Chris Whiteside's Blog

 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. The current committee of the Debating and Political Society at Bangor University, who may or may not have broken that law but were certainly very 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 was entirely within their rights, but they then put themselves firmly in the wr...

"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 ...

This is what Angela Rayner, then deputy leader of the opposition, tweeted when Rishi Sunak became Leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister without calling a general election:

Wednesday 4th February 2026:  Sir Keir Starmer at this week’s PMQs ‘ Morgan McSweeney is an essential part of my team. He helped me change the Labour party and win an election. I have confidence in him. ’ Sunday 8th February 2026: Morgan McSweeney resigns. He said: "After careful reflection, I have decided to resign from the Government. The decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was wrong. He has damaged our party, our country and trust in politics itself. "When asked, I advised the Prime Minister to make that appointment and I take full responsibility for that advice. In public life responsibility must be owned when it matters most, not just when it is most convenient. In the circumstances, the only honourable course is to step aside."

  And Air Chief Marshall Sir Arthur Harris - known to popular history as "Bomber Harris" - was as good as his word. The point has also been made that the present Russian government seems to have attacked Ukraine with a similar naive belief that they could bomb the hell out of Ukraine's civilian population, but it would be an outrage if anyone did anything to them ...

 

The Crewkerne Gazette has put together a parody of Major General Stanley's song from "The Pirates of Penzance" - this one is called "I am the very model of a modern Prime Minister." If you watch it, you will probably find it worth watching to the very end: there is a surprise twist in the last few seconds!

Let me make clear at the start that I am not in favour of racism against anyone, whether their skin is white, back, brown, yellow, blue or any other colour, whether they are Jewish, Muslim or a member of any other faith group or none, and whoever the racism is coming from. Anyone may fall foul of the temptation to slip into racist modes of thought, anyone can be a victim of racism, and the suggestion that people of any particular colour are either uniquely guilty of or uniquely free from racism is itself racist. I am in favour of sensible attempts to educate people against racism and extremism. However, all such programmes must be constructed carefully to ensure that they do not become subject to over-reach and in particular, do not appear to target what the majority of society would regard as legitimate mainstream opinions. The danger of this is all the greater because it is usually the product either of genuine misunderstandings and miscommunication or of unconscious biases on the pa...

The CPC is to seek a retrial in the Elbit Systems case. I presume that on the charges where the jury acquitted the defendants those verdicts will stand, but there should indeed be retrials on those charges where the jury was unable to reach a verdict.

When the history of newspapers in Britain is written, Eddie Shah deserves to be remembered as the man who started a revolution in the industry by freeing the press from the print unions and introducing new computer-based technology to the nationals. His actions were hugely controversial at the time, but after his death in late December 2025, even The Guardian could write of him in their obituary published yesterday,  " Shah sparked the changes that broke the unions’ power and allowed the introduction of new printing methods, exploited first by Rupert Murdoch and subsequently by every other national newspaper group including the Guardian. From the grey and inky pages and grainy black-and-white photographs of the 1970s and early 80s, the newspapers burst into colour reproduction, more innovative designs and speedier and uninterrupted print and circulation runs. " They quoted Eddie Shah himself as saying “ It wasn’t a failure because our innovations benefited the rest of the ind...

 “I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many or the prejudices of the few.” — Benjamin Disraeli

 

 

This was Andrew Neil's monologue at "Times at One" yesterday, and posted on X "BETRAYAL  And still the revelations about Peter Mandelson’s betrayals from the heart of government come, each one more jaw-dropping than the last.  We learned earlier this week that he’d tipped off his convicted paedophile mate about an imminent €500bn bailout of the Eurozone, advance information hugely useful to a financial fixer like Jeffrey Epstein.   Even more incredibly, we saw how he’d advised America’s most powerful banker, via Epstein, to threaten the British government over plans to tax bankers’ bonuses in the wake of the Great Financial Crash, caused by said bankers.  Which the powerful banker then did in an intimidating call to then Chancellor Alastair Darling. A call inspired by the government’s very own business secretary, one Peter Mandelson.   Now we learn that the moment Mandelson was given a note about a highly sensitive meeting between Darling and then US T...

"Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured." Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) Yes, I have used this quote before, but in the past few years I have found that reminding myself of it has become more and more necessary given the number of terrible things happening in the world and sily thigs being said and written about them.

Today is the 52nd anniversary of the M62 coach bombing, one of the worst terrorist atrocities ever to take place on British soil. Twelve people, including a woman and two small children, were killed when a bomb exploded on a coach carrying off-duty soldiers and their families. An entire family was wiped out by the bomb. Another 38 people, including men, women and children were injured. The authorities believed the attack to be the work of the IRA, who never formally claimed responsibility but implicitly admitted later that this and another two incidents had been " authorised operations carried out by units of the Irish Republican Army. " Here is a plaque commemorating the victims at the M62 Hartshead Moor service station near to where the blast occurred. We will remember them.

“One of the reasons why I am in favor of less government is because when you have more government, industrialists take it over, and the two together form a coalition against the ordinary worker and the ordinary consumer.” Milton Friedman

Andrew Willshire, founder of the independent strategic analytics consultancy Diametrical Ltd, has a great piece on Conservative Home about Kemi Bdenoch's path to renewing the Conservative party and the internal contradictions in the arguments of her critics, particularly those of the recent Conservative defectors to Reform UK. You can read the whole piece at Andrew Willshire: Reform is a Frankenstein’s monster of a party | Conservative Home but here are a few extracts "Ever since the election, there has been a fashion among parts of the right-wing commentator class to tour news studios to demand that the Conservative party have some sort of “reckoning”, an “inquisition” into how and why it failed." "More particularly, it is apparent that the reckoning that they want is primarily for the so-called “Lib Dems in the party” to be expelled. By this account, it was solely the fault of these 40 or so MPs that 14 years of Conservative government failed to result in the New J...

I have written a number of articles on my blog about cases  When clever people do stupid things  and about  Why clever people do stupid things . You will rarely find a more example of a brilliant man who repeatedly does incredibly stupid things than Lord Peter Mandelson. I suspect future historians will gasp in disbelief at how, between 1997 and 2024, three consecutive Labour Prime Ministers (Blair, Brown and Starmer) appointed Peter Mandelson to some of the most important jobs in their power to bestow, and then kept bringing him back and appointing him to new high offices after he repeatedly crashed and burned in disgrace. The temptation to appoint him must have arisen because when he was at his most intelligent, Mandelson was one of the most able, effective and persuasive people Labour had. But it should have been obvious after at most the second time he had to resign in disgrace that when it comes to matters of personal ethics, Mandelson doesn't have the common sense o...

Jeremy Clarkson is not always right. But every now and again he hits the nail on the head. I think he may have a point here ...

"Economic policies need to be analyzed in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the hopes that inspired them." Thomas Sowell

I put up a quote at the weekend from a column in The Times by former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. The honesty of the column enormously impressed me: how many senior politicians an you think of who would write for publication that they are concerned about their successor repeating their own mistake? Rishi argues that the politicians' dilemma is this - almost every reputable economist will tell you that if you want to provide decent public services while protecting the standards of living of everyone in society, especially the most vulnerable, the most important  thing you should concentrate on is economic growth. (Even Starmer appeared to understand that at the outset.) But that is "Jam tomorrow" and is rarely at the top of the priority list for swing voters. You can't deliver a better society without growth, and you can't deliver growth if you listen to every trend on social media and the newspapers (or if you listen to a single word that delusional people like the...

 A point to ponder from Roger Scruton on education:

Former Police Officer Charlotte Cadden has been selected as the Conservative candidate for the Gorton & Denton by-election. Charlotte served for 30 years as a Police Officer, both for Greater Manchester Police – where she led a Neighbourhood Policing Team – and the Metropolitan Police Service.     Charlotte is also a trustee of the charity Sex Matters, a member of the LGB Alliance Business Forum and coordinates the Women’s Rights Network in Greater Manchester. She has also been involved in local Conservative politics in Bolton and a school Governor in the area.  Labour have failed the people of this constituency, hammering the local high streets with higher business rates and local residents with higher taxes to pay for more welfare. Meanwhile Reform and the Greens both offer nothing, but fantasy politics built on unfunded promises and socialist economics – with no serious plan to tackle the serious issues our country faces. Only the Conservatives, under Kemi Bad...

Today is Candlemas, also known by various other names including the Feast of the Presentation  of Christ in the Temple. That's why I posted  "When to the temple Mary went" by Johannes Eccard  as my Sunday music spot this morning. Candlemas is usually celebrated in the Anglican church on the nearest Sunday to the second of February, and marks when Joseph and Mary took the infant Jesus to the temple to be dedicated to God, forty days after his birth. This date is also half way between the winter solstice and the Spring Equinox, and thus marks that we have passed the deepest part of winter and re on the way towards Spring.. Some people may be thinking at this point,  "Hang on - didn't the Holy Family flee to Egypt after Jesus was born to avoid the hit squad sent to Bethlehem to kill all infant boys under the age of two by King Herod?" The usual answer to this from Christian scholars is that Jesus, Mary and Joseph did not have to seek refuge in Egypt until the W...

After John Rentoul, chief political correspondent of the Indy, had published the summary below of alleged comments from Tony Blair with his (mostly unflattering) views of various colleagues including Sir Keir Starmer and Gordon Brown, Tomon Doran came back and asked, "If Blair thought Brown was a nutcase, why did he let him keep the second most important job in the country for over a decade?" John Rentoul replied: "He thought he was a brilliant nutcase with a lot of support in the Parliamentary Labour Party." (The passage which inspired this exchange is here:)

"Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage." Winston Churchill

Whether you agree with Rishi Sunak or not, this level of honesty from a senior politician is most unusual, and welcome. The below is from a Times Newspapers article this weekend, by former PM Rishi Sunak. More to follow on this issue.

Today the new Whitehaveen and Workington Conservative team had a great campaigning session in Whitehaven with the Conservative candidate to be Mayor of Cumbria, Mike Starkie.  And here is a great performance of a brilliant piece of music to which to relax after the hard work.  You'll see that Hilary Hahn had a most distinguished audience for this performance!

"Knowledge can be enormously costly, and is often scattered in widely uneven fragments, too small to be individually usable in decision making. The communication and coordination of these scattered fragments of knowledge is one of the basic problems- perhaps the basic problem- of any society." Thomas Sowell

Since the election, police numbers have fallen by more than a thousand.  Keir Starmer is weak on crime, weak on the causes of crime. And our High Streets are paying the price. Violent theft from businesses is up by two-thirds. The next Conservative government will recruit an extra 10,000 police officers and crack down on crime, as part of our plan for Stronger High Streets.

A great parody by Russ Abbot of the song I just published as today's music spot

  High streets are struggling. High taxes. Punitive Business Rates. Soaring energy costs. Rising crime. More paperwork. ‍When our high streets struggle our communities fall into decline. That's why the Conservatives have developed a credible plan to get British business booming again. We will: Abolish business rates for 1000s of high street businesses including pubs and shops. Cut electricity bills for businesses with our Cheap Power Plan. Hire 10,000 extra police to crush crime on our high streets. Cut red tape for businesses. Defend key pillars of the community such as post offices, pubs and pharmacies. We will also continue to engage businesses to identify new ways to help communities flourish.‍ Do you back our plan to get high streets thriving again? Is there anything else we should be doing? Let us know. Complete our survey at: Supporting our High Streets

Labour is holding Britain back. Kemi Badenoch has been setting out her plans to put Britain back on track. More details to follow.

 "A regime that can only stay in power through sheer violence and terror against its own population has its days numbered.  It may take weeks, but this regime has no legitimacy to govern the country." German Chancellor   Friedrich Merz on the Iranian regime massacring its' own people in a desperate attempt to retain power.

Professor Slantchev appeared pleasantly surprised that the FT published this letter from him ...

If someone stands for the leadership of a political party, doesn't get it, and then defects to another political party, then they have proved the people who didn't vote for them right. Any such defection probably also says more about the party which is willing to accept that kind of recruit than it does about the party they have left.

"Labour's latest partial u-turn on pubs isn't fooling anyone. Cafes, hotels, and small businesses across the country are still getting clobbered by their tax rises. Only the Conservatives will abolish business rates for thousands of firms and help rejuvenate the high street." Rt Hon Kemi Badenoch

"Not long ago I was flying back from Poland after my first visit to Auschwitz, and mulling the horror of what I had seen - the hills of children’s shoes and suitcases, the tonnes of human hair. What struck me was the sheer scale of the operation and the obvious truth that the Nazis had not done this on their own. The rounding up of innocent people and packing them into trains : this greatest ever act of mass murder was committed with the active complicity of huge numbers of European civilians in every occupied country.  On my plane back from Warsaw I happened to meet the daughter of an old colleague who told me that she no longer felt safe to wear a Star of David round her neck in London. I was furious and ashamed at the failures of policing and political leadership that have allowed her to feel so unsafe. Anti semitism is alive again in Britain, Europe and around the world. The old virus is awake. We must never be so arrogant and so conceited as to believe that our civilisation c...

The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) 2026, 'Bridging Generations', is a call-to-action. A reminder that the responsibility of remembrance doesn't end with the survivors - it lives on through their children, their grandchildren and through all of us. This theme encourages us all to engage actively with the past - to listen, to learn and to carry those lessons forward. By doing so, we build a bridge between memory and action, between history and hope for the future. As the years pass, we’re growing more distant in time from the Holocaust and from the other, more recent genocides that are commemorated on HMD. That distance brings a risk – memory fades and the sharp reality of what happened becomes blurred, abstract or even questioned. Bridging Generations highlights the crucial role of the next generation in preserving the memory of the Holocaust and carrying it forward. It highlights the power of intergenerational dialogue – of listening to those who came before us and ...

Eighty one years ago today, on 27th January 1945, at about 9am, the first Soviet soldier from a reconnaissance unit of the 100th Infantry Division appeared on the grounds of the prisoners' infirmary in Monowitz. The entire division arrived half an hour later. The same day a military doctor arrived and began to organize assistance. In the afternoon soldiers of the Red Army entered the vicinity of the Auschwitz main camp and Birkenau. Near the main camp, they met resistance from retreating German units. 231 Red Army soldiers died in close combat for the liberation of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Monowitz. Two of them died in front of the gates of Auschwitz main camp. One of them was Lieutenant Gilmudin Badryjewicz Baszirow. The first Red Army troops arrived in Birkenau and Auschwitz at around 3 p.m. and were joyfully greeted by the liberated prisoners. After the removal of mines from the surrounding area, soldiers of the 60th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front marched into the camp and broug...

"This Holocaust Memorial Day, we remember the millions of lives lost in the Holocaust. This year’s theme, Bridging Generations, reminds us of our duty to carry these memories forward, especially as antisemitism rises again. We must never let the truth fade. We will remember them." (Rt Hon Kemi Badenoch , Conservative leader, shown here with Dr. Marcel Ladenheim, while signing a Holocaust book of remembrance.)

"Some basics about Chagos for BBC reporters, Sky anchors and others coming new to the debate. 1.  The Chagos Islands lie half-way between Africa and Indonesia, and host a key Anglo-American military base on the main island, Diego Garcia 2.  France ceded the archipelago to Britain in 1814 separately from Mauritius; the islands were always a distinct territory, though, lacking suitable facilities, their administration was sited in Mauritius 3.  To put the issue beyond doubt, Mauritius permanently renounced any claim to the islands in 1965 in return for a cash payment from Britain 4.  It eagerly trousered the money, its first post-independence PM, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, explaining that he had been glad to sell any theoretical right to “ territory of which very few people knew, which is very far from here, and which we had never visited ” 5.  Mauritius is indeed 1337 miles from the islands, and began to press its claim again only when it grew closer to China in ...

 Posted Saturday 24th: "Yesterday, the Conservative team in Parliament delivered a masterclass in how experience and teamwork can defeat bad policy. Thanks to the combined efforts of Priti Patel, Lords True, Callanan, Keen, and Wolfson, along with our defence, legal and foreign policy teams in the Lords and Commons, we forced Labour to pause its reckless attempt to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.  Labour's stupid surrender deal would have cost the British taxpayer £35 billion and weakened a vital UK-US military base in the Indian Ocean. This wasn’t the work of one speech or one person. It was the result of deep experience across the Conservative benches -people who understand how parliament works, how the law works and will knuckle down to get stuff done.  I'm so proud of my team." Rt Hon Kemi Badenoch , Conservative leader

They used to define an intellectual as someone who could listen to this without thinking of "The Lone Ranger" ...

"To Our Allies: I Am Sorry." A US Marine veteran issues a deeply moving tribute to his former comrades from America's NATO allies and apologises for the words of his president.

"Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true. But other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly - and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence." (Thomas Sowell)  

The Leader of the Conservative party had this to say about the outrageous comments from the US President about America's allies serving "well back from the front" " President Trump’s comments about British Troops in Afghanistan are disgraceful. Comments like this are factually wrong, weaken NATO, and denigrate the memory of our brave soldiers who served there. " Rt Hon Kemi Badenoch 1,100 troops from countries other than the USA died supporting the American-led coalition mission in Afghanistan, including among others 457 Brits, 149 Canadians, and 43 troops from Denmark. Those eleven hundred people were not killed "well back from the front." I wonder how many Americans realise how much anger among America's allies President Trump stirs up every time he makes another gratuitous and cruel insult to people who gave their lives when their countries came to the aid of the USA. Or how much completely unnecessary damage he has done to America's reputat...

Andrew Neil's monologue on Trump's Greenland climbdown: "So it’s peace in our time after all.   Trump marched his ego to the top of the hill then marched it down again.  After numerous demands that he be allowed to annex Greenland coupled with threats of penal tariffs on anybody who opposed him, Trump backed off in Davos yesterday, agreeing a framework with NATO to bolster security in the High North — Greenland and the Arctic region.  NATO secretary-general Marc Rutte, who brokered the deal, says US ownership of Greenland — something Trump had insisted was essential for US security — wasn’t even raised in his Trump talks.  So it was all much ado about nothing. A waste of everybody’s time for those covering this story and for those trying to follow it. Sorry about that.  The usual Trump sycophants and know-nothings are piling in to claim it’s all just another example of his negotiating genius, the art of the deal in action again, in all its vain glory.  He p...

As I have previously posted, the Labour government asked 63 councils which were going through local government reorganisation whether they would like to postpone elections due this May (2026). It is important to stress that there were councillors of all parties who voted to go ahead with elections, that a majority of councils did NOT ask to have their elections postponed, and the elections for those councils will go ahead in May. We now know which councils have asked to have their elections postponed, and for which councils the government is bringing forward legislation to do this but for some reason there are discrepancies in what is being reported in the mainstream media and shared on social media about which councils are involved. I have seen various reports that 28, 29 or 30 councils asked for, or are, having their elections postponed - but the government statement lists 29 councils for which it says it is bringing forward legislation to postpone elections this year. They are: ...