Two-Tier Britain Is Here
This week's events laid bare the corruption of our institutions
Announcement: We are delighted to welcome James Gillham as the Conservative Reader’s newest co-editor. James is the Digital Lead for Build for Britain.
Towering Columns
In The Telegraph, Nick Timothy outlines how equality before the law no longer exists in modern Britain.
The Sentencing Council itself, which sets guidelines for judges, explicitly cites ethnicity as a factor to consider as mitigation when sentencing young offenders. The Judicial College’s Equal Treatment Bench Book – which has a whole chapter on race – says “treating everyone the same does not always ensure true equality”, because people with protected characteristics may be disadvantaged by “neutral” treatment. This kind of identitarianism is risible.
Treating criminals as vulnerable – and treating race, religion, age and mental disability as conveying automatic disadvantage – runs through the logic of the whole system.
But it’s not just in matters concerning the race of the victim or perpetrator where justice and policing are going wrong. The judge in the Fordingbridge rape case, when sentencing the three teenagers concerned, said his responsibility was not to “criminalise” them, and that his priority was their “reintegration into society”, rather than providing justice to victims or protecting the public. These comments sound deranged. But they are straight from official sentencing guidelines.
Now David Lammy wants to make things even worse with a new youth justice white paper, which will set an arbitrary target of cutting the number of under-18s in custody by one fifth regardless of the severity of crimes committed. The paper even suggests treating young adults differently based on their age or identity, as happens in Scotland. Labour’s endless focus on the rights of criminals, and engineering the system to benefit certain identity groups, places offenders first and victims last.
For the National Post, Michael Murphy compares the response to the murder of Henry Nowak with the response to the death of George Floyd.
It should come as no surprise that the attitude of senior officers might trickle down to those making life-and-death decisions on the streets. This is, in fact, merely the system working as intended. Britain’s Police Race Action Plan stipulates that “racial equity” does not mean “treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour-blind,’ ” and recommends taking a “racialized’ approach to policing. How could officers responding to Nowak’s death, and the Digwas’ lies, not have been affected by these guidelines? That question is, for Hampshire police, a Catch-22: either they conducted themselves in a colour-blind manner, in violation of their guidelines, or they did not, to Nowak’s detriment.
These vexing questions remain unanswered. Into the vacuum, Reform Leader Nigel Farage declared that “white lives matter too,” and called for a response to Nowak’s death of “pure, cold rage.” On Tuesday evening, protesters in Southampton clashed with police, with some demanding they kneel for Nowak, in the manner that many of their colleagues did for George Floyd, who was murdered by police in the United States in 2020.
The same British establishment that promiscuously embraced the hysteria of Black Lives Matter is now calling for calm and condemning Farage for his supposedly inflammatory language. The contrast of that language to that deployed by the state during comparable outrages is likely intentional. After the Manchester Arena bombing, the public was urged not to “look back in anger.” This response became something of a leitmotif for tragedies resulting from political decisions, like unwanted mass migration, that the establishment attempted to place beyond politics, and therefore beyond criticism. Farage’s pointed language is alien to British politics; it marks a new juncture, in which the grievances of the majority have, belatedly, entered the mainstream.
For The Telegraph, Sam Ashworth-Hayes argues Britain’s institutions prioritise racial justice over all else - including preservation of life.
Concerns over Axel Rudakubana were downplayed when a former teacher was accused of stereotyping him as “a black boy with a knife”. Fears of accusations of racism meant that security staff failed to confront the Manchester Arena bomber. In each case, the mechanisms at play in the Nowak case were on partial display.
The rationale which underlies them remains the same, today, as those which gave way to the bout of self-examination in the Macpherson report. Having embarked on a project to utterly remake the country through historically unprecedented levels of migration, Westminster has been playing catch-up in managing the tensions and conflicts that result, constantly attempting to maintain legitimacy with an increasingly divided and untrusting populace.
The way it has chosen to do so is by identifying the risk of majority rejection of minorities (as opposed to the more manageable minority rejection of majority) as the greatest threat it faces, and accordingly by putting the management of these tensions – racism, bigotry, hatred, whichever description you choose – as the greatest priority for policing.
Even the sentencing remarks for the case bear the imprint of this logic, with the judge noting that Digwa had “stirred up racial tension” and “made many Sikhs worried about their own safety”.
Watch the bodycam footage of Henry Nowak’s death – quiet pleas for help ignored as officers went about the business of managing tensions – and you can see what this means in practice. This tragedy was not an aberration. It was the two-tier machine of law-enforcement doing precisely what it was meant to do.
In Conservative Home, Callum Price summarises the events of the debate between Zia Yusuf and Fraser Nelson at the IEA.
The ‘what’ is easy, and identified by Yusuf, Nelson, Frost, and countless others alike. Energy costs through the roof; a planning system that strangles development of infrastructure and housing; a government structure seemingly incapable of getting anything done; a tax burden that suffocates work and investment; a welfare bill through the roof; a criminal justice system on its knees; and questionable border security, to give the understatement of the century.
The ‘how’ is somewhat trickier. But there is low-hanging fruit, particularly on the economy. First, stop doing harm. The state should lift its boot-heel from the throat of businesses and workers alike. We should make it easier, not harder, to hire new employees. We should stop punishing wealth creators, and make work pay more than welfare. There is common ground here for more than one political party to get behind. What’s more, if we can fix the obvious issues in our economy, the benefits will filter out quickly into the overall mood of the nation.
During Monday’s debate, Lord Frost pointed to 2010 as an estimation of when, he believes, things began to feel worse in Britain. Others point to similar periods in time to make a similar point – one meme jokes that the 2012 London Olympics was the Britain’s ‘season finale’, because everything has been downhill since then. Interestingly, this time frame maps quite nicely on to the chart that shows our growth problem. After the financial crash, the UK economy basically stopped growing in any meaningful way.
In UnHerd, David Goodhart outlines why the 2010s political realignment is here to stay despite recent elections globally.
The emerging cross-party consensus (minus some parts of the Left) echoes the priorities I described above. It now includes: a permanent low level of legal immigration, and a goal of zero illegal immigration; ongoing attempts to hack back the regulatory state; acknowledgement that higher education has over-expanded and technical skills have been neglected; the recognition that the triple lock is unaffordable and welfare spending is out of control with too many dropping out of the labour market (only four in 10 households are net contributors); the need for a rethink on Net Zero, a regional rebalancing to the economy, an openness towards some degree of re-industrialisation, more national control over critical assets, and limits to free trade in the coming bloc-based global economy; more investment in innovation, defence, and the application of AI, including by UK pension funds; greater pushback against the progressive activist war on tradition and authority; more concern about polarisation, anomie and loss of meaning, especially among young people, a concern now focused on social media regulation.
This new consensus tilts more towards the Right bloc (Conservative/Reform) than the Left bloc (Labour/Greens/Liberal Democrats); that does not guarantee the Right will prevail. Minus the scepticism about Net Zero and welfarism, plenty of the above could align with the economics of Andy Burnham’s Manchesterism. Nevertheless, in the short term, internal Labour politics, with or without Starmer, is likely to require more old-school, statist, tax-the-rich Leftism (despite the fact that we already have the most progressive tax regime in the developed world).
But is the new consensus postliberal? There are many schools of postliberalism, each defined by their distinct critiques of liberalism. Matt Sleat, in one of several recent books on postliberalism, complains that it is often little more than an immature rage against liberalism. And it is certainly unformed as a distinct ideology by contrast with older rivals like socialism, conservatism or liberalism itself.
In The Telegraph, Andrew Lilico argues that Covid-era lockdowns are partly to blame for record-high youth unemployment.
This has been a trend for decades, but more recent factors have exaggerated it. Covid and its aftermath coincided with, and contributed to, reduced labour market participation by the young and a sharp increase in mental and physical health problems. Prior to Covid, the proportion of Neets was around 11 per cent, compared with 13 per cent today. The youth is now more likely to experience a common mental disorder (CMD) than any other age group, with 22-23 per cent of those aged 17-25 having a probable mental disorder, whereas two decades ago they were the age group least affected.
Mental health challenges have become strongly correlated with worklessness among young people. Among those aged 16-34, those with mental health conditions are 4.7 times more likely to be economically inactive than their peers.
Some of that is surely a by-product of Covid restrictions such as social distancing and lockdown, not necessarily in the direct sense of people developing mental health issues in that period (though that may have happened too), but in the more fundamental sense that the disruption of those years meant young people with common challenges never developed the habits and life patterns that allowed previous generations to learn to cope.
Having missed critical life windows for that development, it’s now very hard for them to escape. This was of course predicted at the time of these restrictions, but the interests of the young were not understood or weighted highly by policy in that period.
Wonky Thinking
A new report by Cambridge Circus Research analyses the complex NGO-charity structures that hold huge swathes of influence over our public life. It finds that some charities have been using their money for overtly political purposes, while many are funded by foreign entities such as Iran.
For a political party seeking to govern amid this landscape, the practical risk is posed not by a single hostile organisation, but by a network of actors singularly committed to frustrating their agenda. Major foundations fund intermediaries; intermediaries funnel to frontline organisations; legal charities and advice bodies identify claimants and evidence; campaign organisations supply oppositional narratives; media outlets present campaign representatives as neutral experts; and the same bodies appear in formal consultations and parliamentary evidence. Immigration and asylum provide the clearest examples, including the Conservative government’s Rwanda scheme and Labour’s UK-France “one in, one out” arrangement.
The central institutional problem is democratic displacement. Governments may possess a mandate for an agenda, but implementation can be slowed, reframed, or effectively vetoed by networks that are legally sophisticated, professionally funded, and only partially transparent. The policy response should therefore focus on increased transparency, stricter definitions within charity law, and better preparation ahead of policy delivery.
1. Charity law permits policy campaigning where it furthers charitable purposes, but the boundary between charitable advocacy and political purpose is too permissive and too weakly enforced in practice [S1].
2. The infrastructure is layered: large foundations and public bodies fund intermediaries, intermediaries fund or support campaign groups, campaign groups generate evidence and media pressure, and legal charities or public-law firms translate policy opposition into litigation.
3. Immigration and asylum are the clearest policy fields in which this system operates, but the model also appears in climate policy, protest law, equality policy, procurement, citizenship, legal aid, and public administration.
4. There are also national security implications – weak oversight has allowed networks of charities funded, directed, or acting on behalf of hostile state actors including Iran. Some of these charities propagate proscribed group propaganda and advance antisemitic and Holocaust-denying rhetoric.
5. Public funding can create a “state-funded opposition loop”, in which departments, local authorities, or arm’s-length public bodies finance organisations that later campaign, litigate, or give evidence against the state in the same policy field.
6. Consultation responses, select-committee evidence, and broadcast appearances can give organised advocacy networks the appearance of neutral expertise or broad civil-society consensus.
7. The Charity Commission is responsible for over 170,000 registered charities but possesses only 457 employees, including the board. This is insufficient to pursue meaningful enforcement of 7 Breaking the Blob charities in breach of charities law. As it stands, the Charity Commission is simply not fit for purpose.
8. The data on grants is highly fragmented and incomplete. Many of the numbers disclosed in this report must be treated as lower bounds. Transparency would be greatly improved if an auditable centralised data repository were available to cross-reference grants to charities and track funding flows.
Podcast of the Week
In The Critic Show, Chris Bayliss, Henry Hill, and Reverend Marcus Walker discuss the intergenerational responsibility that politicians hold, and how they are currently failing to govern with the interests of future generations in mind.
Quick Links
A Saudi national, Almunthir Daqamah, has been charged with attempted murder after shooting a member of staff of his former university with a crossbow.
Steve Hilton (Republican) and Xavier Becerra (Democrat) top polls in California gubernatorial race with each polling ~26 per cent.
SoftBank opts to build €75bn AI facility in France, with the facility planned to be Europe’s largest.
Polling by Survation suggests that Andy Burnham holds 10-point poll lead in Makerfield, with Reform UK’s candidate trailing behind.
Home Office admits to insufficiently collecting data on failed asylum seekers.
US State Department condemns British government over two-tier policing in wake of Henry Nowak’s murder.
Former Defence Secretary claims MoD may have misled 2011 Chinook crash review team.