Leuven: Belgium’s most underrated city

From the vertiginous belltower of Leuven’s university library, you get a great view across the mottled rooftops of Belgium’s most underrated city. Leuven isn’t swarming with sightseers, like Bruges. It isn’t choked with commuter traffic, like Brussels. It’s lively and compact, ideal for a weekend away – so why have most British travellers never even heard of it? Search me. I’ve just spent three days here and I had a great time. I can’t wait to go again.

One of the best things about Leuven is, it’s so easy to get here: two hours via Eurostar from London St Pancras to Brussels, and then a local train to Leuven from the same station. Trains leave every ten minutes at peak times and take around half an hour. Eurostar’s Any Belgian Station ticket (from £51 each way) covers both legs of the journey, saving you the hassle of buying another ticket when you change trains at Brussels Midi.

I first came to Leuven seven years ago, to see an exhibition about Thomas More’s Utopia. More’s strange, beguiling fantasy, his prophetic vision of an ideal society, was first published here, in 1516, and in 2016 Leuven’s main museum, M Leuven, mounted a fascinating show to mark the book’s 500th birthday. But for me, the main attraction was the city itself.

More’s Sci-Fi yarn was launched here, rather than in his native England, because Leuven, then as now, was the seat of one of Europe’s leading universities – the adopted home of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the greatest thinker of his age. Erasmus was good friends with More, and when he offered to publish Utopia in (relatively) liberal Leuven, the future Lord Chancellor and Catholic martyr was happy to oblige (it wasn’t printed in England until 1551, long after Sir Thomas – latterly Saint Thomas – got his head chopped off).

Seven years on, I’m back in Leuven for another exhibition, devoted to the 15th Century painter Dieric Bouts, who spent most of his life here. Dieric who? Precisely. Bouts was a leading member of the so-called ‘Flemish Primitives’, whose astute, accomplished paintings dragged Northern European art out of the Dark Ages and into the light of the Renaissance. Although he’s revered by art historians, Bouts is little known beyond Belgium. This colourful, enjoyable show, with its gory depictions of tortured saints and gleeful sadistic demons, confirms what a powerful artist he was. The Bouts revival starts here.

Bouts’ greatest painting, The Last Supper, usually has pride of place in Sint Pieterskerk, Leuven’s ethereal cathedral – an exquisite example of late gothic architecture, a haven of peaceful contemplation amid the urban bustle. Across the cobbled square is the Stadhuis, Leuven’s opulent town hall, an ornate relic of the city’s mercantile heyday during the Middle Ages, when it was the biggest conurbation in Burgundy, a wealthy hub of the wool trade.

The medieval city centre remained more or less intact until the First World War, when much of it was burnt down by the Kaiser’s army, including the university library and much of its precious collection – a cultural atrocity which shocked the world. Rebuilt between the wars, only to be burnt again during the Nazi occupation, it was rebuilt once more after the Second World War – an inspiring symbol of the triumph of learning over barbarism.

Leuven is a city on a human scale, a pleasant place to wander. It’s not uniformly beautiful, like Bruges, but amid the bland modern buildings are numerous clusters of medieval architecture, wonderfully bereft of tourists. Hidden down a sleepy sidestreet, Martin’s Klooster is an antique villa, 500 years old, once the home of Guy Morillon, secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Today it’s a smart hotel, yet though the building is palatial, the house style is refreshingly informal. The rooms are suave and understated, and the service is friendly and relaxed.

Eating out is always a pleasure in Flanders, particularly here in Leuven, where the standard seems especially high. Last time I came here, I had a delicious dinner in one of Leuven’s best restaurants, Land aan de Overkant. Returning seven years later, I was glad to find the quality was just as good. This time, in honour of Dieric Bouts (or Derek, as I prefer to call him), they’d laid on a medieval menu. No potatoes, tomatoes or peppers, but lots of spices from the Holy Land, brought back by the Crusaders: ginger, cloves and cumin, saffron and cinnamon.

Leuven’s most famous export is Stella Artois, beloved by countless thirsty Brits, like me. Real ale snobs tend to be rather snooty about this mass-produced brew, preferring the dark, malty beers which are more synonymous with Belgium, but I’ve always been a fan of this crisp, unpretentious lager, and it’s a thrill to find it here on draught, in bars all over town. Does Stella actually taste any better on tap, in the city where it’s been brewed for the last century? I like to think so, but maybe that’s the beer talking.

You can visit the modern brewery, on the edge of town, but an even bigger treat is a trip to the original brewery, in a hip, up-and-coming, post-industrial district, which has been tastefully converted into a groovy events space called De Hoorn. The in-house restaurant dishes up hearty, tasty grub in a huge, cavernous hall filled with trestle tables – terrific fun.

I finished my latest trip to Leuven back where I began, at the university library, desecrated in both world wars, now a place of scholarship again. I’d come to see an exhibition called (Un)Chained Knowledge, about fake news and censorship during Dieric Bouts’ lifetime. I was intrigued to see how censors blotted out the naughty bits in biblical illustrations and scratched out whole passages by Erasmus – far too progressive for their tastes.

With the invention of movable type transforming printing and publishing, Leuven in the age of Bouts was the Silicon Valley of its day. This information revolution facilitated the Reformation, igniting centuries of bloody conflict. It made me wonder where our current information revolution will lead.

I left this exhibition full of gloom, brooding about impending Armageddon, but on my way out I saw something that lifted my spirits and sent me home hopeful for the future. I tiptoed into the great reading room of this august library, lovingly restored twice over, after its destruction in those twin infernos, and found it full of silent students – reading, writing, lost in thought. For these young men and women, the two world wars are ancient history, as remote as the dynastic wars which ravaged Flanders in the Middle Ages. Today Leuven’s university is the city’s economic driver, and its big student population gives it a youthful buzz, saving it from genteel atrophy. Perhaps the pen really is mightier than the sword, after all.

I’m sick of streaming. Films were better on Blu-ray

The digital world, I’m realising, is a bit of a racket. Recently most of my iTunes library disappeared from my iPhone, and I just don’t know if I can be bothered to go through all the different hoops, portals, queueing systems and long forgotten passwords to get them back again. I’ve also had the repeated experience of trying to view a film I’ve downloaded on Amazon, only to get that little square in the middle of the screen telling me that the player’s having issues at the moment, and would I, could I try again later? Meanwhile, the CDs and DVDs reproach me from my shelves like an abandoned spouse. ‘We were once your rock,’ they remind me, ‘And you traded us for tech-tinsel, a piece of cyber-skirt. How are you feeling now?’

I feel what I’ve always felt – that DVDs and Blu-rays were the summit of the film-lovers’ experience, and that progress should have stopped forever after that. Perhaps downloads or streamable films can have the picture quality of a Blu-ray (someone will doubtless tell me they do), but works of art should produce an artefact, something you can hold in your hand and own. 

I get pleasure from looking at the DVDs and Blu-rays on my shelf – like books, but much less daunting – and the special extras are something to behold. The Blu-ray of 24 Hour Party People has different commentaries by lead actor Steve Coogan and the late Tony Wilson, the TV presenter and club-runner the film’s about. Taxi Driver had voiceovers by Scorsese and Paul Schrader, and The Red Shoes, though low on commentaries, was as ravishing on Blu-ray as anything I’ve ever seen. Recently I bought Tár (the year’s best movie) and there was something delightful about taking the plastic wrapper of this masterpiece and possessing it in its highest quality form.

But whatever the logic of buying these things, I know it marks me out as a period piece. My daughter, when she’s of an age, will cast the same cold eye on my Blu-rays as I did on my grandparents’ 78 records, their talk of ‘gramophones’ and ‘wirelesses.’ There is something automatically chafing about older people who don’t keep up with technology, who carry on writing cheques long after the instant bank transfer has become a thing or send things in the post when email will do the job in seconds. It will be the same with my spinning silver discs.

So I foresee a future in which I will have to lead a double life – keeping abreast of every tedious innovation for show while clinging to the old ways of doing things in private. I cannot muster any enthusiasm for the host of new screening services or music sites. My sister, a recent convert to Spotify, tells me it’s ‘more, much more’ than I could possibly imagine, that it puts together libraries and playlists and offers you different versions of songs and anticipates your future needs. I can’t help feeling I have a brain, a set of tastes and a memory to do this for myself. I get that, in a time of housing crisis, anything that remains in a cloud rather than at large is probably desirable – I’ve certainly been grateful to ditch many of my books – but when it comes to films and music, it’s something I don’t desire at all. Their shiny, colourful spines do so furnish a room.

So my Blu-ray collecting goes on, but it’s strictly finite. I don’t want any film I don’t actually love (this rules out the collected Tarkovsky or Bergman, things I’d like to think of myself as liking rather than actually wanting to watch). My ambitions in fact are modest: the middle period works of Woody Allen (they’re about £25 a piece and should be), the odd Hollywood classic (the more technicolour the better) and some of those gritty 1960s northern films (the kind Morrissey purloined for his album covers) starring Tom Courtenay and Rita Tushingham. Then, barring the odd hiccup, I’m done.  

Perhaps then I can put my energies into learning about this wonderful new world of streaming sites, of RuTrackers and torrents and things that will doubtless be superseded as soon as I’m on top of them. Regarding online services, I suspect I’m like a lot of people of my age. I couldn’t live without YouTube. I’m delighted I can buy tickets online and that I don’t need to pay £2 per minute to speak to someone abroad. I’m also irritated I can’t book top-up driving lessons without using a special app (the instructor lives opposite me, for God’s sake, I see him in the fish and chip shop) and that I need to remember a range of passwords to do the most basic things. It has made life both easier and much, much more agitating. Meanwhile, there are the Stephen Frys among us, who jog along excitedly ahead of the cutting edge, going into raptures over every new development, who will doubtless remain au fait with it till they die. ‘Don’t worry,’ one imagines him wheezing lovingly in his husband’s arms before breathing his last. ‘There’s a special new cremation app on my iPad 27.’

I’m also aware that with the rise of computers human beings have had to become more machine-like to compete with them – that there are a whole range of behaviours now deemed ‘inappropriate’ or ‘unacceptable’ or simply too messily human to survive much longer when they can be circumvented with a couple of clicks. ‘The Lenovo Special Dogsbody doesn’t come back after lunch with beer on its breath,’ you imagine HR managers saying beadily to someone they’re laying off. ‘It doesn’t clear its throat noisily or weep at the desk over its recent divorce. Please tell me why I shouldn’t use the Lenovo Special Dogsbody instead of you.’

As someone who, along with that Blu-ray collection, possesses a floor-length mirror, I know exactly how that HR manager feels.

What’s more trendy than space travel? Banning it

In bedrooms across the country, women are wearing £145 sexy silk chemises emblazoned with jewels spelling out the words ‘Ban Space Travel’.

This isn’t just a bit tacky or part of a new kink. It’s a sign of growing cynicism around space exploration. (Another item in the same collection, sold by luxury underwear company Bluebella, casually calls for ‘world peace,’ as though the two issues are akin.)

Bluebella’s CEO Emily Bendell says the garment, designed by Ashish Gupta, is a ‘cultural statement’. ‘With so many problems here on earth, we have to hold billionaires focused on space exploration to account,’ she says. It is unclear exactly how much holding to account exactly lace-trimmed camisoles can do.

But this movement goes far beyond the bedroom. Prince William, for instance, expressed a similar sentiment when he said great brains should be ‘trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live.’

Meanwhile, a 20,000-participant-strong report conducted by satellite provider Inmarsat found that only 23 per cent of people feel space exploration is ‘important,’ with younger generations feeling particularly concerned about its environmental impact.

Professor Anu Ojha, who is the director of championing space at the UK Space Agency, gives a wry chuckle at the underwear. He says it shows only that experts need to do better at communicating the benefits of space to the general public. ‘Space is critical for monitoring the environment, weather forecasting, and disaster management. More than half of climate change you can only measure in real time from space.’ he says.

Although launching a rocket may cost the equivalent of around 400 flights in fuel, in a world where 1,300 flights take off and land in Heathrow per day, ‘it’s a small part of a big problem’. ‘The UK has a leading reputation in trying to push what we are calling “space sustainability,”’ he adds.

Ian Crawford, Professor of planetary science and astrobiology at Birkbeck, is similarly robust in his defence of space exploration and unease around calls to ‘ban space travel’. ‘If Prince William or anyone else is going to start saying: “Well, we’ve got all of these problems on the earth, why are we spending all this money on space exploration?” That is a valid point but it also has to apply to everything else that society spends money on – and some of these things are more dangerous and less useful than space exploration. There’s a bigger perspective there that has to be grasped before people start putting memes on t-shirts.’

Professor Crawford points to the fact that satellites can map deforestation in the Amazon, monitor methane levels and are essential in pinpointing polluting areas of the planet.

But it’s not all about environmental concerns. Billionaires and the A-listers are giving space a bad rep too. Some celebrities are just saying silly things: Take Joan Collins, who criticised fellow actor William Shatner for taking a space flight. She called him a ‘fool’ before wheeling out the now familiar line: ‘Let’s take care of this planet first before we start going off [into space].’

Other stars, such as singer Justin Bieber and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, have purchased tickets for the SpaceShip Two Virgin Galactic flight, as though Mars is just the new Mustique. Billionaires like Musk and Bezos are, as Professor Anu Ojha points out, making some people ask the question: ‘Is this just a playground for the rich elites?’

Professor Crawford says their input should not be dismissed, but that it’s certainly no reason to initiate a ban. ‘There are lots of billionaires who we never hear of who are just happy to spend all their money on their own personal pleasures, like their super yachts and millions of houses, doing nothing constructive. Whatever you say about people like Musk, he is actually employing a lot of people and his Space X activity is helpful in reducing costs of access to space.’

Space travel, Professor Ojha points out, helps countries become richer. He says £360 billion of annual UK economic activity could not happen without space services. ‘Space is actually a wealth multiplier. It generates wealth back on earth, it makes life better,’ he says emphatically.

Even space travel just for the thrill of it isn’t entirely unproductive. Professor Ian Crawford points out that there are emotional and spiritual benefits, not factored in by calls to ban space travel: ‘Only through space travel can you see the earth as a planet from the outside. This brings with it an extremely important perspective because it makes people see in a visceral way that actually the earth is very small and it puts a big responsibility on our shoulders to look after it.’

When astronauts first go into space, many experience a cognitive shift involving a profound appreciation for Earth and the people on it, called the ‘overview effect’. It supposedly has a transcendental effect – making the viewer feel more affection and responsibility for the human condition.

If Bluebella really believes in the cause behind its ‘World Peace’ nighties, it might do better to sell chemises saying: ‘Support Space Travel’ alongside them.

The real far-right threat

There was a horrendous far-right gathering in London yesterday. Racist cries cut through the air like a knife. One attendee wished death on an entire race. Others celebrated the mass murder of ethnic minority people. Some even wore fascist-adjacent uniforms, showing off their supremacist ideology to a shocked city.

I am speaking, of course, about the ‘March for Palestine’, not that collection of right-wing hotheads at the Cenotaph. Yes, those rowdy men were a menace. They certainly caused a headache for the cops. They accounted for the ‘vast majority’ of the 126 arrests made yesterday. But for the most visceral racism, the kind we dreamt had been scrubbed from our society, it’s the other demo you had to look to.

Essentially there were two far-right marches in London yesterday. There was the one the left are wringing their hands over today: the Cenotaph event. And there’s the one the left was actually on: the anti-Israel event. It was the latter that sounded fascistic to me, at times literally.

It was on the left’s march that we heard grotesque utterances you’d normally expect from fascists. One attendee said ‘Death to all Jews’. A mob gleefully chanted about the Khaybar massacre – a 7th-century slaughter of Jews by Muhammad and his army. This is a chant with one aim and one aim only: to strike terror into the hearts of Jewish people.

Some attendees wore Hamas-style bandanas. Just a month after Hamas committed one of the worst acts of racist barbarism against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, people in London were cosplaying as Hamas murderers. And we’re told to worry about some noisy blokes in tracksuits having a run-in with cops?

There was the usual Holocaust minimisation. Placards compared Gaza to Auschwitz – a grotesque lie designed to defame the Jewish state as the heir to the evil once visited upon the Jews. A woman waved a placard showing the Star of David mixed with the swastika, the implication being as clear as it was bigoted: Jews are the new Nazis. This is Jew-taunting, pure and simple. I saw nothing as morally rancid as this at the Cenotaph gathering.  

It is true, of course, that not everyone on the ‘March for Palestine’ holds disgusting views like these. And yet, how many times can a person of good conscience march in the vicinity of Jew-haters before he thinks to himself, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this’? This is the fourth big ‘pro-Palestine’ demo at which there have been vile flashes of Jew hate. To mingle with anti-Semites once may be regarded as misfortune. To do it twice looks like carelessness. Four times? There’s no excuse for that. 

The left’s rage against the right-wing mob at the Cenotaph strikes me as a cynical effort to distract attention from the vile racial animus we saw on the ‘pro-Palestine’ march. 

Not only do they seem relaxed about sharing the streets with people who celebrate anti-Jewish massacres – they also provide moral cover for these lowlifes by saying: ‘Look over there! Look at the racist gammon whipped into a frenzy by Suella Braverman!’ Whether intentional or not, the result of their fury over the right-wing mob has been to bury the fact that fascistic hatred for Jews was given voice on the streets of London yesterday.

Yes, hard-right troublemakers are a problem. But to my mind, their threat pales into insignificance in comparison with the orgy of anti-Semitism we’ve been living through since the Hamas pogrom of 7 October. This points to grave cultural fissures in our society and everyone who cares for our country’s future needs to start taking this more seriously. 

Sunday shows round-up: Don’t blame Braverman for disorder, argues Shapps

The Home Secretary Suella Braverman caused controversy this week when she wrote an apparently unauthorised article for the Times accusing the police of bias ahead of Armistice Day and the planned pro-Palestine rally. That march went ahead despite the wishes of some members of parliament. The police had to deal with violence from what was described as ‘far-right groups’ who converged on the Cenotaph as well as disorder from some of the pro-Palestine marchers.

Trevor Phillips asked Defence Secretary Grant Shapps if Braverman’s actions might have made it harder for the police to maintain peace. Shapps paid tribute to the police, but claimed that far-right groups had already announced they were going to be there before Braverman’s article and drew attention to people on the pro-Palestine march ‘celebrating what terrorists have done’.  

Yvette Cooper – ‘highly irresponsible’ Home Secretary should be removed

The shadow home secretary had a rather different point of view, arguing that Braverman had undermined the police and inflamed tensions. She told Laura Kuenssberg that Rishi Sunak was ‘weak’ in allowing her to act in such a way and that she shouldn’t be allowed to carry on in her role. Cooper also pointed out that Braverman had previously broken the ministerial code under Liz Truss and suggested she should never have been appointed in the first place. 

Upcoming SNP ceasefire motion causing further Labour division

The upcoming vote on a Scottish National party King’s Speech amendment, which calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, is causing further division in the Labour party. Some shadow ministers are reportedly ready to resign rather than vote against a ceasefire. Kuenssberg asked Yvette Cooper whether an anonymous Labour briefing which described resignations from the party as ‘shaking off the fleas’ was racist. Cooper agreed that it was a disgraceful comment and said it didn’t come from anyone close to the Labour leadership. Kuenssberg then asked whether Keir Starmer would sack any MPs who vote in favour of the ceasefire. Cooper repeatedly evaded the question, saying she couldn’t ‘preempt the processes around the Speaker selecting amendments’. 

Israeli President – ‘of course we listen to our allies, but first… we defend ourselves’

Some of Israel’s allies have begun calling for a ceasefire. French President Emmanuel Macron this week asked Israel to stop bombing women and children and the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said too many Palestinians are being killed. Kuenssberg asked the President of Israel Isaac Herzog if they were listening to their allies. Herzog said they were listening but first needed to defend themselves. He claimed Israel’s military is behaving ‘exactly according to the rules of international humanitarian law’ and that many of the tragedies affecting Palestinian civilians are caused by Hamas. Herzog said he was a ‘huge supporter of peace in the Middle East’. 

Shapps – ‘we’ve forgotten that in war, very sadly, people lose their lives’

Grant Shapps defended Israel’s military action, claiming that civilian deaths are inevitable in war and comparing the bombardment of Gaza to Britain’s bombing of Dresden (which took place before the Geneva Conventions established modern international humanitarian law‚. Shapps supported Herzog’s claims that Israel was going out of its way to protect civilians, mentioning reports of Israeli military contacting civilians and telling them to move on before advancing. Shapps said Hamas needed to stop using civilians as human shields and mentioned that the UK was working hard to try to secure the release of British hostages in Gaza. 

The NHS problem that can’t be solved with money

Earlier this year, I wrote, out of a mixture of bewilderment and frustration, about my experience as a novice in-patient at what is widely regarded as one of London’s premier teaching hospitals. I had been admitted with a badly broken ankle, and the result was three stays of just a few days each over the course of a month: the first (from A&E) for an operation that didn’t happen; the second, ten days later, for an operation that did happen, and the third two weeks later after the wound became infected.  

The central point of my piece was the nigh-total information vacuum that surrounded me and the impossibility of finding out pretty much anything about either my care or my condition. Even trying to persuade a nurse (or assistant) to divulge whether the regular blood pressure, oxygen and temperature tests were OK was like wringing blood from a stone.  

It was hard to divine who, if anyone, was actually in charge either of the ward or of me – no doctor’s name featured on the board above my bed (or anyone else’s, in fact, including mine). I had to ask what drugs I was being given, and why – and twice they were wrong. 

The information limbo extended to nurses and other ward staff, who rarely seemed to share information, with the wall between nurses and doctors particularly impenetrable. Instructions were routinely passed along only by computer, with attendant delays – including for admissions and discharges.

But enough of my (repeated) whingeing. It turns out that my experience was by no means unique. Complaints about poor, or non-existent, communication feature time and again in a cluster of recent accounts published by approximate contemporaries of mine in the journalistic world, who see it, as I do, as a major source of frustration, inefficiency, and, yes, mistakes. 

Here is the BBC’s former technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, in an article headed, ‘My NHS hell waiting for surgery and information’. Cellan-Jones says that a particular source of anxiety, as he awaited his summons to an operation was ‘the difficulty of contacting anyone at the hospital. Without a name you are lost in switchboard hell, passed from one extension to another as you try to identify the correct department.’ 

That is, if the phone is ever answered. In my experience, as in that of Edward Lucas, formerly of the Economist, now a columnist for the Times and a Lib Dem parliamentary candidate, you can spend days on hold listening to muzak – then they cut you off promptly at 5 p.m. Lucas was writing about trying to improve life for his 92-year old Aunt Sarah in her last days. No shrinking violet in real life, Lucas admits to being ‘on the verge of helpless tears’ trying to navigate a system which included a 40-page form to apply for ‘end of life support’, and where ‘the hospital that had discharged her, the overworked GP practice, the rule-bound tribes of watchers, wipers and feeders – all failed to work together.’

He hands, as I would, a bouquet to the district nurses – but they are the neglected relics of an older system, and ‘accessing’ their service can be another nightmare. Elsewhere, as he notes, ‘kindness and common sense evaporated’ in the ‘maze of acronyms, buck-passing, jargon, jobsworthery and muddle’. 

Cellan-Jones meanwhile was back in hospital and hoping for his operation. ‘I kept asking when a decision would be made… but got no answers. Hope began to fade, and then around 10.15 a doctor arrived and seemed surprised that I had ever expected to be heading to theatre…’ And then, ‘After 36 hours occupying a valuable bed to no purpose, I was released… to go home for the night – although the paperwork for my release took four hours.’ Then, ‘due to a mishap with passing on my contact details, it took all day Friday to hear about the next step.’ 

While he compliments the staff, what struck him, he said, ‘is that the NHS remains a cumbersome beast that struggles to talk to its patients or to itself… communication between medical staff within and between hospitals also appears hopelessly inadequate, with the gulf between doctors and nurses particularly acute’, and computers at times more a hindrance than a help. 

An especially tragic case is that of Martha Mills, the 13-year-old daughter of Guardian journalist, Merope Mills, who died from undiagnosed sepsis, after suffering an injury to her pancreas in a cycling accident. Mills launched a successful campaign for patients and/or their carers to have the right to a second opinion. Interviewed by the BBC Today programme, in addition to appearances non many other outlets, Mills related the sequence of dismissive responses that preceded the death of her daughter and the regret she felt about not contesting the lack of medical concern more robustly. We must wait to see how keen doctors are to implement what is to be known as ‘Martha’s Rule’ – but I wouldn’t hold my breath. 

So where do all these complaints – from the trivial (phone waits) to the catastrophic (the avoidable death of a child) – lead us? As a reader, you might be tempted to dismiss the lot of us as an entitled elite who have been insulated from reality for too long and are now hitting the age where we brush up against the medical world more often. What do you mean, you’ve never been in hospital before? Stop thinking you deserve better than the NHS can provide. It’s doing its best; if you think it’s so bad, go private. 

And maybe we are just that, an entitled elite viewing the NHS from our own niche perspective – with the added problem that, because information and communication are our thing, we find it especially hard to get to grips with situations where those basics are missing. But please note also how much our accounts have in common – across different NHS hospitals and services — and note, too that, as journalists, we are used to asking questions and are mostly not in awe of experts. 

So why was it so difficult even for me to get answers to such basic questions as: what is my injury precisely; when is my operation happening; what are these pills you are giving me’ what did my blood tests show; and, please, when can I go home? Isn’t this what most patients and their families want, and need, to know? The point is that if even we – professional questioners who were conscious and aware during most of our stays – found ourselves in this information black hole, how bad is it for those who do not have a public platform to vent their frustrations? 

To which someone in the NHS will doubtless respond that any remedy would require more people and more money. Oh no it wouldn’t. It would cost nothing at all for the many different bits of the NHS to start talking to each other – but especially to those in its care. Cellan-Jones says he emerged from hospital ‘convinced that more money and more staff won’t solve its problems without some fundamental changes in the way it communicates’. So say all of us. 

Nadine takes aim at Gove (again)

Remembrance Sunday traditionally brings with it a pause in political hostilities but not for Nadine Dorries. The former Culture Secretary was out on Laura Kuenssberg’s show this morning, three days on from the release of her long-awaited book on the supposed ‘plot’ to bring down Boris Johnson in which Michael Gove is cast as one of the central villains. And following the bizarre scenes yesterday in which Gove was mobbed by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, Dorries showed little sympathy with her onetime cabinet colleague:

ND: “But the point on Michael Gove in that, I’ve got to raise it, what was Michael Gove doing in the middle of Victoria Station on a day when every other sensible politician would not want to make the police’s job any harder and would keep away. I mean was he drunk? What was he doing there?”

LK: “Are you suggesting he was drunk?”

ND: “Well no, to coin a phrase. But why was he there? What judgement made him walk through Victoria Station? Was that playing to the gallery?”

Far from being ‘drunk’, team Gove counter that the man in question was in his ministerial car on the way from constituency to his London residence but couldn’t get through because of road closures so had to walk. Tune in next week for the latest chapter in this ongoing feud…

What BLM and the Remembrance Day protests had in common

Back in June 2020, I attended a quasi-legal Black Lives Matter protest in London, and a widely reviled counter protest, by hard-right Tommy Robinson-esque ‘football lads’, who were determined to ‘defend’ the Churchill statue and the Cenotaph.

As a journalist, I was able to move freely between these two protests: one – the football lads – took place in Parliament Square and lower Whitehall, and the other – BLM – was largely confined to Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross. Mostly, the police managed to keep the warring tribes apart, occasionally the lines broke, and pretty serious violence ensued. I saw this violence from both perspectives.

It was thus with a sense of sad expectation that I sat down to read what my fellow journalists wrote about that day, and it was with a total sense of shock that I realised that none of the journalists was prepared to tell the truth. Because these journalists were standing right beside me and they saw what I saw.

They saw that the BLM protests were way more violent than the pathetic drunken football lads. They saw the gangs of BLM protestors targeting people just because of their race – for being white and looking a bit laddish. They saw people being gouged, kicked, stabbed, and nearly killed, as the football lads had a pitiful ruckus with the police down in Whitehall. And yet, did they tell you any of this? No. Instead, all the focus was on ‘the ugly threat from the far right’, whereas, in fact, the ugly threat was that you might be beaten to death by BLM, simply for being white in the wrong place.

And so it was with a much greater sense of scepticism – towards the media – that I attended the two rallies in London on Saturday. I was interested in many things, I was definitely interested to see if the media would lie once more, not least because the circumstances were eerily similar. Again in Parliament Square, it was a tiny crew of tragic, leering, coked-up, snaggle-toothed football lads allegedly ‘defending’ the Cenotaph. Once again there was a more diverse opponent, though this time the ‘enemy’ was far more significant: 300,000 people marching from Hyde Park to the US Embassy in defence of Palestine.

What did I see? Lots of strange things. A kaleidoscope of surreal images. At one point in Parliament Square I saw a drunk, racist football hooligan angrily abusing a preternaturally calm police officer: ‘you dickless wanker, you have no minerals, you fucking loser’. An hour later, on Vauxhall Bridge Road, I saw the pro-Palestinians also abusing the police ‘you racist fascist scum, you Nazi bastards’.

I saw Piers Corbyn, brother of Jeremy, make a bizarre speech about McDonalds and Zionism. I then saw the marchers denounce him as a ‘thief and a Freemason’ – and do it so ferociously he had to be escorted away. I saw stray Tommy Robinson fans in Pimlico pubs make unwise ‘wanker’ signs at the enormous march going past the saloon bar windows. I saw the police manfully defend the lives of these idiots.

I saw happy and amiable Muslim families, lovely little kids in Palestinian headbands, glamorous students with blue hair and angry placards, middle-aged women with Just Stop Oil tattoos, and I heard them all shout, chant or shriek – ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’. And then I saw the sky and the mood darken as we crossed Vauxhall bridge – even as the BBC reported that the protestors were all singing Imagine like it was a vast jamboree of kumbaya-ness.

Finally, the crowds dwindled in the dusk to a sizeable hardcore of protestors dressed all in black and entirely masked, which made me ask: why do you need to protest like that, in London, if you care about a war 3,000 miles away? And then I had to ask, why are you now shooting fireworks directly at buildings, passers by and police? 

This felt especially strange when I read what Channel 4 news was right then tweeting: ‘After being branded hate marchers by the Home Secretary, a massive pro-Palestinian march passed off peacefully, with hundreds of thousands in attendance. The only scuffles on the day involved far-right protestors who clashed with police.’ Channel 4 News was tweeting an outright lie.

It was, in other words, another bleak experience, to match the BLM protests of 2020. Indeed it was much bleaker, as the levels of anti-Semitism I witnessed yesterday were like nothing I have ever seen in the UK or indeed any western nation. It made me despair for our media and for the future of Jews in the UK.

I can, however, report one nice experience, which perhaps gives me a shred of hope. Towards the end of the events, I was talking to a copper about his task. He was pleased to have a friendly chat, I think: thankful to meet someone not obviously hostile. At the end of our conversation, I said ‘anyway, well done you guys, you have a tough job, policing this, you do it well’ and as I said this a Muslim girl in a hijab overheard the exchange and politely interrupted to say ‘yes, I agree, thank you’ to the policeman, adding ‘you’ve been amazing’. She obviously meant it; he looked properly touched.

It was a rare moment of human decency on a desolate day. In the middle of all the media lies and the ethnic hatred, I am clinging on to that. We have to cling on to that.

Farage to seek millions in damages from NatWest

It’s a busy old time if you’re Nigel Farage. The Brexiteer is expected to shortly become the latest politician to enter the jungle on ITV’s hit show I’m A Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here. But before that, Farage has certain scores to settle: including with the state-backed NatWest bank. He is now seeking millions of pounds of damages over the debanking scandal which eventually forced the resignation of chief executive Dame Alison Rose.

This weekend Farage instructed London-based Grosvenor Law to act for him in a claim against both NatWest and Rose, with initial legal letters expected to be issued by Farage’s lawyers during the course of next week. The claims are due to be filed just days after NatWest confirmed that it was cancelling the bulk of Dame Alison’s potential £10m-plus severance package.

A source close to Farage told Mr S: ‘Nigel will aim to defend the many thousands who have had their accounts closed by NatWest. If they thought he was going to go away quietly, NatWest group are sadly mistaken.’ Steerpike suspects that the bank are now sorely wishing that they hadn’t tried to take on the former Brexit party leader.

The irony for NatWest is that if they’d waited a bit longer for Farage to enter the jungle, he would have qualified for a Coutts account after all…

Can Remembrance survive?

This week the BBC interviewed the last of the Few. Group Captain John Hemingway, 104, is apparently the only remaining RAF pilot who fought in the Battle of Britain. This brings home how long ago the second world war was. The year the war broke out, 1939, is closer to the battle of Gettysburg than today.

For people of my age, this chronological distance has sometimes been obscured by the war remaining, until quite recently, a powerful cultural presence in British life. When I was born in 1983, there were still tens of thousands of veterans of the conflict in the workforce, and a good number in public life (the Archbishop of Canterbury among them). The wave of anniversaries in the early nineties featured veterans who were in many cases still lively and engaging conversationalists. Classic war films were a staple of Sunday afternoons and Bank Holidays, in those far-off days before social media and streaming and the fragmentation of media. We watched them with our dads and re-enacted them in the playground.

But this cultural presence is noticeably diminishing, for various reasons related to the passage of time, technological change and demographics. I suspect very few small boys play ‘English versus Nazis’ anymore in the playground, as most of us did 30 years ago. Armstrong and Miller made great comedic hay out of the idea of wartime RAF pilots speaking like modern urban youth, but I don’t think the idea would make it into a BBC comedy now, just 15 years later, for the simple reason that most people watching in 2023 would not be familiar with the old films to which the sketch refers.

Soon the war will pass out of living memory altogether. Arguably it has already done so, for most cultural-social purposes. To remember the war at all, in even the most rudimentary way, you have to be well north of 80.     

What, then, should commemorations of our war dead look like in 20 or 30 or 50 years’ time, when the terrible total wars of the twentieth century have passed into the history books?

It must be said that many aspects of Remembrance have become a little odd. There has been a distasteful commercialisation of the simple and democratic poppy. You can get sparkly poppies, headscarves, mugs, and key-rings. In 2015, Transport for London decked out some of their vehicles in poppy designs, and were offering a free meal-for-two to the person who shared the best picture of one. This feels like a mockery of its intended purpose, as a quiet personal gesture of solidarity and an encouragement to others to donate to the Royal British Legion.

Another aspect of this oddness is the increasing grandiosity of commemorative events. A few years back, a restored Dakota dropped hundreds of thousands of poppies over the White Cliffs of Dover. Sporting mascots dress as giant poppies. Then of course there is the excessive vigilance about whether people in the public eye are wearing one and whether they have the correct attitude to Our Brave Boys.

It’s not sentimentality per se, though sentimentality is part of it. Nor is it hyper-patriotism or militarism. It’s a kind of desperate reverence; an artificial and overwrought deference to any event, person or item linked to Remembrance. It seems to be more and more common, for example, to describe all military personnel as ‘heroes’, regardless of where they served, for how long and in what capacity, devaluing the very concept.

I have a partial explanation, namely that Remembrance is a form of safety blanket in a much-changed world, so we cling to it very tightly – perhaps too tightly, just as we might grow unhealthily attached to the possessions we rescued from a house fire that destroyed everything else we had.

The rituals and traditions that surround Remembrance are among the last remaining links to Old Britain. For a few days in the year, you can wallow in the country as it was. You can bask imaginatively in the long Edwardian summer and the heyday of Empire and dashing young men in Spitfires or naval uniforms. Watching the royals stand on the balcony of the Foreign Office while military bands play Nimrod and O God Our Help in Ages Past, you don’t have to think about TikTok and stakeholders and cancel culture and preferred pronouns.

There is a tangible sense in modern Britain of something ancient and grand slipping away, to be replaced by something shinier, louder, and more comfortable, but also shallow and brittle. People therefore cling to the forms of the old culture, however much those forms have been drained of actual substance. They intuit correctly that much of what was valuable, unique and formative in British culture has been destroyed, often beyond retrieval, and that their aspirations and attachments are publicly held in contempt by officialdom and cultural elites.

Naturally, they mourn. Is it too fanciful to think that the current overdone approach to Remembrance is a kind of over-compensation, in reaction to a widespread realisation that we are engaged in a vast collective forgetting?

Obviously we will always need ceremonies for military remembrance. But to return to the question of the future of Remembrance, such ceremonies are surely going to look very different in two or three decades’ time than they do today. Around 7,000 British service personnel have lost their lives on military operations in the 70 years since the second world war. That’s a tragically high figure. But nevertheless the number of people with a genuinely personal stake in Remembrance is declining significantly. While we do have tens of thousands of active service veterans, only a tiny proportion of families in contemporary Britain have experienced the loss of, or serious injury to, a family member in war. The armed forces are shrinking. All three branches have lost almost half their personnel strength since the end of the Cold War. Defence spending, which stood at nearly 5 per cent of GDP just before the Falklands war, has declined to about 2 per cent of GDP. We are not the martial nation that we were when Lutyens’ Cenotaph was dedicated on Thursday 11 November, 1920.

And we have changed in other ways. A gulf has opened up between us and our grandparents. Moral convictions and attitudes which were commonplace among the generations that fought the two world wars – about sex, religion, the family, the arts, and patriotism – are now regarded with a combination of bafflement, hostility and mockery. A demographic transformation is underway: one in six current British residents were born abroad, a proportion which is only likely to rise for the foreseeable future (in 1951, when my father was the age my daughter is now, it was fewer than one in 20).

Can explicitly Christian Remembrance services, which draw heavily on the culture, manners and traditions of a Britain that no longer exists, possibly survive as a widespread custom in the longer term?

Simply to entertain the thought feels like a kind of betrayal. My grandparents endured the London Blitz in that grim winter of 1940-41. I grew up reading Biggles and Commando comics and I sang traditional hymns in churches where union jacks and regimental colours stood proudly on the walls. In Sea Cadets I spent many hours standing proudly at war memorials on freezing November mornings. I am deeply attached to the old England. It is, however, a necessary reckoning.

How North Korea is supporting Hamas

First, it was Russia’s war with Ukraine. Then, it was Hamas’s terrorist attacks against Israel. Both of these events, in gross violation of international law, have certainly not escaped the watchful eyes of that infamous state sponsor of terrorism, North Korea. Earlier this week, a Hamas official said North Korea is ‘part of [Hamas’s] alliance’, and he intimidated Israel and the United States with the words that: ‘the day may come when North Korea intervenes’ by unleashing a direct strike against the United States.

Recent events have clearly demonstrated that Hamas does not just want to destroy the lives of Israeli civilians, but the very existence of the Israeli state. Similarly, Israel is a state that North Korea does not recognise. Following Hamas’s initial attacks, the North Korean Foreign Ministry predictably sided with Palestine, and then began the blame-game against the United States and the West. Pyongyang accused Washington and its allies of ‘taking sides with Israel’ and ‘disguising Israel as a victim.’ Much like its rhetoric in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, North Korea blamed the United States as the ‘ultimate cause’ of this rapidly escalating war.

North Korea’s anti-Israel stance is not recent, and goes back to its establishment of diplomatic relations with Palestine in 1966. Since then, the hermit kingdom has argued that Palestine has legitimate and ultimate sovereignty over the entirety of the Israeli state, bar the Golan Heights. During the Cold War, North Korea’s first leader, Kim Il-sung, tried – albeit not entirely successfully – to forge friendships in the third world. Together with Syria and later Iran, Palestine proved to be one such friend. It became an eager recipient of military assistance from Kim’s regime, and a useful example to highlight North Korea’s desire to be a supporter of revolutionist anti-imperialist regimes around the world. As Kim forged closer relations with Yasser Arafat, then-Chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), his denunciations of Israel as an ‘imperialist satellite’ of the United States intensified. Arafat visited North Korea several times in the 1980s, most notably in 1989, the year after Palestine declared its independence, as the PLO sought to strengthen ties with North Korea, namely so it could receive arms and guns.

According to North Korea’s playbook, any opportunity to bolster its position against the United States is worth taking. For Pyongyang, exploiting geopolitical crises beyond its borders is worthwhile if it can portray the United States as a ‘hostile’ power. As well as stoking nationalism at home, it also offers a convenient justification for the regime’s acceleration of its nuclear and missile programme, and the diversion of its funds from feeding its people and developing its paltry economy.

When it comes to armed support, the three generations of the Kim family have experience in evading international sanctions, not least from the United Nations Security Council. As North Korea’s supply of ammunition to Russia demonstrates, weapons are a key source of income for the regime, at a time when it is desperate for cash. It is therefore unsurprising that in the first assault on Israel, the F-7 rocket-propelled grenades used by Hamas militants were, in fact, produced by North Korea, a claim that the Kim regime swiftly denied as a ‘groundless and false rumour.’

It is nothing new for North Korean weapons to be used in conflicts far away from the Korean peninsula, not least in wars involving Israel and Palestine. Given its cooperation with Iran and Syria, the foundations for a weapons-transfer network from Pyongyang to Tehran to Gaza are firmly in place, aided by an extensive network of smugglers. After all, Pyongyang has had plenty of time to gather such know-how. In 2007, an Israeli airstrike on a Syrian nuclear reactor at al-Kibar revealed that its design was based on North Korean nuclear reactors at its main nuclear weapons facility at Yongbyon. North Korea’s intention was to export weapons-grade plutonium to Syria, which would be subsequently processed and, eventually, manufactured into a nuclear bomb. More recently, in the conflict between Israel and Palestine in 2021, Hamas was seen using North Korean anti-tank guided missiles as well as rocket launchers, which were likely smuggled into their hands via Iran.

For all its support of Palestine and long-term denunciations of Israel, however, the day when North Korea intervenes directly will not happen anytime soon. That is a step Kim Jong Un is simply unwilling to take. But this will not stop North Korea from collaborating with enemies of the West, especially if Pyongyang can exploit regional geopolitics to increase anti-US sentiment. The enemy of North Korea’s ultimate enemy is always its friend.

For Israel, the real battle is only just beginning

Israel must steel itself over the coming weeks for more national trauma as the fighting against Hamas in Gaza intensifies and troops losses begin to mount. The country’s armed forces have already paid a high price, with 348 deaths since October 7^th. To give some context, this is almost twice as high as the number of British soldiers killed in eight years of fighting in Iraq. In a country with just a tenth of the population of the UK, the losses will be even more difficult to bear.

The break-in battle was always going to be the easiest part for the Israeli Defence Forces. The aerial bombardment, like a first world war artillery barrage, sent Hamas terrorists retreating into command bunkers buried many feet below ground. But the real battle – where the metal meets the meat, as the US troops might say – is only just beginning.

In the coming days and weeks the fighting will only become increasingly messy, with Israeli troops being picked off by snipers and targeted by Iranian-supplied improvised explosive devices, triggered by an infrared beam and capable of destroying a tank or armoured personnel.

The mission facing the IDF will be made much harder by the vast network of deep tunnels which run beneath Gaza city and across the whole strip. Emerging from below, Hamas terrorists can easily carry out hit and run attacks, killing and maiming before disappearing again.

The young IDF reservists, who just a few weeks ago were sitting behind desks looking at spreadsheets or tending to their almond groves in the Jezreel valley, will have to decide whether a lone Palestinian picking their way through bomb damaged streets is a distressed civilian or a Hamas suicide bomber.

In urban warfare, where death can lurk beneath every step and around every corner, it is easy for fear to take hold and chip away at previously high levels of  morale as the days of street fighting turn into weeks and months. The slow drum beat of casualties from hit and run attacks can be more psychologically damaging to the IDF than relatively large losses in fixed battles. 

Battle fatigue will set in and those fighting on the bomb-cratered streets of Gaza today will soon have to be replaced with fresh blood if the current momentum is to be maintained.

The IDF’s mission is essentially to annihilate Hamas’s high command – but that is a vague mission where the end point is difficult to identify. Hamas has an estimated 30,000 fighters – does Israel intend to kill them all or just the strategic masterminds responsible for the October 7th attacks?

There is also the question of what happens to the estimated 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza who have been displaced in the current crisis, many of whom will have no home to return to when the crisis ends.

Time is not on the Israelis’ side. So far, and according to Hamas, more than 10,000 civilians have been killed along with 4,000 children, and it would appear that US patience with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s relentless bombing campaign is being exhausted.

In that sense, the claim that Israel has walked into a trap set by Hamas appears to be true. But as General Jack Keane, a former vice-chief of the United States army puts it, Israel had no choice but to enter Gaza and destroy Hamas. If they didn’t more terrorist attacks certainly would follow.

Speaking to the BBC, he said:

‘Hamas’s strategic objective in conducting this savage brutal attack, largely against civilians, was a departure from past Hamas attacks when the focus was usually on the IDF. What they were seeking by this savage attack on civilians was a very violent response from Israel and they are looking for widespread international condemnation of the Israeli response.

I think they have likely accomplished that. Hamas also wants to undermine the people’s confidence in the Israeli government to protect them, and I think they have accomplished that. The other strategic objective they (Hamas) are attempting to achieve is international isolation of Israel. I don’t think that is necessarily accomplished but there is certainly a tendency towards that.’

General Keane also said that part of Hamas’s strategy was to dismantle the Abraham Accords, the peace agreement and the process of normalisation between Israel and Arab countries, which Saudi Arabia was moving towards. He added: ‘The Israelis don’t have any choice but to attempt to dismantle this organisation once and for all because the fact is Hamas will be back in two or three more years doing exactly the same things. You saw their political leader giving an interview where they indicated they would do just that. So the Israelis have got to get about finishing this as quickly as they can. The Israelis need to keep moving in the right direction to exterminate this terrorist organisation.’

It has often been said that there is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis but it would appear that there is not a political one either – not in the short term anyway. There may come a time for the Israeli government to talk about the future of Gaza but it is not now and not with Hamas.

Remembrance Day protests through the ages

It’s not the first time that protesters have intruded on Remembrance Day. But this time feels different.

In the 20s, the protests were against the poverty and inequality of the era. On Armistice Day in 1922, 25,000 unemployed ex-servicemen marched past the Cenotaph, wearing their medals next to tickets from pawn shops to indicate their plight. The year before, in Liverpool, 200 men interrupted the two minutes’ silence with shouts of ‘Anybody want to buy a medal?’ and ‘What we want is food, not prayers!’

In the 70s and 80s, more disturbingly, it was the far right who occupied the headlines. The National Front made its Remembrance Sunday march into its big national event. In 1986 1,000 police were called up to keep the peace between the NF and an anti-fascist counter-protest.

And ever since the 1930s, pacifists have given a quieter kind of witness, laying a wreath of white poppies at the Cenotaph to the irritation of traditionalists.

What all those – very different – demonstrations have in common is an attempt to reframe the event itself: to suggest that the real tribute to the war dead would be to build a more just society, or a more racially pure one, or a more peaceful world. Yesterday’s march by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign was different: in a very 2023 way, it was marked more by indifference towards the whole occasion. The PSC happened to be organising a march every Saturday, and despite the public alarm they didn’t see why it would be a big deal to do so on November 11.

Whatever you think of the marchers, – and it is hard to say how many of them are sinister Hamas sympathisers, and how many are earnest humanitarians – the fact that the march went ahead suggests that the meaning of Remembrance Day is fading. In some ways, that is a statement of the obvious. As the World Wars pass out of memory, we will never recover the spirit of 1919, when the whole country fell silent, and the chimes of Big Ben reached distant towns which had never before heard the bell in daylight hours; or of 1929, when someone wrote to the Sunday Times to complain that ‘drivers of motor cars have not always stopped their engines’ at 11 o’clock.

Remembrance has had some revivals over the last few decades: in the Thatcher years, under the influence of official patriotism and the Falklands War; and more recently, in the shadow of Iraq and thanks to the work of the Royal British Legion. But it has suffered from the same decline of interest – if you trust the statistics – as other markers of national allegiance.

Support for the monarchy weakens dramatically among younger age groups. Millennials are far more likely than older generations to say they would dodge conscription. ‘Democracy’ is the principal value in our citizenship oath, but it has never been more unpopular.

Some on the right, looking on all this in justified dismay, blame the ideologies of multiculturalism and diversity. On this view, you cannot expect to have a healthy national culture, with a shared history and a shared sense of purpose and obligation, if your elite tells everyone that nothing defines the country except how various it is.

It is a highly persuasive argument. But those making it don’t fully reckon with the issue it raises: namely, of what that shared national story could be. The old answers don’t work any more. British identity was forged in the 18^th century out of anti-Catholicism, military might and commercial ambition. Later it became inseparable from the Empire. And then, as Roger Scruton once remarked, the British ‘lost their imperial identity without gaining a national identity with which to replace it.’

That is the question which haunts this weekend: what is our inheritance? Where did our institutions come from, and why should we be grateful for them? How can we make sense of the glories of our past, and its crimes? How did we get here, and where are we going? Perhaps there is an answer out there. But it is fitting, in more than one way, that our greatest moment of national unity is a profound silence.

Democrats are tearing themselves apart over Israel

A month is a long time in American politics – or so it would seem judging by the growing split among US Democrats over the Israel-Hamas war. In the days immediately after Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, killing 1,400 people and taking more than 240 hostages, Democrats across the board in America offered unequivocal support for Israel and its right to self-defence.

That was then. Now, support for Israel’s actions has plunged the party into an increasingly vitriolic internal battle that is pitting former political allies against each other. The festering divisions in the American left running along ideological, generational and racial lines are set to deepen as the conflict drags on and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza escalates.

Some in the party are calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza while others continue to stand firm in support of Israel’s military actions. Positions are becoming more and more entrenched, and the insults are flying, becoming uglier with each day that passes.

The tensions burst into the open earlier this week on the House floor, when 22 Democrats joined forces with the Republicans on Wednesday to censure the Democratic congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American, for her rhetoric on the conflict. The censure motion accused Tlaib of ‘promoting false narratives’ about the Hamas assault on Israel. Some of her own party colleagues said she was ‘calling for the destruction of the state of Israel’.

Emotions were running high throughout the session. ‘I can’t believe I have to say this, but Palestinian people are not disposable,’ she declared, accusing her opponents of trying to ‘silence’ her.

The unprecedented rebuke of Tlaib came in the wake of video footage featuring her, shared on social media, that included a clip of pro-Palestinian protesters chanting ‘from the river to the sea’, a slogan condemned by Jewish leaders as anti-Semitic. Tlaib, rather ludicrously, has suggested that the phrase is an ‘aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence’. It really isn’t that, and Tlaib should know better than seeking to defend it as such.

Tlaib’s supporters were furious with those who supported the censure resolution. Cori Bush, a former Black Lives Matter activist who represents Missouri, accused House members of putting ‘targets on the backs of actual people, most of whom are Black or Brown’.

The fissures in the party are now spilling into public view. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a prominent Florida congresswoman, was damning last month about party colleagues who wouldn’t back a resolution affirming support for Israel in its war against Hamas: ‘Someone who votes against this, I would think, doesn’t have a soul.’ Some in the Congressional Black Caucus were quick to hit back, telling her that referring to people of colour as ‘soulless’ is a trope that was used to justify slavery. These are cracks too deep to be papered over easily.

The American left is facing a long overdue reckoning. Support for Israel used to be one of the few areas of bipartisan consensus: Democrats and Republicans fought tooth and nail over most things but tended to speak as one on Israel. No longer.

Israel is the one foreign policy issue that now splits the Democratic party like no other. This divide has become more pronounced in the last decade or so, as the party base shifted more to the left and Israeli politics moved steadily rightwards.

The progressive wing of the party is now much more openly and defiantly critical of Israel. Polling from Gallup, published in March, showed that for the first time in more than two decades, Democrats sympathised with Palestinians more than Israelis. Research also suggests that younger members of the party are much less supportive of Israel than their elders.

The splits in his party are a dangerous challenge for President Joe Biden. His initial handling of the crisis was sure-footed and he was crystal clear in his strong support for Israel and its right to self-defence. But there are signs of a gradual shift: the backing for Israel is still there but it is increasingly accompanied by language raising concerns about the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the need for Israel to protect civilians.

Even so, Biden is finding himself increasingly at odds with a significant chunk of his own party. The divisions in the ruling party could not come at a worse time: America is struggling to forge an international consensus on what happens to post-war Gaza as well as contain the ripple effects of an increasingly dangerous and unpredictable war in the Middle East. Bickering and divided Democrats back home can only diminish Biden’s attempts to project strong US leadership on the international stage at this critical time.

Have we forgotten the lessons of Shoah?

Since Hamas’s assault on innocent Israelis, a wave of anti-Semitism has swept across the world. Jews in Europe feel distinctly unsafe. There’s been an arson attack on a German synagogue, the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Austria, and, last weekend, in Lyon, a Jewish woman was stabbed twice, a swastika sprayed on her door. Meanwhile, in Britain, as the Guardian newspaper proclaims that ‘Israel must stop weaponising the Holocaust,’ the Metropolitan Police report antisemitic attacks to have increased in early October by 1350 per cent. You wonder what the late director Claude Lanzmann would have made of it.

Lanzmann’s nine-hour Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985) – meant to be sampled in two parts or at one sitting – was intended to be a colossal blow against such hatreds ever returning to haunt Europe again. Eleven years in the making, it contained long, harrowing accounts of the mass-execution by the Nazis of six million Jews. Lanzmann spoke to those who had survived the camps, to witnesses and perpetrators. He was able to meet ex-guards, Nazi officials and pen-pushing bureaucrats from whom, armed with a hidden camera, he was able to extract the most damning confessions. This was brave and even reckless: when his cover was blown, Lanzmann was brutally beaten up at one point for his efforts. But the filming went on.

Shoah is a work on the Holocaust like no other. There are no black and white scenes of living skeletons, no stripy uniforms, no accompanying musical soundtrack. Instead, Lanzmann gives us an environment and allows the stories to fill it. Amidst the tales of Treblinka and Sobibor we see the Polish countryside – callously picturesque – in which they were located. The long low building of Birkenau is filmed in every weather and every different mood, like Monet’s haystacks. Shots of modern factories seem to rhyme eerily with the gas-chambers, and there are endless comings and goings of trains. Mostly the landscapes are empty, so that when we see the occasional person moving across them – a cyclist, a group of children, even a chicken – it brings us up with a jolt. On his travels in Iran a few years before his death, Lanzmann was asked to prove the Holocaust had really happened. Where were the bodies? ‘The proof,’ he replied, ‘is not the corpses. The proof is the absence of corpses. There were special details who gathered the dust and threw it into the wind or into the rivers. Nothing of them remained.’ 

Of course, we hear terrible stories – the film’s overwhelming force comes not from the scale of the event but the minutiae. We’re told of prisoners forced to dig mass-graves with their bare hands, listen to people who witnessed Jews falling out of gas-vans only partly asphyxiated, so that ‘when they were thrown into the ovens, they were all conscious. Alive.’ One of those interviewed, ordered to disinter a mass-grave, found his entire family buried there: ‘They’d been in the earth four months and it was winter. They were very well preserved.’ 

So it goes on, detail after detail. His subjects sometimes tell their stories with odd little half-smiles, occasionally a prelude to breaking down completely – or trying hard not to. Often the real horror lies in the silences, the moments when the talking stops and the survivors cannot go on with their memories. A barber who’s been stolidly recounting how victims were prepared for the gas-chambers suddenly dries up – ‘I can’t… It’s too horrible…. Please.’ Lanzmann, coaxingly, forces him to continue. He is at times pushy in his questions, exhaustive, unreasonable – but then, films like this are not made by ‘reasonable’ people. It’s not so much the ‘why’ that obsesses Lanzmann, but the ‘what’. What did the gas-vans look like? What instruments did barbers use to cut Jewish hair, and how long did they take? What happened when, after ‘special treatment’, gas-chamber doors were opened once again? 

Often the sobering things are the most routine. We see railway timetables neatly typed for transports to the camps, with hours scheduled for cleaning of the cattle-trucks and administrative codes to clarify they’re returning empty. We hear one ex-Nazi say expansively of Treblinka that it ‘worked well, that production line of death,’ and that in two hours, from arrival to cremation, ‘it was all over.’

Part One of Shoah, after four unwavering hours, ends with a secret Reich directive on the design of gas-vans. Electric lights must be retained in them, we hear – ‘because of the alarming nature of darkness, screaming always occurs when the doors are closed’ – but should henceforth be covered with a protective grille. For efficient cleaning, a drain is to be installed in the van floor, so that ‘fluid liquids can drain off during the operation.’ The vehicle company to make these innovations, the directive says, is ‘Saurer’ – at which point Lanzmann’s camera lingers on a modern lorry from the same manufacturer. Corporations adapt to survive, we note, just like people. Visiting Poland decades after the Holocaust, Lanzmann said the greatest shock was finding out normal life had gone on in places like Auschwitz and Treblinka– as if events, it’s implied, had been vapourised as conclusively as the Jews themselves. 

We see this process of amnesia in Shoah too. ‘No one can describe it,’ says one survivor. ‘No one can recreate what happened here. And no one can understand it. Even I, now… No, I just can’t believe it.’ Perpetrators seem to exculpate themselves, speaking of the Jews of ‘those poor people’ or the events themselves as ‘sad, sad, sad’. At one point, Lanzmann visits the ex-deputy-commissioner of the Warsaw Ghetto, who’s now become the dullest of office-workers, with snazzy glasses, ballpoint-pen and button-down collar. ‘I recall more clearly my prewar mountaineering trips than the entire war period,’ he tells Lanzmann airily. ‘We tend to forget, thank God, the bad times more easily than the good. The bad times are repressed.’ 

In Autumn 2023, if recent attacks are anything to go by, the world seems in danger of forgetting them too. Most, if not all, of the people interviewed in Shoah are now dead, along with Lanzmann, who passed away in 2018. The following year American’s PBS channel produced a programme called ‘The Last Survivors’, in which one of them, cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, admits: ‘We are the last ones, when we’ve gone…Then it’s all history books.’ 

Or it’s films like Lanzmann’s. There’s nothing more powerful than the monumental Shoah to help us recall how easily those unprecedented events slotted into a world we can just about still recognise as our own. 

But let the last word go to Filip Müller, one of the film’s survivors, interviewed throughout in a room with the blinds drawn, who couldn’t forget even if he wanted to: 

‘Every day we saw thousands and thousands of innocent people disappear up the chimney. With our own eyes, we would truly fathom what it means to be a human being. There they came, men, women, children, all innocent. They suddenly vanished, and the world said nothing.’ 

England and Scotland are forever bound in mourning

Today, on Remembrance Day, wreaths will be laid to remember the fallen at 11am at the Stone of Remembrance. It follows the firing of Edinburgh Castle’s One O’clock Gun at 11am yesterday on Armistice Day. In London, there was a firing of guns from Horse Guards Parade and a procession past the Cenotaph. Last Remembrance Day, Nicola Sturgeon lead a wreath outside Edinburgh City Chambers. Humza Yousaf will likely do the same this morning. The history of Scotland and England is one of shared war.

The union came through war and conquest. By 78 AD, all of England and Wales was under Roman control, but some of Scotland was never taken over. (Around 83 AD, the Romans crossed the Forth and defeated the Caledonian Confederacy, but were only able to take the lowlands. Highland terrain was far too tricky.) From the third century, Barbarians started to attack the British Isles, and by the seventh century, Roman Britannia had dissolved into a number of kingdoms. The Jutes established themselves in Kent and parts of Hampshire, the Saxons in southern England and the Angles in northern England. A couple hundred years later, Vikings plundered England, and in Scotland Kenneth I MacAlpin, king of the Gaelic kingdom of Dàl Riata, conquered the Picts. The fighting seemed to never end.

At the end of the Tudor line in 1603, with the death of the childless Elizabeth I, there was a union of the crowns when James VI of Scotland also became James I of England. Despite James’s hopes for a ‘union of love,’ or, at least, a measure of administrative and economic unity between England and Scotland, the union (in law and fact) remained essentially that only of the monarch. It was weak, and when Charles I repeatedly threatened violence to solve political crises, the civil war began. Charles’s man in Scotland, James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, was a brilliant tactician, but was ordered to lay down his arms when Charles surrendered to the Scots. When union really happened, Britain was a parliamentary creation, the unitary state of Great Britain being established on 1 May 1707.

Risings and rebellions continued regardless. One of the last was the Battle of Culloden in the Scottish Highlands in 1746, that led to a total defeat of the Jacobite claim to Britain. The victory of the Duke of Cumberland led to a complete remodelling of the governance of the Highlands, removing military and judicial powers from Scottish feudal lords, and the Scottish clergy were forced to pledge allegiance to the British royals. The British state was one whose political tone and agenda were set in London and southern England. Scots were brutally forced to accept that.

It’s only relatively recently, then, that Scots have fought alongside the English, playing a major role in the British army. In world war one, it was Douglas Haig, an Edinburgh man, who led the British army on the Western Front in the battles in the Somme, Ypres, Cambrai and in other places. In world war two, the 1st Battalion of the Royal Scots defended Dunkirk during the evacuation. They were ordered on 26 May 1940 to fight ‘to the last round and last man’ in covering the beaches — and they did. When a rogue, isolated group of Royal Scots were taken to a French hospital, the German officer who escorted him said they ‘fought like lions’. Their battalion was almost entirely wiped out.

In the 1960s the Scottish National party began its rise and, by the 1990s, during the campaign for the Scottish Assembly and after the Claim of Right, Scottish nationalism became increasingly popular. Scotland has since had an independence referendum and will likely have another. It’s worth remembering today, regardless of all that, that England and Scotland will be forever bound in mourning.

Gove mobbed by pro-Palestinian protesters 

Rarely has a protest had so much hype before it has even happened. But today’s pro-Palestinian march had something for everyone.

Sadiq Khan has pointed the finger of blame at Suella Braverman over the attempts by right wing protesters to ambush pro-Palestine supporters. Meanwhile, the chants of ‘from the river to the sea’ have led watchers to question whether this was really a march for peace after all. And now a government minister has been thrown into the mix.

Footage is doing the rounds on social media of Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, being mobbed by pro-Palestinian protesters at Victoria station this afternoon. Gove appears to have got caught up in the march, rather than having planned to be there.

So far, more than 90 counter protesters have been arrested and a further ten people across the capital for other offences. Once again questions are being asked as to whether the police were right to say they had it under control… 

Inside the Armistice Day protests

The Metropolitan Police today staged their largest-ever operation with two marches – the pro-Palestinian march and a smaller counter-protest – taking place in London. The latter, centred on Westminster, provided most of the arrests.

The main route of the pro-Palestine march (which started in Park Lane and was moving towards the US Embassy in Vauxhall) passed more peacefully with fewer scuffles. The demonstration drew perhaps 300,000 (although Jeremy Corbyn claimed a million) and the main arrests seem to be those who decided to sit down at Waterloo station and not move when asked. No one person on the march can hope to give an account on the whole thing. But I can say what I observed and summarise some of the various reports.

The police were right to worry more about the counter-protesters, intent on causing trouble. They were ‘not one cohesive group’, said the Met: factions, each trying to provoke in different ways and places. One of them tried to run for the Cenotaph and disturbed the peace during the wreath-laying ceremony. They were doing all they could to provoke, throwing missiles at police and trampling on the names of dead Palestinian children which had been placed on the National Gallery. 

The main Palestine march gathered at midday as promised (they had promised to avoid the 11am Cenotaph ceremony) and started moving (very slowly) at 12:45pm. Many of the slogans were toxic, some disgustingly anti-Semitic. I saw one saying: ‘Gaza is a real Holocaust’ and there were reports of the Hamas flag (which is illegal to fly) and other chants that are so anti-Semitic as to be illegal. But few arrests for this: not today, anyway. Police insist they make arrests for the offending slogans in due course. Their approach has been not to arrest at the time so as not to inflame the crowd.

Officers had one overriding objective: don’t let it kick off. And keep the protesters and counter-protesters apart. The EDL types started at 9am in Westminster and their target seemed to be the police. ‘Several hundred arrived’, said Matt Twist, a Met assistant commissioner, a few hours later, ‘and seemed intent on confrontation and intent on violence’.

That certainly squared with what I saw. One scuffle broke out in front of me at Westminster: a man with a ‘Free Palestine’ sign was walking towards Parliament Square. An officer went over to him and I followed. ‘The protest starts in Victoria’, the policeman was saying, ‘so why have you come to Parliament Square?’ Or that’s what he was trying to say. 

The counter-protesters moved in instantly: the idiot with the flag was ready to give them the fight they wanted. Spotting this, a blur of police officers charged screaming ‘Cordon! Cordon!’ They penned the counter-protestors into a little side street next to a pub, where they remained for the next hour, occasionally spasming and chucking a bottle. As I write, many of them are still drinking in central London pubs. 

Sadiq Khan, London Mayor and Humza Yousef, Scotland’s First Minister, both referred to the counter-protesters as ‘far right’ (and a ‘direct result of the Home Secretary’s words’ Khan said). That label was rejected by those I spoke to. They insisted they had come down to London for Armistice Day to remember the fallen: ‘In every other country this is allowed. In every other country you’re allowed to be patriotic.’ The Met, as a group of three told me, are ‘traitors’. (At one point, they started singing ‘You’re not English anymore’ at the police). When I asked them whether they approved of charging at British police – the bottle-throwing, the firework-hurling etc. – a couple said that we ‘don’t need that shit’. ‘Sometimes you’ve got to do something like that, though, to get yourself noticed?’ So like Just Stop Oil, I asked. ‘Yeah, yeah, bit like that.’ 

None of the counter-protesters I spoke to thought that the pro-Palestine march should have been banned. ‘Because it’s free speech and they’ll come for us next.’ The last march to be banned (due to security concerns) in Britain was an EDL march in Tower Hamlets 2011. 

I then moved over to the Palestine march where most were walking slowly, occasionally bursting into song (and yes, ‘river to the sea’ was the most common). There was a distinct smell of weed floating around. Drugs may have been common on both sides: on the other side, the Met said they’d chalked up a few of the counter-protestors for class A usage, most likely cocaine. One war memorial was targeted: a First World War memorial near Wellington Arch where a Palestinian flag was hung around the waist of a statue. Elsewhere, a protester climbed a drainpipe to the locked basement of the Irish embassy to a chant of ‘Allahu Akbar’ Police tried to give chase but were blocked by the crowd.

The police may draw criticism for devoting more officers to the smaller march in Parliament Square, but from what I saw that was the right decision. They were the more aggressive crowd, and were far more likely to kick off. The Met may be vulnerable to the accusation of not caring about anti-Semitic hate speech, since it has made a great deal of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ and language over the past few years, and suddenly seems calm about it. There are reports of about 100 arrests, more than 90 of whom were the counter-protesters but that figure is bound to rise later on this evening. Today, the Met focused on keeping the streets free of violence, actual violence, and thuggery – and to a large extent, they succeeded. So far, at least. As night falls, their job might get harder.

Why the Tories need the new Hong Kong voter base

With the Conservatives trailing around twenty points in most polls, the outcome of the next election seems all but set. However, even if Rishi Sunak will struggle to lead his party to a fifth term, the scale of a likely Labour victory remains unclear. Whether it’s a backlash from the Muslim community over Starmer’s position on Gaza or Scottish independence, there are plenty of factors that could dampen a Starmer victory parade.

One of these unknowns that could swing the balance for some crucial seats in the next election are that of the new voters from Hong Kong, 125,000 of whom have come to the UK on British Nationals (Overseas) status since China imposed a National Security Law on the city in 2020.

According to new research conducted by the organisation Hong Kong Watch, a London-based NGO, and seen by The Spectator, there are a number of marginal seats in which a highly educated and politically engaged Hong Kong voter base could swing results in the next election. The research estimates that there could be 140,000 new voters from Hong Kong by autumn next year, and has cross referenced National Insurance data with new school enrollments to guess at where they live (as I’ve written recently, the relative financial independence of these new arrivals make them harder to track than your usual migrants). Polling from the University of Liverpool suggests that more than half of the new arrivals would vote Conservative (the Lib Dems come second at 16 per cent, and Labour last at 14 per cent).

There are three Conservative seats in which the number of BNO passport holders may well be bigger than the size of the Tory majority, according to Hong Kong Watch. These are Warrington South, where Red Waller Andy Carter holds with a 2,000 vote majority (there’s an estimated 2,200 BNO voters in the constituency); leafy Wimbledon, where the majority is 628 (more than 700 BNO voters estimated) and incumbent MP Stephen Hammond has already announced he will step down at the next election; and Kensington, where government minister Felicity Buchan has an 150 seat majority but the BNO voter population may be over 600. Targeting the Hong Kong voter base in these seats could make all the difference for the Tories (Labour is the second largest party in Kensington and Warrington South; whereas Wimbledon may well be lost to the Lib Dems).

In addition, there are eight Tory seats where the BNO population is estimated to be more than a third of the size of the majority. In the Greater London constituency of Carshalton and Wallington, for example, Elliot Colburn holds a 629 vote majority, gained from the Liberal Democrats in 2019. There, it’s estimated that there will be over 500 BNO voters by autumn next year. Other such constituencies range from Gedling in the Midlands (BNO voters make up two thirds of Tom Randall MP’s 679 vote majority), to Heywood and Middleton in greater Manchester (BNO voters make up 38% of Chris Clarkson MP’s 663 vote majority), and Chipping Barnet in north London (where BNO voters make up a third of former cabinet minister Theresa Villiers’s 1,212 vote majority).

We know relatively little about the political opinions of these Hong Kongers. A 2023 poll from the University of Liverpool found that 36 per cent considered themselves ‘moderate democrats’ and that ‘political factors were the most significant influence on individuals’ decision to leave Hong Kong’ – respondents cited democratic rights like freedom of assembly and speech as causes they cared about such that they left Hong Kong. Explicitly, 52 per cent said they’d vote for the Conservative party.

Anecdotally, this tallies with the Chinese and Hong Kong Chinese Brits that I’ve spoken to. Much like British-Indians who also lean conservative, British-Chinese tend to be family-oriented and financially comfortable. They favour a smaller state (this may be even more the case for Hong Kongers, given the low taxes in their home city) and tend to choose where to live based on the best local schools.

They’re also likely to actively participate in British democracy, given how many of them left Hong Kong because of its authoritarian turn. They turned out in high numbers to the local elections earlier this year, according to an informal survey that Hong Kong Watch did with Hong Konger groups in London and beyond.

So, for the first time ever, British political parties will need to consider and try to understand this new and substantial voter base. Is their support for the Conservative party baked in? Or can Labour and in particular the Liberal Democrats tap into their priorities on, say, housing and education? What does this mean for the government and opposition’s China policy, given these new voters are likely to have a critical view of the People’s Republic? So far, Britain’s new Hong Kongers are a bit of a mystery. But politicians will need to start understanding and reaching out to them soon.

The Tories’ biggest missed opportunity

In about a year’s time, maybe less, the British people will collectively hand the Tory government their P45s. Rishi Sunak will be mildly disappointed for about five minutes and then move on to a cushy billet in a Silicon Valley tech firm. The Cabinet members will mostly return to the backbenches. Some of them will be able to wangle regular gigs in the newspapers or on TV, where they will argue for the red meat policies that they failed to pursue in office.

And so will pass one of the most incredible missed opportunities in British political history. A Tory majority of a size not seen since the Thatcher years has been used to achieve a great deal of nothing at all. There was not a single measure from Tuesday’s King’s Speech that could not plausibly have appeared in a Labour manifesto.

The Tories talk a good game. Ever since the early Cameron era, in the dog days of New Labour, they have floated reform of the Human Rights Act. There have been countless promises to cut police paperwork, to get them focused on real crime, and to put ‘more bobbies on the beat’. The party has promised to cut immigration at every election since 2010. More recently they have been loudly opposed to wokeism. 

But there is no follow-up. The government seem unwilling or unable to use the levers available to address the structural and systematic causes of the problems they lament, and inexplicably afraid of the opprobrium of people who hate them and will never vote for them anyway. This week’s kerfuffle over Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s article in the Times is a perfect illustration of both points. Ms Braverman was correct. Public order policing in the capital is in a bad way. It is perhaps defensible – the Met would say that by treating some large-scale demonstrations with a certain indulgence, they are ensuring good community relations and avoiding large-scale disorder – but it is surely unsustainable in the longer term for the police to turn a blind eye to lawbreaking by particular groups. The hysterical reaction to her very moderate and measured arguments has been highly instructive.

But in politics it is not enough to be right. You need to have a plan and you need to get things done. If the Home Secretary is concerned about these matters, she has actual power to address them. She is not a pundit, fulminating uselessly on a Fleet Street op-ed page. She is not Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells, spluttering into his marmalade over the latest instance of the country going to the dogs. She has extensive authority over the domestic affairs of this country. 

But instead, she writes an opinion piece, letting the media make the story ‘Tory splits over Braverman’s attack on police’ rather than ‘Sectarian Islamist activists plan yet another weekend of disruption’. If she thinks there is a problem with the police’s operational priorities and with the rise of Islamism, she should be working quietly and diligently to fix those problems: to rein in radical mosques and organisations, to control immigration from countries where radical Islam is a problem, and to sort out the police.

All that said, the decision to effectively throw her under the bus by other senior figures in the government demonstrates the other part of the problem: the rank cowardice frequently shown by senior Tories in the face of bad faith criticism from their political opponents. Number 10 has briefed against Braverman; Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has distanced himself from her remarks. One has to wonder what on earth they think they will achieve by doing so. The government is becalmed in the polls, twenty points behind. Some projections suggest that they may have fewer than 100 seats after the next election. There is literally nothing to lose at this point from urging the police to take a more robust attitude to sectarian marches in central London on Armistice Day. They might even gain back the confidence of conservative-minded voters who have given up on them in disgust. 

The common factor behind these two aspects of the Tories’ inertia problem is that they do not have the stomach or the intelligence to dismantle the Blairite settlement, which has the effect – if not the intention – of making rightwing politics very difficult. We have seen this year how human rights law has hamstrung the government’s attempts to address the Channel migrants crisis, and to deport foreign criminals. The Equality Act has embedded a doggedly egalitarian moralism throughout most of the public sector and a good deal of the private sector, making them institutionally left-wing. The Malicious Communications Act 2003 and the Public Order Act 1986 both contain loosely drafted provisions that are now used by the police and the courts to suppress ‘offensive’ speech in a way that would have considered outrageous not long ago. Just in the last week or so we have seen two appalling cases: a Tory MP, Bob Stewart, received a criminal conviction for being mildly rude in an argument, and several former policemen received one for sharing an off-colour joke in a private WhatsApp chat.

The Conservative government could undo all this quite easily. But they don’t. As far as I am aware, they did not raise a squeak of protest about either the Bob Stewart case or that of the retired policemen. This suggests that they are objectively happy with this state of affairs – which is conceivable – or that the possibility of unpicking it through their still-substantial majority in the Commons has just not occurred to them. They are content to play by the rigged rules drawn up by the Blair revolution; they do not care that the aim of modern liberal politics is to make conservative politics impossible. They dare not even try to level the playing field, to write their own rules, to reject fake ‘constitutional norms’ invented by civil servants less than twenty years ago.

Electoral oblivion, whenever it comes, will be richly deserved.