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Elon Musk isn’t an extremist threat
At conferences and roundtables on counter extremism in recent months, it has been impossible to escape the terms ‘mis’ and ‘disinformation’. For among experts, practitioners, academics, civil servants and police officers, it is the default explanation for understanding not only extremism in Britain, but the wider mood of popular discontent.
Over the weekend, this view was lent further credence in the pages of the Observer by two counter-extremism heavyweights, former counter-extremism commissioner Dame Sara Khan and the former head of counter-terrorism police, Neil Basu. Together, they warn that the government’s new counter-extremism plans are not enough ‘to address a toxic pool of hatred, conspiracy theories and “dangerous rhetoric” from high-profile figures including Elon Musk.’
The tendency to view everything through the lens of ‘narratives’ is a fundamental failing of the extremism sector’s thinking
Parts of Khan and Basu’s diagnosis are largely – and depressingly – correct. We live in an extremely polarised and fragile moment, where extremist groups thrive and simmering tensions look likely to boil over at any moment. But their decision to blame people like Musk for the rise of extremism risks exacerbating the very problem they seek to address. For starters, it could lead the government to believe the fantasy that were it not for misinformation peddled by rabble rousers online, the febrile atmosphere in our country might not exist. This is the 21st century version of an ailing regime blaming ‘outside agitators’ while a crowd roils outside the presidential palace. It is not the way to prevent more violence or extremism on our streets.
In his remarks, Neil Basu suggests Musk’s online activity on X has the potential to cause race riots, or even more alarmingly, an outright race war. This is asserted without evidence and seems unlikely. Musk has certainly re-amplified the grooming gangs scandal, but domestic anger was bubbling up again with or without his involvement.
Basu warns that another Darren Osborne – who drove into worshippers outside Finsbury Park Mosque in 2017 – is out there. He may well be. But as the Magdeburg attack or the Texas synagogue siege indicate, violent individuals can latch on to many different grievances and find a justification for murder if they are determined enough to do so. Osborne had allegedly watched Three Girls – the BBC’s dramatisation of the grooming gangs scandal in Rochdale. Presumably this does not mean the BBC should never have produced and aired it. If anything, this would be exactly the kind of thinking that prevented the grooming gangs from being stopped in the first place.
It’s not entirely clear what is being proposed by Khan and Basu, but their focus on the language and online activities of certain public figures means it is likely to be taken by the counter-extremism sector as another call for censorship and greater control of information. This is the go-to solution for this bloated industry. Instead of actually addressing people’s concerns, top down efforts at control, or sending NGO types out to former mill towns to ‘counter the narrative’ and run critical thinking workshops are unlikely to restore trust.
Basu seems to be suggesting to the Observer that ‘people claiming there is a cover-up of mass rape’ will foster unrest. But it’s clear from documentary evidence like court transcripts and survivor testimony that there were indeed cover ups when it came to the grooming gangs. In many cases the horrifying actions of these gangs were ignored because police, social workers and local government officials were afraid of inflaming community tensions. This is not an ‘extremist narrative’ but the reality of what happened.
The tendency to view everything through the lens of ‘narratives’ is a fundamental failing of the extremism sector’s thinking. It seems to barely occur to some in the sector that ordinary people might actually be sincere in their beliefs and sense of anger. The world cannot be divided into vulnerable dupes and nefarious radicalisers spreading discord for personal gain or profit (although those certainly exist), and this view has done much to damage counter extremism efforts going back to Isis recruitment fears.
Whether you agree with his response or not, it seems entirely possible that Musk, who has frequently remarked on his British ancestry, is genuinely incensed and outraged by what he has learned about the grooming gangs in the last few days.
It is a scandal which likely fuels his belief that the existing liberal establishments of western countries are beyond salvation and must be replaced. In this belief and in his online missives, he has not broken any UK laws (let alone any laws in the US). And any new law to criminalise his interventions would be both ineffective and a total betrayal of freedom of speech.
Basu and Khan have spent many years at the coalface of counter extremism and counter-terrorism in Britain and they have made immeasurable contributions. But the government would be wrong to accept their logic here. Already, and predictably, the Prime Minister’s references to the far-right, disinformation and misinformation have backfired on him. Rather than countering extremism, they have only made the establishment seem even more detached and in denial.
There’s something hypocritical about Macron attacking Musk
Europe’s leaders rounded on Elon Musk on Monday as the American tech billionaire continued to air his views on the state of the Old Continent. Although Musk – who in a fortnight’s time will be president Donald’s Trump efficiency tsar – has focused most of his ire on Britain, he’s also endorsed Alternative for Germany (AfD) in a newspaper column ahead of next month’s parliamentary election.
Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Store, said in an interview that he finds it ‘worrying that a man with enormous access to social media and large financial resources is so directly involved in the internal affairs of other countries’. According to Store: ‘This is not how it should be between democracies and allies.’
Emmanuel Macron didn’t mention Musk by name in an address to French ambassadors at the Elysée Palace, but that’s who he had in mind as warned his audience to be on their guard: ‘Ten years ago, who could have imagined it if we had been told that the owner of one of the largest social networks in the world would support a new international reactionary movement and intervene directly in elections, including in Germany.’
Even after he left the Oval Office, Obama continued to stick his nose into European politics
Musk responded in kind, refraining from namechecking Macron but responding to his declaration on X with the remark: ‘Oh, like that time Starmer called [Donald Trump] a racist and said the British government should do everything to stop him?’
There are plenty of other examples of outsiders meddling in European affairs. When Barack Obama was American president he notoriously warned Britons in 2016 that a vote to leave the EU would leave at the country ‘at the back of the queue’ for trade talks.
There was a similar threat from president Francois Hollande – to whose government Macron belonged – who said three months before the Brexit referendum: ‘I don’t want to scare you, I just want to say the truth – there will be consequences.’
Another prominent opponent of Brexit was the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros, who donated £400,000 to the Remain campaign with a sense of ‘pride’. The same year he invested $500m to support refugees and migrants arriving in Europe. Soros’s son, Alexander, now runs his father’s business empire, and in November he met Macron at the Élysée in what the former described as a discussion to ‘find innovative ways to work together in an increasingly fragmented world’.
Obama also endorsed Angela Merkel in the final weeks of his presidency as she pondered whether to stand for re-election in 2017. ‘It’s up to her whether she wants to stand again,’ Obama said in November 2016. ‘But if I were here and I were German and I had a vote, I might support her.’
Even after he left the Oval Office, Obama continued to stick his nose into European politics, as Macron knows all too well. ‘Obama backs Macron in last-minute intervention in French election,’ ran the headline in the Guardian, days before the French went to the polls in May 2017 to decide whether Macron or Marine Le Pen would be president. ‘The French election is very important to the future of France and the values that we care so much about,’ said Obama, by way of justifying his endorsement of Macron, whom he said appealed to ‘people’s hopes and not their fears’.
In his final press conference as president in January 2017, Obama had told reporters that he would return to the public arena when ‘I think our core values may be at stake’.
By ‘core’ values, he meant ‘progressive’ values, those shared by Merkel, Macron, Jacinda Ardern, Justin Trudeau, Nicola Sturgeon, Leo Varadkar, Matteo Renzi and Mark Rutte. The 2010s was the high-water mark of elite centrism, the rule of the ‘Anywheres’ over the ‘Somewheres’, the triumph of the progressives over the nationalists.
It began to recede with Brexit and the victory of Trump in 2016 and its levels are now dangerously low with the rise of Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Geert Wilders in Holland, Marine Le Pen in France and the AfD in Germany.
It was rather symbolic that the moment Macron attacked Musk, Trudeau announced his resignation as prime minister of Canada. His departure means Macron is the only progressive left standing from the Class of 2016/17.
But he is a president without power, a man who has seen four prime ,inisters come and go in the last 12 months as France came apart at the seams.
In attacking Musk as the leader of a ‘new international reactionary movement’, Macron is trying desperately to rally the forces of progressivism. It shows his disconnection from reality. It is no longer 2017. His elite centrism or, as Macron defines it, his ‘extreme centrism’, is finished.
Voters in Europe and North America are no longer prepared to tolerate diminishing living standards, mass immigration, rampant lawlessness and crumbling infrastructure, all in the name of ‘progress’.
As Time magazine wrote in naming Donald Trump its Person of the Year for 2024, ‘all of us – from his most fanatical supporters to his most fervent critics – are living in the Age of Trump’.
That includes you, Monsieur le President.
Sarah Champion and the grooming gang attention span problem
There are now two debates underway about grooming gangs and how the government should investigate them further. The first is the one raging on social media, largely conducted by people who haven’t up to this point shown much interest in the issue but who are busily accusing others of not doing enough. The second is a more fruitful one between the politicians who actually have engaged with the inquiries that have happened over the years, and who are now trying to work out what should happen next.
Some MPs have been plugging away at the grooming issue for years, long before talking about it garnered them likes and retweets
A few weeks ago, there were no debates at all, and it is notable that last night the government appeared to be pushed by events into announcing it was implementing some of the recommendations of the inquiries that have already taken place. Yvette Cooper told the Commons that so far ‘none of the 20 recommendations from the independent inquiry into child abuse [IICSA] has been implemented.’ She announced that the government would use the crime and policing bill coming to parliament in the spring to make it mandatory to report abuse. There will be professional and criminal sanctions for those who fail to report or cover up child sexual abuse. There will also be legislation making grooming an aggravating factor in the sentencing of child sexual offences, and ministers will ‘overhaul the information and evidence that are fathered on child sexual abuse and exploitation and embed them in a clear new performance framework for policing, so that these crimes are taken far more seriously.’
Cooper was also justifying why her Home Office colleague Jess Phillips had refused Oldham council’s request for a national inquiry into grooming gangs on the basis that it should be held locally instead. It was this refusal, or rather the reporting of it, that sparked the social media storm that has dominated the government’s new year. The Conservatives had to justify in their response why they hadn’t implemented any of the IICSA recommendations (the election they called got in the way, and so on), but also press for a full national public inquiry. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp insisted that the IICSA ‘was mainly directed at other child sexual abuse and exploitation issues, and it covered only six of the towns involved in the gang rape scandal – it did not cover everything.’ He demanded a ‘national statutory public inquiry, which can compel witnesses to attend, requisition evidence and take evidence under oath.’
None of these demands – or indeed the government’s response – are unreasonable. The debate in the Commons last night was tense but it at least focused on what has actually happened in this area, rather than the bizarre spectacle on social media of campaigners claiming that nothing has happened at all, or that the previous reports into grooming were a ‘whitewash’. That last claim was made by Nigel Farage, who didn’t take part in the Commons debate last night, and who is also dampening Elon Musk’s involvement in this by pushing back against the suggestion that Tommy Robinson should be welcomed into Reform UK. The problem with the reports is not that they were a whitewash – they were detailed and largely had the support of victims – but that their recommendations have not been acted upon, and that they may well not have covered the full picture of abuse.
Whether or not there ends up being a full national inquiry, the government has been pushed by the row into acting far quicker than it had originally intended, and its actions on child sexual abuse will face far greater scrutiny than before. Some will argue that this is a good thing and shows the power of social media. An alternative perspective is that what has happened in the past few days is in fact a damning indictment of how Westminster works – or doesn’t.
The IISCA recommendations didn’t become urgent this week. Grooming gangs didn’t even become a scandal this week. They have been reported on for years – most notably by Andrew Norfolk of the Times – and have been a source of shame to those who ignored them for years too. All that has changed this week is that the issue became salient, which is a grim truth for victims who have given evidence to previous inquiries. We see this time and again with national scandals: the journalists covering the Post Office scandal found for many years that they were the only ones in courtrooms or interviewing the hundreds of victims, and feared that little would be done to change the toxic culture of the Post Office – until suddenly the issue became salient and everyone was jumping all over it like fleas. The suffering of the victims and the need for change had not altered one bit – it was just that for a short while the attention span of Westminster was focused on them.
Some MPs have been plugging away at the grooming issue for years, long before talking about it garnered them likes and retweets. Former Labour MP Ann Cryer was praised in the Commons yesterday for having ‘bravely persevered despite accusations of racism and worse, including from her own colleagues.’ Some of the Labour frontbench might have the more recent memory of their colleague Sarah Champion having to resign as a shadow minister because she wrote the following sentence in the Sun in 2017: ‘Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.’
She was a shadow equalities minister under Jeremy Corbyn, and apologised as she quit that role for her ‘extremely poor choice of words’. She has not returned to the Labour frontbench since. Since the row became popular again this week, Champion has conducted herself with characteristic dignity, merely pushing for the changes recommended by the IICSA to be implemented, and arguing that there does not need to be another inquiry. Yet she, unlike so many in Westminster, chose to pursue the issue when it was not helpful to her career to be seen to be doing so. Indeed, she continued to pursue it when the attention had moved elsewhere.
Now, you could argue that the attention span issue is just the way politics works, given there are always a thousand competing priorities and scandals. It might be the way that social media works, sure, but politics should surely be as much about the quiet plugging away as it is about the dramatic moments. Ministers should work on addressing problems whether or not they are trending or on the front pages. Cooper herself said that what was important was ensuring that change actually happened, ‘rather than just thinking, “well, an announcement has been made”, but nothing changes and nothing is actually done.’ And yet the government has been moved along by the tide of attention to make an announcement, showing that even those who identify the problem are not immune to it themselves.
Watch Isabel Hardman on SpectatorTV:
The grooming gang scandal needs to change our entire worldview
The recent re-eruption of the grooming/child rape gang scandal has been disorienting, seeming to blow up from nowhere. It has re-emerged – as far as I can ascertain, it moved so fast – through posts on X that quoted horrific extracts from trial proceedings. Within hours the full horror of what happened (and may well still be happening) in towns and cities around Britain blasted into public consciousness and global headlines.
This is obviously one of the very worst things, maybe the very worst thing, to have occurred in Britain since the war
It’s been a strange few days – not least because none of this information is new. What feels different this time is that its importance has broken out and been acknowledged, by the public if not yet entirely by some politicians.
‘Shouldn’t that be a bigger story?’ has always been a fairly common thought when reading, listening to or watching the news. But there is usually some rhyme or reason to it. This time though it made no sense at all. How was this story ‘missed’ over the last 20 years? Why didn’t we realise how big it is, and what it signifies?
I think it is because of the sheer scale of its importance and significance. The bandwidth of our collective consciousness is too narrow, our vocabulary lacking, there is no ‘form’ for talking about it. The ethnicity of the perpetrators hit a nerve that was too exposed for most people to consider talking about it, at least in public.
We’d do anything to look away. And we have. The focus is shifting again already, moving to political gossip and point scoring. It’s hard to think of a more inappropriate reaction to the last few days than to squawk about the largely mythical ‘far right’ – but Starmer, of course, did exactly that.
The contrast with the manias that we reacted to with acres of print is telling. The BLM frenzy of 2020, the Downing Street wallpaper and sandwiches, #MeToo, the obviously barmy lies spread by Carl Beech. And there were plenty of other shocking things, from hate marches to genderism, that were also simply absorbed by the background noise.
But the grooming gangs are at another level. This is obviously one of the very worst things, maybe the very worst thing, to have occurred in Britain since the war. Hundreds of little girls have been raped. This moment of clarity needs to become more than a moment; we need to get over our lingering cultural cringe about anti-white racism, a major factor in these crimes. We need to face up to what’s happening, because these aren’t distant crimes we’re happy to pontificate about, they are not historical sins like slavery or empire. They are occurring in Britain right now. The British state’s attempts to avoid stoking ‘community tensions’ has been a perfect recipe for inflaming them. Mass immigration and multiculturalism have been a disaster. It is horrible to face this, but we must.
What’s stopping us? I think in many cases we are still using a mental map formed in the mid-1990s, with a compass that has been pointing increasingly out of true ever since, and which has now become useless. In the last few days some politicians and celebrities, from Starmer to Armando Iannucci and Chris Mullin have made crass interventions, working on that model from the 90s. Iannucci has accused Musk of being a ‘toxic gonad’, poisoning the discourse of the country, while Mullin has said GB News and the Telegraph are ‘climbing on the Musk bandwagon’ for their recent coverage of the grooming gang scandal.
That level of cognitive dissonance is very bad for you. Because yes the story has recently broken out, but we knew, we all knew. For years. We all saw Jess Phillips breezily dismissing the Cologne sex attacks on Question Time. We all heard about the disappearance of the abused girl Charlene Downes. We read about the parents who went to try and rescue their daughters and were arrested. But none of it went in.
Forty years ago, in my sixth form college, a classmate told me about what we would now call a Pakistani grooming gang in nearby Aylesbury. I dismissed her. I thought ‘well that can’t be true’. It sounded like a nasty racist lie. I think many public figures are still running that mental routine.
A challenge to your worldview – or ’values’ as they are so often pompously labelled today – is an enormous jolt. The professional term is ‘ontological shock’. I had my ontological shock, about all manner of things, in about 1999, which meant I had the advantage and luxury of doing it privately. The people around me knew about it, but strangers didn’t, and I had no history of public statements or reputation to consider. Politicians have never had that option, and social media ‘receipts’ now make it harder for anybody with even a minor profile to change their mind.
But the time has come for a lot of people to catch up, to update their ‘values’. The liberalism that we loved cannot begin to resolve this situation. It will be painful, but at a level that hardly compares to the pain of the victims of the gangs.
Watch more on SpectatorTV:
Farage: Reform will hold grooming inquiry if Labour don’t
The focus on Britain’s grooming gang scandal is very much here to stay. Calls for the government to hold a national inquiry into the matter are intensifying and the Labour government is coming under increasing pressure from opposition politicians in the wake of Elon Musk’s rather heated social media posts on the issue.
Victims Minister Alex Davies-Jones was sent out by Labour on the morning round today, with the MP was quizzed on multiple programmes about the need for another probe. On Sky News, host Wilfred Frost asked Davies-Jones about the Conservative party’s attempts to force a vote on whether there should be a full national inquiry into the sex abuse scandal – and whether she would back it. ‘I won’t vote for it,’ the Victims Minister replied, going on:
We’ve already had a national inquiry into child sexual exploitation and abuse. The Professor Alexis Jay inquiry conducted extensive investigation, over 7,000 brave victims and survivors gave their testimony to that. It is for them that we need to deliver justice and we need to get on with the job of delivering for them, working at pace to deliver those recommendations that the previous government failed to do. That’s what they deserved: we need action and less words.
Wilfred Frost: The Tories want to force a vote on whether there should be a full national statutory inquiry into the grooming scandal… how will you vote?
— Haggis_UK 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 (@Haggis_UK) January 7, 2025
Alex Davies-Jones: "I won't vote for it, because we've already had a national inquiry… we need action & less words.." pic.twitter.com/ad2Y5vI16l
While shadow justice minister Robert Jenrick also came under pressure this morning – quizzed about why the previous Conservative government had not conducted a national inquiry into the grooming gangs – it transpires that Reform leader Nigel Farage has been busy making some statements of his own.
Speaking to LBC, Farage says his party will fundraise for a new inquiry into grooming gangs with ‘independent former judges’ if Sir Keir Starmer’s government doesn’t agree to one. Expressing the same sentiment on Twitter, he noted :’If the Labour government won’t hold a full public inquiry into the widespread mass rape scandal then we at Reform UK will. Raising the money won’t be a problem.’ How curious.
Might Musk step in to Reform’s aid? There were questions raised at the weekend about whether Twitter CEO Musk would still bankroll the party after he called for Farage to step down – but in the last 24 hours it seems the tech billionaire has rowed back a little on his stance and has returned to reposting Farage’s tweets. All’s well that ends well, eh?
Mark Carney is not fit to be Canadian PM
He has global experience. He has proven his leadership. And he has the management skills needed to turn around a sinking ship. As Mark Carney makes a bid to succeed Justin Trudeau as Canadian prime minister, he will no doubt make much of his credentials as a ‘rock star’ central banker. There is just one snag. As it turns out, it takes only a cursory glance at his record as Governor of the Bank of England to work out that Carney’s reputation is completely overblown – and in reality he is not fit to be Canada’s next prime minister.
The Bank made a whole series of mistakes under his management
Given that Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative party will almost certainly win a huge victory at the next election it is not clear why anyone would want to take over as Canadian PM. They will be heading for an epic defeat. Still, that has not stopped the always confident Mark Carney from generously offering his services. Within hours of Trudeau stepping down, he had already made it clear that he was a candidate for the role.
If he runs, much will no doubt be made of his global experience. Carney chairs Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management, with $1 trillion in assets under management, as well as the financial data giant Bloomberg. He is also a UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance. But he is probably best known for his spell as Governor of the Bank of England. Appointed by George Osborne, he was the first foreigner to hold the position, and was constantly praised by the former chancellor as one of the most brilliant financial minds of his generation.
The trouble is, it is now clear that he was not actually very good. The Bank made a whole series of mistakes under his management. Growth was consistently weak. The Bank printed way too much money, stoking an asset bubble, and ultimately triggering the highest inflation rate in the G7. It badly misjudged the impact of the UK’s departure from the EU, allowing itself to become politicised as part of ‘Project Fear’. It lost control of regulation, as became clear during the ‘liability-driven investment’ crisis during the Truss premiership. And it allowed the City to start losing its position as a leading financial centre, a trend that has accelerated since he left. It is hardly a very inspiring record.
It has gotten even worse since then, with Carney becoming one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Rachel Reeves during the run up to the election, praising her expertise and vision. Whatever your politics, it is surely now clear that Reeves is hopelessly out of her depth, and is turning into one of the worst chancellor’s of the modern era. Again and again, Carney’s judgement has been terrible. True, he will make a very easy opponent for the Conservatives if he does take over as PM. But the blunt truth is this: he is not fit for the job, and Canada can do far better.
Watch more on SpectatorTV:
Did we learn anything from Charlie Hebdo?
Ten years ago today, two men armed with Kalashinikovs barged into the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and opened fire. They unleashed hell. In less than two minutes, 12 people were slaughtered, eight of them writers or cartoonists at the famously scurrilous weekly. Their crime? Blasphemy. They had mocked Muhammad and they paid for it with their lives.
They were doing a jig on the graves of the dead. It defied moral comprehension
A decade on, this atrocity, this crime against liberty, still chills the soul. I can’t be the only journalist who works in a small, busy office who has found himself imagining the terror of that day. The din of gunfire, the whiff of smoke, the killers’ shrill cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ so that their victims might know the reason for their pitiless execution. No means of escape, no offer of mercy – it is a horror that stains our age.
It felt like a medieval hysteria had descended on modern-day France. Satirists put to bloody death for the ‘sin’ of mocking a prophet – this was 7th-century savagery in 21st-century Europe. It was an apocalyptic assault not only on life and limb but on France itself, on its founding ideal of liberté. Into the land of enlightenment came the unforgiving violence of a darker, more tyrannous time.
Ten years on, here’s what’s horrifying: the killers have won. The murderous brothers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, may have been justly slain following the attack, but their grim, despotic ideology still stalks Europe. Their twisted belief that criticism of Islam is so hurtful and sinful that it must be firmly punished is found everywhere now.
Only where they no doubt referred to such devilish speech as ‘blasphemy’, we call it ‘Islamophobia’. And where they believed such unholy utterances should be punished by summary execution, we prefer to punish them with bans or fines or social ostracism.
Morally, though – if not physically – it amounts to the same thing: the penalisation of all foolish mortals who dare to diss the religion of Islam. How has this happened? Why are we upholding, not the roguish libertinism of Charlie Hebdo, but the censorious fanaticism of its persecutors?
After the massacre there was an outpouring of solidarity with Charlie Hebdo. But it was shortlived. It wasn’t long before all those placards declaring ‘Je Suis Charlie’ were trampled under the boot of business as usual. Just a week after the slaughter, a writer for the Guardian slammed Charlie Hebdo’s ‘racist caricatures’ that create such a ‘toxic environment’. Students at Bristol University said Charlie Hebdo could not be sold on campus because it would violate ‘our safe space policy’. Students at Manchester were forbidden from displaying Charlie Hebdo’s covers.
Three months after the massacre, various luminaries of the literary world protested against PEN America’s decision to give Charlie Hebdo a freedom of expression award. Why decorate a mag that causes such ‘humiliation and suffering’ to Muslims, they haughtily cried? Then there was the Islamic Human Rights Commission’s sick stunt: it gave Charlie Hebdo its Islamophobe of the Year award. Two months after Charlie Hebdo’s staff were butchered for being ‘Islamophobes’. They were doing a jig on the graves of the dead. It defied moral comprehension.
The violence of the killers was compounded by the treachery of the intellectuals. The one visited brute force on Charlie Hebdo, the other failed to defend its right to print anything it bloody well pleases. Europe’s fleeting cry of sympathy for Charlie Hebdo gave way to pompous head-shaking over its needless provocations. It was a species of appeasement, with the cultural elites warming more to the grievances of the killers than to the God-given liberty of their victims; more to the mental pain felt by easily offended Islamists than to the fatal pain of the men and women they executed for speechcrimes.
We end up in the truly dispiriting situation where on the tenth anniversary of this massacre over ‘blasphemy’, Keir Starmer’s government is thinking of adopting a new, sweeping definition of ‘Islamophobia’. There are fears the definition will demonise perfectly legitimate criticism of Islam and thus ‘curtail free speech’. That our leaders are mulling over a clampdown on anti-Islamic speech a decade after 12 of our French cousins were butchered for the very same feels unconscionable. I swear, if Starmer so much as says the word Islamophobia today, as we remember the good men and women of Charlie Hebdo, he will not soon be forgiven.
Everyone will condemn the massacre today. Yet the moral logic of the massacre still lives. The ideological fuel of that barbaric act – that criticism of Islam must not be allowed – is now an article of faith in polite society. Hence the movie The Lady of Heaven was withdrawn from British cinemas in 2022 on the basis that it was offensive to Muslims. And the Batley Grammar schoolteacher remains in hiding for the ‘sin’ of showing his pupils an image of Muhammad. And critics of Islam are blacklisted from university campuses.
Our punishment of blasphemy is less barbarous than that visited on Charlie Hebdo ten years ago, but it is equally as yellow-bellied and regressive. Enough is enough. It’s time for a full-throated defence of freedom of speech, the liberty upon which every other liberty depends. No god, prophet, book or fad should be ringfenced from our hard-won right to criticise and mock. Je suis toujours Charlie – et vous?
The dark legacy of Justin Trudeau
He’s gone – but he’s not gone. As per his announcement in Ottawa on Monday, one of Canada’s most disliked prime ministers is finally set to exit the political stage. First sworn in on November 4, 2015, Justin Trudeau will resign once the Liberal party has chosen his successor. It is a process that may take some time.
Trudeau started out as prime minister by promising ‘sunny ways.’ Instead his regime delivered a tumultuous decade of radical social and legal change, achieved by methods that were frequently high-handed and occasionally unprecedented (such as the debanking of protestors).
Trudeau has always been a curious mix of ruthlessness and juvenility
Under his leadership, Canada doubled its national debt, legalised marijuana, witnessed homicides and gun crime skyrocket, and saw overdose deaths quadruple, while assisted suicide went from a criminal act to Canada’s fifth leading cause of death. Not so sunny, after all.
During the pandemic Trudeau’s administration imposed some of the most repressive health restrictions in the world. This led to the 2022 truckers’ protests and border blockades. A viral photo of anti-mandate protestors sitting in inflatable hot tubs amid the February snow on Parliament Hill will probably end up being one of the iconic images of Trudeau’s premiership during this time. The other will probably be the image of a masked police officer riding on horseback over a fallen protestor in the street.
Trudeau has always been a curious mix of ruthlessness and juvenility – confidently invoking the never-before-used Emergencies Act to disperse a protest, for instance, but prone to such unseriousness as dressing himself and his family in traditional Indian garb for an official tour of that country, a matter of some diplomatic embarrassment. Yet his interest in costume was felt to be so patently sincere that he was able to shrug off photos of his younger self in blackface as an excess of enthusiasm – an explanation which few other politicians in this era could get away with.
During his time in office, he went out of his way to stoke anti-religious sentiment. When the nominally Catholic Trudeau first became leader of the Liberal party in 2014, he announced that all Liberal MPs, regardless of faith or conscience, had to vote pro-choice on pain of expulsion. After winning the election he doubled down, restricting government funding for groups that endorsed abortion.
Then in 2021, Trudeau chose to lend credence to the still unsubstantiated claims of mass graves at indigenous residential schools, which had been largely run by the Catholic Church (but also other Christian churches) on behalf of the Canadian government. Soon vandals and arsonists began attacking churches. More than 100 Canadian churches have been burned and many others vandalized since.
Trudeau’s legalisation of marijuana has led to annual cannabis sales of nearly $5 billion. His administration also allowed British Columbia to begin a three-year trial period of decriminalising the possession of hard drugs. Small quantities of drugs including fentanyl can now be carried there with impunity. Unsurprisingly, organised crime has come to view Canada as one of the most favourable countries for fentanyl manufacture and export.
Which is why soon-to-be US President Donald Trump recently threatened Canada with a 25 per cent tariff on all goods entering the US from Canada if the Canadian government doesn’t get a handle on illegal drug trafficking and migration – a tariff that would significantly harm the Canadian economy if left unaddressed.
This has brought a great deal of pressure to bear on Trudeau, both from provincial governments and from his own administration. During Trump’s previous tenure as US president, Trudeau notably failed to establish good relations, and his government is struggling to resolve the situation. His finance minister Chrystia Freeland resigned before Christmas – coincidentally, on the very day that she was expected to announce, and explain, the enormously increased federal deficit. Instead, she released a lengthy open letter complaining about her boss, citing differences on how to handle the tariffs among other reasons for her resignation.
This was not the first time that a key Trudeau insider had turned on the prime minister in a very public way – his one-time justice minister and attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould resigned in 2019, accusing Trudeau of wrongly attempting to influence criminal proceedings in the SNC-Lavalin affair. Both women had been key members of Trudeau’s government from the very beginning. Both were appointed to his first cabinet, which he famously declared would be the first to be equally divided between men and women, ‘Because it’s 2015’ . Perhaps he should have considered his appointment criteria more carefully.
With his former friends turning on him, time seems to have run out for Mr Sunny Ways, though one cannot but note he has not actually left office yet. A leadership race seems likely to be messy; at present there is no obvious choice to succeed him. Rallying the party faithful will be challenging enough. But beyond that, whoever gets the job will have a hard time shaking – or glossing over – the Liberal party reputation for radical progressivism it has so justly acquired over the past decade.
With parliament prorogued until spring, Trudeau will continue to run the country, with no chance of a no-confidence vote to unseat him. While Canadians may feel the end is in sight, it’s not over till it’s over.
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Ten years on and is France still ‘Je suis Charlie’?
Today marks ten years since two brothers walked into the office of Charlie Hebdo and shot dead most of the staff. It was punishment for the satirical magazine’s blasphemous treatment of the Prophet, according to the Islamist gunmen.
The murders shocked the West. Millions of French men and women gathered across the country four days later, and in Paris, world leaders stood alongside President François Hollande in a show of solidarity for the freedom of expression. ‘Je suis Charlie’ was on everyone’s lips.
Hollande was recently asked if the spirit of Charlie was still present in France. He conceded that it wasn’t as strong as he would like. ‘To be Charlie is to be free, to conquer fear,’ he said. Curiously, he then went off on a tangent, claiming that journalists’ freedom of expression in France in 2025 is endangered most by the ‘power of money…which doesn’t necessarily have the same conception of freedom of expression’.
‘Money’? Not ideology? Not Isis or al-Qaeda, whose adherents have murdered over 100 French people in the past decade – including the journalists of Charlie Hebdo – and not the Muslim Brotherhood, whose soft power strategy is spreading so effectively?
In an interview shortly before Christmas, Bertrand Chamoulaud, head of the National Directorate for Territorial Intelligence, outlined to Le Monde the extent of the danger posed by the Brotherhood. ‘Their infiltration affects all sectors: sports, health, education, etc,’ he said. Allied to this infiltration, explained Chamoulaud, is their strategy of victimhood in which the Brotherhood accuses France of being an ‘Islamophobic state’ whenever its expansion is challenged by the Republic.
The French understood Hollande’s allusion to the ‘power of money’; he was thinking of the media tycoon Vincent Bolloré, a conservative Catholic despised by the left. When I attend left-wing rallies in Paris, I see his name often on placards, along with some of his star presenters, notably Pascal Praud, who has the prime-time slot on CNews, best described as France’s equivalent to GB News.
I’ve watched Praud’s panellist show on many occasions and I’ve yet to see any evidence that he is far-right in his opinions. The same goes for CNews in general. What it offers is an alternative viewpoint to the centre-left ideology that has dominated the French media for half a century. It’s an alternative that has turned CNews into the most-watched news channel in France.
But while the proles love CNews, the left loathe it.
During last year’s campaigning for the European elections, the Socialists’ candidate, Raphaël Glucksmann, refused to appear on a debate televised live on CNews because he claimed it is ‘a tool for ideological ends and it’s a cultural, political, ideological crusade that I don’t see myself endorsing’.
Glucksmann’s partner is Léa Salamé, one of France’s best-known journalists, who presents the breakfast radio show on France Inter. The broadcaster describes itself as ‘progressive’ and is well known for seeing life through a left-wing lens. The same applies for all of the state-funded media, as revealed in a report published last year, around the same time Jean-François Achilli lost his job on a national broadcaster.
He was fired after he met Jordan Bardella, the president of the National Rally, to discuss the possibility of ghosting his autobiography. Achilli decided not to proceed with the project, but that wasn’t enough to save him.
CNews offers different views, but diversity of opinion is the one form of pluralism that the French left just will not tolerate. Lucie Castets, who was the left’s candidate to be Prime Minister after last year’s parliamentary elections, blamed the popularity of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally on CNews. As a consequence, she wants greater ‘regulation’ of the media.
A similar claim was made last month by Éric Dupond-Moretti, who until recently was the Minister of Justice in Macron’s government. In an interview on France Inter, the left-wing lawyer described CNews as Le Pen’s ‘dedicated channel’.
Even the French NGO Reporters Without Borders (RWB), whose raison d’être is to ‘act for the freedom, pluralism and independence of journalism’, appears to take issue with CNews. It accused the channel of lacking diversity. CNews retorted that it regularly invites figures from across the political spectrum to appear on its programmes, but what can it do if left-wing politicians refuse to appear?
Ten years ago, RWB marched in Paris – as I did – for Charlie and for freedom of expression. Its director general at the time, Christophe Deloire, declared that ‘we must not let predators of press freedom spit on the graves of Charlie Hebdo’.
A decade later, the ‘predators’ menacing free speech include progressive types within the Paris elite. One of their victims is the distinguished historian, Georges Bensoussan, the man who in 2002 coined the phrase ‘the lost territories of the Republic’. His blunt but honest description of the Islamist takeover of many of France’s inner-cities resulted in his being shunned by Paris’s polite society.
He attributes the elite’s desire to censor CNews to ‘panic’ because they know they are losing the culture war. ‘The working classes are beginning to make their voices heard and this is something that the cultural bourgeoisie finds very difficult to tolerate,’ said Bensoussan.
To be Charlie, as François Hollande said, isn’t just about conquering fear; it’s also about conquering prejudice, particularly when it comes to the proletariat.
What’s the real reason Labour is reluctant to hold a grooming gangs inquiry?
Keir Starmer is facing growing pressure to a launch a national review into grooming gangs, but so far the Prime Minister is holding firm. ‘This doesn’t need more consultation, it doesn’t need more research, it just needs action. There have been many, many reviews…frankly, it’s time for action,’ he said yesterday. Starmer’s comments reinforce the position of Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, who last week refused Oldham Council’s request for a government-led public inquiry into grooming gangs in the town. But what’s the real reason Labour is so reluctant to probe these appalling crimes?
Is Phillips reluctant to give the go ahead to an inquiry that might ask difficult and sensitive questions about the identity of the perpetrators?
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Phillips’ wafer-thin majority might play a part in her thinking. The Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley won at the last election by just 693 votes. When she made her acceptance speech, she was heckled. Phillips responded by saying: ‘I understand a strong woman standing up to you is met with such reticence’. Her constituency, like others in Birmingham, has a significant Muslim population. Is Phillips reluctant to give the go ahead to an inquiry that might ask difficult and sensitive questions about the identity of the perpetrators in Oldham, and indeed in other towns affected by Pakistani grooming gangs who exploited children for their own sexual gratification?
Phillips’ letter to Oldham Council, seen by GB News, claims that it is for the local authority ‘alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the government to intervene.’ Whether or not this increasingly untenable position can hold isn’t clear. But what is plain to see is that Labour appears petrified of having an open discussion on the ethnicity of perpetrators, in places like Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford. Is this because vote bloc politics risks swinging elections in marginal constituencies?
Whatever the reason, this issue isn’t going away. Elon Musk at least appears determined that it won’t. The X owner has said: ‘So many people at all levels of power in the UK need to be in prison for this’. He even suggested Phillips herself should be jailed. Whatever you think of Musk’s intervention, the choice here must surely be to prioritise justice for victims of child sexual exploitation. But is Labour’s fear of losing seats influencing their apparent reluctance to give the green light to a broader inquiry?
Comments by ex-Labour MP for Rochdale, Simon Danczuk who responded to Musk’s ‘prison’ post on X, makes it clear that Labour at least has questions to answer on this subject. Danczuk, a Reform candidate at the last election, made a bombshell accusation that ‘senior Labour politicians warned me not to mention the ethnicity of the perpetrators, for fear of losing votes, when I tried shining a light on the Rochdale grooming gangs’. His accusation, if true, pours further fuel on this increasingly explosive issue.
The role of the perpetrators’ religion in these crimes remains a sensitive issue in British politics, which many politicians are clearly wary of addressing. Yet it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this was an important factor in at least some of the crimes. Notably, in 2012, Judge Gerald Clifton, who sentenced members of the Rochdale ‘grooming gang’ at Liverpool Crown Court, said: ‘All of you treated them [the victims] as though they were worthless and beyond respect. I believe that one of the factors that led to that was they were not of your community or religion’.
Despite this clarity, many still remain fearful of pointing to the truth. The ‘Islamophobia’ definition drafted by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims (and adopted by Labour) hardly helps; it says using the phrase ‘sex groomer’ in relation to someone of Muslim heritage might be an example of ‘Islamophobia’.
According to GB News’s Charlie Peters, whose dogged reporting has shed much light on these horrific crimes, there are ‘credible reports’ of grooming gangs being active in dozens of different towns and cities across Britain. These organised rape squads have targeted mainly white working-class but also Sikh girls, inflicting unimaginable horrors on children for decades. Former home secretary Jack Straw said victims were seen as, ‘easy meat’. Indeed, victims say perpetrators referred to them as, ‘white slag,’ ‘white trash,’ and one case even involved forced sharia marriages.
Despite this, the racially and religiously motivated element of these heinous crimes remains hardly discussed. The Telford inquiry (2022) revealed more than 1,000 girls were abused, and said it had gone on for decades, beginning as far back as the 1980s. The Jay report into Rotherham (2014) said that 1,400 children in the town were subject to ‘appalling’ abuse over 16 years from 1997. The ‘majority’ of known perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage. In Oxford, there may have been as many as 373 victims.
The harrowing reports of what children in Britain have endured over the last few decades are nightmarish. Several children were murdered (one was allegedly dismembered and disposed of at a kebab shop), a girl was kept caged and made to act like a dog, abusers routinely tortured children, a perpetrator branded ‘M’ (for Mohammed) on a victim’s buttock with a hairpin to indicate ownership, and an aborted foetus was taken by the police for DNA purposes, without the 13-year-old grooming victim being told. In some cases, the girls were dismissed by the authorities as ‘child prostitutes’ and betrayed by the very people tasked with their welfare. The police botched investigations, fathers trying to save daughters were arrested, and cries of ‘racism’ shut down discussion about a clear pattern of criminality occurring within local authorities, emboldening perpetrators.
But amongst the darkness, there has been light, not least the efforts of Andrew Norfolk, whose investigations for the Times triggered the Rotherham inquiry. Whistleblowers like Jayne Senior and Maggie Oliver, and former prosecutor Nazir Afzal deserve credit. So, too, does Sarah Champion, the Labour MP for Rotherham, who received death threats and was forced to quit her role as shadow equalities minister in 2017, after she wrote, ‘Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls’. We must also pay tribute to courageous campaigning survivors like Sammy Woodhouse, Samantha Smith, Dr Ella Hill and Elizabeth Harper.
Musk’s intervention has put the global spotlight on the issue and there is mounting pressure on the government to act. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has called for a national inquiry into grooming gangs. There’s still time for self-proclaimed feminist and ‘strong woman’ Phillips to do the right thing. As minister with responsibility for violence against women and girls, she owes it to survivors and families to shine a spotlight on this nationwide scandal.
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In defence of Gail’s
A few months ago in Primrose Hill, I overheard a woman from the Camden New Journal, the local paper, asking in a café about rumours of a Gail’s opening in the famously anti-chain neighbourhood. Just a few weeks previously, there had been uproar in Walthamstow about a new branch – an unpleasant alliance of the anti-gentrification brigade, anti-business and anti-Brexit types who protested at investor Luke Johnson’s politics, and anti-Israel fanatics who objected to the fact that the bakery chain was founded by two Israelis. The latter element was what caught my attention, given the extent of anti-Zionist nastiness since 7 October. If Primrose Hill were to join in the anti-Gail’s protest, the sense of sinister anti-Israel sentiment would grow stronger.
Everything naughty at Gail’s is delicious: the naughtier the better
I need not have worried. Gail’s will open in Primrose Hill – joining Joe and the Juice in the chain gang. It seems that, as is often the case, the market acts as a moral straightener, since demand and supply is thoroughly unmoved by dodgy armchair politics. Reliably good cinnamon streusels, room-temperature parmesan chicken brioches and chocolate chip cookies that felt like a huge step forward in the mid-2000s still speak a more powerful language than even anti-gentrification and anti-Zionism.
So Gail’s – far from being squashed – is set to massively expand, with up to 40 more stores planned for next year and another 1,000 staff to be hired. This is satisfactory for many reasons. One big reason is the ongoing pressure Gail’s exerts on independent coffee shops, which (contrary to the bleating of the anti-gentrificationists) are everywhere and going gangbusters, to keep improving. If your only goal is to be better than, say, Pret, Costa or Nero, then you don’t have to be very good at all.
But if the competition is Gail’s? You’ll have to be good. And if there is no independent artisanal vendor to hand, which is often the case, then Gail’s is a lifesaver. The coffee is made with decent espresso machines with individual spouts for the coffee rather than the array of buttons sported in Pret.
And the food, which is why I go, ranges from the serviceable to the absolutely delicious. This is more than you can say for most high street chains, Greggs included (the allure, beyond price, of those awful sausage rolls and plasticky cookies and doughnuts mystifies me).
Interestingly, the signature Gail’s product – bread – is the least remarkable. A friend confided when I said I was writing this that he hated their bagels. The challah bread, which I have sometimes sought out in a pinch on a rare Friday in which my Jewish identity is remembered with a pang while shops are still open, is not my first choice.
But everything naughty at Gail’s is delicious: the naughtier the better. I used to go with a friend as a treat to the original branch, in Hampstead on a weekend. We’d sink in delighted silence into the blueberry muffin and the giant chewy chocolate chip cookie. The latter was my perennial purchase in the old days (Gail’s version has since been equalled and sometimes, very rarely, exceeded by a general improvement in understanding of the squidgy point of the American ‘cookie’). The muffin, meanwhile, was great, exploding with the fruit and the stodge, packing the double hit in a way that was, again, very hard to find in 2000s Britain – and frankly remains so. I always had confidence in Gail’s not in spite of, but because of its Israeli origins; there is no better country on earth for food, including baked goods.
Gail’s offering has only improved. I love the chestnut, ham and turkey ‘hand pie’ – salty satisfaction in filo pastry, and the spinach and feta pie is good too. The sausage rolls pioneered the stuffed-to-bursting model – not bad at £4.50. The aforementioned parmesan chicken – a piece of schnitzel served in a cheesy sauce with pickle and lettuce, encased in non-stale brioche – is a gross-sounding idea but is actually a stupendous one. One friend craved it constantly while pregnant. The fresh soups are excellent and have brought me much warming pleasure after a freezing swim outdoors. Pancakes, porridge and other fresh breakfasts are surprisingly delicious.
The reason I would find it hard to be on Ozempic, as I have written previously, is that the existential embrace, the warmth and cosiness, of cake would cease to mean anything. I judge bakeries by the gap between promise and delivery of that embrace. Just a pretty face under the perspex isn’t going to cut it. And while some call Gail’s cakes too doughy, I find the heavily crumbled, sugared, cinnamon-doused, slightly too-large array of sweets as comforting to eat as they are tempting to browse. There have been times when I’ve managed my dough addiction by having a daily ‘plain’ scone from Gail’s, but at other times I just go for the pecan and cinnamon crumb cake and have done with it. Eat one of those and all cravings die.
I do understand the grim sense of being imprisoned by a market delivering homogeneity to areas that once felt distinctive. When Pret opened in place of a dry cleaners near me, I threw an impotent tantrum for months. I do not think the world needs any more branches of Costa or Nero or the deeply weird Perky Blinders. But Gail’s is always good and somehow cheery, a beacon in an often dire set of options. London progressives may not be grateful for its expanding presence on our streets, but the market has made the decision for them – and it’s the right one.
Fanboys are ruining the arts
I’ve been to a talk by two very clever and talented men: the American novelist and critic Jonathan Lethem and the English documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. They were talking about Lethem’s book about his art collection, Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture. Never have I left a talk with such a warm glow of schadenfreude. Here were two gifted men who had nothing interesting to say about their chosen subject. It was an evening full of ArtSpeak and hot air, a facsimile of intelligent ‘cultural discourse’, as they say in the art world. The interesting Lethem and the brilliant Curtis had done the unthinkable: they’d become boring.
Oh, what a joy it was to witness! I got more pleasure watching these two have nothing to say than if their conversation had been full of dazzling insight and wit. Why is that? Am I envious of their success? Yes. Do I envy their talent? Definitely. But my pleasure in seeing the limitations of their double act goes deeper than that.
I always get an illicit pleasure in watching interesting and talented people be as boring as I can be. It’s something you don’t see so often. Their capacity to be as boring as the rest of us is a great cultural equaliser – for a moment the great and the gifted have fallen off their pedestals and into the mosh pit of mediocrity along with the rest of us.
But here’s the great difference – unlike us mortals, they have no idea how boring they can be. Creative people who enjoy a life of uninterrupted success live in a little bubble of constant love and appreciation. No one – editors, fans or friends – ever says of their latest work: sorry, this is boring rubbish. How else can you explain the truly terrible novels of very talented people? For example, Lionel Asbo: State of England by Martin Amis. That was shockingly bad. Someone – Hitchens? The wife? – should have said, ‘Mart, this is shit! Please don’t do it.’ But the talented never listen because they can’t believe how bad they can be. Amis used to dismiss criticism of his work by saying that critics were just envious of him.
Arts media, especially in the UK, has been infected with a kind of fanboy mentality, where interviewers are reluctant to ask the gifted one any kind of challenging question that might be considered critical or hostile. It has given rise to the phenomenon known as the ‘blowjob’ interview. (For a good American example of this phenomenon, please see David Remnick’s 2003 interview with Philip Roth on YouTube.)
I remember once reading a critic who said about Clive James that ‘he couldn’t write a boring sentence if he tried’. To which any sensible person would reply: oh yes, he can! And did. (See his essay on Sophie Scholl in Cultural Amnesia, in particular his whole Natalie Portman fantasy riff.) But that’s OK. There is no writer who hasn’t written a boring line or two. So why pretend the artists we love are creatively invincible?
The curious thing is that creative people in the arts – writers, filmmakers, musicians – who give talks and lectures never worry about boring people. They ask all the Big Questions about Life, except the one they should ask about their work: am I boring you?
It’s not just creatives who suffer from this conceit; no one worries about being boring anymore – except me. (I know some smartass reader is thinking: then why are you writing this boring column? Ha-bloody-ha). Just look at what your friends post on Facebook to see we are a society that has no fear of being boring.
Before the actual event I went up to Curtis and Lethem and tried to engage them in conversation. Big mistake. I wanted to show Curtis that I had a deep appreciation and understanding of his work – and I came across as one of those crazy stalker fans he must encounter all the time. He made a quick bolt for it, mid-sentence. But we met again.
On the seat in front of me at the talk, someone had left a kind of man-bag, and it was partly open. Inside, I could see items of clothing and one cheap roll-on deodorant; I think it was Sure. Who brings deodorant to a gig like this? I began to imagine the sad man with the cheap man-bag who kept his deodorant close to hand. Did he sweat a lot? Had he left without his bag? I was still pondering the mystery of the man and the bag when its owner came and collected it: it was Adam Curtis.
I treasure these little peeps into the lives of people I admire. I proudly tell my lefty friends that I once stood at a men’s urinal next to the distinguished critic Edward Said. Think of it: his Arabic penis and my Hebrew schlong were less than half a foot away from each other. I was tempted to turn and face him, penis in hand, and say, ‘Professor Said, here we stand, just two regular men holding their dicks across the great bloody divide of history. With respect I say to you, sir: shalom!’ But I thought he might take it the wrong way.
A version of this article first appeared in The Spectator World edition.
The end of the Church of England
I spent New Year’s Eve in the company of a former Anglican vicar who lost his faith and had the honesty to resign from the Church as a result. He said what I have long suspected; that almost none of those in the hierarchy of the Church today believe in the central tenets of their faith: the divinity of Christ, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection of the dead, the miracles of Jesus, the Trinity, Heaven and Hell, life after death, or even a benevolent God.
To be told that the guardians of that faith are today little more than hollowed-out hypocrites going through the ritualistic motions is a tad dispiriting
In the end, I, an agnostic who tries to keep an open mind about Christianity, found myself arguing with the former clergyman’s new faith in atheism. I pointed out the enormous power of faith, which has continued burning in dark times for two millennia. I’m more of a sinner than a saint and found it slightly odd to be attempting to persuade a theologian that his former faith still has life in its desiccated bones.
I live in a cathedral city where the evidence of the once overwhelming place of Christianity in our culture is all around. To be told that the guardians of that faith are today little more than hollowed-out hypocrites going through the ritualistic motions is a tad dispiriting. For many years, the dear old Church of England has been but a pale shadow of its former robust self. The faith that inspired its early martyrs – the Cranmers, the Latimers, and the Ridleys – to literally let their flesh burn and shrivel in the flames rather than recant their dearly held beliefs is gone.
Even the dry, abstruse arguments that motivated the 19th-century Oxford Movement scholars – the Newmans, the Puseys, and the Kebles – no longer have meaning in a Church that prefers to fret over whether gay couples who live together should be allowed to have sex. It may be naïve of me, but I have never understood the close connection between ‘smells and bells’ and homosexuality. The Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church seems almost entirely composed of gay clergy, while the evangelical ‘happy-clappy’ warriors tend to be as conservative in their sexual preferences as they are in their faith.
Call me a fuddy-duddy reactionary if you wish, but where in his entire ministry did Jesus of Nazareth so much as mention the love that once dared not speak its name, but which in today’s Church appears to be the sole preoccupation of those ministers whose job is to preach the Gospel of Christ?
In his poem ‘Church Going’, Philip Larkin – a sceptic who nonetheless respected the dominating position that the Church once held for us – visits an empty church and wonders what will become of it when we not only don’t believe, but have forgotten what faith itself is all about. He concludes that the ruin will remain ‘a serious place on serious earth… if only because so many dead lie around’.
In another poem, ‘Aubade’, Larkin called religion ‘a vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die’. The cathedral in my hometown contains the double tomb that inspired yet another Larkin poem, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, with its magnificent closing line ‘What will survive of us is love.’ But what really lay behind these poems was not love but fear – terror of the death that Larkin called ‘the sure extinction that we travel to’ and fear of the void in which we all move and have our being.
The tragedy of our dying Church is that when it finally disappears, few will gather around the grave to mourn an institution that has long since abdicated its real role. As it sinks into eternity, who will remember Hugh Latimer’s injunction to his fellow martyr Nicholas Ridley: ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. For we shall this day light such a flame in England that I trust by God’s grace shall never be put out’?
Wes Streeting’s ‘care plans’ are old news
There is much that is good in today’s NHS elective recovery announcement: changes to incentives for trusts so that they are rewarded for clearing their backlogs faster; a new partnership agreement with the private sector; a proper plan for returning to 92 per cent cent of patients waiting no longer than 18 weeks from referral to treatment by 2029; minimum standards for elective care; and so on. But until we know the government’s overarching plan for reforming the NHS, it’s difficult to make much sense of the piecemeal announcements we are getting before then.
It is not just the failure to reform social care, though, that makes it more difficult to realise all the other planned reforms.
Wes Streeting tried to justify the government’s decision to delay social care reform when he made a statement in the Commons this afternoon, saying ‘there is plenty of blame to go around’ for the failure of the past few decades, before saying ‘it is time for all of us across this House to do things differently’.
That ‘doing things differently’ sounded oddly like the way things have been done for the past few decades, which is to try to reach a consensus between the parties on reform and have another review. Streeting himself told the chamber that ‘there hasn’t been a shortage of good ideas in the past 15 years, but a lack of good politics’ and that ‘I hope all of us across this House will put aside our ideological and partisan differences and work together on this to finally find a way through to a long-term plan that can build the broad consensus we need’. He repeatedly emphasised that Louise Casey was ‘one of our country’s leading social reformers’ and not someone it was easy to say no to. He will, though, have three years in which he doesn’t have to say yes or no to any of Casey’s long-term recommendations for reform.
On the NHS itself, Streeting claimed that ‘this Labour government is prescribing the cure’ to the problem that Lord Darzi diagnosed in his review of the health service. He said Britain now had a ‘two-tier healthcare’ system in this country in which ‘people who can afford it are increasingly going private to skip the queue, while those who can’t are left behind: working people are going into debt and others are running fundraisers to pay to get an operation’. He said the government would make ‘no apology’ for treating ‘working people faster’ – something he later explained didn’t mean that stay at home mothers or carers wouldn’t be treated as a priority, but ‘the fact that working class people are so often left behind with a two tier system’. It is hardly surprising that Labour secretaries of state like Streeting and Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson talk about class so much when justifying their reforms – but it is worth pointing out as a clear theme of this government.
But Streeting wasn’t setting out the full extent of his reforms, because he has to wait until the ‘national conversation’ on the NHS concludes and the government comes out with its full NHS plan later in the year. Much of what he was saying today was old news, allowing the Conservatives to accuse him of ‘reheated’ announcements. Shadow Health Secretary Edward Argar joked that it was unlikely many in Downing Street would be calling on Streeting to be ‘more ambitious’, but argued: ‘I do call for him to be bolder and to go further, because, as with so much from the current Prime Minister, with multiple relaunches of previous announcements, what we see here is yet another relaunch of a previous announcements from 2022.’ The problem is really that Keir Starmer has been happy to kick so many key policy areas into reviews on coming into office – which seems particularly ironic given he was today railing against having more reviews and not just getting on with reform.
Justin Trudeau was Canada’s worst ever prime minister
Canada’s long national nightmare is finally coming to an end. Justin Trudeau has announced he is resigning as leader of the Liberal party of Canada. He will remain prime minister until his replacement is announced in a forthcoming leadership race, and has prorogued parliament until 2 March.
What took Trudeau so long to read the tea leaves that have been available for consumption for what seemed like an eternity? His poll numbers, as well as his government’s, have been disastrous for years. The Liberals are well behind Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives. One recent Angus Reid Institute poll had the Liberals at a record-low 16 per cent.
That’s a question only he can answer, but we can speculate on possible reasons. Here’s an easy one: Trudeau is not only the worst prime minister in Canadian history, but also the most delusional.
Liberals have had enough. Canadians have had enough
All of the previous occupants of this esteemed office, both Liberal and Conservative, would have known it was time to depart long ago. There are moments in history when a national leader loses the confidence of the people, his caucus and parliament. He or she may have largely contributed to this impending demise – or, in some cases, only partially. Regardless of how it happens, a relatively graceful exit is always the best way to preserve one’s political legacy.
Trudeau didn’t have the slightest understanding of how to do this. That’s why he couldn’t completely step away on Monday, like he should done.
Meanwhile, many of Canada’s political commentators and columnists, including me, sensed that Trudeau either felt he’d done nothing wrong as PM – or that everyone else was to blame for his demise. He also seemingly thought that he could turn this rudderless Liberal ship around.
Based on what evidence? Beats me. The list of his failures, missteps and blunders since becoming PM in 2015 leaves the mistakes of every previous prime minister in the dust.
Three older instances of wearing blackface, for instance. Tensions with female Liberal MPs like his former parliamentary secretary Celina Caesar-Chavannes, and former female cabinet ministers like Jody Wilson-Raybould, Jane Philpott and, most recently, Chrystia Freeland. Two violations from the Ethics Commissioner for accepting a trip to the Aga Khan’s private island and the SNC Lavalin controversy.
There’s more. Trudeau’s preposterous 2014 comment that the Canadian budget ‘will balance itself’, and his equally preposterous 2021 remark to reporters, ‘you’ll forgive me if I don’t think about monetary policy’. The PM worked hard to persuade the US and Mexico to include concepts like gender rights and Indigenous rights during Nafta renegotiations instead of focusing on the main issue, trade. He’s spent tax dollars like a drunken sailor: passing a crippling national carbon tax that’s left Canadians of all political stripes furious for years. Housing and heating prices have become unaffordable in many Canadian provinces. Even Trudeau’s recent proposal of a GST holiday on certain items like potato chips and alcohol was rejected by most Canadians correctly discerned as a wasteful measure to regain lost voter support.
There was a litany of national and international controversies, too.
Accusations of Chinese election interference in the 2019 and 2021 elections still remain unresolved. Trudeau skipped various speaking engagements to go surfing with his family in Tofino, B.C. during the first National Truth and Reconciliation Day, which the Native communities will never forgive him for doing. There was taking the knee during the Black Lives Matter protests in front of cameras and the media. There was the Freedom Convoy and disgraceful use of the Emergencies Act. There was allowing a Nazi to be applauded in parliament. There was speaking out of both sides of his mouth about Israel and the Middle East. There were icy relations with two US presidents, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. There was complaining to Trump about the economic implications of the latter’s forthcoming 25 per cent tariffs on all Canadian products instead of offering solutions, which has led to jokes, taunts and memes about Canada becoming the 51st US state and Trudeau its ‘governor’.
Yet Trudeau likely thought that he could still weather this thunderous storm that had raged for nearly a decade until the stunning resignation of Chrystia Freeland, his deputy prime minister and finance minister, last month.
‘On Friday, you told me you no longer want me to serve as your finance minister and offered me another position in the cabinet,’ Freeland wrote in her resignation letter on 16 December. ‘Upon reflection, I have concluded that the only honest and viable path is for me to resign from the cabinet. To be effective, a minister must speak on behalf of the prime minister and with his full confidence. In making your decision, you made clear that I no longer credibly enjoy that confidence and possess the authority that comes with it.’
What was even more ludicrous? Freeland was still expected to give the government’s long-delay fall economic statement that day! Having finally realised this self-described liberal feminist PM was anything but, she refused. Who can blame her?
Liberals have had enough. Canadians have had enough. The world has had enough. Good riddance, Justin Trudeau. Few will miss you, and many will enthusiastically wave good-bye when you’re finally gone.
Watch more on SpectatorTV:
Labour apologise for graphic song use in latest TikTok
It’s not been a great start to the year for Sir Keir Starmer’s army. As if poor poll ratings and sporadic online attacks by Elon Musk weren’t causing enough problems, now the Labour party has landed itself in more trouble. The UK Labour party’s TikTok account was found to have released a rather bizarre video featuring a song that contains some quite, er, controversial song lyrics.
The baffling clip sparked outrage after social media users clocked the song used as the backing track. The choice – entitled ‘Montagem Coral’ by DJ Holanda, MC TH and MC GW – consisted of graphic lyrics that, when translated to English, are shown to discuss giving young women drugs before sleeping with them. Not exactly the most appropriate choice of music as Britain’s grooming gang scandals return to the spotlight, eh?
While most of the lyrics are too vulgar to be repeated in the fine pages of The Spectator, one part of the song goes, when translated to English: ‘Perfect combination is sex, beer and marijuana / The young ones got addicted, everyone is enjoying the wave.’ Er, right. The video overlaying the track shows an AI-generated British bulldog walking down a street in police attire while a line of text reads: ‘You’ll feel safer with more police on the beat.’ You couldn’t make it up…
They may only be in their sixth month in power but already the Labour lot have left the British public frustrated over questionable policy decisions, sleaze scandals and now, it seems, its ill-judged social media output. Responding to Mr S, a Labour spokesperson said about the matter:
This post is an adaptation of a viral social media trend and contains a mix of two music tracks. We acknowledge the translation of the lyrics are completely inappropriate. We apologise and the video has now been deleted.
What a mess, eh? Budding social media creators may want to keep their eyes peeled for upcoming vacancies…
What has the BBC got against Tommy Robinson?
Do you know, I have noticed a certain thawing in the BBC’s attitude to the American entrepreneur, Elon Musk. I wonder what might have occasioned such a sharp change in mindset of late? It is all a bit of a mystery.
I never believed that Musk would bung Reform UK £100 million, and as the weeks went by the promise seemed to become more and more vague. But that’s not what this article is about. It’s about Tommy Robinson – or, as the BBC always refers to him, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Why do they insist upon doing this? What about all those blokes who were once called Laurence and are now called Loretta? Do they ever say: “Laurence Smith who now calls himself Loretta Smith”? Of course, they do it because they hate Robinson. And they may have cause to do so. But perhaps Robinson should put a wig on and change his name simply to Mrs Robinson. I wonder if the BBC would desist then? If the CEO of BBC News, the absolutely brilliant Deborah Turness, is reading this, perhaps she might explain the anomaly.
Labour isn’t doing enough to win over Scotland
Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney began 2025 in the traditional manner – with a chorus of Auld Lang Syne. Speaking at Edinburgh University on Monday morning, Swinney called for unity across the political divide and urged opposition leaders to get behind his government’s budget. Failure to do so, said the FM, would ‘feed the forces of anti-politics and of populism’. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, however, was in no mood to clasp hands with Swinney and sing along about bygones correctly placed. As the First Minister spoke in Edinburgh, Sarwar delivered his own state-of-the-nation address, 50 miles west at his alma mater, the University of Glasgow. While Swinney was reaching out, Sarwar was reciting a litany of SNP failures.
While John Swinney was reaching out, Anas Sarwar was reciting a litany of SNP failures.
The Scottish Labour leader used his speech today to describe – accurately – the miserable state of public services in Scotland after almost 18 years of SNP government. Not that his audience received all that much detail about how Scotland might differ under Labour. In fairness to the Glasgow politician, his reticence about detailing policy indicates an awareness that anything vaguely workable proposed by an opponent pre-2026 is liable to end up in the nationalists’ next manifesto. The SNP is tired and out of ideas.
After almost two decades of political dominance in Scotland, the next election is not looking especially promising for the nationalists. The decision by former first minister Humza Yousaf last year to end the SNP’s coalition with the Scottish Greens leaves the government without the majority it needs for its 2025-26 draft budget to pass smoothly through Holyrood next month. Success made SNP ministers arrogant and so the humility Swinney is now attempting to display in his dealings with opponents represents quite the shift in tone.
A blink-of-an-eye ago nationalist ministers would have had us believe that a vote for Labour was exactly the same as a vote for the Conservatives. Now, Swinney wishes us to accept he is part of some kind of progressive alliance alongside politicians who, until he needed their support, the SNP treated not merely with disdain but with naked contempt. The first step in this new journey of unity would be the passing of his party’s budget. This would boost confidence in the political system and act as an ‘antidote’ to the forces of populism. So, the age-old ‘vote for our crappy budget to save civilisation’ pitch, then.
The Scottish Labour leader needs to do more to stand out.
If Swinney cannot muster enough support for the SNP’s budget and MSPs vote it down on 25 February, a Holyrood election will be required. Spoiler alert: this will not happen. No party at Holyrood is ready for an election right now. In any case the signs are that the Scottish Liberal Democrats are willing to help the nationalists get the numbers they need. Furthermore, the draft budget is littered with landmines – the retention of the winter fuel payment, the abolition of the two-child benefit cap – laid with Labour in mind. Can Sarwar really lead opposition to these policies, unfunded though they may be? No, he cannot.
Not that the Scottish Labour leader’s troubles end there. Early decisions by Sir Keir Starmer’s government such as the abolition of the universal winter fuel payment for pensioners and the u-turn on support for compensation for women campaigning over pension inequality played into the SNP’s hands. And so Sarwar – affable and quick-witted – is currently engaged in an attempt to show Scots he is very much his own man.
But the Scottish Labour leader needs to do more to stand out and show how a government led by him might differ. He’s not yet managed to convince Scots that his lot deserves to seize power. This is despite the chaos caused by the departures of Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf plus a voter backlash against plans to reform the gender recognition act. All that combined with the scandal of an ongoing police investigation into allegations of impropriety involving party finances should have been enough to knock the SNP out of the running, even this far out from the next election. Instead, although polls show Labour back in the game, the nationalists maintain a lead.
Labour’s failure to capitalise on the nationalists’ difficulties appears entirely down to decisions taking by Starmer. Before the general election, the inevitability of his victory was devastating to the SNP – whose claim that only a vote for them would get rid of the Conservative government was rendered nonsensical. Since then, Starmer has turned into Swinney’s little helper, making decisions that undermine Sarwar’s insistence he’s his own man and not merely Labour’s branch manager in the North.
While John Swinney is all but certain to see the SNP’s budget pass next month, he leads a party worn out by scandal and divided over strategy. All things considered, Anas Sarwar should be the runaway favourite to become Scotland’s next First Minister. Thanks to Sir Keir Starmer, however, the SNP – weakened though John Swinney may be – aren’t done for yet.
Elon Musk is just one of Labour’s many headaches
It’s not terribly helpful for Keir Starmer that Elon Musk is creating polls on X, asking his 210 million followers if ‘America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government’. Nor does the Prime Minister seem very happy about the attacks on his record as chief prosecutor, using the Q&A of his healthcare speech this morning to insist that he used his five years in the role to tackle child exploitation ‘head on’.
But the mudslinging back and forth across the pond has buried one of the most worrying indicators for 2025 announced so far: business confidence has sunk to its lowest point since Liz Truss’s infamous mini-Budget. According to the latest poll from the British Chamber of Commerce, 63 per cent of businesses say they are concerned about taxation including National Insurance (this is the highest level on record) while fewer than half of companies report they expect ‘their turnover to increase over the next 12 months’.
It’s yet another blow in an increasingly expanding series: just last week the Financial Times’s survey of economists pointed to disappointing annual growth figures, which they forecast will fall below the Office for Budget Responsibility’s 2 per cent prediction for the year. This followed the latest set of growth figures, which showed that the UK economy contracted in October – the second month in a row.
All this has the backdrop of higher-than-expected monthly inflation rates – a concern for businesses as well, with 55 per cent of businesses reporting they expect ‘prices to go up in the next three months, with labour costs the biggest driver.’ As was forewarned in the OBR’s assessment of Labour’s first Budget, the vast majority of the NI hikes are expected to be borne by lower wage hikes and higher prices for consumers.
On and on it goes, as Labour’s first round of major economic changes continue to drag down business optimism about the coming year. In a bid to turn the narrative around, the government has tried to kickstart their new year message with talk of reform and efficiency gains, mainly around the NHS, insisting this morning that the health service cannot become a ‘national money pit’.
As Isabel Hardman notes on Coffee House, all of Starmer’s talking points were overshadowed by the grooming gang scandal, but particularly by Musk’s commentary about Labour’s handling of the atrocities. ‘I think people are more interested in the NHS, frankly, than what’s happening on Twitter,’ was Stamer’s first response. That may largely be true, but were Labour forced to engage on its NHS record so far, it might find those questions difficult to answer – including why more than half of the additional tax hikes were gifted to the NHS in the Budget, if the party is so committed to avoiding the ‘money pit’?
Ongoing questions about how the grooming gang scandal was handled – and what safeguarding measures (or lack thereof) have been implemented since – will continue to be tricky for the government to answer. But as this morning’s press conference showed, the scandal has fast morphed into something political. And if Labour has to have a fight this week, Musk may well be the preferred foil over other opponents.
Catch up on SpectatorTV:
Quarter of Labour voters suffer buyer’s remorse
Dear oh dear. There’s more bad news for the Labour lot as new polling by More in Common for LBC has revealed that a quarter of those who backed Sir Keir Starmer’s party in last year’s election now regret their decision. After the events of the last six months – from freebie fiascos to cronyism rows to unpopular policy decisions – Mr S can’t say he’s all that surprised…
The latest poll shows that 24 per cent of all Labour voters surveyed regret supporting Starmer’s army, with a staggering third of this aged between 60-74 years old suffering from a serious case of buyer’s remorse. Similar frustration can be seen in the over 75s and among Generation X (44-59 years old). Younger voters are a little less sceptical of the lefty lot, with a fifth of millennial registering their disappointment with Labour while two-thirds of young adults are sticking to their guns and, so far as yet, have no regrets.
On the subject of Labour scandals, the More in Common polling also reveals that voters believe many of the fiascos that have dogged the Starmtroopers in recent months have been more damaging to the new government than Partygate was to the Tories. In fact over half of those polled believe the cuts to winter fuel payments have done more damage to Labour than Partygate did to the Conservatives, with more than a third blasting the farming tax changes as a bad move for Sir Keir's crowd. Crikey.
If this is what the mood is like six months in, how will Brits feel after five years? It's hardly the best start to the job…