MY WEEK began in Westminster Magistrates’ Court, sitting in on Tommy Robinson’s terrorism trial. I went with one purpose, not so much to judge whether he got a fair trial or not but to find out on what grounds he had been prosecuted in the first place and, more importantly, to be able to assess whether the MSM would report both the charge and the trial fairly. You will be able to read my breakdown and what I conclude after November 4, when the District Judge (formerly known as a stipendiary magistrate) delivers his verdict. However just or unjust it is, I am not prepared to risk contempt of court by commenting in the meantime.
With a whole day out of my editing life I spent the rest of the week running to catch up.
Trump’s peace (ceasefire) agreement in Gaza has been front of mind. Torn between what is undoubtedly an extraordinary achievement – not wanting to pour cold water on it – and the cost and risks. When I read that Hamas were running rampage through their own streets conducting public executions of their enemies I wondered whether the IDF withdrawal was such a good thing after all. Trump has vowed to disarm Hamas (shouldn’t that have been a prior condition?) but hasn’t said how. The release of the final brutalised and starved hostages (over whom international outrage was astonishingly muted, I thought) was paramount. But as Daniel Jupp pointed out in his excellent article on Thursday, it’s come at ‘tremendous disproportionate advantage’ to Hamas. Israel gets back 20 tortured, kidnapped civilians and Hamas gets back nearly 2,000 murderous terrorists – a 100-1 ratio, he points out, and ‘no parity at all between the people being saved and released’.
On the same day Breitbart and two Israeli news outlets reported a number of accounts of the psychological terror the hostages endured – starved unless they converted to convert to Islam was one aspect. It’s grim reading and should leave no sympathy anywhere for Hamas. The International Criminal Court should surely issue arrest warrants against their surviving leaders and any identifiable killers and torturers. It was troubling to read on X a list of the middle-class professionals who are members of this murderous mob.
Then what about Qatar, one of Trump’s supposed guarantors for making a permanent peace, but also the sponsor, funder and protector of Hamas? Will it undermine attempts to deradicalise the population of the coastal enclave, which is a central pillar of this peace plan, Melanie Phillips has asked. It’s an important question that President Trump must address. I was disturbed to read elsewhere that Qatar is funding a set of purpose-built hangars, squadron spaces and housing in an Idaho military base. I am not reassured by the article’s insistence that the US still owns it all.
Qatar is one of the largest foreign funders of US higher education with investment of more than $5.1billion in American universities. Hmm . . . How compromised are we too? Our universities have been put up for sale as well. This 2021 article says funding from Islamic states is leading by a wide margin.
Several hours this week spent reading and editing Bruce Newsome’s articles on the Starmer administration’s China espionage scandal brought me up to speed. What occurred to me was that this was but the latest episode of impervious Sir Keir’s scandal-ridden administration. It is almost unbelievable that a Prime Minister who has so terrifyingly compromised our national security can remain in office. Yet I suspect even this will not bring him down. Nothing has. Starmer the Imperturbable rolls on from one misconduct in office to the next, each new scandal obscuring the last with an amazing rapidity. Take his as yet unexplained appointment of Peter Mandelson as US Ambassador, given his prior knowledge of the Epstein connection. All now forgotten.
In September The i Paper tallied up ‘The 16 Labour scandals and controversies in 14 months of power’, starting withStarmer’s £107,145-plus worth of gifts and benefits, and half his cabinet on the make too, from Labour donor, Lord Waheed Alli. Was Starmer made to pay it back? Was he reprimanded by any ethics committee? Did he even apologise?
But that wasn’t the start of it. The real corruption set in with Starmer’s refusal to disclose Axel Rudakubana’s terrorism connections combined with the fact that, as Toby Young has pointed out, Starmer himself likely breached legislation on online misinformation. His obfuscation on the identity of the killer triggered Muslim communities to organise intimidating counter-protests. He should have fallen foul of his own law. But no, he used it to crack down on any dissent about immigration, encouraging and calling for a punitive two-tier response from the legal system.
It occurred to me that after 15 months in office Sir Keir has reserved a third tier of justice all for himself. Never does the buck stop with him, as it should do in our unwritten constitution. Despite the catalogue of ministerial resignations and arrests, high-profile U-turns and internal rebellions, and repeated questions over his judgment and conduct, the so-called right-wing press seem unable to nail him.
Is it that two-tier thinking is so entrenched in the establishment? The answer must be yes. Take the combined attempt of several think tanks and the press to help Rachel Reeves pick her taxes for next month’s Budget which she says (and they say!) she needs to fill the ‘£22billion black hole’. Why are they taking this as read? The Telegraph devoted a huge article to how she could do this with the least disruption! How helpful of them! Why weren’t these column inches devoted to how she could best chop a £22billion head off the many more billions of profligate, wasteful and irresponsible public spending?
Meanwhile the same paper progresses the Antifa-style blame game as though black people have no moral autonomy. What an insult – how racist! Yes, they’ve given fulsome coverage to Sir Lenny Henry’s new book that blames slavery for blacks being in prison today. Any logic seems to have departed from the reporters. If we believed this argument we’d have to ask why aren’t the prisons disproportionately filled with Jews whose ancestors were put in gas chambers as well as enslaved? And why our prisons are disproportionately filled with Muslims whose ancestors were African slave traders quite as bad, if not very much more brutal, than European ones?
That’s why we are here. To bring some moral compass and dispassionate focus back into reporting and comment that other organs seem to have lost sight of.
I am taking a back seat for the next three weeks while I catch up with an outstanding project, and leaving you in the more-than-capable hands of Steve Doughty and Simon Caldwell.
