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A thousand little beer-and-music festivals spring up every weekend: steam trains, cider, bad rock music and burnt sausages. Pub gardens start to fill up.

England feels alive.

Read The Full article here At Coffee House Online:

https://spectator.com/article/the-world-cup-cant-save-englands-pubs/

And Don’t forget our day in the country on the 18th of July, there will be burnt sausages, knobbly knees the best of real ale and cider and more importantly lots of fun and interesting people. I hope to see you there.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/10/sinn-fein-hypocrisy-belfast-violence-staggering/

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No Tickets, No Fees, No Lanyards

Just a day out from London in the beer garden of a 500 year old village pub.

https://spectator.com/article/kemi-badenoch-responded-to-henry-nowaks-murder-with-class/

This happened because his killer made a false claim of racism and the police believed it. The bodycam footage is unbearable. Henry said, “I have been stabbed and I can’t breathe.” The officers dismissed him.

His family has said, heartbreakingly, that he did not die with dignity. This is a failure of policing, born of decades of ideology that puts community tensions above evidence, above humanity, and above a dying young man’s blood.

Two voices have stood out to me so far. Not because I agree with everything they say, and not because they agree with everything I have written, but because they have cut through the noise with something we rarely see in our political class: grace, clarity, principle, and, most importantly, basic human decency.

Those voices belong to Kemi Badenoch and Festus Akinbusoye.One is the leader of the Conservative Party. The other is a former police and crime commissioner, special constable, and councillor in Westminster. Both have Nigerian heritage, and neither seems remotely interested in playing the identity game. In 2026 Britain, that is very important.

Festus wrote a piece in a recent edition of the Independent, and it is worth reading in full. He did not shy away from the horror. Henry deserved better than to die in handcuffs while his murderer’s lies were initially believed. He backs a swift IOPC investigation and wants accountability.

But he refutes Nigel Farage’s attempts to turn this tragedy into a one-sided culture-war prop. As a man who was stopped and searched far more often than the national average for young black men, Festus knows from personal experience what it feels like when it goes wrong.

Yet he still insists on the same standard for everyone. Officers must act on evidence, apply the law consistently, and treat every victim, regardless of colour, with equal urgency and equal humanity. That is the bare minimum any of us should demand. What I admire most about Festus is that he refuses to let grievance define the conversation.

Kemi Badenoch has been equally unflinching. She has met with Henry’s family. She watched the footage and said it will stay with her forever. She has described the police response as unforgivable and called for this case to be a seminal moment for Britain, on a par with the Stephen Lawrence case, but with crucial differences. Racism, unfortunately, happens to everybody, and an accusation alone is not evidence.

It can never be a larger crime than being stabbed or murdered.She has rejected two-tier thinking. She says there can be no two-tier policing and no to the belief that racism only happens to ethnic minorities. It happens to everyone. You must have one law and one standard for everyone.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man.In the last couple of days Kemi has shown her class, her ability, and her humanity. In moments of national crisis people rise to the top and get to show their quality. It is a terrible job being a politician at times like this, because these are the moments that define a politician’s career. Yet it has only come about because of the tragic killing of a young man who was only at the start of his life. This may well be the moment when Kemi Badenoch moved from being leader of the Conservative Party to a genuine hope for many as the next Prime Minister.

Both Kemi Badenoch and Festus Akinbusoye could have played these cards differently. It could easily have been framed through the lens of their own skin colour or background. Instead they have chosen the harder and better path: judge the evidence, judge the actions, and, most importantly, judge the character.Henry was a young lad walking home.

His killer chose violence and then chose a lie about race to try to save himself.The killer has ruined his own family and destroyed his own life, just as he has killed Henry and destroyed Henry’s family’s life. That is an almost unbearable tragedy.

The officers, however good their intentions may have been, made the wrong call because they had been trained for years to fear the wrong thing.Kemi and Festus refused to let any of that be reduced to identity checkboxes. This is not a new idea. At one time we would have considered it the right, simple, and only way of dealing with our fellow humans. The genius, of course, is in the simplicity. It is irrelevant what identity group you belong to. All that matters is whether you are a good and decent person, whether you can be trusted, whether you are kind, considerate, helpful, and honest, and so on and so forth.

The so-called new woke identity politics that has infiltrated and poisoned police training is just Marxist conflict theory dressed up in modern clothes. It will only lead to fragmented societies and a hierarchy of victims. It actively encourages victimhood and rewards grievances.As we see in the news day after day, it fuels division, polarisation, hate, and fear.

For those of us who loathe and despise racial prejudice of all kinds, and for those of us who crave a colour-blind society, one solution and one solution only exists. We must ditch critical race theory, banish two-tier policing, and return to the ideals that underpin Martin Luther King’s dream and make it a reality.

Henry Nowak is not a symbol. He was a young man with an entire life ahead of him. The officers who failed him are not cartoon villains. They are the product of a system that taught them to see colour and community before human beings. The killer, who lied about racism, does not represent any faith or ethnicity. He is a murderer: a young man who made a terrible choice that has ruined his life and his family’s life and killed Henry and destroyed his family.That he reached for the same ideology that is now tearing us apart is indicative of a deeper problem in society around race and racism.

Kemi Badenoch and Festus Akinbusoye are showing us what real leadership and commentary can look like. They have put character first. They remind us that decency and honour are not the property of any particular skin colour, tribe or political identity or tick box. It is, and always has been, a choice.

It is still possible if enough of us make the right choice, publicly and unapologetically, without fear or favour and without fear of being called names. Maybe the next young man, the next Henry Nowak, will be treated as a dying boy who needs help, not as a potential community-relations problem.

That is the Britain I want. I suspect it is the Britain most of us still want. Let’s build it together.

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Henry Nowak, a first-year University of Southampton finance student, is walking home alone after a night out with friends in Portswood. Vickrum Digwa, 23, approaches him. Digwa, carrying a 21 cm ceremonial kirpan he says he is permitted to have as part of his Sikh faith, stabs Henry five times. One wound pierces his chest.

Henry tries to flee, leaving a trail of blood. He collapses. When Hampshire Police arrive, Digwa is quick-witted and calm. He tells the officers he has just been the victim of a racist attack: the white teenager called him a “p***”, knocked off his turban, and assaulted him. He claims self-defence.

The officers look at the scene: a distressed young brown man with a turban story, and a young white man bleeding on the floor. They take the path of least resistance. Five officers move on Henry. They begin reading him his rights and handcuff him on suspicion of assault. Henry, choking on his own blood, gasps, “I’ve been stabbed… I’ve been stabbed.”The officers appear to mishear or dismiss him. “Where?” they shout. “I don’t think you have, mate,” one replies.“I can’t breathe,” Henry says.

He will repeat those words seven more times, by some counts nine, while the officers continue cuffing him and reading him his rights. He dies there, on the street, in handcuffs. Something has clearly gone wrong. Millions of us have now watched the harrowing bodycam footage, released only this week at the insistence of Henry’s family after Digwa was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 21 years.

The killer’s false racism claim was rejected in court. The footage is unbearable. Hampshire Police have apologised for the officers’ response and the IOPC investigation into the individual officers is ongoing.What has gone wrong? And why has it gone wrong?

The public wants one thing from policing: that officers do their job without fear or favour. That means acting on evidence, applying the law consistently, and treating every victim, regardless of colour, with equal urgency and equal humanity.

This was not a failure of “a few bad apples.” It bore all the hallmarks of a culture that has learned, over decades, to arrest and remove the more compliant party first in order to avoid conflict with the more numerous, active, or aggressive one.

We have seen it far too often: two-tier policing on marches, the West Midlands Police’s handling of Israeli football fans, and, most terribly of all, the fear of “community tensions” that paralysed the authorities in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oldham and a dozen other grooming scandals, as documented in multiple official inquiries.

This is “take the knee” lanyard-class policing in action. It is the direct, predictable result of the post-Macpherson ideology that has warped British policing since 1999. The Stephen Lawrence inquiry’s legitimate demand to root out racism was turned into a doctrine that treats any accusation of racism as presumptively true, especially when it comes from a minority voice, and any hesitation to accept it as institutional failure.

Officers are trained, incentivised and disciplined to prioritise “community cohesion” over cold evidence and equal justice.The IOPC investigation into the individual officers is important and necessary.

But it is not sufficient. We need a top-to-bottom cultural shake-up.I believe we should move to a highly mobile national force for serious incidents, backed by a separate municipal-style police for large towns and cities, something closer to France’s Gendarmerie Nationale and Police Municipale model. Clear chains of command, national standards, and an end to the postcode lottery of local “sensitivities.

”Henry Nowak was not a statistic. He was a boy who left home to study, who did nothing wrong except exist in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong skin colour when a killer decided to weaponise race against him.

His family have said he “did not die with dignity.” That should shame every senior officer and politician who has spent twenty-five years pretending that treating people differently based on race is somehow anti-racist.

The public can see the bodycam footage for themselves. They can hear Henry’s last words being ignored. They can see the contrast between how the two men were treated in those critical minutes.

Policing without fear or favour is not a right-wing talking point. It is the bare minimum any citizen in a liberal democracy is owed. If we cannot deliver that, if we continue to let ideology trump evidence, then we are not protecting the public. We are managing them.

Henry Nowak deserved better. Every future victim does too.

In a series of toe-curling exchanges with Peter Mandelson, beleaguered Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden, one of the few sane and decent ministers in this government, let slip exactly what every meeting in this government is really about, “Every meeting I have is, ‘Who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others?’ They’re asking the wrong questions.”McFadden’s Law, Labors ‘‘Ratner’’ moment ladies and gentlemen. Write it down.

It is more revealing than anything Starmer or Reeves have said in public since they took office. Net zero is destroying growth. Taxes cannot really be raised much higher, although they probably will anyway. Billions are being wasted on people who could and should be working, at our expense. And still Labour obsesses with finding new taxes to give more money to the work-shy.

Keir and his collection of non-entities are beyond the pale and have been recognised as such by virtually the whole country in a remarkably short period of time. No doubt the highly malignant and toxic influence of Gordon Brown is quickly becoming a factor in public perception.I have never known any government to have so little business or private sector experience, and it shows. Of the 32 members of Labour’s Cabinet, just one has ever started a business, while fewer than half have any private sector experience whatsoever.

This is not a minor detail. It is the reason the government’s every instinct is to reach for the taxpayer’s wallet rather than unleash enterprise.It is a truth unending that Labour were not, and are not, wedded to wealth and markets because they recognise in them a general social good.

They only allow others to create wealth so they can siphon off what they perceive as their “fair share” to be redistributed to those who don’t want to get up at 06:00 am. Of course there are people who need a hand. That is what a social security net is for: to catch you when you fall (as we all can), to help you get back on your feet during hard times. We are not the US, red in tooth and claw. But it was never meant, nor intended, for millions of people to treat it as a lifestyle choice.“To each according to his needs.” Bevan would not recognise the system he helped put in place, and he would surely see that it will collapse.

The number of workers contributing to the system is almost the same as the number taking from it. This is madness. We will see the inevitable rise of massive discontent from those who are working and struggling to feed far too many who are significantly better off doing nothing and gaming the system. That will not end well.

The age of the public-spirited, honourable and patriotic Labour politician died at the grubby hands of Call-Me-Tony and his fellow trolls. The majority of Labour MPs are totally oblivious to fiscal reality and the level of gaming the system that millions are doing every day, and worse, few care.

Only the bond markets and investors selling sterling because of our weak finances can call time on these incompetents. A tough but necessary lesson from the 1970s, again under a Labour government, has been long forgotten. Back then the IMF had to step in and tell them the game was up. History may yet repeat itself, and this time the markets will not be so polite.

Mandelson telling McFadden that “Keir lacks verve as does the cabinet as a whole” and describing No 10 as “beleaguered and bereft. It requires complete revamp and infusion of purpose and confidence to get anywhere. Tells us everything we need to know about the economic halfwits in charge of the country”

That is the government we actually have, laid bare in their own private words.

She’s the fighter the Tories and Britain needs and I think is slowly starting to want. Time is on her side. Three years is a long time for Reform to hold together and the cracks are starting to show a long way out from the election.

Her letter to The Times laid more punches on Tony Blair than anyone has in decades. It’s the clearest diagnosis of Britain’s real problem in years.

In a letter published by The Times last week, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch declared that Sir Tony Blair’s legacy is a country “run by HR”. She also slammed him for introducing the Human Rights Act and paving the way for net-zero diktats.

Excellent stuff from Kemi. She’s a fighter, and I wish there were more in the party like her. It’s been a depressingly long time since most Conservative MPs were prepared to be this rude about Labour in public instead of offering the usual anaemic, focus grouped passes during election campaigns.

The country didn’t become “run by HR” because politicians suddenly fell in love with paperwork. It became run by HR because institutions spent thirty years reacting to risk. Every scandal produced another procedure. Every lawsuit produced another compliance layer. Every mistake produced another form. Every edge case produced another policy document.

The result was predictable: risk management expanded faster than productive activity.This wasn’t purely an ideological project. There was always a technological limitation as well. Compliance was expensive because checking things was expensive. Monitoring things was expensive. Reading documents was expensive. Verifying claims was expensive.

Then along came AI. For the first time in history, the cost of analysing, checking, auditing and monitoring information is collapsing, not linearly, but exponentially. Some of us (in a slightly utopian way) believe the future is not a country run by HR.

The future is a country where much of what HR departments, compliance teams, regulators and administrators currently do can be performed instantly and continuously by machines with human oversight, smaller groups but far more productive and far more effective working with AI rather than just using AI.

The political debate is still arguing about the world of 2005 while the economics of compliance are rapidly becoming the economics of software. The question is no longer “can we afford compliance?” The question is: what happens when compliance becomes almost free?

Others rightly point out it’s not just about cost. The sheer extent of regulation and compliance is already stifling innovation and killing employment opportunities. And no, AI won’t magically eliminate data-centre bills, the huge salaries (and tax breaks) demanded by the new AI emperors, or the endless battle to stop idiots doing stupid things with their pet AI agents.

The human element and entrenched power structures won’t disappear just because technology makes their jobs technically redundant. But even with those caveats, the direction of travel is unmistakable; the bureaucratic blob that Blair helped supercharge is about to face the biggest technological shock in a century.

Kemi gets that. Labour, meanwhile, engaged in some predictably pathetic comms tactics this week, trumpeting a “revelation” that Reform’s candidate Robert Kenyon once voted for the main left-wing party. I was left Snorting with laughter, you genuinely couldn’t make it up. I agree it’s no great argument in favour of his historical judgment, though I’m surprised to find Labour suddenly agreeing with the sentient universe on this one. Will they derive the obvious conclusions any time soon? The sun is due to implode in about five billion years; I won’t hold my breath for any epiphanies before then.

Back to Kemi. Her history and tenacity are remarkable. It was a narrow call whether she ended up in the US or the UK, but as it turned out she has repaid the Tories’ faith in her tenfold. She represents what Britain once stood for far better than the vast majority of our current politicians, and she does so proudly and unapologetically.

Sometimes it takes an outsider looking in to see clearly where things have gone wrong. During all the years since Blair jumped before he was pushed, it’s been almost impossible for anyone to change anything. That’s precisely why her willingness to call it out matters.

If the Tories want to win again, how about a major intervention on welfare a proper “rush to paying your way” scheme aimed at moving masses of households off Universal Credit in a rapid timeframe? (The chances of this Labour government doing anything in a rapid timeframe are minimal, of course.)

Instead we get Starmer talking about a “rush to electrification” while the country flirts with South African-style loadshedding. Remember Eskom? Before 1994 it was a global engineering powerhouse. Socialism + BEE appointments + corruption turned it into rolling blackouts. Sound familiar?

I keep an eye on power generation via the excellent iamkate site.We’re still importing around 20% of our electricity from France and Norway. “Rush to electrification”? It’s not very long since there was a dash for gas.

That is not a plan or policy; it’s a soundbite that likely came out of a groupthink session of interns with degrees in media studies or law, anything other than engineering or hard science.

If we switched all gas heating to electricity (even with heat pumps) we’d need to more than double our electricity supply. Houses need to be properly insulated and ventilated first. Only then should heat pumps even be discussed.

This government’s real goal seems to be justifying the closure of the North Sea while pretending they’re saving the planet. They really are the most idiotic team of individuals ever to try to govern us.

Kemi Badenoch, by contrast, is the real deal. I don’t think she needs to worry about her position one bit. I’m not aware of anyone else in the current Conservative Party who could provide better right-wing leadership.

Among the voters the Tories need to win back, she is genuinely popular. She’s a fighter. She sees the country clearly. And she’s willing to say the uncomfortable truths that most politicians still tiptoe around. Britain needs more of that urgently.

There is something about the whiff of cordite that seems to turn the heads of apparently moral and decent people. Take Stephen Rea, actor, humanitarian, progressive, moral giant.

I very much doubt there is a single fashionable cause the man wouldn’t sign up to. And to no one’s surprise, last week he added his name to an open letter from some of the finest historical and legal minds of modern society Kneecap, Christy Moore, Paul Weller and various footballers demanding that the FAI refuse to play Israel in the upcoming UEFA Nations League fixtures.

Yet not a peep, not a word, no pity slogans, marches, rallies or banners when Ireland played the slaveocracy of Qatar in a friendly just days ago. No boycotts, no open letters, no tennis-ball protests. Playing football against Qatar where migrant workers die building stadiums and homosexuals can be jailed is apparently hunky-dory, nothing to see here, great lads altogether the Qataris.

But Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, is beyond the pale. It is the only multi-ethnic, multi-religious, open and free country in the region, one where Muslim indentured servants are not worked to death, where there are gay pride marches, and where Israeli Arab Muslim judges have sentenced senior Israeli politicians to lengthy jail sentences.

Israeli Muslims, Christians and Druze hold senior roles in every part of the civil service, judiciary and army. Oddly enough, there aren’t too many Jewish or Christian judges in Qatar.

This isn’t principle. It is not “taking truth to power.” It’s narcissistic compassion, performative mob group-think, the same historical illiteracy that sees Rea happily share a platform with the ghoulish, balaclava-wearing wannabe thugs of Kneecap — a group whose entire schtick is a perverted eulogy to the Provo/Sinn Féin murder cult. (I wrote about their hypocrisy here.

)

The late John Hume, Nobel Peace Prize winner, SDLP leader and the man who actually risked his life for what he believed in, summed the Provos up perfectly in his 1988 speech:

“If I were to lead a civil rights campaign in Northern Ireland today the major target of that campaign would be the IRA. It is they who carry out the greatest infringements of human and civil rights whether it is their murders, their executions without trial, their kneecappings and punishment shootings, their bombing of jobs and people. The most fundamental human right is the right to life. Who in Northern Ireland takes most human lives in a situation where there is not one single injustice that justifies the taking of human life?”

Hume then laid out the damning statistics of murder.

Up to late 1988, people describing themselves as Irish republicans had killed six times as many people as the British Army, thirty times as many as the RUC, 250 times as many as the UDR — and twice as many Catholics as the security forces had.

The IRA wasn’t resisting injustice. It was the injustice.

Was it O’Casey who said: “The gunmen are not dying for the people, the people are dying for the gunmen”?

Yet Rea, the self-appointed guardian of human rights, has never to my knowledge — uttered a word against the greatest human-rights abuses of the Troubles. Worse, his own past is uncomfortably close to them. His ex-wife, Dolours Price a convicted Old Bailey bomber and IRA member admitted driving Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, to her execution by the IRA in 1972. (McConville was kidnapped, tortured, shot in the head and secretly buried; her body was not found for over twenty years.)

Price, many years later, confirmed her role in interviews and the Boston College tapes. Stephen Rea carried her coffin when she died in 2013. He has spoken of her with affection and has repeatedly, eloquently and fiercely defended her past.

He has never, as far as I can find, condemned the IRA’s campaign of murder, kneecapping and “disappearing” let alone the horror visited on the McConville family.And to no one’s great shock, there has never been a word or a whisper from Rea about the rape, murder and mutilation of women and children and the taking of more than 250 hostages on October 7th, when Hamas terrorists slaughtered more than 1,200 Israelis in a single day.

But a bunch of Jews kicking a ball around? That must be stopped at all costs. That is the line in the sand, the hill to die on.

Here, then, is the mote in God’s eye. These people see Israeli footballers as the great moral stain of our age while romanticising, or at best remaining silent about, a terrorist campaign that murdered thousands over decades.

They lecture the rest of us about “human rights” while platforming a rap group that treats balaclavas and Provo nostalgia as edgy fashion.Moral relativism and narcissistic compassion dressed up as virtue. Selective outrage that always, somehow, ends up pointing in the same direction.

This is why so many ordinary people, the ones who actually remember what real terrorism looks like are sick of being lectured by celebrities who wouldn’t know a genuine principle if it kneecapped them.

On Thursday the 23 July 2026 (Tisha B’Av) I’m asking ordinary non-Jewish British people to wear a visible badge that says

“I Stand With British Jews”

for one single day.

No marches. No rallies. No political statements.

Just a quiet, positive act of neighbourly solidarity.

Here is the official poster

The badge can now be ordered from :

https://i-stand-with-british-jews.myshopify.com/

Please if you can share the poster on social media it will make a huge difference

Thank you

To order a physical badge go here:
https://i-stand-with-british-jews.myshopify.com/

If you’d like to help spread the word or have any questions, just reply to this post or email me at myone_ie@hotmail.co.uk. If you can’t order a badge just sharing the poster to your friends would make a huge difference.

Thank you — and let’s make this a day that actually matters.

https://i-stand-with-british-jews.myshopify.com/

Saturday 18 July, we’re doing something different. No lanyards. No £400 tickets. No lukewarm chicken and warm white wine.Just a proper English pub garden, a BBQ firing from lunchtime, cold pints, two short funny speakers, an open-mic “talking nonsense” slot, and live music as the sun goes down.

We’re calling it The Non-Conference:

“Why the Right is More Fun”.

While the virtuous, and dull as dishwater forever protesters are gluing themselves to motorways and the professional conference circuit is busy virtue-signalling, we’ll be gluing ourselves to bar stools and having a far better time.

Date: Saturday 18 July 2026
Time: 12:30 – 20:00 (come and go as you like)
Venue: The Vine Inn, Cumnor, Oxfordshire
Entry: Completely free – just turn up and buy a drink and some food when you’re there.

15 minutes from Oxford station, 50 minutes from London Paddington. Big garden, big car park.Bring your mates, bring your stories, bring your opinions. The only rule is no glue, no slogans, no saving the planet — just save the pub and enjoy the afternoon.Poster and full details below. I’ll be sending personal invites to a few people over the next couple of weeks.See you in the garden.

Do we care? Unfortunately, we should. Keir Starmer is a disaster on defence, on the economy and even on basic competence. He has failed so badly that he has fallen below even the extraordinarily low bar set by his own party.

But here is the uncomfortable truth that too many on the right still refuse to face. Compared with what is waiting in the wings, Starmer looks almost statesmanlike.

Last week’s local election bloodbath was not the beginning of the end for Labour. It was merely the latest symptom of a party that has been hollowed out for decades. The real story now is the succession crisis.

If Starmer is finally forced out, the field that replaces him will not represent a return to sanity. We will have a carnival of careerists and ideologues who will make the current cabinet look serious by comparison.Let us be brutally honest about the names that are currently being floated. Andy Burnham is the great Trotskyite hope, the Lenin-on-the-train candidate for the modern left. Picture him returning in triumph…..

Compare him with the giants who once led the party, and the contrast is almost obscene.Take J. R. Clynes, son of an Irish immigrant labourer.

Clynes started work at the age of 10 in a cotton mill. After working brutal 12-hour shifts, he would go to night school. At 16, he started writing exposés on child labour in the linen industry, and at 17 he helped found the Piercers’ Union.In later years, colleagues in the Commons would be astonished by his ability to quote verbatim from the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton and Ruskin.

This knowledge he had won the hard way. He became one of Labour’s brightest stars. In 1906, he was an MP, by 1910 he was deputy chairman, and he served in the Lloyd George coalition during the war as Minister of Food Control. He backed a Jewish state in Palestine in 1917 and he led Labour through its breakthrough election in 1922, taking the party from 52 seats to 142.

As Home Secretary, he refused Leon Trotsky a visa and split with Ramsay MacDonald over austerity because he believed the interests of British working people came first.A patriot, an autodidact, an intellectual and a wily operator, Clynes put the material conditions of ordinary Britons above abstract ideology.

Now, unfortunately, let us look at Burnham. Special adviser straight out of university, think tank, quangos, then MP. There was no mill, no night school, no trade union organising from the factory floor. Just a casual, smooth ascent through the professional political class.

The rest of the field is hardly better. Wes Streeting offers more of the same, with added talk of going back into the EU. Angela Rayner remains the great hope of the left. When Jess Phillips resigned, she was solemnly described as a great beast, a political heavyweight. Jesus wept.

Peter Kyle, occasionally mentioned because of his private-sector background, managed a Next store for a couple of years in the 1990s. Apparently this now counts as impressive private-sector experience.

And Rachel Reeves is held up as the economic brains of the operation. How has it come to this?

The Labour Party that produced Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, Aneurin Bevan, Clement Attlee, Barbara Castle and Harold Wilson was rooted in the real grinding experience of the British working class. Many of its leaders had real scars. They had known poverty, worked long hours and built trade union membership from the factory floor. They believed Britain and British citizens came first, always and at all times.

Today’s Labour is the party of the professional political class: university straight into the machine, special adviser to think tank to safe seat. There are no calluses and no real connection to the people they claim to represent.

The inevitable result is a party that has replaced patriotism with performative internationalism and hard-won pragmatism with facile slogans.This is why even the most committed Tory will watch the coming leadership race with something closer to dread than glee. Starmer is bad.

The alternatives are worse. A Burnham leadership or, heaven forbid, a Rayner-Streeting ticket or whatever emerges will accelerate the drift towards the keffiyeh left, the Greens and the break-up artists already circling.

We still need a functioning centre-left party in British politics. Because nature abhors a vacuum the alternative is far worse and could lead to national disintegration, a limping, mediocre Labour Party is still better than the ruins that would be fought over by extremists.

The great shame is that the serious, patriotic, working-class Labour tradition embodied by men like Clynes is dead. It is now unimaginable to the people jostling to replace Starmer.So yes, there will be a leadership race. And yes, we should care.

Not because we want Labour to win elections, but because when it fails completely, the people who will replace it will make Starmer look like a moderate. The vacuum is growing. The question is no longer whether Labour is dying. It is who or what will inherit the corpse and whether there is any chance of resurrection.

Motorways are blocked, runways sabotaged, factories defaced, and the streets themselves are taken over weekend after weekend by thousands, tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands. As we saw last weekend, those streets are now becoming contested spaces.

Two different tribes are coming out in ever greater numbers, flying different banners, shouting different slogans and holding fundamentally different beliefs. In just under three years, the country is lurching towards a political reckoning.

Current polling suggests the possibility of a seismic shift. Reform UK appears on course to become the largest party in the House of Commons at the next general election, although it could still fall forty or more seats short of a majority, especially after its recent dip in vote share at the local elections.

The centre-ground parties that have dominated British politics for generations are being squeezed from both sides.The question is no longer whether the backlash against endless disruption and rapid cultural change will arrive. It has already arrived. The real questions now are what form it will take and whether the state can contain the fractures it will produce.

A Reform-led government, or even a strong plurality, would be historic. Reform might look to the Democratic Unionist Party and the Ulster Unionist Party for support on confidence-and-supply votes, but there are nowhere near enough seats there.

They would need the Tory party to make any arrangement work. Yet that is where the difficulty lies. If the Tories improve their national vote, which seems almost certain, they will be deeply unwilling to enter any coalition or any formal deal as the junior partner. The example of the Liberal Democrats from the last coalition is one that is not lost on Tory Grandees.

The depth of the current political realignment makes any such accommodation toxic for them. Is a period of parliamentary deadlock followed by another election therefore more likely?

That outcome would only deepen public exhaustion with a political class seemingly incapable of delivering stable government. Meanwhile, on the streets, the usual suspects, the Blob, that loose but potent alliance of climate, Palestine, anti-deportation and identity activists, have mobilised as never before.

The direct-action groups that form the sharp end of this movement do not accept democratic verdicts they dislike. “Whose streets? Our streets” is not a slogan of persuasion. It is a declaration of ownership.

In the Celtic fringes, the rhetoric is hardening. Nationalist politicians in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland speak openly of secession or a constitutional crisis should a “far-right” government take power in Westminster.

In Northern Ireland, republican paramilitary remnants will watch developments with keen interest, ready to exploit any vacuum. In Liverpool, Manchester, London, the Midlands and the old industrial north, fear can turn visceral. Sections of Muslim, Black and other minority communities, primed by years of activist messaging and media framing, are preparing for the worst.

Rumours of camps and mass deportations will spread rapidly across social media. The sectarian tensions that Britain has been importing from the Middle East, Central Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond will find dangerous new flashpoints on British soil. The result rioting and street disorder on a scale never before seen in modern Britain.

On the other side, we may well see a counter-mobilisation. Ex-soldiers and ordinary citizens, frustrated by years of one-way disruption and two-tier policing, might begin to organise counter-marches and community defence groups. Some of these could take on a paramilitary flavour.

The police, already stretched by the huge surge in direct action and street violence, will find themselves caught in the middle in a way not seen since the miners’ strike of the 1980s. Will they, or the army, or even the monarchy, be able to hold the centre?

Throughout all of this, the agents of chaos, the direct-action networks, will continue their theatre of disruption, indifferent or actively hostile to democratic outcomes.

Foreign actors will watch with interest. The IRGC, Russia and Islamist networks will see rich opportunity in a fractured, inward-looking Britain. The ever-increasing likelihood of a spectacular terrorist outrage is growing just, as sectarian fault lines deepen.

This whirling dervish of political, ethnic and religious fracture is not inevitable, but it is surely the logical destination of a country that has allowed a small but highly motivated cadre of true believers to hold the rest of society to ransom through performative disruption.

Meanwhile, institutions hollowed out by decades of cultural capture stand by, unable or unwilling to intervene. The great historic institutions of the state, the Anglican Church, the judiciary, the military, the monarchy and the police, now look like hollowed-out shells of their former selves.

Whether they can still command the loyalty and respect needed to hold the centre will be the decisive question of the coming decade.

Thank you for listening or reading and I hope you will follow me into part 7 next week

Regards

Rory