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Lost in Mexico: in the stumbling footsteps of Malcolm Lowry
I had been kicking my heels in a dusty two-star hotel on a dual carriageway in Leon, central Mexico, for days. One afternoon, I spotted a battered old English language hardback in a junk shop window: Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.
I had read the book before, half a lifetime ago, in maybe 1985, when I knew nothing about Mexico, failed relationships or alcoholism. Almost 40 years later, with a more than working knowledge of all three, I felt better placed to appreciate Lowry’s 1947 masterpiece. With nothing else to do or read, I bought it. I haggled the shopkeeper down to 100 pesos – about £4.
Barely 24 intense hours later – the same time span that the novel unfolds in – I had finished it. Or had it finished me? Certainly the experience of reading it seemed to wipe me out emotionally.
It’s set in a single day but it took Lowry eight or nine years to write Under the Volcano. It never would have been released without the help of his second wife, Margerie Bonner, who edited it into publishable shape. It describes a love triangle involving alcoholic British consul Geoffrey Firmin, his estranged actress wife Yvonne and his failed-musician-turned-cowboy half-brother, who’s just back from fighting in the Spanish Civil War.
The story plays out in the Mexican town of Quauhnahuac – a fictionalised rendering of Cuernavaca. The day begins with the consul – the Lowry character – drinking whisky at 7 a.m. Things only get messier as the day progresses. It’s a chaotic and intense book – and very, very sad. Coming to it a second time, I found it hauntingly well done.
I was in Mexico because I was meant to be shooting a film in Guanajuato for an American journalist who’d paid for me to fly out. But a series of mishaps had turned a short wait into a long one. So the return to Lowry was the most exciting thing that had happened to me in three weeks. With still no shooting schedule in sight, and the book burning in my mind, I started Googling and found that the book’s real-life setting was only about 300 miles away – south-east of me, close to Mexico City.
Four hours later I was on a night bus, alone, exiting the mountain basin of Leon, and six hours after that, a huge cement factory heralded the notorious sprawl of the Mexican capital where I changed buses at the Terminal del Sur. After another 60 miles, I was coming into Cuernavaca.
Lowry had arrived in Cuernavaca with his first wife Jan Gabrial on 2 November 1936, the Day of the Dead – the day he would set the novel in. She had already run away from him once, moving from Paris to New York in April 1934, but he had followed her. And she took him back, staying with him for another two years, despite him admitting himself to Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital with an alcohol-induced breakdown.
With the book burning in my mind, I started Googling and found that its real-life setting was only about 300 miles away. Four hours later I was on a night bus, alone
They had moved to Mexico to try for a fresh start. But in Cuernavaca, she finally left him for another man. In her memoir Inside the Volcano, Gabrial later suggested that a lot of Lowry’s problems had to do with his ‘tiny penis’.
Popocatépetl volcano, which gave Lowry his title, is 50 miles east of Cuernavaca. At 18,500ft it is Mexico’s second highest peak – although I still managed to miss it, despite straining for a view as my bus finally rolled into town. But as we drove through the sprawling outskirts, I saw something that took me back to the book: two soldiers on horseback, riding through a pine forest. This echoed the processions of soldiers mentioned in the novel’s memorable ending. No spoilers, but it doesn’t end happily.
Cuernavaca has always been a retreat for elite chilangos – wealthy natives of Mexico City – but the bus station barrio was reassuringly down-at-heel. Five minutes after stepping off the bus I hit my first Lowry landmark: the latticed pink-and-white plaster facade of Teatro Morelos, a cinema, where the consul’s friend Laurelle finds his desperate letter to Yvonne hidden in an anthology of Elizabethan plays. As he burns the letter, a bell tolls twice – the city’s fortified cathedral is next door.
The Teatro Morelos was absolutely as I imagined it, and although the interior had been gutted, it was still a cinema, which seemed remarkable. Outside, a woman in rags, berating the traffic, put me in mind of the woman playing dominoes with a chicken in Chapter 8. Across the street, a fat man busked for small change on his tuba.
Feeling pleased with my first encounters, I took breakfast in the corner cafe before walking 20 minutes to my lodgings at the Hotel Bajo el Volcán, which is built around Lowry’s actual house. The original Art Deco tower is still there, but the front of the building has been replaced with a pretty bad stone facade which takes you into reception. The guest rooms are just little cabins built in the grounds behind. Outside my cabin, huge black beetles were drowning in a small swimming pool. I rescued a few.
In the afternoon I went looking for what interested me most: The Hotel Casino de la Selva where Jacques Laurelle and Dr Vigil drink anisette in the opening chapter of the book. The streets were blighted by high-walled chilango ‘castles’ – the Mexican equivalent of what we might call footballers’ mansions’ – bordered by shops and street-food traders.
Unfortunately, the once magnificent Casino de la Selva had disappeared. In its place stood two huge chain supermarkets skirted with hundreds of grey parking spaces. The only trace of the Latin Gatsby’s playground was the brutalist ‘hyperbolic paraboloid’ shell of architect Felix Candela’s dining room, which still served food under the management of Casa de los Abuelos – literally ‘grandparents’ house’. Avenues of old trees hinted at former glories, but you felt the steel and concrete supermarkets were in the ascendancy.
Such indifference to history shouldn’t come as a surprise. Mexico’s natural heritage currently faces a potentially catastrophic threat from an ugly railway which is ploughing through the last tracts of virgin jungle in the states of Yucatan, Campeche and Quintana Roo. Against that, the loss of a few of Lowry’s 1930s haunts has understandably failed to trouble the locals.
I got back to the hotel feeling sadder still. There was a new guy at the reception desk. I asked if he could show me the tiny room in the tower where Lowry used to write. It’s not in the public areas of the hotel, he protested. After a lot of cajoling, and trying to explain about the novel and its meaning for me, he agreed to abandon his post to take me up into the tower.
A fire escape with a tacky gold handrail led to a door on which the beige paint was flaking, with leaves blowing across the terracotta tiles outside it. I tried the handle but it was locked. I asked him to open it. He refused – even when I offered a $20 inducement. He wanted to get back to his post. His indulging me was over. ‘It’s just for brooms and stuff,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to see that.’
Maybe I didn’t.
Israelis and Palestinians will be here again, and again, and again
‘When the Lord returned the captives to Zion,’ Psalm 126 goes, ‘we were like dreamers. Our mouths were filled with laughter and our tongues with songs of joy.’ Watching the images of Alexander Troufanov, Sagui Dekel-Chen, and Iair Horn paraded by their captors after almost 500 days of torment, there was no laughter and not a hint of joy. That the three Israelis have been reunited with their families will bring immense relief to those who know and love them, but it cannot give this nightmare the illusion of a dream.
These captives have been returned, but others remain. Iair’s brother Eitan is still in Palestinian hands. Their mother Ruti says: ‘I am very happy, but the joy is partial. I still have one child who is there.’ Matan Zangauker is still there, too. In an eleventh hour act of petty sadism, the Palestinian side made Iair carry an hourglass branded with a photograph of 25-year-old Matan and his mother, and the words, ‘Time is running out.’ It is not enough to separate son from mother, they must taunt mother too. Or, in Sagui’s case, father from daughter. Now freed, Sagui will meet his little girl Shachar for the first time, the infant having been born while her father was being held at gunpoint. His jubilation will be tempered by the knowledge that his Palestinian kidnappers deprived him of the first year and a half of his daughter’s life.
The three men are not the only ones going home. In exchange for their freedom, Israel has released 369 Palestinian ‘security prisoners’, the preferred euphemism. These included Mazen al-Qadi, who was serving three life sentences for his involvement in a 2002 attack on a Tel Aviv restaurant that killed three Israelis; Ahmed Barghouti, a commander in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, who sent suicide bombers to murder a dozen Israelis during the Second Intifada; and Iyad Abu Shakhdam, jailed for his role in the murders of dozens of Israelis, including 16 Jews blown up in a 2004 bus bombing in Beersheba. When Israel demands its sons and fathers back, men like Alexander, Sagui and Iair come home. When the Palestinian side demands its sons and fathers back, men like al-Qadi, Barghouti, and Shakhdam come home.
It’s a commonplace to say that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a cycle of violence, but it is in fact a cycle of avoidance. The Israeli government has again avoided the long-term, large-scale military operation required to destroy Hamas and allies such as Palestine Islamic Jihad for good. The Israeli people have again avoided facing up to a grim reality: that freeing terrorists to secure the release of hostages will guarantee Israel more of both.
The Palestinian leadership continues to avoid all but the most cursory diplomatic consequences for invading a neighbouring state and slaughtering and raping its citizens. The Palestinian people continue to avoid the painful truth that their investment in extremism and rejectionism, and their commitment to passing on these strategies for self-defeat to their children and grandchildren, is more of an obstacle to Palestinian independence than any Israeli prime minister, fighter jet or settlement project.
The Israelis and Palestinians will be here again, and again, and again. More captives, more killers; more mothers pleading for sons, more fathers kept from daughters. The world will go on encouraging the deadly fiction that the Palestinians can have a future in the land without making their peace with a Jewish state next door. Only when the Palestinians accept that Israel is here to stay, that they cannot murder or kidnap their way around the onerous work of coexistence, will their own dispossession come to an end. Only then will our mouths be filled with laughter and our tongues with songs of joy.
The Middle East’s language wars
When the Middle East gets me down, I sometimes rewatch the video of Donald Trump announcing the death of ISIS leader ‘Abooo… Bakarrrr… al-Baghdadi’ in 2019. It never fails to make me laugh when Donald declares the terrorist leader ‘died like a dog… a beautiful dog’. It’s funny to many in the West, because Trump’s words seem like crass bluster from a primitive communicator. In fact, he was deadly serious, and was not speaking for our ears alone.
In essence, Trump was ‘speaking Arabic’ – not linguistically, but culturally – delivering a calculated message to the Muslim and Arab world. To call a man a dog is a profound insult in Islamic culture, evoking contempt and dishonour. His words were designed not only to confirm al-Baghdadi’s death but to ensure he died in disgrace. It was a message of humiliation tailored for an audience that understands the power of such a label.
In recent weeks Trump has employed this technique again, discussing the Gaza hostage crisis. His declaration that ‘all hell will break loose’ if hostages were not freed was not simply overheated rhetoric. Once again, his language carried religious overtones, designed to communicate wrath and judgment in a moral frame that resonates deeply in the Middle East. In 2017 at the Arab Islamic American Summit in Riyadh, he framed the battle against terrorism in similarly stark terms –‘a battle between good and evil’ – declaring, ‘if you choose the path of terror… your soul will be condemned’. These phrases, rooted in religious finality, were not merely hyperbole; they were signals, tailored for a region where morality, shame, and divine judgment carry immense weight. Trump, often mocked in the West for his theatrical style, is fluent in the religious language of the Middle East.
But Trump is not alone in mastering the art of audience-focused communication. Hamas, too, uses the language of symbolism, stagecraft, and subtext – though its productions often appear to western eyes as farcical and amateurish. Their recent hostage handovers have been a case study in crude but effective messaging. The stages they build are rickety and absurd: banners marred with clumsy errors, such as a defiant fist drawn with six fingers; women throwing confetti like they are at a wedding; cameramen scuttling back and forth as if shooting a low-budget music video. To a western observer, these spectacles are embarrassing – cheap theatre from third-rate PR teams with ties to Al Jazeera.
And yet, despite the low-grade Insta-influencer production values, the message lands precisely where it is meant to. To the Arab world, the scene is not a joke but a signal of defiance: We are still here. We still resist. The banners, crude though they are, declare their narrative. Today’s show was a good example: on the left: Yahya Sinwar, their dead leader, gazing toward Jerusalem with the caption ‘There is no immigration except to Jerusalem’ – a clear answer to Trump’s population relocation plan. On the right: a pantheon of martyrs, from Muhammad Deif to senior commanders of the 7 October attacks, glorified as heroes of the cause. Beneath it all: photos of the Israeli territories breached on that dark Saturday 497 days ago – a triumph memorialised on vinyl, their greatest victory reduced to a printed image flapping in the wind. There was even an actual sand-timer on the desk, dedicated to Einav Tsengoker, the mother of Matan, another hostage who remains in Gaza. Translation: time is running out.
Even the coerced performances of the hostages are layered with meaning. Alexander Troufanov, Yair Horn and Sagui Dekel-Chen forced to speak in Hebrew, plead with the Israeli public to secure the release of those left behind. This, too, is a calculated choice. Speaking in Hebrew, Hamas weaponises empathy, broadcasting their message directly into Israeli homes, seeking to sow pressure on the government. But to the Arab world, the meaning is different: Israelis, stripped of their power, made to beg on a Hamas stage. Language, again, is the battlefield.
Israel, for its part, has a communication challenge, too – walking a tightrope between two audiences with vastly different expectations. On one side, to the Arab world and the axis of terror led by the Islamic Republic of Iran, Israel projects an iron fist – relentless strikes, high-profile assassinations, and the complete destruction of terrorist strongholds. The message is one of unyielding strength: You will not break us; we will break you. On the other side, to the West, Israel’s messaging is tempered: a narrative of humanitarian concern, lawful conduct, and moral clarity. They showcase their efforts to minimise civilian harm, open humanitarian corridors, and operate within the bounds of international law. Yet, it is an impossible balance – one side demands fear; the other, compassion. And where the Palestinians had their vinyl banners, Israel this week released the agreed Palestinian prisoners wearing custom T-shirts featuring a star of David and the inscription, in Arabic, ‘we will neither forget nor forgive’. The print-on-demand shops of the Levant have been busy.
What emerges from this cacophony of banners, speeches, and threats is a lesson in how wars are fought with language and images as well as weapons. Every actor – Trump, Hamas, Israel – is fluent in the dialect of their audience. To the casual observer, this theatre may seem confusing or absurd. But every word, every stage, every image is part of the dialogue of war. The actors know their audiences. The question is: do we know how to listen?
Why JD Vance’s Munich speech matters
When was the last time a new U.S Vice President gave a truly memorable speech? The post has traditionally been regarded as being ‘not worth a bucket of warm spit’. But JD Vance is now changing all that, after two striking speeches in as many days. First, there were his comments in Paris on the EU and AI. Then, yesterday, he shocked the Munich Security Conference, by lambasting Europe’s record on free speech.
Delegates arrived, thinking they would hear Vance address the key question of America’s involvement in European security, after a week of confused messaging by his cabinet colleague Pete Hesgeth. Instead, he delivered a double-barrelled assault on various European governments – including that of Britain. Vance argued that the greatest threat facing the continent was not from Russia and China, but ‘from within’. The UK and other countries, he argued, have retreated from their values and ignored voter concerns on migration and free speech. He spoke in particular about a British man convicted for praying outside an abortion clinic in 2022.
Vance’s comments had quite the reaction, being met with silence in the hall and various denunciations thereafter. In Munich, it is the speech all the delegates have been talking about. Here in London, both the Times and the Mail have splashed on his comments. Vance will likely be a prominent topic of conversation among conservative intellectuals at the Arc conference, which begins tomorrow. If Donald Trump is the Commander-in-Chief, then JD Vance is his intellectual equivalent, proselytising, justifying and expounding his president’s actions in office.
But the Vice President’s comments did not merely underline his own credentials as a political actor and thinker. They sent a clear message to Europe, signalling an end of the postwar consensus and an inversion of traditionally norms. For three generations, America has defended the continent’s borders, while being broadly content to leave internal politics to Europe’s own elites – particularly since the end of the Cold War. Yet now, the Trump government suggests it is less concerned about external security and intend to focus much more on changing Europe’s culture. Vance’s speech shows he intends to continue his pre-election campaigning into office.
Much of his speech was clearly intended for domestic political consumption. ‘JD Vance destroyed the Munich Security Conference and all of Europe!’, read one gleeful conservative commentator’s take on the Vice President’s remarks. In Moscow, the Kremlin’s outriders signalled its delight. ‘Humiliated Europe out for the count. Its American master flogged its old vassals’ enthused Komsomolskaya Pravda. But the most important reaction could be in Europe, many of whose leaders have spent the past 24 hours fulminating against Vance.
In Germany, there was outrage at the timing of the speech. With barely a week to go until federal elections, those in the CDU and SPD feel that Vance violated diplomatic norms by being invited to their country and then delivering a de facto campaign speech on behalf of the AfD. Many of those on the European right believe it will benefit them to be associated with the Trump White House and its intellectual headwinds. After his speech, Vance met with the AfD’s Alice Weidel, having declined a meeting with Olaf Scholz. In the UK, Reform’s Rupert Lowe declared Vance is a ‘real hero.’ Some in Trumpworld harbour hopes the President will bolster kindred spirits and sister parties abroad.
But there are risks to Americans becoming involved in the domestic politics of foreign countries. Just look to Canada, where the inauguration of Donald Trump and the threat of tariffs upturned the domestic situation there almost overnight. Prior to January, the Conservatives had led in every poll for almost two years and were typically boasting 20 point margins. Yet since then, the Liberals have surged – with one Leger poll this week showing a virtual dead-heat.
The ripple-effects of Vance’s address will take time to establish. It remains far from clear what fills the void if America vacates its security commitments. But it is obvious that this is a White House which intends to be bullish about diplomatic norms and distinguishes little between the culture wars of America and those of Europe. The supposed distinction between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ is dead; Keir Starmer and his cabinet better take note.
Why Labour needs to think about religion
Liberalism, as Michael Lind has argued, is under attack because it cannot deliver the promised self-correcting markets that provide for free and fair economic competition, political renewal and cultural reconciliation.
The malign reality is it consolidates winners, economic monopolies, politically entrenched divides, canyons of class, geography, education and cultural echo chambers where opposition is cancelled.
The remedy is to dismantle concentrations of economic, political and cultural power and challenge meritocratic arguments that help reproduce them.
This might involve new anti-trust initiatives, attack on sites of monopoly political power, such as in universities, and confront woke culture
In terms of ‘postliberalism’, I get the frustrations with a liberalism conditioned by liberal economics and hyper-individualised identity politics; the production of economic monopolies, concentrated political constituencies and thought binaries.
But I would ask, are there other liberal traditions beyond both its modern and classical iterations worth excavating?
For instance in the 1870s, the neo-classical revolution contracted economics into an individualised science of society. In response the late 19th century saw a ‘new’ or ‘social’ liberalism emerge with figures such as TH Green, Hobhouse and Hobson – challenging self-interest with questions of character and positive liberty. It believed in progressive taxation, pension and social security reform, saw property rights as conditional and supported public ownership of natural monopolies.
Or take US New Deal liberalism This influenced Attlee’s post war attempt to regulate the market and challenge capital. His idea of a British New Deal, the welfare state and socialised medicine consciously echoed FDRs Second Bill of Rights – to rebuild US citizenship through the provision of fundamental economic and social entitlements.
Obviously this liberal tradition has eroded – primarily because human rights lawyers have reduced it to questions of civil and political rights, rather than economic and social rights.
New Deal liberalism agenda was in response to the domestic fascist threat and later the global fight against tyranny – could such an approach help fight against oligarchy today?
Our government would run a mile from such a radical agenda – but maybe reframing citizenship around access to housing, medicine, work, social protections, freedom from fear – could have real political, potency today. Call it a populist response to oligarchy.
To me, Michael Lind’s strongest argument is his desire to rebuild labour as an economic and social force.
Some think the present government is doing that with its New Deal for Working People: what it calls the biggest overhaul of employment rights for a generation.
I fear a missed opportunity. Today Labour is basically re-establishing the 2010 status quo ante. Removing Tory reforms and enacting new individual rights.
Nothing regarding company law reform, redefining stakeholder and worker interest in the architecture of the firm; nothing on economic or industrial democracy, nor extended contract compliance; outside of social care, very little about extending organised terms and conditions into unorganised sectors, or sectoral bargaining.
There are minor changes to the union recognition procedure – but that procedure has been a failure.
Historically Labour’s role was to extend collective bargaining with minimal legislative interventions. Today, we focus on individual rights rather rebuilding the power of labour. It’s type of thinking that views so-called ‘left behind’ communities as passive, inert: full of individuals in need of fiscal or legal remedies.
An alternative is to rebuild the economic and social power of the working class. In recent years the working class have demonstrated they are far from passive – actively reclaiming a politics which has failed them. We require a bolder response from the party of labour not least because the costs of inaction will be dramatic.
Today, politics is being reset around questions of religion and identity. Over the coming years we will witness profound community upheaval and religious strife.
On the far right, figures such as Tommy Robinson are consciously adopting Christian nationalist language and imagery to propel cultural dissent. So too Reform UK.
A distinct aggressive Catholicism will likely emerge here in the slipstream of figures such as JD Vance, Peter Thiel, and Viktor Orban.
Conversely, protests over Gaza spilled into the general election and foreshadow the possible emergence of a Muslim UK party. We can also identify a more muscular Hindu nationalist political movement, with covert support from foreign governments spreading throughout the country. The politics of Harrow reflect this, so too violence between Hindu and Muslim communities across Leicester – all signalling what might lie ahead in urban settings.
Labour is basically re-establishing the 2010 status quo ante
Yet recently Britain elected the most consciously secular parliament in history.
Apart from at the margins, the Labour government is uninterested in faith and ill-equipped to build religious dialogue.
In fact, fearful of populism it will retreat into an ever more technocratic administration preoccupied with questions of policy delivery and utility as populist antidote.
That is precisely the wrong response.
Look at Labour’s plan for measurable milestones – a utilitarian politics of fiscal transfers – incapable of addressing questions of spiritual national renewal.
In contrast, in recent weeks Kemi Badenoch has developed an evangelical hostility to the progressive left and how it is embedded in the bureaucratic state. Recently she wrote of her fear of ‘a new progressive ideology’ that is on the rise, one fuelling identity politics and an assault on both democracy and the nation state. She wrote that: ‘Culture and economics are entwined… the new progressive ideology sees the nation state, and related migration controls, as a purveyor of historical injustice’.
I think Badenoch might be moving with the spirit of the times – she suggests Conservatism must become a national force equipped with moral certainty in defence of the sacred.
We have retreated from an era of muscular even evangelical secularism, the ‘new atheism’ of writers Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, who asserted a new age of reason, of disinterested scientism, and the triumph of liberal rationality.
Today religious convictions appear culturally ascendant, captured in public conversions by figures such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the original new atheists, the views of Jordan Peterson, as well as footballers, rock stars and dodgy comedians.
Why this renewed interest in spiritual concerns?
Maybe it was the pandemic, when we were forced to confront death and reconsider meaning and purpose. Certainly there’s immigration and cultural tensions; the decline in our ideological traditions, political alienation, institutional distrust, a sense of social anxiety; the threats to humanity from technological change; and the effects of conflict and war.
Cumulatively there appears a distinct religious turn in response to a secular progressive ideology deemed responsible for a sense of national decline.
Two decades ago, new atheism was in part a reaction to the religious fundamentalism driving 9/11. Today, growing political movements are consciously seeking to defend a sense of the sacred.
There is a real problem here for the government – because they are asking the wrong questions. Their utilitarian milestones with their suspension of the ethical – are not the answer to those seeking spiritual renewal: politics of a different order.
Even if they deliver on these terms they are playing on a different technocratic part of the pitch.
Their opponents wish to return to moral concerns. Politicians of the left have deserted this territory.
JD Vance is right. Europe is in peril
On Wednesday evening, a man threw a fragmentation grenade into a café in Grenoble, leaving 15 people injured.
The following day, an Afghan shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ drove his car into a crowd in Munich and injured more than two dozen.
The previous week in Brussels, two men strolled through a metro station firing bursts from Kalashnikovs – one of several shootings that day in the Belgian capital, which wounded three people.
It is believed that Wednesday’s attack in Grenoble was the latest in the drugs war being fought across the country by rival cartels from North Africa. Last year, I described Grenoble as ‘one of the most dangerous places in France’, although there are other contenders.
Marseille, for example, where in the past two years scores of people have been killed by the cartels. Or Paris, where last month a 14-year-old boy was murdered for his phone.
Initially, some media reported that Elias had been stabbed with a knife after refusing to hand over his telephone to a 17-year-old. This week, his family issued a statement accusing the press agency that broke the story of misinformation. Their ‘terrified’ son had handed over his phone, but the mugger killed him anyway – not with a knife, but with a machete. ‘The real difficulty is to understand the society in which we now live,’ said the parents. ‘It is totally beyond our grasp.’
The steady disintegration of European society this century is beyond the grasp of most people. A minority remain in a state of denial, jabbering ad nauseam that diversity is Europe’s great strength.
Really? Tell that to the four people who were stabbed by an Egyptian in the Italian city of Rimini on New Year’s Eve, or the young women who were assaulted in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo on the same day. One of the women told reporters that the 40-strong mob of non-European men shouted ‘vaffanculo Italia’ (‘fuck off, Italy’) as they encircled their victims.
It is not just Italy that these people hate – it is the West in general. They are westernophobes.
Axel Rudakubana murdered three little girls in Southport last year and boasted to the police who arrested him that he was ‘so glad those kids are dead … it makes me happy.’
We are told that Rudakubana wasn’t an Islamist, and nor was Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, the Saudi who drove his car into a throng of Christmas shoppers in Magdeburg last December, killing six and injuring 300. In a message posted online prior to the attack, al-Abdulmohsen declared: ‘If Germany wants a war, we will fight it… If Germany wants to kill us, we will slaughter them, die, or go to prison with pride.’
It appears that he killed because he hated Germany, its people and their way of life.
The ISIS terror cell that massacred 130 Parisians in 2015 did so because they lived – in the words of the statement released by ISIS after the atrocity – in ‘the capital of abominations and perversion’. They targeted bars and a rock concert because they regarded them as emblems of Western decadence.
A month after the Paris attack, in Cologne, scores of women celebrating the new year were assaulted by men who had recently arrived in Germany after Angela Merkel’s open invitation.
For some of these men, German women were worthless – an attitude shared by the Pakistani men in England who for decades have raped and abused white girls and women because they considered them ‘trash’.
In response to this week’s attack in Munich, Alice Weidel, leader of the AfD, asked: ‘Will this go on forever?’
There is certainly an air of resignation among some European leaders. In one bloody week in October 2023, an Islamist murdered a French school teacher in Arras, and another gunned down two Swedes in Brussels. Emmanuel Macron responded by declaring: ‘All European states are vulnerable … It’s the vulnerability that goes with democracies, states governed by the rule of law, where you have individuals who, at some point, may decide to commit the worst.’
But hasn’t this vulnerability been exacerbated dramatically by a continent that has given up controlling its borders?
It was certainly a defeatist message – one which echoed that of Manuel Valls in 2016, when he was Prime Minister of France. ‘Times have changed,’ he said, shortly after an Islamist had slaughtered 86 people in Nice. ‘France should learn to live with terrorism.’
Why have times changed? It took an American, JD Vance, to explain why in his speech to the Munich Security Conference. Having first offered his thoughts and prayers to those injured in the attack in the city 24 hours earlier, Vance noted that this wasn’t the first attack of its kind in Europe. ‘How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilisation in a new direction?’ said Vance. ‘No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.’
So why are they here? Because, said Vance, ‘of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent.’
Europe is faced with a choice. It can follow Vance’s advice and change course, or it can carry on doing nothing, as Valls proposed, and learn to live with terrorism. This will require stoicism and a little luck – that next time a man drives a car into a crowd, you are not among them, and that the café you frequent is not a target of a drugs cartel.
One eyewitness to the attack in Grenoble remarked to reporters: ‘Guns, trafficking – Grenoble isn’t a good place to live.’ But where is, in Europe, these days?
What happened to children’s hobbies?
Do kids still have hobbies? Maybe hobbies isn’t quite the right word. What I mean is a passionate interest in something fairly adult, something more than playing with toys. For example, a child might get precociously into theatre or birdwatching or medieval history and have a first taste of adult enthusiasm for something.
I was into magic, meaning conjuring tricks. This seemed the most interesting thing about the world, the clear pinnacle of its complicated cultural array. Why wasn’t everyone fascinated by the fact that it was possible to perform acts of seeming wizardry?
The magic bug bit me when I was about 11 – who knows why. Maybe it was my uncle doing a card trick, maybe Paul Daniels on television, maybe a basic magic set someone gave me.
I had to know all about it. I found a few books in my local library. Then I heard about a magic shop in central London and went on a bus on my own for the first time. It was in a weird underground arcade by Charing Cross station – this den of delight. I loved all the exotic kit: the silk handkerchiefs and wands and smooth, bright playing cards and little boxes that vanished things. On one level, it was a new excuse to play with toys. It was also an imaginative realm, linked to theatricality and to the past – I learned about Victorian illusionists, some of whom posed as Chinese sages.
I liked the magic at kids’ parties, with clownish patter and big shiny props. (I did a few shows for my younger brother and his friends.) I even acquired a pet rabbit, with a view to learning to vanish it. This is not a good reason to own a pet, and Percy was not a happy bunny.
But what really drew me was sleight of hand: I spent many hours in front of the mirror trying to master a few moves. I admired the skills and showmanship of the buskers and jugglers at Covent Garden. My favourite prop was a little gadget that the audience never even saw, but that allowed one to vanish a silk handkerchief from one’s fist – I won’t even name it because it gives it away, but a few readers will know what I’m talking about.
I even acquired a pet rabbit, with a view to learning to vanish it. This is not a good reason to own a pet, and Percy was not a happy bunny
There was actually a magic club at my school, but I kept my distance a bit. It attracted a few rather shy boys, blushingly fumbling with their latest props, jealously guarding their secrets. But I once saw an older boy back-palm a playing card and determined to learn it (many more hours in front of the mirror). Magic obviously attracts a few confident show-offs, but I think it also attracts a lot of shy boys – I’m not sure about girls – who dream of delighting big crowds but are wary of actually performing to anyone beyond their mum. I was one of these. The pressure of pulling off a trick was almost too much for me, and if the trick did work, I felt slightly guilty about deceiving people. For a while I favoured ventriloquism, where the deception is in the open. (I somehow managed to overlook the naffness of Keith Harris and Orville, which surpassed even that of Paul Daniels.)
So I drifted away, to more abstract imaginative realms. In fact, one of my central interests in later life has been religious ritual, and in a way magic was a sort of the first draft for this. As I say, it was the theatrical atmosphere that attracted me – the shared wonder.
I still have a little old suitcase of tricks, the silk handkerchiefs threadbare yet still bright, the smart wands still firm (except the comedy collapsing one). Maybe I will tire of more abstract conjurings, and their time will come again.
Starmer is in denial about the high cost of defence
It is hard to think of a recent prime minister whose first months in office have seen defence in the headlines more often than Sir Keir Starmer. Even John Major, coming to power in 1990 as a United States-led coalition prepared to eject Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait, was dealing with an expeditionary adventure which soon concluded.
Labour has come to power against the backdrop of a grindingly bloody and entrenched war in Ukraine and furious military activity in the Middle East. Starmer had also made choices: he had committed to an immediate strategic defence review. His party’s manifesto had also tried evasively to counter the Conservatives’ pledge of more money for the military by saying that it ‘will set out the path to spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence’.
If defence spending does not increase significantly, the armed forces will continue to lose their capabilities
Bland aspirational slogans are now meeting brutal reality head on. Last month, rumours emerged that the target of 2.5 per cent would not be met this decade because of financial pressures elsewhere in Whitehall. Failing to raise spending would be catastrophic for the armed forces and would confirm that the United Kingdom simply could not fulfil the military commitments it had made.
This remains true. If anything, the situation is now worse. The new US secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, told a summit in Brussels on Wednesday that America would no longer ‘tolerate an imbalanced relationship’ and that therefore European countries would have to spend more on defence. His message was unambiguous:
Safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of Nato. Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and non-lethal aid to Ukraine.
Starmer has made extravagant promises of UK leadership on Ukraine, promising £3 billion in assistance for ‘as long as it takes’ and signing a 100-year partnership with Kyiv. Yet the mood music emanating from Whitehall is unchanged: there will be no immediate increase in spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP – which in any event would only make good current shortfalls and deficiencies. The Ministry of Defence may even see a small real-terms fall in its budget.
The Prime Minister is reportedly meeting with the heads of the armed forces to try to resolve a serious disagreement emerging from the closing stages of the strategic defence review. In short, the military wants defence spending to rise to 2.65 per cent of GDP, while the Treasury is insistent that the proportion should remain at 2.3 per cent: in real terms, this gap is around £10 billion a year. Starmer’s own inclination is to cling tightly to his promise of setting out a ‘pathway’ to 2.5 per cent, which, until he provides a schedule, is meaningless.
This has the air of a Potemkin argument. The unambiguous message delivered by Hegseth, combined with President Trump’s insistence that European countries should be spending 5 per cent of their GDP on defence – considerably more than the United States – and the substantial increases made or planned by Poland and the Baltic countries, mean that even the high bid of 2.65 per cent is barely adequate.
The facts are inescapable. An increase to 2.5 or 2.65 per cent would more or less allow the armed forces to make good their current capability gaps and get our diminished services to something near readiness. But the Ministry of Defence has deluded itself for so long that it would only mean that our existing commitments could now be fulfilled, nothing more. The Treasury’s lowball represents an unwillingness to face reality and should not even be entertained.
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this situation. As matters stand, most of the Royal Navy’s attack submarines are unable to undertake operations; the Royal Marines are reliant on one landing ship with inadequate command and control capabilities; and the Army’s principal combat formation, 3rd (UK) Division, would struggle to generate even a brigade-strength deployment. The new Ajax armoured fighting vehicle will not reach full operational capability until 2028, eight years behind schedule, with its wheeled Boxer counterpart reaching that milestone in 2032.
The Prime Minister cannot prevaricate on this. If defence spending does not increase significantly, the armed forces will continue to lose their capabilities, and maintenance of equipment will become even slower and more disruptive. President Trump will conclude, quite reasonably, that the UK is not interested in or capable of maintaining a global role; our Nato allies will cease to regard us as a reliable ally if we cannot deliver the military force we promise.
A government spokesman spoke on the issue in that disjointed, robotic prose so characteristic of the Starmer administration:
The strategic defence review is being conducted at pace to determine the roles, capabilities and reforms required by UK defence to meet the challenges, threats and opportunities of the 21st century.
Let us be absolutely clear: that cannot be done with the level of spending the Treasury is proposing. Something will have to give.
How seriously will Putin take Ukraine negotiations?
We have no idea whether Vladimir Putin is serious about peace negotiations with Ukraine. He may simply be going through the motions while enjoying the spectacle of the West engaging in mutual recrimination and performative outrage, or he may genuinely feel there are grounds for some kind of agreement. More likely, given his track record as a tactician rather than a strategist, he is simply seeing what opportunities emerge.
Nonetheless, his choices of format, venue and representatives may give us some sense of his intentions. His lead negotiator at abortive talks in Istanbul in 2022, for example, was Vladimir Medinsky. A former minister of culture, his main claim to fame was as an outspoken champion of ‘patriotic’ culture, funnelling money to everything from history textbooks to action films that portrayed a gung-ho, nationalistic perspective on Russia’s past. As such, he was regarded by many as an essentially lightweight, cartoonish figure. This was probably unfair, as it likely was simply that in those talks Putin wanted a loyal factotum rather than the kind of serious operator who might have his (or her) own ideas as to how to handle the talks. Nonetheless, the choice of Medinsky hardly helped set a positive tone for those negotiations.
According to Bloomberg, though, this time round the Kremlin is ‘assembling a heavyweight team with decades of experience in high-stakes negotiations’, which would immediately mark a change from past practice. The reports suggest that the key figures will be presidential aide Yuri Ushakov and Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) director Sergei Naryshkin, with an informal role also being played by financier Kirill Dmitriev.
The position of presidential aide is an ambiguous one in the Russian system, which can mean much or little. It can be an honorific step towards retirement, as for former Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev, or it can be a trusted hatchetman or advisor of the president. In Ushakov’s case, it is definitely the latter. The 77-year old veteran diplomat has been Putin’s main foreign policy advisor since 2012, and as foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s standing and influence diminish, Ushakov’s role has only grown. He was ambassador to Washington from 1998 to 2008, through Putin’s first two presidential terms – when cooperation was more of a priority than confrontation – and a former staffer from the US embassy in Moscow has described him as ‘a consummate diplomatic operator’ and a ‘deal-maker’.
Naryshkin, whose frequent public pronouncements are laced with a heavy dose of anti-Western conspiracy theory (most recently he suggested that Poland had imperial designs on the west Ukrainian city of Lviv) may seem a less obvious choice. The SVR has already been involved in quiet engagement with the CIA, though, and despite his KGB background, Naryshkin is more politician than spook. A former parliamentarian before he was transferred to his current position as part of a reshuffle, he is an ardent amateur historian and, at 70, seems eager for elevation to a comfortable sinecure in the Senate. He is a political operator in his own right as a former speaker of the State Duma, the lower chamber of the legislature, but also a Putin loyalist, whom the president can rely on to keep an eye on the domestic political implications of any deal, while Ushakov focuses on the geopolitics.
Finally, Dmitriev, who was educated at Stanford and Harvard, and worked for both McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, before returning to Russia and now running the country’s sovereign wealth fund, would be the potential wild card in the Russian hand. He may be used both as an unofficial back-channel, and also as someone able to connect with the unconventional and transactional approach adopted by Donald Trump. Indeed, he appears to have played a key role in arranging the release of imprisoned American teacher Marc Fogel this week. This gave Trump a public success of the kind he so likes, and in the process, opened the way for this week’s fateful conversation: a pretty good exchange as far as Moscow is concerned.
In other words, although it is impossible at this stage to say how and even when or whether the negotiations will happen, let alone how successful they may be, should those early indications be true, Putin is certainly taking them a great deal more seriously than some may have feared or expected.
Bring back shortwave!
Aeschylus is credited first for the time-worn aphorism that in war, truth is the first casualty. But in the next major conflict, truth could find itself joined by virtually all information.
As a society at war, we face becoming blind, deaf and dumb once the balloon goes up. Britain and most western countries have put all their eggs in one large basket: that of digital communications. In a time of global conflict, this could be a risky and painful prospect.
The rise of digital communications has been a boon but has also opened society to grave risks through cyber war. Ukraine found this out in the first years of its war with Russia. Just as worrying has been the penetration of television, the internet and streaming radio by hacker groups, both military and criminal. Attempts to change the narrative of society and sow discord through fake news and false information, denial-of-service attacks and interference with GPS signals have all been a serious challenge in the ongoing war. Ukraine has hit back with its own hacktivist networks, even disrupting Moscow television stations, and the cyber war continues.
Last year, in the United States, the FBI revealed the existence of a massive penetration of American telecommunications networks by China, conducted by a threat group dubbed ‘Volt Typhoon’. It had taken vast amounts of data about Americans, including text messages, and perhaps inserted malware into networks. This complex cyber-attack against routers and switching networks could have been ongoing for years. More recently, the spate of sabotage against data cables on the floor of the Baltic sea, involving Russian-linked or Chinese vessels, has raised alarm about communications and internet vulnerabilities for Nato allies.
If a major regional or global war erupts, UK power networks could be struck hard and cellular communications compromised as network providers and utilities are hit by cyberattacks and even physical strikes. Satellite links too might come under attack and face disruption. All streaming services, including television and radio, could be interrupted, mobile phones may lose signal, and if the electrical grid is hit, issues recharging your phone battery might make the last point moot.
The evolving UK Emergency Services Network for first responders is based on a BT/EE-run cellular network using 4G and some 900 masts dotted throughout the country. Even with cyber firewalls, the system could still have reliability issues during wartime, and is not likely to replace the existing 4G Airwave system until 2029. First responders might be able to communicate with one another, but how will the general public be kept informed?
It’s not all doom and gloom, however: global conflict can spark innovation. During the second world war, Britain developed civilian and military communications networks superseding copper landlines and vulnerable deep-sea cables. The new technologies were largely jam-proof and allowed secure voice and data to be transmitted across Britain and the world. Radio telegraphy and shortwave radio became the mainstays of British wartime communication methods. In battle, newly harnessed Very High Frequency (VHF) radio helped the RAF defeat the Luftwaffe by allowing reliable, rapid communications between fighters and ground stations. Moreover, the enemy could not jam shortwave or mediumwave broadcasts in Britain, meaning the population could be kept informed. Mobile transmitters were deployed along with fixed stations, and an immense national effort on the production of radio equipment and components at the strategic level was initiated, ramping up as the war progressed.
Might it be time to bring shortwave out of retirement? The BBC continues to broadcast on shortwave to Africa, Asia and the Middle East, but budgets and audiences have declined markedly over the years. Updated with the latest tech innovation, Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) sound quality and compression are hugely improved, eliminating the snap, crackle and pop. There is just one UK-based shortwave transmitter remaining in operation, at Woofferton in Shropshire, which was built during the second world war. But China (and, to a lesser extent, Russia) has invested heavily in shortwave broadcasting for both domestic and international reach, with many transmitters spread across the country. Even tiny Vanuatu in the Pacific has recently decided to use shortwave broadcasting as the basis of its emergency response network in times of natural disaster.
True, it’s retro-analogue, but shortwave gets through to people where more sophisticated digital communications fail. Perhaps it’s time Britain doubled down on ensuring national resilience and took another look at radio. A fleet of analogue, mobile transmitting stations could be a good investment if Britain finds itself at war and under a sustained information attack – an attack which could make hitherto service outages look like a minor inconvenience on an otherwise sunny day. And maybe the public should start digging out those old hand-cranked shortwave receivers and pocket radios again – or better yet, buying new ones, though the vast majority are now made in China.
France’s churches are burning – and no one seems to care
France’s churches are under attack, yet the media and political establishment are pretending not to notice. Last year, we saw blazes at historic churches in Rouen, Saint-Omer and Poitiers – each one another grim statistic in an escalating crisis. For years, we’ve seen Christian places of worship targeted in acts of arson and vandalism. Yet, until now, official confirmation of the scale of the problem has been curiously absent. That has changed. The French territorial intelligence service has reported a 30 per cent increase in criminal church fires in 2024. That’s not a handful of isolated incidents – it’s a surge. And a deeply troubling one at that.
In 2023, there were 38 recorded cases of criminal arson against churches in France. In 2024, that number jumped to nearly 50. The most affected regions are Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Île-de-France, and the Grand-Est. These are not accidental blazes sparked by faulty wiring or an unwatched candle left flickering. These are deliberate acts. Yet there has been no outcry in response to this surge, no demand for action from the mainstream French press, just an unsettling silence.
We are often told that all religions must be respected. We see swift condemnations of attacks on synagogues or mosques, and rightly so. But when it comes to churches, a strange silence descends. The French media, usually keen to dissect social trends, has been conspicuously quiet. Europe 1 and the Journal du Dimanche, both right leaning, gave the report a passing mention, noting the increase in church fires, the rise in thefts from places of worship (up 7 per cent to 288 recorded incidents), and even an attempted Islamist attack on a church foiled by security services in March. Beyond that, nothing. No front-page headlines. No national debate. Just quiet indifference.
Christianity in France is under attack – not just in the metaphorical sense of dwindling church attendance and the creeping secularisation of society, but in a very real, physical way. Arson, desecration, theft. This is not happening in some distant land, it’s happening in France, a country that still pretends to be rooted in its Christian heritage.
The statistics may be new, but the trend is not. Attacks on churches have been mounting for years, with reports surfacing of smashed altars, defaced statues, and stolen tabernacles. Yet each incident is treated as an unfortunate one-off rather than a worrying pattern.
One of the most shocking attacks in recent years was the brutal murder of Father Jacques Hamel in 2016, who was taken hostage by two Islamist terrorists while celebrating Mass in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray. They forced him to kneel at the altar before slitting his throat, all while filming their barbaric act. His death should have been a turning point against the escalating violence against Christian places of worship. Instead, the pattern of attacks has only grown.
Politicians, eager to avoid uncomfortable conversations, wave it away as petty vandalism rather than something more sinister. The fact that a government report now acknowledges the scale of the crisis should be a wake-up call. Not only are the attacks increasing, but official reports confirm a rising number of deliberate arson cases, thefts, and disruptions of religious services, highlighting an escalating hostility toward Christian places of worship.
Acknowledging anti-Christian attacks would mean confronting a few inconvenient truths. It would mean admitting that France is failing to protect its own heritage. It would mean addressing the uncomfortable question of who is responsible. And it would mean breaking the fashionable narrative that portrays Christianity as outdated, oppressive, or even deserving of scorn.
This cannot continue. France’s churches are not just places of worship; they are living links to the nation’s past, cultural treasures that belong to everyone, believers and non-believers alike. Their destruction is an attack on both the country’s heritage and its people. The French government has finally confirmed what many of us already knew. The attacks are getting worse. The question now is whether the French government will be doing anything about it. Unfortunately, I think we already know the answer.
Could Ukraine descend into civil war?
US President Donald Trump has announced that peace talks with Putin are set to begin ‘immediately’. While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says that he has not yet seen a ready US plan for ending the war, it seems that we are moving towards the final stages of the conflict. At some point the guns will fall silent, and the leaders of Ukraine and Russia will sign a peace agreement. But what happens then?
Opinions vary, and not everyone is optimistic about how the war will wrap up. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Polish President Andrzej Duda warned that the war’s end could trigger a surge in international organised crime, first flooding into Poland and then spreading across Europe and the US. This is a concern that has long been whispered in western political circles. Duda likened the situation to the post-Soviet 1990s when Afghan war veterans fueled a wave of gangsterism and violence across the former USSR.
Having lived through those times, I can say this: the aftermath of Ukraine’s war could be even worse. The Soviet-Afghan war lasted a decade, yet it didn’t leave us with the same level of social upheaval that Russia’s full-scale invasion has caused in Ukraine. The Ukrainian military is now nearly a million strong – with 980,000 personnel as of January 2025, according to Zelensky. The country will soon have to deal with hundreds of thousands of battle-hardened veterans returning to their towns and villages – many with physical wounds, and many more with psychological scars. They will be returning to a homeland left in ruins.
The scale of the mental health crisis is difficult to predict, but the Ukrainian Health Ministry estimates that nearly 15 million citizens – almost half the population – will require psychological support. The question is whether a nation with a shattered economy and broken infrastructure can provide that help.
Ukraine’s public debt reached $166 billion at the end of last year. It’s not clear the government can fund essential services, never mind mental health programmes. The recent legalisation of medical cannabis to help those suffering from PTSD is little more than a band-aid on a bullet wound. And is marijuana really the answer in a country already awash with illegal weapons?
Before the war, Ukraine had nine million registered firearms, with an untold number circulating on the black market. In the Kyiv region alone, 18,000 rifles were distributed to civilians so they could defend against the Russian incursion. No one knows how many of these weapons remain unaccounted for. What happens when armed, traumatised men return home to find only ghost towns and unemployment? It does not seem far-fetched that Ukraine could very soon find itself at war again – this time internally. A civil war would tear the country apart, but at the moment it doesn’t feel like anyone is preparing for this eventuality.
The Ukrainian government seems more focused on electoral maneuvering than on addressing the long-term consequences of the war. While officials frequently comment on global politics, there is a noticeable lack of attention to the welfare of veterans, which could potentially become a time bomb.
The type of peace agreement reached with Russia could easily make future conflict more likely. If the agreement is perceived as a capitulation to Russia, it’s easy to see how that would further erode national morale. History shows that these moments often breed public disillusionment and weaken people’s confidence in their leaders. During these periods, extremists and hardline nationalists emerge, calling for revenge and seeking to upend any fragile stability.
In February 2022, as Russian troops stormed across the border, Ukrainians united under symbols that had previously divided them. The slogan Slava Ukraini! (Glory to Ukraine), once associated with Stepan Bandera’s nationalist movement, was taken up from Lviv to Ukraine’s south-eastern regions, where Bandera had long been viewed with scepticism.
In 2025, Ukraine’s nationalist fervor has waned, but this could be a temporary lull before another eruption of unrest. When nationalism is driven by vengeance and compounded by trauma, it often mutates into extremism. Ukraine may not escape this trend.
Vladimir Putin is undoubtedly factoring this into any peace deal. What he failed to achieve through his ‘special military operation’, he may attempt through destabilisation from within. A large group of unemployed, armed young men suffering from PTSD could be ripe for manipulation.
Ukraine will need significant support from its western allies to prevent this from happening. Financial aid, infrastructure development and comprehensive mental health services will be crucial for reintegrating veterans into society and maintaining societal stability.
The critical question now is whether Ukraine’s allies will rally to prevent the country from descending into chaos or allow it to collapse from within.
Peace will eventually come to Ukraine. But there is real possibility that the war’s conclusion could prove even more devastating for the country.
Donald Trump has blown apart America’s failing status quo
Political science uses anaemic jargon. The ‘Overton Window’ frames all topics that at any given moment are deemed to be politically respectable. It moves. However, since Trump’s inauguration on 20 January we need more robust imagery. Potus47 – Mr Trump – is the captain of an ice-bound ship and he has been dynamiting the pack ice to get it free. Sequenced, linked charges have been exploded to create open water leads. The shock waves have global importance.
Tariff threats were one stick of dynamite that detonated, particularly those levied on China to push back its gaming of the era of globalisation since the PRC was admitted to the WTO in 2001. There is no categorical case which shows that tariffs are unnatural and always bad and that free trade is, as Richard Cobden argued at the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846, natural as ‘nature and nature’s God intended it to be.’ The judgement is always time and context specific. Both change.
In 1815, the Corn Laws were brought into these islands by the landed interest to protect a depressed farming sector after the Napoleonic wars during which domestic food production acreage had greatly – and prudently – increased against the threat of blockade. Timing was bad because a ‘global cooling’ volcano intervened. Tambora, an Indonesian volcano, erupted titanically on 5April 1815. Vast quantities of dust and ash obscured the sun, causing the ‘Year without a Summer’ in 1816 with disastrous harvests, floods, mass starvation of people and animals and, holed up shivering in July in a villa near Geneva, Mary Shelley’s victory in the ghost story competition with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron and his paramour Claire Clairmont. Enter Frankenstein who is very much a creature of those apocalyptic times.
A century later, and following the 1870s agricultural depression caused in large part by the opening of North American and Antipodean virgin lands, now accessible by steam railways and ships (as too the black soils of Ukraine when railways superseded the chumaki hauliers and their ox-carts), Joe Chamberlain and Halford Mackinder argued for tariff protection principally as an adhesive for Imperial Federation. It would give the Canadian wheat-farmer as much as the British industrial worker community of belonging and tangible benefits from the shared global protection of the Royal Navy. Chamberlain and Mackinder misjudged; and in the 1906 election Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberals swept the Tories out with a 400 seat majority. But in the long run they were simply premature.
Free trade is wonderful until someone cheats, which is always; and as the British Empire discovered in the 1930s, Imperial (later Commonwealth) Preference was a rather wise policy to the active advantage of the English-speaking nations within it, which endured until the Bretton Woods System and specifically Gatt (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) scaffolded an American-dominated free trade world. Since 20 January the wheel has turned once more. With China cheating and needing to be put back in its box, ‘tariff’ has become Trump’s favourite word.
Today we see Potus47 using the threat of tariffs in two quite different ways. It worked instrumentally in the very short term as a brutal big stick – shown and removed – to secure specific actions from Mexico and Canada. In the longer term, systemic tariffs, especially 25 per cent on steel and aluminium, are intended to shield the blue-collar jobs of Maga-voters in the Rust Belt which he promises to turn once more into something gleaming, starting with the auto-industry. On this we watch and wait.
Another ice-floe was blown apart on 4 February. Trump’s Gaza plan explodes the fiction of there ever being a negotiated settlement between Israel and those Arabs whose motives are no less genocidal than those of Hajj Amin al Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who refused the first ‘land for peace’ offer from Ben Gurion in 1948.
A fanatical supporter of the Nazis, the Mufti spent the war in Berlin on stipend. In the ‘lemonade summit’ of 28 November 1941 in the Reich Chancellery (Hitler disliked the smell of coffee, so served lemonade) he simultaneously thanked the Fuhrer for the excellent slaughter of Jews by the einsatzgruppen following the German armies into Russia, agreed to provide a Muslim Waffen SS Division (the 13th Handschar Mountain Division) and asked for a reversal of the 1917 Balfour Declaration (which he didn’t get until later).
Since then, events have confirmed the truth of Golda Meir’s view after the Yom Kippur war in October 1973: ‘They say we must be dead. And we say we want to be alive. Between life and death, I don’t know of a compromise.’ The Apocalyptic hadith – the one where the stone cries out to the Muslim that there is Jew hiding behind him, come and kill him (Sahih Bukhari 4:52) – is inscribed into the Hamas Charter as Article 7. Trump also knows that no-one – not even the Irish – wants to receive a manipulated population that requires correction of three generations pathological indoctrination. Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud! Jaish Muhammad soufa yaʿoud (Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews! The army of Mohammed will return) – the antisemitic war-cry – was what 7 October was all about as the depravity of the torture, rape and killing showed. Now Potus47 has the power as global market-maker and margin-producer in oil and gas to wield another big stick: he can simultaneously induce and compel compliance.
Trump’s action takes us back to first principles. In three ways Israel is a country from the River to the Sea: as First Nation by historic patrimony, by mandate through the law of nations (not ‘international law’, which is no law) and by right of victory of arms three times existentially and now once again, and continually in armed vigilance.
Trump has forced everyone to face squarely the consequences of the failure to implement as instructed the 24 July 1922 British Mandate for Palestine. Seventy-seven per cent was to be Arab Palestine east of the Jordan for the Arabs. Twenty-three per cent, as Article 25 of the Mandate prescribed, was Jewish Palestine from the River to the Sea for the Jews. That is the direction towards which the region is now turning again.
Potus47 did not waste a minute in preparing to blast the ship of state out of the frozen grip of the status quo
Most immediately, what happens at 12:01 p.m. EST on Saturday 15 February 2025? Potus says that if all the hostages are not released by Hamas ‘all hell will break loose’. What does that mean? Obviously the ceasefire and associated diplomacy ends. The IDF is already raising its readiness level. However all the military signs on the ground indicate that Israel unleashed will not necessarily begin in Gaza, nor will it end there.
A detailed analysis of the Israeli Air Force attack of 25/26 October 2024 is illuminating. It was the most sophisticated use of intelligence-led air-power to date in the history of air warfare. The IAF is consistently operating at a level far above any other free world air Force. With the loss of one drone and no aircraft or people, over 100 aircraft, plus drones, successfully attacked and destroyed missile fuel-mixing and warhead assembly facilities at Parchin in Iran. Sead (Suppression of Enemy Air Defences) operations knocked out radars and anti-aircraft missile batteries (including the previously much vaunted Russian S-300) from Iraq to the target areas, and also those surrounding oil production and export facilities and at known sites in the Iranian nuclear weapons complex which were not attacked that night. In a psychological signalling use of force, bombs were dropped near the grave of Ayatollah Khomeini.
In short, this operation looks like preparation for part two, by making the skies safe not least for USAF B-52’s which arrived in Qatar from Minot Air Force base shortly afterwards. Part one prepared the way for the kinetic portion of the ‘full-spectrum’ destruction of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the entire bomb programme (for hints on possible tactics, study the equally spectacularly successful 8 September 2024 IAF Shaldag (Israeli SAS) raid that destroyed the Iranian missile production facility under a mountain at Masyaf in Syria).
The removal of the Shi’a theocracy knocks out the keystone and collapses the current grip of Shi’a and Sunni (Muslim Brotherhood) Islamists. It also opens the door for the Persians of the 2009 ‘Green Wave of Iran’ who the West betrayed, to recover their country, and, by an indirect approach, then to complete the destruction of the Iranian proxies, rendered headless in Gaza and Lebanon. With Persia returned to the Persians, a complete geopolitical realignment of the region becomes possible and the Abraham Accords can be enlarged. The descendants of the Arabs who the British were mandated to move to Arab Palestine in the 1920s, may then do so.
A final word. The Potus47 team, unlike Labour in opposition, did not waste a minute in preparing to blast the ship of state out of the frozen grip of the status quo pack ice as they manifestly are now doing. Therefore, we should reverse the usual assumption about democratic politics which is that muddle normally prevails. When an ice-floe is blown apart, assume that it was planned until you are sure that it wasn’t.
JD Vance’s criticism of Europe is hard to take
JD Vance certainly knows how to grab people’s attention. In a landmark address to the Munich Security Conference, he accused Europe’s leaders of being scared of voters and failing to defend democracy. In a fiery speech, he criticised Europeans for abandoning their roots as ‘defenders of democracy’ and of shutting down dissenting voices. Vance even went on to claim that the demise of free speech posed a far bigger threat to Europe than Russia. Harsh words indeed.
Vance’s criticisms came as something of a shock to his audience, who had been expecting to hear more from him about the US administration’s priorities for the transatlantic alliance, military spending, and President Trump’s approach to negotiations for ending the war in Ukraine. Vance only deigned to talk about Ukraine in passing – saying that Europe had to ‘step up’, but gave no defined goals for a negotiated settlement beyond a comment that the US administration ‘believes we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine’.
Instead Vance was much more eager to lecture Europeans on the continent’s own failures in living up to democratic ideals, scolding political leaders for not sufficiently upholding democratic values – an accusation ironically that many of them have thrown at the Trump administration. He told allies that the main threat to European security did not come from Russia.
‘The threat I worry most about vis-a-vis Europe… is the threat from within,’ he said. ‘The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values it shares with the United States of America.’ Vance singled out the suppression of free speech, citing the arrest of a man in Britain who broke a ‘buffer zone’ law against protesting at abortion clinics.
Vance also criticised Europe over mass migration, condemning the UK for betraying Brexit voters by opening ‘the floodgates to millions of inverted immigrants’. He insisted that of all the pressing challenges facing Europe and the United States, ‘there is nothing more pressing than migration’. Vance had a warning for those who tried to block hard-right parties from joining governments. ‘There’s no room for firewalls’ in elections, Vance observed. To cap it all, he had this chilling warning for Europe’s political elite: ‘If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you’.
It’s heady stuff but few in the audience appeared convinced. The German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, was quick to condemn Vance’s remarks as ‘unacceptable’. Even so, outside the rank of dignitaries gathered in Munich, there will be plenty of ordinary voters who are tempted to murmur and nod in approval, thinking Vance is on to something when he cites worries about the process of shutting down dissenting voices and of leaders running scared of the electorate.
But who is Vance to lecture Europe’s politicians on their failings? It is easy enough to take the moral high ground at a podium in Munich but his own political record is far from perfect or consistent. Vance – like most politicians – has shown himself to be driven more by opportunism than any firm set of political beliefs or ideology. He once called Donald Trump ‘America’s Hitler’, ‘morally reprehensible’ and a ‘demagogue’ – but this didn’t stop him joining the presidential ticket when the call came. He simply went from self-described ‘never Trumper’ to fervent loyalist in one quick and easy step. During the recent US presidential election campaign, he called women without children ‘childless cat ladies’ uninvested in America’s future. He also promoted a baseless conspiracy theory claiming that Haitian immigrants were eating household pets in Ohio.
Vance can’t resist hogging the limelight by saying things that make easy headlines but amount to nothing more than that. Some voters in Britain may be tempted to think Vance, given his remarks on Brexit, is a shrewd observer of the political scene here. Yet only last summer he claimed that the UK under Labour might be the first ‘truly Islamist’ country with nuclear weapons. An absurd remark, unworthy of a serious politician. Even so, his fears of an Islamist nuclear-armed Britain (if he still holds that view ) haven’t stopped Vance from striking up a friendship of sorts with the foreign secretary David Lammy, another notorious political shapeshifter. It is hard to envisage the two men as political soulmates. That’s the problem in a nutshell: it is hard to be sure what Vance the politician really thinks and believes, beyond what suits at that particular moment. His headline-grabbing hectoring of European leaders should be seen in that light and nothing more.
Read: JD Vance’s full speech on the fall of Europe
Here’s a full transcript of the speech that JD Vance gave at the Munich Security Conference this afternoon.
One of the things that I wanted to talk about today is, of course, our shared values. And, you know, it’s great to be back in Germany. As you heard earlier, I was here last year as United States senator. I saw Foreign Secretary David Lammy, and joked that both of us last year had different jobs than we have now. But now it’s time for all of our countries, for all of us who have been fortunate enough to be given political power by our respective peoples, to use it wisely to improve their lives.
And I want to say that I was fortunate in my time here to spend some time outside the walls of this conference over the last 24 hours, and I’ve been so impressed by the hospitality of the people even, of course, as they’re reeling from yesterday’s horrendous attack. The first time I was ever in Munich was with my wife, actually, who’s here with me today, on a personal trip. And I’ve always loved the city of Munich, and I’ve always loved its people.
I just want to say that we’re very moved, and our thoughts and prayers are with Munich and everybody affected by the evil inflicted on this beautiful community. We’re thinking about you, we’re praying for you, and we will certainly be rooting for you in the days and weeks to come.
We gather at this conference, of course, to discuss security. And normally we mean threats to our external security. I see many, many great military leaders gathered here today. But while the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine – and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defence – the threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America.
I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.
Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defence of democracy. But when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say ourselves, because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team.
We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them. Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the cold war positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that cancelled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not.
And thank God they lost the cold war. They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty, the freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, invent, to build. As it turns out, you can’t mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can’t force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe. And we believe those things are certainly connected. And unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the cold war’s winners.
If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you
I look to Brussels, where EU Commission commissars warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest: the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be ‘hateful content’. Or to this very country where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of ‘combating misogyny’ on the internet.
I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant – and I’m quoting – a ‘free pass’ to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.
And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular in the crosshairs. A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith Conner, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an Army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 metres from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own. After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of his unborn son.
He and his former girlfriend had aborted years before. Now the officers were not moved. Adam was found guilty of breaking the government’s new Buffer Zones Law, which criminalises silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person’s decision within 200 metres of an abortion facility. He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.
Now, I wish I could say that this was a fluke, a one-off, crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person. But no. This last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called safe access zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law. Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thought crime in Britain and across Europe.
Free speech, I fear, is in retreat and in the interests of comedy, my friends, but also in the interest of truth, I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation. Misinformation, like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China. Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.
So I come here today not just with an observation, but with an offer. And just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite, and I hope that we can work together on that.
In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town. And under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square. Now, we’re at the point, of course, that the situation has gotten so bad that this December, Romania straight up cancelled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbours. Now, as I understand it, the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections. But I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective. You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do. You can condemn it on the world stage, even. But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.
Now, the good news is that I happen to think your democracies are substantially less brittle than many people apparently fear.
To believe in democracy is to understand that each of our citizens has wisdom and has a voice
And I really do believe that allowing our citizens to speak their mind will make them stronger still. Which, of course, brings us back to Munich, where the organisers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations. Now, again, we don’t have to agree with everything or anything that people say. But when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them.
Now, to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election.
Now, this is a security conference, and I’m sure you all came here prepared to talk about how exactly you intend to increase defence spending over the next few years in line with some new target. And that’s great, because as President Trump has made abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent. We don’t think you hear this term ‘burden sharing’, but we think it’s an important part of being in a shared alliance together that the Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger.
But let me also ask you, how will you even begin to think through the kinds of budgeting questions if we don’t know what it is that we are defending in the first place? I’ve heard a lot already in my conversations, and I’ve had many, many great conversations with many people gathered here in this room. I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?
I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people. Europe faces many challenges. But the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making. If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump. You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years.
Have we learned nothing that thin mandates produce unstable results? But there is so much of value that can be accomplished with the kind of democratic mandate that I think will come from being more responsive to the voices of your citizens. If you’re going to enjoy competitive economies, if you’re going to enjoy affordable energy and secure supply chains, then you need mandates to govern because you have to make difficult choices to enjoy all of these things.
And of course, we know that very well. In America, you cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail. Whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news. Nor can you win one by disregarding your basic electorate on questions like, who gets to be a part of our shared society.
And of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration. Today, almost one in five people living in this country moved here from abroad. That is, of course, an all time high. It’s a similar number, by the way, in the United States, also an all time high. The number of immigrants who entered the EU from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone. And of course, it’s gotten much higher since.
And we know the situation. It didn’t materialise in a vacuum. It’s the result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent, and others across the world, over the span of a decade. We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city. And of course, I can’t bring it up again without thinking about the terrible victims who had a beautiful winter day in Munich ruined. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and will remain with them. But why did this happen in the first place?
It’s a terrible story, but it’s one we’ve heard way too many times in Europe, and unfortunately too many times in the United States as well. An asylum seeker, often a young man in his mid-20s, already known to police, rammed a car into a crowd and shatters a community. Unity. How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilisation in a new direction? No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants. But you know what they did vote for? In England, they voted for Brexit. And agree or disagree, they voted for it. And more and more all over Europe, they are voting for political leaders who promise to put an end to out-of-control migration. Now, I happen to agree with a lot of these concerns, but you don’t have to agree with me.
I just think that people care about their homes. They care about their dreams. They care about their safety and their capacity to provide for themselves and their children.
And they’re smart. I think this is one of the most important things I’ve learned in my brief time in politics. Contrary to what you might hear, a couple of mountains over in Davos, the citizens of all of our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy. And it’s hardly surprising that they don’t want to be shuffled about or relentlessly ignored by their leaders. And it is the business of democracy to adjudicate these big questions at the ballot box.
Embrace what your people tell you, even when it’s surprising, even when you don’t agree
I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy. Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference. Even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential – and trust me, I say this with all humour – if American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.
But what no democracy, American, German or European will survive, is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.
Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t. Europeans, the people have a voice. European leaders have a choice. And my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future.
Embrace what your people tell you, even when it’s surprising, even when you don’t agree. And if you do so, you can face the future with certainty and with confidence, knowing that the nation stands behind each of you. And that, to me, is the great magic of democracy. It’s not in these stone buildings or beautiful hotels. It’s not even in the great institutions that we built together as a shared society.
To believe in democracy is to understand that each of our citizens has wisdom and has a voice. And if we refuse to listen to that voice, even our most successful fights will secure very little. As Pope John Paul II, in my view, one of the most extraordinary champions of democracy on this continent or any other, once said, ‘do not be afraid’. We shouldn’t be afraid of our people even when they express views that disagree with their leadership. Thank you all. Good luck to all of you. God bless you.
Vance: Free speech ‘in retreat’ in UK
To Germany, where the Munich Security Conference is in full swing. The city is hosting a number of political bigwigs – although Prime Minister Keir Starmer didn’t make an appearance – including US Vice President JD Vance. Addressing the conference this afternoon, the VP gave a rather punchy speech, first taking aim at Nato before claiming that ‘in Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat’. Crikey.
Using the example of abortion buffer zones to describe how the ‘religious liberties’ of Britons were being curbed, the VP stressed his concerns about the role of the state in European countries and the UK. Going on, Vance told the conference:
The threat that I worry the most about vis à vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.
While the VP’s speech will undoubtedly ruffle feathers, one British politician has lauded Vance’s intervention – with Reform’s Rupert Lowe taking to Twitter to gush: ‘The Americans have got a real hero in JD Vance.’ He’s certainly making waves…
Watch the clip here:
'In Britain and across Europe free speech, I fear, is in retreat'
— Sky News (@SkyNews) February 14, 2025
US Vice President JD Vance spoke at the Munich security conference and took a swipe at Brussels, Germany, Sweden and the UK.https://t.co/Ci0hPtWFvG
📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube pic.twitter.com/X1aVj7aSSX
Dinner for one is the best way to spend Valentine’s Day
This Valentine’s Day, as the nation does its duty and celebrates by dining out, often in stilted discomfort, it occurs to me that many of my finest restaurant experiences have been in singular company. No offence is meant to my wife, whose conversation has remained fascinating to me over the 21 years of our relationship. And no snub to my friends, either, especially those – a non-trivial number – with whom friendship has been founded on sharing long lunches and prolonged dinners. But in a life filled with superb restaurant meals, some of the best, I realise, are those I have spent alone.
Valentine’s Day triggers these thoughts, with its annual rush for restaurant reservations amongst the nation’s couples. The scene on the evening of 14 February is so often glum – but it is only an exaggerated version of what takes place every other night of the year. Fine to see families having to work at their conversation, and lapsing awkwardly into silence – family is an obligation, and falling into easy chat with children is never guaranteed – but sad to see how often it afflicts couples.
Life really is short, and it is not only dining opportunities that are limited
I am not talking about the easy, companionable quiet between a couple which is always honourable to dip into, and a pleasure to be around. I mean instead the painful, desperate silence of those who cannot heave their hearts into their mouths, or find thoughts with which to entertain each other. On Valentine’s night the restaurants are packed with such couples, but the rest of the year, in smaller numbers, they are there all the same.
Occasionally I have caught these couples giving me pitying looks, as I walk into a restaurant by myself. Sometimes the waiting staff feel awkward. They seat me at my table for one as though in the presence of bereavement. Perhaps in that other country of the distant past I once felt awkward myself, but no longer.
The table is set for one, but it is wrong to say I dine alone, for I always have a book. In Sesame and Lilies, John Ruskin spoke of how crowds would pack the streets to catch a glimpse of someone famous, or hear a word fall from their tongue, but how few would take the opportunities – so readily available! – to allow the truly famous to unfold their most intimate hearts at great length. How easy it is to let them do so. A friend once told of his delight, as a young pianist in a hotel, of seeing the novellist David Niven, in full white tie, seat himself at the bar and order a martini. ‘I thought then,’ said my friend, decades later, ‘that my life would never again be so near to glamour, and it never was.’
Having sat through dinner with David Niven’s work on many occasions, I can report the glamour is still available. To eat while reading The Moon’s A Balloon is a delight. One’s eyes sparkle at the company, and chuckles and occasional roars of laughter spill out. Enjoyment is infectious, and the sadly sympathetic glances of waiting staff, when they see you smile, are replaced by smiles of their own.
Yet even the most convivial of us can flag. For all of us, the wheels of being sometimes turn slow, interest drains out of life, and our inner monologue stumbles and seems stale. Strange that it should be so, when beneath the sun and the moon is so much of perpetual interest, waiting to be discovered, but occasionally we all find ourselves stumped for inspiration.
Those couples who sit in hangdog silence each Valentine’s aren’t necessarily unhappy, or foolish, or wasting their lives. Some may just be shattered, or having a bad evening. But many are missing out – if only for those reasons. Life really is short, and it is not only dining opportunities that are limited. Poetry is generally too rich a fare for a man dining alone, but the well-stocked larder of any British mind includes A.E. Housman:
From far, from eve and morning
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither: here am I.Now – for a breath I tarry
Nor yet disperse apart –
Take my hand quick and tell me,
What have you in your heart.
Life, like a meal out, is ephemeral, and it behoves us to have the best food and the best company we can – which does not mean the poshest or the most expensive, and certainly doesn’t mean the most pompous. The finest companions don’t take themselves seriously, because they take life seriously instead. And they know that doing so demands appreciating life’s comedy and that the best comedy is good-humoured. Works by Clive James and Joseph Epstein are recurring favourites. Moral weight makes their aphorisms epigrams, and you are likely to laugh out loud with delight as you scrabble to record their sentences in your commonplace book – which, in my case, has become a file on my phone.
Adventure is out there, and life is too full of fascination to waste an evening in tongue-tied awkwardness. One need only pick up a book – and, perhaps, invite it out for dinner. Even on Valentine’s.
Feminist coding and Armenian fashion week – my findings from Spaff
The Spectator Project Against Frivolous Funding, or Spaff, has been launched this week to shine a light on government waste. To help track down examples of frivolous spending, The Spectator has created a search engine that allows anyone to look at government transactions, foreign aid projects and procurement contracts all in one place for the first time.
If you’re like me, and your eyes light up at the idea of rooting out government profligacy, the search engine is a treat. Here’s what I’ve found so far:
Let’s start with the Arts Council, which has burnt through a tremendous amount of taxpayer cash. Particular funding highlights are a feminist creative coding camp for £5,000, a production of ‘Islamajam’ for £29,000 and a £90,000 bung to a group aiming to ‘decolonise’ pole dancing.
On the weirder end of the spectrum, the Arts Council has been funding a show in Thanet named ‘Daddy Issues’ (£30,000), and productions such as ‘Vagina Cake’ and ‘Where’s My Vagina’ (£12,500 and £22,934, respectively). It gave another £14,692 to the ‘FATTY FAT FAT TOUR’.
Recently, you might have been shocked by the crazy projects our American cousins have been funding through USAID, which is in the process of being shut down by Donald Trump. American taxpayers, for instance, were likely horrified when they learned recently they’d contributed £19,869 to a drag show seminar for Venezuelan migrants in Ecuador.
If you think that is shocking though, wait until you hear what the Foreign Office has been up to. What do Armenian fashion week, fighting gender bias in the North Macedonian judiciary, and ‘climate smart villages’ in India have in common? Correct, they’re all funded by the British taxpayer. In those cases, the damage is £28,713, £45,808 and £35,817 respectively. On top of those examples, and endless similar ones, I’ve also discovered that the running total for British gifts to Mauritius is £205,014 larger than we’d thought with the country benefitting from three separate FCDO schemes, the largest being aimed at supporting ‘institutional strengthening for climate disclosure.’
Using the Spaff search engine, you often get the impression that civil servants are being taken for mugs. What do you think is a reasonable price for an office chair? Well, at DCMS, they seem to believe £1,000 is the going rate for a ‘workplace adjustment chair and footrest’. The Home Office is equally guilty of this: it has spent £900 on a single work jacket. As is the Cabinet Office, who spent £1,273.50 on Nespresso in just two months towards the end of last year.
Now it’s easy to look at this mountain of waste and become increasingly depressed about what your hard-earned money is being spent on. But at least with Spaff trawling for wasteful, inefficient and downright mad spending, it has become a lot harder for the government to keep throwing your money down the drain.
In defence of The Apprentice’s Jana Denzel
The front page of the Sun today pronounced that a star on the television show The Apprentice has quit for using ‘racist language’, specifically for employing a ‘highly offensive term’ to describe a black person. One can only recoil in imagining what a foul and obscene word the contestant must have used. But you needn’t be unduly nervous. The offending word was ‘coloured’.
According to the story, Jana Denzel, a dentist of Sri Lankan heritage, was reported by two ‘shocked’ female teammates after making the utterance. Bosses at the show took ‘swift action’ and made him undergo diversity training. Following discussions with producers, who explained to him the offensive nature of the remark, Denzel announced his departure from the programme.
Over-sensitivity to controversial words is one of the hallmarks of our time, and testament to the influence and stubborn resilience of a hyper-liberal woke ideology that is obsessed with language and the power of words. But what we see here is an orthodoxy operating in its most pernicious and pitiless manner.
The irony is that people who use the word ‘coloured’ often do so because they still believe they are being polite and non-racist. The word became popular in the 1960s among a liberal generation in the West who looked for a softer term for ethnic minorities, and for some white people who were even afraid to say ‘black’. The label ‘coloured’ was certainly more acceptable than some of the abusive and degrading terms then current, and in America it had long been embraced by black and mixed-race people themselves, who in 1909 formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, an organisation that retains that title to this day.
In time, however, the meaning and connotations of the word have gradually shifted. Today, Collins, one of the most popular and unquestionably progressive and prescriptive of dictionaries, warns that ‘coloured’ is ‘old-fashioned, offensive’. It warns likewise with ‘half-caste’. That is another description often used innocently in the past, simply to describe a person with one parent who was white and another who was black, but which increasingly came to be interpreted as suggesting a belief in racial purity. Collins also advises now that ‘mixed-race’ is ‘sometimes offensive’.
The evolution of the word ‘gay’ has been an even more tangled affair, with the word initially supplanting ‘homosexual’, a description that was not only commonly derogatory, but one with legal and clinical overtones which served to remind how homosexuality was once criminalised and pathologised. Then there arrived ‘queer’, taken up as a more politically-charged alternative for gay. But many gay people these days are hostile to the term ‘queer’, it being default among a radical trans-movement which they regard as homophobic. All of this has left many well-meaning straight people none the wiser, stumped as how to address those with a different sexual orientation without causing offence.
Some people will always be offended. Righteous moral indignation against other parties, even those poor souls are wholly lacking in malicious intent, is a guaranteed means of assuming the moral high ground.
This is why a belief in ‘micro-aggressions’ has become so popular on university campuses, where the expedient desire to be offended is rife. According to a guide produced by the University of Minnesota, some micro-aggressions include:
‘Where are you from?’
‘Where were you born?’
‘You are so articulate.’
‘There is only one race, the human race’.
‘I believe the most qualified person should get the job.’
All of these utterances could plausibly be construed as demeaning, patronising or unconsciously racist, if you really tried. But some people really do try, being resolved to see malevolent motivation, or more crucially, pretend to see it.
Language changes, and peril lurks for those who fail to keep up or say words out of context. Those who seek to find offence are forever on guard for those who transgress against the latest tribal codes.
Chastising others for using wrong or outdated terminology is often a marker of social distinction. We saw this in 2016 when the late darts player Eric Bristow appeared on the television show Good Morning Britain, where he was monstered by presenter Piers Morgan for calling fellow-host Susanna Reid ‘darling’. There was no evident harmful intent, but the ‘Crafty Cockney’ belonged to a different time and a different social stratum. This was his crime.
The same goes for those who say ‘coloured’ today. Even if some people don’t mean badly by the words they use, there will always be others determined to see it that way.
£1m spent on 2024 Jobcentre translation services
Well, well, well. It turns out that just under £1 million was spent on Jobcentre translation last year, with £882,118 splashed on language assistance including the International Pension Service. The figure was revealed in a parliamentary answer from the Department for Work and Pensions to Reform’s Rupert Lowe this week – who has called on the department to bin off all of its foreign language interpretation services.
The revelation comes after it emerged that interpreters for benefits claimants have cost the British taxpayer almost £30 million over the last five years. As reported by the Telegraph, £27 million has been spent on language help since 2019. The highest yearly spend was in 2022, with £8 million splurged – compared with £1.7 million the year before. Meanwhile a million calls to the DWP Universal Credit helpline needed the assistance of a foreign language interpreter last year. In fact, during the first few months of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government, the DWP splashed a staggering average of £25,000 a day on language aid. Good heavens…
The Department for Work and Pensions has insisted it will start publishing data held on non-UK citizen households and refugees claiming Universal Credit – as pressure piles on Starmer’s army to get a grip on Britain’s borders. UK net migration reached record levels in 2023 with 906,000 while over 20,000 small boats arrivals have been recorded since the Labour lot won the July poll. While reds protest they have deported around 19,000 illegal migrants since the election, they still have their work cut out trying to get a handle on the numbers.