BNP canvassers in Burnley, 2012

A week ago, a report on a maternity care scandal in the Nottingham area was published. The Ockenden Maternity Review had been set up in May 2022 “following significant concerns raised regarding the quality and safety of maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) and concerns of local families”; this review replaced a prior regionally-led review as a result of families’ concerns. The week before, Rupert Lowe, founder and currently sole MP of the Restore Britain party, published his report from what he called his “Rape Gang Inquiry” (PDF), his crowd-funded inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal. Excerpts from that review have been published verbatim or uncritically summarised in posts on social media and Substack, often accompanied with complaints about how it was ‘ignored’ by the mainstream media; Ockenden’s review was, by contrast, front-page news, as was Baroness Amos’s review into maternity services nationwide, along with a high-profile resignation from its board. (The charity Rape Crisis has given its response here.)

I mention the two together because the Ockenden review represents how long an inquiry into a major regional scandal can take when done properly; the RGI report shows how quickly you can do it if you have reached your conclusion before you start. So many injustices have taken years to put right — Bloody Sunday, Hillsborough and the Grenfell Tower disaster spring to mind. Lowe’s report consists of a summary, a long section consisting of survivor testimony from the inquiry (usually with first names as pseudonyms, though some are identifiable having spoken publicly) and four profiles of ‘whistleblowers’. These include a former UKIP councillor, Caven Vines, who was successfully sued for libel by two Rotherham Labour MPs, John Healey and Kevin Barron, for claiming they knew about grooming gang abuse but did nothing (Lowe omits to mention the UKIP link). He also includes three long paragraphs on “Tommy Robinson”, without giving his real name (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), portraying him as a man persecuted by the police for “exposing grooming gangs” and for “speaking publicly” after forming the English Defence League, rather than rightly prosecuted for assaults, mortgage fraud, use of a false passport, stalking and harassment, and interfering in a grooming gang case in a way that could prejudice it (everyone in the media here knows that is against the law).

Lowe presents claims from politicians as fact. There is a page and a half about the situation in London, where to date there has been no prosecution of anyone for grooming gang activity but which he alleges “stands exposed as the epicentre of institutional denial in the grooming gang scandal” and where “the scale of abuse … was more catastrophic than anywhere else in the country”, an extraordinary claim. It is entirely possible that London is not free of grooming gangs, but to claim it is worse than anywhere else and has been somehow covered up really needs proof, not mere claims from a Tory councillor in Harrow and an ex-cop on a video posted by the Daily Express’s YouTube channel. London is the centre of the national media and if there was evidence of a lot of such abuse going on, it could easily have been reported on. Lowe alleges that the Metropolitan Police “announced a review of 9,000 child sexual exploitation cases”, inviting the reader to assume (wrongly) that CSE and grooming gang activity are synonymous. In a chapter outlining the “Islamic” influence on the gangs, he quotes liberally from a pseudonymous misery memoir by one Hannah Shah. Other unreliable sources include a Triggernometry podcast episode and various politically biased think-tank reports (Policy Exchange and Quilliam for example).

His chapter on the “Islamic influence” contains a long list of supposed issues with Islam (often flimsily-understood concepts) that are actually irrelevant to this situation, not only because they are simply inapplicable to the situation (for example, the discourse on slavery and the Barbary pirates, who were from North Africa, which is nowhere near Pakistan, and the victims were not slaves) but because the major players in the gangs were not particularly religious and just used distorted, selective readings of Islam to justify their behaviour. Every aspect of their behaviour and the modus operandi of the grooming gangs goes against many aspects of Islamic law: most obviously, the prohibition of consuming or supplying alcohol or other narcotics, sex outside marriage, pimping, rape, deception (such as forming relationships with vulnerable girls to lure them into the clutches of the gangs), coming between girls and their parents, using violence and threats to keep victims in their grip and prevent them living their own lives, among many other things. None of this is jihad; it’s just criminality. Lowe cites a Dr Hill  As for Al-Wala’ w’al-Bara’ (loyalty and disavowal), it’s quite likely that most of these men had never heard the term but as said the late mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdul-Aziz bin Baz, who took a hardline view of the concept, “Hating them and regarding them as enemies does not mean that you should mistreat them or transgress against them if they are not in a state of war with the Muslims”. Dr Hatem al-Haj gives a more nuanced view on the subject here.

Rupert Lowe makes no attempt at analysis beyond issues such as political correctness and fear of being perceived as racist. The various blogs and social media posts which parrot extracts from this report also relay this ‘analysis’ uncritically. To clarify, this was a reason some of the time but was not the reason all the time. As Maggie Oliver and others have mentioned, other reasons include laziness, political interference and classism and sexism within police forces and social work departments: the young victims were seen as difficult, uncooperative, “child prostitutes”, the authors of their own misfortune, among other things. Rape myths are common in society and police across the UK and overseas have been known to look for ways to dispose of rape complaints unless they meet common “classic rape” stereotypes; this was seen in the investigation into the “Black Cab rapist”, John Worboys, and at least one of his victims was posh (now married to Boris Johnson, no less), so when they are girls from troubled families or council estates, the response can be expected to be at least as bad. West Yorkshire detectives stubbornly refused to believe that the Yorkshire Ripper was a Yorkshireman, having heard a north-easterner boast of the crimes on tape, despite several of his victims telling them so. There is nothing for the police in his set of ‘recommendations’; no challenge to police sexism or misogyny (or classism). Cases of serving police officers abusing their partners and spouses and others backing them up, or committing sexual crimes and getting away with it for some time are legion. I guess a MacPherson report for women would be too woke; wouldn’t want to hurt the police’s precious morale, would we?

There was a time when the existence of grooming gangs were widely doubted, that they were believed to be a figment of propaganda. We now know the gangs themselves were real, but this report absolutely is propaganda. It takes survivors’ stories and presents a pre-made analysis and recommendations that are standard right-wing talking points. This report is not a substitute for a proper public inquiry; that will have to take into account factors this report does not touch because its purpose will be to prevent further such abuses and to protect children both at home and in care, not to be racist enough to satisfy podcasters and the Reform/Restore media or to justify the policies of one political party.

The other day I heard the former British prime minister Tony Blair being interviewed on Radio 4, twenty minutes after the more recent former PM Rishi Sunak being interviewed on the same channel. Blair was promoting a long essay he had written about what he sees as the directionless state of the Labour government and the essay and interview has been described as a repudiation of everything he stood for when he was PM. Both, however, eagerly promoted something they called the “AI revolution”, and when the interviewer put it to Blair that he was advancing the interests of the tech giants that fund his think-tanks and his pal Larry Ellison (of Oracle), he said that he promoted it because it was great technology. I remarked on my socials after hearing it that Blair had not learned from the principal mistake of his time in office, of putting the needs of business over everything else including the needs of ordinary people (a major example being opening the doors in 2004 to east European workers, an action not taken by the rest of the EU as had been the case previously when countries with weaker economies joined, a disastrous mistake which ultimately cost us our EU membership), which goes some way to explaining why Boris Johnson could get away with saying “f*** business”, a remark which would have sunk any mainstream politician under previous Tory governments. 

In his essay, he posits that “the technology revolution led by developments in artificial intelligence … will change everything”, that “governing in the age of AI will be the principal challenge”:

There is no point in debating whether this technological revolution is a good or bad thing. Just know it is a ‘thing’. In fact, it is ‘the thing’. It will displace jobs, though creating new ones, but no one yet knows the full consequence. Companies and countries will rise or fall on the back of it. It will revolutionise the private sector and should in time revolutionise public services and government. Yet people in most countries, including Britain, have no idea what is about to hit them.

What is a revolution? Usually the term means an upheaval that leads to major, and at least partly positive, social and political change. In practice, ‘revolutions’ are often the result of military coups, palace coups or civil wars and sometimes bring about regimes as tyrannical as those they replaced (e.g. Russia). The recent rise of a particular type of AI may seem revolutionary to those able to generate content easily that previously would have taken imagination and skill, but to many of us it feels more like a reactionary coup in the public space and takes power out of the hands of ordinary people and puts it in the hands of tech giants. Its ability to impersonate a human being, on the face of it more convincingly than anything previously available, is a gift to fraudsters and other species of criminals and scoundrels; it frees companies and other large bodies, including government departments and local councils, from having to engage with their clients on a human-to-human level. To give an example, when trying to complain about the poor signal on my mobile phone in my local town centre, I first took to Twitter, on which there was previously an account run by actual people; now the responses are by a chatbot, which told me to call 150, the network’s customer service number. That offered me no way of talking to a human being about the problem, only a computerised menu, which ultimately told me to use the provider’s mobile app, which told me there was no problem with the signal at my home address, which is true. That was not my complaint; my complaint was about the centre of the nearest town, which has had poor signal for years.

AI has been described by Cory Doctorow (of Enshittification fame) as “the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok”, something that will in the future be ripped out of systems as the mineral was from buildings. The social sphere, both the platforms that have corralled social interaction online and the video sharing spaces, have been filled with junk text that is full of inaccuracy, junk videos and poorly-enhanced pictures, often portraying a post that was never real. Schools and colleges fight to make sure nobody gets qualifications on the basis of auto-generated and plagiarised essays while students find that they are penalised because their work is misidentified as AI because of some stylistic detail such as the “em-dash” (rather than the obvious inaccuracies that are normally the red flag for AI-generated text; people assume that computers do not make mistakes, the same assumption — baked into law — that led to the Post Office accounting scandal). Job applicants are now being screened by AI before a human being even reads their application, often complaining of getting no response at all. AI requires large data centres, which require water for cooling, which comes out of the public water supply, often at the expense of locals’ domestic water. It has disrupted the chip industry, resulting in one major supplier of consumer memory withdrawing from that market as it is more profitable to supply the AI industry.

Some will say that the poor output of AI in 2026 is because it is new, and that refinements will result in better output in the future. A mineral does not change — asbestos is still asbestos — but technology does. Maybe this will mean better customer service, but maybe it will also mean fakes so convincing that we cannot trust a picture or video anymore, if we can even now. But to bring it back to Tony Blair, it is noticeable that his essay makes no reference to regulating the use of AI such that it does not become a blight on the public sphere, online or off, or an obstacle to or substitute for public or customer service; rather, he talks of “governing in the age of AI” as if the changes wrought by it were inevitable, demanding that the planning system be sacrificed to it and North Sea oil and gas resources be thrown at it. We must make it compulsory for large companies to employ customer service staff who live here and can communicate with British customers fluently, and the same goes for central and local government bodies, and not allow companies to sack people en masse in favour of letting AI do their job cheaply, but invariably worse and less satisfyingly and more frustratingly for the customer or the citizen. We must not cave into demands for data centres which will put a drain on public resources, especially the water supply. In a democracy, AI must remain “on tap, not on top” (if tolerated at all) and its demands never allowed to trump people’s needs. British politicians have a poor record of striking such balances; they now have the challenge of finding ways to employ AI in ways that are beneficial to society rather than to those who merely seek power or profit and care nothing about its environmental dangers, resource hunger or the technology’s own enormous potential for harm.

Nymans, a NT garden in Sussex; May 2022

I’ve been a member of the National Trust, a British conservation charity which maintains a large number of estates including parks, stately homes, gardens and landscapes, since 2019. I’ve spent many an afternoon wandering around some of their homes and gardens in the south-east of England, taking pictures to share on my Flickr account. Last week Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie, accused the Trust of a “catastrophic dumbing-down” by hosting a Pokemon treasure hunt at 15 of their estates including Dyrham Park in Somerset, Sizergh in Cumbria, Hughenden in Buckinghamshire and Winkworth Arboretum in Surrey (archived copy here). He also claims that the Trust seems embarrassed about some of its country houses, treating them as “repositories of dull history, which happen to have absolutely fab running-around areas for the kids to have fun in” while their magazine, if it features their country houses at all, presents it as “a backdrop to some carefully curated, supposed ‘adventure'”. Their director of communications and fundraising, Celia Richardson, responded on Twitter: “Our Pokemon partnership isn’t unique. From the Van Gogh Museum to the Natural History Museum, & city‑wide experiences that lead visitors around landmarks like the Louvre, it’s a global pattern of cultural organisations experimenting with how people encounter heritage”.

Since Covid most of my visits to NT properties have been to the gardens and parks rather than into the houses; my first trip was to Petworth House in Sussex, which had a formidable collection of bits of Roman statuary, collected on “grand tours” of Europe when that was the done thing among the British upper class, wherever possible assembled into whole statues (photos here). Families visit their houses and gardens often, and there are often nature trails and other amusements for children, often with colourful signs and objects that don’t exactly blend into the scenery. Still, as an adult visitor, you can ignore these things and just wander round the park and enjoy the scenery and the trees and flowers and, of course, take lots of pictures. Winkworth is a place I visit often as it’s an easy drive from where I live; I rather hope that the Pokemon event is no more obtrusive than any of their other children’s amusements (the centrepiece will no doubt be in the new visitor centre that’s due open any day now). Running a large park and maintaining a garden does of course cost money and it’s worth noting that the NT maintains a lot of properties that do not charge for access, such as Morden Hall Park in south London. It would be nice for some adult visitors if places like Sheffield Park did not have amusements that stood out from the scenery like sore thumbs, but they have to attract all sorts, including families with children.

As for the NT’s magazine and the contrast with how private estates present their houses and gardens, the NT does not just run country houses but all sorts of other attractions, including landscapes which are not part of stately homes or formal gardens and where no admission charge applies. Some of their large parks and woodlands could be best marketed to families with children as good places for an adventure (Hatchlands and Winkworth Arboretum spring to mind). Some of the houses are not just showpiece country houses but house art collections and museums; the basement of Polesden Lacey in Surrey features a lot of wartime (as in WW2) technology and thus serves as a kind of museum of that time and of the “below stairs” life that many working-class young people went into then. The NT magazine is not just about old houses but about all the activities they undertake, such as (in the most recent edition) preserving a chalk figure, making their gardens resilient to climate change and some recent digs at the Saxon burial site Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk. There are also features on craft and food as well as promotional features for their  attractions, including a production of Othello by The Lord Chamberlain’s Men at venues owned by the NT, including (round here) Hatchlands and Morden Hall Park, which might be more up Harry Mount’s street.

They do, however, maintain a few mediocre houses here and there which aren’t cultural treasure troves, just rich men’s houses. Harry Mount mentions Clandon Park in Surrey, an 18th-century Palladian mansion that belonged to a local wealthy family, the Onslows, and was gutted by fire in 2015. I did not get to see this building before it burned down, but it was not my idea of a greatly beautiful building, basically a big red-brick box with turrets. Mount alleges that “rather than rebuilding it with their insurance payout, the brain-numbingly foolish Trust are preserving it as a ruin for ever”; if the building were restored to how it was before the accidental fire, it would not be the house the family that owned it lived in but a replica. That is why the NT chose to use the ruin as an exhibition and event space instead. They already have a proper stately home with a vastly superior garden a few miles down the road at Polesden Lacey.

That said, Sheffield Park, Cliveden, Mottisfont, Scotney Castle and no doubt many other NT attractions are worth the annual membership fees by themselves: well-maintained and curated outdoor and indoor attractions. I definitely don’t get the impression that they are run by morons or cretins; if they were, they would be overgrown and ramshackle by now. I will, I hope, be making good use of my membership fee at a couple of their parks or gardens this bank holiday weekend and if you have one near you, I recommend you make a visit. You won’t meet the executive committee, just the volunteers.

Last week Simon Heffer wrote a piece for the Spectator, a British Tory-associated news and opinion magazine, alleging that the politician Enoch Powell, an MP from 1950 to 1987 (with a break in 1974, at which he switched from the Tories to the Ulster Unionists and took a seat in Northern Ireland) who is best known for an inflammatory, racist speech against the admission of family members of Asian immigrant workers in the late 1960s although he had been responsible for some progressive policies and speeches including one in 1961 advocating reform of Britain’s mental health services which set in train the move away from asylums. Heffer claims that Powell came to be associated with “one utterance” and that “long after his death he found himself, in contemporary parlance, cancelled”, noting that his own biography of Powell was withdrawn from publication after the death of George Floyd in the US. He then compares the rejection of Powell with the erasure from history of people deemed to be “Unpersons” in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Having read the book, I can say that the comparison is ludicrous.

In 1984, an Unperson was someone who had been killed by the regime and whose name and deeds were erased from the records. The central character, Winston Smith, worked in the records department, rewriting history by simply making up stories to overwrite the real stories of people he had been informed were ‘Unpersons’. This could be because of a trivial faux pas — some expression of dissent that could have been said in his sleep, as happened to one of Smith’s colleagues. It was the Stalinist practice of airbrushing out of official pictures politicians who had fallen victim to Stalin’s purges taken to its logical conclusion. The comparison of Powell with this treatment is consistent with the way right-wingers claim to have been ‘cancelled’ despite enjoying columns in national newspapers and even seats in parliament. Enoch Powell remained a Tory MP for six years after this incident, and then secured a seat with the Ulster Unionists in Northern Ireland, and remained in parliament until being defeated by the nationalist SDLP in 1987, declining a life peerage because he had opposed their introduction in 1958.

It’s true that Powell’s career was more than the 1968 Rivers of Blood speech (reproduced as a PDF here), and he supported some liberal positions and others commonly associated with the Left (such as unilateral nuclear disarmament) and criticised MPs who justified abuses of Kenyans during the so-called Mau-Mau uprising and called them subhuman, but that speech was heinous. He repeated claims from an anonymous letter about a woman in Wolverhampton, in a street that had declined from the moment the first Black person (or ‘Negro’ as he called them) moved in (a common racist trope), who had impoverished herself by refusing to rent rooms to immigrants and was told by the council “racial prejudice won’t get you anywhere”. When she went out, she was followed by the immigrants’ children, who taunted her with the only word of English the anonymous writer claimed they knew: “racialist”. He quoted a comment from a constituent who told him that he was making sure his children would resettle overseas because immigration made the UK not worth living in; “in this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”. The speech was blamed for a rise in violent attacks on Black and Asian people, but decades later the phrase “Enoch was right” was heard when a Black or Asian person appeared anywhere that was not one of “their areas”. When the Radio 4 soap opera The Archers began to feature an Asian family, I heard a letter being read out on the same station’s Feedback programme, expressing scepticism that an Asian family would actually be so warmly received; when Asian families dared enter village pubs, the writer said, it was common for them to hear “Enoch was right”. Even in the 2000s, Muslim women commented on this blog that they did not feel safe walking in the English countryside.

It’s not uncommon for a politician to be remembered for one ugly speech or one bad policy if its effects on people were particularly bad. Tony Blair introduced many progressive pieces of legislation, especially in his first term in office, such as the Freedom of Information Act, the Human Rights Act and various anti-discrimination bills, but he is generally reviled in many quarters for getting us involved in the Iraq war. He still makes a good living from his think-tank and his services to politicians, including many dictators, the world over. He is in no sense ‘cancelled’ nor an ‘Unperson’ and neither was Powell. His Water Tower speech, for example, is often mentioned in articles about British mental health care and has been played in documentaries about it. But anyone who’s ever walked into a shop or pub and heard people say “Enoch was right” will remember him for one thing and that’s only to be expected.

Image source: Bill Peloquin, via Wikimedia. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) 4.0 licence.

Last week local elections were held in the UK, mainly for district and unitary authority councils in England but also for the Welsh and Scottish parliaments. For the second time, Reform UK gained majorities on a number of county councils as well as several large metropolitan boroughs in Yorkshire and the West Midlands. Last year, they gained majorities on a number of county and large unitary authorities in the Midlands: Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and both halves of Northamptonshire as well as Kent, Lancashire and the metropolitan borough of Doncaster in South Yorkshire. This time they gained Suffolk and Essex counties (both formerly Tory), two met boroughs in the West Midlands and, crucially for Labour, three more met boroughs in South and West Yorkshire: Kirklees (Huddersfield), Calderdale (Halifax) and Wakefield. The map on the right shows the county and metropolitan boroughs according to current dominant party, and the turquoise areas show Reform UK held councils. Labour have been scoring poorly in opinion polls ever since 2024, when they won with a lot of help from a right-wing vote divided between the Tories and the rapidly growing Reform UK, formerly the Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage who was formerly the leader of UKIP. As a result, there have been a lot of calls for the prime minister and Labour leader, Keir Starmer, to resign. Starmer’s supporters are variously calling it idiocy or madness, comparing it to “changing pilots in mid flight”, and pointing to everything Starmer’s government has done for us.

It’s true that on previous occasions when a governing party has suffered local election losses, they have neither changed leaders nor called a general election: John Major in 1995 and Tony Blair in the first term of his government have been mentioned. However, both of these had won majorities on the basis of more than 40% of the vote; Starmer won 2024 on the basis of less than 34%, a smaller share than Blair won in his last election, in 2005, or Jeremy Corbyn’s share in 2017. (John Major’s government, which was losing safe seat after safe seat in parliamentary by-elections, went down to defeat two years after those council elections.) Starmer won seats that Labour had never won before, including in their 1997 landslide; as with some of those seats, these are unlikely to be won again and the winning candidate won less than 30% of the popular vote and benefited from a split Tory vote. For much of the time since, Labour has been polling around 20%. While opinion polls have their flaws, it’s unheard of for a governing party to show this poorly, or anything like it, consistently over months or more than a year. Mid-term blues are a thing, but they are never this bad for a newly elected government which should be riding high. Council elections are not referendums or votes of confidence on the government, but voters often treat them as such.

As the resignations mounted earlier today, someone on BlueSky mentioned by way of a historical parallel a challenge to Gordon Brown’s leadership in June 2009, supported by three ministers (James Purnell, Hazel Blears and Jacqui Smith). In fact, the two women had resigned for reasons connected with their expenses. None of the three, they point out, are still in Parliament: one is in the Lords, one has retired and one is now a CEO of a company. Yet Gordon Brown lost the election the following year, so it does not really strengthen their case for Starmer remaining leader.

These results, in other words, are dire. Labour’s leaders should be painfully aware of the ephemeral nature of the 2024 result and some of the particular constituency results, that Labour won by the skin of its teeth, but it seems they are not. They should be worried about the flipping of former safe Tory county councils to Reform, because it points to the end of the split Tory vote that Starmer benefited from; they should worry about the fact that people are undeterred by the Council Tax rises and other broken promises, poor attendance, recurrent resignations and defections at Reform councils since last year; can we really assume that the immediate resignations this year, or the revelation that one of their winning candidates was a made-up name and an AI-generated picture, will put people off in future? I see his supporters flattering him on social media, appearing blind to his faults as Corbyn’s fans back in the 2010s were to his. They also keep sharing lists of Labour’s achievements since returning to power. These are mostly good things, but in politics “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”. People should not need to have the benefits of a Labour government explained to them; they should be able to feel it, otherwise it will be like the benefits of the EU: we will miss them when they are gone and it is too late. So, stop praising Starmer’s “steady hand” and “boring” or “unflashy” policies. This is not the time for that. People have to know about what they are doing, and feel the benefits.

The country is in dire danger. A party of incompetents and racists is growing rapidly, gaining control of councils from both Labour and the Tories that were considered safe ten years ago, exploiting the failures of both of those parties. Labour have neglected its working-class base for decades, treating them by turns as an embarrassment and as having nowhere else to go. It treats other people’s lives as just bargaining chips, things to calculate over, though these are millions of people and millions of votes. Disabled people, immigrants and their British families, the white working class, the Asian working class. They have just alienated too many major groups for their current strategies to stand a chance of winning another election. I once read a description of the last native prince of Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (Griffith), that he “simply fumbled his way to disaster” and this, as Jess Phillips’s letter shows, describes aspects of Starmer’s leadership. I am not convinced a new leader will change much; whoever wins will probably be much like Starmer in terms of policy, maintaining the attacks on disabled people’s welfare supports and harsh, unfair changes to immigration law, the attachment to Israel while it wages war on its neighbours and continues the genocide of Palestinian natives, but they might just be able to connect with people in a way Starmer cannot (experience in the US shows the danger of that); what the party needs is not just new leadership but new ideas, fast, to prevent a defeat in 2029 that will make 1983 and 2019 look mild (not least because the winning party was nowhere near as extreme) and allow the wretched Farage to drag this country into the abyss.

Image source: Open Council Data.

The arrest of the suspect in the Golders Green and Great Dover Street stabbings.

Last week three men were stabbed in London by the same individual, a man born in Somalia though now a British citizen who had previously been imprisoned for stabbing a police officer and his dog and had recently been released from a south London psychiatric unit. The first man stabbed was attacked at Great Dover Street on the south-eastern edge of central London and was also of Somali origin. The other two were Jewish men, attacked at Golders Green, an area of north London which is actually mixed but is also a centre of the Jewish community. After this, he was arrested by a group of officers who used a Taser and kicked him repeatedly in the head. The second two stabbings were proclaimed a terrorist incident by the Metropolitan Police; the terrorism threat level was raised from substantial to severe, the second highest of five levels (low, moderate, substantial, severe and critical; since 2006 it has never been lower than substantial). The incident prompted a lecture from the Prime Minister and much hand-wringing in the mainstream print and broadcast media: calls to “stand with the Jewish community”, people claiming antisemitism was now a matter of national security, and that the marches against the Gaza genocide which have been taking place every two or three weeks in central London since the start of the Gaza genocide should be curtailed, or that what the protesters are allowed to say be policed a lot more because it “makes Jews feel intimidated” and contributes to antisemitism. Meanwhile, Twitter (now X) saw tweets from broadcasters such as Sky News referring to the incident as a double stabbing when in fact the man had been charged with three counts of attempted murder.

Melanie Phillips posted a tweet moaning that “the really terrible thing is that the lies told about Israel day in, day out have poisoned British discourse so badly that people don’t want to hear about the Holocaust or Jewish suffering ever again”. That tweet embedded a video in which Rabbi Doron Birnbaum said he had received the news of the stabbings while accompanying a group from a London Jewish school to Poland, suggesting that one day someone might lead Jewish schoolchildren around London as he had just done in Krakow, pointing to inscriptions on walls and saying “a Jew lived here”. The real reason people are weary of protestations of Jewish victimhood is that we have had a bellyful of it since 2015: one spurious or exaggerated claim of ‘antisemitism’ after another, many of them from people with columns in national newspapers or seats in Parliament. After a two-and-a-half year genocide, amply documented by the victims and in some cases the perpetrators in both mainstream and social media, the idea that a few stabbings and arson attacks in London are the first killings of a new Holocaust or a harbinger of pogroms looks fanciful. Phillips’s tweets was shared by “La Scapigliata” (Maja Bowen), a Serbian bigot most notorious for her doctrinaire stance on transgender issues and waving her medical degree to prove that her stance must be right, who then complained about the “lies told about Serbia and Repblic Srpska (sic), day in, day out” etc. The people who inhabit Republika Srpska ran concentration camps for Bosnian Muslims in the early 90s, in some of which women and girls were gang-raped by men who had been their neighbours months earlier. They massacred the men and boys of Srebrenica after the town fell, an acknowledged act of genocide. Some of their atrocities, like the Sarajevo bread queue massacre, have been echoed (or copied) in acts by the Israelis during the genocide in Gaza. Anyone over 40 remembers this; nobody except the very old remembers anything that happened during World War II, which ended 81 years ago.

The word ‘terrorist’ is being widely misused, including officially, detached from what most people understand by it. Those of us who lived through any part of the Troubles in Northern Ireland know what terrorism looks like and what it involves: principally, bombs and bullets, used to stage mass-casualty events. The same effect can be achieved through vehicular impact and the sabotaging of equipment or computer networks (though these two activities are not always terrorism). One man with a knife, acting without instruction from anyone, cannot commit a terrorist attack. A political motive, or a presumed one, is not enough. The state, within hours of last Thursday’s stabbings, rushed to apply the label of ‘terrorism’ and raised the “terror alert level” before knowing anything about the perpetrator, including his history of mental illness and his criminal record, let alone another stabbing he carried out hours earlier, purely because the victims were Jewish, a measure not taken after attacks by white racists on members of other minorities. A racist attack is not a terrorist attack; a terrorist attack is a mass-casualty attack (or one intended as such) on members of the public. It does not cause mere disruption but loss of life or injury.

Skegness: anti-immigrant protester destroys a rainbow umbrella

Twice since the last general election, we have seen mob attacks on Muslim and immigrant communities in this country. The first was because of a triple murder wrongly believed on the basis of rumour to have been a Pakistani; the second was because of a report of a rape that turned out to be false. There have been a Muslim woman deliberately hit by a car and two Sikh women, believed to be Muslims, raped. Social media has been full of the most insane slurs on Muslims and Islam that I have seen at any time, even exceeding the worst of the pro-war mid-2000s blogosphere, much of it being boosted by accounts belonging to certain feminists or serving or former police officers. By contrast, there has been no mob attack on Jews any time since the genocide began and nobody raped; campaigners for Palestinians’ rights are careful to mention Israel and Zionists or Zionism rather than Jews in general. The only violence anyone in the campaign defends is the sabotage of military hardware being manufactured here that is known will be used on civilians. Yet, the dominant pro-Israel voices in the mainstream media refer to our peaceful protests as “hate marches” and accuse us of fomenting antisemitism or even terrorism, while using words like ‘protesters’ in reference to the mobs which roam around looking for immigrants or their homes to attack (as I write, they are fomenting another ‘protest’ in Skegness).

Nobody needs to have gone on any protest to know what Israel has been doing. We do not know if the Golders Green knifeman or any of the people who have carried out the small numbers of attacks on Jews this year — their total number is considerably fewer than those who descended on Epsom to avenge a rape that never happened — attended a single protest. They just have to have seen any of the vast number of videos that come out of the West Bank, Gaza and now Lebanon. The fact that attacks on Jews and Jewish properties in London only started happening on a regular basis in March this year, just as Israel and the US attacked Iran, suggests that most of the recent spate is not the work of ordinary Muslims or Palestinian sympathisers outraged at Israel’s massacres but of Iranian-backed groups and that the Palestine solidarity campaign and its protests are innocent of any involvement or contribution. However, anyone who must ask why everyone is not “standing with the Jewish community” has to look at the attitude that community has displayed since the genocide began. True, ordinary British Jews are not the state of Israel but many of its official bodies act as de facto press offices for it.

A large contingent of the Jewish community, including a number of mainstream Jewish community groups, Synagogue chains and senior leaders, in the western world actively supports Israel. This does not just mean believing in principle that there should be a state of Israel, much as believing women should have the right to vote does not make you a feminist in 2026. It means amplifying its propaganda, repeating false claims about anything from the 1948 Nakba to the 2023 attacks on Israel and beyond, sowing and then reinforcing false doubts about Israeli abuses in both Gaza and the West Bank and blaming victims. It means organised letter writing to the media, complaining of ‘bias’ whenever a newspaper or broadcaster fails to echo Israel’s version of events. It means trying to drive Muslim professionals out of their jobs by complaints to regulators such as the GMC. It means making demands that reminders that Palestinians exist, such as children’s artwork, be removed because it “goes against neutrality” or “makes Jews feel unsafe” or some other concocted reason. It means making false complaints about ‘antisemitism’ while straining the definition of that through the needle’s eye; this includes any mention or acknowledgment the existence of Jewish or pro-Israeli lobbies, or Jewish influence on the mainstream media or political parties. It means demanding the censorship and silencing of opposition to Israel and its oppressions. It means crying antisemitism when Jews are linked to Israel while maintaining actual links, not only to Israel itself but its armed forces, settlers and extremist organisations.

If you are one of the people doing any of this, don’t blame those who marched peacefully against Israel’s depredations on the natives of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon for the lack of sympathy from people other than your friends in high places when you play the victim. We have simply heard these protestations far too many times already.

A boy throws a missile at police during Wednesday’s Epsom ‘protest’

Last weekend a woman reported that she had been raped by a gang of men outside a church in Epsom, Surrey (this is a few miles from where I live), between 2am and 4am after leaving the Labyrinth night-club. Over the past few days, the police have not issued any descriptions of the alleged attackers, leading people online to “put two and two together” and assume that this means the attackers must have been asylum seekers living in nearby hotels or houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) or at the very least were not white. Comments like “no description is a description” and “it’s those doctors and engineers again” can be found under any link to a newspaper article about the alleged incident on Facebook. Yesterday, a ‘demonstration’ took place in Epsom town centre, in the middle of rush hour, allegedly by “angry locals” but no doubt supported by organised groups of racists from outside town; their supporters on social media have been taunting the police whose job it was to contain them, calling them ‘traitors’ and the demonstrators “English patriots who have had enough”, cheering as ‘projectiles’ are thrown at them and they took a step back as the ‘demonstrators’ moved forward up Epsom high street. Epsom is fairly posh, with the exception of a council estate (or former council estate) to the north of the town centre; the seat was solidly Tory from its inception in 1974, regularly returning its MPs with more than 50% or even 60%, until 2024 when a Liberal Democrat was elected. It is unlikely that most of the ‘demonstrators’ depicted are anything like local.

Complaints about “two-tier policing”, first heard after the riots following the 2024 Southport triple murder, have been heard in relation to this ‘protest’, both on social media and on the new-right TV channels like Talk TV. The complaint is that the police are nowhere near as heavy-handed with pro-Palestinian protesters in London as they are with “decent honest English” when they protest against “third world vermin raping our women”. The obvious reason is that these mobs, including many with convictions for domestic violence and other criminal behaviour, went on the rampage after the Southport murders in an attempted pogrom against Britain’s ethnic minorities and immigrant communities; they did not distinguish between the two then and still do not. Demonstrations against the Gaza genocide have been overwhelmingly peaceful, and many of the arrests have been for politically manufactured speech crimes such as holding up placards supporting Palestine Action, the banned group that sabotaged military hardware intended for use by the Israeli military. The protests have been subject to restrictions: a demonstration outside BBC Broadcasting House was banned because it was near a synagogue on a Sunday, while an order was issued that pots and pans not be used (to ensure that the noise could be heard in the Israeli embassy) in one demonstration in Kensington. The policing of the ‘demonstration’ in Epsom yesterday was not especially heavy-handed; riot police were deployed with shields because previous protests in similar circumstances based on similar accusations have turned violent.

The conspiracy theory as to why no description of the attackers has been published by the police is that that they are asylum seekers and that the police and politicians are more concerned for asylum seekers’ welfare than for the rights of the ordinary citizen. A variant on it is that the attackers will claim to be under 18 and that the police will not identify them after arrest or charge because of this claim. (A man touting this theory has been putting out videos on Twitter, alleging that the police know who the men are and are lying to the public.) Ex-cops both on Twitter and in the new-right media have been repeating variations on these theories when they should know better. One reason they have not been able to release descriptions of the men is that they are still patiently trying to get information out of a traumatised victim; another is that they do indeed know who they are but need to gather actionable evidence to arrest them, so that they will not have to release them under investigation a few days later. Another reason is that they are trying to find corroborating evidence for the claim and maybe even that they are having trouble doing that. (A few years ago in Oxford, a teenage girl reported being raped by two men who arrived in a van; police could not find any evidence that said van was in the area at all, and closed the case.) The fact that the area of the alleged rape is covered by CCTV has been amply mentioned by the racists on social media, but this possibility never occurs to them.

Yes, no word from the police for several days might look suspicious, but sometimes the police have to watch what information they put in the public domain to avoid endangering the inquiry. Racists, the sort who assume that such an attack must be the doing of a Black or Asian person, an immigrant or an asylum seeker, do not have the right to have their assumptions confirmed or addressed by the police when they are trying to solve a report of a serious crime. 

Tamara Jernigan, American astronaut

Earlier today I saw a short video on Facebook or Instagram, I forget which, by a woman called Tamara who migrated from Croatia to the United States (I don’t know which part). I saw the video when I had just arrived from work; when I tried to open the app again to re-watch the video and maybe reply, the app had refreshed and the video had gone, so I have no way of finding it or its author. Tamara is married to a man I’m guessing is from Taiwan: he has a Chinese name spelled the “old way” which I also can’t remember. Their new friends habitually call her ‘T’ and her husband also a pair of letters because their names are supposedly too foreign or unfamiliar for them to try to pronounce. Americans, she said, always favour ‘comfort’ over accuracy and it was nothing personal. I disagree: to not even bother to try to pronounce someone’s name is simply lazy and disrespectful.

The name Tamara is not even difficult to pronounce in the least. It’s not even a name that is unknown in the US. Wikipedia has a list of famous people with that name and there are a number in the US: Tamara Braun (actress), Tamara Brooks (choral conductor), Tamara Feldman (actress), Tamara Hope (Canadian actress and musician), Tamara Johnson-George (volleyball player), Tamara Stocks (basketball player), Tamara Jernigan (astronaut), though maybe that’s over these people’s heads, figuratively if not literally. In Judy Blume’s ‘Fudge’ book series, the title character has a younger sister born during the series called Tamara Roxanne, though they end up calling her Tootsie. Americans tend to pronounce it with the stress on the middle syllable rather than the first as the Croatian Tamara pronounces her name, but still, it’s not at all unfamiliar. When I mentioned this in a social media post earlier, someone pointed out that the name Tamara has the same consonants as the word ‘tomorrow’, so there’s no real excuse to just shorten it to ‘T’ (not even Tammy or for that matter Tootsie).

I was reminded of the chapter in Maya Angelou’s childhood autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, where she works as a servant to a wealthy local white woman, Viola Cullinan. She was named Marguerite Johnson at birth; the employer first calls her Margaret and then, at her friends’ suggestion, Mary. A colleague had been similarly renamed from Hallelujah to Glory, simply because she couldn’t be bothered to call her by her real name. (Angelou’s family called her Ritie; the name Maya originated with her brother who always called her “my sister” and this became My and then Maya.) The young Maya was not going to “let a white woman change her name for her own convenience” and explained that most Black people she knew were horrified by being “called out of their name”, in large part from being referred to by derogatory racial terms for generations. She dropped some precious crockery which Cullinan’s mother had brought from Virginia, and Cullinan was distraught. Her friend demanded, “was it Mary?” to which Cullinan responded, “her name’s Margaret, God damn it!”. As she fled the scene and never went back to the house, we don’t know if Viola Cullinan continued treating her employees in that way.

Chinese names are a bit more tricky, as they are tonal and getting the tone wrong can make a name mean something completely different (the word ‘Ma’ in Mandarin has five meanings including mother and horse, all differing by tone), but refusing to pronounce a mildly foreign name just sounds like racism. The attitude is that they are the dominant race in the world’s biggest superpower and they have no need to learn anything about any language or culture besides their own. Whether the people concerned say it’s “nothing personal” is immaterial; it’s plain rude and insulting to refuse to call someone by their name.

Image source: NASA.