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Piece de resistance: how jigsaws became a fashion accessory
The jigsaw is having a moment. Ditto other puzzles, games and brain teasers. Couples engage in post-coital sudoku (apparently). Wordle was played 4.8 billion times in 2023 (the lockdown invention of a young Welsh lad, Josh Wardle). Board game cafes have sprung up in cities.
This recent resurgence in the popularity of puzzles is partly a hangover from the Covid pandemic. Sales of jigsaws and board games soared 240 per cent during the first week of lockdown, with more puzzles being bought for adults than children. There are also wider reasons: the so-called ‘homebody economy’ and Scandi-inspired hygge lifestyle craze (think being wrapped up in blankets with a log-burning stove while your mates are on a night out). Then there’s the millennial and Gen-Z commitment to wellness and obsessive search for self-care and ‘balance’. If puzzling over the right way up for Mickey Mouse’s ears is part of that quest for good mental health who am I to argue? A box from Gibsons or Ravensburger is certainly cheaper than therapy. Jigsaw sellers also report nostalgia being big, especially for chocolate box scenes such as wintry pubs and cottages. If you aren’t the type to want a pint in a boozer, doing a jigsaw of one is apparently the next best thing.
One influencer has posted ‘Ten Expert-Level Tips’, from using baking trays to lay out the pieces to sifting them through a colander to remove the ‘puzzle dust’
As always, social media is playing a part. A study in MIT Technology Review notes that ‘social media is helping to create a community feel around what is still essentially a solitary pursuit’. Influencers share time-lapse videos of themselves completing complex jigsaws. One, called Karen (seriously), has posted ‘Ten Expert-Level Tips’, from using baking trays to lay out the pieces to sifting them through a colander to remove the ‘puzzle dust’.
They are a British invention: John Spilsbury, a London cartographer, created the first jigsaws around 1760. He mounted his maps on to wood and then cut around the countries to be reassembled by students as a teaching aid. I don’t remember ever doing those in school but maybe there are some creative teachers out there who will prescribe them as geography homework this term.
What can we learn from the jigsaw’s staying power? That absent-minded – if not totally mindless – activity can often be the most ‘mindful’. See also knitting and podding peas. But also that offline leisure time, and hard copy – physical stuff – still have appeal. Many of us continue to hold out against the Kindle, wanting well-thumbed trophies on our bookshelf. Likewise, jigsaws – now stocked by fashionable retailers such as Oliver Bonas and Anthropologie – are fast becoming collectors’ items, as fashionable to display on a coffee table as a Taschen hardback. Like the Rubik’s Cube, existing in the physical world makes a completed puzzle more impressive. Only a few weirdos do jigsaws on a digital screen.
Little wonder the Benevolent Confraternity of Dissectologists – a club for jigsaw aficionados – is going strong. The latest issue of their magazine features a review of laser-cut puzzles worldwide and an update on new hand-cutters learning their craft in the UK. Members recently had a club trip to the JHG puzzle factory in Dorset to look forward to. I love this stuff.
So what makes a good jigsaw? According to jigsaw lovers, the best-selling format is 1,000 pieces, giving hours of entertainment relatively cheaply. While jigsaws are now primarily made from cardboard, many fans caution against flimsiness. ‘Not too much annoying sky or brickwork’ is another key determinant of a favourite puzzle. Some hold precious memories: a 1950s wooden puzzle of The Princess and the Frog – without accompanying picture – had been meant as a challenging gift from one aficionado’s parents. That present was something of a forerunner of the modern ‘wasgij’ (jigsaw spelled backward) where you use your imagination to piece together the solution.
The only annoying thing about jigsaws is the risk of pieces going missing. Even more enraging than losing Old Kent Road from the Monopoly box, it leaves the whole thing fundamentally, glaringly, unfinished. Even a pack of cards with a missing Ace of Spades (a victim of being used to scoop up a living room spider at Christmas) can be replaced with a quick bit of felt-tip over the face of the joker. Not with jigsaws.
In a digital world, there is something pleasing about jigsaws’ enduring popularity. Just remember to do what the influencers do and store your pieces in the box in sandwich bags in case your tower of jigsaws has a Jenga-like fall. After all, flying off your handle after many patient hours and multiple cups of tea rather defeats the point of all that mindful puzzling.
The life-affirming misery of the Cure
Watching the Cure’s live-streamed performance of their first album in 16 years, it was hard not to notice the toll time has taken on Robert Smith. At 65, his black spiky hair has long turned into a bedhead of fag-ash grey – a reminder to those of us who have grown up with him that none of us are as young as we used to be.
As the slow waltz of the first track of Songs of a Lost World kicked in, and Smith wailed ‘Where did it go?’, it was starting to look like a very gloomy evening indeed – even by the standards of a band hardly known for its cheeriness.
I’ll admit that as I started to watch the Troxy gig live from my sofa, even I, as a long-time Cure fan, worried how dark it was going to get. And sure enough, along came seven more songs covering the death of loved ones, ageing, regret and fear for the future.
Many of Smith’s fans have grown up with him – and now he speaks for those of us who are looking in the mirror also ‘wondering how I got so old’
But then, along the way, something else happened too. Despite all the lyrics about endings, goodbyes and losses, the momentum kept building, propelled by pounding drums and shimmering guitar cadences. By the three heartfelt ‘nothings’ of ‘Endsong’ that finally brought the record to a close, it all felt strangely cathartic. Radiant, even.
And it seems I’m not the only one who felt this way. After its release at the start of November, the undeniably bleak Songs of a Lost World became one of the fastest-selling albums of 2024, at one point outselling the entire rest of the top ten of the week combined. So how did the launch of this gloomy LP become one of the defining musical moments of the year?
For me, the power of Smith’s music lies in the fact that it manages to be just so gloriously miserable. Many of his fans have grown up with him – and now he speaks for those of us who are looking in the mirror also ‘wondering how I got so old’ when we don’t feel a day over 21. And as he – and his audience – grow older, stories of heartbreak of all kinds become even more heartfelt. We’ve known him long enough to trust him to be a comforting conduit for our sadness with tracks like ‘Plainsong’ and ‘From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea’.
What is also poignant about this record is that if you close your eyes, Smith’s voice is as undiminished as when we first played cassette tapes of the Cure in our teenage bedrooms and sung along about being in love on Fridays. The songs themselves might not offer much by way of escapism, but that voice does.
There’s also something comforting about the fact that Smith, who released the first Cure record in 1979, remains resolutely un-rockstar-ish. While other musicians pronounce on world peace, when the Cure last headlined Glastonbury in 2019, Smith joked that he was going for the record for the frontman who said the least at the festival – and true to his word, he did nothing but sing for the first 45 minutes. He seems to have taken the ageing process in his stride and is happiest taking walks around his land to check on his sheep. He can’t even be bothered to own a phone, saying that the only reason he’s on social media is so no one else can pretend to be him.
So perhaps it could only be Robert Smith who could make the exact record we need at the crossroads we are facing at the start of 2025 – utterly bleak, oh yes, but beautiful and brilliant too. I believe the secret of the success of Songs of a Lost World is that after listening to it, some of us feel less alone with our worries. After all these years, no one does misery better – and there’s a comfort in that.
Trump 2.0 is more than a ‘vibe shift’
People don’t like to use the term ‘vibe shift’, but I suspect it will turn out to be rather more than that. Certainly, I have never known opinion to change so rapidly – almost overnight.
I’m talking about Donald Trump, or, more properly, how he is regarded. On Saturday morning, I was presenting my new Times Radio show (10 a.m. to 1 p.m., tune in, tune in, please!) and struggled to find any interviewees who might criticise Donald Trump. In a lengthy debate on World War Three, the wonderful Lord Owen (Labour, then SDP) was optimistic we would avoid conflict largely because of Trump’s presidency, and he praised Trump’s determination to provide security for his own country and his recognition of the strategic importance of Greenland and the Panama Canal. Humphrey Hawksley (Lib-Dem-ish), debating the issue with him, agreed – especially regarding Greenland.
Earlier, I had spoken to Sir Trevor Phillips (Labour) and Juliet Samuel (centre-right), and both agreed with Trump on Greenland and even more so on the Chagos Islands. Before the show, I had read a piece extolling the virtues of Trump’s adventurism by the usually amenably liberal (and always well-informed) Roger Boyes, in The Times. I remember the issue of Greenland arising during Trump’s first presidency and the overwhelming view was that he was ‘mental’. Not any more. Not on Greenland, Chagos, or his foreign policy in general.
It is a remarkable shift and should give us all grounds for great cheer. It is only six or seven months ago that people would look at me as if I were a leper for suggesting a Trump presidency might be a lot better for us and the world. Even then, I heavily caveated my remarks so as not to be considered a pariah.
This shift has not yet manifested itself in the BBC, of course…
Sunday shows: calls grow for Tulip Siddiq to resign
Peter Kyle: Tulip Siddiq will lose job if inquiry finds her guilty of breaking ministerial code
The Conservatives have called for the prime minister to sack anti-corruption Treasury Minister Tulip Siddiq after she herself became part of a corruption investigation. Reports have emerged that Siddiq may have been living in properties linked to her aunt, Sheikh Hasina, who is being investigated for allegedly embezzling up to £3.9bn whilst serving as prime minister of Bangladesh. Siddiq has referred herself to the ethics advisor, but on Sky News, Trevor Phillips asked Science Secretary Peter Kyle whether Siddiq should stand down while the investigation takes place. Kyle said that Siddiq had ‘done exactly the right thing’, and that the outcome of the investigation ‘will be stuck to’ by Keir Starmer. Phillips argued that if the same thing had happened to the Conservatives, Labour would be demanding a resignation. Kyle contrasted Labour’s approach with the previous government’s, suggesting that the Tories had not acted on the conclusions of the inquiry into former Home Secretary Priti Patel for bullying.
Do new online safety rules match the scale of the problem?
This week, Meta announced that it will replace third-party fact checkers with the ‘community notes’ system pioneered by Elon Musk. This change will initially take place only in the US, but there are fears it could reduce online safety and aid the spread of disinformation. On the BBC, Laura Kuenssberg played Science Secretary Peter Kyle a clip of Ian Russell, the father of Molly Russell, who took her own life after consuming vast quantities of content about depression and suicide. Ian Russell argued that online platforms are moving backwards, and that Starmer needed to prioritise online safety to protect children. Kyle said he had made a ‘personal commitment’ to make sure that vulnerable people have protection online. He pointed out that in March, it will become enforceable that any illegal content must be removed, and from next year all platforms and content creators must make sure that their content is age-appropriate for the person viewing it.
Mel Stride: On China, Labour are ‘getting it wrong’
With growth rates stubbornly low and borrowing costs hitting the highest level since 2008, the outlook is gloomy for Chancellor Rachel Reeves – who is in danger of breaking her fiscal rules. Reeves’ visit to China this week has secured a £600m investment, but Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride told Trevor Phillips that it was not right for Reeves to go ‘cap in hand’ to China when the UK’s economy is in ‘significant distress’. Stride said that China is ‘also a competitor’ to the UK, and that Labour did not have the right approach. Phillips asked if Stride was being ideological, rather than pragmatic. Stride claimed he was a pragmatist, but there needed to be ‘both sides’ when it comes to China relations.
Former Governor of California Jerry Brown: ‘Not even Donald Trump… can repeal the laws of physics’
Parts of Los Angeles have been devastated by huge forest fires over the last week, with at least 16 people killed, and almost 200,000 forced to evacuate. Laura Kuenssberg interviewed Former Governor of California Jerry Brown, who told her that climate change was to blame for the ferocity of the fires. Brown said that it would cost $6tn a year to deal with climate change, but humanity had to ‘start paying now’. Kuenssberg suggested that Donald Trump had a very different view to Brown. Brown said: ‘nature is nature’ and predicted that over the next four years there will be ‘a reduction to absurdity of the idea that climate change is a hoax’.
Historian Simon Schama: ‘unelected President Musk’ will test Trump administration
Donald Trump will be inaugurated on the 20th of January. Kuenssberg asked historian Simon Schama on her panel for his thoughts about the incoming president. Schama argued that the supreme court’s decision to go through with the sentencing of Trump in his hush-money trial was evidence against the idea of a ‘quasi-authoritarian destruction of the guard rails in the American Constitution’. He then predicted a tension between ‘practical capitalism and… wild-eyed capitalist utopians’ in the Trump administration, with policies such as mass deportation of immigrants clashing with agricultural needs, and trade tariffs creating potential big rises in inflation.
Could Farage’s autocratic streak wreck Reform?
Ten Reform party councillors in Derbyshire have resigned in protest at Nigel Farage’s ‘autocratic’ control of the rising party and its direction of travel. Farage has dismissed the revolt as the action of what he calls a ‘rogue branch’ of Reform, but there are stirrings of discontent in the grassroots of the fast-growing party that may signal more than minor teething troubles.
There are legitimate questions to be asked both about Reform’s structure and the way that Farage’s robust personality impacts upon it
During the Reform UK East Midlands conference, a former Tory MP for the Dudley seat – Mario Longhi – defected to Reform and was introduced by Nigel Farage as, ‘a loyal member of the Conservative Party for the last goodness knows how many years’. Some interpreted the spectacle as a fresh example of the Reform leadership’s preference for headhunting disaffected and opportunistic former Tories, rather than platforming loyal ordinary members.
Many members liked the radical former Reform party secretary Ben Habib, who quit the party late last year for the same reasons as the Derbyshire ten. Again, Farage brushed Habib’s departure aside – telling LBC that he had not been responsible for appointing him.
The Derbyshire revolt was first reported in the Guardian, and it is obviously in the interest of the Left to talk up any discontent in the insurgent party, which, with over 150,000 members and poised to take the lead in opinion polls, poses an existential threat to both Labour and the Tories. Yet criticism of the party leader has also come from those who might be thought to be natural Farage supporters – such as Elon Musk, who tweeted that Farage should be replaced as leader for not being up to the job.
As a Reform supporter myself, I hope the party continues to grow and prosper, but there are legitimate questions to be asked both about Reform’s structure and the way that Farage’s robust personality impacts upon it. To declare an interest, I was a UKIP candidate in the run-up to the 2016 referendum and admired Farage in action at close quarters on numerous occasions, though I was never a friend. Much later, I had lunch with him with a view to writing his biography: a project that never came to pass. For what it’s worth, here are my views of the man and his party.
For let us be frank: Nigel Farage is Reform, and without his dynamic energy, years of experience at the rough end of politics, and shrewd political nous, the party would never have attained the high profile it currently holds, with serious commentators predicting it could win 100 seats at the next election and even hold the balance of power.
Farage has a track record to prove his populist credentials: without his creation of UKIP and years of tireless campaigning, the Brexit referendum would never have been held, let alone fought and won. Without his creation of the Brexit party, Theresa May would have continued her betrayal of Brexit, and Boris Johnson would never have become Prime Minister, purged the Tory Remainers, forced Brexit through a reluctant Parliament, and won the 2019 election.
So, even before being elected to Westminster for the first time last year, Farage was arguably the most consequential British politician since Mrs Thatcher, and one who may yet still have his finest hour if Reform proves as successful as the first two parties he created. It is therefore important to examine the flaws as well as the aforementioned skills of the man who aspires to shatter the cosy Westminster consensus and make Britain great again.
It is a cliché that Farage is a Marmite politician – a figure who repels as many people as he attracts. The same, of course, could be said of his heroes Churchill and Trump, and the visceral hatred many Tories as well as Leftists hold for Reform’s leader is seen by his adoring fan base not as a handicap but as a badge of honour.
Not even Farage’s most devoted fans would claim he is a team player, and his autocratic tendencies have seen him fall out with too many of his ablest and most loyal lieutenants in the course of his long career.
All politicians are egotists, but Farage’s overweening self-regard can sometimes interfere with his judgement, and any criticism of his decisions tends to be met by Boris-style bluster. His chumminess with Donald Trump seems to have gone to his head and robbed him of his capacity for objective self-criticism.
In Farage’s case, it is his way or the highway, and all three of his party vehicles have been made in his own image. Reform is a top-down party – well, actually not a proper party at all but a company with Farage and a few friends as the shareholders. Key appointments are made by the leader without the slightest pretence of democracy or consultation with the party’s membership.
These faults may well be outweighed by the vital role that Reform and Farage himself have played and are still playing in remaking Britain’s failing politics. If Reform succeeds in its grand design, nitpicking complaints about Farage’s faults and foibles will be rightly forgotten – but there are already worrying signs that too much hubris could one day bring nemesis in its wake and burst Reform’s bubble before it has completed its vital mission.
When will Tulip Siddiq be sacked?
It’s rare that a world leader knows the name of a junior minister in the British government – let alone is calling for them to be sacked. Yet that is the feat achieved by Tulip Siddiq, No. 4 in Rachel Reeves’ Treasury team.
The anti-corruption minister is now facing calls to resign from an unlikely source after the leader of Bangladesh condemned the use of properties gifted to her and her family by its former regime. Muhammad Yunus told the Sunday Times today that the London properties used by Siddiq should be investigated and returned if she is found to have benefited from ‘plain robbery’.
Yunus has some authority here: he, after all, is the Nobel peace-prize winning economist who has led the interim government of Bangladesh since last year. Who did he replace in the role? None other than Tulip’s aunt, Sheikh Hasina, who, er, was removed in an uprising last year and stands accused of corruption and ‘crimes against humanity’. So much for that talk of a rules-based order. Hasina is among those said to have benefited from a nuclear energy deal she brokered with Russia. Siddiq, the MP for Hampstead & Highgate, denies benefiting from the deal, which is being examined by Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission, or any other allegedly corrupt venture.
Yunus wants an apology from Siddiq. But with Tory leader Kemi Badenoch now warning of a diplomatic crisis, it seems less a matter of a simple ‘sorry’ and more a question of whether Tulip will still be a Labour MP in a week’s time. Tellingly, on the media round this morning, Science minister Peter Kyle refused to say that the government has full confidence in the Treasury minister, only that he has full confidence in the ongoing investigation by the Prime Minister’s ethics watchdog.
An early winner of the 2025 sack race perhaps?
Press barred from grilling Starmer’s Chagos chum
There are just eight days to go until Donald Trump takes office. So the question much of Whitehall is asking is: will David Lammy’s Chagos deal get over the line in time? The agreement to hand the valuable cluster of islands to Mauritius has been attacked by China hawks in the U.S – including Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for Secretary of State. He has decried the deal as ‘a serious threat to our national security interests in the Indian Ocean.’ Given those risks, why is the Labour government so intent on pressing ahead? After all, handing over British territory isn’t cheap: the current bill stands at £9 billion for UK taxpayers.
One reason why the Labour government might be keen on settling the issue is direction from the top. Keir Starmer’s close friend Philippe Sands KC is Mauritus’ chief legal adviser and a longtime agitator for Mauritian control of the islands. The pair co-founded Matrix Chambers, from which Starmer plucked his Attorney General, Richard Hermer, ennobling him back in July. Sands is a regular on various political panels, boasting at Cambridge last year about ‘humiliating’ the UK in international courts. Sadly, though, it seems these days his public appearances are a little more curated.
Philippe Sands’ appearance at the Jewish Labour conference today carries a warning note: ‘this session is open to attendees but not open to journalists.’ The subject of the discussion you ask? A conversation on ‘human rights and international law.’ You couldn’t make it up. The conference blurb breathlessly offers the chance to ‘hear from two leading barristers … at a time when the rules based international order seems threatened.’ Mr S wonders whether handing over Chagos to a China ally will help or hobble that ‘rules based’ system eh?
Sadly, it seems that the conference is not the only place where answers are in short supply. For in the Commons, Mark Francois has asked the government for a list of all meetings between Starmer and Sands on the subject of Diego Garcia since the election. The government’s response has been to direct him to the gov.uk website where details of such meetings are published. Though sadly not before 20 January…
‘Islamophobia’ and the grooming gangs scandal
At PMQs this week, Kemi Badenoch told MPs that Labour’s adoption of the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslim’s definition of ‘Islamophobia’ has inhibited public discussion of rape gangs. She pointed out that, according to this definition, anyone who draws attention to the over-representation of Muslims in the grooming gangs is guilty of Islamophobia. This, she argued, is why some members of the Parliamentary Labour Party have been ‘scared to tell the truth’. She’s right, but the problem runs deeper than that.
The definition Mrs Badenoch referred to was drawn up by the APPG in 2018, when the co-chairs were Wes Streeting and Anna Soubry. It issued a report that defined Islamophobia as ‘a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness’ and went on to give examples of how this prejudice manifests itself. The definition was formally adopted by the Labour Party in 2019.
At the time, the report was criticised for defining Islamophobia too broadly. For instance, it says ‘claims of Muslims spreading Islam by the sword’ are an example of ‘classic Islamophobia’. By that definition, Tom Holland’s book on the history of Islam – In the Shadow of the Sword – is Islamophobic. Another example the report gives is accusing Muslim majority countries of exaggerating or inventing claims of genocide perpetrated against Muslims. That would make anyone who disputes Iran’s description of Israel’s military operation in Gaza as ‘genocide’ an Islamophobe – including, ironically, Sir Keir Starmer.
Christian Concern’s Tim Dieppe, in a briefing for the Free Speech Union (FSU) published last year, warned that such a definition could severely curtail free speech, with people biting their tongues for fear of being branded Islamophobic.
These concerns have been brought into sharp focus in the past week because the APPG report gives the example of ‘grooming gangs’ as a ‘subtle form of anti-Muslim racism’.
In the past, this has led to people who’ve drawn attention to the overrepresentation of Muslim men in grooming gangs being branded Islamophobic, even though we have good evidence of that. Data from 43 police forces in England and Wales for the first nine months of last year show that men of Pakistani heritage are up to four times more likely to be responsible for child sex grooming offences reported to the police than the general population.
But when Suella Braverman, then the Home Secretary, highlighted the over-representation of Muslim men in rape gang cases in 2023, she faced significant backlash, including from Ipso, the independent press regulator, which upheld a complaint by the Muslim Council of Great Britain.
It isn’t just the Labour Party that has adopted the APPG definition. Alarmingly, it has been embraced across the political spectrum. The Liberal Democrats, the Green Party, the Scottish National Party, the Scottish Conservatives, Plaid Cymru, and the Scottish Greens have all formally adopted the definition. This means that members of these parties risk being sanctioned if they say anything that falls foul of the definition – including mentioning the religious or ethnic characteristics of the men found guilty in rape gang cases. (The Conservative Party has refused to adopt the definition, citing concerns over its potential impact on free speech.)
In 2022, the GMB Union, which has nearly 600,000 members, was the first trade union to adopt the definition.
The definition has also been widely adopted by local authorities. A Freedom of Information request conducted by Hardeep Singh for Civitas in 2023 revealed that 52 councils in England – approximately one in six – have adopted it. Many of these councils are in areas where grooming gangs have been operating. In these areas, councillors or council workers could face disciplinary action if they speak out against grooming gangs in ways that might be deemed Islamophobic under the APPG definition.
The FSU first encountered this particular restriction on free speech when we defended a district councillor in South Kesteven after she was investigated for allegedly Islamophobic social media posts. The council, which has adopted the APPG definition, conducted an investigation into her comments.
In another troubling case, a local councillor from Boston, Lincolnshire, was blocked from becoming Mayor after raising concerns about Islamic practices in Qatar during the 2022 World Cup. He too was accused of Islamophobia.
For public authorities to penalise councillors for saying things that are not unlawful, but run afoul of the APPG definition of Islamophobia, is a breach of the legal protections for political speech in the UK. Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees freedom of expression, particularly when it comes to political debate, where speech is given the highest level of protection.
In light of this, it’s reasonable to conclude that one reason there hasn’t been a more open public conversation about the rape gangs, and those who turned a blind eye haven’t been properly held to account, is because potential whistleblowers are worried about being accused of Islamophobia according to the APPG definition.
Given the growing adoption of the APPG definition across various political, governmental, and civic bodies, the risk is that even more voices will be silenced. Worryingly, sources within Angela Rayner’s Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government have confirmed that officials are considering introducing a non-statutory definition of Islamophobia, which could have the effect of further inhibiting public discussion of this critical issue.
This is a dangerous path to go down, one that risks eroding the principles of free speech and open discourse that our democracy depends on
This is a dangerous path to go down, one that risks eroding the principles of free speech and open discourse that our democracy depends on. It’s not just about one political party or one particular issue – it’s about ensuring that all citizens retain the right to express themselves openly, particularly when tackling some of the most pressing issues of our time.
In light of the chilling effect the APPG definition of Islamophobia has had on discussion of the rape gangs, is it time to consign this term to the history books? As Christopher Hitchens said: ‘It is a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.’
I’m worried about what Labour might do to our schools
In my first lesson teaching Year 8 in inner-city Birmingham, one boy, seeing the opening slide of my ‘Introduction to Judaism’ PowerPoint, rocked back on his chair, and, with a level of focus that he never matched again, simply said, ‘I f***ing hate the Jews.’ The Teach First training programme had promised us ‘challenging’ schools. And that was exactly what we got.
Behaviour was bad, but so was the curriculum. There was little or no teaching resources, which meant that each night we had to hurriedly reinvent the wheel. Surely, I thought, someone must have created a worksheet on Genesis 1 before?
The other oddity was how we were encouraged to teach. The favoured pedagogical style was what is called ‘minimally guided instruction’ – a pedagogical theory with roots in Romanticism which, while highly seductive, has the downside of not being very good.
We were told to involve the pupils – sorry, ‘learners’ – in as many varied activities as possible. Pupils in rows facing the teacher were out; grouped tables with the pupils facing each other were in.
To those of us training at the time, it was hard to believe that the hours of cutting out pieces of cardwere really necessary. I knew Jonny kept kicking Kevin, but was there really such a thing as a ‘kinaesthetic learner’? And why weren’t my pupils getting more empathetic when I asked them to put on De Bono’s thinking hat?
Despite all of this, there was a buzz.
The coalition government had just taken power and, whatever else they might have been getting wrong, there was a sense that, for education at least, change was in the air.
The Education Endowment Foundation, founded by the government the year before, was committed to providing evidence-based resources for teachers to use in schools. Two years later, ‘ResearchEd’ was formed by classroom teachers to debunk the pseudo-science that had seeped its way into teacher training.
Injected into this intellectual petri dish was a new catalyst: Free Schools. New Labour’s Academies programme, under Lord Adonis, had successfully begun a structural revolution in the noughties and now groups of teachers could set up comprehensive state schools, distanced from local authorities’ muddled ideological control. With a new performance measure, Progress 8, schools would also finally be judged on their pupils’ average academic progress, regardless of their different starting points.
Thirty years on from the original Academies’ programme, and a decade and a half on from the first Free Schools, we have worked out what works. Some schools teach so well that their pupils achieve two grades more than the national average. The same pupil who is awarded a set of 6s at GCSE at one school will likely receive a set of 8s and 9s at another.
Pupils at Mercia School in Sheffield, Mossbourne in Hackney, and the school I was fortunate enough to be a part of, Michaela School in Wembley, have all had their lives changed as a result. The academy trusts at the top of the Progress 8 rankings, such as Ark and Harris, are managing to do this at scale.
But we should worry about what comes next.
Some of the sounds coming from our new Labour government are encouraging. The Education Secretary’s recent slap down of the hard left when they suggested making school exclusions more difficult will be a relief to senior leaders grappling to keep good order in their schools.
Thoughtful teachers know that the precondition of learning in any classroom is the quality of behaviour. And the thing that drains the energy of teachers is the small number of pupils whose behaviour has an outsized impact on school culture. ‘Teacher Tap’, an organisation that surveys teachers’ opinions, found in a 2024 survey that 30 per cent of all teachers said they had witnessed pupils fighting that week.
We should worry about what comes next
A progressive Labour government won’t waste valuable time making school exclusions more difficult: it will spend time and money improving the quality of alternative provision for children who, for complex and heartbreaking reasons, cannot be taught in mainstream classrooms.
But their recent changes to academy freedoms look like a step in the wrong direction.
Rather than celebrating the autonomy both Labour and Conservative governments have given schools since the Blair years, Bridget Phillipson appears to want to restrict it. The ‘Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill’ will remove the freedoms of Academies to set pay, employ staff without ‘Qualified Teacher Status’ and curtail the creativity these schools have enjoyed over the curriculum.
The move is significant because it suggests that the Government is more interested in flattening and levelling down school practice than it is identifying excellence. More worryingly, it raises the question of whether the government has understood the relationship between freedom and standards: do they think that schools that help pupils to achieve two grades more than the average are able to do so because their curriculum is the same as everywhere else?
We’ve seen such muddled thinking elsewhere. Sir Keir Starmer was originally upbeat about ‘oracy’. And there could be much to commend it. Encouraging pupils to articulate their answers in pairs in ‘turn and talk’ tasks before sharing answers with the class boosts confidence and almost certainly helps children to improve the quality of their thinking.
But when the Labour party uses the word ‘oracy’ it sounds like the faddish technique that was pioneered at the less-than-stellar ‘School 21’. Founded by Peter Hyman, formerly senior adviser to Sir Keir Starmer, School 21 believes that the best way to prepare pupils for the 21st century is project work and the teaching of generalisable skills, despite the overwhelming evidence that we can only become skilful within domains of knowledge.
And how progressive is cancelling a state schools’ Latin programme? The Department for Education has recently told schools that it will be terminating its Latin Excellence Programme, and not even at the end of the school year, but in February. It seems that, just at the moment when the government is making independent education harder, it’s choosing to restrict classical education to the private sector.
The broader worry is that our new government isn’t capitalising on, or even curious, about what works.
For a long time Finland was held up by educationalists as a beacon of progressive education but, in recent years, its light has been flickering. In the most recent international PISA survey, England has overtaken Finland for both reading and maths. England also scores highly on other international tests: our Year 5 pupils are ranked fourth in the world for reading in the PIRLS assessment and our Year 9 pupils are ranked sixth for maths in the TIMSS assessment.
Whisper it, but England is the new Finland. After this educational revolution, teachers from the Netherlands, Australia and the US no longer go to Helsinki to see lessons but London and Sheffield. In which other areas of public policy can we say the same?
The silence from the government is unnerving. Is it because they don’t agree? They seem not to be interested in the science of learning, school culture and spreading what works across our system, but curtailing the freedoms that engendered such ingenuity and innovation in the first place.
Another lesson I teach is on England’s non-conformist movement. My pupils learn that the movement came to prominence by striking out at a complacent establishment. Valuing education highly, non-conformists established their own schools and universities, and these became famous the world over as engines of innovation and scientific enquiry. England became the envy of the world.
The Anglican establishment of the day, rather than harnessing and learning from such churches and their ‘enthusiasm’, often sought to spurn them. The establishment hunkered down with what was easy and comfortable, rather than allow these new churches to offer gentle, but vital, critique.
It is often said that Labour owes more to Methodism than to Marxism. Let us hope so.
How green is the government’s car service?
The government’s green credentials are in the firing line – and not for the first time. In office, Keir Starmer has sparked headlines with seemingly endless plane trips abroad. And now Mr S has done some digging to find out what ministerial cars are being used to ferry our leaders around. A Freedom of Information request on the Government Car Service reveals that the Department for Transport invoiced more than £1.3 million to government departments making use of ministerial motors over Labour’s first three months in power. But Mr S is a little sceptical about Whitehall’s commitment to its electric vehicle ‘revolution’ – not least because the bulk of its fleet still runs at least partially on petrol, with a rather high number of gas-guzzlers and carbon-emitters still very much in use. Rules for thee but not for me?
Of the 124 cars in service as of November, a staggering 70 per cent were not yet fully electric – despite the Labour manifesto calling on Brits across the country to ditch their petrol engines by 2030. A key aim of the government’s Road to Zero strategy – that at least a quarter of the fleet should be electrified by 2022 – was met under the previous Tory administration, but Steerpike can reveal that Starmer’s army have invested in 10 new petrol hybrid Jags and are continuing to use diesel engines for official business. In fact, a fifth of the fleet runs on either petrol or diesel engines, while almost half of the total government service cars are petrol hybrids. Tut tut. It reminds Steerpike of an eerily similar scenario – in which Ed Miliband in opposition called for an electric car drive but admitted that he, um, didn’t own one himself. Awkward…
There’s an exceptional number of fuel-guzzlers in the GCS. A car with a fuel economy rating of between 50 to 60 miles per gallon is generally viewed as being efficient – yet around a third of the cars used for official government business fall short of this mark. The biggest culprits include the eight petrol-powered Jaguar XFs and seven of the Ford Galaxy (also running on unleaded fuel) – both of which only manage around 35 miles to the gallon, according to their company’s tech specifications. By contrast, Mr S has to admit he was rather impressed by the government’s new Range Rover hybrid – which manages a rather impressive 409 mpg.
A Department for Transport spokesperson told Mr S:
More than 80 per of the Government Car Service vehicles are electric or hybrid. The Government is committed to 100 per cent of the central government car and van fleet being fully zero emission by 2027. As more people make a switch to electric vehicles, they’ll see the benefits of cheaper motoring, lower emissions, and we’ll drive growth and jobs in the industries of the future.
But on carbon dioxide emissions, the fleet does not fare well either. A whopping 60 per cent of the vehicles in the government’s service do not meet CO2 targets agreed by the UK in 2021, which aspired to see cars have emissions lower than 95 g/km. There is minimal reflection of this today, however, with Starmer’s army apparently still content to make use of 10 Honda CR-Vs running on unleaded fuel, which each emit a whopping 179 g/km of the pollutant – while the eight petrol-powered Jaguar XFs each release 166 g of CO2 per kilometre. So much for eco-friendly, eh?
The unstoppable rise of Christianity in football
Christianity is thriving on the football pitch. Despite the declining number of Christians in the UK, Instagram, X, and other social media sites are awash with biblical quotes. And those responsible? Professional footballers.
Over recent years, something of a movement appears to have developed in English football. Players, previously so determinedly secular, have become not only practising Christians, but also individuals who are happy to broadcast their faith to a wide audience.
Palace captain Marc Guehi wrote ‘I love Jesus’ and ‘Jesus loves you’ over a rainbow armband
Every weekend, top flight footballers either use quotes as motivation for their approaching match, or thank God if the contest reached a successful conclusion. Arsenal’s Bukayo Saka met the news of his recent injury by describing it as ‘#GodsPlan’. Following last weekend’s draw with Chelsea, Crystal Palace’s Eberechi Eze declared the outcome to be ‘not by might nor by power, but by his spirit’. Jurrien Timber, Arsenal’s Dutch defender, leaves supporters scrabbling for their nearest Bible by cryptically stating ‘Isaiah 43:19’, or ‘Luke 1:14’. If you follow your favourite footballers online, the chances are that you’ll be familiar with these invocations.
A spotlight was thrown on this trend recently, when Palace captain Marc Guehi wrote ‘I love Jesus’ and ‘Jesus loves you’ over a rainbow armband worn to support LGBT+ communities. Amidst commentators’ performative gasps and groans, everyone overlooked that Guehi’s stencilled note was not in any way surprising. It was merely symbolic of the rise of evangelical Christianity across elite football.
The church’s relationship with football in England is long and complex. Early forms of the game were disdained because of the violence that sometimes erupted on, and off, the pitch; traditionalists also didn’t like the fact that some games were played on a Sunday, the Sabbath. However, with the turn into the 20th century, churches around Britain increasingly advocated the sport as something that fostered ‘healthy bodies’. Everton, Fulham, Manchester City, and Southampton were all formed by local church organisations; north of the border, Celtic have always been intimately linked to Glasgow’s Catholic community.
Individual English players rarely made their own religious views overt. In the latter half of the 20th century, tales of footballers’ faith are few and far between. World Cup winner Nobby Stiles attended Mass every day during the 1966 campaign. Wolves forward Peter Knowles quit football to become a Jehovah’s Witness in 1969. But these stories formed the exception rather than the rule. If anything, Christianity was looked down upon. Renowned ‘hard man’ Roy McDonagh was frustrated by what he described as Cambridge United’s ‘Holy Trinity’ in the 1980s. In his words, the club’s trio of Christians, including future Manchester United manager David Moyes, were ‘discussing their beliefs when they should have been getting psyched up for a relegation scrap’.
But in recent years, bucking the trend of diminishing Christianity elsewhere in British society, footballers have become far more open about their faith. At the recent European Championships, a self-described English ‘God Squad’ was formed, comprising Eze, Saka, Ivan Toney, and Guehi. This mirrored a Bible study group held by the Dutch national team, attended by 15 of their 26-man squad. Saka publicly presents himself as ‘God’s Child’, while Dutchman Memphis Depay defines himself by 2 Corinthians 5:7 – ‘walking in faith, not by sight’.
Why has football become so proudly Christian? The reasons are predictably various. In the early 1990s, a set of footballers including Cyril Regis and Justin Fashanu began to normalise overt faith in dressing rooms. Graham Daniels, one of those pioneers, describes how a ‘precedent’ was set, with players pointing to the ‘holistic’ benefits a strict Christian lifestyle could provide. When tied into the increased professionalism and pressures that the modern game has brought, Christianity was seen as providing a mental outlet and moral reference-point.
Premier League demographics and the rising number of participants from outside Britain also play a role. In 1992, there were 13 foreign players in the Premier League. Now, 66.2 per cent of players are from outside the UK. With many hailing from religious countries like Brazil and Spain, these new players have had an influence, offering more open displays of their Christian faith than their English counterparts. After Liverpool’s Roberto Firmino was baptised by his teammate Alisson Becker in 2020, the pair went viral for sobbing while clutched in each other’s arms.
But what has had the greatest impact is a change in wider British society. While church attendance has more than halved in the country as a whole, evangelical churches have bucked this trend. In immigrant communities, and especially in areas of south London, where many of England’s new generation of footballers were brought up, religion is far more present; a more overt vision of Christianity has been propagated there.
Those players explicitly espousing their Christian faith often come from immigrant (first, or second or even third generation) backgrounds; most are from evangelical or Pentecostal communities, reflecting the Premier League’s ever-increasing ethnic diversity. Nearly one in five players were from black and minority ethnic backgrounds in 1992, with that number rising to 43 per cent in 2022. It is natural that such trends should lead to the increasing visibility of the faiths that thrive within such communities. There is also the fact that, aided by social media, one of the key tenets of evangelicalism is that you talk about your faith, espouse it and spread the word; this marks a stark contrast to the quieter, more domestic expectations of Anglicanism.
The question posed by the response to Guehi’s statement is whether, moving forward, players may find themselves put under increasing pressure to mask their faith and beliefs. With football one of the few areas where Christianity is visibly resurgent in the UK, this is not a debate that will likely go away.
Syria’s Christians face an uncertain future
When I visited Maaloula in southwest Syria in 2016, the Jabhat Al-Nusra (the predecessor of the Hayat Tahrir Ash Sham jihadis, who have toppled Bashar al-Assad) had systematically destroyed and desecrated the town’s churches and monasteries. Orthodox nuns were kidnapped and held to ransom, only freed after the Syrian government agreed to release extremist prisoners. During my visit, I was told again and again that young men had been singled out and executed when they refused to convert to the extremists’ version of Islam. Some of the most moving moments in my life have been to pray with the townsfolk and help to rededicate an ancient altar that had been desecrated by the militants.
Maaloula isn’t just another small town caught in the crossfire of Syria’s brutal civil war. For Christians, its importance lies in the fact that it is one of the last remaining communities to speak Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ, the Holy Family and the Apostles. Were this community to be destroyed, something precious and irreplaceable would be lost.
Of course, Maaloula is not the only atrocity experienced by Christians during this long drawn-out conflict. There are many clergy who were kidnapped and still have never been found, such as my friend Mar Yohanna Ibrahim, the Syrian Orthodox bishop of Aleppo, and Paul Yazigi, bishop of the Greek Orthodox Church in Syria. We must presume that they have been killed.
It is alarming, therefore, to learn that Maaloula is, once again, under attack. Multiple reports are saying that the extremist families who were removed from the town after it was recaptured by the army after 2016 are now returning. Christians there are receiving threats, being shot at and their property is being confiscated. After the last attacks, Christians, like other ethnic and religious groups, had armed themselves to protect their communities. This is being used as an excuse by rebel forces to stage armed operations against ‘pro-Assad militias’.
One element in the confusing mix that is Syria today is the presence of large numbers of foreign fighters from the China’s Uighurs, Uzbeks from Central Asia, Chechens from Russia, Afghans and Pakistanis. The incident of the burning of the Christmas tree in Suqaylabiah, another Christian-majority town, was the work of some of these foreign fighters, as the new regime has acknowledged. It is worrying that these fighters are now embedded in the army and some have been appointed to high ranks within the armed forces. It has also been declared that they will be granted Syrian citizenship because of their fighting during the rebellion against the Ba’ath Party and President Assad. How will these fighters, with their historic rejection of plural societies, be integrated into a country known for its ethnic and religious diversity?
The protests by Christians in Damascus over the Christmas period show that there is widespread anxiety within the Christian population of what the future will hold for them. Their population has already been reduced drastically during the civil war and the extinction of some of Syria’s oldest communities would be a tragedy.
Of course, what may be happening to the Christians cannot be separated from what is happening to other vulnerable groups. The BBC has reported attempted confiscations of Alawite property in Latakia province by rebel groups and there have been reports of summary executions of captured Christian and Alawite soldiers by some groups. Given their experience of IS in Iraq, the Yazidis are also anxious about the future, as are the Druze. I understand that Armenians have already begun to flee.
What accountability is there for the country’s new leadership?
The Ba’ath party was a secular party, modelled on national socialist, that is to say, fascist lines. Assad was at its head, but it was not a one man show. Syria was governed as a virtually one-party state by a system that had remained resilient until now. While severely curtailing political freedom and plurality, the system allowed a measure of personal, religious and cultural freedom to Syria’s diverse communities. The question is whether this will continue. According to anti-Assad and pro-HTS commentators, most Syrians want a secular, democratic and religiously diverse society. Will their desires be met?
A new constitution will take time to frame and elections are a long way off. What accountability is there then for the country’s new leadership? One option that the international community has available is that of sanctions which were imposed on the Assad regime because of its crushing of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011 and in the events that followed. It should be made clear to the new rulers, who have little experience of democracy, that sanctions will not be lifted unless there is demonstrable respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms such as freedom of belief, expression and religion, certified by the UN Human Rights Council and other international fora.
Maaloula and Suqaylabiah may well be the ‘canaries in the mine’, alerting us to the dangers facing ethnic and religious minorities in the new Syria. Even a fragment of what happened in Iraq with IS and the Taliban in Afghanistan should not be allowed to happen in Syria for the sake of all its people and for stability in the region and beyond.
Michael Nazir-Ali joined Damian Thompson on the latest Holy Smoke podcast to discuss the plight facing Syria’s Christians:
Keir Starmer wants to redefine crime and punishment
How far should a government go to stamp out people smuggling? This month, the Home Office is set to introduce powers that will allow courts to place expansive restrictions on those suspected of people smuggling and other serious crimes. Penalties are set to include social media bans, restrictions on banking and even curfews, imposed pre-arrest. Infringement of these court orders would be a criminal offence punishable by up to five years in jail.
Some have welcomed this as tough action from the Labour government; finally, you may think, they’re doing something about illegal immigration. But tough policies aren’t always good policies. The mooted powers would allow the police to shut down a suspect’s social media accounts, freeze their bank accounts and even track and limit their physical movements, all before there’s enough evidence to mount an arrest. Private companies like banks and social media platforms would be required to enforce these restrictions. To me, this proposal raised the chilling spectre of another ‘tough’ policy: China’s social credit system.
I am not suggesting that Labour is about to introduce a British social credit scheme
First, a caveat. Social credit has been one of the most misreported stories about China in recent years (and you can listen to my podcast, Chinese Whispers, to understand how the hyped-up reports came about). Any Chinese person can tell you that there is no single score, à la Black Mirror, that dictates their lives. Nevertheless, what does exist is still a scheme that allows authoritarian overreach and an inconsistent and arbitrary application of the law, which dishes out wide-ranging punishments that equate to modern day cancellation.
The scheme mainly targets unscrupulous companies and tries to ensure that any lawbreakers in one part of China will be placed on a blacklist and limited in their freedoms in other parts of the country. Infractions include not meeting food safety standards or committing fraud.
But individuals also fall foul of the system, and it is so fragmented and vague that citizens are often left in the dark as to their rights. Tax evasion, smuggling, and fraud are all violations that will land you on a blacklist in some provinces, but not in others. Some blacklists require court rulings, but not all. Local authorities can also add their own violations, which means criminals are punished quickly, but with little scrutiny. During the pandemic, when China had a ‘zero-Covid’ policy, some local authorities blacklisted non-mask-wearers, but not others. Under a system that respects the rule of law, citizens know what is illegal and what isn’t, and can rely on a consistent application of the law; in China, the social credit system has created a shadowy parallel to the legal system that is rife for accidental or deliberate abuse.
Punishments for the blacklisted include: being banned from air travel or high speed rail; having your children banned from attending private school; your bank accounts being frozen. These collateral punishments are applied with little communication – and those who try to appeal the decision find a bureaucracy that is Kafkaesque in its slowness.
I am of course not suggesting that Labour is about to introduce a British social credit scheme. The Home Office’s suggestions target only those suspected of serious crimes, and the restrictions are only intended to be a pre-arrest arrangement. Britain’s legal system is also mature and (most would say) independent of politics in a way that China’s is not. Law enforcement agencies generally apply the law without supplication to an authoritarian government, and the British media is much more capable than China’s of calling out abuses of power, judicial or political.
But there are some troubling similarities in the principles at play. Restricting the liberties of those who haven’t been charged or even arrested is a move towards social credit’s arbitrary application. The extensive impact on various parts of one’s life – enlisting the help of private companies too – opens up a new world of collateral punishment.
Will those placed under court restrictions be able to appeal the decision – and promptly – before their social media accounts are frozen and internet access is cut off? Will all law enforcement agencies that can apply for this power be held to the same threshold of evidence required to make such a request? Will courts have explicit and consistent guidance on what is an appropriate scale – or area – for the package of punishments, especially as judges will be deciding on a case-by-case basis?
Democracies can slide into authoritarianism through complacency (recently and vividly demonstrated by some of the government’s Covid policies). Of course people smuggling and other serious crimes need to be rooted out, but we mustn’t hand over our own liberties and allow the erosion of our civil rights in the name of security. That is the very trade-off that the CCP uses to justify its rule. We can already see where it leads.
Give Trump’s realism a chance
In one place at least, the reaction to Donald Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal has been one of unequivocal joy. That is Russia – and for obvious reasons. Most Russians have long seen US language about the ‘rules-based order’ as a mere mask for US empire and US national interests. In their view, Trump has now removed the mask.
Even more importantly, for the Russian establishment Trump’s words are a confirmation that he and Vladimir Putin see international affairs in very much the same way: as a matter of spheres of influence, transactionalism, and the ruthless defence of national interests.
During the Ukrainian revolution and the Russian intervention in Ukraine in 2014, German chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly said that Putin was not in touch with reality and was ‘living in another world’. Trump lives there too. This raises a horribly disquieting question for British and European elites: what if Putin and Trump (and Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Mohammed bin Salman) are in closer touch with reality than European establishments have been for the past generation and more, and are therefore better placed to agree among themselves?
After all, these leaders are in good company: Their coldly realist view of the world was first formulated intellectually by Thucydides more than 2,400 years ago. What if a better basis for international peace is a respectful understanding that states will define their interests for themselves? When those interests are vital, states can go to war to defend them.
It could be time to give Trump’s realism a chance
The liberal internationalists like Merkel (who permeate the western-educated classes and formulate the rhetoric of western governments) see this as a world-historic regression and a tragedy. And so it may turn out to be. This is not however fore-ordained. We should be willing to consider the possibility that Trump’s approach may form a better basis for world peace than that pursued by the US and its European satellites since the end of the Cold War; though only if – and it is a colossal if – Trump is willing to understand and respect the vital interests of other major states, and is truly anxious to avoid more (domestically unpopular) wars. If so, it is highly unlikely that Russia or China would run the existential risks of attacking US vital interests as defined by Trump.
It is hardly as if the US liberal internationalism of recent decades has been successful in preventing wars, reducing international tension or even (outside the former Yugoslavia) ending humanitarian catastrophes. On the contrary, it has contributed to a number of catastrophes. This is of course largely due to recalcitrant international realities; but it is also because liberal internationalism became completely entwined with the ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine’ of 1992 – adopted to a great extent as the standard operating procedure of every subsequent US administration – whereby the United States should be the sole hegemon, not merely in the world as a whole, but in every region of the world.
This would be in the name of spreading ‘freedom’, but would be pursued if necessary through the exertion of military force and economic pressure. No other country would possess any influence beyond its own borders except what was allowed by Washington. All states would be required to change their domestic political systems and policies in accordance with US ideas and wishes. This was the mailed fist behind Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’.
This is really the kind of thing you expected to hear in the penultimate scenes of the old James Bond movies, when the arch-villain, having tied Bond up, cackles: ‘Now that you are at my mercy, Commander Bond, I vill reveal to you my brilliant plan to dominate ze vurld, kha kha kha!’
It should always have been apparent to anyone with the slightest sense of history or ability to see the world through the eyes of non-western nations that this US plan would be rejected by most states and would lead to extreme tension and the risk of war with Russia, China and any other state which believed that it had a historic right and a vital interest in exerting influence beyond its borders – and a vital interest as defined by itself, not the United States.
The Wolfowitz Doctrine formed the basis for the later ‘Bush Doctrine’, which Senator Teddy Kennedy described as ‘a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other nation can or should accept.’ Its goals are also now quite clearly far beyond the diminished military and economic capability of the United States, let alone Europe. Since liberal internationalism has so clearly failed, maybe it is time to give Trumpian realism a chance.
For the EU, Trump’s renunciation of liberal internationalism is the most terrible shock. Let us hope however that it may be a salutary one could help to save the EU, at least in a remodified form. The EU, which in its first decades was an immensely valuable institution, has in recent years launched itself on a potentially suicidal path through its own version of the liberal internationalist megalomania that led the US astray.
The EU tried to turn itself from a loose confederation of nations into a form of supra-national state, but lacking any basis of popular legitimacy – whether national or democratic – for this programme. It abolished internal borders between EU states without securing the external ones; it fantasised the infinite fungibility of societies, cultures and populations (and in the process demanded that eastern European nations founded on ethnic nationalism agree to accept their ethnicities’ short-term dilution and long-term abolition); it relaxed its rules for membership for the sake of wider and wider expansion; and it tried to insist that countries outside the EU and Nato observe the same rules as members of those groups. Now, it is even dreaming of itself as some sort of military superpower, although most of its ‘soldiers’ could be kindly described as subsidised backpackers.
Having presented this defence of Trump, it is now necessary to qualify it. If Trump’s blustering threats extract concessions from Denmark, Panama, Canada and Mexico (the latter especially, in the field of controls on migration), then they can be said to serve American interests. It is however also quite obvious that Trump loves bluster for the sake of bluster and has no interest in controlling his own mouth. Calling Canada ‘the 51st state’ and renaming the Gulf of Mexico ‘the Gulf of America’ achieves nothing except to strengthen national resistance to American demands.
Then again… What threats do Russia and China really pose in the Arctic?
It also goes without saying that if Trump really annexed Greenland through force or economic blackmail, or (as he has also threatened to do), launched cross-border military strikes on Mexican drug cartels, this would be a disaster for the US that would push countries in Europe into the arms of Russia, and the US’s neighbours in Latin America into the arms of China. In the case of Greenland at least, it is also quite unnecessary. The Danes and Greenlanders are hardly going to reject US demands for more military bases or more mining concessions in Greenland.
With regard to Greenland in particular, there is one more crucial point to be made. I have presented Trump’s thinking as rational in the context of ancient and universal thinking about state interests and relations between states. But what if there is now a new universal factor that threatens to make all these paradigms irrelevant in the long term? The whole cause of the new US and international security and commercial interest (not only on the part of Trump) in Greenland and the Arctic is the opportunities and challenges created by the melting of the polar ice due to anthropogenic climate change.
Further melting of the Greenland ice cap, contributing 18cm to sea levels by 2100 according to ISMIP6 models (which are however conservative – many experts believe that much higher rises are possible), will disrupt ocean currents (including the Gulf Stream) and weather patterns, and represent climate change that organised states – including the US – will struggle with. When Trump is ancient history, his posthumous defence will be that he wasn’t that much more deluded than most other contemporary leaders.
Where Wales went wrong
There is no land more lovely than Wales. I have walked through a magical forest to splash in the shallow, shimmering waters of the sea at the forested Newborough Beach in Anglesey and traipsed out to the monastery on the spit. I’ve struggled up Mount Snowdon while being pummelled by the angry Welsh wind and stared at by unimpressed sheep. Ten miles north-west, I have inspected the neat beauty of Caernarfon Castle staring into the Menai straits, strolled the pretty streets of Monmouth and Hay-on Wye, and lived it up in the rolling hills just over the border from Ludlow.
As a place of beauty and charm, and a fascinating history of royalty and intra-national power struggles, Wales has everything going for it. Why, then, does it use all its energy up on self-destruction? Why does it insist on turning itself into a laughing stock, drinking down unfiltered woke rubbish and dousing its wonderful natural and cultural heritage in the stuff? The country is like the teenager who is clever, quirky, and loved – yet still chooses to become a rampaging nightmare who squanders all the good in favour of drugs, binge-drinking and Marxism.
With beauty of land and richness of history, Wales is both lucky and special
Unlike with a teenager, however, it has become increasingly difficult to wave away Wales’s behaviour as a mere phase. For me, the news last week that some are offended at the success of ‘fairy porn’ – a genre of romance that includes sexy nymphs and sprites cavorting in glens – was a high, or rather, a low water mark, of the new Welsh sensibility. ‘It can be pretty patronising,’ sniffed Professor Dimitra Fimi, formerly of Cardiff University and now a professor of fantasy and children’s literature at Glasgow. ‘It creates an image of the country which isn’t realistic. That’s not all that Wales is. What worries me is a particular perception of Wales developing within fantasy, which is that it’s this magical, rural, romantic place.’
Offending books include Sarah J. Maas’s best-selling A Court of Thorns and Roses series, which includes the story of a girl killing a wolf, after which a fairy demands an erotic punishment. The popular Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros is about an aspiring dragon rider girl who falls into a sexy clinch with a gorgeous boy called Xaden, a ‘third-year rider and wingleader’. Both authors have been accused of a kind of cultural appropriation. Their tales apparently borrow from Welsh mythology, and their characters have names such as Gwyneth.
Fairy porn-gate is, of course, small fry – and certainly a distraction – next to a deeply concerning bigger picture. Wales suffers from some of the worst poverty rates in the UK (21 per cent of the population and 28 per cent of children); an underdeveloped economy that never recovered from the end of mining; incompetent governance; disastrous educational outcomes compared to most other nations; and the ghoulish consequences of the UK’s broken asylum system, encapsulated by the jailing in October of an illiterate goat herder from Iraq operating as a drug seller in barber shops in Aberystwyth by way of Newcastle. NHS waiting times are poor and addiction issues are rife.
In light of this barrage of real problems, perhaps it is no surprise that Wales has taken up with gusto such US-style notions as ‘systemic’ social and racial injustice, diversity and inclusion, and unhealthy historical revisionism based on grievance.
The usual absurd spectacles arise from these ideological missteps and distractions. With the help of funding from the devolved Labour government, David Lloyd George’s childhood home in Llanystumdwy, which is now a museum honouring him, is to be ‘decolonised’ to ‘promote a multicultural, vibrant and diverse Wales’. At the same time, under recent ‘anti-racism guidance’ from the Association of Local Government Archaeological Officers (those big cheeses), Edward I’s Welsh castles – including Caernarfon – are deemed ‘problematic’. Visitors should be made aware that these castles are not architectural marvels and places of cultural and historic significance, they are ‘symbols of oppression and alienation’ which ‘illustrate well the potentially divisive legacy of historical events’. There’s plenty more where this came from.
Meanwhile, schools seem to have embraced trans ideology with a zest unrivalled in the rest of Britain. In November a leaflet was handed out to 11-year-olds headed: ‘Problem periods when you’re not cisgendered’, informing them that there are ‘men who have periods’. Worse even than the painful confusion that is sure to arise in pupils of such a vulnerable age being told such stuff by figures of authority is the approach to education itself.
Wales has one of the worst track records in the West on reading, maths and science skills. In December 2023, the OECD published the latest round of Pisa tests in these areas, and found that while most countries had seen a dip since the pandemic, the declines were particularly large in Wales, erasing all the progress seen since 2012. Recommendations for the Welsh curriculum included placing ‘greater emphasis on specific knowledge’ and a delay in reforms to GCSEs. There is little sign of these recommendations being taken up. Instead, last month Welsh exam chiefs made the decision to axe Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird from the English language exams because of the books’ use of ‘racial slurs’ that might be ‘psychologically and emotionally’ harmful for some children.
With beauty of land and richness of history, Wales is both lucky and special. Enoch Powell (speaking in Welsh) once argued the ‘contribution of Wales to the history of Britain over the centuries to be an important one indeed… it would be a very poor thing if her contribution to British cultural life was confined to the borders of the principality’. It’s a great shame Wales’s contemporary gatekeepers don’t see it that way. Instead, they seem to prefer diminution, distortion and destruction to celebration, learning and pleasure.
Ex-Labour MP arrested – days after attacking ‘unacceptable’ Elon
It was just six days ago that the Ivor Caplin, the former Labour MP for Hove, emerged from obscurity to offer his thoughts on Elon Musk. Tony Blair’s former defence minister went on GB News last Sunday to offer his thoughts on the Tesla billionaire’s tweets about Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips. Such posts, Caplin declared, were ‘not acceptable’ and ‘it would be even more unacceptable if he was to become a serious and senior member’ of the Trump administration.
Fast forward less than a week and what has old Ivor been up to? It transpires that he was arrested today on suspicion of child sex offences after a sting by paedophile hunters. Footage of Caplin in handcuffs was live-streamed on Facebook and lasted 30 minutes, attracting more than 36,000 views and 3,000 comments. In a statement, Sussex Police has now confirmed that:
We are aware of footage circulating on social media showing a man in Brighton being detained on suspicion of engaging in online sexual communications with a child. Officers can confirm that a local 66-year-old man was arrested on Saturday January 11 and currently remains in custody.
Caplin denies wrongdoing and remains in police custody. It comes months after he was suspended from the party over undisclosed ‘serious allegations’ – which he denies.
Morrisons turns on Rachel Reeves
Poor old Rachel Reeves. Whether it’s being besieged by the bond markets or savaged by the Sinosceptics, it has not been the best of weeks for our under-fire Chancellor. So what better way to cap it all off then a full-barrelled broadside by one of the UK’s most beloved supermarkets? For food giant Morrisons tonight joined the chorus of criticism over Reeves’ planned Budget changes to agricultural property relief, amid dire predictions that it will ‘kill’ Britian’s family farms.
The supermarket giant has tonight released a pithy 47-second video on Twitter/X, featuring Sophie Throup, the head of agriculture at Morrisons. She declared:
We want to send a message of support today for the whole of the farming community. We understand your anger and your frustrations at the inheritance tax – and we’re with you. We share your concerns about the long-term future the inheritance tax is going to have on farms – particularly smaller, family farms – and we know that you want something done about it. We’ve been raising these concerns at the highest level of government since November last year and we will continue to do so. We know it’s important. We are with you. We are here to help you.
Ooft. Guess the Chancellor ought to start shopping at Tescos eh?
It’s unlikely Rachel Reeves is going anywhere
Rachel Reeves, who is now fighting for her political life, was instrumental in helping Labour secure a landslide majority at the general election.
If you don’t believe that then you have probably forgotten that her predecessor as shadow chancellor was Anneliese Dodds. All the while that the wild-haired former university lecturer Dodds was in charge of Labour’s economic policy the party lagged well behind on perceived competence on this vital issue.
But when the sleek, suited and booted Reeves took over that all changed. City and business sentiment gravitated towards Starmer’s party and the Tories were unable to terrify the electorate any longer about the prospect of Labour being in charge of the money.
Six months on from the election, all that has changed. Reeves is now known disparagingly as ‘Rachel from Accounts’ after her CV was discovered to have suffered a similar degree of inflation as afflicted the Argentinian economy in 2023.
Reeves approached the challenge of steering the UK economy with this same spirit of hubris, declaring at the start of the election campaign: ‘I know how to run a successful economy.’
When she took up the post of Chancellor she even released a mini-movie hailing her own achievement at becoming the first woman to hold that great office of state.
Alas her stewardship of the British economy has already proven disastrous
Alas her stewardship of the British economy has already proven disastrous. In a bid to justify tax rises following her election campaign promise that there wouldn’t need to be any, Reeves hyped up the idea that the public finances were in an unexpectedly dire state because of a £22bn Tory ‘black hole’.
Starmer himself reinforced the doom-mongering with a speech in the Downing Street garden in late summer in which he warned that the Budget, then still two months away, was ‘going to be painful’.
Unsurprisingly, economic sentiment divebombed and growth, which was supposed to be this administration’s over-riding goal, dried up. When the Budget did come, Reeves delivered a shocking £40bn of annual tax rises. The great bulk of the projected extra revenue was earmarked for increases in NHS spending and public sector wages rather than to repair public finances. There was no £22bn ‘black hole’, as a review by the Office for Budget Responsibility made clear. The OBR did find though that the overall effect of the Reeves Budget would be to immediately drive down growth – totally undermining her supposed top priority.
Now the bond market has turned against her too, raising borrowing costs by billions of pounds and more than likely removing all her projected fiscal ‘headroom’ in advance of a spending review.
It would be possible to argue that Reeves had just got unlucky in tricky circumstances were it not for the appalling judgment she has also shown over the political implications of various measures.
Taking winter fuel allowance away from all but the poorest 15 per cent of pensioners has caused enormous reputational damage to Labour in return for a very modest financial saving. Former Tory Treasury ministers have identified the policy as being one part of a ‘hobby horse’ file that mandarins in the department attempt to inflict on every incoming ministerial team. An inheritance tax onslaught against farmers is another. ‘There’s a reason why the ideas in that file have stayed in that file until now,’ says one.
There are, however, two good reasons for thinking Starmer will be extremely reluctant to clear Reeves out of the Treasury. The first is that Labour is short of experienced talent at a senior level and it is difficult to see who could command any more credibility. Yvette Cooper is a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury and has the standard Oxford PPE degree, which makes her one possibility. There aren’t many others.
Secondly, ditching a chancellor is very different from ditching, say, a purple-haired transport secretary with a chequered history as a custodian of mobile phones. If a chancellor is dismissed, it tells people that stewardship of the economy is in crisis. And that casts doubt on the judgment of an incumbent premier too.
After all, his sacking of Norman Lamont after Black Wednesday did not lead people to forget that John Major had been the chancellor who took Britain into the ERM. And even in his pomp, Tony Blair never dared kick Gordon Brown out of the Treasury, for fear of the reputational hit.
So Rachel from Accounts will only be removed if Starmer decides he has no other viable way of saving himself. We are not there yet. But those are the rocks that ‘UK plc’ is steaming towards at a fair old rate of knots.
Trump has a point about Greenland
As the second Trump term looms in the near distance, it’s become a bit of a cliché to say that ‘a stopped clock is right twice a day’. Pinko liberal Nats like myself have had to get used to the fact that for all our disagreements with the man on policy and style, there are certain areas where we fundamentally agree.
Most prominently, it was after all Dòmhnall Iain (as his first cousins on Lewis would call him) who first really grasped the systemic challenge posed by China to Western states in his first term. As a member of the Inter Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), it was with a wry smile that we noticed the quiet acquiescence of the Biden administration on that front even as it rolled back other Trump foreign policies.
It will be interesting therefore to see if there is a wider recognition among our political class that behind Trump’s braggadocio on Greenland there lies an implicit rebuke of UK and European security policy. Perhaps one actually tied to the way he understands the China challenge, but also one which – if taken in the right spirit – could help put some flesh on the bones of a debate around defence spending which has been lost down the somewhat blind alley of percentages of GDP.
In so many ways, Trump’s perception of US security is affected by Greenland – where, as ice caps melt and new trade routes open up, China and Russia are jostling for strategic advantage – is as a result of decisions taken by successive governments in Whitehall. Liberal Democrat MP and defence select committee member Mike Martin gave a good précis of the issue here. Quite simply, whereas during the Cold War the Greenland-Iceland-UK (GIUK) GAP was crucial to the UK’s maritime posture, this central plank of UK grand strategy has almost entirely disappeared from our discussion around security. The current Strategic Defence Review being led by former Nato Secretary General Lord Robertson would do well to correct that.
It should do so because the UK’s post-Cold War record in our own backyard has been lamentable. The ‘peace dividend’ of the 90s saw less capability deployed in areas where it was perceived that the new Russian Federation would not pose a threat. This is before we even get to procurement disasters like the cancelled Nimrod programme, T45 destroyers (ironically unable to function in the Gulf as they were built for colder waters) or an Astute-class submarine fiasco that makes the Scottish government’s ferry woes look like an accounting error.
While I certainly welcomed partial nods to the North Atlantic bedrock of our security when they happened – such as the announcement of the purchase of Poseidon P8 MPAs, or welcome cooperation with neighbours in the UK-led Northern Group formation – there was still no doubt that post-Brexit Britain saw its interests going elsewhere, resulting in the little understood ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’ which was the geo-strategic buzzword from the 2021 integrated review.
And this bring us to the nub of Trump’s comments: a state which is tilting to the Indo-Pacific is by design tilting away from the North Atlantic. Even if you account for the commendable UK response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this should not allow us to forget that we have effectively left our back door open to Russian incursions of all sorts for well over a decade now. In other words, Trump has a point.
In other words, Trump has a point.
And while many in the security community have been wise about this for some time – I remember a particular RUSI Whitehall Paper from then Norwegian Defence Attaché John Andreas Olsen on this very topic from as along ago as 2017 – politicians have been very bad at explaining where their priorities lie.
A commitment to the North Atlantic means more than just a percentage spend on GDP: it means reiterating our commitment to the GIUK Gap, and to capabilities like the frigates, maritime patrol aircraft and anti-submarine warfare helicopters that had always been the mainstay of UK defence in our own neighbourhood. I’m even left wondering if it has occurred to many across Whitehall that the UK itself may have contributed something to this current stooshie through its own neglect of the GIUK Gap and North Atlantic more generally.
This Labour government is finding it hard in so many ways to get to grips with the maxim that ‘to lead is to choose’: either choosing badly or falling into the trap of their predecessors in thinking they can quietly opt to have it all and hope nobody notices it’s a fiction. Given their well-documented differences with the incoming Trump White House, Keir Starmer’s government may find that greater focus on the UK’s own backyard – the GIUK Gap – would achieve multiple goals. It would bring Trump’s Whitehouse on board and show that Britain can still lead.
What Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg owe to the mainstream media
Censorship and the silencing of dissenting voices has been a defining feature of the 21st century. It’s curious, because it wasn’t meant to be like this. This epoch, as the tech libertarian utopians of the 1990s so eagerly pronounced, was going to be one of unprecedented and untrammelled freedom. The internet, which burst into public consciousness back then, promised as much. Social media, which erupted a decade later, promised even more. And then it all went wrong.
I was cancelled by Facebook for writing about why men are funnier than women
We shouldn’t have been surprised. Ideologies based on utopian fantasies, underpinned by the illusion that mankind can be perfected, inevitably descend into authoritarianism. Online debate and social media became policed and muzzled, a medium through which liberal orthodoxies and then a hyper-liberal woke creed was imposed and enforced, abetted by mobs who sought to punish dissenters and heretics. Facebook and Twitter became places where you spoke freely at your peril about race, gender, immigration and Covid vaccines. They evolved into forums where uncomfortable truths and unorthodox views were as much suppressed as disseminated, with users cancelled and accounts suspended.
So while Mark Zuckerberg’s belated and somewhat expedient statement this week, regarding the decision to relax restrictions on his social media platforms, is welcome, he is being disingenuous in citing one motive: that ‘the legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.’
Zuckerberg repeats a persistent trope found on social media over the years. This is that the ‘legacy’ or ‘mainstream’ media these days are ossified agents of conformity, and that it’s online where you’ll find unfiltered truths and opinions that these dinosaurs dare not print or broadcast.
This is a myth. It was foremost the Times, and its journalist Andrew Norfolk, who invested time, money and energy into investigating and exposing the rape gangs in the north of England in the first years of this century, against the nervous consensus of the time. Alice Thomson of the Daily Telegraph and now of the Times did similar in interviewing the victims.
From its very inception, the free press has aspired and served to hold to account those in power, and in recent years the ‘mainstream media’ has been instrumental in uncovering uncomfortable truths. Just a couple of examples: it was the Daily Telegraph that broke the MPs expenses scandal in 2009; and it was the same newspaper that in 2023 released Matt Hancock’s appalling WhatsApp messages during the lockdown era.
As for the presumption that the ‘legacy media’ is irredeemably conformist and that social media is where truth and dangerous opinion abound unfettered, this is also not true, as anyone who digests and straddles both mediums knows.
The likes of Jeremy Clarkson and Rod Liddle have for decades been penning opinions that would have had alarm bells ringing had they been made solely on social media, uttered by your man in the street who had no-one to defend him.
Going back further, even more outrageous fare from Auberon Waugh or Michael Wharton (‘Peter Simple’) in the Daily Telegraph would have been unquestionably cancelled by the social media invigilators and puritan activists.
Even I have been cancelled by Facebook, for writing a piece here on why men are funnier than women. That article was removed by Facebook because it apparently ‘violated (the site’s) standards on hate speech’. A tiny incident, I grant you, but it represents a pattern: social media often censors that which the legacy media does dare to put out.
Charlie Peters of GB News, whose Oldham papers recently reignited the debate over the rape gangs, has given full credit to Andrew Norfolk. This is right and proper, yet somewhat ironic, too, given that Peters is a diligent and industrious reporter very much of the old school. And as much as his station likes to present itself as an alternative to the ‘mainstream’, it has become mainstream itself, as its ever-increasing viewing figures attest. GB News is a television and radio station, after all, one that even devotes an hour each night to reviewing tomorrow’s dead tree press.
Many have pointed out that Zuckerberg is doing with Facebook merely what Elon Musk did with Twitter. But both, in turn, are moving towards a model that television has employed for decades and the press have done for centuries: putting out news and opinion even if it upsets people, and apologising or allowing the right of reply if these words prove to be untrue. Long before ‘community notes’ ever existed, publications had ‘Corrections and Clarifications’, ‘Feedback’, and ‘Letters to the Editor’.
The decision by Facebook, and that by Twitter/X before it, to update its position on freedom of speech and truth – accepting that the former is essential for a liberal society and that the latter is held provisionally and open to revision and correction – represents not so much a response to the ‘mainstream media.’ Rather, it’s a tacit acceptance of the norms upheld for years by the mainstream media.