Why we need the Monarchy

The BBC and Channel 4, among others, are enthusiastically exploiting the plight of the Windsor formerly known as Prince to whip up anti-Royal sentiment in a bid to rid us of the Monarchy.

They must be careful what they wish for. Get rid of the Monarchy and hark what discord follows. An elected President? Then where does that leave Parliament and the Prime Minister?

We would require the complete re-writing of our unwritten constitution if that was a serious option. But who could we possibly trust to come up with a viable solution? We could end up like America or France – or even Russia or China.

We could supposedly elect someone without much power but even in Ireland the President has real power. What if she exercised it against the wishes of the incumbent Government? An elected President would certainly have more justification for political interference than an hereditary Monarch and you could easily imagine circumstances where she set herself up in opposition to her Government.

Instead, we could have an appointed President, chosen from among the ‘great and good’. They would almost certainly be the favoured nominee of the ruling party. Peter Mandelson might have been candidate for such an office not so long ago. And how could a political appointee possibly be a unifying force?

Our history and national identity rely on having a Monarchy. We did get rid of it once and it was followed by chaos and dictatorship which ended in everyone agreeing the only thing to do was restore Charles II.

Every country needs a Head of State, someone to represent the nation at home and abroad, and someone above the machinations of politicians. No matter how bad things seem for the Royal Family today, surely we have to agree the Monarchy is the least worst option.

The choice is simple: God Save the King or God Help Britain.

The Man Who Invented The News

Not much Reform going on here

While I think we can all agree democracy is a good idea, the restoration of the franchise in Keir Starmer’s latest U-turn has led to lots of excited talk of a Reform landslide.

As someone who has flirted with the idea of backing Nigel Farage’s party, I thought it would be worth checking out how it’s been doing in the 14 areas where Reform has control of local authority finances.

The results are massively disappointing, suggesting all the talk about Reform cutting out waste, supporting hard-pressed local taxpayers etc is just so much political guff.

As the cliché goes: politicians are all the same. Bearing in mind that a rise of five per cent or more requires special Government permission, these are the rises proposed by Reform-led councils:

Derbyshire County Council: 4.9 per cent

Doncaster Council: 4.99 per cent

Durham County Council: 1.99 per cent

Kent County Council: 3.99 per cent

Lancashire County Council: 4.99 per cent

Lincolnshire County Council: 2.99 per cent

North Northamptonshire Council: 4.99 per cent

Nottinghamshire County Council: 3.99 per cent

Staffordshire County Council 3.99 per cent

West Northamptonshire Council: 4.99 per cent

Leicestershire County Council (Minority administration): 2.99 per cent

Warwickshire County Council (Minority administration): 4.89 per cent

Worcestershire County Council (Minority administration): 9 per cent

Cornwall Council: 4.99 per cent (Largest party)

At the last local elections Reform pledged to ‘Reduce waste and cut your tax’ (Worcestershire increased councillors' allowances by 17 per cent).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEMOxwFAu7o&t=252s

The Russian honey trap

We should shed no tears over the oleaginous Peter Mandelson’s downfall, after so many previous disgraces this slippery, slithy tove has slithered his way out of.

What’s striking, though, is Jeffrey Epstein’s travelling harem seems to have included a large number of young Russian women.

It’s almost as if Vladimir Putin and his chums plotted to implicate as many influential people as possible in one vast honey trap with, or without, the connivance of the spider at the centre of the web.

Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, the Windsor formerly known as Prince, the current President of the United States, various bankers… the list of luminaries involved with the great financier and paedophile goes on and on (though only one relatively minor offender is actually in jail).

So is this all a Russian plot to destabilise the West? If so, you can only say it’s been a great success.

Police 'dodgy dossier' scraping the barrel

Crime commissioner Simon Foster has been pleading poverty again in a bid to put up local taxes to cover an alleged £41 million ‘black hole’ which would certainly be filled if only he stopped wasting public money.

What may or may not be a waste of money (see Birmingham Council’s Oracle debacle) is the West Midlands Police ‘Synergy’ IT programme on which it spent a little over £1.8 million in November and £3.4 million in October.

You’d at least think it was enough to ensure that, when they Googled for evidence to justifying a ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters attending a match at Villa Park, the results would be trustworthy.

On his humiliating recall to Parliament, Chief Constable Craig Guildford told MPs he stood by his force’s ‘dodgy dossier’ exaggerating the cost of policing a Maccabi Tel Aviv game in Holland, completely inventing one against West Ham and falsely claiming it had consulted local Jewish groups.

So what about WMP’s IT policies? It’s hard to tell, after wading through a 2024 report by Marc Williams, its ‘Head of Architecture’.

It uses the word ‘leverage’ 38 times in 35 pages and you can be certain any official report relying on a word that has to be pronounced in the accent of a Wall Street trader means you’re in for a cold shower of meaningless drivel.

For instance, ‘policing Data has become the apex of focus for untapped potential’ while ‘desktops are being leveraged to provide the niche use-case where the fixed technology makes sense’ and so on.

Even so, maybe Mr Guildford should have waded his way through this gibberish (why are IT people incapable of using plain English?) because it does warn: ‘Trust and Confidence in policing's use of public data is critical.’

Mr Guildford told MPs his force ‘do not use artificial intelligence’ which is interesting because his IT report says: ‘A logical step in the enhancement of Data within policing is the potential to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies.’

Mind you, the report does add: ‘Policing needs to proceed with caution here.’

https://www.expressandstar.com/sport/football/aston-villa/2026/01/06/west-midlands-police-chief-denies-scraping-for-reasons-to-ban-maccabi-tel-aviv-fans-from-aston-villa-match/