of the walls of Al-Farabi school, along with some of the same distinctive graffiti in Burman’s photo.

Along with verification by multiple witnesses in Gaza, Declassified showed the photo of Burman posing at the school to three geolocation experts, who all identified it as Al-Farabi school. They used a video filmed by Reuters in April 2024 of a wrecked school in Khan Younis with the same graffiti seen in Burman’s photo and matched the unusual layout of that school to satellite imagery of Gaza. Ryan Geitner from Airwars said: “Reviewing footage from Reuters and the photos posted to social media, we have a high level of certainty that this is the same location. Satellite imagery indicates that the school suffered major damage in the months after November 2023, signs of which are visible in both sets of material.”

Different school 

Jonathan Burman and the Israeli Embassy in London did not respond to a request for comment about his photographs, but Declassified put our findings to the IDF’s international press desk. In a phone call, an IDF spokeswoman referred us to a bulletin the army had issued on 13 December 2023 about the 55th Brigade’s Reconnaissance Battalion. It said “A terrorist cell operating inside a school in Khan Yunis was elimintated [sic] by the IDF…During the operation, the troops engaged with a terrorist cell that fired at the troops with firearms and RPG style anti-tank missiles. The troops killed the terrorists during the battle. In the area of the school, the troops located long-range rockets and an underground combat compound. Furthermore, IDF troops directed an IAF [Israeli Air Force] strike on the compound, and additional observation and control centers belonging to the Hamas terrorist organization.”

The spokeswoman included a link to “video footage of the activity in the school”. Airwars reviewed the video for Declassified and geolocated the footage to a different school, 1.9km north east of Al-Farabi, called Imam Muhammad bin Saleh Al-Uthaymeen private school. It means the IDF has not provided any evidence to explain or justify why Al-Farabi school was in flames when the photographs of Burman were taken there. Further analysis by the Hind Rajab Foundation of where Burman’s unit was deployed in Gaza suggests he may not have been stationed at the school until 8 January 2024. This would suggest the school was set alight several weeks after the IDF had cleared it of Palestinians. Under the Geneva Convention, the “extensive destruction of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” constitutes a war crime.

‘A wild west’ 

The damage to Al-Farabi school is not the only incident of concern that Burman might have been involved with. Another photo he posted and captioned “Khan Yunis” shows him on one knee with a rifle in his hand, amid the rubble of residential houses with a bed strewn on its side and a partially buried toddler bike. His boots are a shade of red, a colour associated with Israeli paratroopers. The IDF’s press office indicated to Declassified that Burman was from the 55th Reserve Paratrooper Brigade, which is known as “the tip of the spear”.

This assessment was confirmed by the Hind Rajab Foundation, who analysed Israeli army documents and found evidence suggesting Burman was in the 55th Brigade’s 66th Battalion, B company. Yuval Green served in this same battalion as a medic. While he was in a different company and does not recall meeting Burman, Green has important insight into the battalion’s mindset. The 66th Battalion’s commander Ofir Adani gave a speech before they entered Gaza in which he told his men: “I want you to be angry. I want you to rage. I want you to have a deep sense of revenge. Anyone who messes with us should die. He and his family. And his relatives. And everyone who supported him.” 

Green remembers hearing this speech at the time and explained: “When you look at the atmosphere of Israel after the 7th October, everything went nuts. People have been apathetic towards the suffering of Palestinians for so long, they had no idea what was going on in Gaza. And the way people spoke after this was just insane. And they’re speaking about killing all the Gazans. Some of the people just really are driven by crazy, insane religious ideas. They’re extremists who believe that Jews should live everywhere around ancient Israel. And this was just an opportunity for them to kill as many Gazans as they can and kick them out and get their lands. They’re saying this quite clearly.”

Green said that as well as Adani giving several speeches like this, Ezra Yachin, a 98-year-old who was involved in a Zionist militia’s 1948 Deir Yassin massacre of Palestinians, gave a speech to his company before they entered Gaza. “This guy comes to us, a group of soldiers, and he’s just telling the story of how he massacred villagers…and no one blinks an eye. And I think this shows you very very well what type of atmosphere we’ve had before we went into Gaza. The writing was on the wall.” Although we do not have a recording of Yachin’s speech, there is footage from another incident where this “motivational speaker” told soldiers: “Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live.”

When asked how he felt seeing photos of Jonathan Burman in front of the burning school, Green said he “felt awful. [It] really takes me back to one of the worst times of my life. This destruction is just so difficult to see. Look at their smiles. It’s just, you know, that’s the first time they’re burning down a building. For them, it’s some type of a crazy experience. And they don’t think about the consequences because it’s a place without rules.” When asked if burning a school could be justified had the IDF found weapons there, Green responded: “I personally don’t think so. You know, I don’t. Is it helpful to burn down a school? Ever?” 

While Green did not personally see schools being attacked, he did see widespread damage to residential properties. “Fifty days after we went into Gaza, they’re telling us to burn down the houses we were at. And I go to my commander and ask him, why are we burning down those houses? And he has no good answer. Absolutely no good answer. If you were to destroy a house in London, you live in a country of law. You live in an organized country. No one can just go and burn down the house. But this war zone is a wild west. No rules. Absolute apocalypse. So you could just go and do whatever you want. You can go and steal whatever you want from those houses. You could burn down those houses and have no consequences whatsoever. And I went to him and I told him, if we’re burning down those houses, I’m leaving the next day. I’m not willing to be a part of it. This is the last straw. And, that’s what happened. They burnt down the houses. I went back, and this was it.”

Burman’s war

Despite the 55th Brigade’s apparent pattern of destruction, Burman’s photos on Instagram show him relaxing, laughing, playing musical instruments and enjoying food and drink with other soldiers. On 31 December 2023, he posted a picture of him in his military uniform sitting on an armchair in what appears to be the ruins of a house, with the caption “happy new year”. The location he places is the “Gaza Strip”. He reflected on his time in the military on 31 January 2024 in an Instagram post where he said “I’ve been out of Gaza for a few days now.”

Israeli Army Radio reported that the 55th Brigade had been withdrawn from Gaza on 28 January 2024, with footage emerging on social media that day apparently showing them driving out of the strip. As well as fighting in Gaza, he appears to have fought in Lebanon and Syria as well. On 23 November 2024, he posted a picture looking over some valleys, locating it as Lebanon. In another post from the next day, he is seen sitting at a balcony with his weapon by his side, sipping a coffee. “Always time for a coffee”, reads the caption, making clear the photo was taken in Lebanon.

Meanwhile, a post on 6 October 2025 shows him in Syria. The timing of his deployments are consistent with the 55th Brigade. His involvement in Gaza has ostensibly not hindered his ability to return to Britain and watch his favourite club. On 17 May this year, his social media showed he attended a match at Old Trafford, Manchester United’s home ground. Burman seemingly grew up in Manchester, attending Altrincham Grammar School for Boys until graduating in summer 2018. He moved to Israel in 2019 and joined the IDF.

‘Almost confessional’

Burman is among more than 2,000 British nationals who served in the Israeli army during the genocide in Gaza, as recently revealed by Declassified. The UK government does not track British nationals that served, and returning soldiers have not been questioned about their activities. The Metropolitan Police recently declined to investigate 10 British nationals accused of committing war crimes in Gaza, before making a U-turn and reopening a probe into four of them. More than 25,000 people have signed a letter calling for the UK government to track the movements of Britons who have served in the Israeli army, screen them at ports of entry, and support thorough war crimes investigations. The public letter has been signed by prominent human rights experts, politicians, activists, lawyers, journalists, including Zack Polanski and Jeremy Corbyn. Green told Declassified:

“When I look outside of Israel now, I see many people furious with Israel. And for good reason. It’s also easy from their perspective to confuse between supporting Palestine and supporting the end of the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank and actually supporting terror. But I say, please don’t choose to support the violence. What happened on the 7th October has been one of the biggest traumas of our life. It has started this new horrible wave of violence. This is not the solution. Resisting in this way is not the right solution.” 

This means Palestinians must rely on international institutions to deliver them justice. Chris Sidoti is an Australian human rights lawyer who serves on the UN’s Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In this role he has worked alongside Nobel Peace Prize winner Navi Pillay. Sidoti told us:

“The methodology that Declassified UK has used is exactly the methodology that we use in conducting our own investigations. We have found that there are very large numbers of digital material published by Israeli soldiers or soldiers serving with the Israeli forces about their exploits. The boastfulness of these soldiers is quite incredible but they produce material like the material that you describe that put themselves at places where war crimes have been committed or at least serious events have occurred that give rise to the possibility of war crimes, crimes against humanity and post it openly on social media accounts. So that information is important information, it’s almost confessional information and in many cases it is confessional. I note that you’re not saying this person is guilty of war crimes, we don’t say that either, we say that the evidence is sufficient to support further investigation and prosecution where warranted. I think that’s exactly correct.”

Sidoti said the Met police’s war crimes unit should now be looking into Jonathan Burman, commenting: “There is the obligation that when this person is within the jurisdiction of that state there should be an investigation and prosecution when warranted.”

Liberal Arts

Lack of coverage is lack of scrutiny, so it was welcome to see Mike Martin on Newsnight. Intelligence Corps, Political Officer in Helmand Province, commissioned to write a PhD on the conflict, ordered not to publish it because it was so critical, resigned his commission to publish it anyway, and now an MP for the Liberal Democrats. In general, though, since they have far more seats in the House of Commons than all smaller parties and Independents put together, most or all of which they are predicted to retain, and since they lead more councils than the Conservatives, then the Lib Dems are scandalously under-scrutinised. But at least David Maddox writes:

The Lib Dems are attempting to evict a 71-year-old founding member of the party who is suffering from incurable cancer from her home to pay its legal bill in a dispute against her. Jo Hayes was a member of the party for 34 years, served on the party’s federal board and was regional chair for the East of England. She is due to appear at the county court in Chelmsford on Wednesday where the party will ask the judge to evict her from her home so it can be sold.

Ms Hayes, a barrister, has been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable cancer of blood plasma cells, and has told The Independent that she is fearful of being left homeless if she is evicted. She said: “It is worrying because I can’t think of a landlord who’d particularly want me as a tenant, since I’ve got all these health problems, and I don’t terribly want to fall over and break something because it won’t heal.”

The dispute began after Ms Hayes was expelled in 2022 shortly before she was due to stand in the election to be the party’s federal president after a complaint by the then incumbent president Lord Mark Pack who was subsequently reelected for a second term. The expulsion happened after she had questioned some of the party’s policies on issues relating to the Equalities Act in regards to trans rights. Ms Hayes attempted to challenge her expulsion but failed to get it overturned in the high court and now the party is pursuing costs. She told The Independent that she still denies the claims against her but was unable to challenge those in the court hearing.

The party has suffered a string of legal losses recently including admitting that it had breached the human rights of former award winning BBC journalist David Campanale when the Sutton and Cheem constituency party deselected him for being a Christian ahead of the 2024 election. A judge is set to consider damages awarded to Mr Campanale in January. The party also lost in court against Natale Bird, a domestic abuse survivor, and was forced to pay her damages of £14,000 after barring her from being a candidate for Wakefield over her gender critical views. The party was also forced to allow Liberal Voice for Women back into its conference. And the party was also sued for discrimination by one of its former councillors Avril Coelho, a disability activist who was expelled.

Ms Hayes will argue that the party is pursuing her because it is faced with bills for damages against others. She said: “The party thought I was rich so were surprised that I did not just have the money which is why they put a charge on my house. They should have know that I wasn’t wealthy given the amount of pro bono work I did for them.” She will also complain that the party chose to use some of the most expensive lawyers in its cases. She said: “One of the things I would have done had I been president would have been to resolve these cases and not use such expensive lawyers.”

Ms Hayes maintains that a liberal party should be able to contain both trans activists and those with gender critical views. “The problem is that it is not a liberal party any more,” she said. She has accused Sir Ed Davey of “weak leadership” and has claimed that the party is “run by a clique.” A Lib Dem spokesperson said: “This is an ongoing legal case so it would not be appropriate to comment.”

Crime and Security, Defence

Archived here, it is pointedly Rebecca Camber, Crime and Security Editor and Mark Nicol, Defence Editor who write in the Daily Mail:

An Oxford University lecturer who was in a relationship with Tory peer Michael Gove is facing trial on child abuse image charges. Dr Lola Salem, 33, who until recently was the girlfriend of the former Cabinet minister, has been charged with possessing multiple indecent photographs of a child. She has now been suspended by Oxford’s Oriel College, where she has been a lecturer in music since 2022. This means she is no longer allowed to teach students at either Oriel or Wadham and St Catherine’s Colleges, where she previously lectured in French.

She has pleaded not guilty to the offences. There was a short procedural hearing in her case at Oxford Crown Court on September 30, at which a date for her trial was set in March 2028. Salem was the girlfriend of Lord Gove for more than two years. But the Daily Mail’s Eden Confidential diary revealed earlier this month that they had split. Lord Gove confirmed to the Mail last night: ‘We are no longer in a relationship.’ News of their romance emerged when the pair arrived together at The Spectator summer party in July 2024, shortly before the Tory peer was named editor of the magazine. Months later, the 59-year-old former Cabinet minister, who is 25 years older than Salem, was photographed kissing her at the London celebrity hotspot J Sheekey. The alleged offences took place before Lord Gove met Salem.

Salem has been charged with having in her possession between May 19, 2021 and February 13, 2023 three category B indecent images of children, which is the second most serious type. She is also accused of having a less serious category C indecent image of a child between April 6, 2021 and February 13, 2023. The academic denied the charges at a pre-trial hearing earlier this year and remains on bail ahead of her trial, which is expected to last two to three days. It is understood that she will argue in her defence that she was sent the four images unsolicited and that she reported them to the police.

Salem was charged by Thames Valley Police in May this year along with Henry Hopwood-Phillips, a historian and geopolitical analyst with whom she worked at The Critic magazine. Hopwood-Phillips, 39, founded a Singapore-based political consultancy that specialises in analysing China’s geopolitics. In June he admitted two counts of taking an indecent photograph and two counts of distributing indecent photographs of a child at High Wycombe Magistrates’ Court. He was handed a 15-month suspended sentence, a sexual harm prevention order and made subject to lifetime sex offender notification requirements.

Born in France, Salem was a talented singer as a child and trained at Maîtrise de Radio France, a prestigious children's choir school operated by the French public broadcaster. She was educated in Paris, excelling in her musicology studies at the École Normale Supérieure before taking an aesthetics and art philosophy degree at La Sorbonne, where she won a young scholar prize. Salem then moved to Oxford to obtain a PhD [it is not called that at Oxford, bah!] in music, specialising in how female singers shaped operatic repertoire and institutional practice at the Paris Opera, before she became a Marshall Research Fellow. Between 2021 and 2023, she worked as head of development at the Canterbury Institute, an independent centre for research and learning in Oxford, before lecturing in French at Wadham and St Catherine’s Colleges between 2022 and 2024.

In 2023 she was selected as a Civic Future Fellow and later became a member of the Civic Future Leadership School, an organisation training individuals for potential public office founded by Munira Mirza, the former head of the Downing Street policy unit under Boris Johnson. According to a page listing her achievements on Oriel College’s website, which has since been deleted, Salem has ‘taught music papers across the University of Oxford since 2018’ and is considered an expert on ‘contemporary debates about the governance of the arts and the future of cultural institutions’. She describes herself as a ‘researcher, cultural and institutional strategist’, and on LinkedIn she highlights her relationships with ‘senior decision-makers’ in the UK. A spokesman for Oriel College said: ‘Oriel College was made aware of serious charges against an employee in June 2026. This employee was suspended, pending the outcome of legal proceedings.’

Stop The Rot About Bots

Zack Polanski could not hypnotise women to make their breasts larger, and Vladimir Putin could not hypnotise Britons to vote for Brexit. But Putin has never made any such claim, while Polanski has never been accused of success. If Russia did swing the referendum, then to what effect? Has Britain been noticeably pro-Russian in the last 10 years?

Keir Starmer whipped Labour MPs to vote for the Brexit deal, so was he a Russian asset? As for interference in the 2019 General Election, in what interest? There was an attempt, which felt purely ceremonial and pro forma, to blame the Russians for the leak of the detailed threat to the National Health Service from a UK-US trade agreement negotiated by Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. But would Andy Burnham have supported those terms? In any case, and although the leak probably did prevent the sellout of the NHS, Johnson still won the Election.

Burnham now claims never to have suggested that Russian mind games had decided the referendum for Leave. But we all heard him say it. Not only that, but Ed Davey congratulated him on the floor of the House of Commons for telling a lie that Burnham denied that he had ever told. The Liberal Democrats have far more MPs than all smaller parties and Independents put together, most or all of which they are predicted to hold next time, and they lead more councils than the Conservatives. You do wonder why some Lib Dems wanted a new Leader. And then you see something like that. Still, what the present plotters really want is to abandon support for the triple lock. Think on.

Likely Stories

Whatever happened to those two “Latvians” at USAF Molesworth? On that as on the fact that I cannot find a cufflink but I am not sure whether the blame lies with Russia or with Iran, I have every confidence that Andy Burnham will set me straight. After all, he has reassured us that it was “highly likely” that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps had “coordinated” whatever it was that had happened at the now-abandoned USAF Fairford, a prime site for affordable housing.

To be exact, the Prime Minister told the House of Commons that, “I can confirm our assessment that it is highly likely to have been coordinated in Iran, almost certainly directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards.” “Highly likely” Iran, but “almost certainly” the Guards. This nonsense has all the coordination of the event itself, and if that event were the worst that Iran in general or the Corps in particular could throw at us, then we would have more to worry about if we were ever invited to stay the night at the birthplace of the Oxford Movement.

The Fairford arrestees have all been bailed, meaning that they could not possibly be suspected terrorists, but Marco Rubio has stepped in to order Britain back into line, and since Burnham had no power to influence decisions such as the granting or otherwise of bail, then he has had to demean himself, his office, the House and the nation. Such abasement before the man whose vulgar pursuit of Donald Trump’s base with a view to the 2028 Presidential Election had caused him to sanction the International Criminal Court in retaliation for the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, not to Trump, but to Navi Pillay.

Now, don’t get me wrong. You wanted the ICC. We didn’t. We said that it would only ever be used against black Africans and against whoever was the wrong sort of Slav that week. Until 24 November 2024, we were pretty much right. While talk of being “democratically elected” is of no relevance, the point is well made that all sorts of monsters had never attracted the ICC’s attention. We told you that they would not. But the best that can be said of Rubio’s nomination chasing is that at least it does not involve a livestreamed execution.

What do our own MAGA wannabes have to say about that? What do they have to say about anything anymore? Obviously, don’t mention Northern Ireland or the Falkland Islands, with the second taboo also operative in relation to the fangirling of Benjamin Netanyahu and of Liz Truss’s beloved Javier Milei. With its downright daft proposal to end the asylum system altogether, Reform UK is demob happy as it waits for the parliamentary report into Nigel Farage’s five million pounds, a report that is due any day now. The Conservatives have already turned away some of their own former MPs who had tried to re-rat. And over at Restore Britain, the Leader of the Great Yarmouth First Group has not only left both parties, but also quit his day job as Rupert Lowe’s constituency office manager. Jon Wedon has used the old line about the impact of politics on his family life, but he will continue to sit as an Independent councillor, so that story is as “highly likely” as any that might be told from the despatch box.

Le Petit Noyau

Hardly anyone has ever known that as Home Secretary, Michael Howard arranged Royal Pardons for the major league Liverpool gangsters John Haase and Paul Bennett, who were associates of his drug-dealing cousin, Simon Bakerman. Hasse and Bennett had been sentenced to 18 years, Haase having been the biggest heroin dealer in Britain. Thanks to 40 per cent of all Royal Pardons granted in 1996, they served all of 11 months. Haase had ordered his men on the outside to plant heroin and guns before telling the Police where to look for them. That was it. That was enough to secure the freedom of two friends of the family of the man who, nine years later, was presented to the electorate as a potential Prime Minister, and who did in fact gain his party 33 seats while the Government lost 48. Yet apart from Nick Cohen, to this day our courageous Fourth Estate has never said a word.

And so to Lola Salem, whose case has in recent hours made the BBC, LBC (which has taken it down, but it is archived here), and the Oxford Mail, from which we already knew that she and Michael Gove had been cohabiting. Yet none of today's three reports mentions Gove. It is just a standard "dodgy don" story. Except, of course, that it is so much more than that. This afternoon, Salem posted on her Substack her article from Gove's Spectator on Friday, 10 days after her hearing, professing that it had "mysteriously vanished". Such is the Americanisation of the London media that they have been calling her a Professor, which she is nowhere near, but she is an immigrant facing charges related to the sexual abuse of children. Where are the blackshirted marchers, even if, required to uncover their faces, they had taken to painting them black in lieu of balaclavas? Yes, really. Who is picketing 22 Old Queen Street, from which Peter Mandelson has been commissioned twice this year? Uniquely, Unity News Network has submitted a Freedom of Information request as to whether Lord Gove had secured a parliamentary pass for Salem, and whether she still held it. Who is going to chase that up in Parliament?

Right About The Danger

Paul Knaggs writes:

Stephen Doughty was given four chances to say what Russia actually did. He was sitting on the Good Morning Britain sofa on Monday, a Foreign Office minister sent out to defend his Prime Minister’s claim that the 2016 referendum was tainted by Moscow. Susanna Reid put the question plainly: what did Russia do in 2016 that interfered with the vote, and did it influence the outcome? Doughty talked about disinformation. He cited a figure of £1.5 billion in Russian interference spending this year, a number he did not source. He said he would not share specifics. Reid told him he was ‘muddying the waters‘ rather than clarifying them. Ed Balls, a former Labour cabinet minister and no enemy of this government, told him flatly that it was embarrassing. The presenters gave up and ended the interview. That is the entire evidential basis, so far, for the most serious allegation any British Prime Minister has made about a British vote.

The Truth Behind Burnham’s Russian Interference Brexit Claims 

The claim came a day earlier, in an interview with The Rest Is Politics, the podcast presented by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart. Andy Burnham said that when he entered Downing Street in the summer he asked whether Russia had interfered in the 2016 vote, and received the clear answer that yes, there was. Hold that venue in mind, because we will come back to it. Note what is absent. He did not say who gave him that answer. He did not say what the answer consisted of. He did not say whether anything Russia is alleged to have done moved a single vote in a single ward. He said it mattered to get this on the record so that voters in Germany and France understood that some of this politics is instigated by Russia. The audience, apparently, was Berlin and Paris. It was not Bolton.

Three Remainers in a Room: One Remainer Said to the Other… 

The claim did not arrive in the House of Commons, where it could have been questioned. It did not arrive as a statement to Parliament, where it would have had to be stood up. It arrived on a podcast, in front of two men who were never going to ask him for the evidence. Look at who was in that room. Burnham voted Remain and has never pretended otherwise. He took Makerfield in June, a seat where around 65 per cent of those who voted in 2016 chose to leave, and he took it while Reform’s leaflets attacked him over his opposition to Brexit. The voters knew exactly what he was. They sent him anyway, which tells you something about how little else was on offer.

Across the microphone sat Alastair Campbell, who called the referendum result the worst decision Britain had made in his lifetime and announced at once that he would set about changing people’s minds. He was as good as his word. He became editor-at-large of The New European in 2017, was among the first movers behind the People’s Vote campaign, joined its top table in 2018, helped plan the October 2018 march on Parliament and the larger one the following year, and in May 2019 was expelled from the Labour Party for voting Liberal Democrat to punish his own side over Brexit. Call that many things. Do not call it neutrality.

He also did not wait for the result before concluding that the public had been got at. On 12 March 2016, three months before a single ballot was cast, Campbell published a piece accusing the Mail, the Sun, the Express and the Star of sinking to fresh depths of dishonesty and of functioning as propaganda sheets for one side. He marvelled that any of their readers was left who had not become, in his phrase, a fully fledged OUTer. He added, as these pieces always do, that those readers were not as stupid as the proprietors imagined. The compliment sits awkwardly next to the argument, which is that they had been manufactured.

Mark that date, because it is the whole story in miniature. Three months before the country voted, the explanation for a Leave victory was already written and waiting: the public had been worked on by a hostile information operation. In 2016 the operation was Fleet Street. In 2026 it is Moscow. The structure of the argument has not altered by a single beam. Only the villain has been recast, and the claim has been moved somewhere it cannot be checked. In 2016 the operation was Fleet Street. In 2026 it is Moscow. Only the villain has been recast.

But Campbell’s Brexit years are not the reason his presence in that room matters. Before any of it, he was Tony Blair’s director of communications, the man who oversaw how the intelligence case for invading Iraq was put to the British public. The Chilcot report concluded in July 2016 that the judgements about Iraq’s weapons had been presented with a certainty that was not justified. Sit with that for a moment. A Prime Minister goes on a podcast and says he asked a question of the security services and received a clear answer, the contents of which the public may not see. Nodding along is the man who handled the last unverifiable intelligence claim this country was asked to take on trust. That one was also clear. It was also certain. It was also wrong, and a great many people died because of it. That one was also clear. It was also certain. It was also wrong.

There is a second debt owed here, and it is about whose marching counts. In February 2003 the largest demonstration in British political history filled central London to stop that war, and the government Campbell served pressed on regardless. Fifteen years later, a considerably smaller crowd demanding that the referendum be run again was received as the authentic voice of the nation, and Campbell helped organise it. The name chosen for the campaign gave the whole thing away. If the second one was to be the People’s Vote, what exactly had the first one been?

Rory Stewart completes the set, and he is the most interesting of the three because he is the least shrill. From around 2011 until shortly before the referendum he was a member of the Trilateral Commission, the off-the-record network founded by David Rockefeller in 1973 to gather political and corporate elites from America, Europe and Japan, according to membership records obtained by Declassified UK. That is not a conspiracy. It is a curriculum vitae, and it is an education in a particular way of seeing the world: government as administration, borders as friction, democracy as a process that occasionally produces an output requiring careful management by people who know better. 

What that room is structurally incapable of producing is a question. Not a hostile one. Not a sceptical one. Not even the obvious one. Campbell had reached his verdict on why people would vote Leave three months before they did it. Stewart arrived at the same place by the civil servant’s road, accepting the result in principle while treating it as an administrative problem to be contained. Burnham voted Remain and has spent ten years managing that fact in public. Assemble those three and the one thing none of them is equipped to ask is whether the thing they would all like to be true actually is. That was not an interview. It was a communion. Three men. Three Remain votes. One conviction that none of them has ever quite said aloud, which is that the largest democratic exercise in this country’s history was an injury to be treated rather than an instruction to be carried out. That is the room in which the British electorate was informed it had been played by Moscow. Set this against the official record, because the gap is the story.

Labour remainers 

Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, in its July 2020 Russia Report, did not find that Russia interfered in the Brexit referendum. It found substantial evidence of interference in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, and it concluded that Russian interference in British politics is commonplace. On the EU vote itself, its finding was narrower and far more damning of ministers than of Moscow: the government had not seen or sought evidence of successful interference in British democratic processes. The government’s own response was that it had seen no evidence of successful interference in the EU referendum. The committee’s criticism was that almost nobody had looked. Nobody looked. That is a scandal, and the Tories who presided over it deserve every word of the contempt the ISC directed at them. But “nobody looked” is not the same as “we found something”, and neither is the same as “it changed the result”. Three entirely different propositions, and Burnham has quietly collapsed all three into one. 

It is worth conceding the strongest version of his case. States interfere in one another’s politics constantly, through propaganda, money, espionage and social media, and anyone who imagines Britain’s hands are clean has not been paying attention. Labour knows this better than most: in 2024 the Trump campaign filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission over British Labour Party staffers volunteering for Kamala Harris. Ed Davey was not being absurd when he said it needed saying by a Prime Minister. Democracies should defend themselves, and a covert operation, if one were ever proven, would be a graver thing than any lawful donation. But that is the point. We are being asked to accept the grave thing on trust, while the documented interference in that referendum sits in the public record, unmentioned, because it ran the other way.

US Banks and £9.3m State Leaflets: The Real Brexit Interference 

On 22 April 2016, two months before the vote, the President of the United States stood in Downing Street beside David Cameron and told the British public that if they left the European Union they would go to the back of the queue for an American trade deal. Barack Obama acknowledged he had, in his words, the temerity to weigh in, and insisted he was not there to fix any votes. It led the bulletins and the front pages for days. Nobody has ever called it interference. It was called the special relationship. 

Then there was the money. On an analysis of Electoral Commission filings by the Sunlight Foundation, American financial firms put roughly £1.76 million into Britain Stronger in Europe. Goldman Sachs gave £500,000. JP Morgan gave £500,000. Citigroup and Morgan Stanley gave £250,000 each. Bloomberg gave another £250,000. PricewaterhouseCoopers added £7,508.50, which has the ring of an invoice rather than a donation. These were not disinterested friends of British democracy. These were institutions with a direct, enormous and openly stated commercial stake in the City of London keeping its access to the European market. They were defending passporting rights, and they were entitled to say so. But let nobody pretend that Wall Street banks bankrolling one side of a British constitutional referendum is a smaller thing than a troll farm in St Petersburg. It is a larger thing, done in daylight, with receipts.

And then there was the state itself. In April 2016 the government spent £9.3 million of public money on a pro-Remain leaflet delivered to 27 million households, with an accompanying website and social media campaign. The designated lead campaign on each side was capped at £7 million. The government, in other words, outspent the legal limit for either campaign, on top of that campaign, with money taken from the very people it was lobbying. The cabinet secretary signed it off. Downing Street cited Harold Wilson’s 1975 leaflet as precedent, which rather proves the point about how old this habit is. So look at the shape of the thing. The most powerful man in the world flew in to warn against Leave. The biggest banks on earth funded Remain. The British state spent £9.3 million of public money campaigning against the choice its own electorate was about to make. Every one of those interventions was overt, documented and aimed at the same outcome. 

And they lost anyway. Ten years on, the proposition from Downing Street is that the side with the president, the banks and the government leaflet was the side that got cheated. Anyway. I was under the impression that Brexit was the work of thick northerners and the grey-haired vote. And Cambridge Analytica. It is becoming difficult to keep up with the official explanation, which seems to be revised whenever the previous one stops working. 

Burnham’s Mandate: No Members’ Vote, No Public Approval 

Tony Benn left the Commons in 2001 with five questions he thought every powerful person should face. What power have you got, where did you get it, in whose interests do you use it, to whom are you accountable, and the last and only one that finally matters: how do we get rid of you? Apply them to the man now in Downing Street. 

Andy Burnham returned to Parliament on 18 June this year, winning the Makerfield by-election by more than nine thousand votes, in a seat vacated on 14 May by Josh Simons, who resigned so that Burnham could stand. Keir Starmer announced his resignation four days later. Burnham was declared Labour leader on 17 July at a special conference, unopposed, nominated by 379 Labour MPs, over 94 per cent of the parliamentary party. There was no members’ ballot. There was no vote share, because there was no vote. On 20 July the King asked him to form a government, making him Britain’s seventh Prime Minister in a decade. 

Not one member of the public has been asked to approve any of it. The next general election is not due until 2029. On the current trajectory, Britain faces the best part of three years of parliamentary trench warfare over a question already answered by 33.5 million people at a turnout of 72 per cent, the largest democratic exercise in this country’s history. In whose interests, then? To whom accountable? And how, exactly, do we get rid of you?

From Makerfield to No 10: Burnham’s Brexit Shift

You will read that Burnham’s old Remainer instincts are resurfacing. The record shows something less flattering than a relapse. There was never a position to relapse from. Ahead of Labour conference in 2017, Burnham gave an interview to HuffPost UK warning that the party would lose northern voters if it refused to confront free movement. It was reported at the time as the mayor of Greater Manchester speaking up for Leave towns. Read what he actually said. “I voted remain.” On single market membership: “I’m not saying I’m against” it. On free movement, that a reform was needed which addressed people’s concerns. 

That is not a case for leaving. It is a case for being seen to understand people who voted to leave. He had voted Remain. He would take single market membership if it were going. His objection to the Norway model was not that it was wrong but that it would be divisive, and his argument for respecting the result was that the alternative would look like the establishment denying it. The anger he described was always somebody else’s.

He was right about the danger, mind. His stated fear was a “London-centric Brexit” in which the City was defended at the negotiating table while manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and the car industry were quietly traded away. That was a sharp insight, and a left one, and almost nobody in his party was making it. The anger he described was always somebody else’s. Which makes what followed harder to forgive. He is now Prime Minister. Every lever he warned about is in his hands. He could spend the next three years making certain the settlement serves Bolton rather than the City, which is precisely the job he identified in 2017 and precisely the job nobody has done since.

Instead, campaigning in Makerfield in May, he told ITV he would not fight on rejoining and that the case existed only in the long term; by September he was no longer ruling out a rejoin pledge in Labour’s next manifesto; and among his first acts in Downing Street was a call to Ursula von der Leyen promising a closer and more ambitious relationship with the European Union. The through-line is not a conviction abandoned. It is that there was no conviction to abandon. In 2017 the north was angry, so he counselled Labour to listen to it. In 2026 the parliamentary party, the commentariat and Brussels want the question reopened, so he is reopening it. On both occasions he read the room and positioned himself at the front of it. That is worse than a Remainer in a Lexit coat. A man with a position can be argued with. He sits, let us remember, for Makerfield, inside the borough of Wigan, where 104,331 people voted Leave against 58,942 for Remain. Very nearly 64 per cent.

Rejoining the EU Is Not an Economic Quick Fix 

If the case for reopening this were economic, it would at least be arguable. It is not. The OECD’s September forecast puts UK growth at 1.1 per cent for 2026; the IMF puts it at 1.0 per cent. The IMF’s figure for the euro area is 0.9 per cent. The OECD has France at 0.4 per cent. In the second quarter of this year the UK grew 0.5 per cent against the euro area’s 0.4, Germany’s 0.3 and France’s flat zero. Nobody should mistake this for success. Britain is not thriving. It is limping, and limping slightly faster than a bloc that is also limping. That is precisely the point. Rejoining is not an economic rescue, because no rescue is on offer. The direction of travel is ideological, not economic, and those pushing it should have the honesty to say so.

What Did The EU Do For Blaenau Gwent 

Here is the fact that ought to end the argument. West Wales and the Valleys was classified by Brussels as a “less developed” region because its GDP per head sat below 75 per cent of the EU average. It received the highest level of EU structural funding available to any region in every funding round from 2000 onwards. In the 2014 to 2020 round alone, Wales was allocated nearly £2.7 billion, almost four times the UK average per person. It qualified for the top tier every time because, every time, it was still poor enough to qualify.

Read that again. Three consecutive programmes, two decades, billions of euros, and the region never climbed out of the bracket. The money arrived. The poverty stayed. Then, in June 2016, Blaenau Gwent voted 62 per cent to leave, the highest Leave vote in Wales. The metropolitan explanation has always been false consciousness, or the tabloids, or now, apparently, the Kremlin. The simpler explanation is that people who had watched the cheques arrive and the high street empty anyway drew the obvious conclusion. They were not duped. They were unimpressed.

The national picture confirms them. The Resolution Foundation reported in July that Britain’s regional income gaps have barely moved between 1997 and 2023. Kensington and Chelsea has roughly four and a half times the disposable income per head of Leicester, a ratio that has held for nearly three decades. More than half of the poorest fifth of local authorities in 1997 were still in the poorest fifth in 2023. Ruth Curtice, the foundation’s chief executive, says Britain has among the highest regional inequality of any advanced economy.

That span, 1997 to 2023, covers almost exactly the years of Britain’s full and enthusiastic EU membership, structural funds and all. The gap did not close. Membership was not what was holding these towns back, and it was never going to be what saved them. What would have saved them is not a mystery. The same report notes that German reunification cost roughly £70 billion a year for twenty-five years. British levelling-up spending in 2022 was £4 billion. Four billion. That is the measure of how seriously Westminster has ever taken this, under any flag, and it is the number Burnham should be ashamed of, not the referendum result.

PUT IT TO THE COUNTRY OR LET IT GO

Andy Burnham built something real in Greater Manchester. He took the buses back into public control when almost nobody in his party had the nerve to try, and he was right, and it worked. That is the argument he should be having nationally: rail, water, energy, housing, the slow unglamorous reconstruction of public capacity in the places that were stripped of it. Instead, a man who can tell you when the next bus leaves Leigh cannot tell you what Russia did. 

If he truly believes rejoining is the answer to Britain’s condition, there is an honourable route. Write it into a manifesto. Stand on it. Ask the 17.4 million. Win or lose the argument in front of the people who have to live with the result, rather than announcing it on a podcast to reassure Berlin. What he may not do is use a security claim he will not evidence to corrode the legitimacy of a vote he lost, while occupying an office no voter has ever awarded him. That is not defending democracy from foreign interference. That is interfering with it from the inside, which is both easier and worse. 

They were not outspent by Moscow. They were lectured by a US president, outspent by Wall Street and out-campaigned by their own government using public money, and they voted Leave anyway. That is not the profile of a manipulated electorate. That is the profile of one that could not be bought. Publish the evidence or withdraw the charge. Call the election or drop the project. But stop telling the poorest regions of this country that the reason they are poor is that somebody in St Petersburg lied to them. Nobody in Blaenau Gwent needed a Russian troll to tell them they had been left behind. They could see it from the bus stop.