Effective 13th December 2026, all non-wholemeal flour produced in England, Scotland and Wales must be ‘fortified’ with 250 micrograms (0.25mg) of folic acid per 100g. Small, artisanal mills with an output of <500 metric tonnes per annum will be exempt. It’s estimated that around one third of all foods will be affected, including all manner of baked goods, pastas, pizzas, canned soups, jarred sauces, instant gravies, pre-packaged spice mixes and many not-so-intuitive examples such as processed meats and seafoods. Bear in mind, flour is used widely as a thickening agent, binding agent, bulking agent, anti-caking agent and a carrier for seasonings and batters. Folic acid will therefore saturate - or, more accurately, contaminate - a huge amount of supermarket inventory. Note, large numbers of products are already voluntarily fortified: cereals, spreads, plant-based milks, energy bars, juices and so on. So, the incoming mandate will be amping up what the marketplace is already doing. This is all being done in the name of preventing neural tube defects (NTDs). I’ll begin by covering the relevant biochemistry which, whilst somewhat tedious, is important to appreciate the egregious nature of what they are doing.

Folate (otherwise known as vitamin B9) is an essential nutrient, present naturally in a variety of foods, chickpeas, dark leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables being some of the richer sources. In foods it exists largely in reduced forms, most notably active 5-MTHF (5-methyltetrahydrofolate), the dominant circulating form, which is also sold as a nutritional supplement: “L-Methylfolate”. Note the methyl- prefix here - it is already methylated and ready for uptake with minimal further processing (food-sourced folates have a polyglutamate tail which is enzymatically snipped into a monoglutamate for absorption in the gut).

Folate has a uniquely important role in what is called one-carbon metabolism: the donating of one-carbon groups including the methyl group (CH₃), methylene group (CH₂) and formyl group (CHO). Supplying these one-carbon groups is essential for DNA and RNA synthesis, making red blood cells (with its all-important partner, vitamin B12), and the methylation cycle. The methylation cycle involves transferring said methyl groups (CH₃) from one molecule to another by the master donor S-Adenosyl-Methionine (SAMe). SAMe starts out as humble methionine. An enzyme combines methionine with ATP to form SAMe. SAMe then hands off its methyl groups in a variety of contexts to regulate DNA (i.e. to turn genes on or off) and make hormones and brain chemicals. (This is why you will find SAMe sold as a nutritional supplement said to support ‘mood and wellbeing’). After donation, SAMe degrades (via S-adenosylhomocysteine) into homocysteine, which is toxic in excess. Folate supplies the necessary methyl group to convert homocysteine back into harmless methionine, which is then converted back into SAMe; and so the cycle goes on.

During early pregnancy, folate levels in the embryo are crucial to healthy development. A track of neural cells is laid down vertically from the tailbone up to the cranium, which will become the scaffold for the brain and spinal cord. In what is a marvel of embryology, the two parallel edges of this cellular track curl upwards, making for a central groove or valley. This curling continues until the two edges meet, first around the neck before zippering shut in both directions through a series of anchor points: up to the head and down to the tailbone so as to form a hollow tube - the neural tube. This zippering-shut process must occur with exquisite precision and necessitates one-carbon donation to support both the tremendous cell division involved and the cytoskeletal adaptation, namely the morphing of the neural cells in a manner which allows for the two edges to seamlessly fuse. Failed closure of the neural tube, either at the cranial end or at the caudal end, results in one of two serious birth defects respectively: anencephaly (which almost always implies a stillbirth or death soon after birth) or spina bifida, where the spinal column has not closed, typically causing severe, lifelong disability.

This critical event happens during a very narrow window - around four weeks after conception - often before the woman is aware that she is pregnant, and there is a lag of a few weeks to build up serum folate levels. The argument made for mandatory fortification, therefore, is that intake in women of childbearing potential needs to occur proactively (pre-conception) rather than reactively.

In reality, NTDs are not caused by deficient intake of folate, or at least hardly ever is that the problem. Whilst poor nutrition (eating highly-processed calorie-dense junk) is rampant in the West, malnutrition (inadequate nutrient intake) is very rare. By sheer dint of consuming lots of crap, we are - albeit by accident rather than good intention - meeting and generally exceeding our nutrient requirements. Make no mistake, the problems of the Western diet are overwhelmingly those of excess, not deficiency: way, way, way too many calories. You will often hear fitness influencers speaking of “hitting your macros” and so on. The idea is pushed that you can’t cram enough protein into your diet. Outside of active muscle builders (applicable almost entirely to men in their youth, since women do not have the testosterone levels necessary for comparable muscle growth), large protein consumption is surplus to your needs and not doing your kidneys any favours. You need the right amount for your age, sex and activity, not a gram more. Outside of a certain cohort including certain elderly people who cannot hold down their food and a subset of vegans, very few people are getting too little protein; most are getting too much of it, alongside carbs and fats of course.

Back to the issue of NTDs, we know inadequate dietary folate is almost always not the underlying cause thanks to the work of epidemiologist James Mills, who showed back in the 1990s that mothers of babies born with NTDs had folate levels on a par with healthy controls. What they did have, though, were abnormal levels of homocysteine, indicating the problem is one of folate metabolism, i.e. a processing defect rather than insufficient intake. This is down to a variety of causes including the presence of autoantibodies to the folate receptors, and defects in the enzyme that converts homocysteine into methionine, methionine synthase (MTR). In other cases, lack of vitamin B12 - without which MTR cannot do its job properly - is to blame. Other risk factors include insulin resistance or maternal diabetes (typically correlating with obesity) due to the suppression of the Pax3 gene, which is a key regulator of the closure of the neural tube. Thankfully our bodies have a backup methyl donor, choline, that is able to bypass the various bottlenecks to which folate is susceptible: it works via its metabolite betaine, which remethylates homocysteine through a separate enzyme (BHMT). A reasonable approach would be to recommend that sexually active women who are not on contraception include choline-rich foods in their diet: eggs, beef liver, fish or plant alternatives.

The state, however, is not concerned with the distinction between deficient folate intake versus deficient folate metabolism. They say: sod all that, if we just flood the systems of recently pregnant women with folate, we can bludgeon our way through these metabolic bottlenecks and more-or-less guarantee any embryo will have access to adequate folate. Since there is no practical way of limiting this supplementation to the cohort of interest, we’ll just have to mass medicate the population at large via the food system.

The snag here, though, is that active folate (5-MTHF) is not stable enough in its free acid form to make for a suitable food additive. Stabilised salt forms exist and are used in supplements, but at the scale and cost demanded by industrial milling they are not viable. Enter folic acid. Folic acid is the synthetic analogue or counterpart of folate, a petrochemical derivative. It is the fully oxidised form of folate: it lacks four hydrogen atoms from its pteridine ring, resulting in two additional double bonds (see red arrows), making it exceptionally heat-stable and shelf-stable and therefore ideal as a flour additive.

We can’t use folic acid directly, though. Our bodies must first reduce it (add hydrogen atoms) into tetrahydrofolate (THF), a job performed in two steps by an enzyme called dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR). THF then picks up a one-carbon unit to form 5,10-methylene-THF, which a second enzyme, methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) - also the name of the gene that encodes it - reduces to active 5-MTHF. This is where it hits a bottleneck. DHFR is expressed in humans at only very modest levels in the gut and the liver because it was never meant to do the job of metabolising folic acid. It is having that job forced upon it. Its native job is to recycle spent molecules of natural folate, namely dihydrofolate (DHF), back into THF. The second bottleneck is that gene variants of MTHFR involving either one copy (heterozygous) or both copies (homozygous) cause reduced efficiency of the enzyme and these variants are very common, some 60-70% of people carry at least one variant.

The result is a spillover of Unmetabolised Folic Acid (UMFA) into the bloodstream, which is detectable in the serum of >95% of the US population, not a country exactly famed for its stellar health outcomes. Anyway, it is UMFA that is the subject of concern, implicated in various health problems. UMFA binds the cell-surface folate receptors (notably folate receptor-alpha) with much higher affinity than natural folates, displacing or outcompeting them. This leads paradoxically to functional folate deficiency and rising levels of homocysteine. So you have a primary issue of UMFA and a secondary one of elevated homocysteine, associated, centrally, with the following harmful effects:

• Masking vitamin B12 deficiency: methionine synthase (MTR, met earlier) is needed to unlock natural folate and build healthy red blood cells. When you lack vitamin B12, this enzyme shuts down, locking your folate away and causing a clear form of anaemia that is easily spotted. UMFA, however, can be fed into the folate pool by DHFR without this B12-dependent step, so no anaemia emerges whilst the damaging effects of B12 deficiency to your nerves occur silently and irreversibly.

• Suppression of Natural Killer (NK) cells - part of our immune system’s frontline defence against viruses and early cancer cells. Note, the evidence here is observational.

• Cancer: a significant rise in colorectal cancers was observed in the USA in 1998, coinciding with mandatory folic acid fortification. However, this was not sustained and was followed by a decline in rates. Folic acid has a dual personality with respect to cancer: it is cancer-promoting in the context of existing tumours, acting like a fire accelerant. This is due to its displacing natural folates, allowing oncogenes to be activated and tumour-suppressing genes to be switched off. On the other hand, it appears to be protective against cancer insofar as it supports DNA repair and methylation. Note, however, this protective effect is a function of folate, not folic acid itself, and is therefore subject to the metabolism bottlenecks discussed. In any event, one interpretation of the spike in colorectal cancers is that it was a ‘flushing out’ of existing tumours or pre-cancerous polyps; increased detection from expanding colonoscopy screening is a competing explanation.

There is no consensus as to what constitutes a safe level of UMFA and establishing such a level is not something which is amenable to a controlled study for two reasons: ethical constraints and the duration of study necessary. After all, UMFA does not cause acute toxicity. Its harms accumulate insidiously through chronic exposure, namely a circulating pool of UMFA being permanently resident in the bloodstream, causing gradual epigenetic drift and immune atrophy. Moreover, when a doctor orders a standard serum folate blood test, the lab test cannot distinguish between healthy, chemically reduced dietary folate and harmful, unreduced UMFA. It’s all lumped together into one high number, which doctors traditionally interpret as an indicator of good nutrition. Consequently, we only have pre- and post-fortification observational data to go by. Since the signals are modest and there are numerous confounders, teasing out the harmful effects of UMFA is very difficult, almost impossible.

The bottom line here is that public health is perfectly willing to hijack the food system and put the population’s health at a degree of unknown risk for the benefit of a minuscule cohort; and I do mean minuscule. The Number Needed to Treat (NNT) for this initiative is something in the order of 330,000 per year which is to say you need to force folic acid on 330,000 people for a year to spare a single theoretical case of an NTD. Such a trade-off is thoroughly perverse but, if you reject the state’s prerogative to violate your bodily autonomy, as I’m sure many of you do, then it is ultimately beside the point because the alleged benefit is irrelevant.

Suffice it to say, the very term ‘autonomy’ is anathema to public health and you need only cast your mind back to 2020/21 to know this is so. You will remember the rabid archetype that came out of the woodwork to prop up the lie of a deadly virus stalking the land. Shills like Dr. Rachel Clarke and Prof. Devi Sridhar were among the worst offenders on the propaganda front, complicit in inflicting widespread misery, above all on the elderly isolated in care homes.

I’ve digressed a little. The point is, a decision to adulterate our food is not guided by any principle that recognises you as an individual but by cold, utilitarian arithmetic. Folic acid is extremely cheap and every case of an NTD is said to cost around £3 million in lifetime economic and health benefit. This £3m is a composite figure based on the loss of quality of life to the affected person (which is translated to a monetary sum for every year of life), loss of productivity by being excluded from the workforce and direct healthcare costs (the NHS burden). Based on the government’s impact assessment, every £1 spent across the milling industry on fortification is expected to yield around £13-£15. The payoff is therefore attractive for them and that’s all that matters.

Remember the state’s objectives. It wants as many tax-generating slaves as possible to service its ballooning debt obligations, which now stand at 95% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Keeping nominal GDP high is crucial to sustaining the creditworthiness of a nation swamped in debt. The debt-to-GDP ratio is a principal driver of the bond market, i.e. how much lenders to the UK government demand to be paid in interest for the risk they are taking on. In an ideal scenario, the state would force the slaves to keep working till they drop dead without ever paying them a penny of their pension entitlement. They cannot get away with that, though. Once the slaves learn they are not getting anything in return for their taxes, they will throw down their tools. The system only works on the latent promise that after slaving away until the age of 67, reprieve awaits in the form of a measly £241 per week State Pension.

If you want to understand why the country and continental Europe have been flooded with immigrants for the last 20 years, there is your answer: Europe is facing a demographic crisis with an ageing population and fertility rates far below replacement level whilst drowning in debt. Italy’s fertility rate has sunk to a staggering 1.14 children per woman, deaths heavily outnumber births, and over 24% of the population is already aged 65 or older; and they have 140% debt-to-GDP. These nations are desperate to prop up nominal GDP and support the bond market. It does not matter that the immigrants arrive empty-handed. GDP = Consumption (C) + Investment (I) + Government Spending (G) + Net Exports (X - M). It measures the sheer volume of money changing hands, regardless of who owns it, how it was generated, or whether it improves anyone’s quality of life. As a brief aside, the idea of depopulation or culling us, which has been a favourite in truther circles, even if limited to what they would view as non-productive elements of society, namely the elderly, the poor and the disabled, is contrary to their overall interests. Although it is true this cohort does not generate tax, they are all consumers and so contribute to the ‘C’ component of the formula.

Private equity billionaires like Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone or David Rubenstein of Carlyle build wealth by executing Leveraged Buyouts (LBOs), namely buying companies using a small amount of cash and huge amounts of debt. It’s all about cheap debt and immigration supports cheap debt via different mechanisms including helping to buffer both inflation (via wage suppression) and the debt-to-GDP ratio. Needless to say, those belonging to this stratum of society are immune to the cultural fallout. They live in ultra-rich enclaves. They will lie back atop their Lürssen yachts in the French Riviera, amused as the masses squabble amongst themselves in the naïve belief that their preferred party-political tribe is different from any of the others in substance over style.

I don’t say this to stoke resentment towards billionaires or wealthy people generally; there are already plenty of grifters who have assumed that role, Gary Stevenson being a prominent example. I only hope to remind those who apparently need serial reminding that the state’s agenda is not at the mercy of your opinion or whichever puppet happens to be installed at No. 10. Western regimes - and Britain especially - are masters at sustaining the delusion that the system is answerable to the masses. It starts with a convincing pantomime calling itself a parliamentary democracy featuring a bicameral legislature, the pomp, the robes, the regalia, the performative jousting at the dispatch box between teams red, blue, turquoise and yellow. Then they grant you a rich toolkit of seemingly democratic mechanisms and protections: elections (both local and national), writing to your MP, FOI requests, the Parliamentary Ombudsman, Public Bill Committees, Select Committees, PMQs, the Ministerial Code, Judicial Reviews, Inquiries (oh we love an Inquiry), Petitions and Public Consultations.

On that last count, they allegedly “consulted” us about folic acid fortification back in 2019. What fraction of the population do you imagine would have even been aware of the consultation (assuming they know what one is), much less responded to it? Less than 1%. Do you recall a single media outlet reporting on it? No. Would it have made the blindest bit of difference if you had responded? No. By the time a policy has reached consultation stage, it’s already been determined. The “consultation” exists only for some final pre-legislative tweaking and, as I say, to pay lip service to the idea that your view is being sought; that they are in some way accountable to you. These processes are without exception a charade and exist only to keep the masses orderly and docile. Nothing reassures the state more than your engaging in officially-approved, permitted forms of protest and complaint: voting, writing to your MP, going on marches, signing petitions and so on. As long as you are doing those things, you are well contained and easily profiled.

So, back to Gary for a moment, if he were less of a grifter, he would stop leading people up the garden path by trying to expand the state’s power to engage in extortion under penalty of imprisonment, commonly known as tax. Instead he would be lobbying vociferously for the abolition of the most offensive of taxes, inheritance tax. Rather than constantly gloating along the lines of “look, the fing is, yeah, you’re up against me, I’m a professional trader”, he might try helping people protect their net worth against runaway inflation by sharing his trades or if not specific trades then his market forecasts, all for free.

The democratic toolkit, as I call it, is very, very effective and allows the average Westerner to wallow in a smug notion of living in a ‘liberal democracy’ and to point their fingers at the likes of Russia and Iran. “Look how they treat gay people, and how women are oppressed!” The media has been heavily pushing a caricature of theocratic oppression in Iran for the last four or so years, beginning with the reported death of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini. Isn’t it curious how this turned out to be a precursor to bombing their country including civilian infrastructure and a girls’ school? Isn’t it also curious how this coincided with Iran selling 300,000 barrels a day of oil in Yuan to China at the expense of the flailing Petrodollar? That is not to defend the human rights records of the likes of Russia, Iran or China - in many cases they are appalling. It is only to highlight that the West commits its human rights abuses with a suit on and has a far more evolved propaganda machine.

Gays and women come up a lot, you’ll notice, during finger-pointing chats. The masses are programmed through rote learning that cheap tokens of freedom - things like gay rights and liberal drug and alcohol laws - are all-important markers of a free society. The state is more than happy to dish out freedoms of this kind and grant the masses all manner of hedonistic outlets.

When it comes to women, I suggest they have certainly not been beneficiaries of the liberal values foisted upon them by the feminists, beginning with suffrage. The agenda has been decidedly devious: promise them emancipation from the ‘evil patriarchy’ and recruit them into the workplace so as to make corporate slaves out of them. They were simply made to swap one master for another, a particularly bad deal that has left many of them childless and, if not childless, then lacking a stable nuclear family. Fatherless households are at an all-time high in Britain. Nearly 50% of first-born children today experience parental separation by the time they reach early adolescence (age 14), versus 21% of those born in 1970. Meanwhile, the number of women whoring themselves out online on OnlyFans - or OnlyFans Lite in the form of X and Instagram - for either money or a limitless supply of validation from strangers is also at an all-time high. One observes a correlation between these two facts.

I hope my point is clear: where ‘democracy’ is concerned, ignore the lofty rhetoric and focus on real outcomes. Things like the fact that they injected 94% of the population with an unlicensed genomic drug (deployed under a temporary use authorisation (TUA) - not a licence) after telling you that you could leave your home for one hour’s exercise a day; or how war criminals (murderers) like Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell roam free, enjoying a lucrative political afterlife.

The fact they are soon to adulterate your food with folic acid is just another illustration of the utter contempt in which they (politicians) hold you. I know some of you will resist this characterisation and continue to cling in vain to the idea of a benevolent politician: “You’re too cynical. Not everybody in politics is like that”; “There are good people who just want to make a difference”. I have heard these platitudes ad nauseam. I can concede that very occasionally decent people slip through the net but they are fringe ambassadors of the system and assuredly marginalised or ousted. There is an especially low tolerance for those who dare to oppose the Zionist war machine. Robin Cook was a victim in this regard. Jeremy Corbyn, leave aside his batty lefty economics for a moment, opposed every single war from Vietnam onwards through to the Syrian air strikes. As soon as he became a credible threat, i.e. in with a fighting chance of becoming PM (he was a 10/11 favourite in mid-2017), boom, they ran the “anti-Semite” smear campaign, mercilessly. Lowe and Farage know where their bread is buttered on that front, make no mistake about it. You can ignore the theatrical hostilities:

I arrive at my parting advice to readers. The game is rigged and always has been. Stop participating in it in any capacity: as a protestor, a voter, a signatory to a petition, whatever. The health and wellbeing of you, your family and your friends is all that matters. Allocate your resources strictly and exclusively to activities that serve that end. For a brief period, I entertained the concept of mass resistance to the technocratic agenda. When the vaccine was being rolled out in 2021, I wrote a long thread urging people in earnest to refuse it, believing that keeping uptake below a critical threshold had the potential to derail any plans for vaccine passports, which were being mooted at the time as a gateway to digital ID. Being caught up in the fervour of it all, I believed, amusingly, that a mass of people rejecting the vaccine would precipitate the emergence of a sort of anarchy that would manifest broadly as resisting the expanding surveillance state and taxation - central features of state tyranny.

In the end, 94% queued up for the jabs. Even where the dissenting contingent is concerned, no sooner had the scamdemic blown over than nearly everyone reverted to type, which is to say back to the safe refuge of their respective party-political tribes. In fact, as far as I can tell, they are now as wedded to party politics as they’ve ever been, with no discernible trace of having ‘awoken’. At the same time, chilling powers of surveillance have been assumed in the form of the Online Safety Act whilst Live Facial Recognition cameras are being rolled out nationwide.

I can no longer in good conscience advocate resisting the ‘agenda’ to anyone. It will serve only to deprive you of time, energy and sometimes money and indeed there is a school of thought which says that resistance movements are designed to do just that. To that extent, maybe the normies, whose diet of popular culture truthers (myself included) were keen to ridicule, had the last laugh, at least insofar as they avoided some of the more apocalyptic fearporn that Twitter was awash with during that whole surreal episode that was 2020/21.

Whatever unpleasant initiatives governments have in store for us over the coming decades, they will fail only due to poor implementation and not because you signed an e-petition. The advantages they have are enormous and insurmountable. It is a case of adapting to their plans more than resisting them: circumventing rules, sometimes flat-out breaking them, where possible and at acceptable risk.

I conclude with some dietary advice where folic acid is concerned. It’s not panic stations. Some commentators are guilty of sensationalising the risks. We will not see a tidal wave of disease - the effects of UMFA are not of that nature. The harm is best understood by analogy with ionising radiation of the kind we are exposed to when flying or when having an x-ray or a CT scan. Occasional or infrequent exposure does not pose any material risk to your health but your cumulative, lifetime dosage matters: chronic exposure is associated with a non-negligible increase in your risk of cancer. By the same token, you will want to be conscious of your cumulative exposure to fortified products and at least limit - or, better still, largely eliminate - them from your diet. The distribution of folic acid will be skewed towards processed foods and ultra-processed foods (UPFs). You should therefore see this as a golden opportunity to eschew processed junk and refined grain - a relatively novel phenomenon in the human diet - in favour of organic, whole foods. Godspeed.

Pick any nominally ‘far-right’ party you like from across Europe: Geert Wilder’s PVV, Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord, Afd in Germany, Rassemblement National in France, Vox in Spain, Orban’s Fidesz, Lowe’s ‘Restore Britain’. Stop and note how they are, without exception, avowedly pro-Israel and either tacit apologists, or worse, champions, of its terror campaign – its insatiable belligerence – its war crimes which include dropping white phosphorus munitions in Southern Lebanon, one of the most diabolical acts man can commit against fellow man.

This is not an accident; and it is not because they have been ‘infiltrated’ or ‘hijacked’ or ‘co-opted’ or ‘subverted’ by Israeli influences as some like to imagine. It is because the entire right-wing movement is a purpose-built vehicle for advancing the Zionist agenda, cloaked under the Union Jack in this country and the respective national flags elsewhere. You place a demagogue at the helm, be it your favourite Mossad pawn, Tommy Rubinstein or, his Country Life counterpart, Rupert Lowe.

What are their functions? Number one, pander to the flagshaggers. Oodles of tacky, souvenir-shop rabble-rousing patriotism is the order of the day. Number two - and this is crucial- portray yourself as a disruptor, a maverick, a taboo-breaker, a rebel who’s upsetting the applecart, who’s causing untold offence to the establishment, who’s out of control, who they need to keep a lid on, and pronto. This cannot be stressed enough, it’s crucial that the mob: (a) get decent entertainment value from sticking it to their perceived enemy and; (b) feel like they are part of an unstoppable uprising. You show your opponents the proverbial middle finger gratuitously and on the daily. Make it seem like you have no filter. Remember, you’re tossing the rulebook on polite discourse out the window and ‘finally saying what the rest of the spineless, political class’ daren’t say’: “I’m banning halal, just watch me” (Ooh, yeah, they love some of that)/"“I’m cancelling benefits for foreigners, if they don’t like it, tough, they know where the door is”(Yes, siree!)/"“Call me a ‘racist’, it’s a water off a duck’s back”. You get the idea.

Then comes the clever bit: you split the movement between hardliners and moderates, designating them ‘ethnats’ and ‘civnats’ respectively. You indulge the more spiteful, bigoted, 1930s instincts among the ethnats, tantalising them with the prospect of mass deportations (that are not remotely viable for numerous reasons) whilst hinting at citizenship and ILR stripping too. Cue “Lowe is shifting the overton window”. You contrive an almighty squabble between rank and file of these two factions who remain oblivious to the fact that they are all unsuspecting sponsors of a common Zionist cause whether in the form of Restore or Reform. As this is true of individual parties, so it is true of the whole.

It’s high time you normies out there, with all due affection, cotton on to how easily you’re manipulated. Start to imagine the devious techniques you might avail yourselves of if seeking to keep the masses trapped in a climate of fear, anger and chaos, the remedy for which is somehow always around the corner if only you vote for the next hero ont the party-political merry-go-round.

It is the gratuitous shoehorning of “confirmed to be Muslim” and “alleged to be a Muslim immigrant” in both tweets which makes anyone angrily reacting to the post liable to be accused of “racial hatred”. It is the syntax, which does not ring true and bears the Nudge Unit’s fingerprints. It is the dry, flipchart-derived name of the account - “European Invasion” - which conforms to a style used by a number of state-conceived entities that have materialised out of thin air in recent years, all with no apparent provenance. Above all, though, it is the uniformity of the media coverage that immediately follows. This involves pummelling you with the term “disinformation” or “misinformation” over and over and over, à la Operation Mockingbird, with Europe Invasion’s post serving as the all-needed citation.

Nothing is more revealing of a psy-op than the legislative subtext found in the media coverage after the fact; and so this makes for a general rule: wait to see what they want out of an event. The problem-reaction-solution formula invariably becomes readily apparent. On prior occasions, it was the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. Then, the Public Order Bill. In this case, calls for beefing up the Online Safety Act 2023 were being made before Lucy had even set foot in a police interview room. Keep in mind, they will always overshoot when it comes to introducing totalitarian laws by asking for more than they want. That way, when a provision of a particular bill is subsequently amended or removed, it will made to feel like a climbdown, all thanks to the hard work of your favourite civil liberties campaigners, “Big Brother Watch” (who are in on the whole charade). Of course, it’s an entirely Pyrrhic victory that will have been secured and what you consider a climbdown will have in fact been war-gamed in from the beginning. If you’re really lucky, they may even let one of your silly, little petitions reach a 100,000 signatures, earning you a precious “debate”. All the while, the veneer of democracy is sustained.

Back to the matter in hand, the tone of the coverage was clear: the scourge of “disinformation” needed to be addressed, pronto. So we mete out a string of custodial sentences for “hate speech” in quick succession, Lucy’s among them, before ushering in the new OFCOM regulations on so-called “illegal content”, effective March 2025. Note, the regulations are lucrative business. Breaches come with very heavy fines, up to 10% of the offending platform’s global turnover. That’s turnover, not profit. For a platform like X, we are talking up to £400 billion, none of which, by the way, is earmarked for so-called “online safety”. It goes straight to the treasury. I would tentatively surmise, in fact, installing the regulations was much more to do with taxation through the back door by means of hefty fines than actual censorship. After all, they need “illegal content” to persist in order to levy the fines, all the while paying lip service to protecting you from ‘online harms’.

As confident as I am that Lucy was set up by 77th Brigade, I concede I cannot prove it. I can only claim to have become a keen observer of how numerous psy-ops have have played out, in the last five years especially. With that, comes an acute familiarity for the various tell-tale signs discussed. Whether you are persuaded by these signs is a matter for you. Ultimately it will come down to whether you believe the state is sufficiently devious, capable and motivated to pull off a straightforward exercise of this kind. Means, motive and opportunity (MMO), in other words. For the purposes of this piece, however, it is not what I have to prove, but rather what the Crown has to prove that concerns us. This brings me to her legal defence, that of which she was ultimately deprived.

Before one gets to the question of what she posted, Lucy’s prospects of receiving a fair trial were shot. There was a deluge of reporting all aimed at drumming up support for regulating social media platforms, all of which had the so-called “far right” in its crosshairs. Several pieces were juxtaposing the Southport riots with Lucy’s post or similar rhetoric as to link A and B. Needless to say, an aggressive censorship initiative was underway and, in line with that, it was clear those who had transgressed accepted norms of online chatter needed to be made examples of. More than that, several accounts were seen discussing her tweet whilst she was still on remand, mischaracterising her words and omitting to mention that the tweet had been deleted. The deletion is crucial to any eventual defence Lucy might hope to enter as it goes it to intent. There is a world of difference between someone who posts something intemperately, then thinks better of it and hastily deletes it, versus a legitimate attempt to foment unrest. It corrupts the perception of any reader to suggest Lucy was in anything other than the first category. The example below, dated 7th August (with 2.1 million views) is particularly egregious in that he states in the present tense that the Lucy “wants to see migrants burnt alive”. These are all grounds for her legal team, such as it is, to put in a stay of proceedings application yet none is made.

I now turn to defending the charge proper. Under section 19(1)(a) of the Public Order Act 1986, the prosecution is required to prove beyond reasonable doubt that: (i) the Defendant published or distributed written material; (ii) the material was threatening, abusive or insulting; and (iii) the Defendant thereby intended to stir up racial hatred.

1. No “racial hatred”

• The deleted post contains no discernible target group by reference to “colour, race, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or other national origins” as exhaustively defined under s.17 of the Act. Race simply does not feature in the defendant’s post, not even incidentally. There are no racist slurs or racist tropes. The post is not a racist diatribe. There is no racist innuendo. There is no dog-whistle reference to any race, no nod and a wink. On the contrary, the defendant is in no mood to be mealy-mouthed. She is unapologetic, defiant and saying it as she sees it but not even a hint at race is to be found. Indeed there are no abusive words full stop, much less racially abusive words. There is a singular insult in the form of “bastards” but it is non-specific and not connected to any protected group

• At least one target race is essential for the offence to be made out; as established as in R v Norwood [2003] EWCA Crim 1983 where a conviction was upheld because the language was unambiguously aimed at a protected class

• The occupants of hotels do not constitute a defined racial or ethnic group as set out by Lord Fraser in Mandla v Dowell-Lee [1983] 2 AC 548 in finding that Sikhs constituted an ethnic group based on various shared characteristics. The hotel occupants may and do in fact come from various racial and national backgrounds, no less than five continents, and they speak a plethora of languages. In R v Sheppard and Whittle [2010] EWCA Crim 65, the written material clearly and explicitly targeted racial groups.

• The contention may be that racism was the undercurrent or subtext or motivating factor for the defendant’s words but such inference is insufficient and in any event denied. At the material time, the defendant saw the housed migrants as being collectively responsible for the Southport stabbing incident earlier that day - mistakenly, yes - unreasonably, yes - but not on account of race insofar as they belong to an agreed upon race or set of races which they do not. Lord Reid in Lewis v Daily Telegraph Ltd [1964] AC 234 (HL), “What the ordinary man would infer without special knowledge has always been the test. He is not naïve; he can read between the lines... But he must base his inference on what the defendant has actually said”

• The defendant includes the phrase “if that makes me racist, so be it” which is to say “if the consequence of what I have just said is to be labelled a ‘racist’, then I accept that consequence”. In other words, at the material time, the defendant was not willing to censor herself in order to avoid being called a ‘racist’. There is no admission of racist intent, quite the contrary, she is pre-empting being called a “racist”, conscious of how liberally and often unreasonably the accusation is levelled. Either way, though, the preceding parts of the post do not contain language directed at a race.

• The prosecution seeks to rely on adjacent communications, such as other posts she made, in an effort to establish racist intent. This is to concede, of course, whether they like it or not, that the racial element of the alleged offence is lacking. The Court is reminded of the wording of the offence under s.19 (a): he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, as to say, by effect of the material itself. The Crown must show the words in and of themselves reflect an intention to stir up. General characterisations of the defendant as someone who, say, harbours racist views are not good enough under the test. The court is obliged to assess the allegedly offending words in their own terms without cross-reference to the defendant's speculated opinions on race. In DPP v Collins [2006] UKHL 40, the House of Lords emphasised that the court must assess whether the words used in the charged communication are, in and of themselves, threatening, abusive or insulting, without importing general character assessments. Similarly, in Chabloz v CPS [2019] EWHC 3094 (Admin), it was affirmed that while prior conduct might inform context, the focus must remain on the specific material charged.

• Absent at least one discernible target racial group, the offence of stirring up “racial hatred” is not made out. The only coherent charge would have been one of “encouraging or assisting a crime” pursuant to the Serious Crime Act 2007 which it is submitted the Crown knew it could not sustain and so strategically opted for a Public Order offence being the softer test insofar as it does not require proving an intention to cause violence per se. The charge is thus an abuse of process and the court is asked to stay proceedings permanently.

2. No Call to Arms

• The key clause is “Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards, for all I care [my emphasis]”

• The insertion of “for all I care” crucially shifts the grammatical mood from the imperative mood (an order or command) to the subjunctive mood. It is no longer a call for arson but an expression of indifference to arson occurring.

  

• “for all I care” is not mere linguistic style. Indignant as the defendant feels at the time of her post, she is evidently unwilling to go as far as issuing a command of violence and so stops short of doing so (and follows this up with a later tweet denouncing violence as being not the answer)

• The court is bound by the literal meaning rule. The prosecution is not entitled to rely on paraphrased or isolated parts of the post or to reinterpret words beyond their linguistic boundaries. Charleston v News Group Newspapers Ltd [1995] 2 AC

3. An ephemeral post does not amount to a “publication”

• Consider a company bound by the Companies Act 2006 to publish its annual accounts. It does so by posting a link to a PDF on its website but then 3.5 hours later deletes it and attempts to argue that it has complied with the requirement. This would not wash with any court or regulator in the Land. “Publication” is not satisfied by the mere technical act of making something visible for a short time. Jameel v Dow Jones & Co Inc [2005] EWCA Civ 75: the mere technical accessibility is not sufficient for liability.

• In criminal law where freedom of expression (Article 10 ECHR) is engaged, the definition of ‘publication’ must be narrower, not broader, than in a civil context

• It is submitted that ‘publication’ requires a defendant’s intention to disseminate the offending words - whatever they may be - to be realised or made effective through continuity of access. Thus an essential property of a ‘publication’ is durability. It’s submitted 3.5 hours is so short a period as for a reasonable person not to accept any publication materialised

• Publishing something is not an irrevocable act. It is the prerogative of a publisher to retract or withdraw that which he has published. This is well established convention. Academic journals often issue retractions. The right to revoke a publication is a necessary extension of the GDPR’s Right of Erasure a.k.a. the Right to be Forgotten which would not be satisfied if the ordinary person were prevented from taking back the words he or she has used

• The deletion of the post by the defendant is incompatible with the intent required to be proven under s.19 (a) (1) and was also so swift as to disqualify the post from amounting to a “publication”

4. Views do not equate to “distribution”

• ‘Distribution’ within in the meaning of Act entails an offender actively and effectively disseminating the offending material or words. This could be handing out flyers as in R v. Bird (1988) or, sending e-mails or text messages, or perhaps recruiting others by word of mouth to attack someone: “tonight, when he gets off work, let’s fuck up John”; but in any event doing something

• The prosecution would have the court imagine that 300k views is tantamount to the defendant having handed out 300,000 printed copies of her post which, it is submitted, is a nonsense. After the defendant clicks “Post”, she is but a passive observer. She has no influence whatsoever over the alleged (and unverified) number of “views” and instead is entirely at the mercy of X’s algorithm and the inclination of others to repost as to how much visibility the post eventually gets. In DPP v Collins, the court distinguished between a person's original communication and how widely it spread once in the public domain with the original speaker not being accountable for the latter

• In a private message, the defendant talks of the post having “bit [her] on the arse” which refers to the unforeseen negative fallout of one’s actions. The defendant realises she has posted something heedlessly and is expressing consternation at the blowback she is receiving from that action. This is not compatible with an intention to distribute and, by extension, an intention ‘to stir up’. The necessary mental element of the charge is lacking.

• The defendant does nothing herself to enhance the visibility of the post. She does not use hashtags. She does not tag anybody. She does not request for it be shared or reposted. Indeed the only positive action she does take is to delete it.

5. Timing as a mitigating, not aggravating, factor

• The prosecution seek to the argue that the prevailing political climate aggravates the offence

• This is purely speculative as there is no objective standard as to what constitutes a time of heightened political sensitivity or any way of determining to what extent the social atmosphere is supposedly fraught. There is no barometer to which one can refer. There is no control environment as to be able to say that, had the defendant made her post at a time of relative calm (to the extent such a time even exists), that it would have been less disruptive. Indeed there is no way to say the post had any effect whatsoever much less a measurably worse effect because of its timing.

• The argument also works both ways. If a speaker is addressing a gathering which is tense and on edge and which subsequently turns disorderly, you can say, on one hand, the timing of speech made matters worse but equally that tensions were already very high before the speaker arrived on the scene and so the speech is unlikely to have made any difference. In other words, that disorder would have followed regardless.

• Consider a road rage incident where a driver is stuck in gridlocked traffic and becoming increasingly frustrated. At a certain point, he loses his temper, gets out of his car and has an angry outburst in the middle of the carriageway which is said to cause alarm and distress to surrounding motorists, giving rise to a Public Order offence. The prosecution argue the large number of motorists on the road at the time aggravates the offence. This results in an absurdity whereby the very thing that has precipitated the offending conduct is also said to have aggravated it, violating the Golden Rule, Adler v George [1964] 2 QB 7.

• In the defendant’s case, it is the timing - being the Southport stabbings - that is itself the triggering factor for her post. Unless it is suggested the defendant had a draft of her post saved and that she chose to deploy it at a time when she believed it cause maximum disruption, then she is a victim of said timing, and insofar as she is guilty of the alleged offence (which is denied), the timing is a mitigating, not an aggravating, factor. To seek to hold the timing of the post against the defendant would be perverse and amounts to a cynical attempt to fashion a more serious offence than exists.

• The offence is not made out

I do not claim this defence would have succeeded necessarily because, when facing a pre-determined outcome, it does not matter what you say. What I do say, though, is that it could not elude even the most junior barrister of questionable competence that a post that makes nil reference to race is liable to amount to a flagrant abuse of process by the Crown.

It gets worse, though. Instead Lucy is advised to put in a “plea in mitigation”, something intended to excuse the offending conduct and lessen the offence which was not merely unhelpful but positively damaging to her cause. This is not to diminish Lucy’s personal trauma as regards the loss of her child 14 years prior, only to say legally it had next to no chance of succeeding. The event had no proximity to the alleged offence and the judge ultimately had none of it (pa. 21, Sentencing Remarks). I’m not privy to what was in Lucy’s mind at the time and so cannot say to what extent it contributed to her reaction that evening but the perception from a court and the public was guaranteed to be that she was seeking to leverage a personal tragedy to excuse “hate speech”. Apart from anything else, it had emerged that she had said something to the effect of intending to play the mental health card which would have been pretty much fatal to any chance of her getting any mileage out of such a plea. That a barrister would even suggest pursuing this course, one that was sure to seal her fate, is highly suspect.

In closing, I come to some of the commentary in the aftermath of Lucy’s sentence, most of which has not done her any favours in my estimation, and that includes Allisson Pearson’s piece in The Telegraph. I’ve no objection to the title vis-à-vis Britain bearing shame for her injustice, that much is true. It’s when we get into the substance, or the lack thereof more accurately, that problems emerge. I had expected, naively, to find a spirited defence of Lucy on grounds of free speech. I thought I might hear of how Milton, Blackstone, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Paine et al. would all be turning in their respective graves to hear of her plight, but nothing of the sort. Five paragraphs in, Ms. Pearson completely bails on her: “It was without doubt a horrible, hateful and deeply offensive tweet”. We are to take it from that she agrees Lucy committed the offence, only that her sentence was unduly harsh.

How craven. What does it matter whether it was “deeply offensive”? Perhaps a brief refresher on our tradition of free speech is due. We do not criminalise impassioned speech. We do not imprison those who indulge in hyperbole or take liberties with language in the heat of the moment. We do not lock people up for having an intemperate outburst. It’s incumbent upon a journalist to say as much and, if you’re not willing to stick your neck out for fear of being seen to condone an “offensive” tweet, then maybe it’s time to reconsider your chosen profession.

The entire piece is predicated on Lucy’s guilt and amounts to a futile plea for leniency on the grounds she is not a bad person. We know this because, among other things, the dog, Harley, misses her terribly, also, Ray found her crying when he got in, plus, she used to look after some black kids. Apparently this flaccid waffling passes for journalism. I don’t care whether Lucy is a good person nor do I know it be so, frankly. I care only that state-sanctioned entrapment was used to pin a bogus charge of ‘stirring up racial hatred’ on her; and that she was railroaded through the charade that is our judicial system, treated as an expendable nobody, all so the credulous, docile masses would hail the arrival of online censorship. By pleading her good character, the implication is that she might otherwise have deserved such treatment. There are some redeeming parts to Ms. Pearson’s article, notably, references to “informal pressure” from above and the judges needing to “crack down hard” but it’s largely a masterclass in controlled opposition writing. Lucy’s supporters learn almost nothing of value and her detractors come away thinking it’s a whinge-fest.

Prevailing opinion is something along the lines of “what she tweeted was appalling but the sentence was an outrage”. There is rather more to it than that, though. In three parts, I examine how I believe she fell prey to state manipulation. I then look at the legal defence of which she was deprived as to make her imprisonment little more than a rubber-stamping exercise; and, finally, how your perennial fixation with a variety of culture wars, especially one with Muslims, proved to be Lucy’s undoing whilst paving the way for more of the same. (Hereafter, ‘X’ and ‘Twitter’ are interchangeable, as are ‘(re)post’ and ‘(re)tweet’).

At the outset, a popular misunderstanding needs clearing up, one which Piers Morgan has unhelpfully perpetuated in a recent post. Lucy was not charged with “incitement” - what is now known as “encouraging or assisting a crime” - as many a commenter seem to think, but instead with a Public Order offence of “stirring up racial hatred”. The legal test for the latter offence is completely different as I will come to in Part II.

Lucy would have been one of those accounts in my outer orbit, popping up in my feed more and more in recent years. I can’t claim to have paid close attention to her tweets but my approximation of her was, in the mold of many others well promoted X, banter-loving; bawdy humour aplenty; lots of swearing; generous use of emojis; occasional purveyor of bare legs pics who likes a tipple and staunchly on, what would be termed, the ‘right’, often seen giving Labour a good kicking.

I can only recall one interaction with her. She’d tweeted that she was in favour of indiscriminate stop & search of teenagers which I assume raised my hackles a bit. I replied accordingly. It’s fair to say, we’d have been politically far removed from one another but, such is the anarchist in me, that this is almost always the case. It just so happened that, during that whole surreal episode that was lockdown, we tended to form loose associations with one another in way we might not otherwise have done. Some materialised into enduring friendships. For others, it proved to be but a temporary coalition that has long since dissolved, often not on the best of terms. On one hand, you have your born-again truthers and on the other, those that have largely repatriated to Normieland. I find myself negotiating between the two camps depending on the subject; and so it proves in the case of Lucy where there is a small contingent of observers adamant she’s not really in prison and that it’s all been one big pro-censorship psy-op.

That there has been a psy-op, we can be in no doubt. What matters is whether those featuring therein are accomplices or pawns which is to say, unwitting participants. As for Lucy, I am satisfied it’s the latter, that she is very much real and in prison and not in any sense a crisis actor. Moreover, that she is known personally to several accounts on X, that they have met her and are pictured with her in some cases. What I did find admittedly odd, at the time, was the husband’s brief comments to reporters outside the court building which I can only describe as limp and unconvincing. It was as if he was talking about someone he didn’t really know but it was pointed out to me that this may just be indicative of a disconnected marriage or that he was still in shock, which is reasonable. Much of what we are shown is theatre, no argument there, but within lie strands of truth an fiction that need to be disentangled. The risk of wrongly discarding this woman out of hand, on the strength of nothing but conjecture, is not something I can countenance, personally - and so I proceed on that basis.

Beginning in late 2022, following Musk’s takeover of the platform, I noticed my X feed being populated more and more, indeed flooded at times, with what is popularly known as race-bating content - incendiary, algorithm-driven clips depicting asylum seekers, or just minorities generally, engaged in violence or otherwise offensive behaviour, all unsolicited. RadioGenoa in particular was (and still is) pumping out a slew of videos of this kind: violent assaults, sexual assaults of young women, theft, obscene or lewd acts and so on, invariably undated and seemingly recycled in some cases from years prior. Concerned Citizen was another and various others have since spawned. In the name of cheap clicks, reposting these videos, with provocative captions, were the likes of Ian Miles Cheong, David Vance, David Atherton, Leilani Dowding and a number of smaller accounts. To some of us, it was obvious this was to be a precursor to an eventual “far-right” crackdown, a convenient pretext for ushering in “anti-radicalisation” measures - censorship, in other words; all with the generous assistance of the named accounts, knowingly or otherwise.

Atherton’s timeline caters really only to those with a bona fide fetish for the impending Islamification of the whole world. Leilani’s makes for an eclectic mix. A large amount of culture wars grift i.e. aforesaid repostings, plus poking fun at burqas, rainbow flags, fat people and so on, much of it very ragey too; but interspersed with perfectly inoffensive stuff, be it yoga poses, farming content, mucking out the stables, or reliving her Nuts magazine days. It’s quite the niche she’s carved out for herself. Countryside milf with trans-bashing thrown in, all for the same unbeatable price - a winning formula, from what I’ve seen.

The common thread among all of these accounts, and the majority of their followers, is their apparent fondness for self-styled political activist, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, stage name: “Tommy Robinson”. This is more than a side note. It’s a hallmark of gullibility. By that, I mean a fixation with a manufactured culture war against Muslims that played right into the hands of those who were able to bait Lucy into reacting as she did with consummate ease. I’ll come back to ‘Tommeh’ in Part III though. I can already hear the cacophony of voices rushing to his defence. For now, all I wish to illustrate is, a roughly two-year long trajectory of progressively stoking tensions against asylum seekers, and inter-ethnic tensions generally, building to a crescendo following the Southport stabbings and culminating in a simple, low-budget but very effective false-flag event - a single post which lit the touchpaper for the ensuing riots.

Let me be clear, they knew what Lucy going to post before she’d conceived of it in her own mind; not that it would come from her account specifically but that a post very much like the one she made would come from a subset of X accounts of which she likely would have been one. All you have to do is prod - provide the necessary emotional stimulus and wait - and so they prodded. What chance do you think your average overexcitable mummy with an iPhone, stands against devious state-sanctioned manipulation?

Consider, I’m sitting at 77th Brigade HQ at Dennison Barracks, Thatcham, Berks., working in conjunction with the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) a.k.a. The Nudge Unit and either running or directing an account on X called “Europe Invasion”. Using custom-built behavioural modelling software (which are they using), I run a simulation, putting out a post “confirming” that the person responsible for this thoroughly barbaric act of slaying three small girls only hours earlier, is a Muslim boat arrival. Let’s call him Mohammed bin Lyin Al-Fakeeh. Out of 24 million UK users on X, I can predict with impressive accuracy the type of enraged rhetoric that will appear in short order and, with the benefit of prior analytics, that it will originate from a watchlist of, say a few thousand accounts, and how much traction individual posts are likely to get depending on the source account. I’ll then select one from an account with a suitably large following, tag it as “racial hatred” and send it viral with aggressive reposting from an army of sock accounts. All done as part a specific exercise to generate online “hate speech”.

Note how they always use these very sterile names for their various impersonator entities which don’t ring true in the slightest: “Europe Invasion”, “Just Stop Oil”, “Insulate Britain”, “Extinction Rebellion”. Keep in mind, it needs to be unmistakeable what the organisation stands represents because mainstream media consumers are infantilised - spoon-fed “bitesized” chunks of information, more or less on the level of “look, bad person”.

There are other giveaways of 77’s handywork - the way it opens with “…confirmed to be Muslim”, as if this fictional attacker, having been apprehended, whipped out his religious identity card. No legitimate report would read that way. It was worded as such for only one purpose which is to support a charge of Islamophobia (“racial hatred”) against any arrested person cites the post as provocation. It sets a trap for a Public Order offence, and this becomes relevant in Lucy’s case because since she made no reference to race or religion in her deleted post.

Lucy reacted on that Monday evening last July, exactly as she (and tens of thousands of others) had been primed, covertly and over an extended period, to a point of compulsion. Some of you might struggle with this idea, labouring under the illusion that we enjoy free will. After all, being the master of your own destiny and similar platitudes are comforting. The reality is, our behaviour, on social media particularly, is at the behest of dopamine (reward) and cortisol (stress) driven impulses which manifest as chasing likes and validation or, as the case was, reacting with anger, aggression and distress. Anything relating to children being harmed provokes an especially visceral response with women tending to exhibit greater activation in regions of brain associated with empathy and emotional regulation such as the amygdala. All social media, reduced to its essence, is about hijacking cortisol and dopamine production to the nth degree. Part of ancient, primal pathways of the human brain that have been conserved over millions of years of evolution, these neurochemicals are deeply rooted in survival, reward and adaptation.

Without veering off into complex neuroscience, what’s fundamentally relevant here is how a platform like X promotes impulsive rather than considered behaviour through reduced engagement of the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) - the most evolved region of the brain associated with planning, higher order reasoning and critical thinking, in favour of the reward centres: the striatum and the nucleus accumbens; and these effects are substantiated by neuroimaging (fMRI) studies. The same pattern is seen in substance abuse and gambling addiction. The result is social media bringing out often the very worst that our temperaments have to offer under conditions of stress. Very quickly you can see how this would be, is being, and has been, used to sinister effect through bot networks, fake accounts, algorithm manipulation, covert state actors, front organisations and cooperation with, or even coercion of, platform operators.

Having elicited precisely the reaction they wanted from their unsuspecting subject, Lucy was arrested and shoved into the next phase, public shaming - parading the poor woman across media outlets, juxtaposing the riots with screenshots of her deleted post (whilst of course omitting to mention she’d subsequently posted that violence is not the answer). The backlash on X was nothing if not predictable. Take David here, he of the FBPE clan, himself ideal fodder for behavioural programming. Do you think he has a considered and impartial perspective on the limits of free speech and, after careful deliberation, concluded that Lucy had strayed across the legal boundary? Not in this lifetime. It’s a tribal reflex. He hates what she represents politically and betrays his spite by wanting her life ruined.

With the baying mob frothing at the mouth, all clamouring for her punishment and branding her a “danger to society”, came the next act in this whole farce, fast-tracking Lucy into prison. Essentially, extracting a guilty plea out of her, complete with a grovelling mea culpa, all whilst she’s shaken, disoriented and, importantly, isolated. So we’re clear, ‘extracting’ does not mean overt duress but rather giving her the impression the alternative of defending the charge was a hopeless prospect, in spite of a coherent legal defence being available to her, the terms of which I will set out in Part II.

When you so desperately want something to be true, you’ll let nothing interfere with that belief. So it seems in the case of Lucy Letby’s supporters, thoroughly convinced as many are, that the whole thing is a fit up; that she’s been scapegoated for a deficient NHS, or some variation thereof. The more militant among her advocates are not merely saying her convictions – 7 counts each of murder and attempted murder - are unsafe but in fact calling for her summary release. Others are rather more restrained, however, and remain troubled by (= in denial about) the two counts of attempted murder by means of insulin poisoning: Baby F and Baby L. As well they might be. They form the lynchpin of the case against her forensically. Once you have her on those two, the house of cards comes crashing down and the likelihood that she then did not have a hand in the 12 other instances becomes vanishingly small. Indeed there’s an argument the CPS should have pursued only these two counts in the first instance and, contingent on the verdict, gone for some or all of the others. This would have allowed for a much more focussed trial instead of the 10-month epic it turned out to be - an unfair burden on jurors, in my opinion, whilst also risking much evidence getting lost in a haze.

Legal hobbyists and internet sleuths alike are found on Reddit and elsewhere poring over the intricacies of the insulin test results, straining every sinew to reconcile their desire for this woman to be innocent with what the tests show; that these babies had extraordinarily high levels of insulin in their blood. Not double, or treble, or quadruple, or quintuple; but anywhere between 60-460x the normal level for a preterm neonate (depending on feeding status). Some choice examples of the mental gymnastics I describe (from Reddit) follow:

• “I have tbh, the child F result is very unusual and kind of worrying, that I understand why it looks the way it does. It’s very easy to see it as it is”;

• “I still believe Letby is a victim of a miscarriage of justice but I can’t deny that’s a hard thing to explain, although not that she’s even done it, but just that the baby has been poisoned by insulin”;

• “Whilst I do lean heavily towards this all being a massive miscarriage of justice, I have to be honest, the insulin cases are still very hard to dismiss”

• “even if there is categorical evidence of insulin poisoning, given that there is still absolutely no concrete evidence related to Letby, it's not satisfactory for me to bang fifteen life sentences on her head”;

• "Again, to be clear, I am personally very invested in Letby being innocent…And like I said, being unable to explain the insulin results doesn’t imply Letby is guilty. But we still lack a robust alternative explanation, other than ‘these tests aren’t entirely reliable’”

It’s very easy to “see it as it is”, he says, as opposed to not how it is? Who are these people? As for being “very invested” in her innocence, if you’re very invested in anything other than the truth, perhaps it’s time to politely and quietly relieve yourself of further participation in the discussion and take up a new pastime, if only out of respect for the parents of those infants who either perished or nearly died under Letby’s care. Your judgement is coloured by a personal agenda. If, on the other hand, you regard yourself a neutral observer who maintains the insulin tests are inconclusive, it’s likely you lack a basic grasp of the relevant biology, specifically the relationship between insulin and c-peptide – one you probably ought to have if you fancy yourself as an armchair expert on this case.

Insulin, as you all know, is a powerful life-critical hormone (protein) secreted by your pancreas which regulates your blood sugar, one of the mostly tightly controlled parameters in the human body, honed to precision through millions of years of evolution. The insulin molecule consists of two chains of amino acids: A and B. It starts out in its inactive, precursor form – proinsulin – where A and B are bound together by a scaffolding molecule namely c-peptide (connecting peptide).

Upon conversion into insulin, c-peptide, shown here in green, is cleaved off (removed) enzymatically and left behind where it remains in the blood and for much longer than its insulin counterpart. It has a longer half-life in pharmacological terms. Synthetic insulin undergoes no such conversion. It’s ready to go.

Just as walking in the snow leaves a trail of footprints, one for each step, so each secreted molecule of insulin leaves behind another of c-peptide. Thus, they jointly increase in the blood in a perfectly linear 1-to-1 fashion. This is an immutable feature of our biochemistry. The process cannot be cheated. There isn’t some backdoor method for your body to make insulin that doesn’t leave behind a c-peptide trail. It is this same feature that makes c-peptide an extremely robust, virtually infallible, biomarker for endogenous (natural) insulin and so by looking at the ratio of one to the other we can reliably deduce whether the insulin present in someone’s blood is natural or not, with caveats to be discussed. Owing to the longer half-life of c-peptide, this ratio will always be >1 under normal conditions, around 1.5-2 in newborns and typically 5-10 in adults (as the half-life becomes longer still). In Baby F, it was <0.036. In Baby L, the values were beyond the respective lower and upper detection limits meaning the baby’s insulin exceeded ~5,000-6000 pmol/L whilst c-peptide was <169 pmol/L, so a ratio <0.034.

Now the crucial part: the interpretation. There are a few rare - very rare - situations in which the ratio of c-peptide to insulin will invert i.e. fall below 1. We will come back to those, don’t worry. The only scenario, however, in which the ratio will violently plummet to near zero is where exogenous (synthetic) insulin has been administered. This is because the standard test (immunoassay) does not distinguish between endogenous and exogenous insulin. At the same time, the pancreas detects blood sugar is low. Natural insulin production is suppressed accordingly. The readings are sent in opposite directions: insulin soars and c-peptide crashes giving the wildly out-of-kilter ratio observed in both cases.

Still not satisfied, Letby’s defenders seek out every esoteric theory in town in an effort to discredit or explain away the tests. The problem is none of them stack up:

1. “The test doesn’t tell us whether it was natural or synthetic insulin”. Answer: correct, it does not. That’s why it’s paired with the c-peptide as to tell you whether the measured insulin represents naturally produced insulin. It categorically did not in either case.

2. “It could be hyperinsulinism caused by a tumour (insulinoma) or genetic mutation”. Answer: Hyperinsulinism doesn’t invert the ratio. There’s more insulin but also more c-peptide. In any case, these babies did not have diagnoses of hyperinsulinism. They would otherwise have had, not acute, but chronic hypoglycaemia and we would not have seen blood glucose normalise after disconnection from the IV.

3. “What about Hirata’s Disease a.k.a. Insulin Autoimmune Syndrome (IAS)?”. Answer: This is an autoimmune condition where antibodies bind to free insulin preventing its clearance potentially leading to a distorted ratio. IAS is virtually unheard of outside of Japan and is not congenital. These babies did not have diagnoses of IAS nor would IAS result in the near-zero ratio observed.

4. “Kidney failure causing impaired insulin clearance” Answer: Neither baby had diagnosed kidney failure and it would not cause a ratio anywhere near as low. Insulin would have been chronically high without subsequent normalisation of blood glucose after disconnection from IV.

5. “Paraneoplastic or ectopic insulin-like factor production” Answer: These types of tumours are not seen in infants and insulin would still be accompanied by c-peptide if it’s true insulin.

6. “Heterophile Antibody Interference” Answer: This is where the patient’s specific antibodies cross react with the reagents in the test producing a falsely elevated insulin reading. Roche incorporates proprietary blocking agents into its assay to neutralise heterophiles antibodies. Nevertheless, no test is perfect and they are not immune from interference. In <1 in 2000 tests interference happens (Sapin et al., 2003). However, the false elevation due to interference is nowhere near the order seen. We’d expect insulin readings in the hundreds of picomoles, low thousands at the most; and it would not affect the c-peptide value. Therefore, a ratio in the order 0.2-0.5, way above what we actually saw. For antibody interference to account for the results in these two babies, you’d need to claim there was a uniquely extreme pattern of false elevation in these two infants, not seen in other babies. This is biologically implausible. It can also be verified retrospectively such interference did not occur by retesting the surviving children’s blood, given that antibodies will generally persist for life.

7. “They didn’t do liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) testing” Answer: LC-MS requires deep freezing of samples and rapid processing by an equipped forensic lab. It can’t be done in a standard hospital lab. By the time the insulin/c-peptide results had been returned and interpreted, the blood samples would likely no longer have been viable and the insulin in the baby’s system long gone. Therefore, the neonatal team would have had to anticipate the poisoning. Clearly, it’s unreasonable to expect that. In any case, the absence of LC-MS does not detract from what is known which is sufficient to conclude the presence of exogenous insulin.

8. “The test is not validated for use in (preterm) neonates” Answer: This is proving to be one of the most frequent criticisms demanding rebuttal. It is true, neonates are not merely small adults but a population in their own right with a distinct physiology. Neonatal plasma can differ by protein composition, bilirubin levels and haematocrit. These differences can cause matrix interference (skewed results) in a way that is not the case or at least far less likely in an adult. Certain neonatal phenomena mean reference ranges can radically deviate from those applicable for adults. For instance, there’s a surge in Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) in the first 48hrs of life. Maternal antibodies that have crossed the placenta (which clear after a few months) can also cross-react with the same TSH immunoassay causing false highs. Validating assays for neonates is undeniably relevant and in a clinical setting non-validated tests require cautious interpretation. All of this true; and should Letby ever get her retrial, the prosecution would do well to readily concede as much.

   So do we just bin the result, then? No. The question becomes: does neonatal physiology have any material bearing on the interpretation in the context of insulin poisoning? No, it does not. First of all, the target molecule, insulin, is structurally identical in neonates and adults - the same 51-amino acid peptide. The Roche Elecsys® Insulin assay uses monoclonal antibodies that target specific epitopes and those do not change in neonatal plasma making it highly specific and not susceptible to cross-reaction with insulin analogues. It’s designed to work in EDTA plasma or serum which are the same matrices used in neonates and indeed it forms part of routine endocrinology and hypoglycaemia workups in many UK hospitals including for neonates (something those seeking to rubbish the test omit to mention). The fact that no validated assay exists is testament to the fact that there has not been a clinical necessity for one. The test result is not corrupted by using neonatal plasma and is not being used to assert a precise reading. We are not splitting hairs here over, say 50-100, picomoles of insulin, rather using it (in combination with c-peptide) to determine the presence of massive, supraphysiological levels of insulin in two infants. You could grant a 30%, even 50%, upward bias in the reading due to matrix interference. The conclusion would remain because the readings were beyond any conceivable margin of error. Just as if someone were caught speeding, doing in 95mph in 40 zone, doubling the usual allowance of 10% + 2mph, to 20% + 4mph does not change anything.

   The test was not abused at trial to say more than it could say and needed to say. Now, if critics were arguing that the prosecution had a duty to declare the immunoassay lacks validation for neonates, that would be one thing. Then both sides can argue the relevance thereof. What they want instead is the test rendered inadmissible and thrown out altogether which betrays their intention. It’s a cynical attempt to deprive a hypothetical future jury of knowledge of the result because they know what it shows and how fatal it would be to Letby’s defence.

By now, a clear theme should have emerged: other causes for abnormal results are possible - that is not denied - but it is the extreme nature of the values observed in Babies F and L, combined with the clinical picture, that allows for said possibilities to be definitively crossed out. We have four boxes ticked: (i) super high insulin; (ii) very low or undetectable c-peptide; (iii) acute hypoglycaemia; (iv) normalised blood glucose after the babies came off the IV.

These two babies were being infused with lethal quantities of synthetic insulin, completely consistent with their clinical notes and were spared only by timely interruptions. You can debate how it got into their systems as a secondary discussion if you want, but that it was there - and for no plausible reason other than to poison them is beyond reasonable doubt, the standard of proof in a criminal trial.

At the Alternative Lucy Letby Trial hosted by UnHerd, Investigative Editor, David Rose, says (19:05) “nobody has satisfactorily explained how on Earth Lucy Letby could have introduced synthetic insulin into feed bags that these babies were receiving through IV lines”. as if this were a logistical feat beyond Letby’s means. I am going to charitably assume ignorance here rather than wilfully trying to mislead the audience. A neonatal IV bag (as for standard adult IV bag) has both a spike or tubing port and an additive port - a rubber self-sealing stopper for injecting medications or other constituents. This is true also for neonatal Total Parenteral Nutrition (TPN) bags too such as the Numeta® G13E triple-chamber bag from Baxter which I believe will have been the type in use at the Countess of Chester.

These are not the only entry points. There’s also the Y-port proximal to the baby or the cannula hub but those points bypass the feed bag so you would not have a gradual infusion and instead an IV bolus where the medication is administered all in one go. Lastly, a syringe driver if one were in use which was the case in one of the babies, as I understand it.

Bolus administration does not fit the clinical picture. Giving that much insulin in one go would have caused rapid collapse, almost certainly death, within minutes, attracting considerable suspicion. Infusion allows for the appearance of deterioration overnight. The babies had persistent hypoglycaemia over a period of many hours which crucially resolved after discontinuing the infusion. Insulin has very short half life of only a few minutes, indicating the poisoned infusion was either ongoing when the respective blood specimens were collected or had just been stopped.

How much insulin would she have needed to introduce to the feed bag? Keep in mind the tiny and fragile nature of preterm neonate weighing 2-2.5kg with less 1/2 pint of blood. Insulin comes in U-100 form: 100 units/ml, 6,000 pmol per unit. To cause a steady-state plasma concentration of ~5000 pmol/L there are various pharmacokinetic variables to account for: dilution ratio of the TPN bag, volume distribution (Vd) for insulin in neonates (~0.15) which means how extensively a drug spreads beyond plasma, insulin half life, the infusion rate (typically 3-8ml/hr). The mathematical formula is beyond the scope of this piece but anywhere between 30-60 units of synthetic insulin or 0.3-0.6ml is a reasonable estimate of how much Letby would have had to have added.

Insulin tends to stick (adsorb) to plastic surfaces and so ideally will be well mixed and the tubing flushed (primed) as to saturate the inner surfaces with insulin first. This is not a small detail. Proper mixing and flushing makes a significant difference to the effectively infused dose. We can’t know whether Letby took these steps not least because she denies the crime. Let’s assume not and favour the upper end of our estimate. You can play around with the calculation. Whatever the figure, we’re talking about a very small amount of liquid, injectable in a matter of seconds into a feed bag.

Let’s be clear, poisoning a baby with insulin, late at night with only one other staff member on the ward, is not a crime requiring great ingenuity, planning or skill. Just intent, opportunity and a modicum of technical know-how, all of which Letby possessed in her capacity as a neonatal nurse. Christopher Snowdon (whilst I agree with many of his points) refers to her as a “very clever woman”, adept at lying and also “very good in the witness box”. No, this is someone of ordinary intelligence, a criminal mastermind she is not. Granted, she took some precautions to be avoid being caught in terms of falsifying records but not more than that. On the contrary, many of her actions are quite reckless. Using her phone to do Facebook searches of the parents on the anniversaries of the children’s deaths and stashing handover notes under her bed, come to mind. Her performance in the witness box is hardly impressive. When forced to account for the many irregularities that emerged, she can’t and reaches for her preferred stock answer: “No, I don’t agree”.

It was not a careful campaign of deception that allowed for Letby to evade capture for as long she did but a culture of complicity and timidity shielding her from direct accusation. Her fellow nurses and senior management had her back, fending off doctors’ concerns, principally Dr. Brearey’s, as to avoid making waves. Entirely self-serving, of course. The doctors relented albeit with misgivings, on my reading. (This internal friction between the professions was a significant feature and warrants inquiry in its own right).

In Letby, I ultimately recognise simply a deeply disturbed young woman who abused her position of trust in the most horrific way. Her handwritten confessions reflect a state of genuine mental turmoil, being wracked with guilt. I believe it’s possible to feel justified pity for her in spite of her appalling deeds. What is not an option, however, is to cling in vain to a notion that she’s innocent in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, therein lies my appeal to her more thoughtful supporters.