Coffee Break: Across the Pond With the Starmer Government

Highlights of the Starmer Government in Action

Trump Hits the UK With a Censorship Tax

Keir Starmer’s keenly honed political skills seem to have let him down again. This time it was over tariffs. It was Sir Keir’s job to persuade Trump not to put tariffs on the UK, because they might just be the final straw for the economy. This was going to be a hard sell because Trump plainly doesn’t like Starmer after he’d sent 100 of his party activists over to campaign for Kamala and had all but called Trump a Fascist on numerous occasions. And Trump doesn’t seem like a ‘let bygones be bygones’ sort of guy. But Trump has a weak spot, he loves royalty, so he was said to be inclined towards not putting tariffs on Britain.

Up until the moment Starmer had this lady arrested.

This is Dr. Tossici-Bolt, a 64 year old retired medical researcher, who is being prosecuted for an alleged breach of a ‘buffer zone’ outside a Bournemouth abortion clinic on two days in March 2023. Under UK law, it is illegal to do anything that is meant to intentionally influence someone’s decision to have an abortion within 150 meters of any recognized clinic in England and Wales. She merely stood closer than the law allows from the clinic silently holding up a sign. And it was Starmer’s prevarication on this case that supposedly led Trump to imposing 10% tariffs on the UK.

We are told that her case is being supported by the ADL in the US and it is possible it was they who brought this case to Trump’s attention. The ADL were described in the article as:

ADL International is an American conservative group which is known for its strict stances including outlawing abortion, banning same-sex marriage and opposing gay rights.

The ADL’s website says:

The Anti-Defamation League has a longstanding commitment to protecting civil rights, and has been a key partner in advancing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) rights.

But it’s not just her case that is irking Trump’s team, another bone of contention is the Starmer government’s insatiable appetite for censorship, especially on the internet. The Starmer government says it has a duty to remove any “grossly offensive”, but legal, internet posts that cause “annoyance or inconvenience” to users. The number of arrests in the UK have increased under Starmer, but were on an upward trajectory even before he took office.

One example of a “grossly offensive” post led to the arrest, allegedly by six taser packing policemen, of two law abiding parents after they criticized the appointment procedure for selecting a new school principal in a private Whatsapp chat. The arrest took place in Hertfordshire, which has a crime rate of 96.7 crimes per 1,000, which is actually quite low compared to many places in the UK. However, many crimes there (32,600) are violent crimes, including sexual offences, which comprise 31.5% of all crimes committed in the area and only 10% of these crimes were investigated thoroughly enough to bring a successful prosecution.

The person in charge, the chief constable of Hertfordshire, Andy Prophet, when asked about the arrest, merely said it was “lawful.” “The law – and I’m answerable to the law – defines harassment really clearly as any behavior causing alarm, harassment and distress,” he told The Times. Apparently, sending 6 policemen in 3 cars, who made a big show of arresting the parents (see the video at the link) and then throwing them into the cells for 11 hours, caused no alarm, harassment and distress, even though they called the ordeal “nightmarish.” The couple continued, “We’d never use abusive or threatening language, even in private, and always followed due process. Yet we have never even been told what these communications were that were supposedly criminal, which is completely Kafkaesque.”

The clearly failing chief constable was even criticized by Jonathan Ash-Edwards, who is the police and crime commissioner for Hertfordshire, and nominally in charge of the police, who said the police intervention was unwarranted. To which the chief constable whined:

“There was a lawful reason to arrest. With the benefit of hindsight, we could have achieved the same ends in a different way… we probably could have had a conversation,” he added.

However, he said he understands why their arrest could have been viewed as “over the top”, saying the uniformed officers and several vehicles may have been unnecessary.

“We probably could have achieved it with one or two uniformed officers and if we needed some people to go in and support, we could have thought about officers in plain clothes and dealing with it a little bit lower key,” he said.

It didn’t stop him from threatening to arrest their local councilor for merely talking to the couple, though. After holding the charges over the couple’s heads (they were hit with restrictions while the matter was being investigated) for over 5 weeks, the police finally got around to investigating and found they had actually done nothing wrong.

This policy of going after non-crimes and ignoring other crimes like burglary, which are seldom investigated, has led to a shortfall in police recruitment, which was not, despite what Sir Mark Rowley said, down to funding cuts as the police budget has been increased every year.

As mentioned last week, Starmer’s government also has plans to force US tech companies to take down anything they consider to be “legal but harmful” using the Online Safety Act.

They’ve already started by targeting the US social media outlet, Gab. Ofcom, the UK’s internet censor, wrote to Gab informing them that they, Ofcom, consider Gab to be under their purview and so they should only allow content to be displayed that Ofcom approves of. Gab told them that they are a US based site that serves US customers under the protection of the first amendment at which point Ofcom threatened them with a $20 million fine.

This stance by Ofcom contradicts Trump’s Executive order 14149, so it will be interesting how this plays out.

Note: the Online Safety Act does not apply to large UK social media sites or search engines, because the country doesn’t have any, with many critics citing a previous set of regulations, called IR35, and the associated onerous bureaucracy, being the reason. Under the regulation it is very difficult to hire a UK based software contractor but hiring software contractors based overseas face no restrictions or bureaucracy.  IR35 also led to an acute shortage of truck drivers. Many people have complained to successive governments about it and the Sunak government promised to either repeal it or make it less onerous but in the end, they decided to leave it as it is. The regulation was supposed to bring in an extra £300 million per year but only raised £1.5 million in its first year of operation falling to only £219,180 in 2011 – the government has refused to say what the enforcement efforts cost to yield such a paltry amount.

STOP PRESS: Keir Starmer has shelved ban on ‘legal but harmful’ social media content to avoid derailing tariff negotiations but will still be demanding to censor US sites via Ofcom. It is not known whether the ban will be revived after the trade talks are concluded.

 

Oceania Has Always Been at War with Eastasia

According to UK’s National Crime Agency, we should no longer be concerned about Russian criminals performing their dastardly deeds in London. Now it’s the Chinese who are the most dangerous foreign criminals operating in Britain and are putting at risk the vast range of freedoms the population enjoys:

The NCA reveal in a new report that mobsters from the country currently pose the biggest foreign organised crime threat to the UK, a conclusion that even experts admit has taken them by surprise.

Chinese criminals play a significant role across a vast swathe of Britain’s criminal underworld, including drug smuggling, human trafficking, modern slavery, fraud and cybercrime – the agency warns in its 2025 National Strategic Assessment.

This is obviously worrying, so have they got any examples of their heinous acts? The NCA could only provide us with a few actual examples, but they assured us they represent the tip of the iceberg. The first is a case where a group of students operated a ‘shadow bank’ to move money to the UK for Chinese students that are studying there, thus evading Chinese currency export controls.

Given that shadow banking is not against the law, what were these students convicted of? They were convicted of money laundering after the police said, with no apparent proof, that they were linked to criminal gangs in China. In fact, it was admitted in the trial that the money legitimately belonged to students and so the crime actually took place in China (evading export controls). However, by securing the convictions it allowed the authorities to seize the money (£55 million was the figure quoted) under the proceeds of crime act.

What else have these wily Orientals been doing? We were told that Chinese gangs steal mobile phones from Britain and ship them to Shenzhen in China, where they are stripped down for parts. We were also told that they are able to get away with it because of China’s “lax laws.” Shenzhen is where many of the phones were first made and the city has massive volumes of phone parts and new phones that hadn’t passed quality checks; so, why these phone thieves target Britain we may never know.

The Chinese also manufacture small boat engines which are used by cross-Channel people smugglers (and half the world’s fishermen). Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, vowed to target the firms responsible as part of a new ‘world first’ sanctions regime announced earlier this year.

And there are Chinese illegal drug operations, like the ‘sophisticated’ cannabis farm discovered by police in Ballymena, Northern Ireland. It was, we were told, run by a ruthless Chinese and Balkans gang consisting of a Chinese man, who tended the plants, and the owner who is an Irish farmer. What the Balkans connection was, remains a mystery.

The most egregious case involved the Chinese ‘Bitcoin queen’ Jian Wen (pictured). As the article says, one minute she was a single parent working in a takeaway earning the minimum wage and a few weeks later she was in control of a £3 billion bitcoin fortune. This money, we were assured, had been stolen from 128,000 Chinese citizens, in China, by a woman named Yadi Zhang, who fled to Britain after committing the heist. And then, trusting soul that she appears to be, she handed it all over to her newly employed maid to launder for her. Why the bitcoin actually needed laundering, given that it can be used legally in the UK, is, you must admit, rather odd.

Another puzzling aspect was why Yadi Zhang didn’t just say she was investing the money on behalf of her 128,000 Chinese investors? Given that the money came from the investment fund she was running? In fact, how did they know that she wasn’t; particularly in light of the fact that the original investment was around £1.2 billion and it is now worth over £6 billion. That sounds like a pretty good return. She seems to have faded from the picture, so we may never know.

Anyway, well done to the police for catching the maid. All they needed to do was hand both her and the money back to China so the victims would get their money back and justice would be served.

Not so fast; the thing is, Britain really needs the money , particularly now that Trump’s tariffs have wiped out the £7 billion fiscal headroom that the Chancellor had set up. And to pull this off and still look legitimate, they needed a Chinese national who committed the crime in Britain, which Yadi Zhang didn’t do – it was admitted that she fled to Britain to escape the consequences of the crime – so they had to convict the maid of the catch-all crime of money laundering.

Which they did, Jian Wen got over 6 years in jail and Britain was able to seize the money under the proceeds of crime act.

There is only one tiny flaw in the plan, Jian Wen isn’t from China, she’s from Singapore.

The Row Over Two-Tier Sentencing in the UK Is Still Ongoing

But now with a new twist. Starmer said that he disagrees with the sentencing guidelines, that treat certain members of community more leniently, and will do everything he can to overturn them. But the sentencing council hit back by saying they were only following the recommendations of a report that was written by one of Starmer’s own ministers; David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary.

Starmer Pledges to Reduce Business Regulations by Introducing More Regulations

In order to attract more inward investment, Keir Starmer pledged to reduce the burden of regulations on business. At the same time his government, in the form of his deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, launched a torrent of new regulations aimed at businesses in the new Employment Rights Bill.

The bill was hailed by the government as their way of boosting productivity and to grow the economy by introducing yet more onerous regulation, complete with Starmer’s legendary addiction to over-bearing and time consuming bureaucracy that is the “duty” of businesses to comply with, with huge penalties for non-compliance. Businesses are still reeling from the increase in National Insurance payments, introduced in the disastrous October budget, with many either reducing staff or simply closing down and they have reacted with dismay to the new, proposed regulations:

Angela Rayner’s workers’ rights Bill is set to bolster unions, harm jobs and cripple growth, employers have warned, in a fresh setback for Labour’s attempt at hauling Britain’s economy upwards.

UK firms say the Government has taken an “irreversible” step towards a more business-hostile Britain through fresh changes to the Employment Rights Bill – which include extending a ban on zero-hours contracts to cover agency workers and giving a new enforcement body more powers.

They also warned that Ministers had turned down almost all of their pleas to loosen the rules – and have said Labour’s Bill will push businesses into a “thicket of regulation” which would “undermine the Government’s own push for growth”.

For example, under the new law, workers can claim sick pay, which is paid by the employer and cannot be claimed back from the government (as it was previously), from day one. So, a person could apply for a job, get accepted and then claim to be ill and thereby collect the sick payments for an unlimited period without ever having done a day’s work there. It also forces businesses to allow unions to enter their premises any time they wish in order to try to entice the workers to join the union. Employers must also praise the benefits of belonging to a union when people are first employed and give people unspecified time off to undertake union duties. Employers even have to provide an office for them to conduct their union work together with access to support services like the internet, office equipment etc. The bill also automatically opts-in union members to compel them to pay a political levy to the Starmer Labour Party and internships are set to be banned.

Under the bill, officials from the Fair Work Agency, which is being brought into being, are tasked with ensuring that the forms are being filled in correctly and the regulations are being strictly adhered to. They have the right to enter both business premises and private homes whenever they want. They are also allowed to compel businesses to hand over any paperwork that the enforcers wish to see even if it impedes the operation of the business. You can read a law firm’s assessment of the new agency here.

You can read the bill here.

 

In Order to Provide More Money for War, Starmer Is Targeting the Disabled

Previous cuts to social welfare have been justified on the basis that they are being used to provide more money to “secure Ukraine’s freedom”.  However, they resulted in a significant increase in children living in poverty, but even then more money was needed. So, the Starmer government decided to go after another vulnerable group, namely the disabled, by scrapping most PIP payments. The government website describes these payments thusly:

“Personal Independence Payment ( PIP ) can help with extra living costs if you have both: a long-term physical or mental health condition or disability. difficulty doing certain everyday tasks or getting around because of your condition.”

It covers things like help with bathing, mobility and eating.

Guardian readers, who are generally highly supportive of the Labour party, have reacted with dismay.

Waving away the condemnation from all sides of the political spectrum, the government boasted that the money saved is in a good cause as it is used to protect the UK’s prosperity and freedoms as “Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine poses a serious threat to UK prosperity and security. We are proud to be a leading partner in providing vital support to Ukraine.” And towards this goal “the UK has committed £7.8 billion in military support for Ukraine and will sustain £3 billion a year in military aid until 2030 to 2031 and [sic] for as long as it takes.” You can read a full list of the UK government’s largess towards Ukraine here.

The Starmer government said there was likely to be further cuts and Starmer said they were going to be using the money they save to spend on arms as we need to get ready for war.

FUD watch

In this week’s new feature, we look at how various European governments are following the advice of the person who was responsible for putting Hitler into power.

According to the UK’s Daily Mail, and based on threat assessments from the government, Britons should prepare an emergency pack like this one:

 

Leaving aside the fact that most people would rather risk radiation than spend 72 hours cooped up in a shelter with people subsisting purely on baked beans; the chart says that a Swiss Army Knife should be included in your kit. However, if you try to buy one, say from Amazon, you get:

If you are curious about the laws relating to knives in the UK, you can read them here. Note, they explicitly ban pea shooters but not Machetes, which are the weapon of choice for London’s drug gangs.

The warning has been issued purportedly because of fears emanating from Russia. In particular, the threats posed by Russia to the UK’s energy system and how everyone needs to be aware of Russian sabotage threats to the LNG supply – note, the UK still imports 4.7% of its gas, in LNG form, from Russia.

You can read more about how Putin is plotting to cause blackouts here. These threats are all somewhat mendacious, the real reason is that the Starmer, Sunak and Johnson governments have completely screwed up Britain’s energy supply (the article goes on to explain how) and everybody can look forward to extended black outs. Which is the sort of thing you’d expect if you put a person in charge of UK energy who isn’t even capable of eating a bacon sandwich.

If you have any other examples of FUD please leave a link in the comments.

The Mood Is Getting Uglier in the UK

This video, made, it is assumed by the accents, by people who came from money, sums it up, saying that the country appears to be heading for a civil war. Isn’t it time for Starmer to spend a little more time at home dealing with the UK’s problems rather than overseas dealing with theirs?