You probably won’t agree with all of Mr Embery’s policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

ANDY Burnham’s premiership is already on borrowed time. That isn’t his fault, of course – not yet, at any rate – but such is the febrile nature of our politics, and so deeply unpopular is the Labour party throughout much of the country, that Burnham will almost certainly be denied the luxury of an extended honeymoon period with the electorate and will, if he isn’t to go the same way as his predecessor, be required to produce near-instant results.

Because that’s where we are at now. British voters are no longer willing to demonstrate patience with their political leaders. After two decades of economic stagnation, plunging living standards and calamitous state failure in a number of policy areas, they have no tolerance for mediocrity and drift. And why should they?

Many years ago, I spoke on a platform with Bob Crow, the late, great leader of the RMT union. Exasperated with repeated pleadings by Tony Blair, then the prime minister, for trade unionists to show patience while Labour slowly tried to fix the country, Crow thundered, ‘The problem is, sooner or later we’re all going to be dead.’

His point stands today. Great chunks of our lives are passing by while politicians attempt – largely unsuccessfully – to improve our country. And as the decline gathers pace, so the status quo becomes more discredited, public anger intensifies, and populist forces on both right and left sweep up support. That’s why Burnham does not have the luxury of time.

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As a Labour party member for over three decades, I want to see a social democratic government that delivers economic justice and gives us a country that is well-governed, safe, ordered, and cohesive. I imagine that Burnham wants those things, too. But whether or not he is imbued with the boldness and courage necessary to achieve them is the great unanswered question.

He invests much in good communications, and his social media output is slick and irreverent. ‘I’m an ordinary northern bloke,’ is the message he wants to convey. But a flashy comms strategy matters far less today than it did 20 years ago. And that’s because our problems as a country are more acute than they were then – and everyone knows it.

What matters now is delivery, pure and simple. It’s all very well pledging to ‘reindustrialise Britain’, but what will Burnham do to make our economy more productive and competitive? Will he abandon the net zero madness that is throttling our productive industries? Will he stand up to vested interests in the City and ensure that the demands of the real economy – and especially our long-suffering manufacturing sector – no longer play second fiddle to those of finance capital? Will he relax ex-chancellor Rachel Reeves’s ‘ironclad’ fiscal rules, which prevented the Starmer government from doing what was necessary to stimulate real economic growth?

If Burnham doesn’t do these things – and swiftly – the economy will remain in the doldrums and, notwithstanding the inevitable ‘new PM’ bounce, so will Labour’s poll ratings.

And salvation for the government and country won’t come only with an economic turnaround. If the small boats keep coming across the Channel, public disquiet at the constant penetration of our national borders by large groups of undocumented young foreign men will only deepen. Shabana Mahmood’s reform of asylum and immigration laws are a step in the right direction, but only genuinely radical measures – such as a Rwanda-style offshore processing system – are likely to provide a lasting solution. Burnham should consider such measures – even if it incurs the wrath of his party.

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Britons want to see speedy and tangible improvements in a host of other areas. Even those of us who support the concept of a generous welfare system know that the current model is broken, with the benefits bill having exploded in recent years and a dependency culture beginning to take hold in many families and communities. No serious prime minister should ignore such an obvious ticking timebomb.

People cannot get in to see their GP and linger for months on hospital waiting lists; violent offenders are released from prison prematurely because capacity has dried up; work is often insecure and wages low; hundreds of thousands of youngsters cannot find employment at all; and the chronic housing shortage now constitutes a national emergency. Meanwhile, state-sponsored multiculturalism, far from leading us to the sunlit uplands of cohesion and harmony, has caused a level of fragmentation and social disintegration never before seen in our country.

In other words, the ‘fundamentals’ are profoundly unsound, and only an intensive dose of shock therapy will remedy things. Andy Burnham must start to think the unthinkable and be willing to take his party into areas where for too long it has been afraid to set foot. Cheaper bus fares and ending rough sleeping are all very well, but it will take something far more radical than ‘Manchesterism’ and a few cliches about ‘hope’ and ‘positivity’ to turn Britain around.

Most crucially, there is little point in Burnham harping on about the damage caused by ‘40 years of neoliberalism’ (it’s actually 50) if he isn’t then prepared to break free of the economic straitjacket into which previous Labour leaders have locked themselves. Similarly, his talk of bringing the country together and building a ‘new national sense of unity’ and ‘common purpose’ will prove idle if he isn’t willing to challenge the hyper-progressive ideology that has captured our public institutions and caused so much division.

Burnham says he will ‘bring forward a 10-year plan, laying out a path from where we are now to where I believe we all want Britain to be’. In reality, he won’t have the luxury of a decade. He needs to understand that, after so much failure, millions of restless voters want results in much shorter order.

Their demands are justified. After all, sooner or later we’re all going to be dead.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.

You probably won’t agree with all of Mr Embery’s policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

SOMETIMES the liberties and freedoms we enjoy as citizens are won and maintained through the efforts of people we will never meet and whose names we don’t even know.

When it comes to the ongoing struggle to defend women’s rights, for example, the name Lynne Pinches might not be uppermost in everyone’s mind.

Neither, I imagine, would most people think of the field in which she operates – she is a professional pool player – as an obvious combat zone in that particular battle.

But every woman owes a debt of gratitude to Lynne. For her sheer courage and determination in the face of injustice and hostility are rooted in the finest traditions of popular struggle and have helped to strike a blow for the rights of her sisters-in-arms everywhere.

Lynne, 53 and from Norwich, is a veteran competitor in her chosen sport. She created waves in 2023 when, having reached the final of a prestigious national tournament, she refused to participate against her opponent, a trans-identifying male. As the match was about to get under way, Lynne shook her opponent’s hand politely, packed away her cue and departed the arena.

It was a small but deeply principled act of resistance against the cult of gender ideology and all its gross injustices.

Lynne argued, as many female pool players do, that biological men enjoyed physical advantages in cue sports. (For example, men are able to make more powerful breaks through greater upper body strength, and they enjoy height and reach advantages at the table.)

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Lynne lambasted the sport’s governing body for refusing to defend the integrity of the female category. ‘I don’t care about the money or the title or the trophy,’ she said after forfeiting the match. ‘I care about fairness.’

The following year, and in protest at the situation, she turned down what would then have been her first professional playing contract.

After that, Lynne’s card was well and truly marked by the sport’s authorities, as well as by radical trans activists. She was subjected to a stream of abuse on social media and in person. On one occasion she was screamed at by the partner of a trans-identifying male competitor, and on another she had a bottle thrown at her.

Such was the level of intimidation that Lynne was advised by police to wear a bodycam at future pool events. She did so in April 2025 when attending a match organised by the sport’s main promoter, Ultimate Pool. But the bodycam was spotted by a trans activist who promptly informed security.

Even though she offered to remove the camera, Lynne was booted out of the venue. Worse, she was banned her from all the promoter’s future events, not only as a competitor but also as a mere spectator. This seemed especially cruel given that both Lynne’s sons played in tournaments and she watched them regularly.

Just days later, the supreme court ruled that women and men were defined by biological sex for the purposes of equality law. This forced pool’s governing body to change the rules so that trans-identifying males were prevented from competing in the female category. Lynne’s principled stance had been vindicated.

But even this didn’t persuade Ultimate Pool to lift the ban on Lynne. She remains blocked from attending all its events. So, in a further act of defiance, she is now suing the promoter for discrimination and victimisation, and has launched a crowdfunder to that effect.

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Lynne says she is taking the action ‘so that no-one else is put through this in the future, because if they can do it to me after a lifetime of playing, they can absolutely do it to anyone’.

For its part, the promoter strenuously denies that the ban had any connection with Lynne’s gender-critical stance and has vowed to fight the claim. Plainly the courts will have the final say on that.

In my view, Lynne is a heroine – one of a growing number of women who have put their head above the parapet because they are sick and tired of seeing extremist ideologues and realty deniers try to erode the very concept of womanhood and smash up their hard-won sex-based rights.

Events have shown that the supreme court judgment, welcome though it was, does not represent the final word in the battle to defend the freedoms and liberties of women and girls from attacks by the trans cultists. Across Britain, bodies and institutions captured by gender ideology are still trying to sidestep the judgment and appease the fanatics. So the fight goes on.

Lynne Pinches has played the game of pool for 35 years. It is truly a disgrace that women like her, who simply wish to compete on fair terms in the sport they love and have dedicated their lives to, are called upon to take part in these exhausting political and cultural battles.

But they do so because they want to do what is right and to express their solidarity with women and girls everywhere. For that, they deserve the solidarity of the rest of us.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.

Image: ‘X’

You probably won’t agree with all of Mr Embery’s policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

I KNOW VERY little about artificial intelligence (AI). I can scarcely tell my Copilot from my ChatGPT, or whatever they’re called, because I never use these tools. Or I haven’t done so yet, at least.

People might find that a little difficult to believe in this day and age – especially coming from someone who writes for an (albeit small) public audience – but the truth is that I have never been quick to embrace new technology (I’d be too embarrassed to tell you which model of iPhone I’m currently using).

I did once download an AI-generated image to illustrate an opinion piece I had written, but that’s about the extent of my engagement with this new capability.

When I research stuff, I tend to stick to more tried and trusted methods, such as websites, books and magazines. I dip into Wikipedia occasionally (I have spent countless pleasurable hours just hitting the ‘Random’ button again and again) but never take it as the final word on anything.

I have a constant nagging fear that something I publish will contain an error so egregious that my credibility as a writer (such as it is) will forever be destroyed.

When I wrote my book Despised (still available from all good bookshops, by the way), I spent countless torturous hours, day after day, fact-checking my own text. (I’m pleased to say that, though plenty of opponents attacked the arguments I made in the book’s pages, nobody has ever identified a factual inaccuracy.)

All of which provides a bit of context for what follows.

I used to work with a guy. Like me, he was a senior trade union official. Let’s call him Martin.

Martin has run his own account on ‘X’ (formerly Twitter), a platform on which I am also active, for many years. We never interact these days.

When we worked together, Martin wasn’t exactly the greatest wordsmith. He had strong political opinions – most trade union officials do – but was, frankly, terrible at expressing anything in written prose. His emails and letters were generally a mess, and we rarely permitted him to draft communications intended for circulation among the membership (or, if we did, we would invariably need to spend a good deal of time redrafting them).

I don’t say any of this to be unkind; it’s just the way it was.

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At any rate, I recently spotted one of Martin’s posts on ‘X’. It was a reply to a politician. The post was comprehensive, grammatically sound, and the height of eloquence and fluency.

‘That can’t be him,’ I thought. But it clearly was.

So I had a nose through his other recent posts. They were pretty much all the same: expressive, articulate, and free from grammatical errors – the very opposite of the stuff he used to churn out for the union.

Now, even someone such as I, with a limited understanding of AI, could see what was going on: Martin was obviously using an AI tool to create the posts.

But what I also noticed was that, since he had been using AI – his old, clunky, pre-AI posts remain visible, so the precise point at which the change occurred is obvious – Martin’s interactions had spiralled. His posts used to attract a smattering of reposts and ‘likes’; now they were pulling in hundreds – sometimes thousands.

The whole experience got me thinking. What are the ethics here? Is it not wrong for someone to pass off commentary made in the public arena as their own, when in fact it is no such thing? Isn’t there even more of an obligation to be up front about this when the commentary begins to attract significant engagement? Aren’t readers entitled to know they are being served AI slop rather than a genuine piece of written prose? Would it be right to expose those who mislead in this way? Should I use my own reach on ‘X’ to draw attention to Martin’s deceit?

Or should we look at AI as a helpful tool for those who might otherwise struggle to articulate their thoughts and opinions in discussion – a sort of helping hand to provide them with a level playing field in the theatre of public debate?

Not having been born with the gift of wordsmithery, is Martin a bad person for enlisting some assistance in getting his opinions – which I know he holds dearly – across to a public audience? Perhaps not. (Though he was certainly dishonest when, after being challenged by an interlocutor who accused him of the very thing he had clearly done, namely asking AI to write his posts, he firmly denied it. He has also now started publishing full-length articles on ‘X’ under his own name – though again obviously drafted by AI. In my opinion, that, too, crosses a line.)

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But perhaps, in general terms, we should look upon the utilisation of AI writing tools by ineloquent individuals as a sort of ‘reasonable adjustment’ – an aid designed to ensure they aren’t placed at an undue disadvantage as they go about their lives. And don’t celebrities employ ghostwriters to pen their autobiographies, almost always without credit? Isn’t that practice deemed permissible by almost everyone?

Joe Weisenthal, a Bloomberg journalist, recently wrote:

Maybe he’s right. But if writers do succumb to such temptation, I feel they have a moral obligation to at least be open with their audience about it. Else they could hardly complain if, in the event their methods are uncovered, their readers end up feeling hoodwinked.

I don’t want to come across as sanctimonious, but I can’t ever imagine a time when I would be persuaded to allow an AI tool to write something on my behalf. The whole exercise would seem profoundly alien to me – no different from asking an artist friend to paint a beautiful watercolour and then mark my signature in the corner (I can’t paint for toffee, incidentally).

None of this is to dismiss the phenomenon of AI or deny its capacity to do good. Though I may be slow to embrace new technology, I am certainly no Luddite. AI is plainly here to stay and will, just as the internet did before it, doubtless enhance our lives in all sorts of ways. (I suspect, mind, that the forewarnings of its likely negative effects – laying waste to large swathes of white-collar industries, for example – may also, in the long run, prove to be accurate.)

But anyone who releases words into the public domain – especially those, such as Martin, who attract large numbers of readers – surely has a duty to be upfront about the origin of those words, including where they have chosen to rely on AI.

Whatever you think of the quality of my prose, dear reader, you may be assured that it is crafted by my own hand. I don’t know if that is anything worth boasting about. But the day it changes is the day I give up writing.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

You probably won’t agree with all of Mr Embery’s policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

IF I WERE Nigel Farage, I wouldn’t have resigned my seat and forced a by-election. I can see why, having concluded that the allegations of impropriety being levelled against him were part of a Whitehall stitch up, he felt the need to do so. After all, for any politician under fire, no verdict is ultimately more convincing or legitimising than one cast by the electorate at the ballot box.

But there was always a risk that things might not pan out as intended, and the Reform leader has undoubtedly been thrown off balance by events since he made his big announcement.

I do not know if Farage is guilty of breaking parliamentary rules in relation to large donations intended, he says, for his private security arrangements. But I do know from personal experience, having co-hosted a show with him on GB News and been in his company in public spaces, that Farage’s security concerns are very real, and that he is forced to take the kind of precautions that would seem alien to most other MPs.

I also know that he is the latest in a growing list of populist politicians and parties across Europe who have found themselves on the end of serious allegations lobbed by opponents from within the establishment – often accompanied by the flimsiest evidence – which then seem to tie them up in lengthy legal or procedural wranglings and sometimes impede their route to power. Strange, that.

But back to Clacton.

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You probably won't agree with all of Mr Embery's policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

BELOW IS THE full video of a discussion on migration, borders and belonging in which I took part at the Spiked Summit in central London on 27 June.

I was joined on the panel by the writer and journalist Dr Rakib Ehsan and the well-known educator - known as ‘Britain’s strictest headmistress’ - Katharine Birbalsingh.

My own speech begins on 13 minutes. There was a lively Q&A during the second half of the event.

Enjoy!

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A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

You probably won’t agree with all of Mr Embery’s policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

WHAT IS IT about our national flag that brings out such hypocrisy in the metropolitan elites? Why do these people, who seem entirely relaxed about the display of virtually every other kind of flag, even politically contentious or divisive ones, exhibit such hostility towards the colours of their own nation?

In recent days, Oxfordshire county council became the first local authority to successfully impose a legal ban on the placement of flags on lampposts, after activists from the ‘Raise the Colours’ campaign had festooned some streets with the Union Jack and St George’s Cross.

The council is run by – no surprises here – the Liberal Democrats. In the high court, where it was seeking an injunction against the activists, the council claimed that the display of flags from roadside infrastructure gave rise to serious safety concerns.

But its leader, Tim Bearder, had already disclosed what appeared to be the real reason for the ban, telling the media before the court hearing that the flags were creating ‘fear and division’ in local communities.

Because that’s the true agenda here, isn’t it? It isn’t really about ‘safety’. This was a political manoeuvre by a council led by a group of cosmopolitan universalists who despise any expression of old-fashioned patriotism by working-class members of the majority culture. They see such sentiments as vulgar, reactionary and thoroughly at odds with a modern, diverse country that is obliged to feel permanent guilt for its imperial past.

Oxfordshire isn’t alone. Councillors in Bristol – Greens, this time – have been trying to prohibit public displays of the St George’s Cross on local streets during the World Cup. Justifying the council’s actions, leader Tony Dyer said that the city must remain ‘welcoming, respectful and safe for everyone during the tournament’.

Meanwhile, liberal politicians and commentators across the country can be found engaging in similar handwringing over the explosion of national flags on local streets. Like the Oxfordshire and Bristol councillors, they see the whole thing as intimidating towards minorities and want it stopped.

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But if what these people claim is true – that some communities are alarmed and offended by the presence of national flags in their neighbourhoods – then our problems as a country run deeper than we realise. There should be no part of Britain where the display of a national flag is unwelcome, or where a particular group of local citizens have a veto over whether it may be flown. The flag is the official standard of our nation and represents who we are collectively. If such places do exist, we are entitled to ask why.

After all, weren’t we told that multiculturalism would create a vibrant and harmonious melting pot in which people from all backgrounds could consider themselves British and become part of the fabric of our nation? Is diversity not our strength? Do some citizens actually consider themselves so un-British that they object to the appearance of the national flag in their community? Wasn’t it necessary to reclaim the flag from the far-right because ‘it belongs to all of us’? Was everything we were told about these things a big fat lie?

Some flags are, in the eyes of the metropolitan elites, perfectly fine, of course. The people who shout loudest about the ‘Raise the Colours’ campaign seem perfectly happy with the proliferation, including on our public buildings, of Ukrainian or Palestinian or Pride or EU flags. On social media, they will often have all these flags, and more, emblazoned across their profiles. But when Dave the brickie fixes the St George’s Cross to a lamppost in some northern post-industrial town – well, they go into total meltdown.

I do not know of any other country whose ruling classes are so heavily populated by people so keen to trash the history and traditions of their own homeland, or who bear such hostility towards basic expressions of patriotism by ordinary citizens.

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The great George Orwell had the liberal intelligentsia marked out eight decades ago, when he wrote: ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman, and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings.’

At the weekend, I returned to my hometown of Dagenham to do some filming for a TV documentary. It is one of those ‘left behind’ areas that has experienced massive cultural transformation and voted overwhelmingly for Brexit. There were plenty of national flags flying from lampposts. Spotting me and the camera crew, a local shopkeeper called out: ‘We’re still here. We still exist.’

In those words, he summed up what ‘Raise the Colours’ is all about. It is not a crusade designed to intimidate or exclude. It is instead a campaign intended to alert a tin-eared political class to the fact that millions of proud native Britons are angry at changes inflicted on their country – economic, social and cultural – that they did not ask for and which have made their lives far more challenging.

They are still here. They do still exist. And no matter the attempts by that same political class to curtail their activities, neither they, nor their grievances, are going away.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.

Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

AS NEWS CHANNELS cut to Euston railway station in London last week, just as the new MP for Makerfield, Andy Burnham, was embarking on the final leg of his journey to the House of Commons, I was half expecting to see the man of the moment sitting astride a donkey and being lauded by crowds waving palm branches and laying down their cloaks in front of him.

Burnham’s triumphal entry into Westminster certainly had a weird messianic feel about it, encapsulated most strikingly by a rather odd photo in which he posed before a phalanx of his fellow Labour MPs who seemed to be gazing upon him as some sort of saviour (though presumably of their jobs rather than their souls).

Say what you like about Jesus, he never shrunk from saying what he truly felt, even when doing so made him unpopular. Burnham, on the other hand, has a consistency problem, and the disciples now falling at his feet might like to think about that.

So far as Burnham has any guiding ideology, it is hard to decipher the nature of it. And where he has set out his stall on certain big or contentious issues – such as the bond markets, trans rights, the EU and immigration – he has revealed a tendency to backtrack when the pressure comes on or the public mood changes.

Pragmatism in politics is fine. But politicians who, on key topics, chop and change their stance with alacrity risk being seen as weathervanes rather than signposts.

To his advantage, Burnham does come across as a normal(ish) sort of bloke. Critics will say, with some justification, that, having spent most of his working life in politics – he started out as an MP’s researcher in his early twenties – Burnham is a classic establishment politician.

But he does at least seem to recognise that a world exists beyond the M25, and in a Britain that is fracturing politically and culturally – not least because voters in such places have for too long been ignored – that is an important quality.

Let us cut to the chase, though. Unless Burnham as prime minister is willing to take some of the bold steps necessary to put our nation back on the right path, all the northern mateyness and charm will swiftly prove worthless.

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Turning around Britain’s failing economy is a key task. Burnham has apparently said that he wants to prioritise growth while sticking rigidly to Rachel Reeves’s ‘ironclad’ fiscal rules. He needs to understand very quickly that it is those rules that are inhibiting growth and hastening a recession. He may as well say that he wants to grow a lush new lawn while issuing a drought order.

Reeves herself will be gone soon, and there is much speculation around who Burnham will appoint to replace her. Whoever it is, he or she must break with the Treasury orthodoxy – rooted in neoliberal ideology – that has strangled our economy over decades and instead be willing to use the massive fiscal capacity available to governments of sovereign, currency-issuing nations to deliver investment-led growth.

The financialisation of Britain’s economy has proved disastrous. A Burnham government should resolve to rebalance the economy away from the interests of finance capital and towards those of the real economy – the productive sector where goods are made and wealth is produced. A resurgence of vibrant productive industries providing solid well-paid jobs would go a long way to bringing a restored cohesion and ease to communities suffering the effects of decades of deindustrialisation and decline.

Burnham is scheduled to give a speech this morning in which he will apparently pledge to devolve power from Whitehall to the regions as part of a mission to boost living standards. Well, such measures might be fine as far as they go. But ‘Manchesterism’ alone won’t provide the solution to Britain’s longstanding growth problem. Instead, Burnham must apply a much greater emphasis on wider macroeconomic policy.

At any rate, success for a Labour government under Burnham will not begin and end with economic improvement. After all, our problems as a nation run far deeper than sluggish GDP figures.

Will Burnham be bold enough to get behind Shabana Mahmood’s attempts to repair our broken asylum and immigration system – the cause of so much public anger over recent years?

Will he abandon his party’s embrace of militant cosmopolitan liberalism that has alienated millions of traditional working-class voters and undermined social solidarity in their communities?

Will he ditch the net zero folly which is threatening our prosperity and security, as well as throttling Britain’s productive industries?

Will he honour Brexit and resist all attempts to usher Britain back into the arms of the European Union?

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If he doesn’t do these things, he will find that the Red Wall – whose votes he simply could not do without if Labour is to secure a second term – will be in no rush to return to the fold.

Burnham’s supporters may point to his victory in Makerfield as a sign that Red Wall electors can be persuaded to vote for ‘progressive’ politics over Reform’s populism. But Makerfield in a byelection – where local voters knew that the outcome would determine the fate of the most unpopular PM in history – is not the same as the entire Red Wall in a general election. In any case, we simply don’t know precisely how progressive (or indeed conservative) Burnham is on many issues on account of the fact that he has been either too vague or inconsistent in his statements.

Burnham is almost certainly heading to number 10; that much is clear. But if he is to refute the charge of being nothing more than ‘Keir Starmer in jeans’, he will need to set out in clear terms his guiding beliefs and core policies. And if these things are too far removed from the demands and desires of an impatient and resentful electorate which knows its country is in sharp decline, and whose communities are increasingly afflicted by economic stagnation and social disharmony, he will go the same way as his predecessor.

Will the real Andy Burnham please stand up?

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.

You probably won’t agree with all of Mr Embery’s policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

TEN YEARS AGO this very day, Britain voted to leave the European Union. It was, by any measure, a seismic political decision.

I had thrown my heart and soul into campaigning for Brexit. As the national organiser of an excellent little group called ‘Trade Unionists Against the EU’, I spoke in the media and debated at several public events. I even lost my position as a senior union official over my pro-Brexit activities.

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Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

THE SPEED AT which the axis in British politics is shifting is startling.

I have spent over three decades as a foot soldier on the political left, much of it as an activist in the Fire Brigades Union (FBU).

While right-wing parties have always been able to attract the support of a layer of trade union members, it was the left, and usually the Labour party, which traditionally commanded their loyalty - especially those who, like me, worked in the public sector.

But I have recently begun to witness, via social media, a remarkable phenomenon. Growing numbers of my fellow FBU members and activists are openly stating that they will back Reform UK, a party of the populist right.

A former FBU official whom I served alongside for many years even stood as a Reform candidate in the May local elections. Another has become the chairman of his local Reform branch.

This anecdotal evidence chimes with a recent poll – conducted by JL Partners for the Times – which showed that support for Labour among public sector trade unionists has collapsed (down from 48% to 28% since the general election), while for Reform it has surged (up from 16% to 28% for the same period).

In that context, a recent internal communication circulated by senior managers within Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service (GMFRS), and which amounted to a direct attack on Reform, was as tone deaf as it was chilling.

An email dispatched to all staff by the joint heads of the service’s ‘race and faith network’ sought to provide ‘reassurance regarding some recent activity we’ve seen within the organisation’.

And what exactly was this ‘activity’? Well, some staff members had stood on a Reform ticket at the recent local elections. ‘We know this may cause concern within our network and wider,’ wrote the senior managers.

To which a legitimate response would, of course, be: ‘So what?’ After all, Reform is a lawful political party, and one that might very well form the next government. And, unlike the police, firefighters are perfectly entitled to stand for election to their local council. That’s democracy.

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But the GMFRS overlords plainly had no truck with such sentiments. ‘The individuals involved have been spoken to, to make it clear that as members of GMFRS, our core values and professional behaviours must be displayed at all times.’

That term: ‘spoken to’. It’s pretty obvious what it means. It certainly would not have been an open and relaxed discussion. More like a dressing down. What in the British army they call an ‘interview without coffee’.

But there was more. The senior managers went on to reveal that the service was obtaining ‘formal legal guidance’. This, they advised, was to ensure that employees were ‘protected from all perspectives and that our inclusive culture remains safe’.

Really? Running off to the lawyers at public expense because some employees exercised their right to represent Reform in a council ballot? Did these managers truly believe that firefighters – who, as I know from personal experience, are among the bravest and most resilient of folk – needed to be protected from political opinions they didn’t like?

Of course, most firefighters would laugh out loud at the suggestion that their wellbeing at work was threatened by colleagues who stood as Reform candidates. Such ideas invariably surface not as a result of demands arising from the shop floor, but because they have been dreamed up by woke-obsessed institutional leaders.

‘Our priority is and always will be ensuring that every member of this network feels supported, respected and safe at work,’ the authors of the email signed off, before imploring staff to ‘reach out’ if the felt ‘impacted’ by these events.

They also advised that they would be consulting the FBU over the matter.

Well, as a former senior official of the FBU, I would suggest the union tell these managers where to get off. Their internal communication is utterly Orwellian. I have never voted Reform and have no intention of doing so. But, like it or not, the party is now very much a part of the political landscape of Britain, with representation in our national parliaments and on local councils throughout the country.

If managers within Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service do not support the party, that’s their affair. But they have no business using the communication channels of their organisation – which, let us remind ourselves, is a public body – to impart their own political prejudices on their workforce.

The implication, of course, is that Reform is somehow an illegitimate outfit whose representatives and activists do not merit a place in civilised society. In the minds of worthy progressives, the party is ‘toxic’ and ‘hateful’, even ‘neofascist’.

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In reality, it is a party of Thatcherite economic libertarians and cultural traditionalists – the type of people who hold views that, until about five minutes ago, were considered by everyone, even those who opposed them, to be a valid part of mainstream political debate.

But so debased is our political discourse these days, and so captured the upper echelons of our national life by radical progressive ideology, that such views are now seen by those who run our public and corporate institutions as being akin to the sort of ideology once espoused by Mosley’s Blackshirts - and those who hold them as morally contaminated.

And this distorted worldview convinces these leaders that such standpoints are inherently harmful and must be suppressed. As my old pal Maurice Glasman, the founder of Blue Labour, observed, ‘There are none so intolerant as those who preach tolerance.’

The chiefs at Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service have done a grand job of illustrating precisely why faith in our public institutions has plunged. It’s because too often they are repositories for suffocating groupthink and rigid ideological orthodoxy.

If firefighters wish to stand for Reform in an election, they should be perfectly free to do so. We don’t have to vote for them, and we are entitled to oppose and challenge their ideas. But their bosses’ attempts to use their institutional powers to demonise and marginalise them constitutes an appalling abuse of authority. Those bosses deserve to have their feet held well and truly to the flames over it.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.

You probably won't agree with all of Mr Embery's policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

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BELOW ARE TWO videos of recent media appearances by me. First is an interview on GB News’s State of the Nation, hosted by Jacob Rees-Mogg. Jacob and I discussed the very welcome criticism of the government’s net zero strategy by the GMB union, which represents thousands of workers in the oil and gas industries.

The second is an interview on Iain Dale’s show on LBC. This discussion centred on the reasons behind new polling data showing that many rank-and-file trade unionists had deserted Labour and thrown their support behind Reform UK.

Enjoy!

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A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

IT WAS ONE of the most troubling images I’d seen. Two Metropolitan police officers were manning the barriers at a protest in central London organised by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the wake of the George Floyd killing. Only these officers were not focused on their duties. Instead, both had dropped to one knee – a deliberate gesture designed to show they were on the side of the protestors. The officers had become part of the demonstration they were there to police.

Anyone who believed that the thin blue line existed to uphold the law impartially – and particularly when policing high-profile political demonstrations – might, at that moment, have been disabused of such a notion.

Or perhaps that happened a few days later when police officers in Bristol purposely refused to intervene while BLM protestors vandalised a statue of Edward Colston and tossed it into a river.

Or maybe on the numerous occasions that officers had been filmed, in uniform, dancing and prancing at Pride parades. Or when a deputy chief constable released a video to mark ‘International Pronouns Day’. Or when any number of citizens were arrested for saying and doing things – reading from the Bible in public, for example – which were deemed to have offended against modern progressive ideology.

Such spectacles provided confirmation that, as well as being occasional defenders of law and order, police officers were now also political activists – and specifically for the most modish causes. Nowhere was this more evident than in the arena of racial politics, where the stance of the police was often scarcely different to that of some of Britain’s most radical race activist groups.

As it was for the police, so it was for most of the public sector, where a new ‘lanyard class’ of middle-class white liberal managers, armed with university degrees and guilt complexes, now ruled the roost, peddling hardline progressive dogma and professing to bring harmony and unity while increasingly doing the very opposite.

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As someone who has worked in an emergency service for nearly 30 years, I have seen this phenomenon up close. A well-intentioned and justified desire to eliminate prejudice began to mutate into something very different – namely a relentless political crusade which encouraged workers to see themselves as members of either a privileged or oppressed group, bombarded them with lectures promoting the new religion of ‘diversity, equality and inclusion’, and made career progression contingent upon being able to preach that particular gospel on demand.

And it was all buttressed by the Equality Act 2010, which – read Part 11 of the Act if you don’t believe this – made it perfectly legal for certain workers to be treated more favourably on account of their ‘protected characteristics’ (of which race is one).

For the police, the road to this new politicised world began with the appalling murder of Stephen Lawrence and the subsequent Macpherson report, which branded the force ‘institutionally racist’, and for which senior officers seem to have spent most of the years since desperately trying to atone. This has led them to some pretty dark places. It is, for example, the current position of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, as set out in its ‘race action plan’, that its desired goal of ‘racial equity’ means ‘responding to individuals and communities according to their specific needs’ and that ‘it does not mean treating everyone “the same” or being “colour blind”’. So much for equality before the law!

The same document also resolves to bring about ‘an end to racial disparities’ in policing outcomes, including ‘the likelihood of people being criminalised by the police’ – seemingly without concern for the differing rates of criminality among certain groups. The document reads as if it has been penned by the most militant BLM activist.

You can probably guess where I’m going with all this. It was against this whole backdrop of incessant race-based teaching and propaganda that police officers arrived at Belmont Road, Southampton, last December, having been mobilised to an altercation. Henry Nowak was bleeding out on a driveway. The man who had stabbed him five times, Vickrum Digwa, claimed to officers - falsely - that Henry had racially abused and assaulted him. A prostrate Henry, gasping for air, told the officers several times that he couldn’t breathe. He also said he’d been stabbed.

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But that didn’t matter. For the key accusation had already been made. The other man had alleged racism. That was enough for all the necessary warning lights and alarms to go off in the minds of the officers and for their intensive conditioning to kick in. Doubtless Digwa made the allegation in the full knowledge that that would be its effect.

Henry’s pleadings were ignored. He was placed in handcuffs and shortly thereafter departed this world. As the father of a boy, like Henry, in his first year at university in an ordinary English city, I cannot begin to explain how moved – and angered – I was when viewing footage of the incident.

I don’t know if the officers were motivated specifically by anti-white bias. But I think it highly likely their actions were in some way influenced by the ethnicity of the perpetrator and his claim of having been racially abused and assaulted.

In light of everything that police officers have been force-fed in the way of DEI dogma over the past quarter of a century, it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise. In fact, such is the intense focus on racial bias training in the constabulary concerned – Hampshire and Isle of Wight – a number of its officers have reported feeling ‘controlled and pressured’ by it. The same constabulary has publicly declared that ‘Being anti-racist, ethical and inclusive is top of our agenda.’ You might have thought that preventing and detecting crime would be the main priority for any police force. You’d be wrong.

It doesn’t take a lot, in this context, to see how police officers feel obliged to walk on eggshells when dealing with minority communities, or why they look the other way when, for example, evidence emerges that groups of Pakistani Muslim men are systematically raping young white girls in towns across England. Get it wrong, and bang goes the career. So best keep schtum.

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The reaction of the progressive elites to Henry Nowak’s murder is also highly instructive. When George Floyd was murdered, politicians and celebrities aplenty lined up to express their indignation and support the protests that swept the US and Britain. The ‘rage against the machine’ was, apparently, justified back then. But now all we get are appeals not to ‘politicise’ the murder of a young man or to ‘stir up tensions’.

Remember Rhiannon Whyte? She was the hotel worker brutally murdered in 2024 by an asylum seeker from Sudan. Her mother, Siobhan, has revealed on social media that political leaders have shown no interest in engaging with her, despite her having reached out to them several times. Are any of us truly surprised at that?

The elites are playing with fire. The public can see their two-tier approach, and they don’t like it. People recognise, too, that there has been a massive oversteer in the anti-racism crusade, and that it is leading to its own serious injustices and inconsistencies.

When even Jack Straw, home secretary when the Macpherson Report was published, argues that police anti-racism guidelines have gone too far, we are obliged to listen.

Ultimately, this isn’t just about the tragic last moments of a university student on a street in Southampton. It is about everything that goes with it, in particular the stark divergence in priorities between a liberal ruling class and a large chunk of the populace that increasingly feels as though the state machine is biased against it.

For that reason, I sense that the Henry Nowak murder will, in years to come, just like the Southport massacre, be seen as a pivotal moment causing a decisive shift in the public mood. I suspect that our politicians sense it, too. Which perhaps explains why they are so desperate to quell the growing backlash.

I fear they are too late. The anger and discord are here to stay.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.

Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

IT WAS INEVITABLE, wasn’t it? The moment Robert Kenyon was announced as the Reform UK candidate for the Makerfield by-election, the social media archaeologists were on to him, digging meticulously through layer after layer of his past commentary in the hope of excavating some valuable gem – one they hoped might render his campaign dead in the water before it had even begun.

Because that’s the world in which we now live, right? A world in which full-time offendotrons go hunting for evidence of ‘wrongspeak’ by their political opponents, all with the purpose of suppressing views they don’t like and ejecting from the public square anyone who dares express them.

Less and less are contentious issues judged on the merits of competing arguments. Instead, they are tested according to whether a particular argument conflicts with what passes for fashionable opinion among a cohort of self-appointed liberal-left political and cultural gatekeepers. And, slowly but surely, this new authoritarianism has seeped into our state and corporate institutions, so that the commanding heights of our public life are now dominated by ‘progressive’ ideology, and we end up at a place where a major city council sees fit to offer ‘safe space conversations’ to anxious staff ahead of a visit by Nigel Farage, a man who may very possibly be our next prime minister.

The whole thing has had a suffocating effect. ‘I disagree with you,’ has increasingly been replaced by ‘You mustn’t say that.’ The causing of ‘offence’ through the expression of an unwoke political or moral opinion is seen as a grievous sin, with transgressors fair game for vilification or cancellation, particularly if they have any sort of public profile.

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So you could sense the new puritans positively salivating at the prospect of unearthing something incriminating from Kenyon’s past, all the more so when it emerged that his ‘X’ account had for some undefined reason been temporarily suspended.

And, sure enough, they turned up some mildly embarrassing artefacts, including a tasteless remark about Carol Voderman and some spicy comments about women drivers and immigration.

But, look, Kenyon is an ordinary working-class guy – a white-van-driving plumber and former army reservist – who, during many years of activity on social media, has, like millions of others, occasionally engaged in some off-colour banter.

Though he speaks well in front of a camera, I dare say he never imagined he would one day stand for parliament and, while I am no supporter of Reform, I think the party deserves credit for selecting a local man with no background in politics and who appears to be the sort of bloke you might find yourself standing next to in the pub or on a football terrace. Much rather that than someone who has taken the conventional route to Westminster: university, thinktank or charity, MP’s assistant, minister’s special advisor, and eventually a safe parliamentary seat.

I do not argue that those who stand in elections are entitled to expect a free pass for anything they have done in their lives until that point. On the contrary, scrutiny of those who seek to govern our country is a good thing, especially where it shines a light on flawed policy commitments or exposes lies, hypocrisy or corruption.

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But that plainly isn’t what is going on with Kenyon. Instead, what we are seeing is character assassination, an attempt to convince voters in Makerfield that the Reform candidate isn’t fit to represent them on the green benches, not because his arguments are defective or he has committed serious impropriety, but because he is morally a Very Bad Human Being.

The pitchfork-wielders pursuing Kenyon have an innate loathing for what they see as the reactionary working-classes. They view such people as low-IQ ‘gammon’ unworthy of holding political office. Their prejudice was laid bare after the Brexit vote and still lingers.

They see politics as the preserve of their own kind – morally-enlightened guardians of civilised society who hold the ‘correct’ opinions and are therefore uniquely qualified to run the country and control its institutions. There is no place in the corridors of power for members of the lower orders who dare to express un-PC views from time to time.

But here’s the thing. Cancel culture, and the general attempt to demonise anyone who has ever expressed an unfashionable opinion, is meeting with growing resistance. Voters are increasingly unmoved by it. In fact, many are sick of it.

So when the progressive elites launch an assault on a new target, they are finding less and less that the mud sticks. When a country is functioning effectively, the masses are less inclined to rock the boat – or to rally to the support of anyone so minded. But when the nation is going to the dogs, they are more willing to get behind dissenting voices, to defend those from ordinary backgrounds who are brave enough to speak unvarnished truth to power, to express themselves in plain language like the man on the street, and to challenge the status quo.

If Robert Kenyon had stood for a mainstream party a decade ago, his past comments, once uncovered, would have sounded the death knell for his candidature and reputation. And there would likely have been little public protest.

Not so now. Things are shifting. People don’t care about such things any longer. They look at where the progressive authoritarians have taken the country, and they feel no kinship with them, nor any desire to see their critics silenced.

Cancel culture is on the retreat. Heresy is in vogue. You don’t have to be a supporter of Robert Kenyon or his party to welcome that long-overdue reset.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.

You probably won’t agree with all of Mr Embery’s policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

IF I WERE a Reform UK operative running a mole at the top of the Labour party, I would give him or her one simple instruction: restart the Brexit wars!

For nothing would be more likely to inflict electoral damage on Labour, and play right into the hands of Nigel Farage, than the reopening of the rancorous EU referendum debate.

Many will therefore be utterly perplexed that Labour appears to be embarking on that destructive course. After Wes Streeting told a Blairite thinktank that Brexit had been a ‘catastrophic mistake’, an under-pressure Andy Burnham quickly declared that he would not be advocating a return to the EU in the upcoming by-election in Leave-supporting Makerfield – only for footage of him doing exactly that at last year’s Labour conference to immediately resurface.

We’ve since seen other senior Labour figures pressed in interviews to reassure Leave voters that there would be no attempt in the future to reverse Brexit – and in some cases conspicuously failing to do so.

All of which means that, having previously proclaimed the debate dead, Labour is fighting the battle all over again – and is suspected by many of secretly organising to force Britain back into bed with Brussels. Reform UK must think all its Christmases have come at once.

I happen to be that rare thing in politics: a pro-Brexit Labour party member. People like me were once commonplace inside the party. But that was back in the days when a rich Eurosceptic seam ran through Labour, rooted in the principles of sovereignty and democracy, and articulated by titans such as Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Barbara Castle and Peter Shore. Nowadays, any Eurosceptic is about as welcome inside the party as a hedgehog would be at a nudist colony.

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Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

WHAT DOES ‘CLASS’ mean in Britain today? Are the traditional markers of social class still relevant? As our material conditions have improved over the generations, do we still have a working class in any meaningful sense – and, if so, who belongs to it?

Well, an intriguing new study has found that many of us think of class in very different terms to how our forebears might have done.

The study, by research firm Attest, suggests that, for growing numbers of Britons, the old fixed class structures hold limited relevance and have been supplanted by perceptions of social status that are more fluid.

For example, more than a third of adult Britons regard themselves as belonging to a different class from that which they were born into, while one in seven are members of a new ‘polyclass’, meaning they identify across multiple classes.

Such sentiments are particularly prevalent among younger generations, with around half of Millennials and Gen Z declaring they have either moved class or hold more than one class identity. Similarly, those from privileged backgrounds are significantly more likely to identify across multiple class groups.

Perhaps none of this should come as a surprise. This is, after all, the era in which the political and cultural elites peddled the concept of gender self-identification, which advanced the principle that objective truth should be subordinated to our internal feelings. So, in that spirit, why shouldn’t, say, a person of high social status identify as a horny-handed working-class son of toil? Isn’t class fluidity as valid as gender fluidity? I jest only slightly.

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More seriously, the research does reveal something rather alarming – that class chameleonism of this kind comes with a price. Of the Gen Z polyclass, for example, just over a quarter say they feel they do not truly belong anywhere, and almost a fifth reveal that they experience ‘imposter syndrome’ as a consequence of their class identity.

It cannot be a coincidence – can it? – that this is the cohort of people in our society which has been most exposed to an ideological blitzkrieg that told them they were citizens of the world, that open borders were a good thing, that common identities were all a bit reactionary and intolerant (unless, of course, they were minority identities, in which case full-throated celebration was called for), and that being inclusive and welcoming, even to the extent that one’s own sense of belonging was compromised, was virtuous. And now these disorientated young men and women don’t quite know who they are or where they fit into society. Fancy.

When it comes to working-class Britons, however, the research tells a somewhat contrasting story. For this group, class remains a fixed feature of their lives, with around 70% saying they continue to identify with the class into which they were born.

Again, this isn’t surprising. After all, when one’s life chances – such as in the way of career progression and opportunities for travel and cultural exploration – are constrained by a lack of wealth, such sentiments as attachment to place, rootedness and a desire for social solidarity are heightened. Belonging often means something different – and more profound – to a person who is tied to a place as a result of the hand he or she has been dealt in life.

The Attest study also finds that, despite the blurring of class lines, classism and accentism are still alive and well, with 49% revealing they have been negatively judged because of their class background and 35% because of their accent. Such prejudice is a stain on our society. Nobody should be made to feel inferior on account of the circumstances of their upbringing or the way they naturally speak. Take Angela Rayner, for example. She may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but she surely deserves great credit for, in the face of constant petty snobbery, never attempting to soften her bluff northern accent.

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It is easy in this day and age to forget that working-class people continue to suffer this kind of discrimination. Or that the upper echelons of our society – across politics, media, industry, the law, and even some sports – are still heavily dominated by those born into wealth and privilege.

But, then, working-class people have never received sufficient credit for the efforts they make in ensuring that our society functions – the people who collect our bins and look after our sick and elderly and deliver our parcels, the brickies and plumbers and joiners.

But I digress. This latest research ultimately demonstrates that things are less clear cut on the issue of class than they once were. And that the traditional barometers for determining social status are in flux.

Some citizens will assume they’ve achieved such status in life that they have inevitably moved beyond their working-class roots – and, by the way, there is nothing wrong with such a sentiment. Why should anyone be condemned for wanting to earn more money, or to have the freedom to enjoy the finer things in life, or to advance in one’s chosen career? All of that is fine.

When all is said and done, however, even those who are doing well in life – those, for example, who earn a generous salary and own a nice home and car – are quite often just a month’s pay packet away from real grinding hardship. And it’s at such moments that, for all the attempts to divide us up into different class categories, those of us who are, in the end, required to sell our labour in order to survive suddenly realise that we perhaps aren’t so different from each other after all.

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A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.

Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

SO that’s it. Thursday’s election results were atrocious for Labour and are certain to sound the death knell for Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership. The inevitable hammering has been dished out by British voters and, soon enough, the removal vans will be pulling up to the rear entrance of 10 Downing Street.

Starmer is a dead man walking; there can be no doubt about that. And it will likely be no more than a couple of months before the curtain falls on his premiership. But Labour MPs and activists should banish from their minds any belief that his departure will lead to electoral rehabilitation. Because, oh boy, the party’s problems run far, far deeper than the shortcomings of its current leader.

In fact, in the absence of major shock therapy, the question of who leads the party will prove entirely irrelevant. It would be like the crew deposing the captain of the Titanic as it steamed towards the iceberg only to then fail to take the necessary emergency action.

Look, we all understand that most governments – even competent ones – experience a popularity crash mid-term, and this often manifests itself in heavy defeats in local elections. So it would be easy to dismiss Thursday’s events as standard political fare.

But these results do seem particularly significant, not least because on this occasion the official opposition also received a spanking. That is most unusual. And the big winner happened to be an insurgent party which still has just eight MPs and only came into existence five years ago. In the context of British political norms, that is extraordinary.

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Strikingly, that party, Reform, made tremendous inroads into both Labour and Conservative territory. In Red Wall Wigan, for example, it won 24 of the 25 seats up for grabs, while in Havering it won overall control and obliterated the Tories (who were previously the largest party).

Reform is evidently building its base around what the political writer and commentator David Goodhart has described as the ‘Gavin and Stacey’ alliance: the middle-classes in suburbia and the shires, and the working-classes in our post-industrial, left-behind towns. Brexit-voting Britain, in other words. And the strategy seems to be working.

Meanwhile, though they didn’t win a huge number of seats, the Greens picked up a decent vote share and put in their best ever local election performance.

All of this confirms that British politics is splintering all over the place, and that the old tribal loyalties are breaking down.

This phenomenon will surely only gather pace in the months and years ahead, particularly as the government and country face a very profound - and almost unprecedented – set of challenges. For not only is the country in a deeply parlous state – with the economy cooked, public services crumbling, the welfare system in a shambles and social disintegration breaking out in our communities – but nobody within government seems to have the foggiest idea of how to turn things around.

Instead of displaying the boldness and radicalism required to set the country on a new path, ministers simply tinker at the edges of the existing discredit system. So, on the economy, they raise a tax here and redirect a bit of money there while stubbornly refusing to use the government’s massive fiscal capacity to reinvigorate our productive sector and drive growth.

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The great economist John Maynard Keynes, once a guiding light for centre-left governments the world over, famously – and correctly – said, ‘Anything we can actually do, we can afford.’ Rachel Reeves rejects all that. Couldn’t possibly relax those ‘ironclad’ fiscal rules and risk upsetting the markets, you see. Even if such a course serves to plunge the country into recession, as it will almost certainly do.

We no longer make things in Britain. We don’t build houses. We don’t value vocation or skilled labour. We don’t maintain our roads. We have no energy security. We don’t catch and punish criminals. We can’t control our borders. We make people wait weeks for a GP appointment. The list of problems is endless.

Labour isn’t solely to blame for all these failings, of course. Most have been many years in the making. But the party did promise to start putting things right in short order. And, in many cases, it has fallen well short. Hence its poll ratings are scraping along the floor. For too many Britons, there is little tangible change from the final years of the last Tory government.

That is precisely why we are now into multi-party politics across Britain. The old establishment parties have shown themselves utterly incapable of breaking with orthodoxy and forging a brighter future. What they broke, they are not trusted to fix.

On social media a few days ago, a woman wrote of her despair that her son, having completed a law degree at a good university, applied for 150 jobs or internships, but secured nothing. This is the future our kids are facing – a desperate and often fruitless struggle to land a job and home, and become a valuable and productive member of society. And in many cases saddled with huge debt before they even get going. The expectation that life will be better and easier for our children than it was for us seems like a sick joke.

So Labour can and will change its leader. And, in time, the Tories may feel tempted to do the same with Kemi Badenoch. But these changes alone won’t change the fortunes of those parties. Different faces pulling precisely the same defective levers is not what the electorate wants or country needs. We need instead complete honesty about the extent of our nation’s predicament and a credible programme for recovery.

The British public have had enough of the status quo. They want a fundamentally different society. If that wasn’t clear before Thursday, it is now.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.

You probably won't agree with all of Mr Embery's policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

I SNEAKED INTO one of my favourite watering holes in the fine city of Norwich a few weeks ago. I have been drinking there on and off for around 30 years, having been introduced to it by a relative who had moved to the area.

It’s a cracking pub, often bustling, and the recipient of multiple gongs (including the Campaign for Real Ale’s prestigious ‘national pub of the year’ award).

This particular visit occurred early evening on a Saturday. Sure enough, the place was rammed, with every stool, seat and table occupied, and thankfully with no strains from a juke box or clacking of pool balls to drown out the conversation flowing between punters. It’s a proper pub, you see.

But as I was quaffing a pint of Oakham Citra and soaking up the atmosphere, I noticed that the place was beginning to thin out. It couldn’t have been later than about 7.30pm. Yet over the next half an hour or so, a good number of customers left, and hardly any fresh ones came through the doors.

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By the time I departed, a short while later, the pub was half empty and much of the atmosphere and hubbub had dissipated. (One wisecracker later suggested to me that the Green-voting urban liberals of this trendy university city saw me, a Blue Labour foot soldier and GB News pundit, walk through the door and decided to drain their glasses and scarper – but I like to think that wasn’t true.)

I had witnessed this phenomenon – pubs that, once upon a time, were busy long into the evening now emptying out well before closing time – quite a bit in the past three or four years, but had not paid too much attention to it.

This latest experience, however, jolted me. If it was now happening here at one of the most popular taverns in the country, and one which, as I knew from personal experience, was once regularly well-filled until near closing time, particularly on a Saturday, perhaps we were looking at a definite cultural shift.

I was quite used as a young man to being in pubs when the bell for last orders sounded, often precipitating a rush to the bar. I suspect that there are very few establishments where that sort of thing still happens. Do pubs even have these bells behind the bar today? I cannot remember the last time I heard one rung.

I don’t claim to be certain of the reasons for why pubs are clearing out much earlier than was once the case, and I’m unaware of any specific research into it. Some will doubtless argue that pub prices are so prohibitive that customers are simply driven away – or at least forced to wend their way home sooner. And with supermarkets selling alcohol so cheaply in comparison, many drinkers will choose more regularly to have a tipple at home.

But I suspect it’s something more than these things. In my view, the whole covid saga fundamentally altered the nature of our society, and in particular our relations with each other and the balance between our home, working and social lives. During the long periods of lockdown, we became accustomed as a society to staying at home.

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We worked out with Joe Wicks on YouTube and stopped going to the gym. Men built ‘man caves’, usually including a mini bar, at the end of their gardens and no longer felt the need to go out for a beer. We held quiz nights with family and friends on Zoom and participated in work meetings in the same way. Many never went back to the office in any meaningful sense. We upgraded our home entertainment systems – because we spent so long staring at our TVs and devices – and no longer looked upon a night at the cinema as a treat. If we did choose to venture outside for the purposes of socialising, we were subjected – including in pubs – to absurd and dehumanising social distancing rules. So many of us just didn’t bother.

We got into the groove of spending our days and evenings in the comfort of our own homes – and millions have stayed there. So while a couple of hours down the pub in the afternoon might still be a welcome event, the thought, for many, of having a proper ‘session’ well into the evening and right up to closing time, with a bunch of other people, seems odd, almost unnatural or decadent.

Perhaps this new way of living had started to take hold before covid struck. Certainly the bonds of association and the sense of community that was once a feature of most of our lives have been slowly eroding for years. But the pandemic, and the concomitant heavy restrictions placed on the population by the authorities, unquestionably accelerated the shift. And, in a spiritual sense, we are much the poorer for it.

Pubs were one of those common spaces that acted as a social gel, bringing together friends and strangers, sustaining old relationships and helping to forge new ones. Likewise with local shopping parades, working men’s clubs, nightclubs (a staggering 36% of which have closed since the pandemic), churches, communal workplaces, youth clubs, libraries – all of them social hubs that bound us together; now withering on the vine as we retreat more and more to the comfort of our living rooms, home offices and smartphone screens.

It is surely undeniable that the decline of such places, and the consequent narrowing of our social networks, is contributing in no small way to the disintegration and atomisation gripping our society. Against this backdrop, it’s a minor miracle that couples are still able to meet and form relationships at all. Little wonder that our birth rate is falling off a cliff.

We desperately need to revitalise our civic society and breathe new life into those spaces and institutions that were once the seedbed of social interaction and human flourishing.

But is such a thing achievable at this stage of our malaise? Well, isn’t that just the sort of burning question that one might ponder while supping a pint or three in the snug at the local with a few friends.

In fact, I think I’ll do precisely that. Though I’ll be sure not to arrive after 7.30pm. Otherwise I’ll be talking to myself.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

You probably won't agree with all of Mr Embery's policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

A LABOUR prime minister on his way out of number 10. Potential successors jockeying for position. An appointments scandal. A major economic crisis looming.

No, this is not 2026. It is, in fact, 1976.

For it was half a century ago, almost to the week, that Harold Wilson sailed off into the sunset, sparking a leadership election in his party and causing a stir with the inclusion among his resignation honours (the famous ‘lavender list’) of one or two dodgy names.

Our present-day PM, almost certainly on the last leg of his own premiership and still embroiled in a controversy over one of his own high-profile appointments, could be forgiven for believing that history was repeating itself.

Not least because the impending economic catastrophe may wreak as much havoc as the IMF crisis did for the Labour government and country back then. However, just as Wilson departed before the worst of the storm broke, so Starmer is unlikely to be at the helm when it does so again this time around.

Wilson, of course, wasn’t pushed out of the door. In fact, his sudden resignation came as a complete shock to his party and the country. Starmer will almost certainly not enjoy such a luxury.

And that isn’t the only difference between then and now. Just consider the list of candidates in the election that followed Wilson’s departure.

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BELOW IS A video of an appearance I made on the ‘Thinking Class’ podcast hosted by John Gillam. John is an intelligent and thoughtful interviewer, and I thoroughly recommend his own Substack.

John and I talked about the state of British politics and, in particular, the serious challenges our society faces in the way of economic insecurity, deindustrialisation, demographic transformation and social disintegration.

Though the interview was filmed a few months ago, all the issues we discussed remain entirely relevant.

Enjoy!

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A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

You probably won't agree with all of Mr Embery's policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

TRADE UNIONS ARE a force for good in our society, and I’ll make that argument to anyone who cares to listen. Name a right enjoyed by Britons at work – the minimum wage, sick pay, health and safety protections, annual holiday entitlement, take your pick – and the chances are that the trade union movement was instrumental in getting it on to the statute book.

Without the courage and efforts of generations of trade unionists, our workplaces would unquestionably be less safe and contented environments.

I became a trade union member at 16, later serving as a senior official, because I felt my own generation had a moral duty to make sure our hard-won rights were not rolled back. That’s why I always get behind campaigns and legislation, such as the recently-introduced Employment Rights Act, designed to safeguard and extend those advances.

But while there is so much about the trade union movement that has made me proud, there is one thing that has made me truly ashamed of it. And that is its contemptible role in the whole transgenderism debate and, in particular, its shameful abandonment of women fighting to defend their sex-based rights.

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The trade union movement has been on the wrong side of this debate since the beginning. Drunk on radical progressive ideology, which it had been imbibing for years, the movement succumbed to the overtures of the trans lobby and began to preach its gospel. Biological reality suddenly became irrelevant. In the name of ‘kindness’ and ‘inclusivity’, people were expected to comply with what in their hearts and heads they knew to be a lie.

Initially, the blowback was limited. But then the demands of the trans cultists became ever more extreme. They wanted individuals to have the right to ‘self-identify’ as members of the opposite sex, and they insisted that trans-identifying males be given the right to enter women-only spaces – including rape crisis centres and prisons – and take part in women’s sports.

And so women began to organise and fight back. But when they did so, they found that their trade unions were not standing with them.

Even in more recent years, with trans mania at long last on the retreat and after women have racked up a series of victories in the courts and tribunals, most unions have barely shifted their position and continue to sell their female members short.

Female nurses, in particular, have been in the frontline of the battle to defend sex-based rights in the workplace. Take the case of Jennifer Melle, an A&E nurse from south London. During a shift, Melle was racially abused by an aggressive trans-identifying male patient (who happened to be a convicted sex offender). Instead of defending her, Melle’s NHS Trust employer took disciplinary action against her. Why? Because during the exchange with the patient, she had used ‘incorrect’ pronouns – a cardinal sin in our woke-captured health service.

Last week, Melle won a much-deserved settlement payment from her employer. Good for her. But it was no thanks to her union which, despite the sheer injustice of it all, totally abandoned her.

In another high-profile case, Fife nurse Sandie Peggie found herself in hot water with her employer after challenging a trans-identifying male colleague using the women’s changing room. Like Melle, she found that her union turned its back on her in her hour of need. An employment tribunal later ruled that Peggie’s employer had harassed her.

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In a similar case, a group of nurses in Darlington stood firm after their employer tried to force them to share a changing room with a trans-identifying male. Once again, the trade union – in this case Unison – was nowhere to be seen. The president of the union even went so far as to accuse the nurses of ‘anti-trans bigotry’. An employment tribunal subsequently ruled that the nurses had suffered discrimination and harassment.

Though such legal victories should be seen as a shot in the arm for the campaign to defend women’s sex-based rights, trade unions usually look upon them as setbacks. When the Darlington tribunal judgment landed, Unison released a terse statement declaring that it stood by its ‘beliefs in the rights of our trans, non-binary and gender diverse members’.

What a deplorable response to a ruling that should have been shouted from the rooftops, and what a display of contempt towards a group of women whose courageous actions in defending their rights at work stood in the best traditions of trade unionism.

In my own industry, the fire and rescue service, women spent years fighting for better provisions – such as single-sex toilet facilities and washrooms – in the workplace. The struggle was, in a male-dominated environment, long and hard. But, with the help of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), they eventually they got there.

Now the FBU, on whose national executive I once sat, has bought fully into trans dogma and looks upon anyone who seeks to uphold the principle of biological reality as a bigot or reactionary. When the supreme court ruled last year that women and men were defined by biological sex for the purposes of law, the union condemned it as being on the ‘wrong side of history’ (whatever that means) and motivated by ‘far-right ideologies’.

What a betrayal of women firefighters past and present and of the union’s own proud history in the struggle for sex-based rights in the workplace.

I hope that the trade union movement soon comes to its sense and distances itself from the trans cult. Too often, women who run into trouble at work for standing up against gender fanaticism are being forced to rely on Christian groups or the Free Speech Union to come to their assistance. That is a genuine scandal. Britain’s mainstream trade unions should be throwing their considerable heft behind these women and defending them when they come under attack.

Trade unions are needed as much today as they ever were. The battle against injustice in the workplace never goes away. But if unions remain determined to alienate an entire sex class – and many others besides – through their continued embrace of an increasingly fringe ideology, they will be hastening the decline of their own influence. And, ultimately, that is neither in their own, nor - given the vital and beneficial work they often do for Britain’s workers - the country’s interests.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.

You probably won't agree with all of Mr Embery's policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

I HAVE RECENTLY been reading Joseph Anton, the memoir of Sir Salman Rushdie, the esteemed novelist who, at the back end of the 1980s, infuriated some mullahs in Tehran by having the audacity to produce a work of fiction which, as they saw it, ‘blasphemed’ against their prophet.

The memoir – whose title was the alias adopted by Rushdie during the many years he spent in hiding – provides a captivating and often harrowing account of the daily life of a man living under a death sentence handed down by a despotic foreign government.

The author’s acute frustration at the timidity shown by certain members of the British political and media classes in the face of the bullying theocrats leaps from the pages. Government ministers equivocated; members of parliament in constituencies with sizeable Muslim populations denounced him; ‘liberal’ commentators implied that he had asked for it; the archbishop of Canterbury called for an extension of the Blasphemy Act to cover Islam.

Truth be told, they were petrified. Some may have privately wanted the man with the pen to prevail over those with the swords, but they weren’t willing to put their own necks on the line by publicly expressing solidarity with Rushdie or condemning his persecutors. So they took the path of least resistance.

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What is striking from reading the memoir – which, it should be noted, was published before the author was stabbed by an Islamist in New York – is how little the atmosphere has changed in the years since. If anything, it has become even more oppressive. Every now and then, something will occur to prove the point. The hounding of a schoolteacher in Batley. The censoring of an artistic work. The wilful institutional blindness to the activities of rape gangs. The de facto blasphemy laws. The general desperation of the political and cultural elites to delegitimise any criticism of multicultural ideology.

A mood of nervousness still abounds. The elites remain terrified of the potential reaction of certain radical tendencies within the Muslim community to any perceived slight against their religion. And so they abandon the principles of free expression and critical thought in favour of affording to Islam a degree of indulgence and protection that no other faith could possibly hope to enjoy.

Christians, especially, are expected to accept every bit of criticism and mockery that comes their way. Their faith is an easy target, because those who aim for it know they will never be subjected to a fatwa ordering their execution.

When, during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris in 2024 and before a global audience, the Last Supper was parodied by various crankish characters, including a couple of sexualised drag queens and a transgender model, there were many complaints, including from various Christian organisations. But there was never a hint that anyone involved with the performance would become a target. No threats of violence from Christian groups. No demands for revenge. The story was dead within a few days. Just imagine if the performance had centred instead on, say, the Qur’an story of Muhammad’s journey through the heavens on a winged horse.

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Similarly, last week, Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, tending the sick. The post was, like much of Trump’s output these days, in poor taste and caused some prominent Christian voices to publicly object and demand its deletion. But most of Christendom just rolled its eyes and went about its business. Again, no blood-curdling threats to kill or demands for retribution. Though they may have felt slighted, most Christians will have understood that, in democratic and pluralist societies, religious ideas and iconography cannot be protected against insult or lampoonery, and that believers are certainly not permitted to avenge their hurt feelings through violence.

In fairness, many Muslims also understand this and would not dream of persecuting – still less physically attacking – someone who had offended against their religion. And, lest I be accused of being an ‘Islamophobe’ (that awful word), I would point out that I believe there are aspects of the Islamic faith – such as the emphasis on family, community and self-restraint – that are commendable and, far from being ‘anti-British’, chime with the conservative and traditionalist sentiments of many non-Muslims across the country.

But the persistent threat from the faith’s militant elements has caused our weak-kneed political establishment to decide that some kind of special forcefield must be deployed around Islam, and that if anyone is stupid enough to breach it, they must expect the blowback.

Well, not in my name. Islam, regardless of the extreme views of a minority of its followers, must not be ringfenced in such a way, and if sections within it cannot reconcile themselves to that position, they must be confronted and, if necessary, dealt with under the law of the land. No quarter must be given to the bullies and fundamentalists.

There is a scene in the comedy film Alan Patridge: Alpha Papa in which Partridge, the Norfolk-based radio disc jockey, berates his studio sidekick off-mike for having made a rude on-air wisecrack about Islam. ‘Never – never – criticise Muslims,’ barks a flustered Partridge. ‘Only – only – Christians.’ He pauses. ‘And Jews a little bit.’

Yep. That just about sums up where we are.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.