A COUPLE of years back, I’d estimate in about late summer 2021, Nigel Farage rang me to ask my opinion. He and Richard Tice were worried about the lack of cut-through for the party name Reform. Hardly any of the public seemed to know what it was or the stances it represented. There was strong internal pressure to revert back to being the Brexit Party.

As Reform, manfully though Tice was leading the ship in tough times, the party was bumbling along at three per cent in the polls and performing terribly at by-elections. So what did I think?

I said I thought reverting to the Brexit Party would be a retrograde step for an election not expected for another few years. Yes, some purists would be motivated to campaign on Brexit not being done yet, but it felt to me that bigger voter issues were out there that suited the Reform name perfectly well. Farage and I had both long agreed that immigration was the thing. Tice’s number one issue was opposing carbon net zero. It was growing in salience, but it wasn’t there yet as a massive “gut” voter issue. Boris was still there was prime minister, convincing some gullible voters that he would implement some actual right-wing policies. He was a terrible prime minister, but a great campaigner, which made things difficult.

So, no I said, I wouldn’t change the name back. You’ve just got to plough on through

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WHAT DO the likes of Ben Habib and Rupert Lowe think they are achieving? If their desire is to create a more ideologically pure version of Reform that can take on the establishment on issues such as mass deportations then they are barking up the wrong tree.

Habib’s plan for a new party, “Integrity”, unveiled last week, will join all the other right-wing micro-parties that have failed to gain any electoral traction whatsoever. I’d give it 18 months tops and predict it will never get anyone elected. One cannot help but suspect Habib became addicted to showing-off his undoubtedly impressive intellect on the likes of GB News, on which he built a small cult following. Being removed as a deputy leader after failing to win a seat in the Commons clearly bruised his ego too, but it was a perfectly logical outcome that his fellow deputy leader at the time, David Bull, took with good grace.

Lowe has if anything handled his position even worse. Elon Musk’s praise and numbers of “likes on X” clearly convinced him that he could do a better job as party leader than could Nigel Farage. In fact, I was a fan of his hard-as-nails messaging on immigration policy and law and order. But for him to be waging a legal war against his party and its leader in the week of the local elections is utterly crackers. When pressed about his frustration about Reform’s tardiness in committing to ultra-tough immigration policy his response should have been something like: “I accept that I am something of a radical on this stuff, even in Reform terms. But I know all my parliamentary colleagues have campaigned hard on it too and I am very confident by the time we launch our election manifesto in three or four years, we will be offering a set of policies that can save Britain and restore full national border control.”

Even in the past couple of weeks, Farage has unleashed much tougher soundbites on immigration, dubbing himself the “deporter in chief”. Habib, Lowe and their online fan club want to commit to blood-curdling stuff now but in political terms they are both novices. Farage knows when to bring the pot to the boil.

So what impact will Habib and Lowe have on Reform’s performance on Thursday? Let

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ALMOST the whole of the British race relations debate is built on lies. Liberal-left media from the BBC downwards pumps out a completely skewed picture designed to make us think that anti-black racism is running out of control.

Crime within the black community – which is every high – is almost never mentioned. Yet any scrap of a grievance from a minority community member against white people is elevated into a major national scandal.

This is what turned so many people off about the moral panic whipped up by MPs and broadcasters about the Netflix fictional drama Adolescence, in which a white 13-year-old boy from a stable two-parent family murders a girl in his class.

Most MPs went completely gaga for the story, while TV presenters such as Naga Munchetty launched a witch hunt against Kemi Badenoch for not having watched it, telling her “everyone” was talking about it.

Now, I hear that it was a very well acted and scripted piece of work. But we do know it was based on a Big Lie, don’t we? You see the actual homicide perpetration rate among black youths is somewhere between six and eight times that among white youths.

The eight-fold figure was used by Dame Cressida Dick in her appearance before the Commons home affairs select committee in summer 2020. “You are four times more likely to be a victim of homicide if you are black and eight times more likely to be a perpetrator,” she told the committee. The BBC did not report the story at all, preferring instead to hype up the police having stopped a car in which two black athletes were travelling.

More recent ONS figures, for the period from March 2022 to March 2024, suggest that 64 per cent of homicide perpetrators were white, compared to a proportion of whites in the general population of 82 per cent. Yet fully 20 per cent of perpetrators were

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THE Supreme Court has today asserted science and common sense over gender woo woo in a unanimous judgment.

A biological male who identifies as a woman cannot be deemed a woman, even if that person has been furnished with a gender reassignment certificate.

To adapt the famous words of a triumphant Norwegian football commentator: “Nicola Sturgeon, Angela Rayner, Angela Eagle, Maria Miller, Daisy Cooper, Caroline Lucas, Caroline Nokes, Penny Mordaunt. Can you hear me Penny Mordaunt? Your boys took one hell of a beating.”

To that litany of political mediocrities can be added countless other mid-wit MPs and, frankly, cowardly ones who ducked answering the basic question “what is a woman?” when the militant trans movement had an almost total chokehold over Whitehall and broadcast media – Rishi Sunak, Rachel Reeves, Keir Starmer (who declared that “it shouldn’t be said” that only a woman could have a cervix). At one point David Lammy genuinely appeared to believe medics could grow a vagina and other female parts inside a biological male, turning that man fully female. Remember, this was the same David Lammy who accused gender critical campaigners of “hoarding rights”.

Well, the Supreme Court ruling today could not be clearer – or more logical. Its judgment could even have been written by Professor Robert Winston, from his famous Question Time oration of a few years back. And one can hardly praise it more highly than that.

“The definition of sex in the Equality Act 2010 makes clear that the concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man…Persons who share that protected characteristic for the purposes of the group-based rights and protections are persons of the same sex and provisions that refer to protection for women necessarily exclude men. Although the word ‘biological’ does not appear in this definition, the ordinary meaning of those plain and unambiguous words corresponds with the biological characteristics that make an individual a man or woman”.

And all hail Kemi Badenoch on this score. Today must have been sweet for her after all the hatred spewed towards her over her refusal to join the trans bandwagon. It brings us a much-needed reminder of her exceptional strength of character.

She said in response to today’s judgment: “You cannot change your biological sex. Saying ‘trans women are women’ was never true in fact and now isn’t true in law either. This is a victory for all of the women who faced personal abuse or lost their jobs for stating the obvious: Women are women and men are men.”

What joy – we are even getting back the primacy of the ordinary meaning of plain words – a stunning reversal of the Woke inquisition.

Perhaps now the BBC and other media outlets will stop describing biologically male sex attackers – men – by their preferred pronouns – she, her, “a woman”. Such insults to our intelligence have been hard to bear. Perhaps gyms will properly enforce women’s changing rooms and theatres will do the same with ladies’ loos. Perhaps women’s refuges will be able to exclude trans-identifying men with complete legal confidence. Perhaps comedians will go uncancelled for mocking the nonsense religion of trans. Perhaps female sports will be properly protected, at last, from male-bodied athletes with vastly superior pace, power and muscle-mass.

Most old-fashioned guys from my neck of the political woods – Brexiteers, social conservatives – have campaigned against this insidious cult from day one and have been scarcely able to believe what a grip it has taken over the public realm and especially women within the public realm.

But as one such old-fashioned guy who has written countless articles defending women’s rights on this score for a decade or more, I’d like to move the debate on today.

Now that everyone realises females need protections and seclusions because of a general male physical power advantage that some men will abuse, can we stop pretending we should expect equal outcomes between the sexes in physically-demanding paid occupations?

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SO THERE I was in my last article lamenting my recently-acquired habit of “totting-up” the impact of policies on my own white British group and wishing a wise Labour minister would call a halt to the whole DEI, “white privilege” nonsense that is so corroding our society.

And immediately afterwards two new and infuriating stories landed – Thames Valley Police trainees being made to lament their own “white privilege” and West Yorkshire Police allowing non-whites to apply early for job vacancies, before white candidates are permitted to lodge applications.

West Yorkshire Chief Constable John Robbins wants to go even further and legalise direct preference for minority candidates even when there could be a white candidate better qualified for a position.

What’s more, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, whose own constituency lies within the West Yorkshire Police domain, is perfectly fine with what is happening because she wants to see police staff align with the communities they police and at the moment the force is whiter than the local population.

Cooper suggests final recruitment must still be based on merit but this is pure sophistry given the exposure of West Yorkshire’s “gold, silver, bronze” categorisation of recruits by ethnicity.

Yet it is about as reasonable to ascribe the under-representation of people of Jamaican or Albanian or Vietnamese ethnic origin in the police to racism as it is to ascribe the under-representation of Indians, or Chinese or Jews in professional football to the same factor.

Obviously, there are cultural factors at play in both cases. So long as police forces, like elite football clubs, are open to talent we should leave them to pick by merit alone and get rid of the DEI staff and monitoring apparatus. And we should have faith that Britain is a pretty fair country in which a hard-working person is able to rise in his chosen occupation (though given current tax thresholds not necessarily to become a prosperous homeowner).

Instead, leftist fanatics are tearing the country apart and inviting incomers to believe white British people are bigots and the offspring of imperial overlords who owe them apologies, reparations and special fast-track promotion schemes. This is an insane attitude to try and inculcate in new arrivals.

Twice recently on the London Underground there have been people on my carriage playing their personal stereos loud without headphones. On both occasions the miscreants were young black males (I am sure that all ethnic groups have people who do this by the way). Each time, I have been aware that for me to issue a challenge to

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DO YOU find yourselves these days “totting-up” the response of the legal and political systems in the UK to gauge whether your own ethnic group is getting a harsher deal than others?

I must confess that I now do this in the field to two-tier justice. For instance, why were only 20 Harehills rioters sent down, but more than 70 Rotherham ones? Can that really be disconnected from the fact that the Harehills mobs were predominantly made up of various ethnic minorities, while the Rotherham ones were overwhelmingly white?

I was similarly annoyed that the murderer in the Adolescence drama was a white boy, despite the homicide perpetration rate among black youths being many times higher. Yet the system is only comfortable dealing with black youths as victims, still giving the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence 32 years ago many times more coverage than the literally hundreds of black-on-black murders which have taken place since in London alone.

Not so very long ago, it would have been unthinkable for me to develop an ethnic radar like this. I don’t like myself scouring for the interests of my “in group” rather than thinking about the good of the country as a whole.

But the leftish British political establishment has developed a new approach to keeping the lid on our society: treat angry minorities with kid gloves, while coming down like a ton of bricks against the white majority. And I am afraid it is coarsening our political debate and leading many hackles to rise among moderate people.

If every ethnic minority is encouraged to complain about alleged discrimination and lobby for concessions, then there will come a moment when the shrinking white majority starts doing the same. Perhaps last summer’s post-Southport rioting marked such a moment.

So our once reasonably harmonious multi-racial society is collapsing amid a move to balkanisation, ethnic rivalries and enclaves.

Just this week Labour scrapped its paltry plan for five local inquiries into the Pakistani-heritage rape gangs. This huge real scandal is apparently deemed much less serious than the fictional plot of Adolescence.

Back in the early 1980s, my favourite footballer was Cyrille Regis – one of the famous “three degrees” at West Bromwich Albion. I remember being incandescent at times that the England manager Bobby Robson always seemed to prefer the much less athletically powerful Paul Mariner to be his first pick centre-forward. Cyrille did not get a fair crack, in my opinion. Now Robson had worked with the dependable but unspectacular Mariner when he was manager of Ipswich Town, so that was possibly the reason for his selections.

These days fortunately there are basically no England football fans who “tot up” the ethnic make-up of the team – we all just want to see the best players on the pitch and almost nobody would claim any kind of colour bar is in operation - that would be absurd in such a ruthless meritocracy as pro-football. However, the England women’s team still attracts squalls of leftist criticism for being predominantly white (never mind that England is still about 80 per cent white). This again demonstrates the bias of elite media and politics: always pushing the idea of barriers being placed in the way of ethnic minority people, while expecting the white population to be constantly apologising for its achievements – the very essence of Woke.

I’ve largely given up on top level club football since the BLM knee-taking, virtue-signalling nonsense was forced upon us a few years back. At least they don’t do it in tier six of the non-league!

But the gradual build-up of reactive white English identity politics – particularly

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MY FRIEND Allison Pearson, fearless columnist at the Daily Telegraph, has catapulted coverage of the Lucy Connolly injustice back to the top of the news agenda.

Mrs Connolly got a 31-month prison sentence (the last sixty per cent due to be served on a tag at home) for the crime of distributing material with the intention of stirring up racial hatred.

The “material” was a single incendiary tweet sent out on July 29 last year, the day of the mass murder of little girls committed by Axel Rudakubana, the Cardiff-born son of Rwandan migrants.

The tweet stated: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.”

Mrs Connolly, who had suffered the agony of losing a child some years earlier, then took her dog for a walk and when she returned home some hours later deleted the tweet and sent out messages saying that violence was not the answer.

One particular service Allison performed in her masterly article in the Telegraph was to remind us that the presiding judge, Melbourne Inman, included the following political statement in his sentencing remarks: “It is (a) strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive.”

That un-nuanced mantra is his opinion, shared by Sadiq Khan and countless others on the liberal left. Yet it is not my belief, or the belief of millions of other Brits. We think excessive diversity is in fact a weakness, in danger now of balkanising Britain, while the religion of “inclusion” often results in anti-meritocratic decisions that demoralise people striving to succeed.

Anyhow, these issues are obviously irrelevant to the case. It is wrong to deliberately stir up racial hatred, especially at a time of heightened tension. That’s the crime. It’s just that the judge’s irrelevant platitude raises the suspicion of ideological bias from him.

So you might expect me now to launch full in on judge Inman, blaming him for the flagrant injustice suffered by a good woman, doting mother and wife, pillar of her community getting sent to prison with dire consequences for herself and her family.

But I’m not going to do that. Because in my view, the lawyers who truly deserve bucket-loads of rhetorical manure tipped over them are Mrs Connolly’s defence team, who advised her to plead guilty to the very serious offence of which she was charged. The starting point sentence of such an offence is three years imprisonment.

As Judge Inman noted in his summing up: “In relation to your culpability this is clearly a category A case – as both prosecution and your counsel agree, because you intended to incite serious violence. In relation to harm it is again agreed, correctly, that what you did encouraged activity which threatened or endangered life and therefore falls within category one. There is also further relevant factor in relation to harm in that you sought, and achieved, widespread dissemination of your statement by positing it on social media.”

Well, hold on a cotton-picking minute. Is this correct? My interpretation is that a

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IT IS very bold of Keir Starmer to make patriotism the key consideration as to who people should vote for in the local elections.

Speaking at the launch of the Labour campaign, Starmer claimed “there is nothing patriotic about Reform” and again accused Nigel Farage of “fawning over Putin”.

Regular readers will know I have long disagreed with Farage’s interpretation of the origins of the war in Ukraine. But were I living in an area with elections on May 1, there is not an earthly chance that this would influence which party gets my vote.

As it happens, I agree with Starmer that we are at a juncture in our island story where basic tests of patriotism should be decisive. The trouble is that he is leading one of the least patriotic governments in our history.

Let us set aside the disgrace of the Chagos surrender and the giveaway of billions of UK taxpayers’ money over coming decades – though that is a very telling indication of Labour’s ranking of “international law” above the national interest.

It is on the domestic agenda that Starmer and his administration are presiding over the active dismantling of the foundations of British and especially English society.

Nine months into his premiership, Starmer has already allowed into Britain some 30,000 illegal gatecrashers from abroad via the Channel dinghy racket. This is an astonishing number – the worst rate by far of any prime minister to date. He has abandoned a promise to stop using hotels to put up the law-breaking arrivals, mainly young men. He now says it may be impossible to stop the boats altogether but is still determined to “smash the gangs” he deems entirely responsible for the traffic.

In a speech this week at a security conference, Starmer insisted that the migrants were mainly victims of these gangs, declaring: “It is unfair on the illegal migrants themselves because these are vulnerable people being ruthlessly exploited by vile gangs.”

In the Commons, immigration minister Angela Eagle underlined this view by stating that people arriving illegally should still be able to lodge asylum claims and have them considered in the normal way.

This depiction of the illegal gatecrashers as victims is wilful naivety. The truth is that most of the criminals involved in this racket are the men in the boats. They are the biggest beneficiaries by far too – heading from what Donald Trump would term their “shit hole countries”, to lifetime access to the British welfare state and ultimately the right to apply to bring family members in for “reunification” purposes.

In the meantime they are put up in hotels, given meals, pocket money and special instant access to healthcare. And all this is turning various parts of our towns – and even villages – into no-go zones after dark as long-term residents seek to avoid large groups of foreign males.

Many of us pointed out from the start that Starmer’s policy of handing out more gold braid and epaulettes and talking-up “integrated crackdowns” was dressing-up box nonsense – doomed to failure. His actions in abandoning the Rwanda deterrent and scrapping the Illegal Migration Act’s rule that unlawful arrivals would be forbidden from lodging asylum claims has left “Treasure Island” wide open for plunder.

This is the very opposite of patriotism. It has torn up the social contract between government and the governed. And it has been accompanied by dozens of other policies which seek to relegate, disadvantage and marginalise the white indigenous majority on these islands.

On top of the Sentencing Council fiasco, we now have a police race action plan which explicitly abandons the idea of treating everyone the same or being “colour blind” in favour of seeking “equality of policing outcomes for people from different ethnic groups by responding to individuals and communities according to their specific needs”.

But seeking equality of outcome in a country where, for example, black people commit homicide at eight times the rate of the general population is crackers. The

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IS THERE actually a “deep state” controlling the outcome of politics in most ostensibly democratic countries?

Not so long ago, such an idea would have been left to the whackier end of the conspiracy theorist community. Yet former prime minister Liz Truss has used the term several times recently while giving her own explanation for her rapid downfall – it’s obviously a more attractive get-out clause than the idea that she just messed up very badly, very quickly.

The idea of a deep state is meant to refer to secret networks which operate independently of democratic politics to secure their own goals. Personally, I continue to think that Orwell’s idea of “Groupthink” more accurately explains the increasingly partial behaviour of elites against “populist” threats.

Take, for example, the knocking-out of Marine Le Pen this week from the 2027 French presidential race on grounds of her party having misused European parliamentary funds for national campaigning purposes. It is obviously an absurdly excessive punishment, delivered by a French judge, depriving the people of France the right to choose who the next president of the republic should be. Le Pen was the leading candidate in the polls. The French people were surely perfectly capable of weighing her misdemeanour against many other factors to decide who should lead their nation.

The judge’s decision is classic “lawfare” of a type unleashed by judicial elites across the West in recent years, always against perceived right-wing threats to the status quo. Similar methods were used to try and knock Donald Trump out of last year’s US

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THE leadership of Reform UK has spent the last few months feeling nervous about the impact of ultra-hardline rhetoric on immigration.

The party high-ups have a view that they have already “bagged” the migration-sceptic vote, given the terrible records in office of Labour and the Tories, and that drifting into ever more alarmist language on the subject will prevent the insurgent party from cracking the 30 per cent opinion poll barrier.

This was certainly an important contributory factor in the schism with Rupert Lowe, who had started to turn his guns on the party machine for not coming out with stronger and more worked-through plans on immigration control and deportations.

And yet, scour the big, frontbench names of Labour and the Conservatives as I might, I cannot find any major figure close to the leaderships who decided to attack Reform for being “racist” or “extremist” on immigration matters.

This suggest to me that the collective leaderships of both major parties understand that popping up on the airwaves to complain Reform is too tough on foreigners would be a suicidal strategy, reminding voters of their own betrayals.

Now, it does not follow from this that there is zero risk of Reform scaring off some potential voters by talking about “remigration” or Enoch Powell being right etc. It is not only the other political parties that help create the climate of opinion and determine the positioning of the Overton Window of acceptable views. The media also plays a huge role in this, with the BBC retaining a massively dominant market share in the UK.

Nigel Farage is surely correct if he thinks that for him to start emphasising plans for mass deportations of people already in the country would see him pilloried by dominant left broadcasters as a bigot, extremist of fascist.

And yet, Farage seems far more relaxed about venturing into territory that his Labour opponents in particular view as a major weak point for him. On healthcare policy, Nigel goes into interviews in expansive, talking-off-the-top-of-the-head mode.

The last exchange I heard him have with Nick Robinson of the BBC, just last week, saw him suggesting that people “who can afford it” should pay an insurance top-up for their treatment. Yet Farage had no definition of what he meant by people who could afford it and no detailed parallel insurance scheme to unveil. Why should someone who is just moderately well off after a lifetime of hard graft be expected to cover their own healthcare costs when neighbours who have never worked will continue to get it all free? And while voters may instinctively trust Farage to get a grip on excessive immigration, given his political record, how many will instinctively trust him with the future of British healthcare?

I would have thought the classic target Reform voter – an older, blue collar person living in a red wall seat, who has paid his national insurance stamps for decades, would be in the vanguard of those opposing such a “co-payment” system.

So it comes as no surprise to see Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting hone in on healthcare for a strongly-worded attack on Farage.

“Fancy forking out over £20k for a hip replacement? Being asked for your credit card details as a deposit in A&E? Me neither. Nigel Farage is a threat to the NHS. Insurance premiums might be OK for Mr Moneybags, but it’s not the Labour way or the NHS way,” said Streeting.

The Labour party itself has reinforced the attack with a post on X declaring: “Farage and his mates want to make you pay for healthcare. It’s as simple as that. A vote for Reform will just embolden him to go further.”

Committed Reform supporters may well roll their eyes as this and claim it is all

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GIVEN that this site is called “State O’ The Nation”, I do feel under an obligation to give an occasional overview of that very thing.

And at the risk of coming across as akin to the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in his sonnets of desolation phase (“no worst, there is none…”), I must observe today that dear old Blighty is in a terrible state and there is no sign of anything much getting better anytime soon.

Something close to a total systems failure is afflicting us. We haven’t enjoyed significant growth in pecuniary living standards per head for close to a generation. Our armed services are hollowed out in a way not seen in living memory. They are struggling to recruit young adults who tell pollsters in ever-greater numbers that they would not fight and die for the hot mess their country has become.

Our political class keeps writing gargantuan cheques on yet more borrowed money – for foreign aid, carbon net zero, finding housing for illegal immigrant gatecrashers – sinking us ever-deeper into debt. Privatised, foreign-owned water companies pump raw sewage into our great rivers at volumes which make them unsafe for leisure users. Angela Rayner is preparing to chew up more green fields forever in a huge house-building programme, without even contemplating a restrictive immigration policy to stabilise the population first.

But of the myriad crises – economic, social, environmental – it is in the area of the law that the rot surely runs deepest. There is obvious two-tier policing of public spaces. A modern judicial caste drawn largely from the political left has ruthlessly exploited the constitutional reforms of the Blair governments to seize power and impose the “progressive” values of the elite permanently.

Hence, we are about to see the idea of everyone being equal before the law ended, with certain sympathised-with identity groups given the privilege of a guaranteed pre-sentencing report: blacks, Asians, women, sexual minorities. But not ordinary white blokes.

On top of that, we have seen the emergence of a de facto Islamic blasphemy law based around the misuse of public order and incitement legislation, so that activist Muslims, for example, can render the burning of a Koran (a horrible act) an illegal one just by kicking off with sufficient vigour.

This is not all. Left-wing political motivations are now officially regarded as mitigating factors in sentencing – see the current debate over Just Stop Oil closing the M25 – while right-wing political motivations are treated as aggravating factors. So breaking the law while campaigning against climate change will see you get a lighter sentence while breaking the law while campaigning against illegal migration will lead to the book getting thrown at you by judges who regard support for multiculturalism and liberal attitudes towards “refugees” as the only tolerable outlook.

Increasingly often judges are letting these values-driven considerations creep into their sentencing remarks. In a recent case of vandalism of a statue of Paddington Bear, the actual judge hearing the case condemned the offenders on grounds that their behaviour encompassed everything that Paddington would be against. Judge Sam Goozee told the vandals, who had been drunk: “He represents kindness, tolerance and promotes integration and acceptance in our society…Your actions were the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for.”

Funny how Paddington has prospered by becoming a no-borders ideologue, while his children’s TV contemporaries the Wombles have ebbed away as a cultural phenomenon by dutifully continuing to pick up litter in this era of fly-tipping and street-as-dumping ground.

Meanwhile the parade of foreign criminals - including paedophiles and rapists - successfully fending off deportations through ludicrous interpretations of their “human rights” goes on and on. You will remember the Afghan rapist who couldn’t be

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I WROTE last time out about the unjustifiable burden of benefits, particularly disability-related benefits, paid out to people who don’t work.

The article was based around a case study the BBC carried out of a non-binary person living on the south coast, alone in their own flat. They were on £33,000 a year in benefits made up of Personal Independence Payment, Housing Benefit and Employment & Support Allowance (with a disability premium). The claimant did not seem to be wheelchair-bound and the main disability stated was a problem with connective tissues around the joints. They had high-level computer skills.

I suggested this income was a good few grand more than the average salary for a working person in the UK of just under £30,000. But, as has been pointed out to me, this is a misleading comparison.

Because the claimant involved almost certainly won’t be having their benefits taxed. For a working person to take home £2,750 a month, comparable to the claimant, they would actually need to be on a salary of £42,000. That would easily be in the top 40 per cent of earners for people in their 40s (like the claimant is). Lower down the age ranges only very small percentages of workers earn that much.

Also, the claimant has no travel-to-work costs to pay, unlike their working peer group, which can reasonably be estimated to be another saving of a couple of thousand quid a year.

And of course, the claimant has the luxury of long hours of leisure time in which to seek out activities to raise their enjoyment of life. In some places, discounts are given to the “unwaged” too.

The welfare state is supposed to be a safety net, not a feather-bed. Britain cannot

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THERE was a news item that cropped up on the BBC website a few months back which brought me up short and has troubled me ever since.

It concerned the state having put someone in early middle age on a lifetime of taxpayer-funded benefits. The case, involving someone whose preferred pronoun appeared to be “they”, was eyebrow-raising because of the level of benefits that had been agreed. The claimant – “they” – was worried about how Rachel Reeves’ first Budget might hit their income.

I don’t think it would be fair, this far on, to seek to turn this single case into a singular scandal and thus to bring hostile media coverage on to the shoulders of “them”. They seem to have cleared the various hurdles required by the state in order to access long-term funds, after all. So I won’t name them.

But here is what really got me. The claimant, residing alone in an expensive city, was in receipt of benefits totalling £33,000 per year. This was made up of Employment and Support Allowance (including a severe disability premium) of £1,042 per month, a Personal Independence Payment of £798 and Housing Benefit of £917. This total adds up to over £3,000 a year more than the average UK salary for a working person. And there aren’t even any children in the picture to be supported. So much for the “benefit cap” policy unveiled by the coalition government of 2010-15 with such a fanfare. That is meant to limit benefits for single people with no children to a maximum of £18,200 a year. But going through the detail on the official UK Government website reveals a list of exemptions as long as your arm.

The BBC’s case study summary of the claimant did not appear to show they were severely disabled in the sense that the term is commonly understood, ie confined to a wheelchair, not in charge of bodily movements or functions, perhaps with partial paralysis. Instead, the BBC explained that the claimant “previously worked as a civil servant and in digital marketing but hasn’t been able to work for the last few years due to several disabilities, including a connective tissue disorder that causes their joints to dislocate”. Perhaps that is a bit or a lot worse than having dodgy knees with worn-out cartilage and ligament, such as many of us suffer from in late middle age onwards. But should it really lead to a lifetime on premium rate benefits with no responsibility to seek paid employment?

Asked about reports of a looming clampdown on health and disability benefits, the claimant described that as “very concerning”, adding: “You’re going on the proviso that if you have mobility issues you can just work from home – that’s very oversimplified. There are lots of reasons why you might have mobility issues that might impede your ability to work.”

Equally, one might reply, there are lots of reasons why someone relatively young – mid-forties – and clearly with full cognitive ability and advanced computer skills (a former digital marketeer) could reasonably be expected to help support themselves rather than just be fully funded by hard-pressed taxpayers in perpetuity.

To put it bluntly, Britain isn’t rich enough – not by a long chalk – to stick such people on £33,000 a year taxpayer support in return for them contributing nothing to the economy. The claimant’s final quote was highly political and while it might look reasonable at first glance, I will explain why I vehemently disagree with it. Here’s what they said: “Everyone, whether in work or not, should be entitled to a decent standard of living, autonomy and dignity.”

Call me heartless if you will, but I don’t think so. Someone who could work, at least

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IN THE mid-1980s Nick Faldo took a decision that would go on to lift him from the ranks of players capable of brilliant rounds “on their day” to become instead Britain’s greatest ever golfer.

Faldo, who had already established himself as one of Europe’s big-name players, decided to take the huge risk of “deconstructing” his swing and then rebuilding it from scratch. He had identified within it an element of unreliability that was holding him back from reaching the very highest level.

For two years he laboured on honing a new technique and his form suffered in the meantime. But in the summer of 1987, everything came good as he won the British Open at Muirfield. He had found a way to “address the ball” with more precision and control. Two more Open Championship victories followed, along with three US Masters wins.

I was put in mind of Faldo when considering the current predicament of somebody who shares the same initials: Nigel Farage. He has built a political persona which has already brought him appreciable success as a brilliant maverick. With Ukip, he led the campaigning pressure that forced the EU referendum. Then he set up a pop-up political party – the Brexit Party - to block a mushrooming establishment plot to keep us in the EU. Most recently he secured a parliamentary “bridgehead” for the Reform Party at last year’s general election. In all of these achievements, the remarkable extent of his dominance over his various parties – even to the extent of being able to remove Richard Tice as Reform leader on a whim - was vindicated.

Since then he has led his current party in the familiar, “cheeky chappie” Brand Nigel style that has enabled him to forge a powerful connection with millions of voters. Broad brush strokes and killer soundbites are still prioritised over detailed policy work. Often he plays things apparently “off the cuff”, making pronouncements which blind-side his supporting cast. One thinks of his recent suggestion that Britain should consider bringing back Shamima Begum and other jihadis held in the Middle East.

Brand Nigel’s standing in the US market – potentially a source of lucrative future income – is also clearly driving the stance of Reform, leading it to line up behind Donald Trump even on matters upon which Trump’s approach is unpopular with the UK electorate.

Since last year’s election, this formula has generally worked pretty well. Reform’s poll ratings have soared from the 14 per cent vote share they achieved last July to an average of 26 per cent just a couple of weeks ago.

Yet Farage is now facing a strategic fork in the road. Can he afford to go on running with his big fish-small pond persona when his new aim is not just to give establishment parties a bloody nose but actually to become prime minister? To put it in Faldo terms, he is out to win some majors.

To me, something just doesn’t feel quite right with this. Important policy issues in

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SO, a little local difficulty or the collapse of stout party – how should we characterise the feuding at the top of Reform?

The growing tension between Rupert Lowe and Nigel Farage has been a talking point in Reform circles at least since the turn of the year.

Elon Musk’s backing for Lowe – given in January after the world’s richest man claimed Farage did not have what it takes – has been sustained ever since. As recently as Monday, when news broke of 592 Channel migrant arrivals the previous day, Lowe put out a tweet on Musk’s X platform demanding: “Every single one of these fake asylum seekers needs to be immediately deported…Detain, deport. This is the ONLY way.” And Musk gave Lowe a glowing one-word reply: “Yes.”

A few days later, on Thursday, came publication of Lowe’s explosive interview with the Daily Mail, in which he appeared to doubt Farage’s capacity to transform from a protest party messiah to a “sage” national leader.

By Friday afternoon, Lowe was out on his ear – suspended from the whip, reported by Reform HQ to the police over an episode alleged to have taken place in December but now suddenly remembered and accused of being implicated in the “bullying” of two female staff members.

Long-term followers of Farage will be well used to his bust-ups with senior lieutenants – with the likes of Godfrey Bloom, Neil Hamilton, Suzanne Evans to name but a few and even briefly with yours truly a decade or so ago. In all of those instances the adage “Nigel always wins” came swiftly to pass.

And Nigel will “win” again this time. But equally, this time it is more complicated because the rift with Lowe is partly down to ideological differences over the totemic issue of immigration. Lowe is the uncompromising voice of the party’s right-wing, demanding the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. He also wants many recent legal arrivals to have indefinite leave to remain withheld so they can be ushered out of the door too when their visas expire. These robust opinions have connected with huge numbers of online right-leaning folk.

Farage, by contrast, has softened his rhetoric on immigration-related issues over recent months, saying that if Reform takes on the whole of Islam it will lose and that largescale repatriations are not achievable. Farage and his inner-circle have ironically embarked upon a “Vote Leave” strategy, named after the more centrist official Brexit campaign that he bitterly opposed at the time.

Compared to Farage’s Leave.EU and Grassroots Out pressure groups, Vote Leave was deemed to have more sway over undecided, centre-ground voters. And, having already hit an average 25 per cent poll rating with Reform, these are the next tranche of voters that Farage now has his eyes trained upon. So he doesn’t want to frighten the horses

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I’VE been studying the pattern of the most recent opinion polls carefully (mainly so you don’t have to) and they point to a noteworthy change: Labour is overall back in the lead, only by about a point from Reform, with the Tories still trailing by a few points in third.

Reform has by no means taken a nosedive and yet I’m definitely taking this new pattern as vindication for my prediction that its stance on Ukraine was going to cost it. The last three nationwide polls published all show narrow one or two point Labour leads over Reform, which seems to be settling back to a new average score of 25 per cent after having touched 27 per cent a couple of weeks ago.

So it looks like Keir Starmer is enjoying a very modest and probably short-lived “bounce” on the back of cutting foreign aid, losing Anneliese Dodds from the Government and being super-pally with President Zelensky while still managing to build a decent rapport with Donald Trump.

But here is where the news gets better for Reform supporters: given the weight of poll evidence about UK voters – including Reform-minded voters – turning against Trump over the past fortnight, the party’s ratings are actually pretty robust. There is no sign of a collapse in Reform poll scores, just a very modest slippage.

Also, it may be that the anti-Trump mood is at or near its peak. Perhaps if we get a serviceable peace deal in Ukraine over the next couple of months that preserves it as an independent nation and sees Putin’s Russia having to make concessions too, the anti-Trump fervour will subside. The killing will have stopped and people may conclude that Trump couldn’t have made his peace omelette without breaking legs.

That’s not all. It is also quite possible that Starmer’s apparent assembling of a

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IN AN interview with the Telegraph published on February 10, Kemi Badenoch referenced the Conservative party – her Conservative party – as being “a broad church”.

Regular readers of this blog will know this is a phrase that always sets my teeth on edge. Because what senior Tories comfort themselves is an asset – the ability to accommodate widely differing strands of political thought within one party – has actually become a disabling negative.

We saw that over Brexit, where the Tories were the only party substantially split between Leavers and Remainers. This lack of a dominant and settled stance meant they royally screwed up the negotiations over our terms of departure.

We saw it over stopping the illegal Channel migrant crossings too. When Rishi Sunak pretended to be ready to withdraw from the European Convention of Human Rights and its supervisory court in Strasbourg, leading figures in the “One Nation” caucus of Tory MPs reminded him he didn’t have the votes in parliament to deliver such a thing. And so the boats weren’t stopped.

For millions of voters who understand that our political system is failing drastically and that a whole new framework for politics is needed, based around the primacy of the nation state, the idea of voting Conservative thus seems ridiculous – a veritable “unlucky dip”. The basic policy mix that you will get delivered depends on which faction in the parliamentary party has the upper hand at any given moment.

Yet, even by the standards of the Tories, the last few weeks has seen the sending out of an astonishing number of disastrous signals about ideological confusion, division and contradiction in Tory ranks.

Exhibit One: Shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel seeks to present the enormous and catastrophic “Boris Wave” of low-skilled, culturally non-aligned immigration as basically fine. And keeps her job.

Exhibit Two: Former Justice Secretary David Gauke (yes, I know he is not in the party again now after having briefly rejoined last summer) pens a report for Keir Starmer that could be fairly summarised (with apologises to The Simpsons) as: “Release the prisoners, Smithers.”

Exhibit Three: Former Attorney-General Dominic Grieve (I’ve no idea if he is still in the party or not) is unveiled as the head of a review into law on “Islamophobia” that has been set up by Labour deputy PM Angela Rayner.

Exhibit Four: Tory peer and London Assembly Member Shaun Bailey is unveiled as a founder member of a parliamentary Black Caucus being set up by Labour leftwinger Dawn Butler – the MP who recited that horrible poem during Black History Month in which she claimed to be one of the “chosen ones” and mocked white people for having skin that burns in the sun.

Exhibit Five: Tory former minister Greg Hands pens an article for the Conservative Home website welcoming the utterly barmy new “Carbon Budget” produced by the unelected zealots on the Climate Change Committee. As Hands helpfully reminds us in his article: “Conservatives have endorsed all the previous six carbon budgets, even legislating most of them into law.”

Exhibit Six: Former Cabinet ministers James Cleverly and Andrew Mitchell, both still Tory MPs, come out publicly and separately against the cut in foreign aid announced by Keir Starmer, generally wanging on about “soft power”. This opinion is then underlined by former defence minister Tobias Ellwood (no longer an MP).

Exhibit Seven: Another former Tory Cabinet minister, Rory Stewart, has an epic whine about Donald Trump’s cuts to the US foreign aid budget in which he reveals his own wife’s aid organisation, “Turquoise Mountain”, has had $1m of US government funding withdrawn. Turquoise Mountain is then exposed as running programmes teaching Afghans about interpreting western modern art, especially a notorious installation of a urinal as a gallery exhibit (Note to self: must remember to refer to Stewart as “Latrine Boy” from now on).

So that’s high profile Tories or former Tories hitting the headlines defending hyper mass-immigration, backing a “progressive” law and order agenda, cogitating special protections against criticism for the Islamic belief system, helping launch an ID politics black power initiative, heralding more economically-crippling Net Zero measures, condemning reductions in Britain’s own bloated aid budget and bemoaning the Trump administration slicing off funding for an aid programme so ridiculous that one could not, as Richard Littlejohn would say, have “made it up”.

I, you – we – are presumably expected to chill out about all this because we need to understand that “it’s a broad church”, this Tory thing. And no doubt, yes, there are other senior Tories who oppose all this stuff and take a view more similar to our own.

But consider Reform, the rival brand in the centre-right market place. Would any of

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IF SOMETHING is truly unsustainable then it won’t be sustained. You’d think that much would be obvious to the allegedly intelligent people who run our country.

And you’d think the ensuing approach would be for those people to consider carefully how to establish a new sustainable equilibrium in the relevant policy area. Because trying to sustain something that isn’t sustainable within a democratic political system will otherwise lead to a huge upheaval in voter behaviour that will sweep away incumbents.

Yet the British political class has a rotten record in this regard. It couldn’t even work out that the terms of our membership of the European Union – zero border control, massive net financial contributions and a sovereignty ratchet away from the nation – were unsustainable. So it didn’t bother fighting very hard to renegotiate them and then the “unthinkable” happened, causing shock and trauma across the entire British establishment.

I started campaigning for Brexit in late 2010, when I was chief political commentator for the Daily Express, precisely because I did identify that our membership of the EU was unsustainable. At the time, the very idea of Britain leaving the EU seemed massively far-fetched to my peer group in political journalism. Some of them thought I’d gone slightly mad. And yet the unsustainability – which showed up in countless opinion polls about British attitudes towards membership, free movement and “ever-closer union” – turned out to be a stronger force than conventional wisdom.

Long-time readers of this blog site will know that I have identified something else as unsustainable: the asylum system to which we are signed up through various UN compacts and the European Convention on Human Rights. And I don’t just mean unsustainable in the sense that it must be reformed with a few tweaks to eliminate the most egregious examples of the system being gamed by bad-faith claimants. I mean the whole thing is literally unsustainable and will have to be scrapped.

Hence my article of August 2023 recommending that we take a Japanese approach to asylum (basically: don’t grant it) and instead give the Home Secretary quasi-judicial power and responsibility for granting a small number of exceptional applications for sanctuary each year. There would be no legal appeals system in place. In effect, our vastly expensive immigration tribunal system could be abolished. The nation would restore to itself the power to tell foreign nationals whether their presence within our borders was tolerable or not, with no interference from activist lawyers.

( https://patrickoflynn.substack.com/p/the-big-read-the-global-asylum-system )

Don’t ask me to talk you through all the political shenanigans that will have to be gone through to arrive at a position whereby a British government pulls the plug on the current regime of asylum and loophole-seeking immigration tribunals. I couldn’t have done that in advance on Brexit and yet I knew it was going to happen.

In that case David Cameron privately explained to friends his decision to grant a referendum by complaining “I’ve got UKIP breathing down my neck”. And I was proud to play a role in that UKIP neck-breathing operation.

We can certainly expect electoral pressure to be at the heart of the campaign to ditch as asylum system which has turned into a de facto right for almost any foreign

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REFORM has caught a crab. Its positioning on the Ukraine war is all wrong and I predict that it will result in the party losing opinion poll support.

From Nigel Farage downwards, Reform is giving the impression that its stance on the war is driven mainly by a desire to stay aligned to US President Donald Trump – whatever position Trump expounds.

Overnight this has meant Reform politicians making snide jibes at Volodymyr Zelenskyy, albeit not going so far as Trump, who has described the Ukrainian leader as a “dictator” and implied that he started the war.

The British people are not fools in these matters. They know it was the murderous, thug regime of Vladimir Putin which began the war. They know about Russia’s war crimes. And they are firmly on the side of the plucky Ukrainians in their heroic resistance (see latest polling if you doubt this).

( https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/survey-results/daily/2025/02/20/c33bd/1?utm_source=daily_question&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=daily%2F2025%2F02%2F20_question_1 )

Many British voters admire many aspects of the new Trump administration – not least its determination to get to grips with illegal immigration and its uncompromising rebuff of trans militancy so that women and girls once more have access to protected spaces and sports.

But cuddling up to Putin – who has repeatedly sent his agents into our country to commit murder – while badmouthing Zelenskyy is not such an admirable aspect.

Reform is in danger of failing a key test of patriotism by subordinating the British

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THE rapid rise of white identity politics is in my view the most dangerous and destabilising force to afflict our society for generations.

This is not to condemn those who find themselves swept up in it as hate-filled bigots or even as unreasonable people. But, logically, when many of the majority group in society – and white Brits still form around 70 per cent of the UK population – start thinking primarily in terms of racial loyalty then the prospects for a peaceful multi-racial society look bleak indeed.

White identity politics – what Keir Starmer would call the “Far Right” impulse – for generations ranged from dormant to almost defunct in Britain. Thinking back just to the 2012 London Olympics, I was fortunate to be in the athletics stadium on “Super Saturday”, when the only colour that mattered was the gold of the medals brought home by the black Mo Farah, the mixed-race Jess Ennis and the white Greg Rutherford.

Of course, even back then not everything in the garden was rosy. British political elites were deliberately keeping the lid on injustices suffered by working class white communities at the hands of ethnic minority criminals. This not only encompassed the Pakistani rape gangs that had cropped up in many towns, but also an unremarked upon predilection for knife crime within black communities.

The state rightly drew attention repeatedly and for many years to the heinous murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence by a white gang in 1993. But it made almost no reference to the much more common instances of white youths being stabbed to death by non-white ones.

Only those of you who follow these things unusually closely will even have heard of Ross Parker or Kriss Donald, both murdered by Pakistani-heritage youths in racially-targeted attacks in 2001 and 2004 respectively. There was little national press coverage of either case.

Perhaps more of you will remember the names of Jimmy Mizen and Ben Kinsella, white boys both murdered in 2008 by non-white youths.

Nearly all of you will recall the terrible case of Fusilier Lee Rigby, murdered in 2013 by two Islamist terrorists of Nigerian descent in Woolwich. But maybe the killing of Charlie Bartolo in nearby Greenwich in 2022 slipped past you: a white teenager slaughtered by a black knife gang allegedly on postcode rivalry grounds.

More recently, we have seen mass slaughters in Nottingham and Southport perpetrated by young black men. In the Southport case, there is definitive evidence of at least a partial racial motive – the perpetrator had spoken of his desire to see a “white genocide”.

In Sheffield, police have charged a 15-year-old with the knife killing of the white boy Harvey Willgoose at a local school a fortnight ago. Because of the defendant’s age, we are not permitted to know his identity or ethnic background, though plenty of people on social media have purported to be aware of it. Next month a trial will be held over the killing of the white asylum-hotel worker Rhiannon Whyte in Walsall. The defendant is a small boat migrant from South Sudan.

As the former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Dame Cressida Dick made clear to the Commons Home Affairs committee in her thorough testimony in the summer of 2020, knife crime is many times higher among black youths than among their non-black contemporaries.

“Nationally – you probably know the figures – you are four times more likely to be a victim of homicide if you are black and eight times more likely to be a perpetrator. The overlap with my key metric, which is knife injuries for under-25s…shows enormous disproportionality in the way it affects our young black men as victims and, I am sorry to say, as perpetrators,” she told the MPs.

In this context you’d have to be complacent to the point of utter negligence to be unworried if you are a white parent bringing up teenagers in a multi-racial environment.

Think about it: many black boys having fallen into a knife culture and yet simultaneously being fed woke narratives at school about white privilege, white exploitation and white fragility: actually being taught to feel resentment or hostility towards their white contemporaries and having these prejudices legitimised by bogus pseudo-social theory.

Perhaps such lessons even played a contributory role in developing Axel Rudakubana’s evil mindset. Who knows?

But the idea of “white people bad, non-white people good”, fed to us for so long by elite media such as the BBC, is deservedly and belatedly dying on its arse. Alex

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