-
AAPL
213.43 (+0.29%)
-
BARC-LN
1205.7 (-1.46%)
-
NKE
94.05 (+0.39%)
-
CVX
152.67 (-1.00%)
-
CRM
230.27 (-2.34%)
-
INTC
30.5 (-0.87%)
-
DIS
100.16 (-0.67%)
-
DOW
55.79 (-0.82%)
The intensity of female friendship explored
Sam Leith has narrated this article for you to listen to.
‘From the days of Homer on,’ Vera Brittain wrote, ‘the friendships of men have enjoyed glory and acclamation, but the friendships of women, in spite of Ruth and Naomi, have usually been not merely unsung, but mocked, belittled and falsely interpreted.’ Rachel Cooke’s anthology – inspired in part by her own ardent friendship with the late Carmen Callil – seeks to redress that.
It was, as Cooke reports in her introduction, more of a challenge than she’d anticipated. Every other popular novel these days may be about female friendship (‘The result,’ Cooke semi-grumbles, ‘both of feminism and, I think, of capitalism’), but before Jane Austen, ‘fully realised and articulated friendships between women in literature’ were as rare as full stops in Henry James. The important relationship for women in fiction was marriage. 1991’s Oxford Book of Friendship – edited by two men – relegated friendship between women to a single brief chapter, and only 49 of its more than 300 authors were female.
‘Do women really have more friends than men, and are their relationships with them more intense?’
Cooke bravely risks the charge of what’s sometimes called gender essentialism in saying that female friendships – which is what this book, as its publisher might indicate, is interested in – are different from the male sort: more complex, more confiding, more agonised. ‘Do women really have more friends than men, and are their relationships with them more intense? It seems that the answer to both questions is yes.’ Blokes talk about ‘music, football, books’. Women talk about… other stuff too, apparently. Chaps can find out what that other stuff is by reading this book.
The result of Cooke’s considerable labours in the archive is a spry and very dip-in-and-outable anthology of writing about female friendship in an exhilaratingly wide array of forms from high culture and low. Here are passages of fiction and poetry and memoir, speeches and obituaries, letters, agony aunt columns and even comics (The Four Marys from Bunty!). The oldest entry is from the Bible. The most recent pieces include Cooke’s send-off for Callil and a very touching speech given at Hilary Mantel’s funeral by her oldest pal Anne Preston.
Every anthology needs some sort of structuring principle. This one, writes Cooke, ‘has the shape of a human life’. It’s chronological, but not in the publication dates of its texts so much as in their themes. It takes us from the bassinet to the funeral parlour chapter by chapter: ‘Definitions’, ‘Childhood’, ‘First Encounters, Confessions, Closeness, Contrasting Characters’, ‘Solidarity’, ‘Loneliness and Longing’, ‘Frenemies and Falling Out’, ‘Shifting Sands’, ‘Old Friends’ and ‘Goodbyes’. Each of these sections jumbles voices from different ages – so in ‘Old Friends’ Chaucer and Samuel Richardson share space with Toni Morrison and Carol Shields.
Predictably enough, the ‘Frenemies’ section is a corker. One highlight is a just wonderful worm-turning character assassination of the ghastly Susan Sontag by her former disciple Terry Castle; another is a run of extracts from Katherine Mansfield’s letters bitching poisonously about her lifelong friend Ida Baker. Imagine Ida’s delight when the letters were published after Mansfield’s death.
But there’s as much to be moved by here as to cackle over. A piercing lesser-known poem of Stevie Smith opens the bit on loneliness, and the last section – the send-offs – is just as touching as you’d expect. Here’s an incomparably tender and exact description of Hannah Arendt by Mary McCarthy. The book ends, quite properly, with the death of Helen Burns from Jane Eyre: ‘Resurgam.’
And as Cooke’s anthology reminds us – in an age when we’re all gushing over our ‘besties’ on Instagram (Elena Ferrante has firm views on affixing hierarchical adjectives to the word friend) – sometimes less is more. Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore were boon companions for two whole years, I was delighted to learn, before they stopped calling each other ‘Miss Bishop’ and ‘Miss Moore’.
Emilie du Châtelet – a lone voice among Enlightenment thinkers
Two things that amaze me about the European Enlightenment are the brilliance of its achievements and the stupidity with which it excluded much of humanity from its circle. Say, for example, you were an 18th-century Frenchwoman who wished to advance human understanding of the universe by doing experiments, discussing texts and comparing hypotheses with other experts. You could forget about joining any of the scientific or philosophical academies created for that purpose – they would not let you in. Instead, your best hope was to create a salon and make it fashionable. For this you had to be wealthy, so you could provide the snacks and wine, and you’d need a country château or a Paris apartment or both. Also, you’d have to have been lucky enough in childhood to have a supportive parent to give you an education. Finally, you would need a tolerant husband – the sort who would not panic if he saw a scandalous personage such as Voltaire around the house.
All these advantages were possessed by one of the most celebrated of Enlightenment women, the Marquise du Châtelet. Born Gabriele Émilie le Tonnelier-de-Breteuil in Paris in 1706, she had an encouraging father who taught her Latin and Greek. She then had the suitable husband, Florent-Claude du Châtelet, an aristocratic colonel who owned the château of Cirey-sur-Blaise in the Champagne region, and who was often away on military service. Even when at home, he did not mind seeing Voltaire – which was fortunate, since Voltaire was at Cirey a lot and was Émilie du Châtelet’s lover for a time.
Mostly, the pair spent their days engrossed in the study of physics, especially the work of Isaac Newton. Du Châtelet translated Newton’s books and both she and Voltaire published their own studies of Newtonian theory. Of their two books, Du Châtelet’s The Institutions of Physics (1740) had more impact. It went into four editions and influenced Enlightenment thinkers ranging from the editors of the Encyclopédie (who reused her words with only partial acknowledgement) to Immanuel Kant, who praised her ‘distinction of understanding and scientific training’. Du Châtelet’s life was cut short at 42, when she died following childbirth, but her intellectual legacy lasted longer.
Not much longer, however. In subsequent years, she came to be thought of mainly as a translator and as Voltaire’s mistress, rather than as a serious philosopher of science. Kant, once so complimentary, now ridiculed her as a woman trying to apply her ‘lovely understanding’ to matters better left to men. Turned into a sidekick, she was kicked aside.
Voltaire described Newtonianism as
a ‘faith’, a ‘gospel’, and a cause for which one might become a ‘martyr’
So far, so familiar. Much restoration to her place in intellectual history has already been done, notably in a 2006 biography by Judith Zinsser, cited with appreciation here. In The Enlightenment’s Most Dangerous Woman, Janiak sets himself a different task. He seeks to show that Du Châtelet’s work was buried not only because she was female but because it contained philosophical elements that later generations found threatening.
Identifying these elements takes him deeply into her arguments in The Institutions, and thence into Newtonian physics, especially aspects found most controversial at the time, such as the theory of gravity as a universal force able to operate even in empty space. Some critics dismissed this as absurd: how can a force be transmitted if there is literally nothing to transmit it? Others embraced it so eagerly that they became almost religious in their devotion to the great man. Among these was Voltaire, who described Newtonianism as a ‘faith’, a ‘gospel’, and the sort of cause for which one might become a ‘martyr’.
Du Châtelet, by contrast, read the pro- and anti-Newton texts coolly, analysed their points and concluded that some right and wrong could be found in most of them. The edifice of science, she wrote, is built by many different hands. ‘Each philosopher has seen something, and none has seen everything; there is no book so bad that nothing can be learned from it, and none so good that one may not improve it.’ She warned the reader: ‘I advise you not to carry respect for the greatest men to the point of idolatry.’
Her message, as Janiak explicates it, is that we would do better to consider particular arguments as they are made rather than swearing allegiances. She also cautioned against getting carried away by abstract speculation. Hypotheses were a necessary speculative stage of scientific method, but they should be put forward with ‘epistemic modesty’, to use Janiak’s phrase. This meant recognising that complete truth about reality might never be found, but parts of it could be settled through scientific investigation tempered by good philosophical judgment, the two disciplines working not in competition (as often happened) but in harmony.
Kant ridiculed her as a woman trying to apply her lovely understanding to matters better left to men
Janiak argues that Du Châtelet’s philosophy ran up against the new era’s longing for heroes to worship, a desire that increased as Enlightenment thinkers became more emotionally invested in their projects. Rather than the many-builders picture, they wanted narratives in which modern geniuses and rebels (like themselves) overthrew older thinkers mired in tradition. The irony is that many of them in emulating their loner heroes became uncritically subservient to them. It’s all a bit Life of Brian: ‘Yes, we are all individuals!’
According to Janiak, Du Châtelet had to be sidelined because her philosophy of pluralism and restraint exposed their fallacies. Even the authors who benefitted most from her Newtonian interpretations went on to neutralise her by confining her to that interpretive role, ignoring her larger arguments. As a philosopher, she disappeared.
Janiak writes warmly about Du Châtelet’s work while mostly avoiding the hero-worship trap she had warned readers against. As co-leader of Project Vox, which recovers lost voices of women in science and philosophy, he has immersed himself in the subject for years, and tells us that the book emerged from a ‘thicket’ of material gathered by him and his research partner Karen Detlefsen, which they’re still ‘wading’ through. Meanwhile, he wanted to write a ‘popular book’ as an offshoot.
Some academic thorns remain. There are dense passages, and 75 pages of notes and bibliography is a lot for a 275-page book. The fact that ‘institutes’ then meant ‘foundations’ or ‘elements’ is explained too many times and not quite in the right places, and a few jovial remarks such as ‘things can get dicey’ are no substitute for genuine lightness of touch.
But it does not matter too much because the excitement comes from the argument rather than the story. This derives from Janiak’s feel for the forces that underlie how books fail or prosper in the world and for the way their authors are made to play various roles (hero, rebel, disciple, sidekick) as those forces pull them this way or that. He reminds us that the building, or revising, of a literary canon is also the work of many minds, and that those minds do not always operate in harmony. In providing us with a model for thinking about these processes, Du Châtelet the philosopher certainly deserves the reassessment she is now receiving.
Has 2024 been the BBC’s worst year yet?
It’s certainly been an eventful year for Britain, what with the snap election, a change in government and yet another new Tory leader. But 2024’s drama hasn’t only been political. The UK media landscape has also faced a number of challenges this year – with our public service broadcaster very often making the news rather than, um, breaking it.
This year, the Beeb has come under fire over dodgy presenters, the accuracy of its own verification service and what it does and does not choose to report. Mr S has gathered some of the most memorable BBC slip-ups from the last 12 months to remind readers just how far the mighty can fall…
BBC pays Huw Edwards six-figure sum after arrest
The Huw Edwards scandal has plagued the public service broadcaster this year, after its former star presenter pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images of children at Westminster magistrates’ court. Around the same time, it emerged the presenter had received a £40,000 pay rise in 2023-24 – despite not having worked for most of that period. Crikey.
Edwards was suspended by the BBC in July 2023 over sex scandal allegations and was arrested in November of that year for possessing indecent images of children. Yet despite Beeb director general Tim Davie confirming in August this year that the organisation had been aware of Edwards’ arrest and the reason for it, the ex-newsreader was paid more than £200,000 after he met with police in November.
After the rather bizarre revelation came to light, the BBC asked Edwards to return the six-figure sum he was paid after his arrest last year. ‘Had he been up front when asked by the BBC about his arrest, we would never have continued to pay him money,’ the BBC board said at the time, raising questions about Davie’s assertion that the corporation knew Edwards had been arrested over the most serious category of indecent images of children. How very odd…
Another star presenter bites the dust
In October, another big BBC name made the Sun splash when it was revealed that TV bosses had investigated Masterchef co-host, Gregg Wallace, over alleged inappropriate sexual comments. In 2018, BBC chiefs met with the cooking show host after a production team was left ‘mortified’ by his behaviour while working on the game show Impossible Celebrities. Wallace had been accused of ‘taking his top off’ in front of a female production worker after ‘boasting about his sex life’, according to a source – who also stated that ‘Gregg appeared to think it was all just banter’. Hilarious…
But that’s not where the story ended. More complaints began to surface and in late November a BBC News investigation set out allegations of inappropriate sexual comments by 13 people who worked with him over a 17-year period. Now the former Masterchef co-host has stepped away from presenting the show – with his lawyers insistent that it is entirely false to say Wallace engages in behaviour of a sexually harassing nature – and will be replaced by the Guardian‘s restaurant critic Grace Dent.
Laura Kuenssberg’s Boris gaffe
To another member of BBC staff: Laura Kuenssberg. The host of the BBC’s flagship Sunday morning politics show came under fire after she announced she had to cancel her interview with former prime minister Boris Johnson. The reason? She had, er, sent him all of the interview briefing notes meant for her team. Oh dear…
Still, the hiccup didn’t stop Kuenssberg from winning interviewer of the year at the 2024 British Journalism Awards. There’s hope for us all, eh?
BBC Verify under scrutiny
The corporation’s much-lauded fact-checking service was launched to combat the scourge of fake news – and yet there have been a number of concerns raised about the way in which it operates, with calls for BBC Verify to take a closer look at the channel’s own coverage before pointing the finger elsewhere. One case includes the rather odd video that was shown on BBC Breakfast about the tragic deaths of two teenage boys in Cardiff. The footage aired by the BBC showed a police van materialising Star Trek-like out of thin air, just behind the bike – with the accompanying voiceover not stopping to highlight the edit, despite the debate at the time concerning the role which the police ‘pursuit’ played in the boy’s deaths.
Or take, for example, David Collier’s research earlier this year that suggested BBC Verify was falling short of the high standards to which it holds other. A BBC report, relying on incomplete IDF footage and the main eyewitness account of a journalist whose outlet has links to the IRGC, insinuated that Israel was directly to blame for Palestinians killed as food aid arrived in Gaza in March. Collier was so enraged about the corporation’s use of the eyewitness, Dr Mohamed Salha, he wrote online that BBC Verify ‘consists of amateurish hacks, who have a supremacist attitude and who don’t even bother to do the most basic of checks. This is not journalism – it is activism.’ Ouch.
For its part, the Beeb rejected Colliers’ allegations, adding: ‘ It is simply wrong to claim an agenda on our part – and ignores much of the journalism we have done.’
But it’s never a good look when the public is left to fact check the fact-checkers…
Silence over the curious case of Rachel Reeves’ CV
Just four months after the Labour lot got into power, the Chancellor got into a spot of bother over the accuracy of her own CV. Mr S documented the full timeline here, after questions were raised about whether Rachel Reeves did – as she claimed on LinkedIn and in a Stylist interview – spend almost a decade working in an economist role. In November, amid growing scrutiny, the Chancellor apparently found time to edit her LinkedIn work experience history, changing her role as ‘economist at the Bank of Scotland’ to instead detail a ‘retail banking’ job at Halifax.
But more questions were raised about her time at the Bank of England, after it emerged that instead of working there for a ‘decade’, as she’d told Stylist, Reeves had worked only six years there – one of which was actually spent at the London School of Economics for a master’s course. What sort of economist gets her numbers wrong by 50 per cent, eh?
Yet while opposition politicians and the general public were understandably angry about the whole palaver – with shadow paymaster general Richard Holden even calling upon Reeves to ‘publish a full, unedited CV’ – the taxpayer-funded Beeb hadn’t published a single article about the affair for almost a month after inaccuracies were flagged by Guido Fawkes. In fact, it took Steerpike himself to publicly question why the BBC hadn’t bothered to cover the story before the corporation eventually did. How very curious…
Kemi Badenoch’s attacks on Farage are backfiring spectacularly
Throughout the last parliament, Labour leader Keir Starmer and Lib Dem leader Ed Davey did not have a bad word to say about each other.
In fact, they hardly even acknowledged the existence of each other’s parties. Neither did they shake hands on a formal Lab-Lib electoral pact. They just both kept pounding away at the Conservative government’s weak spots and allowed it all to happen organically. Anti-Tory voters in every constituency congregated behind the ‘progressive’ party best placed to oust sitting Conservative MPs. It worked like a dream for both.
Right now Farage is having huge fun baiting Tory leader Kemi Badenoch at every possible turn and it is not hard to see why
The contrast between the bounty from that arrangement and what is going on across the right of centre today is painful to behold. Reform leader Nigel Farage is far more of a natural pugilist than Davey and was always going to intrude into the Tory party’s private grief during its protracted leadership contest and aftermath. Right now he is having huge fun baiting Tory leader Kemi Badenoch at every possible turn and it is not hard to see why: Badenoch doesn’t so much keep falling into his traps as leaping into them head-first. In doing so, she risks turning a party with five MPs into the equal of a party with 121 in the eyes of right-of-centre voters.
Instead of just ranging her guns on the multiple targets already being offered up by a hopeless Labour administration, Badenoch is expending energy trying to crush Farage and Reform by talking about them from dawn to dusk. Given that low brand visibility was the most effective brake on Reform’s poll rating until six months ago, this is a strategy which seems to fall well within the scope of Conquest’s Third Law (that the behaviour of an organisation can best be predicted by assuming it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies).
Just in the past week, Badenoch has lost a bruising media argument about whether Reform has overtaken the Conservatives in terms of members – it clearly has – and in doing so turned a clever Christmas holiday stunt by Reform into the dominant political story of the festive season. This has in turn generated another Kemi vs Nigel splash on the front of the Mail on Sunday today – a scoop about her moaning to GB News bosses about the amount of airtime given to Farage.
Where Starmer and Davey once had an undeclared non-aggression pact, Badenoch and Farage now have a famous feud. For Farage this is fine – more headlines and more credence for the idea that he and Badenoch are locked in a fight for dominance on the right that he may well be on course to win.
For Badenoch, it is a disaster. Her perceived hostility towards Farage is likely to upset voters who once backed the Tories yet have recently transferred their allegiance to Reform. It will foster the notion that she is just another ‘Tory Wet’ who is rattled by Reform’s full-blooded agenda on immigration, net zero, tax, law and order, anti-wokery and other touchstone issues. In short, it will make them less likely to return to the Tory fold, even if they live in areas where the Tories are best placed to oust a sitting Labour MP.
A far smarter approach from Badenoch would be just to ignore Farage and make Labour her target in every fight in which she engages. That would both cheer up remaining Tory supporters and make those who were drifting off to Reform like her more.
On the occasions when ignoring Farage is not an option, Badenoch would be wise to stress her appreciation of him as a protest politician harnessing the righteous anger of voters towards a broken system. Defining him as the great disrupter and herself as the purveyor of workable solutions would be a far more subtle and effective approach.
Of the 98 constituencies where Reform came runner-up in July, 89 were won by Labour. So Reform, if left to its own devices, is going to become a much bigger thorn in the side of Labour than the Tories.
Achieving calmer relations with Reform is in my view becoming a prerequisite for Badenoch to succeed. The current toe-to-toe slugfest with Farage only makes sense if she can knock him out and squash Reform down to 5 per cent in the polls. Given the negative reputational baggage the Tories are carrying from their failures in power and the momentum already achieved by Reform, that seems highly unlikely.
So the Tories must create an atmosphere where anti-Labour sentiment can work its organic wonders across the country, achieving a mirror image of the Starmer-Davey effect from the summer. If Badenoch cannot do this then her MPs may soon start hankering after someone else who can.
Katy Balls speaks to Oscar Edmondson and Paul Goodman on the latest Coffee House Shots podcast about Kemi’s performance so far as leader of the Conservative Party:
This latest mega poll is a problem for Badenoch and Farage
The next election may not be expected for another four years but that won’t stop politicos speculating as to what would happen were a vote called now. Less than six months after Keir Starmer’s landslide election victory, the Sunday Times has published a mega poll which finds that if an election was held today, Keir Starmer would lose his majority and just under 200 seats. However, Labour would still be the largest party with 228 seats – as the vote on the right would split between the Conservatives and Reform.
The Tories would be in second place – six seats behind Labour on 222 seats. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage's Reform party would climb to third place with 72 MPs. The Liberal Democrats would fall into fourth on 58 seats while the SNP would be in fifth on 37 seats. As for the Green party, there is little to suggest a green wave, with the party predicted to be stuck with two MPs. The poll makes particularly uncomfortable reading for the cabinet, with six members tipped to lose their seat to the Reform party. They include Angela Rayner, Yvette Cooper, John Healey, Ed Miliband, Bridget Philipson and Jonathan Reynolds. The Health Secretary Wes Streeting would also have a fight on his hands to stay in post but his main opponent would be a pro-Gaza independent.
So, what does this poll tell us? There are a few ways of looking at it. The most obvious is that it confirms the trouble the Labour party finds itself in so soon after their election victory. Starmer supporters will reply that it is early days and they have time on their side but it points to why No. 10 is now betting so much on delivery. Without a change to how people feel about their day-to-day lives Starmer's government is in real trouble.
The positive takeaway for Kemi Badenoch is that it shows the Tories – for now at least – remain the main challenger to Labour. While the Reform party is keen to talk Farage up as the next inhabitant of 10 Downing Street, this poll points out that a reasonable good-case-scenario for Reform on their current trajectory is overtaking the Liberal Democrats. Given they are currently on five MPs and are a new party, this in itself would be a huge achievement. Yet the excited talk of late that Farage could soon be prime minister means that this could now be seen as the party falling short. What's more, Reform plan to use 2025 to prove they have the momentum.
Where the poll is less good news for the Tories is on the red wall. In the 2024 general election, Farage's party came second in 89 seats held by Labour. This poll suggests that Reform remains the main challenger in these seats with the Tories struggling to break out beyond their more traditional heartlands. Farage's party looks set to make significant gains in the North East, Greater Manchester and Wales.
What's more, the poll points to a fracturing of the two party system and a hung parliament where Reform could play kingmaker. One of the Tories' big challenges is that they have few parties who would form a coalition or power sharing agreement with them. Given the current war of words between Badenoch and Farage over membership numbers, it's hard to see the pair joining forces anytime soon. But if the polls in the coming months and years continue to show both the Tories and Reform falling short of forging their own path to power, talk of a potential electoral pact will only grow louder.
Katy Balls speaks to Oscar Edmondson and Paul Goodman on the latest Coffee House Shots podcast about Kemi's performance so far as leader of the Conservative Party:
Elon Musk’s AfD article has rocked German politics
Fresh from explosively disrupting the politics of the US and Britain, Elon Musk has now turned his attention to Germany. The world’s richest man has written an op-ed in the newspaper Die Welt, endorsing the hard-right populist AfD party, which he has called ‘Germany’s last faint hope’.
By doing so, Musk has smashed the carefully constructed firewall which Germany’s old ruling centre-right and centre-left parties had erected against the rapidly rising AfD. The older parties have effectively refused to cooperate with it or join the AfD in local government coalitions.
Germany’s establishment will not stem the rise of the right by banning the AfD or branding them as neo-Nazis
With Germany facing a general election in February after the collapse of Olaf Scholz’s wildly unpopular coalition government, Musk’s intervention could not have been better timed. It has already caused a rumpus at the centre right Die Welt, with the paper’s comment editor resigning in protest against Musk’s piece.
Founded in 2013 as a protest party against the abolition of the Deutschmark currency for the Euro, the AfD rapidly moved to the right to protest against the impact of mass immigration to Germany. It is now second only to the opposition centre-right CDU/CSU in the polls. Faced with the insurgent party coming first in local elections in eastern Germany this year, the old parties accused the newcomers of being neo-Nazis.
Germany’s internal intelligence agency, which guards the constitutional order against any revival of the banned Nazi party, has placed the AfD under special surveillance on suspicion of harbouring Nazi views, and it is true that leading AfD figures have used old Nazi slogans. Its leader in Thuringia, Bjorn Hocke, has also described the Holocaust memorial in central Berlin as a ‘monument of shame’. Musk countered this Nazi accusation by pointing out that AfD leader Alice Weidel has a same sex partner from Sri Lanka, asking rhetorically ‘Does that sound like a Nazi?’
If opinion polls are to be believed, the coming elections in the New Year will be won by the CDU, with the AfD coming second and Olaf Scholz’s centre-left SPD trailing in third place. Rather than any resurgence of Nazism, Germany is belatedly experiencing a phenomenon that is already transforming politics in states elsewhere in Europe like France, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria. All have seen the rise of hard-right populist parties, mainly in response to millions of migrants arriving from the Middle East.
Germany’s establishment will not stem the rise of the right by banning the AfD or branding them as neo-Nazis, and Elon Musk has exposed the futility of such tactics with his explosive intervention. Yet again the billionaire entrepreneur has demonstrated his unerring ability to stir up politics across the globe by highlighting urgent issues that established parties would rather ignore.
We should support Donald Trump’s attempt to buy Greenland
Over Christmas, president-elect Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social site that:
‘For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the world, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.’
Trump’s overture, while highly unwelcome to the Danes, is not a new idea. He made the proposal first in 2019. When Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen described the idea as ‘absurd’ and said, ‘Thankfully, the time where you buy and sell other countries and populations is over. Let’s leave it there’, Trump promptly cancelled his visit to Copenhagen.
Frederiksen has been equally dismissive this time round. But the main response has come from Greenland’s premier, Mute Bourup Egede: ‘Greenland is ours. We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom’. The struggle for freedom of course does not refer to the United States but to Denmark. Egede is Chairman of the socialist Inuit Ataqatigiit party which is fighting for a fully independent sovereign Greenland.
Denmark’s historic links to Greenland are tenuous. According to the Icelandic sagas, Greenland was colonised in the tenth century by Erik the Red after his exile from Iceland. But Norse occupation seems to have been wiped out by the 15thcentury. Racially, Greenland’s population of 56,000 people (living on an island nearly ten times bigger than the UK) is Inuit not Scandinavian.
Until the Danish constitution was revised in 1953, Greenland was a colony. Thereafter it was designated as a county and a constituent part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Home rule was granted in 1979 and in 2008 a referendum approved the Self-Government Act which transferred further powers to Greenland. Denmark still retains control of foreign policy, defence and security.
The idea of buying Greenland and other Arctic territories has history. In 1867, under the presidency of Andrew Johnson who succeeded Abraham Lincoln, US Secretary of State, William Seward bought Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million. It became mockingly known as Seward’s ‘Ice Box’. At the same time, Seward, clearly a real estate dealer at heart, also tried to purchase Greenland. Congress was not enthusiastic, and the idea lapsed – until that is Democrat President Harry Truman offered to buy Greenland for $100 million in 1946.
The rejection of the purchase deal did not prevent Denmark granting the United States the right to set up an air force base at Thule which became a key US outpost in the Cold War. This gets to the nub of Trump’s current interest in Greenland. There is a new Cold War in play. This time it is China-Russia alliance which is battling the United States for global domination. As I noted here in 2020:
‘China claims the same rights as Norway to exploit the resources of the Norwegian-controlled Svalbard archipelago. China further argues that UNCLOS [United States Convention of the law of the Sea], which it has ratified, gives it rights over the ‘Arctic Belt and Road.’
Since then, there have been two developments that make the issue of Greenland even more important to global security. Firstly, the war in Ukraine has pushed Russia ever deeper into China’s maw. This matters because of Russia’s extravagant claims to the Arctic. All the Arctic countries can claim ownership of an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) 200 miles from their shore. But Russia, Canada and Greenland claim ownership of an underwater mountain shelf, the Lomonosov Ridge which extends for over 1,000 miles into the Arctic and includes a peak that rises 2.1 miles from the ocean floor.
Thus far Russia is winning. In February 2023 a UN Commission, after studying Russian date provisionally gave Moscow’s claim the ‘highest authority’. American naval research expert Elizabeth Buchan has called this a ‘major win in the Arctic seabed legal battle.’ As Dr Javed Zafar in his paper for DIPAM (Center for Diplomatic Affairs and Diplomatic Studies) concluded:
‘Russia’s triumph in this case not only cements its strategic dominance in the Arctic but also provides significant economic advantage.’
A second change which makes America nervous about security is that in 2022 the Chinese navy overtook the US navy in size with 234 operating warships to 219. On certain metrics the US is still ahead but the direction of travel is clear. Significantly, the US Navy is much older. About 70 per cent of the Chinese Navy was commissioned after 2010 compared to 25 per cent for the United States. Even US naval intelligence puts Chinese warships on a par with America in terms of quality.
If combined with the Russian navy, the United States is a long way behind the China-Russia alliance. In the Arctic the United States is particularly weak. Unlike America, Russia has a permanent Arctic fleet based in Murmansk. Russia also possesses 41 icebreakers of different classes including numbers of heavy ships including the world’s only nuclear-powered icebreakers. By contrast the US, at a cost of $1.9 billion only committed to its first heavy icebreakers for 46 years on Christmas Eve this year.
It can only be a concern too that Greenland, a very socialist country, is so open to Chinese investment. Even when the European Union requested restrictions on Chinese mining of rare earth minerals, Greenland baulked and replied that ‘Greenland is open for investments from the whole world.’ As Chuan Chen, a lecturer at the University of Copenhagen has concluded,
‘China, a deep-pocketed investor with a huge consumer market, could play a key role in the development of Greenland’s three industries [mining, fishing and tourism].’
For Greenland, sucking up to China is a play for full independence. But for America it is a potential geopolitical disaster. Could a future government there rescind its current arrangements on the US space base at Pituffik?
So, Donald Trump’s concerns about Greenland are not outlandish as the West’s liberal media imagines. Furthermore, expansion by purchase may be a foreign concept to Europeans but it represents a consequential part of American history.
In 1803, in a transaction known as the Louisiana Purchase, the United States acquired from Napoleon a territory of 830,000 square miles for $15 million – an area stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border. Sixteen years later Florida was bought from Spain for $5 million. After the US walloped Mexico in the American-Mexican War of 1848, at the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, President James Polk agreed to pay for a territory that today comprises California, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Arizona. The Gadsden Purchase in 1854 added further territory to these last two states.
The Philippines followed as a $20 million purchase from Spain after the US Navy sank its fleet in Manilla Bay in 1898 following the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in Cuba. The last major US acquisition was the Danish Virgin Islands which it purchased for $25 million from Denmark in 1917. In aggregate the purchase of territories accounts for roughly 40 percent of the United States’s landmass.
The historical precedents are clear. While a potential acquisition of Greenland looks unlikely there are compelling reasons why this would be of benefit to the West’s security. Economically it would probably benefit Greenlanders too. The UK and Europe should support Donald Trump in his expansionary ambitions.
Chocolat doesn’t need a trigger warning
Trigger warnings have become a totemic feature of our times, symptomatic of an age that is both hopelessly fragile and insufferably judgemental. They have spread like a canker as publishers and authors have sought to parade their sensitivity and flaunt their moral superiority. And they are increasingly a means of a virtue signalling and projecting one’s ego.
Evidence of this has been on show this week with the revelation that Joanne Harris has begun to add content warnings to her own books. Readers of her bestselling 1999 novel, Chocolat, will now be cautioned that the story contains ‘spousal abuse, mild violence, death of parent, cancer, hostility and outdated terms for travelling community and religious intolerance’. Furthermore, Harris’s website has been updated to add that her Loki novels include ‘depictions of eating disorders’, that The Blue Salt Road contains ‘depictions of whale hunting’ and The Little Mermaid contains ‘ableist and transphobic slurs’.
A fundamental, underlying motive for trigger warnings has always been for people to signal their moral superiority
Risible as all of this may sound, it will surprise few aficionados of literature, theatre, cinema and television. Trigger warnings now proliferate to the point of banality. For example, the latest re-run of the 1980s and 1990s show Star Trek: The Next Generation on Sky Mix includes new introductory inanities as ‘contains adult themes and emotions’ and ‘contains mild violence’ – both of which are fair descriptions of reality itself. Such redundant warnings are in keeping with Joanne Harris’s own caution, again, on ‘mild violence’. It’s fundamentally a meaningless expression. In this, trigger warnings now serve more to signal compassion and social awareness than seek to prevent any real harm.
There has always been something cynical and vacuous about content warnings. Harris’s intervention only makes their insincerity all the more explicit. While they were ostensibly designed to forewarn those who might actually have been traumatised by events as represented on the page, stage or screen, there was always an element of moralism lurking within. Trigger warnings are part of a culture that seeks to censure or censor what it finds hurtful, offensive or unacceptable.
Intrinsic to Year Zero wokery – an ideology that hasn’t so much gone away as insidiously entered the mainstream – is the notion that most things pertaining to the past are in moral error. History, especially western history, is characterised and caricatured as a litany of sins and horrors: slavery, colonialism, racism, sexism. Hence the mania for toppling statutes some years back, an iconoclasm representing a desire to literally destroy the past and its vestiges.
If the past can’t be demolished, then the next best thing is for it to be traduced and slandered via trigger warnings. This is why content warnings first became so conspicuous within the novels of yesteryear, are now mandatory in museums and galleries, and are affixed to movies and sitcoms repeated on television. They are being applied now to programmes of an even younger vintage. As reported in September, the 1970s soap opera Crossroads has been given a trigger warning on the ITV website because it ‘contains broadcast standards, language and attitudes of its time’.
A fundamental, underlying motive for trigger warnings has always been for those to signal their moral superiority over matters relating to the past, where everything was wrong and horrid. Hence Harris’s admonition on ‘outdated terms for travellers.’ Here she is in keeping with our own particular times and culture, one which assumes it has reached a fixed plateau of enlightenment from which all other epochs can be judged and condemned.
Yet Harris has taken this impulse one step further. Whereas trigger warnings have traditionally sought to pour scorn on the past, here we see them employed to cast aspersions on the present, to lay bare our own lazy acceptance and even representations of all that is wrong and unjust in society: spousal violence, religious intolerance, ableism and transphobia. Through this gesture, Harris seeks to assert and clarify that she is more compassionate than her readers and contemporaries, more alert and more aware about deplorable aspects of society today. This is the trigger warning as a virtue-signalling vanity exercise.
The irony of our predilection for issuing boastful, superior trigger warnings, in the presumption that we have reached an eternal pinnacle of moral sagacity, is that the whole sorry phenomenon is very much of its times: our times. It is a symptom of a particular early-21st century culture that is egotistical, amnesiac, highly self-regarding, preachy and obsessed with feelings, victimhood and identity politics. Ours is an age of censoriousness and hectoring piety. We call it ‘woke’. Perhaps future historians will have a better word for these strange days. But they will still find us fascinating and horrifying in equal measure.
Does Starmer really think quangos will boost economic growth?
If you wanted some ideas for how to boost economic growth, would you ask the people who run businesses or the quangos which regulate them? No prizes for guessing which of them Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Jonathan Reynolds have plumped for. Yes, they really do seem to think that government regulators have some useful ideas for how to boost growth. They have written a jointly-signed letter to the heads of Ofwat, the Environment Agency, the Financial Conduct Authority and healthcare regulators asking them for advice as to how the government might lighten regulation and so make the country richer.
You might as well ask a bunch of turkeys what should be done about Christmas.
You might as well ask a bunch of turkeys what should be done about Christmas. The only answers the government is going to get are those which ensure that regulators get to keep their jobs. Any initiative to cut government regulation is going to send them into survival mode. How could they ever abolish the many regulations which give them something to do and make them feel important?
But then whom do you ask for advice when you want to reduce regulation? Previous efforts to consult businesses and the public have not been hugely fruitful. Tony Blair appointed a ‘red tape czar’ Lord Haskins, who gave up in frustration after a while – having come to the conclusion that excessive regulation was rather popular with big business because, while it made their lives a little more difficult, it made the lives of smaller competitors a lot harder. If the lives of the village butcher and greengrocer are made a misery by some pettifogging health and safety rule, that is just fine in the minds of the supermarket which has just opened down the road.
In 2011 the Coalition government launched its ‘Red Tape Challenge’, asking the general public for ideas for how regulation might be trimmed. The result? Within weeks, business secretary Vince Cable was saying ‘very perversely, we are being bombarded by messages from the public saying please increase regulation.’ While David Cameron later claimed that 800 pieces of legislation were later abolished or amended, the Coalition soon abandoned its great red tape challenge.
Any government which tries to take on red tape finds out very quickly that actually, red tape is quite popular among the general public. Most people do not run businesses and don’t care too much about the burdens placed upon those who do. What matters most to them is that they can get their money back if a product proves faulty, that they can sue their employer if they suffer a workplace accident and that there is some rule by which they can cause the closure of the noisy metal-bashing works down the road. The views of the public can also be very easily manipulated by campaigners who, for example, try to blame the Grenfell Tower disaster on deregulation – even thought that disaster should really be seen as a consequence of the perils of over-regulation. People did not die at Grenfell because of a lack of building regulations – we have tens of thousands of pages of them – nor through a lack of regulators: the building works were inspected no fewer than 16 times. People died because in the fog of pointless regulations the important, and obvious, things, such as not wrapping tower blocks in flammable cladding, got lost.
The paradox is that the public does, however, want economic growth. People want above-inflation wage rises every year, as well as good dividends to feed their pensions. It is just that they struggle to see the connection between over-regulation and a struggling economy. If the present government really is going to tackle red tape it is going to have to work hard to make that case. Asking the red tape establishment for ideas laws to repeal is not a great start.
Who’d want to survive a nuclear war?
The conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East keep raging, Vladimir Putin has lowered the threshold required for Moscow to nuke Europe and Donald Trump is shadowboxing ahead of his return to the ring. You’d need almost divine reserves of Zen to not worry about where all this is heading.
Some people are really worried: they’re paying ‘eye-watering’ and ‘extortionate’ prices of up to £48,000 for nuclear bunkers in case the bomb drops, according to Metro. But surviving a nuclear war ‘doesn’t have to set you back thousands of pounds’, said the Daily Mail. You can build a shelter with ‘objects commonly found around the home’ like internal doors and shower curtains, according to the paper. So your ‘only expenditure’ should be ‘around £72’, on plastic sheeting and ‘a few broom handles’. Best of luck with all that.
The very, very worst thing to do in a nuclear war would be to survive it
I tried to build a homemade nuclear bunker myself once but in my defence I was only 11 years old at the time. It was the morning after I’d watched the BBC’s agonisingly grim nuclear war film, Threads, which portrays a nuclear strike on Sheffield. The film scared me so much that it turned me into a nuclear paranoiac overnight and it’s cast a (mushroom) cloud over my existence ever since. I can sense the march of impending Armageddon in even the calmest of news cycles.
As well as being paranoid about the bomb I’ve also become curiously preoccupied with it. I’ve watched dozens of films about nuclear conflict from The War Game (the only one to rival Threads for sheer hellishness) to the comparatively tame The Day After and the heart-breaking When The Wind Blows.
I’ve also consumed countless books, such as London After The Bomb and Nuclear War: A Scenario, which spelt out in painful detail the realities of nuclear apocalypse. One of my favourite podcasts is called Atomic Hobo and it’s presented by a woman who’s so obsessed with the bomb that she makes me seem disinterested and chilled out in comparison.
So having consumed so much graphic atomic content, I’m very surprised people are so keen to survive a nuclear war. Perhaps I could remind everyone of the excruciatingly obvious point that the very, very worst thing to do in a nuclear war would be to survive it?
A global all-out nuclear war between the US and Russia would lead to an absolute minimum of 360 million quick deaths, so your chances of survival are slim. Direct radiation and the fireball would kill millions within microseconds and then the blast wave would arrive to mop up any human life. You’d find those broom handles were a waste of money at this stage, and then you’d face the fallout dust, which would expose anyone left to terrible doses of ionising radiation.
Anyone who survived all that would contend with hell for the rest of their stunted existences: drastic changes in climate, widespread radioactive contamination and a terrifying collapse of society. A memorable scene in Threads sees a survivor offer her body to a man in return for a few dead rats for her to eat. Life really would be far from ideal and I wonder if you’d think that the £48,000 you shelled out to experience it was money well spent.
You wouldn’t even be safe if you lived hundreds of miles from where the bomb dropped because the ‘nuclear winter’ would cause drastic falls in temperatures and sunshine, a global agricultural collapse and disaster for virtually all forms of life on Earth for decades. That shocking collapse of food production would lead to protracted famine and the deaths of billions of people.
Those who survived to crawl through the rubble of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings went through hell. But even their awful experiences would be a crawl in the park compared those of any survivors of a future nuclear war; some of the weapons of today are far more powerful than the atomic bombs that dropped on Japan.
The human survival instinct is hardwired and it’s also only natural to want to protect yourself and your loved ones. But after a nuclear war the survivors will surely envy the dead, so don’t spend £48,000 trying to stay alive after the bomb drops. Don’t spend even £72. A much wiser pre-nuclear investment would be a bottle of whisky for you to drink as you rush to ground zero, as the sirens wail all around you.
Can Ukraine survive the coming of Donald Trump?
On the eastern marches of Europe, after nearly three years of slugging it out with its larger, more powerful neighbour for control of a string of unlovely mining towns, Ukraine is approaching exhaustion. Kyiv, which has led a fierce and unexpectedly successful defence of its realm, is contending with a waning supply of weapons, ammunition and money. Worse still, president Volodymyr Zelensky’s war effort is beginning to run out of fighting men.
All men aged 25 and over – with the exception of those deemed critical to the war effort, or who have fled, gone into hiding or bribed their way out of the draft – have been dispatched east to hold the line. Those who volunteered during the first days of the war and are still able-bodied are manning positions years after they believed they would be rotated out. These are now some of the most battle-hardened soldiers in the world and Ukraine cannot afford to let them go home.
The scene, then, is set. Moscow and Kyiv are both on a countdown to exhaustion
Since the heady days of late summer 2022, when a lightning counter-offensive seized back a large pocket of territory near Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv, Kyiv’s prospects have steadily dimmed. The chances that it can now recapture the Donbas, not to mention Crimea, seem remote.
Zelensky has admitted as much and suggested he would sign a peace deal that would put the ultimate fate of those regions off for another day. In effect he would probably be signing them away.
And yet, even as Kyiv has scaled back its war aims and Moscow’s forces are advancing steadily across the 600-mile frontline, Putin’s war machine is also creaking. Russian’s economy is in peril. Overall inflation is rising and the costs of staple goods are rising quicker still. Bread has gone up 12 per cent in the last year, cabbage by 26 per cent, and potatoes by 74 per cent.
To try and keep a grip on rising costs, the central bank’s competent but increasingly unpopular governor Elvira Nabiullina has set interest rates at 21 per cent. But with 40 per cent of Russian federal spending going into the war she is running out of economic levers.
And then there is the supply of military equipment. More than 80 per cent of the tanks and armoured vehicles Moscow is sending into battle are from old Soviet stock. Those reserves are predicted to slowly run out in late 2025.
The stalwart Soviet soldier who fought his way to the Reichstag was underfed, under-appreciated, and underpaid. But now Moscow is having to cough up huge signing-up bonuses to persuade reluctant Russians to join the army. Those muscular salaries are further pushing up inflation. And the recruitment of around 30,000 men a month into the military is denying the rest of Russian industry badly-needed manpower. The number of corporate bankruptcies in Russia is sharply up.
There are also the questions of Putin’s leadership. For a quarter of a century, many ordinary Russians have been willing to give their blessing to the former KGB man because he was seen as broadly competent. But that patina has gone from his stewardship. Ukraine’s successful incursion into Kursk, the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, setbacks in Africa, not to mention the appallingly slow and costly advance in Ukraine, have all led to a growing sense that the old man might be losing his touch.
It would, of course, be foolish to put money on Putin’s imminent demise. But sometime soon, probably in the second half of the new year, his problems will begin to compound. At that point defenestration becomes a possibility. If Ukraine can hold out until then, doubtless with the help of western money, ammunition and armour, it is yet conceivable that it could, if not exactly win the war, then at least force Russia into negotiations from a position of strength.
So, as we head into 2025, two clocks are ticking down, one in Kyiv and one in Moscow. And at this critical juncture enters Donald Trump, the former real estate mogul, TV host and American president-elect who has promised to bring the war to the swiftest of ends.
Trump has said he will cut military aid to Ukraine. He will also attempt to persuade Moscow to bank the advances it has made on the battlefield and accept a ceasefire. What happens next really depends on what you believe to be Vladimir Putin’s wider intent.
If you think, at the of 72, he will be happy with control of the 20 per cent of Ukraine his forces have seized, then he may order his men home and call a belated victory parade. But if you believe that his real aim is to control the whole of Ukraine – whether overtly or through proxies – then any ceasefire will only be the curtain at the end of act one.
As soon as Putin sees fit, he will resume campaigning, whether with tanks and guns or political blackmail, assassination and spycraft. Either way Ukraine will remain under Russia’s sway.
On the Republican side of the aisle in the US, and, more quietly, in a few European capitals, some politicians are asking: so what? The answer to that question lies in whether you think that giving an aggressive dog red meat will quieten it or simply encourage it to come back for more. After four years living in Moscow and two decades of Russia-watching I find it hard to imagine an ageing Putin spending his last years overseeing a period of peace and healing.
In the very short term, as Trump prepares to move back into the White House, western policy-makers are focussing on two major issues. Firstly, is the west prepared to give a rump Ukraine meaningful security guarantees? And, if so, what would they look like? And secondly, if Washington pulls its funding, something it has widely telegraphed, is Europe prepared to bankroll and arm Ukraine (probably with weapons bought from the US) until such a time that the mill that is Moscow’s war machine runs out of grist?
The scene, then, is set. Moscow and Kyiv are both on a countdown to exhaustion. Kyiv wants to guarantee its future as an independent state. Moscow wants to ensure that it becomes no such thing.
Trump’s aims? Definitely a ceasefire, probably a signing ceremony in Washington, just possibly a Nobel Peace prize for the man who ended the war? How he sets out to achieve those aims, however, and the price he is willing to pay to bring Moscow onboard, could determine not only the fate of Ukraine in the short term, but security in Europe for decades to come. The next few months are critical.
Ireland has a serious case of ‘keffiyeh brain’
As Irish households glowed with lights and festive cheer ahead of Christmas day, the Taoiseach of Ireland made time for a cordial call with Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority. Simon Harris assured Abbas that the plight of Gazans weighed heavily on Irish minds, reaffirming his country’s ‘unbreakable’ support.
‘Ireland once again calls for a lasting ceasefire in Gaza,’ read a statement from Harris’s office. ‘Despite the humanitarian catastrophe and unconscionable loss of life in 2024, peace fuelled by a two-state solution must be the goal of the world community in 2025.’
No doubt, Harris saw the conversation as a diplomatic win. Dublin nodded vaguely to ceasefires and peace, and earned praise for recognising a Palestinian state, the government and borders of which remain a mystery to all parties involved. But why fuss over details? As Harris cooed, there’s ‘never a wrong time to do the right thing.’
Be that as it may, there is a wrong time to do the wrong thing. Abbas has evaded elections for 18 years, obscenely claimed the Holocaust resulted from Jewish moneylending, and provides stipends to the families of suicide terrorists. Even among Palestinians, he is more loathed than loved. Yet Harris thought, as Irish people ‘gather with their families for Christmas,’ what could be more in the spirit of the season than a call to such a figure?
Worse, the Taoiseach presumed to speak for the ‘Irish people,’ tarnishing his countrymen – most of whom reject anti-Semitism – with his posturing. Such declarations are catnip for keffiyeh-clad Irishmen, but for many others they are a cause of shame. Once again, Ireland will be the toast of Hamas, who applauded Harris’s recent attempt to alter the definition of genocide to better find Israel guilty of it.
It is, of course, understandable to lament the destruction in Gaza. But affiliating with figures like Abbas, just a week after Israel withdrew its embassy from Dublin over Ireland’s extreme ‘anti-Israel’ stance, crossed another line. Uncritically repeating Hamas death tolls, as Harris did on Monday, further cemented Dublin’s status as an anti-Israel mouthpiece.
So, what was achieved by the call? Admirable as it sounds, Dublin’s bid to set the world’s agenda didn’t move the dial: the war rages on, undaunted by Harris’s proclamation.
Indeed, global events are exposing the limits of this kind of fluffy diplomacy. It wasn’t solemn words from Dublin but two events – both abhorred by the Irish government – that have brought peace closer than ever. First, Israel pummelled Hamas and Hezbollah into the rubble, despite Dublin’s protests. Second, Donald Trump was re-elected. Soon after, he warned Hamas – and reiterated last week – that if the hostages aren’t returned when he assumes office, ‘all hell is going to break out.’
This is language Hamas and their Tehran backers understand. Counting on global outrage, amplified by countries such as Ireland, to erode US support for Israel, they pressed on, believing there was light at the end of the tunnel. Instead, Trump’s silhouette now greets them, and they’re scrambling to cut deals.
For all their controversies, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu instinctively grasp that some forces yield only to hard power. Both leaders have shouldered life-and-death decisions, making them more realistic operators in this increasingly perilous world than politicians in Ireland, which relies on the RAF to guard its skies. Perched safely on the edge of western Europe, it remains insulated from the dangers baked into Israeli life.
From this position of comfort – much like that of elite western university campuses – what we might call ‘keffiyeh brain’ sets in. It’s easy to play the radical, cry ‘justice’ from the soapbox, and admonish those grappling with real-world problems. But this isn’t diplomacy; it’s performance art, unbecoming of a serious country.
Most-read 2024: How did Wolf Hall escape the attentions of the BBC’s diversity commissars?
We’re closing 2024 by republishing our five most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 3: James Delingpole’s article from November on the new BBC Wolf Hall.
Wolf Hall is one of the few remaining jewels in the BBC’s tarnished crown. Presumably that’s why it was allowed to get off relatively lightly from the attentions of the Beeb’s resident diversity commissars.
It seemed to strike an acceptable balance between verifiable historical incident and dramatic licence
Yes, I recognise that I may be a terrible reactionary, completely out of tune with the times. But I think I speak for quite a few of us when I say that I was grateful in the first episode to notice only two discreet gestures towards anachronistic casting: one lady in waiting and one member of the king’s council.
As I keep saying, whatever you think about ‘representation’, what matters far more in period drama is authenticity. If you’re going to go to all the trouble and expense of recreating Tudor England – sumptuous locations from Hampton Court to Montacute House and Penshurst Place, fabrics so rich they could have jumped out of a Holbein portrait – you need to get the casting right too. After all, Wolf Hall viewers are the kind of people who notice that in the first episode of season two we’ve got a character talking about ‘tripwires’ when the first recorded use of the word, according to the OED, wasn’t till 1916.
Damian Lewis continues to make the most brilliant Henry VIII. Possibly he’s not quite as rotund, gouty and ulcerous as the king would have been by this stage. But he captures perfectly that mercurial mix of impulsive generosity and charm, giving way in an instant to wounded pride, suspicion, outrage and vengeful, mortal fury which must have made Henry such a terrifying, nerve-racking proposition for his wives, children and courtiers.
Mark Rylance is very watchable too, as Cromwell, the only man in Tudor England capable of riding the king’s violent mood-swings, anticipating his changing needs and acting to their mutual benefit. But he inhabits the role so fully that it becomes almost distracting. ‘There’s Mark Rylance immersing himself in the character of someone who never quite looks you in the eye, is the consummate fixer, but is totally unknowable,’ you think. Whereas what you should be thinking is: ‘That’s Thomas Cromwell.’
I can’t remember why I gave up watching the first series. Nine years is a long time ago; so long that some of the original cast, e.g. Bernard Hill, have died and been replaced, or got so famous, like Spiderman’s Tom Holland, that they’re no longer affordable on a BBC budget. However, I seem to recall finding it a bit sludgy and ponderous, as well as mumbly and oppressively gloomy.
For its second outing, though (directed, as before, by Peter Kosminsky and adapted by Peter Straughan) it appears to have upped its game. Apart from the ‘tripwire’ solecism (how did no one notice?), there were no moments where I wanted to throw rocks at the screen; it seemed to strike an acceptable balance between verifiable historical incident and dramatic licence; and it looked and felt right. Maybe I’ll stick with it this time.
Putin’s Azerbaijan apology will have bruised his ego
Has Vladimir Putin been forced to eat humble pie? Earlier today, the Russian president felt compelled to issue an apology – of sorts – after an Azerbaijan Airlines plane crashed in Kazakhstan on 25 December, killing 38 of the 67 passengers on board. The plane had been travelling from the Azeri capital Baku to Grozny, in the Russian region of Chechnya, when it was hit by air defence systems, forcing it to crash-land hundreds of miles off course in neighbouring Kazakhstan.
Speaking on the phone to the Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev, Putin called the crash a ‘tragic incident’ and expressed his condolences to the injured and families of the victims. Shedding some light on what is supposed to have happened, a readout of the presidents’ conversation issued by the Kremlin stated that ‘at that time, Grozny, Mozdok and Vladikavkaz were being attacked by Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles, and Russian air defence systems repelled these attacks’.
Today’s phone call, with its half-apology, will have been bruising enough for his ego
In Russia’s version of events, then, the plane was unintended collateral damage in attempts to defend Grozny against an incoming Ukrainian drone attack. There are however still many unanswered questions surrounding the circumstances of the crash, not least why the aircraft diverted to Kazakhstan after being struck instead of landing somewhere else in Russia.
Despite apologising, it appears Putin stopped short of claiming responsibility for the downed plane. So too did Alivey resist directly accusing the Russian president of causing the crash, saying only that it was subject to ‘physical and technical external interference’ and had been damaged before it crashed.
For a president who in his nearly 25-year reign so far has made a firm habit of never saying sorry, the fact that Putin apologised at all – not least to a minor diplomatic ally such as Azerbaijan – is in itself significant. Precedent, as with the tragic case of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 shot down by Russian-backed forces over Ukraine in 2014, would suggest that Putin might do his best to ignore the fact the crash ever happened. But, as the call between Putin and Aliyev today showed, Moscow’s relations with Baku are too important for the Russian president to burn bridges by ignoring the incident entirely.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, Azerbaijan has played an increasingly large role in the export of natural gas from Russia, with export volumes quadrupling in 2023 alone. With Baku’s own gas exports to western Europe also rising following the decision to sanction Russia’s supplies, the arrangement has raised questions over whether Baku has in fact been helping Moscow ‘launder’ gas for the West. Similarly, Moscow has long supported Azerbaijan in its territorial dispute with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, sending in ‘peace-keepers’ and providing the region with cheap energy.
Putin is a dictator who reads apologies and contrition as signs of weakness; today’s phone call, with its half-apology, will have been bruising enough for his ego. But it is a small insight into the strain his leadership is coming under as Russia fights its third winter in Ukraine and the country pays the price with a stuttering economy and ever-increasing cost of living crisis – not to mention estimated war casualties of nearly 750,000 men by some counts.
The conflict is currently leaning in Moscow’s favour, not least with the prospect of a second Trump presidency and the likely withdrawal of American support for Kyiv now within touching distance. But evermore isolated and financially strained, Russia still needs all the friends it can keep.
The Christmas day downing of the Azerbaijan Airlines flight also tragically brings home a further reality of the war Putin began in Ukraine nearly three years ago. Thanks to him, the war is now coming to the Caucasus, with innocent civilians from peaceful countries such as Azerbaijan being unwillingly drawn into the line of fire. Above anything, as the likelihood of a Trump-brokered peace deal edges ever closer, it is a reminder that it is no longer only Ukraine and Russia impacted by Putin’s bloody whims.
Brits have bleak outlook for 2025
Dear oh dear. The Labour lot have not fared well in opinion polling this year and More in Common’s New Year poll has certainly not bucked that trend. The new survey, which quizzed more than 2,400 people, reveals that half of Brits believe 2025 will be worse than 2024 – while less than a quarter think it will be better. It’s yet more bad news for Starmer’s army…
The new polling suggests that nearly 20 per cent of people are concerned next year will be ‘much worse’ than the last 12 months – while a quarter believe 2025 will remain the same. Even a third of Labour voters are convinced things will get worse next year, while almost two-thirds of Reform and Tory voters feel the same. Crikey.
And there are some rather interesting thoughts about what exactly will happen in 2025. Almost a third of Brits think Sir Keir Starmer will resign as PM, with just over a quarter convinced that 2025 will be the year Prince William becomes King. Half of those polled worry AI development will result in ‘serious job losses’ around the world, a quarter hope for a royal baby announcement – and only a fifth expect NHS waiting lists to fall. Might these predictions really come to pass? Stay tuned…
What are Spectator columnists outlook for 2025? Rod Liddle, Lionel Shriver and more join Lara Prendergast and William Moore on a special festive version of The Edition podcast:
Keir Starmer could still walk away from the Chagos deal
When Sir Keir Starmer announced in October that he had reached an agreement with Mauritius to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos archipelago, he was met with fierce and sustained criticism. The deal essentially surrendered the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), one of the 14 remaining overseas territories, to the government of Mauritius, while salvaging a 99-year lease on the island of Diego Garcia, home to a strategically vital joint UK/US military and naval base. But the Prime Minister has unexpectedly been handed an opportunity to row back on this agreement. The question is, will he take it?
When the agreement was announced, opponents argued that the Prime Minister had endangered both British and American national interests by ceding the islands to a nation which has close economic ties with China. Critics gravely wondered aloud what the implications might be for other overseas territories subject to territorial claims, like the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar.
Mauritius has never exercised sovereignty over the Chagos archipelago as an independent nation
At first, the government was at least able to point to support from the White House, as President Joe Biden welcomed the settlement. But the situation has since become more unpromising: sources close to Donald Trump’s advisers have indicated deep concern, calling the deal a ‘high-priority issue’ for ‘day one’. Not only this, but the new prime minister of Mauritius, Navinchandra Ramgoolam, has rejected the terms of the arrangement because they ‘would not produce the benefits the nation could expect’.
Even the most charitable observer could hardly rate this as a foreign policy success. Nevertheless, if the Prime Minister wants to end the year on a relatively high note, he should see that there is an opportunity here. He could make at least some kind of silk purse out of this sow’s ear if he now has the courage and wit simply to walk away from the deal.
Of course, there would be a degree of humiliation and obloquy to endure, though Starmer has so far demonstrated a startling indifference to that in his first six months in office. But there is counter-narrative: His Majesty’s government negotiated in good faith, continuing the work begun by the Conservatives as far back as 2021, but new administrations in Mauritius and the United States have now made the existing arrangement unsustainable, therefore regretfully etc etc. (The diplomatic service could no doubt refine the language.)
It is, after all, a terrible deal. Let us remember, firstly, that Mauritius has never exercised sovereignty over the BIOT as an independent nation. The Chagos archipelago formally came under British control in 1815 and was governed, for administrative convenience, from Mauritius, which had been taken from the French five years before. But the islands are more than 1,300 miles apart.
The archipelago was made a separate jurisdiction and established as an overseas territory in 1965, while Mauritius, then still a crown colony, only became independent three years later. Mauritius also received financial compensation equivalent to £75 million at today’s value. Yet somehow its government now believes the UK is not paying enough money to surrender the sovereignty of territory which never belonged to it except as a British possession.
This is being done, we are told, because the legal climate makes it inevitable that the UK’s sovereignty over the BIOT will be declared invalid. In 2019, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion that the separation of Mauritius and the Chagos archipelago had been unlawful, and in 2021 the international tribunal on the law of the sea, ruling on a dispute between Mauritius and the Maldives, judged that the UK did not have sovereignty over the BIOT.
Neither of these decisions is legally binding. Yet the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, told the House of Commons in October that the deal negotiated with Mauritius was vital:
A binding judgment against the UK seemed inevitable, and it was just a matter of time before our only choices would have been abandoning the base altogether or breaking international law.
It is a strange foreign policy indeed which not only anticipates but brings forward defeat while the battle is still underway – a Pyrrhic victory without the victory. There is also an unpleasant tang of deceit. The Labour party’s election manifesto was unambiguous about Britain’s international commitments:
Defending our security also means protecting the British overseas territories and crown dependencies, including the Falklands and Gibraltar. Labour will always defend their sovereignty and right to self-determination.
That has proven to be a lie. The BIOT’s sovereignty has been surrendered, not defended, and there has been no notion of self-determination nor consultation even with the exiled Chagossian communities. It is impossible to believe any assurances the government might make about other overseas territories.
In adversity can lie opportunity. The Prime Minister could walk away from this unholy and disreputable mess of his own creation. Donald Trump and Navinchandra Ramgoolam have unintentionally opened a door for him. If Starmer chooses to slam it shut again, it will suggest he is in thrall to politics masquerading as law, and sixth-form postcolonial agitprop, at the expense of Britain’s strategic interests.
The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said ‘nous sommes nos choix‘ – we are our choices. Who will Sir Keir Starmer be?
The triumph of When Harry Met Sally
Look at any list of the ‘greatest ever romcoms’ and you’ll find When Harry Met Sally near the top of the list, if not heading it. This 1989 movie, directed by Rob Reiner and written by the late Nora Ephron – with terrific performances from Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan as the title characters – is about as good as the genre got, the high peak of romantic comedy before its slump to the present day. With its New Year’s Party ending and rendition of ‘Auld Lang’s Syne’, it’s also the perfect film to watch in the week after Christmas (hence, no doubt, the BBC’s decision to screen it this coming 30 December).
New York looks blow-dried, glossy and gleaming. Central Park in autumn is ravishingly on fire
Is there anyone over 35 who hasn’t seen it? For those who haven’t, the movie, set mostly in 1980s New York, asks a perennial question: can men and women ever really be friends or does sex always get in the way? We watch as over twelve years the title characters – Harry Burns and Sally Albright (smart names, we realise) – meet and hate, then befriend and rely on each other, before wrecking it all (perhaps) with a one-night stand. Looking on are their two best friends, played, delightfully, by Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby, for whom – SPOILER ALERT – the course of true love runs a lot more smoothly. But the decades-long grope towards romance between Harry and Sally – one so pessimistic, one so bright and sunny – is part of the fun of the film.
Nora Ephron, in a later interview, was keen to stress the difference between Christian romantic comedies and Jewish ones. In the first, she said, there was usually a visible obstacle to the romance; in the second, there was no obstacle at all except for the man’s neuroses. This film, very much the Jewish kind, sprang from long, confessional conversations Ephron had with director Rob Reiner, whose marriage had broken up and who was dealing uncomfortably with the dating scene. The truths Reiner revealed to her about men, she said, were ‘all the things you hope no one will ever tell you.’ In return she assured him that women often faked orgasm; Reiner, initially incredulous (‘Not with me!’) found that just a little research proved Ephron right.
All these things would go into the movie, as well as Ephron’s tendency – copied by Sally – to make numerous amendments when ordering off a restaurant menu. Virtual newcomer Meg Ryan, having read for the part of Sally, was judged ideal: ‘We all knew within a week of shooting,’ Ephron said of her, ‘that a jackpot was going to be hit.’ Reiner, who considered himself Harry’s prototype, said it could only be played properly by his old friend Billy Crystal. The rest, as they say, is casting history.
Now a classic, When Harry Met Sally wasn’t universally loved on its release. Many critics said it was over-influenced by Woody Allen, with its jazz soundtrack, its lingering shots of New York landmarks, and its Jewish angst in Billy Crystal’s performance.
No one could deny Allen’s influence on the film – it’s plastered all over the screen – but does it matter? Ephron/Reiner’s film isn’t so much abject imitation as their love-letter (or even thank you letter) to a director whose work they (and so many of us) clearly adored. Besides, comparisons can be drawn too with About Last Night (another hit film of the decade) or the fireworks between Sam and Diane in that US 80s sitcom without equal, Cheers. Similar ingredients to them all, yet a subtly different dish.
But just like Allen’s 1977 Annie Hall, When Harry Met Sally is a series of exquisite comic moments – Harry and Sally sniping about love on an airport escalator, the matchmaking dinner which goes horribly wrong (or right), the series of long-married couples (played by actors, but scripted from the real thing) talking to camera about how they met. It also, of course, has that scene in the delicatessen, where Sally puts down her turkey sandwich to fake a tumultuous orgasm in public, and whose inception is a story in itself. A moment suggested by Ryan, it required her to do numerous, gruelling takes over the course of a day, after Reiner had given a noisy rendition of what it should look and sound like. The scene was criticised, by Roger Ebert among others, for betraying the film’s ‘realism’: ‘I didn’t believe any woman would ever do that.’ He is right, but it just doesn’t matter. That orgasm became more famous than the film itself and was even parodied on The Muppet Show, with Ryan replaced by Miss Piggy.
If the film caught the zeitgeist between men and women – when the sexual revolution (raging in Annie Hall twelve years before) had calmed down and was revealed not to have changed very much – it’s also now very much the picture of a lost America. In 1989, the country was confident and breezy after 8 years of Ronald Reagan. Nixon’s disgrace and the Kennedy assassination had faded into the background, while Carter’s downbeat speeches on American ‘malaise’ were a thing of the past. America was just about to win the Cold War (I saw the film for the first time in Los Angeles, a week or two after the Berlin Wall fell) and really did seem to set the standard for us all.
Accordingly, the film has generosity to spare and is unashamedly full of the Good Life. New York looks blow-dried, glossy and gleaming in this film. Central Park in autumn is ravishingly on fire, and the characters seem to veer from riverside restaurant to uptown bookstore, from baseball game to hotel ballroom. Everyone, whether they’re arguing over furniture or hauling home Christmas trees, is making an effort to keep life splendid, and appears virtuous for doing so. What stops the film – which seems at times shot through a lilac gauze – from moving into chocolate-box territory is the quality of the writing and its pin-sharp depiction of the abyss between men and women, who, despite all the bafflement and frustration, retain a basic goodwill towards one another. This warmth is notable in the chemistry between Crystal and Ryan, as they bicker and heart-to-heart their way to intimacy: ‘It feels,’ said Ephron, ‘as if they’re crazy about each other.’ The war between the sexes, though crackling away all right, still hasn’t gone to Def Con 3.
‘It’s the job of a man to try to understand the nature of a woman. It’s the job of a woman to try to understand the nature of a man. And, by doing so, we can kind of forge a détente,’ said Reiner – which is as good a New Year’s resolution as any. Such a staple film has it become for the night, there are even sites telling you exactly what time to start watching, so as to count down to 1 January along with the characters. Most of us wouldn’t go that far, but a year that begins with Ephron’s masterpiece can’t be all bad. 35 years on and still glowing with good humour, When Harry Met Sally remains one of the wisest, snappiest romcoms ever made.
Taboos around incest are there for a reason
Since Tory MP Richard Holden called for first-cousin marriage to be banned in the UK earlier this month, few people have been prepared to speak in favour of the practice. While not unheard of among white British families, cousin marriage is rare and viewed as rather odd. So, when writer Charles Amos agreed to speak to GB News in defence of such relationships, we welcomed the opportunity for debate.
The interview with Andrew Pierce and myself took an unexpected turn when, having argued against a ban on cousin marriage on the grounds that the state should not interfere in such matters, I asked Amos if this view extended to sibling marriage. He replied that it did, and expanded on his answer to imply that even sexual relationships between fathers and daughters should not necessarily be off-limits.
'Individuals should be free to marry and have children with whoever they want…'
— GB News (@GBNEWS) December 19, 2024
Writer, Charles Amos, joins GB News to describe why he believes individuals should be free to form a relationship with anyone, including incestuous relationships with cousins or siblings. pic.twitter.com/vxXv7Xnfli
This answer precipitated a Twitter pile-on, to which Amos responded articulately in The Spectator. While I deeply regret the online abuse, I’m grateful for this opportunity to explain why I believe Amos is wrong.
But first a point of agreement. Like Amos, I don’t believe cousin marriage is always immoral. First-cousin marriage increases the risk of birth defects but, as Amos points out, we do not ban other risky conceptions, such as those in women over 40. But in terms of justifying state intervention, it has become a question of scale. Generations of inbreeding in some communities has greatly increased the rate of serious deformities, a situation that is both tragic and increasingly costly to the taxpayer. This is no longer a private issue but a societal one.
Like Amos, I don’t believe cousin marriage is always immoral
Amos does not only oppose bans on cousin and sibling relationships on the basis of government overreach. He also defends the existence of the children conceived in this way, saying that in prohibiting incest “the sperm and egg will never meet. That life would never exist”. This is an odd argument to make. Once a child has been conceived, he or she is as fully human and valuable as any other, regardless of the circumstances of conception. But to object to the prohibition of incest on the grounds that it prevents potential lives from existing is to condemn any action or inaction that might avert a future conception, such as the use of contraception, celibacy or even the prevention of rape. It is difficult to make the case for the rights of a hypothetical child who does not – and may never – exist.
Amos argues that widespread disgust at the idea of close-family incest is a biological reaction, not a moral one. The visceral online response to Amos’ views on sibling and father-daughter sex certainly has a strong instinctive element. But the higher risk of birth defects is not the primary reason why close family incest is morally wrong. Western law and ethics have their foundations in the Old Testament, where God expressly forbids incestuous sex, including between stepparents and stepchildren where there is no blood relationship.
The purpose of this prohibition cannot, therefore, be solely to prevent birth abnormalities; rather, I believe, it is to shield women and children from sexual abuse. For obvious reasons, women and children must be protected from predatory males who seek to use them for sexual gratification. Societies have developed laws and conventions (such as single-sex provisions) to limit opportunities for rape and sexual assault. But in private family homes, it is principally the role of older members of the household – especially males – to protect women and children from unwanted sexual advances. If it is socially acceptable for fathers and brothers to see their daughters, stepdaughters and sisters as legitimate sexual partners then how, and where, can women and children ever be safe?
The contemporary liberal idea that sexual morality can be reduced to the presence or absence of ‘consent’ is inadequate in the context of the close family. Family relationships are given and hierarchical not consensual and equal. No child ‘consents’ to being told to go to bed or eat their greens by a parent or older sibling. Neither can he or she meaningfully ‘consent’ to sexual activity with a more senior member of the family. This may not always apply to more distant, non-household blood relationships such as second cousins. But parent-child or sibling incest is by its very nature abusive, undermining the protective integrity of the family.
This is why Amos is wrong to argue that opposing incest is morally equivalent to supporting eugenics because, as he sees it, both positions imply that ‘healthy’ people are to be valued over ‘unhealthy’ ones. But one can be both opposed to incest – on the grounds that it is incompatible with children’s welfare – and opposed to eugenics, because any attempt to ‘optimise’ foetal traits is a slippery slope to devaluing the lives of disabled people.
When both our biological and moral inheritance tell us so strongly that something is abhorrent, we should heed the warning. Taboos around incest are there for a reason.
How the Black Death helped bring prosperity to Europe
As the media alarms us about an approaching ‘quad-demic’ of diseases this winter (Covid-19, Flu, RSV, Norovirus) it is a timely moment to think about the travails of our mediaeval forebears. Their common scourges were typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis, anthrax, scabies and syphilis – all untreatable at the time. And then there was the plague.
The plague tore up the foundations of society and paved the way for dramatic economic, political and social change
Arriving at the ports of Venice, Pisa and Marseilles in 1347, shipboard rats carrying the Yersinia Pestis bacterium disbursed the bubonic plague in Europe. Originally it is thought that plague was brought by Genoese ships from their trading fortress, Caffa, in the Crimea. By legend, the Mongol Jani Beg, leader of the Golden Horde, catapulted plague-infected bodies into the city. Though we often think of the plague as a European phenomenon, in the same year it arrived in Aleppo, Gaza and Damascus and decimated large parts of Africa’s population. Some believe it to have originated from Kyrgyzstan, while others favour China as the source.
The plague was not restricted to a single epoque. While we tend to think of the Black Death as a one-time event starting in 1346 and ending in 1353, it was a disease that has emerged time and again throughout history. A famous outbreak, known as the Plague of Emperor Justinian, began in 541 AD. There were also dozens more outbreaks in Europe in the 14th century and beyond. Across the world, plague has been a common visitor, though rarely with the scale of the pandemic that killed 30 to 60 per cent of Europe’s population between 1347 and 1353. The population of England halved to two-and-a-half million. The plague pits of east London are well known, but there were also pits in Vincent Square, Westminster; Golden Square, Soho; Knightsbridge Green and Green Park, St. James. In Hoxton (Hackney), the name Pitfield Street is a bit of a giveaway.
While the devastation that the plague wrought on Europe is well known, less remarked is how the Black Death changed the continent in the years and centuries that followed. The plague tore up the foundations of society and paved the way for dramatic economic, political and social change. Without it, Europe might well have looked very different.
With the agrarian population decimated in the 14th century, significant changes took place in terms of agricultural practice. Enclosures, the removal of common land into more efficient privately-owned fields, was a transformation of England’s feudal past that had begun at least 100 years earlier. But it seems likely that the Black Death hastened this process. The dead left land and its rights to the survivors. Property was consolidated.
With fewer people, agricultural labourers’ wages rose. Historians such as Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth have suggested that the dearth of peasants spurred technological change. The heavy plough, originally a Chinese invention, was imported from Holland and helped to increase labour productivity. As Professor Thomas Anderson has asserted:
The heavy plough turned European agriculture and economy on its head. Suddenly the fields with the heavy, fatty and moist clay soils became those that gave the greatest yields.
Animal husbandry became more labour-efficient and profitable than growing crops. This led to the breeding of better livestock. By the 16th century, the preponderance of sheep was such that Sir Thomas More hyperbolically complained:
Your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, have become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.
The wool trade, which had already become the backbone of the mediaeval English economy by the 14th century, increasingly moved to production of finished cloths that were sold not only throughout England but also the Netherlands. In East Anglia, for example, the Heydon family developed flocks of 20,000 sheep and turned their castle into a processing factory. Thus the Black Death may have been a contributing factor to the development of a yeoman class and indeed an entrepreneurial ‘landed gentry’.
It is not exaggerating to suggest that the agrarian changes wrought by the Black Death were a consequential precondition of the Industrial Revolution. Eventually, the agricultural revolution led to a rapid growth in population in the 15th and 16th centuries. People moved to towns and cities in search of work, while increases in agricultural productivity provided surplus capital to be deployed elsewhere and enabled a non-agricultural urban labour force to be fed.
However, the contribution of the Black Death should not be overegged. Similar increases in agricultural productivity were taking place at the same time in other parts of Europe. But the Industrial Revolution was a unique sui generis development in England. This was a result of a combination of favourable preconditions.
With fewer people, agricultural labourers’ wages rose
The signing of Magna Carta at Runnymede laid the foundations of property ownership in law by limiting the power of the executive – the King. The development of English common law is an often-overlooked feature of the take-off of economic growth in England. Later the dissolution of the monasteries with their ‘fire sale’ of land led to the growth and consolidation of private estates. Enclosures reached their peak in the 16th century. Primogeniture, a system of inheritance not practiced in France and elsewhere in Europe, further consolidated estates and enabled more efficient management of land including the widespread adoption of the ‘Norfolk System’ of four-field crop rotation.
In an age where transportation of agricultural goods was only economic within about ten miles of any town, the existence of navigable rivers was a boon. It took a horse to pull a cart weighing one ton, but that same single horse could pull 30 tons of goods on a boat. Dykes built by the Romans also aided the growth of national markets for food, but particularly for wool. There was Car Dyke, which linked Cambridgeshire with York. It was preceded by Fossdyke in 50 AD which linked the River Trent to Lincoln. The agricultural economy further benefitted from the absence of internal tariffs. Britain was the largest free trade zone in Europe. As such, Britain was able to develop national markets for goods faster than other European countries.
Developments in shipbuilding also benefited an island state in terms of transportation cost. The Dutch showed the way in terms of shipbuilding, overseas trade, and perhaps most importantly the development of joint stock companies. England benefited from these technologies. The early development of a capital market in London was the driving force behind industrialisation, and it remains the single most successful part of the UK economy.
The catalyst for the Industrial Revolution, Britain’s singular and most important contribution to humanity, remains a subject of great debate amongst historians. But what was is clear is that, to the annoyance of Marxists, it was not a deterministic path. The Industrial Revolution in England was an unplanned, haphazard coincidence of multiple factors of which the Black Death was one.
By tracing back the origins of the agricultural revolution to the 14th century, the current leftist belief that British wealth was built on colonisation, slaves and Empire can be shown to be an absurd myth. The Industrial Revolution, the creation of a system of sustainable economic growth and the accumulation of wealth was initiated long before Britain began to acquire significant imperial assets.
Who is Mikheil Kavelashvili?
‘They say the human body, given time, builds a resistance to pain. But after being tear-gassed six times in 21 nights, I can’t say I’ve started to tolerate it, let alone appreciate it,’ says a colleague who hasn’t missed a single night of the pro-European protests on Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue since 28 November. She counts herself lucky; so far, she has avoided the brutal beatings meted out by the masked riot police, nicknamed ‘robocops’. These enforcers have become the Georgian government’s ruthless arm for crushing dissent, their mission seemingly to maim and mangle those who find the prospect of embracing the Kremlin’s Russkiy mir less than appealing and aren’t afraid to say so.
The protests, initially ignited by anger over alleged electoral fraud, swelled to unprecedented numbers a month ago today. On 28 November, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze declared that Georgia would freeze EU accession talks until 2028, and rejected all EU budgetary support. Citing ‘blackmail’ and ‘insults’ from Brussels, he insisted that George would only join the EU on its own terms. For many, Kobakhidze’s rhetoric bore an uncanny resemblance to comments made by Ukraine’s then-president Viktor Yanukovych in 2013; his decision to freeze EU trade talks triggered the Maidan protests, paving the way for Putin’s annexation of Crimea, and the full-scale war with Russia.
What drove Kobakhidze to make his declaration – especially when the EU had already frozen the very same talks as punishment for Georgian Dream’s controversial ‘foreign agents’ law – remains an open question. Could a statement of that magnitude have been made without the blessing of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, the party’s founder and its mastermind? If it was indeed Ivanishvili’s decision, it marks a rare misstep for the usually calculating oligarch – as both the timing and the fallout are proving to be disastrous for a regime that was already flailing in its attempts to secure international legitimacy after the disputed elections. If not, then we might have entered a brave new world, where Kobakhidze, famous [and prized] for his loyalty and unquestioning obedience to his patron, might have committed the cardinal sin of acting on his own free will.
Whatever it was, it reignited the protests to a scale unseen before. And with unprecedented numbers of protesters came an equally unprecedented level of police brutality. That no lives have been lost so far more lucky than intentional.
The government’s justification for the violent response? Some protesters allegedly launched fireworks at riot police. Their idea of an ‘adequate’ countermeasure? Tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, brutal beatings, and mass detentions under charges ranging from public disorder to plotting a coup d’état. Among those detained are minors, women, journalists, cultural figures and NGO workers. They recount tales of brutal beatings and psychological torment during their time in custody.
Wearing a press badge, once considered a safeguard, now appears to invite greater aggression. Journalist Guram Rogava describes his ordeal: ‘It felt like something out of a video game, as if I had a second life. Surviving was pure luck.’
He was struck in the head from behind and left sprawled in agony on the wet asphalt, repeatedly kicked:
Something exploded, and I raised my hands to protect my eyes. I was holding a microphone, doing my job. They knew I was a journalist. Their faces were masked, and they wore no identification. I know they’ll never tell us who they were. No investigation will bring them to justice – they had a green light to do what they did to me.
Another journalist, Aka Zarkua, endured almost ritualistic humiliation: ‘They beat me until they got bored. At one point, their commander tried to shove my press badge into my mouth.’
As brute force alone fails to quell the protests, the government has turned to legal repression. A new law, reminiscent of measures imposed by Ukraine’s Yanukovych regime during the Maidan protests, will soon ban protesters from covering their faces – effectively stripping them of basic protection against tear gas and exposing them to post-protest crackdowns. The legislation’s implications are clear: without the anonymity of a mask, dissenters risk an knock at their door and accusations of inciting civil unrest.
The Georgian Dream party remains adamant that they won’t allow the West to stage another ‘Maidan’ in Georgia. In yet another bizarre attack on the West, Mamuka Mdinaradze, a leading figure within the parliamentary majority, claimed that the West, in alliance with the Georgian opposition, planned a revolution for December 16-20 – only for the ever-watchful Georgian Dream to foil their plans.
With outgoing President Salome Zourabichvili becoming a champion for the protesters’ cause both at home and abroad, selecting her successor has become one of the most challenging tasks Georgian Dream has faced since its disputed victory in the November elections. The party has been twice bitten: Zourabichvili herself and her predecessor, philosopher Giorgi Margvelashvili, were hand-picked by the Georgian Dream only to turn into some of its fiercest critics.
Enter Mikheil Kavelashvili, a divisive figure from a radical offshoot of Georgian Dream. Known for his vehemently anti-western rhetoric, Kavelashvili is a former footballer whose resume includes stints in Russia, Switzerland, and a forgettable spell at Manchester City, long before the club’s glory days. (Highlights of his playing career in a sky-blue shirt? A solitary Premier League goal against arch-rivals United.)
His nomadic sporting career saw him pledge allegiance to three Swiss clubs that were bitter rivals of each other, but Kavelashvili the politician doesn’t seem to be prone to a change of heart. The sole qualification that appears to have landed him this nomination is loyalty.
‘They could’ve picked a labrador retriever and still run a higher risk of it going rogue than Kavelashvili,’ says one political analyst.
And yet the choice has sparked bemusement and consternation, even within the Georgian Dream’s own ranks. Many see it as a brazen demonstration of the presidency’s complete erosion as an institution. Among GD’s support base, aside from its most die-hard fans, the selection has been met with lukewarm approval at best.
Worse still, even though the Georgian Dream-controlled parliament has already declared Kavelashvili president-elect, President Zourabichvili has refused to vacate the presidential palace, citing the elections as illegitimate and insisting, therefore, that Kavelashvili has no legitimacy either. The showdown between the two looms large as Kavelashvili’s inauguration date of 29 December approaches.
Will the Georgian Dream resort to force? Kavelashvili himself has a penchant for fighting – having engaged in brawls during parliamentary sessions. Could Zourabichvili be arrested? While this seems unlikely, it is not out of the question.
For now, the Georgian Dream has relied on pettier measures – such as switching off the heating in the presidential palace – a move that appears to have done little to daunt its current resident. The inauguration may mark the official start of Kavelashvili’s presidency, but it remains to be seen whether he will have to find another, vacant palace to sit and play president in.
The European Union, meanwhile, is concerned. They’ve frozen Georgia’s EU accession talks, demanding a return to the democratic path, and issued condemnations against the Georgian Dream government in high halls like the European Parliament. But beyond this well-meaning finger-wagging, tangible actions have been few and far between.
The EU’s attempts to introduce sanctions have been blocked by Budapest and Bratislava – Kremlin’s trusted Trojan horses within the Brussels walls. The suspension of Georgia’s visa-free regime, while not requiring unanimous consent, is seen as a nuclear option – one that risks punishing ordinary Georgians more than their government.
In the absence of a united front, it has fallen on the individual countries to mete out the punishment. The Baltic trio has already imposed sanctions on Georgian Dream operatives, with Poland and the Scandinavian states poised to follow. What truly matters, however, is whether major players like Berlin, Paris, Rome, and London will join. Being shunned by Europe’s great capitals carries a toll far heavier than symbolic slaps on the wrist.
France seems most likely to take the lead. President Emmanuel Macron, who is close to Zourabichvili (she is French-born) has been increasingly vocal in his criticisms of the Georgian government’s actions.
And the US? Biden administration has suspended its ‘strategic partnership’ with Georgia, but this elicited little more than a shrug from Georgian Dream’s leadership. The PM boasted that they’d ‘sort it out’ with Trump and that whatever happens will be ‘as Trump says.’ (Much to Kobakhidze’s chagrin, it was not he, but Zourabichvili who recently met with Donald Trump during his visit to France. And it’s safe to say she wouldn’t have spent the precious minutes with the Potus-elect advocating for a regime she openly deems illegitimate.)
Yesterday, the US also imposed sanctions on Bidzina Ivanishvili himself. The official reasoning effective brands him a Russian stooge. Ivanishvili, it states, has been sanctioned ‘pursuant to section 1(a)(ii)(C) of Executive Order 14024 for being responsible for or complicit in, or having directly or indirectly engaged or attempted to engage in, actions or policies that undermine democratic processes or institutions in the United States or abroad, for or on behalf of, or for the benefit of, directly or indirectly, the Government of the Russian Federation’.
Still, the West appears reluctant to take decisive action. Georgia’s fight for European values, fought on the fringes of the continent, hasn’t spurred the kind of western resolve it deserves. The responses are closer to the Yes Minister approach to foreign crises: 1) nothing’s going to happen; 2) something may be going to happen, but we should do nothing about it; 3) maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we can do; 4) maybe there was something we could’ve done, but it’s too late now.
Two starkly different futures seem possible for Georgia: one modelled after Belarus, the other after Ukraine. In Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko crushed dissent, tightened his grip on power, and, with Moscow’s backing, remains firmly in control. Ukraine’s Maidan revolution, on the other hand, triumphed but came at a devastating cost – a Kremlin bent on punishing its defiance unleashed years of war and suffering.
A seasoned observer of Georgia’s Byzantine political scene suggests other paths may emerge. One is a fragile compromise – a temporary truce between the opposing sides, holding out just long enough for hostilities to inevitably reignite. Another, even bleaker vision, sees Georgia morphing into an oil-less version of Azerbaijan. In this scenario, an agreement with Washington is brokered, with the ever-shrewd oligarch cutting a deal with the man who authored a book on the art of it.