Chris Whiteside's Blog

Since the present regime in Iran came to power in 1979 and consolidated their position with a wave of executions, they have 🔴Violated the immunity of our legation in Tehran 🔴Abducted and assaulted British diplomats 🔴Pronounced a fatwa against a British citizen 🔴Kidnapped British naval personnel 🔴Seized a British tanker 🔴Backed Houthi, Hezbollah and Hamas terrorism 🔴Supplied drones and missiles to Putin 🔴Sponsored at least 15 terror plots on UK soil  🔴Arrested British citizens and after a mockery of a trial, imprisoned them on patently false charges And after beginning their hold on power with a massacre of Iranian citizens suspected of not supporting the regime, they have over the last few years massacred men, women and children for protesting against the tyranny of the regime. I have no idea how many dissidents the current Iranian regime has butchered but there is plenty of evidence that it is a large number, almost certainly in the thousands. This is what Kemi Badenoch s...

Whitehaven and Workington Conservatives were out campaigning today, most of us in Workington but also some work done in Moor Row and there was also some mutual aid to colleagues in Penrth where there is a council by-election coming up. For all those who were out campaigning today, here is some music to relax to.  

 

In the days when the Green party regarded having a "leader" as too hierarchical, they had two "Principal speakers" and Darren Johnson held that post from 2001 to 2003. He was also a Green member of the London Assembly from 2000 to 2016, the party's candidate for Mayor of London in 2000 and 2004, and a Lewsham councillor. In December 2024 he resigned from the Green Party after 37 years' membership. On why most of the people who people who represent what the Green Party traditionally stood for have mostly, unlike himself, remained members as the party changed out of all recognition, he had this to say on X today: " With the Greens descent into ludicrous left-populism ("Zionism is racism" "abolish landlords") people ask me why other longstanding Greens have remained. After years in the wilderness, you've got to remember how intoxicating winning can be, even if your new activists are batshit. " Challenged in relation to yesterd...

Labour created the monster of harvesting Muslim community bloc votes and yesterday that monster came back to bite them. As I've said many times before, we are a multiracial country, not a multicultural country. If you stir up grievance politics between groups based on religion or race, as Labour have done for decades, as Reform are seeking to do, and as the Greens have done successfully in this by-election, you are pitting neighbours against each other and you start to unravel the culture of tolerance that makes Britain great.  Our country is not broken, but this by-election showed that Labour, Reform and the Greens are trying very hard to break it. Labour trying to buy people off with more and more benefits spending. Reform telling people you can't be British if you aren't white. The Greens running a nasty, sectarian campaign while simultaneously wanting to legalise crack-cocaine. Clearly this election was not about who would be the best MP. But there was only one sensibl...

‘For a country to hand over its territory to another country free of charge could be construed as misplaced benevolence. To insist on paying for the pleasure suggests some sort of international humiliation fetish.’ Stephen Daisley , in a Telegraph article this week on Labour's Chagos Islands surrender deal.

"My apprenticeship changed my life. I gained real skills, earned a wage, and was building a future without debt. That’s why Conservatives will create 100,000 new apprenticeships a year with our New Deal for Young People backing choice, skills, and opportunity." Rt Hon Kemi Badenoch , Conservative leader.

 

 

(Lord) Dan Hannan had this to say today: "The Green Party, for the sake of a by-election campaign, risks igniting the sectarianism that blows countries apart. We do not sufficiently appreciate the extraordinary and, in its fashion, beautiful, way in which British communities of South Asian heritage avoided the lingering feuds which still influence Indian and Pakistani politics. I read several eye-witness accounts of the 1947 intercommunal violence some years ago, and don’t like to think about, let alone write about, what happened. Nirad Chaudhuri was one of the most expressive writers of his generation, but he could find no language for what he had witnessed: “ I have weighed nearly all the words and phrases which the murderous ferocity of man, as distinct from his warlike ferocity, has contributed to the vocabulary of European peoples: massacre, pogrom, lynching, fusillade, noyade, St. Bartholomew, Sicilian Vespers, Bloodbath of Stockholm, Bulgarian atrocities, Armenian massacres...

 

The passage below is another extract from one of his articles tweeted on X by Stephen Pollard, Stephen Pollard on X: here ,  this time from his Daily Telegraph piece on today's Prime Ministers' Questions. Is there a more pathetic sight than Sir Keir Starmer? "Is there a more pathetic sight than Sir Keir Starmer, the Black Knight of politics, at PMQs?   Every week he arrives for his joust with Kemi Badenoch, and every week he leaves after doing his impression of the character from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. As one deadly Badenoch barb after another slices limb after limb off, on he ploughs: “Tis but a scratch.” It’s a truism that Badenoch has found her voice at PMQs but, in recent months, she has been presented with a weekly Michelin three-star menu of topic choices, all of them lethal. The obvious choice this week would have been Peter Mandelson, whose downfall Badenoch has both hastened and deepened with her expert cross-examinations of the former director of public...

 

"I am grateful to each of the 107 countries that stood with Ukraine today in defense of life at the UN. The General Assembly adopted our resolution in support of a lasting peace, with clear calls for a full ceasefire and the return of our people. These are the right and necessary steps. And we will keep working actively to achieve peace, together with our partners." President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine Below is how the UN's member nations voted.  

Stephen Pollard posted the extract below on X from an article he has written in the Jewish Chronicle. You can find the full article at Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has built a career on the back of being an ‘anti-racist’. Say no more - The Jewish Chronicle - The Jewish Chronicle A couple of days ago Yasmin Alibhai-Brown published a tweet attacking the appointment of Margaret Hodge to follow Michael Grade as chair of the regulator Ofcom on the grounds that they are supposedly both "Uber-Zionists." Like Michael Gove my initial reaction when I saw the tweet was was to wonder if it was really from the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown or from a parody account. Yes, it really was from her. Yasmin alibhai-brown on X: "Uber Zionist Margaret Hodge will, we hear, become Ofcom chair after uber Zionist Michael Grade steps down. A two step solution to ensure the Palestine & Palestinian suffering are denied proper coverage. And the Israeli state gets away with atrocities." / X This is...

  Four years on from Putin’s illegal invasion, we stand united with the people of Ukraine. Now and always.

 

Continuing the "Pink Panther" theme, the song " Meglio Stasera, " known in English as " It Had Better Be Tonight " was performed by Fran Jeffries in the original 1963 "Pink Panther" film. The music was composed and performed by Henry Mancini and his orchestra with Italian lyrics by Franco Migliacci and English lyrics by Johnny Mercer. Although Fran Jeffries steals the show and holds your attention with her superlative singing and dancing in this clip, if you look carefully at the background you can also see some excellent acting from the film's protagonists, David Niven (suavely enjoying the song) and Peter Sellers (bumbling along as Inspector Clouseau.)

"Student loan repayments have become a scam. You work hard but you get "rewarded" with high interest rates. How is that fair? Conservatives will reduce interest rates for hundreds of thousands of graduates. That's just Step 1 in our New Deal for Young people." Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch

 Rishi Sunak says Zelensky showed him real-time casualty data from the front in Munich. - 80% of Ukrainian kills are from drones - Russia is losing 1,000 soldiers a day. His conclusion: Europe is not ready for this kind of war.  This was Frazer Nelson's summary of a piece Rishi Sunak has written for tomorrow's Times which I a certainly going to read. I think he's right Our soldiers, sailors and aircrew must never again be put in the position of trying to fight the next war with the weapons and tactics of the last one. War has changed and our defences must be updated to reflect the new reality.

Joani Reid MP, Char of the All-Party-Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism, and a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee, has issued the statement below about the ban by West Midlands Police preventing supporters of the Israeli football team Maccabi Tel Aviv F.C attending the team's match with Aston Villa. It is now beyond reasonable dispute that the process West Midlands Police followed to arrive at this decision was egregiously flawed and that they made a whole serious of factually incorrect statements about it, including some given in evidence to the Home Affairs select committee by the then Chief constable, such as a false statement about the extent to which Birmingham's Jewish communities had been consulted and the release, presented as fact, of AI-generated details of a supposed Maccabi TA match involving crowd trouble which had never actually happened. West Midlands police also gave an account of a violence associated with a match in Amsterdam, which was seriousl...

" A shot in the dark " was the first of the sequels to " The Pink Panther " in which Peter Sellers reprised the character of the bumbling policeman, Inspector Clouseau. The theme music was written by Henry Mancini and performed by Manchini and his orchestra.  

 

 

 Polish Foreign Minister, Radoslaw Sikorski : @sikorskiradek "In Poland, we think that if Putin succeeded in conquering Ukraine, we would be next, and the cost of deterring him on the Polish border would be much higher. We are paying for Ukraine's sustenance both as a state and in the defensive war. I personally believe that gives us the right to have a voice in these negotiations. Of course, we wish luck to the US, but it has to be a fair peace that respects Ukraine's red lines and respects Europe's security."

Host:  "Do you think that this issue of territory, Donbas region, is a solvable one?" General Ben Hodges : "Yeah, Russia could leave and recognize this as Ukrainian sovereign territory."

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, a season of reflection inspired by Christ’s forty days in the wilderness. We wish everyone a Lent filled with reflection, prayer, and service.

I must confess that I do not always agree with President Trump. Indeed, that is probably the biggest understatement I have ever posted on this blog. However, here is something he has got right. The Labour government had been briefing that the US president had come round to supporting their plan to give away the Chagos Islands to a country which never owned them, against the wishes of the Chagos Islanders themselves, and pay £35 billion for the privilege. Well he hasn't. This is what President Trump said on the subject today: The Labour government has been telling us, wrongly, that international law requires us to give away the islands. This is not, and never has been true. And in fact, because of treaties we have signed with the USA, it is against international law to give them away without US agreement. Which means this terrible deal cannot proceed.  Kemi Badenoch said: " As I've said before Starmer’s Chagos deal is an act of great stupidity.  Paying £35bn to surrender ...

I attended the funeral today at St Peters' Kells and at Distington Hall of Ronald Fox, a true gentleman, who was born in Whitehaven in 1944 and died earlier this month just before he would have reached the age of 82. Ron was an immensely kind man who liked nothing more than helping people, and he had a great many friends in Whitehaven and the surrounding area, many of whom were there today. Rest in Peace. 

 

At the Reform press conference, Robert Jenrick was asked about his new party's stance on the two-child benefit cap. Nigel Farage cut in with a response beginning " I want to speak for Robert here. " Kemi Badenoch summed it up in three words: " One. Man. Band. "

New figures released today show that unemployment in the UK rose to its highest rate in nearly five years at the end of 2025. The unemployment rate climbed to 5.2% in the three months to December, from 5.1% in the three months to November, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) The rise in unemployment came as annual wage growth slowed, dropping to its lowest level in almost four years. The UK's economic growth has dampened, with a backdrop of slower hiring as businesses cut back due to higher costs. The ONS says that estimates numbers of employees on payrolls in the UK fell by 121,000 (0.4%) between December 2024 and December 2025, and by 6,000 between November 2025 and December 2025. This is based administrative data from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC). When looking at the quarter from October to December 2025, to compare with ONS  Labour Force Survey (LFS) estimates, the number of employees fell by 130,000 (0.4%) compared with the previous over the year and by 46,0...

"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value." Arthur C. Clarke

This afternoon the government U-turned on their proposals to delay May 2026 elections in a number of councils. Elections to those councils will now go ahead in May after all. I am certain this is the right decision but have some sympathy for the Electoral Registration officers in those councils who have lost weeks of planning time. Everything about this was confusing. On 22nd January the government announced that 34 of the councils going through reorganisation and originally due to hold elections in May would go ahead with those elections. They also listed 29 councils which would now have their May 2026 elections postponed. The original Press release with those two lists of councils can still be seen on the Gov.uk website at   Councils granted flexibility to finish reorganisation - GOV.UK Today housing and communities Secretary of State Steve Reed announced a U-turn on this decision. His letter to all affected council leaders can be seen at: Postponement of local elections in Engla...

The Monkees' most haunting song:

 

"This is pathetic. You’re the Cabinet Office. The elite of the bureaucracy.  At the heart of government. This is not just  juvenile. It’s factually wrong. We used to think the senior civil service a Rolls Royce. You’re not even a Trabant now. For god’s sake grow up!!!" The above was Andrew Neil 's response when on Valentine's day the cabinet office posted this:

 “Patience is not the ability to wait but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting.” — Joyce Meyer

Great campaigning session this morning and early afternoon in Kells. It's a long way to the next general election but our campaigning team is fired up with enthusiasm. And having walked about seven miles and thirteen thousand steps, time to put the feet up and relax for half an hour before the next job.  What better music to relax to than the "Pifa" pastoral symphony from Handel's Messiah? 

Well, here is the answer. "Paraskevidekatriaphobia" is an irrational fear of a date. Such as an irrational fear of Friday the 13th.

Conservatives have WON the Worth Valley, Bradford by-election with over 50% of the vote and nearly twice as many votes as the Reform UK candidate: Cons: 1815 (51.7%) Ref:   917 (26.2%) Lab: 425 (12.1%) Grn: 245 (7.0%) LD: 83 (2.4%) IND: 29 (0.4%) Conservative majority 898.   Congratulations Cllr Paul Golding! Nigel Farage may arrogantly claim we're dead but we're not in the ground yet.

 

"The government must agree to create a new category of Extreme Criminal Protest Group to make it easier to ban groups like Palestine Action without necessarily labelling them as terrorists. Ministers should accept my amendment in the House of Lords." Lord Walney.

When former Home Secretary Yvette Cooper proscribed the "Palestine Action" campaign group under anti-terrorism legislation, the comment I made at the time was that banning a group which had organised the deliberate sabotage of RAF aircraft was entirely justified but I wasn't certain that the use of Blair-era anti-terror legislation was the best way to do it. Jake Symons wrote,  " In a recent episode of The Brink, " (Link to that episode below at ‘We are deeply compromised’: Security Experts Expose Britain’s Intelligence Crisis ) " Lord Walney, the former Independent Adviser on Political Violence and Disruption in November – and a Labour figure – revealed that he had suggested a solution that would have restricted Palestine Action without having to resort to terror legislation. That was the obvious solution. Yes, they broke into Brize Norton and caused significant damage to our national security infrastructure, but to lump them with Islamic State and Al Qaed...

This is the 1969 version of the song, written for the original "The Thomas Crown affair" film, which was used fifty-six year later to conclude the second season of "Severance."

This is a particularly appropriate question for today. What irrational fear is referred to by the following word, paraskevidekatriaphobia? An appropriate prize (it isn't something nasty) will be sent to the first person to post the correct answer in the quiz thread comments on either of the two blogs on which this quiz post will simultaneously appear at 06:00 UTC on Friday 13th February 2026.

“ Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR. ” Now the driverless train chugs on, with no direction. The control room is empty, and the Prime Minister is stuck unable to change the track himself. From an article by Tom Harwood in The Critic which you can read in full be clicking on the link below: Starmer’s countdown begins | Tom Harwood | The Critic Magazine The first sentence above, in italics and quotation marks, is taken from the book, " Get In " by Gabrial Pogrund and Patrick Maguire, and they were quoting a member of Starmer’s inner circle describing his political operation, citing the driverless Docklands Light Railway.  The following sentence is what Tom Harwood's wrote immediately after that quote and is his commentary on what that means for the country now that Morgan McSweeney, the brains behind the operation, has resigned. 

The ONS has released the latest figures for UK economic growth, relating to  the UK's Gross Domestic Product for the three months ending December 2025: In their words, "GDP grew 0.1% in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2025.  Services showed no growth (0.0%), while production grew (+1.2%) and construction contracted (-2.1%)." Source:  GDP first quarterly estimate, UK - Office for National Statistics They also said that GDP per head has reduced slightly in each of the last two quarters. 

Tom Peck in The Times on the PM's dreadful performance at Prime Minister's Questions yesterday ... “When you’re bang to rights, it’s common in politics, though never wise, to point out that your opponent is worse than you are. It’s never wise because it’s not a denial, it’s an admission of guilt. This was like that, but worse. When you’re on the ropes over child sex offences, you can’t really return fire with an illegal cheese and wine party, but he tried it.”

From Jan Ganesh in the Financial Times on the Labour challengers to Starmer: "You have to have access to a special plane of consciousness to believe that Labour is unpopular because it is not leftwing enough."

 

Bangor University has issued a statement disavowing the views of their student Debating and Political Society and confirming the University's commitment to free speech. Here is the statement.

“A smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again. But a wise man finds a smart man and learns from him how to avoid the mistake altogether.” Roy H. Williams

I try never to get too hung up on any single opinion  poll, especially three years out from a General Election, but this set of results from the pollster More in Common is quite interesting.

Hat-tip to John Rentoul for posting on X this section of Stephen K Bush's morning Newsletter:

 Thanks to Andrew Griffith MP for posting this comment from Heath Secretary Wes Streeting on X: (Source:   Andrew Griffith MP on X: "I agree with Wes on this! More self awareness than his own Chancellor and Prime Minister.⬇️ https://t.co/stdeQxM0cw" / X )

When I was a student I was a strong supporter of Free Speech (within the law) and opponent of the so called "No platform" policy. I supported a private member's bill proposed by Fred Sylvester MP to make it unlawful for student unions or the higher education establishment's authorities to stop a group of students inviting a speaker because the people implementing such a ban disagreed with the speaker's views. A measure very like the Fred Sylvester bill did eventually become law as the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023  (click on link for details of the act.) I strongly support that act. Because Education is devolved it does not apply in Wales. The current committee of the Debating and Political Society at Bangor University, who might or might not have broken that law if it applied in Wales but were certainly unwise, have walked into a Reform UK trap by turning down a request by two Reform UK members of parliament to speak to the society. That in itself...

"A smart man only believes half of what he hears, a wise man knows which half." Jeff Cooper

Stan Ford, a royal navy veteran who took part in the D-Day landings and survived the sinking of his ship not long after that, has died at the age of 100. Stan, who was born in Bristol and later lived in Bath, celebrated his 100th birthday in May 2025, at a party attended by family, friends, and local officials. Above: Stan Ford (centre) at his 100th birthday celebration Ford served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and, at the age of 19, was serving was aboard HMS Fratton when it was torpedoed off the coast of Normandy in August 1944.  HMS Fratton was an escort ship assigned to accompany ships taking men and supplies across the Channel on D-Day and afterwards. The impact of the explosion from the torpedo which sank her was so severe that the gun platform Stan Ford was operating was blown off the ship and into the sea, with him still on it. He suffered a fractured spine and injuries to both legs when the ship was sunk in 1944, leaving him with lifelong injuries. He was p...

After the Deputy Prime Minister, David Lammy, let it be known that he had warned the Prime Minister not to appoint Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to the USA - an interesting comment since Lammy was Foreign Secretary at the time and would presumably have had to sign off on the appointment - a "Labour source" told the Guido Fawkes site, (see here ) “ If Lammy’s political instincts are telling him it’s time to make his move, it can only mean that Keir is entirely safe. ”

 “There’s a theory about the Russo-Ukrainian war that is designed to satisfy the innate desire of the contrarians to be 'against the current thing.'” “It also satisfies the desire of anti-Western westerners to blame … the West.” "Best of all, that theory allows you to appear thoughtful and nuanced while everyone else is being hysterical about Russian aggression. Letting go of it is near impossible, because ones ego and intellectualism are at stake." "The theory goes like this: Russia invaded Ukraine in preemptive self-defense against American aggression, embodied by NATO’s arrogant eastward expansion. Had America simply shown restraint and honored its alleged promises to Gorbachev, none of this would have happened. It’s a compelling narrative - one that transforms a war of conquest (born out of ideology) into a story of Western arrogance and Russian victimhood." "There’s only one problem with that theory: it’s almost entirely fiction . A very carefully ...