James Conaghan

Creative soul and lover of facts.

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." (George Bernard Shaw)

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

"Helping you to communicate with clarity" your profile boasts. Please feel free to do that any time soon. I'll help you with factual statements from St Helens Council as quoted verbatim from St Helens Star:

In a statement, St Helens Council leader George Woodward, who was elected as Reform swept to power, said he was "pleased to announce" that St Helens Council "will not be engaging with, nor funding Refugee Week this year".

At the weekend, Cllr Woodward had said the previous administration had "earmarked £60,000 of taxpayers' money to pay for the event".

He then added: "In light of the illegal immigration emergency facing Britain, we don't think that this is an appropriate use of council resources."

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

@DisabledRebel @TheBritLad I'm guessing you don't know what irony means.

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

@MissLauraFong @NickBuckleyMBE @RaheemKassam @RestoreBritain @RupertLowe10 Doubtful.

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

The selective suppression of material differences between two cases, which is precisely what you have done, is exactly the kind of thing you'd be expected to identify and challenge in opposing counsel's arguments. Doing it yourself on a public forum, for ideological effect, is reprehensible. Your own words apply: in the bin!

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

Putting aside your mischaracterisation of 'fascists", I'm sometimes never sure who is being the most fascistic, the protesters, or the police.

The (probably) most honest critique of heavy-handed policing is that it reveals selective enforcement: something demonstrably true in many jurisdictions. This is a serious problem about institutional bias and equal, or rather unequal treatment under the law. A juxtaposition that was clearly evident in how the police acted in the case of Henry Nowak.

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

Did she really say at the end of the clip that "it's not necessarily to do with immigration"? I don't know about "absolute lunatics" but IMO, the Green party are the most naive, and the most prone to confirmation bias, in the arena. She's also one of the most patronising individuals ever to appear on an already biased TV show.

That said, I've never really taken to Rob Kenyon, but fair's fair, and on the subject of immigration I agree with him. His statement is logically unassailable at the most basic level: population growth of any kind adds to housing demand. It also adds to the strain on our public services, eg: NHS. Population growth is population growth, and demand for housing will be created whether it comes from natural growth or migration. But the scale matters, and where it comes from. Net migration has been adding around 700,000 people annually, which drives up demand, house prices and rents. For instance, the Migration Advisory Committee's analysis found that a 1% increase in population due to migration leads to a 1% rise in house prices. That's not a controversial claim, it's arithmetic.

As an aside, it was a cringe-worthy moment when he was confronted about that repost of his. There's no way around that one. He admitted it was disgusting, and it really is indefensible. It may cost him and Reform dearly, in Makerfield. As they say on social media, there's always a tweet.

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

@twoclarkkents @Jughead_Fiddles @LeoKearse I'm pretty sure you were the one assuming who were reasonable and who aren't. And if you won't read past 280 characters that just confirms your rather obvious confirmation bias. I was past caring what you think at your assumption that only you know who the reasonable people are.

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

"Most reasonable people"? Oh. Let's look at what's reasonable then.

Unfortunately, we don't have any polling that would tell us which "group" is right or wrong on interpretation as you frame it. But we do have polling that consistently tells us that the broader public is far more sceptical of Starmer than of Farage on questions of policing, immigration, and straight-talking. Also, we have YouGov data from January 2026 showing 75% of people have an unfavourable opinion of starmer. Then we have the following facts.

The "I met the family" move is classic Starmer. He takes a morally sympathetic position and uses it as a shield against substantive challenge. The family's wishes about not stoking division are genuine and understandable, but Starmer deploying them to frame *questions about policing policy* as exploitation, is a rhetorical sleight of hand: something his lawyerly big self is adept at. The family don't want riots, no 'reasonable' person does, but they haven't said the two-tier policing question is illegitimate. Starmer is collapsing those two things deliberately. He's a technocrat who learned politics through institutions that reward process over instinct. And we've just seen how process played out on the night of Henry Nowak's death.

The Nowak family's request was essentially: investigate this properly, fix it, don't use it for point-scoring, and Starmer selectively amplifed that to the "don't cause division" part while being conspicuously quiet on the substantive question the family implicitly raised: i.e. why did police apparently credit a false accusation of racism over a dying boy's repeated statements that he'd been stabbed? That is the two-tier policing question, and it emanates from the family's own tragic experience, not from Nigel Farage.

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

It is almost idiotic but not unsurprising that a Labour MP would misquote what Nigel Farage actually said. It is even more idiotic that you would attempt to make it mean something it didn't.

It wasn't "cold rage" that Nigel Farage said, it was "pure cold rage". He's telling his base to be angry, stay angry, and direct that anger into political pressure on this issue. That's what opposition politicians do. It's what Farage has always done particularly well. He's a gifted translator of diffuse public frustration into focused political energy. Something his opposition, like you, don't understand and loathe him for.

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

Apparently you don't understand the meaning of any of the three terms you've used. I'll help you. Gammon is the raw hind leg of a pig that has been cured, either by dry-salting or brining, and it may be smoked.

It wasn't "cold rage" that Nigel Farage used, it was "pure cold rage". He's telling his base to be angry, stay angry, and direct that anger into political pressure on this issue. That's what opposition politicians do. It's what Farage has always done particularly well, he's a gifted translator of diffuse public frustration into focused political energy.

As for "tantrum". That's what you're having, and it's borne of the usual Farage Derangement Syndrome. It's quite common among airheads who can't think for themselves.

As a gesture of goodwill, and in parting, I'll wish you a good day. But I don't mean it.

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

You're a better man than I, Gunga Jim. Spot on analysis regarding the erosion of policing by consent post-Macpherson. It's a shame the same analytical mindset seems to be missing from those who are charged with training our police service.

The DEI-inflected training frameworks that have entered British policing in the last 25 years - perhaps moreso in the last decade - were presented as solving a trust deficit, primarily the post-Macpherson institutional response to the Lawrence inquiry. But several of those frameworks, if they are examined honestly, actually violate Principle Two as well as Principle Five of The peelian Principles (as you have cited them). If significant portions of the public believe the police apply different standards based on race, religion, or political affiliation, whether that belief is held by white working-class communities in the north of England or by minority communities in inner cities, then those frameworks have actually worsened the legitimacy problem they claim to fix.

The Macpherson legacy is complicated. The institutional racism finding was serious and the Lawrence case was shameful. But the corrective response was poorly designed. It treated differential outcomes as proof of differential intent, which is both philosophically and morally weak, and it embedded into police training a presumption that impartiality itself could be a form of bias. Once they accepted that premise, Peelian impartiality became reframed as a problem rather than a principle.

The question that follows from all of that, IMHO, is this. Can they restore Peelian policing from within the current institutional culture, or has the philosophical corruption gone so deep that it requires something more disruptive? Frankly, I am of the opinion, that the same question could be asked of a parliament where the prime minister allows his personal loathing of Nigel Farage - a legitimately elected MP and party leader - to cloud his every thought. The same applies to the herd who follow his lead.

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

Where exactly is the evidence that Nigel Farage incited violence? I attach a video clip in which he uses the phrase "pure, cold rage" which seems to be the pivot for all these accusations. Quite clearly - at least to fair-minded people - there is no call to violence, no call to riot, no call to even protest... but you and every other Farage hater are so steeped in confirmation bias that no contradictory evidence would persuade you from your preexisting beliefs.

Yours is the now usual pathetic response from Labour MPs who should know better, but you don't, and you expect respect. You won't get it with lies.

https://t.co/mkDsZoiiA4

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

Where exactly is the evidence that Nigel Farage invoked the Southampton riot? I attach this clip in which he uses the phrase "pure, cold rage". There is no call to violence, no call to riot, no call to even protest... but you and every other Farage hater are so steeped in confirmation bias that no contradictory evidence would persuade you from your preexisting beliefs.

https://t.co/mkDsZoiQpC

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

@LeeKurtiss @Damian_cfe @KonstantinKisin Making sense just isn't your thing, is it.

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

@FreesoulFaizan @KonstantinKisin Dear Mr South Asia, pointing out empirical patterns in migration, crime, integration failures, or policy biases is not "race-baiting." It is pattern recognition based on available data. I think you're confusing freedom of speech with saying stupid shit.

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

@margin_mag @koshercockney @LNathan123 @Jacob_Rees_Mogg @cenkuygur Oh for god sake, what a ridiculous comment. Don't be a twatwaffle. It's one of the most easy books to gain access to and read within a short space of time. It's not exactly Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

For any reader interesting in reading this dribble:
https://t.co/0rcp1eCDHq

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

The most frustrating part of what you say above is not that you are wrong, you're not, but that at PMQs today, Starmer began his rant against Nigel Farage, who had just said, "It is now clear to growing millions in this country that we're living under two tier policing" with the following words. "Mr. Speaker, I don't believe there's two tier policing in this country." Yet you have just encapsulated documented evidence that proves him wrong. SMH.

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

If you are suggesting someone who wrote a book in 1922 was absolutely right about "The Jews", you are absolutely wrong. And if you agree with what he wrote, you are antisemitic. IMO this is why.

Standards for what constitutes acceptable public discourse about Jewish identity, collective interests, and community distinctiveness shifted dramatically after the Holocaust. Things that were sayable and debatable in 1922 among educated Europeans, became unsayable after 1945, for obvious reasons.

That said, several features of the book, and of Belloc's wider writing, go beyond sociological observation into something that looks like prejudice dressed as analysis. For instance, in his introduction, Belloc wrote that he had "carefully avoided the mention of particular examples in public life of the friction between the Jews and ourselves" which he contended was to 'reduce emnity'. He then began his first paragraph titled "The Thesis of this Book" with the following emnity laden words:

"The Jews are an alien body within the society they inhabit - hence irritation and friction- a problem is presented by the strains thus set up - the solution of that problem is urgently necessary. An alien body in any organism is disposed of in one of two ways: elimination and segregation."

Those words hardly reduced emnity, especially the last three: "elimination and segregation", and Belloc was educated enough to know exactly what he was reaching for. That's not neutral sociological framing. That's a metaphor with a very specific implication.

So the people who call him antisemitic aren't simply being anachronistic or oversensitive. They're noticing that the conceptual structure of his argument, collective Jewish agency, hidden influence, the need to "name" the problem, is indistinguishable from antisemitic thought, even when the conclusions are moderate.

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

Hilaire Belloc was widely considered to be anti-Jewish. A prominent Franco-English Catholic writer, he frequently expressed prejudice against Jewish people in his political journalism and essays, and the book you cite was regarded as controversial even in 1922. Belloc viewed Jewish people as a distinct, unassimilable "nation" and an alien presence living within European nations. Hardly a worthy source for impartial information.

[James Conaghan @JamesConaghan8]

TBH, I put my objective hat on to say what I said about Kemi though I do think you are right to suggest she is probably the best political leader around at the moment. To me, she is a leader in the wrong party (always allowing for the fact I could be wrong).

IMHO, the Conservatives really botched their time in office from Cameron to May to Johnson to Truss to Rishi Sunak... although Sunak brought a more dignified, scandal-free approach to Downing Street. All things considered, it was just too late to save them after the comedy of errors since 2016 and particularly in Boris's time - there is simply too much to forgive at this juncture and Kemi has a mammoth task ahead of her. Who knows what the next 3 years will bring. Such is life, as Ned Kelly said just before they hung 'im.