Brian Stanley

Dearlove Is Shocked. He Should Be. But He Is Looking At The Wrong People. Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, said yesterday he was shocked to learn that a senior Foreign Office civil servant had discussed Britain's nuclear deterrent in closed-door meetings with an organisation he describes as a front for China's main foreign spy agency. He called for parliamentary scrutiny of Stephen Lillie's meetings with the Grandview Institution during a four-day trip to Beijing last October. Dearlove is right to be shocked. He is looking at the wrong level. Lillie's meeting did not happen in isolation. It happened during what the Telegraph describes as a flurry of trips to Beijing by top British officials amid Starmer's deliberate thawing of relations with China. Sir Olly Robbins, subsequently sacked, lunched with Grandview experts the week before Lillie's visit. Jonathan Powell, now the Prime Minister's National Security Adviser, met Grandview before his appointment. Since becoming National Security Adviser in December 2024, Powell has met Wang Yi, the Politburo member directing Chinese foreign affairs, four times. His vetting arrangements have never been publicly confirmed. Every parliamentary question about those arrangements has been blocked. A civil servant discussing nuclear deterrent protocols with a Chinese spy agency front is alarming. The Prime Minister's National Security Adviser maintaining undisclosed relationships with PLA-connected officials through his private consultancy, while his vetting status remains secret, demands scrutiny of an entirely different order. The government's defence of Lillie's meetings is that no sensitive information was discussed. That formulation covers every difficult question this government has faced on China. The spy trial that collapsed because the government refused to name China as a national security threat in court. The super embassy approved despite a concealed underground chamber positioned within a metre of the cables carrying the City of London's financial data. The Mandelson appointment despite a due diligence report flagging China and Russia concerns. The same language. The same outcome. Dearlove warned yesterday that Chinese intelligence operates on an industrial scale, approaches every engagement with aggressive intentions, and exploits any relationship it can access. He said British officials should have been briefed in detail about the threat before attending these meetings. He said he has serious concerns about the national security adviser's previous contacts with China. Those concerns are warranted. The question Dearlove has raised about Lillie is a question about process and judgment. The question Powell's undisclosed vetting raises, alongside the spy trial collapse, the super embassy, the Indo-Pacific withdrawal, and Chinese components being embedded throughout Britain's energy grid against explicit American intelligence warnings, goes considerably further. A pattern of decisions this consistent, each retreating from Britain's interests and advancing Beijing's, each defended with the language of pragmatism and engagement, does not emerge from poor judgment alone. Poor judgment produces occasional errors. Sequential decisions, each pointing in the same direction, over two years, by a Prime Minister warned repeatedly who proceeded regardless, produces a different and more troubling question. Dearlove wants the ISC to scrutinise Lillie's paperwork. The ISC is already reviewing thousands of pages on Mandelson. Parliament has been blocked from scrutinising Powell. Scrutinise the civil servant by all means. Then ask who sent him, who knew, and why the pattern of engagement with an organisation accused of fronting for Chinese intelligence runs from the bottom of the Foreign Office all the way to the office of the Prime Minister's National Security Adviser. Sir Richard "has serious concerns about the national security adviser's previous contacts with China."

The Manifesto Was the Alibi The Labour manifesto of 2024 was explicit. Britain would not rejoin the customs union. It would not rejoin the single market. There would be no return to freedom of movement. Voters were told this clearly, repeatedly, and in writing. They voted accordingly. That was the promise. Eighteen months later, Cabinet ministers are publicly calling for exactly that. David Lammy has pointed to the benefits of customs union arrangements. Wes Streeting has called for a deeper trading relationship with the EU. Peter Kyle, the Business Secretary, has said it would be crazy not to engage with the prospect of a customs union. These are not backbenchers freelancing. These are senior ministers, at the Cabinet table, arguing openly for the reversal of a commitment their party stood on at a general election. Ask yourself what that tells you about how seriously the commitment was made. Downing Street's response is instructive. Sources close to Keir Starmer did not say the ministers were wrong about the destination. They said they had not thought it through. The objection was tactical: move too fast, trigger freedom of movement, and the politics become unmanageable. The direction of travel was not disputed. Only the pace. That is the admission. Buried in a briefing designed to look like a rebuke is a concession: the government accepts the logic of deeper integration. It simply wants to manage the sequencing before the public understands what is being decided. This is not a debate about Europe. It's a question about whether the people who voted in 2024 were told the truth. The agrifood deal now being finalised illustrates the method. Ministers present it as a modest technical arrangement, a matter of reducing friction for exporters. What it actually involves is Britain operating under EU law, enforced by the European Commission and the European Court of Justice, with British taxpayers funding the privilege and British ministers having no vote on the rules they are required to follow. That is not alignment. It's accession by another name. And if you doubt that the same logic will be applied sector by sector until the architecture is complete, consider that no one in government has yet explained where it stops. The economics do not justify it. Independent analysis from the Growth Commission and the Prosperity Institute reaches the same conclusion: rejoining costs more than it returns. The case being made in Cabinet, that integration means growth, is not supported by the modelling. It's an article of faith presented as an economic argument, and the public is being asked to pay for it without being told so. And the damage extends further still. Rejoining the customs union would require Britain to abandon its trade deal with India, exit the CPTPP, and unwind agreements with Australia and New Zealand. Those arrangements took years to negotiate and represent the most tangible gains from leaving. They would be surrendered not for a gain but for a loss, in exchange for re-entering a regulatory framework in which Britain has no seat, no vote, and no means of redress. That is the deal. It should be stated plainly, because the government will not state it at all. The Downing Street briefing made one thing plain. The complaint against Lammy, Kyle and Streeting was not that they were wrong. It was that they were saying openly what the government is doing quietly. The objection was to the candour, not the content. The manifesto said one thing. The negotiations are producing another. That is not a government managing a difficult policy. It's a government that made a promise it never intended to keep, and is now hoping the public will not notice until it's too late to matter. "David Lammy has pointed to the benefits of customs union arrangements. Wes Streeting has called for a deeper trading relationship with the EU"

There is a new belief taking hold among Britain's institutions, and it is as dangerous as it is dishonest. The countryside, we are told, is "too white." Not green. Not rural. Not historic. White. And therefore a problem to be fixed. This is not satire. It is official policy. Government-commissioned reports now describe England's hills, fields, pubs and footpaths as a "white environment" that risks becoming "irrelevant" unless it is reshaped to reflect a "multicultural nation." Rural authorities are instructed to attract specific ethnic groups, redesign access, rewrite interpretation, adjust behaviour, and rebrand culture itself. All paid for by the taxpayer. This is not about access to nature. No one is barred from walking in the countryside. There are no gates marked by race. What is being objected to is not exclusion, but presence. The wrong people, in the wrong numbers, in the wrong place. Solitude is suspect. Pubs are "problematic." Dogs are a "barrier." Englishness itself is quietly reframed as a form of hostility. Once again, the pattern is familiar. First the language. Then the targets. Then the money. Culture is recast as a flaw. Continuity becomes "dominance." History is reduced to optics. And the group that built, sustained and preserved these places is told – politely, bureaucratically – that it must adapt or move aside. What makes this moment different is that the countryside was never in crisis. Cities were transformed by pressure, density, and policy failure. The countryside was stable. Rooted. That stability is precisely why it is now being targeted. It stands as a rebuke to the idea that constant demographic churn is inevitable or desirable. So it must be corrected. This is demographic engineering, not conservation. The state has decided that England's national landscape reflects the wrong story, and that story must be rewritten. Marketing is altered to show the "right" faces. Outreach is targeted at the "right" groups. Behaviour norms are revised. The land remains, but the meaning is changed. We are told this is because "we all pay for it." But that argument collapses on contact with reality. If something truly belongs to everyone, you do not single out one group as a problem and instruct it to change. You do not racialise shared space. You do not treat existing culture as a barrier to be dismantled. That is not inclusion. It is displacement by policy. The same logic now runs through housing, planning and migration. New towns dropped onto villages. Farmland sacrificed. Infrastructure ignored. Numbers driving everything, consent nowhere. The countryside is no longer a living inheritance but a blank surface onto which officials project social outcomes. And notice the asymmetry. One group must always adapt. One culture must always soften, explain itself, dilute itself. The others are affirmed, accommodated, reassured. That alone tells you this is not about fairness. It is about power. Once you accept that England itself is a racial problem, nothing is safe. Not villages. Not landscapes. Not history. What survives only does so until the next report declares it "unrepresentative." The countryside does not need re-education. It does not need racial quotas, rewritten customs, or academic lectures about who belongs. It needs defending because when the state decides a country's heartland is "too white," it has already decided the country itself must change. And once continuity is broken, it does not return. "The wrong people, in the wrong numbers, in the wrong place. Solitude is suspect. Pubs are "problematic." Dogs are a "barrier." Englishness itself is quietly reframed as a form of hostility."