Last Thursday it was reported that a man had stabbed two people to death outside a synagogue in Manchester. Today the man’s name was revealed to be Jihad al-Shamie, a name widely ridiculed by people who have never heard of Jihad being used as a first name (I have, many times), but it was also revealed that he in fact stabbed not two but one person before he was shot dead by police as he appeared to be wearing a bomb around his waist; the second fatality and a third injury were in fact caused by police gunfire. There is also a pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide demonstration also planned for tomorrow, as there has been most weekends since the genocide began in October 2023; a number of politicians have demanded it be called off. Starmer also made some ludicrous remarks in a speech on Thursday, claiming that “antisemitism is a hatred that is rising once again, and we must defeat it once again”, and that Britain not only provides refuge, but a home.

That last claim comes as the Labour government, in an attempt to outflank the Deform UK party, has proposed to double the length of time it takes to secure Indefinite Leave to Remain (Deform have talked about abolishing it altogether, which will mean no means for foreign nationals to live in the UK permanently other than by taking British citizenship) from five years to ten. The first claim will be news to anyone who has witnessed the rising tide of hatred towards both Muslims and asylum seekers in the UK over the past year; hotels housing asylum seekers, including children, have been subject to ‘protests’ by racist goons that often turn violent, while racist tropes increasingly dominate the public space, especially on social media and the Deformist new media, finding ways to blame Muslims in general for grooming gangs in particular. I’ll believe antisemitism is the hate that is rising when I hear a harsh word about Jews or Israel from Nigel Farage, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (who is expected to visit Israel as a guest of the minister of diaspora affairs Amichai Chikli later this month, barring another run-in with the law) or Matthew Goodwin, or when a synagogue is actually besieged by a mob because of a crime someone presumed to be Jewish committed.

Both politicians and media have been demanding that anti-genocide protests planned for this weekend be called off so as to “respect the grief of the Jewish community” (they legally can’t force them to be for that reason). “This is a moment of mourning. It is not a time to stoke tension and cause further pain. It is a time to stand together” tweeted Starmer; Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, called the protests “un-British and wrong” and told us to “take a step back and allow [the Jewish community] to grieve”. The protests are not aimed at the Jewish community; they are invariably routed away from synagogues and when people wanted to demonstrate near the BBC’s Broadcasting House one Saturday, it was banned because there is a synagogue a few streets away. They are aimed at the state of Israel and its backers in the British government, which include Starmer. It’s interesting how a demonstration in London against a genocide being perpetrated against Palestinians by the state of Israel is deemed to be hurtful to British Jews, or to interfere with their grief at a single Jew being killed by a low-life (who was not even Palestinian) in Manchester. We have a Palestinian community here too; many of them are grieving relatives lost in the genocide — to say nothing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims who have seen their brothers and sisters slaughtered in huge numbers, while not being chased from place to place while starving, for the sake of Israel’s final solution. Yet the establishment still demand that the precious feelings of British Jews govern what we can and cannot say about Israel and Palestine, and how Israel treats Palestinians.

The media have also repeated some of the slurs: that pro-Palestinian demonstrations are full of antisemitism, or that they make Jews feel threatened, or that they are fronts for Hamas or at least riddled with Hamas supporters, or supporters of other ‘terrorist’ groups such as Palestine Action. These days ‘terrorist’ means whatever the government says it means; as with PA, they do not have to do anything that resembles actual terrorism, which means targeting the general public with violence to force political change, but the limit of “support for Hamas” at some demonstrations consists of things like pictures of gliders on people’s clothing, or one or two incidents of “reckless speech”; there has been no large-scale demonstration of support for Hamas itself. As for antisemitism, the Palestine solidarity movement has always bent over backwards to avoid language that implicates Jews in general, or even mentions them; it mentions Israel and Zionism, and specific atrocities. The propaganda is long on accusations and short on evidence, and is aimed at people who have never been on one, and do not know anyone involved.

So, you’re grieving. Boo hoo, so are we. There’s a genocide going on. People are dying in huge numbers. There’s still an occupation going on in the West Bank, Palestinian natives being forced off their land because Israeli settlers covet it, or some other reason, and still being threatened by settlers and soldiers as they go about their daily lives. Mainstream Jewish organisations in the UK, including the Chabad Lubavitch organisation that runs the synagogue targeted last week, loudly support much of this (if not explicitly, then through genocide denial, victim blaming and repeating other Israeli propaganda) and use ‘antisemitism’ smears against those who expose and oppose it. Unlike when terrorist acts are committed by Muslim organisations or when violent acts are committed by individual Muslims, there is no pressure on the Jewish community to condemn or distance itself from the perpetrators; any attempt at such pressure is met with antisemitism smears. So, excuse us for not minding your feelings while we march against the genocide you support. You stop killing, we stop marching.

Recently there has been a movement, spearheaded by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (the football hooligan and racist rabble-rouser known as Tommy Robinson) and his associates  to fly both British and English flags off buildings and lampposts, as well as the more traditional flagpoles, pretty much wherever they are. The campaign has been accompanied by the usual claims from Reform supporters and the like on GB News that anyone who objects is a snob, or a woke lefty who despises the ‘real’ white working class. Matt Goodwin posted a video taken from a car driving down a street in Rednall, on the south-western outskirts of Birmingham, in which flags had been attached to every lamppost (in this case Union flags; in other cases they have been St George’s Crosses or a combination of the two), and in the accompanying tweet called it “act of resistance against mass uncontrolled immigration, broken borders, the decision by politicians to house illegal migrants in the heart of their communities, and the loss of their national identity”.

The other day I saw a video, on a motorcycling channel on YouTube, titled “Does the Saint George’s flag offend you??”. The simple answer to this is no. (YouTube apparently blacks out any flags that are posted by emoji in the comments; this was assumed to apply only to that flag.) But the context and atmosphere in which these flags are being posted does. We have seen footage of louts painting flags on other people’s property, while racially abusing Asian people who just happened to drive onto the scene to do shopping. We have seen footage of council workers being assaulted, in one case by someone trying to remove the ladder he was standing on, while removing unauthorised flags or just while working on the pole or mast the flag was attached to. If flags are flown from public property such as lampposts and not attached properly, they can become a safety hazard, for example by falling into a cyclist’s or motorcyclist’s face, obscuring their vision; if they just fall off, they become litter. In many cases the flags were the wrong way up, representing a signal of distress, not a show of pride. It’s quite right that some councils want to remove unauthorised flags; it doesn’t mean they “hate the English” or “despise the working class”. It means they want to keep their districts clean and looking civilised, and keeping their character.

In a recent debate at the London Assembly, a Tory assembly member named Emma Best, having made some now common accusations that “the Left — people like you, people like the mayor — exaggerate and lie about members of the Right, and this … will lead to more violence” (having already mentioned the murder of Charlie Kirk), suggested that the best way to ‘reclaim’ the St George’s flag would be to fly it at City Hall and across the GLA and TfL (Greater London Authority and Transport For London) estate. The deputy mayor did not answer the question adequately, mumbling about how she had been born here and supported the English football team, and thought that Britain at its best was seen in the Second World War and in the welcoming of refugees from Ukraine, as “a place of inclusion and tolerance”. The TfL estate consists of things like railway stations and depots as well as bus and tram stations and maintenance depots; a brief glance at the Google Street View images of many TfL rail stations shows that they do not have flagpoles. Of those I looked at, only Embankment had one, and sometimes this was empty and sometimes it carried the Union flag. To fly flags at stations would require flagpoles to be installed, which would cost a lot of money that could be spent on improving the service; station staff also have enough to do without having to worry about raising or lowering flags when it’s deemed appropriate.

But the other answer to Emma Best’s question is that the flying of flags is something we do on special occasions, to celebrate or to commemorate. Aside from government buildings, and at military bases and the like, we see them at war memorials as well as on village greens. Companies use it to indicate a British product, though this can often mean British design rather than British manufacture. We do, of course, see flags flying when a British sports team is in an international tournament and when it is the English football team, the flag will be the English one. However, there is nothing traditional in this country about flying flags everywhere and attaching them to every lamppost, least of all by people who do not know how to fly them properly, and the persistent display of flags outside of competitions has a menacing overtone, reminiscent of its use for sectarian purposes in places like Northern Ireland. And it’s nothing for us to be proud of to have thugs roaming the streets, waving flags in people’s faces who didn’t ask for it, painting them on other people’s property without permission and then attacking or threatening council workers who try to remove them, or anyone they meet who looks different from them. It’s not a spontaneous display of national pride; it’s an ugly wave of incivility and thuggery from the worst of British.

Charlie Kirk

I am not sure I knew of the existence of Charlie Kirk when he was assassinated in Utah last Wednesday. I saw a tweet from a Muslim account on Twitter which drew attention to his well-known (in the US maybe) stance on gun control, that a few gun-related deaths were worth it to keep Americans’ Second Amendment rights. He was killed by a sniper, believed to be a young man from a conservative Mormon family in southern Utah, as he held court under a marquee bearing his slogan “Prove Me Wrong!”. In the immediate aftermath, Trump and his supporters rushed to blame the “Radical Left”, trans activists and even the Democratic party for the murder, while mainstream Democrat politicians published videos condemning the killing. I saw plenty of content, however, which while not condoning the murder made no secret that they believed Kirk’s death was no tragedy, was nothing to mourn, or was a comeuppance for his pro-gun views. Meanwhile there are also people proclaiming themselves ‘grief-stricken’ by the killing and condemning anyone who does not share their grief, accusing them of condoning murder, or of “virtue signalling” while actually betraying a vicious streak.

Last Thursday, the day after Kirk’s murder, a British lawyer on YouTube calling himself the Black Belt Barrister uploaded a video in which he proclaimed, “regardless of your own personal views, I’m sure you all share a sense of shock, horror and for many of you, even if you didn’t know them, a profound sense of grief for the cowardly and unlawful killings of Charlie Kirk and, of course, Iryna Zarutska”. Iryna Zarutska was a Ukrainian refugee who was stabbed to death on a commuter train in Charlotte, North Carolina; racists have posted content alleging that the killing was part of a “race war”, drawing attention to the commuters who failed to act until it was too late (having seen the video, it does not appear that she was in danger of dying until she actually collapsed — she did not appear to be bleeding heavily, for example — and the killer was still in the carriage, armed). The two killings were entirely unconnected, the latter with no political motive, just a random killing by a man with a history of severe mental illness, and thousands of miles apart. He then goes on to accuse people who rail against the far right, racists etc., and accuse them of fostering hatred which leads to incidents like the murder of Charlie Kirk. All this before anything was known about who shot him. As for the reaction to Iryna Zarutska’s murder, the only vile or hateful comments I could see were those that implied that she was killed because the killer was Black and she was white, and that the others in the carriage (again mostly Black) did not spring to her aid for the same reason. There were comments like “don’t take your eyes off these people” as if every Black person was a madman looking to stab the next white person they see. All nonsensical, demented, racist drivel.

But I’m not grief-stricken about Kirk’s death. Not only because I didn’t know him, but also because he actually was a hateful, racist misogynist who also stood in the way of protecting children from violence. His last words, in response to a question from the audience about mass shootings in the US, were “counting or not counting gang violence?”: he was trying to divert the conversation onto Black-on-Black crime, which is mostly irrelevant to the matter of US mass shootings. His supporters want us to be empathetic to his wife and children, but he shows none to families who have lost loved ones, including children, to mass shootings. I am never going to be especially sad about the loss of a person like that. Gun control actually would not have saved him because the gun control being advocated in the USA relates to automatic or assault weapons, which does not appear to be what was used here, and better background checks and safety devices to prevent accidental discharge. Even in the UK, while we have had no school massacres since Dunblane in 1996, we have had a mass shooting by a sniper (the west Cumbria shootings of 2010). However, this was still a man who thought others’ right to their lives — schoolchildren and teachers — were worth much less than his own right to an automatic firearm capable of killing multiple people in seconds. While we may agree that his murder was wrong and that the killer should be punished, it stands to reason that when a person with such contempt for others’ lives loses his own, many people will not be especially aggrieved.

There has also been a chorus of disapproval at the mere use of words like racist and bigot to describe people who espouse racist and bigoted views. We are being told it creates the climate of hatred that leads to such acts as Charlie Kirk’s murder. History in fact shows that racism leads to violence to an extent that accusations of racism simply do not. With the exception of Cambodia, every genocide in recent times has been motivated principally by racism, as have countless other systems of oppression: chattel slavery, segregation, Apartheid. This is not to say that no injustice ever results from false accusations; we only have to look at the history of the Labour Party since 2015 to see that. But in this country at least, nobody died as a result of those false accusations of antisemitism (arguably it contributed to the Gaza genocide by making speaking out against it costly, especially in the first year or so, but nobody was killed because they were called antisemitic, even if they were expelled from a political party or even lost their job). Racism kills, both through direct violence and through the ways prejudice works its way into our police, education and health systems (deaths in custody, higher maternal mortality rates, etc) among other things. Many of the people coming out with this rhetoric are the same people who have been moaning about “cancel culture” for the past decade while enjoying columns in major newspapers, ample time in the broadcast media, ample representation in national and regional legislatures and so on; Kirk himself ran a “professor watch” website, ‘exposing’ academics he disagreed with, while his allies are now trying to drum people out of jobs for failing to manifest the required grief over his death, or repeating his less savoury opinions. These include a female primary school teacher who repeated his views about guns, a stance which results in people like her dying or seeing their pupils killed by young embittered men with guns no civilian can get hold of anywhere else, whose own congress representative joined the campaign to get her fired.

We’ve had nearly two years of watching a genocide on social media, with the most appalling acts of depravity and cruelty plain to see, obviously innocent people shot dead for no reason, doctors, nurses and ambulance staff murdered as they do their job (or the rest of their families killed while they work), stories from visiting medics of repeatedly seeing children shot in the head by snipers, journalists murdered and then slandered by their killers; some of those lecturing or trying to silence us have been “standing with Israel” all this time, openly excusing or justifying it, or even celebrating it and mocking the dead and those who fought heroically to save them — as Kirk himself is on video doing. These include the ‘moderate’ Democrats now publicly commiserating with the Trumpists and falling over themselves to distance themselves from political violence when it’s on American soil. These people have had the past two years to demonstrate the decorum they expect from us when a public figure is murdered; they did not care to do so then but they expect us to now. So, there will be no crocodile tears here. He was not killed by one of ours, but was an enemy of ours and had contempt for us. His death is no great loss and will not be mourned.

A man being arrested near the Brook Hotel in Norwich

Last Thursday in the Guardian, there was a letter from one Desmond Hewitt telling us we should watch what we say about the people ‘protesting’ outside hotels housing asylum seekers in the UK. Referring to an article by David Renton which suggested drawing a strong link with the convictions for domestic violence of a large number of the prominent ‘protesters’, he said that this would be “like a red rag to a bull to the many protesters not involved in crimes of domestic violence” which could be dismissed as a “lefty slur against all men protesting against immigration”. He also suggested that we call “Tommy Robinson” an Islamophobe, as he targets single Muslim men: “if we can’t get that blatant fact out there as our argument, then I’m afraid we are, as they say, screwed”. I wrote a letter in response, but have had no reply in my inbox, so here’s a response to it.

To take the question of “Tommy Robinson” first: he certainly is an Islamophobe, but that term doesn’t have the same ‘sting’ among the far right, or even much of the mainstream Tory right, these days that “antisemitism” has across the political spectrum, except when it’s used as a slur against anyone opposing the genocide of Palestinians, or the oppression they experienced for the several decades leading up to it. They claim “we’re not Islamophobes, we’re Islamo-realists” or some similar get-out based on a selective reading of Islamic history, entirely overlooking the history of the Muslims in their country. Robinson, however, has a long criminal record, much of it violent.

In footage of the ‘protests’ outside the asylum hotels, we have seen an awful lot of violence, not only aimed at the hotels and their residents but also against counter-demonstrators and other dissenters. Last week, for example, footage was shared on social media of a man talking to reporters outside the Brook Hotel, a Best Western hotel on the outskirts of Norwich, telling them among other things that the ‘demonstrators’ bothered him far more than the asylum seekers do by disturbing his sleep, which was interrupted by thugs who chased the man around before he took refuge with the police guarding the hotel itself; the goons’ supporters cheered it on, calling the young man an ‘infiltrator’. There have been scores of arrests at these events; these include attempting to enter the hotels and attacking police, as well as things like breaching bail conditions. Locals not involved — women included — often say, as did the young man at Norwich, that they find the ‘protesters’ far more threatening than they find the asylum seekers themselves.

You can tell a man by the company he keeps, and the people at these ‘protests’ do not seem to mind the company of thugs, nor to listen to the speeches of thugs. Whether they all have pre-existing convictions for domestic violence or not, they choose to attend gatherings outside people’s homes that are designed to threaten them, gatherings they know have ended in violence, and many of those without prior convictions will doubtless acquire some, as many have found out to their cost.

Still from a video of Cycling Mikey’s bike being struck by the black Fiat.

Last week some videos went around showing a road safety activist (some call him a vigilante) named Michael van Erp, AKA Cycling Mikey, trying to stop a Fiat 500 going the wrong way up a partly closed road in west London and getting his bike knocked over and his property strewn over the street. The footage attracted the attention of some right-wing newspapers, some social media lawyers and some social media driving instructors, some of whom have criticised Mikey’s behaviour in the past and been blocked. Much of the commentary has been gleeful, as if Mikey “finally got his comeuppance”, and includes suggestions that Mikey broke the law by pushing his bike out to obstruct the Fiat, or “threw his bike into the road”, and ignores the multiple offences committed by the driver of the Fiat, which should not depend on Mikey reporting it. A YouTuber called Big Jobber, who has worked in the insurance industry, gives a fairly balanced explanation of the whole incident here.

Specifically, the driver of the Fiat, who had a child in their car, drove through a road that was clearly closed in the direction they were travelling in (the exit side had been closed because of roadworks; the entry side remained open, and there were numerous “road ahead closed” warning signs along the road at every junction, including at least one that was a viable diversion), then drove at a pedestrian who was in the process of entering the road ahead, causing damage to his property, then drove off without stopping; the latter is called “failing to stop after an accident”. This was witnessed by a number of bystanders, some of whom indicated that they recognised Mikey and some of whom also recorded their own footage. There will be other camera footage (shot by the local authority and the police) showing that the Fiat was in the area; if the social media footage is not good enough, that surely will be. Some of the commentators have suggested that Mikey’s actions constitute contributory negligence that will count against him if he has to claim on his insurance, but the Fiat driver’s actions were indefensible and plain criminal.

I have not much time for Cycling Mikey in the main; he is best known for riding around looking for people doing things they shouldn’t, such as using their mobile phone at the wheel, and publishing it online and sending the footage to the police. I have sometimes questioned how he has so much time to do this. I wrote about this in a previous entry on ‘snitching’ a couple of years ago, though I didn’t mention him by name then; most of the people he catches are stationary, not in motion and he was the classic example of the self-righteous snitch. But there’s also a world of difference between an inconsequential breach of the law and using your vehicle to barge someone out of the way — as a weapon — because you don’t have the patience to do what you should have done in the first place and find another route. The only crimes in this video were committed by the Fiat driver, and there were many of them.

Yesterday, at a protest organised by Defend Our Juries in Parliament Square, London, more than 500 protesters, many of them elderly, were arrested for holding banners supporting the organisation Palestine Action, proscribed last month after invading an RAF base to spray red paint into the engines of two aircraft used to refuel planes which conduct spying missions over Gaza out of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. The group has carried out a series of actions targeted at companies which supply the Israeli military and this was going on well before the genocide began in 2023; there had been calls to proscribe them before, but the decision was made once the news of the Brize Norton air base invasion broke. Nothing the group has ever done meets any traditional definition of terrorism; they have never killed anyone, nor carried out any action that endangered or was intended to intimidate the general public, but the Terrorism Act 2000 uses a broader definition that does away the need for a group to target the general public or try to kill anyone. At the time, animal rights activists were running a “direct action” campaign targeting companies that bred animals for experimentation, some of which were family farms, and their tactics were often described as terrorism. The same act also criminalises not only carrying out group activities or fundraising, but any public expression of support, such as carrying a banner or wearing a T-shirt giving the impression of support, or making statements which are reckless as to whether they give the impression of support. All this for organisations which need not be involved in actual terrorism; rather, it’s terrorism if the government call it that.

It’s no secret that some powerful people are annoyed at the continual protests in London against the genocide in Gaza. We frequently have Jewish accounts on Twitter whingeing that London “is not safe for Jews” every Saturday (as that’s the day they are usually held); one the occasion that the protesters wanted to demonstrate at the BBC’s Broadcasting House, the government intervened to ban it, on the grounds that there was a synagogue a few streets away and it was the Sabbath. There are, however, rarely arrests at these events for anything more than speech offences under the aforementioned Terrorism Act. The same cannot be said, of course, for the “peaceful demonstrations” outside hotels housing migrants or refugees arrived via the “small boat” route; these demonstrations routinely attract thuggish elements and have led on a number of occasions to violent acts that target the migrants themselves, and when people have posted on social media calling for such hotels to be burned, and are convicted of long-established crimes of incitement to violence, we see Reform supporters calling them political prisoners and calling for their release, with Rupert Lowe (MP for Great Yarmouth, leader of Reform splinter group) having indicated his intention to host her at parliament on her release; some of these same people have been congratulating the same police for arresting hundreds of “useful idiots” (fancy a supporter of Israel calling someone a useful idiot!) or “radical leftists” supporting the ‘psychopaths’ of Hamas.

Arresting more than 500 people for a non-violent speech offence isn’t a good use of public resources. As a result of years of cuts to the criminal justice system, it takes years for serious crimes to get before a court, with some victims dropping out after a year or two. I heard that personnel were drawn in from other police forces across the country to police what they knew would be a non-violent protest, because anti-genocide protests have been, since the start. We have enough problems in London; we have a spike in mobile phone thefts, while bicycle and motorcycle thefts routinely go unpunished with victims expected to rely on insurance to deal with the problem, with the result that pavements have strips reading “Mind the Grab” warning of snatch thieves and it can cost upwards of £1,000 to insure a 125cc motorcycle in London for fire and theft. When my bike was stolen a few years ago, I had to just buy a new one for £400 (which is what my old one also cost), and my bike was used to get me to town and to the park, not to bomb tents or kill doctors and schoolchildren. The police can and do refuse to deal with certain crimes for lack of resources; the prosecution service can and do refuse to prosecute because it would not be in the public interest, and there is no better example of “not in the public interest” than prosecuting someone for holding a banner (something, by the way, nobody was doing until the government banned it!) supporting an organisation that sought to arrest a genocide when the government refused to

When people criticise the police, they and their supporters commonly remind us of who we’d call on if we were raped or if our house was burgled or our relative was murdered. They fly the “thin blue line” flag, or use it as their profile picture (some police forces allow it as a patch on the uniform; the Met does not). Who is it keeps us safe, they ask? Yet it’s not much safety to be only safe if you keep your mouth shut if you have opinions the powers that be despise. The American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin famously wrote that “those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”; we are currently in that state of having neither. Our police are protecting those who deal death and oppression, denying us our freedom while neglecting our safety.

Image: Defend Our Juries.

The Colne Valley Viaduct, Buckinghamshire

Recently Radio 4 broadcast a series about HS2 (in ten fifteen-minute parts, starting here), and how it went from being a mere idea on a bit of paper to being a grand infrastructure project, braving objections from well-heeled landowners and householders in the Chilterns and other green and pleasant parts of the country, with big ideas about linking to the Channel Tunnel line and having two branches to the north-west and the north-east to being cut back to merely a shuttle between London and Birmingham. Towards the end, the programme quoted an unnamed chartered surveyor’s explanation for why building anything costs so much in this country: “because we live on a small, highly populated, property-owning, democratic island”; France has more than a thousand miles of high-speed railway, with much more empty countryside for it to sweep through, while China has nearly 30,000 miles of high-speed rail but has centralised power and fewer protest rights. There’s some truth to this, but the crucial point is that this is a small and densely-populated country; that we are a democracy is presented as almost a bad thing, that it would be so much easier if the government could just move people aside at will.

France is twice the size of the UK; China is many times the size of either. France’s major cities are much more spread out than ours are; none of our major cities, except Newcastle, is more than 200 miles from London. By contrast, the French LGV Est (eastern high-speed line) from Paris to Strasbourg is 250 miles long; the series of lines that links Paris with Marseille is 459 miles long. While high-speed lines are planned for the much closer northern cities such as Rouen, Le Havre and Caen (a similar distance from Paris as Birmingham is from London), these are unlikely to open before 2040 if at all, while the main lines to Lyon, Brussels and the Channel Tunnel have been open since the 1990s. Birmingham should not have been a priority for HS2; the priority cities should have been Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow, and Glasgow was never even part of the scheme. Likewise, of the cities on the eastern leg, only Leeds and maybe Sheffield should have been in on it; Nottingham, Derby and Leicester are already served by the Midland Mainline and none of those places has a population approaching Liverpool’s or Manchester’s. The priority there should be electrification, not replacing a perfectly good rail link directly to central London with a circuitous one to a western suburban station.

Our biggest problem when it comes to infrastructure is that we have chosen wasteful, grandiose prestige projects over smaller but more beneficial ones. The major demand when it comes to rail in the north of England is better east-west links; it is said that you can tell which trains are going to London because they are newer and in better condition. East-west lines in the north are heavily dependent on unelectrified, two-track lines where through trains share space with local stopping trains. Whole tracts of Britain’s rail system remain unelectrified, resulting in diesel pollution especially around termini such as Marylebone and St Pancras in London; in other areas, partial electrification has meant that special “bi-mode” trains have had to be built, carrying diesel for 100 miles or more for use only on the section of track they left out (such as the lines into Bristol and Bath). Meanwhile, collapsing infrastructure is left unrepaired for cost reasons, even as we press ahead with grandiose projects like HS2. In London, Hammersmith Bridge has been left to rot for years, requiring traffic on a major artery to crawl along unsuitable roads around Kew Bridge; in north Kent, a stretch of the A226 has been closed for the past two years following a landslide, and as of March this year “there has been no funding within our budgets for … the continuing work required to progress the remedial scheme to tender and construction” according to the county council. A rail bridge in Woodford, east London, was also closed for “safety reasons” in July 2023 and only last month did the council resolve to replace the bridge and “fight for funding”, wording which suggests that winning is not guaranteed.

I think the reason we are reluctant to build more infrastructure is that we are somewhat more precious about more modest beauties than they are on the Continent. We are more romantic about the countryside and more protective of it, not least because it is a major destination for recreation and tourism; Italians cannot afford to be so precious about the Alpine scenery and rely on mountain passes to get between cities, or to France and other neighbouring countries. Doubtless more people see that scenery from a train window or from one of those motorway viaducts than on any skiing trip. We are also half the size of France and our productive land is smaller still, and we can only cover so much of it in concrete before we are left with neither natural beauty nor productive farmland. The exorbitant amount of money wasted on the unnecessary HS2, a scar through some of our prime countryside, could have been spent on much needed improvements in the north and on patching up road and rail infrastructure elsewhere; we have ended up building a shuttle service between two close-together cities that only the rich will be able to afford to use, and might not bother with anyway if the old route is cheaper and more convenient.

Image source: 42 Walkers, via Wikimedia. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (BY) 4.0 licence.

Matt Single

Last Wednesday, BBC’s Radio 4 broadcast an episode of their File on 4 Investigates programme which exposed a ‘school’ (not actually a school as such, but a centre for home educators) called Hope (Home Of Positive Energy) Sussex, based outside Hastings, which appeared dedicated to fostering ‘awareness’ of conspiracy theories in the children being taught, and the parents who come in with them, with the clear intention of nudging them in that direction. The programme is titled “We Are Not A Conspiracy School”, but this is clearly what the place is. The ‘community’, which hosts music festivals and talks by among other people Katie Hopkins and Kate Shemirani (a nurse struck off for spreading misinformation about Covid at the height of the pandemic, and who influenced her daughter to refuse treatment for cancer, which she subsequently died from), was founded by Matthew Single and his wife Sadie who were former members of the British National Party who were expelled (and fined) for leaking its membership list in 2008, then disappeared from public view before reappearing as anti-vax theorists. The programme noted that Ofsted had expressed concerns about the institution but had been unable to investigate as it did not have the statutory powers to do so.

There was no doubt that the ideas they were promoting were outlandish, anti-scientific, and rooted in paranoia. The programme noted that the two founders were the Singles, but the website lists two co-founders, both female, named only as Katy-Jo and Sadie, but all three were heard on the programme. One of them told the interviewer that she did not believe in viruses; they also told him that schools only teach one theory about the origin of the universe and life on earth, namely the Big Bang theory (which is untrue, from personal experience). A man was heard telling children to fire ball-bearing guns at a TV, which we were told had the letters ‘BBC’ on it. The ‘community’ is secretive, its headquarters (a former agricultural college) unwelcoming to journalists from the “mainstream media” and has only a sign reading “No Trespass, Strictly By Appointment Only” (though its other entrance is marked with a yellow flag with a smiley face on it, for the benefit of festival attendees); the journalist met them at a recording studio. The founders told the interviewer that they were not brainwashing their children at all, and could not as the children were free to ask questions, and did so, having been taught “critical thinking”. However, it was clear that the community existed so that like-minded people could withdraw from the world and teach their children free from what they call “the bonds of a malevolent State, intent on imposing ever tighter control over us all”.

HOPE are cranks and I would not recommend them to anyone looking for support if they are home educating, but the programme did not find any evidence of children being physically abused, which is at least as important as the issued raised here. It’s important that home education and home-educating parents in general are not judged by the extremists as there are schools you would not send a dog into either, especially at secondary level. I know families that home educate and most did so to remove their children from environments where they were bullied, or faced racism or other prejudice, or because there was a necessity stemming from a medical condition or disability. There are some children the school system simply makes no effort to accommodate, and education departments encourage parents to home educate; there are school leaders who take pride in harsh ‘discipline’, humiliating children over petty uniform infractions, locking toilets to prevent “internal truancy” during lessons regardless of how adequate they are for the numbers of children needing to use them during breaks, or such problems as girls getting periods unexpectedly. Some parents want to protect their children from the depredations of such “leadership teams” or from whatever bad influences other children have been exposed to and nobody should be standing in their way.

Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn

This past week it was confirmed that Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana were launching a new party after both were expelled or suspended and then resigned from the Labour party. They have decided to solicit a name from a mailing list; their website currently calls it “Your Party”, which has led to widespread ridicule from those who thought they intended to call the actual party that, as well as from people who suspect that putting the name to a vote could lead to a silly name being selected, in the same manner as the vote to select a name for what became the RRS Sir David Attenborough, the research vessel of the British Antarctic Survey, came up with “Boaty McBoatface” (that name was used for one of its remotely-controlled submersibles). A common criticism is that, with Reform UK gaining ground at the expense of the Conservatives and looking increasingly likely to be a united right-wing opponent to the Labour party come the next election, any new left-wing party “splits the Labour vote” making a Reform victory more likely. I wonder why they never level this criticism at Starmer or Labour itself.

There are two reasons the Labour Party, especially under right-wing leadership, recurrently produces splinter groups. One is that the party is run as an elective dictatorship in which members can be expelled for public dissent. This includes refusing to support an official candidate, even when that candidate was not chosen democratically but imposed centrally, or does not reflect what many Labour members would consider to be their values, or has no history of supporting the Labour party (e.g. when they are a recent ‘convert’ from the Conservatives who “needs a home”), or there was an overtone of racism or other discrimination in the selection process. Such expulsions were regularly reported in the Welsh Labour party in the 2000s when local Labour activists hoped to promote their own candidates but were overruled in favour of people who were favoured by the leadership. This tendency has heightened since Starmer became leader: we have seen a number of MPs have their whip withdrawn for the kind of dissent that would normally only result in a minister or shadow minister having to resign, often voting for the very things that Starmer and those around him were promising when in opposition, particularly when Starmer was running for the Labour leadership, and for the things people would join the Labour party for and expect a Labour government to deliver.

Related to this is the sheer, abject cowardice typically displayed by Labour leaderships, whether in power or in opposition. This, too, is heightened under Starmer. Labour leaders have a record of being tough on the powerless while quick to jump to appease the powerful. There was no better example than when the Tory press manufactured the “foreign criminals” scandal in 2007, complaining that foreign nationals convicted of crimes were not automatically deported, as they believed they should have been, resulting in scores of people being rearrested who had served their time years ago for such things as getting in a fight in a pub. When faced with an angry US president after 9/11, Blair sent British troops into two separate wars at great cost to us. The same has been seen under Starmer, albeit less dramatically than under Blair: removing Labour candidates for being too forthrightly pro-Palestinian, for fear of accusations of ‘antisemitism’ from Zionists and the right-wing media, and then summarily expelling Jeremy Corbyn for defending his record and (rightly) calling the ‘crisis’ an exaggeration. As prime minister, Starmer has become the anti-Obama: his motto seems to be “no we can’t”, justifying his cowardice with Tory-style appeals to morality. The mean Tory restrictions on state benefits which many of us thought would be swept away in the first year of a Labour government have not been; Starmer now tells us his party is there for “working people” while expecting disabled people to pay the price for balancing the budget his way, while Labour MPs who challenge him have been thrown out. He also rolls out the red carpet for Donald Trump, a president who has, among other things, enabled gangs of thugs to launch a reign of terror against the country’s Latino population, with numerous legal immigrants and even citizens arrested, imprisoned in camps and deported to countries they have no connections to. 

A couple of years ago, in response to the Uxbridge ULEZ controversy that cost the party a by-election result in Uxbridge (Boris Johnson’s former constituency Labour thought it could win), I saw it observed on Twitter that “one striking thing about Starmer (and his legal/managerial ilk more generally) is that he is constitutionally incapable of conducting a political argument. when criticised from the left, he shuts it down bureaucratically. when criticised from the right, he instantly capitulates”. A graphic I have seen shared on Twitter a number of times puts it more succinctly: Labour are “weak with the strong, strong with the weak”. Labour constitutionally requires a kind of discipline of its members that suggests that it is involved in building a certain kind of society, expecting them to forego freedom of speech (by always publicly supporting the chosen candidate, for example), yet fails to realise that expecting such discipline of people in pursuit of social or political justice in support of a party that perpetually disappoints, or openly regards them as a liability, or treats them with contempt, is not going to work (this is a major reason why I have spent most of my life outside the party: I will not pay to give up my freedom of speech so that men like Luke Akehurst can get jobs that others could do better, representing communities). When a candidate who is deselected for thinly-veiled racist reasons runs independently, Labour members — the same ones who chide us for not having patience with or faith in Starmer’s leadership, as if he was a prophet rather than a politician — accuse her of being selfish, of passing up an opportunity to unseat a long-standing right-wing Tory for personal ambition; they never point the finger of blame at the party machine.

The party should be seriously discussing removing Starmer. He had one job and that has been done. It is not at all certain whether he will be able to repeat that achievement given the changing political climate and is unwilling to do what it takes. He is weak in the face of right-wing pressure. He has no charisma whatever. He thinks like a boss and blames everyone else if his demands are a cause of conflict. He does not listen; like many of his class, he thinks that is what other people are supposed to do when he speaks. Opinion polls are showing that Labour is losing ground to Reform, and was even before the Corbyn/Sultana group emerged. He has neither the wit, nor the imagination, nor the courage to deal with any of the crises affecting the country and the party now: the migrant boats issue, the roving gangs of hooligans exploiting it, the anger around his complicity in the Gaza genocide (and that of several of his team), his failure to address issues around education and welfare other than with further cuts. If there is no change at the top fairly soon, the party faces oblivion and the country faces being dragged into the same abyss as the United States. The party cannot blame Corbyn; they must fix this mess themselves.

Diane Abbott, 2010

Diane Abbott, Britain’s longest-serving woman MP, was yesterday suspended from the Labour party after a BBC Radio 4 interview in which she reiterated remarks she made in a letter to the Observer in 2023, for which she was suspended at the time (though later allowed to defend her east London seat as a Labour candidate, and won) about the racism experienced by white minorities, specifically mentioning Irish, Jews, Gypsies and Travellers, compared to that experienced by Black and Asian people who can easily be identified by their skin colour which the aforementioned minorities could not. This week an interview with the Radio 4 presenter James Naughtie, recorded in May, was broadcast in which she reiterated the point she had made in her original letter to the Observer: that racism against people identifiable by skin colour was just not the same as against those who aren’t, and it is just silly to pretend otherwise. (The interview can be listened to on BBC Sounds here.) Ava Vidal wrote a response to the controversy for the Independent. What Diane Abbott said in both this interview and in her original letter has been the standard view of anti-racist activists for decades, and many Black and Asian listeners will think her observations were self-evident, but the sticking point with her list of groups which aren’t oppressed quite like Black people is that includes Travellers, who are one of the country’s most openly despised minorities.

Admittedly, a Traveller can be walking down a street which is far from any Travellers’ site, or a location where there is a dispute over a Travellers’ site, and not be recognised as such. However, Travellers face intense resistance when seeking to establish new sites as well as legal and political efforts to remove them, and as research by Katherine Quarmby notes, Travellers’ sites are often in “risky and unhealthy” locations, nearly always within 500 metres of a major road, railway line, canal, sewage or refuse plant or industrial estate (more than half were within 100 metres), and often these sites are miles away from amenities such as schools and clinics. Intersecting the Traveller and Irish experiences, only last year the holiday camp chain Pontin’s were found to have discriminated racially by blacklisting a number of Irish surnames, such as Boyle and Gallagher, on the basis that they were common surnames of “undesirable guests”, and telling call centre staff to refuse or cancel bookings on the basis that a guest had an Irish accent (see these tweets from Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC from last year — KC, for my overseas readers, means King’s Counsel or a senior lawyer). People use anti-Traveller slurs, or thin euphemisms such as “do-as-you-likeys”, quite openly in a way they would not use more ‘traditional’ racial slurs against Black and Asian people.

Speaking as someone of Irish descent on my mother’s side (not with one of the surnames on the “undesirable guest” list), I can honestly say I’ve never experienced anything close to racial abuse. I’m white, and I speak with an English accent, as does everyone related to me on my mother’s side of her generation. By the 80s when I was growing up, people of Irish background had anglicised, and although still Catholic (and often more practising than they are now), were not particularly Irish by culture. Actual Irish people did experience discrimination, and suspicion of association with the IRA, during the early years of the Troubles in the late 60s and early 70s. There is still prejudice against Jews and violent, organised antisemitism on the Far Right and James Naughtie mentioned to Abbott that synagogues usually have guards to protect worshippers from violence. However, the majority of claims of antisemitism that blighted the Labour party in the five years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership had nothing to do with violence, discrimination, slurs or anything else that would be recognised as racism if it concerned any other group; it was about intemperate speech on Israel (at a time when their oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank was ratcheting up) and criticism of individual Jews which fitted a list of so-called “antisemitic tropes”, frequently strained through the needle’s eye to justify an accusation. While there are Jewish dissenters who openly criticise or condemn Israel’s actions, the mainstream Jewish representative bodies are openly aligned with Israel and openly cheer on its genocide while denying that one is taking place. Such accusations were commonly levelled at Black and Asian Labour activists during the Corbyn years.

Labour’s policy on racism appears to be a convenient mishmash of different doctrines around racism. On antisemitism, they demand we accept Jewish definitions, despite the ample history of false claims levelled in response to justified criticism of Israeli actions; they fail to uphold this standard when it comes to anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. Anti-racism activism has traditionally held that racism is not prejudice alone but prejudice combined with power. This is significant, because plenty of Black people can tell stories of Black children being punished for shouting back “honky” or “white pig” at groups of racist white bullies who themselves went unpunished, or who turned on the tears and got sympathy from a teacher. Labour only seem to be quick to deal with perceived racism on the recipients’ terms when the recipients are the one minority which is more likely to be white and middle-class, and many of the loudest voices in accusing all and sundry of ‘antisemitism’ are anglicised white Jews. Whether Starmer’s reaction to Diane Abbott’s interview is yet another cave-in to that racist mob or yet another example of his authoritarian behaviour as leader, exiling Abbott because she is a relapsed heretic, is debatable. As was the case at the last election, if her health permits, she could easily win her seat with or without Labour’s blessing at the next election, much as Corbyn could. However, while it is not antisemitic to say that Jews are not principal victims of racism or oppression in modern Britain and have not been for decades — it’s fact — her principal injury is to the Traveller community whose oppression she belittles just because it is not exactly like what Black people experience. It says much about official attitudes to that community that this injury goes unnoticed in this whole debate.

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Louise Casey

Last week Louise Casey’s report (PDF) on the long-running issue of grooming gangs, a system of criminality in which young girls are ‘groomed’ through younger boyfriends, plied with alcohol and free food and then trapped so they could be raped by sometimes numerous older men, was published, recommending a national inquiry as the type of gang has appeared in many towns and cities across the UK over several decades. Her report also recommended that mandatory reporting of suspected child abuse by certain professionals be made law and that taxis be regulated strictly locally, with a loophole that allows a taxi driver to be licensed by one authority and then operate in another to be closed, but also that the law on rape be amended such that any sexual activity between an adult and anyone between ages 13 and 15 be classified as rape rather than merely “sexual activity with a minor” (currently that law only applies when the younger party is younger than 13), which I think is a bad idea, but the government announced on Monday evening that they would be making these specific changes to the law demanded in the report. The report notes that the ethnicity of both victims and perpetrators are not reported in a large number of cases, meaning that we cannot tell how many perpetrators are in fact Pakistanis (or other mostly Muslim ethnicities such as Kurds) and how many not. We have seen demands for the deportation to Pakistan of the perpetrators, and even of a mass deportation of British Pakistanis. It seems a lot of people have made up their mind that the problem is simply Pakistanis, or even Muslims, and nothing that comes out of this review will satisfy them if it does not confirm their beliefs.

Who is a Pakistani?

The independent (elected as Reform) MP Rupert Lowe has demanded that perpetrators be deported and that Pakistan could be threatened through the aid he believes they receive from the UK to accept the deportees. The phrase “Pakistani ethnicity” keeps being repeated as if it were the most significant factor. The truth is that Pakistan has six major ethnicities (Sindhi, Muhajir, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Pashtun and Baluch) and many smaller ones; the people involved in the gangs could be from any of those, or more than one, but they all have different languages and cultures although they are bound by Islam. More importantly, not every British ‘Pakistani’ actually has any right to Pakistani nationality anymore; there have been two or three generations born here and the younger generation may have no nationality except British. In the case of the actual immigrants, many had been born in British India and thus were not Pakistani for very long and have an unbroken chain of British nationality going back some 300 years. Pakistan is quite within its rights not to take ‘back’ people whose grandparents left the country in the 1960s, who were born in England and went astray in England. This does not mean we should not deport people who are not citizens who commit serious crimes, let alone people who came here on criminal business, but a British citizen is no less British for having committed a crime and this was not a plot hatched in Mirpur or Karachi. Without that principle, citizenship becomes a glorified visa.

The former Clacton UKIP MP Douglas Carswell, now extolling the virtues of the state of Mississippi on YouTube, has posted a call for a mass deportation. That is a ludicrous, unjustified, racist demand; the majority of British Pakistanis are not criminals and some contribute positively to our community. We also should not fall into the trap of assuming that any interracial relationship between a white working-class girl and a Pakistani is a grooming/rape case in the making. Most Pakistanis are normal people, not gangsters, much as most Italians are not mafiosi.

What is and isn’t rape?

I often finding myself explaining to people why the media commonly report on people “having sex” or “sexual relationships” with people under the age of 16 or even 18 which is the age of consent in much of the US. “That’s rape,” they say; “why don’t they call it rape?”. The answer is that until now, the UK reserves the term rape for, well, rape: forcing someone to have sex against their will, or having sex with them when they do not know what is going on because of unconsciousness, being too drunk, or being too cognitively impaired to be able to understand being asked their consent. The law distinguishes between sex which is not legally valid and the total lack of consent, or no attempt to seek it, or the lack of consent being the whole point. The exception is when the younger party is 12 years old or younger: then, it is classed as rape and is a strict liability offence, i.e. defences such as believing they were over 16 do not apply (presumably because a 12-year-old cannot reasonably be confused with a 16-year-old, and will usually be too young to have any desire for sex anyway). This law was only introduced in 2003; until then, rape always meant rape.

David Blunkett boasted that one of his achievements in the last Labour government was the introduction of “statutory rape”. It wasn’t, though. In countries where statutory rape exists in the law, it’s a separate offence from rape. It’s a different name for what we call sexual activity with a minor. Yvette Cooper, the same politician now planning to classify a group as ‘terrorists’ for throwing paint at an aircraft suspected of being used for the Gaza genocide, plans to enshrine a lie into law: that there is no difference between having sex with a willing 15-year-old and raping them. The former may be inappropriate and the adult should know better, and the teenager may be left broken-hearted and feeling used, and there’s a good reason why it is illegal, but it’s not rape. This change in the law will result in an absurd situation: a charge of rape where the victim is an adult will leave no doubt that the victim was forced, while the same term when the victim is an adolescent could mean that no force needed to be used as the ‘victim’ was willing, and an actual rape victim who had been that age at the time might find herself having to explain that fact. Casey (who gets the law wrong in her report: sex with an under-13 is not merely illegal, but is charged as rape on a strict liability basis) claims that the ‘ambiguity’ in the law had resulted in charges being dropped because it appears that the girls had consented, but there was no need for charges to be dropped as sex with a minor is still a crime; it is just not called rape. Some of the cases of charges being dropped or cases collapsing would have been the result of this pattern of offending being new to the legal system; as it becomes better understood, prosecutors know to look for signs of grooming and of grooming gang activity.

Casey calls for protections to be put in place to avoid criminalising consensual relationships between teenagers; in my experience, public attitudes (and the attitudes of feminists in particular) have been getting harsher towards boys in recent years. I have heard feminists online call a relationship between a 17-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl creepy and inappropriate, when this age gap could be as little as a year and half in reality and the two could be only a year apart at school, and insisting that a 15-year-old boy had ‘raped’ a 13-year-old girl because she was 13; his age was irrelevant to them and when I pointed it out, I was called a “rape apologist”. There will be pressure to make any such window as narrow as possible. Such a window should be enshrined in law rather than mere practice; the latter could be overruled if a girl’s family is wealthy or powerful and a boy’s isn’t, for example.

Grooming and racism

There is no doubt that racism has been boosted by the issue of these gangs and also influences the debate. There are people who have been railing against “mass immigration” for some years, and have jumped on this particular issue to prove that “these people” have a culture which is incompatible with “British culture”. The gangs are assumed to be made up of ‘immigrants’ when in fact British Pakistanis go back, as a large community, to the 1950s; when the three young girls were stabbed in Stockport last year, racists jumped on rumours that the attacker was a Muslim, and started a riot. There is an assumption that the rest of the Muslim community knows who is involved and turns a blind eye; in fact, the groomers often operate away from the eyes of the rest of the Muslim community (in the case of Rochdale, for example, much of the activity went on in the predominantly white Heywood area). It is quite different from the culture of sexual abuse in the churches which was known of in the recent past; the abusers are not pillars of the community but low-skilled workers such as kebab shop owners and workers and taxi drivers. Since this behaviour is contrary to Islam on numerous grounds (the supply of alcohol and drugs, coming between girls and their families, the deception involved in giving ‘gifts’ to justify later abuse, sex outside marriage, let alone rape), it should be no surprise that the perpetrators are in a lot of cases not particularly observant. The problem is a particular class of criminals, not a “problem with Islam” or Muslims in general.

Grooming gangs are far from Britain’s only example of a culture of violent misogyny. Young boys freely access pornography on their mobile phones that give the impression that women enjoy being raped, and lap up the drivel of Andrew Tate and other popular misogynists. Social services and police (the latter of which has been notorious for harbouring rapists and domestic abusers in its ranks) turned a blind eye for decades, calling the victims child prostitutes and sometimes criminalising them instead of pursuing the abusers. Yet when a particular group of offenders appear to be mostly Muslims, the default response is that their ethnicity or religion — how they are “different from us” — is the problem rather than that this is how misogyny has manifested itself among the less scrupulous of them. There have in fact been a number of gangs convicted of sexual abuse and other forms of organised modern slavery whose members are not Pakistanis or Muslims, and the same people always shouting about Muslim grooming gangs say nothing when the gang members are white. It’s a bit less complicated when you can’t say their culture is not ours or is not compatible with ours, but if you are only angry when the perpetrators are not white and the victims are, that is a good indication that you are a racist.

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