Mamdani’s People’s Republic of New York

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Mamdani’s People’s Republic of New York

Proudly displayed in the window of my local Barnes and Noble are copies of a children’s book called Zohran Walks New York. It’s a graphic novel that shows our city’s new perma-grinning mayor meeting residents who are overwhelmingly happy to see him. A more instructive text for the children of Park Slope was tucked away in the corner of the basement: Animal Farm. I bought it for my 11-year-old daughter at the weekend. She’s into dystopian novels.

More people will become hooked on state benefits and more staff will be needed to shove piles of cash towards them

I thought of Orwell’s allegory of the Russian revolution this week when our mayor threatened to increase property tax to pay for his huge $127 billion budget. He says he will be left with no other choice if Governor Kathy Hochul refuses his plan to tax the rich, increasing income levies on the ultra-wealthy and corporations.

The most obvious way of raising money was ignored: cutting costs. Mamdani has never had a job outside the public sector – save for a brief career as a rapper – nor has he ever run a large organization. The state has always taken care of him. And he wants the same for you, comrade.

Orwell’s pig leader, Napoleon, would be proud of the way Mamdani has presented this: the mayor vs the rich. Good vs evil. New York City is to become a superstate, a bureaucracy that will give to the needy by taking from the undeserving. But middle-class New Yorkers will inevitably pick up the tab. Remember Boxer, Orwell’s carthorse? “I will always work harder,” he wheezes, before the pigs ship him off to a glue factory.

The size of Mamdani’s new state will be hard to roll back even if New Yorkers replace him in four years time. The mayor is proposing $2.3 billion more in rental-assistance and $1 billion in “cash assistance” benefits over the next two years. More people will become hooked on state benefits and more staff will be needed to shove piles of cash towards them.

The mayor intends to hire hundreds of lawyers to go after local businesses to “protect consumers” and wants another 50 Department of Finance auditors to “enhance” tax revenue collection. Small businesses, the engine of the New York economy, are going to be squeezed. He also plans to spend another $1.2 billion next year on immigration services, bringing the total cost to $10 billion for the city. “Islam is a religion built upon a narrative of migration,” Mamdani said at a recent inter-faith breakfast. More migrants will be welcomed, nevermind the cost to ordinary New Yorkers.

The two-out, one-in rule for new public sector hires is to be scrapped, so we can expect an explosion in payroll in the next decade. Meanwhile, he wants to cut the NYPD budget of $6.4 billion by $22 million which effectively cancels an order by his predecessor Eric Adams to hire 5,000 new police officers.

The mayor intends to hand the Department of Education $543 million without any requirement to improve grades, despite the fact schooling already accounts for 40 percent of city spending already. Poorer Republican states, such as Louisiana and Mississippi, spend far less on public schools and yet achieve better results than New York in math and reading. But good results aren’t Mamdani’s aim, the aim is to super size the state.

This is the “warmth of collectivism” that Mamdani warned us about in his bitingly cold inauguration speech. Like in Orwell’s tale, individual agency is being replaced by state control. Mamdani said he would “govern expansively and audaciously,” and he is. As well as the proposed property tax of 9.5 percent, Mamdani threatened to raid the rainy day fund and the retiree health benefits reserve. No one is safe in the face of the $5.4 billion revenue shortfall.

Former mayor Adams claims that Mamdani has manufactured the crisis and that he had, in fact, left the city in rude health with $8 billion in reserves. But Mamdani knows the people who voted for him aren’t the property owning class, they are the renter class, to whom a tax on the bourgeois might be quite appealing.

Economists and property experts are falling over themselves to point out that the mayor’s figures don’t add up. That by increasing property tax, rental prices will go up. And landlords will also have less money to spend on rent control properties, which will fall into even further despair. None of that matters. The point is audacious expansion.

Mamdani is building the People’s Republic of New York. Of course, Orwell’s tale does not have a happy ending – the pigs become indistinguishable from their human oppressors. The book is a warning to future generations about how populations are manipulated and revolutions sour. This generation of New Yorkers has failed to heed that message.

America’s future looks vulgar

The latest Super Bowl offers the most recent opportunity to reflect on the terminal state of our national culture, held together chiefly by a distractive and unhealthy mania for commercial sports and perfectly exemplified by the infantile yet aggressively transgressive nihilism of a brainless showoff calling himself Bad Bunny and dressed all in white, suggestive perhaps of an anti-Easter Bunny. Why, one wonders, has no political theorist from Hobbes forward posited the ideal human community as one which would combine political democracy with cultural and intellectual aristocracy – as, indeed, America at the time of her founding and for several generations thereafter did? Such an arrangement might satisfy critics of democratic society on the anti-egalitarian right, such as T.S. Eliot, and those on the egalitarian left, like John Rawls, for whom democracy can never be inclusive and participatory enough.

The likely answer is that the thing is a theoretical as well as a practical impossibility, like a scientifically advanced society that combines modern dentistry with pre-industrial technology. The principal enemy of the supremacy of the intellect in a civilized society is not, as anti-democratic critics over the past 200 years have argued, democratic systems of government. It is, rather, industrial economies which destroyed aristocratical governments and cultures by creating the mass societies which emerged from the industrial ones and on which the latter depend, as high culture depended on agricultural societies and the aristocracies that shaped and controlled them.

The western world, it seems, is doomed to a future of a vulgar and transgressive popular culture

It is true that agricultural civilizations of the past were comprised of an upper minority stratum, the cultural elite who were both the creators and, as we say today, the consumers of the achievements of a high culture, resting upon a majority lower one consisting of the ignorant and unlettered, just as the industrial ones of the modern era are.

The difference between the two – and it is a critical one – is that ever since the arrival of industrialism the division has been between a high culture and a mass culture, whereas in the countless ages before it the distinction was between high culture and folk culture, whose contribution to civilization throughout recorded history has been in every way as valuable, rich and significant as that of the former. Indeed, in many instances, the two are indistinguishable – Beowulf, for example, or the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, or the fables of Aesop and La Rochefoucauld, or the English madrigals and the French rondelays.

What differentiates the two – the folk culture of the aristocratic-agricultural past and the mass culture of the democratic-industrial present – is that the first was created spontaneously by the “folk,” the people themselves, whereas the second is artificially generated, carefully and cynically according to commercial calculation based on prevalent consumer tastes determined by statistical surveys consulted by “creative” hacks and their employers who expect to satisfy and profit from those tastes, after having created them themselves.

The result is that while children in the not-so-long-ago invented their own games and entertainments and their elders wrote their own stories and composed their own songs and playlets to perform for their families and neighbors, today they buy them out of a box or imitate the popular “artists” they see and hear on television, radio and the antisocial media.

David Cannadine, the author of The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, correctly noted that many British aristocrats were philistines. Still, the aristocracy constituted a socially and culturally stable class that was the chief preservative element in high British civilization over a full millennium; a role that the unstable financial and industrial plutocracies that succeeded the old aristocracies and whose members rapidly ascend to and as quickly drop out of them as business and social conditions fluctuate – thus virtually ensuring that they pass little if anything of tradition and high value on to their successors – cannot fill.

Folk culture, equally the victim of the destructive new civilization that arose in the early 19th century, has proved itself similarly unable to survive despite the earnest but sporadic attempts of people like John Ruskin toward the end of the same century and since to reject the industrially manufactured arts and crafts in favor of their humanly created equivalents.

Other dissenters (in America especially) from the new world in formation attempted to revive the old agrarian tradition, the most famous being the Southern Agrarians in the American South in the 1920s and 1930s whose members included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle and Robert Penn Warren. But Agrarianism failed to survive World War Two, while subsequent and more inclusive and popular attempts at resurrecting and promoting the old agricultural values and ways of life – the “back-to-the-land movement” in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, and Wendell Berry’s protest against industrial agriculture and what he calls “the unsettling of America” – were as quixotic in practical terms as they were productive in literary ones.

The tragic fact is that the recreation of any sort of high culture as something more than a footnote to the mass culture represented by Bad Bunny, Taylor Swift, the Kardashians, Billie Eilish, et al. is as impossible as the reestablishment of anything like civil and political peace in the United States – and elsewhere – is. The western world, it seems, is doomed to a future of a vulgar and transgressive popular culture, maintained in the context of angry political division and social chaos.

The seismic arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor

Ever since the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, no member of the royal family has been arrested, which makes this morning’s news that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been taken into police custody under suspicion of misconduct in public office all the more seismic. And with a certain grim irony, his arrest comes on his 66th birthday, of all days.

This arrest represents not so much the beginning of the end as the point at which the Rubicon has been crossed, forever

This development had seemed inevitable for a considerable amount of time now. Remarks from both Buckingham Palace and prime minister Sir Keir Starmer in the past few days seemed to indicate that both the King and the Prime Minister expected that the once-unthinkable would happen sooner rather than later. Which means that the visit of six unmarked police cars and plain-clothes officers to Wood Farm in Sandringham today is something that only fool – or an optimistic former royal – would have bet against.

The latest reports in the Epstein files that Andrew may have passed on sensitive information to the pedophile financier during his time as a trade envoy, AKA “Air Miles Andy,” seemed a far more likely basis for criminal prosecution than the shadier, grimmer details of whether or not the former Duke of York had been involved in the sex trafficking of underage girls. His argument on the latter account is that he has never committed a crime, and he has denied all wrongdoing. The fact that he had never been arrested meant that there were still a few who were willing to defend him, citing the presumption of innocence before guilt is proven. It seems likely that these people will now be a great deal quieter.

Of course, just because Andrew has been arrested does not necessarily mean that he will be charged, any more than a conviction is inevitable. Yet the suspicion also remains that the wider Firm will not be offering any support, tacit or otherwise. Andrew has been an extraordinary embarrassment to the royal family for years now, ever since his disastrous TV interview in 2019. This arrest represents not so much the beginning of the end as the point at which the Rubicon has been crossed, forever.

The saga of Andrew’s involvement with Epstein has been grim and unsavory from beginning to end. While the sex scandal aspect is the one that has attracted the most attention, and criticism, it is these new allegations that may yet be Andrew’s undoing. Peter Mandelson – another disgraced figure thanks to his Epstein toadying – may well be expecting a similar fate to befall him over the coming days. The police are sending out a clear message that they will be investigating allegations of misconduct in public office without fear or favor. The arrest of a senior member of the royal family – a man who still remains eighth in line to the throne, although we can expect this to change very shortly, especially if he is charged with a crime – is the most unprecedented occurrence that there has been in living memory.

Charles and the royal family had hoped that 2026 would be a quieter and more harmonious time for the royals after two of the most turbulent years in memory. This latest event has blown that possibility out of the water. We – and they – are in uncharted territory now. Whatever happens over the coming hours and days, it represents an extraordinary, jaw-dropping development that opens up the possibility that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor will serve a prison sentence at his brother’s pleasure. What a birthday present to receive.

The seismic arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor

This arrest represents not so much the beginning of the end as the point at which the Rubicon has been crossed, forever

Why the Equality Act has to go

If the Equality Act 2010 made discrimination illegal, then why we have seen the rise of persistent and widespread discrimination against white males across the public and private sectors?

Today, some form or other of anti-white social engineering can be found in practically any institution you care to name. Famously in 2023, the RAF, in a bid to make ‘the few’ even fewer, discriminated against 31 ‘useless white male pilots’ in a recruitment scheme. But we can add the NHS, universities, all manner of coveted white-collar grad schemes and internships, the Premier League, GCHQ and local councils.Or just take what we’ve seen in the police. In 2024, three white officers were passed over for promotion by Thames Valley Police because of their race; last year, West Yorkshire Police temporarily blocked applications from white candidates in a diversity drive; only last month, it emerged that two male officers had been fired from a team by Suffolk Police on the grounds of ‘operational reasons linked to gender balance’.

It seems that in multicultural Britain, some ‘protected characteristics’ are more protected than others

It seems that in multicultural Britain, some ‘protected characteristics’ are more protected than others.

It is welcome news, then, that Reform has this week announced plans to scrap the Equality Act on ‘day one’. Suella Braverman, unveiled on Monday as Reform’s new shadow education, skills and equalities secretary, said Britain is being ‘ripped apart by diversity, equality and inclusion’.

In her new brief, the former Conservative home secretary will take aim at the equalities state and ‘build a country defined by meritocracy not tokenism’. In schools, this will mean a ‘patriotic, balanced curriculum’, where in particular Braverman has pledged to root out transgender ideology in the classroom, including banning the so-called ‘social transitioning’ of pupils. She also fired a warning shot at universities, some which she says have ‘descended into hotbeds of cancel culture [and] anti-Semitism’, rely too heavily on foreign students, and ‘keep conning young people into worthless degrees’.

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This is undoubtedly red meat for the base – Braverman’s Equality Act proposals prompted the loudest cheers at Monday’s London press conference – but it is important to be maximalist in principle. Previous attempts from the right to take aim at the equalities bureaucracy, most recently spearheaded by Kemi Badenoch as equalities minister, have misfired by failing to address the problem at its philosophical root. The problem is not just that EDI initiatives are costly make-work schemes with little evidence base to them – it’s that the racial gerrymandering they are trying to achieve is itself a bad idea.

‘The problem with the Equality Act is not poor implementation’, explains Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, director of campaign group Don’t Divide Us, ‘It is that it embeds identity politics.’ Indeed, it was always telling that despite Mrs Badenoch’s reputation as an anti-woke firebrand, she presided over the diversity bureaucracy as equalities minister – and created a good deal more of it. Braverman, meanwhile, now in teal, wants to abolish the equalities brief altogether.

There are important reasons the Equality Act has to be changed. For one thing, it has encouraged untold vexatious complaints in the workplace. A recent report by Don’t Divide Us found a seven-fold increase in employment discrimination claims around race between 2016-17 to 2023-24, despite just 5 per cent of claims being successful over the whole period. The Act’s focus on personal identity and victimhood encouraged a grievance culture, it found, which far from easing racial tensions was only exacerbating them further.

In particular, it is the Act’s Public Sector Equality Duty and ‘positive action’ wheezes which have made it a vehicle for systematic discrimination against less politically favoured groups – whites and men. While the Act outlaws ‘positive discrimination’, where minorities are explicitly hired preferentially, it doesn’t outlaw ‘positive action’, where minority groups get special outreach programmes, which we’re supposed to think is fair and unobjectionable. But as those would-be airmen know, this is really a distinction without a difference. If you’re giving a leg-up to some groups to increase ‘diversity’, you’re not giving them to others. ‘Institutions should be held accountable for treating people fairly rather than hitting artificial demographic targets’, says James Orr, Reform’s new head of policy.

Necessary as it is, Reform’s anti ‘equalities’ crusade is sure to rile the left. An unsubtle Guardian headline on the press conference anticipates the line of attack: ‘Farage insults female reporter as Braverman says Reform UK wants to scrap Equality Act.’ On Monday’s Newsnight,a testy Victoria Derbyshire repeatedly grilled new shadow home secretary Zia Yusuf over which particular discrimination protections Reform was looking to scrap. In reality, though, while critics will no doubt try to paint Equality Act reform as extreme, the policy hits a healthy middle ground. Orr explains: ‘The Equality Act consolidated pre-existing legislation on disability, sex and race discrimination. Reform UK supports the predecessor legislation and unequivocally opposes discrimination based on protected characteristics.’

It was Harriet Harman who introduced the Equality Act, in the death throes of the Brown government. During the recent row over the Garrick Club, Harman declared that, after her revolution, Labour’s idea of equality is now ‘a recognised public policy objective’ – and what’s more, that ‘all those in public life should be committed to that objective’. But do ordinary Brits really share Labour’s dreams of a totalitarian equalities state? I’d imagine not. It’s high time a major party took a chunk out of it.

Iran cannot afford to call Trump’s bluff

The talks are still alive. Just. Iranian and US diplomats, engaging indirectly through Omani intermediaries, have yet to make any substantive progress toward a framework of understanding that governs further talks – as Kafkaesque as that might sound – but they are talking, and that is the best that the diplomats can hope for right now.

What separates Iran and America is a vast chasm between their respective red lines, and beyond that, the very substance of the talks themselves. The US is not willing to countenance an Iran that enriches uranium, has a ballistic missile program and arms proxies throughout the region.

Iran, for its part, perhaps unwisely – as they may be about to find out, will simply never agree to neuter itself on the above trilogy of capitulations. They prefer to see the talks as narrowly defined discussions on enrichment levels permitted in a state that is a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and nothing more.

In Iran, the fear of war, massively amplified by Iranian state broadcasts, is real

The problem Iran has is that Donald Trump is not one for the intricate niceties of Iranian patriotic sentiment. The problem Trump has is that the Iranians know only too well how much he simply wants to get a deal done and to have at the oil and the gas.

Iran would do well, however, not to overestimate Donald’s desire for a deal. Given the distance between the two parties in terms of red lines, not to mention the deep wellsprings of animosity that exist between them, it is perhaps unlikely that we will get a deal in this round of talks in Geneva.

The movement of US military assets to the region within the past 24 hours therefore represents a significant escalation. We have gone from a posture that seeks to use the threat of military action to achieve diplomatic ends to a posture that is poised to strike in the event of a failure to reach a deal.

Iran, given its history with Donald Trump’s use of military force against the regime, cannot afford to call his bluff. This is 19th-century gunboat diplomacy recast for a 21st-century audience. The technologically superior power has simply parked their overwhelming force on the doorstep of their intended target and either waits or strikes until surrender.

The last time the British Empire used this tactic in the 19th century against Iran was when all sides fought it out for control over the city of Herat in Western Afghanistan. The Persian court very quickly abandoned their taste for territorial expansion and retreated to the shell of a capital in Tehran as its port cities came under sustained artillery bombardments.

But both sides need an off-ramp, or something akin to “success” that they can sell to their domestic audiences. Donald Trump’s rather rash outbreak of proto-revolutionary fervor, promising that “help” was on its way to the brave Iranian people as they were slaughtered in their thousands in the recent uprisings, was a hostage to fortune. As was his red line regarding the execution of protestors, which continues apace across Iran.

Accordingly, many Iranians have lost faith in the US to do what it says it would do, namely, to strike the Islamic Republic’s organs of repression and mass killing and to topple the Islamic Republic.

Likewise, Tehran too needs a diversion from the reckoning that surely must come when the world, and its own people, realize the monstrous scale of the crimes perpetrated against innocent Iranians. And what better way to achieve this than to spread fear and loathing of the US as the “real” enemy? That’s a trick that conveniently allows Ayatollah Khamenei to portray protestors as traitors and therefore justify further repression and death. For in Iran today, the fear of war, massively amplified by Iranian state broadcasts, is real.

And this is why, perhaps, a likely outcome after the inevitable failure of these talks is for the US to launch a series of calibrated strikes. These would be designed to show strength and that it keeps its promises, but not enough to topple the Islamic Republic, which would be permitted to return to the status quo ante, alliances with Russia and China and horrific levels of oppression at home. And perhaps even a renewed attempt to revive nuclear talks, and so on.

As children we are advised not to look gift horses in the mouth. The Islamic Republic is, despite their horror of negotiating with the Great Satan and the undeniable dent this would make on their massive national pride, being offered a lifeline by the United States.

Talk to us, and we will take off sanctions, as we did in Syria, and you can go about your business – so runs the message from DC to Tehran. A message that feels distasteful to many Iranians and Israelis, but a message nonetheless that could save the Islamic Republic from itself and potentially revive a regime that has just killed tens of thousands of its own people in the most gruesome manners imaginable. Whether Tehran takes that option or not could determine the fate of millions of Iranians for years to come.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is arrested

Happy birthday to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. He has today been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office, after photos showed cars arriving at the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk earlier this morning. Thames Valley Police have previously said they were assessing a complaint over the alleged sharing of confidential material by the former prince with late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In a statement, the force said:

As part of the investigation, we have today (19/2) arrested a man in his sixties from Norfolk on suspicion of misconduct in public office and are carrying out searches at addresses in Berkshire and Norfolk. The man remains in police custody at this time. We will not be naming the arrested man, as per national guidance. Please also remember that this case is now active so care should be taken with any publication to avoid being in contempt of court.

Assistant Chief Constable Oliver Wright added that:

Following a thorough assessment, we have now opened an investigation into this allegation of misconduct in public office. It is important that we protect the integrity and objectivity of our investigation as we work with our partners to investigate this alleged offence. We understand the significant public interest in this case, and we will provide updates at the appropriate time.

Andrew, who turns 66 today, has consistently and strenuously denied any wrongdoing. One to keep an eye on…

Antonia Romeo is the new cabinet secretary

We have a new cabinet secretary! After a shambolic week in which Downing Street were forced to admit to the lobby that they did not know who was running the Civil Service, today we finally get our answer. Antonia Romeo is the first woman to rule Whitehall, taking over from the somewhat plodding Chris Wormald. He earns the distinction of being the shortest serving cabinet secretary in history – a blow that will be somewhat softened by a pay-off worth at least £260,000. Ching ching!

Romeo faced multiple bullying complaints earlier in her career but government sources have told the BBC today that Sir Keir Starmer was impressed by her ability to ‘get things done’. Gee, that would be a novelty eh? In modern Whitehall, where hard rains and foul-mouthed spads rule aplenty, it says something that Romeo is already the longest-serving permanent secretary at just 51, having led the Home Office, Ministry of Justice and Dept for International Trade. Amid much horror in the press about her supposed ‘self-promoting’, Steerpike just hopes that Sir Humphrey’s spiritual successor keeps giving the press good content to write about…

As one Whitehall source told Mr S: ‘The hare has finally beat the tortoise.’

A homegrown Visa card won’t save Britain in a crisis

It is finally dawning on the government and the banking industry that it is not such a good idea to put the entire economy at the mercy of a couple of large overseas corporations. Today, a consortium of banks are meeting to hammer out a plan to create a homegrown alternative to Visa and Mastercard, which at present have a virtual duopoly on the handling of card payments in Britain and much of the developed world. Their fear, in particular, is that Donald Trump could simply order Visa and Mastercard to switch off their services to any country which displeased him. This is what happened in Russia after the Ukraine invasion, under the Biden administration, when Russian businesses suddenly found themselves unable to handle their customers’ payments.

But why has it taken this long for the UK financial industry to appreciate the vulnerability which comes with over-reliance on a highly-centralised payments system? The problem has been obvious for years during repeated localised failures of the payments network. Yet for all this time the financial industry has been remarkably relaxed about the risks. In fact, it did everything it could to try to encourage us to give up using cash and switch to paying via card, apps and other electronic means. It did so because it was in its financial interests to do so: electronic payments present opportunities to cream off fees in way which cash payments simply don’t. Moreover, the use of electronic payments creates mountains of valuable marketing data on who is buying what, where and when – data which can be sold.

The government should be mandating the survival of infrastructure for handling cash

Even now, the UK banking industry doesn’t seem that interested in promoting genuine resilience in the payments system – it just wants a slice of the Visa and Mastercard pie. Why isn’t it lobbying for cash use to be maintained so that people can continue to do business during a national emergency, such as a cyber attack, which took out electronic systems? Nor does this risk seem to register much with the government. Three years ago, the then government of Rishi Sunak launched a website called ‘Prepare’, which implored citizens to equip themselves with tinned food, bottled water, wind-up torches and radios and other kit in case of an emergency. Yet it didn’t mention anything about cash.

Sure, let’s have a UK-based competitor to Visa and Mastercard, if banks want to invest in it. But if we are going to protect ourselves properly against a cyber attack and other disasters, the government should be mandating the survival of infrastructure for handling cash. We should have a law such as they have in New York and San Francisco whereby businesses are obliged to accept cash payments (I have never worked out why the law of legal tender does not enforce this, but plenty of shops and businesses in Britain seem to think they can get away with banishing cash). Moreover, Britons should be encouraged to keep enough cash at home to cover their basic living costs for at least a fortnight.

Paying electronically is in many cases more convenient than paying with cash, but it comes with big risks attached. It also delivers enormous power into the hands of corporations who could cut us off at whim – imagine if banks started cancelling our cards because they disagreed with our political views – as Coutts did when they debanked Nigel Farage. What UK banks are proposing in the way of a British Visa or Mastercard does not go far enough in protecting us against the misuse of corporate power.

The dodgy data behind child poverty

Britain is set for another dodgy data scandal. In last Friday’s Reality Check newsletter I picked up on reporting from the Times which called into question the income data used to calculate Britain’s child poverty metrics. Now, the BBC reports that those figures are going to be revised. The result: half a million children who the government previously claimed were in poverty were in fact not.

This is obviously good news. But let’s be clear: it’s also a total and utter scandal.

The way we measure child poverty has always been a bit of nonsense. It uses ‘relative poverty’, which sets a breadline of 60 per cent of median income. The problems with using relative income measures are obvious. If median earnings were to drop slightly, then hundreds of thousands would apparently be lifted out of poverty despite their material circumstances not having changed a jot.

So many of our political decisions now seem to be driven by these dodgy metrics

But worse still, they bake in stagnation and destroy a nation’s ambition. So long as we use those metrics, policy alarm bells will ring as soon as anyone starts to do well because that poverty line will be dragged up – worsening the statistics.

But fine, it’s still an internationally recognised and fairly standard methodology, so use it if you must. However, if you’re going to do so, at least make sure the income figures you feed into it are accurate. In Britain, they have been anything but.

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To get those income figures, statisticians use something called the ‘Family Resources Survey (FRS)’ which simply asks a sample of around 19,000 families about their income, housing and living conditions. The trouble is respondents have been underreporting their benefits income. In the 2023 survey, the BBC points out, households reported £190 billion in income from welfare payments. Yet the DWP actually paid out some £234 billion. In other words, £44 billion of income was not reported.

When the DWP switches to using administrative data next month – e.g. the actual payments they made – incomes in the metric will rise and so poverty is expected to fall.

Think about what this means. Almost every contentious public spending debate over the last few years has come unstuck because of an impact assessment which somewhere references these poverty statistics. The two-child benefit cap was lifted because of what models said it would do to child poverty; Liz Kendall’s £5 billion cuts to sickness benefits didn’t happen, at least in part, because of poverty metrics. They were cited in the winter fuel debates too. It may even turn out to be the case that Tony Blair actually did hit his poverty reduction targets that these metrics infamously claim he missed.

This story will go largely ignored. It’s about one spreadsheet being replaced with another. But given how so many of our political decisions now seem to be driven by these dodgy metrics, it deserves serious scrutiny. It’s great that we’ll be using more accurate figures going forward. But they never should have been so off in the first place.

Iran cannot afford to call Trump’s bluff

In Iran, the fear of war, massively amplified by Iranian state broadcasts, is real

Is Reform brave enough to take on the pensions triple lock?

Will any political party ever take on the triple lock? The answer from Reform’s Robert Jenrick yesterday appeared to be no.

At a press conference where Jenrick, Reform’s Treasury spokesman, appeared to junk nearly everything Reform had previously said on economic and fiscal policy. He chucked overboard what was in many ways a left-leaning approach to both economic and fiscal policy and adopted a list of proposals that would be right at home in a Tory manifesto. That included committing to keeping the triple lock – which guarantees the state pension rises by the highest of earnings, inflation or a floor of 2.5 per cent.

Afterwards, however, Reform’s leader Nigel Farage appeared to have a different view on keeping the pensions triple lock in place, saying that the policy was ‘still open for debate’. Some hope for Britain’s young and the public finances then, perhaps. So where will Reform land on this?

You’d have to be just reckless to let this problem go on for much longer

The rest of Jenrick’s announcements were clearly aimed at spiking Tory guns, given the one area the Conservatives are leading on is the economy. Many think, at the moment, that the next election could be decided on this issue. But there was another audience too: bond markets.

As I said on yesterday’s Coffee House Shots, some in bond markets had been warning of a ‘Reform premium’, where attacks on Bank of England independence lead to a permanent increase in gilt yields costing tens of billions of pounds. Committing to maintaining Bank independence neuters that.

But to bring down longer-term borrowing costs, those same traders say, you need to tackle our ballooning spending commitments. ‘There’s not even a seed of a conversation about what to do with the triple lock or other benefits paid out of current spending,’ one investor complained to me last year.

They, along with Britain’s youth, will be dismayed at Jenrick’s desire to maintain a policy that has already cost three times as much as it was originally expected to. The Office for Budget Responsibility expects it to cost over £15 billion a year by the end of the decade.

You can see that Jenrick would want to avoid doing something that nearly every other party sees as political suicide. Given that pensioners are more likely than anyone else to vote, you have to be almost recklessly brave to reform the main policy that benefits them. But Farage may be thinking about the long term. Because you’d have to be just reckless to let this problem go on for much longer, draining funds from spending on nearly anything else.

As for the bond markets, those I’ve spoken to have been quietly reassured by Jenrick’s speech. The Conservatives, meanwhile, are already on the attack. One party source remarked last night: ‘Robert’s lack of business experience has always been fairly obvious.’ But with both Mel Stride and Kemi Badenoch committed to keeping the triple lock, it is difficult to see Farage allowing pensioner policy to become a dividing line with the Tories either.

What happened to Speakers’ Corner?

We need to talk about Ahmed Mohammed. He’s a Sudanese asylum seeker in the UK, and this week he was spared jail after being convicted of threatening a person with an offensive weapon in a public place. The public place was Speakers’ Corner in London, and the victim was a Christian preacher. In May last year Mohammed dragged the follower of Christ from his stepladder and threatened him with a knife. ‘I’m going to stab you’, he barked.

The trigger for his blind rage was the preacher’s plea that he let Christ into his life. ‘What would you like to happen in my life?’ Mohammed had asked the preacher. ‘I would like to have the Lord in your life,’ came the reply. According to the prosecution, this was the ‘catalyst’ for Mohammed’s wrath. He went immediately to fetch his knife, so enraged was he by this expression of Christian faith in a Christian nation.

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Amazingly, it gets worse. Mohammed, who’s been in the UK since 2012, has 29 previous convictions for 67 offences. Three of those offences were thefts committed just weeks before he threatened a man for daring to give voice to Biblical beliefs. Then comes what I believe is the darkest part of this story. The court was told that ‘a number of people, including Muslims’ tried to dissuade the Christian from calling the police. Think about this: they had just witnessed a wild-eyed man jab a knife at a peaceful preacher and their instinct was to let that man go.

Every now and then, a news story comes along that doubles up as a snapshot of the state of the nation. This is one of those. It has an asylum seeker with a string of crimes who for some reason we won’t deport. It features a savage act of Islamist intolerance against the free expression of Christian beliefs and yet it barely makes a dent in the public consciousness. It stars a Muslim violently menacing a Christian and yet we’re told the crowd rallied to the Muslim’s defence rather than the Christian’s.

It’s all there. Our withered sovereignty that prevents us from exercising dominion over who is in our country. Our cultural docility, where even a violent threat against a man of God fails to rouse the nation’s passions. Our fractious cities, where crowds are as likely to side with a knife-wielding maniac as they are with a cordial believer in Christ. And the fraying of our devotion to justice, so that even a man who commits that most unthinkable crime – violently seeking to silence another’s freedom of expression – is spared jail. Mohammed was sentenced to 22 months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years.

That this drama unfolded at Speakers’ Corner heaps yet further allegory on this tragedy. For if even that free-wheeling corner of Hyde Park is not safe from the alien cultures of Islamist intolerance and mob sympathy for a Christian-persecuting knifeman, then we really are screwed. If Speakers’ Corner falls, Britain falls.

This isn’t the first time Speakers’ Corner has been invaded by a burning animus for the Christian faith. In 2021, Hatun Tash, the ex-Muslim turned Christian preacher, was slashed with a knife after daring to wear a Charlie Hebdo T-shirt to Britain’s best-known free zone. In 2023, an Islamist fanatic by the name of Edward Little was sentenced to life in jail for plotting a gun attack on Speakers’ Corner – his key aim was to murder Tash.

Be honest. Does that name, Edward Little, mean anything to you? Do you remember his case? It is astonishing that Speakers’ Corner can be rocked by so much violent Islamist rage and yet it barely registers in the public mind. Two knife attacks and a gun plot, in just five years, all with the twisted aim of metaphorically ripping out Christian tongues. And we just forget about it. We move on.

Anyone who has visited Speakers’ Corner lately will have glimpsed a terrible truth

Speakers’ Corner has been a space for rowdy expression since the mid-1800s. Marx was a frequent visitor, and later C. L. R. James and George Orwell. It survived epoch-shaking debates over capitalism, war, the vote, women’s rights. And yet it seems it might not survive the march of Islamist dogma.

Anyone who has visited Speakers’ Corner lately will have glimpsed a terrible truth – it has become an unforgiving domain of Islamist agitation. Young men in draping thobes hold forth on Islam and physically bristle at those with different beliefs. I remember the Speakers’ Corner of my youth: mad, yes, but fun too. There were ageing socialists on soapboxes, pained young Christians, surrealist blatherers, and poor souls who 200 years ago would have been in Bedlam rather than Hyde Park. It was ridiculous and fascinating and – most crucially – free.

No longer. It has a menacing air now. Christians are no longer safe. No one is if they deviate too strongly from Islamic beliefs. A High Court free-speech case in 1999 celebrated Speakers’ Corner as a cornerstone of British liberty. It ruled that freedom of expression extends to ‘the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome, and the provocative’. I want that culture back.

There’s no beating the comfort of cabinet pudding

The British hold a steamed pudding close to their hearts. Like a culinary hot-water bottle, it may not be terribly elegant but it’s hard not to feel comforted and delighted by its presence.

Most, however, follow a similar formula: a sponge cake mixture that is steamed into ethereal lightness and topped with a gooey, drippy sauce. This isn’t to decry them: I could never be fatigued by the spongy similarity of a golden syrup pudding and a bronzely glistening ginger one but they all come from the same sponge playbook, so I was intrigued to find one that doesn’t fit the mould.

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Once turned out, the pudding shows off its stained-glass exterior, candied fruit peeking through the custard

Cabinet pudding is a Victorian steamed pudding, but different from those you might find at the end of a pub menu, as it combines sponge fingers or stale cake with an onslaught of custard. It has fallen somewhat out of favour and is unlike any other pudding I’ve made. The result is soft, wobbly, layered, plump and moist. I described it to a friend as ‘a cooked trifle’, which, while accurate, may suggest I won’t have a career in marketing.

The origins of both the concept and the name are murky. Also sometimes called chancellor’s pudding or Newcastle pudding, there are wildly varying interpretations: some recipes show a simple sponge cake mixture poured on top of a handful of glacé cherries (boring); others claim it is simply a lemony bread and butter pudding (also boring). English Heritage even gives a recipe for cabinet pudding that is an entirely conventional bread and butter pud without embellishment (so boring). So where has the ladyfinger and custard combo come from?

The first mention of ‘cabinet pudding’ is found in William Kitchiner’s The Cook’s Oracle and House Keeper’s Manual, which was published in 1822. This calls for the cook to take a pudding basin and ‘fill up with bread and butter, &c’. But by 1836 we’re getting closer to the savoiardi and custard duo: in John Mollard’s The Art of Cookery, the recipe says to pour hot milk over cake or sponge biscuits before mixing egg whites through the dish, and steaming.

Escoffier’s Le Guide culinaire includes a recipe for a ‘cabinet pudding’ that combines ladyfingers with a custard which uses both egg yolks and whole eggs, and is layered with candied fruit. Interestingly, he also has a recipe for a ‘pudding diplomate’, which is often translated as ‘chancellor’s pudding’, and lines the pudding basin with candied fruit. This version is chilled, rather than steamed, and served cold, and uses a bavarois cream rather than a crème anglaise, but is otherwise strikingly similar to our cabinet pudding.

Today we think of a cabinet pudding as combining both these varieties: ladyfingers, custard and a jewelled coat of glacé fruit. Tessellated candied fruit line the bowl, and then sponge fingers or stale cake make up the body of the pud, and the whole thing is drenched in a perfumed custard before steaming. You can, if you wish, interleave the sponge fingers with crumbled amaretti or ratafia biscuits. A vanilla and sometimes lemon or orange water-scented crème anglaise is poured over the pudding, before it is wrapped and steamed for 90 minutes. Once turned out, the pudding shows off its stained-glass exterior, candied fruit peeking through the custard. You can use whichever candied fruit you fancy, but I favour the contrast of scarlet glacé cherries with bottle-green candied angelica and the mellow yellow of stem ginger. The thin créme anglaise soaks into the sponge fingers and is gently cooked by the steam, just to the point of setting, leaving the pudding with a gentle wobble.

Cabinet pudding probably doesn’t need further custard or cream poured over the top but I’m irresistibly drawn to food writer and historian Regula Ysewijn’s suggestion of serving the pudding with ‘sack sauce’: equal parts butter, sugar and fortified wine (historically, sack wine, but Madeira or sweet sherry will produce a similar effect). Melt the butter until it begins to brown, then add the sugar and booze, and stir until the sugar is dissolved and the sauce is creamy.

Serves: 6
Hands-on time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 30 minutes

15g butter, for greasing
6 glacé cherries, halved
10g candied angelica, cut into diamonds
25g candied stem ginger, sliced into discs
400ml whole milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
½ tsp orange blossom water
2 egg yolks
50g caster sugar
150g savoiardi sponge fingers

Grease a heat-proof 1 litre-capacity bowl liberally with butter. Arrange the fruits in a pattern, beginning in the centre of the bowl and moving outwards, sticking them to the butter up the sides of the bowl.
Combine milk, vanilla and orange water in a saucepan over a medium heat. Whisk together egg yolks and sugar. Once the milk is steaming, pour it over the egg mixture, combine, then return the whole thing to the pan. Lower the heat and cook the custard gently until it thickens. Remove from the heat.
Dunk the sponge fingers into the custard and line them up the sides of the bowl until completely covered, then continue to dunk and place the rest of the sponge fingers until the bowl is filled, breaking them up as needed. Pour the remaining custard over the contents of the bowl.
Cover the top of the bowl with greaseproof paper, and then a sheet of tin foil on top. Tie tightly around the rim of the bowl with string, cutting away any excess to leave a small border and making a waterproof seal.
Place the wrapped pudding in a large pan, and pour enough boiling water into it so that it comes half way up the pudding. Place the covered pan over a low heat and steam for one and a half hours.
Unwrap the pudding and turn it out on to a serving plate. Serve warm.

The real problem with Welsh rugby

Wales rugby coach Steve Tandy must have the most difficult job in sport, apart maybe from Jim Ratcliffe’s public–relations whizz. In a Churchillian moment, Tandy has called for national unity after Wales were humiliated by a sublime France in front of their lowest Six Nations home crowd in Cardiff. But here is a simpler solution. Ditch those red shorts. Wales have always played in red shirts and white shorts and who wears red shorts away from the beach? It might sound like a footling point, but it is symptomatic of the ease with which great national organisations are willing to turn their backs on their past, doubtless at the say-so of a few kids from marketing rifling through a laptop.

Winter sports people are so admirable. Everyone can see how risky it all is

Anyway, all who care about rugby must wish Tandy well. Rugby needs a strong Wales, just like football needs a high-performing Manchester United. But some of the eternal rugby verities remain, such as quite how Scotland can always lift their game to unseen heights when they are playing England. Finn Russell has never played better than against England, though England brought a lot of it on themselves. Kicking the ball has clearly worked very well up until this game but why didn’t they have the presence of mind at Murrayfield to say, ‘This isn’t working – let’s try something different’? Were they anxious about incurring the coach’s displeasure by changing the game plan?

Like the Six Nations, the Winter Olympics are delivering something really special. Who could not love Britain’s very own Matt Weston picking up two gold medals in one of the most frightening events in sport – and that is just watching, let alone experiencing the nerve-shredding terror of hurtling head first down the ice track at more than 80mph. His obvious joy for his family and friends and, in the team event, for his fellow gold medallist Tabitha Stoecker was why winter sports people are so admirable. They care and they share, and everyone can see how risky it all is.

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It is so human too, making you realise quite what sport means and how an elite athlete handles defeat. The Norwegian Atle Lie McGrath is one of the finest slalom skiers on the planet. The gold medal at Bormio was his for the taking. He was a long way ahead of his nearest rivals when he started his second run: all he had to do was finish. But then he straddled a gate early on and the full horror of what happened hit him, not least the sight of the Swiss coaching team celebrating wildly, now that their man Loïc Meillard, lying in second, was assured of the gold. First a disgusted McGrath, who had wanted to honour his grandfather, who had died during the Games’ opening ceremony, threw his ski poles away as far as he could. Then, distraught, he marched off the course and across the fields before lying down in the snow, occasionally covering his face with his hands, and then trudging dejectedly into the woods. You had to love him: all that was missing was a front door to kick.

‘I just needed to get away from everything,’ he said afterwards with great honesty. ‘I’ve lost someone I love so much and that makes it really hard. It’s the worst moment of my career.’ If only more people could talk so bravely when disaster hits.

Some do though, and it is still all about these winter Games. An impossibly handsome young American called Ilia Malinin was widely seen as the best male figure skater in the world when he took to the ice. He was already so far ahead he just had to avoid mistakes to guarantee gold in the freestyle programme. But the pressure was all too much and he fell twice attempting jumps that were second nature. ‘I just thought that all I needed to do was go out there, but of course it’s not like any other competition, it’s the Olympics. It was just something that overwhelmed me and I felt I had no control.’ From a likely first, he finished eighth. But it is the Olympics.

The future of racing is in the Middle East

You can always judge a country by the reception you get at passport control. America is aggressive. Don’t even think of answering ‘certainly not’ when asked if you packed your own suitcase.

But when I arrived in Saudi Arabia last week, I was greeted by the most friendly, charming man, even though he was an Arsenal fan. He must have had a busy week with the Prince of Wales’s entourage arriving the day before. Which football teams do equerries and royal reporters support? Probably not Millwall.

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The future of horse racing, a sport conceived in the UK, is now in the Middle East

I was of course here in Riyadh for the Saudi Cup – the richest horse race in the world, with £15 million up for grabs.

And, for the next five days, the people were the friendliest I have encountered anywhere. But I was keen to experience a little culture and was advised, rightly, by taxi driver Ahmed that the old palaces of Diriyah were a must.

The statue of Turfa in the horse museum there is magnificent. Turfa was the Arabian filly presented to King George VI by the King of Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud, in 1937. Surely King George must have bred from her? But where are the offspring? What a return present that would be. One of Turfa’s descendants.

It was interesting and significant that Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) chose the equine connection between our countries as one of the set pieces of Prince William’s visit. But the highlight of my ramblings was a trip to the desert for a picnic. And who should come yomping over the dunes as I was tucking into my pomegranate juice? Joseph O’Brien, his brother Donnacha and Thady Gosden: three of the brightest young trainers in the sport.

Fair-skinned Joseph hadn’t put any sun cream on. His mother is going to be really cross with him when he gets home, although the £820,000 he picked up the next day, when the six-year-old gelding Sons and Lovers won the Red Sea Turf Handicap (1m7f ) before the Saudi Cup, may have got him off the naughty step.

The picnic was spectacular and watching Joseph get stuck in did make me wonder how on earth this tall young man kept his weight down when he was riding. It’s testament to his strength of character that he controlled it for so long. As the sun went down over the sand dunes, he told me: ‘You’ve got to know when to stop.’

I suspect his enjoyment of the landscape may have been tainted by my incessant questions about training racehorses:

‘So how many times do you send the horses up your gallop?’

‘Which surface do you prefer?’

‘Do some National Hunt horses have more speed than flat horses?’

I can be a nuisance when I get going.

And then we got talking about whether Constitution Hill could still be a good flat horse at the age of nine. Joseph is probably the best dual-purpose trainer in the world (keep your hair on, Willie Mullins) so who better to ask?

‘The thing would be, does he have enough stamina for the staying races on the flat?’ said Joseph. ‘Because top-class two-mile hurdlers have a lot of speed.’ It was an interesting observation and one I’d not heard before.

Thady had to leave early. He didn’t have a runner in the Saudi Cup but was off to Doha to saddle Lion’s Pride in the Amir Trophy (no joy, sadly).

The Saudi Cup is a cultural and sporting affair, where women and the younger generations can express themselves as they wish. The whole occasion is the embodiment of how MBS has freed up his citizens and encouraged them to study hard, work hard and embrace their historical heritage. ‘He has liberated a nation and put Islam back on track,’ a young Saudi woman told me.

The Japanese trainer Yoshito Yahagi’s Forever Young repeated last year’s success in the Saudi Cup, taking his career prize money to £23 million. He got a dream run into the home straight to pick up the £7.5 million purse this year.

Ryusei Sakai, who rode Forever Young, will no doubt be forever grateful to his competitor Adel Alfouraidi, who allowed Banishing to drift off the fence, opening the door for Forever Young to slip through and get first run on the Bob Baffert-trained Nysos, who finished in second place.

Sometimes a racing festival feels like more than a bunch of horses racing each other. The future of the global horse-racing industry was also debated at the Asian Racing Conference in Riyadh last week.

Ambitious plans to build a new racecourse down the road at Qiddiya were unveiled. It is going to be a project that will celebrate Saudi Arabia’s equine culture and will be woven into the country’s ‘Vision 2030’ aspirations.

Parts of that master plan – such as the construction of Neom, a vast eco-city in the desert – are being pared back. That reflects intelligent adjustment rather than a bloody-minded inability to change course. And before we get too judgmental about having to reassess projects, perhaps we should reflect on HS2?

What is obvious is that the future of horse racing, a sport conceived in the UK, is now in the Middle East. As our government attacks the pillars of the sport with excessive taxes on gambling and crippling business rates on trainers, countries such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are happily embracing their equine roots. We should celebrate that.

Trump slaps down State Department on Chagos

Just what is happening in Washington? It was only yesterday that the State Department was trying to merrily wave through Keir Starmer’s great Chagos sell-out, issuing a glowing statement suggesting that ‘The United States supports the decision of the United Kingdom to proceed with its agreement with Mauritius concerning the Chagos archipelago.’ Nothing more to see here guv.

So it was presumably to some diplomatic chagrin then that Donald J Trump clearly thinks rather differently about the wisdom of such a deal. The US President took to Truth Social tonight to declare:

I have been telling Prime Minister Keir Starmer, of the United Kingdom, that Leases are no good when it comes to Countries, and that he is making a big mistake by entering a 100 Year Lease with whoever it is that is “claiming” Right, Title, and Interest to Diego Garcia, strategically located in the Indian Ocean. Our relationship with the United Kingdom is a strong and powerful one, and it has been for many years, but Prime Minister Starmer is losing control of this important Island by claims of entities never known of before. In our opinion, they are fictitious in nature. Should Iran decide not to make a Deal, it may be necessary for the United States to use Diego Garcia, and the Airfield located in Fairford, in order to eradicate a potential attack by a highly unstable and dangerous Regime — An attack that would potentially be made on the United Kingdom, as well as other friendly Countries. Prime Minister Starmer should not lose control, for any reason, of Diego Garcia, by entering a tenuous, at best, 100 Year Lease. This land should not be taken away from the U.K. and, if it is allowed to be, it will be a blight on our Great Ally. We will always be ready, willing, and able to fight for the U.K., but they have to remain strong in the face of Wokeism, and other problems put before them. DO NOT GIVE AWAY DIEGO GARCIA!

Such a slap-down does beg the question: who exactly speaks for America on this?

Did Billie Eilish get me deported?

For someone who believes that “no one is illegal on stolen land,” it’s a surprise that Billie Eilish’s legal team may have blocked my entry to the US. My plan was to test her theory of land ownership, which she stated at the Grammys to great applause, and take over her LA mansion with the help of Native Americans. But, sadly, I was turned back at the border last weekend – my sacred and inalienable right to freedom of movement curtailed by border guards who were, I suspect, briefed about my arrival by Eilish’s team.

I’m an Australian political activist, more usually focused on exposing the influence of the Chinese government in Australia. But I made an exception after Eilish made her ludicrous statement at the Grammys. I joked on Twitter that I intended to fly to Los Angeles to take up residence at her home as an illegal migrant. The post went super-viral with more than 1.1 million likes across Instagram, X and TikTok – so I decided to actually go through with the joke. I started a fundraiser to cover my flights and accommodation (on the off-chance that Eilish decided not to let me move into her mansion).

Now, obviously I did not intend to do anything illegal. My plan was to call a press conference complete with a professional Native American smoke ceremony on the road outside her mansion. To that end I was in advanced discussions with multiple different professional Native American dance groups who wanted to help. I didn’t expect to encounter any actual problems at the border. Vice President J.D. Vance retweeted me just a few months ago, so I assumed I was still in the good books of American authorities.

My problems began in the passport line. I was taken aside to a screening room and made to wait without access to my phone for four hours. Then I was brought to a holding area, a liminal zone that they referred to as the “Upstairs’’ unit. An armed guard sat behind plexiglass next to a set of cribs, airport chairs and a television playing Friends re-runs on mute.

After about six hours I was finally allowed to contact the Australian emergency consular line. The Australian Consulate patched me through to my dad at some ungodly time back in Brisbane. I implored him to try to get the word out on Twitter that I had been detained, but he only had 20 followers on an anonymous account. “You have to try DM my mutuals!’’

The guard overheard me and told me that I would be in trouble for that. I wasn’t supposed to talk to anybody other than the Australian Consulate. Eventually I pulled my hoodie over my eyes and fell asleep in an airport chair. I was called in for an interrogation at about 4 a.m. by Officer Martinez. He was honestly nice to me. He took me to one of the interrogation rooms and allowed me to sneak a text message to my family on my phone. Officer Martinez started his interrogation by asking me who Billie Eilish was. I was really confused. She’s a really famous singer, I said. I tried to sing the famous line from “Bad Guy’’ and Officer Martinez laughed.

According to open-source information, he said, you intend to trespass on her property. I told him that it was an elaborate social media shitpost or joke. He asked me if I intended on trying to make contact with Billie Eilish, whether I intended on meeting her. I honestly could not think of anything worse, I said. I obviously never intended to go anywhere near her. I pointed out that a British reporter for GB News had knocked on her door as part of a report and nothing happened to him.

The strangest part was that he then started questioning me about my past activism against the Chinese Communist party. He wanted to know if I had ever attempted to blow up a Chinese government building. Whether I had previously attempted to assassinate Chinese government officials.

I was shocked. I traveled to the US in January 2026 on an ESTA with zero issues. Walked right off the plane with zero problems. I even spoke to US State Department officials around this time about free-speech issues in Australia. Somehow three weeks later US customs officials were interrogating me about whether I had tried to blow up Chinese government facilities.

This insane allegation goes back to July 2022 when I was framed by the Chinese Embassy in London for sending them a fake bomb threat. I am a thorn in their side and they were angry that I was staging a peaceful protest carrying a Uighur flag outside the embassy. The fake email said: “this is Drew Pavlou, you have until 12pm to stop the Uyghur genocide or I blow up the embassy with a bomb. Regards, Drew.” I was arrested by London’s Metropolitan Police as a terror suspect before being completely cleared by British authorities.

This incident formed just one part of a broader overall state harassment campaign – the head of the Australian Federal Police ultimately testified to the Australian Senate that the AFP carried out police raids in Australia to disrupt a pro-CCP foreign interference plot to find my address and violently harm me.

I was extremely worried. I had been meeting with US State Department officials just a week prior to this interrogation. Now I was suddenly under suspicion of terrorism. I could only surmise that somebody had prepared an information pack on my activist history and sent it to DHS solely to get me blocked at the border. Perhaps that somebody could have been linked to Billie Eilish’s legal team.

My plan was to call a press conference complete with a professional Native American smoke ceremony

I went back to sleep and was woken up at about 6 a.m. They took me to get my fingerprints taken. It was at this point I knew that I wasn’t being let in. Officer Martinez informed me that I would be denied entry mainly due to my posts about Eilish. They also didn’t like the fact that I planned to do a podcast while in the US.

I wouldn’t be banned from the United States but I would not be allowed to use an ESTA visa waiver again. From then on I would have to go to the US Embassy in Canberra and submit to an interview to obtain a different visa category. The process could take up to a year. I had already been detained for nearly 15 hours so I just begged them to send me home on the earliest possible flight. They told me that would be 9 p.m. so I would have to wait almost another 15 hours.

Eventually two armed guards with guns escorted me onto my return flight at around 8:30 p.m. I think they wanted to shame me in front of the other passengers. But I honestly felt cool. I got home to Brisbane after another 20 hours of travel. By that point I had been in transit for more than 65 hours straight.

Was it worth it overall? It’s a good question. Ultimately I think it was. I truly wouldn’t change anything. It was beautiful performance art – I managed to help Billie Eilish and her legal team embrace border control and deportations. Through sheer force of willpower, I made thousands of open-border enthusiasts come around to backing deportations the second they found out I was the one being sent back. These same people who would fight to the death to prevent the deportation of a cartel member or a child killer suddenly bayed for blood when learning that a right winger was being deported.

I stand ready to assist US border authorities in any further capacity. If Stephen Miller and Donald Trump need me to just fly into LAX every couple weeks to get deported, solely to build leftist support for harsher border controls, I will do it.

And I remain willing to move into Billie Eilish’s mansion should her legal team ultimately decide to transfer her stolen land to my possession. I will be waiting in Australia for the call.

How the Obamas marginalized Jesse Jackson

During a visit to Zimbabwe in 1989, Jesse Jackson was walking down the dirt trail leading to Victoria Falls when a group of three African men hunkered in the shade of a scrubby tree stood up to point at him. One asked, “Is this… is this the great Reverend Jesse Jackson?”

His fame was global. He popped up in the most unlikely places: negotiating the release of hostages in Lebanon, lobbying for earthquake relief in Armenia, criticizing factory conditions in Japan. A photo spread of his career would show him face-to-face with Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milošević. He hosted Saturday Night Live and appeared on Sesame Street, and he had a talk show on CNN that ran for eight years.

Jackson knew that assassination was a very real possibility in his line of work

By the time of his death, the world seemed to have passed Jackson by. The multiracial “Rainbow Coalition” that he championed – “Red, yellow, brown, black and white, and we’re all precious in God’s sight,” as he said at the 1984 Democratic National Convention – was replaced by a Democratic party that holds “Black Lives Matter” as a sacred phrase never to be modified by reference to lives of any other color.

Barack Obama bears much of the blame for marginalizing Jackson, although his reasons were as much personal as ideological. Back in Chicago, the Obamas and the Jacksons had been close. Jesse’s daughter Santita was maid of honor at Michelle and Barack’s wedding. But during the 2008 presidential campaign, Jackson was critical of Obama’s handling of racial issues, and those frustrations became disastrously public when Jackson was heard, on a Fox News hot mic, saying he wanted to “cut [Obama’s] nuts off.” Jackson apologized for the remark, but he was effectively banned from the White House during Obama’s presidency.

Jackson came from truly humble beginnings. He was born in Greenville, South Carolina, to a high-school student who had an affair with her much older neighbor. She soon married another man, Charles Jackson, who adopted Jesse. But as soon as they had a child, Jesse was packed off to live with his grandmother in a house around the corner. Twice rejected before the age of ten.

At a dinner party in 1987, Democratic grandee Arthur Schlesinger Jr. asked Bill Clinton what he thought of Jackson, and that trauma was what Clinton focused on: “Jesse, he observed, was an illegitimate child. His father lived next door where he had a son the same age as Jesse. Every day Jesse saw his father come home and play with his half-brother.” His incredible drive to make something of himself sprang from that.

Jackson had nothing going for him when he moved to Chicago at the age of 23. His only connection to the city was a letter of introduction to mayor Richard Daley from the white Democratic governor of North Carolina, Terry Sanford, for whom he had done some work as a college student in Greensboro. Daley looked at the letter and offered Jackson a job as a toll booth attendant, which he declined.

He got his first big break from magazine publisher John H. Johnson, founder of Ebony and Jet. “My mother came to me and said, ‘Son, there’s a young man at our church who needs a job,’” Johnson recalled. The only job available was in the warehouse. “But when he arrives, he’s a very tall, striking, handsome young man, and when he begins to talk, very articulate. The first thing I’m saying to myself, I cannot have him unloading trucks.” He gave Jackson a job in sales.

This gave Jackson a chance to build a personal network of contacts across every black neighborhood in Chicago, which he put to good use as an organizer for Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1966, the SCLC was pivoting to an economic message after its civil-rights victories. Word reached headquarters in Atlanta that a young activist in Chicago was racking up success after success persuading local businesses to hire black workers – 44 jobs at Country Delight Dairy, 184 jobs at High Low Foods. King ordered that Jackson’s salary be doubled.

On the day King was assassinated, his associates gathered in the Lorraine Motel and agreed that no one would talk to the reporters gathered outside. Minutes later, one of them saw Jackson addressing the television cameras and heard him say, “Yes, I was the last man in the world King spoke to.” That wasn’t true, but the false image of Jackson cradling the slain leader’s head would be repeated in the press until a 1975 book by an investigative reporter decisively proved that Jackson had been nowhere near King when the shots were fired.

In 1984, there was a sense that the time had come for a black person to run for president. The press had plenty of possibilities to propose: Atlanta mayor and former ambassador to the UN Andrew Young, Chicago mayor Harold Washington, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley. But none of them wanted to do it. Only Jackson stood up and launched a national campaign, coming third behind Walter Mondale and Gary Hart.

Most novelty campaigns lose steam the second time around, but Jackson won more votes and primaries in 1988 than in 1984. When he unexpectedly won the Michigan caucuses, he was briefly the front-runner.

It took bravery for Jackson to run for president. He might not have cradled King’s head, but he knew that assassination was a very real possibility in his line of work. Vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro warned her children not to stand near Jackson in public, and photographers covering him wore bulletproof vests.

His character appealed to Donald Trump. The President issued a statement when Jackson’s death was announced on February 17. “He was a good man, with lots of personality, grit, and ‘street smarts. Despite the fact that I am falsely and consistently called a Racist by the Scoundrels and Lunatics on the Radical Left, Democrats ALL, it was always my pleasure to help Jesse along the way.”

Obama’s statement, in comparison, sounds like an AI wrote it. “For more than 60 years, Reverend Jesse Jackson helped lead some of the most significant movements for change in human history,” he posted on X. If you are going to honor the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the great master of anaphora and chiasmus the least you can do is put a bit of rhetoric into it.

My Epstein confession

As the flames of the Epstein Inquisition burn higher, let me get my general confession into the public domain before the guardians of public morality come for me. Here begins my deposition.

I, Matthew Francis Parris, do solemnly confess that I know slightly and have been on mostly friendly terms with former British ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson; and continue to believe him to have been a far-sighted force in the creation of a sane and successful Labour government such as we so notably lack now.

I CONFESS: that I know former prime minister Sir Tony Blair, who knows Lord Mandelson, who knew Jeffrey Epstein, and appointed Mandelson to high office in the last century. And I know and respect Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, who ran a company with Lord Mandelson, and who on Mandelson’s instruction once met Jeffrey Epstein for 25 minutes, and that I continue to regard Mr. Wegg-Prosser as a friend.

We may on occasions rub along with many strange or even deplorable people, and enjoy doing so

I CONFESS: that I know and am on friendly terms with the editor of the UK edition of this magazine, who knew Lord Mandelson, who knew Jeffrey Epstein.

I FURTHER CONFESS: to a lifelong habit of visiting friends in prison who have been -convicted of criminal offenses. In 1977, I visited a friend serving a sentence in Brixton prison for possession of marijuana, and tried to take him some (legal) cigarettes. Some years later I testified to the otherwise good character of a friend who had tried to smuggle an illegal immigrant girlfriend into the UK, in the boot of his car; and was imprisoned for this. Knowing he (rightly) planned to plead guilty to this undoubted crime, for which he was (rightly) imprisoned, I remained willing to offer evidence in mitigation.

I CONFESS: to having visited, in Maidstone prison, an old school friend who had been convicted of fraud. I confess also to encouraging him to believe his life was not over and that those who knew him still cared for him.

I CONFESS, TOO: to accompanying to court a longtime friend and former colleague accused of viewing some indecent images, for one of which he was given a suspended sentence. I hoped that by my continuing friendship I could encourage him to know his life was still worth living. I do not regret that.

NOR DO I REGRET: remaining friends with individuals who have fallen into disgrace; nor being by disposition unwilling to write people off even if they have done something very wrong. Should disgrace ever befall me I would hope they might treat me likewise.

I WOULD NEVER, THEREFORE: hold it against anyone that they had been friends with – or been friends with someone who had been friends with – a disgraced person, so long as they had not been complicit in the disgrace itself.

SO I MAINTAIN: and intend to continue maintaining, a wide circle of friends, many of whom are different in character, belief or behavior, from myself, and some of whom I may not always and in every respect approve.

AND FINALLY, I MAINTAIN: that staying friends with somebody, or doing business with somebody, is not, ipso facto, to condone everything they do and are. And that we may on occasions rub along with many strange or even deplorable people, and enjoy doing so.

Here ends my deposition. It must not be taken to imply that Epstein was anything other than a deeply wicked individual, or that remaining close to him while suspecting or knowing as much was anything other than a terrible error of judgment and a serious moral mistake. I could never forgive, or like, such a person. But, as many besides myself have remarked, there is something medieval, something of Salem in the time of witches, something of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, about the current mood in Britain: a mood in which guilt by association spins its web ever wider.

I think about my life inside and around politics – a span now of almost half a century. How many rumors, how many hints have I been privy to that I never felt the responsibility to follow up? How many men (mostly men) have I known with half-secrets that never came to light? How many government and opposition whips have I known – and how great a store of secret knowledge have they possessed? If all the parliamentary whips in the past hundred years, alive still or in another place, were to be gathered into Westminster Hall and provided with whistles to blow, they could blow the roof off.

I have blown a whistle or two but by no means all the whistles within my reach. I’ve fended off self-reproach by murmuring to myself that there’s nowt so queer as folk. I’ve enjoyed the company of friends who knew more, sometimes rather too much more, of the wickedness of the world than I did. Heavens, I’ve even enjoyed a friendly chat with the late Jeremy Thorpe, accused of complicity in a planned murder.

So I pick up an old copy of my now 30-year-old book, written with the journalist Kevin Maguire, Great Parliamentary Scandals. Our sometimes forgiving tone would not be extended to devils like Epstein, but, still, I thumb the index for my entry on the late Reginald Maudling, a leading Tory who faced suspension from the House after very serious allegations involving corruption.

The then Labour leader, the late Michael Foot, warned the House not to succumb to a “liberal form of lynch-law… Of all mobs, the most objectionable is the sanctimonious.”

I’d met Maudling. I wrote: “It is not unusual to find that men who have been touched by power, and also by some kind of disgrace, show towards the end a sort of frankness, an impatience with certitude, and a weary humanity… [A] certain knocked-about quality in a statesman can add proportion, compassion, and a redeeming cynicism to his judgment.”

So, as the inquisitors gather my books for the bonfire… I CONFESS: I still believe that.