The Silence at the Old Bailey: Why is the Starmer Arson Trial Being Buried?

THE LOUDEST SILENCE IN BRITAIN

Three men are in the dock at the Old Bailey. The trial opened this morning. Most of Britain’s press cannot find the space to tell you.

When three men are accused of a coordinated campaign to torch properties linked to the sitting Prime Minister, and the nation’s editors collectively determine there are more pressing matters, you are not living in a free press. You are living in a managed one.

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There is a question that every journalist in Britain should be asking today, and almost none of them are. It is not a complicated question. It does not require a security clearance or a well-placed source in Whitehall. It requires only a pair of eyes and a functioning conscience.

The question is this: why, on the morning that Britain’s most politically charged criminal trial of the year opens at the Old Bailey, are the digital front pages of the BBC, the Daily Mail, and even the supposedly insurgent GB News so conspicuously devoid of the names Roman Lavrynovych, Petro Pochynok, and Stanislav Carpiuc?

THE TRIAL THE PRESS WOULD RATHER YOU MISSED

At 10:30 this morning, those three men took their places before a High Court judge at the Central Criminal Court. They face serious charges arising from three coordinated incidents over five days in north London in May 2025. A car was set alight in Kentish Town on 8 May. Three days later, a fire was started at the front door of a converted flat in Islington. In the early hours of 12 May, another fire at a property in the same Kentish Town street where Keir Starmer had lived before he moved into Downing Street.

Lavrynovych, 21, a Ukrainian national from Sydenham, faces three separate counts of arson with intent to endanger life. Pochynok, 34, also a Ukrainian national, of Holloway Road in Islington, and Carpiuc, now 27, a Romanian national of Ukrainian origin from Chadwell Heath, each face one count of conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life. All three have pleaded not guilty. All three have been held on remand at HMP Belmarsh since their arrests. A fourth man, arrested at Stansted Airport in June 2025, was released without charge. A fifth, a 19-year-old from Harlow, remains released under investigation.

Counter Terrorism Policing London is leading the investigation, a designation that reflects the nature of the alleged target and not the charge. No terrorism offences have been brought. The Metropolitan Police have made no public attribution to any foreign state. The motive, officially, remains what one court document described as unexplained and opaque. The maximum sentence for the offence of arson with intent to endanger life is life imprisonment.

When a bin fire occurs in a leafy suburb, it makes the local rags. When three men stand accused of targeting properties linked to the sitting Prime Minister, the silence is not an oversight. It is a condition.

Sir Keir Starmer, at Prime Minister’s Questions, described these alleged incidents as an attack on all of us, on democracy and the values that we stand for. He was right to say so. What he did not address, and what the press declines to address alongside him, is what it means for that same democracy when the trial arising from those alleged attacks arrives without fanfare, without gallery reporters filing copy, without the rolling coverage that any dispassionate assessment of the case’s gravity would demand.

THE DSMA DISTRACTION

Social media has filled the vacuum left by the press with its own theories, many of them coalescing around the idea of a so-called D-Notice. It is worth being precise about this, because imprecision here does the argument no favours.

D-Notices were abolished in 1993. The body that replaced them issues what are now called Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) notices. These are, in any case, advisory. They carry no legal force. Any editor who chose to ignore one would face no prosecution for doing so. Media law consultant David Banks, a leading practitioner in the field, stated publicly and explicitly that this case is not subject to a DSMA notice. There is no public evidence to contradict that assessment.

If there is no DSMA notice, and there is not, then the silence cannot be explained by state compulsion. That is, in some respects, a more disturbing conclusion. It means the silence is chosen.

CONTEMPT, CAUTION, AND THE CONVENIENT EXCUSE

There is a more respectable explanation available, and parts of the press will reach for it readily. The Contempt of Court Act 1981 creates strict liability for any publication that creates a substantial risk of serious prejudice to active legal proceedings. Now that this trial is live, editors will argue that the sub judice rule counsels restraint.

There is something in this. Responsible reporting of an ongoing criminal trial requires care. Speculation about guilt is impermissible. Reporting the identities of defendants, the charges they face, and the fact of the trial itself is not. These are matters of open public record, heard in open court. Restraint and silence are not synonyms. The British press knows the difference perfectly well when the defendant is someone it wishes to pursue. It applies the distinction selectively.

We note, for instance, that this concern for the sanctity of sub judice proceedings did not noticeably inhibit coverage of other high-profile cases in recent memory, cases where the accused commanded less institutional sympathy, less proximity to the circles in which editors and proprietors move. The principle, it seems, is applied with a discretion that happens to align rather neatly with the interests of those who own the platforms on which it is supposedly upheld.

Contempt of court and silence are not synonyms. The British press knows the difference when it wants to.

THE MANAGED DEMOCRACY

There is a tradition in British public life of what might be called institutional protectiveness: the collective instinct of established organisations, including newspapers with proprietors who lunch with ministers and attend the same charity dinners as senior civil servants, to soften the edges of stories that could prove destabilising to the order from which they all benefit. This is not a conspiracy in any formal sense. It requires no coordination, no room, no memo. It is a culture. It is absorbed rather than instructed.

The result is a press that is ferociously aggressive toward those it has decided are outsiders and reflexively protective toward those it has decided are insiders, regardless of the formal posture of any given outlet. GB News presents itself as an anti-establishment insurgency. Its silence today is as telling as the BBC’s. The establishment is not a building. It is a set of assumptions shared by people who have persuaded themselves that they hold none.

What is being managed, in this silence, is not merely the reputation of a Prime Minister under extraordinary political pressure. It is the public’s right to know that a serious criminal trial, arising from alleged attacks on the head of government’s former home, is proceeding in the Central Criminal Court on their behalf. That is precisely the kind of information that a free press exists to communicate. Its absence is precisely the condition that a managed press is designed to produce.

We are not suggesting that any defendant in this case is guilty. That question belongs to the jury alone, and we have no doubt they will discharge their responsibility with seriousness. We are suggesting that a public that does not know this trial is happening cannot be said to be fully informed participants in the democratic life of their country. And a press that does not tell them is not doing its job.

WHY WE ARE TELLING YOU

Labour Heartlands covered this case when the charges were first brought. We covered it when the defendants entered their pleas. We covered it when the trial date was set. We are covering it now because it is happening now, and because somebody should.

We are a small, independent publication with no proprietor to please, no government advertising contract to protect, and no dinner invitations that depend on our good behaviour. That is not a boast. It is a structural fact, and it is the structural fact that makes independent journalism possible in conditions where the mainstream press has decided that discretion, comfort, and access are more important than the public’s right to be informed.

Britain’s press will cover this trial when the verdict arrives, if it arrives. They will write it up as news, as though they had been attending all along. They will treat the outcome as information. They will not explain where they were during the preceding weeks.

We will be here throughout. Because this is not merely a criminal trial. It is a test of whether the institutions that are supposed to hold power to account are still capable of doing so, or whether they have become, quietly and without fanfare, another instrument of the power they were meant to scrutinise.

LEGAL NOTICE: These proceedings are now active before the Central Criminal Court. Nothing in this article constitutes a comment on the guilt or innocence of any defendant. That question is a matter solely for the jury. This article examines the conduct of the British press, not the conduct of the accused.

“The press that refuses to cover the trial is passing its own verdict long before the jury does.”

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