The growing appeal of dreary Düsseldorf

In the cavernous basement of Bilker Bunker, a second world war air raid shelter in downtown Düsseldorf, the staff of groovy events guide the Dorf are toasting the magazine’s tenth birthday. During the war, Germans sheltered here from the RAF. Today, their descendants come here to party. With an art gallery up above and DJs down below, this labyrinthine concrete relic is a symbol of Düsseldorf’s transformation – from industrial powerhouse of the Third Reich to Germany’s hippest city.

The Dorf is the size of a slim paperback. It fits neatly into your coat pocket. It started out online but its success soon spawned a print edition: art, music, fashion and loads of entertainment listings. It’s like a throwback to the 1980s when inky newsprint still reigned supreme. I thought these old-school listings mags were all killed off by the internet. Seems I was mistaken. The people at this birthday bash are half my age (and twice as stylish as I ever was) and the latest edition of the Dorf is full of equally chic events, all over town.

I’ve been reporting from Germany for 30 years, off and on, crisscrossing this complex country more times than I can count but for a long while I steered clear of Düsseldorf. Like most German cities, it was bombed flat by the RAF and rebuilt in a dreadful hurry, in dreary modernist style. It had no iconic landmarks, no must-see sites. It lacked the dark allure of Berlin.

But as I travelled around the Bundesrepublik, the name of the place kept cropping up. Artsy Germans assured me it was a creative hotspot and so ten years ago I decided it was high time I paid a visit. I was amazed by what I found. Sure, much of the city looked pretty drab but it was a hive of artistry: several of Europe’s leading museums, plus countless commercial galleries. It seemed there were artists everywhere. It felt like a city on the rise.

I’ve been back half a dozen times since then and I like it more each time I come here. It’s not a place you’d go for sightseeing but it’s dynamic and authentic. With a population of 600,000, it’s about the same size as Glasgow – a city with which it has quite a lot in common. Like Glasgow, it owes its living to the water. The mighty Rhine, which runs through the heart of town, gives it a potent maritime air. An international inland port, a place of arrival and departure, its riverside is festooned with bars and nightclubs. After dark, the narrow streets along the waterfront are awash with tipsy revellers.

I was back in town last month for the swanky reopening of the Kunstpalast, the city’s leading art gallery. Closed for three years for renovation, the dramatic rehang is like a time tunnel through the history of western art. Most of the big names in European art are here, including some gutsy German expressionists, whom you rarely see in Britain but the most remarkable exhibit is an immaculate recreation of Cream Cheese, the Düsseldorf nightclub where a local band called Kraftwerk played their first gig. On the back wall is a mural by Gerhard Richter, now one of the world’s most famous (and expensive) artists. Richter studied just across the road at Düsseldorf’s Kunstakademie, then as now one of Europe’s leading art schools. Its list of alumni includes some of the most exciting artists of the last century: Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, Andreas Gursky…

Kraftwerk’s influence has been even more far-reaching, pioneering electronic music, inspiring everyone from David Bowie to Daft Punk, from the Pet Shop Boys to Coldplay. A generation of British bands followed in their footsteps (Joy Division, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode…) and their futuristic sound crossed the Atlantic, galvanising nascent house and hip-hop bands in Chicago and Detroit. Now the wheel has come full circle: Düsseldorf now has a thriving hip-hop scene. Check the Dorf for details.

If hip-hop isn’t your thing (maybe you’re too old and square, like me) there are lots of other ways to let your hair down in Düsseldorf. The Altstadt (Old Town) is full of places where you can sample altbier, the local malty brew. Most of these bars serve decent grub – all the usual hearty Teutonic staples, the best way to line your stomach after all that beer. If you fancy something more refined, Düsseldorf has the biggest Japanese community in Germany (the third biggest in Europe, after London and Paris) and there are loads of Japanese restaurants clustered around the Hauptbahnhof (central station). I feasted on fresh sushi at Kushi-Tei of Tokyo on Immermannstrasse, washed down with a few glasses of Kirin Ichiban, a crisp Japanese lager. With 7,000 Japanese residents, no wonder locals call this area Nippon am Rhein.

Düsseldorf has always been a wealthy city, the buckle of the German rustbelt. Built on coal and steel but spared the brownfield blight of the Ruhrgebiet, it’s now become a hi-tech hub – a realisation of Kraftwerk’s prophecy in albums like Computer World. The Königsallee is the city’s smartest street, lined with designer stores (Claudia Schiffer was first spotted in a nightclub here – shades of Kraftwerk’s hit single, ‘The Model’) but unless you’ve got money to burn, Bilk is a more interesting district, full of quirky shops and cafes.

There are plenty of good places to stay. If I’m paying my own way, I like to stay at 25hours. It’s a modern high-rise hotel and from the outside it doesn’t look like much but the stylish interior is warm and welcoming. The communal areas are lively and sociable and the minimalist bedrooms are snug and cosy. I’d recommend the in-house restaurant, too. If I’m spending someone else’s money, I’ll stay at The Wellem. It calls itself a boutique hotel but in fact it’s quite the opposite – a palatial, neoclassical building, a bombastic remnant of Bismarck’s Second Reich. It’s in a great location, on the edge of the Altstadt and a short walk from the Kunstpalast.

Ironically, it was the Brits who put Düsseldorf back on the map after its destruction by the RAF. The city and its hinterland fell within the British area of occupation and since Cologne had been even more badly bombed, they established their HQ here and subsequently made Düsseldorf the capital of Nordrhein-Westfalen (North Rhine Westphalia), a new portmanteau state which became Germany’s richest and most populous region. The victorious allies imposed a federal model upon a defeated Germany and state capitals like Düsseldorf have prospered from their autonomy. It makes you wonder whether such a model might work rather well for Britain, too.

I finished my latest trip on the windswept promenade beside the Rhine, watching the huge barges chugging past – northwards to the Netherlands and southbound to Switzerland. Düsseldorf is not a pretty place but like Glasgow or Chicago, it has a restless energy which always brings me back. It’s ugly cities like these that produce great art and music. Will Bilker Bunker launch the next Kraftwerk, the next Gerhard Richter? Watch this space.

What fiction can teach us about terrorism

The first decade of this century, following Al Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September 2001, was something of a golden age for films about terrorism, a spate of them following in quick succession. In the light of Hamas’s 7 October mass-killing of innocent Israelis, it’s interesting and informative to watch one or two again – and see how the nature of terrorism changes little.

A good place to start is Antonia Bird’s The Hamburg Cell (2004), which tells the story of the terrorists who flew the planes that day and had made the west German city their base. Centre stage is the character of Ziad Jarrah – the Lebanon national who hijacked United Airlines 93 (and was ultimately forced by passengers to crash it into a Pittsburgh field). When we first meet Jarrah in Germany, he’s young, smiley and unguarded, interested in ‘cars and planes and pretty Turkish girls.’

Yet invited to a local mosque – one he starts attending regularly – Jarrah is steadily radicalised, sucked into a group of young men cut adrift by what the West has to offer. ‘There’s no God in this modern world,’ says one of them. ‘It’s brutal, it’s schizophrenic, it’s totally chaotic.’ Instead, fundamentalist Islam offers them an austere sense of belonging and its own distinct lifestyle: praying sessions in darkened rooms, endless cups of tea, Quran readings and furious debates about Jihad – leading step by step to 9/11.

Palestine – initially of little interest to him – begins to occupy a central position in Jarrah’s thoughts and is part of his radicalisation. Money is collected routinely for ‘our Palestinian brothers’ at prayer meetings, and the sufferings of the displaced are used to build a sense of grievance and routine anti-Semitism, both of which are channelled later on. Jews ‘run America,’ he’s told; cell leader Mohammed Atta, who later flew one of the planes into the World Trade Centre, remarks that whether the Holocaust happened or not is irrelevant: ‘The point is that the Jews ultimately profited from the second world war. They used the Holocaust to steal our brothers’ homeland.’ Muslims who express qualms about killing Christians or Jews are quickly expelled from the group, sometimes physically. The juggernaut is moving on without them.

As Ziad becomes more devout we also see him grow aloof, moodier, and more prone to tell lies to his (non-fundamentalist) family. He also, in his new-found self-righteousness, starts to oppress those closest to him: ‘What are you doing relaxing?’ he screams at his girlfriend. ‘Women and children are being slaughtered in Palestine!’ Increasingly he seems to inhabit a world centuries away from this one, in which violence and spiritual kitsch are dangerously mixed. Given a pep talk before 9/11, he’s told he’s about to do a ‘great, great thing’ and become like one of the ‘companions’ of antiquity. We all know how this story ends.

Another knockout film from the decade was The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008), Uli Edel’s portrait of the Red Army Faction terrorists in 1970s Germany and the mindset, the complex, which drove them. As frustrated, crusading journalist Ulrike Meinhof begins to doubt the power of her pen and turns to direct action instead, we enter, along with her, a world of homemade bombs, quotations from Chairman Mao and casual mass-murder. It’s presided over by the anti-capitalist Andreas Baader, an unstoppable force looking for immovable objects to dynamite, and his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin, no slouch with a grenade herself.

Once again, Israel and Palestine are a trope running through the film. Caring vocally about the latter is a ticket to belonging and a part of radical chic, as much a vital accessory as an Afghan coat or a poster of Che. When we first meet Ensslin at her family home, she’s furiously decrying Israel’s actions in the Six Day War. ‘It’s Israel’s right to defend itself,’ mutters her clergyman father.

‘Then Hitler’s attacks on Poland, Russia and France were defensive too,’ Ensslin snarls back at him. It’s an exchange which might have been lifted verbatim from social media this autumn. Yet some of the film’s rare light moments come from seeing how utterly incompatible the two cultures are. When the Baader-Meinhof gang travels to a Jordanian training camp, they find themselves incapable of following the rules. Baader refers to his Arab trainer as ‘Ali Baba’ and a ‘camel driver.’ The group, sunbathing naked on the roof of their barracks, bitterly offend the Muslim locals and take pride in it. ‘Queers for Palestine’ should perhaps pay attention here.  

As for Baader-Meinhof’s opponents, they’re frequently reduced by the gang to symbols – Jew, banker, high court judge or agent of imperialism – and are correspondingly easy, with a heightened sense of rectitude, to snuff out. Nor is it a fleeting phenomenon. After the suicides (executions?) of Meinhof, and with Baader and Ensslin in jail, a new generation of B-M terrorists springs up, ready to embrace ever more savage acts in their name. Fast-paced, unflinching and with a thumping soundtrack, it’s a film to leave you shaking.

This is also true of Carlos (2010), Olivier Assayas’s splendid three-part TV miniseries about Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, AKA Carlos the Jackal, a figure whose black and white image anyone over 40 can remember staring out, creepily, from 1980s newspapers. Assayas follows Carlos from the moment he joins the PFLP (the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) in 1970. Later sacked for insubordination, he hires his services out to the shadier departments of Middle Eastern governments. Far from being the architect of history he dreams himself to be, Carlos ends up, with the passing of the Cold War, washed up and useless, a burnt-out relic of history.

Until then we get the terrorist as preening popstar, surrounded by women, whose every act of violence is like the release of a new album. Leading actor Edgar Ramirez plays Carlos as narcissistic and self-deceived, a man addicted to violence and power, whose good faith may simply spring from a chronic lack of self-knowledge. Around him, Assayas manages to recreate a subculture – the freedom songs, the raised fists and Marxist bookstores, the political groupies turned on by cheap slogans, and the violence which is the logical end point of it all. We witness Carlos and his bosses work to disrupt the Palestinian peace process – ‘Arafat is a dog,’ he hisses – and see their blanket anti-Semitism. Carlos casually bombs a Jewish bank, hurls grenades into a Jewish chemist, and makes an assassination attempt on the UK chairman of Marks and Spencer. Throughout he remains, in his mind, a man of honour on the side of the oppressed, someone who wants to ‘do good’. A media-cult forms around him.

‘The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history,’ said Hegel, and Carlos convinces you that terrorism isn’t so much to do with injustice as with a character type that’s always with us, along with the human tendency to glamourise or excuse their darkest acts. ‘We are the victims,’ said Hamas spokesmen Ghazi Hamad recently, ‘therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do.’ The ‘Baader-Meinhof Complex’, safe to say, is alive and flourishing.  

Gove promises ‘Dawn will be coming’

He has served under four of the last five Tory premiers. So who better to address revellers at the ConservativeHome Christmas shindig than Michael Gove? This evening the Levelling Up Secretary took to the stage to deliver the canapé equivalent of a state of the nation address. And, in true Gove style, he began by heaping praise on his hosts. ConservativeHome, he noted, was founded in 2005 and as such has now ‘been going for more than 18 years – it’s older than many members of the House of Lords!’

Having noted the attendance of several high-profile journalists and assured the crowd that he never spoke to the denizens of Fleet Street, it was time for Gove to turn his attention to his own party and the, er, somewhat unfriendly fire that has been exchanged in recent months:

‘Conservative coalition always changes over time, but the conservative coalition that Boris has secured for us is a coalition that we need to keep in mind as we go into the next election,’ Gove warned – fitting on the night that Rishi Sunak faced his first defeat in the Commons. Never one to stay solemn for long, he quickly lightened up, concluding: ‘It will be the case that the shortest day will pass. The days will be lengthening. Dawn will be coming.’

A subtle message delivered, perhaps, in the hope his party can pull itself back together again…

Sunak loses Commons vote for first time as PM

The government has just been defeated in the Commons for the first time since Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister. It wasn’t on one of the issues Sunak and his camp fret most about: it was on compensation for victims of the contaminated blood scandal. It was close: the government lost by just four votes on an amendment to the Victims and Prisoners Bill by Labour’s Diana Johnson. The new clause passed 246 votes to 242, with 23 Conservatives backing the motion. 

Johnson was calling for the government to establish a new body chaired by a High Court judge to administer compensation for victims, and that this would be done within three months of the Bill being enacted. Compensation has been repeatedly delayed, and ministers argue that while they accept the need for compensation, they must wait for the publication of the public inquiry into the scandal before giving a proper response. 

Why didn’t enough Tories buy that argument? Johnson is a very good cross-party campaigner, and is in large part responsible for the inquiry happening at all. She had been pushing for it for years, and saw an opportunity when Theresa May was negotiating for a supply-and-confidence agreement with the DUP in 2017. The DUP signed up to a call for a public inquiry while the talks were still going on, and May agreed that one should be set up for fear it could derail her entire government. 

Sunak has tried to steer clear of any votes that derail his authority by leading to a defeat which highlights how hollow his majority is, which is why he claims to make long-term decisions while doing nothing meaningful on planning reform. This issue is not a political hot potato in the same way, and Johnson’s success in persuading Conservatives to sign and back the amendment came in part because she is well practised in making issues seem non-partisan, but also because Conservative MPs just didn’t believe that by the time the inquiry published next year, there would be much time for the government to start the compensation scheme before an election. The case for holding out had not been made properly to them.

The contaminated blood scandal began in the 1980s, but it has still not been resolved today. One of the reasons is that it has rarely been politically expedient to take action immediately: the scandal was never really explosive and political salient in the way that others have been, despite the appalling way in which the use of blood products for haemophiliacs and people receiving blood transfusions cut their lives short – and ended them in a painful and often very lonely manner. The stories of the bereaved families and living victims of the scandal at the public inquiry have been horrifying: but what also seems to have horrified enough Tory MPs tonight is that there has still not been the sense of urgency from their government to crack on with compensation for those left waiting.

Full list of Tory rebels here: Duncan Baker, Peter Bottomley, Robert Buckland, Rahman Chishti, Tracey Crouch, Kevin Foster, Marcus Fysh, Damian Green, Adam Holloway, Andrea Jenkins, Julian Lewis, Tim Loughton, Nigel Mills, Damien Moore, Anne Marie Morris, Holly Mumby-Croft, Caroline Nokes, Chloe Smith, Henry Smith, Julian Sturdy, Kelly Tolhurst, Justin Tomlinson, Robin Walker.

Tory MPs rebel over infected blood vote

It’s another bad day for Rishi Sunak. Hours after the Prime Minister discovered that he is polling worse than his short-lived predecessor Liz Truss and losing supporters to Nigel Farage’s Reform party, he has tonight had to confront a Tory rebellion. The sliver of good news for Sunak is that it has turned out to be a smaller mutiny than first thought.

23 Tory rebels, including former Welsh secretary Sir Robert Buckland, joined forces with the opposition this evening to support a Labour amendment to the Victim and Prisoners Bill – a little less than the 31 MPs who had signed the amendment before the vote. The matter concerns the contaminated blood scandal of the 70s and 80s, where tens of thousands of patients were given infected blood products. The Labour amendment to the bill, brought forward by Home Affairs Committee chair Diana Johnson, seeks to create a new body to help compensate those affected. It was agreed by 246 ayes to 242 noes.

The vote comes after shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves warned her opposite number Jeremy Hunt at the weekend that Labour would back the proposal, writing that: ‘For the victims, time matters. It is estimated that every four days, someone affected by infected blood dies.’ But despite this, the government said it wouldn’t be supporting the amendment.

Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer was sent out on the airwaves this morning defending the government’s decision – yet it wasn’t quite enough to convince everyone in her party. The small insurgence follows a weekend of negative briefings against a Prime Minister struggling to hold his party together over immigration – and tonight’s mutiny highlights the cracks elsewhere.  

Might this backbench rebellion be the first of many? Well, Mr S is certain of one thing: you won’t see the Conservatives playing happy families anytime soon…

The Tories’ migration crackdown will have many victims

The UK’s immigration system must be ‘fair, consistent, legal and sustainable’, proclaimed the new Home Secretary as he presented his ‘five-point plan’ to reduce legal migration in parliament. James Cleverly billed these changes as ‘more robust action than any government’ has taken before to reduce the headline net migration figure. 

They involve increasing the skilled worker earnings threshold from £26,200 to £38,700 from next spring; increasing the NHS surcharge (paid every time most migrants secure or renew their visa), from £624 to £1,035; ending the 20 per cent salary reduction for shortage occupations (as well as reforming and reducing the list); increasing the minimum salary for a family visa to £38,700; and a review of the graduate route that allows students to stay and work in the UK for two years after they have completed their studies, with no recourse to public funds, as they try to find a company to sponsor them long-term.

‘This package’, including the previously announced plan to crack down on health and social care workers bringing dependents, ‘will mean around 300,000 fewer people will come in future years than (came) to the UK last year’ said Cleverly – falling from a record high of net 745,000. But do these changes meet his own criteria?

Many of the government’s immigration announcements these past few weeks can hardly be described as ‘legal’ or ‘consistent’. Indeed the government’s Rwanda policy – the centerpiece of its agenda to crack down on undocumented migrants – was ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court. This has forced the government to go back to the drawing board to address the long list of both domestic and international law that stands in the way of loading some of the most oppressed people on earth onto a plane and shipping them off to Rwanda. 

Nor can today’s announcements be described as ‘consistent’. This is the third wave of Tory reforms to immigration rules since the party came to power in 2010. Cleverly’s announcements are almost a complete undoing of Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit reforms, which were designed to undo the damage Theresa May did as Home Secretary when she cracked down on non-EU migration in a bid to get numbers down.

It feels an awful lot like history repeating itself: focus is on the headline net figure (and how those numbers might impact the party electorally) which is determined to be ‘far too high’ – as voiced by Cleverly today – and ‘needs to come down’. For May and David Cameron, it was an inability to do anything about free movement from the EU that set her sights on reducing other groups as much as possible. For Cleverly and this government, it seems to be a response to their failure to tackle illegal migration. 

In both cases, it’s led to a set of changes that are laser-focused on reducing the headline rate, rather than on who the UK will be deporting and rejecting and what that means for public services. It’s also likely to lead to the same consequences: a crackdown on tax contributors and vital roles in sectors like healthcare.

Cleverly all but admitted this when he noted that the increase in the NHS surcharge would bring in £1.3 billion pounds for the NHS – that’s additional to the income tax paid by migrant workers. The Johnson reforms deliberately reformed the points-based system so the vast majority of people coming to the UK were putting more into the system than they were taking out – the exception over these past few years being the refugees fleeing places like Ukraine, Hong Kong and Afghanistan, for whom there is almost universal support.

Yet listening to Cleverly’s speech in the House today, you could easily have thought in moments the Home Secretary was talking about illegal migration. ‘When our country voted to leave the EU, we also voted to take back control of our borders’, he said, as if the UK has not been setting its own immigration policy since the start of 2020. This meant it was time for a crackdown on those who would ‘try to jump the queue and exploit our immigration system’ – one that is only counting the number of legal migrants coming to the UK. The word ‘abuse’ was bandied about over and over again, which in every usage seemed to be referring to migrants using the latest system set up under the Tories to pay their fees and secure their visa to come to Britain.

What will happen now? Today’s policy announcements will almost certainly reduce the headline figure as intended – and as was already projected to happen by the Office for Budget Responsibility, which forecast last month that net migration would balance out post-pandemic, falling substantially over the next few years. But now as a point of law, rather than organic movement, fewer graduates will be able to stay and work in the UK. Tax receipts may take a hit, as people who would have been hired into jobs between £26,200 and £38,699 will no longer qualify for a work visa. Meanwhile, many more partners are likely to remain separated, as the threshold to bring over your spouse now requires a British citizen to earn more than the median salary in the UK.

Already in the Commons there is a big debate going on about shortages in health and social care, with industry bosses in the care home sector warning that today’s move risks making the homes less viable. Cleverly has insisted that while ‘an individual with a family might be dissuaded’, single foreign healthcare workers should not be put off from coming to the UK – a point that has not wholly convinced his peers that vacancies will be filled. The Home Secretary is expecting the most recent set of welfare reforms to do a lot of the heavy lifting, referencing in his announcements the changes made in the Autumn Statement to get native Britons back into work.

All this marks yet another shift in the Tory party; more evidence of what this latest iteration of Conservatism represents. Early feedback suggests the right of the party has been satiated, with The New Conservatives’s group praising the changes, showing that ‘common sense has prevailed’. 

As that side of the party is embraced, the further the Tories drift from any sense of liberal thinking. The evidence of this drift was already there: hiking taxes and public spending to record highs, and ushering in a smoking ban for the next generation. But today perhaps solidifies it, as some of the only truly liberal, supply-side reforms implemented by the Tories since 2015 were expunged today. 

The obsession MPs and the commentariat have with the headline figure has ushered in another crackdown that will result in many of the same, destructive outcomes we saw during May’s ‘Go Home’ vans era. Once again, countless individuals will be caught up in blanket, blunt policy designed for purely political purposes.

It’s not unthinkable that policy might change again in the coming years, when the other criteria of being ‘fair’ and ‘sustainable’ also proves hollow. In the meantime, a lot of avoidable economic and social damage is about to take place.

Watch: Scottish Lib Dem leader accused of voting from the pub

It takes a lot for the Scottish Liberal Democrats to make headlines, but party leader Alex Cole-Hamilton has today gone and done it. The Lib Dem leader made a rather embarrassing gaffe when trying to vote remotely on a recent Holyrood motion, prompting calls for the politician to apologise for his ‘inappropriate’ conduct.

Absent from the Chamber, Cole-Hamilton used his phone to raise a point of order, projecting his face onto the parliament screen without quite managing to keep his background discreet. MSPs were quick to spot Cole-Hamilton in the parliament’s pub Margo’s, a mere minute’s walk away from the Chamber.

Calls of ‘shame!’ and ‘disgrace!’ from his eagle-eyed colleagues were heard in the room while the deputy presiding officer Liam McArthur looked very much less than impressed. It’s reported that one politician was overheard telling former Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie: ‘We’d have never have got that from you, Willie.’ Mr S knows the four-man band of Lib Dems are hardly a serious bunch north of the border — but surely ‘working from the pub’ is stooping to new lows?

You can watch the video here:

The chilling link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism

Isn’t it remarkable how similar anti-Zionism is to anti-Semitism? The latest proof of an intimate link between these two ideologies comes from Philadelphia. There, last night, a baying mob gathered outside a Jewish-owned restaurant to accuse the owners of being complicit in ‘genocide’. Guys, the 1930s called, they want their bigotry back.

Last night’s protest was a genuinely vile affair. Actually, ‘protest’ is far too grand a name for this kind of gathering. It was more like a mini-pogrom, the noisy harassment of a restaurant for its sin of being founded by a Jew. The restaurant is called Goldie. It is owned by Mike Solomonov, an Israeli-born, Pittsburgh-raised, award-winning chef. ‘Goldie, Goldie, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide’, the mob screamed.

It was a ‘blatant act of anti-Semitism’, said Josh Shapiro, the Democrat governor of Pennsylvania. Goldie was ‘targeted and mobbed because its owner is Jewish and Israeli’, he said, and that isn’t politics – it’s ‘hate and bigotry’ reminiscent of a ‘dark time in history’.

Absolutely. The Philly incident directly echoes horrors of the past. Jewish-owned restaurants were frequently targeted in the anti-Semitic hysteria unleashed by the Nazis in the 1930s. False rumours were spread about the ‘dirty kitchens’ of Jewish-owned restaurants. Jewish-owned businesses, including eateries, were smashed to smithereens during the calamity of Kristallnacht.

One should never rush to compare events in the present to events in the 1930s. But really, it is almost impossible to speak about what happened in Philadelphia without at least thinking about Nazi Europe. To target a restaurant solely because its owner is of Jewish and Israeli heritage is unconscionable. It is racist. It is ‘deeply anti-Semitic’, as the left-wing Philly politician Ben Waxman said.

What is most bizarre is that the Goldie-demonising mob was no doubt made up of the kind of leftish people who have spent recent years fretting that Trump is the new Hitler. People who have wrung their hands over populism and Fox News and right-wing demagoguery, denouncing it all as 1930s-style hate. And yet here they are in 2023 doing the Brownshirts proud by intimidating a Jewish-owned business.

We have seen this time and again since Hamas’s 7 October pogrom. Supposedly ‘progressive’ activists who’ve been wailing for years about ‘the return of the 1930s’ have themselves behaved like throwbacks to the 1930s.

They have minimised the fascistic horrors carried out by Hamas. They have marched alongside radical Islamists who have crowed with glee over ancient massacres of Jews. They have turned a blind eye as people have branded the Jewish state a Nazi-like entity that now does to Palestinians what Hitler once did to Jews. That’s Jew-baiting, pure and simple. It’s an attempt to denude the Jews of their moral status by likening them to the monsters that murdered their forebears. Like the Philly mini-pogrom, it is a blatant act of anti-Semitism.

The rank hypocrisy of 21st-century ‘anti-fascism’ stands exposed like never before. Self-styled anti-fascists rage against the ‘gammon’ who vote for Brexit or gender-critical feminists who dare to say they don’t want people with penises – aka men – in their private spaces.

Yet when an event takes place that really does echo the violent anti-Semitism of the 1930s, they stare at their shoes. They make excuses. Maybe those pesky, evil Israelis had it coming, they say. This week, some bright young things at Columbia University will host a teach-in on the ‘7 October counteroffensive’. Counteroffensive? I’m sorry but you’ve spelt racist pogrom wrong there.

To virtue-signalling activists, Trump is Hitler, Brexit is the 1930s, Tucker Carlson is Goebbels. But the 7 October slaughter of Israeli Jews is a ‘counteroffensive’. Targeting Jewish-owned restaurants is ‘radicalism’. Calling for a global intifada alongside literal anti-Semites is a ‘peace march’. Everything is fascism except fascism. It is doublespeak on steroids.

Surely the Philadelphia pogrom masquerading as a protest will be a wake-up call to decent people. It is clear now that the radical animus for the Jewish State is pock-marked with darker, older hatreds. From its feverish boycotting of Israeli produce and people to its apologism for literal anti-Semitic violence, the Israelophobia of the influencer left echoes the 1930s far more than anything on the right does.

If people gathering at a Jewish-owned business to scream ‘genocide’, a word that haunts and horrifies Jews, doesn’t give the ‘pro-Palestine’ elites pause for thought, nothing will. We’re about to find out just how morally lost these people are.

Six of the worst SNP sex scandals

It seems a fresh scandal is embroiling the SNP. In recent days, reports have emerged that two of the party’s politicians were so wrapped up in an extramarital affair during Covid that they disregarded their own government’s pandemic restrictions to continue it. Matt Hancock, step aside… 

The SNP has denied the rumours as ‘categorically untrue’, but reports of the illicit affair continue to dominate the news. Mr S takes a look at some of the most recent SNP sex scandals to have hit the headlines. Here are six of the worst that we can report on:

1. Love triangle

A storyline fit for the movies, this scandal began with three love-rats and ended in two broken marriages. In 2016 it emerged that Serena Cowdy, journalist for political magazine the House, had been involved with married father-of-three, SNP MP Angus MacNeil during the independence referendum campaign. Only a few months later, Cowdy moved on to another lover: deputy leader of the SNP at the time, Stewart Hosie. Hosie was also married – to SNP MSP and close friend of Nicola Sturgeon, Shona Robison. Robison ended her marriage after Hosie confessed to her in the aftermath of the 2016 Holyrood election result and since then, Cowdy and Hosie have remained together. Cowdy was elected as an SNP councillor in Angus last year and is attempting to become a nationalist MP for Arbroath and Broughty Ferry. All’s well that ends well…

2. Three-in-a-bed

MacNeil – now an independent MP after his bust-up with former SNP chief whip Brendan O’Hara – is no stranger to saucy affairs. Long before he met Cowdy, MacNeil was implicated in a three-in-the-bed sex scandal that involved two teenage musicians from the Isle of Lewis. MacNeil has since apologised for the event and described it as a ‘lapse of judgement’. The tryst damaged both his reputation and his career prospects. Before the unflattering story was broken, MacNeil was tipped as a rising star of the SNP after making the police complaint that sparked the ‘cash for honours’ sleaze scandal at Westminster. How the mighty fall…

3. Cross-party relations

The Nats haven’t always been bad at cross-party working. In fact, the SNP has form for getting into bed with the opposition: SNP MP David Linden split from his wife for Labour frontbencher Cat Smith. Smith’s first husband, who also happened to be head of digital at Labour HQ, took to Facebook to express his dismay at the affair. So much for all that talk of Red Tories, eh?

4. Costa Rican Casanova

Former SNP MSP Kenny Gibson was embroiled in scandal after he was caught eloping to Costa Rica with married SNP aide, Ellen Forson. Only weeks later, he jetted off again – to Spain, with his SNP MP wife Patricia. But this wasn’t the first time Gibson was caught red-handed. His former fiancée had spoken out previously about Gibson’s affair after she found out he’d planned a romantic break to Cyprus with, er, none other than Patricia herself. What goes around…

5. Crooked councillor

One of the more shocking incidents was when SNP councillor Jordan Linden was forced to resign from North Lanarkshire council after a teenage boy alleged Linden had sexually assaulted him. Linden also withdrew his bid to become an MP for the area after details about the alleged assault, which was said to take place at a party after Dundee’s Gay Pride celebration in 2019, emerged. The Sunday Mail subsequently reported that a number of young men, some of whom were Scottish Youth parliament members, had been propositioned. Linden, who denies the accusations, quit as a councillor earlier this year.

6. Schoolboy error

Former finance secretary Derek Mackay was suspended from the party after he was found to have had sent inappropriate messages to a 16-year-old boy. Mackay invited the schoolboy to dinner, a Scottish parliament event and also told him that he was ‘really cute’. Senior SNP figures were rattled by the revelations, expressing concerns that the messages were close to grooming. They weren’t concerned enough, apparently – as it was later reported that the Scottish government had challenged the Sun’s right to publish text messages between the politician and the young boy. More of that openness and transparency the SNP are so good at, eh?

Cleverly promises to cut migration by 300,000

‘Migration to this country is far too high and it needs to come down’, began James Cleverly at the despatch box this afternoon. It has been a difficult three weeks since his appointment as Home Secretary, with the Supreme Court’s rejection of the Rwanda scheme and then the publication of record migration numbers. It was the latter subject of legal migration that dominated this afternoon’s debate in the Commons, ahead of Cleverly’s expected visit to Kigali in the coming days.

The Home Secretary’s tone was hawkish on the subject, with repeated reference to migration being too high. That reflects a concern in his party that Rishi Sunak’s government is too blasé about the 1.2 million people who arrived in the country between June 2022 and June 2023. Following a week of briefings, Cleverly today announced a new package of measures to cut record net migration that will see the number of people moving to the UK fall by 300,000 – a reduction of around a quarter of those who entered Britain last year.

To do this, Cleverly has set out his own 'five-point' plan, that closely resembles the one put forward by the immigration minister Robert Jenrick. The salary threshold for foreign workers will be hiked from £26,200 to £38,700 in a win for right-wing Tory MPs. Those coming on health and social care visas will be exempt from the higher salary threshold but overseas care workers will no longer be allowed to bring dependants. The occupations on the 'shortage occupation list', which allows people to come to the UK on lower wages, is also being reviewed. Other measures include looking again at the graduate visa route and a hike in the immigration surcharge to £1,035.

To reach their target of 300,000 less arrivals, the Home Office is clearly targeting the dependants of care workers. According to Cleverly, some 120,000 dependants accompanied 100,000 care workers and senior care workers in the year ending this September. 'Only 25 per cent of dependants are estimated to be in work, meaning a significant number are drawing on public services and not helping to grow the economy' he told MPs. It was a line that got some cheers in the House but it remains to be seen how much of an impact it will have on social care recruitment. Similar questions can be asked about changes to graduate visas on Britain's under-funded higher-education sector.

With just over a year left in the current parliament, it remains to be seen whether the impact of today's changes will be felt before the next election. Tory MPs wanted ministers to act; the government will hope that today's statement shows that they are serious about curbing legal migration.

The real reason the Tories are getting tough on the licence fee

You know the Tories are worried about their core vote when they start talking tough on the BBC licence fee.

Rishi Sunak took time out of his Cop28 jaunt to declare that the Corporation must ‘cut its cloth appropriately’. Meanwhile, Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer is against the planned £15 increase in the fee, which comes after a two-year freeze agreed between Auntie and the government. The new hike, set for April, will reflect the 12-month average of inflation, bringing the annual cost to television viewers to £173.30. 

Frazer is concerned about any increase being ‘sustainable for families across the country’ and so she reportedly wants to use a different metric for inflation, the consumer price index as of September, which stood at 6.7 per cent. Under this calculation, the TV tax would rise by only £10.65 to a mere £169.65. Disgruntled right-wingers claim there’s no value in having the Conservatives in government, but that’s just not true. We can put a value on it: £3.65. 

No doubt this will be frustrating for conservatives who oppose any increase in the licence fee or want to see it abolished altogether. All I can advise is that they elect a critic of the BBC as leader of the Conservative party then campaign hard enough that he wins an election with an 80-seat majority. Then the licence fee’s days will be numbered. 

I snark, of course, but I snark for a reason. The licence fee is another example of pundit government, in which ministers have come to see their primary function as commentating on political controversies rather than making law and policy in response to them. This might be understandable if the government was in a minority status in the House of Commons or if the issue in question was so fundamental that acting threatened to split the party. 

But neither of those things are true. There is something fundamental going on but it’s in the Conservative philosophy of government. The party – left and right, Leave and Remain, frontbench and backbench – considers the business of government to consist of briefing journalists, tweeting concerns, complaining on GB News, and doing absolutely nothing to change things. In fairness to them, you can’t get more conservative than that. 

This government’s stance on the licence fee is a timeline of do-nothingism. Three days before the 2019 election, Boris Johnson said at a campaign event in the North East: ‘At this stage we are not planning to get rid of all TV licence fees, though I am certainly looking at it.’ Three days after the election, Treasury minister Rishi Sunak (whatever became of him?) announced a review into whether non-payment of the licence fee should continue to be a criminal offence. In February 2020, ministers launched a consultation asking the public ‘whether the government should proceed with the decriminalisation of TV licence evasion by replacing the criminal sanction with an alternative civil enforcement scheme’. 

However, in December 2020, the Daily Telegraph reported that, following the departure of licence fee reform advocates Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain, Johnson was shelving decriminalisation. One month later, ministers published their response to the consultation, declaring themselves ‘concerned that a criminal sanction for TV licence evasion is increasingly disproportionate and unfair in a modern public service broadcasting system’, but adding that they had decided to take ‘no final decision’ on decriminalisation ‘at this time’. In a broadcasting white paper published in April last year, the government repeated these concerns and added that it was ‘particularly concerned’ about licence fee prosecutions against ‘vulnerable elderly people’ and ‘the ongoing disparity in the proportion of sanctions against women’, noting that 74 per cent of all people convicted in 2019 were women. Concerned, particularly concerned, but not concerned enough to do anything.

And now that there’s the faintest chance the government might actually do something, it would involve hiking the licence fee by slightly less than the BBC would like. So while the Conservatives are worried about their core vote switching to Reform or staying home come the election, they seem to believe a difference of £3.65 will be enough to woo back voters who regard the licence fee as iniquitous and the organisation it funds institutionally hostile to conservatives and conservatism. Again, this is pundit thinking at work. ‘The Conservatives limited an inflationary rise in the licence fee’ is serviceable enough to chuck near the bottom of a lines-to-take email but it has little merit beyond that. 

Those of us who believe in the BBC despite its many flaws have allowed ourselves to become complacent and some of our rationales for the licence fee haven’t kept pace with social, technological or media consumption changes. We haven’t had to make the case for a long time, in part because, for all their huffing and puffing, the Tories have no intention of making any changes beyond the margins. We shouldn’t assume this will always be the case. As with immigration, house-building, cultural confidence and much else, the Tories’ failure to carry thorough its core voters’ wishes on the licence fee is likely to be an important fault line in the soul-searching-cum-civil-war that follows the next election. In the unlikely event that a coherent conservatism emerges from that exercise, the licence fee would be one of many issues abruptly ripped out of the SW1 consensus.

Eddie Izzard’s charm offensive backfires

If there’s one thing Eddie Izzard can’t be faulted on, it’s enthusiasm. The comedian and actor, who also self-identifies as Suzy, is standing to become the Labour candidate for Brighton Pavilion. After Green MP Caroline Lucas announced she would not be standing for election in 2024, Izzard jumped at the chance to succeed her — less than a year after attempting to stand for Sheffield Central some 230 miles away. Since then, Izzard’s self-promotion has been nothing short of relentless, ahead of the upcoming local Labour selection meeting.

Indeed Eddie is so committed to the area that Brighton will become Izzard’s ‘main home’ — but only if the constituents deign to elect the comedian as their new MP. Unfortunately Izzard’s announcement today hasn’t exactly gone down well with the local electorate, who have been making their views clear on X, formerly Twitter. One commenter replied: ‘If I’m not elected, no biggie – I’ll never come back here and I’ll mince off to any other constituency that’s desperate enough to tolerate me’. ‘Your “main home”. Truly a man of the people,’ added another. A third replied dryly: ‘You really thought this was a good thing to post, didn’t you?’ Mr S would suggest that enraging would-be constituents is something of a sub-optimal start to a selection campaign.

But then again, who knows better about winning than good old Eddie, whose past triumphs include Yes2AV, Remain, euro membership and Andy Burnham’s leadership campaign. For now at least, Izzard looks set to remain politically homeless…

Starmer has no vision. Is that a bad thing?

Keir Starmer seems to be most comfortable when he’s pointing out how badly the Tories are doing, rather than when he is setting out his own plans. This afternoon he talked about the importance of long-term decision-making, skills and supply side reform: none of which would sound out of place in a speech by Jeremy Hunt or Rishi Sunak.

The question-and-answer session afterwards was more enlightening than his speech. Starmer distanced himself not just from the Conservatives on public spending, but the Labour party too. There would be no opening of the spending taps, he said in his speech, and he further articulated this in answers afterwards, saying that having run a public service, he knew that ‘if you put more money in the top, you tend to get a better product out, but if you want a really better product, you’ve got to reform it’. Labour had been in a ‘habit’ for a long time of ‘thinking that the lever that is spend, investment, is the only lever that can ever be pulled’. He didn’t accept that. Planning reform would mean businesses could grow at the rate they wanted, and NHS reform would bring healthcare ‘closer to people in their communities’. 

But he dodged questions on whether public services would end up getting less money. Starmer insisted that ‘we are a party that always invests in our public services’, which wasn’t the same as the question of whether services would remain at the level they are at the moment or whether there was a new age of austerity. He complained that some Conservatives had briefed that ‘the King’s Speech was all about making my life difficult’, adding: ‘I don’t care which political party you support: government should never be reduced to that.’

He also all but rejected the Labour principle of redistribution when asked about it, saying that ‘of course’ he hadn’t given up on redistribution, but ‘I think it’s very important to recast the way redistribution should work’, and that it should not be the ‘one word answer for the rest of country’ outside London and the South East. He said Labour had made that ‘mistake’ in the past ‘and that lacks the basic dignity and respect that working people want, they want their economy to grow where they are, they want their place to be part of the wealth creation’. The £28 billion green investment would only happen if Labour got the growth it wanted and the money was within the fiscal rules. He emphasised the importance of the ‘three to one ratio’ whereby every £1 of public money triggered £3 of private investment. 

Oh, and he rejected Margaret Thatcher’s politics, for those Labourites who’ve spent the weekend down a weird rabbit hole in which they’ve wondered if their leader actually secretly wants to roll back the frontiers of the state since he pointed out that the late Conservative prime minister had achieved a lot. He clarified the point he had been making in the Sunday Telegraph, saying: ‘Thatcher, now of course it doesn’t mean I agree with what she did, but you don’t have to agree with someone to recognise they had a vision and a plan, in her particular case about entrepreneurship.’ But even though he has been studying Thatcher (and Attlee and Blair, who he also named), he hasn’t quite got into the habit of setting out his particular purpose for himself.

Starmer offers a heavy dose of the big state

Keir Starmer wants to set expectations early. Speaking at the Resolution Foundation’s economy conference later today, the opposition leader used his speech to emphasise just how little scope he’d have at the start of any Labour government to splash the cash. His party will not ‘turn on the spending taps’, he told an audience of economists and policy analysts. Anyone expecting them to do so is ‘going to be disappointed.’ The speech seemed to deliberately echo the infamous ‘I’m afraid there is no money’ note left for the incoming Tory government by a Labour minister. 

Starmer responded to the spending trap laid out in the Autumn Statement last month: where Chancellor Jeremy Hunt used almost all his fiscal headroom to cut taxes rather than boost public sector spending. As a result, the Office for Budget Responsibility has forecast a £19 billion hole, as inflation has – and continues – to strip departments of their spending power.

The government’s defence of this spending hole is that it thinks it can be filled with productivity gains rather than additional cash, with Hunt promising back in October to aim for 0.5 per cent gains in the public sector, which would translate into billions of pounds saved. Starmer addressed this too, insisting that ‘raising Britain’s productivity growth’ would become ‘an obsession’ of his party.  

‘Having wealth creation as your number one priority, that’s not always been the Labour party’s comfort zone’, he noted, in another bid to push Labour’s more moderate economic credentials. But productivity gains weren’t his only answer. He also had an accusation to dish out: that the Tory ‘record over the past 13 years will constrain what a future Labour government can do’.

In other words, any perceived austerity taking place under a Labour government, Starmer wants to pin on his predecessors. He’d be inheriting an economy, he is set to claim, ‘worse than the 1970s, worse than the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s, and worse even than the great crash of 2008’.

But will voters agree that Labour’s hands are completely tied? Starmer and his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves could, in theory, find more cash if they were to reverse the tax cuts announced last month, or usher in new ones. This is exactly where the Tories were hoping to apply pressure ahead of an election: forcing Labour to make clear what action it would take to find more money for public services.

It seems, for now, Starmer doesn’t plan to take the bait, and instead will point the blame back at those currently in charge. It could work for some time. But even under the projected spending crunch, public sector net debt is still steadily increasing, expected to reach £3 trillion by the end of the decade. 

Furthermore, Starmer couldn’t help but introduce a big dose of interventionism, spelling out slightly more what Reeves’s ‘securonomics’ agenda includes. So far, it seems to mean a lot more state interference in the economy. Starmer said that ‘government can and must shape the mission…shape the markets’, with bigger industrial strategies, to reshape the economy to ‘better serve working people.’ It’s the kind of vague language that can put workers and businesses on their guard, who, through experience, have come to doubt descriptions of the state as a ‘careful steward’, as Starmer described it today.

With Whitehall already collecting more tax receipts and spending more money than ever before, Stamer is likely to come across similar questions being put to the Tories right now, especially given his zest for growing the size of the state: where exactly is the money going to come from, and why are taxpayers getting less and less for their growing contributions? 

Sunak to unveil new measures on legal migration

Rishi Sunak has had a bad start to the week, with the latest ConservativeHome cabinet league table placing him at the very bottom at minus 25.4, just below his Chancellor Jeremy Hunt. Now, the Prime Minister is hoping to move his government onto firmer ground with a package of measures aimed at reducing legal migration. Sunak has been under renewed pressure to act since new figures showed that net migration reached a record high of 745,000 in 2022. Given the Tories promised to reduce overall levels of migration in the party’s 2019 manifesto, they are some way off delivering their pledge.

When the Home Secretary addresses the Commons later, the measures will include raising the minimum salary threshold for a skilled worker visa from the current level of £26,200. This could potentially be raised to over £38,000. Also expected to feature are the number of dependants migrants can bring to the UK (including students) as well as a tightening of visas for healthcare workers. Ministers under-estimated how many health workers would use these visas when they were first brought in.

I understand that the measures bear a close resemblance to the five-point plan Robert Jenrick has been arguing in favour of behind the scenes – the Home Office minister has won praise from the right of the party over his push for tighter measures. Jenrick met with Sunak on Wednesday to discuss the potential plans. The idea is the package will reduce net migration by around 300,000.

Of course, when the measures are unveiled, they will be compared with the policies Cleverly’s predecessor Suella Braverman has called for. But the other question will be: when will there be an impact? The concern among Tory MPs is that even if the measures are the right ones, they may not bring down the figures sufficiently by the time of the next election. It’s why another important response will be Labour’s. Keir Starmer has talked tough on migration of late while his shadow minister has said the party would want to bring down the figures to a couple of hundred thousand. So, will Starmer commit to keeping the Tory clampdown in place under a Labour government?

Union hosts festive bash after derailing commuters

Merry Christmas to the rail unions – they strike quicker than Harry Kane. On Friday, the Aslef union began a week of industrial action and reduced service, ruining Christmas parties across the nation. But like the good trade unionists that they are, Aslef boss Mick Whelan made sure that his own union’s party plans were unaffected by the service, hosting a 100-strong, full-trimmings bash at the four-star Earl of Doncaster hotel. So much for solidarity….

Whelan was featured in the Sun this morning, sharing a festive cracker with Labour MP Kate Osborne who on social media later praised her union ‘comrades’ and celebrating the ‘womderfully [sic] Christmas venue.’ Good night was it, Kate? In a sniffy comment the union claimed its shindig could not be considered a party on the grounds that ‘there was no music, no disco, no karaoke, and no dancing.’ With lines like that, maybe they ought to get a job in the Downing Street press office?

The public on the other hand may be a little less, er, enthusiastic about the timing of the bash. Support for striking rail workers has remained low all year: in March, only 32 per cent of people were sympathetic to striking train workers, compared to 58 per cent supporting ambulance drivers. And support has stagnated at only 36 per cent across separate polls in July and September.

It isn’t just commuters who have been left fuming at this week’s strikes: members of other unions aren’t much impressed either. Fully qualified train drivers can earn upwards of £65,000 — a rather lot more than nurses, who have expressed frustration at the latest round of industrial action. One deflated carer earning less than £400 a week told the Sun: ‘We work 12-hour shifts, all year round. I look at these striking drivers and think: “Spend a day in my shoes.” They’d never moan about money again.’ 

Hardly the workers united, eh?

Starmer risks a backlash with his Thatcher praise

Two Telegraph stories in successive days illustrate Labour’s dilemma. Today the paper gives a favourable write-up to the party’s Australian-style scheme for AI to analyse hospital scans. It comes after the Sunday edition yesterday splashed Keir Starmer’s praise for Margaret Thatcher – a tactic they have previously deployed in the same paper to great success. Alongside warm words for Tony Blair and Clement Attlee, Starmer wrote that the Tory premier effected ‘meaningful change’ in the UK as she ‘sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism.’

Both stories are positive for Labour, making use of the opposition’s relatively-few tools to try to dominate the news agenda. The key difference between the two though is the sums involved. Streeting’s vision costs money – £1 billion according to former health minister Neil O’Brien. But Starmer’s praise for Thatcher was a fiscally-free way of appealing for Tory votes, at a time when ‘there is no money left’.

The ‘cost’ of Starmer’s article instead comes in the form of a backlash from parts of the Labour party. A typical reaction was from Liverpool MP Ian Byrne, a member of the Socialist Campaign Group, who posted on Twitter/X: ‘Inequality, hunger, destitution & misery. That’s the real legacy left by Thatcher.’ Kim Johnson, who also sits for a Liverpool seat, added: ‘Margaret Thatcher did nothing for working class communities in Liverpool and across the country: destroyed industries, attacked trade unionists, privatised our core industries.’

The SNP have been quick to try to exploit a division between Labour’s Scottish and Westminster leaders, with Stephen Flynn writing an open letter to Anas Sarwar, urging him to distance himself from Starmer. It’s not just the usual critics too, with John McTernan, the former Blair advisor and vocal supporter of much of Starmer’s agenda, opining in the Guardian that the move ‘wins over no wavering voters but risks losing the goodwill of a wide range of his supporters, old and new.’

References to Thatcher instinctively conjure up images of City boys, mounted policeman and Union Jacks in the South Atlantic. But more instructive for Starmer’s team is the often-overlooked opposition leader of the late 1970s, who led her party back to power. His article was much more qualified in its praise for the Iron Lady than his critics might like to pretend. Rather than praise privatisation or pit closures, Starmer instead noted Thatcher’s success in enacting a transformative agenda – an objectively true statement, regardless of whether agrees with her policies or not.

Like most leaders who seek to change their party, Sir Keir is likely to get the benefit of the doubt from sceptical members for as long as he leads in the polls. Currently, they point to him following in the footsteps of Thatcher, Attlee and Blair in being a successful Leader of the Opposition – namely one who led his party into the promised land of government.

How China weaponises its cuddly giant pandas

So Yang Guang and Tian Tian are on their way back to China. Rather like a pair of high-profile celebrities, the giant pandas travelled in convoy to Edinburgh airport this morning, with every detail of their last days in the UK scrutinised in dewy-eyed detail.

They’re not travelling business class, not quite, but they do have specially constructed metal crates apparently complete with sliding padlock doors, bespoke pee trays and removable screens so the keepers accompanying them can check on them during the flight. ‘I think they’ll be fine. I’m sure they’ll have a safe journey,’ said Rab Clark, the zoo’s blacksmith, who built the crates.

The duo were the last remaining giant pandas in the UK and had been at Edinburgh zoo for 12 years, two years longer than planned because of the pandemic. They were enormously popular, with a rush to see them in the weeks before they left. The precise time of their departure was kept secret until the last moment to reduce the chance of disruption from crowds of well-wishers or protest groups.

There is something adorable, almost intoxicating, about giant pandas – and especially about panda cubs. Breakfast television presenters the world over drool and coo from their sofas at the sight of them; politicians and celebrities compete to be photographed alongside them. I was once told during a visit to a panda research station in China’s Sichuan province (while shooting a report for a breakfast television show, of course) that they trigger the same neural reaction in us as the sight of human babies. Perhaps, but giant pandas are also cold and calculating instruments of Chinese diplomacy. Beijing has long treated them as envoys to countries deemed to be friends or to those with whom it is seeking influence. That is why Yang Guang and Tian Tian are the last giant pandas in the UK – relations with Beijing are not so great right now.

For the same reason, America is down to just four, all at Atlanta zoo; the national zoo in Washington returned its three last month. Xi Jinping did suggest though during his visit to San Francisco in November that more might be on the way – if America behaves itself. He called the pandas ‘envoys of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples,’ telling business leaders, ‘We are ready to continue our cooperation with the United States on panda conservation and do our best to meet the wishes of the Californians so as to deepen the friendly ties between our two peoples.’

China is the only place in the world where giant pandas live in the wild. There are thought to be a little under 2,000 left, mostly in the mountainous areas of Sichuan province, in China’s south-west. But to describe the doling out of pandas to foreign zoos as conservation is a bit of stretch. Those which are lent overseas are bred at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, a sprawling facility outside the provincial capital. Critics have accused China of neglecting conservation and the panda’s dwindling forest habitat, and instead breeding them solely for politics, prestige and profit.

China has a monopoly on giant panda production. The pandas in Edinburgh zoo, as with every other foreign zoo that hosts them, are rented from China. Zoos typically pay between $500,000 (£400,000) and a million dollars (£800,000) a year for the bears, which must be returned after an agreed period, together with any cubs they produce. Since the 1950s, China has strategically placed scores of giant pandas in countries around the world. In 1972, a pair of giant pandas were famously loaned to the national zoo in Washington as a symbol of rapprochement between Beijing and Richard Nixon’s America. These days, Xi Jinping is said to personally approve the placement of every panda.

When panda twins were born at Berlin zoo in 2019, a local newspaper asked its readers to suggest names. The most popular, according to Der Tagesspiegel, were ‘Hong’ and ‘Kong’, an apparent vote of support for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests. The zoo, Germany’s oldest and most respected, instead named them Meng Xiang and Meng Yuan, which translate roughly as ‘long-awaited dream’ and ‘dream come true’. In reality, the zoo had little choice but to ignore the newspaper if it wanted to keep the pandas. The twins were expected to be a magnet for visitors. Their parents were already the zoo’s most popular attraction, presented to Germany by China in 2017. Xi Jinping and Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, were there for the handover, with Merkel calling the giant pandas special ambassadors between the two countries and speaking of a ‘new beginning’ in relations.

‘Panda diplomacy’ has been very successful. Arguably the giant panda, which China calls its ‘national treasure’, is the country’s most successful export. Forget about smartphones and toys, they cannot compete with those cuddly instruments of what diplomats call ‘soft power’. Pandas are made for it – quite literally in the case of China’s panda production system. Across the world, politicians as well as ordinary people have been wooed by their weaponised adorability. And why not? Influence is central to diplomacy. But those who work with pandas will remind you that behind that cuddly façade, they have sharp claws and can be extremely vicious.

France isn’t buying Macron’s excuses after the Eiffel Tower attack

There was more bloodshed in Paris this weekend, this time involving a man who, prosecutors claim, had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (IS). A German tourist was killed as he strolled close to the Eiffel Tower with his wife during the attack on Saturday evening. Two other passers-by, including a Briton, were wounded by the assailant, who French interior minister Gerald Darmanin said shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ranted about Muslims dying in Afghanistan and Palestine as he launched his deadly assault. Police used a stun gun to stop the man who is being questioned by anti-terror police.

France is supposed to be on high alert following the outbreak of war in the Middle East, but there are mounting questions about how this attack was not prevented. The alleged killer had served four years in prison for planning a radical Islamist attack before being released in 2020 and placed under judicial supervision. This monitoring ended earlier this year, according to a report in Le Figaro, although the man was still subject to what is known as an ‘Individual Administrative Control and Surveillance Measure’, which is run by the interior ministry. 

This system has clearly failed, just as it failed in the case of the Islamist terrorist who killed Dominique Bernard, the Arras schoolteacher. So far, the reaction from Macron’s government has been characteristically feeble. Prime minister Elisabeth Borne tweeted that France ‘will cede nothing in the face of terrorism. Never’. After the death of Bernard, Borne had vowed that France ‘will not give in to violence, we will confront it and we will fight it’. 

These are trite and meaningless words, and the French are no longer fooled. They know their government is weak and impotent, as is its judiciary. A poll last week revealed that half of people have lost faith in the justice system, mostly because of weak sentencing that allows violent criminals and extremists to roam the streets.  

The head of the French judiciary, Éric Dupond-Moretti, the minister of justice, was himself in court last month to answer a charge of a conflict of interest. He was acquitted, but in many European nations the mere fact that its justice minister was in court would prompt his resignation or dismissal. Not in Emmanuel Macron’s France, where ministers very rarely take responsibility for their monumental and unacceptable errors. Certainly not Darmanin, who came to the attention of Britain in May 2022 when he wrongly blamed Liverpool football fans for causing trouble at the Stade de France during the Champions League final. In fact, Liverpool fans were the victims of violence inflicted by local gangs; a subsequent inquiry by the French senate strongly criticised Darmanin’s conduct. Far from being punished by Macron, Darmanin was rewarded with an extra ministerial portfolio. 

In response to Saturday night’s attack, Jordan Bardella, the president of the National Rally, claimed that ‘Darmanin’s failure to protect the French people has led to these tragedies and deaths’. But it is not just French people who have been failed by the Republic’s incompetency, as Saturday night’s tragedy demonstrated. And nor is France alone in failing to keep its citizens safe.

Six weeks ago, a Tunisian man living in Belgium shot dead two Swedish footballers in Brussels in the name of IS. It was subsequently revealed Abdesalem Lassoued should not have been in Belgium. The 45-year-old had a lengthy criminal record in his native country and the Tunisians had requested his extradition in August 2022; this request had not been acted upon by Belgium and, as a result, two Swedes lost their lives.  

Four days after the attack, Belgium’s justice minister, Vincent Van Quickenborne, resigned because of what he admitted was a ‘monumental and unacceptable error with dramatic consequences’. Van Quickenborne had the good grace to quit – but in France those in charge rarely face the consequences.

The atrocity in Brussels was committed the week after Dominique Bernard was stabbed to death outside his school in Arras. When it was disclosed that the assailant had been on an extremist watchlist, Macron reportedly ordered a re-examination of all the extremists under surveillance. But no one was sacked or felt obliged to resign for the errors that had resulted in the death of Dominique Bernard. Will any heads roll for this latest – to paraphrase Vincent Van Quickenborne – ‘monumental and unacceptable error’? 

Saturday’s was another symbolic attack, perpetrated at France’s most iconic landmark, committed 236 days before Paris hosts the Olympic Games. Macron’s long-standing dream is to use the Olympic Games to show off himself and his country, but with violence and lawlessness rampant in France that dream is turning into a nightmare. 

Why the world loves Margaret Thatcher

There are many rituals surrounding the placement of a new Japanese Emperor on the Chrysanthemum Throne. Perhaps the most peculiar is the would-be emperor’s encounter with aquasi-sacred, 1300-year-old bronze mirror, the Yata no Kagami. This object, which embodies ‘wisdom’, is so enigmatic the aspirant emperor isn’t even allowed to see it; instead, functionaries are sent to assure the mirror of the new emperor’s fidelity. Some historians believe the mirror no longer exists, and was lost in a fire in Honshu’s Ise Shrine, 980 years ago.

Thus it is with Labour leaders and Margaret Thatcher. Ever since the departure of the Iron Lady, aspiring or actual Labour prime ministers have made obeisance to the strange, overpowering ghost of British politics, years after her retirement and death, when her continued omnipresence is therefore a kind of Zen mystery.

Tony Blair, as ever, got in his fealty precociously early. As a young Labour frontbencher, he expressed his high regard for her election winning clarity, and her stance as ‘a moderniser against outdated collectivism’. As he said: ‘she goes right to the heart.’

Gordon Brown was more begrudging. Nonetheless, when he became PM in 2007 he described her as a ‘conviction politician’ who ‘saw the need for change’; he also invited her for tea at Number 10. Likewise, in 2014, then leader of the opposition Ed Miliband signalled his admiration for Baroness Thatcher’s ‘sense of purpose’, which enabled her to make crucial ‘public service reforms’. And now, of course, we have Sir Keir Starmer, who wrote and spoke, yesterday, of his respect for her ‘driving mission’ and his awe at the way ‘she sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism’.

Indeed, the one Labour leader who has not performed this ritualised, kowtowing abasement before the mirror of Maggie’s soul is Jeremy Corbyn. And where is he now? Virtually thrown out of the party in disgrace, after delivering Labour’s worst defeat in eight decades. You can see, therefore, why superstitious Labour leaders feel a need to genuflect before the fearsome totem of La Thatch.

All of which would be funny, yet parochial, if this was merely a British phenomenon. But it isn’t. I first personally realised that Mrs Thatcher was a planet-wide icon in Egypt in the late 1980s. Barely out of my teens, I climbed in a taxi in Cairo, discovered the driver was garrulous and good at English – then I heard a paean of praise for Margaret Thatcher.

‘Great woman!’ the driver kept saying, slapping his steering wheel with unsettling enthusiasm, ‘Great woman! She is strong leader, very good for England!’ Somehow the mythos of the Iron Lady was already reaching the patriarchal backstreets of Egypt.

Since then – it seems to me – the power of her legend has only grown. As with the Japanese imperial regalia, her putative non-existence has not reduced her potency. It may even be adding to it.

She is, of course, extremely popular on the contemporary right. Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD, the alt.right party surging up the polls in Germany, regularly declares Thatcher to be her ‘role model’. Geert Wilders, leader of Holland’s most popular party, the PVV, has used very similar but even more enthusiastic words, claiming Thatcher is his ‘greatest political role model’. 

Another right-wing populist, Donald Trump, is said to see Margaret Thatcher as his true political inspiration (according to Trump’s guru Steve Bannon). Indeed, profound respect for Thatcher is almost obligatory in the Republican Party; the GOP candidate most likely to replace Trump (should he stumble) is Nikki Haley: she is an avowed fan of Thatcher, and directly quoted Britain’s first female PM in a Republican debate a few weeks back (‘if you want something done: ask a woman’). Meanwhile, down in Argentina, yes Argentina, their new leader, Javier Milei recently said, of the Falklands victor: ‘she is one of the greatest leaders in the history of humanity’. 

Nor is this reverence restricted to right-wing westerners or Latin American mavericks. When Thatcher died in 2013, Barack Obama claimed the ‘world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty’. At the same time, the EU’s Jose Barroso described her as ‘a great stateswoman’, Mikhail Gorbachev honoured her as a ‘great politician’, Israel’s Shimon Peres called her ‘exceptional’, Irish PM Enda Kenny hailed as ‘a formidable political leader’, and ex Polish president Lech Walesa called her simply a ‘great person’.

Most piquantly, Vladimir Putin has described Thatcher as a ‘brilliant political figure’, this despite Thatcher – rather presciently – saying in 2000 that she looked in Putin’s eyes and ‘could not find a trace of humanity’.

One of my favourite examples of Thatcherphilia comes from an obscure socialist British academic named Michel Brown. He was working in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, and faced constant toasts in praise of the Blessed Margaret. Eventually he objected, and – as he writes – ‘their reaction [to my objections] was usually utter incomprehension and bafflement. “Who doesn’t like Thatcher?”‘

Another, better known example is Yanis Varoufakis, the firebrand far-left Greek ex-finance minister. He actually spent half his early life opposing Thatcher’s UK reforms, when he studied and worked in Britain. He went to multiple marches, shouting ‘Maggie Maggie, Maggie, Out Out Out’. By 2016, at the Hay Festival, he admitted he had come to admire much about her character.

It is quite a global legacy. Only Churchill really compares in modern British politics, and arguably even Churchill – with his complex luggage of imperialism – does not get the unstinting praise afforded to Mrs T.

What, therefore, is going on? It seems to me multiple things are at work. For any female politician, Thatcher is an obvious role model. For any democratic leader – an Obama or a Blair – she is an example of gritty determination that wins elections. For any nationalist – a Putin or a Pinochet – she is an inspiring patriot (and war winner). For any leader with a tough economic job – like Starmer, or Milei – she is an example of how you can turn a country around against the odds, given sufficient conviction.

There is also, of course, the possibility that she now occupies a more religious space in our minds: genuinely closer to the Yata no Kagami. In that respect, Margaret Thatcher is akin to a modern-day King Arthur. She is not dead, she merely sleeps, under the Royal Hospital at Chelsea, awaiting the moment when she must return: Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus. At some point, at the very nadir of British history, when we are at maximum peril, the sharp midwinter light will strike her sleeping eyes, and she will blink awake, and return to lead us out of danger. In which case, looking about me, I do wish she’d get a move on.