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How I learned to embrace my autism
I’m autistic, I teach autistic children and I care for autistic adults, but I never kid myself that we are better than other people. When I asked a fellow autistic man if he could name any famous autistic people, he replied: ‘Hitler and Einstein.’ I love his answer because it punctures the romanticism around autism. There are evil autistic people, as well as geniuses.
Was Hitler autistic? We’ll never know for sure, but he showed several symptoms. People who met him found that once he started talking, he would not stop. He was also nocturnal, had an addictive personality and developed lifelong obsessions (in his case, racial purity).
Around half of all the people referred to the anti-radicalisation programme Prevent are autistic males. Are we more likely to become political extremists? Rachel Moseley, an autism researcher at Bournemouth University, told me that there was no evidence that autistic people are more likely to become radicalised, but they are more likely to be referred to programmes like Prevent. The reason, she said, is a ‘lack of a nuanced understanding of autism, so that certain behaviours and interests are easily misconstrued’. In 2002, Gary McKinnon, who is autistic, was accused of the biggest ever hack of America’s military secrets. He claimed he was looking for evidence of UFOs. The US authorities wanted to lock him up. A more intelligent response would have been to hire him.
Anyone diagnosed with autism should be reassured that life is getting easier for us, thanks to technology
Was Einstein autistic? He did poorly at school except in the subjects that interested him: maths and physics. He and Ludwig Wittgenstein have been described as having Asperger’s syndrome, which is incorrect. Asperger’s is autism without speech delay, but Einstein and Wittgenstein didn’t start speaking until they were four and five respectively. The term Asperger’s has fallen out of favour now that we know Asperger collaborated with the Nazis’ eugenics programme.
I wasn’t diagnosed as autistic until I was 26 but I was sure I had it by the age of 19, when I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. It is in my opinion the greatest fictional depiction of autism. Mark doesn’t have autism although he did teach autistic children. When he wrote about symbols getting jumbled up in the protagonist’s head, I knew I had the same condition.
I got diagnosed for a rather odd reason: I wanted to take part in experiments at the Maudsley Hospital. They hooked me up to EEG scanners and attached wires with bright lights to my head. I was also given experimental antidepressants. They asked me to do puzzles as I was put through an MRI. For £240, I was conclusively diagnosed and I also helped with scientific research. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend my time.
Earlier this year, the Nuffield Trust said the NHS couldn’t cope with the demand for autism diagnoses. The number of people wanting to see a specialist has risen five-fold since 2019. This may seem alarming, but anyone diagnosed with autism should be reassured that life is getting easier for us, mostly thanks to technology.
One common symptom of autism is dysgraphia or bad handwriting. Mine is terrible. However, thanks to keyboards, I have never had to handwrite a single article or CV. Video calls mean that those of us who are too anxious to travel can work and have meetings from home. We often struggle to recognise social hierarchies. Video-conferencing reduces this risk by enabling more egalitarian conversations.
If you want to experience autism in a crowded environment, try listening to several podcasts at once. We don’t have the ‘cocktail party effect’, that ability to filter out background chatter in a conversation, so we can’t control information that reaches our brains. If we hear something, we can’t help but focus on it, which can be frustrating and confusing.
Earphones have changed everything. Not only do they reduce sensory overload, but they also help reduce unwanted attention. How do they do this? A lot of autistic (and schizophrenic) people talk to themselves, usually repeating phrases they find amusing. This used to attract bullies but people now assume you’re talking on a Bluetooth earpiece if they see you talking to yourself.
Above all, it is the smartphone that has liberated us. My phone helps me to reduce sensory overload by allowing me to read white letters on a black background. This way, I can read for hours and my eyes don’t sting. Even illiterate autistics who I work with can use smartphones, thanks to the visual icons and voice-to-text technology. Those who can’t talk can use text-to-voice technology.
If autism were renamed ‘geek syndrome’, far more people would understand it. Geeks are socially awkward people with obsessive interests, a perfect description of autism. One reason autism is so common among computer programmers is that being a perfectionist is a bonus: one misplaced punctuation mark will ruin a line of code. ‘Geek’ was originally a term for people at funfairs who could tell you, for example, which day Christmas was in 1705. Some 10 per cent of autistic people have what are called savant abilities.
Speaking of labels, I wish we would stop using terms like ‘neurotypical’ for non-autistic people. There is a reluctance to use the word ‘normal’ to avoid making some people feel weird. But what’s wrong with being weird? Of course we are weird. We move our bodies when people don’t expect it. We get obsessed with things like tartan, Paraguayan history and giant tortoises. Thanks to modern technology, we can usually find someone else who shares our obsessions. If you’re autistic, obsessions are your life. Embrace the weirdness.
Ambitious, bold and confusing: BBC4’s Corridors of Power – Should America Police the World? reviewed
Narrated by Meryl Streep, Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? announced the scale of its ambition straight away. Before the opening titles, we’d already heard from Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and the late Henry Kissinger. We’d also seen the lines drawn up as to how its bold subtitle might be answered.
It is an authentically confusing programme, where any firm moral position doesn’t stay firm for long
As Clinton put it, in 1945 a question emerged whose implications would dominate post-war US foreign policy: ‘Why didn’t we do more to try to prevent the transport of the Jews?’ The immediate response was the heartfelt yet potentially glib declaration: ‘Never again.’ But what would that actually mean in practice? Was it now America’s duty to ensure the world’s countries behaved themselves? Or is it dangerously arrogant to proclaim yourself – as several presidents have done – ‘the one indispensable nation’ in charge of monitoring all the others? And in any case, what would happen when the rhetoric of either position bumped up against pesky real events?
Over the next hour, and with seven parts still to go, these questions were given a thorough and intelligent airing. Also an authentically confusing one, where any firm moral position you might wish to adopt didn’t stay firm for long. The programme clearly wanted to take a liberal view – the trouble being that, as the complexities piled up, it wasn’t entirely apparent what the liberal view is.
To begin with, denouncing America was easy enough. The first episode began in 1970s Iran with a reminder that the Shah had come to power in a CIA-backed coup and that his regime relied on CIA-trained secret police. (Accompanying footage showed him clinking glasses with the sainted Jimmy Carter.) But then the Islamic revolution of 1979 suddenly turned America’s closest Middle Eastern ally into its biggest enemy.
In the quest for a new close ally, the choice fell on Saddam Hussein, whom the Americans saw, maybe rightly, as the only hope of stopping Iran running wild. On the other hand, it wasn’t long before they knew about his gassing of Iraq’s Kurds.
Perhaps the most disturbing moment in a programme full of them was a recording of ‘Chemical Ali’ explaining his genocidal plans. ‘For every insect there is an insecticide,’ he said. ‘I will kill them all with chemical weapons. Who will say anything?’ Not so far behind, mind you, was a 1988 White House memo stating: ‘Human rights and chemical weapons use aside, in many respects our political and economic interests run parallel with those of Iraq.’
Until, that is, Saddam invaded Kuwait – at which point George Bush Sr decided that he was ‘Hitler revisited’. Moreover, as Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker unblushingly told us, Saddam’s mistreatment of Kuwaitis was ‘something that America could never permit’. As for those bleeding hearts who moaned that it was all about oil and money, don’t they realise that ‘money’s worth fighting over’? Yet, even in the face of such cynicism, the programme’s only regret about the American intervention appeared to be that it didn’t overthrow Saddam.
This week’s episode ended with Bush Sr’s post-Cold War proclamation of a ‘new world order’ in which no country could invade another without American retribution. Paul Wolfowitz then set up next week’s by explaining that, 12 months later, Serbia had invaded Bosnia and ‘we sat on our hands’, making ‘that whole speech look like a joke’. Wolfowitz’s position seemed to be one the programme heartily approved of – but my guess is that when it gets to the 2003 Iraq war, of which Wolfowitz was an architect, its enthusiasm for US intervention will be less marked. Like I said, confusing.
For any younger viewers, Saucy! Secrets of the British Sex Comedy will be one of the weirdest documentaries they’ll have ever seen: set in a Britain where pornography was illegal and the biggest thrills available were supplied by films such as I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight and Under the Doctor in which naked female breasts (lavishly illustrated here) were combined with policemen falling into the water and lots of double entendre featuring words like ‘up’ and ‘it’. Stranger still, these films packed in the punters, saving British cinema in the 1970s.
The second and final episode picked up the story halfway through the decade, when the movies were becoming so rude as to offer the occasional glimpse of pubic hair. By then, the biggest star was Mary Millington – which presented the show with something of a problem. On the whole, the tone was celebratory, the former performers looking back with a mixture of defiance and amusement (although rarely pride). Millington, however, died by suicide in 1979, which rather spoiled the mood. The programme, in fact, treated her death with some sensitivity – but there was also an awkward sense of it feeling obliged to, before it could return, with obvious relief, to the saucy fun.
Edinburgh has turned into a therapy session
Therapy seems to be the defining theme of this year’s Edinburgh festival. Many performers are saddled with personal demons or anxieties which they want to alleviate by yelling about them in front of a paying audience. Professor Tanya Byron puts it like this in the Pleasance brochure: ‘Therapy is where art and story-telling combine.’
This show crashes and burns like the stock market on a bad day. A cheerier ending might help.
At the Pleasance, Joe Sellman-Leava is seeking catharsis through his show It’s The Economy, Stupid! (Jack Dome, until 26 August). He begins by delivering a friendly lecture about credit, interest rates, retail banks, Adam Smith and so on. After 40 minutes, he loses his cool and starts to rant and swear at the crowd about his personal lack of funds. Overwhelmed by financial distress he collapses on the floor in a quivering heap. When he gets back to his feet he explains that despite working for 17 hours a day, he’s stuck in a leaky, rat-infested flat. His difficulties began in childhood, he continues, when he saw his parents lose their small business and the family home at the same time. They responded to bankruptcy and eviction, however, by having a third child. Perhaps he inherited his lack of financial acumen from them. Hard to say. This show crashes and burns like the stock-market on a bad day. A cheerier ending might help.
The Outrun (Church Hill Theatre, until 24 August) examines various cures for alcoholism. Adapted from Amy Liptrot’s memoir of the same name, the show is set in Orkney where Amy battles her day-long craving for booze by working in menial jobs. She escapes to Edinburgh University to study literature and later to London where she leads a wild, rootless, hedonistic life that leaves her unfulfilled. In rehab, she meets an elderly woman from Bristol who keeps relapsing. Amy has little interest in romance or family life and the characters she meets feel like reflections of her self-absorption – yet her journey is good to watch.
Eventually she finds peace in the untamed beauty of nature, and the closing minutes of the show feel like an advert for Visit Orkney. Amy observes corncrakes migrating from central Africa and enjoys daily swims in the freezing Atlantic. At night she dances in stone circles beneath the green haze of the northern lights. And she bonds with a wise old shepherd who just so happens to be her father.
The issue of transphobia is covered in an amateurish biographical drama, TERF (Assembly Rooms Ballroom, until 25 August). It opens in an east-Asian restaurant in Soho where Daniel Radcliffe has convened a summit meeting with Rupert Grint, Emma Watson and J.K. Rowling, whom they call ‘Auntie’ or sometimes ‘Mummy’. Rowling is portrayed as a stylish, combative upper-class diva with a drawling delivery and a vicious line in put-downs. Inspecting the restaurant’s speciality, ant-egg soup, she calls it ‘human vomit.’ She dismisses Radcliffe as a ‘virtue-signalling brat’ and criticises Watson’s botched facelift: ‘It looks a bit Cro-Magnon.’ The four characters attempt to discuss transphobia but the argument descends into a screaming match about compassion and kindness and the statistical probability of women being attacked by bearded men in lavatories.
Then the scene changes to the mid-1990s as Rowling meets her publisher for the first time. He predicts that her books will make no money and he advises her to sanitise her ‘anti-Semitic’ descriptions of goblins. She refuses. Cut to a scene in which her creepy Portuguese husband talks about their failed marriage and tries to intimidate her physically. Rowling refuses to be bullied. This is a puzzling production. Usually, a show with a Harry Potter connection sells out briskly – but TERF appears not to have benefited from the Hogwarts magic. If the producers hoped to disparage Rowling they failed because she comes across as witty, likeable and steely-minded. A warrior queen rather than a miserable bigot.
Nurse Georgie’s hour of scathing comedy is delivered with the full assent of healthcare professionals
Eric Morecambe was known by his mother as ‘skiffle-arse’ because he refused to sit still. Was his craving for attention the motive for his comedy career? Morecambe puts this question to Bob Monkhouse as they chat with Tommy Cooper in a heavenly dressing-room after their deaths, spending an amusing 70 minutes discussing the highs and lows of their starry careers. The Last Laugh (Assembly George Square Studios, Studio One, until 25 August) is a goldmine for comedy fans and it feels like a family sitcom with Monkhouse as the knowing paterfamilias, Morecambe as the cuddly mother figure and Cooper as the sulky baby who refuses to admit that his rivals have any talent whatsoever. ‘Him?’ he says of Arthur Askey: ‘He never made me laugh.’
Cooper admits that he steals jokes without acknowledgement because his sole concern is getting a chuckle. Monkhouse and Morecambe discuss the interchangeability of gags. ‘Des O’Connor is a hard man to ignore but it’s worth making the effort.’ They agree that either of them could use that anodyne quip, but Morecambe rejects Monkhouse’s suggestive material about his love life. ‘I’m still enjoying sex at 58 which is handy because she lives at 56.’ Such an explicit reference wouldn’t suit Morecambe’s family-friendly image. The show is distinguished by superb costumes, wigs and make-up, and by three impersonations that could scarcely be bettered. A must for students of comedy.
Nurse Georgie Carroll spent several decades working in healthcare and she’s on a mission to expose the cant and humbug of the medical profession (Assembly George Square Studios, Studio Two, until August 25). Allergies are often imaginary, she says. The work of physiotherapists is largely ornamental. When mature nurses complain that the NHS is going downhill they mean that the drugs cabinet is harder to ransack. She likens newly qualified nurses to dolphins who move quickly and look attractive ‘but they can’t save anyone – all they know is how to squeak for help’. The public are convinced that nurses are ‘angelic Baywatch virgins’ but in reality they’re more like ‘small woodland creatures throwing things out of drawers and screaming’. It’s unwise to report a trainee nurse for being drunk on duty because ‘she’ll probably be promoted to bed manager’.
Nurse Georgie’s hour of scathing comedy is delivered with the full assent of healthcare professionals in the crowd. The biggest laughs come from nurses who understand exactly what she means. Her family observations are just as sharp, and she describes her 16-year-old son with affectionate bemusement. ‘He has enough self-confidence to question David Attenborough’s commentary during a wildlife film and yet he once Googled “what was Hitler’s surname?”’
5 Mistakes That Changed History (Assembly George Square Studios, Studio Three, until 25 August) has a catchy title and a stylish poster that shows a young Napoleon on horseback. But the production doesn’t quite deliver on its intriguing premise. The host is a blandly charming type who delivers a series of random anecdotes rather than a list of epoch-making blunders. He opens by observing that Alexander the Great died without appointing a successor, which led to extensive wars between his lieutenants as they fought for control of his empire. After this, we hear stories about the use of toxic metals in dinnerware and the Victorian habit of excluding women from male-dominated professions. The longest section dwells on Churchill’s escape from a PoW camp during the Boer war. The inmates of the jail were treated with notable leniency and Churchill was able to amass £75 in cash and a large supply of chocolate before he hopped over the wall. His absence was noticed only after he failed to appear for his 8 a.m. appointment at the prison hair salon. This show is aimed at inquisitive children rather than at students of history but it seems to be hugely popular thanks to its well-chosen title.
The fringe is a great place for accidental discoveries. Low Effort Sketches (Just The Tonic at the Caves, until 25 August) is tucked away in a musty pub just off Cowgate. The performers, Alice and Andy, look like nerdy yuppies and their knowing, cynical sketches feel tailor-made for Radio 4. That’s the bad news. The good news is that they have lots of charm and a fantastic sense of surreal mischief. They perform a spoof gameshow, Who Wants to be a Millionaire for Etonians, in which the contestant has to ‘phone a friend’ with lots of inherited money. ‘Can you give me a million pounds?’ asks the contestant. The answer is ‘yes’. The contestant wins. Frivolous gags like that work wonders. The venue was packed.
Can the grid take Ed Miliband’s net zero targets?
Ed Miliband, along with those who support his ambition to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030, has long had a favourite argument with which to try to put down people who say it can’t be done: why, if it is going to be so difficult to achieve, is the National Grid ESO – the company which manages the electricity network – not more worried? It is true the company has not been protesting openly about government policy, yet it transpires that in private it is another story. ESO executives, the Telegraph reports this morning, have warned that the South East could be facing blackouts by 2028 as a result of the switch towards intermittent and less predictable wind and solar.
Besides the intermittency issue, one problem is that a lot of the wind capacity being added to the grid is in the North Sea or the Scottish Highlands, a long way from where the demand for power is greatest. We have a grid which was designed around a cluster of large power stations in South Yorkshire and the East Midlands, which is going to need serious reconfiguration if it is to cope with a greater share of renewables. While ESO does have plans to invest in this work – hence Miliband’s efforts to head off protests against new pylons across East Anglia, which are opposed even by Green co-leader Adrian Ramsay – the work is lagging well behind where it needs to be.
Some wind farm developers have been told it will take years to connect their wind farms, while consumers are paying many millions in ‘constraint payments’ to wind farm owners to turn off their turbines at times when the grid cannot accept the energy they are able to produce. ESO has predicted that the bill for constraint payments could reach £2.5 billion by the middle of this decade as construction of wind and solar farms runs ahead of development of the grid.
ESO is reported to be looking into breaking the electricity market into zones, so that generators would be paid more for supplying power to the South East at times when electricity was scarce there. That is not likely to go down well with consumers. Moreover, it is likely to mean that Britain will end up importing even more power from the near-Continent via subsea cables. It is a little-reported consequence of the drive for renewables that we are importing even more of our power – around 10 per cent of our electricity is now imported, with the quantity doubling last year. Importing electricity may help Britain reach its net zero targets – as they only include territorial emissions – but it is hardly helping the planet. Belgium and the Netherlands still have significant amounts of electricity generated by coal.
ESO has this morning denied reports that the South East could face blackouts by 2028. That its public utterances are at odds with what its executives are saying in private is perhaps the most worrying aspect. It shows we are not having an open and honest debate about Miliband’s decarbonisation plan, nor about net zero targets in general.
Europe is worried that Britain’s riots might spread
The riots that have erupted across England in the last week have been splashed across Europe’s newspapers and broadcast on the primetime news. There have been editorials in France’s Le Monde, video reports in Spain’s El Pais and podcasts in Sweden’s Aftonbladet. The Italian newspaper, La Stampa, published video footage of disturbances in Plymouth on Monday night, and described the rioters as a mix of ‘extremists and hooligans’.
Why did the anti-immigration riots not explode first in France or Germany?
Some of the coverage has been superficial. The editorial in Le Monde read: ‘The current riots raise the painful question of the underestimated influence of the far-right in the UK, in a country that likes to recall its traditions of political moderation and its past of resistance to Nazism.’ The German tabloid, Bild, published a more in-depth and honest analysis of the riots on Tuesday. ‘Can something like that also happen with us?’ asked the paper. Yes, was the general consensus from the cross-section of experts canvassed by the paper. Felix Neumann, an extremist researcher, explained there are various far-right organisations in Germany full of angry young men who ‘definitely have a mobilisation capacity’.
Thorsten Frei, an MP in the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, said that the riots in Britain should be seen as a ‘warning’ to Germany. He added: ‘In this country, too, we have to note that migration policy is rejected in some parts of the population and contributes to the strengthening of populist aspirations.’ A psychologist, Ahmad Mansour, said that Germany was in danger of experiencing similar unrest if the poilitical class didn’t address the anger of some of its citizens. Mansour advised: ‘Limiting migration, deportation of criminals, border controls and better integration, taking fears of the population seriously.’
There has been scant reaction from Europe’s political class to the riots in England. Right-wing politicians such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Jordan Bardella in France, and Italy’s deputy PM, Matteo Salvini, have passed no comment on social media. They and their peers are enjoying the sun and the Olympics, recharging their batteries before they return to the office later this month. But Europe’s political class will be nervously following events in England and examining their own societies. Could it happen here?
Another question they will probably ponder is: why England? Why did the anti-immigration riots not explode first in France or Germany? One reason may be Brexit. When Britain voted to leave the EU eight years ago, people believed that immigration would be brought under control. The opposite has happened. Other European nations are angry at the scale of immigration in the last decade, but in England this discontent is deepened by a sense of betrayal.
There is also, as Italian paper La Stampa alluded to, England’s ‘hooligan’ element. Italians have more reason than most Europeans to recall the English football hooligans who terrorised the continent in the 1980s and 1990s, sacking cities from Marseille to Dublin to Rotterdam. In 1985, Liverpool hooligans indirectly caused the deaths of 39 Juventus fans when they rioted at the European Cup Final in Heysel. Football hooliganism was dubbed the ‘English disease’ and it soon infected other nations, notably in northern Europe where Dutch, Belgian and German hooligans modelled themselves on the English.
Some of the troublemakers in England probably do fit the description of ‘far-right’ but many are recreational rioters and hooligans. The worry for Europe, however, is that this new ‘English disease’ will once more spread across the continent.
Are the riots about to get worse?
When will the violent disorder across England and Northern Ireland dissipate? That’s the question being asked in Westminster as ministers brace for further incidents. Keir Starmer last night chaired his second Cobra emergency meeting ahead of a wave of possible events over the next 48 hours, with 30 potential riots anticipated today. Among possible targets identified by the police are refugee shelters and lawyers’ homes. Last night, Starmer said people will be safe thanks to the police preparations.
So far 400 people have been arrested, with the first rioter jailed on Tuesday afternoon. James Nelson, 18, received a two-month sentence after pleading guilty to causing criminal damage in Bolton on Saturday, after he was spotted smashing cars while wearing a balaclava. The hope among ministers is that, as individuals are named and sentences handed out, it will start to act as a deterrent against those considering taking part in further disorder in the coming days. More than 2,000 extra riot police are on standby.
As the riots drag on, Starmer is facing further criticism of his handling of the situation, including from a former Met Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson who suggested too much from Starmer has been rhetoric over action. The Prime Minister’s new nemesis Elon Musk has been back at it today – branding Starmer ‘Two Tier Keir’ over allegations of two-tier policing, with left-wing protests being shown more tolerance than those on the right.
In a sign that this criticism is starting to cut through, the Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood took to the social media platform earlier to declare: ‘It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re protesting – if you turn up in a mask, with a weapon, intent on causing disorder, you will face the full force of the law.’ It’s fair to say there is a nervousness in Whitehall over how the next few days will turn out.
Catch up on the latest Spectator TV:
Britain’s rioters have acted like Bolsheviks
British riots are not a new phenomenon. They were regular occurrences throughout history and usually the spark that lit the tinder was a sense of grievance that the authorities were refusing to deal with. In our century, governments have better technological means to stay attuned to public opinion. But the recent outbreaks of violent protest have taken government and parliament by surprise, and the rioting and looting may not have reached its peak.
Far-right political militants have undoubtedly helped to instigate the troubles on our streets, and the question arises: are they employing a model of far-left activism that led to the Bolshevik seizure of power Russia in October 1917? Some features are very reminiscent. Bolshevism in Russia fed off the resentments of garrison soldiers who objected to a diet of lentils and workers who feared the closure of their factories by owners facing bankruptcy. Bolsheviks in every city organised demonstrations through city centres. They put up posters advertising their plans. They encouraged supporters to come along with rifles if they had them.
The Bolsheviks were coy about some of their long-term intentions
Bolshevik leaders themselves – Lenin and Trotsky among them – avoided standing at the front of any march: they knew that they would be the first targets for arrest. In fact, Lenin spent most of the time between the February and October 1917 either in Switzerland or Finland, not in Petrograd. He detonated his demagogic bombs from a safe distance – rather as the British far-right agitator Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) is doing from a pool in Cyprus.
After carrying out their seizure of power, the Bolsheviks claimed that their victory was based on a scientific analysis of the logic of trends. They kept hidden – even from themselves – how much they had benefited from a fortuitous run of events: a European war, economic collapse, ruinous welfare conditions and the disintegration of the old tsarist state. In the chaos, their policies for Russia fell into fertile ground.
Bolsheviks adapted efficiently to open politics. Whereas among themselves they talked in Marxist jargon, in public they spattered society with slogans that everyone could understand: peace, bread and land. Their party membership swelled from a few thousand to 300,000 by the end of the year. They had the advantage of being able to criticise power before wielding it themselves. They queried the sincerity of the post-Romanov Provisional Government. Why were Russians fighting an unwinnable war against Germany on the eastern front? Why were urban citizens going without food? Why did the landlord elite still hold on to their rural estates when peasants did all the work?
The questions touched a raw nerve. The Bolsheviks were not inventing but loud-hailing them, and they were coy about some of their long-term intentions. Even Lenin and Trotsky, both of them fanatical believers in Marxism, soft-pedalled their baleful music about dictatorship and terror. As events were to show, they knew that a successful communist revolution would require the spillage of oceans of blood. Indeed Lenin believed in the need for a ‘European civil war’.
It would be passing strange if the instigators of the attacks on police vehicles or refugee hotels in the United Kingdom were as sophisticated as the leading Bolshevik communicators. The political far-left in Russia in 1917 was heavily intellectual and their scribblings in exile in Zurich, Vienna and Paris had always made huge demands on their readers. But that is not the point, which is that once they were back on Russian soil, they knew how to probe the existing wounds in society. They looked for and found an overlap between their own ideology and the feelings of resentment that were widely held in society.
Are we truly in danger of an advance on power by the British political far right? Surely not. But there are resonances from revolutions of the past. In France in 1789, one of the factors that sparked the Parisian revolt against the monarchy were the stories that Louis XVI was bringing Swiss and German troops to suppress trouble. This was indeed what the king intended. In summer 1917, however, there was no truth whatsoever in Lenin’s claim that the Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky was plotting to hand over the capital Petrograd to Imperial Germany. Lenin was deliberating stoking fires of dread among factory workers and soldiers who already faced a multitude of difficulties of life. For centuries, agitators – and there have been few agitators more masterly than Lenin – have made play with concocted rumour.
Their trick is always to focus on current resentments and place future plans under a hood. But the Bolsheviks operated in a much more congenial environment than the British political far-right can count on. In Russia, the police had already fled from their posts within days of the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in the February 1917 revolution. The army, at first loyal, soon suppurated with revolutionary inclinations as soldiers in the garrisons and at the front came over to the Bolshevik side. While most people yearned for the restoration of law and order, few any longer had confidence in the Kerensky government. Lenin and Trotsky did not walk through an open door to power in October 1917, but the locks were already broken.
These give reasons to be cheerful. The United Kingdom, unless I am totally misled by the evidence, retains an efficient counter-disturbance police force and there is no sign of mutiny in the armed forces. British public opinion heavily favours law and order. The government is widely endorsed for taking stern measures against rioters. The fomenters of disorder have no agreed idea of what to do next if they were to succeed in burning down every single refugee hotel. But the bigger point remains to be solved: what to do about the grievances held by many of the rioters who chucked bricks at policemen?
Should we treat rioters like football hooligans?
Images of thugs causing mayhem on Britain’s streets has brought back painful memories of the football hooligans of the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, ‘firms’ of shaven-headed white men regularly went on the rampage, in and around railway stations, town centres and football grounds. Shops were looted, police officers and their horses were pelted with beer cans, and highly organised gangs did battle. Many of those involved did not even bother to attend the football matches.
We’ve seen something similar in the days since the murder of three children at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport last week. Groups of mostly white men, uncannily similar in their appearance, clothing and tattoos to the firm members of the 1970s and 1980s, have taken to the streets in droves, all over the country, to attack perceived Muslim and immigrant targets and to do battle with the police. The police have struggled to maintain control. The authorities’ experience of tackling football hooliganism will prove crucial in the fight to restore law and order – and bring those thugs responsible for the violence to book.
During the 70s and 80s, a large number of those involved came from small towns in deprived areas of Britain, such as Sunderland’s notorious‘Vauxies’; members of these firms often aligned themselves with the far-right political movements of the day, including the National Front. Swastika tattoos – even on the face – were all too common.
Against this background, and in particular that of the Heysel stadium disaster in 1985 (when 39 Italians died and English teams were banned from Europe), Margaret Thatcher first convened a ‘war cabinet’ and, later introduced the Football Spectators Act 1989, in an effort to address the ‘British Disease’, as hooliganism became known. For the first time, the courts were given the power to issue ‘Football Banning Orders’, preventing convicted hooligans from going anywhere near football grounds on matchdays.
Improved policing and the introduction of all-seater grounds, following the Hillsborough disaster in April 1989 (itself wrongly and repeatedly attributed to hooliganism), led to a sharp fall in football violence in the 1990s. However, widespread outbreaks of violence involving British fans, at the Euros in 2000, led to the rushed introduction by Tony Blair of the Football (Disorder) Act 2000, which imposed some of the most draconian restrictions of movement on British subjects since the Second World War. Only the strict Covid lockdown laws, again introduced with little parliamentary scrutiny, imposed greater controls on the freedom of movement of our citizens in recent memory.
The courts were given increased powers to impose bans on football hooligans, even for those who were not convicted of, or even charged with, any crime. The police merely need to establish that a defendant ‘has at any time caused or contributed to any violence or disorder in the UK or elsewhere and that there are reasonable grounds to believe that an order would help to prevent violence or disorder at or in connection with any regulated football match’.
Should we look to the model of Football Banning Orders – or even Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, that provides for specially trained and authorised police officers to ‘stop, question and when necessary, search and detain individuals and goods travelling through the UK’s borders’ – to help respond to the racist riots on our streets? Should police officers be able to stop, search and detain people, potentially intent on rioting, with no grounds at all? Should the courts be given the power to ban those responsible for rioting from attending scenes of demonstration and protest in the first place? Should we go as far as imposing restrictions of movement upon those who have not been convicted of a crime at all? All in the interests of ‘preventing violence and disorder’ on our streets.
The solution to the explosion of mindless, racist hooliganism on our streets lies not in the expansion of the statute book
Faced with scenes of random, racist and factually misguided violence, up and down the country, it is understandable that politicians are talking tough and look for a quick fix, in the form of draconian new police powers and restrictions of movement. Facing his first real test as prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer has talked of using ‘the full force of the law’ against the rioters. That was precisely the thinking behind both Football Banning Orders and Schedule 7. And, of course, we saw the ultimate manifestation of this approach in 2020, when we could be stopped by the police, simply for leaving our homes. But we should be wary of such a crackdown.
As a criminal lawyer for over 30 years, I have seen the gradual erosion of basic rights and safeguards, in response to real or perceived necessity on the part of successive governments. The hallowed right to silence went in the 1990s. Hearsay and even evidence of bad character have been routinely introduced in criminal trials for over 20 years. For me, the Covid regulations, with their encroachment on every aspect of our lives, represented the nadir of British respect for the basic rights of the citizen. Every single additional removal of the right to be free from arbitrary arrest, detention and movement, is another nail in the coffin of our hard-won freedoms and democracy.
We already have plenty of laws to deal with rioters. Our basic freedoms are already more restricted than for generations. The solution to the explosion of mindless, racist hooliganism on our streets lies not in the expansion of the statute book, but in ensuring the police have the resources they need to combat this threat. We must also use our freedom of speech to call out those who spread hatred and misinformation and those who commit acts of violence. Let the majority of Britons be clear, at every opportunity, that this violence is not in our name. We have the power to defeat hatred on our streets, through the weight of our numbers and basic British standards of decency, rather than yet more rhetoric and ever more draconian laws, which are so often favoured by our leaders.
The trouble with Ireland’s balaclava ban
Balaclavas were once the preserve of bank robbers and members of the IRA, but this week they were worn by thugs who clashed with police. During riots across England, protestors concealed their faces as they threw projectiles and smashed up shops. Balaclavas were also worn during anti-immigration protests against a proposed asylum site in Coolock, Dublin, last month. The sight of criminals wearing face coverings is a terrifying one – and Ireland has responded with a proposal to ban balaclavas at protests. It’s a shame it took so long.
Balaclavas were worn during anti-immigration protests in Dublin
Ireland’s embattled justice minister, Helen McEntee, is weighing up draft legislation which ‘intends to introduce a ban on face coverings, including balaclavas, at protests in circumstances where the wearing of a mask is intended to intimidate.’ On the face of it, that seems like an eminently sensible plan. Whether it has been the truly shocking scenes of the chaos across England and Belfast, or the violent disorder outside the planned asylum shelter in the Dublin suburb of Coolock, the worst behaved people are usually the ones covering their faces.
The reasons for that are obvious, both practically and psychologically. Not only does wearing a balaclava grant the wearer the anonymity they need to commit their nefarious acts; face coverings also erect a sort of barrier between the wearer and the rest of the world, thus granting them a type of Dutch courage to do something they would never normally consider doing.
But, as we have come to expect from a government which often seems to limp from one self-inflicted wound to the next, the mooted ban raises more questions than answers.
For starters, there is the problem with the practical application of any such crackdown. The Gardai are severely under resourced and extremely demoralised. Yes, the Public Order Unit has seen a recent increase in manpower. But when individual units are deployed to a disturbance, the numbers on the ground will be much smaller; if several hundred thugs are all wearing balaclavas at the same time, it’s going to be rather difficult, if not impossible, to enforce the ban.
And what constitutes ‘circumstances where the wearing of a mask is intended to intimidate’? Surely, wearing a mask or balaclava at any time, under any circumstance, is intended to intimidate? After all, balaclavas would be useless if they didn’t. Such a clause, if it makes it into the legislation, surely means that any half decent lawyer might be able to argue that yes, their client was indeed wearing a balaclava, but honestly, m’lud, there was no malicious intent involved.
It also raises another question: why now? The likes of Antifa have been parading through the streets of Dublin wearing masks for years; various protesters and other rabble of all stripes have been doing the same.
Has the crackdown come about because the likes of Antifa are somehow considered to be ‘good’ protesters, while people with concerns about immigration are considered to be ‘bad’ ones? There may be an element of that, but the likely answer is more prosaic and less conspiratorial; it boils down to the protests taking place outside various politicians’ private homes.
In June, groups of masked men harassed family members and left politicians such as minister for children, Roderic O’Gorman, and the Taoiseach, Simon Harris, understandably shaken. Suddenly, a ban on balaclavas became a government priority. It might have been nice if they had shown such an interest before these events, but better late than never.
There is, of course, a delicious irony also at play here when it comes to legislation about face coverings. When the government imposed its first covid lockdown in Ireland in 2020 (the longest lockdown in Europe) it was mandatory to wear a mask in many places. Similar rules applied for the next lockdown in 2021.
So can the government really, with a straight face, tell the people that it is illegal to not wear a mask in 2021, and then, in 2024 tell them that it is now illegal to wear one?
As it happens, I’ve spoken at numerous rallies in Ireland in defence of free speech and in opposition to the ridiculous proposed Hate Speech Bill (which now sits sulking balefully in the parliamentary long grass, looking increasingly unlikely to be passed). Those events are always met with fierce opposition from the balaclava-wearing incels of Antifa.
Frankly, they’re not intimidating in the least. They’re just cosplaying as heroic anti-fascist street-fighters. But in a free and liberal society, we should all have a right to be able to look someone in the face without them hiding their visage.
Wearing a balaclava immediately tells the world that you’re not a good guy and that you have something to hide. So, Ireland’s balaclava ban is good in theory. But the implementation will be nigh on impossible and, like so many other initiatives trialled by the Irish government, it simply gives the impression that it hasn’t been fully thought through.
Chefs are nice people, really
I used to think that chefs were egotistical maniacs. Some of them are. But the vast majority of chefs are hardworking individuals coping with enough stress to send a beta-blocker into cardiac arrest. I spent more years than I care to admit moonlighting as a bartender and waiter. I worked with dozens of chefs. Some were brilliant, some had trouble frying an egg. Others spent more time with cocaine than flour. One tried to drunkenly glass me in the face with a bottle of Moretti, another became a very good friend.
I learnt a lot from chefs: how to shuck an oyster, how to tastefully plate a dish, how to chain-smoke a pack of Marlboro Reds without throwing up. I also learned that a chef is the pacemaker of any good establishment. Chefs are rarely the problem: it’s the people around them. It’s the beady-eyed general manager who insists on keeping the kitchen open for an extra hour because Doris arrived late for her 89th birthday. It’s the 18-year-old part-timer who vapes all over the food and starts fights with the prep chef. It’s the ignorant yet domineering owner who doesn’t know the difference between a colander and a sieve saying, ‘Let’s turn this place into a tiki bar. I know you were trained by Pierre Koffmann, but how do you feel about bottomless hot wings?’
I also learnt that a chef needs to be handled properly. They may be the scariest figures in hospitality, but once you understand how to approach a kitchen and what not to do, a previously tumultuous relationship can blossom into a fruitful one. I just wish someone had explained the ground rules before I’d dipped my toe into the furnace.
First of all, never disrupt a chef’s flow. A chef may be convivial outside of work, but once they’re inside of a kitchen they are tapped into a frequency that the front of house staff will never understand. Do not loiter by the service bell and ask the head chef if she knows Marco Pierre White and if he really is as smelly as he looks. Do not ask the kitchen porter if he wants to go to the casino after work (he does). Do not ask the chef de partie for a Rizla at any point during the service.
If you do get in a chef’s way, they’ll have you up against the wall faster than you can squeal, ‘I’m telling HR!’ I was 19 when I first experienced a chef’s wrath. One moment I was lounging by the pass, cracking one-liners and gurning like an idiot, the next I was ducking a knife that the sous-chef had launched at my forehead.
‘What was that for?’ I asked, still in the brace position.
‘The [expletive] cream is falling off the [expletive] pancake you curtain-haired cretin. Hurry up!’
It’s best not to answer back in these situations. Instead, crawl onto the floor like the lickspittle you are and play possum; they might take pity on you.
I don’t blame that particular chef. I was a cocky university student, ignorant to the ways of the kitchen and the working world. He was a dedicated chef in what was then one of London’s busiest brunch chains. I was a part-time goon on the interminable conveyor belt of hospitality. He was a professional. I’d have done the same if I were him, only I wouldn’t have missed.
Over the years, I’ve come to feel sorry for chefs
The brunch restaurant taught me a lot about ‘kitchen respect’. The team was an aggressive and well-oiled machine. The chefs had a Cosa Nostra hierarchy, having worked together for years; if you upset one of them, you upset all of them.
There’s only one thing that really – and quite rightly – upsets a chef: simple mistakes. Returning to the kitchen with a customer’s plate of uneaten food is a bit like handing a gun to a madman:
‘What’s wrong?’ asks the chef.
‘Uh, well, the customer – the customer says they don’t like pesto,’ you say, trying not to quiver.
‘It’s a pesto dish. It literally says pesto gnocchi on the menu. Can they not read or are they stupid?’
I — I don’t know.’
‘Did they order it without pesto?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who took the order?’
‘I did.’
The chef takes a deep breath and rubs their eyes. They’ve been at work for 14 hours already. ‘And did you write “no pesto” on the ticket?’
‘I think so,’ you mumble. You pray to God that you did as you rifle through the stamped tickets. You find it: one nocchi pesto + side of buratta. You didn’t write it on the ticket. You also spelt gnocchi and burrata wrong.
Over the years, I’ve come to feel sorry for chefs. They spend their lives in a pressure chamber and, unless they’re on Instagram, their work often goes unnoticed. You can ask them why they do it, but it’s a bit like asking a soldier why they want to be in the military, or a penniless artist why they keep painting after years of ungratifying work. Unlike most people in hospitality, a chef’s career isn’t transitory. I think that’s partly why they get a bad rap – everyone else is just passing through with a vague notion of ‘something better’. For chefs, this is the ‘better’. This is the dream. That’s why they take it so seriously. Without great chefs, there would be no hospitality — I think the industry has forgotten that. Hospitality is a hot, sticky mess, and I wouldn’t wish it as a career on my worst enemy, but if I could give my younger self one piece of advice, it would be this: Listen to chefs, stay out of their way, never take them from granted and if you see a job advertisement for a bottomless brunch bar, run.
Seagulls are a nightmare
I’ve lived in Brighton and Hove since 1981. I’ve been surrounded by seagulls for most of my life, but somehow I’ve never really got used to them. There’s something unsettlingly prehistoric about those gnarled beaks and oversized, reptilian feet. While the feet can occasionally lend them a pleasingly comic aspect, the sheer size of the seagull makes its feelings impossible to take lightly. Their cries, so evocative from a safe distance, sound incredibly ugly at close quarters; I once lived near a nest, and it was like being trapped in an early Yoko Ono album.
Granted, the place wouldn’t be the same without them – Brighton’s seagulls are its oldest and most recognisable natives. But they brought shame on their home last month when a survey revealed that they are also the most remorselessly violent seagulls in the whole country.
Any visible food can make you a target
It’s mainly about chips – they really do love their chips – but any visible food can make you a target. A few years ago I was visiting the Palace Pier with family when an ill-advised hot dog purchase caught the eye of a gull lurking on the roof of the Cup ’n’ Saucer. In retrospect I should have realised something was off when the person handing me the food just laughed for seemingly no reason, but I was too hungry to take much notice.
I turned around, walked three steps and lifted the hot dog up to my mouth… then thump. It was as if someone had swung a pillowcase full of antique teddy bears – the needlessly heavy, Victorian kind – at the back of my head. I was aware of a sudden confusion of white around my face as my head was knocked forward, and when I looked up there were three spiny seagull toes raking through my painstakingly engineered ketchup river.
He couldn’t quite grab hold of it, the clown, but he did manage to knock off and break my glasses, so I was half-blind for the rest of the day. And although my snack was still in my possession, his foot had gone literally the entire length of it – as if, having realised he couldn’t steal, he’d maliciously opted to spoil. As I binned it and the man at the hot dog stand laughed some more, the seagull, back at his original spot, looked on: cold, implacable. He was clearly blaming me for the fact that neither of us would now be eating, and this seemed so unfair that it was as much as I could do not to shake my fist at him in the classic style: Happy now?
The official advice if a seagull attacks you is just to ‘move out of the gull’s way’, which, to me, sounds an awful lot like appeasement, and the more general advice is to never, ever, feed them, because that’s what got them so interested in chips in the first place. But isn’t that a bit like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted? Not just bolted but fully escaped, crossed three counties, made friends with a bunch of other animals and had a series of heartwarming adventures?
It is inconceivable that the gulls will simply forget about how nice chips are if we stop feeding them – I’ve not had a McDonald’s for years now but I think about them almost every day. A far more likely outcome will be that they grow ever more envious of chips, ever more resentful of us for not surrendering them and yes, ever more aggressive in their attempts to liberate them.
Of course it would be great if the gulls just went back to fishing instead of obsessing over fatty finger food, but then I suppose you could say the same thing about us. All of our fates were sealed from the moment we learned that food can be something you actually enjoy instead of just live on. That first chip, once tossed, can never be untossed.
So don’t feel too bad if you end up giving a gull a scrap the next time you’re at the beach – you’ll just be helping out a brother. An angry, smelly brother with terrifying personality problems.
Are the Great Novels worth it?
To finish or not to finish? The dilemma of whether to give up on books we aren’t enjoying or plough on to the end lasts a lifetime, but as we grow older it gets easier. We not only have less time, but also the increased confidence to decide that if a great novel isn’t engaging us, it’s possibly the book’s fault. What does it really matter if Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain defeats us, or Finnegan’s Wake sends us to sleep? We’ve survived much worse than that.
But in youth, such things torment you, and the more highly regarded the novel, the greater your shame in abandoning it. You still labour under the fallacy there are novels and writers out there you have to have read – Sartre, Beckett, the Odyssey, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and even (God help us) Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities – and the workload is crushing. In my teens and twenties, surveying all the famous books out there, I had a fantasy of being locked in an empty room with one volume a week, someone occasionally feeding me M&S ready meals through a slot in the door, so that I could emerge a year or so later feeling like George Steiner. I’m 54 now, and still haven’t read Proust, Les Miserables or Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. And yet I’m still here.
There were key moments in my battle against the tyranny of Great Novels. Cyril Connolly said that if an artwork were widely considered great, you should simply stand in front of it until you began to agree – a noble idea but one to keep you in chains for a lifetime. Thankfully, there were other, less reverent takes on the matter. ‘Eat as long as you are hungry’, said Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer. ‘The moment you are filled, leave the food… There isn’t such a thing as a “must” in literature.’ An American academic I lunched with muttered to me, in his cups, something that delighted me but which, the following day, he angrily denied having said at all: ‘Robin… the classics are boring.’ The late writer Peter Vansittart, a sort of friend, told me one of the reliefs of old age was realising you’d survived quite happily without reading Don Quixote: ‘There are all sorts of famous books which the culture will absorb for you and feed back and that you don’t actually need to read at all. Everyone already knows what the word “Kafkaesque” means.’ On this last point I’m not so sure – one of the disappointments of reading Kafka, when I finally got round to it, was discovering he wasn’t nearly Kafkaesque enough, and that I’d have to look elsewhere.
Alongside the books you have to have read – and often long to discard – are those you genuinely love, which make the ground shake and possess you, often way off the beaten track. Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, which taught me more about thrilling writing than anything I’d encountered. A long autumn afternoon spent with Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth in my early twenties, willing the phone not to ring and break the spell. The last lines – and the near trancelike state they flung me into – of Colin Thubron’s Among the Russians, or Isabel Allende’s Paula. Kundera, for God’s sake – Kundera! These were the books I really loved, and to struggle through Madame Bovary or Dostoevsky’s The Devils, feeling nothing but ennui, felt a kind of insult to it all. Sometimes, discarding a book, I would crawl away in disgrace (Dickens’s Bleak House), sometimes reject the book violently. I still remember the copy of Henry Green’s Caught I hurled from a moving train, worried afterwards it might have landed on someone’s head and that for days afterwards the newspapers would carry the chilling headline ‘Harvill paperback killer – no clues as yet.’
But occasionally soldiering on has been worth it, and I offer the following story as a how-to guide for others who want to finish a work of great literature. Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Mount Everest for bookworms) I embarked on several times, invariably casting it aside around the page 200 mark, and the sense of something uncompleted, still exerting a hold on me, niggled into my mid-thirties. When a week’s holiday from the Spanish language-centre I worked at beckoned, I decided something radical was called for. As I sat invigilating the students in their end of term exams, I wrote out the words ‘I will finish War and Peace’ several hundred times to boost my willpower, and analysed what had stopped me finishing the book before.
There had been the need to pause and digest each page, the distractions of daily life, even the cumbersome weight of the one-volume edition – and I attacked these issues one by one. The diary was kept clear and the phone switched to silent. The huge tome I cut up with a Stanley knife into novella-sized slices, resolving never to ruminate too much over any page (that would do for a second reading, if it ever came) but simply to press on. I also decided to rip out each page as I finished reading it, scrunch it up into a ball and throw it onto a pile – an act of vandalism which will surely upset those rather precious types who bang on about books as sacred objects in themselves, but which helped motivate me as I went (and it was only the Wordsworth edition, after all). As the week flew by, that pile of pages turned into a hillock and then a great mountain, and it was clear that this time – this time – I was going to get to the end.
Sometimes, discarding a book, I would crawl away in disgrace
Was all this hassle worth it? Was War and Peace as great as its reputation suggested? I’m sorry to tell you this but resoundingly, yes. It’s still the greatest reading experience I’ve ever had and the most enveloping. There were sections so transporting that when I described their effect to someone I could only say, rather inelegantly, it had been like ‘snogging God.’ One friend told me of reading Moby Dick, and of entering so deeply into the maritime experience that, when she stood up from her bed, she unconsciously expected the floor to creak and sway like a ship under her feet. And though no one expects to see a snow-bound troika or hoarfrost on the windowpanes in sunny Andalucia, I knew, from that week of Tolstoy, exactly what she meant.
‘There is only one way to read,’ wrote Doris Lessing in her preface to The Golden Notebook, ‘which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those…., skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought… Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.’
Whatever that drunk American academic told me and however true it seemed, perhaps it’s time to go back to Madame Bovary – if she’ll have me – once again.
No one wants to lead these riots
Joe/Jeff Marsh wants to make it clear that he did not, like people keep saying, start the riots in Southport. He wasn’t at the riots. He doesn’t like riots. He’s a white nationalist, fine, but he’s also a busy, self-employed builder from Swansea. And Swansea is nowhere near Southport. All he did was share a picture of a poster about a protest to 2,000 people who subscribe to his channel on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app. A few people reposted the poster, shared his share elsewhere, then the protest just… became a riot.
Joe’s trying to explain this on the phone, and I’m getting him up on Google Images while he talks. (Joe is his real name. Jeff is a decoy to give him anonymity.) In the pictures he has a big bald head and wears a camouflage cagoule. ‘A tweet saying that it was my demo has had like 1.9 million views’, he says down the line. ‘I’ve had a barrage of abuse from lefties. I’ve had loads of people tagging the police, saying “this man ought to be arrested”. I literally did not organise that demo, you know?’
None of the big names in far-right British politics want to lead the protests. (‘Far-right’ isn’t the perfect descriptor, but you have to group them in some way.) At the hour of revolution, Tommy Robinson, who started the English Defence League, was unwinding at a five-star hotel in Ayia Napa, in Cyprus. Where was Mark Collett, the leader of Patriotic Alternative, Britain’s largest far-right group? At home posting on Telegram about the need for non-violence.
Joe is a serious character in Britain’s white nationalist scene. He was in the British National party, then the EDL, and now runs the Welsh ‘branch’ of Patriotic Alternative. His home has been raided by anti-terrorism police, and he claims his phone and computer are bugged. Joe honed his disorderly behaviour a few decades ago when he was a football hooligan, a member of Cardiff City’s ‘Soul Crew’. On the back of his book, The Trouble With Taffies, he says he had ‘a few spells in prison including one for stabbing two Man Utd fans’. The director Irvine Welsh considered making a film about the Soul Crew. Joe might’ve been the new Billy Bright.
Nowadays, Joe says he splits his time between managing his online persona, ‘The Welsh Nationalist’, and organising and attending peaceful rallies to advance the supremacy of the white race. Along with the 2,000 subscribers on Telegram, Joe has another 35,000 subscribers on YouTube. In the past week, he’s posted a video of the ‘Muslim Defence League Marching Through Stoke With Samurai Swords & Other Weapons’, and a 96-minute ‘Welsh Invasion Update’.
Joe is rough, but even he thinks these riots have gone too far. Looting and torching and fighting are bad ways to make nationalism popular. ‘I’m not interested in that sort of thing now. I don’t think that these big demos where they end up fighting with the police, you know, they don’t do us any favours at all because I want the general public to support us, and they’re not going to support violence, are they?’
Joe has tried to intellectualise his views. The protestors are burning hotels; he is waging an epochal battle for the future of his kind. Outlaws want to fight; Patriotic Alternative wants to see British descendants of immigrants offered ‘generous financial incentives’ to return to their ‘ancestral homelands’. When Joe left prison after the stabbing incident, he did a degree in Criminal Justice at the University of Glamorgan.
Looting and torching and lynching are bad ways to make nationalism popular
If you want to trace it back, today’s ungovernable mob formed in Luton, in Bedfordshire, in 2009. On 10 March, on St George’s Square in the centre of Luton, Islamists protested a battalion of British troops returning from the Iraq war. They called the soldiers the ‘butchers of Basra’ and ‘baby killers’. Counter-protesters shouted ‘we pay your benefits’. A couple of months later, Tommy Robinson – then just an angry townie – created the EDL. Football hooligans joined and Muslims were attacked at rallies. People called the EDL far-right. To try and prove otherwise, Robinson arranged a special press conference in October 2009: in a disused office block in Luton, EDL members doused a Nazi flag in petrol and set it alight.
Robinson quit the group in 2013. ‘Though street demonstrations have bought us to this point, they are no longer productive’, he said. ‘I acknowledge the dangers of far-right extremism and the ongoing need to counter Islamist ideology not with violence but with better, democratic ideas.’ He was speaking like a politician, too moderate for the EDL. The group disbanded not long after he quit. ‘New groups have just formed up from everywhere’, Joe says. Ex-members have joined more extreme football firms, or WhatsApp groups that share the date and location of protests. They offer the hooligan violence, removed from politics.
Protestors last week chanted Robinson’s name, like they were calling him back from Ayia Napa. He remains a kind of spiritual leader for them. In some other world, St George’s Square might’ve become the… Mecca… for EDL-types. But Robinson won’t lead the mob, and neither will intellectuals like Joe. Last Friday evening on St George’s Square, people were taking photos of a new 20-foot sculpture of an angel made of knives confiscated by police. No protests.
An unlikely comeback: Rare Singles, by Benjamin Myers, reviewed
Last year, the Proms had a ‘Northern Soul’ special concert; and Benjamin Myers won the Goldsmith’s Prize for Cuddy, his polyphonic novel about St Cuthbert’s afterlife. I do not think he will win the prize again this year for Rare Singles, his novel about Northern Soul. I am glad about the Prom though, since I knew very little about the music; and listening to it did not appreciably deepen my enjoyment of this novel. Sentimentality is not a bad thing per se, but it is a difficult genre to do well, and Myers doesn’t do it half badly.
The central figure is Earlon ‘Bucky’ Bronco, an elderly American widower wracked by pain, whose musical career comprised two singles, one barely released and both largely forgotten. But the flame has been kept alive by soul aficionados in Scarborough, and Earlon is to be the guest of honour in an unlikely comeback. It has been organised by Dinah, a no-nonsense, put-upon woman. Her son, Lee, has a Filipino fiancée he has never met, who ‘seemingly had a thing for under-employed, under-qualified twenty-something stoners with porn addictions who still lived with their parents’. Her husband, Russell, is a drunk layabout wearing ‘boxer shorts she bought for him four prime ministers ago’. She doesn’t know it yet, but Bucky has lost his opioids and is terrified of appearing.
The hooks are clearly marked. Will Bucky’s comeback be apocalyptically embarrassing, and will it need the pharmaceuticals? The third act is well-paced between flashbacks and the closure; and the whole has a pleasantly distinctive humour – Scarborough is ‘Scarbados’, and Dinah fantasises about offing ‘psychopathic’ seagulls with ‘tiny grenades secreted in Scotch eggs’. It would work well as a 90-minute Sunday evening drama, and I could see Jeffrey Wright as Bucky and the ghost of Victoria Wood as Dinah.
The other characters are really just cameos. I could almost, having now acquainted myself with the must, imagine how R. Dean Taylor’s ‘There’s a Ghost in my House’ would fit certain elegiac and ruminative scenes. Myers makes a wise call in not describing the actual songs and leaving them to the imagination, although, with my suddenly acquired expertise, I’d have thought there would be nods to the ‘three before eight’, for example.
This year the Proms had an orchestral tribute to Nick Drake, and given their affinities in the English mystical tradition, it would seem a far more obvious subject for Myers’s equally obvious talents. Rare Singles is deep-fried battered candyfloss, a slightly guilty and queasy pleasure. But a pleasure nonetheless.
David Baddiel’s father and mother must be the most talked about parents in Britain
According to Clive James: ‘A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.’ In My Family: The Memoir, the famous comedian David Baddiel proves he’s also had a life. Or, at least, a family.
For anyone who hasn’t been paying attention – and Baddiel, as he admits, craves attention – or who has never watched television or listened to the radio over the past 30 or 40 years, Baddiel is famous as a stand-up comedian specialising in a ‘sweary and often not-very-nice-Jewish-boy style of comedy’, as a TV chat show host with fellow comedian Frank Skinner, presenting Fantasy Football League and Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned. He also writes films, sitcoms, novels and non-fiction, including the recent Jews Don’t Count. Oh, and he’s famous for co-writing the football anthem ‘Three Lions’, with its irritating earworm refrain: ‘It’s coming home.’
The book chronicles Baddiel’s ‘strange mad damaging childhood’, growing up in a Jewish household in north London –though, as Baddiel is at pains to point out, this was not the Jewish north London of the goyish imagination. It was Dollis Hill. There are some nice bits about him attending the North West London Jewish Day School, chosen by his parents for him and his brothers as the school where they were ‘least likely to get knifed’. We also get glimpses of Baddiel at Haberdashers’, and at Cambridge, of him thriving in the Footlights, and accounts of his early fame and success.
But the main subject of the book, apart from Baddiel, is his mother Sarah, who died in 2014 and who was clearly what one might call a ‘character’. He describes her as a ‘fantasist’. ‘She was someone who, at various stages of her life, had adopted different – and obsessive – personas.’ She was a ‘child of the Sixties, a woman of the sexual revolution’, a dealer in golf memorabilia and also an everyday 1970s kind of a mum, who wore ‘bright green flared Lurex slacks’ and who would say: ‘I tell you who I do like – that Paul Daniels.’
As one might expect, funny stories abound, and not just about Sarah. This is a celebrity memoir, after all. There are some Ned Sherrin-type anecdotes about Baddiel’s embarrassing encounters with Peter Gabriel, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Peter Cook and Prince Edward, but the book’s other main character is Baddiel’s father Colin, who towards the end of his life suffered from dementia and who has already been the subject of Baddiel’s 2017 television documentary, The Trouble with Dad. These parents may indeed be the most written and talked about in Britain. Baddiel acknowledges that some of the stories in his memoir will be familiar to anyone who already knows his work, and his tweets, which feature throughout, or who saw his one-man show, My Family: Not the Sitcom, or his Who Do You Think You Are? They can even be dimly discerned, as through a glass darkly, in his first novel, Time for Bed (1996).
But it’s not all bantz and rehash. Baddiel is possessed of what he calls an overwhelming ‘truth urge’, ‘the David Baddiel Truth-At-All-Costs Urge’, which he defends as a kind of artistic method, and which leads him to push on and on into increasingly uncomfortable territory:
The only way to combat untruth is with detail. To be more specific, with idiosyncratic detail. The more detailed and the more idiosyncratic the presentation of who you are, the more it works as evidence. As truth.
But truth hurts. He describes his childhood home, for example, as ‘an over-sexualised house’, with pornography left lying around on the breakfast table, and there was clearly a lot of unhappiness there. Sarah remains clearly adored by Baddiel, for all her faults: ‘The rich strangeness of my mother cannot be conveyed in compliments but in stories, true stories.’ Colin, on the other hand, a scientist who became a dealer in Dinky Toys, emerges as a rather diminished figure, ‘old school, relentlessly male, thriving on the put-down, the jab and the comedy of insult’ – a bit of a bully, in other words.
But the real villain of the piece is someone called David White, ‘the embodiment of 1970s man’ – bearded, virile, pipe-smoking – who was still alive at the time of writing and who for many years was Sarah’s lover. He becomes the target of much of the book’s comic ire, so much so that in the end one can’t help but feel rather sorry for the poor bloke.
My Family offers a number of useful lessons and insights. The one I’ll take away is this: do not commit adultery with the mother of a future comedian. Seriously, don’t. Mr White has a lot to answer for.
What did Britain really gain from the daring 1942 Bruneval raid?
These days we use radar to help us park our cars, but during the early years of the second world war it was white hot technology and a closely guarded military secret. First used to detect aircraft in 1935, within a few years it had helped win the Battle of Britain and sink the Bismarck. It was so secret that work on it was forbidden even to physicists of genius who had fled the Nazis. (In the event, this freed up two such émigrés, Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch, to prove the viability of the atom bomb and thus kick-start what became the Manhattan Project.) Intelligence about what the enemy was up to with radar had a price above rubies.
In particular, during the autumn of 1941 the RAF was desperate to find ways to degrade German flak and night-fighter defences and the radars that controlled them. With America not yet in the war, the Soviet Union fighting for its survival at the gates of Moscow and Hitler dominant across Europe, the bomber offensive was almost the only weapon the Allies could use to hit back at Germany. The results, however, were meagre and the costs terrible. On one raid against Berlin in November 1941, fewer than half of the 169 planes ever found the target, and 21 machines and their crews never made it home again. Total damage caused was 14 houses destroyed. Something clearly needed to be done.
When an opportunity arose to inspect the technology inside a German Würzburg radar, therefore, the boffins and the brass hats jumped at it. Photo reconnaissance had identified an isolated radar position on a clifftop overlooking the Channel near the little Normandy village of Bruneval. The defences did not look too formidable, and close by was a convenient beach. Here was an ideal target for a raid by some of the recently established special forces that Churchill was so keen on, and a great opportunity for them to showcase what they could do.
The plan was for a company of 120 soldiers from the 2nd Parachute Battalion, commanded by Major John Frost, to drop at night into German-occupied France. One group would attack and capture the site, holding it against enemy counterattack while technicians dismantled and removed what they could. Meanwhile another group would fight their way down to the beach, clearing a path for the whole force to be picked up and evacuated by Royal Navy landing craft from Lord Mountbatten’s Combined Operations HQ.
Photo reconnaissance had identified a remote radar position on a cliff in Normandy overlooking the Channel
Whether this raid, codenamed Operation Biting, which took place on the night of 27-28 February 1942, was just ‘breaking windows with guineas’, like some of the raids on the French coast executed during the Seven Years’ War, or had important consequences, is difficult to tell. Bomber Command adjusted its radar-jamming techniques afterwards, most famously by dumping strips of aluminium foil (codenamed ‘Window’) into the sky to create false echoes, but maybe they would have found such solutions anyway. There was little improvement in Bomber Command casualty rates, in any event. The airborne force was expanded, eventually to a strength of two entire divisions, but neither the paratroops nor Combined Operations seemed to have learnt much. Many of the problems that cropped up during Biting, for instance in the planning and command of airborne operations, and the training and morale of the troops, recurred in later battles, and Mountbatten’s next amphibious assaults included the costly St Nazaire raid and then the disaster at Dieppe.
Hastings is more interested in story-telling than in analysis of that kind, however. Since the Bruneval raid was the first operation carried out by the men of what became the Parachute Regiment, it is central to the mythology of that very famous unit, and it has appeared in plenty of books and films, so the story is well known. Still, it features a fascinating cast of characters, including the mighty Mountbatten and the ambiguous General ‘Boy’ Browning; the dashing pilot Charles Pickard, already a war hero who had survived nearly 100 missions; and Charlie Cox, the radar technician who was ‘volunteered’ to parachute in, despite never having left the ground before. John Frost lived long enough to see his 1944 heroics at Arnhem portrayed on screen by Anthony Hopkins.
This is a dramatic story on an intimate scale which gives Hastings the chance to make the most of both his journalist’s eye for human detail, and his war correspondent’s ability to understand and convey the chaos of combat while making sense of it for the reader. He also has long private and professional connections with the Parachute Regiment and perhaps it is not fanciful to feel something personal at work, giving the book extra punch. Anyway, stories this good, and told this well, never get stale. I read Operating Biting in an afternoon and was sorry to put it down. It is a good book by any standard, and Hastings’s best by some distance.
Women beware women: Wife, by Charlotte Mendelson, reviewed
Charlotte Mendelson has been described in the Times as a ‘master at family drama’, and her previous novel, The Exhibitionist (2022), contained in Ray Hanrahan one of the most odious fictional husbands ever. Mendelson clearly has an appetite as well as talent for writing awful spouses. In her latest novel, Wife, Penny Cartwright is if anything even worse.
This is the story of a lesbian relationship that sours. The book begins at the marriage’s end, but in its slightly confusing structure it leaps back to the beginning and then forward again. In fairness, these time- jumps are clearly signalled and I think the sense of bewilderment they nonetheless create is intentional. Although the narrative is in the third person, this is really an account of what happened from the point of view of Zoe Stamper, Penny’s wife, who has been thoroughly gaslit, so the sense of the reader being on the back foot beside her feels deliberate.
The claustrophobic bullying in the marriage is so well done that I found it nausea-inducing. Zoe’s mortifying shyness – which Penny presses on, as though it were a bruise – is also well-evoked, as is her intense longing for Penny at the beginning of their relationship: ‘Zoe would look at her slender wrist, or the soft stretch of her under-arm, and wonder if one could pass out with desire.’ Troublingly, that desire is in part fuelled by the way Penny humiliates Zoe, even from the start:
It usually turned Penny on that Zoe would pull away out of shyness when people could see them; she’d whisper filthy plans for her into Zoe’s ear, watch her writhe. And, afterwards, in private, she’d torment her, call her her little virgin, her sexy slut, with predictable results.
This is not an accidentally lesbian novel: Penny and Zoe go the cinema to watch the lesbian classic The Hunger, starring Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon, and later, The Kids Are All Right, which featured Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as a couple – notably, a couple who are troubled when their children develop a relationship with their biological father. Mendelson is also good on London’s lesbian tribes, particularly of the past:
With Ali, the Old Girlfriend, Zoe had struggled with certain aspects: her Hawaii-Five-O pushed-up shirt-sleeves, all that folk-singer silver-and-turquoise jewellery. The hat. She’d tried to find the British Telecom hockey player’s wash ’n’ go haircut and warm-up gear alluring, and failed.
But the heart of this novel is how Mendelson portrays, with some comedy alongside the horror, the disintegration of a marriage – and Penny and Zoe’s marriage is complicated by the existence of Robin, the children’s biological father, and also by Justine, Penny’s former lover. There are some toe-curling scenes with all four of these characters in family therapy. What is truly radical about Wife, however, is its portrayal of a contemporary lesbian couple behaving as dysfunctionally as a straight one might.
Does bitcoin fit the definition of good money?
Three philosophers walk into a crypto-currency. Resistance Money: A Philosophical Case for Bitcoin, I’d argue, is a slightly inaccurate title. Messrs Bailey, Rettler and Warmke have composed a book that is a meticulous and unphilosophically lucid examination of the origins and properties of bitcoin. No Hegel, no Husserl, no fuss. ‘We don’t prophesy,’ they state. ‘We don’t preach.’ They plead a Socratic humility. ‘We’d forgive you for thinking that three philosophers aren’t up to the task.’ They describe themselves as ‘epistemic trespassers’ in matters of economics and cryptography.
Access to bitcoin has changed from a muddy country path to a six-lane highway
The editorial sessions for Resistance Money must have been hell. Unlike many academic books where one particular aspect of a subject is assigned to a specialist, this one is a joint text by all three. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that they have written one of the best introductions to bitcoin. Perhaps precisely because they aren’t experts, they’re better at explaining things. Andreas Antonopoulos’s Mastering Bitcoin breaks down the tech stuff in greater detail, but you need some serious sitzfleisch and maths muscle to get through the elliptical curve cryptography and Merkle trees.
Bitcoin is a teenager. Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper came out in 2008. Bitcoin production, ‘mining’, started in 2009. The story of its outlandish growth is so implausible you couldn’t put it in a novel. It was envisaged as digital cash, a cash outside the control of wicked, inflation-creating governments, the ‘sly, roundabout solution’ that Friedrich Hayek had hoped for.
Is bitcoin functioning as digital cash? Not really. You can use it to buy a slice of pizza or a coffee, but deploying it like that is a real headache. And if you possess some bitcoin, you’d be better off spending your evaporating fiat currency to buy your refreshments. Bitcoin is notoriously volatile, with spectacular pumps and dumps; but over the years its value has been rising inexorably. Its ferocious tenacity has earned it the nickname of the honey badger of money.
For the moment bitcoin functions as ‘gold with wings’ – a store of value, if a capricious one, that is much easier to move than bullion and a little harder to confiscate. The future? The philosophers scrupulously assess the arguments against bitcoin – its mining will boil the seas, it’s the drug dealer’s delight – and its possible shortcomings.
The book is laid out in neat, clearly marked sections, obviously for teaching purposes, but the smorgasbord arrangement also allows the casually inquisitive to home in on the questions that interest them most. Writing a book about bitcoin or crypto presents an insurmountable problem, though. Things move so rapidly that the production time of a book will guarantee that you’re recording ancient history and your work will probably have some glaring gaps.
Bitcoin’s basic protocol is now Stone Age in terms of transaction speed and costs. Like the internet, it seems that bitcoin and crypto will evolve by layer after layer of development. The authors make some mention of ‘layer 2’ phenomena, such as the Lightning Network, which has much faster transaction speed and insignificant costs. But as I write this, it’s had little adoption, for various reasons. What has taken off dramatically in the past year is the ‘smart contract’ side of layer 2s, Defi, NFTs and meme coins (dogs ’n’ frogs) anchored by the bitcoin network. Will all these extras boost bitcoin in the long run, or simply clutter its network?
The most grievous absence in the book is the launch of bitcoin spot Exchange Traded Funds in the United States this January, the frenzied embrace of Wall Street. Access to bitcoin has changed from a muddy country path to a six-lane highway. Now the fuddy-duddies, the timid and the lazy can get an easy chunk of bitcoin without the perils of self-custody. The Blackrock Bitcoin ETF is the fastest growing ETF ever, and Blackrock’s CEO Larry Fink is now bitcoin’s most fervent evangelist. The Suits are on board.
Hailed by many of its early proponents as an almost universal financial panacea, bitcoin has one important function, the authors assert – as a form of resistance. Spawned in the world of cypherpunks, it has always had a groovy guerrilla, trickster, snook-cocking, sticking-it-to-the man side to it, along with the Austrian economics.
Wobbly, wheezy currency? Dodgy or dastardly government? Bitcoin can offer some comfort or a way out. If you can remember a dozen words (a bitcoin seed phrase, to recreate your wallet) you can flee any country, no matter how zealous the cavity-search, with your stash. Bitcoin adoption is an appealing savings option in Europe or the US. In other places it can be much more significant. In Vietnam, Nigeria, Argentina and Ukraine, bitcoin is big – it provides an emergency exit. Power to the people? Well, some of them.
Towards Zero: the gruesome countdown to the American Civil War
Some 100,000 books have been written about the American Civil War since it ended in 1865. That’s hardly surprising, given the four-year conflict’s impact on society, and not just because of the immense death toll, which new estimates put as high as 750,000 – more than the losses from all other wars combined. The effusion of blood created a new nation and a new mythology, anchored on the principles of freedom, equality and democracy.
There is not much room in this crowded field for Civil War neophytes. Erik Larson knows what he is about, however, in The Demon of Unrest – but do his critics? The mixed reception this book has received suggests not. As with his previous best-sellers, the author has taken a single event, the Battle of Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, in this case, and used it as a highly effective framing device for the immersive story he wishes to tell.
The actual event was a straightforward one. After holding out against Confederate forces for 108 days, the starving Union garrison relinquished its control of the fort on 13 April 1861. The battle was the point of no return, and although there hadn’t been any fatalities during the 34-hour bombardment leading up to it, a gruesome accident during the 50-gun salute did result in the first death of the war. Neither the Confederate besiegers nor the northern defenders of the fort had any inkling of the hell they were about to unleash on their fellow Americans.
This is not to say they were blindsided by the war. The country had been tearing itself apart over the issue of free vs slave labour ever since the invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s. Once slave-grown cotton could be efficiently cleaned and processed by machine, the South went from being an agricultural backwater to an economic powerhouse exporting four million cotton bales a year.
The production costs were cheap, the supply inexhaustible, and the southern states had a virtual monopoly on the global market. Unlike the northern states, they didn’t need immigration, education or industrialisation to grow rich – just millions of Africans, force-fed and force-bred into perpetual bondage. In the 1830s, southerners began referring to slavery as the ‘peculiar institution’, not because it was wicked and shameful, but on account of it being unique and inseparable from the southern way of life.
If northerners were at all uncertain about the non-negotiability of slavery – unlikely, given the political paralysis it caused in Washington – incidents on the floor of the Senate such as the Mississippi senator Henry Foote brandishing a loaded revolver and the South Carolina senator Preston Brooks beating the abolitionist campaigner Charles Sumner unconscious, helped to clear up any confusion.
International condemnation of slavery also fuelled southern bluster and arrogance. On the eve of the war, Britons were unamused to hear the South Carolina plantation owner James Hammond (rendered in gloriously repulsive detail by Larson) describe England as a vassal state in the southern empire. ‘Cotton is king,’ Hammond raged in a speech in 1858 that made him infamous on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘No power on Earth dares to make war on it.’ No power except the executive power of Abraham Lincoln, it turned out.
‘Cotton is king,’ James Hammond raged in 1858. ‘No power on Earth dares to make war on it’
The pivotal role that individual action plays in momentous times is a recurring theme in Larson’s books. He is fascinated by two kinds of anti-heroes: the monster with a talent for propelling events, like Hammond, and the decent man whose limitations spur him towards catastrophe, like the professorial William Dodd, America’s ambassador to Germany the year Hitler came to power (In the Garden of Beasts, 2011). A colleague of Dodd’s later recalled he had seldom, if ever, ‘worked with a chief of mission who was more futile and ineffective’.
In The Demon of Unrest, Larson’s anti-heroes are more starkly drawn. The decent men may be doomed to die, like Lincoln, or fail in their objective, like US Major Robert Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, but their flaws and limitations render them more, rather than less, admirable.
Lincoln was elected the first Republican president in November 1860 by a majority in the 34-state electoral college. But he lost the popular vote by a wide margin, giving the impression that his victory was an accident. His failure to address this added fuel to the claims of southern fire-eaters that he intended to destroy the South’s economy using high tariffs, ram abolition down their throats and set off a race war between blacks and whites.
Having never visited the Deep South, Lincoln was unaware of how entrenched the secession movement had become or how desperately pro-Union southerners needed support and leadership. Even more damaging for the prospects of peace was the traditional four months’ grace between the election and the inauguration. The General Assembly of South Carolina, the state with the noisiest supporters and longest history of secession attempts, voted to become an ‘independent commonwealth’ on 20 December 1860. Half a dozen more followed soon afterwards, yet Lincoln was still in Illinois in early February when the seven announced the formation of the Confederate States of America under President Jefferson Davis.
Lincoln only settled into Washington at the end of February, by which time another four states were preparing to secede, bringing the final total to 11. At his inauguration on 4 March, his belated attempt to cool secession fever by insisting he would defend the Union to his last breath while promising that slavery was safe in his hands alienated everyone. Southerners were convinced he was lying, even as abolitionists hoped that he was.
Initially, the majority of Lincoln’s cabinet felt certain he was not up to the job. Several tried to sideline him, sowing chaos among the already confused attempts to prevent disunion. Lincoln never altered his position, however, that slavery was a negotiable issue, but not Federal authority. Only two naval fortifications were still in Union hands by the time he took office: Sumter in Charleston and Fort Pickens in Pensacola, Florida. Back in December, John Floyd, Buchanan’s secessionist secretary of war, believed he had picked ‘one of us’ when he assigned a middle-aged southern officer from a slave-owning family to oversee Charleston’s fortifications. Major Robert Anderson’s rise up the ranks had stalled, despite an exemplary service record and being severely wounded in action during the Mexican-American War. He was teaching cadets at West Point when Floyd recalled him. It was not uncommon for such men to seek compensation by means of treachery. Anderson was the exception.
South Carolina’s secession was meant to have been the signal for Anderson to stand aside or evacuate his position. He did, slipping out under cover of darkness with a few dozen troops; but only to take up a stronger one. Although still under construction, Fort Sumter was the biggest of Charleston’s three forts. Anderson didn’t care about the rights or wrongs of slavery, nor did he care much about politics, but his honour and duty were sacred to him. To the indignation and fury of his now former brother officers, he made it clear that he would protect the Union flag flying over Sumter until he ran out of food or Confederate forces overwhelmed him.
In Larson’s dramatic rendering of the countdown to war, Lincoln was the one who cocked the starting gun by insisting that Major Anderson be resupplied, knowing it would provoke the Confederates; by engaging in a battle he knew he would lose, Anderson was the one who fired it. There’s an unmistakable aura of Greek tragedy to these men in The Demon of Unrest. They are reluctant heroes, forced to act the way they do because they are incapable of behaving in any other way.
It’s history as a form of catharsis, which leads to the deeper purpose of this work. The real project of the book may not be immediately divined from its soaring prose and ripping action scenes, yet it was shaped by the calamitous events at the Capitol on 6 January 2021. ‘I had the eerie feeling that present and past had merged,’ Larson writes in his foreword. It seemed to him as though America was once again in danger of slipping loose from its ideological moorings.
The Demon of Unrest is Larson’s attempt to call the country back to its senses. The book is not so much history in the traditional Thucydidean manner of causes and events, but rather a political argument posing as history in the manner of Xenophon, the father of popular narrative history. It is a full-throated defence of democratic values, individual agency and the power of collective action. Why read it? Because to understand the meaning of freedom for others is to know it in ourselves.
Sarah Rainsford joins the long list of foreign correspondents banned from Russia
Goodbye to Russia is an elegy for a lost country – the warm, chaotic Russia of unlimited possibility that welcomed the 18-year-old Sarah Rainsford in 1992. She stayed on, studied, worked in an Irish bar in St Petersburg, joined the BBC in 2000 and, after spells in other parts of the world, returned to Moscow as a Russian correspondent from 2014. Her memoir’s 30-year period covers an entire cycle in Russian politics – as Anna Akhmatova might have put it, from vegetarian to carnivore.
In August 2021, Rainsford was stopped at the Russian border and refused entry as a ‘threat to national security’. A few weeks later, she was expelled with no right of return, one in a rollcall of foreign journalists banned from Russia. Who knows what the trigger was – perhaps a too-sharp question to Aleksandr Lukashenko – but what’s very clear is that Putin’s Russia, these days, sees no need to explain itself to the West. It’s now more than two years since Russia invaded Ukraine. Alexei Navalny is dead. Rainsford comments: ‘No one cares about appearances anymore.’
Structured as a patchwork of scenes from her experiences, personal and professional, the book is suffused with affection and self-deprecating humour as well as the pain of this final rejection. In places this can feel confusing; but, as the narrative builds, so does its undoubted emotional power. Rainsford describes reporting on ‘early lessons in Putinism’ from the Kursk submarine disaster in August 2000: 118 crew members slowly suffocated while Putin holidayed in Sochi, followed by a press conference in which a furious family member collapsed on screen, stabbed in the back by a nurse with a syringeful of sedative.
She also witnessed first-hand the storming of Beslan School No 1, in which hundreds of children and adults died under a hail of government gunfire. She points out that the world really has no call to be surprised at the Russian army’s war crimes in Ukraine: they have done it before, twice, in Chechnya. ‘Even the mass looting was not new. In Chechnya, Russian forces made off with washing machines, fridges and cars.’ The unifying theme, even from the Yeltsin years, is impunity. No reckoning with the crimes of the Soviet period. No consequences, either internally or on the international stage, for ongoing violence and corruption. Only rewards and riches for the criminals.
At the same time we meet the impressive individuals who have stood up to Putin’s regime. Boris Nemtsov, shot outside the Kremlin in 2015. Anna Politkovskaya, killed outside her apartment on Putin’s birthday. Vladimir Kara-Murza, poisoned after being followed by the same FSB team that tracked Navalny, now imprisoned. Kara-Murza speaks about the thousands of Russians who were arrested for protesting after the outbreak of full-scale war in 2022, saying: ‘This is Russia too.’ In 1968, he points out, just seven dissidents protested against the invasion of Czechoslovakia, although they knew their cause was doomed to fail and the consequences would be dire. ‘As we now know, their cause wasn’t so hopeless after all.’
Rainsford, reporting from Ukraine after her expulsion from Russia, is all too aware of the hatred many Ukrainians feel towards all Russians now, unwilling to allow for any good in a society that they see as at best passive and at worst active supporters of Putin’s genocidal imperial ambitions in their country. Amid the tragedy she is staggered, again and again, at the total pointlessness of this war. The letters ‘Z’ and ‘V’ that the Russian army tag their equipment with – what do they even stand for?
Why be surprised by the Russian army’s war crimes in Ukraine? They’ve done it before – twice in Chechnya
Previously, Putin launched waves of repression within Russia in response to a fall in his popularity ratings – petulance raised to the level of a police state. Following the Maidan uprising in 2013, he seemed almost to have taken Ukraine’s move towards the West personally. Perhaps, during the paranoia and isolation of Covid, he actually did begin to believe his Eurasian fantasies – the idea that the Slav brotherhood of nations was naturally suited to autocracy (like a direct plagiarism from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). Perhaps there are geopolitical causes. Misha Glenny has commented on East Ukraine’s reserves of rare earth minerals and other resources, although it seems insane for Russia, one of the most resource-rich countries on the planet, to bankrupt itself in the hunt for more.
One aspect that Rainsford is particularly well placed to report on is the erosion of press freedom and the accompanying rise of state-controlled propaganda. She wonders what drives the spokespeople for Putin, with their nightly outpourings of vileness about Ukraine, the West and any other perceived enemies on primetime television. Politkovskaya thought their motive was straightforward: cash. Yet now they have been sanctioned, their Italian villas and yachts have been stolen, and still they spout. ‘I have seen the immense power of propaganda,’ Rainsford comments. Before February 2022, after nine years of anti-Ukraine hate speech, people already associated the country with fascists and thought that Russian-speakers were in danger there. ‘Those had been the TV talking points for years, and people quoted them back at me endlessly.’
Now based in Warsaw, Rainsford says she no longer feels nostalgia for Russia – at least Putin’s Russia. Neither does she feel much optimism for the bright Russian future that Navalny dreamt of – ‘I find it harder than ever to imagine.’ Yet 20 years after those seven dissidents came out onto Red Square in 1968, the whole Soviet system collapsed. That was Russia too.