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Europe must be stronger, or it will die
Over the last weeks, the words and actions of the Trump administration have caused the biggest rift between the United States and Europe since the end of the Cold War. Relations between the longstanding partners are more strained now than they were in the run-up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq or in the aftermath of Trump’s 2018 joint press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.
Over the last few weeks, European officials were horrified that Trump pressured the prime minister of Denmark, a longtime ally, to cede parts of its national territory to the United States. They took umbrage at a speech at the Munich Security Conference in which J. D. Vance, Trump’s vice president, seemed to ally himself with the continent’s right-wing populists. Now, they are apoplectic that an American delegation has flown to Saudi Arabia to negotiate about the future of Ukraine with their Russian counterparts, without any European representatives at the table, while their boss back in the White House is tweeting insults about Volodymyr Zelensky.
There are good reasons for Europeans to be deeply concerned about these developments. Since the end of world war two, the United States has been a guarantor of security and stability in western Europe. The Marshall Plan helped to lift the economies of France and Italy, of West Germany and the United Kingdom, out of an initial postwar slump. American soft power helped to boost moderate parties on the western side of the Iron Curtain at a time when the fate of democracy hung in the balance at every election (something that is now all too easily forgotten). The presence of American troops put limits on the territorial ambitions of leaders in the Kremlin, stopping Joseph Stalin from swallowing West Berlin and (much later) Vladimir Putin from invading Estonia. These historical facts shaped the most fundamental assumptions that European foreign policy makers made about the future – and it is now becoming clear that they will have to radically revise their mental model.
But while Europeans have good reason to be saddened, they have no excuse for being shocked. Trump made his feelings about Nato amply evident during his first term in office. He has expressed his sympathy for Vladimir Putin on countless occasions. And he has been deeply hostile to Zelensky – as well as extremely critical of American support for Ukraine – for years. Nothing about any of this should have been surprising.
So why is Europe so unprepared for what is happening? Why was the audience at Munich so unprepared for Vance to tell them things that Trump and his closest allies have been saying for years? Why aren’t European leaders able to give sufficient support to Ukraine to make it impossible for Russia, America or anybody else to make a deal about the country’s future without their participation? Why, in short, are Europeans still so incapable of taking the fate of the continent into their own hands?
In the fall of 2016, I was a junior fellow at the Transatlantic Academy of the German Marshall Fund – a job title that gives you a sense of the general vibe that prevails in the worthy, if rather staid and unimaginative, institutions that make it their business to ensure the smooth functioning of the western alliance. A few weeks before Donald Trump was set to face off against Hillary Clinton, we went on a road trip to meet senior policymakers in Berlin.
At every meeting, our sherpa, Steve Szabo – a man with a midwestern demeanor so placid that it’s easy to miss how incisive his questions tend to be – would gently press our interlocutors on their plans for a potential Trump administration. And at every meeting, the responses of Greens and Christian Democrats, of Liberals and Social Democrats were well-nigh identical: Trump can’t possibly win. But what if he does? American foreign policy surely won’t change all that much. But what if it does? Things will go back to normal after Trump. But what if they don’t?
Silence. A shrug. And then, in few words or many, the implicit refrain: they have to, because anything else would be unthinkable.
This set the tone for what Europe did – or rather, didn’t do – for the next eight years. While the continent’s leaders were deeply discomfited by Trump’s victory, they treated his presidency like a one-off nightmare from which we would all eventually wake up, with the laws of the world around us magically reset to ‘normal’. They took advice on how to shake Trump’s hand during summits. They tried to placate him with modest increases to their military budgets or lavish shows during state visits. They bided their time and waited for Americans to come to their senses by electing somebody like Joe Biden. And then, of course, that’s exactly what Americans did, seemingly proving that European inaction (in truth born of a total lack of imagination) was a stroke of tactical genius.
The same denial of impending realities has shaped the European response since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, 2022. At every security conference, think tankers and military strategists fretted about the extent to which support for Ukraine was becoming a political playball in Washington. ‘Did you read about the Republican Congressmen who voted against the latest aid package?’ one think-tanker would say. ‘Have you seen the latest Truth Social post about Zelensky that Trump sent from his exile in Mar-A-Lago?’ another military strategist would whisper.
But mounting concern never translated into real action. While Europe has made a significant contribution to Ukraine’s defence over recent years, the continent’s political leaders never developed a plan for how they could contain Russia if a new administration in Washington really did leave them to their own devices. In fact, some of the same politicians who now appear genuinely shocked by Trump’s betrayal have themselves betrayed Ukraine for political reasons. Facing an uphill struggle for re-election as chancellor of Germany, for example, Olaf Scholz repeatedly touted his reluctance to do more for Ukraine as a mark of his superior judgment, insinuating that the more hawkish position taken by his main rival, Friedrich Merz, would risk inciting world war three.
In retrospect, Trump’s election in 2016, at a time when he did not yet have the political experience or the loyal staff to turn his instincts into reality, was a gift to Europe. It handed the continent’s leaders the better part of a decade to prepare for a world in which they could no longer rely for their security on the United States. But Europe’s leaders squandered that gift. It would be much easier to sympathise with the horror they are now expressing if they hadn’t done everything in their power to avoid preparing for the eminently predictable predicament in which they now find themselves.
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke on a panel at the Harvard European Conference alongside a recent member of the European Commission and a current member of the European Parliament. We were supposed to talk about populism, and we did for a while, but perhaps inevitably the conversation also turned to the continent’s economic and geopolitical prospects. To my astonishment, my interlocutors were very bullish.
One term they were particularly fond of was the ‘Brussels Effect’. According to this idea, endlessly repeated in speeches and private conversations at the conference, Europe’s true superpower is its ability to lead the world in (no joke) regulation. If the European Union adopts a new set of rules, faraway companies in Asia or North America that want to maintain access to one of the world’s biggest markets will need to abide by the wishes of Brussels bureaucrats. Even when it comes to cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, the other members of my panel insisted, Europe remains a force with which the world will have to reckon.
One problem with this view is that it demonstrates a shocking poverty of ambition. To think that the rightful role of the continent that invented the printing press and the steam engine, the automobile and the World Wide Web is to become the world’s regulator-in-chief is (as I’ve written before) reminiscent of a child’s dream of growing up to be a hall monitor. The other problem with this view is that it is an exercise in wishful thinking. While this ambition may be dispiritingly modest, the current state of the continent makes it wholly unrealistic.
Take the case of AI. When I asked members of the audience at the conference whether they had ChatGPT installed on their phones, nearly every hand shot up. When I asked who had DeepSeek, about a quarter of the audience raised their hands. When I asked about MistralAI, Europe’s most advanced play in this space, I only spotted one hand. (The former member of the European Commission proudly pointed out to me that I hadn’t noticed a second person who had also raised their hand.)
Now, if none of the world’s cutting-edge AI technology is developed on the continent, Europe might still be able to regulate what kind of content American or Chinese chatbots are able to display within the European Union by threatening to ban them. And if they are willing to place ever more severe restrictions on free speech – a path they have been striding down with uncharacteristic brio over the course of the last years – they might even be able to slow the spread of ‘harmful’ AI-generated content on social networks within the continent.
But this supposed cure would not only be worse than the disease; it would also fail to forestall the real dangers posed by AI. Can Brussels bureaucrats somehow ensure that a lethal bioweapon designed with the help of artificial intelligence stops spreading at the continent’s borders? Will their laws protect Latvia or Finland against a drone army remote-controlled by an advanced AI agent? Will they save humanity against an army of hyper-intelligent robots gone rogue?
Of course not. And the fact that my co-panelists got genuinely mad at me for pointing this out shows just how deeply denial about the true condition of Europe now goes. Call it, if you will, the Brussels Defect.
Europe has forgotten one of the most fundamental lessons of its own past: Either you shape history – or history shapes you. This has seduced European citizens, intellectuals and political leaders into vastly underestimating the price of relative decline.
Over the last few decades, Europeans have – slowly, reluctantly and incompletely – come to recognise that they are playing a smaller and smaller role in world affairs. Technological innovations are happening elsewhere. Economic growth is concentrated in Asia and North America. Even the center of gravity for culture and fashion is steadily shifting away from the continent.
But even as its declining importance is starting to dawn on the continent, the assumption that this decline can be managed gracefully stubbornly persists. Perhaps the voice of the president of France or the chancellor of Germany will count for less and less at the United Nations or the G20. Perhaps European companies will be restricted to doing business in legacy industries. Perhaps European universities will no longer be world-class. But life in Europe will continue to be pleasant. Europeans will continue to make good salaries, to enjoy a robust welfare state, to take long holidays, to live in beautiful cities, and of course to enjoy democratic institutions.
Sadly, I am increasingly doubtful that the changing international landscape will allow Europe to decline so gracefully. When the basic economic model of a country like Germany goes kaput, the country’s affluence need not stagnate; it can just as easily nosedive. When countries decline both economically and demographically, their welfare states don’t necessarily become a little less generous; they can just as easily cease to be sustainable altogether. And when countries become increasingly dependent on strongmen and dictators in faraway places, this doesn’t just constrain their foreign policy choices; it may also transform their values and institutions.
During the Cold War, European countries that were subjected to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence ended up as communist dictatorships, one and all. European countries that were part of America’s sphere of influence eventually became democracies, one and (virtually) all.
Sooner or later, client states usually come to resemble their sponsors. Konrad Adenauer, Germany’s first postwar chancellor, faced a consequential choice: he could anchor the newly founded Federal Republic firmly within the western alliance or he could try to turn Germany into a neutral country unaligned with either the United States or the Soviet Union. His decision to reject neutrality despite the (highly uncertain) prospect of reunification was as much about culture as about power politics: it was a testament to his vision for the values that henceforth should – and, for the most part, eventually did – shape the country.
Europe’s ability to stand on its own feet is incompatible with its resignation to being the continent of museums and mediocrity
European policy-makers now face a choice that is similarly consequential. Their first option is to hedge. Over the next few years, the temptation will grow for Europe to decide that the way to deal with an increasingly unreliable American ally is to make nice with Russia and China. Indeed, that position is already popular among rulers in Prague and Budapest, and many voters in Paris and Berlin. But that would effectively turn European nations into vassals of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping – and risk making Europe’s domestic politics increasingly vulnerable to the whims of authoritarians around the globe.
The second option is to carry on as before. In this scenario, Europeans would continue with a set of policies that were fundamentally premised on the idea that they can outsource their security needs to the United States. After a round of pledges to increase spending on the military and engage in closer cooperation between their armed forces, they would – as in 2022 – quietly return to business-as-usual. This scenario, it seems to me, is far more likely than the outraged rhetoric of the past days might suggest, in part because it would flow most naturally from the general inclination of European policy-makers: not to make any big changes unless they can’t possibly avoid them. But, like the first option, such a refusal to reckon with new realities would seal the continent’s fate as a plaything of the world’s great powers, including future administrations in Washington.
The final option is for Europe to do what it takes to get back to being a historical actor in its own right. But this would take much more imagination and much greater effort than just about anybody in Europe now seems inclined to recognise. Europeans would need to invest much more money into beefing up their military forces so they can credibly provide security to their own continent, of course. But they would also need to recognise that their ability to stand on their own feet is wholly incompatible with their implicit resignation to being the continent of museums, monuments and mediocrity.
Leaders like Emmanuel Macron have, in the last years, occasionally invoked the need for Europe to achieve ‘strategic autonomy’. But coming from a French president, it was easy to dismiss such aspirations as a nostalgic attachment to Charles De Gaulle’s unrealised aspirations for la grande nation; it will take much more concerted action in the capitals of a much larger number of European nations to turn such aspirational slogans into anything resembling reality.
The most pressing need for Europe now is to invest in its own defence. In the wake of two horrifying world wars, countries from Italy to Sweden understandably preferred to spend money on schools and pension schemes than on soldiers and fighting jets. And since America emerged from the first half of the 20th century with vast resources and an abiding commitment to the western alliance, they could outsource much of their security to Uncle Sam.
The era in which Europeans could reliably outsource their security to the United States is now over. It will not come back – not even if Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg or the ghost of John McCain were to be elected president of the United States in 2028. Unless Europeans take their fate into their own hands, they tacitly agree to put themselves at the mercy of the great military powers on other continents: a communist government hungry for international influence in Beijing; a neo-colonial dictator hungry for revenge in Moscow; an increasingly unpredictable wrecking ball with a penchant for chaos in Washington, D.C. Europeans must be able to defend their own continent with their own forces.
Sydney Smith’s love for life lives on
Why should anyone care about Sydney Smith, who died on this day in 1845? 180 years have diminished the stature of his worldly achievements. He was an Anglican cleric who campaigned for an end to slavery, against the oppression of Catholics, for moral reform in the church and democratic reform in parliament. His political arguments have lost most of their interest in a world where those questions feel settled.
Smith helped found the Edinburgh Review. He suggested the motto ‘tenui musam meditamur avena’ – ‘we cultivate literature on a little oatmeal’ – but this was ‘too near the truth to be admitted, and so we took our present grave motto from Publius Syrus, of whom none of us had, I am sure, ever read a single line’, he said.
Forgiveness and optimism, Smith counselled, were duties
People who knew Smith loved him, and many more have done so by reputation. Smith was another Dr. Johnson, but where Johnson struck fear, Smith kindled warmth. His words were as memorable, his character as strong – yet his spirit was kinder. ‘You have been laughing at me constantly, Sydney, for the last seven years,’ said one friend, ‘and yet, in all that time, you have never said a single thing to me that I wished unsaid.’
He preached cheer, and what he preached he practiced. ‘Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship.’ Putting his neighbour at ease came naturally to him, as did urging people to happiness. ‘Many in this world run after felicity like an absent man hunting for his hat, while all the time it is on his head.’
People loved Smith’s wit – but even more, they loved Smith. How could they not, when he brimmed with love himself? Smith was amiable – worthy of love and worth loving – because he found his fellows amiable, and because he had the wit to make them feel that this was the case, even when he mocked. Macaulay called him the Smith of Smiths. The two great conversationalists were friends. ‘Macaulay,’ said Smith, ‘has occasional flashes of silence that make his conversation perfectly delightful.’
Smith believed ‘life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence.’ He preached that someone need not be in front of you to survive in your heart:
If I lived under the burning sun of the equator, it would be a pleasure to me to think that there were many human beings on the other side of the world who regarded and respected me … It is not that a man has occasion often to fall back upon the kindness of his friends; perhaps he may never experience the necessity of doing so; but we are governed by our imaginations.
Like Johnson, Smith suffered from depression, but while the former was as brutal with himself as with others, the latter was playful and kind. ‘Dear Lady Georgiana, nobody has suffered more from low spirits than I,’ wrote Smith, ‘so I feel for you.’ He advised taking a short view of life – ‘no further than dinner or tea’ – and bade her keep busy. Good advice, then as now.
Forgiveness and optimism, Smith counselled, were duties. ‘Some very excellent people tell you they dare not hope; why do they not dare to hope? To me it seems much more impious to dare to despair.’ He wanted to be a barrister, but constraints meant he entered the church.
I am not leading precisely the life I should choose … [but] I am resolved therefore to like it and to reconcile myself to it; which is more manly than to feign myself above it … as long as I can possibly avoid it I will never be unhappy.
Giving a lecture at the Royal Institution, he asked his audience to picture life as a table with different holes, into which our characters must fit. A man, said Smith, must ‘find out where his powers lie, and what are his deficiencies’. Square pegs and round holes are a Smith-ism.
‘Don’t expect too much from human life – a sorry business at the best,’ he said in that letter to Lady Georgiana. Those low expectations were not a way of diminishing life’s grandeur but a reminder to seek joy where it could be found.
Man could direct his ways by plain reason, and support his life by tasteless food; but God has given us wit, and flavour, and brightness, and laughter, and perfumes, to enliven the day of man’s pilgrimage, and to charm his pained steps over the burning marl.
Smith lived when tragedy was an expected part of life – as, until recently, it always was. In 1829, his eldest son Douglas died. ‘His death was the first sorrow he ever occasioned his parents,’ reads the epitaph his father wrote, ‘but it was deep and lasting.’
He wrote to his friends of his grief:
I am very unhappy, and quite beaten but I shall get better … I never suspected how children weave themselves about the heart … God save you from similar distress! … I did not know I had cared so much for anybody; but the habit of providing for human beings, and watching over them for so many years, generates a fund of affection, of the magnitude of which I was not aware.
In his final days, as he slipped from consciousness, Smith’s last words were cries of his son’s name.
‘We know nothing of tomorrow;’ said Smith, ‘our business is to be good and happy today.’ Johnson is better remembered – not because his life makes a better lesson, but because he had James Boswell to chronicle it. Johnson knew agony and persevered, which is admirable. Smith knew agony too – but it made him cling fast to hope, which is lovable. ‘Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything,’ he taught. Wikipedia remembers him for a poem about the delight of a good salad dressing. He ate well. Gout, he said, was the only enemy he did not wish to have at his feet.
Even without his own Boswell, enough of Smith’s words survive to pepper our culture. His accusation that a friend’s idea of heaven was eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets, his declaration that he never read a book before reviewing it, since ‘it prejudices a man so’. Even part of his poem about salad dressing – ‘fate cannot harm me, I have dined today!’ – is remembered.
‘My sentences are frozen as they come out of my mouth,’ he said, of preaching at St Paul’s, ‘and are thawed in the course of the summer, making strange noises and unexpected assertions in various parts of the church.’ Not a bad image for the way a life may echo down the years. ‘Pleasure is very reflective,’ he believed, ‘and if you give it you will feel it.’
Smith still gives it today. Philip Larkin said that what survives of us is love. People loved Smith because love was how he lived. We love him still. He died having written of his thankfulness, and with grief for his son on his lips. Lost to that foreign country of the past, Smith lives on because his gift was to put love for life – real life, with its limitations and tragedies – into words.
Thank goodness for the Six Nations
The first months of the year are a tough time to inhabit this corner of the planet. First there’s January to contend with – darker than Himmler’s sock drawer and full to the rafters with post-festive self-flagellation. Then we’re into February, which is just more of the same: January by another name. No wonder the powers-that-be decided to shave a few days off it.
Fortunately, salvation has arrived – as it does every year, just when we were nearing breaking point amid the relentlessness of winter. I write, of course, of the Six Nations, a great sporting festival devoted to genial national rivalry and daytime binge-drinking in equal double measures.
After all that gloom it’s a legitimate excuse to head back to one of your favourite places and while away hours watching sport in the company of friends. As such, given the opacity and ever-changing nature of rugby’s arcane rules, the Six Nations is not so much a sporting pageant as an annual celebration of British pub culture, a six-week beer festival masquerading as a sporting tournament.
And what a joy it is. Step into a pub with the Six Nations on and you find yourself on a different, happier planet. Because in that moment nothing else matters. It’s just you, the screen, the blokes on the pitch, the chat, the Guinness. It’s a Donald Trump and Rachel Reeves-free zone. And it’s glorious.
One minute, the concentrated silence can be deafening – except for the hissing noise from the stadium and the commentator’s voice. The next there’ll be a whistle, and you’ll notice a benign, contented hubbub fill the room; men chatting happily about nothing, a noise I fancy you would have on the sidelines of such contests for centuries. It’s so good they bottle it and play it on Spotify.
Rugby in its broadest form is a seriously ancient undertaking. Primeval, you might even say. Yes, rugby union proper is only 200 years old – ‘invented’ in 1823 when William Ellis famously (though many doubt he ever did) picked up a football and ran with it on the playing field at Rugby School.
But long before him, groups of blokes have been running back and forth with balls or bladders – sometimes sticks too – for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks had harpustum, a game which took its name from the word meaning ‘carried away’ and involved a smallish rugby-sized ball filled with feathers. The Romans caught the bug from them. Several years ago I witnessed a bizarre match of rugby-style football in Florence in a huge sandy enclosure on the Piazza Santa Croco. It was American football meets British bulldog in pantaloons, and not for the faint-hearted. The quarters of that city have been at it for centuries, apparently.
And this is something of what the Six Nations taps into. It’s ancient stuff and speaks to who we are. Were you to dress the six teams in identical clothing, you would still be able to guess their nationality in a blink of an eye. You would, wouldn’t you? Not least since half of them actually resemble Asterix caricatures of our national stereotypes. It’s not the Six Nations in association with Diageo’s famous stout brand so much as a sporting tournament brought to you by Albert Uderzo.
And there’s sound reason for this. The participant peoples of the Six Nations have been living cheek by jowl and killing each other for a very long time. What’s more, whatever the Royal Navy thinks, we Englishman can generally spot a Frenchman at a couple of hundred yards – comfortably within the effective range of a longbow. Ditto a Welshman, or a Scot or Irishman. As for the Italians, hah! Come on…
Not even an emperor in his box at the Colosseum had it better than your average chap watching the Six Nations in the local pub with pint of bitter and a packet of dry roasted peanuts
It cuts both ways because while we’ve all been at each others’ throats for more than a thousand years, so these historic rivalries have helped define us. One of the reasons we are who we are is because we’re not them. And so it is for the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish and the Italians. And yet for all of that cultural bedrock of medieval violence and enmity – none of it is even faintly present in this pageant of athleticism. It’s only as real as the foam horns on the helmet of chaps dressed as St George.
Similarly, watch the match at the local and you’ll find none of the swearing or aggressive outbursts that you’d get for football, even though there’s a hundred blokes in there, each with several pints down them by half time. A couple of dads will likely have brought their children along – they’ll be skipping about the place, too, sipping full-fat Coca-Cola with relish because their mums aren’t there and being placated with kilos of crisps. But no one minds. And that’s a bit like the score – because while we all like to win, it’s really all about the taking part, and the sheer unbridled joy of watching one of your players break through the line of opponents and run 20 or 30 yards to score a try.
Which is why, to my mind, the Six Nations offers the last word spectator or non-participation sport (watched as it is by more people than play the game). Not even a Roman emperor, seated in his Imperial box over the blood-stained enclosure of the Colosseum, had it better than your average chap watching the Six Nations on a Saturday afternoon in the local pub with pint of bitter and a packet of dry roasted peanuts. What’s for certain is that from the end of January through to the first burgeoning days of spring in mid-March, by which time you might get to see a bluebell or two, the Six Nations makes it good to be alive.
Could it be improved? Well, we let the French in in 1910, and it’s not gone too badly. The Italians joined the party 25 years ago and are very good at letting people win points. So could it be time to make six into a seven? The Germans have had a rugby union team in since the 1920s and aren’t bad. Not only would this lengthen the festival of sporting light by another week or so, it would also be an opportunity for the Italians to share the wooden spoon with someone else. What’s more, England might get to win at penalties for a change…
Hamas’s final torment of the Bibas family
So Hamas has committed yet another act of depravity against the Bibas family. It said Shiri Bibas was in one of those four coffins it put on grim display in Gaza yesterday before handing them over to the Red Cross. But she wasn’t. It was the remains of some unknown person that Hamas passed off as the mother-of-two whose return the whole of Israel has been crying out for. Truly, is there no end to the cynicism and savagery of these terrorists?
Israel says forensic testing has confirmed that two of the coffins contained the bodies of the Bibas children: Ariel, who was four when he was kidnapped, and Kfir, who was just nine months old. A third coffin contained the remains of the 84-year-old Israeli peace activist Oded Lifschitz.
But the tests revealed that the fourth body is not Shiri’s. It seems it is not any of the hostages who were seized during Hamas’s 7 October pogrom. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu says it looks like Hamas ‘put the body of a Gazan woman in a coffin’.
The callousness of Hamas chills the blood. To shove a deceased person into a black box and tell the world ‘This is Shiri Bibas’ is moral degeneracy taken to new, unfathomed depths.
It feels like the sickest of power plays, as though Hamas is cherishing, for one last time, its power of torment over the Bibas family. Not content with stealing and killing Shiri and her two tiny sons, now Hamas mocks their mourning family by sending them the remains of a stranger. Just imagine the anguish of dad Yarden, who himself survived 484 days in the captivity of these neo-fascists: he can now bury his children but not his wife.
Hamas says there was a ‘mix-up’. Its spokesman Ismail al-Thwabta said on X that Shiri’s remains must have got mixed up with other bodies in the rubble of a bombed-out building. (Hamas says the family was killed in an Israeli airstrike; Israel disputes this.)
That Hamas thinks it can just say ‘Oops’ about something as despicable as sending a stranger’s body to a grief-stricken nation and family sums up its moral wretchedness. The fact is, Hamas told the world that the coffin contained the remains of Shiri Bibas. It either knew her remains were not in the coffin or it was not entirely sure. Either way, what it now calls a ‘mix-up’ was in truth yet more cruel and unusual punishment visited on a young family whose only ‘crime’ is that they were Jews in Israel.
What Hamas has done to the Bibas family almost defies belief. History will record it as one of the most barbarous persecutions of innocents in the early 21st century. It has been humiliation upon humiliation.
First, they were kidnapped, a mother and her infants seized from their home by a mob of anti-Semites. Then they were made into prisoners. Then they perished, and it matters not one iota whether that was as a result of an Israeli airstrike or at the bloody hands of a Hamas killer – either way, Hamas bears every bit of responsibility for the death of this family.
Then their coffins – well, the coffins of little Ariel and Kfir – were put on public display before a heaving mob. And now we discover that mum Shiri was not among those bodies that Hamas so grossly invited the world to gawp at. She remains lost in that hell she was dragged to with her babies. The consequences could be severe: Israel says Hamas’s failure to return Shiri’s remains is a violation of the ceasefire – ‘a violation of the utmost severity’, in fact. It is. If the ceasefire now falters, it will be down to the evil of Hamas.
Once again that question remains: where are the West’s progressive voices? Where is their condemnation of this fascistic persecution of a young family of Jews? Where are the feminists? A woman dragged from her home, with her children, by a mob of tooled-up racist men, and there has been silence from the #MeToo brigade. Perhaps they’ve been too busy fighting for their right to quaff wine with thespians and aristocrats at the Garrick Club to ask, just one time, ‘Where is Shiri Bibas?’.
The silence of the West’s progressives in response to Hamas’s taunting and torture of Jews feels profoundly unsettling. Hamas’s butchery, tragically, is to be expected – it’s the western left’s moral abandonment of Hamas’s victims that truly startles and horrifies. ‘Where is Shiri?’ ought to be the cry of every decent person right now.
Why Trump doesn’t see Putin as a real threat
It turns out that Harold Wilson’s famous quote, ‘A week is a long time in politics’, is equally applicable to changes to the world order.
So far this week, President Trump has extended a hand to Russia, savaged Ukraine and upended a transatlantic alliance eight decades old. In doing so, not only has he performed a 180 degree turn on established US foreign policy, but he has forced the UK and its European allies onto a new trajectory that will have ramifications for decades, if not longer.
Trump’s outreach to Putin was not unexpected. During his election campaign he repeatedly stated he could bring the war in Ukraine to a close ‘in a day’, and that he would prioritise this early in his administration.
What has been a surprise is how Trump has set about doing this. Not only has he attacked Ukraine and its president, calling Zelensky a ‘dictator’, but he has arranged a bilateral meeting with Russia to end the war while excluding his European allies.
His actions are not just about the war itself. Trump is calling for better overall relations with Russia. He wants to bring the country back into the G7, which it was suspended from following its annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The question is why he is doing this.
There is Trump’s personal attitude towards Putin. The American President has long been a fan of his Russian counterpart, calling him a ‘genius’ and ‘savvy’ for initiating the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
There is also the US strategic dimension. Quite simply, Russia is not a direct threat to the US in the eyes of this administration. Yes, it has invaded Ukraine and other neighbours, but it is not able to undermine US power like China is. Russia has not, for instance, established global entities like the Belt and Road Initiative. Nor is Russia’s economy – about an eighth the size of America’s – something to be worried about.
Trump has made it very clear that he sees China as the main threat. In his first administration he started a trade war with China, and he reiterated that he would take a tough stance on Beijing during his recent campaign.
That dealing with China is a major reason behind the proposed deal with Russia was made clear when Peter Hegseth, US Defense Secretary, said that ‘the US is prioritising deterring war with China in the Pacific’.
All this is good news for Russia.
Normalising relations with the US will allow Putin to declare to his people, and to the world, that he has won a strategic victory over the West, especially Europe. This will have severe negative consequences for the latter’s international standing. As former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said following Trump’s call with Putin last week, ‘Europe’s time is over’.
Secondly, it will give Russia more opportunities for further action. If the US is intent on carving up the world into areas of interest, this will leave Russia to focus on Europe and potentially Africa too. For a revanchist, expansionist power this is a golden opportunity.
There is though a potential fly in the ointment for Russia – and that is China.
Ever since the invasion of Ukraine, China has taken advantage of the distraction this has caused the West to push its own global agenda, for example launching several international structures (like the Global Security Initiative) that look very much like it redrawing the international order to be centred on Beijing.
If Washington is now turning its attention to the western hemisphere to focus on its main strategic competitor, this will give Beijing less freedom for manoeuvre. The Pentagon is already preparing for war with China – being able to focus all its efforts on this rather than on Russia too will be an advantage.
This is all reminiscent of President Nixon’s 1972 détente with China, which was aimed at peeling away Chinese support for the Soviet Union (which was then America’s main rival). Nixon’s strategy of using this thaw to increase pressure on Moscow worked, and led to the Soviet leadership taking a less unproductive stance with the US, for example over nuclear weapons.
Xi Jinping knows his history, and will understand the risk from Trump and Putin collaborating. It would be surprising if the Chinese didn’t somehow try to scupper a deal between the US and Russia, even if they have said they support the peace process.
There are plenty of reasons why the proposed US-Russia deal might not work from a US perspective. There might be a misalignment of expectations, or a change of heart by Trump. But pressure from China – which is now Russia’s biggest international supporter – would make it hard for Moscow to clinch an arrangement with Washington.
Even if the Trump-Putin deal over Ukraine doesn’t end exactly as currently planned, there is no doubt that the UK and Europe have to assume the US is no longer the military backer it once was.
This is important because British and European leaders now recognise that Russia has territorial designs on more than just Ukraine. As the Lithuanian defence minister put it this week, ‘We all understand that Ukraine is just the first stage currently of an imperial expansion of Russia’.
The only way to stop Russia is to have a strong, united front: a report by Danish intelligence suggests that Moscow could be ready for a major war in Europe within the next five years, especially if ‘it perceives Nato as militarily weakened or politically divided’.
Europe is already trying to establish more unity through a new coalition of 19 countries that is emerging to deal with Russia. Even though it is France’s President Macron who is pushing for this, the UK has the opportunity to step into the US’s military leadership role. It has already done so in part by taking over the convening of the group of countries supporting Ukraine.
By becoming the leader of this new grouping, it will ensure that London is able to steer its allies towards its own strategic priorities rather than being subject to what Paris or Berlin think is most important.
But the only way to succeed in this is to dramatically increase British defence spending, and fast. This will be a challenge for the government, and will force it to reprioritise domestic spending priorities, with all the political fallout this will create. The announcement this week that more than three million people are claiming benefits without any obligation to look for work shows that there are options, but only if the government wants to take them.
There are also opportunities for the UK in all this. One, which will be hard for Atlanticists to swallow, is that it will give Britain more freedom now that it is no longer expected to align with America.
The UK has different strategic interests to the US. Sometimes this has been forgotten in the enthusiasm for the ‘Special Relationship’, but the last few days have proven this. Washington appears to want peace at any price so that it can focus on China. For London, it is essential that Russia doesn’t claim a win now, so it is not tempted to take another chunk out of Ukraine and perhaps go on to invade more of the continent.
This week is likely to go down as a hinge of history. Britain has to seize the opportunities this has created and create long-term benefits for itself and its allies. The only other option is for the country to enter the emerging new order without a voice, and give Putin the chance to target not just the territory of Europe, but our whole way of life.
Ante-post bets for the Cheltenham handicaps
The entries for the Cheltenham Festival handicaps races were announced this week and so now seems a good time to try to steal a little value from bookmakers, with the four days of elite jump racing just around the corner next month.
We still don’t yet know the weights that each horse has been allotted for these races but, in most cases, that’s fairly easy to predict given that official ratings for every horse on both sides of the Irish Sea are updated weekly. As usual, the British handicapper is going to give several of the Irish-based horses a slightly higher rating – and therefore weight – than his Irish counterpart.
As usual too, the bookmakers are not giving much away, whether they are betting on normal ante-post terms (which means there is no return of stakes for any non-runners) or whether they are betting, offering slightly shorter odds, Non-Runner No Bet (NRNB).
Irish trainer Gavin Cromwell looks to have a pretty strong hand in several of the handicaps and I like the chances of his horse PATH D’OROUX in one of the Festival’s newly-created races, the Jack Richards Novices’ Handicap Chase, on 13 March.
Despite some big runs last season over chases, including being third in last year’s Grand Annual at the Festival, Path d’Oroux remains a novice at eight years old due to his lack of wins over the larger obstacles.
According to his trainer, Path d’Oroux is likely to step up in trip next month for the Jack Richards race rather than race again over the minimum trip by lining up for the Grand Annual again.
Although the horse is fairly exposed, the extra half mile could be the making of him and I like the fact that he has much more jumping experience than almost all of his likely rivals. However, as he has two other Festival entries other than for the Jack Richards, back him at 25-1 NRNB with Ladbrokes or Coral, both paying four places. Some bookies are offering shorter odds, but more places.
In the Glenfarclas Cross Country Chase on 12 March, Cromwell’s horse Stumptown is already as short as 2-1 with the bookies and that looks terrible value. Yes, he was impressive when winning over this quirky course and distance in December but he will take a hefty rise in the ratings – probably 8lb – for that cosy victory.
The horse behind him that day was Mister Coffey, who always finds a way of not winning, so my preference is for LATENIGHTPASS, who was third that day, beaten just over four lengths.
He is now a 12-year-old gelding and I am prepared to forgive him his ‘UR’ – Unseated Rider – last time out when he stumbled at the very first fence and unshipped regular jockey Gina Andrews. He is usually the safest of jumpers.
In fact, he won this race two years ago off a slightly lower mark when trained by Dan Skelton. Back Latenightpass each way at 16-1 with bet365, paying four places. Those odds are without NRNB but this race is his only Festival target and so, bar injury or illness, he will run in it.
I am happy to back a real outsider in the William Hill County Hurdle on the final day of the Festival (14 March) even though OUR CHAMP is ground dependent and needs a good surface to be at his best. He didn’t get decent ground last time out when eighth in the William Hill Hurdle at Newbury on soft ground.
However, if he gets his preferred terrain, he can be competitive off a rating of 135 and his trainer Chris Gordon is keeping the faith that this seven-year-old gelding can still be competitive in this sort of contest. Back Our Champ each way at 66-1 with Ladbrokes or Coral, both offering NRNB, four places. If the rain arrives, I hope the astute Gordon will swerve the race with his horse and wait for another day.
In recent weeks, I have already put up four bets in the handicaps including two wagers on day one, 11 March – first of all, Liam Swagger each way at 33-1 in the ‘Boodles’, registered as the Fred Winter Juvenile Handicap Hurdle. He will have his prep run for the Festival on the flat at Southwell later today.
Secondly, I tipped Haiti Couleurs win only at 8-1 for the National Hunt Challenge Cup Novices’ Handicap Chase and he is now vying for favouritism. However, in the same race I want to go in double handed with trainer Neil Mulholland’s strong stayer, TRANSMISSION.
As with Haiti Couleurs, the horse’s handler protected his handicap mark over chases by racing him over hurdles last time out. But this race has been very much the plan for some time which is why all four runs for the horse this season have been at Cheltenham.
Back Transmission each way at 12-1 with bet365, paying five places, once again ignoring the NRNB concession in search of better odds.
So that’s eight bets in all, including Storm Heart win only NRNB for two different races, put up ante-post for the handicaps at odds ranging from as short as 8-1 to as long as 66-1.
As for tomorrow’s fare, the Virgin Bet Eider Handicap Chase (2.10 p.m.) at Newcastle over 4 miles 2 furlongs is never a race for the faint of heart, whether for horse or jockey. However, this year, the ground is better than usual at ‘good to soft’. With no real rain forecast before the off, there should be more finishers than usual.
With 18 runners lining up, it is very competitive but my preference, now that her stable is in better form, is for Lucinda Russell’s tough gelding YOUR OWN STORY,who will have no trouble staying the marathon trip provided he can keep in touch with the field early on.
True, he hasn’t won for nearly two years, but he is pretty consistent. Back Your Own Story each way at 20-1 with bet365, paying five places. He is 16-1 or shorter with other bookies. Happy punting, as always.
Last weekend: – 5.5 points.
1 point each way Patriotik at 15-2 for the Betfair Exchange Handicap Hurdle, paying 1/5 odds, 5 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.
1 point each way Annsam at 8-1 Betfair Swinley Handicap Chase, paying 1/5 odds, 4 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.
1 point each way Highstakesplayer at 12-1 Betfair Swinley Handicap Chase, paying 1/5 odds, 4 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.
1 point each way Apple Away at 17-2 for Grand National Trial Handicap Chase, paying 1/5 odds, 4 places. 2nd. + 0.5 points.
Pending:
1 point each way Your Own Story at 20-1 for the Eider Chase, paying 1/5 odds, 5 places.
1 point each way July Flower at 11-1 for the Close Brothers Mares’ Hurdle, paying 1/5 odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Liam Swagger at 33-1 for the Fred Winter Handicap Hurdle, paying 1/5 odds, 5 places.
2 points win Haiti Couleurs at 8-1 for the National Hunt Challenge Cup Novices’ Handicap Chase.
1 point each way Transmission at 12-1 for the National Hunt Challenge Cup Novices’ Handicap Chase, paying 1/5 odds, 5 places.
1 point each way Sixmilebridge at 16-1 NRNB for the Turners Novices Hurdle, paying 1/5 odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Latenightpass at 16-1 for the Cross Country Chase, paying 1/4 odds, 4 places.
1 point each way Djelo at 16-1 for Ryanair Chase, paying 1/5 odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Ahoy Senor at 50-1 NRNB for the Cheltenham Gold Cup, paying 1/5 odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Path d’Oroux at 25-1 for the Jack Richards Novices’ Chase , paying 1/4 odds, 4 places.
2 points win Storm Heart at 12-1 NRNB for the Coral Cup.
1 point each way Galileo Dame at 16-1 NRNB for the Triumph Hurdle, paying 1/5 odds, 3 places.
2 points win Storm Heart at 10-1 NRNB for the County Hurdle.
1 point each way Our Champ at 66-1 for the County Hurdle, paying 1/4 odds, 4 places.
1 point each way Kandoo Kid at 33-1 for the Grand National, paying 1/4 odds, 4 places.
2024-5 jump season running total: – 29.26 points.
2024 flat season: + 41.4 points on all tips.
2023-4 jump season: + 42.01 points on all tips.
2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.
2022-3 jump season: + 54.3 points on all tips.
The online shopping boom is well and truly over
So much for ‘dry’ and ‘no buy’ January. The UK public seems to have thoroughly rebelled against efforts to persuade them to work off the excesses of the festive season. In particular, we seem to have stuffed our faces somewhat.
The retail sales figures put out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this morning show that the volume of sales in food stores rose by 5.6 per cent in January relative to December. That helped overall retail sales volumes to rise by 1.7 per cent, compared with a 0.6 per cent fall in December. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has good reason to feel relieved. Until a week ago it seemed as if Britain was heading for a recession. That looks a lot less likely now that retail sales seem to have picked up and last week’s GDP figures suggest that the economy expanded by 0.1 per cent in the last three months of 2024.
When money is tight, shoppers have decided they would rather see what they are buying first
Yet not all is well in retailing. Sales volumes in clothing fell by 2.7 per cent in January, and household goods by 1.7 per cent. It is not just a case of further decline on the high street. Online retailers endured an especially torrid month, with household goods sales down 14 per cent and clothing sales down by 7 per cent.
The great boom in online retailing, which was given a huge boost during the pandemic, appears to be well and truly over. When money is tight, perhaps shoppers have decided that they would rather see what they are buying first. Another factor is that online retailers have started to crack down on customers who order large volumes of clothes to try on at home knowing that they can return whatever they don’t like.
Last year, according to market intelligence firm Retail Economics, customers returned £27 billion worth of goods bought online. Of this, £6.6 billion was attributed to ‘serial returners’ who make a habit of sending back large volumes of goods. Younger generations are far worse at doing this than older ones, with the practice blamed partly on TikTok videos. To try to stem their losses from the practice, retailers have started to fight back. In October, Asos introduced a £3.95 charge if customers returned items and failed to keep at least £40 worth of their order.
It is extraordinary that retailers didn’t seem to see this coming. You want a special outfit for a big night out? Why buy one when you can order one over the internet and then send it back once the big night is over (assuming you can avoid spilling red wine over it)? It has become far too easy for customers to use online retailing as a free clothing hire service. That retailers have tolerated this speaks of some desperation on their part.
There is a word of caution, however, with this month’s retail sales figures – as with every month. They are seasonally adjusted, using assumptions about patterns of spending. That we saw a drop of 0.6 per cent in December followed by a rise of 1.7 per cent in January suggests that those assumptions may be a bit out of date – and that we are no longer splurging before Christmas as we used to do.
Seasonal adjustment attempts to smooth out the figures by revising December’s figures downwards and January’s figures upwards. But the latest figures seem to suggest that the figures may have been revised downwards a little too much in December and revised upwards a bit too much in January. Not that that will bother Reeves, I suspect, as she enjoys a rare bit of good news.
Has Rachel Reeves broken her fiscal rules?
Rachel Reeves is having to borrow more money than even the worst estimates expected. Figures on the public finances, published this morning by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), show that in the financial year to January we borrowed over £118 billion. This is £11.6 billion more than at the same point in the last financial year and is the fourth highest borrowing period since comparable records began in 1993. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had expected borrowing to be some £13 billion lower by this point in the year.
This news puts even more pressure on the Chancellor who, reports now suggest, has blown her fiscal headroom and failed to stick to her fiscal rules. She faces the choice of taking Britain’s tax burden even higher than the post-war high it will reach according to current plans, having to slash public spending – or most likely both.
January figures usually bring good news for the Treasury as self-assessment tax returns flood in. Reeves has, as a result, experienced the largest January surplus since records began. The ONS’s figures show the public sector was in a £15 billion surplus last month – £0.8 billion larger than last year. Successive decisions to take the tax burden to its highest post-war level are reaping rewards for the Treasury as HMRC recorded some £36.2 billion in income from self-assessed and capital gains tax receipts in January. That’s nearly £4 billion more than was raised last year and the highest January tax take since records began.
However, the self-assessed tax take of just under £26 billion was £3 billion less than the OBR was hoping for. Capital gains taxes also brought in over £1 billion less than the OBR expected. All this eats into any fiscal wiggle room the Chancellor had left.
Labour insists it is going ‘through every pound spent, line by line’ to meet its priorities. This newfound commitment to cutting waste and improving efficiency is welcome, but today’s borrowing figures don’t require forensic analysis – they’re written in bold across the balance sheet. The government is spending too much and propping it up with unsustainably high levels of debt. Only a major rethink about what the state does and doesn’t do will fix that.
The shame of Big Energy’s £3.9 billion profit windfall
It is one of the world’s great mysteries: if wind and solar energy are supposed to be so cheap then why does the UK – which generates a higher proportion of its electricity from wind or solar than virtually any other developed country – have higher electricity prices than any other member of the International Energy Agency? There are several reasons for this, in fact. Wind and solar energy are only cheap if you look at the marginal price of generation, which is very low because the wind blows and the sun shines for free. Add on the cost of back-up and/or energy storage to make up for the gaps in generation and it becomes a very different story.
But Citizens’ Advice claims to have come up with another reason for Britain’s sky-high electricity prices. It claims that ‘network companies’ – such as National Grid, UK Power Networks and Scottish Power – which between them operate the grid, have enjoyed a £3.9 billion windfall because Ofgem over-estimated the cost of servicing the debt on their investment.
Like so much concerned with supposedly ‘privatised’ utilities, the business of distributing electricity around the country is not quite the free market many might think. It is a heavily regulated structure in which Ofgem effectively decides how much profit the distribution companies are allowed to earn – through what is called a price control financial model. One of the inputs into this model are assumptions about what the network companies need to pay in interest on their debts. It is this which Citizens Advice contends Ofgem has got wrong, over-estimating the cost of interest payments to the tune of £3.9 billion over the past four years. This includes excess profits which Citizens Advice says have been made running the gas network as well as the electricity network.
That is not the end of the perverse workings of our electricity market. There is also ‘marginal cost pricing’, where all suppliers of electricity at any one time are paid the same rate. The wholesale market is divided into half hour periods. For each period, the operators of wind farms, solar farms, nuclear plants and gas plants all submit bids to provide energy at a certain prices.
The market accepts the bids in order from low to high, stopping when sufficient power is being generated. But then all chosen providers get paid the same, regardless of the bids they submitted. If the last bid to be accepted is from a gas peaking plant which is charging an elevated rate because it is only going to be switched on for a few hours to counter a shortage of electricity, then we are all going to be paying through the nose.
It is rather as if you go to a supermarket looking for twelve bottles of Prosecco, but when you get there you find the shop only has eleven bottles. So you put a bottle of vintage champagne in your trolley to make up the twelve – and then when you get to the checkout you are charged for twelve bottles of vintage champagne.
Wind and solar energy never were as cheap as Ed Miliband likes to make out – because much of the cost of these forms of energy comes in the form of upfront capital costs; wind and solar prices are very sensitive to interest rates. When rates were on the floor, as they were for a decade, the cost plummeted. When rates started to rise, so, too, did the cost of wind and solar energy – very sharply.
But there are other factors in the high cost of Britain’s electricity which are only gradually coming to light. We will not have cheaper energy until they are resolved.
The hard truth about Britain’s armed forces
There is something ironic about the fact that just as Donald Trump has made it clear that Europe needs to start defending itself, Britain has been moving in the opposite direction: and indulging in the fantasy of soft power.
Already this year, the government has argued that Britain must give away the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, which is a puppet of China, because the International Telecommunications Union might rule against Britain and that such a ruling might put broad spectrum military communications at ‘legal risk’. You really cannot make this stuff up. Starmer has surrounded himself with unworldly left-wing lawyers such as Lord Hermer, who fellow Labour man Lord Glasman last week called the epitome of the arrogant progressive fool. But that is not the real issue.
The hard truth is that Britain and other major western European powers have so neglected their armed forces over so many years they can barely afford to recapitalise them and pay for their running costs, never mind defend the continent.
The future defence of Europe largely depends on three countries. Britain, France and Germany represent some 70 per cent of all European defence investment and 90 per cent of all defence research and technology investment.
In 2021, the French Ministry of Defence produced a strategic update which established its security and defence priorities up to 2030. The Macron government emphasised the centrality of the French nuclear deterrent to Paris’s defence strategy. Paris also called on ‘Europe’ to assume greater ‘strategic autonomy’ from the Americans. And yet, French defence expenditure will not match Britain’s until 2027.
One problem both Britain and France share is the cost nuclear forces impose on the rest of defence. France spends about 2 per cent GDP on defence, but in 2024 some €6.6 billion of
of its €57 billion defence budget was allocated to nuclear forces. Consequently, Paris spends no more than 1.4 per cent or so of its GDP on conventional forces. Britain is not much better, spending only 1.5 per cent on conventional forces. The nuclear drag is one reason British defence chiefs have warned Starmer that increasing defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP will ‘not even touch the sides’.
As for Germany, the Bundeswehr is in an even worse state than the British and French armed forces. In 2023, General Alfons Mais, the head of the Bundeswehr, said that the force had only 60 per cent of the equipment it needs ‘from A for artillery pieces to Z for tent tarpaulins (Zeltbahn)’. Mais pointed out that nearly 2,000 crucial items are missing from Germany’s arsenal. Of all the major European powers, only Poland has committed to spending anything like the 5 per cent defence commitment Trump has called for, with Warsaw planning to spend 4.7 per cent of its GDP on defence in 2025. But even this means Poland’s 2025 defence budget at $31 billion will be less than half of Britain’s $80.62 billion.
The only thing Britain’s own Strategic Defence Review needs to address is the challenge Trump has laid down: what does Britain need to do to prevent Russia from attacking Nato Europe in the absence of American forces?
At the very least Britain would need to contribute to a European force of sufficient strength, mobility, military capability and capacity to fight any Russian advance to a stop. Such a force would need to operate across multiple domains, including air, sea, land and space.
Unfortunately, Starmer seems to be retreating into strategic fantasy instead. Nowhere is this more apparent than his proposal to send British forces to keep the peace between Russia and Ukraine in some future demilitarised zone. First, what troops? British forces are so hollowed out after years of under-funding they simply lack the resources and personnel to undertake such a role. To do this, Nato would also have to move almost all of its forces to Ukraine, leaving the Baltic States and the Black Sea region effectively undefended.
What is clear that the old Nato model whereby America defends Europe whilst Europeans pretend to defend Europe is over. At the Nato Hague Summit in June the Americans will likely do the following. First, they will talk about the need to spend 5 per cent of GDP on defence as part of a negotiating ploy. They will settle for between 3 to 5 per cent over five years. Second, they will emphasise how much Europeans spend on defence using American definitions (the Nato definition of defence spending includes non-military expenditure such as pensions). Third, the US will reject the excuse that European countries can only increase defence expenditure when ‘economic circumstances permit’. Fourth, Trump will link tariffs to defence expenditure. The White House will likely offer tariff relief to European nations who commit immediately to spending more than 3 per cent of GDP on defence with a sliding scale thereafter for those who spend more. Trump will also likely demand access for US companies to the European defence market as part of the ‘defence tariffs’ deal. For Trump it is all about the money.
Washington will also likely call for a strategic audit to see how Europeans can get more bang for their existing buck and demand that new equipment is put in the field far sooner. The solution they will offer is to buy American military equipment off the shelf – in other words, buy American, get tariff relief.
The hard truth is that Britain’s armed forces not only need a lot more money, but a radical rethink. Much greater use of civilian assets will be needed, particularly in the digital domain, as Artificial Intelligence plays an ever-greater role in defence and deterrence. A new form of conscription might also be needed whereby companies loan technical specialists to the armed forces for a time to create a new kind of digital reserve. There are also some interesting ideas about involving the financial sector as a kind of great arsenal of 21st century democracy.
The hardest truth of all is that on our current levels of defence spending, Britain can either afford a bespoke nuclear deterrent or a Nato-useful conventional deterrent – but it cannot afford both. Of course, the government could increase defence expenditure at a stroke if it once again took all the costs of the nuclear deterrent out of the defence budget. But the costs will be eye-watering.
Britain will have to decide soon. For decades the Americans have been Europe’s Leviathan – but they cannot and will not fund such a role any longer. Europeans can no longer rely on empty words and soft power. The era of Paper Leviathans is over.
Christoph Heusgen is just another arrogant boomer
Historians will look back on the tears of Christoph Heusgen as a defining moment of the early 21st century. When the German began blubbing as he wrapped up the Munich Security Conference last Sunday, he wasn’t just crying for himself but for all his generation who believed that the collapse of Communism had marked the ‘end of history’.
The phrase was coined by the American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, in his 1992 book of that name. He claimed that the end of the Cold War was the ‘end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’.
Fukuyama is a Baby Boomer, as is Christoph Heusgen. They were both born in the early 1950s. The political flowering of this generation coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and heralded a new confident and optimistic era at the start of the early 1990s. The liberal international order, which emerged from the second world war, had triumphed and the future belonged to progressives and globalists.
Heusgen helped shape this new world. Between 1990 and 1992, he was deputy head of a section responsible for negotiations on the Treaty of Maastricht, the EU’s founding treaty that heralded ‘a new stage in the process of European integration’.
In 1999, Heusgen was appointed director of the policy unit in the General Secretariat of the Council of the EU. When Angela Merkel became German chancellor in 2005, she selected Heusgen as her foreign policy and security adviser, a position he held for 12 years until he was named permanent representative of Germany to the United Nations.
It was at the UN in 2018 that Heusgen was seen smirking as Donald Trump warned Germany of the danger of being over reliant on Russian energy.
Heusgen always preferred the company of Democrats to Republicans. In June 2016, he gave a speech at the American Academy in Berlin in honour of Samantha Power, the United States permanent representative to the United Nations. Power had been awarded the Henry A. Kissinger prize for ‘exceptional contributions to transatlantic relations’. In his speech, Heusgen praised Power’s ‘liberal idealism’ and her powerful advocacy of ‘military intervention on moral grounds’.
Power, incidentally, was chosen by Joe Biden in 2021 to head the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), recently described by Elon Musk as ‘a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America’.
By the end of 2016, Heusgen’s ‘liberal idealism’ had been shaken. First the British voted to leave the EU, and then America elected Donald Trump as its 45th president. Both events were chronicled in an article in Time headlined ‘The Populists’. Heusgen confessed to Time that he found the events ‘very confusing’.
Time described Nigel Farage as ‘a kind of roving ambassador for Trumpism… giving speeches and campaigning for the dawn of a new world order – or at least the destruction of the old one.’
Farage told the American magazine that he was in ‘no doubt that the European project is finished. It’s just a question of when.’
Brexit didn’t finish the EU, but Trump’s second presidency might. He is the inspiration for a new generation of European politician who have all risen to prominence since 2016: these aren’t Boomers but Generation Xers, and they have no time for the liberal idealism of their elders that they hold responsible for the inexorable decline of Europe in the last 30 years. They include Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and her deputy PM, Matteo Salvini, France’s Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders in Holland, Alice Weidel in Germany and Spain’s Santiago Abascal.
Heusgen’s generation have ruined Europe economically, militarily, educationally, socially and culturally
They celebrated the speech given by J.D. Vance at the Munich Security Conference last week. Weidel – who later had talks with the American vice-president – called it ‘excellent’. Wilders thought it ‘great’ and Salvini praised Vance for his ‘clear ideas’ and urged his 1.5 million followers on X to listen to what he said.
This was the same speech that reduced Heusgen – the chairman of the conference – to tears and led him to warn delegates that ‘we have to fear that our common value base is not that common anymore’.
It was a response shared by many boomers, the arrogant and self-absorbed generation whose time is up. From Thierry Breton – a former European commissioner – to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Alastair Campbell to Joseph Borrell, the EU’s former foreign policy chief; all found Vance’s speech repellent. Breton called it an ‘humiliation’. The fact it was given by a millennial like Vance must have made it doubly so.
Vance’s boss is reviled even more, perhaps because as a boomer himself Trump is regarded as a traitor to his generation. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who led the student protests in Paris in 1968 and was for many the figurehead of his generation, has compared Trump to Hitler.
Angela Merkel berated Trump in her recent memoir that was published in the same month he and Kamala Harris contested the election. Merkel had written that she wished ‘with all my heart’ that the Democrat would triumph.
No leader has done more damage to Europe this century than Angela Merkel. On nearly every major issue she was wrong: energy, immigration, industry, security and defence. As the Economist headlined its Charlemagne column last November: ‘Merkel’s legacy looks increasingly terrible’.
As her foreign policy and security adviser, Heusgen must share a lot of the blame. But so must all his generation of liberal idealists. They have ruined Europe economically, militarily, educationally, socially and culturally. It’s not they who should be crying, it’s the generations who follow. They have to try and repair a Europe broken by boomers.
There’s something sinister about the Mustique mafia
It’s half-term and instead of the Baftas and Anmer Hall in Norfolk, the Prince and Princess of Wales have decamped en famille to Mustique. Old pictures of Kate and Wills walking along the Caribbean seafront hand in hand and a young Prince George in a green polo shirt are accompanied by newspaper commentary detailing how Kate deserves a rest in what is thought to be her favourite place. So far, so very lovely.
Mustique itself, though, has always struck me as a rather sinister place. Far from a moneyed Caribbean idyll, Mustique has to me always been synonymous with Princess Margaret, fag-in-mouth, sent raving mad by the booze and shagging gangster John Bindon, or poor old Lady Anne Glenconner suffering one of her husband’s famous temper tantrums and being beaten up with a walking stick made from shark’s vertebrae. There must be a reason why Lady Anne, resourceful to the last after her late husband left his St Lucian estate to a manservant, wrote a 2020 novel entitled Murder on Mustique in which a ‘thrill-seeking’ young heiress comes to a sticky end. In a life stranger than fiction, perhaps the dark Mustique chapters were best kept out of her best-selling 2019 memoir Lady in Waiting.
I happened upon a 1971 episode of Whicker’s World titled ‘A Giddy Head – In Paradise’, in which Alan Whicker, consummately dressed in a suit and tie throughout, interviews Mustique’s owner Colin Tennant, Lord Glenconner, as they tour the island on one of Tennant’s golf buggies. From the off, things appear distinctly strange. Asked in the pouring rain why he wanted to buy the supposedly sun-drenched island, Tennant, dressed like Willy Wonka in a striped pyjama suit, explains that it works out cheaper than heating his Scottish estate. Whicker says nothing while the camera focuses on a large reptilian creature wading around in the mud and a horse with a ‘giddy head’ bolting off into a wind-whipped sea.
In this strange island universe, Whicker proceeds to press Tennant on why making Mustique ‘the Debretter the better’ would be a good idea; Tennant, drink in hand, equivocates, occasionally giggling and imperiously greeting the locals who tip their hat at him in fear. In by far the most bizarre scene of all, Whicker asks a young woman seated next to Tennant at dinner what the allure of the island is while Tennant looks on. ‘It’s hard,’ she says sadly, before Tennant silences her by stroking her hair.
Lord Glenconner – by all accounts a troubled man – bought Mustique from the Hazell family in 1958 for the princely sum of £45,000. When the farming of the unforgiving landscape proved difficult, he turned his hand to property development, eventually connecting the island to royalty by giving Princess Margaret a plot of land as a wedding present after her marriage in 1960 to Antony Armstrong-Jones.
As a PR masterstroke, Tennant could not have hoped for more. Princess Margaret built her house, Les Jolies Eaux, on the island and visited it often, claiming that it was ‘the only place she could truly be herself’. If ‘being herself’ was a euphemism for a life of extreme debauchery, then Mustique, famed for its privacy from prying courtiers, was certainly the place, even if the pictures of her swimming alone in the sea appear drenched in melancholy.
These days, Mustique retains its royal connections despite Les Jolies Eaux having been sold by David Linley in 1998. The Sussexes and the Cambridges are said to enjoy their time there, although presumably not together. Tennant’s Old Etonian network presides over the island in a no-nonsense, sun over the yardarm, boozy way. ‘It’s Balmoral-on-Sea,’ one told me, ‘nothing as naff as Barbados.’ People drink G&Ts in Basil’s – the only ‘destination’ on the island – and are apparently expected, by three-line whip, to turn up at the Cotton House on Tuesday evenings as a sort of debs’ ‘coming out’ ceremony for the purposes of dinner party planning. When so much of the Caribbean has been appropriated by Sandals resorts and infinity pools, Mustique is unknowable, still in thrall to its upper-class, tight-lipped mafia.
When writing this piece I ask around various friends, trying to get a sense of the place from those who have been. Friends put me in touch with those who have grown up there or know it well, but the trail quickly runs cold. ‘It’s a closed circle,’ one says, ‘they’ll never tell.’ I think of Princess Margaret swimming in the sea, and I think of the reptile eyeing Tennant, and I’m rather glad I don’t know. Call it envy if you like, but I think I’ll stay away.
A pint, a punch and a scotch egg
My local gastropub, which is very popular, serves a hot, freshly made and runny-yolked scotch egg. It’s billed as a ‘Cackleberry Farm Scotch Egg with Maldonado Salt’ because part of hospitality is marketing. If you just chalk up ‘scotch egg’ on a board, it doesn’t entice the appetite in quite the same way. But call it ‘œuf écossais enrobés de chair à saucisse’ and serve it on a cracked slate tile – you’ve got yourself a stampede.
A couple who live in the village visited the pub and ordered two of them. Shortly after being served, the husband of the couple returned the plates to the bar and asked the staff to reheat their partially eaten scotch eggs. The landlord explained that he could not reheat them once they had been partially eaten. If a person is infected with Covid, then the virus could be present in saliva left on the scotch egg. In reheating the scotch egg, you are potentially turning the microwave into a virus incubator, he further explained. Viruses are like show-offs at a party – they do not just sit there, they like to circulate, alighting on as many victims as possible.
The husband refused to listen to reason. It escalated into a quarrel and the customer – adopting the absurd posture of an Edwardian boxer – challenged the landlord to a bout of fisticuffs. Meanwhile, a burly Territorial Army volunteer had been waiting at the bar for his ‘Cackleberry Farm Scotch Egg’. Having lost patience, he strode out to the garden, taking the angry customer with him. ‘Hit me,’ he said to Fisticuffs.
Inadvisably, the latter threw a half-hearted punch, which missed, and received a good pre-decimalisation clout round the ear. Fisticuffs dropped from view, going down like a defenceless nan. Returning to the bar, the TA volunteer asked: ‘Can I have my fucking scotch egg now?’
The incident became known as scotch egg-gate. Fisticuffs brought no charge of assault and was barred from the pub for a year. Very silly of him because the next nearest public house is three miles away. This is why celebrity local Sharon Osbourne chose to move the family here – to prevent the Prince of Darkness from sneaking out the back door during the Emmerdale omnibus to get tiddly in the snug bar. A local craftsman made a little plaque for the bar counter: ‘Please do not ask for your scotch eggs to be reheated as a refusal often offends. Thank you.’
Smaller communities tend to exact justice over lesser matters rather than calling our absent police force. We are not talking about ratepayers holding pitchforks, presided over by a Vincent Price figure, or dunking a habitual shoplifter in the village pond (although I would not find this problematic). I’m referring to arbitration. If arbitration fails, a collective solution might be sought.
Smaller communities tend to exact justice over lesser matters rather than calling our absent police force
For example, last year, two neighbours engaged in a lengthy spat over a parking space. The space was not privately owned and neither neighbour held the exclusive right to it. However, the spat escalated to the point where one of them placed a traffic cone on the patch of road when the other was absent. It was then moved. This traffic cone went back and forth more times than Theresa May between London and Brussels. The parking war was raised at a parish meeting where it was agreed that the neighbours share the space on alternate days. Simple. No Thames Valley Police. No siege. No overhead Sky News helicopters.
Relatively minor matters, unchecked or unresolved, can grow into a full-time occupation. Villagers become ever-vigilant guardians, stationed next to a blind, peering through a slat to monitor the situation. The number of British householders engaged at any one time in a boundary dispute is legion. Fisticuffs served his sentence, which obliged him to travel to Chalfont St Peter if he wanted to enjoy the ambience and bonhomie of the English pub. Suitably repentant, he was allowed back into the gastropub where, one suspects, he refrained from asking for a Cackleberry Farm Scotch Egg with Maldonado Salt again.
Is the Amazon version of James Bond doomed?
So at last the deadlock has been broken. After months, even years, of tension between Amazon MGM, who own the rights to the studio that made the James Bond films, and Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, the producers and de facto custodians of the franchise, it has been announced that Broccoli and Wilson have, somewhat unexpectedly, ceded complete creative control to the Bond character and the 007 series to Amazon.
Presumably they did so in exchange for an amount of money that might make even Ernst Stavro Blofeld go weak at the knees. This now will not only accelerate development of a new Bond film, but also gives Amazon what it has wanted for years: the ability to exploit the intellectual property opportunities of one of the best-loved characters in contemporary entertainment.
Whatever you think about Broccoli and Wilson – who in many regards hold the same dominion over Bond that Kevin Feige does at Marvel – they’ve been unafraid to experiment, moving in a far grittier direction with the Daniel Craig movies and hiring Oscar-winning actors to serve as baddies and, in the case of Skyfall and Spectre’s director Sam Mendes, a bona fide Oscar-winning director.
It has been rumoured that the reason why there is no Bond film hitting our screens any time soon is because Broccoli, in particular, was deeply hostile to the idea of Amazon’s ownership of the character; the Wall Street Journal quoted her as referring to the company as “fucking idiots,” and there was notably no pushback from the reporting of the comment.
Still, now that Amazon are in complete control, it will be fascinating to see what comes next. On the plus side, the door is open for a major auteur director like Christopher Nolan or Quentin Tarantino – both of whom have repeatedly, publicly expressed interest in making a Bond film – to step up and make their mark on the franchise, presumably with the full creative control that they would never have been allowed in the Broccoli-Wilson era. Yet on the other hand, the 007 films have never been a director’s medium; Mendes’s work on Skyfall is probably as idiosyncratic as the series has ever allowed for, and even that was largely through Roger Deakins’s unforgettable cinematography.
No, it’s a lot more likely that the reason why Amazon have paid a supervillain’s bounty is because they want to do the same to Bond that Disney have so inexpertly done with Star Wars and Marvel and create countless spin-off franchises that they can then put on Prime. If you ever wanted to see origin stories for everyone from Blofeld and M to Moneypenny and Felix Leiter, well, you’re in luck; no doubt there will be a rush of them over the coming years. And just as the Disney exploitation of previously beloved characters has led to a dearth of creative imagination, so we can expect this particular return to the well to run out of juice very, very quickly.
The reason why James Bond has endured for over 60 years is not because of the terrible quips, the martini recipes or the ridiculously named villains or love interests. It is because, ever since its creator Ian Fleming’s death, there has always been someone making sure that the franchise does not descend into bathos. Sometimes, it has anyway – I defy anyone to watch Die Another Day or Quantum of Solace and suggest that the creative process has been firing on all cylinders – but, at their best, the Bond movies are some of the most reliable mainstream entertainment to be found in cinemas anywhere.
But now, with the long-standing producers apparently throwing in the towel (they will, admittedly, continue to co-own the franchise), the sound that you hear is a thousand Amazon executives rubbing their hands together in glee. And that, frankly, is more frightening than any nefarious hook-handed villain’s world-conquering plan.
Luis Rubiales and Spain’s war on machismo
Luis Rubiales kissed player Jenni Hermoso on the lips during the medal ceremony after Spain won the Women’s World Cup in August 2023. Rubiales, at the time president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, said the kiss was consensual but Hermoso said it wasn’t and filed a criminal complaint.
Rubiales has now been found guilty of sexual assault and fined €10,800 (£8,945). He was also ordered to pay a portion of the costs and compensation of €3,000 (£2,484) to Hermoso. Rubiales has ten days to appeal the sentence. He and three ex-colleagues were acquitted on a separate charge of attempting to coerce Hermoso into changing her story.
Spanish feminists are outraged by the judge’s leniency (Rubiales could have received a two-and-a-half-year jail sentence). But many other Spaniards think it’s a shame that bestowing a brief, spontaneous kiss in a moment of euphoria and celebration should now be considered a criminal offence and sympathise with Rubiales’s claim that ‘False feminism is a great blight on this country’.
This clash of opposing views is not surprising. Since 2018, under a vociferously feminist left-wing government, sexual mores have changed at a bewildering speed in the country that gave us the word ‘machismo’ and the libertine, Don Juan. Adapting to new gender roles has not been easy for many Spaniards who grew up during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship when a woman required her husband’s permission to take a job, open a bank account, initiate legal proceedings and even to travel. Certainly a lot has changed since 1975 when, five days before Franco’s death, actress Carmen Maura was admonished by a military judge for not forgiving the soldier who had raped her.
Macho attitudes didn’t die with Franco of course and continued to manifest themselves, often in less serious ways. In 2006 José María Aznar, who until a couple of years previously had been prime minister of Spain, was approached by an eager young journalist, microphone in hand. He signed the book she’d handed him but instead of answering her question, popped the pen into her cleavage, smiled and moved on without a word. That incident passed largely unremarked at the time but – a sign of how attitudes have changed –it has attracted plenty of adverse comment since it recently resurfaced on national television.
There was nationwide outrage when five men accused of the gang rape of an 18-year-old girl in 2016 were only found guilty of the lesser charge of sexual abuse since she hadn’t been violently coerced. The men were sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment and freed pending appeal. In 2019, however, following mass protests across the country, the Supreme Court determined that the victim had been subjected to ‘a truly intimidating scenario’ and had ‘at no time consented to the sexual acts carried out by the defendants’. The court ruled that the men were therefore guilty of rape and imposed an immediate 15-year sentence. The case proved a catalyst for Spain’s ‘Solo sí es sí’ (Only yes is yes) law passed in 2022 which established that consent cannot be assumed and must be clearly communicated. It is this law that, the judge has now decided, Rubiales broke.
Rubiales will be back in court before long because of corruption charges centring on the deal that made Saudi Arabia hosts for Spain’s Super Cup tournament. He denies all wrongdoing. The Royal Spanish Football Federation’s long association with corruption is not unusual in Spanish public life where graft has long been endemic. Indeed the government is currently mired in several corruption scandals.
So while the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report now sees Spain amongst the top ten countries in the world for gender parity, in Corruption Perceptions Index, Spain has just dropped to 46th in the world – behind Botswana and Rwanda.
It seems a pity that the government can’t bring itself to fight corruption with the same enthusiasm that it shows in the struggle against machismo.
The cruellest thing about Trump vs Zelensky? Trump’s right
And just like that, we are back in 2017. Donald Trump, the President of the United States, is posting ridiculous hyperbole on his socials and mouthing off from Mar-a-Lago, as he always has.
In the last 24 hours, however, the global political and media classes have gone back to gnashing their teeth and wailing in the way they did in Trump’s first term. It’s disgraceful! It’s sub-literate! He’s Vladimir Putin’s puppet! He’s reckless and utterly out of control! And that, of course, is the point.
Trump’s re-election proved that he is no aberration, so in 2025 the liberal, western world order has tried to come to terms with him. Western statesmen took turns to recognise his achievements, or his mandate, and to distance themselves from their past condemnations. But this was all insincere politesse and it was never going to work. Trump doesn’t care. His mandate is to cripple their authority. And on the international stage, Ukraine was always going to be the breaking point.
The West has invested a huge amount of capital – political, economic and strategic – in the fight against Russia, and it has failed. Trump knows that and so he’s ending the war: if that means insulting Volodymyr Zelensky, parroting Russian talking points and playing nice with Putin, so be it.
Fact-checkers have been queueing up to rebut Trump’s incoherent Truth Social post last night, which is worth reposting here in full:
Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelensky, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and “TRUMP,” will never be able to settle. The United States has spent $200 Billion Dollars more than Europe, and Europe’s money is guaranteed, while the United States will get nothing back. Why didn’t Sleepy Joe Biden demand Equalization, in that this War is far more important to Europe than it is to us – We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation. On top of this, Zelenskyy admits that half of the money we sent him is “MISSING.” He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden “like a fiddle.” A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only “TRUMP,” and the Trump Administration, can do. Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring Peace, and Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the “gravy train” going. I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died – And so it continues…
And so it does.
To westerners who have spent years grandstanding against Putin, such words are anathema. To the many Ukrainians who have fought and died fighting Russian forces in their country, such rhetoric is beyond reprehensible. But if you can somehow look through the insensitivity, the febrile exaggerations, the score-settling with Zelensky, the half-lies and the cruel braggadocio, you have to admit that he is right – or at least not wrong.
Only offensive, odious Donald could end the war in Ukraine, which he is now doing. Europe has failed to bring peace. In a press conference on Tuesday, Trump said that Ukrainians shouldn’t complain about not being involved in his dialogue with Russia: ‘Well, you’ve been there for three years… you should have ended it three years… You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.’ That’s been widely interpreted as him saying that Ukraine started the war, and while his choice of words was poor, in context he is clearly referring to the thwarted efforts to achieve peace in the conflict’s early days in 2022. Trump is also right to say that vast amounts of western funding to Ukraine have gone missing, because the country is – and always has been – deeply corrupt.
For European leaders who have spent years advocating on behalf of Ukraine, the most painful part will be Trump’s reckoning on Zelensky. In the days and months that followed Russia’s invasion, when Ukraine’s President bravely stayed in Kyiv and led Ukraine’s impressive resistance, Zelensky became a western hero. People called him a 21st-century Churchill. He was fêted in European capitals, Hollywood and on the cover of Vogue magazine as young men killed each other on the front line.
There’s no doubt that, in our eagerness to champion the man in the military fatigues, we overlooked the more sordid aspects of his leadership. The Pandora papers showing his links to shady offshore bank accounts were forgotten about. His ties to deeply corrupt and double-dealing oligarchs, such as Ihor Kolomoisky, were brushed over. His ruthless suppression of Moscow-affiliated religious groups was dismissed as Kremlin ‘disinformation’.
Western politicians, and military-industrial types who have made a lot of money from the war effort, have always known, deep down, that in supporting Ukraine against Putin they have covered up awkward truths. What really frightens them now is not necessarily Trump’s recklessness. It’s that the murkier realities of the Ukraine-Russia relationship and the West’s involvement in the conflict going back to 2014 and before, may soon come to light.
The incalculable evil of Hamas’s coffin stunt
We need to talk about what we witnessed in Gaza today. The sick ceremonial handover of the bodies of slain Israelis was a new low, even for Hamas. This was the theatre of death, a public spectacle of Jewish agony for the delectation of voyeuristic anti-Semites. If the world fails to speak out against this racist, morbid stunt, then we are in even bigger moral trouble than I thought.
The bodies of four hostages were returned. Oded Lifschitz, an 84-year-old peace activist, and the three late members of the Bibas family. Mum Shiri and her two tiny sons: Ariel, who was four when he was kidnapped, and Kfir, who was just nine months old. The images of the Bibas’s being dragged from their home by an Islamist mob on 7 October 2023, a terror-stricken Shiri clutching Ariel and Kfir to her chest, are among the grimmest we have seen in the 21st century so far.
That a baby could be taken hostage feels almost incomprehensible. It is an act of incalculable evil to turn a mother and her infant children into ‘prisoners’. It was a testament to the anti-Semitism that pulses through the ranks of Hamas that they viewed even a Jewish baby as their enemy. That to them, even this helpless tot, by virtue of his Jewishness, was a legitimate target. The seizing of the Bibas’s was an unconscionable crime.
And the crime continued today. With staggering cruelty, Hamas denied the Bibas family dignity even in death. Instead it hauled their black coffins, and the coffin of Oded Lifschitz, onto a specially erected stage. It displayed them to a baying crowd of men waving flags and taking photos with their phones. It made a circus of their demise. Not content with robbing a mother and her children of their liberty and their lives, now it was robbing them of the grace every person deserves when they pass.
It turned the handover of their bodies into a political stunt. Worse, an anti-Semitic stunt. Behind the coffins there hung a vast banner showing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu with vampire-like teeth. Blood dripped from his teeth and pooled around an image of the Bibas family and Mr Lifschitz. Hamas claims the hostages were killed in an Israeli airstrike – Netanyahu’s ‘Nazi army’ killed them with his ‘Zionist warplanes’, said the banner behind the coffins.
Try to take in the bigotry, the sheer inhumanity of this stunt. The Jew as vampiric blood-drinker is a classic anti-Semitic trope. Calling the Jews ‘Nazis’ is anti-Semitic too. It’s a vile taunt designed to wound Jews with their own historic suffering. And both of these things were emblazoned on that banner behind the coffins. Hamas engaged in brazen Jew hatred right next to the coffins of four Jews it kidnapped and condemned to death. If this doesn’t wake our ‘progressives’ to the wickedness of Hamas, nothing will.
Will those leftists who say ‘Black Lives Matter’ now say ‘Jewish Lives Matter’? Will the people who think even scuffing a page of the Koran is an act of ‘Islamophobia’ call out the despicable race hatred of mocking the Jewish people next to the coffins of slain Jews? Will the activist class that sees ‘fascism’ everywhere – in every vote for Brexit, in every criticism of mass immigration – see the true fascism in Hamas’s garish demonisation of the Jews as it hands back four of the Jews it stole from their homes?
I won’t hold my breath. For the sad, unsettling truth is that far from offering solidarity to the Bibas family, some activists in the West conspired in their demonisation. Posters of the Bibas family were torn down in our cities during that orgy of deranged hatred for Israel that followed Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October. Even posters of baby Kfir were defaced and destroyed. Some were ‘ripped in half’.
We can, and should, reel at the horror of the kidnapping of a nine-month-old baby from Israel. But we must also reckon with the violent assaults on images of that baby right here in the West. Just as Hamas’s kidnapping of a Jewish mother and her children confirmed its savage rejection of civilisation, so the dearth of Western solidarity for that family spoke to our own crisis of civilisation. We live among people who responded to the kidnapping of a baby Jew by destroying likenesses of the baby Jew – that must never be forgotten.
Today’s racist stunt in Gaza shows just how unreasonable, if not outright lunatic it is to expect Israel to live next door to Hamas. No nation, including the Jewish nation, should accept neighbours who invade its land, rape its women, kidnap its children, and heap racist invective on its citizens even in death. Whatever the future for the Middle East, this monstrous movement that makes a pantomime of Jewish pain must have no part in it.
Putin is watching Trump attack Zelensky with glee
Britain might not even be close to putting boots on the ground, but proposals by Keir Starmer to send UK troops to Ukraine have already been rejected by the Kremlin. Put forward by the Prime Minister as part of a plan to send a 30,000-strong European peace-keeping force to the country in the event of a ceasefire with Russia, this idea is ‘unacceptable’, the Kremlin has said. Reacting to plans reportedly being prepared by Prime Minister Keir Starmer with leaders on the continent (some of whom have already refused to involve their countries in), Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said such a proposal was ‘a matter of concern’ as it would amount to the deployment of Nato troops on Ukrainian soil.
Peskov’s remarks come as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky prepares to meet US special envoy Keith Kellogg in Kyiv today. Speaking to reporters yesterday, Kellogg said he would aim to ‘sit and listen’ to Ukraine’s needs, including the country’s desire for permanent security guarantees from the US if a peace deal with Russia is struck. Zelensky said he hoped the meeting would be ‘constructive’.
In Russia, there is already chatter that Trump’s positioning might result sanctions being lifted
Zelensky and Kellogg’s meeting will take place against the background of rapidly deteriorating relations between the US and Ukraine. Triggered by US President Donald Trump’s decision earlier this week to send a delegation to meet with Russia in Saudi Arabia and discuss an end to the war – without Ukraine present – the Ukrainian and American presidents have since been engaged in an increasingly vitriolic war of words.
Last night, after Zelensky denounced Trump as living in a ‘disinformation space’ created by Russia, the American president turned on his Ukrainian counterpart. On his Truth Social platform, Trump branded Zelensky a ‘dictator’, goading him to ‘move faster’ or he won’t ‘have a country left’. Speaking to the BBC from Air Force One in the early hours of this morning, Trump added that Russia ‘has the cards’ in any peace talks to end the war on account of the amount of Ukrainian land they have grabbed.
The source of Trump’s shocking claim that Zelensky is an illegitimate ruler – pushed frequently by Moscow – lies in the fact that, on account of the war with Russia and the instatement of martial law, the Ukrainian president’s mandate expired last year. Only once martial law is lifted will the country be able to hold fresh elections. The fact that Putin has occupied the Kremlin for over 25 years, holding elections that at best can be described as unfair and undemocratic, seems to have barely occurred to Trump during his rant.
In the hours after Trump’s diatribe, Starmer called Zelensky in order to reassure him that he had Britain’s support and was indeed considered a legitimate leader. The Prime Minister plans to travel to Washington next week; according to reports he will present his peace-keeping proposal to Trump then. Starmer may yet have a fresh headache to deal with as reports emerge that, as members of the G7 look to draft a statement ahead of the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion on Monday, America is resisting labelling Moscow the ‘aggressor’.
Moscow is watching the deepening rift between Washington and Kyiv with glee and clearly senses an opportunity to move the goal posts in its favour ahead of any coming talks. The Kremlin knows exactly what it is doing: Peskov also passed comment on Trump’s attack on Zelensky, saying the Kremlin ‘absolutely agreed’ with him. Such flattery is likely to further massage Trump’s ego as he positions himself as the only person capable of ending the war.
In Russia, there is already chatter that Trump’s positioning might result in the lifting of sanctions against the country – and even the return of foreign brands who pulled out of the country in 2022. This has prompted the chairman of Russia’s central bank Elvira Naibulina to warn that it is ‘premature’ to discuss what the financial impact on Russia may be.
What is clear is that the Kremlin is delighted by Trump’s sulphurous attacks on Zelensky – and the US president’s seeming willingness to throw Ukraine under the bus.
Why progressive activists feel superior
Left-wing activists are less likely to understand or listen to people with conservative beliefs, compared to the rest of the population. They are more inclined to view them negatively, and to dismiss them as having ‘been misled’ in forming their opinions. This is the revelation on the front page of the Guardian today. Reporting on a study by the political group More in Common, it relates how the liberal-left are ‘out of step’ with most people in the country when it comes to cultural matters and immigration. When it comes to conservatives in particular, progressives are more prone to misunderstand them, criticise them and even refuse to campaign alongside them.
Elaborating on this progressive mindset, Luke Tryl, an executive director at More in Common and co-author of the study, speaks of ‘a tendency to impose purity tests on those they will campaign with, overestimating how many people share their views, and using language that is inaccessible to the wider public’.
This feels less like a news story from the Guardian and more a belated admission of what conservatives have known for ages: that left-wing progressives often don’t listen to their opponents, will dismiss them as ignorant, ill-educated or immoral, and regard themselves by contrast as superior members of an enlightened elite.
This long-standing state affairs only came into sharp relief in recent years with the arrival of a woke ideology in the last decade. The language deployed by its advocates in progressive circles today – ‘heteronormative’, ‘terf’, ‘microaggressions’ and the rest – is indeed ‘inaccessible’ to most people, and for a good reason. It was adopted deliberately by a new clerisy to signal their membership of an elite. Our new, Eloi class used it to differentiate themselves from the Morlock underlings too stupid to understand it or use it properly.
Yet the ‘Great Awokening’ of 2016 merely solidified and made more glaring a mode of thinking that’s been around for aeons. Long before the arrival of a hyper-progressive dogma, there existed an ingrained progressive assumption that right-wing people were not just in error, but actually immoral. To be a Tory in the 1980s and 1990s was to risk accusations of being ‘selfish’ and ‘heartless’. Until the early part of the new millennium the Conservatives still sought to shed the image of the ‘nasty party’.
This is why students of old used to ‘no platform’ contentious speakers, and why students today ‘cancel’ similar types they likewise designate to be beyond the pale. Progressives have forever been liable to regard their most outspoken opponents as unworthy of human dignity. This assumption that those on the right are actually bad people persists in politics today, with Reform in the UK and Donald Trump in America routinely and constantly slandered as ‘fascist’ or ‘racist’ by leftists – campaigners who simultaneously profess to be ‘caring’ and ‘compassionate’.
While the abusive language used by those who call themselves loving and tolerant may strike some as peculiar, or even ironic, it does actually make sense. The reason why so many passionate progressives on social media have heart symbols on their X profiles and declare themselves members of a #BeKind collective, while simultaneously engaging in the most atrocious and vile behaviour, is that those possessed with unshakeable righteousness have always behaved like this.
So many went along with trans ideology or Black Lives Matter because they wanted to appear compassionate
Bigotry and intolerance, whether it be political or religious, manifests itself among those convinced that they have good on their side, and that their opponents are evil. In this regard, hyper-liberals don’t merely hold that left-wing policies are better or more efficient, they believe a left-wing perspective reflects a superior moral character. Today’s bellicose progressives are merely continuing a long tradition, one that equates right with might.
This is why efforts to counter a philosophy based on feelings will always fall on deaf ears. In an attempt to counter the accusation that they are selfish or heartless, conservatives will try in vain to make arguments based on reason. Those whose interest is in economics will invoke Adam Smith’s metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’, the theory that if everyone is motivated by self-interest, then society will consequently benefit in the long term. Social conservatives will argue that policies that encourage individual responsibility, family stability and community cohesion will likewise benefit the country as a whole.
None of this makes a difference. The pull of sentiment and the elevation of convictions triumphs these days. It’s why woke ideology took hold in the western world in the first place. It emerged in a post-Diana culture in which emotion, herd opinion and the imperative of being seen to be good became more esteemed than rational argument. So many went along with trans ideology or Black Lives Matter because they wanted to appear compassionate, because it felt right, and because being progressive always seems like the right thing to do.
Optimism alone won’t raise Britain’s birth rate
Few things could make Nigel Farage squirm, but a question from Jordan Peterson at this week’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference seems to have done the trick. During a fireside talk, the Canadian psychologist asked the Reform leader whether long-term, monogamous, heterosexual, child-centred marriages were the foundation stone of a civilised society.
After conceding that, having been divorced twice, he might not be the best advocate for stable unions, Farage, a father of four, responded that ‘we need higher birth rates’ and emphasised the importance of our ‘Judeo-Christian’ culture. ‘Of course we need higher birth rates,’ Farage said. ‘But we’re not going to get higher birth rates in this country until we can get some sense of optimism.’
The narrative goes that Gen Z have sunk into a state of near-total disillusionment
Young people in the UK today might well disagree, however, given they appear to have a dispiritingly low opinion of our culture and values. Just last week, a Times survey revealed 48 per cent of Gen Zers believe Britain is a racist country; just 36 per cent disagreed. A paltry 11 per cent would fight for us; half think we are stuck in the past. One 22-year old reported that, when abroad on holiday: ‘I sort of try to be quiet because I don’t want people to know where I’m from.’ A separate poll has suggested a fifth of young people would rather live in a dictatorship.
There are many reasons to want our birth rate – which at 1.6 is far below the replacement rate of at least 2.1 – to increase. Worsening demographics are likely to mean a much higher welfare bill in the future, yet fewer workers to fund it. The share of the country aged over 65 rose from 14 per cent in 1974, to 16 per cent in 2004, to 19 per cent in 2022. Few believe Labour will do what it takes to slash benefits, reform the NHS or resolve the crisis in social care, meaning politicians are likely to borrow more, and at some point the UK will face a bond market crunch.
It’s possible, as Farage says, that reviving a sense of optimism may spur the young into starting and growing their families. It may also help restore young people’s faith in the Western model of free markets and free nations.
The narrative goes that Gen Z, and younger Millennials, have sunk into a state of near-total disillusionment. As house prices have soared, the dream of home ownership has faded further into the distance. University is failing to deliver the promised results: research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies has revealed around one-fifth of students can expect to be worse off over their lifetimes for having gone to university, as taxation, lost earnings during the years of study and repaying tuition fees swallow up any benefit they might have gained.
Then there’s the fear that they are paying into a system which won’t cough up when they themselves reach retirement. It is estimated that there are nearly 13 million pensioners in the UK, costing the Exchequer £137.5 billion – or 55 per cent of the state’s total welfare spending. The Office for National Statistics projects the number of pensioners to rise to 15 million in just over 20 years’ time. How can we possibly retain the pension triple lock under these circumstances?
These problems need addressing if we are to shake ourselves from the current economic torpor. But we shouldn’t be surprised if they have only a negligible impact on our birth rate. Hungary spends almost 6 per cent of GDP on pronatalist policies: maternity benefits last up to three years, families receive housing subsidies, mothers with four or more children are exempt from income tax. Yet their fertility rate has only risen from 1.23 in 2011 to 1.51 in 2023. It may continue to rise, but for now the long-term trend is population shrinkage.
ARC speakers can proselytise the benefits of the family unit, but the fact remains that, given the choice, some women won’t have children and many will only want one or two. We may need a strategy of adaptation rather than mitigation.