The story, by now, is well known. When Aston Villa drew Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Europa Leag…

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Knowing the controversy about the Europa League match against Maccabi Tel Aviv, played on Thursday evening, I got to Villa Park early. Walking past my old school and through the public park on the way to the ground, it all felt quite normal.

But as I turned on to Trinity Road, the noise of the hateful anti-Israeli – and yes, anti-Semitic – crowd reached me. “Death, death to the IDF,” yelled the crowd. Later, “Kill, kill the IDF,” and the genocidal chant, “from the river to the sea.”

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We may never know the full details of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, or what exactly happened with Virginia Giuffre, who accused the Prince of sexually abusing her when she was a minor. We do know that Andrew agreed a financial settlement to prevent Giuffre’s allegations being heard in court. In her posthumous book, Giuffre describes “orgies” with underage girls, and, in the latest raft of published documents, there is evidence of Andrew receiving “massages” on Epstein’s private jet.

We also know that Prince Andrew lied – in his notorious interview with BBC Newsnight – about how long he had remained in touch with Epstein. And we know that Sarah Ferguson, Andrew’s ex-wife who continues to live with him, had stayed in contact with Epstein longer than she had previously claimed.

This all follows a stream of other controversies, including questions about his business connections, and the “close confidant” who turned out to be a Chinese spy invited by Andrew into Buckingham Palace. There remain questions about Andrew’s personal finances, and the lease agreement he has allowing him to live in Royal Lodge – a thirty-room mansion – without rent.

Of course, prompted by the King, Prince Andrew has said he will no longer use his royal titles. He will never again be called the Duke of York or a Knight of the Garter. But his involvement with the Royal Family remains a source of deep embarrassment. The Prince and Princess of Wales are due soon to move into their own home near Royal Lodge, the public will want to know they are not funding the lifestyle of a man in disgrace, and a motion might yet be put before Parliament to debate what remains of his royal status and privileges.

That this saga continues is down to Prince Andrew’s lack of shame. Only belatedly did he accept he needed to stop using his royal titles, and even now he appears determined to defend what he still has. He seems not to recognise at all that he has brought his family, the monarchy and the country into a state of dishonour and disrepute.

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And the main terrorist danger we face remains Islamist. It was not the Far Right who attacked London Bridge, it was not Hindu nationalists who murdered innocent children at the Manchester Arena, and it was not lonely incels who blew up trains and buses on 7 July 2005. The details of the latest terrorist atrocity – at the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester – are not yet confirmed, but the attacker was Jihad al-Shamie, a Muslim from Syria, whose family were supporters of the 7 October attacks by Hamas on Israel.

The police have confirmed al-Shamie was motivated by Islamist ideology - but no government minister has been prepared to say the same. The Prime Minister and Home Secretary have mouthed platitudes about standing “shoulder to shoulder” with Britain’s Jews, but said nothing about al-Shamie’s motivation or ideology, nor the rancid swamp of anti-Semitism in which Britain is now drowning.

Yet a recent study showed a quarter of people living here hold anti-Semitic views, and research shows anti-Semitic attitudes are more prominent among British Muslims than others. Since the 7 October attacks, the rolling anti-Israel protests have seen campaigners openly express anti-Semitic hatred without challenge. The Muslim men who drove through Jewish neighbourhoods in London threatening to “rape their daughters” were never prosecuted.

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The story was briefed out in a hurry to distract from troublesome news that was not going away. The Prime Minister and his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, had broken the rules and kept £750,000 of political donations se…

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There was some dissonance between Nelson’s account of the Reform surge and his insistence that mass immigration has been a boon for Britain. But this observation – that Farage has a clear story to tell, while the parties he is challenging are struggling to produce and communicate their own – is surely true.

Labour are staggering around the ring like a boxer who has taken too many punches, beaten by the realisation that they have no plan to turn the country around. The so-called “Ming vase” strategy before the election was no clever ruse to minimise political risk while a radical plan was prepared behind the scenes: it was cover for the fact that there was no plan at all.

Beyond plotting to increase spending eight times more than they promised, and to increase taxes and borrowing accordingly, they had little idea of what they would need to do. The assumption that Labour would get more out of the civil service than the Tories and more from European countries – simply because they were the better people, with better morals, building better relationships – has proved to be utterly risible.

Labour are not only incapable of telling a story – with their policy direction changing daily, and at random thanks to the Prime Minister’s lack of core principle – they are not even good at the bureaucracy. They promised to close the asylum hotels, only to take to the courts to keep them open, said they would cut quangos, but opened 27 of them, and made such a mess of the public finances the Chancellor was reduced to tears – while a junior minister is writing the Budget for her.

And this is before we consider the stench of sleaze emanating from Whitehall under Starmer’s leadership. The one thing the Louise Haigh, Tulip Siddiq, Angela Rayner, Peter Mandelson and all the others have in common is the misjudgement and poor leadership of the Prime Minister himself.

My party – the Conservative Party – is still developing its story. A little more than a year since the worst defeat in our history, we have much to do to convince the country we have understood why we lost so comprehensively, and that we have the humility, seriousness, ideas and plan to be trusted with political power again.

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This week the new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has noticed illegal immigrants are making “vexatious, last-minute” legal claims to thwart deportation. A concerned citizen might have taken this intervention to mean curbs on the laws that allow these appeals were forthcoming. But hard words will be followed by limp action.

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In Britain, while figures such as Alastair Campbell have made fools of themselves, the clash in values and perspectives has been epitomised by the response of George Abaraonye, a student at Oxford University and the president-elect of the Oxford Union. Abaraonye’s response was shocking not only for its callousness or its ease with violence, but for its complete lack of humanity. To Abaraonye, Kirk was not an ideological abstraction but somebody he had met in person at the Union. Yet he immediately and instinctively celebrated his death.

And as the president-elect of the Union, Abaraonye is – more than anybody – supposed to stand for the vital importance of free speech. The Union traces back its history by more than 200 years and fancies itself as the “most prestigious debating society in the world.” Abaraonye might only be at Oxford because of politically-correct admissions policies, but surely we might expect a man who has reached the top of the Union to stand against political violence and free speech?

Of course not. In growing numbers, those who call themselves liberals – on the Left and the Centre of politics – have rejected free speech for many years. And their reasons are not only selfish and intolerant: they also enjoy the cover of intellectual justification provided by a series of post-modern thinkers, starting with Michel Foucault.

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These are the words of Graham Linehan, the comedy genius behind Father Ted and Black Books. And for the avoidance of all doubt, they are my words too. If the police believe Linehan’s statement – published online in April – constitutes an act of criminality, they should arrest me just as they arrested him last week.

The case is as serious as it is ridiculous. It is known that trans activists make absurd attempts to convince the police to investigate their critics and ideological opponents. Yet the police went along with the game: their po-faced statement confirmed that Linehan had been arrested for his quip because it “incited violence.”

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Take energy prices. Since the Climate Change Act in 2008, or arguably the Renewables Obligation in 2002, it has been a matter of government policy to order the energy “trilemma” so that decarbonisation became a greater priority than security of supply or affordability. As a result Britain has the highest industrial energy costs in the West, and domestic energy costs that are cripplingly expensive for many families.

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What metrics might they choose to demonstrate the stability of the economy? According to the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, Rachel Reeves has created a £51 billion black hole in the public finances. Inflation is up. Unemployment is up. Business confidence is down. Job vacancies are down. The cost of government borrowing is higher under Keir Starmer than under Liz Truss – and indeed any prime minister since the financial crash.

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This is why so many modern political conceptions of identity fall short. Those intimidated by the relationship between history and today and between ethnic and civic conceptions of identity often like to say our British identity is about “British values”. But while we might share some broad values, and reject others, this is of course nonsense. For in a large and complex society, the clash between different values and interests is never-ending. If we settle on those values about which we agree – democracy and the rule of law are usually given as examples – we would be no different to Belgium. And we are clearly not Belgium.

The other way modern politicians obfuscate about identity is by claiming we have always been a “country of immigration”, implying that our population has for a thousand years been in constant flux, and our true identity is about diversity and inclusivity. If this were true, we would be nothing more than a vacuum to be filled by others. And the claim is anyway quite obviously historically illiterate. Our population was, until Tony Blair, notable only for its stability. But since he was elected prime minister, there has been more immigration into Britain every single year than there was in the entire period from the Anglo-Saxons in the fifth and sixth centuries until the Second World War.

The inconvenient truth about identity is that it is stronger when we know we have more things in common, and it is weaker when we have less. So radical diversity necessarily weakens our shared identity, and with it the reciprocity we anticipate and the willingness we have to do things for others. This should not be surprising, because a shared identity is what allows us to recognise familiarity in strangers – ultimately to the point that we are prepared to fight and die for them and the land we share.

There is no single description of a national identity, but it is a complex mix of the places we have in common, our history and shared stories, institutions large and small, language, culture, and norms and rules that set out our expectations of decent behaviour. It is an organic thing, encompassing history, language, traditions, collective memories and shared places. Just as a family’s identity is about memories and achievements and jokes and holidays and joy and arguments and tragedies and loss, so a national identity is formed along similar lines.

This is why integration can be difficult even when it is what a newcomer and their family really want. But this prompts a different question. What if it is not what the newcomer and their family really want? What if rival identities and obligations make it difficult for a newcomer to embrace the responsibilities of British identity and citizenship?

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An hour later, several police officers surrounded Mr Steele, asked for his personal details and when he refused to provide them, they took him to a police station where he was detained, finger-printed and swabbed for DNA. His “crime” had been to ask the woman about Quranic verses regarding the treatment of wives by their husbands. Body-worn cameras record a police officer talking about needing to “lock him up” and another explaining he had caused the woman “harassment, alarm or distress.”

These are the words of Sections 4 and 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, which is now used by the police, prosecutors and the courts far beyond any reasonable interpretation of its purpose. Section 4 says it is an offence if somebody “uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour” if it is “with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress.” Section 5 says “threatening words or behaviour” that have the same effect may be criminal, regardless of intent.

Eventually the Crown Prosecution Service discontinued the police action against Mr Steele. This should not be a surprise, because Sections 4 and 5 contain defences where the accused can show his conduct was reasonable, or he had no reason to believe he would not cause “harassment, alarm or distress.” But others have not been so fortunate. Already this year, two people have been convicted of Public Order Act offences after they desecrated copies of the Quran and insulted Islam.

We can question the use of the Public Order Act in this way – as I have in Parliament – but we should also ask about the police themselves. Because this incident is part of a wider pattern.

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Blasphemy prosecutions

Already, sections 4 and 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 are being used to police what we can and cannot say about Islam. This was never the intention of the Act, as is clear from the transcripts of the Parliamentary debates at the time, and the fact that the controversies about blasphemy and Islam in this country began two years after its introduction, with the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988.

Despite this, the police, prosecutors and courts are now using the Public Order Act to criminalise speech and actions that offend Muslims. Sections 4 and 5 of the Act, make it an offence to cause “harassment, alarm or distress” by using “threatening, abusive or insulting words of behaviour.”

One might say it is legitimate to prosecute somebody for saying something that might cause wider disorder. Perhaps in some circumstances that may be so, but what has happened in our criminal justice system in the last year goes much further. First, the Crown Prosecution Service gave the game away by charging one man who desecrated the Quran with causing “distress” to the “religious institution of Islam” – which is almost the dictionary definition of blasphemy. Second, twisting the law to make a protestor responsible for the violent reaction of those who will not tolerate the opinions of others is wrong. In any other context it would be called “victim blaming”, and this novel legal interpretation destroys our freedom of speech.

I am campaigning to change the law to make clear that nothing in the Public Order Act – nor in other pieces of legislation – should prohibit or restrict any discussion and criticism or even ridicule and abuse of religious ideas. But there is another – perhaps even more damaging – threat to our freedom of expression, and that is the Government’s plan to define “Islamophobia”.

“Islamophobia”

The term “Islamophobia” has been thrown around – and used to attack and silence legitimate political opinion – for years. The Centre for Media Monitoring, which sounds benign but is an offshoot of the Muslim Council of Britain and used to intimidate the free press, has for example claimed reports that the Manchester Arena attacker yelled “Islamic slogans” were “Islamophobic. It claimed the same about reports that referred to “Jihadi John” – who notoriously executed hostages for ISIS – as a “terrorist”, on the grounds that he had never been convicted.

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It is easy to list the individual things that are going wrong. But to really understand what is happening and why – and what we must do to save our country – we have to go a little deeper. For what we are experiencing is not only a set of overlapping and interconnected crises, but the complete failure of an ideology – the collapse of a paradigm accepted unthinkingly by those who have governed us and have run big business and the media for decades.

We have grown used to believing the world in which we live – the world of globalisation, international governance, mass immigration, multiculturalism, radical diversity, racialised politics, net zero, managed decline, two-tier justice, and the rule of judges, lawyers and technocrats – is just the way things are.

But there is nothing inevitable about any of it. Our world – and the problems it produces, like a weaker West, lost economic opportunity, rising crime, a diminished public realm, squandered social trust and growing collective anxiety – is a construct of ideology. That ideology is not as extreme as the systems of belief our leaders find easy to reject, such as communism or fascism, but it is an ideology nonetheless. And like all ideologies, as its contradictions and failures mount, liberalism is retreating into delusion and denial, growing illiberal and intolerant towards dissenters, and bestowing privilege and prizes upon its favourites.

Our liberal leaders

For some years now, I have argued that conservatives need to reject liberalism and rediscover true, philosophical conservatism. We need to develop a new conservativism that respects personal freedom but demands solidarity, understands the importance of individual agency but requires responsibility, reforms capitalism and founds a new national economic model, and rebuilds community and our shared national identity.

It is important that conservatives do not become reactionaries, and true conservatism can never be illiberal. Conservatives must be careful to defend the essential liberalism that stands for pluralism and our democratic way of life. Essential liberalism is what makes liberal democracy function. It requires not only elections to determine who governs us, but protections to prevent the the tyranny of the majority. It demands good behavioural norms, including a willingness to accept the outcome of election results.

And it requires support for free markets. Essential liberalism does not seek to turn every aspect of life into a market, but it knows that economic freedom is closely related not only to personal freedom but other values, including dignity, justice, security and recognition and respect from our fellow citizens.

The power of essential liberalism is that it does not pretend to provide a general theory of rights or justice or an ideological framework that leads towards the harmonisation of human interests and values or a single philosophical truth. It respects political diversity and allows for all manner of policy choices, from criminal justice to the tax system.

And it understands that human values and interests are often in conflict. My right to privacy might undermine your right to security. A transsexual’s right to be recognised as a woman might undermine the safety of women born as women. We need institutions, laws, and a limited number of legal rights to handle those conflicts. We need customs and traditions to maintain our shared identities and build up trust. Keeping the fragile balance between conflicting values and interests is a delicate and difficult job. As liberalism has grown more ideological, its failure to maintain this balance has become more dangerous.

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Starmer clearly has no idea of what it takes to lead, and no desire to take responsibility for what happens on what we might laughably call “his watch”. This might be part of the explanation for the numerous u-turns he has performed in his first year in power – from the rape gangs inquiry to the restoration of winter fuel payments – and it is certainly a factor in the long and sorry story of the Government’s attempts to cut welfare spending.

The PM’s excuse this time is that he was too “distracted” by events in the Middle East to handle the backbench rebellion against changes to Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payments. This is weak stuff, and to understand what is really happening, we must go back to the beginning. Starmer won the leadership of the Labour Party promising everything from the restoration of European free movement rules to the nationalisation of utility companies. One of those promises was to “abolish Universal Credit and end the Tories’ cruel [benefits] sanctions regime.”

Having broken most of his promises to the Labour Party once he was elected leader, Starmer then took the same approach to the country. The broken promises on fiscal responsibility, on borrowing and on tax rises are all explained by the rank dishonesty of Labour’s promises about public spending. While their manifesto said they would limit spending increases to £9.5 billion a year by 2028/29, their Budget raised spending by £76 billion a year: eight times more than they had promised.

That this was all a preconceived deceit is obvious. Before the election, leaks from within the Labour Party set out exactly what has since come to pass. Once in power, the sources explained, Starmer and his Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, would claim that the public finances were in a worse condition than they could ever have imagined.

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This can only be considered good news. For all the talk of diplomacy and de-escalation before the strikes, diplomacy had failed. As I said on the BBC on Friday night, we had known for years that the Iranians were cheating the JCPOA deal. Of course this remains a dangerous moment, but anybody who says they are against nuclear proliferation and Tehran getting the bomb – but oppose these strikes – needs to set out their alternative, because more talks would only meant more time for Iran to get nuclear weapons.

And Iran is not just another autocratic state. It is a crazy theocratic state that believes it has a religious mission. It terrorises its own population, and subjugates women in particular. It wants to destroy the state of Israel and murder the Jewish people. It is the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world, culpable for the deaths of civilians on every continent. It trains al-Qaeda terrorists and its proxies include Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

Iran is behind attacks on shipping lanes in the Red Sea, Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman, risking world trade. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps – still not a proscribed organisation here – is a big player in international organised crime. It controls Iraqi oil and exports Iranian oil on the black market. It is involved in crypto mining and laundering, shadow banking networks, dollar smuggling from Iraq, and barter trade with Russia. The IRGC is probably the biggest drug dealer in the world, exporting heroin and other narcotics to fund militias, launder money and undermine other countries at home.

All of this demonstrates not only the criminal and terrorist nature of the Iranian state, but its reach into countries across the world. According to Ken McCallum, the Director General of MI5, “we’ve seen plot after plot here in the UK, at an unprecedented pace and scale.” Since January 2022, McCallum says MI5 has “responded to twenty Iran-backed plots presenting potentially lethal threats to British citizens and UK residents.” Just last month, the Government told us an Iranian terror attack in Britain was foiled with only hours to spare. Yvette Cooper said it was one of the biggest counter-terrorism operations seen in Britain for years.

So while the strikes were necessary for global security – and therefore welcome – they are clearly not the start and end of this story. We know there is likely to be serious blowback in the Middle East and around the world – including, potentially, within Britain. The Prime Minister dodged a statement in the House of Commons last week following the G7 – which is highly unusual – and there are unanswered questions we need the Government to answer.

1. Will the Prime Minister say he believes the strikes were legal?

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Such dishonesty is a common theme these days, and it is not limited to the media. When Axel Rudakubana murdered three little girls and injured more in Southport last summer, Merseyside Police said, “this incident is not currently being treated as terror-related.” The Prime Minister and members of his government all stuck to that line, with Angela Rayner saying speculation that details of the murders were being kept from the public, and that the murders were an act of terrorism, was “fake news” and “conspiracy theories.”

But it was not fake news. On 29 October Rudakubana was charged with murder, and offences under the Biological Weapons Act and the Terrorism Act. The police had discovered the chemical weapon ricin at his home, and a training book called Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants – the al-Qaeda Training Manual.

Keir Starmer later admitted that he had known about the discovery of ricin and the terrorist manual all along, but he justified keeping the information secret, warning if he had revealed these details he would have risked the collapse of Rudakubana’s trial. The police justified their own obfuscation, saying “for a matter to be declared a terrorist incident, motivation would need to be established.”

But this was all nonsense. The police and government itself often confirm that crimes are being treated as acts of terrorism, before the motives become clear. And anyway, we were finally given the missing details when Rudakubana was charged, before his trial. He was, as we all know, successfully prosecuted despite this information being in the public domain. There was nothing to stop the police or Starmer saying the murders were being treated as terror-related, nor saying ricin had been found. The Prime Minister had simply decided not to tell the country the full truth.

It has become a bitter joke among sceptical members of the public that when the police fail to describe the ethnicity of a suspect, it must mean that the suspect is not white. Recently, when I sent Freedom of Information requests to various police forces asking them for written records of their policies and decisions to describe a suspect, they stonewalled. Some referred me to the College of Policing guidance regarding the circumstances when an arrested or charged suspect can be named – deliberately missing the point of my questions. But the public can see what is happening.

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1. A gilty government

Labour’s promise of fiscal responsibility did not last long. Their manifesto said they would limit spending increases to £9.5 billion a year by 2028/29. But in the Budget – published just four months after the manifesto – that went flying out of the window. They increased spending by eight times more than they had said: by £76 billion a year.

The tax rises and extra borrowing that have done so much to spook consumer and business confidence – and the bond markets – all follow from that decision. Taxes went up not by the £8.5 billion a year promised in the manifesto, but by £40 billion. And borrowing increased not by the promised £3.5 billion a year, but by £36 billion.

This is not just cynical and dishonest but deeply dangerous. We have a persistent budget deficit, even when we discount investment spending. Our stock of debt already stood at 95.5 per cent of GDP, or more than 100 per cent based on how it was calculated before Rachel Reeves fiddled the figures. But even this is an under-estimate, given unfunded public sector pension liabilities are estimated to be worth towards £1.4 trillion – around half the estimated stock of debt.

And government borrowing is no longer as simple or safe as it once was. International events, like the Covid pandemic, which prompted massive government borrowing – and now rearmament – and slower trends, like the reduction in capital flows from Asian savers to global bond markets, mean borrowing is more expensive. Rising US interest rates, driven by Trump policies like his “Big, Beautiful Bill” and uncertainty over the stability of the Federal debt mountain, have sucked more of the world’s capital into America, increasing borrowing costs for governments elsewhere.

Longer-term domestic changes matter too. Our ageing population means demand for gilts from British pension funds is falling, as existing schemes mature and defined benefit schemes close. Huge chunks of our debt need to be refinanced every year, and in 2025 the Debt Management Office must sell more than £300 billion in gilts – the second-highest sum ever recorded, and lower only than during the pandemic.

But Labour’s fiscal expansionism – justified by discredited excuses about their economic inheritance and in contradiction to what the party had promised at the election – undermined market confidence. Unsurprisingly, more British gilt sales, more bonds sold by other governments, higher international interest rates, and fewer buyers at home and abroad leads to higher prices – and perhaps, eventually, a loss of demand and failed auctions.

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