So said the woman standing next to a squalid tent residence that has sprung up at the corner of 46th Street and 11th Avenue, on the far west side of Manhattan. Skeletally thin, eyes almost popping out of her wan, sunken face, she’s hunched over trying to light something as I approach. “Jane” (not her real name) looks like she could fall over any second. A strong gust would do the job. But she keeps it together, somehow.

We’re across from the Intrepid, the WWII-era carrier that serves as a floating aviation museum, beloved of tourists and younger New Yorkers, like my 9-year-old son, Max.

When I visited this area a fortnight earlier — so Max could watch the action-sci-fi classic Independence Day on the deck of the Intrepid — the homeless camp was much more expansive. It took up a significant span of the block and teemed with people in various states of undress and intoxication. Then the New York Post (where I used to work) got wind of the camp and gave it two days of coverage: “Lawless NYC Homeless Encampment Near Intrepid Grows,” ran one headline.

Pressed at a Monday news conference about the camp, Mamdani gave what the Post fairly described as a “non-answer.” Said Hizzoner: “We are focused on connecting New Yorkers to shelter and on establishing a pipeline to stable housing, not just moving New Yorkers from one place to another place. To this specific encampment that you brought up, we’re going to look into the details of that.”

Well, now we know what “looking into the details” would entail. The camp looked much smaller by Monday evening when I visited. “They” had dispersed the residents, as Jane reported. Who’s they? “Sanitation,” she replies, pointing with her chin at the official notices duct-taped to the wire fencing next to her makeshift home.

“That piece of paper says we have to take our stuff and move on,” she says matter-of-factly. “Otherwise, they’ll come and throw away our stuff, and we can do nothin’ about it.”

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As she says this, I happen to notice a green-and-white Department of Sanitation SUV driving slowly — very slowly — toward the tent (or tents, really, a complex of them conjoined somehow by various boxes and carts and covered over by multiple tarps). But the sanitation boys roll up their windows and tear away before I can ask questions.

And in that set of interactions — Jane’s report of the great dispersal, sanitation preferring to do its work quietly — lies the key to how Mayor Zohran Mamdani is addressing one of the persistent crises of blue-city governance. Across the country, homeless encampments have become hotbeds of open drug use, prostitution, violence, and general human misery. They annoy local residents and businesses and foster a general sense of decay and disorder. 

Mamdani’s response amounts to a careful threading of the needle between doing what’s necessary and keeping the activist, anti-police Left at bay. He doesn’t want a “Mamdani-Ville” mushrooming on his watch, feeding daily horror images to the tabloids. But he’s tackling it with the lowest-intensity and -visibility means possible. 

To wit, Mamdani has apparently resolved to disperse the west-side camp — but crucially, without involving the police or coercively removing its “residents” from the streets. The residents still haunt — I use the verb decidedly — the neighborhood. But they’re no longer as visibly concentrated and thus less likely to attract media attention.

It’s (sort of) working for now — a testament to the mayor’s political agility, not to mention the Post’s power to set the agenda. But in the long term, the strategy risks damaging his credibility and, by extension, that of the wider social-democratic renewal he’s attempting.

One thing Mamdani has going for him is the tight geography of Manhattan. Save for its parks, which have historically avoided the encampment scourge, the city has few wide-open spaces conducive to the permanent in-gathering of the addicted and mentally ill (a substantial majority of those who camp this way abuse substances or have severe mental-health problems — often both).

Manhattan’s situation stands in contrast to more sprawling West Coast cities with plenty of open room for camps to grow into unless the authorities intervene — something they often didn’t do amid the anti-policing mania that swept American progressivism beginning in the mid-2010s. “At least we don’t have the camps” was thus one of the consolations of Gothamites during the era of “peak woke” and #Defund.

If there is one part of Manhattan where camps could take root, however, it’s the sleepy far-west stretch along the Hudson River. With its warehouses, auto-repair shops, and utility facilities, the area has always been surprisingly empty, though more recent development has brought a number of glass high-rises straight out of Doha or Dubai. The area’s relative emptiness has been an invitation to encampment, and it was only a matter of time before one would appear.

Soon, locals and businesses were complaining about the sights, sounds, and smells of the camp. Joggers found themselves hurdling the limp bodies of drug cosmonauts sprawled across the pavement, dodging the paraphernalia and other filthy detritus scattered around them. I saw all this myself on my earlier visit.

By Monday night, though, the scene is more contained.

“Where have the rest gone?” I ask Jane.

“Not far,” she replies. “They’re just down the 40s. Just walk up and down, man, you’ll see.”

Has anyone offered to take them to shelters? She shrugs. “I mean, they come and talk to you. But —” Her voice trails off. My questions are beginning to annoy her.

A security guard on a foldable chair across the street backs up her account. “I see cops come by and sort of chat with ’em. City workers, too. But they don’t do anything.” The Mamdani administration seems to have placed much — perhaps most — of the onus for dealing with the crisis on the shoulders of sanitation workers.

Jane tells me she’s been on the streets for two years, at this corner for two weeks. She’s outlasted the others, but sooner or later she, too, will have to drag her things a few blocks and start again.

Her neighbors aren’t hard to find. Farther north, at 47th Street, a smaller camp: a more alert woman working the corner in a bedraggled mini-dress (“Hey, Daddy!”), two pairs of male eyes staring coldly from inside the tent behind her. On 45th, another makeshift residence, where a couple smokes outside while a third man tries on roller blades. On 44th, a couple lies belly-down in their tent, watching videos on a phone. Farther east (away from the river), clusters of men doze off in various nooks and doorways.

Jane was right. You just have to walk up and down. Mamdani, for now, has “solved” the problem at a surface level, and in the most non-coercive manner imaginable. There will be fewer fentanyl-porn scenes readymade for Post cameras. But the total volume of decay and disorder hasn’t been diminished, only the concentration. 

When it comes to the complex of social crises that gives rise to a Jane, his administration’s philosophy is still largely informed by the Left libertarianism that refuses to coerce people whose illness tells them they’re doing just fine. What this model has to do with social democracy — with the project of subjecting our common life to rational deliberation — is anyone’s guess.

Above all, de la Espriella is more or less Colombia’s answer to Argentina’s Right-wing populist President Javier Milei: bombastic, cartoonishly subservient to US power, wont to break but not to build. His victory is a testament to Colombian progressives’ folly in adopting the climate, security, and identity politics of the Western Left.

Much like President Trump, de la Espriella fits the Right-wing archetype of the outsider businessman, complete with allegedly dubious deals and flamboyant self-promotion. In the Colombian’s case, the millions came from his legal firm and his extracurriculars include recording music videos and shamelessly promoting self-branded luxury goods on his eponymous podcast.

De la Espriella has been derided as el abogado de la mafia, “the mob’s attorney,” for representing clients like Colombian narco-paramilitary warlord Salvatore Mancuso and Colombia’s former President Álvaro Uribe (2002 – 2010). The most consequential is Uribe, who is alleged to have run death camps with Mancuso’s United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, racking up thousands of civilian casualties while conducting war against FARC, the Left-wing guerillas-cum-drug dealers. De la Espriella previously made the unrealistic promise to nominate Uribe as his vice president. For his part Mancuso, who served time in the United States for drug trafficking, claimed in 2025 that he and de la Espriella were childhood friends.

As an attorney, de la Espriella also represented Colombian-Venezuelan businessman Alex Saab between 2014 and 2019, long after the latter’s ties to the former Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro were well known. On May 19, Saab was extradited to the United States for allegedly laundering $350 million via American banks for the Maduro regime. Days later, the Colombian journalist Daniel Coronell published documents showing that de la Espriella received almost $400,000 in illicit funds from Saab’s companies.  

In his own words, de la Espriella’s international role models are Trump, Argentina’s Javier Milei, and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. From Bukele, de la Espriella has borrowed his appearance — the two men look remarkably similar — and his hard-line security policies. But by far, his greatest influence is Milei, who anthropomorphizes himself as a lion in accordance with libertarian social Darwinism. In the same vein, de la Espriella styles himself El Tigre, often engaging in song and dance with AI-generated felines at his rallies.

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Like Milei, de la Espriella professed elite libertarian views before launching his presidential bid. Up until recently, his market fundamentalism came paired with vocal support for euthanasia, abortion, and adoption by same sex couples. The issue, of course, is that this combination of progressive social views and market worship is repellent to the working class. De la Espriella now claims that he evolved on these issues, exalting the traditional family and calling abortion “an abomination.”

More dubious still is his conversion from godless globalist to a Catholic patriot. In 2017, de la Espriella stated in an interview that he denied the existence of anything that reason can’t explain. When asked why he married his wife through the Catholic Church, he replied, “We all commit foolishness and stupidities for love.” In the same vein, the millionaire attorney is a tri-citizen of Colombia, Italy, and the United States, and lived abroad in Florence and Miami for at least a decade prior to his campaign.

Recognizing these vulnerabilities, de la Espriella now claims that he found God in 2020 following his aunt’s death from Covid, though pre-campaign evidence of his religiosity is scant. Now, the president-elect champions Christian nationalism and has adopted the slogan Firme por la patria — “firm for the fatherland.”

In practice, this firmness seems to involve a great deal of deference to Washington — or rather, southern Florida’s Trump World. This month, de la Espriella stated that he voted for Trump and is a registered Republican in the United States. He has also celebrated the White House’s extrajudicial killings of alleged “narco-terrorists” near Colombian waters, though none of the victims have been proven to have engaged in drug trafficking. Undaunted, de la Espriella has gone so far as to say that he would welcome US strikes inside Colombia.

Much of this explains why de la Espriella’s victory was so slim. Petro, moreover, will leave office as the most popular Colombian leader since Uribe. After spending much of his term mired in telenovela-esque scandal and identitarian excesses, Petro engineered a stunning turnaround that saw his approval ratings recover to nearly 50%.       

In 2024, the administration passed a pension reform expanding coverage for almost 14 million Colombians, including some 3 million seniors living in extreme poverty. Petro also restituted around 1 million out of a total of 3 million hectares for victims displaced by guerrilla conflict. Jhon, an ex-soldier and displaced person from rural Tolima, told me that his hometown had since flourished thanks to government investment, including improved infrastructure and rural health care. “People are growing coffee and bananas again,” he said.

The Petro administration also passed a historic labor reform, reducing the workweek to 42 hours and restoring workers’ rights and benefits that were previously cut by Uribe. Workers now receive overtime worth an additional 35% of wages after 7 p.m., as opposed to 9 p.m. previously, in addition to 90% overtime on weekends and holidays in 2026, set to rise to 100% next year. Additionally, the government has raised the minimum wage around 40% in real terms since 2022, including an unprecedented 23% hike for 2026. Contrary to scaremongering about job losses and “Venezuelization,” poverty and unemployment have fallen to record lows. 

So why, then, did so many Colombians vote for a politician who can only be described as a MAGA-Miami asset? 

The answer is that Petro’s pro-worker turn proved too little, too late. In recent years, much of the Latin-American Left has taken to the activist-academic progressivism of the Western Left, which largely appeals only to credentialed cosmopolitans. Cepeda’s margins with working-class Colombians fell decisively relative to Petro in 2022. Supporters will inevitably fixate on de la Espriella’s surge among fickle, middle-class voters, but this ignores serious failings of policy by the Leftist establishment.  

Colombia produces virtually no fossil-fuel emissions, yet Petro halted all novel oil exploration under the pretense that humanity has 12 years to avoid extinction from climate change. Around half of government revenue derives from the sale of petroleum, most of which comes from the state firm Ecopetrol. Yet Petro resolved to destroy Ecopetrol, whose revenue collapsed by more than half during his term. Up until 2025, Colombia was wracked with stagflation — low growth, high inflation — a predictable consequence of the government’s energy sabotage. 

Catastrophically, Cepeda’s campaign remained committed to the outgoing president’s climate fundamentalism, despite a spiraling energy crisis. In a show of sheer stupidity, Petro and Cepeda put Ecopetrol’s union in the impossible position of choosing between labor rights and the promise of renewed exploration under de la Espriella. To his credit, the president-elect has committed to a commonsense, all-of-the-above strategy that includes fracking (which Petro has described — try not to roll your eyes — as a “crime against humanity”).

Security was also a top concern among Colombians. When it came to tackling common crime, particularly in urban areas, Petro has embraced “criminal-justice reform” of the kind that has hobbled cities run by Democrats the world over. His government attempted — and thankfully failed — to reduce prison sentences for crimes like murder. He also condemned building prisons for fear of perpetuating “mass incarceration.”

Asked by a youth influencer about how he would respond to someone breaking into his own home, Petro waxed philosophical on criminals as victims of society. In contrast, de la Espriella has promised to build mega-prisons modeled on Bukele’s in El Salvador.

Dealing with the militarized cartels, guerrillas, and Right-wing paramilitaries that dominate parts of the Colombian countryside is a different matter, however. Petro’s record on this front, while poor, is roughly comparable to that of his post-Uribe predecessors. Since 2022, Colombia’s high national homicide rate, about 25 per 100,000, has remained stable. While cocaine production has soared to a record high, critics omit that production has risen consistently since 2012. Accordingly, Petro has seized record amounts of the drug.

In contrast, Petro’s “Total Peace” initiative — negotiating peace deals or terms of surrender with multiple armed groups simultaneously — has created more problems. In May, infighting within a FARC splinter group led to nearly 50 dead in the Colombian Amazon. The competing factions were allegedly torn between guerrillas interested in negotiating with Petro and others keen on exploiting illicit economies.

Norberto, a schoolteacher and de la Espriella supporter, told me he wasn’t opposed in principle to talks with armed groups but felt that Petro lacked an iron fist and follow-through during negotiations. Indeed, the architect of Total Peace was none other than Cepeda, Petro’s heir and would-be successor, who doggedly refused to explain what, if any, changes he would make to the policy as president. Then again, de la Espriella’s promises of mass bombings, perhaps conducted by Washington, are unlikely to meaningfully improve security in the countryside; Petro’s predecessor, Iván Duque, tried a similar strategy with mixed results. 

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More broadly, the problem with the president-elect’s promise to imitate Bukele on law and order, is that Colombian courts, unlike their Salvadoran counterparts, are unlikely to tolerate an indefinite suspension of due process. Even then, the example of Noboa’s Ecuador shows that autocratic methods may still prove insufficient against militarized cartels as opposed to simple street gangs; de la Espriella himself has noted that Colombia’s drone-specialized armed groups are far better-equipped than El Salvador’s street gangs.

Colombians have taken a gamble on de la Espriella. Yet — as with Petro — they are likely to be disappointed. Indeed, it is likely that Colombia will descend into mass unrest by year’s end. Like his Right-wing peers elsewhere in the region, the president-elect is enamored with Milei’s “chainsaw austerity,” which he aims to enact via a Trumpian executive decree. Promises to privatize all state companies and slash 40% of public employees are certain to deliver mass protests identical to those in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile.

The saddest part about the president-elect’s market fundamentalism is that — unlike with the cartoonishly mismanaged Argentina — there simply is no case for mass cuts in Colombia. The Andean nation’s debt-to-GDP is just 60%, compared to Argentina’s whopping more than 150% in 2023. Colombia’s deficit is admittedly high at more than 6%, yet critics neglect that mass cuts would kill economic growth, thereby increasing total debt. Much like Petro’s dogmatic capture on climate change, de la Espriella is equally captured by a fanatical hatred of public services; ironically, the bulk of Colombian public employees form part of the country’s desperately needed armed forces.

There is a painful lesson here for the Latin-American Left. Mexico’s Morena under Presidents AMLO and Claudia Sheinbaum remains the only ruling party Left-of-center in the region to have won re-election since 2020. Sheinbaum, a climate scientist, has championed the state oil firm Pemex and even pushed to expand fracking in tandem with renewables. And contrary to her image as a progressive heroine, the Mexican president and her hard-line security minister, Omar García Harfuch, have tripled Mexico’s incarceration rate, leading to a historic reduction in homicides. Wage hikes have likewise been steeper in Mexico.

Until Left and Right can get it into their heads that voters despise their respective groupthink — on climate change, crime, market fundamentalism, and worship of foreign interests — they will continue to alternate power in the most destructive manner possible. It remains to be seen whether de la Espriella and the current crop of Right-wingers in the Americas stave off a bloodbath in the next wave of elections. 

A festive hit in 1972, The Poseidon Adventure was among a clutch of disaster movies that thrilled and chilled Seventies audiences. The optimism of the Sixties had dissipated; Vietnam was going down the toilet; New York was broke, with random crime and visible decline terrorizing the residents of Fear City and their horrified compatriots. Airport in 1970, Earthquake and The Towering Inferno in 1974: all mirrored the secret fears of moviegoers whose faith in authority had waned, who braced for catastrophe in a world gone dark with only their pluck to buoy them.

Two decades later, at the end of history, CGI inflamed the disaster-movie genre: Independence Day (1996), Armageddon (1998) and Deep Impact (1998) offered sweeping apocalyptic visuals — crumbling landmarks, waves dwarfing Midtown skyscrapers, cows mooing in the carousel of a hurricane. These were fantasies of Western annihilation, fantasies which peered into the White House situation room and caught the bead of sweat on the president’s forehead. At a time of relative prosperity and security — and before 9/11 — the focus was on the spectacle of destruction, how far directors could push newly available special effects. The usual bungling authorities still made an appearance: stock hawkish commanders, dumbfounded local cops — but unlike in many Seventies equivalents the threat was external, rather than a crumbling moral core.

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These days the disaster blockbuster has fallen out of fashion. Covid killed the zombie apocalypse by bringing the weary realities of contagion to our doorsteps; climate anxiety shattered the comet careening through space with its promise of slow and sweaty demise. But visions of urban destruction have not disappeared; they’ve simply migrated to the news. The 2020s, so far the decade of disease, decline and demographic transformation, have taught us that the most psychically terrible threat is no longer immediate apocalypse — it’s the insidious, years-long erosion of protections and values taken for granted, whose loss is written on the sidewalks of London, and written on the wall for a New York City preparing to welcome an untested Millennial mayor.

In the real world, social contracts are not blown up but forgotten in the back of some dusty drawer. Personal safety is not, for the most part, violated by a lone attacker — it disappears when we acclimatize to the petty transgressions of normal people, those who press their bodies against us to shuffle in on our subway fares, who strut out of Tesco with bottles clinking in their pockets, who hock spit at minor officials when their toddler antics are reprimanded. Disaster happens, yes, when planes crash; but it also happens when they don’t — when dismal passengers rub their bare feet, puff clouds of sickly vape smoke into the cabin, rage at the stewardesses for no reason at all. Politeness, consideration, conformity: these are the casualties of a real-life disaster movie, a world forever changed by a lost expectation of a sensible and cohesive public. Citywide breakdowns recall riots, looting, mass catastrophe — but social orders can buckle under the weight of less spectacular tragedies, and barrier-bumpers, gum-spitters and participants in the pavement pissoir are all doing their bit to lower trust and heighten quotidian horror.

New York landmarks have been nuked, flooded and blown up countless times on screen. Lady Liberty has been decapitated (Cloverfield), buried in sand (Planet of the Apes) and entombed in ice (The Day After Tomorrow). She embodies a shining city, a way of life worth saving — but today that image reads differently, a dismal cliché, probably because the gleaming metropolis she represents has given way to a grimier reality. In the disaster movie, New York and London are depicted quaintly, sentimentally, flattened into tableaux of cheerful hot-dog vendors and chintzy tearooms, overcoats on Madison Avenue and urchins in the East End. The fantasy of the disaster movie is that, apart from the approaching asteroid or the mile-high tidal wave, nothing of note has ever changed in the endangered city. The person-sized disasters of managerial neglect, low-level lawlessness and economic hardship don’t exist.

Yet in 2026, disaster looks different. As New York prepares to inaugurate a 34-year-old, untested and catastrophically naive mayor on New Year’s Day, its merrymaking residents, much like the Champagne-popping revelers of the fictional Poseidon, don’t know what’s coming their way. Melodramatic, you might say — but consider how fragile is the order of the day-to-day. Even without a total naif in Gracie Mansion, life here rests on a knife edge: street-corner encounters turn violent without provocation, sly parcel-swipers continually invade hallways, and looking askance at the wrong commuter can earn you a slashed cheek or lit match. Mamdani has threatened to make the city’s buses, already mobile circus wagons full of antisocial sideshows, free — they could well go the way of the Central Park pool this summer, which became de facto baths for the “unhoused” and handy toilets for the disturbed. Men who pay for sex, ravaging the city’s desperates and driving women and girls into the hands of pimps, may no longer even be rapped on the knuckles: decriminalized “sex work” and scot-free soliciting could rob prostitutes of already scant protections under the guise of well-meaning toleration and sex positivity. And those beaten by partners might, if Mayor Mamdani’s campaign pitch comes off, be referred to swamped and bureaucratic social workers instead of police officers — shoved through a consequence-lite muddle of paperwork instead of their abusive partners being shoved into a cell.

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These are the real disasters headed for the American city: a peek across the Atlantic is all New Yorkers need to envision the immediate possibilities of progressive mismanagement. Sadiq Khan’s London, a city swamped in antisocial miasma, shows us what happens when incompetent policing collides with vanishing public values, when going easy on the violent and depraved becomes cruelty to the innocent. Sexual offenses on the Tube up 10% in a year; violent crime up 40% in a decade; security tags on bottles of Persil. Of course, New York has its own charms — subway cars becoming sleeper trains for fent addicts with hands down their pants; guns. With Mamdani installed, the complaints of the law-abider look soon, as in London, to be drowned out by the appeals of our betters to see bad behavior as evidence of victimhood. As Fraser Nelson has pointed out, Khan has overseen a TfL whose staff are told not to intervene when riders vault or shove through barriers, creating a stark division — also visible in New York — between those who gleefully bump and those who sourly tap their way in. The Met have a similar institutional limpness when it comes to shoplifting; as Nelson puts it: “You can walk into a shop, steal anything you like, walk away — and the chances are you won’t be caught.”

Why do we love disaster movies? The blockbusters of the Nineties impart a strange comfort: they impress on us the value of what is under attack, how lucky we are to live unmolested by comets and quakes, how charming and functional regular life is. But how true is that today, when urban life is the way it is? While violent crime in New York is down since the Nineties, petty offenses — just like in London — have jumped since Covid owing to lax enforcement, creating the perception of depressing lawlessness. Maybe that’s why the big-budget disaster film has fallen out of fashion; the city no longer feels like the symbol of national or Western order, and the stakes of mass destruction seem lower when the target is itself a crucible of chaos. It is telling that the only recent cinematic success in this genre, Twisters (2024), jeopardized not a noble metropolis but a ramshackle rodeo town and the main character’s humble homestead. Today the atmosphere of the city more closely recalls the Seventies, when moral decline and distrust in authorities created the first true classics of the disaster genre. If the on-screen apocalypse has a third wind, it will be in this mold. As for reality, will 2026 be a disaster? Very possibly; the real question is whether those in London or New York, so accustomed to demoralizing, ubiquitous delinquency, will even notice.

Welcome to the “most toxic place on the internet”. Tattle Life is an online forum which publishes endless threads of unhinged speculation for a million monthly visitors. It sells itself as “a commentary website on public business social media accounts”, but its targets range widely: everyone from obscure influencers to that “nasty little oik” Prince Harry. Under cover of anonymity, posters pretty much say what they like. Tattle Life, then, is surely the internet at its worst, ruining lives as well as livelihoods. Yet it turns out that anonymous bitching pays pretty well. Tattle’s founder, Sebastian Bond, is still making tens of thousands of pounds from ad revenue on the site. But, as he has found to his cost, two can play the anonymous game.

***

For years, we didn’t know who Bond, the so-called “King of the Trolls”, even was. Until recently, he remained in the shadows, running the website under a female pseudonym, Helen McDougal. That’s even as disgust at the website grew, with a petition to close it now signed by over 70,000 people, including a sitting MP. But then, in June 2025, Bond was finally unmasked. His nemesis came in the shape of Neil and Donna Sands, a Northern Irish couple who were victimised on the site, and who sued Bond for libel and harassment. After launching what their lawyer described as a “global forensic investigation”, it eventually identified Bond as the website’s host.

Giving judgment at the High Court in Belfast, Mr Justice McAlinden said Bond had been “peddling untruths for profit” and built his site to “monetize people’s misery”. That was made even worse by his anonymity — which, the judge said, had made it “practically impossible” to sue him. None of the victims of the website’s venom could ever find redress, with many complaints ignored or even mocked. Exemplary damages totaling £300,000 were awarded to the Sands, plus costs up to £1.5 million and an order freezing Bond’s worldwide assets. Cue a TV victory lap from the Sands, with their spokesman claiming Netflix has expressed interest in adapting their tale.

It seemed, then, that this two-year legal saga was finally over. But today, I can reveal, lawyers acting for Bond will appear at another Belfast hearing, asking the High Court to quash the original judgment. Among other things, they allege the Sands knew who Bond was a full 18 months before they informed the judge. That secrecy, Bond’s lawyers claim, meant he couldn’t defend himself: he simply didn’t know he was being sued. The irony is inescapable.

Bond, meanwhile, has remained invisible, though his website still bristles with nasty abuse. Reports claimed he was “lying low” in Thailand, and he has never given an interview — he would only ever appear on Tattle under his pseudonym enthusing about the site. The only photos of him published are years old. Last month, however, he spoke exclusively to UnHerd and posed for pictures. We met on a drizzly day in Manchester, at a hotel next to Piccadilly station. There, he told me the story of his life, and tried to defend the site that’s caused misery to so many.

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In person, Bond looks younger than his 42 years. Slim and softly spoken, he’s dressed in a polo neck and jeans and carries two small rucksacks — which, he says, contain most of his clothes and other worldly goods. Since the end of the pandemic, he has spent much of his time as a digital nomad, traveling the world with hand luggage only. “I like being minimal,” he adds, “having very little stuff.”

His early life contained few clues to his future as “king of the trolls”. Both parents were teachers, who brought him up on the outskirts of Gloucester. After studying computing at the University of Brighton, he joined Accenture as an IT consultant, but grew to loathe the work’s corporate stuffiness. They expected him to wear a suit, he says, and “they just wanted too much of my life. I thought, ‘you don’t pay me enough for this’”. Soon enough, he became a web developer at the online sex shop Lovehoney, a job where “you’d walk into the office and see one of the girls on a video call with someone measuring their cock”.

Despite such distractions, Bond still craved independence. So, in 2016, he set up Nest and Glow, a vegan recipes website. It remains online, though Bond is no longer a vegan and hasn’t updated it for years. It also includes his photo, but not his true identity. The site names him as “Bastian Durward” — his grandmother’s maiden name — and Bond tells me that his almost pathological privacy came after a stalker turned up at his house. “I tried to make myself less visible”.

Nest and Glow was successful, bringing in up to £4,000 a month from ads and it is also where Bond first heard about influencers. As he tells it, the crucial moment came when he was offered £500 to feature a vegan yogurt that he didn’t actually like. He took the money, and it also gave him an idea. “That was the one and only time I did any influencing,” he tells me, “but once I had, I started getting a lot of offers to push products in this way. It opened my eyes to the influencing world — a cheap, insidious way to advertise brands. Yet the work is so easy! If you’ve got 30,000 followers, you can easily make double what a nurse makes in a year.”

Especially appalled by influencers who “monetize their children”, Bond says he was inspired to set up Tattle Life. An old-fashioned forum, it’s split into various sections — “Influencers”, “Instagrammers”, “Bloggers” — with each containing hundreds of threads and millions of messages, often visceral in their spite. Just like Bond, most users prefer to remain anonymous — hardly surprising when almost every thread deteriorates so rapidly.

“She has cod eyes,” remarks one user, commenting on Price’s plastic surgery. “Has she finally realized how repulsive her mouth is?” asks another, their profile picture a zoomed-in image of their victim. Yet perhaps the grimmest weapon wielded against Katie Price are the online polls, with one speculating about her next batch of cosmetic surgery. With 124 votes, the Tattle Life crowd thought “Gnashers replaced” was the most likely option, though “Saggy bum chopped” and “Cheeky ears moved” were popular alternatives.

Of course, such abuse is hardly unique to Tattle Life. But Bond’s website surely distinguishes itself by its deeply personal, and often misogynist, brand of nastiness, especially when it’s aimed at D-list celebrities you’ve probably never heard of. Yet if Price has stated that Tattle Life’s relentless churn even contributed to a suicide attempt, Bond himself seems remarkably relaxed about the project. Yes, he concedes that posts against Price are “problematic” — but equally says there’s “often a long backstory to a problematic influencer and previous behavior that won’t be gleaned from a cursory glance at the curated image they portray on their Instagram.”

Overall, then, Bond offers a broad defense of Tattle Life and its content. “Most of the threads I agree with,” he tells me, “although as with any user-generated site, some will overstep the mark.” It’s a position he’s taken before. As the website has put it: “It’s an important part of a healthy, free and fair society for members of the public to have an opinion on those in a position of power and influence.”

Such a laid-back approach might be explained financially. In 2020, Tattle Life’s annual income from ads hit six figures. In 2022, it made a profit of £410,000, and in its best-ever month, May 2023, had 1.8 million visits. It likely boomed because it had an effective monopoly: no one else seems to have thought of building a website where users can devote 27 pages to attacking “Disney Vloggers”.

I ask Bond how he squares this bonanza with his self-proclaimed crusade against “insidious” influencers. “When it was set up money wasn’t the aim, but I’d be lying if I claimed money wasn’t a big part of why I carried on running it over the years,” he admits. “It does corrupt everything.” Bond adds that he closed the site to new registrants at the end of 2022, something he wouldn’t have done if he’d wanted to “earn every penny I could”.

In this, Bond seems to have changed his tune. As recently as 2021, writing under his adopted female persona of “Helen McDougal”, he boasted that an anti-Tattle campaign by influencer Em Sheldon is “all good publicity” for the site, parading its rising user numbers. That indifference to criticism is arguably reflected elsewhere. For one thing, the complaints system apparently consists of a rudimentary form. For another, there’s little evidence that Bond took even serious concerns seriously.

After Tattle Life posters allegedly worked out the home address of one content creator — discussing their findings openly — she contacted the website: only to be met by a silence. “I had such paranoia that someone was going to break in and kill me, and my unborn baby,” she later said, “that I was signed off work for a week.” Bond, for his part, insists that claims the site “doxxed” influencers are untrue. At the same time, he says his website is equipped with special software that flags sexual threats and other abusive content, theoretically allowing it to be removed. But you don’t have to spend long on Tattle Life to wonder how well that’s working out.

Then there’s the question of Bond’s anonymity. Why, in short, did he choose not only to conceal his identity, but also adopt the female persona of “Helen McDougal” when he emailed his critics? In part, his response again hinges on privacy. “I’ve never wanted fame or attention,” he says. “I’m not sure I deliberately started out to make it anonymous: I just didn’t put myself out there.” That’s hard to square with his erstwhile pride in Tattle Life’s soaring user base, let alone the irony that Bond himself was keen to stay hidden while the website’s targets were so publicly insulted.

As for the reason he chose a female alterego, Bond points out that 70% of the website’s users are women, mostly commenting on other women, so a male persona might have seemed strange. On the other hand, though Bond insists he does not regret establishing the site, he says he wishes he’d been open about his identity from the start. That, he says, “has allowed people to run wild with the worst possible false accusations. It turned it into a mystery. I just never thought there would be such interest in the person that started the site.”

Long before that, Bond knew just how much the website was loathed. In 2021, it was the subject of a fiercely critical Radio 4 documentary by the Tattle Life victim and Guardian beauty columnist Sali Hughes. Further coverage included an article stating that reading Tattle Life was like “dipping a foot into an acid bath”. In practice, however, there wasn’t much people could do. With many of its subjects small-time influencers, they just didn’t have the funds to fight “Helen” directly. As one 35-year-old influencer told The Guardian, she looked into taking Tattle Life to court after her address was published on the site. But as her lawyer explained, that would have cost £30,000. It goes without saying, of course, that Bond himself didn’t have such concerns. In 2022, Tattle Life’s ad revenue hit £550,000.

Yet that didn’t stop some of Tattle Life’s enemies from taking a more proactive approach. In 2021, an anonymous team of “troll hunters” called “The Detechtives” began asking followers of their Instagram account to “report trolls anonymously”. They went on to issue threats against the authors of Tattle Life posts, claiming they had software designed for counter-terrorism that meant they could see users’ keystrokes and unmask them.

With his business under threat, Bond examined The Detechtives’ digital footprint. He found evidence it belonged to one Neil Sands, a Belfast tech entrepreneur — who, it turned out, had once emailed “Helen” asking her to delete a thread about him and his wife Donna. As seems the norm, there was no response. But now it was his turn to issue a threat. On 24 September 2021, using his female alias, Bond sent Sands an email to his personal address, saying he knew he was behind The Detechtives’ account and would sue him if he did not close it. Less than an hour later, the Detechtives had vanished.

Round one of the fight between Tattle Life and the Sands had gone to Bond. But round two was looming, and this time, Neil and Donna would do the suing.

***

The Sands were a high-profile couple. Donna had her own clothing label, which she promoted on Instagram, while Neil was cutting a swathe through Irish society having started out in Silicon Valley. In 2023, he and his father Conor made headlines when they spent £1.1 million on a horse to race at Ascot, while Neil has claimed that his tech consultancy is “the secret weapon of Fortune 500 companies all over the globe”.

At first, the Tattle Life thread about the Sands focused on a business dispute between Donna and her sister. But as seems inevitable on this website, the anons grew vitriolic, and started to comment about the couple’s taste and personalities, as well as make unfounded claims about their marriage. They also discussed a scheme for which Neil attracted widespread publicity to make “cost price” Covid face masks in Sligo, which in the end did not materialize.

The Sands decided to sue. In April 2023, they employed a private investigation firm, Nardello and Co, to uncover the real owner of Tattle Life. Nardello has described “piecing together” Bond’s identity through a muddle of aliases and personas, amassed over two decades. Yet despite this — and whatever the real reason Bond has used so many pseudonyms, from “Bastian Durward” to “Helen McDougal” — it seems to have found the job relatively easy.

After all, Nardello’s report, obtained by UnHerd, states that a month before the Sands launched their legal action, in June 2023, its investigator visited Bond at his Dorset home and confirmed his identity. On 28 June, Xenforo, whose servers hosted Tattle Life, disclosed everything they knew about the site to the Sands’ solicitor Peter Barr. That included Bond’s email and postal addresses, as well as financial records making it clear he ran Tattle Life.

The evidence that the Sands had this information at such an early stage is now central to Bond’s attempt to get the verdict against him overturned. For when the Sands first appeared at the High Court, in June 2023, they asked the judge to conduct the case in secret: on the grounds they did not know who owned Tattle Life. This would allow them to issue their claim against “persons unknown”; to conceal their own identities; and to impose a media gagging order. Their lawyers accepted this went against the usual requirement that justice should be open and seen to be done, but claimed publicity could “tip off” the site’s owner and make it harder to find him.

Their wishes were granted, with the proviso that the secrecy would end once the Sands found out who was behind the site. Yet by Neil’s own account, they already knew: in June 2025, in the wake of their victory, he reposted an Instagram story that suggested that Bond was first unmasked on May 4, 2023, appearing to confirm that he had known Bond’s identity weeks before the June 2023 hearing.

Bond’s lawyers now argue that because of the secrecy, their client lost his right to mount a defense. Either way, by 8 September, 2023, the Sands’ lawyers told the judge that Tattle Life had “chosen not to reveal the true identity of the persons behind it” — implying that the “persons unknown” had made a conscious decision to ignore the lawsuit. On that basis, and because no one had come forward to offer a defense, the judge entered a judgment by “default”. This meant he awarded damages and costs without hearing any evidence, because the claim had not been challenged.

It was not until November 2024, when the Sands asked him to freeze Bond’s assets, that they finally disclosed they knew who ran Tattle Life. Bond says that if had known about the lawsuit, he would have defended it, arguing that “private” information which the Sands said was posted on Tattle Life was readily available from public sources, and that the posts were not libelous. Be that as it may, he says it was only at the end of last year that he realized something was amiss — when he discovered he could not withdraw money from his Nationwide account and his bank said the secrecy orders meant it could not provide them. And it was only in June, when the Sands asked the court to lift the anonymity orders, that he finally learned the truth, and received the details of the Sands’ claim against him for the first time.

Currently, he is allowed to withdraw just over £1,000 a week, and would need to pay a “cessation figure” of over £1 million to have the order lifted. Not that Bond is exactly poor: its readership is down, but Tattle Life is still generating some £20,000 a month, paid into an account Bond controls in Hong Kong. But the asset freeze means he cannot touch it.

Today’s hearing, then, is a preliminary skirmish to fix a date for the battle to come — round three in the battle of Sands vs Bond. “If I lose”, Bond says, “it will cost me everything I’ve earned from the site, everything saved in my years of working in tech.” If he wins, the Sands, who refused all requests for comment, will not only lose their damages, but become liable to pay their huge and mounting costs.

In the meantime, and minus the thread about the Sands, Bond’s website remains online, as chaotic and vicious as ever. Yet whatever happens to the site, to say nothing of its multi-named owner, Tattle Life is surely a tale of our times. It speaks, for one thing, about the ways in which online anonymity can both empower and destroy — sometimes both at once. For if Bond is right that people with “power and influence” shouldn’t be immune from criticism, he himself is a walking, talking example of how easily that same principle can be twisted back against you, whatever the outcome of his legal troubles.

And if Tattle Life is the ultimate online ouroboros, that ancient snake that ate its own tail, there’s another irony here too. Bond started Tattle Life, he says, with a noble goal, to strike at the heart of the greedy influencers that dominate contemporary internet discourse. Yet as the man himself admits, money corrupts everything. And, no matter your take on Tattle Life, it’s hard to spend time on the site, or the strange legal saga it’s spawned, and really disagree.

My question seemed to be answered the following day. On Truth Social, the president posted pictures likely taken from the motorcade that morning or the next, as he returned for another round of golf. Alongside images of roadside tents and trash, Trump wrote, “We’re having a News Conference tomorrow in the White House. I’m going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before.” Sure enough, at a marathon briefing on Monday morning, Trump announced that he was placing the DC police force under federal control and deploying the National Guard to secure streets long blighted by disorder — and bloodied by the fourth highest homicide rate in the nation. 

At first, I hardly noticed the encampment. My parents dropped me off for college at Foggy Bottom 14 years ago this month, and as far as I can remember, tents have dotted that part of the city ever since. But rumours were swirling that a federal takeover of DC was imminent, so I spent the ride thinking back on the last decade.

Washington, DC, is like most other major American cities: dirty and crime-ridden in some pockets, idyllic in others. But it isn’t just another city. It’s the centre of American power and the seat of American democracy. It’s the gateway to America. Trump himself illustrated this well by reflecting on something his father, Fred, had told him when he was young. “Son, when you walk into a restaurant, and you see a dirty front door, don’t go in, because if the front door is dirty, the kitchen’s dirty also.” The president added: “Same thing with the capital. If our capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty, and they don’t respect us. It’s a very strong reflection of our country.”

This is the deepest tragedy of the capital city. It really does reflect the country. It reflects our class dynamics, our inability to end cycles of poverty and crime, our aborted ambitions.

Trump’s critics are correct that Washington is lovely and, like many cities, much improved since a nadir in the Nineties  and early Aughts. True, Covid ravaged the city, to the point where downtown streets sometimes resembled surreal scenes from dystopian fiction. That is no longer the case, though there are more empty storefronts than there should be; fentanyl visibly haunts the homeless community; and heinous violence still visits multiple corners of the city every week. 

The place feels better than it did amid the riots and lockdowns of 2020, but that’s a low bar. While city statistics show the population is growing again and crime is falling, the police union accuses leadership of manipulating data on the latter. “To evade public scrutiny, MPD leadership is deliberately falsifying crime data, creating a false narrative of reduced crime while communities suffer,” the union’s chairman said in a May news release. Allegations of data tampering are under investigation in the police force.

Perhaps most important, the school system is crumbling. A sweeping Washington Post investigation this summer found that the number of students in the public school system “who missed at least two weeks of class in a school year increased 110 percent over the past decade”; and that “more than 18,000 reports of truancy went uninvestigated in the last three full school years.” 

Just this spring, local media reported that “the number of juveniles arrested in DC has gone up each year since 2020. More than 2,000 were arrested in 2023 and 2024.” The report, from NBC Washington, continued: “Juveniles also accounted for 51.8% of all robbery arrests in 2024, according to the police department. About 60% of all carjacking arrests made to date in 2025 are juveniles,” and “nearly 200 juveniles arrested in 2024 for violent crimes had prior violent crime arrests.”

In April, Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela Smith warned: “We have seen an increase in fights in our schools and more serious criminal offences outside of our schools. And we have seen an increase in juvenile suspects involved in criminal offences district-wide.”

Just days later, the Navy Yard neighbourhood experienced the first of several violent teen takeovers that have rattled the city. “In just a matter of weeks, our neighbourhood has witnessed yet another teen crime… terrorisation — for lack of a better word — of our neighbourhood,” a commissioner recounted to residents assembled at a May community meeting. He described the event as “a planned attack on our community orchestrated by youth from across the region.”

Hillrag reported, “Hundreds of teenagers have converged on Navy Yard twice over the past month, first on April 18 and again May 17,” during which the commissioner said (and much video evidence confirmed) the kids “entered communal spaces of private residential buildings, fought in public spaces, robbed adults exiting local bars, and yelled at police officers positioned at metro stations.” 

This crisis has persisted through the summer months. As in many other cities, each week brings more horrifying anecdotes of murder and assault. Of course, apologists for the existing state of affairs remain unbending. An Associated Press report in January asserted that, overall, “experts say most cities are seeing a drop in crime levels that spiked during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. But they say misleading campaign rhetoric in the run-up to the November elections and changes in how people interpret news about crime have led to a perception gap.” 

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In DC, at least, the police union seems to believe perceptions of a steady crime rate are more accurate than the city’s figures. Regardless, the low bar set during the apocalyptic days of the pandemic explains why Trump’s bluster is being met with scorn and mockery in the press corps. He’s obviously not right about everything. DC has been worse. Many American cities have been, too. But perhaps the most important message Trump sent on Monday isn’t about the data, it’s about refusing to tolerate what every single American knows is a vicious cycle of crime and poverty in the nation’s greatest cities. The public reaction of DC journalists will be much cooler than the public’s, inside DC and out.

To be sure, the success of Trump’s intervention isn’t guaranteed. The roots of the problem are clearly planted deep in the city’s failing schools and shattered families. Conservatives will point to dependence on government programs, and liberals will argue those programs are underfunded. But the National Guard won’t fix these underlying problems, though a posture of intolerance for crime and enforcement of the law will surely help. If the plan succeeds, hundreds of kids in DC will be spared from the trauma of being victimised by crime and also the trauma of participating in it. 

The problem is worse than it should be in this historic centre of global wealth and power. Quibbling over the data isn’t unimportant, but it risks obscuring the bigger picture. Washingtonians, and Americans, can do much better. That isn’t really up for debate.

Bedford, they had all been told by the police and local authorities, had been getting better, despite its post-pandemic troubles with crime and civic drift. But no one believed them. And now they were willing to listen to a man with a successful YouTube channel. For the next eight weeks, McCormack plans to self-fund a private security scheme in Bedford to guard the high street. The private security firm would act as “scarecrows” to deter vagrants and sex pests that had come to plague the town.

“Is there a danger,” asked one elderly woman in the crowd, “that we are bringing more shame on people who are already vilified? Do we have a long-term plan to help them?” Eyes rolled. “This is what I like to call suicidal empathy,” answered McCormack. “I care more about the working people of this town than criminals and drug addicts.” The crowd nodded in agreement.

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This was the start of Project Bedford, a model of civic renewal and regeneration for Britain’s provincial malaise that McCormack has described to one American podcaster as a potential “political coup.” To put it differently, it’s the ethos of “you can just do things” brought to a small English town, where a broader national schism of mistrust and cynicism has manifested itself in angry shopkeepers and radicalised dads in Ralph Lauren shirts.

But this wasn’t just about men in high-viz jackets guarding the Lidl carpark. The stories shared at this beleaguered caucus pointed to some deeper cosmic disturbance in the natural order of a boring English market town. Shoplifters chased away with shovels, pedophiles using their business’s wifi to download unspeakable things, a lady who had locked herself in a cupboard, because the police wouldn’t come to deal with a man pursuing her. This was a moral degradation for which the hollow and mimsy hallmarks of modern English civil society — with its neighborhood policing plans and community outreach initiatives — seemed unable to resolve.

On first impressions, rumors of civic collapse seem hard to believe in Bedford. “Somewhere in England,” was how evacuated BBC broadcasters referred to their new home during the Second World War. In trying to remain anonymous from the Luftwaffe, they had inadvertently stumbled on the perfect description of that parochial yet reassuring dullness you can still find by the banks of the River Ouse. This is an atmosphere that, over its 1,000-year history, has nurtured everything from Pilgrim’s Progress, the deepest work of devotional introspection in the English language, to what will soon be Europe’s largest theme park.

Bedford is the spiritual middle of middle England. A town of 100,000 people, equidistant from both Luton and Milton Keynes, it now finds itself in some unwilling struggle between those two archetypes of modern England. At some point in the Sixties, its post-war architects lost interest in the idea of Bedford as a quaint county town, burrowing a concrete shopping center right through its central hearth. Today, it’s home to a closed Marks and Spencers, haggard South Asian Deliveroo drivers, and delirious alcoholics. The town and its surrounds, Victorian suburbs, new build estates and genteel hamlets, tend to avoid the place altogether. Visitor numbers to the town center have fallen by half a million a month.

Walking through the old center, you can still feel the spirit of the curtain twitcher, the bossy parochial council, that stifling and sinister provincial mystery that promises to hold the place together for eternity. Now it’s been put to the test, with disorder so hallucinatory and surreal it appears like a paranoid apparition for a town that once dreamt of being in The Sunday Times property supplement. The morning of McCormack’s meeting, I watched a topless crack addict barrelling through a shopping arcade filled with families and their toddlers licking ice cream. A mid-morning frenzy of lolling eyes and semen-stained trousers.

Further up the high street, there was more disorder. “Someone causing trouble with a knuckleduster,” said one bystander with morbid glee. Two police cars had pulled up outside the Natwest, and in the ruckus a suspect was bungled away. In the brief return to normality, the topless man took out his pipe, rubbed it on his wobbling belly, then lit up in relief.

McCormack’s plan is popular. Nearly everyone I spoke to welcomed the scheme, with many noting that Milton Keynes already has its own private security run by My Local Bobby. The firm is increasingly operating across the country, after its success guarding central London and its affluent suburbs. But McCormack’s vision is less the preserve of a flashy neighborhood watch, and more of a market town populist driving a wedge in the ongoing war over perceptions of reality in Bedford — between the people who live here and those tasked with running the place. Between those who say things are getting better and those who believe it is not.

In the aftermath of his event, John Tizzard, the local police and crime commissioner, accused McCormack of “exaggerating and spreading misinformation about the town’s decline,” arguing that official statistics showed that crime was improving. During McCormack’s meeting, a patrol car made a point of crawling past, promptly dismissed by attendees as a pathetic sop. McCormack is now in a public spat with Tizzard, who he has called a “weak man”, who must resign.

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Speak to locals and it’s clear whose side they’re on. One shop owner, who runs one of the town’s longest-running stores and didn’t want to be named, said he had “stopped engaging” with officers — “if I tell them how it is,” he said, “then I’m scared I’ll get arrested.” Mark, a construction surveyor who has lived in the town for 35 years, shared a similar loss of faith. When I ask him to explain how the town has declined, he thinks long and hard before bringing up the former England rugby player and policeman Martin Bayfield, who used to work for the local force. “The problem is we don’t have people like him anymore,” says Mark of the six-foot-10-inch former officer. “Everyone knew Martin, and no one wanted to mess with him.”

This war over reality when it comes to civic decay is now playing out on the national stage, with Nigel Farage recently launching Reform’s latest “Britain is Lawless” campaign. Among other things, Farage points to erroneous statistics that exclude shoplifting, or else that fail to weight for high crime areas. In Bedford, one excellent example of revealed preference is the local mayor, now more than happy to lean on the philanthropy of a YouTuber.

“What does the mayor think of all of this?” a young man sneered during the meeting at Real Coffee. A large, jolly Dickensian man, the Conservative Tom Wootton, stood up and bellowed across the room. “In a few years time, less than three miles there’s going to be eight million visitors. We’ve got a short window and a short time and we’ve got to make it work.” He’s referring to Universal Studios Great Britain, a planned 700-acre theme park and resort complex just outside of town, one supporter claims could bring 28,000 jobs to the local economy.

It’s this looming deadline, to restore Bedford into a gentle site for tourists, that adds an unsettling urgency to McCormack’s campaign. Given his bleak outlook, five years seems a long time for a government he sees as pushing us towards state collapse a la Venezuela. And with Reform’s newfound councils discovering the legal and professional limits of their promise to overturn Britain’s provincial decline, it’s one McCormack believes could come to a head in Bedford.

“The grievances of the colonies against the King were the same as we have now,” he had previously told an American podcast. When I ask him in the more sobering setting of Bedford high street if he’s serious, he doesn’t back down. “If enough people are angry enough we could look at the playbook of the Velvet Revolution,” McCormack says. “An entirely peaceful revolution no shots were fired and it brought down the Czechoslovakian government.” And could that start in Bedford? “Maybe, maybe so. I think we have enough reason to say that the Government is now illegitimate; they have no mandate. I’m going to walk up to that line and hover around it.”

All the while, the people of Bedford remain elusively discontent. Before I left, Mark took me on a tour. The night was drawing in, and wandering through the town center like lost shoppers are scores of vagrants who line the boarded-up shops. “No one really knows where they’re coming from,” Mark says. And then we see a scene that sums up the war over reality taking place here in Bedford. There, outside what was once Clinton’s cards, is one of the council’s “Rapid Response” vehicles. Inside are two security contractors from South Asia, one with his feet on the dashboard, slowly herding a merry huddle of drunks through the derelict shopping center in a bemused, ineffectual daze. “We love them,” says one of the drunks.

The last place Mark showed me was a lamppost outside a Greggs. It’s the spot where Thomas Taylor, just 17, was stabbed and stamped on by four youths and “left for dead” at the start of the year. That day, the front page of the local paper had the latest details of the trial. One of the 18-year-old killers had habitually carried a ten-inch knife, even into the Job Center across the road. On the lamppost were no flowers, just a black piece of tape to mark the spot.

Behind the scenes, though, these operations are actually far closer to movie-making. The terrorists are the actors, albeit unaware of their starring roles. Like a real-life Truman Show, their performances are watched, tracked and analyzed by a small army of detectives, surveillance operatives, technical specialists and intelligence officers. Finally, the director calls “Action!” and armed officers blow doors off hinges. Surprised-looking suspects are bundled into police vans. Then, because no bombs exploded, and no civilians died, we switch off. Keep scrolling. Continue with our lives. Which is as it should be.

Over the weekend, police held seven Iranian nationals in a textbook operation. The arrests were for offenses under the Terrorism Act and the new National Security Act (2023). Though the suspects were split into two unspecified groups, reports suggest they were only “hours away” from launching an attack. The target? Sources suggest it was possibly a synagogue. Or, given Tehran’s propensity to pursue dissidents abroad, a member of the Iranian diaspora. Whatever the truth, the potential for state-sponsored terrorism presents a sophisticated challenge for Britain’s security services — especially when balanced with so many other threats, and when internal instability only continues to soar.

On and off, I worked in counterterrorism policing and counterextremism for over a decade. And as a single cog in a vast machine, I witnessed firsthand how the threat evolves, from the IRA to Al-Qaeda. I’ve also seen how our security apparatus occasionally behaves like First World War generals: fixated on fighting the last war. After all, mass casualty, cell-based Islamist terrorism differs markedly from the lone-wolves of more recent times. Then there are the loose cannons, neo-Nazis like David Copeland or internet-radicalized killers like Axel Rudakabana. The latter, especially, now consumes much of counterterrorism’s operational bandwidth. Yet CT policing is also expected to deal with them all, like a chef asked to prepare sushi one minute and a Baked Alaska the next.

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It’s no wonder, sometimes, that they hanker after signature dishes. Is the flavor of the month now state-sponsored terrorism, possibly involving the infamous Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)? If so, they may be in for a struggle, not least in the way it could herald the rise of asymmetrical warfare on Britain’s streets. Sometimes known as “grey zone” operations, it inevitably means espionage and paramilitary activities blend into policing. My very first operation was a stark reminder of how blurred things can become, as I watched paramedics working on the body of an IRA man shot dead by police.

Later, I witnessed the challenges of investigating state-sponsored criminality during the Alexander Litvinenko murder inquiry. Wider political and diplomatic considerations impact on operational decision-making. Noses are tapped. Leads are declared “not in the public interest”. We can see this already, with the Foreign Office arguing the IRGC shouldn’t be proscribed as a terrorist organization (even though it unambiguously is). Our diplomats view the well-connected IRGC as an influential conduit into the Iranian regime. The politics, given Labour’s attempts to tread a fine diplomatic and political line over Gaza, are extremely sensitive for the Starmer government — a government, its critics allege, which is strategically over-reliant on Muslim votes.

To be fair, not all foreign spies possess the efficiency of Bond movie villains. As I discovered during the Litvinenko case, the Russian FSB were slapdash, operating flashily in plain sight. We hardly made it difficult for them; London in the 2000s was a sordid playground for dirty Russian money. MI5, preoccupied with mass-casualty Islamists, also took its eye off the Russian threat. Nonetheless, Litvinenko’s killers were hardly discreet, leaving traces of radioactive poison on an airliner and in a hotel room. Then there were the Russian military intelligence operatives who, as a cover story, declared an improbable interest in the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. In fact, they were trying to poison the defector Sergei Skripal, as open-source intelligence quickly proved. A recent trial of a Russian-sponsored spy ring consisting of Bulgarian agents was similarly amateurish. The hapless agents were nicknamed “Minions” by their handlers, after characters from the children’s movie Despicable Me.

Sadly for British intelligence officers, Iran poses a more substantial challenge than the GRU or FSB. The Iranians are, arguably, more disciplined and committed. There’s also a significant diaspora community in the UK. And though many British-Iranians are implacably opposed to the Mullahs, cover opportunities for agents are easier to find. The current legality of the ICRG also means regime front organizations can operate with relative impunity. No doubt the Home Office will be squaring up to ever-obdurate Foreign Office mandarins, seeking to pursue diplomacy whatever the cost.

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Then there’s the issue of motive and proportionality; the Russians, although shameless, intuit a line in the sand when murdering their own abroad. They are reckless, as they were when they released poison into the hotel where they met Alexander Litvinenko, but their targets are usually strategic. Though Putin is happy to crush potential turncoats, I suspect he wouldn’t back mass-casualty terror. The Iranians have no such qualms, considering themselves at perpetual war with the West and particularly Britain: the “Little Satan” to America’s plus-sized version. Jews are another target. Iranian-backed terrorists blew up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, killing 85. I therefore find myself unsurprised to learn the regime is suspected of trying something similar in the UK, with MI5 publicly warning of hostile Iranian intelligence activity in this country.

The authorities face another challenge too. Terrorism — and counterterrorism — is a destabilizing issue in our increasingly Balkanized society. Countering state-sponsored threats involves a rapidly evolving kind of hybrid conflict. It’s a shadowy, difficult and sometimes controversial arena for the police and security services to operate in. Human rights laws and “proportionality” will be tested to their limits. Mistakes, as happened at Stockwell, will inevitably happen. Politics, usually of the grubbier variety, will be engaged. And, tragically, innocents will die if terrorists succeed. As the IRA famously said of their attempt on Margaret Thatcher’s life, the police have to be lucky every time. The terrorists? They only have to be lucky once.

Such terrorism, especially when linked as it is to religion, also has a knock-on effect to what we used to optimistically call “community cohesion”. The truth is that there are many in Britain who would be equivocal about an attack on the country’s Jews. Some would even support it. Chief constables, politicians and the Home Office are acutely aware how an attack might well provoke public disorder, as it did in the summer of 2024. As MI5 Director General Ken McCallum has warned: “There clearly is the possibility that profound events in the Middle East will either generate more volume of UK threat and/or change shape in terms of what is being targeted.”

No wonder, then, that radicalization and extremism will continue to flourish on all sides. Are the police ready for these grim consequences? Of allegations of two-tier policing? As I’ve written before, if the “Prevent” program is anything to go by, I doubt it. As it is, I would suggest we’re in an early-Seventies scenario, one where the situation in Gaza replaces Vietnam in helping to radicalize a new generation of activists. Only a tiny proportion need to convert their anger to violence to prompt widespread societal disruption.

Even worse, mainstream British policing is in a sorry state. Counterterrorism is well-funded, but draws its personnel directly from existing forces. Labour’s plans to create a national counterterrorism force doesn’t change the fact it will continue to recruit from the same pool of demoralized, inexperienced and poorly-led officers. Specialist officers aside, the societal impact of terrorism — such as the public disorder, which terrifies senior police and politicians — is still dealt with by conventional police officers using conventional methods. Counterterrorism and extremism is a broad, interconnected spectrum. To continue the movie comparison I made earlier, if an operation was a Hollywood movie, the hard yards of counter-extremism intelligence are a niche BBC 4 documentary, and even the biggest studios can only film so many epics at once.

If my experience is anything to go by, anyway, there’ll be barely time for the production team to enjoy a beer before they’re summoned to work on one sequel, and then another. Each time, there’ll be new stars. New plots. New locations. The directors and producers will have unrealistic expectations and deadlines, cursing the studio’s endless and contradictory demands. Meanwhile, the production team will follow their unsuspecting stars through viewfinders or rifle sights. They’ll listen to covert signals intelligence. They’ll meet in backrooms with nervy informants. And they’ll all be thinking the same thing: will we be lucky this time, or will they?

And so the counterterrorism show will trundle on, from the CCTV trawls to the criminal trails at the Old Bailey. Yet on the streets, and on the internet, angry voices will amplify, and the causes of extremism will only persist. The overlooked police and intelligence service officers who deal with it are the runners and extras of counterterrorism. And we should wish them luck too: over the years ahead, they’re surely going to need it.

Focused on extremism and counter-terrorism (CT), the government’s plans potentially mean UK forces finally adopting a continental-style model, one encompassing tiers of municipal, regional and national units. If nothing else, that could mean centralized, government-directed police bodies. Combined with the looming return of ID cards, there are reasons to worry. He may not mean to, but there’s a real chance that Sir Keir Starmer could yet establish a de facto secret police force — with ominous consequences for everyone in Britain.

According to the National Police Chief’s Council’s official report into the future of CT policing, our current policing model will last until at least 2030. But speaking to The Guardian, an official government source stated counter-terrorism policing units would now gain independence from local forces, becoming part of a new force and sitting in a newly minted “national center for policing”.

The issues this raises, not least in terms of accountability, are stark. The UK’s counter-terrorist policing network is vast, involving everything from the surveillance of Islamists to so-called “domestic extremism” — both of the far-Right and law-breaking protest group variety. The controversial Prevent programme is also part of its remit, even as CT policing works closely with MI5. The spooks, used to running rings around the police in Whitehall, will undoubtedly have their own views on this hefty-looking competitor.

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By Dominic Adler

This isn’t to say reform is necessarily a bad thing. Having worked on several high-profile terrorist investigations, I understand the value of effective CT policing. Yet in the aftermath of the riots last summer, I fear an illiberal ghost in the machine. I suspect the hastily rejected Home Office “sprint report” — dismissing discussions of two-tier policing as “far-Right talking points” — has left an impression. The report may have had a stake hammered through its heart, with Security Minister Dan Jarvis insisting it contained no “new policy”. But does its spirit live on? I think it’s possible. After all, we have a Prime Minister whose views on the subject largely seem influenced by Netflix.

Why, then, this sudden change of direction for CT policing, especially when rumours of a national CT regime have clung to New Scotland Yard for years? Think again to the aftermath of the 2024 riots. Sir Keir, shaken by his inauspicious debut, acted tough with rioters and those accused of online incitement. Intriguingly, he also suggested the formation of a national public order force to quell future disturbances. A cynic might note that Labour has never been a keen advocate of public-order policing. Certainly, the party appeared to recuse itself over the contested pro-Palestine marches that have dogged London. Before last summer’s disturbances, indeed, the Labour seemed most worried about disorder in… 1984. Shortly after the last election, Labour committed itself to a public inquiry into the disturbances at Orgreave during the Miners’ Strike, red meat to the party’s restless Left.

Starmer’s proposed “gendarmerie” was short-lived. After all, a standing force of 2,000-plus riot cops would mean significant costs to cash-strapped constabularies. Instead, existing “mutual aid” arrangements, whereby forces lend each other personnel, will be rehauled. Nonetheless, the proposal offers a clue to government thinking: its ongoing desire for a centralized force it can direct and influence, if not control directly. Politicians will strenuously deny it, but this is as true now as it was in the late Nineties and early 2000s, when Tony Blair bewailed a lack of joined-up policing during disputes over petrol and farmers.

What, then, of the specifics? As it stands, National CT policing is headquartered with the Met in London. Its officers work on regional counterterrorism units, seconded from their home police forces. This causes issues around employment regulations: sometimes officers are forced to transfer forces completely to take a CT role on. These are legitimate concerns, which might say more about inflexible police regulations than the efficacy of the CT network. Nonetheless, CT is chronically short of experienced detectives. Why? Because it draws them from austerity-hit local police forces, which themselves suffer acute shortages of qualified investigators.

In short, CT doesn’t exist in isolation from mainstream policing: it’s umbilically attached to it. But does that mean Starmer craves a British version of the FBI, with its own directly recruited staff? This is where the vicious politicking between senior law enforcers and spooks comes in, not least in the form of the National Crime Agency (NCA). Formerly the Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), the NCA was a Blairite attempt to create a national force, liberated from the tedious bonds of police control, scrutiny or accountability.

Rising from the ashes of the old National Crime Squad, the wonky phoenix was still riven by turf wars between former police and customs investigators. The NCA is now colloquially known as either “No Coppers Allowed” or the “National Chaos Agency”, with its officers drawn predominantly from the civil service. Essentially there to fight organized crime, it’s not been a tremendous success. This isn’t simply sour grapes from a former copper either. I’ve spoken to serving officers, and they bemoan its risk-averse and sluggish culture. The NCA also has accountability issues. After all, the NCA answers to central government. Its “agents” can simultaneously hold the powers of police, immigration and customs officers (something they’ll proudly tell you).

The NCA, which initially couldn’t decide if it was an intelligence or law-enforcement body, was once cruelly mocked as “MI7” by the real spooks. Yet that hasn’t stopped the Government from airing another idea: “brigading” national CT policing with the NCA. That’d create a veritable super-agency, one responsible for terrorists, gangsters — and, er, incels.

The NCA will undoubtedly be salivating at the prospect: CT is the jewel in the policing crown, offering prestige, promotions, influence and funding, and will finally condemn those “MI7” jibes to history. Indeed, this internecine struggle is as important to some senior officers and civil servants as catching terrorists. That’s unsurprising: a national CT body would, at last, be genuinely comparable to a British FBI. More alarmingly, it might even be a prosecutorial version of MI5, a powerful, European-style secret police, of the sort Britain has traditionally shied away from. After all, the existing Security Service shares similar thematic responsibilities, but has no powers of arrest. Though it has primacy over CT intelligence, it doesn’t over any reactive investigations.

How would this new all-powerful CT agency fit into existing British law enforcement? It’s not hard to imagine a national body, some 10,000 officers strong, eventually flexing its muscles and rebelling against the spies. MI5 won’t take this lying down, possibly leading to a dilution of the CT model, dysfunction — or, given the current British state, both. On the other hand, MI5 might be told to concentrate on its pre-9/11 counterintelligence role, focusing on catching foreign spies on British soil. Certainly, there’s ample evidence of Russian and Chinese spooks operating in our towns and cities.

What about the operational issues at stake? In my experience, one of the British CT model’s strengths is precisely that umbilical connection to local forces I mentioned earlier. A detective with SO15, the Met’s counterterrorist command, can pick up a phone and talk directly to a community PC in a London borough. The detective might even have worked on the same beat. Local knowledge was immediate and easily available. Having experienced liaison between the Met’s intelligence bureau and the NCA, I cringe at what the future might look like. Sure, there will be the usual hot air about integrated local liaison, which too often means coalface officers grafting while specialists take the credit. I can anyway imagine local goodwill towards a national unit evaporating fast. CT operations can also only work if officers are flexible. Intelligence gathering — managing sources, analyzing reports, surveillance — is generally less resource-intensive than post-crime investigation. The latter usually involves literally hundreds of “boots on the ground” as detectives gather evidence, take statements and trawl CCTV footage. The current arrangement, with forces supporting operations on their own patches, therefore makes sense.

My real concern, though, is proportionality. As we saw with the Home Office’s notorious sprint report, an illiberal aura emanates from the department’s mandarins. Our political elites are obsessed with online “harms” and discourse, desperate to determine what constitutes “disinformation”. If you doubt how much police officers mimic the concerns of their political masters, consider this recent bulletin from the Prevent program to parents, prompted by none other than Adolescence. To quote the scheme’s coordinator, the fictional drama has prompted some “incredibly important” discussion, not so different from the Prime Minister’s own take.

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This week also saw more devils, more details, and potentially more unintended consequences: ID cards. A group of Blue Labour MPs aligned to Morgan McSweeney are rolling the turf for mandatory digital identification. This is another piece of reheated Blairism, adding credence to theories the former PM still wields considerable influence. An implicit justification for the move is surely illegal immigration — but, interestingly, Starmer would rather make us all carry papers than simply leave the ECHR.

I’ll leave the contradictions in the Prime Minister’s blend of human rights and authoritarianism for political commentators. Suffice it to say, a national CT force would be strongly in favor of universal digital ID. It would make tracking us all, for whatever reason, much easier. And never mind the ocean of contradictions. The average Labour MP usually has plenty to say about stop and search and racial profiling. Add identity cards to the mix? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

As I mentioned earlier, all this feels strangely European, oddly French, where every government department gets its own spooks to spy on each other. Britain has traditionally thumbed its nose at continental models of hapless municipal coppers, gendarmes and secret policemen.

That, it seems, is about to change. Most fair-minded people will agree the police must be as effective as possible, especially when protecting us from terrorism. But reasonableness and accountability matter too, things we largely took for granted when dealing with our cops in the past. We need to be confident officers are focused on the real threats to our safety, especially around Islamic extremism, and not get distracted by political hobby-horses. I’d therefore say this to our political class: be careful what you wish for. Especially given modern Britain’s grim record on free speech, I’m reluctant to trust what might well become Starmer’s secret police.

This latest upset concerns pre-sentence reports and shines a light on how the system has been captured by political activism. “PSRs” are reports about a defendant written by probation officers for the assistance of the judge in a particular case. Probation officers advocate for probation. If there is any chance that a defendant might avoid prison, his lawyer will want a PSR: it’s just that little bit harder for a judge to bang someone up if he has a document in front of him arguing for a non-custodial sentence such as a Community Order, written by an expert and filled as they always are with very scientific-looking sociological analysis in support of that recommendation.

No PSR is needed, though, if a judge thinks it “unnecessary” — which generally means: if the defendant will definitely be sent to prison. Otherwise, a report must be obtained. The new guidelines, which were due to come into force this week but were temporarily suspended following a last-minute legal intervention by Robert Jenrick and are soon to be made unlawful and of no effect by Shabana Mahmood’s emergency legislation, add to the “unnecessary” exemption: “A PSR will normally be considered necessary,” the proposed instruction goes, “if the offender [is] from an ethnic minority…”

In edge cases, then, this new line will nudge judges into ordering a PSR when they otherwise wouldn’t. Then, armed with a report recommending a Community Order, the non-white offender has a significantly higher chance of avoiding custody. Of course, not all PSRs recommend non-custodial sentences. But most do. So, on average, a PSR helps you avoid prison.

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By Gavin Haynes

When Shabana Mahmood, the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, complained that “access to [a PSR] should not be determined by an offender’s ethnicity”, the Chair of the Sentencing Council, Lord Justice William Davis, replied at length. The closest he came to dealing head-on with the fundamental unfairness in the effect of the new guideline — that non-white offenders would on average enjoy a race-based advantage — was something of a straw-man: “I have seen it suggested that the guideline instructs sentencers to impose a more lenient sentence on those from ethnic minorities than white offenders. Plainly that suggestion is completely wrong.” Plainly. But that is not what Mahmood, who is now proposing emergency legislation to block the implementation, nor any sensible person, is saying: there’s no instruction to impose a more lenient sentence, but a more lenient sentence will be the overall average effect if the special encouragement to order a PSR for a non-white defendant is to be heeded.

The Chair even accepted that “if access to a pre-sentence report were to be determined by membership of […] an ethnic minority background – that would not be a proper approach”. But if race-based preferential treatment is improper if it always happens, then it is improper if it “normally” happens. It is a distinction of degree, not kind. Ethnicity might not be strictly determinative, but it is a significantly influential factor.

As to the intention behind the guidance, the Chair explained, “the purpose of the list [that includes “ethnic minority”] is to remind sentencers of the kinds of cases in which it is likely that they will require more information”. But that is not what the guidance says; that purpose is not at all clear from the relevant text. And anyway, a discriminatory effect is a discriminatory effect.

More generally, the letter notes that it wasn’t the Sentencing Council’s idea, most of the consultation responses supported it, and the Lord Chancellor had not previously complained. All true, but that absolves neither the members of the Sentencing Council, who bear responsibility for its output, nor the wider political culture in which it operates. It is particularly striking that not one of its 14 members — including academics, several very senior judges, a Chief Constable of Police, and the Director of Public Prosecutions himself — thought to call out this obvious unfairness. As the Chair emphasized in defense of the measure, the Council’s vote was unanimous. But we shouldn’t be too harsh on them: you don’t get to be a member of the Sentencing Council, nor even a Court of Appeal judge, without proving your commitment to EDI.

Above all, and regardless of whether the guidelines come into force or not, the Chair’s letter gives an illuminating snapshot of how the Blob quietly turns unpopular racial activism into force-of-law policy. In this instance, the idea had its origins in a “thematic inspection report” by HM Inspectorate of Probation. The letter does not identify the specific report, but it is probably this one, which complains that “[pre-sentence] reports did not consider the impact of structural barriers on the lives of black and mixed heritage boys or explore their experiences of discrimination”. Without first-hand knowledge of the Probation Inspectorate, its Blob factor is hard to determine, but the slides that accompany the report (sample extract: “add some unity, understanding, and respect for the future, Serve with justice, And enjoy”) indicate that it’s probably on the high side.

The next step was for the “Probation in Courts” team to “highlight what they considered to be the importance of referring to specific cohorts when reminding sentencers of the importance of requesting pre-sentence reports”. After that, the Sentencing Council considered the Equal Treatment Bench Book, relevant passages of which include a summary of findings from David Lammy’s 2017 report on BAME outcomes in the criminal justice system, such as the significant overrepresentation of black people in prison, the (not unrelated) fact that black defendants are much more likely to plead Not Guilty, and the observation that “pre-sentence reports may be particularly important for shedding light on individuals from cultural backgrounds unfamiliar to the judge”. On this basis, then, and taking into account “all the available evidence and guidance”, the Sentencing Council decided to insert the fateful lines.

Then came the consultation process, and it was noted in the consultation report that “many individual respondents, including some magistrates, did not believe there should be a cohort list at all, mostly citing reasoning around the idea that the list is biased and conflicts with equality in sentencing”. “While responses varied,” the report continued, “with strong views both for and against the list, overall, a much higher number of respondents supported retaining the list.” But the institutional consultees tend to be, per O’Sullivan’s First Law well-disposed towards “positive” discrimination — and there are powerful disincentives for individuals working in criminal justice to cry foul. It’s hardly a fair referendum.

Another ongoing battle in this area, which gives a flavor of the climate in which lawyers now operate, is the Bar Standards Board’s efforts to replace a duty not to discriminate with a duty to “act in a way that advances equality, diversity and inclusion”. The consultation closed in November last year, and is yet to report. Last year’s Chair of the Bar, Sam Townend KC, has opposed the change because it is “likely to hinder progress” and “probably unlawful”. Former Justice Minister David Wolfson KC called it “coercive, illiberal, and dangerous”. Akua Reindorf KC said that it could put barristers “under a duty to promote an ideological position with which they disagree”.

But the Director General of the BSB, Mark Neale, was unrepentant, and sought to reassure the legal journalist Joshua Rozenberg (another critic of the change) that the consultation was “very genuine”. As opposed to what, one wonders — other consultations he has presided over?

In fact, the proposed new duty is effectively already in force, because anyone applying to become a KC has to prove that they are taking “positive action to promote diversity…” Indeed, the assessed competency entitled “Diversity action and understanding” is given the same weight as written and oral advocacy combined. But no one much spoke up when that was brought in, and now — surprise, surprise — the BSB now prays it in aid. Relax! You’re already doing it actually! It can’t be that bad!

Shortly before the BSB announced their proposed change, the Bar Council Chair had suggested that the regulator leave EDI matters to the profession. But the BSB (statutorily separated from the Bar Council since 2007) is obliged to “encourage a diverse profession” under s.1 of the 2007 Act. Its chief, explaining why he would not do as the Bar Council Chair suggested, claimed that “students from minoritized backgrounds are half as likely to be successful with pupillage applications as equivalently qualified White counterparts”. However, in no meaningful sense is this true.

The data from which the claim is likely derived (he gives no citation) was analysed by the Bar Race Working Group, a body established by the Bar Council in the George Floyd summer of 2020. It consisted of 32 barristers, of whom around 80% are from an ethnic minority. They concluded, in their 2021 report, that “the data… categorically and definitely evidences, in quantitative and qualitative terms, that barristers from all ethnic minority backgrounds…  face systemic obstacles to building and progressing a sustainable and rewarding career”.

According to the BSB’s 2021 report on diversity at the bar, the percentage of non-white barristers that year was 14.7%, while the percentage of non-white working-age people in the population as a whole was… also 14.7%. That does not seem very racist. As far as pupillage is concerned (that’s a barrister’s year-or-more-long apprenticeship, hard to obtain) at least 23% of pupils were found to be from ethnic minorities in 2020, which compares with 20% ethnic minorities among the jurisdiction’s 25-34 year-olds (roughly the age-range of pupillage applicants). That does not seem very racist either.

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So how could Neale be claiming that ethnic minorities are half as likely to get pupillage? The answer seems to lie in the fact that ethnic minorities attend Bar school and apply for pupillage in hugely disproportionate numbers: 39% of pupillage applications in 2022 were from ethnic minority applicants (actually more like 42% if the “prefer not to say” answer is evenly distributed), whereas they only account for 21% or 22% of pupillage offers.

So, although they outstrip their proportion in the population, they are not succeeding in proportion to their rate of application. Alright, but one explanation might be the large number of foreign students on the Bar training course. The status of being “called to the Bar”, even if they do not obtain pupillage, confers professional advantage in many former commonwealth countries. If, as is likely, many of these students have non-native-level English and limited connection to this jurisdiction, it is perhaps not surprising that their success rate is lower. Whether or not this is in fact the reason, you can be sure that any such alternative explanation is given no space in any of the official reports on the matter. To say that ethnic minorities are “half as likely” to get pupillage, when their proportion among pupils is higher than their proportion among their age group in the population at large, and just leave the inference of racism there for the taking, is at best deeply misleading.

But this is how it seems to go in the justice system now. Whether it’s Lammy on racist courts, or the BSB on racist barristers, data is interpreted to fit an agenda. And the resulting bad idea, in breach of an important principle, is laundered through public consultations few sane people have the time or nerve to respond to. Then, the thick end of the wedge is driven in as small victories are parlayed into bigger ones. If only we had a barrister as Prime Minister, who valued meritocracy and the independence of the Bar and judiciary, who might be able to make all this stop.

The place he’s talking about isn’t Turkish — nor is it much of a hairdresser. But it is almost certainly laundering drug money. Most UK high streets have similar barbershops, or nail bars, or mysteriously diner-free restaurants. Speaking under a pseudonym, Liam meets me not on a gritty housing estate, but in rural Hampshire, in a village with a green and a coaching inn. It’s hard to think of a better example of modern British drug dealing, of county lines stretching right across the nation.

The phenomenon has usually been depicted as an invasion of urban street gangs, trafficking narcotics to far-flung provinces. These days, though, the model has evolved, “growing arms and legs” as we used to say on the force. Dealers once ran drugs from their city redoubts. Now they’ve moved the business model into local communities. With the dealers, of course, comes misery: eye-watering violence, yes, but also innocents pressured by gangs into ruining their lives. It demonstrates how buyers are complicit in the suffering of others — and how even law-abiding Brits now struggle to escape the chaos, as disorder creeps from London estates to the leafy Home Counties.

The most obvious way of understanding Britain’s drug problem is by the numbers. Official statistics put the annual value of the country’s narcotics market at £10 billion, even as drug-related crime costs about the same again. This is before you consider the wider culture of drugs. Our national appetite for narcotics is insatiable. Gak. White. Chop. Chisel. Luca. Drugs permeate our society, like needles in an addict’s arm. A new Danny Dyer movie is called Marching Powder, for fuck’s sake. Apparently it’s a romantic comedy.

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Then there are the gangs themselves, bewildering in their variety. Somali gangs from southeast London traditionally ran drugs down to Kent, from Mogadishu to Margate if you will. All the while, Albanian and Turkish gangs from north and east London work Hertfordshire and Essex; west Londoners, mainly Afro-Caribbean, take Hampshire, Berkshire and Surrey. As those Home Counties names imply, this is a business that long ago transcended its urban roots. One year, a detective told me, the biggest post-Carnival party happened in that famous west London neighborhood — Basingstoke.

Given this ubiquity, across the southeast and beyond, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Britain’s drug trade happens more or less openly, clear enough when I swing by that barbershop in Hampshire. It’s a sepia-colored, dusty sort of place. Quiet. The sign looks amateurish. A young woman appears in the doorway, smoking a cigarette and checking her phone. She looks up and down the street, then disappears back inside.

The obviousness of the façade is almost comical, even as these places are the terminus of the whole business. Cash-only, high turnover businesses like barbershops are ideal places for laundering money. Some of the proceeds of drug-dealing enters the cash register dirty, coming out the other end as clean as a head of freshly washed hair. They are quickly set up and closed as necessary. And, in quiet rural communities, they can hide in plain sight.

At the other end of the funnel are mostly North African and Albanian mafias, importing drugs through corruption-addled ports like Rotterdam and Le Havre. Drugs are smuggled in lorries, cars and even body-packed. They come in on cargo ships, yachts and barges. The ingenuity of the smugglers is driven by profit and demand. These networks are violent and determined, prepared to murder judges, journalists and politicians. Parts of the Low Countries increasingly resemble soggier analogues of Juarez.

Then there’s the middle-market, the retailers, who brazenly use social media to plug their wares. They offer cheap drugs as tasters, to get users hooked. They also offer ubiquity and ease of supply. Cocaine dealers will always promise the best stuff, even though it’s often heavily cut.

For low-level dealers and for many users, this is basically victimless crime. The punters crave and the market provides. They’re wrong. Liam mentions an operation where a teenage runner kept hassling him to score cannabis. Liam wasn’t interested — he was after Class A drugs — but made the buy to get the kid off his back. When the police raided the teen’s house, they found a Kalashnikov in his bedroom. “People fail to appreciate how young they are,” one officer tells me. “These kids literally have nothing. They join gangs for a new pair of sneakers.” The lines have swallowed an entire generation of underclass children, lost boys and girls disappearing into an underbelly of near-Victorian squalor.

If you know where to look, there’s even worse here too. Another detective once told me about a North London drugs line operating in semi-rural Scotland. A local dealer “skanked” the gang out of £200. To set an example, London gang members forced him to have sex with a dog. At gunpoint. This isn’t an Irvine Welsh novel. This is real life.

All the while, dealers and runners bully vulnerable people into surrendering their homes to use as bases of operations — a practice known as “cuckooing”. This remains a hidden crime, far from the stereotypical Top Boy world of street gangs, zombie knives and drill music. It is, however, as crucial to the whole business model as those deserted rural barbers. Among other things, cuckooing offers cheap, discreet accommodation. It also provides a steady source of slave labor.

To understand how cuckooing works, I visit Catalyst Support. A charity supporting victims, it’s based in Woking, a commuter town off the M25. Hardly the hood — but Surrey is county lines turf now. Nick, a veteran caseworker, has the air of a man who’s seen and heard it all.

“We had one client coerced into moving county line gang members into his elderly parent’s house,” he tells me. “They ended up using the place to store and deal drugs.” Age seems to be no barrier to falling victim to cuckooing. In fact, middle-aged and older people, especially those with learning difficulties, are especially vulnerable.

Catalyst Support can offer assistance, but one theme is grimly familiar. As Nick says of another cuckooing case, which took place in a small English village, “it was obvious. A vulnerable person, living alone, suddenly has loads of new visitors? Yet none of the neighbors said a thing.” I can’t help but think of Liam’s barbershop, and how drugs are a “crime accelerator” prompting other types of offending. I’m thinking here of a spate of cashpoint thefts plaguing quiet service stations, gangs using gas tanks to blast ATMs from garage walls.

There are victories. The charity assisted the Home Office and other public bodies to formulate legislation that will make cuckooing a specific criminal offense. That’s progress, especially when victims are sometimes offenders too. Making it a specific crime, the charity suggests, helps clarify the status of cuckooing victims. Still, issues remain. Cuts often hit preventative services like Catalyst Support. Then there’s the perennial bane of third-sector organizations: performance indicators used to justify funding. Whitehall targets are often aimed at eye-catching problems like knife crime, rather than the hard yards of crimes like cuckooing.

The police have responded too: mapping gangs, markets and trafficking routes. In law enforcement vernacular, this is “Level Two” cross-border crime under the National Intelligence Model. Chief officers love theoretical models. They offer an illusion of control, despite highlighting the essentially parochial nature of UK forces. Criminals, it goes without saying, don’t recognize borders. But the cops? The border between Orpington and Swanley — marking where the Met gives way to Kent Police — once resembled the 38th Parallel.

This was a weakness gangs took advantage of, until police changed tactics. They formed cross-border task forces, to proactively target offenders. Even so, austerity-decimated local constabularies often found operations too time-consuming and resource-intensive. By the time they caught up, the lines were dug in. To be fair, officers tell me, support from the center has improved significantly. That’s especially true around identifying offenders from communications data.

Yet all the while, organized criminal groups have multiplied. This is partly due immigration patterns. For example, gangs from Sub-Saharan Africa are slowly replacing the Somalis who dominated southeast London a decade ago. Then there are settled ethnic gangs from Eastern Europe, who’ve been in the UK for decades. Criminals also rely on refugees from war-torn nations: young men used to chaotic lifestyles involving violence. And, crucially, these gangs quickly cross-pollinate with local, white criminal groups in provinces outside the big cities. The county lines are a truly multinational, multicultural enterprise.

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By Darren McGarvey

These new criminals are offering new products too. After the Taliban stymied heroin production in Afghanistan, the street price in America rocketed, leading to an increase in highly dangerous synthetic opioids from China. According to investigators, drugs like Nitazenes are the next big thing. Cheap to produce, and offering a fuzzy, heroin-like high, they offer a huge return on investment. If misused, they can also be very dangerous — Nitazenes can be 800 times as potent as the equivalent dose of morphine.

What hasn’t changed is the young age of offenders, both dealers and runners alike. Once ensnared, and subject to violence and sexual abuse, some became dealers themselves. “The question I’d ask,” one officer wonders, “is how did we get to this point? There’s a massive failure of parenting and education in the US.”

I’m soon tempted to ask myself the same question. In another semi-rural town, this time in Surrey, I see another barbershop. Two kids in hoodies loiter outside a convenience store, like meerkats, their eyes scanning the streets for trouble. An Audi SUV is parked nearby, cannabis smoke bleeding from the semi-open, blacked-out windows. I’m not even looking for this stuff, but here it is. I wonder what the kids are thinking. In their minds, is this pretty village their corner? Their ends?

It’s impossible not to see this as a symptom of full-spectrum societal failure — and those kids are just the start. I’m reminded of the familiar argument: if you saw how meat pies were made, you’d never eat one. Perhaps well-heeled Surrey commuters, ordering their weekend baggies of poorly-cut cocaine, should set foot in a traphouse or watch a teenage runner bleed out on the pavement. In the lines business, that’s exactly how the pie is made. Yet this weekend alone, nearly 50 kilos of dirty powder are destined to hit America’s collective septum. For some reason, our opinion-forming and media classes rarely protest about that particular drug. Then again, they’ve probably never been cuckooed.

The police insist they welcome the public’s assistance in the fight against crime. Chief Constables urge us to become special constables, police station volunteers, neighborhood watch coordinators. For many, though, beat-plodding and curtain-twitching don’t get the blood pumping quite as fast as pedo-hunting. There are over 100 such vigilante groups all over Britain, arranging stings and catching offenders — and journalists are increasingly keen to tag along as well.

As the M4 tragedy so desperately implies, however, online vigilantism can quickly go wrong. Lacking any of the protections offered by law, the targets of the mob are easily crushed. And even when they aren’t, online detectives often misunderstand the laws they claim to defend, with every dubious Facebook post putting justice in peril. But with the police in bureaucratic meltdown, and new tech making amateur sleuthing simpler than ever, don’t expect the pedo-hunters to vanish — quite the contrary, as vigilantism goes from online hobby to grim reality right across the country.

The appeal is understandable. It offers moral certainty, a sense of achievement and a soupçon of excitement. And, like most types of crime, pedophilia is impossible for the police to manage alone. Home Office statistics reveal nearly 40,000 child sex abuse image offenses were logged in 2023-2024: and that’s only reported cases.

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By Dominic Adler

I recall a conversation with a former colleague, an officer I’ll call Mark. “The most depressing thing about this job?” he once told me. “After a while, you begin thinking everyone’s a pedophile.” Mark was starting his fifth year as a full-time covert internet investigator, and spent his days hunched over a keyboard, tracking predators. “There’s thousands of them,” I remember him telling me, exhaustion on his face. “You could nick ‘em all day and all night, there’d still be more.” Like many police officers, Mark thought the only way to manage these criminals was either life imprisonment without parole or capital punishment. Otherwise impeccably liberal doctors and academics I’ve met are similarly hawkish — citing the tactics pedophiles use when pretending to engage with treatment.

I myself have helped convict a would-be contact offender by posing as a pedophile, even if the nightmarish evidence, and the offender’s laughably short sentence, meant I subsequently declined work in the area. Yet, DIY pedo hunting only continues to soar — and not merely, I think, because of the ethical rush it provides. As Adrian Smith’s tormentors showed, all you need to start is an internet connection.

So-called “digilantism” arguably started after the Boston Marathon bombing, in 2013, when online sleuths tracked down witnesses and suspects. Never mind that their hit rate was dubious: a new craze was born. True crime podcasters now work cold cases, while wannabe spies glean data using satellite images. For their part, pedo-hunters have their own MO. After arranging a meeting between a fake child and their would-be abuser, they detain their targets and call the police, handing over the evidence they’ve gathered.

Collaboration between police and civilians isn’t wholly new. During my covert training, tabloid journalists were sometimes cast as Sherlock Holmes, the police as the hapless Lestrade. Back then, hacks were happier to go to the “real world” and confront their targets, warning us police in advance if they were about to buy guns or drugs. Then they’d hand over their notes and, I imagine, wander off to the pub. Their findings could even be compelling, even as they sometimes collapsed into hearsay. Like builders asked to come in and complete a half-done extension, the professional detectives would sigh and get on with it.

Given the shocking scale of pedophilia across Britain, one policeman I know is predictably sanguine. It helps that, among officers, pedophiles have a reputation for presenting negligible physical risks when confronted. As for the digilantes themselves, they seem increasingly aware of law and procedure. Many observe the “agent provocateur” principle of not encouraging a crime, which renders evidence inadmissible (this is the closest English law has to entrapment).

Paedo-hunters also video their activities for transparency. For officers given the task of arrest and prosecution, you might argue that the hard work’s already been done. It’s not dissimilar to the days when officers actually took shoplifting seriously: you’d arrive at a supermarket to find a thief sitting in the security office, a statement prepared and evidence bagged and tagged. Police called these mundane arrests a “GIC” (Given Into Custody). I must admit, I never thought I’d see the day pedophiles were treated as GICs.

Even so, the process isn’t flawless. First, there’s the welfare of the hunters. Notwithstanding their reputation, there’s always the chance that their targets will lash out when cornered. That’s before you consider the safety of the suspect. This is something police officers always do — and which some paedo-hunters clearly don’t. A broader issue is evidence. Though the digilantes are becoming more sophisticated, professional officers understand something they don’t: every theory, no matter how outlandish, offers a potential get-out when cases come to trial. In court, a barrister is perfectly entitled to ask: “Officer, why didn’t you investigate theory X or Y?”

Each piece of well-intentioned online speculation, then, might offer another slither of reasonable doubt. After the former Russian FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was murdered, in 2006, I was given the job of investigating just such conjecture. I researched online allegations and spoke with experts to examine leads. Yes, internet sleuths, your caffeine-fueled Reddit theory might end up being some poor detective’s day-job.

We’ve seen the limits of online detective work elsewhere too. The Nicola Bulley case is a prime example. She disappeared in January 2023, having fallen into a river. But the subsequent tsunami of poisonous, ill-informed commentary by TikTok “detectives” (some of whom arrived at the scene to create content) only impeded the investigation. Jay Slater, a 19-year-old tourist who fell into a ravine in Tenerife, faced a similar fate, with some true crime obsessives conjuring outlandish theories about how he died. That’s hardly strange. Crime has always been an adjunct to entertainment. And now the internet offers another dimension — interaction, immersion, even as the real-world suffering is all too real.

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In the end, though, I suspect that some officers disapprove of digital paedo-hunters not for ethical reasons: but because it infringes on their turf. Most police work is boring. Once coveted detective roles now involve call-center busywork. Local CIDs investigate a sisyphean landfill of safeguarding cases, domestic disputes and drunken assaults, all to satisfy arbitrary performance metrics. Little wonder officers seek to ringfence genuinely useful online work from amateurs — if UK policing were the British Empire, the few specialisms left would be like pre-1997 Hong Kong.

Ironically, of course, that bureaucratic malaise means officers are stuck with the amateurs whether they like it or not. To give one example, digilantes aren’t bound by the strictures of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. The administrative treacle police wade through to monitor an open, publicly-viewable Facebook profile is comical. As I once said to my detective inspector: “I could just go home, boot up my laptop, use a VPN, intrusively research this suspect and phone the results into Crimestoppers. What’s to stop me?” The inspector shrugged.

As bureaucracy grows, and operational budgets shrink, it seems inevitable that digilantism will only increase — especially given the proliferation of easy-to-use online tools and AI. You could therefore argue a forward-thinking police service should incorporate digilantes into the investigative mix. They might offer training, or work towards some sort of licensing regime. That, I suspect, wouldn’t work. The entire point of being a vigilante is to be outside the system, a workaday superhero, stepping beyond the mundane. Batman was never a special constable with the Gotham PD. Batman never had to fill out a 12-page form for permission to monitor a Facebook page, or complete a risk assessment to knock on a front door. Batman never suffered DEI courses or spent days cutting-and-pasting his internet search history into a disclosure schedule. And, to my knowledge, Batman never gave evidence at Isleworth Crown Court.

More to the point, the end-user of a digilante’s work will always be a cop, posing significant risks when detectives are required to manage overenthusiastic or malicious actors. And if the challenges are clear enough online — depressingly apparent from the Canaries to Bristol — just wait until less internet-savvy vigilantes want in on the action too. With law and order collapsing from city centers to quaint Wiltshire villages, it makes sense that posses of wannabe superheroes are heading to the streets, with Birmingham just one of towns now stalked by gangs of vigilantes. But don’t worry: I’m sure the police have a form for reporting that too.

What images define the British countryside in 2023? Closed pubs; a new estate of boxy, pricey houses; the packed waiting room at the one doctor’s surgery within 20 miles; farmers at kitchen tables reading trolling tweets by vegans and rewilders; polluted rivers; empty beer cans beside bus stops where the bus now longer stops; the red-brick cottage which working people once rented, but which has now been turned into an Airbnb; the Ocado van delivering supplies to the second-homers; and, if you look closely, the shadowy figures breaking into farmyards before roaring off into the night in a Merc Sprinter van.

Crime in the countryside often sounds like a bit of a laugh: too much underage cider with Rosie down The Crown, or ruddy-faced rogues off The Archers rustling a few sheep. But there’s a truth behind the clichés. Livestock theft has always been a problem in the sticks, although it isn’t just rural rascals nicking cows and sheep these days — it’s organised crime. An estimated £2.4 million worth of livestock was stolen in 2021, and this figure is increasing as the cost-of-living crisis bites, with the stolen animals going to back-street butchers. It is believed that the meat is then sold door to door by criminals posing as ethical organic meat suppliers.

Then there is the killing of sheep by pet-illiterate pandemic dog buyers (cost to farmers: £1.5 million in 2021), industrial fly-tipping, trespassing, fuel siphoning, and the nicking of £2.6 million worth of Land Rover Defenders for parts in 2021. There’s the hare coursing, the “liberation” of lambs by vegan activists, and the theft of farm quad bikes, tractors, machinery and technical equipment by roving overseas gangs. Especially sought-after are the pricey Global Positioning Units (GPS) on modern tractors and combine harvesters, which can cost up to £20,000 each.

There has long been a black market in agricultural kit destined for Eastern Europe, but according to the National Rural Crime Unit (NRCU), the main outlet for the burgled goods is now Russia. Western sanctions following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have left the Russian bread-basket thirsty for stolen farm machinery. The National Farmers Union, the main rural insurer, believes that the cost of GPS theft doubled to more than £500,000 in the first four months of 2023, compared with the same period last year. While gangs have targeted the arable farms of eastern England for several years, they now operate up and down the country; in the last week of May, GPS units were stolen from farms from Wiltshire up to the Scottish Borders. In many instances, the farms were “cased” or surveilled by drones.

The problem is only getting worse. In the decade up to 2021, crime rates rose nearly three times faster in rural towns and villages across England and Wales than in the rest of the country. In the first quarter of 2022 alone, the cost of rural crime rose 40%. And yet, despite all this, the Countryside Alliance Rural Survey for Wales reported in February that 56% of respondents believed that the police were failing to take countryside crime seriously.

All of which hints at the real crime perpetrated on the countryside: it’s been abandoned. For what seems like forever, the shires have belonged to the Conservative Party, but the crime wave and the endless neglect are offering opposition parties sniffs of victory. The Green Party is surging; in the May local elections, the Greens even won Mid Suffolk district council from the Conservatives, taking 24 of the 34 seats and securing their first ever majority-held council in the UK. Overall, the Greens doubled their councillors nationally from 240 to 481. In the Sussex market town of Lewes, the Tories, once the largest party, were wiped off the electoral map.

Even Labour, usually as popular in the countryside as foot-and-mouth disease, feels victory in the air. Responding to the Countryside Alliance’s survey on rural crime, shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said: “These figures show just how concerned people are about crime, including in rural communities across the country.” She went on to make her pitch in true-blue, law-and-order political territory: “Labour is the party of law and order. The next Labour government will deliver a Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee, with 13,000 extra neighbourhood police and PCSOs, and proper action to tackle antisocial behaviour.”

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By Chris Clarke

More coppers in the countryside? That’s exactly what rural communities want to hear. At the Future Countryside Conference last week, Labour peer Peter Mandelson set out his party’s rural stall with some gusto, reminding the audience that, despite lacklustre rural returns in recent years, the Labour Party had historically taken a decidedly pro-countryside approach. The “countryside was, is and will be a great Labour cause”, he said. He also warned the progressive wing of his party against “picking a fight” with rural people and their traditions, before taking aim at the Conservatives’ rural record in government for the past 13 years, declaring that he saw “a Conservative party that has taken rural Britain for granted” and that country people are “feeling let down and angry”.

Mandy, nobody’s fool, is sensitive to rural discontent. He was, as a player in Tony Blair’s government, on the wrong side of the 2002 Liberty and Livelihood march, the biggest rural demonstration ever. But he’s correct to note that this rebellious Us (the country people) vs. Them (the townies) mentality is boiling over once again. I’ve spent the last fortnight travelling around the West Country, including visiting the agricultural Three Counties Show at Malvern, where one young woman farmer said to me: “If the fucking crime is what pronoun to use, then they [city types] need a fucking sense of priorities.” She then went on to list various Tory deficiencies regarding the countryside, from “confusion” on agricultural policies to failure to “deliver anything from Brexit”.

She, like many other farmers, won’t be voting Conservative at the next election. That number has plunged since 2020, according to a December 2022 survey by Farmer’s Weekly. Just 42% said they would vote Conservative in a general election, down from 71% in 2020. The countryside is seeing red. Mandelson is hoping it will vote red. That might happen here and there; more likely, I suspect, is that at the next election, the countryside will stick two fingers up at the lot of them at the next election.