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Looking on in anger: Happiness and Love, by Zoe Dubno, reviewed
The fantasy of telling disagreeable friends how awful they really are is a relatable one. But rarely does it find such extravagant, relentless expression as in Zoe Dubno’s debut novel Happiness and Love. The narrator is a nameless woman who finds herself among former friends in New York. While she never succumbs to an outburst, her interior monologue issues forth like a furious esprit d’escalier.
The dramatic scenario – modelled on that of Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 novel Woodcutters – is a dinner party in the loft dwelling of an ‘art world’ couple with whom the narrator used to live, following the funeral of one of their cohort. The narrator remains resolutely mute – sitting for much of the span of the ‘story’ (which is really a framing device for her stream of consciousness) on the corner of a sofa watching her erstwhile friends.
The novel’s humour and grim horror are concentrated in the figures of Eugene, a narcissistic artist, and Nicole, his trustafarian curator girlfriend. From the moment the narrator bumps into Eugene in the street after a five-year hiatus he is cast as a ghastly pseud, almost too pretentious to be plausible – his tote bags stuffed full with what he calls ‘texts to fuel his study of object-oriented ontology’. He and Nicole are art collectors, too, of the worst variety – believing that ‘by purchasing the work, that in exchange for handing over the cash, they receive from the artist not only the piece but also the key to what it means, but of course they never do understand the work’. Italics denote reported speech, but also serve the wider function of inverted commas – unmasking the hidden folly of choice words or phrases.
Dubno has a particular talent for capturing the vanity, neediness and delusion of a certain type of wealthy ‘benefactor’ – their desire to be flattered (but not too much) and their gnawing suspicions of the motivations of others. Reading the novel is akin to spending time with a witty if merciless observer of other people’s idiocies. There’s something of a latter-day Holden Caulfield about the narrator in her dissections of Nicole (‘her ridiculous black Margiela mourning costume’) and Eugene (‘motoring along with cocaine long after his faculties of judgment, tact and coordination had been dulled to the point of nonexistence’).
The novel is at its best where its claim to dramatic realism is thinnest. Disembodied voices reverberate with more force than events. The actress who turns up and rails against the assembled party, ventriloquising much of what the narrator herself seems to have felt, is more a choric figure, swooping in to pass judgment, than a character in any classical sense.
If at times the narrative style has the stridency and one-sidedness of a rant, it also possesses an enlivening, claustrophobic charge. Unbroken from beginning to end, the monologue is characterised by a self-conscious chewing over of certain phrases or words or ideas. The device of italics suffers from an overuse that may be intentional, acquiring its own faint absurdity – as though anything and everything were worthy of ironising. Eugene’s demi-monde is eye-rollingly framed, for example, as ‘a new-world downtown, a place full of artists and critics’.
Reading Happiness and Love, one has the rising sense of being trapped in a single point of view – encased in the prism of the narrator’s burning disdain. But this ends up being the novel’s peculiar force. The present-tense setting of the gathering at the apartment (a ‘cathedral of modernist rococo’) evolves into a sort of hell, within which the narrator plays the part of a contemptuous ghost, observing proceedings yet barely noticed. Just when you feel that Dubno – or her character – can’t keep banging the same drum of invective, she somehow breaks through the other side of monotony. The repetitiveness becomes a propulsive refrain, like a delirious anger that feeds off its own momentum.
The trials of ‘the sexiest man alive’
This is an account of the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard court cases with a top-dressing of pretentious tosh about the meaning of celebrity, etc – but you can easily ignore the tosh because the basic story is so gripping.
Depp was 46 and already a global superstar when he met Amber Heard in 2009. She was a relatively unknown 22-year-old actress, but he auditioned her for the female lead in a film he was making of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary. Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson were also up for the role, but as soon as he saw Heard he decided ‘Yep… That’s the one.’
Amber arrived for filming with her girlfriend Tasya van Ree, whom she introduced as her wife. The director Bruce Robinson panicked: ‘She’s gay?!’ But Depp reassured him: ‘Don’t worry, no leading lady of mine stays gay for very long.’ People magazine had voted him the Sexiest Man Alive for the previous two years. But he was supposed to be in a long-term relationship with the Parisian actress and singer Vanessa Paradis, the mother of his two children.
Nevertheless, he split from Vanessa and married Amber in February 2015. All his friends urged him to get a prenup, but he didn’t. He was supremely insouciant about money. He spent $500,000 a month just on storing his collections of Hollywood memorabilia, vintage guitars and cars, and he owned 14 properties around the world, including a private island. He spent a further fortune on drugs and alcohol.
The marriage lasted only 15 months and was characterised by violent fights from the start. Depp’s bodyguard apparently noticed that ‘every time I see him, he’s got marks or scratches. She has a scary, scary temper.’ One time when they were filming in Australia, Depp apparently showed him his bloody hand and said: ‘She cut my finger clean off… she slapped me with a vodka bottle.’ The bodyguard dragged him to a car to take him to hospital while Heard kept screaming: ‘You’re a fucking coward, you big man.’ The butler managed to find his severed fingertip, but it was too late to sew it back on, and Warner Bros put out a press release that Depp had been injured in a go-karting accident.
There was photographic evidence that Heard’s face could look bruised one day and flawless the next
In May 2016 Heard filed for divorce, accusing Depp of 14 incidents of domestic violence, and was granted a $7 million settlement which she said she would donate to charity. She then had a relationship with Elon Musk, which Depp later described as ‘brutal’. Musk’s brother Kimbal said: ‘She was just so toxic.’
On 27 April 2018 the Sun described Depp as a wife-beater, and he sued for defamation. Then Heard wrote an article for the Washington Post, speaking out against domestic violence. It didn’t mention Depp by name, but still he sued for $50 million and she countersued.
The Sun defamation suit opened at the Royal Courts of Justice in July 2020. Heard was the paper’s star witness and testified to 14 different incidents of domestic violence. The judge believed her in 12 of the incidents and ruled that the Sun had not defamed Depp when it called him a wife-beater. He also rejected Depp’s case that Heard was responsible for him losing a finger in Australia and found that he had in fact assaulted Heard on that occasion. Warner Bros then dropped Depp from its forthcoming Fantastic Beasts film.
The bigger Washington Post trial was delayed by Covid for almost a year, and Heard spent the time having another lesbian relationship and producing a daughter, Oonagh, by surrogate. The trial was held in the town of Fairfax, Virginia, where the Washington Post was printed. The place was quickly overrun by TV teams and fans who queued all night to get a wristband admitting them to the courtroom. (One of the wristbands later fetched $4,000 oneBay.) Many fans came dressed as Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean – but there was also a woman who appeared as a turd, in reference to ‘Poopgate’, when Depp’s housekeeper claimed to have found faeces in his bed.
This time the trial did not go all Heard’s way. Depp’s lawyer established that she had not actually donated her $7 million divorce settlement to charity as she claimed. She said she had ‘pledged’ it, and ‘I use pledge and donation synonymous with one another’. But the fact was the charity hadn’t received it. Then jurors were shocked by an audio recording of Heard ranting at Depp, calling him a ‘washed up piece of shit’, where she was obviously goading him into a fight. And there was photographic evidence that her face could look bruised one day and flawless the next.
After a six-week trial, the jury found in favour of Depp and awarded him $10 million damages. One of the jurors later claimed that they believed him rather than her because her evidence had so many inconsistencies and also ‘having him on the stand was a breath of fresh air’. After the verdict, Depp retreated to his island in the Bahamas with his personal therapist Beechy Colclough and Heard moved to Spain. The newspapers wrote heavy op-eds asking if this marked the end of the #MeToo movement, and maybe it did. Anyway, the circus had moved on.
An explosion of toxic masculinity: The Fathers, by John Niven, reviewed
‘Fucking men,’ spits a woman towards the end of John Niven’s brilliant tenth novel, The Fathers. ‘Why do they always think it’s about fixing everything?’ It’s a classic hit of deadpan humour from a novelist best known for sending up the most appalling blood, spunk’n’booze-spattered excesses of modern men.
A former A&R man with a reputation for partying harder than any rock star, Niven made his name satirising the Britpop scene in his 2008 novel Kill Your Friends. Influenced by Vladimir Nabokov, Martin Amis and Irvine Welsh, he excelled at condensing his characters’ most brutal, misanthropic thoughts into kick-in-the-balls prose. The hectic, testosterone-spiked plotting and shock humour force conspiratorial laughs from readers before their spinning moral compasses knows what’s hit them.
But Niven, now 66, has grown increasingly interested in the more tender feelings squirming within the puffed-out chests of even his most venal characters. His previous book, O Brother, was non-fiction – a painful, piercing examination of the life of his younger sibling Gary, a petty criminal who died by suicide in 2010. In it, Niven compared his own life as a wealthy and successful arts graduate with the hardscrabble existence of Gary, whose debts he could have paid with a wave of his wallet. The complex emotional truths he squared up to for that book have clearly helped broaden the psychological scope of the fictional characters who appear in The Fathers.
Like Niven and his brother, this is a story of lives on different tracks. But unlike them, the titular fathers – two men in their late forties who meet outside a Glasgow hospital on the night their sons are born – come from very different backgrounds. Dan is an arts graduate who’s made a fortune writing and producing a long-running detective series set in the Scottish highlands. He drives a Tesla, only eats environmentally friendly salmon and dotes on his clever wife.
He’s caught off guard when Jada, a small-time crook and now the father of a sixth child by a sixth woman, appears beside him in the darkness to pass judgment on the bodies of various expectant mothers passing by: ‘Ye’d ride that until the fucking wean pushed ye oot, eh?’ Gentle, thoughtful Dan is left fumbling for words while his writerly magpie mind snatches up Jada’s slang for future dialogue. Dan’s son will come home to a lovingly baby-proofed nursery, his name already down for the local private school. Jada’s will soon be chugging energy drinks from his bottle while passively smoking weed.
Two fathers’ lives become a frantic scramble to ‘fix’ issues that spiral out of their control
But the plot quickly tangles the two fathers’ lives into a frantic scramble to ‘fix’ issues that spiral out of their control. Without preaching on social issues, Niven uses a catastrophic domino-topple of events to ask what power either man has to control the violent turns their lives take. We must consider the roles class and education play as both continue to regard one another as mugs. The horrors they endure expose heartbreaking, levelling vulnerabilities.
The book’s most shocking scene rips Dan from his middle-class cocoon; its most tender moment finds Jada (high on class As) lovingly atuned to the beat of his son’s ‘rabbit heart’. Without losing any of the propulsive, sweary energy or outrageous comedy of his early work, Niven has added real, lingering depth to his fiction. It’s this new richness of heart that makes The Fathers such a blockbusting explosion of toxic masculinity. A week after finishing it, I still feel my ears ringing as I wait for the smoke to clear.
Romantic fantasies of the French in India
‘The English cannot assimilate any nation,’ declared the narrator of a French travelogue set in India and published in the aftermath of the uprising of 1857. ‘They can only dominate with brutality, squeezing every last drop of blood from the veins of the oppressed.’ Reduced to ‘slaves’ who ‘tremble before the Englishman’s whip’, the Indians in this tale yearn for the ‘heroic Dupleix and his deputy de Bussy’. Had Louis XV’s jealous court not betrayed those two men, ‘India would have been French, not British’. The book was a work of fiction. It had to be. In reality, scarcely anybody in India, barring a reactionary nawab here and an obscurantist sultan there, longed for French rule.
The French were history’s losers. They were latecomers to India, backed the wrong locals, were betrayed by their masters at home and, despite their ambition and resourcefulness, were outsmarted by their British rivals on the battlefield. But defeat produced a powerfully nostalgic reaction in them for what might have been, in the way that an unrequited romantic constructs fantasies about a failed relationship. Like the Dutch, Portuguese, Danes and British, the French had gone to India to plunder it. But that opportunity lost, they imagined themselves as tragically thwarted missionaries of liberty. A cottage industry of counterfactual history materialised in France to cater to a market mourning India’s ‘loss’.
The actual history, as Robert Ivermee shows in his luminous Glorious Failure, was wretched. The French preached Christianity to Indians, pillaged their wealth and enslaved their bodies. The Mughals attempted to halt the last of these horrors, but the trafficking of abducted Indians on French vessels did not end until the 1830s. The French rose and expanded rapidly in India. By the time the Compagnie des Indes launched in 1664, the Portuguese had been present in India for 166 years and the British for more than six decades. But it took the French less than a century to emerge as Britain’s chief adversary on the subcontinent. The credit for this belongs to Joseph-François Dupleix, the governor of French India, whose labours to build an Indian empire for France occupy a large chunk of this book.
With some luck Dupleix might have ended up as the French Robert Clive. He was a more competent diplomat and a less avaricious administrator than his British counterpart. What he lacked was reliable support from Paris. In 1754, he was abruptly recalled home for having exhausted the Company’s coffers in pursuit of his political vision. French decline in India thereafter was swift. The Seven Years’ War, ending in 1763, confirmed France’s diminished status: losing spectacularly to the British in southern (or peninsular) India, it was left with five trading posts, which eventually became colonies of the French crown.
An industry of counterfactual history materialised in France to cater for those mourning India’s ‘loss’
France never recovered its nerve. Indians who set their clocks by the French would find themselves ruinously disappointed. Tipu Sultan, despite being the most formidable challenger to British dominance in southern India, failed to extract support from the French even after sending embassies to Paris. Napoleon, who saw his invasion of Egypt in 1798 as a mere prelude to the conquest of India, retreated home once Tipu’s kingdom fell to the British the following year. But France clung to its possessions in India until well after the British departed the subcontinent. In 1949, no longer able to control an increasingly restive population, it staged a referendum in one of its territories. The result was a decisive repudiation of the romantic fables of French rule fabricated by Parisian writers. Virtually the entire population chose unification with India.
Under intensifying pressure from Delhi, which threatened to choke French India by imposing economic cordons around it, Paris ceded control to India of all its holdings by 1954 – though this transfer of power was only ratified by the National Assembly in 1962, following the end of French rule in Algeria.
Ivermee begins his book with a counterfactual scenario in which Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s inaugural prime minister, recites his ‘freedom at midnight’ address in French. Although the ideas that emanated from revolutionary France – of liberty, equality and fraternity – animated the spirit of the liberal constitution India gave itself, an India ruled directly by France would have lacked the ingredients that gave rise to its unique quest for national independence. There would have been no Gandhi in French India. British rule, with all its cruelties, is what quickened India’s unification and rebirth in a republican democratic avatar.
The experience of those exposed to other imperialisms can be instructive and clarifying. Consider the words of the late Tibetan writer Tsewang Yishey Pemba in 1974: ‘If only Tibet had been annexed as a British colony she might today enjoy the same status as India.’ To recall Pemba’s words is not to exonerate imperial rule. It is to remind ourselves that there were infinitely worse forms of it than what India ultimately got.
What’s next for Taiwan?
When Portuguese traders sailed past a verdant, mountainous land on the fringe of the Chinese empire in the mid-16th century, they named it Ihla Formosa – ‘beautiful island’. But Kangxi, the third emperor of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, was less impressed when his naval forces captured it in 1683, scoffing: ‘Taiwan is no bigger than a ball of mud. We gain nothing by possessing it, and it would be no loss if we did not acquire it.’ Beautiful or not, Taiwan was a pirates’ lair, inhabited by tattooed head-hunters and best left alone.
Yet the Qing clung on to Taiwan for two centuries, with Chinese settlers gradually displacing the indigenous Austronesian population. In 1895, the island was ceded under the Treaty of Shimonoseki to Japan, which transformed it into a model colony with good sanitation, modern railways and a formal education system. When Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945, Taiwan was occupied by the nationalist troops of Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China (ROC). Then, in 1949, when the victorious communists founded the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Chiang evacuated across the Taiwan Strait. To this day, Taiwan is officially the ROC.
Contrary to the PRC’s claims, Taiwan has not always been part of Chinese territory. But whether the 22 million ethnically Han Chinese who live there today are Chinese, Taiwanese or a mixture of the two is a complex and highly contested question. For Xi Jinping, however, it is straightforward. ‘Blood is thicker than water, and people on both sides of the Strait are connected by blood,’ he declared last year. For Chris Horton, the author of Ghost Nation and a veteran reporter who has lived in Taiwan for a decade, it is equally simple: Taiwan is not Chinese.
In a punchy narrative, he sets out to ‘dispel the carefully crafted disinformation sowed by Beijing’. His intention is to provide Taiwan’s friends and protectors with a better understanding of its people, history and politics. His book is the result of hundreds of interviews, including one with the aged Lee Teng-hui, the ‘father of Taiwan’s democracy’, conducted shortly before his death in 2020. Horton dips into geopolitics, explaining the strategic rationale for China to take Taiwan. But Ghost Nation is at heart a journalistic history of Taiwan’s long march to become ‘Asia’s freest country’, not a war-gaming analysis to rival the think tanks in DC.
Horton is especially good on the brutality of Chiang Kai-shek’s quasi-fascist Kuomintang (KMT) regime, which ruled Taiwan under martial law from 1949 to 1987. From day one it behaved like an occupying force, seizing land and plundering the island. An estimated 28,000 people died during ‘228’massacres in 1947 – the KMT’s ‘original sin’. Around two million nationalist refugees crossed the Taiwan Strait in 1948-50, adding to the existing population of approximately six million. The native Taiwanese were kept in check during the 38 years known as the White Terror, when Taiwan became a surveillance state, subject to strict indoctrination and brutal punishments. Political prisoners had sharp sticks rammed up their backsides or were forced to eat dog shit.
With the end of military rule in 1987, Taiwan began the slow, difficult process of democratisation. In 2000, Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive party (DPP) became the first non-KMT president in the ROC’s 55-year history. After eight years of Ma Ying-jeou’s KMT government from 2008, which forged closer ties with China, the DPP returned to power under Tsai Ing-wen in 2016. Last year, she was succeeded by the DPP’s Lai Ching-te, who is reviled in Beijing for describing himself as ‘a pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence’. DPP governments have delivered social liberalisation – Taiwan became the first country in Asia to make same-sex marriage legal in 2019 – and fostered a strong sense of Taiwanese identity.
Herein lies the problem with Horton’s account. It is written entirely with a pro-independence view, hammering home the point that the KMT (and CCP) are illegitimate rulers. If so, why did a third of Taiwanese vote for the KMT in last year’s election, and why does it currently dominate Taiwan’s parliament? Horton is scathing of the KMT’s ‘ethnonationalism’, but he does not acknowledge that many Taiwanese view today’s DPP itself as a nationalist propaganda machine. I laughed out loud when he lambasted media organisations that decline to call Taiwan ‘a country’ for betraying the ‘fundamental principles of objectivity in journalism’. At times his own narrative amounts to an erudite rant. This is fine for readers who understand Taiwan’s deeply polarised politics, but it is hardly the ‘panoramic view’ promised on the dust jacket.
So what next for the beautiful island? Horton warns that China is quickly closing the military gap with the US, building the forces it needs to invade. A giant amphibious assault carrier ferrying robotic attack dogs could come into service by the end of next year. Xi has allegedly told the People’s Liberation Army that it must be ready to attack Taiwan by 2027 – though capability does not necessarily entail intent. A war in Taiwan, which sits on the world’s busiest shipping route and manufactures 90 per cent of its most advanced semiconductors, would cause a global depression. But does Donald Trump care about Taiwan beyond its use as a bargaining chip with Beijing? We may be about to find out.
Britain’s new role as a bastion of black culture
One of the great works of journalism to have come out of the Jamaican-British encounter is Journey to an Illusion by the late Donald Hinds. Published in London in 1966, the book is made up of a series of interviews with Commonwealth citizens who had settled hopefully on these shores after the war.
Hinds, who was born in Jamaica in 1934 and worked in London as a bus conductor, was disappointed to find that the British were not only unmindful of the Commonwealth, but disinclined to help African-Caribbean immigrants. (Gallingly for him, Italians in the Soho confectionary business were extended a warmer welcome, even though they had fought on Hitler’s side.) Inevitably as a ‘clippie’ on double-deckers, Hinds was exposed to racism. African-Caribbean folk were not that numerous in 1950s London and an entire week could go by without Hinds seeing another black face. Yet London Transport played its role, he believed, in breaking down race prejudice as buses allowed the public to encounter people from the Caribbean for the first time and even (heavens!) talk to them.
But the sense of camaraderie did not last. The UK was convulsed by race ‘disturbances’ in 1958, when tensions erupted first in Nottingham, then, more grievously, in London. White youths (‘Teddy Boys’ to the press) set out to assault the black and Asian colonial inhabitants of Shepherd’s Bush and the area then known as Notting Dale, between the factories of Wood Lane and the now middle-class streets of Notting Hill. Oswald Mosley’s neo-fascist Union Movement rallied Britons to go out ‘nigger-hunting’. So began four days of some of the worst civil unrest the UK was to see until the Brixton riots three decades later.
In her exhaustive history of the Anglophone Caribbean, Imaobong Umoren relates that any slender confidence British Caribbean migrants might have felt as citizens of the country of ‘Missus Queen’ was undermined by the riots. Overnight they found themselves denigrated as unwanted ‘coloured’ room-seekers. (Back in the Caribbean, the term ‘coloured’ applied to people of mixed race, but in the UK it was one of the basic words of ghastly genteel boarding-house culture.) Mosleyite calls for racial purity puzzled Hinds and other newcomers from the West Indies, as racial mixing was not new to them: Chinese and Indian indentured labourers had long married into the local African slave-descended populations.
Hinds (who died in Brixton in 2023 at the age of 89) was one of the first to champion the English-speaking Caribbean as a multi-shaded community of nations, at once parochial and international in its collision of African and European cultures. Jamaica’s own intermingling of Asian, white and African bloods in some ways made it a more ‘modern’ society than postwar Britain. Hinds, ahead of his time, could see that the UK, too, was going to be racially mixed one day.
Umoren, a professor at the LSE, argues that the problem of the colour-line continues to haunt British-Caribbean relations. An insidious ‘shadism’ has ensured that a minority of white or near white (what Jamaicans call ‘local white’) inhabitants still control the plantations and other industries. Planter snobberies were shaped and defined by colour (or, more properly, ethnicity). In order to bolster their social status, slave-owners evolved an elaborate ranking of skin, beginning with their eminences at the top and descending to the ‘salt-water Negro’ at the bottom. Between black and white were mustees, mustaphinos, quarteroons, octoroons and Sambos –a derogatory term for the children of ‘mulatto’ and African mix. Aspects of this racialised system have survived, says Umoren.
She deploys an armoury of off-putting campus-brand jargon (‘hereditary racial slavery’, ‘male heteropatriarchy’, ‘racial-caste hierarchy’) to make her point. The so-called ‘white élites’ of Georgian England could do no good at all. Even the abolitionists under William Wilberforce were ‘middle class religious zealots’ who culpably derided African culture. The only hope of salvation for the formerly enslaved lay in their move white-ward into Christianity.
Yet, as Umoren acknowledges, many African Caribbeans today hold romantic opinions of the British Empire, or at least display a pious Anglo-patriotism (call them ‘Afro-Saxons’). For them, Britannia was not all ‘white supremacist ideology’ and ‘racial capitalism’. An example? Though the death penalty still exists in Jamaica, most capital punishments are overturned in London by the Privy Council, Jamaica’s court of Final Appeal. Thus an ancient British institution comprised of mostly ‘élite’ white Law Lords becomes an unlikely defender of human rights in Jamaica. Such paradoxes are part of the Caribbean confusion: Victorian moralities that have long disappeared in the UK linger on in its former dependencies.
Lanre Bakare’s We Were There, a bracingly readable social history, celebrates the UK as a bastion of black culture, black music and food. Most white-owned grocery stores in the UK now stock tins of Caribbean ackee, bottles of pepper sauce and carrot juice. The ‘Jamaicanisation’ of London’s old Caribbean quarter – its boundaries roughly at Marble Arch, Bayswater, Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove – quickened apace after Jamaica’s independence in 1962, when more of its inhabitants left for the UK. Britain’s indigenous culture is now so deeply influenced by the island that a Jamaican inflection is hip among white British teenagers. (Dizzee Rascal, whose scratchy beats appeal to both white and black audiences, has ‘Londonised’ a Caribbean tradition of storytelling that was previously found in reggae, calypso and ska’s shuffle beat.) For good or ill, Jamaican culture is youth culture in British cities.
Bakare, who was born in West Yorkshire to a Nigerian father and a mother from Leeds, is well placed to write about Lagosian high-life guitar, ragga, reggae, jazz funk and hip-hop. He conjures the black music and racism that was occasionally rife in the Liverpool and Cardiff docks, as well as in Manchester and Edinburgh during the 11-year Thatcher premiership. While punk took hold in London in the late 1970s, a black American dance music craze exploded in Wigan and other inner city areas in the north where African Caribbean migration was at its most dense. Tony Palmer’s astonishing Wigan Casino documentary, shot in the Greater Manchester dancehall during the winter of 1977, inspired Bakare, he says, to write this book. It shows a Northern Soul all-nighter in full, amphetamine-amped swing. The dancers are manifestly almost all white, but, as Bakare points out, Northern Soul song lyrics often communicated aspects of the black consciousness movement espoused by Stokely Carmichael and other African-American civil rights activists. (The video for Pulp’s current Motown-like single ‘Got to Have Love’, appropriately, uses footage from the documentary.)
In vivid, well-written pages, Bakare considers the British countryside as a last enclave of whiteness, though things are changing. Black nature lovers are now represented by such groups as the London Caribbean Trekkers, Bristol Steppin Sistas and Peaks of Colour. In 1989, the Daily Telegraph’s former editor Bill Deedes (who championed the use of the countryside by all) suggested that the rural Black Environmentalist Network come out in favour of field sports: ‘Blacks for Foxhunting’ was the slogan he suggested, not entirely in jest. Bakare’s excellent book captures the life and glory of a culture that changed the face of Britain for good.
The insoluble link between government and crime
In the 18th century, the cash-strapped British crown imposed customs duties on tea imports that rose as high as 119 per cent. Unsurprisingly, such huge tariffs sparked a smuggling boom in coastal towns such as Deal, in Kent, where the cliffs were pockmarked with secret tunnels and half the inhabitants lived off profits from such illicit activities. When the government tried to crack down in 1781, it had to send in a 1,000-strong militia, headed by 100 men on horseback. Yet smuggling may have accounted for more than half of England’s trade at the time – and it often involved respected figures in communities who regularly bribed officials.
This underlines how the imposition of taxes creates illegal markets that can eat into state revenues and corrupt society. The 18th-century authorities framed this fight in moral terms, with loyalists, such as the theologian John Wesley, fulminating that smugglers were ‘worse than common highwaymen’. Others pushed fears that these crooks created ‘a nursery for all sorts of vice and wickedness’ and might be agents of their French foes. Yet if goods are overtaxed – or banned, like drugs today – then such smuggling can be viewed by some as a righteous fight against state injustice, thus funding and fuelling support for organised crime.
This example is among the glittering array of facts and anecdotes that stud the pages of Homo Criminalis, an examination of organised crime by Mark Galeotti, whose expertise on Russia and security has been so prominent in the media since the launch of Moscow’s atrocities in Ukraine. Fascinated by ‘the shadow worlds in which a nerdy scholar is not meant to intrude’, Galeotti probes the evolution of modern states, seeing them as ‘essentially engines to raise and spend taxes’. He then asks provocatively if we should be thinking of nations as ‘well-organised mafias which have been around long enough to accrue legitimacy’.
He does not really answer his own question; but this does not negate his subversive appraisal of organised crime, as he spears hypocrisy. Dante’s Inferno, written seven centuries ago, placed corrupt politicians in the eighth Circle of Hell, immersed in a lake of boiling pitch to reflect the impotence of the public to thwart their greed. As Galeotti says, corruption monetises privilege. Even elevating party donors or prime ministerial friends to the House of Lords fosters a damaging sense of moral degeneration. There is a corrosive belief that ‘if they break the rules, why shouldn’t we?’ Prosperous western democracies condemn corruption in poorer parts of the planet while their firms pay vast bribes and launder stolen cash.
If goods are overtaxed, then smuggling can be viewed as a righteous fight against state injustice
Galeotti romps at delirious speed through disreputable sectors such as drugs, human trafficking, gambling and pornography, spraying around often fascinating historical nuggets. In a chapter on cybercrime, he points out that the first case of hacking occurred in 1903 when Guglielmo Marconi was demonstrating his cutting-edge radio technology by preparing to send a message in Morse code to London. The receiver started suddenly tapping out the word ‘rats’, followed by the transmission of a scurrilous poem, since a magician had found a way to interfere with his signal.
The author’s obvious enthusiasm for his subject is matched by impressive erudition. Discussing gambling, he flits in one paragraph from a deity’s huge wager mentioned in the Mahabharata to Richard I’s efforts to curb betting during the Third Crusade. Then, in the subsequent one, he looks at the restrictions imposed by 13th-century Norwegian authorities in Bergen and a 14th-century ban on dicing and football in England intended to promote archery practice. Keep up at the back!
Clearly, organised crime is deeply capitalistic, with its ‘violent entrepreneurs’, even if Marxist academics portray ‘social bandits’ as liberation heroes in peasant societies. Galeotti argues that the underworld constantly adapts to service markets created and left unmet by the upper world, filling gaps emerging at any level, from backstreet drug dealing to sourcing antiquities for the wealthy. It exploits globalisation, leverages rivalries between nations and thrives on mistakes made by rulers – such as the ridiculous US attempt to prohibit alcohol. Galeotti claims that criminals become indicators of the gap between what society thinks it should have and what the state is willing to allow. History shows that when the gap grows too great, the deviant behaviour of gangsters can become redefined as legitimate.
This is a curious book – engaging and informative, yet ultimately leaving the reader wondering if it is really saying anything new. It does not solve the conundrum of how to draw the line between the underworld and upper world, despite skilfully skewering the posturing of polite society. One Scottish study found organised crime laundered its profits in cash-in-hand sectors such as cleaning and security, ‘helping to fuel the consumption habits of the middle classes in the bourgeois utopias’. And, as the author says, we need to recognise that our banks are full of dirty money; our foreign policy depends on deals with vile kleptocrats; our supply chains are packed with counterfeits; and our consumer goods and raw materials are reliant on trafficked labour. Sadly, all too often we turn a blind eye while brutal gangsters inflict misery.
The merchant as global reporter
Joad Raymond Wren’s ambitious history of early modern European news, capacious in structure, monumental in volume, is named for a witticism by John Earle (c.1601-65). The author of Microcosmography, a compilation of satirical ‘characters’ whose obvious modern heir is Victoria Mather’s ‘Social Stereotypes’, was arguably the funniest member of mid-17th century England’s most likeable clique, the Great Tew Circle. Wren more than once returns to Microcosmography’s comparison of the nave of St Paul’s, where London’s freshest newsletters were to be procured, with the commercial buzz of the Royal Exchange, with news replacing goods and hard cash as a potentially fruitful alternative currency.
Wren is a recovering academic, expert in the field of bibliography, or book history. You can tell from The Great Exchange that his devotion to that discipline and talent in its interpretation were fierce and genuine, and that he was always going to be obliged by temperament to burst free of its limitations. The book is much less conventional than it looks. In a characteristically garrulous preface, the author turns aside to ponder his labour’s possible obsolescence at robotic hands:
The future will bring more data. AI will be deployed to resolve some of the quantitative questions addressed here… I am only flesh and bone, and numbers aren’t everything.
The Great Exchange begins roughly with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and ends in the early 19th century, amid Waterloo, the invention of the telegraph and the advent of the press barons. Its geographical canvas is huge. A tantalising chapter on ‘The Peripheries of Europe’ includes consideration of what even the author concludes cannot be counted as peripheries – China and isolated Japan. Wren makes a logical and statistically impressive looking argument that speed of communications, political and religious context, commercial and linguistic connections and commonalities of interest constitute factors more electrifying to ponder than mere physical distance. But at times he cannot resist pushing the thought too far.
In Goodhartian terms, he sees early modern news as a force for Anywhere-isation –the lifeblood of polyglot merchants who often preferred like-minded overseas contacts to their quarrelsome, ignorant compatriots. Such men, and the mercantile city states they frequently represented, could be suspect in the eyes of authoritarian princes and conservatively inclined intellectuals and satirists. One figure who combined all these qualifications, Pope Pius II, snarled of the Venetians that ‘too much intercourse with the Turks has made you the friends of the Mohammedans and you care no more for religion’. When Wren states that ‘Venice made the world smaller’, he means it with thorough approval. Though his tone is more inquisitive than doctrinaire, he attributes Britain’s political stasis (rather than stability) not to its precocious political institutions but to its uneven distribution of land ownership and socially divisive educational traditions.
But for all he may think and dream like an Anywhere, Wren writes and feels like a Somewhere. He warns us in an apologetic aside that ‘any residual emphasis on English sources follows from earlier projects’. In Italy he is interesting on facts, but seldom conveys individual character. Regarding the Spanish-speaking world, he advertises much and delivers less. He seems positively alienated by the orderly, hierarchical, classical shape of French reportage. In Germany and in Holland he falls among friendlier company; but it is in our island story that his imagination and contextual understanding patently ramble at liberty.
Witness his evident delight in the way the Paston family of Norfolk burst through all his tentative generalisations, being ‘a small group of non-merchants far from the entrepots of Venice and Florence’. Always excellent on the contending and defecting news writers of our civil wars, he brings us home with the glorious deployment of a forgery, completely unknown to me, by the mid-18th-century Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, of Europe’s supposed first newspaper: the English Mercurie dated to the Armada year. The medium was actually invented two decades later in Strasbourg.
A rebellious childhood: Lowest Common Denominator, by Pirkko Saisio, reviewed
How do you dispose of 48 uniform volumes of the collected works of Lenin and Stalin? Pirkko Saisio and her mother hatch a plan. The books are ‘dumped into the trash bin’ by their apartment block, then coated with ‘a week’s worth of eggshells and fish guts and newspapers’. No one will find them, Mother insists. If anybody did, ‘there’s no way they’ll know they’re ours’. So Pirkko no longer has to hide the embarrassing tomes when friends drop round.
Executed during true-believing Father’s absence, Lenin and Stalin’s stinky downfall is one of many bittersweet episodes that make Lowest Common Denominator such a piquant account of a childhood and a time. A beloved Finnish novelist, playwright and screenwriter born in 1946, Saisio published this first slice of her three-volume autobiographical novel in 1998. Backlight and The Red Book of Farewells followed. It flashes back and forth between working-class Helsinki in the 1950s and the narrator’s present as overloaded writer, mother and daughter to now ailing Father.
From an early age, Pirkko ‘would like to be a boy’. She falls in love with female cousins and teachers, and comes to embrace her destiny as ‘an outsider’. Penguin’s edition highlights Saisio’s position in Finland as a queer icon, and her exploration of a genderfluid childhood. Yet alongside this sexual nonconformity – embryonic in the opening volume – Saisio sketches a poignant, funny-sad picture of a communist family in Cold War Finland. Leningrad lies right on the doorstep, but Washington oceans away. Father projects propaganda films for the Finnish-Soviet Friendship Society. Above all, Lowest Common Denominator registers the birth pangs of an author. When Pirkko understands that imagined stories can be written down, ‘tearful joy rises from the deepest wellspring of her being’. Call it a portrait of the artist as a wannabe young man.
The trilogy as a whole belongs on the same fertile patch of serial Nordic auto-fiction that hosts Tove Ditlevsen (in Denmark) and Karl-Ove Knausgaard (in Norway). Compared to the latter’s ballooning confessionals, however, Saisio is terse, droll and sardonic. She shows rather than tells in dialogue-driven scenes that whip along. Their tone spans affectionate comedy (as when Aunt Ulla decides she’s related to her lookalike Queen Elizabeth II, ‘chips off the same block’), tender snapshots of the tiny rebel’s dawning self-awareness, and the present-day regrets of Father’s final days in hospital. When, as a voracious young reader, Pirkko discovers Chekhov, she can’t share his ‘idle villa life’. Yet somehow ‘the sorrow – the sorrow is the same’.
The narrator changes; so does her nation. Father, that stalwart Party comrade, studies for a salesman’s diploma and wields ‘the only briefcase’ seen on their street. Mother runs a grocery stall. While this ‘fever to move up in the world’ takes hold, elders pass on tales of Finland as a ground-down Russian colony of fragile peasant lives. Aged seven, Pirkko’s grandfather was sold as a farmhand.
In contrast to the docile blondes of her clan, Pirkko feels like the ‘inherently bad’ brunette of a fairy tale – she who ‘laughs in the beginning but dies in the end’. Worse, she yearns to be the boy ‘who spits and goes wherever he wants and doesn’t care about anybody or anything’. But she does care – not just for unreachable angels, such as dark-haired Miss Lunova the circus announcer, but for the acrobatic magic of words. She senses that ‘everything that exists in the world is waiting for me to capture it in books’.
Mia Spangenberg’s translation deftly catches this nimble, glinting prose of memory. In both substance and style, comparisons with Ali Smith may come to mind. My only regret is that the dialogue sounds Urban American. For postwar proletarian Helsinki, readers here might imagine a touch of Glasgow – even Dublin – instead.
Germany isn’t happy about the EU-US trade deal
The US-EU trade deal has been given a lukewarm reception in Europe. Although the agreement between US president Donald Trump and the president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen is merely a framework, rather than a full-trade deal, there are already major concerns on the continent, especially in Germany – a country famously reliant on exports.
German chancellor Friedrich Merz did not seem too pleased with the deal, negotiated by his party colleague von der Leyen. ‘I’m not satisfied with the result in the sense that (it was said) this is good as it is,’ Merz stated. ‘Which, in plain terms, means the German economy will suffer significant damage.’
Europe could pay a big price for its weakness in dealing with Trump
Trump certainly seems to be the big winner from the deal which was thrashed out during the president’s trip to Scotland. The EU has agreed to purchase £558 billion in US energy, and will also up overall investment in the US by £459 billion.
‘We will replace Russian gas and oil with significant purchases of US LNG, oil and nuclear fuels,’ said von der Leyen. No wonder Trump was smiling. Jens Südekum, an advisor to Germany’s finance minister Lars Klingbeil, suggested the agreements on energy would strengthen the American, rather than the German, economy. It’s clear to see why.
The response from industry representatives, especially those speaking for German car manufacturers or the national steel and aluminium industry, was even more downbeat. Importers bringing EU cars to the US face tariffs of 15 per cent. Even though the rate of 27.5 per cent imposed by Trump in April has nearly been halved, the consequences for the likes of Volkswagen and BMW are likely to be severe.
German car manufacturers must surely now increase prices in order to balance the books. The prospect of being effectively forced into moving production from Europe to the United States is also looming. Volkswagen stated that it will decide whether it ought to expand its engagement in the US market once the final agreement is on the table. Meanwhile, VDA, the German car manufacturers trade organisation, predicts that a rate of 15 per cent could ‘cost the German automotive industry billions annually.’
The steel industry has voiced similar concerns, even though the specific rates for exports into the US are yet to be determined. ‘As long as steel tariffs are enforced at a rate of 50 per cent, the consequences for exports from Germany and the EU towards the USA are dramatic,’ said Kerstin Maria Rippel from WV Stahl, the trade association for Germany’s steel industry.
When the agreement – billed as the largest trade deal in history – was announced on Sunday, there was some optimism that further escalation between Europe and the United States had been avoided. However, after the dust settled, the verdict is less optimistic. French prime minister, François Bayrou, labelled the framework deal a ‘dark day’ for the EU. Industry leaders soon pointed out the damage that Germany, but also the EU, is now facing. ‘Who is awaiting a hurricane, is thankful for a thunderstorm,’ Wolfgang Große Entrup, representative of the trade association of Germany’s chemical industry, concluded. Is a bad deal better than no deal? Germany, and the rest of the Europe, is about to find out.
It is true that the US would have likely imposed a general tariff of 30 per cent on the first day of August, had Trump and von der Leyen not announced a first agreement in Turnberry. But this doesn’t mean the EU has won: the outline of the anticipated deal leads to the conclusion that the US has triumphed at the negotiating table. Europe could pay a big price for its weakness in dealing with Trump.
What Labour’s Jimmy Savile attack on Nigel Farage reveals
Nigel Farage is on the side of sex offenders like Jimmy Savile. That’s the verdict of Labour Technology Secretary Peter Kyle, after the Reform leader criticised the government’s Online Safety Act.
Kyle, is of course, speaking nonsense: opposing a law that fails to protect children and cracks down on free speech doesn’t put you in the same group as Savile. But Kyle’s comments do make one thing clear: Labour is seriously rattled about the rise of Reform.
Farage has demanded an apology from Kyle, who has so far refused to back down. Instead, having told Sky News ‘make no mistake if people like Jimmy Savile were alive today he would be perpetrating his crimes online – and Nigel Farage is on their side’, Kyle has doubled down. The Labour minister took to X after that interview to say: ‘If you want to overturn the Online Safety Act you are on the side of predators. It is as simple as that.’
Kyle has, instead, turned to insulting Farage. It’s a tactic that will backfire
Farage has made it clear that he is in favour of protecting children from dangerous content online but doesn’t think the Online Safety Act – which his party would repeal – is the way to do so. Zia Yusuf, Reform’s Doge chief, was even more outspoken than Farage. He told a press conference in Westminster yesterday that: ‘So much of the Act is massive overreach and plunges this country into a borderline dystopian state.’
But it was Farage who was Kyle’s target on this morning’s media round. The reason why is simple: Labour is scrambling to know how to respond to Reform, which has a seven-point lead, according to The Spectator‘s poll tracker.
Labour is facing a sustained assault from Farage, and are finding it hard to get a grip. Previously, Keir Starmer’s party simply dismissed Farage as a populist. As Reform’s rise continued, they tried to question his patriotic credentials, with the Prime Minister levelling accusations earlier this year that the Reform leader was ‘fawning over Putin’.
Another Labour tactic has been to attempt to forge a sense of patriotism to challenge Reform’s. Backbench MP for Dover and Deal Mike Tapp has been leading the charge. ‘I’ll never insult or belittle someone who votes Reform,’ he told The Spectator in a recent interview. But still, Labour has failed to dent Farage.
So Kyle has, instead, turned to insulting Farage. It’s a tactic that will backfire. Voters can see the flaws in the Online Safety Act – and they are unlikely to take kindly to Farage coming under attack for pointing these out.
Dressed up as a measure to protect children, in practice this Act will achieve little. There are already worrying reports of the impact this legislation, which came into effect last week, appears to be having. Footage of people being arrested in Leeds while protesting against asylum seekers’ hotels was censored on X for users who had not verified their age. Meanwhile, videos of a speech made in Parliament by Katie Lam MP detailing the horrors of the rape gangs have also been blocked for some users. One X user reported that paintings by Titian and the 19th century painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau were censored.
Were the effect on free speech not so chilling, it would be laughable. Farage is right to speak out against this ludicrous crackdown. Kyle should see sense and apologise.
Trump is right about North Sea oil
Maybe it is Donald Trump’s way of getting back at Keir Starmer for Labour sending activists to campaign for Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election. Either way, the US president seems to have no intention of obeying the convention that leaders of democratic do not delve into the domestic politics of their counterparts in other nations – and especially not while they are on a foreign tour. Today, Trump has doubled down on his attack on the windfarms he says are spoiling the view from his golf courses in Ayrshire and Aberdeenshire. Posting on his Truth Social account he asserted that UK government ministers ‘have essentially told drillers and oil companies that “we don’t want you”. Incentivise the drillers FAST. A VAST FORTUNE TO BE MADE for the UK, and far lower energy prices for the people.’
We know how Ed Miliband will want to respond to that, assuming he has not been locked away on Starmer’s orders for fear of spoiling the PM’s friendship with the President. He will put on his bewildered air and tell us that wind and solar power are so much cheaper than oil and gas, and that what Trump is proposing would put us in the hands of ‘fossil fuel dictators’ who apparently have to power to set energy prices in the UK.
The facts, though, are firmly on Trump’s side in this case. If Britain’s net-zero policy is delivering us such cheap energy how come we have some of the highest electricity and gas prices in the world? According to the government’s own data on energy prices, UK domestic consumers paid an average of 36.4 pence for their electricity and 10.2 pence for their gas in 2023. US consumers paid 12.9 pence and 4.0 pence respectively. And no, the UK’s high prices cannot be blamed on our reliance on gas. In the UK last year 29.2 per cent of electricity was generated by gas and 30 per cent from wind. In the US the corresponding figures were 42.5 per cent and 10.3 per cent.
Nor is it true that the North Sea is in such sharp decline that Britain isn’t missing much by refusing new licences and taxing the remaining industry to extinction (with a windfall tax which imposes a levy of 78 per cent on profits). According to the North Sea Transition Authority the combined ‘provable and probable’ reserves of oil and gas in the North Sea still amount to the equivalent of 3.3 billion barrels of oil. Offshore Energies UK – which represents the industry – puts it at 7.5 billion barrels. To put that into context, over 40 billion barrels equivalent of oil and gas have been extracted from the North Sea since the 1960s. Unlike the US, long-term self-sufficiency in oil and gas is no longer possible for the UK – at least not from the North Sea, although some estimates for shale gas suggest that fracking could produce up to 47 years’ worth of supplies at the current rate of consumption. However, there are still useful quantities of oil and gas beneath the North Sea which would be exploited if only the government would allow it. Moreover, no one really knows how much is down there unless you look for it – but who is going to spend money prospecting for new reserves in the current climate?
As for Trump’s point about greater North Sea production lowering energy prices, it is hard to argue with it. Britain’s eager adoption of renewables has not lowered prices, however much Miliband may promise us savings of £300 a year. On the contrary, we seem to be paying through the nose for our electricity and gas – around three times as much for our electricity and two and a half times as much for our gas compared to consumers in the much more fossil fuel-reliant US.
Corbyn and Sultana use same crowdfunder as Tommy Robinson
You’d think two botched party launches would have chastened Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn somewhat. Not so. The duo continue to heap praise on the number of sign-ups their new group has seen – reaching 550,000 in the last 24 hours – while Sultana uses the rising figure to barb Reform, boasting at the weekend that it had overtaken Nigel Farage’s party membership. But, as Reform figures were quick to point out, a free sign-up is a rather different thing than being a paid-up party member…
And Mr S has spotted another amusing feature of the dynamic duo’s freshly-formed website. YourParty – which Sultana rather confusingly insists is not the long-term name of the new group – uses a plugin from a US company called Donorbox to crowdfund for its lefty cause. Eagle-eyed observers might have heard of this organisation before – after it gained publicity through none other than far-right activist Tommy Robinson. As previously reported by BuzzFeed, Robinson raised money to cover £20,000 legal fees via the plugin after better-known payment platforms like PayPal cut off payments to some controversial right-wingers. Small world, eh?
When quizzed on Donorbox’s decision to allow Robinson to use the plugin at the time, CEO Charles Zhang remarked that he didn’t want to get into ‘opinions on [Tommy Robinson]’, and added:
We are not a platform or a social network that spreads information. Donorbox is a basic financial tool that allows people to give out of their free will. We hosts donation forms for socialists, conservatives, Muslims, Christians, and the LGBTQ community. It’s often that their views clash dramatically.
Given the politics of the Corbynista pair, Steerpike wonders exactly what the duo will make of using a platform with such a libertarian philosophy – and its links to a decidedly non-left-wing activist…
How could Britain deport more foreign offenders?
Barely a week passes without headlines about the UK’s ongoing issues deporting foreign national offenders (FNOs). Foreign offenders are estimated to make up around 12 per cent of the UK prison population and many are not deported upon release. While some stories may be exaggerated or misrepresented – such as the well-known case of an Albanian offender who initially avoided deportation due to his son’s aversion to foreign chicken nuggets (a decision later overturned on appeal) – there’s little doubt that the current system is both inefficient and somewhat unpredictable.
It would be possible to exclude the immigration tribunal system entirely – potentially eliminating the drawn-out appeal process
Despite claims that the deportation of FNOs is a government priority, recent statistics paint a concerning picture. According to data released in May, there are now 18,982 foreign offenders subject to deportation living ‘in the community’ after serving a prison sentence, up from 14,640 in 2022.
Under the UK Borders Act 2007, the Home Secretary must issue a deportation order for any foreign national sentenced to 12 months or more in prison. But there are a number of exceptions – particularly when deportation would violate the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the UN Refugee Convention, or the Council of Europe Convention Against Trafficking in Human Beings. The Immigration Act 1971 also allows for the deportation of offenders with shorter sentences.
Prisons should refer foreign nationals receiving a custodial sentence to the Home Office for deportation consideration. But in practice deportation orders are often delayed until all appeal routes have been exhausted. Human rights appeals, especially under Article 8 of the ECHR (the right to family life), are one of the most common methods of contesting deportation.
According to the House of Commons Library, from 2008 to 2021, there were 21,500 appeals against deportation and 6,000 succeeded. Of the successful appeals, around 11 per cent were granted on human rights grounds, with most involving Article 8 (the right to family life). Critics suggest that rather too many cases are currently being treated as ‘exceptional’ by tribunal judges to prevent deportations.
Earlier this year, an Independent Sentencing Review by former Lord Chancellor David Gauke recommended that one solution to the question of FNOs (and our increasingly overcrowded prisons) would be to speed up deportations for those serving sentences of up to three years by initiating removal proceedings earlier – rather than waiting until half the offender’s sentence had been served. Given the high rate of appeals, these proposals have been met with some scepticism.
The government has acknowledged the problem. In a June speech to European ambassadors, Lord Chancellor Shabana Mahmood committed to clarifying the legal framework surrounding Article 8, which she said is:
‘Too often used in ways that frustrate deportation, even where there are serious concerns about credibility, fairness, and risk to the public.’
I have previously argued that we need clear, robust, statutory rules to fix these issues; however the precise details of the government’s proposed reforms to the treatment of Article 8 of the ECHR remain vague.
Unsurprisingly, the failure to deport FNOs has been seized upon by some as yet another argument for the UK to leave the ECHR. But it’s not clear that such a drastic step would solve what is, fundamentally, a problem of practical inefficiency as much as legal complexity.
One alternative worth exploring is changing how deportation orders are issued. Gauke noted that deportation can be seen as part of the punishment for criminality. If so, why not allow criminal courts to make deportation orders at the time of sentencing? A judicial role was originally envisioned under the Immigration Act 1971 – judges could recommend deportation when sentencing an offender – but has largely been superseded by the current system.
If FNOs were subject to deportation orders as part of their sentence, these decisions could be made as a judicial determination. The Home Office would not have to conduct its own investigation and it would be possible to exclude the immigration tribunal system entirely – potentially eliminating the drawn-out appeal process.
There’s no legal or practical reason why criminal court judges couldn’t make these determinations. Sentencing judges already weigh family life and personal circumstances when deciding on imprisonment. With robust statutory guidelines, automatic deportation should still apply to serious offenders, while allowing judges to consider any alleged exceptional circumstances at the time of sentencing.
Any appeals could be handled within the normal criminal appeals process, potentially reducing both the volume and duration of challenges. Judicial decisions made at sentencing should carry more weight and attract far fewer appeals.
Yes, the criminal justice system is underfunded and slow. But removing thousands of deportation appeals from the immigration tribunal system could free up significant resources to support this new approach.
At a time when the government is considering proposals for simpler, speedier justice (such as the removal of jury trials for certain offences), the same principles should be applied to the deportation of foreign offenders.
France is turning against the EU
When Donald Trump won a second term in the White House last November the response in Europe was one of barely disguised horror. ‘The European Union must stand close together and act in a united manner,’ declared Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
The French are demoralised and angrier than ever with their ruling elite
Emmanuel Macron posted a message on X: ‘The question we, as Europeans, must ask ourselves is, are we ready to defend the interests of Europeans?’ The president of France got his answer on Sunday evening. No. The trade deal agreed between Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission president, and Donald Trump has not gone down well in much of Europe.
Scholz’s successor, Friedrich Merz forecast that Germany’s economy would suffer ‘significant’ damage because of the deal. EU exports will have a tariff of 15 per cent, which is superior to the customs duties before Trump’s re-election, but much lower than his threatened 30 per cent tariff. Additionally, von der Leyen has promised the bloc will purchase energy worth $750 billion from the United States and make $600 billion in additional investments. According to Hungary’s Viktor Orban: This is not an agreement… Donald Trump ate von der Leyen for breakfast.’
The most strident criticism of the deal came from France, where in a rare display of unity the terms of the agreement were savaged across the political spectrum.
Prime Minister Francois Bayrou said that ‘it is a dark day when an alliance of free peoples, united to assert their values and defend their interests, resigns itself to submission.’
Trade minister Laurent Saint-Martin described the deal as unbalanced and said the government should not accept ‘what happened yesterday because that would be accepting that Europe is not an economic power.’
It was telling that Saint-Martin said ‘Europe’ and not ‘France’. For centrists like Saint-Martin – he was one of the first to join Macron’s fledging En Marcheparty in 2016 – France and the EU are indistinguishable.
Macron’s predecessor (and mentor), Francois Hollande once accused him of ‘believing in nothing and having no conviction’. That is not true. Macron has one unshakeable conviction and that is the EU.
It is why he won’t let Brexit go, taking every opportunity to savage Britain’s decision to leave the bloc. Twice during his recent state visit he went on the attack. Britons were ‘sold a lie’ over Brexit he said at one point, adding on another occasion that the country ‘was stronger when part of the EU.’
As yet there has been no response the Elysee to von der Leyen’s trade deal. Perhaps Macron is still working out how best to spin the fact that Britain’s tariff rate with the USA is 10 per cent.
Marine Le Pen lost little time in pointing this out, posting on X that the EU ‘has obtained worse conditions than the United Kingdom.’ The leader of the National Rally described the deal as ‘a political, economic and moral fiasco’ and said that that ‘this form of globalisation, which denies and destroys sovereignty, has been outdated for many years.’
The majority of the French agree with her. In an interview with the BBC in 2018, Macron admitted that if given the choice his people would probably follow Britain out of the EU. This is one reason why he has been so determined to make life difficult for post-Brexit Britain: pour encourager les autres.
Macron’s strategy has been partially successful. A poll last year revealed that 62 per cent of the French are opposed to Frexit. The bad news for the president is that 69 per cent of them have a bad opinion of the EU.
The poll was conducted a month before the European elections, which resulted in a resounding victory for Le Pen’s Eurosceptic party and a humiliating defeat for Macron’s Europhile movement.
When Le Pen reached the second round of the 2017 presidential election it was with a promise to quit the EU. Two years later she abandoned that position and vowed to reform the bloc from within. Her party won’t return to Frexit but it will increase its Euroscepticism between now and the 2027 election. The same goes for the hard-left’s Jean-Luc Melenchon, who loathes Brussels as much as Le Pen. Bruno Retailleau, the leader of the centre-right Republicans, is also a long-standing critic of the EU’s ambition and voted against the EU Constitution in France’s 2005 referendum. That result, he said in a 2020 interview, along with Brexit, ‘have shown one and the same thing: Europeans do not want a federal Europe.’
Across France enmity towards the EU has strengthened in the last year. The Mercosur trade deal agreed with South America in December is widely unpopular and France’s failure to control its borders is blamed on Brussels.
The French are demoralised and angrier than ever with their ruling elite. A citizens’ collective called ‘Bloquons tout!’ (Block everything) is using social media to mobilise people for a day of protest on September 10. ‘Boycott, disobedience, and solidarity’ is their rallying cry and they are urging people to take to the streets across France.
Will it achieve anything? Probably not. After all, what’s the point of protesting in Paris when all the big decisions about France’s future are made in Brussels.
Labour minister: Nigel Farage is on Jimmy Savile’s side
An extraordinary exchange on Sky News this morning. Peter Kyle was invited on to discuss the reaction to the implementation of the Online Safety Act, amid concern that it is stifling free speech on the internet. But the Science Secretary opted to hit out at Nigel Farage after his comments at press conference yesterday, by suggesting that the Reform leader was enabling grotesque sexual predators. Kyle told Sky:
I see that Nigel Farage is already saying that he would overturn these laws. So we have people out there who are extreme pornographers, pedalling hate, pedalling violence. Nigel Farage is on their side. Make no mistake about it: if people like Jimmy Savile were alive today, he’d be perpetrating his crimes online, and Nigel Farage is saying that he’s on their side.
An incredulous Wilf Frost asked if the minister was honestly claiming that ‘Nigel Farage is on Jimmy Savile’s side?’ Kyle then opted to ignore the out, choosing instead to double down:
Nigel Farage is on the side of turning the clock back to the time when the strange adults, strangers, can get in touch via messaging apps with children.
Downing Street must be relieved that there is no lobby briefing today…
Will the SNP get another independence referendum?
Tumult, turmoil, chaos: select as appropriate how best to describe the last two years for the Scottish National party. Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation, the infighting that followed and the infamous Operation Branchform police probe caused public trust in the party of government to plummet. Fast forward through the gaffe-a-day leadership of Humza Yousaf and current First Minister John Swinney has managed to regain control somewhat, with the SNP noticing a turnaround in the polls and projected to become the largest party in Holyrood next year.
Yet while it has been suggested that the nationalists could pick up a third of the vote, this is some way off a majority. The worry for the SNP is that another coalition or confidence and supply agreement will be required, either with the Greens or possibly the Scottish Lib Dems. Neither option is favourable for a more centrist, pro-independence party. Enter Swinney’s latest independence strategy.
The party of government in Scotland faces a similar issue to the party of government in Westminster: it is losing support to both the left and right.
The First Minister has insisted that securing a clear majority at next year’s Scottish parliament election will get the ball rolling for a second independence referendum. ‘The precedent was established in 2011,’ Swinney told the BBC’s Today programme, nodding to the election that saw the party, under Alex Salmond, win 69 seats in Holyrood. The following year David Cameron signed a deal giving Holyrood the power to hold an independence referendum and two years after that Scotland voted to remain in the UK by 55 to 45 per cent.
In recent years support for independence has stagnated around the 50 per cent mark – with Ipsos polling last month suggesting 46 per cent of Scots are in favour of leaving the UK while 43 per cent are opposed. It’s not quite the sustained majority some nationalist figures have suggested is required for another indyref, but given the SNP is polling at around 30 per cent it does point to the existence of a group of independence backers that the party is yet to win over.
This group has been a source of fascination for pro-indy figures. It was this cohort that Salmond, who died last year, tried (and failed) to appeal to with his Alba party – which now struggles to even register on polls. Senior SNP figures, including Westminster leader Stephen Flynn, talk of how people are simply yet to be persuaded of the cause. But the figures show there remains an issue persuading Yes supporters to back the SNP, as much as there is a wider hope to persuade No voters to come to the other side. And, as polling guru Sir John Curtice said on the BBC the night the nationalists lost the Hamilton by-election, it is very unlikely that No voters will vote for the SNP, even if the party does promise to pursue a gradualist approach to secession and deal first with issues of poverty and healthcare.
The party of government in Scotland also faces a similar issue to the party of government in Westminster: it is losing support to both the left and right. Pollsters predict the Scottish Greens will increase their vote share next year to pick up a couple more MSPs. It’s good news for the left-wing group at a time it is undergoing turmoil of its own: as its leadership contest looms, current MSPs have come under fire from more radical party members hoping to pull the party even further leftwards, similar to Zack Polanski’s efforts down south.
Meanwhile polls have consistently shown that despite not having any kind of party apparatus in Scotland, Reform UK could elect 15 MSPs from a standing start, taking more than 11 per cent of the vote. As I wrote last month, while for now it’s the unionists who have most to fear from Farage, the SNP can’t continue to ignore the threat from the populist right – especially as pollsters suggest as many as 10 per cent of SNP backers could vote for Reform next year.
Swinney has moved the SNP closer to the centre-ground somewhat, and those working in his government are keen to tout their party’s pro-business credentials – highlighted, they say, in his Programme for Government – as a sign the party has recovered from its unserious partnership with the anti-growth Greens. While soft indy supporters unimpressed by the Scottish government’s record thus far are hardly any more enamoured by Scottish Labour, there remain unanswered questions about the direction of travel for the SNP on key policy areas.
The FM told the BBC on Monday that a second indyref would allow the party to make ‘Scotland’s energy wealth work for Scotland’ and introduced ‘fair and equitable’ changes to the welfare system. Yet there is a vast difference of opinion on energy policy between the party’s Westminster and Holyrood groups and there has been little detail on how the party would rework the welfare system. As always, affordability is a concern given the SNP both slammed Starmer’s benefits cuts and continues to laud its decision to direct about a third of its block grant towards the NHS.
Swinney’s independence ‘precedent’ argument follows his party’s recent loss in Hamilton. The SNP’s pivot to a ‘two-horse race’ message against Reform failed to secure victory and left party figures frustrated at the lack of a positive campaign. Putting independence at the heart of the 2026 election campaign is a blatant attempt to win over that non-SNP supporting, pro-independence voter base – though its exact make-up remains unclear. Combine this with more coherent, ‘common sense’ policy positions – with a continued move away from the culture war debates that unhelpfully pigeonholed SNP politicians in the past – and there is a chance that independence voters who rowed behind Labour in 2024 will back the SNP in the Scottish parliament next year.
But then the party, if it is serious about secession, finds itself faced with the same issue that has plagued it for the last decade. Even if the SNP manages to win a majority next year, there is no legal requirement for the UK government to give Holyrood powers to hold a second referendum. (Swinney may talk about democratic process but the party can elect a majority on less than 50 per cent of the vote.) Indeed Starmer on Monday afternoon dubbed the push for independence ‘the politics of yesteryear’. And while the US President has spent much of his time north of the border talking up Scotland, reports from this morning that the Prime Minister left his joint dinner with Donald Trump and Swinney early on Monday evening don’t bode well for fruitful discussions about the First Minister’s latest proposal.
Why Israel is forced to sabotage itself
Israel’s recently announced tactical pause in several sectors of Gaza, aimed at facilitating the distribution of humanitarian aid, is not merely a gesture of compassion under fire. It is a tactical adjustment born of necessity and certainly not a shift in moral posture. To understand this move properly is to grasp the complex interplay of military constraint, media manipulation, psychological warfare, and political coercion.
This is the bitter paradox: to maintain moral and strategic legitimacy in the eyes of its allies, Israel must act against its own operational interests
The decision to implement a daily ten-hour pause in military activity in areas such as Al-Mawasi, Deir al-Balah, and Gaza City reflects more than an internal policy shift. It reflects the immense, and at times irrational, external pressure placed on Israel by international actors moved not by objective fact, but by a meticulously engineered campaign of imagery and emotion. What has been presented to the world as a humanitarian necessity is, in truth, the product of a questionable narrative manufactured by Hamas and amplified by a complicit media ecosystem.
That narrative, relentlessly promoted, is one of famine and mass starvation, with Israel cast as the deliberate agent of human suffering. Images of skeletal children and desperate civilians, often of dubious provenance, have flooded western media
Israel has long worked to prevent humanitarian collapse in Gaza, even while engaging in military operations. Hundreds of aid trucks pass into the Strip daily. Calorically and logistically, the supply is sufficient. The breakdown, crucially, is in distribution. Hamas seizes trucks, sells aid at inflated prices and uses hunger as both a coercive internal tool and an international PR weapon. This strategic use of civilian suffering has allowed Hamas to manufacture outrage that in turn translates into diplomatic pressure on Jerusalem. While the starvation narrative is falsely exaggerated, and the depiction of Israeli intent as cruel or indifferent is entirely fabricated, it is also true that some hunger and shortage now exist. These are not the result of Israeli policy but of deliberate Hamas engineering. Any relief Hamas permits will not be due to concern for its population, but because it is extracting a strategic benefit – time to regroup, concessions from Israel, or PR advantage. And it will not hesitate to throttle aid again if doing so serves those ends.
The role of the UN and particularly UNRWA further complicates the picture. Israeli and independent sources have long documented the deep infiltration of these agencies by Hamas operatives. In recent weeks, Israel allowed international journalists into Gaza to witness the massive stockpiles of aid the UN had refused to distribute – aid cleared by Israeli checks and held up only by UN inaction. Only once exposed and embarrassed did UN agencies begin moving trucks. The resulting chaos, captured on video, showed the UN’s operational dysfunction, contrasting sharply with the more disciplined efforts of the US-Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. High-level sources confirm to me that GHF trucks have never been raided, while UN trucks have repeatedly been hijacked, mobbed, and violently taken over. Numerous videos have documented these episodes, underscoring the vulnerability and dysfunction of UN-led distribution.
The political echelon in Israel is under pressure on multiple fronts. President Trump and the US administration have leaned heavily on Jerusalem to show a humanitarian face. Internally, Prime Minister Netanyahu must navigate criticism from both right-wing parties and security professionals. Some argue that the IDF should distribute aid directly, severing Hamas from its stranglehold on civilian life. Others, including sources close to Netanyahu, insist the tactical pause is essential to preserving operational freedom and denying Hamas the international sympathy it craves.
These pauses, however, are not cost-free. Colonel (res.) Yaron Buskila, CEO of HaBithonistim, warned that the humanitarian corridors risk creating de facto ceasefires, granting Hamas time to regroup. The structure of the pause itself, daily ten-hour windows from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. in designated areas where IDF operations are scaled back, provides predictable, exploitable gaps for Hamas. While Israel pauses, Hamas does not. It continues to exploit the calm to fortify its infrastructure, rebuild command centres, repair tunnel networks, and reposition fighters. On the propaganda front, Hamas uses the visibility of these humanitarian pauses to bolster its victim narrative, claim the international moral high ground, and deepen the sense of equivalence between itself and a sovereign state. In addition, Hamas will use the lull to study the movements of aid convoys and Israeli logistical patterns, gathering intelligence that allows it to more effectively sabotage humanitarian operations. This learning curve is not theoretical: recent weeks have seen an increase in the lethality and precision of Hamas attacks against Israeli troops, a direct outcome of its ability to study and adapt as operational patterns emerge. The cessation of hostilities for aid delivery becomes a two-pronged weapon: operationally beneficial for Hamas and psychologically corrosive for Israel.
The current negotiation framework for a hostage deal further illustrates this asymmetry. Hamas offers a slow drip of some living hostages and bodies of those it has killed, in exchange for a lengthy 60-day ceasefire. This would be a strategic boon that would allow it to rehabilitate while Israel stalls. The demand to shift aid back to UN control and away from the GHF is part of the same plan: to reassert control, regain legitimacy, and cripple Israel’s ability to bypass Hamas’s influence in Gaza.
This is the bitter paradox: to maintain moral and strategic legitimacy in the eyes of its allies, Israel must act against its own operational interests. It must enable aid it knows will be exploited, allow actors it knows to be compromised, and accept international narratives it knows to be false. These tactical pauses are not humanitarian victories. They are defensive moves in a war where images matter more than facts, and where the battlefield extends as much into living rooms and newsrooms as it does into Rafah and Khan Younis.
In this arena, Hamas has one comparative advantage: it is not constrained by truth. And too often, neither are its media allies. That Israel continues to function under such constraints is not a sign of weakness but of ethical discipline. Yet discipline is not immunity. And in a war of attrition fought with lies, even the most moral actor can be coerced into a corner.
Do Donald Trump’s fans like South Park or not?
Eric Cartman, the antihero of South Park, is a disgusting bigot who mocks disabled people, demeans women and says hateful things about Jews.
When the series debuted in 1997, much of what offended parents, educators and religious groups came out of the mouth of this school-aged Alf Garnett. Later, it was the forces of coercive progressivism who bridled, especially at its derision of the trans creed. Suddenly, the median South Park disapprover was Emily, 30 ans, who worked in HR, actually met a black person once, and renamed her dachshund because ‘Dumbledore’ made her feel complicit in JK Rowling’s gendercide. Now the series is displeasing MAGA groupies after its 27th season debuted with a mild satire of Donald Trump.
It marks the first time the White House press office has responded to an animated series mocking the size of the presidential appendage
In ‘Sermon on the ‘Mount’, Cartman awakes to a world in which ‘woke is dead’. He first realises something is up when he tunes into Morning Edition only to find that NPR has been defunded by Trump. The ultra-progressive station is Cartman’s favourite listen because it lets him savour the suffering of well-intentioned liberals:
‘It had, like, gay rappers from Mexico all sad because girls in Pakistan got stoned to death. And guess why they got stoned to death? Because they were raped. It was hilarious. Why would anyone cancel that?’
He goes to school to find that PC Principal is no longer politically correct and has invited Jesus to address the school assembly. Christianity, he says, is the only true faith and all students must accept Christ — in their hearts and at their lunch table — or face expulsion. Along with the establishment clause of the First Amendment, liberal pieties about tolerance and inclusion and all those things Cartman despises have been swept aside. And he’s miserable about it, glumly telling his friend/bullying victim Butters: ‘Everyone hates the Jews. Everyone is fine with using gay slurs… It’s terrible, ‘cause now I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’
The townsfolk, most of whom voted for Trump because they were sick of woke coercion, come to resent his anti-woke coercion and turn on the president. He is dubbed a ‘retarded faggot’, derided for his litigiousness, depicted with a tiny penis, and a White House portrait shows him bumming a sheep. When he climbs into bed at night with Satan, feeling amorous, the mood quickly cools when the Antichrist asks why Trump won’t confirm whether he is named on Jeffrey Epstein’s client list. Like I said, very mild stuff.
Jesus recreates the Last Supper and pleads with the town to stop antagonising Trump in case South Park gets cancelled like Stephen Colbert’s show. CBS dropped the latter from its late-night slot after he denounced parent company Paramount’s decision to settle a lawsuit from Trump about its editing of a pre-election Kamala Harris interview. Paramount recently signed a $1.5 billion (£1.1 billion) deal with South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone to produce 50 new episodes and give the platform streaming rights to the previous 26 series.
Eventually, the president sues the town and, as part of the settlement, they have to produce pro-Trump ads. The episode ends with their first effort, an AI-generated clip in which a heavily obese Trump stumbles through the desert with messianic delusions before stripping off, falling down, and leaving his micro-member to become semi-erect and chirp: ‘I am Donald J Trump and I approve this message’. All good, clean fun and the president’s media detractors could learn from it. This is what MSNBC could be if only they’d employ a heterosexual male or two.
The White House issued a statement about the episode, because of course it did, and snipped: ‘This show hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention.’ It marks the first time the White House press office has responded to an animated series mocking the size of the presidential appendage. Parker and Stone replied with a fake apology and revealed the behind-the-scenes discussions about whether to blur Trump’s wiener. And to think there are people who consider this the bad timeline.
The episode has drawn criticism — well, angry chimp noises — from Trump’s chud supporters and the blue checkmark grifters who steal a living prodding them for engagement. Roughly 172 per cent of them have previously shared clips of the show mocking liberal shibboleths and called those who objected snowflakes. There has been praise from the very resistance liberals who five minutes ago considered South Park and its cruel, punching-down humour the embodiment of Trump’s America. As the new season progresses, the show will doubtless take aim at progressive targets, at which point these two sets of insufferable humour-voids will switch sides and resume hostilities.
South Park is sophomoric satire in the very best sense, satire that takes neither its targets nor itself very seriously. It understands that the hypocritical and the pompous are inherently funny, but all the more so if you lampoon them not with clever-clever Monty Python comedy but with puerile insults. Toilet humour is a great leveller, triggering bores both over- and under-educated into the same condescending sneer, confirming that while their tastes in comedy might differ, their sense of humourlessness is indistinguishable. To paraphrase Mark Twain, against the assault of tiny penis jokes, nothing can stand. Back in 2018, I wrote on Coffee House about the rise of anti-comedy, as American stand-ups and late-night hosts, traumatised by Trump, dropped the humour to offer their equally traumatised audience therapy in the guise of comedy. The problem, as I diagnosed it, was a mass case of progressives taking themselves too seriously. Trump idolisers are afflicted by the same disease.
If you love comedy, the self-serious, woke and anti-woke alike, are the enemy. The dull, scowling, tribal, dishonest, umbrage-taking, laughter-policing enemy. It is your duty to heap scorn upon them, ridicule all that they hold sacred, and scandalise their soulless sensibilities. Failing that, call them what they are: ‘retarded faggots.’
Russians worry what happens when the soldiers come home
Let’s imagine, for a moment, that Vladimir Putin actually respects Trump’s 50-day ultimatum to stop the war in Ukraine. We know what this will spell for millions of Ukrainians. It will mean a chance, among other things, for the ferocious nightly bombings to end and for the country itself to draw breath. But ask yourself this: what happens when over half-a-million Russian troops finally come home?
What happens when over half-a-million Russian troops finally come home?
To make predictions, you first need to know exactly who these soldiers are and where Russia found them. Throughout the war, Putin has avoided, as far as possible, recruiting in St Petersburg and Moscow and has concentrated instead on Russia’s smaller, more far-flung towns and cities in Bashkiria, Tuva, and other Siberian provinces. Typically, these men come from disadvantaged families who, for various reasons, view military service as their only opportunity to improve their circumstances. For these men, life has never held much value to begin with. Their lives aren’t cheap by choice; they’ve simply never known otherwise. Salaries may run as low as £225 a month. Many around them have alcohol problems, and many have been in jail. In these circumstances, you tend not to plan for tomorrow – nobody has ever taught you how to – and life expectancy is low.
Here, patriotism isn’t just a political tool, it’s a lifeline, and being part of a ‘great and powerful country’ is the only way to feel like you matter. Every day, TV and social media bombard you with one message: ‘You have a chance to change your fate.’ You see strong, heroic men in military uniforms. They promise adventure, honour, and money – as a Russia volunteer, you’re reportedly offered around £14,000 as a sign-on bonus. You receive a monthly wage two and a half times the national average, and there are potentially vast payoffs to your relatives should you die in battle. ‘Do something useful for the country and the family,’ your wife shouts. ‘You’re not a man if you don’t go!’
Are you afraid of dying or being crippled? You try not to think about it. You just want to become a hero, to finally earn the respect of your family, to stop being a drunken nobody, and instead, become part of the ‘elite’ that the television keeps talking about.
But we all know how this ends. The public’s perception of these soldiers, even before they return home, is already deeply cynical. Putin’s decision, back in 2022, to allow the late Evgeny Prigozhin, Wagner Group commander, to recruit from among Russia’s prison population has come back to bite the country. While volunteers and conscripts were kept ruthlessly on the battlefield, the criminals, convicted murderers and rapists among them, were allowed to return home.
Getting back, many reverted to their old ways – leaving a trail of rape, arson, and murder. In the two-and-a-half years since the war began, several hundred ‘civilians’ have already fallen victim to them (at least 242 people have died, and another 227 received life-threatening injuries).
Naturally, since these men were the first to come back, they’ve set the tone for how returning soldiers are perceived. There’s now widespread anxiety about what will happen when more ‘heroes’ arrive back in Russia, many with PTSD and unrealistically high expectations of the treatment they’ll get back home. This is often the very opposite of what they’ve been promised. Already, we’re seeing incidents of veterans being denied entry to cafes or shops, or even beaten or mocked. When the trickle becomes a flood, few will be happy to see these men, who will in all likelihood bring aggression, demands, and problems with them.
The locals aren’t the only ones bracing themselves. The authorities, too, will be deeply concerned about the return of these soldiers: they could potentially challenge the existing order and spark social unrest. They may even become opposition figures, speaking with the authority of hard-won experience and bringing about significant shifts in public attitudes. On all these things, the Kremlin will cast the coldest of eyes.
Most probably, the returning soldiers will be reintegrated as gradually as possible. The government will either keep them on contract or resettle them in new territories, giving them jobs on military bases. The goal will be to keep them occupied and ensure they continue to receive their salaries. Even if some return to cities, the majority will likely go back to small towns or villages far from urban centres. Here, it won’t matter much to the Kremlin if they’re unhappy or want something more. Their voices count for little.
For all the state’s promises these soldiers will return as the ‘new elite’, no one has any eagerness to give them power. Bureaucrats fight fiercely for control over budgets and resources – this is how great careers and businesses are built, both in Moscow and the provinces – and they’ll certainly fight for their jobs.
Already, Russian bureaucrats have two strategies to hold onto power. The first is to reinvent themselves as war heroes, briefly joining special units, taking selfies in new uniforms safely away from real combat, and returning home as self-proclaimed ‘veterans’. A number of officials have used a brief, safe stint at the front to launder their reputations.
The second strategy is to appoint real veterans – those who weren’t previously officials – to symbolic positions. Perhaps they’ll become deputy mayors responsible for the social protection of other war veterans. They might be appointed to staff positions in the presidential administration, or hold some other symbolic, non-executive, or non-influential position to showcase social mobility for war veterans. They can meet, drink vodka, complain about their experiences, sing songs, and reminisce about the war. But these roles won’t offer any real power or access to resources. It’s all just for show, pure propaganda. In public, they will be fêted; in private, live in abject poverty.
But what of the severely wounded? Won’t their sacrifice earn them better treatment? If historical precedents after World War II are anything to go by, quite the reverse. Back then, veterans who returned visibly disabled were seen as tarnishing the image of socialism and were smartly packed off to care homes, hospice-like places in former monasteries where they lived out their days without limbs, eyes, or proper attention. A similar fate, I suspect, awaits those coming back from this war, especially the badly disfigured. They’re a living reminder of the catastrophic price Russia has paid for Putin’s imperial ambitions, a price the Kremlin desperately wants everyone to forget. At least, until they’re ready to start another war…