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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The Madleen, en route to Gaza

Last week I heard the introduction to a BBC debate on whether war crimes are taking place in Gaza, featuring Today presenter Anna Foster and a panel of “expert guests”. She introduced it by saying that the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had changed his view, having defended the campaign until recently, and stating his opinion that Israel had perpetrated war crimes in Gaza in an article for Haaretz. I switched off after a few minutes, having heard Foster’s lecture on why we shouldn’t call it genocide:

The decision of whether someone is guilty of war crimes will always be made in a court, not a radio studio; words like ‘genocide’ are a legal definition of a specific crime, rather than an emotive description of events that upset us, the latter use — incorrect until a judge decides — is increasing. 

I will concede that spurious accusations of genocide happen; we hear it used to refer to actual examples of oppression, such as by Israelis of Palestinians before the actual genocide began, and by racists, such as those who claim “race-mixing is genocide” or that a “white genocide” is taking place in South Africa right now. However, the use of ‘genocide’ to refer to Israel’s actions are not a mere emotional reaction and nor have they increased recently. Rather, they increased when genocidal actions accompanied by genocidal rhetoric started being relayed to us by Palestinian witnesses in Gaza from October 2023 onwards. I have previously heard someone on the radio tell us we mustn’t use the term ‘genocide’ because the matter is before the International Criminal Court and we might prejudice the outcome! This completely overlooks the point of why there is an anti-genocide movement at all: people want it stopped. They want action.

First, it’s not illegal to talk about genocide in regard to Israel’s onslaught against the people of Gaza. It’s illegal in the UK to cover a situation that is the subject of active proceedings in a British court which is going to be tried by a jury in a way that might prejudice or unduly influence it (e.g. disclose information or claims about a victim or a witness). This is not the case with matters which will be heard by judges only, such as civil cases or appeals, and it is not the case when the matter is not being heard by a British court, jury or no jury. The ICC is an international court, located in the Netherlands, so it is in no sense a British court, and does not use juries. Second, any word for a crime is a legal term, and when a crime is discovered — say, a body is found of someone who was obviously killed by someone else — words like murder are freely used. For example, after the killing of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in London in 1992, headlines called it murder and one headline read “Boy found clinging to sex murder mum”. After an innocent man was accused of the crime and acquitted after it turned out that a ‘confession’ was made to impress a ‘girlfriend’ who turned out to be an undercover police officer, it was later traced to a serial rapist and double murderer from south-east London, Robert Napper, who pled guilty to manslaughter and was sent to Broadmoor.

Third, and most importantly, the standard of evidence required to act to prevent or stop a crime taking place is much less than what is required to convict someone of a crime and send them to prison or the gallows. You cannot try people for anything without taking such action; you cannot put a concentration camp guard on trial for torture, murder, genocide or whatever while he is still in post. This applies to ordinary people as well as to the state. When the police are made aware of a household or institution in which children are being abused, they raid the house to rescue the children. They do not wait until an individual is proven guilty. If two strong men are walking together and discover a man raping a woman, they disturb the man and if he does not run away, they pull him off. They do not have a debate about it or go and try to convince a panel of experts that what they were seeing really was rape; by that time, the woman might be dead. When atrocities were being clearly reported from the war in the former Yugoslavia, military action was demanded and (albeit three years late) delivered; we did not wait for anyone to be convicted or for a court to rule on what legal terms applied. It took many more years for that to happen.

History shows that genocides only stop when they are stopped. The Holocaust stopped when Nazi Germany was occupied by the victorious allied powers and the concentration camps liberated; the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda stopped when the Rwandan Patriotic Front occupied the country and forced the Interahamwe out. When the genocidal campaign of the Bosnian Serbs (the Chetniks) was raging in the early 1990s, western radio talk shows and newspaper letters pages were full of calls for military action — the deployment of troops and use of bombs — to stop it; today, the campaign has for much of the last two years been too timid, too afraid of being arrested for “supporting terrorism” or accusations of antisemitism (and also, after the wars of 20 years ago, distrustful of western military intervention) to demand anything more than a ceasefire, or at most the cessation of arms supply and for their governments to take a “tough stance” on Israel. 

But it’s soul-destroying to regularly see footage of atrocities on social media and then hear both radio presenters and politicians falling over themselves not to offend the perpetrators or their supporters by calling this what it is, to insist that Israel, a reprobate state with a human rights record far worse than many third-world dictatorships, “has a right to defend itself” from an internal rebellion from natives it has incarcerated and oppressed in numerous ways for the past half century. Last month when our politicians started to concede that our government’s close relationship with Israel might be too much of an embarrassment to continue with, David Lammy’s speech did not mention the words crime, atrocity or genocide once and was laden with appeals to his own support for Israel, his condemnation of Hamas, his desire for “a strong friendship with you based on shared values, with flourishing ties between our people and societies”, Britain’s bilateral relationship with Israel and a whole lot of other cant aimed at Israel’s “better nature” and its presumed concern for “the image of the state of Israel in the eyes of the world”. (Let’s not forget, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Labour party in the 2019 election, when a senior female Labour politician was asked if she considered it antisemitic to even talk of Israeli atrocities, she hurriedly agreed that it was.)

Yet, the censorship continues in the mainstream media; we continue to watch our friends and their children being murdered in plain view while the media debate whether crimes are even taking place (and cutting off people who say they are) and politicians continue to placate both Israel and its apologists in London and New York. Enough. It is absurd to talk of waiting for the ICC to rule before we can call it genocide. It is like waiting for the outcome of the Nuremberg Trials before Auschwitz has even been liberated, and those who silence and censor talk of genocide are collaborators, and we must entertain the possibility that they are willing collaborators.

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Timothy Evans (John Hurt) is led to the gallows in 1971 film 10 Rillington Place. He was later proven to be innocent.

Peter Hitchens, writing for UnHerd this week (and in a videoed discussion with its editor-in-chief, Freddie Sayers), makes a case for bringing back the death penalty, abolished for murder in the UK in 1965. He opines that capital punishment, when “properly conducted”, “makes a country less vengeful and more gentle” and that the alternative of long imprisonment is damnable on the grounds of its cruelty to the convict, a point made by the utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1868. He would require a number of reforms to the judicial system before supporting reinstating the death penalty, among them abolishing majority verdicts, imposing stricter controls on juror selection such as a higher minimum age and requirements of life experience and education and allowing judges to “halt trials where they believe the prosecution is employing emotion rather than evidence”. He also alleges that the abolition of the death penalty weakened the British tradition of the unarmed police, leading to the arming of the police by the “back door” with the use of Tasers and “a new informal death penalty — but one without charge, trial, appeal or the possibility of reprieve, carried out by frightened men and women in a microsecond of fear and doubt”. It also correlates with a vast increase in incidents of both homicide and woundings that, but for improvements in modern healthcare, would have meant a massive increase in murders since the death penalty was abolished in 1965.

I take issue with the suggestion that a country with the death penalty is “less vengeful and more gentle”. He asks us to look not at the USA but at Britain up until the mid-1950s. Hitchens was born in 1951 and thus his memory of that period will be a little sketchy. The execution of Derek Bentley, a 19-year-old with a learning disability whose 16-year-old accomplice had shot a police officer dead during a robbery, took place in 1953; his alleged words, “let him have it”, were assumed to mean ‘shoot’ rather than “hand over the gun” (and both the accused denied these words were said). The Home Secretary, David Maxwell-Fyfe, cited public opinion among the reasons not to grant clemency to Bentley, in particular because the victim was a police officer. He dismisses the example of the US, “an empire haunted by its history of slavery and violence”, but in the US, the only other country in the developed world to retain the death penalty, families campaign to have those who killed their loved ones executed even after decades in prison on death row (as in this case in Indiana, a state that never had slavery); in the UK, it is generally accepted that murderers whose crimes are not highly aggravated (e.g. by the victim being a child, or there being multiple victims, or being tortured or raped before their killing) will be released after serving their minimum period of imprisonment, albeit on a monitored life licence. And surely the reason our police continue not to carry firearms, unlike in the US, is that the population mostly does not possess them. American police carry guns, whether they work in a death penalty state or not, and the ready availability of guns is the major reason our murder rates do not approach theirs.

I’m not fundamentally opposed to the death penalty in the sense of believing that we are somehow no better than murderers ourselves if we put a serial killer or war criminal to death. Hitchens, however, characterises this as a position of the radical left (though not the ‘serious’ Left, as “two of the greatest figures of the British Left, Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin”, along with many working-class Labour MPs, voted in its favour in 1948), yet I have seen it expressed in recent years by figures very definitely of the Right (e.g. Lawrence Fox), including on UnHerd recently. Although Labour were in power when it was abolished, it has survived three subsequent bouts of Tory government, one of them lasting 18 years. With it having last been used in the early 1960s and abolished for other than treason in 1965, sixty years ago, three whole generations will have never known a world in which it existed. This seems to be the case of members of parliament exercising their judgement rather than sacrificing it to their electors’ opinion. I do believe it should be available to war crimes tribunals, precisely because the risk of misidentification is that much less and also because the gravity of the crimes that much higher: kidnap, torture, rape and murder on a grand scale, on the orders of political and military leaders. A person picked up by police at the roadside and accused of being Ratko Mladić could prove his innocence more easily than a Black man picked up in Mississippi and accused of a murder committed by another Black man in a society where many white people would fail to distinguish one Black person from another and might even say “they all look the same”.

Hitchens notes that the two executions he witnessed in the US were for crimes which were long in the past, and were so disconnected from those crimes as a result that they could not be expected to deter anything. However, that time lag occasionally allows for an innocent person to have their case re-examined; when the UK had the death penalty, it was carried out weeks after the sentence was issued. Timothy Evans, for example, was tried for his wife’s murder on 11th January 1950 and hanged on 9th March the same year. A major witness was John Christie, his ground-floor neighbour, a man with multiple previous convictions for thefts and one for malicious wounding (from having hit a woman on the head with a cricket bat), supposedly a reformed character after serving as a special constable (a volunteer policeman) more recently. Three years later, Christie himself was revealed to be the killer, having been arrested for numerous other murders of women including his wife. His trial began on 22nd June 1953 and he was hanged on 15th July the same year. This is considerably less time than it normally takes for a miscarriage of justice to be acknowledged and redressed; first appeals nearly always fail. The majority of the victims of the 1970s miscarriages of justice, such as Stefan Kiszko and many of the groups convicted wrongly of IRA bombings, would have been executed less than two months after trial. So, we have the choice of a swift execution or a long wait on Death Row in the hope that some mistakes might be corrected.

To be fair, Hitchens says he would not support the return of the death penalty in the present legal climate, without some significant reforms. There is a perception that no amount of judicial safeguards and no evidential threshold will be enough to prevent all miscarriages of justice and one is too many. In the event that a bill is proposed to reintroduced the death penalty, I suspect it will not have such safeguards because it will be in response to an egregious murder and laden with demands to execute more murderers rather than make sure we don’t execute anyone wrongly. He suggests abolishing majority verdicts (i.e. requiring unanimous ones), a measure justified by the need to circumvent “juror nobbling” in trials of professional criminals or gangsters (perhaps unanimity should be required outside of those particular situations). When someone is convicted, the law does not distinguish between a majority verdict and a unanimous one, or a case won on the basis of a welter of scientific and other types of evidence and a case won on the back of a lot of weak circumstantial evidence. People later suspected or proven to be innocent were portrayed and perceived as the most evil and depraved person in the country at the time of their conviction; Hitchens mentions Lucy Letby, but the cases of Sally Clark and Donna Anthony (bereaved mothers accused of murders which did not in fact happen at all), or Gerry Conlon, told by his trial judge that he should have been charged with treason so he could be sentenced to death, then by the appeal judge that it was better that a few innocent people suffer than the whole system be impugned, are just as instructive. In the kinder, gentler world of 1951, all these people would have been hanged in six weeks, rather than the years it took to prove their innocence.

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A little over a week ago, in council elections across the UK and a parliamentary by-election in a historically safe Labour seat, the so-called Reform UK party, whose leader is Nigel Farage who previously ran the Brexit Party and before that was leader of UKIP and is notorious for bringing everything down to immigration, gained control of a number of provincial county and unitary councils which neither that party nor its predecessors have ever done before, as well as gaining the seat of Runcorn and Helsby on the outskirts of Liverpool from Labour, a by-election triggered by the resignation of the old MP who was convicted of assaulting a constituent in the street last October. Keir Starmer, the prime minister, penned a piece for the Times (paywalled, but archived here) which contains a lot of platitudes but very little substance other than a warning not to rip up fiscal rules and a mention of “reforming the out-of-control benefits bill left by the previous government” which started its period in office with an attack on disabled people’s allowances, but a major response has been that Labour should focus more on “stopping the boats” than on anything that might improve anyone’s standard of living, least of all the threat of cuts to disability allowances, something Labour freely condemned when they were in opposition and the Tories were doing it.

One of the loudest Labour MPs favouring an over-emphasis on immigration is Jonathan Hinder, a former police inspector who is now MP for Pendle and Clitheroe in Lancashire, one of the counties Reform gained control of (from the Tories) last week. His Twitter feed is full of “culture war” talking points, accusations of Labour being dominated by a “liberal elite” out of touch with Labour’s ‘traditional’ (read white) working-class base. Hinder wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph, a paper heavily associated with the Tory party and probably read by few working-class people, which starts with a claim that “the engines of the liberal establishment are revving up to explain why Reform’s success is not down to the one thing we know it definitely is: immigration”. He makes a brief statement of three examples of his support for what is commonly thought of as Labour policy, but then proclaims that “immigration is fundamentally an economic issue as much as it is anything else, and working-class people are generally the losers”. He demands that Labour pursue a “net-zero” migration goal, of one person entering for one leaving.  He has also called for ‘reform’ of our human rights rules on the basis that a number of deportations have been blocked on “right to family life” grounds, as if the HRA did not guarantee rights to British citizens also (for example, the right of disabled people to live in their own homes rather than institutions).

There is a tendency for ‘populist’ right-wing politicians to talk of immigration, and sometimes ‘identify’, as codewords for race. Judging by Hinder’s recent posts, I suspect the same is true of him. When the Telegraph reported that an 18-year-old Muslim council candidate won a seat on Burnley after giving an interview to PoliticsHome in which she advocated separate public spaces for women, such as gyms, because Muslim women were not comfortable sharing spaces with men, he proclaimed: “we have to put our ‘cultural sensitivities’ in the bin and sort this out. Intolerable”. He also retweeted someone who called this “proper sectarian stuff”. Two weeks earlier, when the Supreme Court gave its ruling on the meaning of ‘woman’ in British equality law (i.e. that it excluded trans women), he gave it his enthusiastic support, sharing among other things Blue Labour’s tweet calling it a “common sense and definitive ruling” based on “biological reality”. This ruling was partly about the circumstances in which one sex can be discriminated against, such as in crisis spaces such as women’s shelters and rape counselling centres, as well as more mundane women’s facilities such as toilets and, yes, gyms. But as soon as Muslim women want spaces away from men, this becomes ‘intolerable’.

An important aspect of these results that has been glossed over in the debate over what lesson Labour should learn from them is that the biggest loser in terms of seats was the Tory party who lost 674 council seats in the authorities in which elections were held (which was by no means all of them) compared to Labour’s 187. Reform gained 677 (from nothing), the Lib Dems gained 163 and the Greens 44. Many of the county councils were rural counties whose urban centres have been excised to unitary authorities since the late 1990s: Nottingham, Leicester and Derby are all unitary, and aren’t governed by the new Reform (or Reform coalition) county councils. The Lib Dems also gained control of three councils: Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Shropshire (the last from the Tories, the other two from hung councils), while both Labour and the Tories gained no councils between them. The dissatisfaction with Labour is clear, but what also appears to be happening is that the former Tory vote is moving to Reform, and that depending on the performance of Reform councillors around the country, Labour at the next election may not have the advantage of a divided Right anymore. It has been reported that many candidates stood for Reform not expecting, or even wanting, to win and have no idea how they will juggle their council commitments with work. How this situation will be resolved remains to be seen, but it could result in some quicker than expected council by-elections.

But as for why Labour lost so badly in places they should have won, just a year into a Labour government, perhaps immigration played a part but there is no denying that people are angry at Labour continuing Tory policies of targeting the welfare system and those who need the support it provides while spouting rhetoric about “working people”. Imposing means-testing on winter fuel payments is pure political folly, even if a lot of the recipients can afford it, because pensioners are far more likely to vote than younger people, but targeting disabled people who bore the brunt of fifteen years of Tory austerity policies and the demonisation that went with it, behaving as if even more people are getting support to live with disability who “don’t need it” than the Tories claimed, simply betrays everything many of us thought Labour stood for. Labour have touted reforms (read cuts) to PIP (Personal Independence Payment) as a means of getting people back to work; PIP is not an out-of-work payment but rather a way of meeting the cost of being disabled, by paying for things like wheelchairs, vehicles, adapted computers and software and the like. By continually harping on the virtues of work, they ignore the fact that many disabled people could not work reliably because their condition requires medical attention often, because of relapses or crises; it ignores the fact that a lot of workplaces are physically inaccessible to wheelchair users and many employers are unaccommodating, even if the job could be done by a disabled person.

When Kamala Harris lost the US presidential election last year, some of her supporters blamed the loss on ‘woke’ or her perceived closeness to trans rights, despite these issues having been present four years ago when Joe Biden won. All the immigration issues we have now were present less than a year ago when Keir Starmer won a large majority in parliament, and progressive parties won a combined majority of the popular vote. What’s changed is Labour’s stance towards pensioners and the disabled. The people insisting that the turnaround could only be because of immigration are those who already have an anti-immigration bias. Labour have to understand that if they do not serve the needs of the working class, Reform will step in and cater to the prejudices of some of them. They cannot beat Reform at their own game because Reform will always proclaim that it is not enough or find another scapegoat. Labour need to get to work at repairing the damage caused by fifteen years of Tory government, restoring the fabric of society — social care, social housing, youth clubs, libraries, schools — rather than boasting that they will make people’s lives harder, not easier. They have a substantial majority in parliament and four more years to make a positive change. If they spend their time making it a meaner place with more clampdowns on disability benefits and work visas, they will produce the conditions for Reform to sweep to power in 2029.

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A major driver training organisation in the UK, which is part of a major driver recruitment agency, today claimed that the UK’s haulage industry risks falling into the same crisis of recruitment seen during the height of the pandemic five years ago unless it “tackles a looming retirement crisis”, with 55% of today’s professional drivers aged between 50 and 65 and little interest in the occupation from school leavers. John Keelan-Edwards of Driver Hire Training mentioned the lack of overseas drivers that we ‘enjoyed’ during the post-2004 years and also the lack of diversity in the profession. He suggested temporary sign-on bonuses but said that the biggest necessity was persuading school leavers of “the fulfilling and varied careers they could have” as lorry drivers. There is no mention, at least in this little article, of the reason why people do not want to be truck drivers anymore, and are leaving the industry, which is the poor treatment and facilities we are expected to tolerate. Tomasz Orsyński wrote an article in July 2021 detailing twenty reasons for the shortage, which includes some of the points I make here, and nothing has changed.

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, I was doing mostly “class 1”, or articulated/semi truck work. This was for a mixture of mostly air and palletised freight companies and the Royal Mail. In 2021 I let my air freight clearance lapse, because I did not want to work for any of the operators around Heathrow anymore. The work was tedious, often involving sitting for hours at the cargo sheds around the airport. Facilities were extremely poor: the ‘Horseshoe’ had one toilet facility for all the male drivers consisting of one urinal, one actual toilet and two sinks. At bonded warehouses (which store air freight which has already been security cleared), the law states that a visiting driver has a right to use a toilet and should be escorted if need be, but they would sometimes refuse if it wasn’t convenient for them (at one point I was told to defecate in a bush if I was desperate). One of said companies (a subcontractor to several major airlines) sent me on a trip to Manchester, and staff at their depots kept me waiting for hours at more than one of the ports of call resulting in my exceeding my 15-hour working day on two occasions, and then refused to pay me for the full day as it would make the violation too obvious. (They told me I should have rung them at one of the places concerned; they should have known I was doing the Manchester run, and got the freight out quickly as it was time critical.)

I did three or four separate stints at the Royal Mail between 2017 and 2023 (I had previously worked for them at Vauxhall, since demolished to make way for the new American embassy and luxury developments at Nine Elms) but that was driving small trucks on local routes, not big trucks on ‘trunk’ routes). On the first of these I got a lecture from the transport manager at Woking for stopping mid-journey to use a toilet, having found the toilets at their Coventry depot inadequate (meaning: few in number, dirty, smelly and crowded). My most recent encounter with them ended after an encounter with a rude “health and safety” jobsworth at their new national hub outside Daventry, who barked at me to put my yellow jacket on when walking ten paces from the door of the building to the door of my truck cab in broad daylight on a 30ºC (or more) summer day. I then had to explain myself to another jobsworth at the local depot in Greenford, west London, and that ended with him telling me not to come in for any more shifts. This local depot had an infestation of rats, one of which I saw in the room where the staff vending machines and water fountain were located; I was informed that said rats had been disturbed by the nearby works on the new high-speed railway. Royal Mail insists on long-sleeved jackets, unlike almost any other logistics company (a lot of construction companies insist on high-visibility trousers as well); these are tolerable at night and in colder weather, but being made of woven plastic are extremely uncomfortable when it is hot, something the organisation has not taken into account at all. The same Daventry depot, despite being newly built, had several toilets out of commission that day (it has fewer toilets than the old National Distribution Centre round the corner), but had time to employ a lackey to drive around in a big car looking for petty “health and safety” breaches to nag people about.

In my experience, the bigger the company, the longer the list of rules and the worse environment it will be to work at. The biggest offenders are the international logistics companies with three letters for names. In the month or so after leaving Royal Mail in 2023, I had a two-week stint at a printworks in west London, which was not perfect by any means (moving pallets stacked high with heavy printed material is hard work) and the cab stank of the previous driver’s food, with crisp dust you could taste in the air (another common problem), but I mostly delivered to and from small printing companies and was required to wear a yellow jacket only once, on the last delivery to a depot of one of those three-letter companies. The jackets have their place, but have spread far beyond that; they are seen (or posed) as an essential guarantee of safety, when in reality they seem to be a substitute for common sense. As truck drivers, we deal with hazards all the time, and most of them are not clad in fluorescent jackets. The way to avoid accidents is for the driver to look where he or she is going and for others not to do stupid things like walk in front of a moving vehicle or behind it when reversing.

As Tomasz Orsyński put it, drivers are treated like thieves; I would say the rules at many sites presume we are thieves, idiots or both. He mentions the practice of expecting drivers to hand in their keys and sit in a waiting room, or even a cage, while being loaded or unloaded; this is often in addition to the truck being physically immobilised to stop it being driven off the bay. When a vehicle is being “live loaded”, i.e. loaded through the back while the trailer is connected to a tractor unit, or it is a single truck, one of these measures is perfectly sensible, but immobilising the truck makes all the others unnecessary. Some depots do not allow the driver to disconnect the truck so as to remain in the vehicle, and others demand we hand over the keys and wait in their waiting room (with no guarantee of how long) even when the truck is not coupled. It appears that somewhere along the line, a group of managers has sat in a room and brainstormed everything that could go wrong, or has ever been known to, and everything they could do to prevent them, then done all of them when only one or two would be sufficient. The measures are imposed from the top down, not in consultation with drivers who typically are not unionised at all. The result is that drivers are told: these are the customers and what the customer wants, the customer gets, and if you don’t like it, tough.

So, you can go round schools telling the kids that truck driving is some sort of enjoyable, varied career where they can get to see the country and meet people, but the truth is that large parts of it have been taken over by a few small companies where the senior management are remote from the workforce; they are impersonal and have a long list of demeaning, often pointless rules. The family firms where the boss started out as a driver in his dad’s firm are mostly long gone. There will be a lot of waiting around, a lot of repetition and a lot of physical work and facilities will be poor. A lot of schoolchildren will be used to that, of course, but might have been looking forward to being treated like an adult, something that is getting rarer and rarer in this industry. If they want to recruit or retain drivers, they will need to look at how they treat the ones they have, because people will not tolerate being treated like dirt indefinitely.

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