Not Guilty Verdict Ignored in Feminist-Led Court of Public Opinion
Five years ago, another #MeToo attack bit the dust when one of Australia’s best-known entertainers, Craig McLachlan, was found not guilty of 13 charges of indecent assault and assault. What’s more, the magistrate awarded costs against the police – Victorian police ultimately paid out half a million dollars, which is the highest payout ever against the police in the state.
So, the police paid McLachlan a fat $500k apology cheque – proof that the allegations should never have ended up in court but little compensation for the loss of his glittering career. McLachlan is known internationally for his early roles in television soaps Neighbours, and Home and Away, plus more recently The Dr Blake Mysteries, but also had a huge career in musical theatre and as a musician. He has not had a major gig in the past eight years since the allegations surfaced.
Craig McLachlan has discovered the hard way that in today’s Australia, a “not guilty” verdict means very little in our feminist-led court of public opinion.
Late last year McLachlan was due to be back on stage in a comedy called Cluedo, appearing alongside some other well-known actors. All was going well until an actress took it upon herself to wreak havoc. She took to social media to declare she was “shocked and disheartened” that McLachlan had landed a major role.
Naturally, the online mob roared in, bullied the rest of the cast for daring to share a stage with him and made life so toxic that the producer — displaying all the backbone of a wet paper towel — caved and booted Craig out.
Fuelling the ongoing attacks on Craig are comments made by the presiding judicial officer in the case, Magistrate Belinda Wallington. The woman has quite a reputation as the magistrate who first ordered the late Cardinal George Pell to stand trial and then famously appeared in an ABC photograph with Louise Milligan, author of the notorious book Cardinal, which very effectively poisoned public opinion before the Pell case went before a jury. The unanimous High Court decision dismissing the Pell allegations speaks volumes about the judgement of both women.
Her behaviour in Craig’s case is equally questionable. Having dismissed all the charges against Craig and awarded costs against the police, Wallington then weighed in with some unwarranted asides, describing the four complainants as “brave and honest” and Craig as an “egotistical and self-entitled man”.
Worse still, she threw in a comment about recent changes to sexual consent laws in Victoria, claiming if those changes had been in place at the time of the charges “it is possible that the result would have been different”.
Naturally the complainants seized upon Wallington’s extra-judicial swipes and went to the media claiming the case had been dismissed “on a technicality”. These complainants can’t be named, despite the fact they happily ‘outed’ themselves in the media – appearing in newspaper stories long before going to the police – and have capitalised on their status as sex abuse victims ever since, even after the not guilty verdict.
McLachlan’s partner, Vanessa Scammell has now produced a very successful podcast series, Not Guilty – The Craig McLachlan Case, dissecting all the court evidence showing that the behaviour of the complainants falls far short of Wallington’s praise and exposing her consent comment as thoroughly misleading.
All the allegations relate to McLachlan’s starring role in a 2014 production of The Rocky Horror Show – following complaints made by actresses soon after they discovered they had not been chosen for the show’s subsequent tour with the actor.
Take a look at some examples of the real behaviour of these “brave and honest women”, many of which took place in front of sell-out audiences, all rivetted on McLachlan’s every move:
- The legendary thigh-tickling caper. One accusation involved Craig reaching up to tickle the complainant up to her inner thigh (while she was perched on an elevated platform). Problem was the physical setup made it comically implausible (he could barely get past her ankle).
- The mid-song passionate smooch. It was alleged that Craig suddenly paused during his big number to passionately tongue-kiss one of the women onstage — even though the scene was choreographed to the split-second with music and lighting cues, giving him roughly zero room to improvise any erotic detours.
- The face-grab fiasco. Witnesses swore blind that Craig grabbed one accuser by the jaw mid-scene and angrily hurled her face aside like a discarded prop. The actual complainant? She shrugged and said the scripted gentle face-touch was just “a little firmer than usual”.
As for Wallington’s comment about new sexual consent laws: there has been a change in Victorian law requiring that the accused person not only has to genuinely believe he had consent but that a reasonable person in the same circumstance would reach the same conclusion.
In only two of the 13 charges was consent law even mentioned as being applicable. One example where consent was an issue involved Craig sitting on a complainant’s lap. Evidence showed lap-sitting was commonplace in the bawdy backstage culture of the Rocky production. In fact, the same complainant had also straddled Craig’s thigh, joking about leaving “snail trails”.
Here the charges were dismissed because the magistrate accepted that Craig genuinely believed she consented. And, given the circumstances, it is a fair bet that any reasonable person in his position would have believed the same. So, even under Victoria’s new consent laws, the result would have been no different.
Wallington’s unwarranted editorial comments were entirely unnecessary to the decision. They were unnecessary comments that she ought to have known would be weaponised to undermine the very verdict she had delivered. In one breath she cleared him – she awarded him costs – and in the next she handed his critics the perfect excuse to misleadingly claim that his acquittal was the result of a mere technicality. The damage has been profound and lasting.
My recent video conversation with McLachlan and Scammell aims to put the record straight – all part of ongoing efforts to bring one of Australia’s finest entertainers back to where he belongs.
As one of Australia’s first sex therapists, Bettina Arndt began her career discussing sex on television and training doctors and other professionals in sexual counselling at a time when such topics were largely taboo. Her current – and even more socially unacceptable – passion is exposing Australia’s unfair treatment of men through the relentless weaponisation of laws and policies that portray women solely as victims. Her decades of advocacy for fair treatment of men in the Family Court included serving on key government inquiries. Bettina makes YouTube videos and blogs on Substack.
Amol Rajan: I’m Very Worried About My Children Growing Up in England
By Will Jones
Amol Rajan has said he is “very worried” about his children growing up in England and is considering relocating to India so his children can “fall in love with the civilisation that’s in their blood”. The Telegraph has more.
The BBC broadcaster, who was born in Calcutta and raised in Tooting, south London, said he was “very worried” about England because it was no longer making history.
The 42 year-old said that India was “exciting and energetic in a way that Britain doesn’t always feel”.
Rajan said he wanted his four children to visit India and decide for themselves where they wanted to live.
He told Gyles Brandreth’s Rosebud podcast: “I can’t tell you how much I love my country, by which I mean England, but I’m very worried about it.
“I think we’ve got some big, big problems that need addressing, and one of the things is whether this is the best place for my four kids to grow up.
“My answer is that it is. But I would say specifically that I’m not sure whether it’s still a place where history is being made.”
Rajan said the UK used to have considerable influence in terms of culture, finance and world politics.
“In the 1960s and 70s, England is where history was being made,” he said, adding: “It had the cultural effusion, the dividend of the baby boomer years, relative peace.”
The broadcaster suggested he would like to raise his family in an area that exhibited more recent prosperity and innovation.
He said: “India is definitely somewhere where history is being made. India is the young country, 1.4 billion people, it adds one million people to the workforce every single month.
“It’s extraordinarily exciting and energetic in a way that Britain doesn’t always feel.
“I’d like my children to experience India and then make up their own mind. I want it to be their decision.
“My youngest is two and when she’s a bit older and the long-haul flights are a bit less perilous I would like to go to India a bit more frequently and invite my children to fall in love with the civilisation that’s in their blood.”
Rajan is married to Charlotte Faircloth, an Associate Professor at University College London’s Institute of Education, with whom he has four children.
Worth reading in full.
Seems weirdly telling to hear an Indian-born man raised in England with England-born, ethnically half-English children speaking of Indian civilisation being “in their blood”. So is ancestry suddenly central to people’s identity? Presumably only insofar as the ancestry isn’t white…
A Brief History of ‘Trans Time’
Have you been struggling to adapt properly to the clocks going forward by an hour last month? If so, the true reason may shock you: your internal body-clock is gay. Yawning because you’ve lost an hour in bed reveals your metabolism is innately homosexual and is engaging in a noble act of rainbow rebellion against the externally imposed anti-queer time-measuring methods of the narrow-minded heteronormative social dictatorship within which you and your oppressed corporeal frame are forced to live. For today’s truly liberated chronoqueer, life is there to be lived to the ticking of your inner own clock, not anybody else’s: forget British Summer Time, it’s time to begin operating on British Bummer Time.
That is the liberating message now emanating from Canada, a land so woke Lake Superior will soon be renamed Lake Equity. Its universities appear even more captured by madness than our own, as proven by an amusing new academic paper, ‘Temporal Disobedience: Intersex Timescapes, Chronopolitics and Intersex Joy’, due to be published in the journal Feminist Theory’s special ‘Intersex Joy’ issue this April. The co-authors describe themselves as follows:
Tori Dudys is a white cis endo queer woman and student in Eastern Canada. Celeste E Orr is a white genderqueer endo disabled professor in Atlantic Canada. Casey Burkholder is a white cis endo bisexual femme and professor at a university in Eastern Canada.
The word “endo” is a piece of Queer Studies jargon meaning ‘born in the correct body’, i.e., all three are biological women, born as biological women. Apparently, there now needs to be a specific word for that. I thought there already was. It was traditionally pronounced ‘women’.
Cock around the clock
Our endo experts set out in their paper to lay out a sweeping theory of “chronopolitics”, or the politics of time, from the perspective primarily of intersex people, but also upon behalf of everyone non-white, non-straight and non-normal. Blacks have black time, queers have queer time, transexuals have trans time, cripples have crip time, and I have no time for any of it. The authors build upon a depressingly substantial body of previous work, in particular that of the Queer Studies chronopolitics pioneer Jack Halberstam, who first defined trans/queer/whatever time as a homosexual rebellion against the standard sequential straight path a normal human life is supposed to follow, as in birth, childhood, education, getting a job, getting married, having kids, retiring, having grandkids, dying, rotting, The End. Instead, Halberstam is quoted as writing:
Fuck family, fuck marriage… this is not my life, that will not be my timeline. Queer time for me is the dark nightclub, the perverse turn away from the narrative coherence of adolescence-early adulthood-marriage-reproduction-child rearing-retirement-death, the embrace of late childhood in place of early adulthood or immaturity in place of responsibility.
Queer time in its early conceptualisation was thus just a fancy pseudo-theoretical justification for abandoning society’s usual adult life-path and making time stand still forever at a point of arrested adolescent development, a perpetual round of pink nightclubs and chem-sex with no familial or career-based responsibilities whatsoever – to become a Peter Pansy, a perpetual child, but with fully functioning gay genitalia. Well okay, you can easily live like that, for a while. But then subsequent ‘thinkers’ built on Halberstam’s work, widening it out into ever-more total weirdness.
Time is a crime
The new paper’s authors grandly reconceive queer people as walking “temporal disruptions” or anti-clocks in human form, living embodiments of the anti-clockwise, like witches dancing naked widdershins upon Walpurgisnacht. Straight time, which goes only forwards, is normative, and thus analogous to whiteness, so can also be called “white time”. During the colonial era, primitive non-white subject-peoples were often thought to be living outside of European historical time, in states like the perennial Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime’. Therefore, chrono-racist white men cruelly equipped them with wristwatches and calendars and dragged them kicking and screaming into 1896 or whenever.
This therefore makes the modern idea of queering time into an innately decolonial project: “Inter time calls for the dismantling of the white, colonial, enabled, cisheteronormative, endonormative life-course, creating a more fluid, tender understanding of time and how people navigate it.”
But how can non-normative folx be enabled to “navigate” time differently than the rest of us? By being allowed to be constantly late for work with no questions asked, embodying as they do the many “possibilities of self-authored timelines, of disorientation that is not pathologised but celebrated”. Imagine if, when the clocks go forward, you decide to take the usual extra hour in bed anyway, and roll up for work at 10 o’clock rather than nine o’clock. Your excuse to the boss should be that, whilst he might think it’s 10 o’clock, upon your own internal gay-clock it’s still 60 minutes earlier, so you aren’t late at all, it’s just that his own clock is a homophobe. If the boss then says you’re mad, you should simply agree with him. Insanity is a subset of disability too, so counts as being a form of crip time, you see, which also allows you to stroll into work whenever you please:
Able-bodied time is rooted in capitalism. Think, nine-to-five workdays, shift work, the grindset, strict routines, the Kafkaesque onslaught of deadlines, appointments and paperwork – these things expect able-bodiedness and able-mindedness. … Building on the concept of queer time, disability, mad and crip studies scholars have taken up the concept of ‘crip time’ as a means to expose the barriers that disabled people face when living lodged within able-bodied and able-minded time. … In doing so, crip time offers a ‘more beautiful and forgiving’ understanding of time, timelines and expectations. … Ellen Samuels (2017) explains that “When disabled folks talk about crip time, sometimes we just mean that we’re late all the time – maybe because we need more sleep than non-disabled people, maybe because the accessible gate in the train station was locked”. … My friend Alison Kafer says that “rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds”. … Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life-stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings.
Jack Halberstam’s initial solipsistic but not outright insane notion of queer time being a youthful gay rebellion against adult responsibility now transforms into genuine magical thinking: “Crip time is time travel.” And when it comes to the specific sub-form of trans time, doubly so.
Late Periods
Is the above verbiage all just harmless hyper-specialist wibble which nobody outside obscure Canadian Queer Studies departments will pay any attention to? Sadly not. The idea of trans time has seeped messily out of academia like one of those melting watches Dalí used to paint, to the point where it is now being pushed as possessing some actual supposed medical validity. Rebecca Minor is a social worker and academic at Boston University and author of the new book Raising Trans Kids, which purports to give confused (and probably highly depressed) parents of cross-dressers essential advice on how to react to their child’s condition besides simply kicking them.
Rebecca’s website features a guide to the concept of trans time, advising parents that, just like there are units of time called ‘dog years’, there are now units of time called ‘trans years’ too:
A trans individual’s age can be perceived in multiple ways. For instance, a trans woman may be 30 years-old chronologically but 14 in ‘trans years’, reflecting the time since she began living as her true gender. This dual sense of age highlights different temporal experiences and the diversity within the trans community, especially in ageing.
Spot the obvious opportunity for abuse here. Via such misguided queer therapy-speak, a ‘born again’ 30 year-old man is potentially empowered to begin living his life not merely as a fake 30 year-old woman, but as a fake 14 year-old girl. So, if such a chronologically ill individual approaches your own 14 year-old daughter in the park one day and requests to join her tweenage friendship group, before asking her if she’d like to go to the swimming baths or the clothes store changing-rooms with him, that should be perfectly okay, right, nothing suspicious whatsoever, just a harmless expression of ‘her’ internal trans body-clock?
Being a fully qualified social worker, Rebecca interprets the scary phenomenon of fully-grown adult males dressing as schoolgirls as merely an innocent expression of delayed ‘female’ puberty:
Delayed adolescence refers to the period of experimentation and change that many trans individuals undergo, often likened to a second puberty. This phase can involve learning new social behaviours and adapting to physical changes, mirroring the experiences typically associated with teenage years in straight time.
We need to begin “moving beyond a one-dimensional view based on chronological age”, Rebecca explains. If a 30 year-old is now 14 again, he/she will obviously start experiencing puberty again, won’t he/she? Queer website Polyphonies thinks he/she will, arguing in an article called ‘Trans Time: Reclaiming Life Trajectories’ that mid-life second trans-puberties are a genuine medico-social phenomenon:
Trans time can be different. Trans people come into new or more authentic identities at different ages, sometimes with new names and pronouns. Those who medically transition may go through second puberties because of gender-affirming hormones. Nemo, a trans young person [we] interviewed, elaborates: “Being trans we have a different age range associated with the label ‘young person’ because a lot of us find out who we are a lot later.”
How long before we start getting 46 year-old men in nappies turning up at nurseries and demanding to be given admittance and a dummy, otherwise they’ll sue? Almost certainly, this day is coming.
Knee replacement surgery
What would a world in which trans time found itself being tolerantly validated by the society around us actually look like? Like the wonderful world of “Stefoknee Wolscht”. Wolscht was a six-foot-plus tall Canadian man who suddenly realised, aged 46, that he was in fact an eight year-old girl called Stefoknee. Splitting from his wife and seven children, Stefoknee was ‘adopted’ by a polyamorous couple who agreed to treat him as their hormone-boosted ‘daughter’, letting him sit around in their house all day looking deviant. “It’s called play therapy. No medication, no suicide thoughts. And I just get to play,” Stefoknee purrs about existing like this.
The Wolschts certainly appear to be a very close family.
Where did Georgina Dawes meet his adoptive parents? At an orphanage? No. On a fetish-website. For a little girl, Stefoknee does appear to be disturbingly sexualised in his appearance. This is him out shopping in a Canadian lingerie department. Since when did eight year-olds buy lingerie? To even ask the question marks you out as a cruel, chrononormative bigot.
The adult baby’s very open-minded adoptive parents had real children and grandchildren too, one of whom was aged seven when Stefoknee started living with them. The real child said she would prefer Stefoknee to be her younger sister, not her older one, so the false ‘child’ suddenly exploited the inherent elasticity of trans time to miraculously become six years old instead of eight, just like that.
A decade or so on since first coming out as a six year-old in the world’s media, it seems Stefoknee is still living suspended at this precise same age as in a fairy-tale, as he explained to the Daily Star in 2023. Unusually for a six year-old, though, Stefoknee has been forced to take on a very adult job to pay his parents some rent: he drives a snowplough. Isn’t this illegal child labour? Maybe not, as, living in non-chronological trans time, Stefoknee’s existence is filled with manifold curious, age-related contradictions. For some reason, he is allowed to vote in Canadian elections, for example:
If you’re only six then you can’t vote. This is illegal, and Stefoknee should be in prison – but children can’t be sent to prison, can they? Naughty Stefoknee can, once being arrested, although he refuses to specify precisely what for. Pathetically, Canadian authorities allowed him to spend his time in solitary confinement in full character. Also illegally for an underage schoolgirl, Stefoknee can drive:
Genuine six year-olds should never be allowed to play with petrol. (At least I presume – and hope – that’s what Stefoknee means by “feeding the donkey” here.) Some readers may think Stefoknee belongs behind bars permanently, but UK cops disagree. During a recent trip to London to promote his chronologically aberrant autobiography, Holding On By a Thread, a trans time-aware British bobby happily posed for Stefoknee’s camera advertising a copy for all to see.
Wasting police time? Again, to the terminally chronoqueer, there’s just no such concept.
Obscure and demented pseudo-academic studies like the one I opened this article by discussing may initially seem small beer indeed, barely even worth considering except to laugh at them. But the fringe ideas contained within have an alarming habit of later acting as justificatory ‘philosophical’, ‘moral’, ‘scientific’, ‘medical’ and, ultimately, ‘legal’ frameworks for blatant real-world perversions in the realm outside niche academia, as sadly demonstrated above. The fact that that the logic at play in such publications is complete and abject nonsense is irrelevant; it is politically useful to the queer agenda, and that’s all that really matters here. We really must stop being so polite, like the policemen and garage-attendants pictured above, and start telling these people to their stupid faces that they have the mentalities of two year-olds – just not the biology to match.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. That’s two times more than this lot ever are.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books.
The Greens’ Migration Policy is Completely Mad
By Will Jones
The Greens have published their migration policy, and it’s even madder than you might have feared, says Brendan O’Neill in the Telegraph. In pursuit of “a world without borders”, all who reach Britain will be given full access to the NHS, welfare benefits and the voting booth. Here’s an excerpt.
The list of reasons not to vote for Zack Polanski’s cranky Green Party is already miles long. This is a party in revolt against the truth of biology – witness Polanski’s loopy insistence that a woman “can have a penis”.
It’s a party that would halt all new oil and gas licensing, crushing thousands of well-paying working-class jobs and hiking our energy bills ever higher. And it’s a party content to rub shoulders with iffy Islamists if it will help it climb the greasy pole to power.
Well, now we can add another reason: the party’s migration policy. It’s one of the craziest policy documents I have ever read. In a nutshell, the Greens would throw open our doors to every soul on earth. People from distant lands who’ve contributed not a penny to our public purse would be gifted the same rights as Britons. They’d have access to the NHS, to welfare benefits, and even to the voting booth. Even migrants who do not have settled status should “have the right to vote in all elections”, say the Greens.
The party outlines its long-term goal – “a world without borders”. But as we await this borderless ‘utopia’ that no one except soppy bourgeois Leftists and globe-trotting crime lords actually wants, the Greens would implement a “fair and humane” system.
Fair for who? Not hard-working British people. Even arrivals who do not have settled status will receive “free and comprehensive” healthcare. They’ll also enjoy “access to welfare benefits”.
Boil this down and what the Greens are saying is that British workers will be forced to fund the lifestyles of foreigners. At the moment, it is mainly only migrants with “settled status” who can access benefits – a dodgy enough system, given it lavishes money on people from faraway lands who’ve never lifted a finger in Britain. Other migrants are informed they have: “No recourse to public funds.”
That would collapse under the Green Party. “Any ‘No recourse to public funds’ conditions will be abolished,” it says. This would act as a green light to the poor of the world. More would come, in the knowledge that our nutty Green government, if such a horror were to come to pass, would give them a house, cash and healthcare.
You’d have to be a fool not to try to land in such a strange nation that hands wads of cash to all-comers.
Worth reading in full.
Ireland’s Fuel Crisis Escalates as Protesters Demanding End to Carbon Tax Block Access to Major Oil Refinery and Government Calls in Military
By Will Jones
Ireland’s fuel crisis has escalated as protesters demanding suspension of the carbon tax have blocked access to a major oil refinery and fuel depots and the Government has called in the military. Sky News has more.
Passengers travelling to or from Dublin Airport are being advised to allow extra time for their journeys as protests over high fuel prices in Ireland continue into a fourth day.
Farmers, lorry drivers and agricultural contractors began a series of demonstrations on Tuesday. They have evolved from slow-moving motorway convoys that restricted access to some of Dublin’s busiest streets to blockades of fuel depots.
The Irish Government will meet protesters on Friday to discuss the crisis, which was triggered by the rising cost of gas and diesel amid the knock-on effects of the Iran war.
Protesters have blocked access to a major oil refinery in Whitegate, Co Cork, as well as fuel depots in Galway City and Foynes, Co Limerick, raising concerns over panic buying at petrol stations.
More than 100 petrol stations have now run out of fuel. The figure could rise to five times as many by Friday evening if fuel supplies remain disrupted, national broadcaster RTE reported, citing the industry organisation Fuels for Ireland.
The Irish Government asked the army on Thursday to remove vehicles from blocked roads amid concerns they could impede police, firefighters and ambulances responding to emergencies.
Ireland’s Health Service Executive (HSE) said the disruption was causing people to miss medical appointments and hitting the provision of home care and critical care, such as dialysis and cancer treatment.
Worth reading in full.
According to Liz Walsh in the Spectator, the protesters’ demands are to cap fuel at €1.75 a litre and suspend the carbon tax (something Sky oddly fails to mention). Permanently suspend, perhaps.
Navy Barred From Boarding Russian Ships After Lord Hermer Legal Advice
By Will Jones
The Royal Navy has not seized any sanctioned Russian tankers because the Government fears it would breach international law following legal advice from Lord Hermer, making a mockery of Sir Keir Starmer’s pledge to “go after” the ships. The Telegraph has the story.
Vladimir Putin’s shadow fleet has been allowed to pass through the English Channel despite Sir Keir Starmer’s pledge, a fortnight ago, to “go after” the ships.
Since the Telegraph revealed on Wednesday that Putin had sent a warship to escort sanctioned vessels through the Channel, there have been mounting questions over the Government’s failure to stop Russian ships.
Now it can be revealed that Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, has given legal advice about how the ships could be tackled in British territorial waters to prevent the flow of sanctioned oil to Russia’s allies.
Under his advice, ships can be boarded by special forces and officers from the National Crime Agency (NCA), but no such operations have taken place because of concerns about breaching international maritime law, which sets a high legal bar for a state to board a foreign vessel.
Officials must present a legal case for each operation, which is known under international law as an “interdiction”, and prove that the vessel has evaded British sanctions.
Putin sent three more vessels through the Channel on Thursday, hours after John Healey, the Defence Secretary, revealed that Russia had run a secret submarine operation in British waters that threatened vital energy and data cables.
It also emerged that one of the Russian vessels that crossed the Channel earlier this week was feared to be carrying supplies for Putin’s armed forces.
On Thursday, Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister, told the Telegraph that Sir Keir had to stop the shadow fleet and recover “some of the respect Britain has lost recently” over its military response to the war in the Middle East.
He said: “I think it’s pathetic. I don’t know why we don’t board these sanction-busting ships. They are fuelling Putin’s war machine and funding his slaughter of innocent Ukrainians and we have a golden opportunity to stop it.
“I think if we did, it would do a lot to recover some of the respect Britain has lost recently for our inability to defend our friends in the Gulf and use our bases in Cyprus.
“Putin is breaking the law – he knows he is, and he is laughing at us. It’s important to choke off Putin’s income. They need to restore a bit of pride in the British Armed Forces. This is not the fault of the Armed Forces – it’s the abysmal leadership of the Government.”
Worth reading in full.
Starmer Forced to Drop Chagos Bill After Trump Opposition
By Will Jones
Sir Keir Starmer has been forced to drop legislation to implement his Chagos Islands giveaway after opposition from Donald Trump. The Telegraph has more.
Labour had hoped to pass a bill to give the islands to Mauritius last year, but delayed it as the US President frequently changed his mind about the deal.
Ministers have now run out of time to put the legislation through Parliament before the end of the current session and the King’s Speech next month.
Trump initially supported the deal, which would see Britain give away the islands, including Diego Garcia, a joint UK-US military base.
The UK would then pay around £35 billion over 99 years to lease back the base, which has been used by the US for operations during the Iran war.
The deal has faced fierce criticism from Reform UK and the Conservatives, who tried to delay the legislation in the House of Lords.
Sir Keir signed the deal with the Mauritian Government last year, but it cannot be implemented until Parliament passes legislation to give up the islands, which are officially known as the British Indian Ocean Territory.
Trump supported the deal soon after taking office, but said earlier this year he no longer thought it was in the interests of Britain and the US.
He then changed his mind twice more, supporting it for a second time and then rejecting it in an angry online post after Sir Keir refused to let him use British military bases to bomb Iran.
Ministers are frustrated by Trump’s repeated change in position, but have said they will not ratify the deal and give the islands to Mauritius without US consent.
Britain is also reliant on the US to formally amend an exchange of letters sent in the 1960s and 1970s that form the legal basis for the agreement to share the base.
Mauritius has repeatedly challenged Britain’s ownership of the Chagos Islands in the international courts, and ministers expected that the International Court of Justice would soon issue a binding ruling to transfer ownership of them.
Worth reading in full.
How could the ICJ issue a “binding ruling” when it has no jurisdiction over disputes between current or former Commonwealth states?
Stop Press: The UK Government has dispatched police and customs officers to the Indian Ocean to intercept a boat carrying vital supplies to Chagosians. Did it do this out of spite?
News Round-Up
By Will Jones
- “Iran’s supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s face is severely disfigured but he is still alive, his inner circle says” – Mojtaba Khamenei has reportedly suffered severe injuries in an airstrike that killed his father but remains alive, according to the Mail.
- “Benjamin Netanyahu declares campaign against Iran is ‘not over’ and there is ‘more to do’ – while US-Tehran peace talks take place in Pakistan” – Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted the campaign against Iran continues despite ongoing US-led peace talks, reports the Mail.
- “Are Britons really cheering for the worst regime on Earth?” – For the sake of blowing raspberries at Donald Trump, the chattering classes are ignoring Tehran’s barbarity, says Jake Wallis Simons in the Telegraph.
- “I reported ‘antisemitic’ art show to the police. Now they are investigating me” – An activist who organised an email campaign by supporters to complain about the antisemitic Margate art exhibition is told by police she may have committed a criminal offence, reports the Telegraph.
- “Starmer must defend British territory, not surrender it” – The delay in the Chagos bill should eventually lead to it being killed off for good, says the Telegraph in a leading article.
- “This isn’t the end of the Chagos debacle” – It’s good news that the Government recognises it cannot ratify the Chagos treaty in the immediate future, but this is a pause, not an end, warns Richard Ekins in the Spectator.
- “Mauritius vows to reclaim Chagos after Starmer shelves deal” – Mauritius has vowed to gain control of the Chagos Islands after the collapse of Sir Keir Starmer’s plan to give them up voluntarily, says the Telegraph.
- “UN investigates whether Chagos deal amounts to human rights violation” – The United Nations is reviewing whether Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands deal breaches international human rights laws after the Government was accused of “ethnic cleansing and potentially crimes against humanity” for efforts to expel islanders, reports the Telegraph.
- “Chagos supply mission thwarted by officials” – UK immigration officers and police have been accused of seizing vital supplies destined for inhabitants of the Chagos Islands, notes the Telegraph.
- “Badenoch: Starmer is lying to you – Britain is not ready for war” – Sir Keir Starmer has lied to the public by saying Britain is ready to defend itself in a war, Kemi Badenoch has claimed, reports the Telegraph.
- “Maga podcasters helped make Trump President. Now, they’re battling to replace him” – Influential Maga podcasters have begun shaping a succession struggle within Trump’s political movement as divisions emerge, reveals Tim Stanley in the Telegraph.
- “Data show court backlogs falling, so why aren’t Ministers talking about it?” – Ministers have been accused of withholding improving criminal court backlog data because they undermine arguments for curtailing jury trials, reports the Times.
- “Labour MP appeared at event with peer convicted of child-sex crime” – Afzal Khan has faced scrutiny after footage appeared to contradict his account of attending an event with a convicted peer, reports the Times.
- “Working-class boys don’t have white privilege, says Anas Sarwar” – Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has argued that many white working-class boys do not benefit from “white privilege”, says the Times.
- “Afghans and Nigerians enter Britain under Ukrainian visas” – Thousands of non-Ukrainian migrants have entered the UK through visa schemes intended for Ukrainians, reveals the Telegraph.
- “Restore ties with Israel to fix Britain’s defences, Air Vice-Marshal tells Starmer” – A former RAF chief has called for renewed ties with Israel to strengthen Britain’s outdated air defence systems, according to the Telegraph.
- “Done four times for driving at 22mph. Welcome to anti-car Britain” – A doctor has accumulated penalty points and now risks a ban for repeatedly driving at 22mph, highlighting concerns over strict traffic enforcement, says the Telegraph.
- “Tony Sewell: The Clapham riots were like Lord of the Flies” – Tony Sewell has compared the Clapham riots to Lord of the Flies while criticising identity politics and social breakdown, reports the Telegraph.
- “Bridget Phillipson accused of putting career ahead of women’s rights in trans war” – Bridget Phillipson has been accused of delaying guidance on single-sex spaces over political concerns, reveals the Telegraph.
- “Everyone cares about Hungary” – The growing international fixation on Hungary is because it has become a symbol of wider European political tensions, says Ed West on Substack.
- “Zohran Mamdani’s racial Stalinism” – The NYC Mayor’s ‘racial equity’ agenda will racialise every aspect of New York City life, laments Hugo Timms in Spiked.
- “How appeasing the IRA opened the door to Islamic terrorism – Part 3” – Concessions to the IRA set precedents that later facilitated Islamic terrorism, says Aileen Quinton in TCW.
- “Matt Ridley: climate alarmism is declining” – Clintel publishes the text of Matt Ridley’s recent lecture where he argues that climate alarmism is waning as economic and energy realities reshape debate.
- “The carbon bureaucracy nobody voted for” – Aiden Buzzetti in WUWT warns that the International Organisation for Standardisation is quietly shaping energy policy without democratic oversight.
- “The hydrogen highway ends in a traffic jam” – California’s hydrogen car experiment has entered a phase where the gap between expectation and experience is no longer subtle, says Charles Rotter in WUWT.
- “Zack Polanski has some nerve calling Reform hateful” – It’s the Green Party that has become a magnet for cranks and bigots, says Tom Slater in Spiked.
- “The National Trust villages caught up in Labour’s Net Zero obsession” – The heritage charity’s centuries-old rental homes will struggle to meet tough new standards, notes the Telegraph.
- “Tony Blair started the rot that’s left Britain bust and divided” – Polling has suggested deep national pessimism that William Sitwell in the Telegraph traces back to Tony Blair’s legacy.
- “Bash Back are thugs posing as victims” – When people are told that their opponents are Nazis and fascists, they will feel justified in doing anything to them, as illustrated by the vicious new trans activist group telling members to attack MPs and organisations, says Julie Burchill in the Spectator.
- “Victorian boys were gender-fluid, museum claims” – The Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle, County Durham, tells visitors that “gender fluidity” was a feature of 19th-century childhoods because some boys wore dresses up to the age of eight, says the Telegraph.
- “The UK has just banned viewing pornographic material that features supposed ‘step-family members’” – Yet the same Government “refused to ban actual cousin f*cking incest. That’s how insane the UK Government is”, says Basil the Great on X.
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