Might Macron’s future rest with the England rugby team?

After two rounds of the Six Nations, France is the only unbeaten team. Their victory against Ireland in a ferocious encounter in Paris on Saturday evening keeps them on course for the championship title.

The last time France won the Six Nations crown was in 2010. The decade that followed was not kind to the national team. One might say their decline mirrored that of the country in general. They became a laughing stock, finishing bottom of the Six Nations in 2013 and suffering embarrassing defeats to the likes of Tonga and Fiji. Everything about the French team was amateur — their preparation, their fitness, their technique — compared to the clinical professionalism of their Six Nations rivals such as England, Ireland and Wales.

But Les Bleus are back. They travel to Edinburgh on Saturday week to face the inconsistent Scots and then it’s off to Cardiff to play a Wales side that also blows hot and cold. If France is victorious in both of those games they will have the opportunity to win the title (and with it the Grand Slam) in their final match, which is not only in Paris but also against the team that everyone in the championship loves to beat: England.

Few French fans will have their fingers crossed for a title triumph as tightly as Emmanuel Macron. The President likes his sport, particularly football, and he has not been shy in the past about exploiting its popularity with the masses for political gain. He was in Russia in July 2018 when France played Croatia in the World Cup Final. France won, and didn’t Macron let the world know it. The photo of him celebrating in the stand, punching the air in delight, adorned the world’s newspapers and internet sites the next day.

Success in the Six Nations would sit very well with Macron. The first round of the presidential election is three weeks after the championship and it doesn’t take much imagination to envisage how he would spin the win to his advantage. France is on the up, Macron will say, not just the rugby team but the country at large.

To no one’s great surprise the government last week suggested that the Covid Passport will be dropped at the end of March, just in time for the election, although of course any such move will be based on health considerations not political ones. Regardless, the French will be delighted with its demise, a sign that life is slowly returning to normal. Throw in a first Six Nations title in 12 years, and which self-respecting French person wouldn’t have a little spring in their step as they entered the polling booth?

There are precedents in how sport has influenced political elections. For example, in the run-up to the British general election in 1970, Harold Wilson was on course to be returned to power. One poll had his Labour party holding a 12 per cent lead over Ted Heath’s Tories. But four days before the election West Germany staged a stirring comeback in the quarter-final of the World Cup to knock out holders England 3-2.

Heath emulated the Germans. Was it a case of the public taking out their disappointment on Labour? In his memoirs the Labour defence minister at the time, Denis Healey, wrote that before he called the election Wilson ‘asked us to consider whether the government would suffer if the England footballers were defeated on the eve of polling day?’

There is another reason why Macron will be desperate for French success in the Six Nations. The team is, to coin a cliche, a ‘celebration of diversity’. Along with the gnarled men of the deep south, such as the hooker Julien Marchand, born in the shadow of the Pyrenees, there is also Demba Bamba, raised on a housing estate in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, and Yoram Moefana, who arrived in France aged 13 from the Pacific island of Futuna. Against Ireland on Saturday the French team — their eyes wide and their chests out — sang La Marseillaise with gusto, along with 80,000 fans in the Stade de France, many of them waving French Tricolores. It was a stark contrast to what was happening a few miles south in the centre of Paris, where policemen used tear gas to disperse protesters from the ‘Convoy of Liberty’.

Macron’s pitch will be that the French rugby team — like the football squad — embodies the very best of the Republic. Éric Zemmour, on the other hand, is the candidate who wants to end all immigration and ban parents from giving their children foreign-sounding first names. How will that help French sport?

Will Macron be in the crowd on March 19 for ‘Le Crunch’ against England? He’s attended high profile rugby events before, such as the final of the French domestic championship in June 2019 between Toulouse and Clermont-Ferrand. But that didn’t quite go according to plan. The public, presented with a rare opportunity to let their President know what they thought of him, whistled and booed as he was introduced to the players on the pitch.

A Six Nations crowd, being more corporate and middle-class, will probably be more respectful. Many of them, one suspects, are Macron supporters. Nonetheless it would be a risk to turn up for the Six Nations decider in person; particularly as it’s against Perfidious Albion, the country Macron loves to loathe. Wouldn’t it be typical of the English to pee on the President’s parade?

England has dominated France in recent years, winning seven of their last ten encounters, and were they to make it eight — and perhaps in the process snatch the Six Nations title from under French noses — Macron could suffer politically. Nobody likes to be linked to a loser.

Merde, the French might mutter, not only did England emerge from lockdown months before us but now they’ve put one over us on the rugby field. Who’s the ‘clown’ now?

The West is doing Putin’s work for him

Ukraine, as is periodically observed, means borderland. Geography will forever influence its destiny as an independent state. With tensions between East and West again rising, however, Kiev might well conclude that Ukraine is more accurately translated as ‘on the margins’.

Foreign leaders and ministers have, to be sure, been punctilious in making courtesy visits to President Zelensky and his team before or after paying court to President Putin in Moscow. But it must now be crystal clear to Kiev that — in a conflict essentially centred on Ukraine, though actually about much more — its western champions have at best considered Ukraine’s interests as secondary to the pursuit of the main quarrel with Russia, often not considering them at all.

How else to explain the flurry of developments over the past week? As Volodymyr Zelensky pressed on heroically with his message of keeping calm and carrying on, and most Ukrainians — quite astonishingly — did just that, the US and the UK together amplified their warnings of a Russian invasion. It is now not just ‘imminent”, apparently, but scheduled for as early as Wednesday.

Nor did they stop at upping the already heated rhetoric, which had been briefly paused at the end of January. They passed on to action — action that has a direct impact on Ukraine. Both countries extended their previously announced withdrawal of diplomats, adding calls for all US and UK nationals to leave Ukraine while there were still commercial routes out. ‘Remember Kabul airport?’ Asked the UK’s second-in-command at the Ministry of Defence, James Heappey, during an interview on the BBC Today programme. Well, he went on, the Taliban had had no airpower to speak of; imagine how it could be with missiles and the like. Oh, and by the way, he strongly inferred, the RAF won’t be risking their lives to get you out.

A dozen countries have now instructed or recommended their nationals to leave. The Netherlands, with memories of almost 200 Dutch deaths in the MH17 disaster, announced that KLM was stopping all flights to Ukraine. Others are expected to follow suit.

There are bleak, but confident predictions, that international insurance companies will cease cover for companies operating in Ukraine, as well as for visitors. That will effectively leave Ukraine not just physically cut off but branded an unsafe destination — a label that will be harder to lose than gain. A UK Foreign Office travel advisory has the effect of banning most travel, as it renders UK travel insurance policies invalid.

And the bad news kept coming. Having announced with great fanfare the dispatch of 2,000 shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles, and a 30-strong group of ‘elite troops’ to show them how to use them, the same minister who treated breakfasting Britons to a horrific vision of air strikes disclosed that all trainers were being withdrawn ‘over the weekend’. The United States is doing the same.

Of course, one interpretation might be that these military departures were envisaged as a tiny olive branch to Moscow, designed to reassure Russia that the West was not about to wage war over, or at least in, Ukraine. But the message this sends to Kiev is far clearer: Ukraine is on its own. It may be a ‘valued partner’ of Nato — as described by the Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, last month — but it is not a Nato member, and as such, does not benefit from the protection of Article 5.

The same message that Ukraine is now on its own was conveyed with the announcement of other US and UK withdrawals: this time from the OSCE monitoring mission in eastern Ukraine. Again, other countries are likely to follow, but not — it has to be hoped — all, as the OSCE, which monitors the fitful ceasefire, is the only international group that just about commands enough trust on all sides to be effective.

On 28 January, Zelensky gave a press conference in Kiev for the international press, which highlighted two main messages clearly intended for foreign governments. The first, since repeated several times, was that western alarmism risked having a counterproductive effect on Ukraine and that, if it wanted to help Ukraine, the US in particular should pipe down. The second was that the West’s dire warnings had killed foreign investment and Ukraine urgently needed economic help. For a president who had started with well-thought-out plans for the country’s development, and had had some success in drumming up interest, this turn of events is little short of catastrophic.

The risk now is that, in precipitating a showdown with Russia over the future of European security arrangements, the US and UK are inflicting near-fatal damage on the state they have treated as their protege since the Euromaidan uprising of 2014.

If you hold the view that a successful, prosperous and democratic Ukraine presents an existential threat to Putin’s Russia, then ruining that country, as the West currently risks doing, amounts to nothing more than doing Putin’s dirty work for him. Even if you don’t hold that view — I don’t, I believe a successful Ukraine is in Russia’s interests — an isolated, insecure and impoverished Ukraine stands to cost the West even more over the long term than it already has.

Many, if not all the gains of the past decade or so, in terms of democratic freedoms, economic growth and a healthy sense of national identity, risk being lost. But perhaps the greatest loss could be the political stability and cohesion that Zelensky’s landslide election victory promised. It should be noted that the huge demonstrations on the streets of Ukraine’s major cities this weekend, which received extensive coverage in the international media as expressions of national unity, were initiated by the nationalist right. This was not the platform on which Zelensky, who is of Jewish descent, campaigned; it is a spectre from Ukraine’s past that could yet be revived.

It is hard to believe that any of this is in the West’s interests. Some European countries and some individuals seem to realise this and are staying, demonstratively, in Ukraine. But many aren’t. Do western leaders really not see that, by their words and their actions, they are well on their way to sacrificing Ukraine, this time in the supposedly greater cause of opposing Russia?

Is Brooklyn Beckham fooling us all?

Brooklyn Beckham, the eldest son of David and Victoria, has launched a new television show Cookin’ with Brooklyn which allegedly took £70,000 and a team of 62 professionals to create.

The result is an 8-minute episode that produced a fish-finger sandwich. Brooklyn oversees an assembly of chefs preparing the ingredients, he looks into the camera, totally deadpan and informs his audience, ‘With sandwiches you can go so many different ways. It really does help to be creative’.

Is this show the epitome of everything that’s wrong with our society, as some have claimed?

Brooklyn Beckham is rich. He is the amusing celebrity-child kind of rich. The sort that spends winters skiing in Whistler and Spring bobbing around the Caribbean on a super-yacht with his godfather Elton John. The kind that falls in love with an heiress to a billion dollar fortune and spends £9 million on his ‘starter home’ in Beverly Hills.

It was inevitable that the time would come when Brooklyn would have to venture out into the big bad world and make his own way. If you can call it that.

Brooklyn has gone big. His lack of any obvious talent was as nothing to his inherited ability to have doors opened for him. This makes people angry. As we sit around wondering how to we’ll cope with inflation and the cost of living crisis, the spectacle of Brooklyn pretending on TV to make a career as something other than a celebrity — for the sake, ultimately, of furthering his utterly unearned fame — grates on many of us.

But we may as well shake our fists at the sky. It may be unfair, but it is undeniable: the children of the celebrity rich have more advantages in a world where online name recognition is everything. It is why Prince Harry, a man with fewer GCSE’s than your average supermarket worker, was paid £112 million by Netflix to make documentaries. And it is why Brooklyn Beckham is a published author, has appeared on the cover of Vogue, shot a campaign for Burberry and been paid £1 million to front a SuperDry campaign all before turning 23.

Brooklyn fancied himself as a photographer, and aged 17 he got himself a photography book deal. The photos were a collection of the world ‘through his eyes’. His writing was, er, succinct: ‘elephants in kenya. So hard to photograph but incredible to see’. He also featured a fishing trip with his family: ‘I didn’t catch anything – annoying but still fun’.

He also dabbled in environmental activism, inspired no doubt by the elephants. In Kenya, he met Sir David Attenborough. Shortly after, he did a SuperDry campaign supporting sustainability. Promoting the campaign coincided with COP26. When asked in an interview what he made of the event, Brooklyn looked blank until the journalist explained it was a ‘big climate conference in Glasgow’.

Ever the professional, he remained unfazed: ‘Every day I am trying to read and learn more’. 

Then came cooking. There was the bacon and egg sandwich he cooked for an audience of nine million on Good Morning America followed by aVogue tutorial in which he cooked creamy, cheesy pasta for his lactose intolerant fiancé. In his culinary arsenal he also has the squish burger (a standard burger you squish just before eating) and the now infamous fish finger sarnie.

To publicly set yourself up to fail on such a grand scale is, dare I say it, admirable. To invite such widespread ridicule is brave.

Is Brooklyn actually secretly in on the joke, as people often thought Paris Hilton was? Is he trying to reveal how far you can go with very little talent but the right parents in our modern, utterly non-meritocratic society?

I fear not. His lack of self awareness seems absolute — the gloriously unfiltered product of being famous from birth.

Of course £70,000 for an eight minute cooking tutorial is insane and outrageous. But don’t blame Brooklyn. The sooner we come to terms with the truth the sooner we can make peace with it. The celebrity super rich can spin gold out of anything  – even fish fingers.

Prince Harry’s ‘Americanisms’ are no such thing

Ever since Prince Harry moved to Los Angeles, royal commentators with an interest in the English language have been watching what he says. He may have walked the walk but has he also started to talk the talk? In October 2020, the Mail ran a piece headed ‘Prince Harry calls opening the bonnet ‘popping the hood’ as he picks up Americanisms after seven months in US with Meghan Markle’. In May 2021, the Express announced ‘Prince Harry swaps Queen’s English for Americanisms in desperate bid to “be liked”‘, gasping that ‘Prince Harry has dropped elements of his cut-glass English accent in favour of Americanisms’. Just last week, as Harry spoke about his mother’s work combating the stigma around HIV and AIDS, some people felt their hackles rise regarding his choice of words: ‘I feel obligated to try and continue [her work] as much as possible’. Why use the American ‘obligated’ when the British ‘obliged’ is right there?

Harry has also been criticised for scattering Americanisms throughout his Archewell podcast, addressing his audience as ‘you guys’ and describing things as ‘awesome’. But anyone thinking all this is evidence of a recent change to his language hasn’t been paying attention: Harry has never had a ‘cut glass’ accent and his idiolect – his personal way of speaking – owes more to the English public school system than to his American wife. If you’ve ever found yourself in close proximity to a group of modern public school boys, what strikes you is not their adherence to the norms of received pronunciation and vocabulary but their keenness to distance themselves from them. Frankly, talking posh isn’t cool.

The young upper classes have been early adopters of US slang for generations. Think of Bertie Wooster, whose zippy lines are almost as full of American slang as they are of English:

Here, with a sniff like the tearing of a piece of calico, she buried the bean in her hands, and broke into what are called uncontrollable sobs.
— P. G. Wodehouse, The Code of The Woosters, 1938

‘Bean’ (meaning ‘head’) feels traditionally British, perhaps reminding us of ‘old bean’. It’s actually US slang from the early 20^th century (related to ‘bean ball”, a baseball term for a ball pitched at the batter’s head), as are countless other beloved Woosterisms, from ‘on the blink’ to ‘spill the beans’. Even that quintessentially English phrase ‘stiff upper lip’ comes from America, its first recorded use being in the Massachusetts Spy of 1815.

Wodehouse’s contribution to the Americanisation of British English gets some commentators rather hot under the collar (another Americanism). In his impassioned plea for resistance, That’s The Way it Crumbles, the writer Matthew Engel laments: ‘If there is a Typhoid Mary in the Americanisation epidemic of the 1920s the name of the No.1 carrier must be the creator of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.’

What’s more, for Engel, the fight against the Americanisation of English is as much about culture as it is about language: if Brits mindlessly import American words into their dialect, we risk unconsciously adopting American ideas along with them. Hence, Engel argues, the Americanisation of the language goes hand in hand with the Americanisation of the culture, playing a part in everything from Thatcherism to Blairism to people losing interest in the countryside. 

But we’d be wrong to assume that this fear of cultural invasion runs only one way. Long before he published his great American dictionary in 1806, Noah Webster argued that establishing linguistic independence from the British was as critical for Americans as political independence.

Language reform, for Webster, was a chance to build egalitarian principles into the very way Americans spoke and wrote. Hence spelling would be simplified – no more unnecessary ‘u’s in ‘honor’ and ‘humor’, no more Frenchified ‘-re’ endings to ‘meter’ and ‘center’. Irregularities would be removed where possible. And as well as fostering a new and enlightened national identity, these changes would support the American printing industry: new books for a new country. Even today there are Americans concerned about the influence of British English: the US website www.notoneoffbritishisms.com attempts to keep track of what it refers to as the ‘Britishism invasion’.

While America’s greater size and cultural heft can make it feel as if the influence is all one way, actually Brits are holding their own. The cultural behemoth of the Harry Potter industry has played a large part in this: while the books were lightly edited for their American audience, care was taken to keep their essential Britishness: they evoke a rather old-fashioned and romantic boarding school world and the British language is part of the charm. One slightly surprising result of this is the US adoption of the British word ‘ginger’ to describe red hair, thanks to Harry’s side-kick, hapless red-head Ron Weasley.

And what of Meghan in all this? The royal watchers who look out for Americanisms in Harry’s language now he’s in the States were equally keen to spot Britishisms from Meghan when she was over here. The results were…underwhelming. Claims that Meghan had started speaking with a British accent were largely exaggerated and quickly debunked. But, had she stayed here longer, it’s highly likely that her both her accent and vocabulary would have changed through a process known as accommodation, that unconscious imitation which so many of us do when speaking to somebody with a different accent. As it is, the sole reported Britishism she has taken back to the States with her is a tendency to say ‘oh dahling!’ without the ‘r’.

Corbynistas trolled by The Crown

Jeremy Corbyn’s fans were never the sharpest tools in the box. But even by Corbynista standards, the egg-heads over at Skwawkbox do a disservice to the Magic Grandpa with their constant half-baked witterings. Since Labour was crushed at the 2019 election, Mr S hasn’t had to care much about what the left-wing websites says about anything, given Sir Keir Starmer’s preference for briefing newspapers, not disreputable blogs. But even he couldn’t resist writing about the latest conspiracy which the slavish socialists have now fallen for, hook, line and sinker.

For Netflix series The Crown is currently shooting in Westminster, with season five expected to cover the monarchy in the 1990s, with the Queen’s annus horribilis, Diana’s death and all the rest of it. As part of this, the cast has taken over the QEII Centre next by Parliament Square, to recreate the scenes of Tony Blair celebrating his victory there on the morning of the 1997 general election. Numerous ‘New Labour’ signs and banners have been erected around the site; cue much droll commentary about whether Starmer really has been studying the Blair playbook too closely.

Unfortunately, Skwawkbox displayed their usual journalistic genius by taking such claims at face value. Without bothering to even ascertain the true reason for the flags, the Corbynista blog duly ran an article headlined:  ‘Starmer removes any doubt he’s a Tony Blair tribute act.’ Like Pravda without the prose, the blog breathlessly claimed ‘Keir Starmer’s latest advertising makes it absolutely clear that he’s presenting himself as Tony Blair Mk II.’ It concluded that use of the ‘discredited’ New Labour brand was the final proof that Starmer would return Labour to the bad old election-winning days, ending its dispatch by sneering that Sir Keir thinks ‘that what the public wants is a new version of the man many would like to see on trial in the Hague for war crimes.’

After it was pointed out to the hard-of-thinking bloggers that, er, the event was in fact unrelated to anything to do with the Labour party, a correction was quietly posted claiming that ‘Some have suggested this may be a set for a new series of The Crown. Starmer is still a Blair tribute act.’ After further online mockery, the title was changed too so that it now reads ‘Blair tribute act said to be The Crown set.’

For Skwawkbox, it seems that things can only get better.

Vince Cable slammed over China (again)

Oh dear. Britain’s onetime favourite ‘liberal’ is at it again. Mr S has chartered the sad decline of Vince Cable in recent months from household name to Beijing’s useful idiot. The onetime Lib Dem leader is one of the few mainstream politicians to claim China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang does not amount to genocide, as part of his bid for the UK to develop closer ties with the country. This is despite reports that the Uyghur persecution there meets all five UN criteria for genocide. Indeed Layla Moran, the party’s foreign affairs spokesman, issued a very public slapdown last June when Cable first made these claims.

Now though, an unchastened Cable has gone even further. In comments made on Friday at the National Liberal Club at a panel discussion on China, the former Lib Dem leader was asked a question by Rahima Mahmut of the World Uyghur Congress about the situation there. Cable, who was speaking at the event to raise funds for the party’s local candidate Edward Lucas, responded strongly:

They did what I did, they read through a lot of the documentation, alleging, quote ‘genocide’ in Xinjiang and they said “What is happening there is dreadful but to call it genocide is absolutely, completely wrong.” This is nothing whatever to do with the kind of horrors that happened in the Holocaust or Rwanda. This is a totally different situation. This is a brutal, probably, overreaction to a terrorist movement and that we should of course criticise it and condemn it. But this is not genocide or anything remotely like it.

He then bemoaned how and he others had been ‘pilloried’ for making such remarks. Poor Vince. He added that describing the situation in Xinjiang as ‘genocide’ is ‘not helpful, ultimately to the Uyghur cause’ – something which didn’t go down well with Mahmut, who does not know the fate of her nine siblings there. She told Mr S: 

I can’t remember the last time I felt so angry, patronised and belittled. Cable clearly knows very little about China, the history of the persecution of Uyghurs and the definition of genocide. He merely repeated the Communist party’s lies about how their suppression of my people is a result of extremism. Cable seems to think he knows better than hundreds of legal scholars who agree that the criteria for genocide are met because the CCP is systematically preventing our women from having children. Vince Cable is a genocide denier, plain and simple. It is hard to believe gestures of solidarity while this man remains within the Liberal Democrats.

It’s worth remembering too that Cable doesn’t just echo the CCP’s lines on Xinjiang. Last month at the Oxford Union he effectively victim-blamed protestors in Hong Kong for Beijing’s clampdown on democracy there, claiming that:

Those people in Hong Kong who, in the name of democracy and free speech, started throwing Molotov cocktails at the police and vandalising their legislature did their little bit to kill Hong Kong democracy because it was very clear what the rules of the game were and the Chinese were not in any way dishonest or unclear about what was permissible.

Such comments received a glowing write up from one section of the press at least – China’s state-run network CTGN. Given that Cable these days doesn’t seem too keen on the ‘liberal’ or ‘democrat’ aspects of his party, Steerpike wonders just what it will take for his fellow knight Sir Ed Davey to kick him out of the party. A Lib Dem spokesperson told Mr S that:

Vince has many views which the party has always valued, but on this he is wrong. There is clear cut evidence of a genocide in Xinjiang Province, as the Uyghur Tribunal found, and we cannot stay silent while the Chinese government commits atrocities against the Uyghurs. That starts with the UK government recognising that a genocide is taking place, something which the Conservatives have shamefully failed to do.

Let’s hope it’s Vince who will be staying silent in future, eh?

Sunday shows round-up: Invasion of Ukraine ‘entirely possible’

The situation on Ukraine’s borders now appears to many as though it is the calm before the inevitable storm. In the Sunday Times, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has even criticised some western actors for creating ‘a whiff of Munich in the air’, referencing Neville Chamberlain’s infamous 1938 negotiations with Nazi Germany. Trevor Phillips interviewed the Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis, who said in no uncertain terms that Ukraine would have to brace itself for the worst:

Boris Johnson will ‘successfully fight the next general election’

Ukraine’s turmoil has been the only story of the year so far that has been able to rival partygate’s rigid grip on the political scene. Downing Street has confirmed that over 50 people have been sent a questionnaire by the Metropolitan Police over the affair, including the Prime Minister. Lewis told Sophie Raworth that the PM had his full support:

Yvette Cooper: Starmer is not a ‘pro-war’ Labour leader

Raworth was also joined by the shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper. She asked Cooper about remarks made by Cooper’s predecessor Diane Abbott, who claimed that Sir Keir Starmer was ‘pro-war’ and would have sent British troops into Vietnam in the 1960s. Cooper rebutted Abbott’s claims:

Rosie Duffield ‘should be free from abuse’

Raworth bought up the case of Canterbury MP Rosie Duffield, who has said that she is on the verge of leaving the Labour party over the levels of abuse she has received for refusing to toe the line on gender issues, notably including her comment that ‘only women have a cervix’:

Former head of the police watchdog: Cressida Dick was ‘a very talented leader’

And finally, Zoe Billingham, who served for many years as Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, stuck up for the outgoing Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick. Dick was essentially forced to resign her role on Friday after it became clear that she no longer enjoyed the confidence of London Mayor Sadiq Khan:

Can Edinburgh really blame Henry Dundas for the evils of slavery?

In March 2021, in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matters protests, Edinburgh City Council approved plans to install a new plaque on the Melville monument to Henry Dundas in St Andrew Square, Edinburgh. Part of the text referred to ‘the more than half-a-million Africans whose enslavement was a consequence of Henry Dundas’s actions.’ Now, bitter controversy rages in the Scottish press about the historical accuracy of those words and whether Dundas deserves to be held solely responsible for the evils of continuing the slave trade.

A leading figure in the government of Prime Minister William Pitt, Dundas (later Lord Melville) was Secretary of State for the Home Office, Secretary of War, and First Lord of the Admiralty. He spoke during parliamentary debates on abolition of the British slave trade, including in 1792 when he proposed an amendment for gradual delay when the House of Commons was set to yet again reject William Wilberforce’s proposal for immediate abolition. The year before, the House had comprehensively rejected by 163 votes to 88 Wilberforce’s motion to introduce a similar bill. As a result of Dundas’s intervention in 1792, for the first time the House of Commons voted to abolish the slave trade, but to do so gradually, though there was debate over the eventual end date and it was stalled in the Lords. Final abolition of the British slave trade did not take place until 1807.

The words on the plaque hold Dundas exclusively accountable for this delay, which has been opposed by prominent historians. In the Herald in January 2021, Professor Sir Tom Devine denounced the wording as ‘bad history’ since it presented Dundas as some ‘kind of superman, a titan who single-handedly managed to produce this extraordinary historical result of postponing abolition.’ Rather than blame Dundas, Devine pointed to key political, economic, and military forces that meant no British government ‘would want to get abolition over the line’ in that period.

Those key forces included the violent insurrection of enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue and the immense shock the rebellion caused in British society; war with France and the strategic importance of the West Indies in that conflict; the great economic benefit for Britain derived from the trade in cotton, and for Scotland, dried salted fish; and unrelenting opposition from the House of Lords and King George III.

Writing for the History Reclaimed website, Professor Guy Rowlands also judged the plaque ‘deeply misleading’ and ‘egregiously unfair’ in seeking to make Dundas ‘carry the blame, and carry it alone, for the continuation of the slave trade.’

In contrast, and in line with the wording on the plaque, some historians have attempted to hold Dundas mainly – and in some cases – solely responsible for the delay to abolition. In an article for the Scottish Historical Review, Dr Stephen Mullen writes that Dundas’s insertion of the word ‘gradual’ into the abolition motion, ‘delayed the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade from 1792 until 1807’. In a blogpost he ramped up his claims by asserting he was ‘the great delayer’ and:

‘The activist position (that Henry Dundas delayed abolition) is not one based upon “rewriting history” but the arguments are broadly consistent with the published work of academic historians going back to 1975.’

Defending the plaque, Mullen has further alleged on Twitter that historians of slavery and abolition ‘are unequivocal that Dundas delayed abolition. The plaque wording reflects that orthodoxy’.

But my examination of the key works of the historians mentioned by Mullen casts very considerable doubt on his claims and those enshrined in the Edinburgh plaque.

The first problem is Mullen’s misuse of previous scholarship, including his misrepresentation of a statement from the historian Roger Anstey. In The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810, Anstey stated that ‘abolitionists were right to acknowledge Dundas … as the most important cause of the failure of immediate abolition in the Commons in the period up to 1796.’ Mullen, however, elided the words ‘in the Commons’ when citing the historian, and missed Anstey’s other remark that ‘To offer an explanation of the defeat of abolition in the Commons is not, of course, completely to explain the parliamentary failure of abolition.’ For Anstey, these further factors encompassed the arch-conservatism of the Lords, the influence of the French Revolution and the less than effective presentation of the abolition case.

Other historians, such as David Brion Davis, have also pointed out that while Dundas had an influence on the delay, abolition was hardly conceivable at the time due to any number of factors including the anti-abolitionist alliance of the King and royal family, admirals in the navy, commercial West India interests, and landed proprietors.

Some historians have, however, suggested that Henry Dundas mobilised Scottish parliamentarians against a 1796 vote to abolish the slave trade within the year, which failed by 70 votes to 74. Twelve Scottish MPs voted against abolition and one voted for it. According to Mullen, ‘Almost no MPs from Scotland deviated from the committed anti-abolitionist stance of the Scottish manager, Dundas.’

Yet with 45 parliamentary seats in the House of Commons, 31 Scottish MPs did not vote. Dundas was among those who did not cast a vote.

That more Scottish parliamentarians did not vote is surprising in light of the considerable role of Scots in the plantation trades and slave system more widely. As Devine has shown, the impact of slave produced commodities had a more significant impact on Scotland’s Industrial Revolution than England’s.

Why, then, did Henry Dundas fail to mobilise Scottish MPs? Distance from parliament may have been a factor. Part of the answer is also that the vote on abolition was one of conscience on a private bill rather than one run along party lines and loyalties. The extreme volatility of the voting record for and against abolition over the period certainly suggests that Dundas did not in any way have an overwhelming influence over the process and was not the arch controller of Scottish parliamentarians as is suggested.

Many forceful arguments were made by politicians to oppose abolition of the slave trade. They encompassed fears of the ruin of planters, the advantage abolition would give to rival slave trading nations, the supposed benefit of the trade to Africans, and that slavery was not inconsistent with Christianity. Indeed, two-thirds of parliamentary arguments put forward national economic and security issues, reflecting a British society grappling with domestic radical change and the dread of mass risings, radical reform, and social disorder as a result of the French Revolution and associations with slave uprisings. To this we can add the temporary decline of popular enthusiasm for the abolitionist cause. Therefore, although parliament had committed in 1792 to end the British slave trade gradually, politicians made their decisions for or against various ongoing abolition measures within the backdrop of national and international alarms, crises and threats.

David Richardson, a historian who has specialised in research on slavery throughout his long career, has emphasised these factors in his new book, Principles and Agents: The British Slave Trade and its Abolition. He identified several individuals who did not support abolition of the slave trade including those with West India interests, the monarch and his entourage, and some influential Tory and Whig leaders. For Richardson, this collective hostility meant that abolition as a formal government policy was ‘inconceivable before 1806-7’.

Whatever the merits and realities of the political and social landscape when abolition was debated, the evidence suggests that Dundas’s arguments for gradual rather than immediate abolition of the slave trade could not have decisively influenced voting patterns.

Any consideration of Dundas’s role also needs to take account of developments in the immediate run up to abolition including abolitionists’ alliances and their political approach. William Wilberforce, a leading figure in the abolition cause, but one who also attracted personal opprobrium among some, withdrew from debates in 1806 and 1807, letting other figures assume responsibility for taking charge of the relevant measures.

The first achievement was the passage in 1806 of the Foreign Slave Trade Bill which prevented British ships from supplying slaves to foreign colonies. Then, in early 1807, a motion to end the slave trade was passed first in the Lords and then in the Commons so as to circumvent royal influence. The Slave Trade Abolition Bill was finally passed by a vote of 100 to 36 in the Lords and 283 to 16 in the Commons, making it illegal after 1 May 1807 for Britain to continue its long central involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.

That abolition was a key issue during the 1806 general election and MPs had to convey to their constituents their support or opposition for the cause may have prompted many members to back abolition to ensure they were returned to parliament, as abolitionism became popular again throughout the country. The cause of abolition also benefited from the revolution of the enslaved in Saint-Domingue and its independence from the hated enemy France in 1804 as the new state of Haiti.

Historical realities, then, were much more nuanced and complex in the slave trade abolition debates of the 1790s and early 1800s than a focus on the role and significance of one politician.

Instead, a series of domestic and international factors explain the failure to achieve abolition before 1807 including: defence and security anxieties at a time of international war and slave uprising; opposition to any domestic ‘progressive’ reform for fear of giving comfort and encouragement to the menacing forces of contemporary political radicalism; the critical dependence of the UK Treasury for war revenues from the lucrative Caribbean trades; the intransigence of Wilberforce and his overall poor parliamentary management; the occasional complacency of abolitionists; the influence of the West India interest in the parliamentary debates on abolition; effective stalling tactics in the House of Lords; and the unrelenting opposition of King George III, his political coterie and some ministers of the Crown to abolition itself.

As such, the current text on the plaque beside the statue of Henry Dundas can therefore be considered patently absurd, erroneous, and ‘bad history’. Edinburgh City Council have a moral duty to amend or remove it as soon as possible. Otherwise, it faces the grave charge and opprobrium of falsifying history on a public monument.

San Francisco is decaying

During the pandemic, a growing number of people in floridly psychotic states screamed obscenities at invisible enemies, or at my colleagues and me on the streets of San Francisco. One morning, a young man came up to me as I was unlocking our front door and coughed in my unmasked face. Another threatened to assault a colleague. In both cases our mistake appears to have been looking at the men.

Many of the problems stemmed from Covid-19. California’s prisons, jails and homeless shelters were under orders to reduce their occupancy. But none of these problems started with the pandemic. Between 2008 and 2019, about 18,000 companies, including Toyota, Charles Schwab and Hewlett-Packard fled California due to a constellation of problems sometimes summarized as ‘poor business climate.’ California has the highest income tax, highest gasoline tax and highest sales tax in the United States, spends significantly more than other states on homelessness, and yet has worse outcomes.

Though I have been a progressive and Democrat all of my adult life, I found myself asking a question that sounded rather conservative. What were we getting for our high taxes? Why, after 20 years of voting for ballot initiatives promising to address drug addiction, mental illness and homelessness, had all three gotten worse? And why had progressive Democratic elected officials stopped enforcing many laws against certain groups of people, from unhoused people suffering mental illness and drug addiction in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle, to heavily armed and mostly white anarchists in Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis?

No sane psychiatrist believes that enabling and subsidising people with schizophrenia, depression and anxiety disorders to use fentanyl and meth is good medicine. Yet that is what San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles are, in effect, doing. What California does with its 100,000 unsheltered residents, most suffering mental illness or drug addiction while living in violent, dangerous and degrading encampments, is mistreatment of the foulest sort. How did we go from the nightmare of mental institutions to the nightmare of homeless encampments?

The question used to be: do you reward people for not committing crimes, or do you punish them when they do? But that’s been superseded by a question from progressives: what if it’s a form of victimisation to try to influence people’s behaviour at all? The governing majority in some of America’s cities seems to believe that the only real public policy problem is how to pay to let people do whatever they want, from turning public parks into open-air drug encampments to using sidewalks as toilets and handing over whole neighbourhoods to people who are heavily armed and purposefully unaccountable.

The crisis of disorder is strongest in progressive West Coast cities. But it is spreading east, like many trends in America do. Progressives have been in charge of San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle, as well as California and Washington during most of the decades in which the problems I describe here have grown worse. It was Democrats, not Republicans, who played the primary role in creating the dominant neoliberal model of government contracting to fragmented and often unaccountable nonprofit service providers that have proven financially, structurally and legally incapable of addressing the crisis. On the fundamental policies relating to mental illness, addiction and housing for the homeless, moderate Democrats, conservatives and Republicans have either gone along with the liberal and progressive agenda or been powerless to prevent it since the 1960s.

The crisis of untreated mental illness, addiction and homelessness is growing worse. Between 2013 and 2016, complaints of homeless encampments to San Francisco’s 311 line rose from two per day to 63 per day. Conditions in the city are internationally recognised as inhumane. In 2018, the United Nations’ special rapporteur visited San Francisco and said, ‘There’s a cruelty here that I don’t think I’ve seen, and I’ve done outreach on every continent.’

Many of San Francisco’s homeless live in densely populated, centrally located areas. The most infamous of these is the Tenderloin, a downtown neighbourhood that borders government buildings including City Hall, a major shopping district with several large tourist hotels and many of the city’s concert venues and museums.

Some argue that the homelessness situation in San Francisco isn’t worse than other cities, but studies show that warmer climates and more expensive housing are major factors behind higher rates of homelessness, both sheltered and unsheltered, in San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles. In much of California, one can sleep outside for most of the year without freezing. Half of the unsheltered homeless population in the United States is in California and Florida alone, even though the two states are home to just 19 per cent of the population.

High-tech companies like Salesforce, Twitter and Stripe, progressives noted, had attracted thousands of employees who had driven up rents, resulting in tenant evictions. While all big cities struggle with homelessness, the West Coast cities of the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and Seattle struggle more. The change over the last 15 years has been dramatic. Between 2005 and 2020, the estimated number of homeless people in San Francisco increased from 5,404 to 8,124. The estimated number of unsheltered homeless rose from 2,655 to 5,180. The San Francisco Bay Area as a whole saw sheltered and unsheltered homeless increase by 32 per cent between 2015 and 2020, with the share of unsheltered homeless rising from 65 to 73 per cent. The total more than doubled in Alameda County, which includes Oakland and Berkeley, between 2015 and 2020.

Meanwhile, homelessness declined in the nation as a whole and in other big cities. Homelessness nationwide fell from 763,000 to 568,000 between 2005 and 2020. In the same 15-year period, the homeless populations of Chicago, Greater Miami and Greater Atlanta declined 19 per cent, 32 per cent and 43 per cent respectively. While it is true that New York City saw an increase of 62 per cent in its homeless population between 2005 and 2020, over 99 per cent of New York’s homeless have access to shelter. In San Francisco, just 43 per cent do.

San Francisco has a much higher share of unsheltered homeless who are ‘chronically homeless’ than other cities. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) defines the chronically homeless as those who have been homeless for a year, had four episodes of homelessness totalling 12 months in the last three years, or those who are too disabled to work. Of the roughly 5,200 unsheltered homeless people in San Francisco, 37 per cent in 2020 were chronically homeless.

While the homeless are poor, few poor people live on the street. Nearly 90,000 people in San Francisco live in poverty but just over 8,000 are homeless. The vast majority of people, including the very poor people who are priced out of San Francisco’s expensive rental markets, move out of the city or move in with friends or family. Vanishingly few decide to pitch a tent on the filthiest sidewalks in America.

The answer must be redevelopment. But this comes at a price. It can cause changes in the demographics of a neighbourhood. Critics complain of too many tourists, too few arts venues and rising rents for those units that do not receive subsidies. But the price of not redeveloping is much higher: the destruction of human dignity and civil society.

Redevelopment makes housing more abundant and can reduce the concentration of poverty. It grows the tax base and generates revenue to improve schools and transportation. That’s what happened in New York City when the open-air drug markets in the Alphabet City area of the Lower East Side were closed and the area redeveloped.

Redevelopment is a chance to make the Tenderloin, the Blade and Skid Row walkable, liveable and beautiful. I am surprised to find little opposition to redevelopment, and even some enthusiasm. Given California’s stagnation, we cannot allow our response to the untreated addiction and mental illness crisis to depend upon significantly expanding the overall housing stock. Human dignity, and the sanctity of our cities, must come before the political agendas of NIMBYs, YIMBYs and everyone else in between.

At the same time, the Tenderloin, Skid Row and the Blade cannot be the only sites of new housing development. Attempting to make them that would be unfair and impractical. If California ever chooses to return to population growth, while reducing the impact of historic injustices, the state will need to build a lot more housing, from apartments and condos downtown to fourplexes and adjacent dwelling units in the suburbs.

In exchange for more apartments downtown, Californians could agree to more suburbs on former farmlands. YIMBYs sometimes misdescribe how cities add housing. Cities around the world, from Tokyo to Atlanta, become more dense as they grow outward. Some pro-density advocates point to Tokyo as a city that grew its population without taking up more land, but Tokyo’s area increased 54 per cent from 1990 to 2010. Its rate of expansion doubled during this time, and it became less dense overall. Housing in suburbs is far cheaper to build than in the cities, which is how Tokyo and Atlanta have been able to keep overall housing prices comparatively low.

Those who move to the Bay Area, and pay dearly to remain, do so in part to enjoy California’s spectacular natural environments. These public areas should remain off-limits to any kind of development. But allowing for suburbanisation of California’s ranches and farmlands would still allow for strong protections of California’s scenic natural areas like Yosemite, the redwoods and the oak woodlands and green spaces near cities.

The obvious way to do so is by rescinding the regressive tax breaks California and other states give to uneconomic farms and ranches. Over the last several decades, the amount of California’s land that was converted from farming to housing has declined. In 2009, five times more of California’s land was used for pasture (17 per cent) and farming (8 per cent) than for cities and suburbs. People should be free to use their land for uneconomic purposes, but they should not be subsidised by taxpayers, particularly when the land would have far higher value as housing.

Whether or not housing can be significantly expanded in California, we should redevelop neighbourhoods that have been taken over by open-air drug scenes for strictly humanitarian and public order reasons. Americans not suffering from serious mental illness should have a right to shelter, though not to a studio apartment, much less one in one of the world’s most expensive downtown real-estate markets. Shelters should be safe, clean and humane. But they also must be low-cost, basic and not so nice as to serve as an incentive to homelessness. And better housing should be earned, not given away unconditionally.

Over the last two years we have seen a disturbing rise in politically motivated disorder. In each case, elected officials not only failed to respond swiftly and decisively; they contributed to the undermining of law and order. In every case I felt an anxiety I had never felt before: the fear of losing my country. I began to genuinely worry that America could become like one of the undemocratic and unfree nations I have visited over the decades. Disorder and the loss of freedom go hand in hand. Political leaders who fail to maintain order are often replaced by leaders who sacrifice freedom.

Many of the people who enjoy some of the highest levels of prosperity and freedom in human history are also the least grateful, and least loyal, to the civilisation that made it possible. The progressive obsession with changing the names of schools and tearing down statues of people allegedly guilty of genocide in the past comes at a time when our greatest global rival is actually guilty of committing one in the present. Today, America is so divided that some progressives are openly proposing that America split apart. This suggestion raises a question similar to the one the psychologist Viktor Frankl demanded of his depressed clients: Why doesn’t America commit suicide? What should America live for?

The traditional answer is freedom, but Americans are deeply divided over its meaning. Today, that starts with valuing freedom as a state of affiliation, not disaffiliation, and of responsibility to, not freedom from, one another as fellow Americans. We must return to a view of freedom that is universal, and not just for people designated as victims. We must affirm equal justice under the law, and equal enforcement of the law.

The American frontier closed over a century ago, and Western values, Californian ones especially, increasingly define the whole of the United States. But we in the West are not living up to our role as leaders, or to our duty to one another as fellow humans and citizens. It is time for us to grow up. That should start in California, the state that most embodies the American frontier spirit and our love of freedom, and in San Francisco, the city that most embodies our ingenuity. It is here, perhaps in the bay that connects the city to America, that we should complete the American project and build what Frankl proposed: a Statue of Responsibility.

Will Trudeau’s clampdown on the Freedom Convoy backfire?

Canada has long been viewed as a peaceful, welcoming country. Like most western democracies, it has witnessed some difficult historical moments: divisive election campaigns, Quebec separatism, and policy debates on free trade, capital punishment, gay marriage and decriminalising marijuana. While these issues led to periods of tension, cooler heads have usually prevailed.

The Freedom Convoy, however, which has seen hundreds of truckers converge on Ottawa and the blockade of cross-border trade with the US, has been a moment like no other in modern Canada.

The Freedom Convoy’s important message of more individual freedom and less government restrictions and lockdown measures during Covid-19 resonated with many Canadians. Conversely, the potential economic ramifications from traffic logjams, blockades and reduced amounts of cross-border trade has started to divide family, friends and neighbours. People want the protest to have a peaceful resolution, and not lead to further frustration, anger – or worse.

How the Freedom Convoy got to this point is an intriguing story on its own.

On January 15, Canada’s minority Liberal government announced a Covid-19 vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers. It was a significant policy shift. Truck drivers and other essential workers had been exempt from the two-week quarantine rule for unvaccinated travellers crossing the Canada-US border. Meanwhile, the Canadian Trucking Alliance had estimated that 85 per cent of Canada’s 120,000 truckers were vaccinated. If the vast majority of men and women who drove the big rigs were complying with the rules, why were they being targeted?

While these matters could have been managed without a restrictive government mandate, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau motored ahead. He knew that most Canadians were fully vaccinated – 78.69 per cent as of Feb 4, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada. Meanwhile, a January 19 poll by Maru Public Opinion found that 66 per cent of respondents favoured ‘mandatory vaccinations for everyone aged 5+.’

Trudeau, a left-leaning Liberal whose political antenna has regularly been on the fritz since taking power in 2015, misread the room once more. Two years of restrictions and lockdown measures had reached a tipping point in the Great White North. The bizarre decision to target truckers, who serve such a vital role in transporting goods and services, was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

In response the Freedom Convoy was organised to protest mandatory Covid-19 vaccines for the trucking industry. Participants came from across Canada, linking together on the nationwide Trans-Canada Highway. A GoFundMe campaign that started off with the ambitious goal of raising $7 million (CDN) surpassed $10 million, although that money has been frozen until organisers reveal where it will be used and spent. Although quite a few truckers participated in the protest, the majority were Canadians who drove their cars to the nation’s capital in Ottawa, in support of the cause of freedom.

Trudeau pushed back by depicting the protesters as a ‘fringe minority’ with ‘unacceptable views.’ This harkened back to Hillary Clinton’s description of half of Donald Trump’s supporters as being a ‘basket of deplorables’ during the 2016 US presidential election. The PM’s strategy, much like Clinton’s, was a failure and only served to increase interest and sympathy for the cause he opposed.

Meanwhile, Liberals pointed to some less-than-savoury characters who latched on to the Freedom Convoy. A Nazi swastika and Confederate flag were seen in the crowd, while a statue of a national hero, Terry Fox, along with the National War Monument and Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, were desecrated. None of these things were defensible. Alas, that’s what often happens at rallies, marches and protests – be they left-wing, right-wing or no wing. No one has a monopoly on the higher moral ground.

There’s also been the unmistakable fact the Freedom Convoy has largely been a peaceful gathering. Protesters come from all parts of Canada, and represent all walks of life. They’re tired of restrictions, mandates and lockdowns. They’ve suffered economically and emotionally. They want to regain control of their lives, and want things to return to normal (or whatever the ‘new normal’ entails).

This is all perfectly reasonable, and difficult to achieve in a protest that won’t end.

Some protesters have said they won’t leave Ottawa until the Liberals either meet their demands or resign completely, which obviously won’t happen. Truck horns have been banned for ten days in this city, which led to an unfortunate (and avoidable) incident with police arresting and handcuffing a 78-year-old retired janitor who defied this rule. Similar protests have occurred in cities like Toronto, and Coutts. The Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, a crucial international border crossing between Canada and the US, is in the midst of a blockade that’s stalled cross-border trade. Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a Conservative, declared a state of emergency on Friday to help bring the blockades and protests to an end. On Saturday, police officers moved to break up the Ambassador Bridge protest.

Where do things go from here? The next few days could end up being some of the most important in Canadian history. Let’s hope that cooler heads prevail once more.

How Britain’s fracking industry was regulated into irrelevance

This week the fracking company Cuadrilla announced that it was permanently closing its two shale mines in Lancashire, after the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) declared that shale gas companies must seal up the wells they had drilled and return the land to nature.

It is, on the face of it, a very strange step to take at this time. The wells have not been producing any gas for some years, of course, ever since environmentalists launched their scare campaign against the industry. It was a campaign that was astonishing in its brazenness. Tiny earth tremors recorded near the wells, of a scale that is entirely normal in, say, the mining industry or in geothermal energy developments were rebranded by activists ‘earthquakes’. The chemicals used – all licensed as entirely safe by the Environment Agency – were declared to be dangerous poisons. In one particularly egregious case, householders were given leaflets which claimed that the gas companies were going to use industrial quantities of a known carcinogen called ‘silicon dioxide’. That’s sand, in common parlance.

And just as they have always done, environmental correspondents across the mainstream media relayed it all to a mostly credulous public, with not a note of doubt raised.

The aim of the campaigners and their media allies was to destroy the industry before it took off, or at least to have it regulated into irrelevance. At first, the government held its ground, but with the media in full chorus that didn’t last for very long. After drilling operations caused a pair of microtremors (of a size somewhat smaller than a lorry rumbling past your window) the scaremongering reached a new intensity. Stories were circulated to the media that homes had been damaged. These claims were later shown to be baseless, but by then the government had had enough, and their resistance crumbled. New rules were put in place that made operators stop work if they caused even a tiny earth tremor. The so-called ‘red light’ level was set so low – far below anything detectable – it was said that if you wanted a long weekend, all you had to do was drop a spanner on the drilling pad on Thursday evening.

The government was making it abundantly clear that they had decided they could do without onshore gas (or at least the political flak that came with it) a message that was reinforced by the fact that no other industry that caused earth tremors had to operate under the same strictures.

Soon afterwards, an outright moratorium followed, and the wells have sat idle ever since. Three years on, however, we are in a very different political landscape. Covid was bad enough, but we are now in danger of being overwhelmed by an energy price crisis too. Unusually for the energy and climate arena, everyone is in agreement: the proximal cause of the crisis is the price of gas, which has surged as the world recovers from the pandemic. Heating bills have shot up in response, and because the market price for electricity is set by gas turbines, there has been a knock-on effect on power prices.

If high gas prices are the problem, then reasonable people might conclude that the solution would involve delivering lower prices, which in turn would mean increasing the supply. Of course environmentalists will say that we should instead build more windfarms and install more heat pumps, but these projects would take several decades to deliver, so they are of little help in the near future. And even in the rather longer term, they would still not help, because market prices are set by gas turbines (the marginal generator, in the economic jargon); that’s why they are currently so high.

That means that the only way out of the crisis in the next few years is to drive down the cost of gas. An increase in the domestic supply would help, because it would enable us to replace some of our more expensive imports, and in particular liquefied natural gas.

This being the case, how can we explain the decision to seal the wells up? In fact, it makes sense if you take a look at the OGA’s remit. In this extraordinary document, you will find no mention of any duty to ensure that operators aren’t cutting corners. There is nothing about making sure that they deliver for consumers, nor even anything about national energy security (another issue of pressing urgency, given Mr Putin’s machinations). Instead, the role that government has given it revolves entirely around delivering Net Zero. Put bluntly, the OGA is more about closing the industry down than regulating it.

When the price cap on domestic energy bills is lifted in a few weeks’ time, there is likely to be a great deal of anger. If people learn that the government’s political cowardice has been making things worse, a major political backlash is on the cards.

The fading legacy of Deng Xiaoping

After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, it was clear to pragmatists in the Chinese Communist Party, led by Deng Xiaoping, that Maoism had not worked.

By the late 1970s, food production had failed to keep up with population growth and nine out of ten Chinese were living on less than $2 a day. But the Party didn’t want to admit the inviability of communism, its raison d’etre. Instead, it dubbed the ensuing decades of privatisation, foreign investments and lifting of price controls ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.

So the country remained nominally communist, even though state-owned enterprises were liquidated en masse and the private sector made up the bulk of Chinese GDP by 2005. For hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese, like my family, reform and opening were keenly welcomed. My uncle was the first in the family to go to university; my mother found work in an international company in the city. When I came along, my childhood was not marred by hunger.

But the CCP has moved on from Deng. These days, instead of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, the Party talks about ‘the new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics with Xi Jinping as core’. With the abolition of term limits and an increasingly tight grip on China’s civil society, government, military and so on, Xi Jinping had already shown himself to be an ambitious Communist leader more akin to Mao and Deng than their relatively bland successors (Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao). But this year, as Xi reaches the end of his first decade in power, this is no longer enough. Xi wants to be second only to Mao, with Deng’s legacy a necessary casualty.

Nowhere was this more clear than in the rare Resolution on Party History published at the Sixth Plenum last November. To read the document, one would have thought that Deng was no more important in Chinese history than presidents Jiang or Hu. A nod was given to the Deng’s role in initiating reform and opening, but by and large the document commemorated the Mao years (while acknowledging the ‘mistakes’ of the Cultural Revolution) and set out the CCP’s ambitions for the Xi era. Xi’s name was mentioned 22 times, Mao’s 18, and Deng’s only six.

Those ambitions are a more assertive, centralised and socialist China, quite different to what Deng envisaged. In a country that still reveres the former paramount leader and his policies, Xi knows that he can only push through his own agenda by subtly forging a personal legacy that is greater than Deng’s. The rhetoric of the November Resolution bolsters the very real changes directed from Zhongnanhai, the guarded Beijing complex where China’s top leaders reside.

This year, expect to hear more about ‘common prosperity’. Deng was unabashed about unabated economic growth, encouraging ‘some regions, some people to get rich first’, Xi put a stop to that. These days, the CCP talks about tackling ‘excessive wealth’ (never quite defining what that means). Billionaires like Jack Ma have had their knuckles rapped through tightening regulation on debt and monopolies (in Ma’s case, a last-minute policy change meant he had to pull the listing of his fintech company, Ant Financial, valued at $310 billion).

Chinese companies now fall over backwards to pay penance for being successful – Ma’s e-commerce firm Alibaba has pledged $15.5 billion to the ‘common prosperity’ cause, and Tencent, the company behind WeChat and the game League of Legends, has pledged a similar amount of money to poverty alleviation. ‘Tencent is just an ordinary company in the greater scheme of the country’s development… [We will be] good helpers’, Tencent’s Pony Ma said recently.

There are also efforts to end the borrowing and infrastructure spending that fuelled China’s early growth. Real estate is the biggest offender, which is why the giant developer Evergrande and it’s founder Xu Jiayin have been targeted. (Former businessman Desmond Shum’s memoir Red Roulette contains a fascinating vignette of when, in 2011, Shum talked Xu out of buying a luxury yacht off the Côte d’Azur because ‘for $100 million you’d expect more elegance, dangling chandeliers’.)

Amid rumours of a property tax coming this year and President Xi saying things like ‘houses are for living in, not for speculation’, the Chinese property market has tanked. The value of home sales fell by 16 per cent in November and S&P estimates that a third of China’s listed developers could face liquidity problems this year.

This latest turn away from Deng comes on top of Xi’s already different approach to diplomacy and politics. When dealing with foreign nations, Deng’s maxim was taoguang yanghui – keeping a low profile and focusing on domestic growth (which has controversially been translated as the ominous ‘hiding your strength and biding your time’). It served the country well in the face of international backlash over the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown – so much so that Hong Kong would still be returned to China by 1997 and the country would join the WTO by 2001. Xi’s wolf warrior diplomacy, enshrined in Xi Jinping Thought, is the polar opposite of that approach.

In politics, the abolition of term limits and the de facto ending of collective leadership within the Politburo Standing Committee overturned two constitutional reforms Deng introduced. Presumably, having personally suffered and seen the country suffer under Mao’s unchecked power, Deng thought these checks imperative. It was also Deng who proposed the ‘one country two systems’ principle to Margaret Thatcher, vital for the peaceful return of Hong Kong. That arrangement is now dead under Hong Kong’s National Security Law, with real implications for any peaceful reunification of Taiwan. To the west of the country, in dealing with the ethnic minorities of Tibet and Xinjiang, Deng favoured pluralism, recognising their differences and encouraging cross-border trade for the sake of growth. Nobody could say that is what’s happening in Xinjiang today.

Yet turning away from Deng is not about Xi’s vanity (at least, not just). Today’s China has new and serious problems. For one, rapid economic growth came with rampant corruption and growing inequality. There is a housing crisis for younger generations, despite the fact that there are enough empty flats in the country to house the entirety of the British population, as the Financial Times worked out last year. Shum vividly documents the extraordinary extravagance of those made super rich by reform and opening (he barely blinked at spending more than $100,000 on wine at a meal). My family didn’t make that kind of breakthrough, but we knew that our lives were still much better than others in the countryside and to the west of the country, where the wealth had yet to trickle through.

Xi has been explicit that economic inequality creates social problems. He points to America’s culture wars as evidence. ‘[In] some countries, the divide between poor and rich and the collapse of the middle cause divisions in society, extremism in politics and populism runs wild – this is a very profound lesson!’ He fears that one can already start to see this in the millennial movement to ‘lie flat’, where young people are protesting the pressures of modern life through voluntary unemployment and singledom.

The strength of modern China also gives Xi options that Deng simply didn’t have. How much of his ‘bide and hide’ was a strategy of necessity when the Chinese economy was a mere 6 per cent of American’s GDP, and the People’s Liberation Army mainly equipped with Soviet cast-offs? Xi has calculated – probably correctly – that China can now throw its heft around to achieve its territorial and political goals. It can elbow others out of the South and East China seas, boycott Australian coal and wine when Canberra misbehaves, fly its warplanes over Taiwan’s self-declared airspace. It no longer needs to hide.

It’s also not simply a case of Deng the good liberaliser vs Xi the hardline Marxist revanchist.

If he were alive now, Deng may well agree with some of Xi’s approach. Deng was no softie – the tanks would never have moved into Tiananmen Square without his say so. In the process of quelling the student protests, Deng also sold out his liberal-minded protégé, the then-General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who wanted to negotiate. Hundreds – some say thousands – of young people died on June 4 1989, and Zhao spent the rest of his life in house arrest. Zhao’s memoir, smuggled out of China and published posthumously, reflected on his erstwhile mentor: ‘Deng had always stood out among the party elders as the one who emphasised the means of dictatorship. He often reminded people about its usefulness’. For Deng as for Xi, the Party always came first.

Deng the diplomat could be charming, as Mrs Thatcher found. He’d think little of the childish jibes that China’s wolf warriors now tweet. And on the issue of term limits, his constitutional reforms were only in place for 35 years (facilitating three peaceful exchanges of power) before being overturned. Deng, who was sent to a tractor factory by Mao during the Cultural Revolution, put limits in for a reason.

Trying to divine what’s happening behind the scenes in Zhongnanhai will forever be akin to watching shadows on the cave wall. There are signs of a Dengist fightback. In September, Professor Zhang Weiyin, an economist at Peking University, warned against the common prosperity agenda: ‘If we lose our conviction in the market, bring in more and more government intervention, China can only walk towards common poverty’. Just before Christmas, an intriguing article was published in the People’s Daily. Authored by Qu Qingshan, an esteemed party historian, the article headlined ‘Reform and Opening was an awakening for the Party’ and made no mention of Xi Jinping at all. Instead, it piled praise on Deng Xiaoping and lauded the Party’s efforts in allowing the people to make the most of reform and opening. This comes on top of Deng’s own son’s caution to the Chinese leadership in 2018. ‘Keep a sober mind and know our own place’, Deng Pufang said in what was read by some as a subtle denunciation of the emerging wolf-warriorism. He made the comments to China’s Disabled Persons’ Federation (he had been paralysed in the Cultural Revolution), but the speech never made it onto the website subsequently.

Perhaps Deng Jr and these academics represent a wider movement in the CCP that opposes Xi’s direction, or (more likely) they are just a small band of old-fashioned liberals who are out of step with a Party that largely coheres around the current leader. There’s unlikely to be any real opposition to Xi Jinping as he begins his third term in this autumn’s National Party Congress. Deng Xiaoping would have wanted Xi to appoint a successor, but what Deng wants matters less and less each day in today’s China.

New Yorker: Cressida Dick handled de Menezes killing with ‘dignity and grace’

For some time now the New York Times has been a pioneer in the field of dodgy reporting on Britain. From declaring that Brits live on porridge and boiled mutton to suggesting that we love to cavort in swamps, the US paper of record has managed to paint an increasingly strange picture of life in this country. But could the NYT now be facing stiff completion from the New Yorker in the British fantasy genre?

This weekend, the magazine published a strange defence of Cressida Dick, after she was forced to resign as commissioner of the Metropolitan Police by Sadiq Khan.

The New Yorker piece, headlined ‘The Misogyny That Led to the Fall of London’s Police Commissioner’ argues that the police chief’s downfall came after she was ‘overwhelmed’ by the misogyny of the men she led – as opposed to the catalogue of errors that defined her career. This line of argument is rather undermined by Cressida Dick’s own tone-deaf and embarrassing responses to recent police scandals which saw the Met, for example, advise women to flag down a bus if they were approached by a lone male police officer following the arrest of Wayne Couzens.

But Steerpike was more concerned about the US magazine’s characterisation of the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot dead by Metropolitan police officers on the tube in 2005, after they mistook him for a suicide bomber.

The New Yorker writes:

‘In 2005, Dick was in charge of the counterterrorism team that killed Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian man, on the Tube, after mistaking him for a suicide bomber. Dick always handled that momentous error with dignity and grace.’

To describe de Menezes’s killing – which saw an innocent man shot seven times in the head by police officers – as being handled with ‘dignity and grace’ is stretching the truth to say the least. Cressida Dick was Gold Commander in charge of the bungled operation, which was later found to have committed catastrophic errors, although Dick was cleared of personal responsibility. Still, Dick didn’t quite seem to grasp the gravity of the Met’s errors when she told an inquiry in 2008 that ‘If you ask me whether I think anybody did anything wrong or unreasonable on the operation, I don’t think they did.’

In the aftermath of the killing a series of briefings from the Met suggested that de Menezes had somehow caused his own death. The Met suggested that de Menezes was dressed suspiciously and had failed to listen to officers at Stockwell station, claims that were later found to be false. The police force also attempted to block the police complaints commission from investigating the case.

In fact, the incident was handled with such ‘dignity and grace’ by the Met that de Menezes’s family this week said that Cressida Dick should have been fired 16 years ago for the fiasco.

Still, what do facts matter when Dick’s resignation can be seen through the prism of American identity politics?

Stonewall’s disgraceful attacks on the EHRC

Whatever happened to the brilliant gay rights movement led by people like Ian McKellen, Simon Fanshawe, Matthew Parris and Angela Mason? For people of my baby boomer generation, one of the miracles of the late 20th century was the speed at which public prejudices against lesbian and gay people evaporated.

Those prejudices haven’t disappeared; but it is now accepted as common sense that LGBTQ+ people should be treated equally. When I started work that kind of statement seemed like generations away. The advocacy of the original founders of Stonewall changed attitudes to such an extent that a Tory Prime Minister – David Cameron – could boast in a conference speech that he supported same-sex marriage, not in spite of being a Conservative but because he was a Conservative – and be received with an ovation from his elderly, right wing audience.

Today, that gay rights movement seems a shadow of itself, preoccupied by the intricacies of a language despotism that has emerged from the faculty lounges of minor North American universities. The latest step, a call for the UN to revoke the status of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, of which I was the founding chair, is baffling. Who could have imagined that LGBTQ+ campaigners would so contort themselves that they are petitioning a body which is advised on human rights by countries that stone women and imprison gay men?

The EHRC is threatened with having its status as a national human rights institution removed because it has raised some questions about Scottish government proposals to make it easier for people to declare themselves men or women, despite what is said on their birth certificates and irrespective of their actual biology. The Scottish government’s proposals could arguably result in open access to women-only spaces for people with penises, and women being locked in cells with men with a history of violent rape. The EHRC has therefore asked for more ‘detailed consideration’ of these issues before the Scottish government changes the Gender Recognition Act. The accusation is that the EHRC is doing so because its new-ish boss, Kishwer Falkner, was appointed by the UK government, and is therefore taking orders from evil anti-trans Tories.

This is a puzzling charge. When it comes to sex, the current Prime Minister is demonstrably the most liberal and least uptight occupant of the post since Lloyd George, and is known to favour a ‘woke’ approach to LGBTQ+ issues.

More substantively, the EHRC’s queries about Scotland’s policies seemed unexceptional to me. It would be bad manners to comment on the decisions of my estimable successors at the CRE/EHRC, David Isaac and Kishwer Falkner, but as far as their independence is concerned it’s worth pointing out that both were appointed in exactly the same way as I was. I served three full terms under different Labour administrations and the Tory/Lib Dem coalition, and it is a matter of public record that I managed to piss them all off with some regularity.

When we created the EHRC we insisted on its independence, not just from government but from sectional interests and powerful lobby groups too. I know that this infuriated some racial and religious groups, who never stopped trying to get me sacked. The problem is that for these sectional interests, independence meant doing what they wanted. They regarded any consideration of the needs of others as a betrayal of their right to shape the world exactly to their desires, and anyone who did not do their bidding as a ‘phobe’.

That fury perhaps explains the somewhat irrational appeal to the UN. Having been the only other person to go through the proposed UN process, might I respectfully suggest to the EHRC’s critics that they consider the irony of arraigning Falkner before a body whose expert committee has recently appointed as its rapporteur a longtime representative from Uganda, where homosexual acts carry a penalty of life in prison. Or the irony of demanding that a Muslim woman, Falkner, be judged by a body whose advisory group proudly features representatives from Saudi Arabia, China and Russia.

To be fair, I admit that I do have beef with the UN machine, which declared me persona non grata when I led the EHRC – partly because when asked to endorse the appointment of Saudi Arabia to the chair of a UN body sitting in judgement on the rights of women, I laughed out loud and couldn’t stop. I do hope the current EHRC is not asked to pay a price for my over-developed sense of the absurd.

But this is, in the end, no laughing matter. There is deep pain and distress here, and a minority of extremists within the trans community who have their own political aims seem to care not one jot about the amplification of that hurt for the majority of trans people. I spent several years, with others like Harriet Harman, trying to craft regulations that would ensure that people who wanted to change their sex could do so with the minimum amount of physical and emotional pain. For me it is hard to see how this call will do anything to help a single teenager born into what he or she regards as the wrong body.

There are wider consequences here. The trans extremists threaten not only the standing of the LGBTQ+ movement, but the hard-won gains of the anti-discrimination movement of the past 50 years. To start with, the point at issue is not compassion for people in pain, nor the rights of trans women and trans men, which are clearly laid out in law. What is being sought by a small minority is the eradication of the very notion that women exist. What the small minority of largely ‘natal men’ campaigners actually want is for sex to be declared a matter of the imagination – specifically their own.

If these fantasists got their way any individual could declare themselves any sex – or none – at any time. Unfortunately for this group, the basis of discrimination law is that people have characteristics which lead to others unjustifiably depriving them of opportunities. Remove this capacity to claim discrimination and any remedy against injustice becomes impossible to enforce. So much for pay gap reporting or claims for equal pay.

But more widely, the elimination of protected categories would inevitably have to be applied to other characteristics if we decided that we could each decide what our sex was. This is a notion that, frankly, could only emerge from a privileged group of white men, who believe that the world should be shaped exactly as they want it in order to fulfil their fantasies. I’m afraid that unless and until science makes it possible for me to decide that tomorrow I’ll have pale skin and blonde hair, I’m not buying it.

Unfortunately, our feeble establishment in the media, universities and some parts of politics are now so afraid of having the finger pointed at them that they cave in to tiny, but vocal lobbies. The extremists have so far had it their own way. It’s time for the grown-ups to come back from the pub and turn off the fantasy on TV. And if the EHRC is first through the door, so much the better. That’s why we created it; that’s what it’s there for.

Will Neil Basu’s past comments come back to haunt him?

Cressida Dick may be gone but will her replacement be even worse? The under-fire Metropolitan police commissioner quit the job on Thursday after five years in the role, meaning that three of the last four Met bosses have now been forced out in disgrace. Dick’s departure has prompted an immediate search for her successor. Unfortunately, one of the very reasons for her survival at the top for so long, was a lack of a viable alternative, with many top cops preferring quieter pastures than London or opting for greater riches in the private security sector.

Perhaps that dearth of talent can be shown in one of the early favourites for the role of Dick’s replacement. Met Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu has featured in much of the commentary around the vacancy, having spent the entirety of his 30-year-long policing career in the Met. Unfortunately, while Britain’s top Asian officer no doubt has many qualities, he has demonstrated a somewhat alarming disdain for the Fourth Estate throughout his time in office.

As head of Operations Weeting, Elveden and Tuleta, Basu oversaw three inquiries into phone hacking, computer hacking and alleged payments to police officers by newspapers. All three came to a total bill of around £19.5million and were criticised on the grounds of cost and for criminalising journalists. Subsequently in July 2019, it was Basu who threatened to prosecute a young journalist working for the Mail on Sunday after the newspaper published leaked diplomatic cables which led to the resignation of Kim Darroch, the British Ambassador to Washington.

Darroch’s derisory comments about the Trump administration were leaked to Steven Edginton, a 19-year-old freelancer. His subsequent story prompted Basu to author an incendiary statement claiming that the publication of the leaked communications could be a criminal matter; comments which were roundly condemned across the political spectrum. Boris Johnson, then a contender for Tory leader, said that any prosecution ‘would amount to an infringement on press freedom and have a chilling effect on public debate’ while his rival George Osborne simply described Basu’s intervention as ‘very stupid and ill-advised.’ 

The news therefore, that Basu could be in line for the Met’s top job has not gone down well with many of Fleet Street’s finest. Edginton, who is now 21 and working for the Telegraph told Mr S that if Londoners ‘value freedom of the press and are sick and tired of woke police officers’ then Neil Basu would be ‘your worst nightmare as Met Chief.’ Edginton said that after the officer threatened action against him and the paper: 

Basu refused to back down from his threats when he gave a speech a few months later to the Society of Editors saying if he had a chance to repeat his actions he would have done so. Basu’s Counter-Terrorism unit launched a completely disproportional and frankly political investigation into the Kim Darroch leaks and, after more than two years, have failed to bring any charges. Basu’s open attempts to prevent journalists from doing their jobs should be enough to rule him out from any further promotion.

Let’s remember too of course that Basu has also made somewhat, er, undiplomatic comments about Boris Johnson himself, having claimed the Prime Minister would be barred from joining the police because of his remarks describing black people as ‘piccaninnies’ and comparing Muslim women to ‘letterboxes.’ He also publicly attacked a ‘No Deal Brexit’ on the grounds that it would make the country ‘less safe.’

Given that the staunch Brexiteer and current Home Secretary Priti Patel gets to make the final call on the Met appointment, Steerpike suspects Basu’s comments could come back to haunt him.

The dog catcher, the terrorist and the dark history of Sinn Fein

The dead in the ground and those who put them there in the name of ideology do not rest easily in Ireland. The Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin was recently forced to close its wall of remembrance to those who died in the Easter rising of 1916 because of relentless vandalism. In previous attacks the wall had been smashed with sledgehammers and in 2017 paint was thrown over it.

What drove this constant destruction? It seems it was targeted because the attackers could not tolerate the presence of the names of British soldiers on the wall. These soldiers had died alongside republican rebels and civilians in the five days of insurrection that gave birth to the modern Irish state.

It is worth noting that the wall was designed as a ‘necrology’ – its purpose was to simply name the dead without putting any political spin on their memory. It was designed on the same basis as the Ring of Remembrance at Ablain-Saint-Nazaire in France which remembers 580,000 soldiers, victors and vanquished alike, killed in world war one. In Ireland it seems WB Yeats’s observation of ‘great hatred, little room’ still holds sway beyond the grave.

Was its closure a craven surrender to intolerance or gross insensitivity to a sacred cause? Unionists and not a few constitutional nationalists saw the closure of the memorial as an illustration of the way a future united Ireland would accommodate people’s British identity. And no political party has made unionists worry more than Sinn Fein. After the cemetery was closed, the Sinn Féin politician Violet-Anne Wynne welcomed the decision, saying the wall ‘commemorated a war that wasn’t ours.’

Ireland’s largest north-south party has had a complicated relationship with reconciliation, to put it mildly. But the political descendants of the IRA – who carved out a special place of horror in the minds of the people they terrorised for 30 years – are often much better at trying to weaponise their bloody past.

With elections on the horizon in the North and South, and with Sinn Fein well placed for government in both jurisdictions, you can expect to hear more bromides from the party about how Unionists will be welcomed and cherished in a united 32-county Irish socialist utopia. But can these assurances be trusted? The anniversary of the dog catcher and the terrorist is a useful if depressing guide.

Just over 30 years ago, a man who I knew as a neighbour, Eric Glass, was working as the council dog warden for Fermanagh district council. In his spare time he was also a part time corporal in the UDR, the locally recruited British army regiment whose main role was to support the police in counter terrorist operations. This was enough for republican terrorists to target him for execution as they had done on countless occasions with other members of the protestant minority in this border country – where part time police officers and soldiers in civilian roles were the softest of targets.

Four terrorists armed with a variety of weapons, including assault rifles, waited to murder Mr Glass, concealed in a lane near a lonely border cottage. They had lured him to his death on the pretext of reporting a dangerous dog on the loose. By 1992 this set up was a grotesquely routine business for sectarian murderers where I grew up. The killers included Joe McManus, 21, from Sligo over the border who ran towards Mr Glass’ van with a revolver. Despite being ambushed, outnumbered, outgunned and his legs subsequently riddled with bullets, Glass struck back with his personal protection weapon. He shot McManus dead and wounded and eventually drove off his remaining executioners. For this act of heroism, he was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal by the Queen, a decoration ranking just below the Victoria Cross.

A few days ago, Orga Sinn Fein, the party’s official youth wing, described this incident in these terms:

‘On the 1992 anniversary Volunteer Joe MacManus was killed on service. He was involved with the IRA Brigade of Sligo and was killed after a shootout in Belleek. We honour this young man’s sacrifice in the struggle for Irish freedom.’

It is hard to reconcile this putrid agitprop with reality but it is revealing nonetheless. It shows that the chain of nativist bigotry that connects the dead of the Easter rising to the dead of the Troubles is still intact. Those chains bind Sinn Fein to a bloody past however many warm references to ‘our Unionist brothers and sisters’ is dispensed by its notional leadership.

Its leadership is notional – just ask the police forces North and South of the border. The IRA’s army council still reportedly calls the shots, which illustrates the difficulty modern Sinn Fein has when trying to dispense with its murderous Siamese twin. You can be forgiven for having no sympathy for this predicament.

It is hard work trying to spin the countless assassinations of protestant victims into a virtue but someone has to do it. Often the party’s members ‘refuse to apologise’ for lionising people who in any other context would be seen as mere psychopaths or serial killers.

It is this refusal to understand, much less care about the harrowing toll cowards like McManus and his ilk unleashed on my community that sticks in the craw. Northern Ireland’s obese and ethically bed ridden human rights industry underwritten by the state has no time to focus on this. Their craven silence, their focus on the behaviour of the state, responsible for only 10 per cent of Troubles deaths, the majority absolutely justified, reveals their complicity in the revisionism of the past.

To paraphrase Stalin, Joe McManus’s death was a tragedy for his family but the deaths of dozens of the protestant minority community in the border country he and his grouping terrorised are mere statistics.

So when Sinn Fein celebrate the destruction of tolerance in Glasnevin cemetery and continue to worship the terrorists who perverted the legacy of the Easter Rising by executing Irish men, women and children on their doorsteps, in their farmsteads, at their places of work and worship, they are showing us who they really are. They reveal how they would act towards a minority community in the event their vision of a united Ireland is achieved. If you’re interested in a reconciled future, it’s not a pretty sight.

Meet Sergey Naryshkin, Putin’s spymaster in Ukraine

On a cool October day in Moscow in 2017, Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, stepped up to the microphone at an outdoor ceremony to unveil a statue honouring a notable predecessor.

‘The name of Pavel Fitin is returning to our history,’ Naryshkin said of the man who ran the Soviet Union’s foreign spying apparatus during world war two. A heroic bronze version of the wartime Fitin, winter coat draped over his shoulders, loomed over Naryshkin and the other dignitaries. Fitin had filed dozens of intelligence reports repeatedly warning Josef Stalin of Nazi Germany’s plan to invade the Soviet Union (to no avail, it must be said, a fact that went unmentioned in Russian news accounts of the ceremony).

Five years later, Naryishkin, a trim 67-year-old who favours nicely tailored business suits and understated ties, has the Nazis on his mind again — at least as a useful Kremlin propaganda line. In January, echoing a constant Russian theme, the SVR boss compared the government of Ukraine to the Nazis who invaded and occupied much of Russia during 1941-1945. Given that the Nazis are equated in Russian minds with absolute evil, Naryshkin’s metaphor sounded like an alarming call to all Russians to prepare for another looming fascist invasion.

Ukraine is squarely in Naryshkin’s crosshairs today. Along with the FSB, Russia’s ruthless domestic security and counterintelligence service, the SVR has long been running spies and double agents in Ukraine and around the world, while overseeing global disinformation operations related to the conflict, according to well-informed sources. Just last month the US and Britain sanctioned four Ukrainians, including two members of its parliament, for allegedly acting as FSB agents. It is likely that the GRU, Russia’s lethal military intelligence service, would be chiefly responsible for staging so-called ‘false flag’ incidents that the US and UK allege the Russians have been preparing to justify an attack on Ukraine, the sources say.

But Naryshkin is undoubtedly a leading player in Russia’s attempt to intimidate the US and Europeans into rolling back their support of Ukraine and Nato’s advances in the post-Soviet era. And for that, Naryshkin has Vladimir Putin to thank.

There can be little doubt that the most defining moment of Sergey Naryshkin’s life took place some 40 years ago, when he encountered Vladimir Putin in the dark and eerie corridors of the KGB’s regional headquarters in Leningrad, known as the Big House. It was a time, under party chairman Leonid Brezhnev, when the Soviet Union was sinking into a stagnant quagmire of unrealised growth and military decline.

Naryshkin had just graduated from one of Moscow’s most prestigious institutions, the Felix Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB. Putin was already working in the foreign intelligence department of the Leningrad KGB when Naryshkin bumped into him.

‘That’s how we met,’ Naryshkin said with a bashful smile on a Russian TV programme in 2018. He ‘already worked there. And so the acquaintance happened.’ Naryshkin also implied he’d gone skydiving with the future president after they were sent to the Red Banner Institute, now known as the Academy of Foreign Intelligence Service. ‘The parachute jump made a very good impression on me…’ he said. ‘I liked it, I liked it very much.’

The future looked bright for both men, despite the grim outlook for Mother Russia.

They had a lot of things in common, especially the traumas of losing close family members during the Nazi blockade of the city. Both also had parents who did not belong to the Communist elite. They grew up outside party ruling circles and had to confront the challenges of adulthood on their own. Driven by personal ambition to climb up the social ladder, they decided that a job in the KGB, perhaps the most powerful Soviet institution outside the Communist party, would enable them to make their mark on the world. And they were not mistaken.

But they would take different paths to prominence. Putin, for instance, obtained a law degree. Naryshkin, two years younger, felt an attraction to science and technology. He graduated from the Leningrad Mechanical Institute with the diploma of an ‘engineer radio mechanic.’ It was there he met his future wife Tatyana, a fellow student. They later had two children, Andrey and Veronica. Today, according to Russian media accounts, he is a grandfather.

For a 67-year old, Naryshkin looks very fit. He likes to begin his mornings with a swim. In a TV interview, he also spoke of his recent fascination with golf. And just like Putin, he seems to enjoy the company of oligarchs, especially when their wealth is at his service. His swim routine recently sparked a controversy when it was discovered that he frequents a pool owned by the controversial Azeri billionaire God Nisanov.

There are no public records of Naryshkin’s work and assignments in the Leningrad KGB. But like Putin, he must have come to the attention of his superiors as a promising young Chekist, as the secret police cadre are known. Only the best, and most trusted, are selected for foreign intelligence training.

Putin and Naryshkin, codenamed Comrades Platov and Naumov at the Red Banner Institute, spent a year learning the essentials of spy craft from veteran foreign intelligence officers. There was also foreign language training. For Putin, it was German, for Naryshkin, French. Interestingly, neither was part of the powerful group of Middle East specialists (known as the Middle Eastern ‘mafia’) that came to dominate the higher rungs of the KGB’s foreign intelligence arm in the late 1980s and in the SVR after the collapse of the USSR.

When they received their first foreign assignments, Naryshkin’s turned out to be more prestigious than Putin’s. Was it because he was a better student, or more of a teacher’s pet? Or because of his specific language training and technical expertise? In any case, while Putin was sent by the KGB to Dresden in East Germany undercover as a lowly translator, Naryshkin was dispatched as a diplomat to Brussels, home to Nato and several European multilateral institutions, making it a key espionage battleground between East and West. By day a functionary in the embassy’s economic section, by night Naryshkin plied his real profession, recruiting spies to steal western science and technology secrets for the Soviet military-industrial complex. With the USSR on the verge of an economic collapse in the mid-to-late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev’s KGB had put technical secrets at the top of its espionage agenda, even higher than political intelligence.

It is not known whether Naryshkin had any success recruiting spies in Brussels. But it is known, thanks to his own admission, that his spy-running career suffered a premature ending. A fellow intelligence officer from the Soviet embassy defected to the CIA and burned him as well as two others. A pro-government Russian media outlet identified the defector as Igor Cherpinsky, a Ukrainian-born KGB officer who worked under the cover of a cultural attaché. In early March 1990, he ‘vanished,’ together with his wife and small child. His current whereabouts (and identity) are unknown.

His personal experience of betrayal might be what drives Naryshkin to emphasise the concepts of honour and loyalty in many of his official statements. He can come off as urbane and soft spoken, far more diplomatic than his boss, Vladimir Putin, who is given to using the language of street thugs, such as in 2010, when he publicly warned both real and potential defectors that, ‘traitors will kick the bucket, trust me.’ But Naryshkin’s surface gloss cannot entirely disguise an inner fury that emerges in TV interviews when he’s asked about the premature end of his spying career,

Just like Putin, Naryshkin quit the Russian intelligence service after the USSR’s 1991 demise and wrangled a job in the St Petersburg city government. He got involved in economic development and foreign investments and, typical of city officials there in the mid-1990s, including Putin, seamlessly toggled between his government job and his business interests. From 1996 to 2004, for example, he had a seat on the board of Philip Morris Izhora, the Russian affiliate of the American tobacco giant, while at the same time working for the city government. There’s no doubt he became a rich man by mingling his government and business positions.

Naryshkin also used this time to improve his educational credentials — with decidedly mixed results.

His 2004 PhD dissertation, ‘Foreign Investments in Russia as a Factor of Economic Development’ — no doubt written for him by sloppy research assistants — was panned by the investigative organisation ‘Dissernet’ as a serious case of plagiarism. Forty per cent of it, they said, was lifted from other sources without any attribution. A second, higher-level dissertation (called a habilitation) conferred by the Russian government’s Institute for Legislation and Comparative Legal Studies in 2010, had similar issues.

In 2009 Naryshkin was appointed chairman of Russia’s Historical Truth Commission, set up to ‘counter attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia’s interests’. Naryshkin’s ‘professorial’ status in economics seemed like an odd credential for this appointment — but its function was to crush criticisms of Soviet behaviour from Ukraine and other former republics and Warsaw Pact states.

Naryshkin’s rise in the Kremlin began in 2004 when, coinciding with the beginning of Putin’s second term as president, he was appointed to the position of a deputy chief of the economic directorate in the president’s administration. Very soon after, he was promoted again, acquiring the rank of a minister. And then in 2007, he rose again, when he was selected by Putin to be a deputy prime minister.

When Dmitry Medvedev became the president of Russia in May 2008 (and Putin rotated to the position of prime minister) Naryshkin was appointed to the top position in the new administration: Medvedev’s chief of staff. His real job was to ‘keep an eye’ on Medvedev for Putin, the Financial Times’ Charles Clover wrote at the time.

Putin must have highly valued his old KGB colleague’s efforts. Naryshkin was tapped up as a candidate of the government’s United Russia party in the December 2011 elections for the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament. His election was a sure thing, but to some surprise, he not only won office but was elected Speaker, despite having no prior parliamentary experience. Moving sideways from a top government executive perch to the leadership of the Duma, is common in Russia, where people from the same political clan hold all the positions of power and can exchange one position for another without any checks and balances. In today’s Russia, they’re known as ‘siloviki, the former officers — security men, soldiers and spies — who have flooded into state structures on the coat tails of Vladimir Putin,” Clover wrote.

Naryshkin’s tenure as the Speaker was marked by the dramatic escalation of Russian foreign policy assertiveness and geopolitical revisionism, in which he played a major role. After Russia’s annexation of the Crimea in March 2014, he was included on the list of Russian officials sanctioned by the United States and the European Union. Just like other members of Putin’s inner circle, however, he accepted the sanction as a badge of honour and never tired of claiming that Russia’s activities were justified by the political developments in Ukraine.

In 2016, Naryshkin was running for reelection, but Putin had other plans for him: running his revamped old outfit, the SVR. In television and other public appearances, Naryshkin, at 62, appeared to relish his return to the spy business.

Under his leadership, the SVR doubled down on its PR campaign to shape its new image as powerful but professional – a KGB with better manners. Its website was updated and expanded. Books by KGB veterans, and pro-regime journalists who were given special access to sensitive material, proliferated. Documentary TV series and films were generously funded and promoted. The SVR’s annual award ceremony was expanded to honour personalities from Russian cultural life, including sculptors and musicians. A group of seven veteran KGB ‘illegals’ who had operated abroad under false identity and with no official cover, were publicly declassified for the first time and feted as heroes. One of them, Mikhail Vasenkov, aka Juan Lazaro, had been arrested by the FBI in Operation Ghost Stories in June 2010 and later exchanged, together with other SVR illegals, in a spy swap in Vienna.

The intensive focus on public relations reached a peak during the SVR’s 2020 centenary celebration. Despite the fact that Tsar Nicholas II’s regime had operated a well-developed and fairly successful foreign intelligence network, the SVR insisted its origins lay in the Bolshevik Cheka’s International Department, or INO, established by Felix Dzerzhinsky in December 1920. Evidently, the legacy of the Soviets — and ‘Iron Felix’ — continue to find favour among those running Yasenevo, the SVR headquarters near Moscow. In 2018, they added the name of Yuri Andropov, the KGB chairman who crushed the Prague Spring and hounded dissidents in the 1960s and 70s, to the official name of the SVR Academy. It had been removed in the early 1990s.

There is no doubt that Naryshkin is the driving force behind the ongoing myth-making about Soviet intelligence operations and personalities. With the possible exception of the SVR’s founding father Yevgeny Primakov, no other post-Soviet Russian spy chief has made such a significant mark of the SVR presence in the public sphere.

In parallel with the SVR’s PR campaign (designed in part to attract new recruits, especially from the class of highly educated, well off young Russians who’ve been the ‘winners’ of the post-Communist transition), the number of SVR operations abroad has increased as well. Naryshkin has publicly boasted of certain ‘friends’ around the world, who he says sympathise with the emerging Russian challenge to America’s global hegemony and are willing to help with covert assistance. He’s even hinted that at some point in the distant future, the world will learn of a powerful Russian spy network in the West, akin to the notorious ‘Cambridge Five’ recruited by Moscow in the mid-1930s. Of course, Naryshkin has offered no evidence for any of these claims.

Retired career CIA operations officer Douglas London casts doubt on such a claim, saying it’s the FSB that benefited most from the post-Soviet breakup of the KGB and reorganisation of Russian intelligence.

‘The FSB received more power, turf and talent,’ London says. ‘We’ve witnessed [the SVR’s] focus and success in cyber, but we haven’t seen evidence they’re otherwise as potent abroad [as the old KGB] in recruiting spies.’

However, there is evidence that Naryshkin has been more successful than his predecessors in forging cooperation with foreign intelligence services, including the CIA under Mike Pompeo. In his TV interviews, Naryshkin mentions with a hint of nostalgia his ‘long’ phone conversations with Pompeo as well as personal meetings with him, two of which are known.

As President Donald Trump’s CIA chief, Pompeo first visited Moscow in May 2017. Later, when he became the Secretary of State, the visits continued. In January 2018, Naryshkin, together with the chiefs of Russia’s other main security and intelligence agencies — Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB (domestic security and counterintelligence), and Igor Korobov, then-head of the GRU — visited Washington at Pompeo’s invitation. This was despite the fact that both Naryshkin and Korobov had been sanctioned by the US over the Crimea annexation (Bortnikov was added later in response to the poisoning of the Russian opposition activist Aleksey Navalny). The visit sparked controversy and its rationale remains unclear.

According to Naryshkin, the ‘warming’ relations with the CIA stopped abruptly when Gina Haspel became CIA director in May 2018. There were no more in-person meetings or even phone calls, he said. Last November, however, with Russia ramping up troops on Ukraine’s border, CIA director William Burns broke the ice, so to speak, with a visit to his SVR counterpart in Moscow.

While today Naryshkin frequently imputes all kinds of nefarious intentions to the CIA (while always leaving room open for cooperation on counterterrorism matters), he is publicly full of praise for his Chinese counterpart. The two countries have a similar geopolitical outlook on ‘the emerging threats to global stability’ (read: America), he claims, and even share analytical reports and information. He also says he’s proud of his friendly relations with counterparts in other countries — some 20 of which he’s visited — and enjoys being one of the main hosts of the annual Moscow Security Conference, which brings together defence and spy chiefs or their deputies from dozens of countries around the world.

In his public appearances with officials and diplomats, Naryshkin comes off as calm, with a smiling willingness to listen. To great effect, the pace of his utterances often slows to a trickle, which seems to charm and disarm his interlocutors. To an unpractised eye, Naryshkin might seem like a rather ordinary, even nice and considerate fellow, somebody who’s ready to accommodate contrary views. What gives him away, though, is the apparent absence of any sense of humour: he reportedly hardly ever laughs, or cracks even the smallest joke or pun. Behind the mask, in the depth of his steely eyes, is that old stone cold KGB agent.

Just like other top Russian officials, Naryshkin also has the habit of using coarse and demeaning expressions in response to critics of his patron Putin. He routinely calls Alexey Navalny ‘the Berlin patient,’ a sarcastic reference to Navalny’s hospitalisation in Germany after he was poisoned. He almost seems annoyed that Navalny recovered at all. To apparently hasten his demise, the opposition leader was arrested upon his return to Russia, on charges of parole violations, and sentenced last February to two years and eight months in prison.

Last year there were well-founded rumours that Naryshkin would replace Sergey Lavrov as foreign minister. Lavrov is over 70 now, which, until recent changes, was the legal retirement age for government officials. There was talk that Lavrov was going to be appointed to the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian Parliament. His old friend Sergey Kislyak, the former Russian ambassador to the US who came under investigation by the FBI as one of the main protagonists in the Kremlin’s 2016 US presidential election campaign interference, is already there as a senator and could show him the ropes.

Lavrov, however, shows no signs of desiring retirement. And it also increasingly appears that Naryshkin, forged by the KGB, prefers to remain in the world of shadows — unless, or until, Putin, who made him who he is, changes his mind.

The academic taking on the trans activist bullies at Bristol university

Raquel Rosario-Sanchez’s case may prove to be a landmark one in the current war on women. She is a PhD student who is taking a civil action against her university, Bristol, on the grounds of sex discrimination and negligence.

She is arguing that the university failed to tackle transgender activists who subjected her to a two-year hate campaign. The case, held in the Bristol Civil Justice Centre, is being taken as a last resort: Rosario-Sanchez previously attempted to resolve matters with the university through the usual channels.

It all began in 2018, when Rosario-Sanchez was invited to chair a meeting of the socialist feminist organisation, a Women’s Place UK (WPUK). She was asked for good reason. Her feminist credentials are impressive. By the time she came to the UK from the Dominican Republic aged 28, Rosario-Sanchez had two degrees in women’s studies, had worked in the women’s sector, and was involved in the campaign to end male violence towards women and girls.

Her interest in issues related to the male demand for prostitution led her to apply to eight British universities to do her PhD on the topic. Having received unconditional offers from all of the universities, she chose Bristol, having become aware of the centre within the university devoted to producing research and evidence relating to ending male violence towards women and girls. It was through this centre and her campaigning work that she became involved with WPUK.

None of this saved her from accusations of transphobia from the Trans Taliban. They waged a campaign of harassment against her over a period of two years. She made many complaints to the university about the bullying and harassment, all of which were dismissed. Instead of helping her, the university doubled down in support of the trans activists. Rosario-Sánchez says that when she stated that only biological woman can give birth, she was reported to the university for being ‘transphobic’ and ordered to apologise.

Eventually, the online abuse became intolerable. Rosario-Sanchez was bullied on campus and the stress became so extreme that she was forced to halt her studies.

Shortly after her troubles began, in early 2018, Rosario-Sanchez invited me to speak at an event at the university on prostitution. I was impressed by her energy and enthusiasm, as well as her forensic grasp of the complex issues relating to the sex trade.

I saw just how vicious the Bristol trans activists could be when I encountered a number of them at a meeting in April 2018 set up to discuss proposed amendments to the Gender Recognition Act, which I was covering for a newspaper.

I was blocked at the door by masked men in balaclavas, many of them identifying as non-binary or transwomen. Rosario-Sanchez was not at the meeting but, having seen video footage of the protest, she confirmed to me that some of the students that had waged war against her were present.

The protesters blocked the stairwell and refused to let me, or anyone else, into the building. One tried to knock my phone out of my hand whilst the others circled me like a pack of hyenas. What struck me was the sheer arrogance and lack of any self-awareness whatsoever. They simply expected people to merely capitulate. The police certainly did, they just let them get on with it, and eventually we found our way into the building through a side entrance. Capitulating to bullies is not the answer; they can smell blood. This is why Rosario-Sanchez’s case against Bristol university is so important; the bullies cannot be allowed to win.

This isn’t a war about transgender people, or even transgender ideology. It is a war against so called progressive men, who have discovered a new and canny way of sticking it to us whilst still appearing to be on the right side of history. Framing this as nasty women not allowing trans people to live their best lives hides what it really is; a misogynist backlash against feminism. Until recently, this subterfuge has even worked with most liberals, although the tide is turning.

But there is another reason why we should back this case to the hilt and stand alongside Rosario-Sanchez. It is about her as a person, a human being. She’s strong and resilient, but she’s also vulnerable and hurt. Rosario-Sanchez left her home and travelled thousands of miles to fulfil her dreams. She left a loving family, her beloved dog, friendship network, and language. ‘I even left the beautiful weather to come here,’ she told me.

If she loses, the bullies win. It means that universities will be able to continue to be cowed by trans activists, and that feminists will effectively be silenced. It would embolden universities like Sussex, whose inadequate responses allowed the bullying of feminist Professor Kathleen Stock to continue unabated.

What has happened to Rosario-Sanchez is a disgrace. If you are still silent on the ways that extreme trans rights activism is affecting her and women like her, you should hang your head in shame. Now is not the time for silence. Now is the time to sit up, and take action.

Licoricia and the forgotten expulsion of England’s Jews

About three minutes’ walk from my house in Winchester is Jewry Street. It runs from the Theatre Royal at one end towards the 13th Century Great Hall at the other. It’s a picturesque throughfare, dotted with cafés, restaurants, churches and a library. But despite its name, it is all but Judenrein.

I’ve lived in Winchester for almost 15 years. My grandparents brought their children up here. The air is clean, crime levels are low and there are many green spaces. It is often listed as the best place to live in Britain, especially for families. But the walk along Jewry Street has always given me a sense of eeriness.

Along the street lie unmarked locations of Jewish significance. The site of the synagogue – whose owner was lynched as part of a blood libel in 1236 – is now a small car park behind a bric-a-brac shop. At the end of the road used to stand the fortified Jews’ Tower, in which the community would take refuge during pogroms.

This eeriness is familiar to me from visits to Germany and Eastern Europe. Many Jewish sites there are empty sockets, defined not by their presence but by their absence. You can feel the ghosts. In Koppenplatz, in the old Jewish quarter of Berlin, there is a sculpture called The Deserted Room. It comprises a table with two chairs, one of which is lying on its back as if somebody has been dragged away. It is about what has been taken from the world.

In 1290, England expelled its Jews. In one haunting incident, Jewish refugees on a ship from London to France were persuaded to stretch their legs on a sandbank at the mouth of the Thames. When the tide came in, the captain refused to lower the gangplank. They drowned, leaving him to sail home with their worldly possessions.

Amid the modern preoccupation with colonialism and the slave trade, this difficult chapter in our island story remains obscure. The official 3,000-word biography of Edward I on the Royal Family website, for instance, does not mention the fact that he expelled the Jews. It’s not like anybody’s making a fuss. As a community, Jews tend to keep their heads down. But we feel it.

Those brutal years occurred many centuries ago. Britain today is one of the most tolerant societies the world has ever known, and nobody is more grateful than the Jews. If it hadn’t been for Edward I’s Edict of Expulsion, however, our community in this country would almost certainly be larger and more vibrant. There would still possibly be a synagogue on Jewry Street. Less would have been lost from the world.

This week, the healing process started. A statue was erected on Jewry Street of a Jewish businesswoman called Licoricia, who was close to Henry III before she was stabbed to death in 1277, along with her toddler son. A carnival of Jewish dignitaries, from the Chief Rabbi to Simon Sebag Montefiore, descended on Winchester for the unveiling. Prince Charles, who had been scheduled to attend, was forced to pull out after catching Covid, so I was unable to bring the biography of Edward I to his attention. Nonetheless, I suspect there hadn’t been that many Jews in the city for 700 years (except, perhaps, at my family parties).

In the peace of this morning, with the colour and bustle of the event behind me, I walked along Jewry Street into town. Licoricia formed a striking silhouette against the bright blue sky. She had been positioned to gaze towards the site of her old house, several doors down from the carpark where the synagogue once stood, where its owner had been lynched. On her plinth was the Hebrew phrase from the book of Leviticus, ‘love thy neighbour as thyself.’ Her expression was defiant, as if looking death in the eye, and her son was glancing over his shoulder, as if at the coming expulsion. Or perhaps they were looking to the future.

I never expected to be so affected. The statue will change my sense of myself in the city, and it will change, I expect, my sense of belonging in this country. The same must be true for many Jews, especially the handful who live in Winchester. Memorials can never remove the suffering of the dead, but they can grant the living something important: acknowledgement.

Can Labour members ever learn to love Keir Starmer?

Keir Starmer is the master of all he surveys. Thanks to partygate, Labour now enjoys a consistent poll lead over the Conservatives and his personal ratings are significantly ahead of those of the beleaguered Boris Johnson. This has given him more confidence to take on some of Corbynism’s sacred cows. But can he persuade Labour members he is the change the party needs to win power?

Starmer has firmly rejected attempts by Unite, Britain’s largest trade union and a key Corbyn backer, to shape party policy. Amidst the build up of Russian troops on the border of Ukraine, Starmer has also been quick to emphasise his support for Nato. For good measure, he has attacked Jeremy Corbyn’s favourite anti-imperialists, Stop the War.

Since Starmer became leader there has been a drift from Labour amongst those who swelled its ranks to support Corbyn’s failed attempt to transform it into a hard-left organisation. Laura Pidcock’s recent resignation from Labour’s National Executive Committee was part of this broader trend. Pidcock was once seriously mooted as Corbyn’s successor. But the disastrous 2019 election and her own defeat in the once rock-solid seat of North-West Durham put paid to that. Pidcock has nonetheless remained popular with party members; in 2020 she came second highest in elections for the NEC. There she and her confreres hoped to frustrate Starmer’s untangling of the Corbyn legacy. But after their demand that the former leader be given the Labour whip back was easily defeated, she threw in the towel. Pidcock remains a party member but others who share her views have joined various splinter and spoiler groups, organised under the hopeful banner of the People’s Alliance of the Left.

For now, Starmer’s leadership looks safe from a Corbynite resurgence: it is now his party more than it ever was. In demonstrating his iron grip over the party, has he become the true heir to Blair?

There was a time Tony Blair hoped he had also transformed Labour into his own image. In 1995 Blair held a plebiscite over his proposal to change clause four of Labour’s constitution, which since 1918 had committed it in principle to nationalisation. The clause was, Blair wrote in his memoirs, ‘a graven image, an idol’, one irrelevant to the modern world but which nonetheless beguiled party members. Yet Blair convinced a staggering ninety per cent of members to support his more market-friendly formulation. It was a moment that led Blair to believe he had finally recast his party’s culture: it really now was New Labour. 

Yet despite winning three general elections, subsequent events – notably Corbyn’s election as leader in 2015 – indicated Labour culture remained little different to the one Blair had inherited from John Smith. All he had proved was that members were willing to tolerate a moderate leader they did not much care for while they looked likely to deliver power. But when Blair’s election-winning success appeared to have become a thing of the past, they turned to more familiar friends on the left who scorned Blair’s new party.

As for Starmer, it is true that so far as many Labour members are concerned their leader is currently more tolerated than loved. Labour’s values, beliefs, and emotions – the same ones that sustained Corbynism – have not disappeared, even if the far left is currently in retreat. So the danger for Starmer is this: how will members react when Johnson is replaced by a new Conservative leader who might start gobbling up his poll lead?

As Blair found out, changing Labour’s culture is no easy thing and Starmer has plenty of other more pressing tasks ahead. But the recent publication of Rethinking Labour’s Past suggests some of those working in support of Starmer’s leadership have clear ambitions on that front. It is edited by the director of Progressive Britain, only established last year and which seeks to provide the thinking that will promote what it believes is a necessary fundamental reconstruction of the party. The book brings together various historians (including, I should confess, me) to analyse key aspects of Labour’s past and to promote what might be termed a non-Corbynite view of the party’s history. That Rachel Reeves and Nick Thomas-Symonds also make contributions shows the initiative has support from within the shadow cabinet.

The basis of the book is that to successfully tackle the challenges of the present, Labour needs a de-mythologised understanding of its history. This has proved a difficult task under previous leaderships. Why? Because Labour members are apt to embrace a nostalgic view of that past, one consisting of socialist heroes and militant struggles. How some recalled the fiftieth anniversary of the ‘Battle of Saltley Gates’ is a case in point. 

Corbyn tapped into this misty-eyed view of the past as leader, one best defined by the brass bands of the Durham Miners’ Gala, which has become a heritage event as directed by Ken Loach. It is a wonderful if mostly bogus version of history, one which gave heart to the party as it crashed to defeat in 2019. Yet as party chair Ian Lavery discovered as he toured the north trying to persuade working-class voters to remember the glorious days of the 1984-5 miners’ strike and vote Labour during that campaign, it is not one with many echoes outside the party’s ranks.

It will take more than one book to change Labour members’ attitudes to their own party’s past. But if the effort is sustained and Starmer continues to ride high in the polls there is some hope he might win his own version of the culture war.