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The EU is being timid with Ukraine
Donald Trump may have pulled the world in a decidedly protectionist direction, but the European Union is not doing its part to lead by example and uphold the ideals of free trade – not even with Ukraine, where the strategic case for free and frictionless trade is overwhelming.
On 6 June, the EU is expected to end the existing tariff-free regime introduced after the Russian invasion, subjecting Ukrainian imports of agricultural commodities to very tight caps, as stipulated by the earlier Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) between the EU and Ukraine. The DCFTA was supposed to be revised by the June deadline, ideally increasing the quotas for tariff-free imports of agricultural products, but the negotiations have stalled for political reasons, for fear that they would disturb Poland’s politics ahead of its presidential election.
Ukrainian agricultural exports to the EU – wheat, corn, and poultry, among others – skyrocketed after the invasion. The share of Ukrainian wheat exported to the EU, for example, went up from around 2 per cent before the war to over 50 per cent in 2023, in part because of the disruption of exports from Odesa to countries of the Middle East and Africa.
The Ukrainians estimate that the reversal will cost them around €3.5 billion in lost government revenue. But, given the EU’s broad budget support for Ukraine, it is more likely that the cost will be absorbed by Europeans themselves.
Trade, not aid, may be a naive slogan at times, but it should be obvious that in Ukraine’s case it is better for everyone to keep its sizeable agricultural sector afloat during the war, including by reducing trade barriers, than to have to spend billions rebuilding it once the conflict is over.
The political signal that the policy shift sends is unfortunate – and it extends far beyond just agriculture. Ukraine continues to aspire to become an EU member state, ideally by the end of this decade. Presumably, it will then continue to be a major agricultural exporter – before the war, agriculture accounted for 40 per cent of Ukraine’s exports, some 10 per cent of its GDP and 14 per cent of employment (compared to EU figures of 9 per cent, less than 1.5 per cent, and 4 per cent, respectively).
Yet, once Ukraine joins the EU, there cannot be any talk of restricting its agricultural exports to the rest of the single market. Moreover, under the current rules of Common Agricultural Policy, (CAP) Ukrainian farmers would also be entitled to a large share of its direct payments – not exactly an attractive political proposition for EU-27.
But while CAP can be reformed, trade is just trade. If even Ukraine’s closest neighbour and ally, Poland, finds competitive Ukrainian agriculture intolerable today, how will the EU come to accept Ukraine as part of its single market, with no quotas, tariffs or other restrictions?
In a Panglossian view, transitory periods for free trade in agricultural products could be introduced at the time of Ukraine’s accession. After the war, one may speculate, Ukraine could be able to reorient its agricultural trade back to its traditional export destinations outside the block. But there’s no guarantee that will happen, especially if Ukraine is a full-fledged member of the single market.
Instead of wishful thinking, what Europe needs is political leadership that can explain and make the case for some of the short-term sacrifice involved in helping to turn Ukraine into a success story. That applies as much to the need for European involvement in policing a future peace agreement – possibly without the backing of the United States – as well as to the economic disruption that is involved in integrating a large country such as Ukraine into the EU on an accelerated schedule.
Ukrainians have eyes and ears. They can see whether European leaders are willing to confront powerful interest groups – in this case, Polish farmers – in the interest of Ukraine’s European future or not. Being less than fully upfront about the challenge ahead risks turning Ukraine’s EU accession into a disappointing story, all too familiar from places such as the Western Balkans. And that would be a tragedy.
The wild optimism of a young society
There’s a strange, near-psychedelic effect that hits you when you travel from an ageing country to a young one. It’s not in the buildings – although the buildings may be new and hastily tiled – and it’s not necessarily in the politics, culture or economic vibe. No, the shock is more human, and intimate. It is in the faces. And the noise. And the nappies.
I’ve just returned from a few weeks in Central Asia: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan. And while these nations differ in history, ethnicity and landscapes, two things bind them all. First, they all have an inexplicable penchant for a stodgy rice dish called plov (in Samarkand I bought a T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘All You Need is Plov’). The second is that they are all young. Wildly, exuberantly young.
The median age in Kyrgyzstan is about 25. In Britain it’s 40. In crèche-crazy Sweden it’s 41. In France it is a creaky 42. The United States, which we always think of as a ‘young country’, clocks in at a too-late-for-kids 39. Germany is a doddery 46, Italy a decrepit 48, and in Japan a close-to-retiring 50. On the island of Jeju, South Korea, it is an astonishing 59, and wow, do you notice. Seeing a child on Jeju is like seeing a leprechaun in Ireland – a glimpse of a miraculous small thing which makes you tell excitable tales in whisky bars.
One big reason Central Asia is so young is that they are still pumping out sprogs. Why this might be is much debated. Is it Islam? Well, maybe – except Islam in Central Asia is fiercely policed. Imams need licences. Niqabs have been banned. Is it women doing traditional roles? Again, probably not, as one of the few positives of communist rule in the ’Stans is that women were liberated – and still are. An hour in Tashkent or Almaty will convince you of that.
Yes, Central Asia has its political problems – don’t we all – and Russia for a neighbour (oh dear) and definite human rights issues (eek!). But the women? They are happy and confident, unveiled and uncowed. Hurray.
Either way, we won’t solve the mighty global puzzle of birthrates looking at Islam or communism, so let’s go back to the feels. What does it feel like to be in a young country? In a few words: peculiar, sad, disconcerting, wild, grand and energising.
For a start, you, the visitor, feel tragically old, if you are anywhere north of 35 (and I am far north). In Astana and Bishkek I felt like stooping Gandalf visiting a particularly cheerful Shire – peering over my long grey beard at elegant elves, jocular hobbits and handsome Riders of Rohan.
Being in a young country is also annoying. Because, my God, the babies and the littl’uns. They are everywhere. Entire supermarkets are apparently set aside by the state for toddlers to have tantrums. Elevators anywhere take a wearyingly long time to arrive because so many families are loading and offloading strollers, baby carriers, tired infants.
It is noisy. Because kids and young people are noisy. They scream, wail, giggle, whoop, and get massively and volubly overexcited by mediocre ice cream. As they grow into teens they get even noisier – demanding horrible music, openly laughing in streets, riding flatulent mopeds, gathering in random clusters to be garrulously beautiful without even realising it.
And there’s one of the crucial upsides: the constant stream of human beauty. The people of Central Asia are alluring anyway – a serendipitous cocktail of Persian, Russian, Chinese, Mongol genes has sorted that out – but when the median age is 25, that means wherever you look you tend to see beautiful young people at their physical best. You see them so often it’s like there’s a sudden fashion for beautiful young people: the way there was a sudden fashion for Burberry check in southern Europe in 1995.
The people of Central Asia are alluring anyway – a serendipitous cocktail of Persian, Russian, Chinese, Mongol genes has sorted that out – but when the median age is 25, that means wherever you look you tend to see beautiful young people
The effect is uplifting. As you walk through a young country, you feel the pulse of animated life. The fierce but natural optimism of a place where most people are under 30, and many are under ten. The UK last had a median age of 25 in the days of Peak Empire, when we exported people to half the world, and conquered the rest. QED.
This generational freshness even seeps into infrastructure. In Kyrgyzstan, everyone seems to have a smartphone QR code that pays for everything, everywhere, instantly. They’ve gone beyond contactless. And Kyrgyzstan isn’t rich. It’s simply young, and therefore full of early adopters.
The psychic lift you get from the young is sometimes so intense it is painful, because it reminds us westerners of what we’ve lost. When you live in a developed country where the median age is about 43, you grow unconsciously accustomed to the ambient muzak of decay. The news becomes an endless dirge, the culture a requiem. ‘Who will nurse the elderly.’ ‘No one goes to pubs any more.’ ‘Everyone must stay indoors to protect 90-year-olds from scissors.’
We in the West live in fearful, cranky old societies. We are ruled by midwit people too scared to do anything, policing a nation too anxious to say anything, and populated by citizens who are, sadly, too tired to care.
But not in Central Asia. Sit down, as I did, on a bench in sunny Bishkek. The person next to you will likely be 23, not 58. Therefore, the person next to you is thinking about a start-up, or a date, or an exciting new job; they are not thinking about their pension, the decline of grammar, the perils of an ageing society or that weird ache that might be hair cancer.
This sunny mood infects the next person, and the next person. There might be something great round the next corner. Things can and will get better. So you stand up and stride into a future – because the future is not a thing to fear, it is something to eagerly embrace. If all this entices you to go to Central Asia, then do: it’s amazing. Just avoid the plov and buy a ‘Plov Will Tear Us Apart’ T-shirt instead. They make you look younger. Probably.
Do cyclists know how hated they are?
Cyclists. I’ve become a tolerant cove in my old age but if there’s one word certain to raise my dander, it’s cyclists. In Brighton they think they own the place, enabled by successive stupid councils, who have spent tens of thousands of pounds on cycle lanes and those eyesore e-bikes all over town. With a murderous version of droit de seigneur – at odds with their right-on, self-righteous self-image – cyclists appear to believe that walkers are a lower order who they are free to run over as they please.
Cyclists in Brighton seem particularly fond of riding on pavements, where the most damage can be done. It’s like they see pedestrians as targets in some sort of video game – ten points for a man, 20 for a woman, 50 for a child. And it’s not just Brighton; London sounds a pedestrian’s nightmare. I asked around on Facebook and got nearly two hundred horror stories in a few hours:
One cyclist grabbed hold of my wing mirror then fell over as I drove over a speed bump. I stopped to ask if he was OK and he brandished a chain and tried to smash my car window with my two-year-old inside.
I got knocked into the middle of a busy road by a cyclist who ignored the red traffic light. He satisfyingly went flying over his handlebars into a building. Later I had concussion.
Driving through London with one particularly self-righteous middle-aged male cyclist who very blatantly and dangerously cut us up in traffic – and when my husband called him a wanker (without realising the guy could lip-read), he proceeded to follow us down the road, banging on the car door and roof. We were stuck in a queue and couldn’t get away from him.
I was crossing the road on a zebra crossing in Mayfair, when a cyclist came out of nowhere so close behind me that he gave me a shove with his hand to push me out of the way. I shouted at him and called him a ‘fucking arsehole’. He immediately turned his bike around and tried to ram me with it. He followed me into Shepherd Market and was shouting at me, calling me a bitch, when thankfully my friend – who owns a dry cleaners and was built like Arnold Schwarzenegger – came running out and chased him away.
I had one try to run me over at a zebra crossing, call me a ‘cunt’ and when I returned the insult he followed me, demanding my business card so he could sue me for defamation, all while wearing those stupid tight shiny clothes and elf shoes.
My daughter got run over by a cyclist on her way to school – he didn’t even stop to check she was OK.
#NotAllCyclists, of course – but a very large percentage indeed. As another cyclist friend told me: ‘The worse the bad ones behave, the more they ruin it for the few good ones left. There are now a large number of cyclists who ignore the rules of the road, so drivers and pedestrians get massively pissed off and hate all of them. If you state you are a cyclist now, you have to caveat by saying “I’m not a MAMIL” [pejorative acronym for “middle-aged man in Lycra”] because their behaviour has ruined cycling for the rest of us.’
Here in Brighton, pedestrians risk life and limb when seeking to take a stroll on the seafront – and even more annoyingly, on actual pavements. Rule 64 of the Highway Code states that cyclists must not ride on pavements, which, according to Sussex Police, is enforceable by law. But Sussex Police are notoriously woke, to the point that in 2022 the Telegraph reported that they became indignant over the possible hurting of a paedophile sex abuser’s feelings by ‘misgendering’. ‘Sussex Police do not tolerate any hateful comments towards their gender identity regardless of crimes committed,’ they huffed of a transvestite who abused five girls and two boys aged between six and 15. Of course they’re going to turn a blind eye to cyclists’ misdemeanours; like policemen dancing with climate change protesters who are blocking traffic, including ambulances, they’ve been well and truly kind-washed. Cyclists are left to do as they please.
Here in Brighton, pedestrians risk life and limb when seeking to take a stroll on the seafront
I’ve found that people who support green politics are slightly nastier than others in their everyday life, feeling that they had ticked the nice box and therefore somehow won the right to be nasty. When I was a volunteer at a blind home a while ago, I’d regularly take a couple of sightless ladies out for a walk; we’d set out along the bustling main streets of our city, one on each arm, only for me to have to shove them roughly into the nearest doorway as some hulking brute drove a bike at us right there on the pavement.
Inevitably, people have been killed by cyclists; when they are, sentencing is risible. Until last year it was based on legislation from 1861 only allowing for a maximum two-year sentence; things are better now, but cyclists who kill are still treated far more leniently than motorists.
It’s not being paranoid to believe that a lot of this behaviour is another form of male violence towards women, as female cyclists also report frequent harassment by their male counterparts. Victoria Pendleton said: ‘If I’m out about on my road bike and I overtake a man, I will hear a rapid crunching of gears as they try to “make amends for it”… usually followed with a pedal-mashing stomp past me.’
Shouting abuse at women for no reason as they cycle by is everyday behaviour; my friend Ruth, in Wales, says: ‘They often swear at me if I’m walking on their pavement, but never a peep if my husband is with me.’ We used to laugh at men with big cars and say they were compensating for lack of size elsewhere; I’d definitely say the same of the dander-raising MAMILs.
Stationery is quietly making a comeback
All of a sudden, our local stationery shop – the Write Stuff – has grown a shelf labelled ‘Letter Writing & Correspondence: Original Crown Mill’. And there, in ranks, are pads of beautiful writing paper – vellum and laid, cream or white, A4 or A5 – plus boxed writing sets, decorated top and bottom with flowers and/or butterflies. All with colourful envelopes to match. ‘Goodness!’ I said to Antonia, who owns the shop. ‘Who is writing letters these days?’ ‘The young,’ she said.
I was astonished and charmed. Immediately, I bought a pad of Original Crown Mill Laid (Finest quality since 1870) and decided to write to the granddaughter currently studying philosophy at York University, whom I rarely see or hear from. Actually, I have three grandchildren; two live nearby and, although I see them quite often, conversation is not their métier. So now I’m thinking letters, beginning with the York granddaughter.
The next time I was in the Write Stuff, Antonia was away – off to the London Stationery Show at the Business Design Centre – so I got chatting to one of her girls. Nicole is so loquacious and keen on paper that I could have adopted her. I learned that my initial notion – that the young were writing billet-doux to each other – wasn’t quite on the mark. More likely it is students, possibly lonely foreign students, writing to their mums and dads and wanting that Edinburgh postmark (though, according to a recent article in this very journal, they’d be lucky if it was delivered this side of Christmas). Anyway, the young like the pretty boxes of paper.
And the vellum and laid? ‘The vellum,’ said Nicole, ‘gives you a gliding experience’, whereas with the laid, which is textured, ‘you can feel what you’re doing’. It was all so tactile I could have bought up their stock. What was out of stock – and what they were waiting for, because it is so popular – was the MD paper: a Japanese paper with cotton content. It came bible-thin or thick, depending on how the surface had been treated, and ‘just soaks up ink from your fountain pen’. Fountain pen? You thought everyone had gone digital? Forget it. The Write Stuff sells at least one, maybe two, fountain pens a day. And there is a choice of 50 – yes, 50 – inks.
Paper isn’t that cheap, so who else, apart from poor students, is writing letters these days? Well, when it comes to important occasions, big or little – marriages, funerals, births, deaths – an email just won’t do. People take to the vellum or the laid and pen a personal letter. And, as Antonia (back from the Stationery Show) said: when parents receive a letter from their offspring, what does it do? They write back, of course.
Antonia was keen to direct my attention to all the pretty notebooks for journaling. Journaling? ‘It’s what young women are doing,’ she said
Antonia was keen to direct my attention to all the pretty notebooks for journaling. Journaling? ‘It’s what young women are doing,’ she said. She thinks it began post-Covid, when people became more inward – literally and metaphorically. ‘Journaling’, I read when I Googled it, is ‘a way to engage in self-expression, self-reflection and self-awareness’. It could be ‘a beneficial tool for improving mental health and managing stress and anxiety’. It has also become something of an art form. You can buy stickers, notebooks with dotted rather than lined paper, and cute stuff like softly coloured highlighters.
Actually, I’m something of a paper junkie myself. My favourite paper is a foolscap pad of lined yellow paper, preferably with a margin. The yellow wards off the terror that comes with a blank page of white, and the lines – well, keep me in line. The margins provide space for corrections and changes of mind. I have used these yellow pads ever since the day, some 30 years ago, I came upon Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. Also from my past – going back to the days when I was a newspaper reporter – are the reporter’s spiral-bound notebooks. I love the way you can write front to back, then turn them over and write back to front. I have drawers full of them, some with a sticky label on the front, many only half full. One is a souvenir from Woolworths. In the days when I wrote letters to friends and lovers, the paper I loved was onion-skin airmail – so fragile, so ethereal, so from the soul. These days I can’t find it.
A week after I had posted my letter (vellum, laid) to my granddaughter, back came a reply. ‘Dear Granny D,’ she wrote. Then three nicely written pages telling me the campus is full of bunnies and ducks (it’s spring), and which philosophers she liked (I recognised Wittgenstein). She ended with lots of love and a nice little picture of a duck. I was absolutely delighted.
I have just bought her two packs of Midori Letterpress paper, plus pale green envelopes. I think I’m onto something – and I want to keep it going. I’m sorry about the cost of stamps, but hooray for letters.
Why are publishers such bad judges when it comes to their own memoirs?
‘The publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar,’ Arthur Koestler once declared. For some reason this put-down has never stopped publishers from fathering their memoirs, and the book trade titan’s life and times used to be as much a staple of the library shelf as slim volumes of nature poetry.
As in other branches of life-writing, the procedural approach tends to vary. There are practical primers – Stanley Unwin’s The Truth about Publishing, say, from the year of the general strike, or Anthony Blond’s The Publishing Game (1971); there are delightful vagaries in the style pioneered by Grant Richards’s Author Hunting (1934); and there is the emollient, if not absolutely vainglorious, reminiscence, most recently on display in Tom Maschler’s Publisher (2005).
That such books no longer seem to make it on to publishers’ lists has an economic explanation – they don’t sell and are essentially vanity projects – but also a structural underpinning. Here, in a more corporate age, the big beasts of old-style publishing, those legendary autodidacts and self-made bruisers who trampled on their competitors like so much chaff, are most of them gone. The days when Chatto & Windus’s Carmen Callil could run her firm at a loss that exceeded its annual turnover seem as remote as the Battle of Lepanto.
Anthony Cheetham, the author of this slim, reticent yet lavishly produced volume, is a major player. In fact a glance at the CV laid out in successive chapters of A Life in Fifty Books reveals that among the handful of survivors capable of writing a history of British publishing since the mid-1960s, he is the best qualified of all. From an apprenticeship in downmarket paperback houses such as the New English Library and Sphere Books to commanding roles at Random House and the Orion Publishing Group, Cheetham was well-nigh omnipresent. He sponsored the works of everybody from Donald Trump and Andrei Gromyko to Vikram Seth and ran into every book trade shark who fiddled a royalty rate or withheld an advance.
And what does Cheetham have to say about the cavalcade of bestselling authors and devious agents who passed through the various publishing houses where he ruled the roost? Well, Ben Okri, whose The Famished Road (1991) won the Booker Prize the day before Cheetham was sacked from Random House by its American hatchet man, is ‘a master artist who has devoted himself to all nine of the classical muses’. The late Irving ‘Swifty’ Lazar, one of the most rapacious deal-brokers who ever extracted his 15 per cent, was ‘a kind and generous soul’; while of Colleen McCullough, the author of the perennially bestselling The Thorn Birds (1977), Cheetham will say only that ‘her hospitality was as legendary as her writing’.
Even Robert Maxwell is
remembered for his formidable intellect and lively sense of humour
None of which, sadly, tells us anything much about the personalities on display. Did Okri ever threaten to take his books elsewhere? Did McCullough, when not furnishing her publisher with high-end meals, ever turn nasty? These are the things that give publishers’ memoirs their zip, but Cheetham doesn’t seem interested in them at all. We are in slightly more promising territory with Kingsley Amis, whose alcoholically charged lunches once saw his companion sent home catatonic in a taxi. But no real dirt gets dished, and even Robert Maxwell is remembered for his formidable intellect and lively sense of humour.
The best bits of A Life in Fifty Books turn up in the early chapters. These take in a notably upmarket childhood in Vienna, where Cheetham’s father was a diplomat; Summerfields prep school (one of the 50 books of the title is Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, devoured by torchlight beneath the bedsheets and an example of a work that left an indelible impression on Cheetham); and Eton, where he befriended Jonathan Aitken and, while staying at the latter’s Suffolk house, met half the Suez-era Tory cabinet and defeated the then foreign secretary Selwyn Lloyd at croquet.
The first few publishing years, too, have an elegiac crackle that some of the later material lacks. I was fascinated to learn, for example, that Cheetham was the onlie begetter of Timothy Lea’s Confessions of… franchise. On the other hand, a final chapter on ‘the future of publishing’ consists of a couple of pages of bromides and a warning that ‘streamers are investing billions in new series because that’s where the money is made’.
I salute Cheetham for his persistence, his indefatigability and his lifelong habit of picking winners. I acknowledge that the British book trade would have been a much poorer place without him. But I respectfully suggest that this catalogue of his 81 years on the planet is an opportunity missed.
Murderous impulses: The Possession, by Annie Ernaux, reviewed
‘The first thing I did after waking up was grab his cock – stiff with sleep – and hold still, as if hanging on to a branch.’
The opening of Annie Ernaux’s essay might suggest that the ‘possession’ of the title is of a husband’s penis. But after our nameless protagonist leaves ‘W’, her husband of 18 years, it is with his new woman that she becomes obsessed – possessed with a ‘primordial savagery’. She is maraboutée, or bewitched. Ernaux writes not in the heat of desire but in retrospect. The translation by Anna Moschovakis is chicly austere. Like concrete poetry, small paragraphs sit adrift on the page; the text is as unmoored as our protagonist.
Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, and her hybrid memoir The Years has been adapted into a staggeringly powerful stage production. The Possession is a microcosmic analysis of jealousy and agony. Our heroine becomes an ‘echo chamber for all pain everywhere’. She goes on a ‘tortuous and relentless search’ through the internet to find the lover and fantasises about committing ‘crimes of passion’, reflecting that one is more likely to cave into murderous impulses in the evening, much like scoffing chocolate. For the French, the only thing worse than murder is getting fat.
What makes her possession possible is the ex-husband. The couple ‘maintain a painful bond’ as W drip-feeds her information about the ‘new woman’. His reasons are especially murky when he gives her a birthday present of a bra and g-string. While she dances on the edge of insanity, she revels in the pain of feeling alive. Being numb is worse than being in agony. Tragic films offer her no respite. As Ernaux adroitly says: ‘Catharsis only benefits those who are untouched by passion.’
The protagonist’s feeling of ‘a woman no longer loved’ has echoes of Jean Rhys’s devastating Good Morning, Midnight. Ernaux captures an existential panic. A profound point she makes is that to revisit romantic places you once enjoyed with a lover is impossible: we cannot step into the same river twice.
While The Possession is frustratingly slender, it’s like sipping an ice-cold Absinthe Martini: chilling and possibly fatal.
The hedgehog and the fox poll highest as ‘the nation’s top animal’
This is a truly wonderful book, erudite and fun. Karen R. Jones, a kind of alternative David Attenborough, explains her purpose: ‘Charismatic and amazing creatures are not only to be found in distant places. They are here. In our everyday spaces.’ Switching effortlessly and with relish between history, science and anecdote, the author selects ten creatures to represent Britain. Hedgehog and fox are polled highest as ‘the nation’s top animal’. Her other choices may surprise: sheep, pigeon, newt, herring, stag beetle, flea, black dog and plesiosaur.
The largest fox ever recorded, reported by the Daily Mail in 2012, was in Moray, Aberdeenshire, weighing 17 kilos. Foxes mate for life. One in seven cubs die in their first month, and their parents bring them playthings. A Bristol study recorded ‘gardening gloves, tennis balls and dog chews’. Excavations at a 16,500-year-old burial site in northern Jordan unearthed the grave of a woman and the bones and skull of ‘what was deemed to be’ her pet fox. The nature writer and farmer John Lewis-Stempel describes the vixen’s call ‘as the eeriest sound of the British night’.
Hedgehogs have been around for the past 15 million years. ‘They witnessed the demise of the woolly mammoths and saw the arrival of humans on these isles.’ They were known as ‘furze-man-pigs’ in Gloucestershire, ‘pochins’ in Somerset, ‘zarts’ in Cornwall and ‘prickleback urchins’ in Sussex. After Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle was published in 1905, according to the ecologist and ‘hedgehog man’ Hugh Warwick, this little mammal, hitherto ‘discarded and dismissed’, became extremely popular. Alas, partly due to corporate farming, there are fewer than one million in Britain today. In 1950 there were 30 million.
Jones also introduces us to the first known record of ‘sheep-counting as a device for insomnia’, as referenced by Petrus Alphonsi, a 12th-century Jewish physician and writer, in his Disciplina clericalis – ‘a selection of 33 fables drawn from the Moorish world which he transcribed into Latin’. The tale, involving a ‘restless monarch’ and his storyteller, was translated into Anglo-Norman in the 13th century. Sheep-smuggling was big in Romney Marsh in the late 1600s.
And what of the sea? The first formal mention of the herring (Clupea harengus) in Britain was in AD 709, in the chronicle of the monastery of Evesham, where ‘the fish appears as an item of revenue, later known as “herring silver”’. In Great Yarmouth, herrings were ‘silver darlings’ and Roman soldiers stationed at Gariannonum (Caister-on-Sea) acquired a taste for them.
As for the pigeon, often hated nowadays, it descends from the prehistoric Archae-opteryx, ‘about the size of a raven with a bony tail’. Pigeons, as we know them, have been around for 60 million years. They were used to convey messages by Egyptians, Romans, Persians and Greeks (including the news of the first Olympic games in 776 BC). ‘Their homing ability is utterly remarkable and still not entirely understood.’ In 1874, Scientific American recorded a pigeon’s flight from Paris to Kent which was ‘faster than today’s Eurostar’.
And did you know that flea-mating involves ‘the male flea inseminating the female with a penis two and a half times the length of its body’? I remember the flea circus – fleas pulling tiny carts – in a side tent at Bertram Mills circus in the early 1960s.
There is a final tribute to Mary Anning, the working-class woman born in Lyme Regis in 1799, who was the first person ever to discover an entire plesiosaur skeleton, a precursor of Nessie. ‘Learned men’ muscled in and took the credit. I loved this book.
The night has a thousand eyes
From a young age – ten perhaps – the author Dan Richards has had a strained relationship with night-time. Grappling with insomnia, he would take ‘the homeopathic approach to [his] waking nightmares’, rereading Moominland Midwinter despite its existential terrors. Even now, he writes, he finds it easier to sleep when he is not at home. This has, for better or worse, given him time to think – and lots to think about – while not much else was going on.
In the avowed spirit of Auden/Britten’s Night Mail, Richards now invites us to follow him across ‘an usual threshold at an unusual hour’, exploring nocturnal life on the streets of Westminster or on North Sea ferries, meeting wildlife preservationists carving out ‘dark corridors’ for bats, or investigating the damage done to our ‘finely balanced circadian timepieces’ by getting just a couple of hours of disturbed sleep.
From poorly paid social workers to hand-picked search-and-rescue crews, to Michael Fassbender playing millionaire boy racer, Overnight – to crib from one Night Mail review – creates adventure from things that happen every night of our lives. In this book about ‘love, care and service’ (with unavoidable pandemic overtones, given its time of writing), some of Richards’s subjects live for their work while others are more ambivalent. But all are doing jobs which aren’t your normal nine-to-five, often unpaid and rarely – pace Fassbender – with much glamour to them. Richards writes: ‘I am moved and comforted to know that people are watching over me during the hours of darkness’, or simply doing ‘things that need to be done before the rest of us awake’.
His regular readers will spot familiar themes: the cultish love of the British postal system; the keen musical ear (albeit one stuck on Radio 6); the verbal levity. Partial to a good footnote, Richards halts, mid opening sentence of the book, to reflect joyfully on the etymology of ‘benighted’.
There’s a touch of the bumbling non-fiction Jerome K. Jerome about the genially self-deprecating author. (He’s openly a bit disappointed when an amazing sleep-analysis system isn’t more Heath Robinson.) Plainly a decent sort, he beats himself up because he can’t remember the nurses’ names from a time when he was at death’s door; wears his heart on his sleeve (there are 11 pages of acknowledgments); and is almost unfailingly sympathetic. The worst you can expect from him, it seems, is a half-line of moderate grumpiness while catastrophically seasick. Reflecting that he’s not keen on early starts, he muses cheerily: ‘In that respect this whole book was a bad idea.’
The flip side of this is a comradely, loose, mildly indulgent style, equal parts nature writer, trainspotter and lyricist. Not for the first time I wondered if there’s a poet lurking somewhere. Fond of metaphor (many things are ‘akin to’ others), Richards is prone to using words like ‘gloaming’ and, true to his arts school background, has an annoying tendency to tell you what basic colour things are. ‘The vacuum of the small hours invites over-thinking,’ he acknowledges; and when he claims of one shift with a night worker that ‘time actually flies’, I had the ignoble suspicion that this wasn’t so true if you’re the one doing the work. I also laughed ungenerously when he geekily asks a steam-train crew where their coal comes from and is told: ‘I dunno. The pallet in the yard?’
‘I am moved and comforted to know that people are watching over me in the hours of darkness’
Though far from politically extreme, Overnight is not neutral either. The number of people sleeping rough, described in the ‘Night on the Streets’ chapter, couldn’t please anyone; but where I might have been more interested in, say, the 24-hour operations of some Hovis megafactory, Richards (an Edinburgh resident) opts for an expensive hipster bakery in Dalston with progressive staffing policies.
But this is not a book for cynics. It is a paean of gratitude to every form of labour in the wee small hours, packed with enough fun facts for an entire pub quiz (‘How many midges can a bat eat in one night?’). Curiosity and boundless enthusiasm are what the reader is paying for here. It’s the author’s infectious sincerity that really makes Overnight work.
Having opened in mortal peril on a Swiss mountainside, Richards winds down with the companionship of late-night radio and that opiate of the middle classes The Shipping Forecast. Only now one feels one should be out exploring. ‘Banish presumption and generalisations,’ we are enjoined. ‘Go and see what’s going on. Listen to the sounds of the city, the country; take the night’s pulse. Who and what are up and doing?’
The childhood terrors of Judith Hermann
The German writer Judith Hermann burst on the literary scene in 1998 with her short story collection Summerhouse, Later, and was soon heralded as one of a new wave of Fräuleinwunder – girl wonders who were writing fiction that felt fresh and uninhibited. Now she has produced a memoir of sorts – in parts slyly moving, in others so stony-faced and self-serious as to border on the parodic.
First the parodic. The book opens one night in Berlin with Hermann running into the psychotherapist she has been seeing three times a week for ten years. Over the course of these sessions, she recalls, she fell in love, then out of love, with him, though he hardly spoke to her at all. This encounter feels initially charged and full of promise, but it leads nowhere in particular. Dr Dreehüs orders Hermann a gin and tonic, they chat, then she leaves. Readers who aren’t signed up to the whole Hermann Fräuleinwunder thing might reasonably wonder why they should care. Later they might ask themselves the same thing when the author recounts, in grave detail, her dreams.
But eventually Hermann turns to childhood, and things get interesting. Brought up in a large, gloomy flat in Berlin, she was bullied by her father, who ‘had a clear desire to frighten me’. He would work himself up into violent rages and once told her, to her lasting terror, that they had a lodger – a stunted man who lived in the suspended ceiling. This disturbing portrait is complicated when Hermann describes her closeness to her father in later life. In one touching episode he takes her to the theatre, making an awkward palaver of presenting her with a little birthday cake afterwards.
Other characters emerge as vividly: Marco, a friend with spectacular teeth who develops MS; Ada, an acquaintance who once stripped off in front of Hermann, striding naked into the North Sea; and the Russian grandmother who made bread soup and collected voodoo dolls.
The book began as a series of lectures on poetics, and along the way Hermann writes about her craft. Every piece, she observes gnomically, ‘is the story of a ghost’; to write stories ‘is to be distrustful’. What will stay with me aren’t these rather grand pronouncements but the author’s evocations of the past: Ada’s dark, ‘almost masculine’ perfume, and the smell of her beloved grandmother – ambergris, sage, sandalwood and smoke.
Round the world in a vast, unlovely barge
Ships change not just their location but their identity throughout their lives. Medieval trading vessels became warships at royal command. The Queen Mary was a troop ship during the second world war. Ian Kumekawa, of Harvard University, has had the clever idea of following a modern ship through its metamorphoses and asking how these changes in use reflect the economic conditions of our time. But this ship is no Queen Mary. He calls it the Vessel, because it changes its name and owner so many times. Without its superstructure, no one would give it a second glance. It has neither an engine nor a rudder. It had to be mounted on a heavy-lift ship or towed to reach it destination.
It is, in fact, a simple steel barge, originally little more than a hull, built on the outskirts of Stockholm in 1979 and sold to Norwegian owners. But it has moved extraordinary distances: first to Scapa Flow in Scotland, then to Gothenburg in Sweden, before being taken to the Falkland Islands, a Volkswagen factory on the German coast, Manhattan, Portland Bill in England and Onne in Nigeria, where it is now laid up, rusting away. Meanwhile its superstructure has provided accommodation for British troops, Gastarbeiter, American and British prisoners and oil workers in the Gulf of Guinea.
The many vicissitudes of the Vessel, along with a sister ship that shared some of the same journeys, provide Kumekawa with a springboard from which he can jump to lengthy discussions of the global economy. It is a history of economic flux. When the ship was constructed, Sweden appeared to be enjoying boom times. But high wages began to undermine the country’s well-established heavy industry. In western Europe and North America a massive shift towards service industries took place. This was a story repeated again and again as the Vessel moved around the Atlantic. As well as the gradual decline in manufacturing, sudden crises had a shock effect on the global economy.
The most significant of these were generated by a hike in oil prices, notably during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and again during the Iran-Iraq War seven years later. There was, nonetheless, a silver lining. Higher oil prices rendered viable costly investment in exploration for new sources of oil and gas, such as the North Sea, enabling Britain to become a net exporter for a while. These changes affected the viability of the companies (often just shell companies) that owned the Vessel and explain why it has changed hands so often.
The Vessel was a product of the age of containerisation. The invention of standardised containers revolutionised global commerce and had a dramatic effect on the labour market. The opportunity arose to shift large quantities of low-cost goods across the world in containers that were cheap to manufacture and could be loaded to the sky. The largest container ships now carry up to 20,000 units. This was the making of modern China. But the units aboard the Vessel were put to other uses. The need for short-term accommodation for British troops in the Falklands led to the transfer of the ship to Port Stanley in 1983.
The ship’s final reincarnation was
as an ill-adapted, steamy hostel for hundreds of oil workers in Nigeria
Container units could be adapted into not very snug quarters for other people difficult to accommodate when pressure on resources was high. The New York Department of Correction had run out of space for prisoners, so in 1989 it took out a lease on the Vessel, turning it into a jail known as Maritime Facility II. In 1997, the Vessel moved again to Dorset and became HMP Weare, home to a drug treatment programme that was widely praised, as were the conditions on board. One inmate said that the food was ‘the best he ever had’. Its final reincarnation, in Nigeria, was as an ill-adapted, steamy hostel for hundreds of oil workers based in the Onne Oil and Gas Free Zone. This was a free port, able to operate outside the supervision of the Nigerian government, which was, in any case, beset by massive corruption, especially in the oil industry.
Kumekawa’s assessment of the economic and social setting of the Vessel’s history is quite opinionated. He sneers at Great Britain: ‘For both the Argentines and the British, the Falklands War was a calculated exercise in rousing nationalist sentiment.’ Margaret Thatcher used the war, he opines, ‘to shift attention away from disastrous economic conditions and political crises at home’. This fits ill with his demonstration elsewhere that global economic changes were transforming the labour market, and that Thatcherite policies attempted to address that.
And there is his equally contradictory treatment of the admittedly tough policies of the NYPD in suppressing drug-related crime, leading to an increase in New York’s prison population. These policies made it a much safer city, but for Kumekawa this was simply to appease an alarmed white middle-class. He likes to throw in the unexplained term ‘international capitalism’ (clearly a Bad Thing) and at the end of the book launches into a diatribe against neoliberalism, which he admits is hard to define.
Naive comments of this order spoil what is in other respects a brilliantly conceived and fascinating demonstration that the history of one rusty ship can illuminate our understanding of the global economy.
Amid the alien corn: Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino
‘I am an Adina,’ the four-year-old protagonist of Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland writes to her extraterrestrial superiors on Planet Cricket Rice, which is light years away from Earth. ‘Yesterday I saw bunnies on the grass,’ she adds, using the fax machine her mother retrieved from their neighbour’s trash. ‘DESCRIBE BUNNIES,’ they respond, sparking a dialogue that continues well into her adulthood.
Adina’s premature birth in September 1977 coincided with the departure of the Voyager 1 probe, which was launched with a phonograph record of sounds intended to explain human life to intelligent extra-terrestrials. The timing is significant because Adina was sent to Earth from Planet Cricket Rice to report on human life.
Or so she thinks – for speculative fiction, Beautyland, which takes its title from a ‘dash-to-in-a-pinch supply store that contains what humans believe are necessities’, is strongly grounded in realism. Bertino’s third novel, published in the US last year, intersperses Adina’s story with news flashes from the intergalactic front line, from the 1991 discovery of exoplanets outside our solar system to the 2017 revelation of the interstellar asteroid Oumuamua.
Like E.T. (Adina will later watch the film at the cinema, bemoaning the choice of popcorn – ‘the loudest sound on Earth’– as the official food of movie-watching), she longs to return home. She has faith that this will happen, despite growing up in north-eastern Pennsylvania with her single Sicilian mother, Térèse.
Adina keeps her alien existence mainly to herself, but before quitting college to move to New York she tries to tell Térèse the truth:
She uses the word extraterrestrial, hoping it will sound less scary to her mother and because she has never understood what she is allegedly alien to. The word is derogatory and overly general.
Throughout the novel, Bertino makes a strong case for individualism. The joy of Adina, a delightful character, is how she gets people to look at life through fresh eyes. She is very much Team Yoko, telling her superiors how the Beatles
sing about vanilla desires, and in reward the world turns them into an institution… Yoko Ono shows up, ideal for othering: petite, Asian, maker of hard art that dares to venture beyond the idea of holding a girl’s hand.
If a künstlerroman is a novel about an artist maturing, this is an ausländerroman, a foreigner coming-of-age story that is as tender as it is witty and perceptive. When Adina, who suffers from sensitivity to certain sounds, such as people swallowing, gets diagnosed with misophonia, ‘she wonders what other rational human qualities she wrote off as extraterrestrial because of a human’s tendency to other what they don’t understand’. Beautyland is a novel that celebrates being different and reminds us that we are all, in our own way, a little bit alien.
A psychopath on the loose: Never Flinch, by Stephen King, reviewed
Stephen King, 77, is a writer of towering brilliance whose fiction appeals to a reading public both popular and serious. His 60th novel, Never Flinch, unfolds in Buckeye City, Ohio, where a serial murderer is on the loose under the alias of Bill Wilson – the name of the man who co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous. Wilson has sworn to kill 14 people in revenge for the death of a friend and former alcoholic who was framed and convicted for child pornography offences. The plot is steeped in AA lore (‘Honesty in all our affairs’) and an awareness of the deleterious effects of drinking to excess.
It’s no secret that King is himself a recovering alcoholic. His scariest novels – Carrie, The Stand, The Shining – were written in the mid-1970s when his life was dangerously tipped by booze. Never Flinch, a superior crime thriller, opens a window on to the world of smalltown American AA meetings and the vexing devil of substance abuse among the Ohioan poor. In pages of heart-pounding suspense Wilson targets various innocent people, among them even AA old-timers he has known (one of whom is called Big Book Mike for his habit of quoting verbatim from the AA handbook).
Parallel to this is an equally disturbing campaign of violence against a feminist activist called Kate McKay, whose bookshop signings attract unwanted crowds of angry white men disgruntled by all things woke. The private investigator Holly Gibney, who made her debut in King’s 2014 novel Mr Mercedes, offers to help the Buckeye City Police bring the AA killer to book and lend McKay the bodyguard protection she demands. A cast of minor characters, ranging from the gospel singer Sista Bessie to the hip-hop artist YoungBoy Never Broke Again, enlivens the intertwining storylines.
This is a zingy, fast-paced cliffhanger with moments of signature horror. If it falls short of the author’s best work, it remains very respectable. King’s frightscapes are among the most haunting in contemporary fiction, and Never Flinch does not disappoint. The novel is brocaded with allusions to Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson and other maestros of horror-suspense. Before King became the emperor of bestsellerdom he studied American literature at the University of Maine, his birthplace. He achieved AA sobriety in around 1988 and has not looked back.
My obsession with ageing rock stars – by Kate Mossman
‘The older male rock star isn’t just my specialist subject, it’s my obsession,’ admits Kate Mossman in the opening pages of Men of a Certain Age. Over the 15 years she’s spent interviewing ageing rockers such as Sting, Tom Jones, Ray Davies, Glen Campbell and Nick Cave for the Word and the New Statesman, she describes feeling ‘something inside of me ignite… so excited, yet so at ease’. ‘How is it,’ she asks, ‘that in the presence of a wrinkly rock star twice my age, I sometimes feel like I’m meeting… me?’
Having encountered my share of these guys myself, I know precisely what she means. Rock journalism is a field in which all the writers are fans, but, as Mossman notes, ‘part of the art is pretending not to be’. Consequently, she bookends each of the 19 insightful and often funny interviews republished here with personal memoirish introductions and afterwords, making the book as much about fandom as about rock stars. I relished her honest analysis of the yearning for connection that interviewers feel when they meet artists who’ve set their hearts ablaze by the music they made – and sometimes the poses they struck– in their youth. As professional journalists, we’re sitting with their older, sometimes wiser, incarnations and asking them to explain themselves and make sense of their impact on us.
It’s often weird. My blushing 13-year- old self was somewhere in the mix while I was chatting with A-Ha’s Morten Harket, utterly bewildered by the fact that the 45-year-old me was bonding with the 1980s pin-up over a shared love of houseplants. The electric exhilaration I felt at 15, walking home from school with Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ exploding through my spongey headphones, was both soothed and confounded as I stood in Dave Gilmour’s kitchen watching the hands which played that spine-tingling riff wash up the mug I’d just been drinking from.
But I’ve never been so overwhelmed by the prospect of an interview that I feared I might black out, as Mossman did on her way to meet Brian May at an Italian restaurant in Holland Park in 2011. She’d grown up as a devotee of Queen – ‘nutcase/ stalker’, she says – at a time when the band’s fist-pumping, stadium-chanting, gee-tar noodling pomp was deeply uncool.
Born in 1980 – a member of the generation, she says, that ‘slipped down the crack between the spotty cheek of Gen X and the well-moisturised buttock of the millennials’ – and raised in rural Norfolk, Mossman loathed the irony that suffused the 1990s culture in which she came of age. ‘Perhaps it was fin-de-siècle ennui,’ she writes, and the acute awareness that the rock’n’roll of our parents’ generation was all coming to us ‘second hand’, but Jarvis Cocker and Damon Albarn upset her by being ‘so arch, so sneering, so over it’. By contrast, Queen’s shameless performative passion dialled right into the heart of a shy, academic girl who didn’t trust her own feelings to fully unfold. She hid her obsession from friends – ‘this secrecy produced a kind of intensity that makes me rather uncomfortable now’ – and was so embarrassed by the more sexual lyrics rattling from the car speakers on trips with her dad that she pretended to be asleep.
In the event, Mossman’s lunch with the ‘religiously kind’ May is a benign affair which leaves her feeling ‘like a child again’. But in retrospect she’s aware of the ‘barely disguised eroticism’ in her write-up of her interview with the Queen drummer Roger Taylor. She locates it in her description of his wet hair and her unfounded assumption that he’d just rolled out of bed. She also confesses that meeting the object of her teenage affections caused an ‘easing up in my heart, in my body… I could hold my head up higher and look to the sky a little more’.
Mossman is a tender chronicler of the sex symbol on the slide. She gets the artist formerly known as Terence Trent D’Arby to joke: ‘The only thing I could think to do with a cock ring now is keep my house keys on it.’ Elsewhere she cracked me up by reminding readers that the young Shaggy – Jamaica’s ‘Mr Lovah, Lovah’ – has ‘an aptitude for pastels’.
Not every interviewee is willing to accept their transformation from sex symbol to dadlike bloke. Maybe that’s understandable after a pretty young woman like Mossman has spent hours asking them rapt, interesting questions about what makes them so fascinating. When she met Soft Machine’s Kevin Ayers in Carcassonne in 2008 she says he assumed ‘I would be coming back to his and sleeping with him’. Ayers’s manager stepped in while Mossman waited outside Ayers’s house. ‘After a brief silence,’ she writes, ‘I heard the crash of a few pots and pans in the kitchen and the manager shouting “It’s not 1967, Kevin!”’ Ayers, she notes without judgment, ‘was from a better age, when rock stars and journalists hooked up on sheepskin rugs and wrote features together in blissful, claret-fuelled symbiosis’.
Now when we’re all reassessing the ways in which old male rockers treated women, Mossman is refreshingly kind and capable of putting these men in the cultural context. She’s no apologist for abuse, but her book features mostly decent guys who’ve muddled their way through chaotic lives of unimaginable fame and money. They are compellingly odd as a result, and Mossman makes allowances without ever flinching from their peculiarities. Above all, her interviews illuminate the music she loves. Her failure to forge a desperately sought connection with Sting leaves him thrillingly remote in his falsetto yelps. Her warm friendship with the virtuosic Bruce Hornsby brings his more abstract keyboard experiments gently into the reader’s emotional range. All the minor chords, swollen egos and backstage bust-ups find safe harbour in this book. It’s a rocking good read. Encore!
Farage skips ‘Brexit reset’ debate for French holiday
To the Commons, where just after midday Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivered a statement on his brand new UK-EU deal. Sir Keir told MPs that the new agreement would ‘strengthen our borders’ and ‘release us from the tired arguments of the past’ on Brexit. But as opposition politicians heckled – ‘tell that to the fishermen!’ one yelled – there was one notable absence in the Chamber. The Brexit kingpin himself, Reform UK’s very own Nigel Farage, was nowhere to be seen. How very strange…
One would think that this was a moment Farage would not want to miss – given Starmer’s deal has given rise to accusations that the Labour PM is ‘betraying’ Brexit less than a year into his premiership. Already, Sir Keir’s deal – which includes a controversial youth migrant scheme and makes concessions to the EU over fishing rights – has been torn apart by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, who slammed it as a ‘stitch up’, with Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey bemoaning the fact the deal didn’t go further and the SNP’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn calling Starmer’s EU market access claims ‘simply absurd’. At this point, Steerpike would have been rather interested to hear the thoughts of Brexit campaigner-in-chief Farage – yet it was his deputy Richard Tice who had to take the reins instead.
Wherever could the Reform founder be? Well, it has since transpired this evening via the Times that instead of attending the Commons debate, Farage has, er, jetted off to France. Alright for some! For his part, the Reform leader said: ‘There seems to be great consternation in the press that they have not seen me for 48 hours. Well, they will have to wait some time. After months of touring the UK in the run up to our hugely successful local election campaign I will resume travelling the country next week.’
Farage may not be a fan of Sir Keir forging closer ties with Europe – but he seems to have no problem basking in the delights of the EU when it suits him…
Britain is playing into Hamas’s hands
Keir Starmer’s government has suspended trade talks with Israel and summoned the Israeli ambassador over the ‘intolerable’ offensive in Gaza. To be honest, I’m surprised it’s taken ten months for any doubt to be cleared up. But now it is entirely clear where the government stands vis-à-vis our supposed great ally in the Middle East, Israel, and the Islamist death cult which seeks to wipe Jews – yes, Jews, not Israel – off the face of the earth: it stands with Hamas.
Don’t rely on my take, but on the words of Hamas
Don’t rely on my take, but on the words of Hamas, who last night issued a statement in response to the latest attempt by the UK government, along with France and Canada, to force a win for Hamas in the Gaza war: “The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) welcomes the joint statement issued by the leaders of the United Kingdom, France, and Canada…Hamas considers this stance an important step in the right direction toward restoring the principles of international law, which the government of the terrorist Netanyahu has sought to undermine and overturn.”
You read that right. We now have a government whose stance towards Israel is praised by Hamas; a government which is taking praise for sharing Hamas’s stance towards international law.
That’s the same Hamas which spent a decade stealing and diverting aid money to build a network of tunnels under Gaza, specifically so that any military action taken against it had, by necessity, to mean Palestinian citizens dying. The same Hamas which sought to have as many Palestinians killed as possible because their deaths would, as its former leader Yahya Sinwar wrote to his fellow terrorist Ismail Haniyeh on 11 April last year, “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honour.”
And the likes of Keir Starmer, Emanuel Macron and now Mark Carney do just what Hamas wants. Yesterday, it was a joint statement. Today, the UK government has suspended talks on a trade deal with Israel. Earlier, it was restoring funding to UNRWA, the UN body which admits that some of its staff may have been involved in the 7 October attack; and supporting the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the former Israeli defence minister.
It’s difficult for those of us who aren’t motivated by jihadism to comprehend the sheer bestiality of Hamas’s strategy. But Hamas’s aim on October 7 2023 was not just to slaughter as many Israelis as possible, it was to use the response to that slaughter to turn the tables on Israel.
Hamas seeks to maximise casualties on both sides. It aims to see more dead Palestinians, precisely so that Israel can be portrayed as the real villain. Every time Israel is condemned, Hamas wins – and it further incentivises Hamas to get more Palestinians killed.
Remember: this war could stop today if Hamas released the remaining hostages and left Gaza. But it won’t, because the West is now precisely where Hamas wants it.
Lucy Connolly is the victim of a great injustice
Lucy Connolly has lost her appeal against her 31-month sentence for inciting racial hatred following the following the horrific murders committed by Axel Rudakubana in Southport.
But having attended the hearing l believe she is the victim of a great injustice. I believe the evidence I heard at the Royal Courts of Justice showed that Lucy Connolly did not understand the effect of pleading guilty after she was advised by her original lawyer. I believe that Lucy Connolly is a victim of the state’s desire to crush the spontaneous rioting which took place last August. And I believe that comments like Lucy Connolly’s, however unpleasant, should not be illegal in a civilised country.
Having attended the hearing l believe Connolly is the victim of a great injustice
Lucy Connolly posted the tweet that led to her being jailed on 29 July, just hours after those murders. It read: ‘Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care. While you’re at it, take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.’
As Connolly explained during the appeal hearing, when she posted that tweet she was feeling, ‘Really angry, upset, distraught that those children had died and their parents would have to live a life of grief…I couldn’t understand how it had been allowed to happen – could it happen to my children? It made me desperately upset and angry.’
I sympathise with this. Given the horror of the crimes, and the failure of the state to prevent them, it was entirely rational to feel cold rage. Lucy Connolly’s response was particularly intense because she lost her son Harry at a very young age, in a way which destroyed her trust in the authorities.
In any event Lucy Connolly walked her dog that night, came home and deleted the tweet. At the appeal she said, ‘I’d calmed down – I knew it wasn’t an acceptable thing to say or the right thing to say.’
When Connolly deleted the tweet, no rioting had begun. The awful attacks on migrant hotels didn’t begin until the weekend of 3-4 August. And yet she was jailed for ‘inciting serious violence’.
During her appeal Lucy Connolly made it clear that she had no intent to cause violence. Indeed, as the riots began, but before she’d been contacted by the police, she tweeted her opposition to the violence taking case.
So why did Lucy Connolly plead guilty? After her arrest on 9 August she was held in police custody and then HMP Peterborough until she was taken to the Crown Court on Monday 12 August. There she met with her solicitor.
Both Lucy Connolly and her solicitor gave evidence at her appeal hearing. They disagreed about the advice Lucy Connolly had received. She was insistent that she did not realise she was pleading guilty on the basis that she had intended to incite serious violence. Connolly’s solicitor claimed that he had been clear with her.
They made for very different witnesses. Lucy Connolly was clear about what she could and couldn’t remember, but was very clear that her solicitor had not made the basis of plea clear. Her solicitor was far less convincing. He phrased his claims indirectly, saying things like ‘I would have told her…’ or ‘I would always have’.
Unfortunately for Connolly, the appeal court believed her solicitor, describing him as ‘conscientious’ in its judgment, and finding that they had ‘no doubt that he advised’ Connolly properly. They also described Connolly’s evidence as ‘incredible’. Having listened to the evidence I think they have made a grave error.
Then Crown Prosecution Service barrister, Naeem Valli, spent quite some time during the appeal hearing questioning Lucy Connolly on whether she is racist:
‘Do you accept that you hold strong views on immigration?’
‘I do’
‘Do you believe this country is being invaded by immigrants?’
‘I believe that we have a massive number of people in this country that are unchecked and that’s a national security risk.’
‘Do you believe that children in this country are not safe because of that?’
‘I believe that children in this country are not safe for a lot of reasons…anyone where we don’t know why they’re here or for what purpose is a risk to our children.’
‘Do you feel threatened by immigrants?’
‘Not threatened personally – I believe that anyone who comes into the country should be checked and have background checks.’
Clearly this questioning convinced the judges. Adam King, the leading barrister representing Connolly, argued that the original trial judge, His Honour Melbourne Inman KC, had given insufficient weight to the mitigating factors in Lucy Connolly’s case. The appeal court dismissed this, concluding that what they deemed to be Connolly’s ‘racism’ meant her attempts to discourage rioting and violence should be ignored.
Lucy Connolly will stay in jail until August. The state will continue to refuse to grant her either early release on ‘tag’ or the chance to see her family via Release on Temporary Licence, both of which are offered to prisoners who pose a real threat to the public. A country which honours free speech would free Lucy Connolly. We do not live in such a country.
Teachers are turning on Labour
When Labour won the 2024 general election, many of my fellow teachers were delighted. After fourteen years of one Conservative or another occupying Downing Street, they felt that finally ‘the right people’ were in power.
Ten months later, their excitement has turned to despair. Promise after promise has evaporated. The jubilant attitude in staff rooms around Britain has been replaced by a kind of exhausted bewilderment as the effects of the government’s economic illiteracy start to bite.
Keir Starmer is quickly discovering that governing is not the same as protesting
Keir Starmer is quickly discovering that governing is not the same as protesting. Making quick pay deals may have appeased the unions, but it did huge damage to public finances, even before the capital and labour flight caused by the Government’s tax policies.
Having run out of other people’s money so soon, Labour has speedily closed down maths and computing hubs in state schools as well as Latin excellence programmes. Its sights are now on level 7 apprenticeships. Those same politicians my teaching colleagues assumed would open new doors to disadvantaged children are closing existing openings and bolting them shut.
The government is also squeezing school budgets. Schools are expected to fund pay rises amid a real-term cut in funding. This is not the first time a teacher pay increase has been promised without providing adequate funding, but the shortfall is cavernous. It is happening alongside a simultaneous increase in national insurance contributions for employers, dealing a double whammy to the payroll.
As a result, heads are having to let staff go. Labour promised to hire 6,500 new teachers over this Parliament, yet we now face the ugly irony of maths teachers being made redundant because Labour’s Treasury team cannot do their sums. As Sir Dan Moynihan of Harris Federation said recently, the situation is ‘unprecedented’. In another twist of irony, those teaching unions that worked hard to help Labour get into power are now watching their most experienced members face the axe because their longevity in the job makes them more expensive than novice teachers.
When teaching economics to sixth-form students, there are few more enjoyable lightbulb moments to experience in the classroom than when learners grasp the Laffer curve. They finally understand why we can’t just tax rich people ‘until the pips squeak’.
Unfortunately, with record numbers of millionaires and billionaires leaving the country, this is a moment of epiphany that leading members of the Government clearly failed to enjoy themselves. We have moved from a fictional £22 billion black hole dismissed by the Office for Budget Responsibility to an actual, predicted £63 billion crater of the Treasury’s making. Schools are now paying the price.
As costs spiral, my Labour-supporting friends’ social media have gone quiet. This Government badly needs its lightbulb moment – the kind that flickers into life in a Year 12 classroom when students understand the Laffer curve. Until then, the government is trapped in the half-dream state of opposition, convinced that consequences are for other people.
Anthony Boutall is a teacher. He is writing in a personal capacity.
Could (bottled) Watergate sink Macron?
History repeats itself. In the beginning there was Watergate and then one gate followed another: Camillagate, Partygate, Monicagate. Hundreds, thousands of gates. And now, it’s Watergate again, in France this time, as a wave of allegations about the cover up of a bottled water treatment scandal threatens to submerge President Emmanuel Macron.
What did Macron know and when did he know it?
What did Macron know and when did he know it? A French Senate investigation this week found that Nestlé used unauthorised purification methods (such as ultraviolet treatment and microfiltration) on products labelled as ‘natural mineral water’. EU and French law says bottled water must remain untreated. The Senate report also found that the French government ‘at the highest level’ was aware of these practices as far back as 2022, but covered up the scandal.
In February, Macron was asked about the Élysée’s role in the Nestlé case and claimed there had been no ‘agreement’ or ‘collusion’. Yet now, a large tranche of heavily redacted documents have been released alongside the Senate report, detailing conversations between the President’s staff and Nestlé and its lobbyists. Watergate the sequel cannot be compared to the crisis of drug gangs, the porosity of borders, the immobility of government, and the stagnation of France’s economy. Nevertheless, it shows how government and industry danced in tango when it came to the scandal.
My own skim of the documents reveals, for example, a 2024 email from an Elysée adviser describing a meeting with ‘the head of Nestlé on Monday’ at which concerns were discussed including excessive use of filtration treatment, ‘with potential impacts on the affected sites and a communications issue on how to manage the sequence.’ Interpretation: never mind the problems with the water, it’s one for the spin doctors.
Sparkling or still, bottled water is as essential on French tables as bread, wine and cheese. The French have never fully trusted tap water, for sound reasons, given the rank pits that passed for plumbing in comparatively recent memory. Although tap water is now drinkable, and despite official efforts to persuade the French to drink tap water instead, French consumers have conditioned themselves to drink water from bottles, often believing it to have mysterious health benefits for the gut.
The water shelves at my local supermarket offer a dazzling array of brands including special expensive red bottles of Perrier with tiny bubbles. Consequently, bottled water is a gigantic, €20 billion industry in France.
At the centre of the affair is Nestlé, the gigantic Swiss food processor which makes everything from Nespresso to your KitKat chocolate wafer to your cat’s Purina pet food. Nestlé was dinged last year when its Perrier brand was ordered to destroy more than two million bottles of water due to E. coli and faecal bacteria found in one of its wells. Nestlé brands Vittel, Contrex, and Hépar are all accused of using unauthorised purification methods on products labelled as natural mineral water, to make them safe for consumption. Last year, the firm agreed to pay a €2 million fine to avoid legal action.
Nestlé has form when it comes to food safety scandals, despite its wholesome image. In early 2022, serious E. coli infections in children were linked to the consumption of Nestlé frozen pizzas. Dozens of children across France fell seriously ill, with several developing hemolytic uremic syndrome, a life-threatening complication. At least two deaths were reported.
Still, Nestlé will probably survive this bottled water scrape, especially after it is forced to perform some corporate grovelling and make deputy heads roll. So will Macron, even if he is discovered to have received a lifetime supply of Nespresso capsules from George Clooney personally.
Meanwhile, the French, I suspect, will continue to consume bottled water. They imagine their bowels depend on it.
Why the Trump-Putin dialogue is so dangerous for Ukraine
“Look, are you serious? Are you real about this?” That question, according to US vice president J.D. Vance, was the essence of yesterday’s phone call between his boss Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. What Vance meant was to question whether Putin was serious about peace. But turning the question on its head would actually be far more revealing. Is Putin serious about winning the war? Absolutely. Is he real about fighting on until he achieves his goal of subjugating Ukraine? Also very much yes.
Is Trump serious about pressuring Russia into ending the war?
There’s a second way to flip the question, and that’s to ask: is Trump serious about pressuring Russia into ending the war? And the answer to that, sadly for the Ukrainians, seems to be resoundingly negative.
The most obvious sign that the two-hour phone call had not gone well for Kyiv was that Putin himself professed that the peace process was “generally on the right track,” according to a readout on RIA Novosti. The Kremlin professed the conversation “very informative and helpful” – but that Russia and Ukraine must agree on “compromises that suit both sides.” And anything that makes Putin happy is, pretty much necessarily, bad news for Ukraine’s hopes of ending the war with its political independence intact.
Donald Trump, too, professed to be happy with the call. “I believe it went very well,” Trump posted on social media. “Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a ceasefire and, more importantly, an END to the War…The tone and spirit of the conversation were excellent.” However, in a crucial detail that will ring alarm bells in Kyiv, Trump also insisted that the details would be “negotiated between the two parties…because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of.”
Trump couched his announcement as an upbeat call for peace talks to start, and name-checked a long list of European leaders and the new Pope Leo XIV whom he had “informed” of his call. But with Trump signaling that he is ready to hand over talks to Moscow and Kyiv, what many Ukrainians will hear is that the US is no longer interested in playing an active role, much less in applying serious pressure to compel Putin to compromise.
It is becoming increasingly clear that what Putin wants is not so much territory (though he has vowed to reach the boundaries of the four provinces he controls only partly) but rather political control over Ukraine’s strategic future. That, decoded, is the meaning of the Kremlin’s demands to address the “root causes” of the conflict. And as Putin’s negotiator made clear at recent talks in Istanbul in practice that means two key remands.
One is “demilitarisation” – i.e. restrictions on the size of Ukraine’s armed forces and limits on deployments of foreign troops there. The other is “denazification” – which means guarantees of the rights of Russian speakers and a reversal of a campaign to de-Sovietize street names and the memory of World War Two.
Or as Putin himself put it in a long TV documentary made to coincide with the 80th anniversary of Victory Day last week, the goal of his “special military operation” was “to eliminate the root causes of this crisis,” to “ensure the security of the Russian state” and to “protecting the interests of our people,” both in the occupied territories and inside Ukraine.
Most chillingly, Putin vowed that Russia has “enough strength and resources to bring to a conclusion what began in 1922 to its logical conclusion.” That was a reference to drawing the borders of the Soviet Ukraine drawn up by Vladimir Lenin, which remain the international boundaries of modern Ukraine today.
Putin’s move from territorial to political demands makes the Trump-Putin dialogue very dangerous for Volodymir Zelensky. Kyiv fears Trump may buy into peace plans cooked up with Moscow – and try to force it on Ukraine as a way to get to a deal by any means necessary. Indeed, the Trump administration has signaled very clearly that it is keen to get the talking over as fast as possible.
“There’s fundamental mistrust between Russia and the West,” Vance told reporters in advance of the Trump-Putin phone call. “It’s one of the things the President thinks is frankly stupid, and we should be able to move beyond the mistakes that have been made in the past, but that takes two to tango. I know the President’s willing to do that, but if Russia’s not willing to do that, then we’re eventually just going to have to say, ‘This is not our war.’”
Having Washington walk away is an outcome that would suit Putin just fine – especially as Putin has become convinced that Ukraine’s other major allies, the Europeans, are fundamentally unserious and irresponsible. That’s an impression that recent rounds of empty European promises to escalate sanctions in a vain attempt to force the Kremlin into a ceasefire has only reinforced.
Furthermore, Putin is convinced not only that that the threats of new sanctions are empty but also that the war on the ground is going his way. Indeed Ukrainian MP Heorhiy Mazurashu (a member of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party) warned yesterday that a military collapse and a crisis in recruitment is taking a serious toll on Ukraine’s fighting ability. “The army is critically understaffed,” Heorhiy Mazurashu told Politika Strany. “We can hide your head in the sand and pretend that everything is fine, that we can keep chasing people into the army and this will solve the problem somehow, but…hope for hope’s sake won’t have any effect.”
At the same time, there are signs that Putin is preparing a serious build-up of forces in Donbas in preparation for a summer push. So even if Trump’s exhortation to “Let the process begin!” comes true and Kremlin negotiators sit down with their Ukrainian counterparts for systematic talks, the work will be “painstaking and lengthy,” as Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov put it. But in the meantime Putin will continue to pound Ukraine’s cities and grind on in Donbas – while the US takes a back seat to the whole mess.
A version of this article originally appeared on Spectator World
Lucy Connolly is in prison because of her politics
Childminder Lucy Connolly was caring for infants at her home in Northampton on July 29 last year when she heard on the news about the murder of three young girls in Southport. She was upset – like many people – and had seen – again, like many – rumours that an illegal immigrant was responsible.
These had been fuelled by early eyewitness reports describing the killer as dark skinned, boosted by fake online news reports, and growing public discontent about hotels being filled with mostly young men claiming asylum.
The state treats expressions of majority nationalism as an existential threat in a way it doesn’t any other worldview, including Irish republicanism or even Islamism and this explains the extraordinarily harsh way it polices online discourse on the right
Connolly described herself as a ‘ridiculously overprotective’ mother to her own 11-year-old daughter, and the news from Southport sent her into a panic. In anger and fear, she typed out to her 9,000 Twitter followers:
‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.’
This tweet, up for less than four hours before deletion, would cost her a year in jail, where she remains today, following today’s decision over her appeal.
Connolly was sensitive to stories about infant suffering. She and husband Ray, a Conservative local councillor, had lost their son Harry 12 years earlier, a tragedy made more painful by catastrophic failures within the NHS.
Convinced her infant son’s illness was more serious than doctors told her, she had contested their diagnosis until eventually worn down by expert opinion. After numerous visits to the local hospital, Connolly had pleaded with doctors to put her son on a drip; instead, they were sent home to put Harry to bed. They woke at 4 a.m. the following morning to find their 19-month-old dead; her husband had attempted CPR, but nothing could bring him back.
The coroner ruled that the hospital had committed a series of catastrophic failures, but had not gross negligence manslaughter, as Ray and Lucy had believed. This tragedy left her heartbroken and fragile, and with a profound suspicion of the authorities. Even many years later Connolly would become profoundly upset at the suffering of children, and according to her husband would write to papers if there were stories about child neglect in the news.
Connolly was well-liked by the parents of the children she looked after, a diverse bunch who came from all over the world. Her husband joked that the house looked like ‘the United Nations’ after the morning drop-off. She was caring by nature, and described by one African parent as ‘the kindest British person I’ve met’.
She also held right-wing views on immigration, and it is impossible to read the transcripts of her court case without concluding that this played a significant part in her fate. In terror of losing control amid last summer’s rioting, the government and justice system were determined to make an example and, like many weak regimes, lashed out where they could.
Connolly, shaken by events in Southport, tweeted out in anger but, having taken the family dog for a walk and had a chance to think better of it, deleted her tweet the same evening. Later that week, and before she realised she was in trouble with the law, she had tweeted her condemnation of the rioting that followed. ‘FFS, I get they’re angry. I’m fucking raging, however, this is playing right into their hands. I do not want civil unrest on our streets. Tommy Robinson is not going to say but this is not going to get anyone anywhere. Protests yes but not riots,’ she tweeted over the weekend, by which point disorder had erupted across England. In another tweet, she wrote: ‘Last night was not protesting, it was rioting. People are playing right into the hands of the establishment and the media. We need people to come together intelligently and articulately, not riots.’ Again, she posted ‘I know people are angry, but violence is not the answer’. By then it was too late.
Her tweet came on the day of the murders, a Monday. The first stirrings of disorder had begun in Southport the following evening, spreading across the country on Friday and Saturday. In his sentencing remarks, the judge who sent her to jail mentioned the febrile atmosphere as an aggravating factor, yet while the country was shaken by Southport, there was no suggestion on the Monday that violence would follow. There had been no rioting following immigration-related atrocities in Manchester or Nottingham, when the authorities had successfully cultivated a message of togetherness. There was yet no indication that this time would be any different.
Yet Connolly’s tweet had already been viewed 310,000 times by the time she deleted, and screenshotted. As the days went on, she became subject to a ‘twitterstorm’, with some trying to get her husband sacked and others snitch-tagging in the police and Ofsted. By the end of the week Connolly had deleted her account, her last tweet asking: ‘Why are people more concerned by my political views than by the actual murder of three little girls?’
Many of us have experienced such a twitterstorm, returning to our laptop or phone to find that hundreds of people suddenly hate us. It’s not a nice feeling, but it passes.
Not for Connolly. A few days later, a woman who had never had any contact with the law found herself in a police station, then a courtroom and jail. She was charged under Section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986, with distributing material intending to stir up racial hatred, and with the far more serious crime of intending to incite serious violence. Arrested on 6 August regarding the offending tweet, and then bailed, she was arrested again three days later and interviewed about previous tweets – and that was the end of her previous life as a free woman.
The Daily Telegraph’s Allison Pearson, who has become Connolly’s leading champion, wrote last month about the surreal process that upended a woman’s life. Pearson described how Lucy went with the police ‘quiet as a lamb, she thought if she did as she was told everything would be fine,’ in her husband’s words. It was only when she was in the police station that the enormity of the situation dawned on her. One prison officer described Connolly at Peterborough jail as ‘the most petrified person I’ve ever seen arrive here’.
‘I couldn’t quite believe what they were telling me – someone who’d never broken the law,’ she said later. ‘Whatever I’d done, police made it quite clear I was going down for this, their intention was always to hammer me.’
Even while this was happening, strangers on the internet were trying to get at the Connollys: West Northamptonshire council received 13 anonymous complaints against Ray, calling for his resignation for standing by his wife. Denied bail – like almost all of the August transgressors – Lucy found herself potentially waiting months inside for a trial, and felt that she had no choice but to plead guilty to the charges laid before her.
Ray gathered character references, including a Nigerian mother who described Lucy as the ‘kindest, most diligent person who looked after everyone and anyone without any regard for their race or ethnicity.’ There was clearly a need to acquire diverse character references, rather resembling the persilschein which Germans once had to produce as proof they were not Nazis.
None of this seemed to matter when Connolly faced Judge Melbourne Inman KC on October 17. Sentencing her to 31 months in jail, which included a 25 per cent discount for pleading guilty, the judge said: ‘As everyone is aware some people used that tragedy as an opportunity to sow division and hatred, often using social media, leading to a number of towns and cities being disfigured by mindless and racist violence, intimidation and damage.’
He directly linked her tweet to ‘serious disorder in a number of areas of the country where mindless violence was used to cause injury and damage to wholly innocent members of the public and to their properties’. Her culpability was ‘clearly a category A case – as both prosecution and your counsel agree, because you intended to incite serious violence’.
Pearson described how the police and Crown Prosecution Service afterwards released a statement saying that Lucy ‘told officers she did not like immigrants and claimed that children were not safe from them’.
‘But Lucy hadn’t said that,’ Pearson wrote: ‘What she said in her long interview with the police was, “I’m well aware that we need immigrants… I’m well aware that if I go to the hospital there are immigrants working there and the hospital wouldn’t function without them. I’m [also] well aware of the difference between legal immigrants and illegal immigrants and they are not checked and [nor is] what they might have done (any crimes) in their country of origin – it’s a national security issue and they’re a danger to children”.’
Pearson wrote that Connolly had cried about the misrepresentation; she was not a bigot, she said, and had been raised by a socialist mother. She had looked after children from all sorts of backgrounds – Lithuanians and Poles, Bangladeshis and Jamaicans, Nigerians and Somalis. Connolly was clearly someone with strong views about immigration but still capable of treating each individual on their own merits.
‘The Connollys asked for a transcript of the police interview which was grudgingly handed over after a long delay,’ Pearson wrote: ‘Lucy’s mother complained to the CPS and they corrected the statement on their website to match what Lucy had actually said. Too late.’
Connolly’s mother told the Telegraph journalist that ‘it would be hilarious… if it wasn’t so horrifying’. Her fellow inmates included murderers, and when they ‘questioned Lucy about her crime – “What you in for?” – and she explained it was a post on social media, “they cracked up”.’
In January, Connolly spent her 42nd birthday in prison, and with his wife’s income gone, Ray was forced to sell his car. She was even denied Release on Temporary Licence, something granted to fellow inmates who had killed people by dangerous driving. ‘You’ve upset a lot of people, Lucy,’ one probation officer told her when asked why.
On Thursday last week, I attended Connolly’s appeal at the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand, the prisoner speaking by video phone from jail. The appeal came about thanks to the Free Speech Union, the group founded by Toby Young to campaign on behalf of people who have fallen foul of Britain’s speech laws.
The FSU had hired the services of Adam King, the highly-rated barrister who has become something of a free speech champion of late. King recently secured the release of a man who faced up to two years in jail for going to a fancy dress party dressed as the Manchester bomber. Yes, you read that correctly.
Without wishing to become a bore on the subject – and perhaps it’s too late – Britain has a real problem with speech laws. This shouldn’t be a right-wing talking point, but it goes against human nature to defend the rights of people whose opinions horrify you. Laws such as the Communications Act (2003) are used to harass people making basic statements of belief, while hateful online language is policed excessively. Connolly’s tweet may well have merited a criminal record and a fine; the question is whether a jail sentence represents justice or anarcho-tyranny.
It was certainly interesting to witness the anarcho-tyranny of the British state at close quarters; before Connolly’s case was heard in front of three judges, we sat through discussions of two previous cases, one involving a man who had run down and killed a 16-year-old boy. The murderer, we heard, had 22 previous convictions for 39 offences at the time of his offence, including robbery, affray and assaulting a police constable. The British state is filled with endless compassion for habitual criminals, always ready to give them ‘once more chance’ to turn their life around – but utterly ruthless against those who breach its speech codes and transgress its sacred values.
In a small courtroom off a corridor on the first floor, about 30 people were in attendance, including Lucy’s husband, representatives from the Free Speech Union, some well-wishers and a handful of sympathetic journalists (including Pearson and former GB News presenter Dan Wootton). In a very British scene, Connolly protesters outside were outnumbered by campaigners trying to stop a music festival in south London (they won, of course), and vastly outnumbered by pro-Palestinian demonstrators. I queued behind two well-spoken elderly ladies in keffiyeh scarves as we waited to get through airport-style security.
Questioned by King about her state of mind when she sent her tweet, Connolly described feeling anxious and scared and worrying about ever sending her own daughter out.
Was she upset about the Southport killings? ‘Absolutely, yes.’
Was she more protective than the average parent? ‘Ridiculously so.’
The tweet was read out, and King asked: Did you intend anyone to set fire to an asylum hotel? ‘Absolutely not’.
Did you intend for anyone to murder any politicians? ‘Absolutely not’.
Connolly said of her post that it was ‘not a nice thing to say’ but ‘it was never my intention to stir up racial hatred’. She felt ‘extreme outrage and emotion. I posted words which were wrong in every way.’
Connolly broke down in tears as she described the process of being arrested, taken to a magistrates’ court and then to a police station before arriving in Peterborough prison, all within the space of 24 hours. She had little sleep on the Saturday and Sunday before meeting her lawyer on Monday.
King argued that Connolly clearly did not intend to incite violence against migrants nor politicians, but had tweeted in anger and then deleted soon after (not ‘in due course’, as the original court judgement stated). Clearly, he argued, no one could claim beyond reasonable doubt that she intended to incite violence. What this looked like was someone who was scared and, facing months inside, pleaded guilty to something she does not accept she was guilty of – incitement to serious violence. She was totally out of her depth.
In the news reports last autumn, Connolly was sometimes described as ‘middle class’, but a keen observer of the English class system – as every journalist is – would be aware, from her accent and her history, employment and her home in a 1930s semi in a Midlands suburb, that she is not People Like Us. I make this point only to reiterate that it’s rarely PLU who find themselves in trouble with Britain’s authoritarian hate speech laws – it’s those who lack the connections, the nous or the sense that they can change the system. Perhaps if I was honest with myself, I’m sympathetic to her predicament because it offends some suppressed patrician sensibilities.
I also broadly share her politics, and feel that she’s in prison because of them. Earlier this month the music world rushed to the defence of an Irish rap group, Kneecap, who had called on people to ‘Kill your local MP’. Kneecap may face travel restrictions in the US as a result of their provocations, or perhaps there will be pressure on Glastonbury to ban them (which will be resisted). Despite the counter-terrorism police now investigating the case, it seems extremely unlikely that they will end up in jail – and rightly so.
Yet the state treats expressions of majority nationalism as an existential threat in a way it doesn’t any other worldview, including Irish republicanism or even Islamism, and this explains the extraordinarily harsh way it polices online discourse on the right. Would I have the deep-seated fairness to care about free speech if it was mainly leftists being punished? I’d like to think so, but I couldn’t be sure. True liberalism goes against our instincts, and requires a ruling class who consciously cultivate such a generous spirit.
The obviously political nature of the sentencing was reiterated at the appeal, where the prosecution lawyer interrogated the childminder about her political views, opening with the words ‘Mrs Connolly, I have some questions about something you posted on social media platform X’.
‘Do you accept that you hold strong views on immigration?’ he asked: ‘You believe this country is being invaded by immigrants.’ It’s unchecked and it’s a national security issue, she replied. ‘Is it fair to say you do not want immigrants in this country? Do you feel threatened by immigrants? You do want mass deportations?’ All of these framings she denied, and argued her case coherently.
The court was reminded of other tweets brought up at the trial to show her views, where ‘further racist remarks’ were noted. She had been accused of having a ‘racist mindset’ and ‘extended hatred of immigrants’, and these tweets gave ‘further insight into her racist views’. Perhaps she holds racist views, or perhaps she’s the kindest British person an African immigrant could meet; perhaps both are true, and people are complex. Either way, being in possession of racist views is not a crime.
Belief in a ‘two-tier’ justice has stuck since last summer, and with good reason. While Connolly was denied bail, Labour councillor Ricky Jones, who was filmed telling a real-life crowd that ‘We need to cut their throats and get rid of them’, is still a free man, on bail awaiting trial (he denies encouraging violent disorder). Many have noted the extraordinary sentences handed out for online speech by judges who show leniency elsewhere, but then judges are constrained by sentencing guidelines and the laws passed by politicians.
It is true, however, that the arrest, trial and sentencing of Connolly was carried out in a feverish atmosphere. As Laurie Wastell wrote in The Spectator, three days into the disorder ‘the Prime Minister told the country that the unrest we were seeing was the work of “gang[s] of thugs” who had travelled to “a community that is not their own” to smash it up.’ Stating that the violence was ‘clearly whipped up online’, Starmer was ‘whipping up the police, Crown Prosecution Service and courts to hysteria, demanding convictions. And none of it was true.’
As her extraordinary sentence was handed down, Connolly’s judge had declared that ‘It is a strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive. There is always a very small minority of people who will seek an excuse to use violence and disorder causing injury, damage, loss and fear to wholly innocent members of the public and sentences for those who incite racial hatred and disharmony in our society are intended to both punish and deter.’
That is certainly true, although one might wonder if a society can be strengthened by being diverse and inclusive if that entails incredibly draconian punishments to deter ‘hatred and disharmony’. That rather sounds like a weakness – it certainly is to the British citizens who find themselves sent to prison for words written in anger.
This article first appeared in Ed West’s Wrong Side of History Substack.