An American soldier, Iraq 2005.
"Those Brits are a strange old race. They show affection by abusing each other, will think nothing of casually stopping in the middle of a firefight for a 'brewup' and eat food that I wouldn't give to a dying dog. But fuck me, I would rather have one British squaddie on side than an entire battalion of Spetznaz! Why? Because the British are the only people in this world who when the chips are down and it seems like there is no hope left, instead of getting sentimental or hysterical, will strap on their pack, charge their rifle, light up a smoke, and calmly and wryly grin, 'Well, are we going then you wanker?" 🏴 🇬🇧
It genuinely amused me that people think replacing Starmer will make things better.
From Boris Johnson's election onwards, we've been shuffling the bollards on the Titanic.
You have to actually change direction if you want to avoid crashing into the iceberg:
- End Net Zero
- Make business viable again
- Get welfare under control
- Fund defence
- Ensure equality under the law
- Arrest criminals and keep them in jail
- Deport illegal immigrants and close the border
- Bring the civil service to heel
Burnham will become as unpopular as Starmer within months since he isn't going to do any of that.
Here’s the problem. The liberal political class wants us to treat atrocities like Belfast as single, random, isolated incidents. “Yes, it’s horrific, but don’t overreact,” they say. “Let the police do their job. Justice will be delivered. Let’s remain united,” and so on.
But the public can see that such incidents *aren’t* random or isolated. They are, in fact, all the consequence of massive state failure in the area of asylum and immigration. All roads lead back there.
That’s why people are angry.. They are sick of the platitudes that get trotted out after each fresh incident. They don’t want to hear them anymore. They know that the decisions of establishment politicians have brought us to this current pass, and they don’t trust those same politicians to fix things, especially when some of them refuse to even recognise that the public’s anger is justified.
There has been a huge vibe shift in recent years. Imagine - God forbid - there were another 7/7. Does anyone think the public response would be anything like as restrained as it was then? We are in really dangerous territory.
The public don’t want flowers and candles and “Don’t let them divide us.” They want someone who says, “I recognise that the state has failed abjectly. We have allowed far too many people to settle in the country without knowing who they truly are. It has disrupted your communities. Your anger is justified. And I will do everything in my power to put things right.”
Any politician unwilling to articulate that message, fully and sincerely, is effectively sanctioning more years of growing social disharmony and discord. Things cannot heal until those in power recognise the extent of the problem and what it will take to fix it. And, on both counts, most of them don’t.
That’s why the next few years are going to be very, very turbulent.
You might have heard of Maggie Oliver.
She's a former Greater Manchester detective who, in 2012, was ordered to abandon her investigation into the systematic rape of children in Rochdale, and decided she would rather resign her warrant card rather than do so.
Maggie, as that would imply, is one of the good ones. I constantly ask how our police can consider themselves worthy of the badge if they are not willing to return the badge rather than commit injustice in its name. Maggie did just that; she was asked to cover for criminals, so she told the shirts to stuff themselves and handed back her commission.
She won a small but consequential victory in the High Court on Friday. Mr Justice Kimblin granted her foundation a full judicial review of whether the British state has actually done anything about the recommendations it accepted, in 2022, at the end of a seven-year inquiry into the institutional cover-up of decades of child sexual abuse.
Maggie Oliver is one woman. She has no political party behind her and no standing in Whitehall. She has no peerage, no chambers, no billionaire foundation footing her bills.
She was ordered, by senior officers, to drop her investigation into a network of men who were raping children in industrial quantities in her city, because of the demographics to which those men belong made the whole thing a bit awkward.
Fourteen years on, she has done what nobody else in this country has been able to. She has hauled the British state into open court to answer for the choice it made, over four years and under two governments, to hold a seven-year, £200 million inquiry into the institutional cover-up of child abuse and implement, deliberately, none of that inquiry's recommendations.
The Home Office accepted those recommendations in 2022. So did the Department for Education, the police inspectorates and the Crown Prosecution Service. And then nothing happened. The recommendations sat. The departments restructured. Ministers rotated.
The girls and women who had given evidence aged. More such operations continued around the country, while the men who had run the previous set of them either walked free, left the country, or drew their own pensions.
The state, in the manner of every institution Tony Blair ever built, had decided that the writing of the report was the action, and the doing of the report could be handed off to history.
That is what Maggie Oliver has now forced into court. And the political class knows what that means. The Home Secretary has not commented. The Prime Minister has not commented. The candidates jockeying through the post-Starmer Labour succession have, at the time of writing, failed even to speak her name, as though they know that, if they do, lightning will flash in the sky and they'll be turned into a pillar of Tesco's-own-brand dishwasher salt.
They are silent because they recognise, accurately, that the answers a judicial review will produce - to the question of why their inquiry's findings were treated as ornamental - will, should, must end the careers of every official who was supposed to act on them and did not. That councillors and councils, mayors, indeed entire political parties, will be caught under ultraviolet light and shown for their guilt.
It's time a government did what the British state has spent twenty years declining to do. Take on institutional failure.
Name the institutions that failed, in public, on the record. Name the officers and officials who covered it up, and the officers and officials who pressed for the cover-up too. Prosecute them under the standards that any other employee of a public organisation defrauding the public would expect to face.
The recommendations the inquiry produced must be implemented in full, alongside whatever further measures a second look at the evidence then demands.
There will not be another inquiry into the inquiries. There will be the verdicts.
Maggie Oliver is one of the bravest people in Britain. She has earned, by her own resignation and by fourteen years and a foundation and a court case carried on her back, the right to expect from a future British government the simple thing that ought to have happened in 2014, in 2016, in 2018, in 2022 and in every other year of this national disgrace.
She has not yet been given it; we have not yet been given it. But it will be given, and soon.
As someone with a worm’s eye view of the legislative process, it really irritates me that Starmer’s spin for the poor local election results is that his Govt hasn’t been moving fast enough. There were 40 bills in the first parliamentary session and there are 37 in the second, as set out in yesterday’s King’s Speech. Starmer has created 96 peers – a higher rate per year than any previous Prime Minister. He could not be going any faster.
The fact that the legislation the Govt has rammed through has not delivered growth or reduced the tax burden on working people or lowered the cost of living – delivered the ‘change’ that Labour promised – is because they’re not designed to do that. They’re designed to placate the Party’s ‘stakeholders’ – backbench Labour MPs, trade unions, NGOs, think tanks, lobby groups, allies in the legal profession, cheerleaders in the media, etc.
It’s been bleedin’ obvious to everyone on the opposition benches – and probably some on the Govt benches too – that the legislation was introduced in the last parliamentary session – particularly the Employment Rights Act – will impede growth, not accelerate it.
We’ve told the Govt’s ministers this in the chamber again and again and everything we’ve predicted would happen has happened – rising unemployment, rising inflation, accelerating borrowing costs, an unmanageable welfare bill, exodus of high income-earners, thereby increasing the tax burden on the rest of us, etc.
The idea that if the Govt had been going *even faster* – which is just straightforwardly impossible – the country would be better off, is for the birds. Even as a piece of spin, it’s pathetic. The reason we’re in an economic doom spiral is because this Govt is only interested in pandering to its ‘stakeholders’ and their only motive is to line their own pockets and advance their own narrow sectional interests.
Changing the leader will make no difference. We need a Prime Minister and a Govt who are going to prioritise the national interest. I don’t see anyone in the pack of hyenas stalking Starmer who’s going to do that.
This is hugely enjoyable. Thank you @afneil for showing the MSM how it should be done
Andrew Neil Confronts MP Stephen Kinnock About Labour’s Performance In T... https://t.co/dy5tSBQqeo via @YouTube