Appeared on ITV London’s The Late Debate alongside Rupa Huq MP (Labour, Ealing Central & Acton) and Helen Maguire MP (Liberal Democrat, Epsom & Ewell), hosted by Simon Harris, ITV London’s Political Correspondent. The programme covered three topics with a London focus.
The Iran war and the Al-Quds Day march
The Metropolitan Police sought a ban on the annual Al-Quds Day march, linked to the Iranian state, amid the ongoing conflict. I argued that Conservatives on the London Assembly had been calling for this ban for some time, given the march’s connection to Iran — the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism — and its intimidating nature.
On the broader conflict, I expressed concern about the lack of a clear strategy: I worry that Donald Trump’s plan may amount to little more than “bomb some people and hope something good happens.” While the Iranian regime is clearly a huge problem for its own people and the wider Middle East, the Prime Minister’s approach has been confusing — spending time cosying up to Trump as a strategic position, then appearing unprepared when the UK was drawn into the conflict. The Royal Navy ship sent to the Eastern Mediterranean could have been dispatched a week earlier.
Sectarian voting and the local elections
Asked whether the Iran war would affect May’s London council elections, I raised the risk of sectarian voting — a pattern we have seen in Northern Ireland for decades, which does not produce good results. I expressed concern that this trend is starting to spread to the rest of the UK and hoped voters would not take that path, while fearing some might.
Court backlogs and jury trials
The government’s proposal to scrap jury trials for some offences to tackle the court backlog was, I argued, a nonsense. No credible person believes that removing the ancient right to a jury trial will solve the problem. The real solution lies in operational management: making sure prisoners are brought to court on time, extending court sitting hours, and fixing crumbling court infrastructure — the kind of unglamorous but effective work that actually increases throughput.
I challenged the Labour MP directly: in her entire defence of the policy, she had not once connected removing jury trials to actually reducing the backlog. The backlog predominantly dates from the Covid era, when courts were shut down, and has continued to grow — getting worse, not better, including in the two years since Labour came to office. Once this right is lost, I warned, it will not come back.
Children, smartphones and social media
I described this as “the issue of our time” and drew on my background in IT and data networks to frame the challenge in two parts. The simple part is phones in schools — a complete ban during the school day is sensible and already works well at my own children’s school.
The complicated part is the digital public realm. In the physical world, a ten-year-old walking through a high street late at night or into a casino can be spotted and stopped immediately. Online, it is impossible to know who anyone is, and children can wander into spaces where they should not be. We have not yet developed a good system to prevent this. Age verification is one approach, but it requires everyone to upload personal documents to third-party sites — and sooner or later, that data will leak. It is a genuinely difficult problem, but an important one to solve.