Restoring The Rule of Law

Equal treatment before the law has been subverted

Jun 12, 2026

Towering Columns

In The Telegraph, Nick Timothy says that the public sector equality duty has undermined our legal tradition and protected the wrong people.

How can it be that an Islamist double murderer can successfully sue the British state under our own laws, costing us more than £200,000? How can unequal treatment based on race or identity be official policy within the Civil Service, education and the NHS? And how can it be that guidelines for police appear to have led officers to handcuff Henry Nowak as he lay dying, prioritising instead his killer’s baseless cry of racism?
The behaviour of the police at the scene of Henry’s death is to be investigated. But – as my party’s leader, Kemi Badenoch, rightly said – they were following the guidance and training they had been given. This is not an excuse, but it is a wake-up call: the politics of race and identity are now hardwired into our public institutions, our public services and our laws. One of the main culprits is the public sector equality duty (PSED), which the Conservatives are now committing to abolish…
The Duty has become a weapon even for convicted terrorists and those engaging in radicalisation of other criminals. It is used against those who guard them, and inhibits the ability of the state to incarcerate dangerous people safely and securely. When our laws allow those who hate our way of life to deploy those same laws against us, they are no longer fit for purpose. And they distort our ancient common law tradition of treating everyone as an individual, equal in rights and responsibilities.

For The Critic, Susan Pickard documents how despite the Supreme Court ruling on gender equality our public institutions are still resisting change.

And that is precisely where we are now: not in a world where the ruling is openly rejected, but in one where its implementation is endlessly softened and deferred, challenged both on technicalities and general principles and suspended accordingly in a kind of institutional ambiguity. Outright resistance is already visible. The President of the National Union of Students has called on Parliament to reject the draft guidance in defence of “trans equality”, while the President of the UCU has described the moment as “significant and unsettling… for trans people everywhere.” Across universities, legal academics continue to publish critiques arguing that the ruling is conceptually incoherent, legally unworkable, or socially unjust with a few, isolated voices arguing in favour, such as Dr Michael Foran, who himself was subjected to bullying on account of his position.
A year on, the everyday culture within universities tells its own story. Pronouns remain recommended on institutional emails. University conferences continue to define “women” in ways that encompass trans women. Colleagues who might object keep their heads down. Looking back, my excitement and relief was misplaced. The Supreme Court ruling clarified the law. What it did not, and could not, settle was whether institutions built for more than a decade around gender identity ideology are willing to accept the implications of that clarification.
Of my three academic colleagues who openly challenged aspects of this orthodoxy, one has since taken voluntary severance, and the other two have decided to keep their views private for professional reasons. I remain where I was: still arguing, still formally protected by the language of academic freedom, and still aware that institutional hostility has not disappeared but has merely become more careful. My American friends still think it’s all over. But within British universities, at least, it has become clear that the real struggle has only just begun.

In Conservative Home, Daniel Pitt argues that multiculturalism has not led to peaceful pluralism but national division.

Cicero, the great Roman statesman, argued that “the good of the people is the chief law.” Multiculturalism has not been for the good of the people in our country, nor has social justice. They have had a corrosive effect on our cultural identity, our national pride, and our understanding of justice. Structural multiculturalism has worn away trust within our community and has cut deeply into the roots of public order.
Rather than going to the heart of our problems, defenders of multiculturalism and social justice have sought to increase government intervention in our lives and have sought more bureaucracy to surmount communal antagonism. This has only made things worse. The alternative to a common unifying culture is not the nice and tolerant pluralism that multiculturalists once imagined but ever more intrusive policing of relations between hostile communities. We cannot let this continue any longer.
Multiculturalism and social justice have harmed justice in the country, not enhanced it. Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, taught us in his Nicomachean Ethics that we “refrain from evil” because we fear punishment, but too many people in our country do not fear punishment from the law at all, and far too many of our law-abiding neighbours and friends certainly do fear the evil that criminals get up to.
A fundamental principle of the rule of law is that everyone is bound by it. However, our left-liberal elite has rejected this principle in favour of social justice and structural multiculturalism, and therefore, they treat ethnic minorities differently. The Sentencing Council provided us with a real-life case stating explicitly that the courts should consider “protected characteristics” in their sentencing. This meant that ethnic minorities would receive a lesser sentence than a white man for the same crime. This, of course, strikes at the heart of the rule of law, and we should not stand for it.

On Substack, Andrew O’Brien argues that Westminster is obsessed by ‘storytelling’ as a way to avoid confronting the crushing reality of national decline.

In many conversations in Westminster you will hear people talk about storytelling in a way that essentially tries to change reality. The inference is that if we told a better story or a different story about the country, it would alter the nature of the decisions that we have to make. We can shift from ‘negative’ narratives about financial crisis and spending cuts to ‘positive’ narratives about reform and change.
Storytelling is the last refuge for a generation of politicians that grew up in a world where the economic settlement was accepted and considered to be working, and where politicians could pick and choose their battlegrounds (Europe, immigration, social mobility etc.). When you hear a politician talking about storytelling, it is simply a plea for agency, a hope that we can deflect from the mess we are in.
The truth is that politicians not longer have control over the story. There is a national story and the debate is really about who can communicate it clearly and write a conclusion to it that ends this chapter of our national life on a good note.
The story is a simple one. Our country has gone from being the epicentre of the global economy, first as producer, then as banker, then as consumer to being on the periphery, dependent on borrowing, prone to shocks and without influence. It has been caused by inevitable global forces, bad policy choices, an insular political and economic elite and increasingly squeezed by rising great power conflicts that are making it poorer, weaker and divided. The psychological blow is crushing the national spirit. The financial blow is fuelling the cost of living crisis. The political fallout is creating instability and division. This is the only story that can be told.

For The Telegraph, Michael Deacon writes about the violence in Belfast and how politicians are ultimately to blame for the riots on our streets.

I fear, however, that they will once again merely resort to lecturing us about the dangers of “division”, and spend more time talking about the rioting than about the atrocity which triggered it. Anything but confront, or even acknowledge, the real source of the problem. They have a longstanding habit of this. Let’s not forget that after Sir David Amess, the Conservative MP for Southend West, was murdered in 2021, many of his colleagues in Parliament responded by calling for a clampdown on social media abuse. Sir David’s murder had nothing to do with offensive tweets – he was stabbed to death by an Islamist. Yet it was social media they talked about. So don’t be surprised if MPs decide that this week’s rioting was caused by social media, as well.
In fact, they really might. After all, social media is where footage of the knife attack first spread. “But for that,” MPs may think, “it would have been so much easier to contain the public’s anger.” For all our sakes, though, they urgently need to realise that while setting fire to buses may not be justified, the public’s anger is. We’re sick of having to live like this. We don’t want to live in a country where binmen are slashed to death while walking the dog.
We don’t want to live in a country where hotel workers are slaughtered with screwdrivers. And we don’t want to live in a country where innocent pedestrians run the risk of being beheaded in the street. Britain has quite enough problems as it is, without importing more of them. So, from now on, we would like our Government to put our safety first. This, therefore, should be our message to the nation’s political elite: “Take a piece of your own advice – and respect our wishes.”

For The Spectator, Gareth Roberts says that social media regulation is not about keeping the public safe but shutting people up.

Politicians would dearly love to shut people up; as we have seen in the last couple of weeks, in particular, what I call gammon management – the fear that low-status whites may notice the effect of progressive policies and get angry – is one of their major concerns. I’m reminded of how Napoleon’s control of information was so total that some French people only found out about the battle of Trafalgar ten years after the event. How Keir Starmer must wish for the same level of control over information. He, and his brethren, would love to muzzle their political opponents.
We have seen how politicians concealed the Afghan resettlement scheme. And today, the Daily Telegraph exposed a suppressed report which said that £28 billion pounds of public money – yes, you read that right – was siphoned to terrorists, hostile states and gangsters between 2015-21. Politicians didn’t think the public had a need to know such things. This is their instinct, and introducing digital ID by the back door, via concern about children, hands them even greater power to control what we know.
I could well be accused of cynicism here. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be suspicious of the government’s motives. If there had been a holistic approach to child protection, I might give them the benefit of the doubt. But you will note that nobody was mooting these bans when Twitter, or X, was run by their ‘side’; when it was equally – perhaps more – full of unpleasantness; and when it was throwing people off for having the temerity to say that men are not women. But people are being terribly rude to Chris Bryant now, you see, so it’s suddenly become urgent.
Likewise, there is the ‘division’ Labour keep fretting about. Actually, they don’t mean racial division at all, as Labour has done more to whip that up than Nigel Farage could manage, even if he wished to. ‘Division’ actually means noticing what politicians are up to. As for protecting kids from paedophiles, Labour turned a blind eye to the abuse of countless little girls by the Pakistani rape gangs. You will forgive me if I scoff at their current hand-wringing, given this record.

Wonky Thinking

On his Substack, Rian Whitton describes the recent sudden decline in our automotive industry and outlines the factors that are leading us to “Carmageddon” with many businesses on the verge of closing factories and cutting jobs. This decline has been caused by the underutilisation of plant, Chinese overproduction and misguided Zero Emission Vehicle regulations.

So how might this collapse start? There are three potential areas of weakness. The car factories themselves, the wider supply chain, or the much-vaunted battery plants. If these are closed down, delayed further or cancelled, they could create a chain reaction whereby they take a large number of businesses with them. Since there are only a handful of automotive clusters in the UK, mass closures at one cluster could spill over into others very quickly.
The best bet may be in Oxfordshire, where the BMW-owned Oxford Mini plant still operates, producing over 100,000 ICE Minis per year. UK-based Mini EV production was supposed to come to Oxford in 2026, but that was put on hold in early 2025. BMW even refused a £60 million government grant to keep the project on track. Meanwhile, in China, they have entered into a joint venture with local firm Great Wall Motor to produce Mini EVs there. Additional Mini EVs are being produced in Leipzig, Saxony. These potential imports face no tariffs and benefit fully from the UK’s electric car grant for consumers.
So Mini EVs produced in China are undercutting the non-existent Mini EV offering in Britain. It begs the question, why would anyone bother to make Minis here?
It is hard not to see the paused decision in 2025 as the first step towards closure, with BMW executives pondering this very decision as we speak. One thing to keep in mind is that while companies, of course, want to make all their plants profitable, when the prospect of closures arises, one plant management team in one country will ruthlessly lobby against a counterpart in another jurisdiction. If the choice comes between the Leipzig plant and the Oxford plant, we can expect only one winner.
This would be a disaster of epic proportions, given the Mini is the second most produced UK vehicle and export model. Immediately, about 1/7th of the total production would be gone, creating cascading effects across suppliers up and down the country.
But this is just one area of potential weakness. A plant closure could just as easily be decided by the fall of a major local supplier. An anonymous source relayed to me that a major international car manufacturer with a British plant is buying components from local UK suppliers for its car production in Eastern Europe, despite the local European industrial base being perfectly adequate to supply itself. They are doing this because if the relevant UK suppliers didn’t have the foreign business, they would collapse, therefore imperilling the company’s own UK assembly line.
The last major threat is that battery plants essential to a transition to electric vehicles do not materialise in sufficient capacity or are cancelled. In October, I mentioned that the UK had very little battery-producing capacity. In 2012, the company AESC built a Sunderland plant, with 1.9 GWh of annual battery capacity. Since then, in late 2025, AESC opened another production line at the plant with 15.8 GWh in capacity. The new capacity gives Nissan a roadmap to scale up BEV production, even if it is likely to lose money on these models.
The next expected gigafactory is the Agratas plant in Somerset. With an expected capacity of up to 40 GWh, it will primarily supply JLR’s electric vehicle range. Originally scheduled for 2025, the Agratas plant has suffered multiple delays and is now projected to begin production by the end of 2027. To keep the project going, it needed £380 million in grants from the UK government in April 2026. Part of the reason for the delay has been JLR delaying the rollout of its EV range in order for demand to pick up.
In 2025, Tata, the owner of Agratas, sold a 12% stake in the company to AESC, the current UK gigafactory operator in Sunderland. AESC is itself headquartered in Japan but is owned by China’s Envision Group. China therefore now has an enormous stake in the battery plant infrastructure in Britain, leading to concerns about diversification.
There is still plenty of opportunity for the Agratas project to go belly up, but even if it gets built, this and the AESC plant in Sunderland do not get Britain the battery-manufacturing capacity necessary to produce over 1 million BEVs a year. Of course, Britain could import the batteries, as they would be cheaper. But then we would lose much of the product’s value, likely reducing the industry’s long-term gross value added. Without new commitments, imports rising, and the ZEV tightening, company executives could easily decide the UK is just not the place to build cars anymore.
The government tacitly accepts that there is a major risk of an industry collapse. It has provided a funding scheme called Drive35, which will distribute £2.5 billion in grants, loans and R&D support up to 2035 in order to provide ballast to the largest clusters. While very welcome, this will not offset a major downturn.

Following a flurry of reports on the ten year anniversary of the Brexit vote, on Substack Warwick Lightfoot analyses the latest data on whether Brexit has damaged the economy. Overall, he finds that leaving the EU has not made a substantive difference to the country’s economic performance because we are more heavily weighted towards services than the rest of the trade bloc combined with the poor performance of the EU on science and technology has undermined its potential growth prospects compared to the US.

An important explanation of the difference in economic performance between the EU and USA is America’s advantage in science and technology. The EU has put huge efforts and resources into its science programme. Yet it has been expensive and yielded disappointing results. The 2024 Draghi report recognised that ‘the EU has an important programme for R&I – Horizon Europe – with a budget of close to EUR 100 billion. But it is spread across too many fields and access is excessively complex and bureaucratic. It is also insufficiently focused on disruptive innovation. The EU’s key instrument to support radically new technologies at low readiness levels – the European Innovation Council’s (EIC) Pathfinder instrument – has a budget of EUR 256 million for 2024…It is also mostly led by EU officials rather than top scientists and innovation experts’.
The Brexit decision has made little difference to the overall performance of the UK economy, given the fact that the Single Market does not cover services that account for over 80 per cent of UK GDP, the UK has a flexible labour market and a flexible exchange rate that adjusts. The Single Market itself has been a disappointment as the work of Andre Sapir over many years explains. The ambitions of the Ceccini report have not been realised. Moreover, the principal policies and institutions of EU economic policy whether it is trade policy, farming, science or vaccines has been defective. Lord King, the former Governor of the Bank of England was probably right in his judgement, that over a fifty year period national accounts data would hardly register a change that reflected membership of the EU in or out. Lord King as Governor was also alert to the difficulty of relying too heavily on differences in reported data and the accuracy of precise national accounts data in establishing strong assertions about causation. It is better to talk in rough terms rather than being precisely misdirected.

Podcast of the Week

On Generative Futures, David Edgerton speaks with Phil Bell about how we think about the rise of Artificial Intelligence, the misguided historical analogies and how businesses are using a lack of knowledge about previous technological transitions to create positive PR around the development of AI.