The SNP leadership race has turned into the mother of all culture wars

Bring back Nicola Sturgeon. The race to replace her as SNP leader and first minister has turned into the mother of all culture wars. Who would have thought that the party of independence would start tearing itself apart over a law on same sex marriage that was passed nearly a decade ago?

The early front runner, Kate Forbes, provoked fury among ‘progressive’ SNP supporters on Twitter by saying she opposes gay marriage – something everyone who knows her knew perfectly well. She is an evangelical Christian for heaven’s sake, a member of the Free Church of Scotland. Of course she opposes gay marriage. That along with having children out of wedlock and working on the sabbath.

However, the Scottish finance secretary, who is still on maternity leave, went on to insist that these are her personal views, not her political ones. Forbes compared herself to former German chancellor Angela Merkel, who opposed same sex marriage but accepted the democratic decision to introduce it.

But that didn’t satisfy a number of Forbes’s erstwhile supporters, including the just transition minister, Richard Lochhead. He withdrew his support on the grounds that her views on marriage are incompatible with leadership in the modern age. Others came straight out with it and branded her a ‘right wing bigot’.

Equal marriage is, of course, a cypher for the real issue tearing the SNP apart: the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. Forbes has effectively said she will scrap Sturgeon’s legislation to allow 16-year-olds to change their legal sex by declaration. At any rate, she will not challenge the UK government’s decision to block it under Section 35 of the Scotland Act. Westminster’s Scottish Secretary, Alister Jack, did so on the grounds that it would conflict with protections for women and girls under the UK-wide Equality Act. The row about male-bodied sex offenders being placed in women’s prisons suggests it very well might. But the SNP’s coalition partners, the Greens, say they will ‘walk’ if the GRR Bill is abandoned or changed. 

Forbes’s main rival, health secretary Humza Yousaf, has insisted that he still supports the Bill ‘100 per cent’.  As the Sturgeon continuity candidate, he says he would fight what he calls the UK government’s ‘attack on devolution’ all the way to the Supreme Court. He also says he supports same sex marriage, even though it is against his Muslim faith. Indeed, the Quran and other Muslim texts are as hostile toward homosexuality as the Bible. Nor did Yousaf vote for the 2014 Equal Marriage Act. He had a diplomatic absence on the day of the vote – although he did support the bill in principle at an early stage.

The third candidate so far, former community safety minister Ash Regan, says she too would scrap the GRR Bill. She also wants to protect the North Sea oil and gas industry, even if that means slowing progress to net zero. But she does support same sex marriage, for what it’s worth. It’s not clear how much support Regan has in the SNP. She has much less ministerial experience than her rivals and little public profile. Her main claim to fame is that she resigned over the GRR Bill last year.

But perhaps a little too much is known about Yousaf’s ministerial experience; it’s mainly experience of failure, according to his critics. He was transport minister when the disastrous island Ferry contracts were going south and when there was a public outcry about the state of the rail service – or ‘Scotfail’ as it was named. As justice secretary, he was responsible for the illiberal Hate Crime Act which outlaws ‘stirring up hatred’, even in the privacy of someone’s home.

Since he took charge of health, the NHS has ceased to function in large parts of Scotland according to Dr Iain Kennedy, chair of the British Medical Association. Waiting times are at historic levels, dentistry is being effectively privatised – and it takes the most dedicated patient to secure a GP appointment. Labour is hoping against hope that Yousaf wins, because they believe he is a three-time ministerial loser.

But the truth is that none of the SNP leadership rivals looks a fitting successor to Sturgeon. There is precious little vision so far on the real issues: the economy, health and education. The race has been dominated by Twitter, which is why it appears to be solely about gender and same-sex marriage. 

We often talk loosely of culture wars in the context of jokes, pronouns and microaggressions. But there is a genuine culture war taking place now in Scotland. It will be fascinating to learn just how many in the SNP agree that Kate Forbes should be excluded from political office because she is a Christian who truly believes in her faith. The 100,000-strong congregation of the SNP will give their verdict in six weeks’ time. 

The spread of ‘slather’

‘Slither, slather, sliver, slaver, slabber, slobber,’ chanted my husband from the armchair beside his glass of whisky, to a little tune he had composed all by himself. The occasion for this outburst was a seventh item of slip-slop vocabulary: a newspaper reference to a slice of bread ‘lathered in mayonnaise’. I think it might just have been a misprint for slathered.

Slather has been used for less than a century to mean ‘spread or splash liberally on’. The OED illustrates its fundamental meaning of ‘slip’ with a Kipling quotation: ‘I hate slathering through fluff.’ This is not very illuminating, since fluff is dry, not slippery. But the quotation comes from a story published in 1905, ‘With the Night Mail’, a futuristic tale of a transatlantic airship set in 2000. ‘We generally pick up an easterly draught below three thousand at this time o’ the year. I hate slathering through fluff,’ says the captain. Here fluff is a fictional technical term for cloud.

Though slather was originally associated with sliding, it is not clear that it derives from slide, as slither does. Slither is often unthinkingly confused (as bought and brought are) with sliver. A visitor, asked if she’d like a slice of cake, might say ‘Just a slither’, as though it were a serpent being offered. We are subconsciously aware of some verbs changing vowels in past tenses (sing, sang, sung; drink, drank, drunk). The process is called ablaut by philologists, a German term since much philology was pioneered by Germans. Thus we associate slather with the same group of meanings as slither, even if the words are not related by descent. Slaver, slabber and slobber are related, but sliver has a completely different origin. Lather also belongs to a different family, coming from an Old Norse word meaning ‘washing soda’ (though Vikings have lost in popular eyes any washday image), being related to Ancient Greek loutron, ‘a bath’, and Latin lavare, ‘to wash’. Just slather it all over, as Henry Cooper didn’t say.

Is Facebook’s verification scheme a scam?

Is Facebook’s scheme, announced over the weekend, to encourage its three billion users to pay $12 (£10) a month to have their accounts verified really just a form of corporate extortion?

I ask only because last year someone – I strongly suspect a deranged Novak Djokovic fan – took the time to create a fake Facebook profile featuring me. The photo that accompanies the profile, which is named ‘Damian Damian’, is certainly of me, although Boris Johnson, who I was standing next to when it was taken, has been cropped out.

Onto my forehead has been superimposed a fetching pair of devil’s horns and posts include ‘I’m a delusional little boy’, ‘I’m an evil journalist with a secret agenda’ and, most charmingly of all, ‘my obsession won, I didn’t order the medicine, I can’t remember the last time I took it’.

I’m fingering a Djokovic fan as the culprit because the profile appeared very shortly after I incurred the wrath of thousands of them on Twitter by posting footage of his team furtively mixing for him mid-match a mysterious drink. Evidently, whoever created the profile has been through my real Facebook profile, because they sent friend requests to all my actual friends, as well as to me.

Mortifyingly, 14 of my friends accepted these requests, including my not terribly tech-literate mother. A friend I haven’t seen since our university days has liked the ‘evil journalist with a secret agenda’ post.

Obviously, I’ve reported the profile numerous times, although it’s impossible to get hold of anyone at Facebook on the telephone. Instead, you have to make your complaint online, by choosing from the various category options with which you’re presented: ‘fake account’, ‘fake name’, ‘posting inappropriate things’, ‘harassment or bullying’ and so on. Naturally, the process was a complete waste of time. When Facebook finally came back to me, via email, it said the profile ‘isn’t pretending to be you and doesn’t go against our community standards’. As a result, it’s still there – my name, my face, my friends, but apparently not impersonating me – for all the world to see. I’ve even tried contacting the Facebook press office, but to no avail.

But now I see that if I just pay for verification, my problems would all go away. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg says in return for their cash, users will ‘get a blue badge, extra impersonation protection and direct access to customer support.’ But isn’t that precisely how a digital protection racket would work? You stump up the cash on the regular, and the heavies ensure you have no more problems. What else could possibly be understood from that ‘extra impersonation protection’ wording?

But why should we have to pay to avoid being impersonated on Facebook, particularly when that impersonation is intended by users to cause distress? Given the social media platform’s entire multi-billion dollar business model has until now been predicated on the value of user data – the value of us, in other words – surely the least the company can do is to protect that data in a way that affords users basic dignity, without them having to fork out extra for the privilege.

It goes without saying, there are real world repercussions to Facebook bullying, or trolling, as it has come euphemistically to be known. As a journalist accustomed over a period of more than two decades to receiving anonymous online abuse as a result of virtually anything I write – a phenomenon with which I suspect all journalists are wearily familiar – I’m fortunate in that I couldn’t care less about it. In fact, in many instances I’ve come to relish it: I take perverse pleasure in annoying people whose need for anonymity to my mind equates to a fear of sunlight. But I’m well aware this is an unusual attitude.

Were my children, for example, to receive the kind of insults I am used to, they would be devastated. When they are old enough to start using the social media sites, such as Facebook and Instagram, that Meta owns, should I then pay extra in order that people can’t bully them, through impersonation? Conversely, if I can’t pay, should I just accept that bullying via impersonation is something they may have to endure?

This is by no means an abstract consideration. About twenty per cent of children aged 10-15 encounter online bullying in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics. To you or me, this is twenty per cent too many. But the decision to introduce verified accounts suggests that Meta sees a sizeable market ripe for monetisation. It’s insidious, too, because where previously cyberbullying was seen as a problem for social media sites to police – not least because it has been directly linked to tragic instances of teen suicide – now one form of bullying, false impersonation, seems to have become a problem, much like the inconvenience of online advertising, for which users themselves must find a solution.

In this way, responsibility for the prevention of bullying via impersonation seems to be shifted slyly from the corporation to the individual. It becomes just another consumer choice. On Facebook, your bullying is now your fault. How meta.

Dear Mary: How do I retrieve the naked photo that was hidden in a cookbook?

Q. My mother is still mentally and physically sprightly at the age of 87. She is perfectly capable of living alone – indeed she has done so for the past 20 years. The problem is that she is still highly social but most of the London friends of her own vintage, some of whom lived in the same historic apartment complex in Piccadilly, have died. Any ideas as to how she could make new friends?

– G.F., Bruton, Somerset

A. Perhaps she could take a tip from another highly social widow, who has just died aged 97, but who was a keen attender of memorial services, having no qualms about turning up at those of people she had never met but who had well-known names.

To the same end your mother might enjoy scouring the Court & Social pages of the Times and Telegraph. She is perfectly positioned, geographically, to turn up at St George’s Hanover Street, the Guards’ Chapel and St James’s Piccadilly. If pressed at the ‘after party’ on her link to the deceased, she can openly admit it was tenuous. Most organisers will be delighted by the presence of anyone who swells the numbers. She may well run into forgotten acquaintances and will at least have the sensation of still being in the swim of things.

Q. I’m living in Brussels and paying what I think is an extortionate rent for a room in a flat. My bills are included but the owners, who use the flat only a few times a month themselves, always turn the heating right down when they leave and I feel uncomfortable turning it up again. I now have a high-maintenance girlfriend who feels the cold – unlike my landlords. What should I do, Mary?

– H.R., Brussels

A. Next time you know they are coming, turn the heating completely off the day before and stay at your girlfriend’s house. Nip back to the flat just before they arrive and turn it back to the level they switched it to when they last visited. In this way they will get a reality dose of how chilly the flat can be.

Q. We recently moved to a small village. My wife took a silly Polaroid of me naked (I’m 59) on holiday last year and for some reason it got shoved inside a cookery book. Yesterday our daily asked if she could borrow a book from the kitchen and without thinking my wife said yes, and now she realises it was the naked cookbook. I don’t want her to think we are perverted, because we aren’t, but I’m not sure whether to say something or let it pass.

– Name and address withheld

A. Your wife should drive immediately to the daily’s house and ask if she can have the book back for a moment. She can explain that you struggle with your weight so she keeps an unflattering photo of you in the kitchen to curb your appetite.

How to outperform ChatGPT

Much of the magic of Curb Your Enthusiasm comes from the show being plotted but not scripted. The direction of the conversation is agreed in advance, after which the cast – mostly stand-up comedians and hence naturally good at extemporising – improvise the lines on the fly. This makes the show engagingly realistic even in the rare moments when it isn’t being funny.

In such ‘high-context’ communication, there is always a side-channel alongside the words which determines their real meaning, whether through tone of voice, facial or hand gestures or shared knowledge. This is why policing language is so dangerous – it is too easy to strip words of their context. Everything becomes a version of the 1952 Derek Bentley case, where five words, ‘Let him have it, Chris’ (which could mean either ‘fire the gun’ or ‘hand it over’), can be framed to suit the prosecution. In such a world it is dangerous to use irony, metaphor, sarcasm, exaggeration or affectionate rudeness. This is why comedians, who depend on such things, mostly oppose restrictions on free speech.

Which brings me to ChatGPT and the question of the Turing Test, the rather arbitrary but interesting threshold for what might be described as computational intelligence, set by Alan Turing in 1950. This requires that in two open-ended conversations, one between a questioner and another human, the other between the questioner and a computer, the questioner is unable to tell which is which.

The obvious flaw in this test is that all of us know humans who fail the Turing Test. By which I mean you could read their transcribed words for many hours and still not be confident they weren’t produced by a machine. 

Nonetheless, ChatGPT is remarkable. The ability almost instantly to repurpose and condense information into plausible, coherent sentences is impressive. It might make you believe it is human, though its extreme literal-mindedness leaves it a long way from convincing you it is British.

Against this, I must list a few criticisms. For one thing it uses a canny psychological trick (known as the labour illusion) by delivering its answers one word at a time, like a fast teleprinter, which makes it seem much more impressive than if it were simply to vomit up a page of text instantaneously. It is unaware of anything that happened since 2021, and so believes that ‘Nicola Sturgeon is sure to have a long future in politics.’

Its probabilistic approach also means it’s not averse to making stuff up. For some deluded reason it believes that I was awarded an OBE in 2018. Eh? A colleague in New York asked it to list academic papers in citation of its findings and it simply invented three papers which sounded believable but didn’t exist. It is also programmed to have a paranoid fear of anything resembling a right-wing opinion.

Andrew Orlowski, writing in the Telegraph, brilliantly argues that the last thing a bureaucratic world needs is the ability to generate yet more text in huge quantities. He’s right. But I see another problem. There will be hundreds of social and professional situations where it will be necessary to prove that we ourselves wrote the words being sent rather than outsourcing them to ChatGPT. And – that Turing Test again – the only way to do this will be to use words ChatGPT won’t. As it explains: ‘I adhere to ethical and legal standards, and I will not generate content that is harmful, discriminatory, or offensive in nature or otherwise unethical.’

This means that, to send a letter or write an article without the suspicion it has been machine-generated, we’ll need to fill it with xenophobic right-wing profanities. So Fraser, you Jock bastard, here’s your 650 words for that hotbed of recusancy that is your magazine. Send the usual pittance to the Cayman account. Viva il Duce!

The Battle for Britain | 25 February 2023

It’s hard work being a house husband

I’m currently sitting on top of a brownie point mountain. Caroline has departed for a two-week tennis freebie in Barbados, leaving me holding the fort. I have three teenage boys to take care of and a very small dog. That means getting them up for school every morning, emptying and loading the dishwasher, walking the dog, doing quite unbelievable amounts of washing, and preparing endless meals. I don’t know how she does it!

To be fair, she doesn’t do it all, because I usually do some of it. And while she has a job, it’s only part-time, whereas I spend at least 60 hours a week doing paid work. So having to combine that with being a house husband is killing me. I fear my three sons will have to become ‘latchkey kids’, although that won’t be easy because only one of our front door keys works after our last visit from the local burglars (which, this being Acton, was about three weeks ago). The bastards forced the lock and I haven’t had time to mend it. At least I don’t have to drive the boys to school. Their bikes have long been stolen, but I’ve opened Lime Bike accounts for all of them so they race to school on those, screaming like banshees. They can cover the two miles in about eight minutes.

The dog is more of a burden, in fact. Mali, a three-year-old cavapoochon, is bereft without her mistress and needs constant reassurance that she hasn’t been abandoned. At night, she trots down to my shed and scratches on the door and insists on sleeping on my bed. Occasionally, I’ll wake up with a start to find her staring at me from a few inches away, perhaps anxious that I’ll disappear as well. During the day, she takes up a position on the stairs where she can see anyone approaching the front door, hoping to spot a suntanned woman with a tennis racket and a suitcase.

True, Caroline has done her best to lighten my burden. She has arranged for our cleaner to come in three days a week and she cooked a vat of chilli which is now loaded into the freezer. She also ordered two recipe boxes from Gousto. For those unfamiliar with this service, a cardboard box arrives on Sunday afternoon containing recipe cards and different sets of ingredients. The recipes aren’t very demanding, but each one comes with tiny little packets of things like dried sage and toasted sesame oil, thereby conveying a spurious sense of sophistication. The finished products all taste vaguely the same – Italian-Asian fusion, if such a thing exists – but the great advantage of cooking-by-numbers is that it’s idiot-proof, which means my sons can manage it when I’m not there.

At least, that was the idea. On Tuesday night, when I was giving a talk in Brighton, they all point-blank refused to cook, claiming it was ‘too hard’. I kept saying ‘It’s idiot-proof – idiot-proof’, but it failed to cut through. They’re either such idiots they don’t know what it means, or they were feigning incompetence to get out of performing a household chore. Can’t think where they picked up that from.

The highlight of our week will be going to see QPR play Blackburn at home on Saturday, although that may not be much of a pick-me-up. We’ve just sacked our gaffer after he failed to win 11 games on the trot. We’ve lost 3-0 at home three times in the past 12 games, a club record, and Blackburn haven’t lost in their last seven. At the time of writing, it looks like Gareth Ainsworth will be at the helm on Saturday, having done a bang-up job at Wycombe Wanderers for the past ten years. But our problem isn’t a lack of managerial talent, it’s the players. For reasons hard to fathom, too few of them want to play for the club. Our injury list is far longer than it should be at this stage in the season and some of those who are available seem to lose interest midway through matches. Given how much these popinjays are paid, with their new hairstyles each week and dayglo, look-at-me football boots, it’s pretty galling.

Maybe it’s time I developed a passion for tennis like my wife. Not only has it landed her this sweet trip to the Caribbean, but it provides her with hours of pleasure each week, both on and off the court. She’s in the ladies’ first team at David Lloyd Acton Park and, unlike QPR, they win occasionally. They’re also less likely to get relegated at the end of the season. Trouble is, if I spent the next ten years playing every day I’d still struggle to make the men’s fifth team. No, for the foreseeable future I’ll continue to struggle with a backbreaking work schedule interspersed with household chores, with my only respite watching the Super Hoops lose every week. Welcome to my world.

Why don’t Harry and Meghan sue South Park?

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are hardly averse to taking matters to court. From their privacy tussles with the Mail on Sunday to the recent revelation that the taxpayer has forked out £300,000 over Prince Harry’s High Court challenge to the Home Office about his security arrangements when visiting the UK (he wanted to pay for police protection for his family, but was informed that the British police were not available for private hire, like taxis), the couple appear to regard legal action as a regrettable necessity that will ensure ‘their truth’ comes out into the world.

Yet now, at last, they seem to have reached their limit. When ‘The Worldwide Privacy Tour’, a recent episode of the hit American cartoon show South Park was aired, it brutally mocked the couple as fame-obsessed and vacuous, chasing dollars from corporations by turning themselves into products.

At the end of the episode, Prince Harry has an epiphany of sorts and declares that he wants to lead a normal life. But his wife – described in the show as ‘sorority girl, actress, influencer, victim’ by an eager brand manager – refuses to give up the opportunities and privileges that her fame (or notoriety) has offered her.

It is a damning, biting attack on the pair. Inevitably there were reports that Harry and Meghan were contemplating legal action. These suggestions have now, however, been dispelled by a spokesman for the couple, who described the scuttlebutt as ‘all frankly nonsense’, and said of the speculation – and, by implication, the show – that it was ‘baseless and boring.’ Words, I fear, that will be used out of context to describe the troublesome prince and his ‘sorority girl, actress, influencer, victim’ wife many, many more times in the future.

Although the publication of Spare and attendant publicity campaign was a commercial success, it has had the side-effect of turning Prince Harry into a laughing stock on both sides of the Atlantic. The Duke appears to have long since accepted that his public reputation in Britain is negligible – he’s ranked as the ninth most popular member of the Royal Family by YouGov, only beating Meghan and Prince Andrew – yet it must rankle that the United States, where the Sussexes have made their home and are pursuing their commercial interests, has rounded on them as well.

The regrettable revelation in Spare that the Duke applied his mother’s favourite Elizabeth Arden cream to his frostbitten penis was satirised by the late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel, who imagined the existence of a children’s book The Prince and the Penis, and ended with Harry saying: ‘But mummy, have you heard about Sir Sigmund Freud?’.

The Duke and Duchess may have calculated that making as little fuss as possible about the South Park episode is the wisest course of action. They may well be right. Tom Cruise was reported to have been unhappy over the 2005 episode ‘Trapped in the Closet’, which satirised both him and Scientology. There were reports that Cruise sought to get the episode pulled from circulation. This was denied by the film star’s spokesman, but the resulting furore helped ensure the episode become one of the show’s most iconic and popular.

It is impossible to say whether ‘The Worldwide Privacy Tour’ will enjoy similar longevity, or whether Harry and Meghan’s decision to hope that the show is soon forgotten as the news cycle moves on will be the correct one. But as the Coronation, and the question of their attendance, looms ahead like a monolith, chances of their fading away remain negligible.  

Does Kate Forbes support austerity?

Watching Kate Forbes this week struggle to reconcile her social conservatism with her ambition to be First Minister of Scotland has been excruciating. But it has also deflected attention away from another important aspect of her politics: her economic conservatism. As well as sitting on the right on issues such as gay marriage, Forbes also gives every indication of being a fiscal conservative who is comfortable with austerity.

Exhibit one is her role sitting on the SNP’s 2018 Sustainable Growth Commission. The Commission’s report was pitched as a realistic roadmap to independence. Unlike the land-of-milk-and-honey narrative that was sold to Scots in 2014, this group would face economic reality square in the face. Unicorns would be slain, and Alex Salmond’s fiscal fantasies of billions of pounds in oil revenues pouring into a new Scottish treasury would be replaced with blunt realism.

At least, that was the intention. The outcome was another unrealistic plan for cutting Scotland away from the economic base it has been an integral part of since before the industrial revolution. However, in attempting to give the pretence of a convincing separation scenario, there was one area in which the Commission moved the dial enough in the direction of realism to give a flavour of the inevitable austerity that would come with secession.

One of the recommendations of the Commission’s report was for total public expenditure (excluding debt interest) to increase by 1 per cent less per year than GDP for the first decade of independence. With assumed real GDP growth of 1.5 per cent per year, that meant holding down real growth in spending on public services and benefits to 0.5 per cent per year.

As the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) noted, this approach would see spending on public services and benefits fall by about 4 per cent of GDP over a decade. The SNP and the Commission furiously tried to spin this as not amounting to austerity, as public spending would be increasing in real terms (this was, of course, before the return of high inflation we’ve seen recently). However, the think-tank was clear that it did amount to austerity. The IFS said:

‘An independent Scotland would face further austerity under the SNP Sustainable Growth Commission’s plans.’

The Growth Commission came under intense attack from left-wing secessionists, who viewed its recommendations as a neoliberal plan for social injustice. Hard-left pro-independence think-tank Common Weal described it as shifting the Scottish economy to the right, and that it will ‘create austerity’ and be ‘subservient to UK’.

Forbes vigorously defended the Commission and its report.

Another signal of Forbes’ embrace of fiscal conservatism is the scepticism of central bank quantitative easing (QE) she has hinted at. QE has been a crucial element of monetary policy in advanced economies over the last 10 years, helping to facilitate massive borrowing programmes during times of crisis, most obviously through the pandemic.

The Growth Commission proposed a currency arrangement known as ‘sterlingisation’, which would mean unofficially continuing to use sterling outside of any formal monetary union with the rest of the UK. One important consequence of this set up is an independent Scotland not benefiting from QE in times of emergency. If Scotland had been using the Growth Commission’s preferred currency arrangement when Covid hit, it could well have found itself going begging to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to finance a bailout.

Forbes’ distrust of QE might stem from the straight-forward political position of needing to defend a currency plan she has put her name to. On the other hand, it could relate to a deeper, conservative belief system to do with not living beyond your means and the penance of belt tightening in response to profligacy. That type of fiscal traditionalism is in line with the views of old-school Westminster Tories. It would be interesting to know if Forbes really is that sort of fiscal conservative, or if her doubts about QE are merely skin deep.

We could speculate on there being a link between Forbes’ social conservatism and her economic conservatism, but with the way her campaign is going it could turn out to be an academic effort. It seems she could crash out of the contest any day.

At time of writing, she seems determined to tough it out, and, who knows, maybe she’ll turn it around. But with each hour that passes, and each new car crash interview that emerges, it seems more and more unlikely.

Her weakness appears to be her honesty. Whereas previous SNP leaders could have been accused of being neoliberals in progressive clothing, Forbes seems happy to embrace her economic conservatism in much the same way she has not shied away from her social conservatism.

If she does become first minister, Forbes will enter office with a Bible in one hand and a copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in the other. It will be quite the change.

Grandees attack the Guardian over its Corbyn leader

It seems the wokest paper in all the west has blundered once again. Last Wednesday the Guardian published a leader column on ‘Labour and antisemitism’ in which the bastion of right-on liberalism opined on the party’s record under Jeremy Corbyn. It opined that:

Mr Corbyn has a formidable record fighting against racism and in speaking up for many persecuted peoples, but in this case he was too slow and too defensive. To show how much better he was than some of his critics allowed, he should have tried harder to engage with their criticisms.

But it seems that not all of the Graun’s readers share their paper’s view of the Magic Grandpa’s reign of error. Today’s letters page makes for damning reading, with the Holocaust Educational Trust, the Jewish Labour Movement and one of Britain’s leading historians all queuing up to condemn the newspaper for its somewhat generous interpretation of Jezza’s record in office. Simon Sebag Montefiore began his contribution thus:

 Like many other people, particularly my fellow Jews, I was surprised, dismayed and disappointed by your editorial. It is extraordinary that the Guardian should devote a formal editorial to defending Jeremy Corbyn only three years after his toxic crankery led to the unprecedented shame of an Equality and Human Rights Commission investigation into racism.

Ouch. Sebag Montefiore accuses the editorial of ‘craven bad faith’ and masking ‘Corbyn’s strange affinity for repressive, bigoted regimes and organisations.’ It ‘shows contempt for the EHRC’ and ‘implies that antisemitism is something other than racism. In doing so, it makes light of centuries of anti-Jewish racism. It is almost as if your editorial was carefully crafted to hurt Jewish people.’ Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust continued:

The notion that “Jeremy Corbyn was wrong in his initial response” suggests no responsibility or culpability from the man at the head of a political party for five years. This is a rewriting of history and a slap in the face to all those who suffered under Mr Corbyn’s Labour party and to all those who stood up to this poison, at great personal cost.

And Mike Katz, the Chairman of the Jewish Labour Movement criticised Corbyn’s ‘reluctance to show any remorse’ and asked whether ‘Jews really don’t count’ in the eyes of the Guardian.

Mr S looks forward to the Graun sticking that on one of their messages begging for donations…

Death, beauty and the writing of a will

Perhaps there’s a German word – for there’s no English one – for that alloy of liberation with melancholy that comes with having faced up to something sad. I have made my will. A draft for my English will lies on the desk beside me, and early this week I flew to Catalonia to make the Spanish will that my brisk and capable Bakewell solicitor said I’d need.

I’m in excellent health for a man of 73 and, God willing, may have many years left; but there’s no gainsaying it – these things need to be sorted out in an atmosphere of calm when there’s time to get it right. It’s what my father did, without a fuss, and Dad is my inspiration in these matters. ‘No favouritism,’ he said, ‘and strict mathematical equality as to the portions.’ As for how to achieve this, ‘pay a professional’.

So I kept a mental picture of my father by me as, travelling without my partner – which has come to feel disconcerting – I boarded an easyJet flight from Gatwick to Barcelona on Sunday afternoon, the return booked for Tuesday, and was met at the airport around sundown with a cheery hug by my much younger sister, Belinda, and her Catalan husband. A splendid meal at the restaurant in the hotel we’ve built in our mountain fastness, l’Avenc, was followed by an early night. Gloomy thoughts were kept at bay.

But just before seven on Monday morning, a shaft of orange light through my bedroom shutters awoke me. Where was I? Who (for a half second) was I? Why this? I opened the shutter. The most glorious red dawn was flooding up from the Mediterranean, 50  miles away. In the great valley above whose thousand-foot cliffs l’Avenc sits, tiny wisps of cloud clung to hills and trees. Soon the sun would be warming the yellow stone of which this 16th-century fortified mansion is built. But I shuddered – I don’t know why.

I wrote a book, Castle in Spain, about l’Avenc. A quarter of a century ago I discovered the old house, sitting abandoned and close to ruin, its roof about to cave in. It was I who wandered the rotten staircasesand broken oak floors, who marvelled at the carved bishop’s head with a water spout for his mouth by a stone sink, the stone filigree decorations around the windows, the arrow-slits designed for a probably pretentious prosperous owner, and in the medieval part of the buildings the broken arch, reinforced after a 14th-century earthquake. It was I who conceived the grand plan for buying the property (for almost nothing) and (for sums that have put grey hairs on all our heads) restoring it as a triumvirate: my sister, her husband Quim and I. The project has since become their life. Now I, the absentee, was returning to settle what would happen when the trio became a duo.

Down in the once-walled little Roman city of Vic next morning, we visited first our solicitors. A plan had been drawn up for the pact successori. We needed to agree it, then take it down the road to the notary, where I would sign, and my sister would sign on behalf of her husband, and of their children, the legatees.

In decor, lawyers’ offices breathe much the same mood across the planet. Gravity,money and a certain self-regard speak through marble, glass and wood panelling. Both our lawyer and the notary spoke good English, and the thing was accomplished within an hour. I came away with a slim white folder that spells it all out, pockmarked with our initials; and down the marble steps we went to the city’s imposing square for coffee in the morning sun. In law l’Avenc remained partly mine, but in that hour something of ownership, of possession, had slipped away.

It’s nearly an hour’s drive on a winding road from the plana de Vic up through the woods and fields and flat-topped little mountains of the Collsacabra to the clifftops on which l’Avenc sits. Trees, mostly oak, were leafless and grey, patches of snow were melting fast, and in late winter the earth looked exhausted, dry. I took a long walk down the narrow tarmac road that we’d finally persuaded the Tavertet local municipality to pave – it was a cart-track when I first found the house – and gazed across the valley at the Montseny mountains, still snowy, glazed and shining, that separate our valley and its lakes from Barcelona on the other side.

That afternoon walk took me along the clifftops once again, after all these years. Tiny green spikes of dwarf daffodils were yet to break surface: daffodils that were in flower in the spring of 1996 when I first saw l’Avenc. I saw it all then with new eyes. Later it became part of my life. And here I was in February 2023, contemplating the end of life. In the evening I dined with my other younger sister, Deborah, a loving soul who has stood hopelessly for election as candidate for an animal-lovers’ party, and who lives to defeat bullfighting and neuter stray tomcats in her town. Her work will never be completed.

It was late when I slept but I set my alarm for 6.30 on Tuesday, and a cup of tea and a final climb with Belinda to see the sunrise from a high rock above l’Avenc. It was still quite dark when we set out: a steep ascent of some 600 feet, but we stumbled determinedly across broken ground ploughed up by wild boar and emerged on to Roca Llarga. From an altitude of 4,000 feet we watched, shivering, as a sliver of pink pricked the bank of cloud shrouding the Mediterranean. And the sun rose, reddening the sky.

Some find the dusk dispiriting, fearing the loss of light; but night holds no terrors for me and I love the enfolding dark. It is dawn that can depress my spirits. I feel unequal to the oncoming day. I know no sadder piece of music than Mussorgsky’s ‘Dawn On the Moscow River’. Dawn, and the renewal of life. That is the hardest time.

My meeting with Europe’s new Iron Lady

‘Look at the dates.’ That’s what I am told as I enter the State Elders Room in Tallinn. I’m here to interview the woman dubbed Europe’s new Iron Lady – Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas. The walls in the room between her office and the cabinet room are lined with portraits. A small plaque beneath each one records the dates of their birth and, more significantly, death. The first shows that its subject died in 1941. The next I notice also reads 1941. So too the third. And the fourth. The story is soon clear. Each of those elders of this now proud independent wealthy European state died fighting in what they call here the communist terror. This country is haunted by its past and the refusal of so many around the world to believe it could, it would, happen again.

Prime Minister Kallas is one of those who can say ‘I told you so’ although she’s much too polite to do so. Many of her fellow EU leaders insisted that Vladimir Putin would not be stupid enough to invade a neighbouring state. Some continued to insist that even after they were shown the evidence. Her family – like families all over this tiny country – know exactly what the men who rule the Kremlin are capable of. Her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother were all deported to Siberia. When she was a young girl, Kallas was taken to see the Berlin Wall by her father. She looked over it to the West, to freedom and democracy. She is now one of the most powerful advocates for the need to fight for those ideals.

The news of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine came as Estonia celebrated Independence Day with a military parade through Freedom Square in Tallinn. The commander of the 900 or so British troops stationed here, Colonel Dai Bevan, remembers watching as people in the crowds reached for their mobile phones to watch the news. My taxi driver tells me that for many the images stirred memories of watching flames engulf buildings in their city during the second world war and seeing the red glow of Helsinki just a few miles away across the water.

At the top of the steps inside the HQ of the Estonian Defence Forces stands a silver sword longer than I am tall. The inscription beneath it reads: ‘We are not free from the mercy of others but we are free because we fought for it ourselves.’ Their commander Major General Veiko-Vello Palm tells me that all too many in the West do not understand the Russian mentality. They do not understand the concept of ‘win-win’, he says. Either Russia wins or she loses. He and his Prime Minister argue that Russia must now lose, be seen to lose and accept defeat as Russia did in Afghanistan. Any security ‘grey area’ will lead inevitably to instability if not necessarily to war.

The next day I stand under the shadow of Warsaw Castle to watch Joe Biden speak to Poles about the battle between democracy and autocracy. Almost everyone in the crowd has a story about why they were here. An old lady pulls her anti-communist ID card from her purse to show me. A young woman tells me that her grandfather died in the Katyn massacre. A man leans over to speak of his pride that Warsaw is ‘the new Berlin’ – the new frontier of the Free World. I am reminded of my own history. In the summer of 1989 – before the fall of the Berlin Wall – I waited for hours in a vast crowd in the centre of Budapest to hear George Bush Sr speak. People then were desperate for change. They carried their own version of the national flag, with a hole in the centre where there had once been the hammer and sickle; many had been there in 1956 before the Soviet tanks crushed their hopes. And I remember that day the following year when I stood with the crowds on top of the Wall and watched a young man jump down into no man’s land – an act that would just days earlier have led to his certain death. He handed a flower to a young East German soldier. The crowd held its breath as the soldier decided whether he dare accept it. When he did, those of us on the Wall broke into a wave of applause. Some said history stopped when it fell. What we’ve seen this week is how wrong that was.

A year ago, on 24 February, I awoke to the sound of explosions close to the hotel I was staying in in Kyiv. I’d abandoned my boys at the airport as we were on our way to watch Manchester United play in Europe. ‘Don’t worry,’ I assured my family, ‘he’s not mad enough to attack the capital city.’ I was wrong. So many were. This year, after reporting on the mood in Europe one year on – after visiting Tallinn, Warsaw and Berlin – I’ll fly to Manchester to stand in the Stretford End and watch United play Barcelona. I’ll hug my children tight and remember how lucky – how very, very lucky – we are.

What else has had the Roald Dahl treatment?

That’s another story

Roald Dahl’s books have been edited to make them less offensive, with references to ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’ people removed. Other children’s media that has been revised:

– The Noddy books originally featured golliwogs, which were removed in 2009.

– Six Dr Seuss books were withdrawn from sale in 2021, one for featuring a Chinese man with chopsticks for eyes, another for depicting African characters in grass skirts.

– Dumbo was taught to fly by crows with exaggerated southern US accents. One was originally called Jim but has been renamed Dandy, and a content warning added. 

– Peter Pan refers to ‘redskins’, also now with a content warning.

Turning profits

How has the profitability of UK firms changed in the past decade? Net rate of return for non-financial sector companies:

Q3 2013 11.3%

Q3 2014 12.8%

Q3 2015 11.6%

Q3 2016, Q3 2017 10.5%

Q3 2018 10.1%

Q3 2019 10.2%

Q3 2020 10.4%

Q3 2021, Q3 2022 9.7%

Source: Office for National Statistics

Gloomy forecasts

How good is economic forecasting? Some forecasts made in the fourth quarter of 2022 for UK growth (which in the event turned out at 0 per cent):

CEBR (Nov) -1.1%

British Chambers of Commerce (Dec) -0.9%

J.P. Morgan (Dec) -0.6%

Bloomberg Economics (Dec) -0.5%

Barclays Capital (Dec) -0.4%

Citigroup (Dec) -0.2%

Capital Economics (Dec) -0.1%

CBI (Dec) 0.1%

NIESR (Dec) 0.5%

Source: HM Treasury

Meal plans

Sadiq Khan wants free school meals for all children at London primaries, at a cost of £130 million. Who gets them now?

– Across England, 1.9m (22.5%) got free school meals in 2021/22. It grew from 13.6% in 2017/18 to 15.4% in 2018/19, 17.3% in 2019/20 and 20.8% in 2020/21.

– Children qualify if they live in a household which receives a welfare benefit and with an income (after tax but excluding welfare benefits) of less than £7,400.

– In 2021/22, the highest proportion getting them was in the north-east (29.1%), and the lowest was in the south-east (17.6%).

Faith belongs in the public square

Everyone approaches life with a particular set of values. Atheists and secularists live by an ethos, although they do not stick a label on it in the same way that we Christians do. Perhaps that’s why some people are particularly nervous about Christians in high office. We can all point to people who proudly wear their faith casting judgment or being intolerant, so it is inevitable that Christians will be asked tough questions.

As a Christian, I don’t get offended when I see Christians in politics treated differently by those who consider themselves progressives. After all, it will always be countercultural to hold to the Bible’s teachings on how we live.

However, as a liberal, this peculiar treatment of Christians troubles me. Should our commitment to diversity not extend to people with faith? Liberalism is the belief that each of us should be permitted to pursue the life we choose.

Yet it seems that western liberal democracies have developed a blind spot when it comes to Christianity. Western progressives lack curiosity as to why a Christian might take a different, jarring position on issues such as refugees, sexuality, poverty, abortion, greed and gender. As it happens, I’d argue that the secular perspective is riddled with internal contradictions. For example, if there is no God or natural law, then human rights are surely an arbitrary, temporary fiction.

This unease with which Christian faith is treated was clear when I was the leader of the Liberal Democrats. It’s clear, too, in Scotland today. One of the early favourites to replace Nicola Sturgeon is Kate Forbes, the 32-year-old cabinet secretary for finance and the economy; an extraordinary job to hold at such a young age. She also happens to be a devout Presbyterian. But even before she announced her decision to stand, just as many newspaper inches were dedicated to questioning her Christian faith as they were to assessing her political aptitude.

As Stephen Daisley wrote recently on The Spectator’s website, Christianity is ‘regarded at best with suspicion but more often as bigotry licensed by superstition’. The implication is that holding fast to a Christian faith is weird, irrational and probably at odds with running a liberal democratic country.

That view is underpinned by a rather lazy assumption that the absence of faith is neutral, and that those whose faith affects the positions they take are pursuing an agenda that is at best eccentric, possibly offensive, and at worst dangerous.

I’ve read some hysterical pieces about the possibility of Kate Forbes becoming first minister. It’s obvious to me that she is not seeking to impose a Christian theocracy from Shetland to Southerness. Instead, she is moved by a desire to follow Jesus Christ and to respect the Bible which implores us to seek justice, to defend the orphan, to plead for the widow, and to reflect God’s calling to love kindly and walk humbly.

Even if I wasn’t a Christian, I hope I’d think that politicians with such moral convictions enrich our public life; far better than those whose ambitions seem to go no further than themselves. When I interviewed her recently for my podcast, A Mucky Business, she spoke of how ‘ambition is for being excellent, not for status or position’. We shouldn’t be suspicious of that attitude. In fact, we should demand it.

‘Have a private faith if you must, but don’t take it into the public square.’ I hear this a lot and it’s nonsense. The truth is that there is no such thing as a neutral place in the public square.

If we want to live in a genuinely pluralistic society, we must avoid suspicion of individuals simply because they belong to certain groups. But for the same reason, we must ensure that we are not all forced to obey a uniform belief in the values of secular progressivism. The 1st-century church – just 7,000 people – lived in a pluralistic society. They didn’t march on Rome or denounce non-Christians. Rather, they loved their neighbours and lived Christian lives in front of a watching world. It should be no different today.

Who really discovered DNA’s structure?

Tuesday 28 February marks the 70th anniversary of – in my view – the most important day in the history of science. On a fine Saturday morning with crocuses in flower along the Backs in Cambridge, two men saw something surprising and beautiful. The double helix structure of DNA instantly revealed why living things were different: a molecule carries self-copying messages from the past to the future, bearing instructions written in a four-letter alphabet about how to synthesise living bodies from food. In the Eagle pub that lunchtime, Francis Crick and James Watson announced to startled fellow drinkers that they had discovered the secret of life.

That all living creatures, from microbes to ministers, turn out to share the same universal genetic cipher is why this breakthrough was more momentous as well as more unexpected than any other discovery I can think of. (Newton’s gravity? Just another force. Columbus’s America? Just another continent. Darwin’s evolution? Close. Mendel’s genetics? Not as big as DNA. Einstein’s relativity? Too obscure. Heisenberg’s and Schrodinger’s quantum mechanics? Too hard to understand. Fibonacci’s double-entry book-keeping? Nice try.)

The American James Watson is now the sole survivor of the five main actors and their many colleagues whose work led to that moment. Alas, at 94 he has lived in seclusion since a car accident three years ago left him with significant memory loss. I called him this week for a chat but he no longer recalls much about the events of 70 years ago. His tendency to shock people with provocative remarks, which maybe worked when he was the enfant terrible of science in the 1960s and the head of the Human Genome Project in the 1990s, and which enabled him to write the painfully honest bestseller The Double Helix, had tarnished his reputation in the years before the accident.

Watson came into the Cavendish Laboratory early that Saturday morning and started playing with cardboard cut-outs of four nitrogenous bases: adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. He had been told the day before by the chemist Jerry Donohue that the textbook had misled him and his metal versions were the wrong shapes. With new cardboard shapes, he suddenly saw something electrifying: adenine bound to thymine was the same shape as guanine bound to cytosine. So it did not matter what order they were slotted into the structure of the DNA molecule, the sequence on one strand of the double helix would automatically determine the sequence on the other strand. Life copies itself. That ‘base pairing’ eureka moment was and is Watson’s alone.

But a hint of wrongdoing hangs over the second part of the story. Crick ‘sauntered in’ at mid-morning, took one look and spotted that the entire structure now fell into shape. For the base pairing to work, the two strands of phosphates and sugars must run in opposite directions, one up, one down, which was exactly what Crick had realised the week before – from work being done by a rival team at King’s College, London. Watson had seen an X-ray crystallograph, known as Photograph 51, taken at King’s, that proved the point and gave crucial dimensions – if you knew how to interpret it, as Crick almost uniquely did.

Whose photograph was it? Therein lies a tangled tale. It is often said that Rosalind Franklin took that photograph, that it was all but stolen from her by Watson and Crick, who never acknowledged their debt to her. It is not so simple. Franklin’s role was vital, and was underplayed in the years after the discovery (and her early death), but the revisionism sometimes goes too far.

The photograph was actually taken in May 1952 by Franklin’s graduate student, Raymond Gosling. It was he, working with his previous supervisor, Maurice Wilkins, who had pioneered the technique for making X-ray crystallographs of DNA fibres. To Wilkins’s surprise the project and the student had been taken from him in 1951 by the boss of the lab, Sir John Randall, and handed to Franklin, creating disastrous mistrust between them. Franklin had improved the technique considerably, but it was Gosling who prepared Photograph 51. He told me so.

Given how much justified indignation nowadays surrounds the stories of senior scientists getting credit for the work of their PhD students – Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s discovery of pulsars in 1967 being the classic case – it is surprising that little fuss has ever been made on behalf of Gosling. Before he died I asked him if it rankled that he was often left out of the story. No, he said, it was ‘Uncle Maurice’ he felt sorry for.

How had Watson seen the photograph? After the Cambridge duo made a clumsy, mistaken model in 1951, greeted with scorn by Franklin, their boss Sir Lawrence Bragg told them to stop working on DNA and leave it to the King’s lab. This was a gentlemanly concession that might not happen today. For a year Franklin and Gosling had an effective monopoly on the subject. Wilkins was excluded, and assorted other scientists who had been inching towards the structure of DNA – William Astbury, Dorothy Hodgkin, J.D. Bernal and Sven Furberg – had for various reasons given up trying. Their Californian rival, Linus Pauling, lacked good samples of DNA and was refused a visa by the American government because of his anti-nuclear views, so could not travel to London to see their pictures.

As 1953 began, Pauling announced he had nonetheless cracked the problem, plunging the Cambridge team into despair. But when his paper arrived in England – via Pauling’s son Peter who was sharing an office in Cambridge with Watson, Crick and Donohue – his solution was obviously wrong. Still, said Crick, it would not be long before Pauling would get on the right track. The Cambridge lab was haunted by memories of Pauling beating Bragg to a previous discovery about protein structures. Hence Watson went to London on 30 January waving Pauling’s manuscript at both Franklin (who sent him packing) and Wilkins.

Franklin had made cautious progress but had chosen not to analyse Photograph 51 so far, focusing on other images of the so-called A form of DNA. She had been offered a position at Birkbeck College to work on viruses and was writing up her DNA research before leaving King’s in March. The long-suffering Gosling, about to be handed back to Wilkins like a parcel, took Photograph 51 to Wilkins, who showed it to Watson, who described it to Crick, who was probably the person in the world best equipped to interpret it. The rest is history.

This is a story replete with competition, friction, misunderstanding and some sexism, but it lacks anything truly unethical, let alone criminal. Four men and one woman, none of whom was perfect and who could have moved faster if they had cooperated, nonetheless stumbled on a spectacular insight about the world, culminating in a eureka moment for two of them in Cambridge 70 years ago next week. On that day I’ll crack open a bottle of bubbly and watch a kind friend’s DVD of the (disgracefully) out-of-print BBC docudrama Life Story, starring Juliet Stevenson as Franklin and Jeff Goldblum as Watson.

The secular inquisition: why must Christian politicians defend their beliefs?

What did Kate Forbes’s supporters expect would happen? When the Scottish finance secretary and Scottish National party leadership candidate was asked whether she would have voted for the legalisation of gay marriage if she had been in the Scottish parliament at the time, she said that she wouldn’t, because as a devout Christian she believes marriage is between a man and a woman. She added that if she became first minister, she would not ‘row back on rights that already exist’.

In response to her honest answer, several of her backers threw their hands up in horror and withdrew their support. One of her own finance ministers said he was ‘unable to continue to support Kate’s campaign’ because equal marriage was one of Holyrood’s ‘greatest achievements’. Others followed suit, all sounding surprised that someone who has always been open about her membership of the Free Church of Scotland might hold true to its teaching even when a big job came along.

Even if they hadn’t known Forbes personally very well before they backed her, surely they understood the religious landscape of their country. The ‘Wee Frees’, as they are referred to in Scotland, are known to hold socially conservative views on marriage, abortion and other moral issues. Being shocked that Forbes also holds these views is like being shocked that a Catholic might agree with the Pope.

The ferocity of the reaction to Forbes is the latest example of the way a secular inquisition works against leading politicians with religious beliefs they actually stick to. When Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron quit his post after the 2017 general election, he said that it had felt ‘impossible’ for him to ‘hold faithfully to the Bible’s teaching’. He had spent much of his tenure dodging questions on gay sex, whereas Forbes has made the decision to confront them early and take the heat. But what the SNP leadership contest shows us is that the inquisition has changed a lot in the intervening six years – and in some ways for the better.

The slightly ludicrous surprise of Forbes’s supporters at her views on marriage was nothing compared with the shock on the faces of Nicola Sturgeon and other more liberal politicians who recently found themselves being grilled about their beliefs for the first time. One of the factors in the First Minister’s resignation was the mess over her support for gender self-ID and her Gender Recognition Reform Bill. Like Farron, she struggled to answer the same question over and over again; for her it was ‘Is the convicted rapist Isla Bryson a man or a woman?’ Her answers became less and less credible. During First Minister’s Questions, she ended up inventing a third sex of ‘rapist’ in order to avoid answering the question, saying: ‘What I think is relevant in this case or not is not whether the individual is a man or claims to be a woman or is trans. What is relevant is that the individual is a rapist.’ When she was asked whether there were ‘contexts where a trans woman is not a woman’ and whether that meant they were not equal to biological women, Sturgeon looked totally exasperated to have her thinking pulled apart.

Sturgeon will have grown used to those sorts of questions – which seek to suggest someone is falling prey to magical thinking – being asked of people like Forbes. The people with beliefs. Sturgeon and many in her party – and across politics, in fact – have ended up thinking that if you do not have religious views, then you are effectively neutral. Their worldview, they believe, is the default way of thinking and therefore the only people who have to explain themselves are the ones who deviate because of religion. Forbes’s answers on why she would have voted against gay marriage might not please everyone, but she has clearly had to think them through and practise arguing them to highly critical audiences. Sturgeon, on the other hand, was not used to being treated with such suspicion, even in the hurly-burly climate of Scottish politics.

Forbes and Farron are both evangelical Christians, but differ in their approach to politics. Forbes comes from a tradition that believes that lawmakers who allow, for instance, gay marriage are harming the very people they are supposed to be guiding and protecting by allowing them something that God sees is wrong. Farron, meanwhile, thinks it is wrong to legislate to force people to live as Christians when they are not.

I know a little of the world both of these politicians move in. For ten years I was very active in the evangelical church in England. I left the church seven years ago and hold no candle for its stance on many things, but even at the time I found it strange that my fellow believers would argue so passionately that they deserved freedom to practise their religion while campaigning vociferously against freedom for others to marry whom they chose. It seemed to me that if we wanted to be left alone to believe what we did about sin and salvation, we should afford the same to everyone else.

My own worldview has changed a great deal more since then, but I find it strange that these days no one accuses me of woolly thinking on moral issues, even when I haven’t interrogated my beliefs very much at all. I remain as capable of being daft and ignorant as when I had a faith, but now I’m not held to be suspicious.

Everyone has a worldview which needs interrogating. It’s no bad thing when politicians are asked – as Kate Forbes was – ‘what’s your position on the morality of the issue?’. It’s just that religious people in politics – and more so conservative Christians than, say, conservative Muslims – are much more used to others being suspicious of their beliefs and assumptions than secular progressives. Anyone who has had a faith will be used to being accused of believing in a ‘sky ghost’, or of having their beliefs about, say, transubstantiation mocked as magical thinking. Now, progressives hear the same insult thrown back at them when they defend gender self-ID: aren’t you guilty of magical thinking too by saying a man can decide he is a woman, regardless of chromosomes or genitalia? Many find that very question deeply offensive, and refuse to put the legwork into explaining themselves in a way they would demand of their religious peers. Of course, the main opponents of gender self-ID tend not to have much to do with organised religion either, but it’s easier to lump them in with the God-botherers than to give them a hearing.

This laziness is one of the very reasons the gender debate has ended up being such a mess. When you assume there is a default ‘right’ view, you stop interrogating its underlying assumptions. You stop understanding how to argue your case – or even when to change your mind. You ignore those who disagree with you and fail to spot when they have a valid critique of what you are trying to achieve. How much easier (and more cowardly) it is to simply declare that someone who thinks differently to you has no place in a modern political party.

Politics becomes flabby and policies dangerous when consensus crushes opposing arguments. Forbes clearly knew she had to answer for her beliefs – the worry is that her opponents don’t seem to think they deserve the same treatment.

Is Shakespeare ‘far-right’ now?

Oh – and the Collected Works of Shakespeare. I forgot to mention that last week: that among the books on the reading list that could be a sign of ‘right-wing radicalisation’, some genius public servant came up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Nobody knows what the attitude of Prevent’s ‘Research Information and Communications Unit’ (RICU) would be towards someone found in possession of, say, a quarto edition of All’s Well that Ends Well. Perhaps they should be deemed to be on the conveyer belt to right-wing extremism?

It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that we have officials who think owning the work of our national poet is a sign of right-wing extremism. Because in recent days it seems that everything has been such a sign.

Take events in Liverpool. Recently a video did the rounds on social media showing a man propositioning a local 15-year-old in her school uniform. The girl saw the adult migrant off, but not all of the locals viewed the interaction benevolently. One additional problem was that the authorities in their great wisdom had decided to put a lot of migrants who have entered the country illegally in recent years into Knowsley – one of the most deprived areas of the country.

A mix of factors led to several nights of unrest. Locals protested outside a hotel housing migrants and a police van was seton fire. As well as condemning any violence, a number of things might be observed about this. One is to note that during a cost-of-living crisis many people do not appreciate those who have gamed the system living in a hotel at the expense of taxpayers who could not afford to live there themselves. The public also take a dim view of men assaulting (or attempting to assault) schoolgirls. Call it a local prejudice of our own.

Fortunately a goodly portion of our media has no time for such backward views. Instead, in reaction to events in Liverpool the media largely did what a portion of it does best: they tried to excommunicate the general public. The Guardian, for instance, went with ‘Far-right protestors clash with police at Merseyside hotel housing asylum seekers’. There are at least two things to admire in that headline. One is the turning of all illegal migrants into ‘asylum seekers’. The second is the turning of any concerned member of the British public into a ‘far-right protestor’. Quite the work of art that.

Others, like the activist group ‘Stand up to Racism’, blamed the protests on Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman ‘scapegoating refugees’ and ‘giving space to the racists and the far-right’. This far-left group went on to express solidarity with all the ‘antiracists and antifascists’ who were turning up in Liverpool to counter the, er, general public.

But it wasn’t just groups like Stand up to Racism who tried to pin the disturbances on the Prime Minister and Home Secretary. A once admirable, if politically ambitious, prosecutor called Nazir Afzal claimed that Braverman was committing ‘victim-blaming of the highest order’ against the migrants. Other pundits insisted that the events were the inevitable result of ‘anti-immigrant’ rhetoric from the Home Secretary. Because if there is one thing we all know about the people of Merseyside, it is that they sit on a knife-edge awaiting their latest instructions from the Conservative Home Secretary.

A few days after these media ninnies performed this drive-by against the protestors in Liverpool, they went a little quiet. Especially when it turned out that four teenage Afghan migrants had just been arrested for the rape of a different 15-year-old schoolgirl in Kent. Also that in just one east London hotel housing migrants, there were at least two cases of sexual assault of underage boys in a couple of weeks.

Naturally, there is nothing that anyone could or should say about this. For if you were to take a dim view of these attacks and you happened not to have a column in a national newspaper, you might seek to make your voice heard. You might even take to the street to say you’re not cool with all these people breaking into the country, getting free housing and – in a small number of cases – harassing the local kids. Except that then, by the rules of the era, you’d be far-right and that’s your reputation gone.

Yet as the days progress I wonder if anything cannot now be called ‘far-right’. Lately, in Oxford city centre, a bizarre array of obstacles have been set up to make vehicle movement around the city centre even more difficult than it has been in recent years. This is because the local council has decided that Oxford should be a ‘15-minute city’. This is a new piece of jargon in the urban-planning world predicated on the idea that everything you need should be within a 15-minute journey. Not because they want to make our city centres more beautiful – God knows what kind of maniac would want to do that – but rather it is done to achieve some net-zero, anti-carbon emission, green stuff that is the only directing cause in some local politicians’ lives.

In places like Oxford, this means that the local population have had their ability to drive around massively restricted. Not everybody is happy about it. The other day there was a quite popular protest against these traffic restrictions.

Perhaps there were some people present who think that the World Economic Forum is planning to make us all stay in our houses and be vaccinated to death, and are just using Oxford city centre as their dastardly testing ground. Years like the ones we have just been through will do that to some people. But most attendees just don’t like the new traffic laws.

Yet who came out in force to oppose these people? Why various ‘antifascist’ groups, of course, all decked out in black to denote that they are not themselves fascists. These brave counter-protestors screamed ‘fascist scum’ at the protestors and promised, as ever, to ‘smash’ them.

An interesting reaction to a traffic-zoning dispute. But then, as with the Complete Works of Shakespeare,perhaps we must just accept that we live in a culture where everything is now described as ‘far-right’ and ‘fascist’ if it does not please people who seem to me, at any rate, unpleasable.

Kate Forbes isn’t homophobic for opposing same-sex marriage

Let me get this right. In Scotland’s political class it is de rigueur to believe that someone with a penis can literally be a woman but it is the height of bigotry to think marriage should be for heterosexuals only? It is good and ‘progressive’ to say that men, even rapists, should be put in women’s prisons if they claim to be women, but it is a cancel-worthy speechcrime to say marriage should be between men and women only? Scotland, you are so lost.

We need to talk about the persecution of Kate Forbes. It is revealing so much about our febrile and unforgiving political climate. For me the big takeaway is just how disorientated so-called progressive politics has become. We’ve now reached a situation where if you discard biological science, observable reality and a truth humankind has known since the very beginning – namely, that there are men and women and they are different – you’ll be praised to the hilt. But if you express a view that was completely mainstream for millennia, which in fact was the organising principle of human society – namely, that marriage is something entered into by a man and a woman – you’ll be shamed, damned and all but hounded out of respectable society. This is not normal.

The social-media mauling of Ms Forbes has been horrendous. Simply for expressing her deeply held religious beliefs – such as that marriage is for men and women and that it’s wrong to have children out of wedlock – she has been denounced as a gross, immoral homophobe who has no place in political life. What is essentially being said here is that traditionally minded Christians should be barred from high office. The intolerance of it all is chilling.

There’s a twisted irony in the Forbesphobia. She’s branded a bigot but it’s her hectoring denouncers who are the true bigots. It’s time to remind people what the word bigotry means. Bigotry is ‘intolerance towards those who hold different opinions from oneself’, says the Oxford Dictionary of English. Who does that better describe? Forbes, who has merely given polite and honest expression to her Christian convictions? Or the foaming Twittermobs who’ve responded to her religious utterances by calling her every name under the sun and insisting she mustn’t be allowed to lead the SNP? Bigots, heal thyselves.

The fire and brimstone is coming, not from Forbes, but from her haters. Forbes has been a paragon of reason and decency in comparison with her seething condemners in right-on circles. It’s they who are behaving like old-world religious hotheads, desperate to damn into obscurity anyone who dares to transgress their eccentric moral code. Surely it’s this neo-religious creed, this fundamentalist opposition to alternative ways of thinking, that has no place in political life?

The Forbes affair has got me thinking about one of the most pernicious claims in public life today – that it’s homophobic to oppose same-sex marriage. It is time to take down this myth. The branding of discomfort with same-sex marriage as a ‘phobia’, a prejudiced malady, instantly makes bigots of millions of our religiously minded citizens. Not just Christians but Muslims, Hindus and Orthodox Jews too. If support for same-sex marriage becomes a condition of engaging in polite society, of entering the political realm, then millions of people will be locked out. That backing same-sex marriage has become a new kind of religious test, a means of measuring someone’s fitness for public life, is nothing short of surreal.

What’s more, there are many non-religious people out there who think same-sex marriage is wrong, or just unnecessary. Including gay people. You can believe that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being gay, and that the dismantling of the vile laws that discriminated against gay people was one of the great progressive gains of the modern era, and still think same-sex marriage is a strange institution that weakens the meaning of marriage and might, in the long run, have problematic social consequences. That’s my view: gay liberation, brilliant; gay marriage, a bit silly.

The ‘progressive’ elites have no idea how ridiculous they look to millions of ordinary people. They have created a world in which kids can’t read the original Roald Dahl books in case they feel offended by the word ‘fat’ but they can be read stories by drag queens with names like Flow Job. A world in which you’re more likely to do well if you believe the violent male tormentor of women is himself a woman than if you believe what the Bible says about marriage. Listen, it isn’t Kate Forbes who’s crazy.

My list of banned words

North America’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Language Project has released yet another list of Bad Say. Scientists are to swap ‘male’ and ‘female’ for ‘sperm-producing’ and ‘egg-producing’ – as presumably most biologists are stuck in remedial learning and haven’t yet got to the chapter explaining that humans come in only two sexes. But rather than opt for another chortle at these petty rhetorical tyrants’ expense, I’m regarding turnabout as fair play. Behold, a by no means complete list of the expressions I’m banning right back.

‘Black and brown bodies’ – a bizarrely dehumanising reduction of people to biomass, often disconcertingly employed by the very folks in possession of said black and brown bodies. If others control or injure your body, they control or injure you. A person is a sentient being; a body is a thing. A person, once dead, as far as we know, is gone; a body can be a corpse. How this expression is meant to dignify minorities is anyone’s guess.

‘People who look like me’ – a wordy, childish reference to others of one’s own race, although any white student who insisted on a syllabus full of books by ‘people who look like me’ would probably get arrested. This weird euphemism for, if you will, ‘black and brown bodies’ bespeaks a telling reluctance to insist outright, say, that you wish only to read books by authors of your own race, or that the mutual humanity of authors of other races is insufficient to conceivably find their work germane to your specially black or brown life. Doesn’t sound as innocent put like that, does it?

The ______ ‘community’ – one of the most misused words of recent decades. By inference, memberships of identity groups such as Asians, the disabled or an alphabet soup of disparate sexual minorities are so palsy and kindred that they effectively form neighbourhood associations, replete with treasurers, secretaries to take minutes at meetings and bake sales. My experience suggests otherwise. Affluent black families in six-bedroom McMansions in Atlanta whose kids are in private schools have precious little in common with black families in southside Chicago whose kids are in drug gangs. Despite this glaring apples-and-oranges problem, non-members often pander to some ‘community’ because the word sounds deferential and respectful. Interestingly, no one seems to refer to the ‘white community’. At least in this regard, convention is spot-on. ‘White’ people have nothing intrinsically in common and famously divide into fractious, antagonistic factions. No bake sales.

‘Hate’ – which the whole world opposes and no one defends, so why are we obsessed with it? The strangely babyish and hyperbolic usage of ‘hate’ has dissociated the word from a real but surprisingly rare emotion. At its strongest, today’s ‘hate’ translates as ‘mild dislike’ or ‘misguided prejudice’; ‘hate speech’ translates as ‘faux pas’. But hatred – a word I prefer, as it may retain a modicum of its original meaning – is a virulent, volatile, all-consuming sensation that directed at an individual can even lead to murder. Me, I mostly ‘hate’ abstractions (Sadiq Khan’s proposed Ulez expansion) or public figures I don’t know (Kamala Harris, Putin), who are also abstractions. Faced with flesh-and-blood people, I seldom marshal any feeling fiercer than eye-rolling despair.

Likewise alienated from their dictionary definitions are ‘pain’ and ‘harm’. In left-wing circles, ‘pain’ and ‘harm’ never entail physical agony or palpable injury. When used to successfully blackmail purported transgressors against the left’s Little Red Book, these howls of unbearable suffering reliably conceal triumph and glee. Scrambling personal and corporate apologies for the ‘pain’ caused by minor infractions of progressive dogma merely incentivise more disingenuous predation and emotional fraudulence.

This is a new one, and it’s suddenly everywhere: ‘minoritised communities’, which overnight replaced the expression ‘marginalised communities’. ‘Minoritised’ suggests that these sub-populations have been maliciously diminished by some alien force, as if in a nationwide remake of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Absent this killer ray, presumably these sub-populations would constitute the vast popular majority. While the indigenous Americans and African slaves of centuries past might awkwardly be characterised as having been ‘minoritised’, today’s immigrants could only qualify as having ‘minoritised’ themselves. Vaguely accusatory, this most cutting-edge progressive coinage implies some unspecified demographic holocaust, the culprits unnamed.

The ‘global majority’ – a euphemism for the ‘non-white’. Truth in advertising: say the ‘non-white’.

‘Queer’ – a subversion of a pejorative into a badge of pride with which I’m fine in theory, but the refurbishment of this slur feels inorganic. The catch-all has been imposed from the academic heights rather than bubbling up from popular culture. Many gay men, especially older ones, despise this term and still react to it with a wince. ‘Queer studies’ having become an established university discipline, it’s doubtless too late, but I’d happily return the Q-word to meaning ‘odd’.

‘Lesbian’: perhaps this is none of a straight writer’s business. Still, when widely adopted in the 1970s, ‘gay’ referred to men and women both. Then, somehow, the men absconded with it (and wouldn’t they, now). Free of baggage beyond its initial meaning of light-hearted, ‘gay’ has been a great linguistic success story. If I were attracted to women, I’d insist the blokes share ‘gay’ again; to my ear, ‘lesbian’ is just an ugly word.

‘Heteronormative’ – always employed critically, for the left now opposes the very concept of norms. Yet nature, to which progressives pledge such fealty, has norms galore. Were men having penetrative sex with women not the norm, our species would be minoritised.

‘Neurodiverse’ – meant to convey that diagnoses of autism, depression, anxiety, OCD or bipolar disorder etc merely mean you’re contributing your valuable perspectives to our gloriously various world. Produced by the neurotically neutral mentality whereby no difference puts you at a disadvantage, therefore a terminology promoting a blatant lie. ‘Diversity’ having become the highest of social goods, ‘neurodiversity’ opens the way to demands that a proportion of every workforce is schizophrenic. Prefer ‘mentally ill’? Oh no! That’s on the opposition’s banned list! Tough.

Letters: Sturgeon’s delusion

Delusion of Sturgeon

Sir: Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation speech was the longest and most delusional in living memory (‘After Sturgeon’, 18 February). There were reportedly more than 150 ‘me’, ‘my’ and ‘I’s spoken, as she congratulated herself at length, despite the government’s deplorable record since the SNP came to power. She referred to Scotland just 11 times. That tells the electorate where her government’s priorities have been all this time. Their focus was never us Scots; it was how to separate from the rest of the UK. If she wasn’t going to persuade the majority to vote ‘yes’ then, like her predecessor, she would be so irritating and divisive that she hoped Westminster would want to see the back of us and grant Scotland another referendum.

Thank goodness that ploy did not work. The support for the Union is stronger than ever thanks to her failures.

Lyndsey Ward
Beauly

Ofcom compliance

Sir: You’re entitled to your opinion, as they used to say, even in Britain. And Toby Young is entitled to his, regarding my recent departure from GB News (No sacred cows, 18 February). However, I was struck by his summation of my show: ‘Great television, but not always Ofcom-compliant television.’ How does he know this? Ofcom has been ‘investigating’ me for a year and has reached no such determination. They have launched three ‘investigations’ into the show. The first they abandoned. The second has been running since April and the third since October. Toby’s breezy assertion of my guilt is clearly prejudicial.

Given Toby’s confidence in my non-compliance, perhaps he’d like to give Ofcom a heads-up on which rules I’ve broken, because they seem to be having trouble getting the goods on me. This risks giving the impression that these ‘investigations’ are a racket: producers and presenters of daily TV shows are expected to ensure that they’re in ‘compliance’ in the mere hours before airtime, but the fellows who wrote the rules need ten months to figure out whether I broke them?

How odd to find Britain’s supposed free-speech champ cheering GB News’s decision to play Queen of Hearts – sentence first, verdict whenever. As Toby has semi-conceded elsewhere, the clause I was being asked to sign is illegal under English law, which tells you something about whether or not this was a good-faith contract negotiation. But, more importantly on the broader free-speech question, GB News is self-censoring and conceding to Ofcom far more authority than the law demands.

Some years back, I ran into a similar situation with Canada’s censorship law –Section 13, which had a conviction rate of 100 per cent. The difference then was that, unlike GB News, the suits at the corporation and our estimable QC, Julian Porter, were all in agreement on the end-game: getting the law repealed and the Canadian state out of the censorship business. It was a tough fight, but we won: on 26 June 2013 the repeal of Section 13 received Royal Assent, and that was that. That’s what should happen to Ofcom’s powers over editorial content.

Mark Steyn
Woodsville, New Hampshire

Fast show

Sir: Jane Stannus (‘Fast and furious’, 18 February) should consider the benefits of being an Anglican when it comes to the Lenten penance advice of the Catholic Church. ‘You can go above and beyond, of course, if you want to’ may well be the Catholic approach to Lenten penance, but such flamboyant virtue signalling is expressly forbidden in the Church of England’s 39 Articles of Religion. Good Queen Bess and her bishops decreed in 1562 (Article XIV) that ‘Works of Supererogation’ – voluntary works besides, over, and above God’s Commandments – ‘cannot be taught without arrogancy and impiety’. So good Anglicans can remain great eaters of beef during most of Lent without any undue qualms, and will banish all thoughts of anything so foolish as going ‘above and beyond’, regardless of how much harm their wits might suffer.

Nicholas Head
Weymouth, Dorset

Coronation chaos

Sir: I wonder if Charles Moore has taken his understandable anxieties about the coronation (Notes, 18 February) to the government’s coronation minister? Not many people know that we have one (Stuart Andrew MP), possibly because he is also the Minister for Sport, Tourism, Heritage, and Civil Society, and has to answer for the Arts in the House of Commons. On top of all that, the Prime Minister recently made him Equalities Minister in the revamped Department of Business and Trade. Poor Mr Andrew was clearly too overworked to save the vital Court of Claims. Is it too late for Charles to take over the coronation ministry in the Upper House?

Richard Heller 
London SE1

Northern knocking up

Sir: Those of us brought up in grimy northern industrial towns and cities will know that the ‘knocker up’ was a man who went round the houses in the early morning wielding a long pole which he tapped on people’s windows to rouse them from their slumbers so as not to be late for work at t’mill (Mind your language, 11 February). So ‘wut [wouldst thou, in Stoke] knock me up in the morning’ might be a request from someone whose alarm clock had broken.

Bob Adams
Oxford

Taking stock

Sir: Impressed by the William Palmer poem ‘What Was a Library?’ (11 February), I cut it out to place in a secondhand book called The Case For Books, considering that to be an appropriate home. Opening the book at the flyleaf, I found that it had been rubber-stamped ‘Kent Libraries Withdrawn Stock’.

Brian Emsley
Kennett, Cambs