Come On Down?

"Falling inflation" means only that prices are going up by less than the last time that anyone officially checked. In this case, prices are going up by 3.2 per cent rather than by 3.6 per cent. Let joy be unconfined.

All this, and 5.1 per cent unemployment, too. Tell us again how there cannot be both mass unemployment and galloping inflation. There can be, there is, and from the point of view of the people responsible, there is supposed to be. Almost all Labour and other MPs regard that as neither a failure nor an accident, but as something to be engineered and celebrated, as it has been and is being, since the fear of destitution is fundamental to their control of the rest of us. They are the Heirs to Blair, whom Margaret Thatcher identified as her greatest achievement.

They Also Serve?

Not even Ukraine wants to be in NATO anymore, so why should anywhere else? De facto American withdrawal means that it has effectively ceased to exist. But membership has always negated the concept of "fighting for your country". You could be fighting for practically anywhere. Explain to me how Russia would invade Britain, an aspiration that in any case it has never expressed. Heaven forfend that Rich Knighton might have his eye on future employment by the arms companies that funded the Royal United Services Institute.

Eagle-eyed viewers of Knighton's RUSI lecture will have noticed that his only medals were Jubilee ones, the Coronation one, and the Long Service and Good Conduct Medal, while there were no wings among his braids. In 37 years, his only combat tour has been as an engineering support officer in Italy during the Kosovo War. To have risen to his present eminence, appointed in the end by Keir Starmer of all Prime Ministers, he is obviously a spook. Someone has to be, but it is a different matter to make public pronouncements on policy. Like Blaise Metreweli, who elected Knighton? And as the RAF veteran Tony Benn would have put it to either of them, "How can we get rid of you?"

Broken Covenant

Danny Kruger welcomed the endorsement of Bonnie Blue. Is that also the view of Sarah Pochin? Of Tim Montgomerie? Of Ann Widdecombe?

Since there cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling, then there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. But unlike the Conservative Party, which merely thinks that it is and acts as if it were, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are constitutionally committed to the “free” market. Yet enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy.

Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today, both by means of drugs, and specifically among young males by means of pornography. In Ukraine, at the same time as they tore down statues of Alexander Pushkin, and renamed streets that had been named after him, they legalised pornography to help pay for the war. Even before then, some people had already been taking payment to strip on camera via a “charity project” called Teronlyfans, to fund the Armed Forces.

Pornography had been legally prohibited and practically unknown in the Soviet Union. But post-Soviet Russia was flooded with it, to placate the young male population during the larceny of their country by means of the economic “shock therapy” that created today’s oligarchs. The rest is history. That tactic was not new. “Sex work” of various kinds has always been encouraged when the young men have needed to be stupefied, and it still is. The corporate capitalist pornogrification of our own society is no accident. Reform UK has picked its side.

Grotesque Chaos

Liverpool City Council did not sack anyone when it hired taxis to hand out redundancy notices “to its own workers”, as if it might have handed them out to anyone else. Those notices were an accounting device. No job was lost.

Today, though, 60-year-old George Wilson has become the first binman to suffer compulsory redundancy after he had refused to accept a pay cut of around £7,000. By Birmingham City Council. A Labour council. A Labour council.

Since March, that council has been breaking the ILO Convention on Private Employment Agencies by using agency workers to break a strike, in this case a strike by the members of a trade union affiliated to the Labour Party. Since November, those agency workers have also been on strike.

Medical Matters

You do not have to be poor to be right. If your pay has not kept pace with your private employer's profits, then you have a legitimate claim. Or if, like the resident doctors, your pay from the currency-issuing State has not kept pace with inflation, then you have a legitimate claim. Since this situation has been 18 years in the making, then all three parties that have been in government during that period need to explain how things have reached this stage.

Strikes are supposed to be disruptive, and arranging them to cause the most disruption is fundamental to them. Strikes in the NHS do not, in themselves, pose a threat to life, as if Aneurin Bevan, of all people, had never thought to put the necessary safeguards in place. I'll give you a clue. He did, so they are. The NHS flourished in the glory days of British trade unionism. Strikes have always been planned for. There is no threat to patient care, and any Health Minister or informed commentator knows that in detail.

The Frontline Is Everywhere

Certainly, the Diaspora gets everywhere. In Ottawa, the Memorial to the Victims of Communism could not be unveiled last month and will now feature no names of specific individuals, since it had originally borne those of numerous Nazi collaborators and war criminals. The next President of Chile is be José Antonio Kast, the son of Michael Kast, a ratline escapee and political patriarch who had been refused a denazification certificate, and thus the brother of the late Miguel Kast, the Chicago Boy who was President of the Central Bank under Augusto Pinochet, whose regime his little brother enthusiastically supported. The Kast background did not seem to bother Milton Friedman, as it expressly does not bother Benjamin Netanyahu.

And while you do not choose your ancestors, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ nevertheless vet to Kingdom Come those of applicants to their ranks. How, then, can the bullying, fearmongering and manipulative Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service be Blaise Metreweli, whose grandfather, Constantine Dobrowolski, was possibly still alive in 1969 after having been an infamous defector from an Allied Army to collaboration with the Nazi Occupation of Ukraine, such that he had been called “the worst enemy of the Ukrainian people” by the Allies when they had placed on his head a bounty equivalent to £200,000 today? Well, why not? If anything, such a background is a qualification for the job. Indeed, that may well have swung it for her.

The Sonnenrad and the Wolfsangel are displayed by Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Battalion, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, and all the rest of them. Those symbols have only one possible meaning. You may as well wear a swastika, and they sometimes do. These are the factions on whom Volodymyr Zelensky depends, and it is beside the point that he himself is Jewish; most of Hitler’s 27 million Soviet victims were not Jewish, and the post-War Western fantasy that the War had been fought because of the persecution of the Jews is more or less unknown in the former USSR.

The real founders of NATO, as of so very much else after the War, were Nazis. Not overly officious traffic wardens, but real, live, actual Nazis. Before the War in Europe was officially over, the generous political donors in the arms trade decided that the next lucrative enemy was going to be the Soviet Union, which in fact had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe, just as Russia manifestly cannot conquer even Ukraine, much less anywhere else. Therefore, we began to clutch to our bosom the people in Europe who were most anti-Soviet. Guess who? The sky was literally the limit for Wernher von Braun, as recently explored even here, and effectively so for Walter Hallstein, Adolf Heusinger, Kurt Waldheim, and numerous others. None of their pasts had ever been any kind of secret. Operation Gladio was full of Nazis, as were the parallel stay-behind operations in non-NATO countries, operations that had particularly close ties to Britain.

How could the Manchester synagogue attack have happened in the land of the Kindertransport? Having taken in only 10,000 Kindertransport children, Britain took in 15,000 Nazi collaborators, one and half times as many. 1,000 Kindertransport children had been interned as enemy aliens, and some of them had been sent as far as Australia and Canada to get rid of them, but there was none of that for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician). Those were ethnic Ukrainians from a formerly Austro-Hungarian area that had been incorporated into Poland after the First World War, meaning that they were able to claim pre-War Polish nationality in order to enter Britain even though they had massacred ethnic Poles during the War. It had been Churchill who had handed Galicia over to Joseph Stalin, but that did not stop many of the 1st Galician from making their way to Britain. See how very much at home they made themselves.

After all, it was by then Clement Attlee’s Britain. The Attlee Government imposed austerity at home in order to go to war to restore the rule of old Nazi collaborators in Greece. Attlee took Britain into NATO alongside Fascist Portugal from the very start, and NATO has now admitted Finland, which did not drop the swastika from the insignia of its Air Force until 2020, nor from a number of its Air Force flags until this August, meaning that NATO forces had been flying flags with the swastika on them. NATO’s “educational” publications, defining Russia as the eternal enemy, laud the 1940s collaborators as the liberating heroes. Their successors are in government in much of Eastern Europe, legislating for the entire EU.

Another founder member of NATO was Canada, where at that time, just after the War, showing your SS tattoo was a guaranteed way of getting in, because it proved how anti-Soviet you were. As late as the 1990s, old Nazis whom the Americans wanted to deport simply moved to Canada, which let them in, and where they carried on drawing their German military pensions. In Mark Carney’s party and into Carney’s adult lifetime, Justin Trudeau’s father protected thousands of these people as Prime Minister almost continuously from 1968 to 1984, and Chrystia Freeland is the granddaughter of Michael Chomiak, who edited Krakivski Visti, a Nazi paper in occupied Krakow, printed on a press confiscated from a Jewish newspaper.

Whatever the complexities of life in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, there was only one possible reason to join the Waffen SS. Life was complicated in Western Europe during the War, but would you make excuses for the Dutchmen, Frenchmen and Belgians who joined that? Or for its British Free Corps, originally called the Legion of Saint George? There were others besides, and in every case the argument was the same, that the real enemy was the Soviet Union. If Yaroslav Hunka was a hero, then so were they. Including Hunka’s Galician brothers-in-arms who ended up in Britain, which had been planning a surprise attack on the USSR from no later than 22 May 1945, and which therefore needed all the Hunkas that it could find. Hunka himself lived in Britain from the end of the War until 1954, and his late wife was British. In 1951, in Britain, she married an SS veteran.

Germany itself has never had a firewall. Not only had key figures in the foundation of the Federal Republic, of NATO and of the EU very recently been Nazi officers, but one of the East German Bloc Parties, complete with reserved seats in the Volkskammer, was the NDPD, specifically for former Nazi Party members and supporters, although it was often observed that there were in fact more former Nazi Party members in the Communist Party than the entire membership of the NDPD. In 1968, long after East Germany professed to have eradicated all trace of Nazism, the new Constitution still felt the need to commit it to doing so. In 1990, the NDPD took fewer votes than it officially had members, so perhaps that commitment had been met. If so, then it did not last. Look at the voting patterns of the former East Germany now.

No one in West Germany even pretended, not really. The obituaries of Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl were as frank as they themselves had always been. By the early 1960s, more former members of the Nazi Party, a party that had been 8.5 million strong at the end of the War, were on the staffs of many West German government departments than there had been current Nazi Party members on those staffs during the Third Reich. In parts of Austria to this day, you can tell what were the American from what were the neighbouring Soviet zones from the vote for the Far Right, since as early as the summer of 1945 local Nazis fled across the river from the latter to the former. There had been no difference in voting patterns before the War. Old collaborators were often set up, usually in London, as governments-in-exile of Eastern European countries, or at least included in them, while Western spooks aided and abetted their stay-behind networks back home. From 1989 onwards, those emerged blinking into the light, essentially unchanged. And here we are. “We” have been allied to the Nazis for more than 13 times as long as we were ever at war with them.

For example, although in all fairness he himself died in 1939, Kaja Kallas’s great-grandfather, Eduard Alver, was a key figure in founding the anti-Soviet Kaitseliit militia that became the Estonian component of the Forest Brothers, collaborationist exterminators of the Jews. It is no wonder, although it is still inexcusable, that it recently came as “news” to her that Russia and China had been among the victors of the Second World War. Thankfully, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty does not mean what most Europeans, and possibly most Canadians, think that it means, since no United States Senate would ever have ratified that. Ask them in Hungary and Slovakia, whose oil supply non-NATO Ukraine can apparently bomb with complete impunity. It really has been 80 years, has it not? But while there may be no more Iron Cross or Arrow Cross, they will always have Vauxhall Cross.

Galatians 1:8

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s spiritual guide is Rikki Doolan, and Doolan’s is Uebert Angel, who is a black Zimbabwean immigrant and a naturalised British citizen, as well as a heretic and probably a crook. The probable crookery need not detain us here. But what of the heresy?

Donald Trump grew up in the Marble Collegiate Church of Norman Vincent Peale, who even took his first wedding there. The Power of Positive Thinking was the old mainline American Protestant tradition reconfigured by the New Thought movement. The practically indistinguishable Word of Faith movement is that reconfiguration of Pentecostalism, and is exemplified by Trump’s close ally, Paula White. As the prosperity gospel, although there are also plenty of other things wrong with it, it is preached both by White and by Angel.

The mainline has become the oldline by turning to secularism and paganism, very much in the liberal Catholic mould of agreeing with whoever it was talking to by sending different people to different encounters. But it is White who has ties to the Unification Church that the Tokyo District Court recently ordered to liquidate its assets because of its role in the assassination of Shinzo Abe, and through that to the Nation of Islam, with which the Unification Church organises mass events and which promotes Dianetics, the basis of Scientology. Such is the sea in which Angel swims. Pulling Yaxley-Lennon behind him. But there is a better way. He is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

No Golden Hope Here

Read Emily Duggan and weep that these courts were also to hear most of the cases that now went before juries, but with no automatic right of appeal to the Crown Court, a right that the Magistrates’ Association had submitted to the Law Commission should be retained:

It was early afternoon at Medway magistrates’ court last Wednesday when it became clear that many of the people in police custody overnight would not be making it into the dock.

“I’m afraid it’s absolute chaos today,” District Judge Stephen Leake told the lawyers gathered in court one, some of whom were still uncertain where their clients were being held.

A shortage of court cells for the 39 people held by police overnight in north Kent meant many of the cases on the morning list had still not made it in. Others were redirected with no notice or produced on video link from cells beneath other courts miles away.

Proposals drastically reduce jury trials by David Lammy, the justice secretary, would pile thousands more cases on to the magistrates’ courts in England and Wales to reduce the pressure on the crown courts, where more serious cases are heard. Those working in them say it is unclear how these courts will be able to take on more work.

Magistrates will be given the power to pass sentences of up to 18 months — and possibly even two years — so they can take on more serious cases from crown courts. Judges sitting alone in crown court would also replace juries in cases with sentences of up to three years.

The backlog of cases waiting to be heard in crown courts is set to reach 80,000 and trials are being listed as late as 2030.

But the well-documented inefficiencies in the crown courts are just as evident in magistrates’ courts, which have their own record backlog of 361,000 after almost two decades of budget cuts and the pandemic.

Between 2010 and 2019 more than half of all magistrates’ court buildings in England and Wales were sold off to fund digital reforms: 164 closed their doors. In Kent this included Dover, Tunbridge Wells, Dartford and Sittingbourne, which is now a Wetherspoons pub called The Golden Hope.

Hope was in short supply in Medway’s cramped advocates’ room. Sara Haroon, a barrister, said: “I went to Sevenoaks court this morning expecting my client to be produced, only to be told he was being taken to Maidstone magistrates’ court cells and beamed here for the hearing.”

Later that day, when the client appeared on video link accused of aggravated burglary, the whole courtroom had to be emptied when he asked to speak to his lawyer. Being in a cell half an hour away meant swift, whispered questions were not an option.

Those not remanded in prison for their first hearings had other practical problems. The door to the dock where they needed to stand was supposed to be unlocked remotely from a button on the clerk’s desk, but mostly refused to budge. “Just listen for the click” she kept repeating to nervous defendants. Eventually, she gave up and ran over with a key.

Under-investment in the building was apparent elsewhere, from the graffiti-covered lavatories to the long-closed canteen.

At 3pm, a junior barrister who had travelled from the opposite end of London to represent two men charged overnight with serious drug offences still had no idea whether his cases, listed for 10am, were going to be heard.

Judge Leake told him: “I don’t even know that the two you’re down to do are here or at the police station or if we’re doing them or not.”

By the time it became certain the defendants were being held in police custody for another night it was the end of the working day. It meant the barrister had spent £30 on travel for a day’s work and would not be paid for attending court because no hearing took place.

One of the fastest ways to clear the backlog would be for fewer cases to come to court. Police use of out-of-court resolutions, such as cautions, penalty notices and community resolutions, has decreased by 35 per cent over the past ten years, according to Sir Brian Leveson, who is conducting a review of the criminal courts. He has suggested these be considered in all appropriate cases, including those already in the system.

Anne-Marie Bodle had waited all day to plead guilty to being drunk and disorderly in a public place after getting in an argument, shouting in the street and smashing some bottles in September.

It was a first offence and the judge was baffled as to why it was taking up court time. Leake said: “It’s not entirely clear why someone who’s never been in trouble at the age of 48 couldn’t have been dealt with by way of a caution.”

There are also concerns about the fairness of plans to take more serious cases away from juries and put them into the hands of magistrates and district judges. Lawyers and researchers — including Lammy himself in his 2017 review of race in the justice system — say case-hardened magistrates or judges take a different view to a jury of peers looking at facts afresh.

Adekunle Salami was convicted last year at Medway magistrates’ court for failure to provide a specimen of breath. The 48-year-old security guard’s conviction was due to be reconsidered at an appeal at Maidstone magistrates’ court last Wednesday morning.

Salami was in a minor accident in Gillingham, Kent, on a summer’s evening in June 2022 and asked by police to blow into a breathalyser. He suffers from asthma exacerbated by hepatitis, and hay fever was making his chest tighter. Every time he blew, it was not enough to get a reading on police machines.

He said: “I really wanted to provide a specimen … I offered the officer a blood sample and he said, ‘I don’t have time for that’.” Instead, he was charged with failure to provide a sample of breath.

Two years later, Salami was found guilty in a brief trial at Medway magistrates’ court. He provided medical evidence of his health conditions but the magistrates said they would not consider it because it was served late.

It is well established that those whose lung capacity is affected by asthma and other respiratory conditions are unable to blow hard enough for breath machines. But, as the magistrates are likely to have known, minor asthma is also used as an excuse for not blowing hard enough by those stopped when intoxicated.

An automatic right of appeal has been seen as a protective factor, acknowledging three volunteers are not equivalent to a judge and jury. But in addition to pushing more serious cases to magistrates, the government is planning to remove this right. The system will replicate the crown court, where appeals are granted only on points of law.

Penelope Gibbs, director of the Transform Justice charity, said: “Too often rough justice is meted out in the magistrates’ court due to defendants who appear without a lawyer and don’t understand the process, defence lawyers who have insufficient time to prepare and inappropriate sentences meted out. As it is, very few appeal against their sentence or conviction since they don’t know how.

“If the government makes defendants make a legal argument as to why they should appeal, the number of appeals will dwindle further. Miscarriages of justice from the magistrates’ court will seldom be overturned.”

Although Salami’s case carried only a 40-month driving disqualification and would not be considered by a crown court, his barrister, Rob Bullock, suggested it was indicative of the difference in the quality of justice offered by magistrates. “The evidence that we submitted, albeit late, wasn’t taken into consideration. If it happened in the crown court they would’ve given an adjournment.”

He was so incensed he prepared the appeal pro bono. But by 11am on Wednesday it became clear it would not be happening. Despite the prosecution being notified of the date in August, the police officer who had taken the breath test was only told a week before the case, already had annual leave booked, and did not turn up.

A Yoruba interpreter was requested in August but none had been booked. The problem is not an isolated one. Last year, it stopped more than 700 magistrate trials, up 46 per cent in five years.

With two important absences the case had to be adjourned. The next hearing in March — almost four years after the incident — will only be administrative to ensure that everyone can be present at a future appeal date.

For Salami, who has two children and a wife to support, the delay was catastrophic.

Walking out of court with tears streaming down his cheeks, he said he had already spent £8,000 to be represented at various hearings. “Christmas is coming and we can’t enjoy it because of all I’ve paid. I don’t want to wait another year.

“I pursued this case because I was not under the influence of alcohol,” he said. “It’s very unfair … I feel there’s another way.”

An expert witness who was acting pro bono, and had travelled from his Northumberland home the day before the hearing because a video link was not agreed, was also unimpressed. Kevin Corbett, a clinical researcher, said: “I drove through 90mph storms yesterday. Why couldn’t a live link be made when it was requested by the solicitor months ago? We live in the 21st century but the reality is it’s archaic.”

The Crown Prosecution Service said: “We acknowledge there was an administrative error that meant the police officer was not properly informed of when he was needed in court, which contributed to the judge’s decision to adjourn Mr Salami’s appeal. We recognise delays can have significant impacts on victims, witnesses and defendants and are determined to ensure cases get through the courts as swiftly and efficiently as possible.”

Another problem Lammy identified in his review was that juries acted as “a filter for prejudice”. Harpal Virdee, a Kent solicitor, said the pool of magistrates was limited as volunteering during the working day was not possible for most people. “Magistrates are volunteering to give up days of their life and they can afford to do that. That’s not the average person,” he said.

Last year fewer than 5,000 magistrates’ appeals were heard, out of a caseload of more than 1.4 million. Of these, half were appealing against the verdict and the remainder the sentence. The rate of success is suggestive of poor decision-making. More than 40 per cent of appeals against verdict are successful and 47 per cent of appeals against sentence are successful.

The Ministry of Justice said: “The Magistrates’ Association has backed our reforms, recognising that they are essential to delivering faster justice for victims. Since the Lammy review eight years ago, we’ve made significant strides in improving diversity, and our nationwide recruitment drive ensures magistrates truly reflect the communities they serve.

“These bold changes — alongside record sitting days and over £450 million invested annually in our courts estate — will reduce delays and put victims at the heart of the justice system.”

Beware Tech-Bro Economics

Although he oddly fails to mention that, as crowed about by Roger Stone, Donald Trump had pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández in order to save Prospera, Michael Lind writes:

Economic growth is back as a political goal in the United States and across much of the West. Among progressives, advocates of the so-called Abundance movement are enthusiastic for making it easier to build new infrastructure and homes, eclipsing the Malthusian pessimism characteristic of the Left since the Seventies. On the Right, meanwhile, retro-futurist visions of space colonisation and flying cars have edged out the rural utopias of “crunchy conservatives”.

Abundance progressives and pro-growth conservatives are right to reject the hostility to science, industry, and entrepreneurialism of “de-growthers,” who dream of an economic stationary state in the near rather than distant future. Such a stationary state existed for most of human history, when long periods of economic and technological stagnation meant that powerful individuals and states could increase their wealth only by plundering the weak. The explosive growth and once-unthinkable technological advances of modernity have vindicated the 18th-century British writer Jonathan Swift since he wrote in Gulliver’s Travels: “Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”

But we can reject mindless anti-growth ideology without mindlessly embracing growth for its own sake. Yes, we need growth — but good growth, not bad growth. To understand the difference, don’t look to the Silicon Valley overlords who are increasingly determining the shape of politics on both sides of the political spectrum.

Good growth leads to, and sustains, countries with strong middle classes and workers and families with decent wealth, leisure, and the power to bargain with their employers. Bad growth maximises gross domestic product at the expense of individual autonomy, social solidarity, and other fundamental elements of a decent human society.

As an economic metric, GDP is compatible with both good growth and bad growth. Because it measures output per hour worked, it can be improved in a good way — improving the productivity of each worker, lowering the prices of goods and services for society as a whole, and allowing workers to earn the same income with less effort, assuming they can bargain effectively with employers to share in the profits.

But GDP can also be boosted in bad ways by expanding the hours worked in a country without boosting individual worker productivity. In a modern industrial society, in which the majority of adults must toil for wages, GDP can be raised by cutting social-insurance benefits to compel the elderly to have much longer working lives, or by legalising child labour. Abstract GDP would go up, but few people other than some employers and capitalists would be happier.

It’s also possible to expand GDP without increasing productivity by flooding a country with migrants. Excessive immigration may lower wages in various occupations, immiserating natives and immigrants alike, even as GDP improves in numerical value because of the population-driven ballooning of the workforce. Conversely, birth rates that outstrip productivity growth can impoverish a country, even as its GDP rises because more workers mean more work hours.

In a good society, work must be balanced with time for family and community and recreation. Members of a society with a healthy work-life balance would be rational to choose somewhat less growth in personal income and the national economy — if the higher-growth alternative requires sacrificing essential social values.

Edith Cresson, the Prime Minister of France from 1991 to 92, is (barely) remembered today for asserting that a quarter of men in Anglo-Saxon countries are homosexuals who aren’t interested in women and that the Japanese were “little yellow men” who “sit up all night thinking how to screw us”. Whatever may be the case with Anglo-Saxon men, the Socialist premier was right to defend the work-life balance of the French against East Asian cultures of overwork, however chauvinistically: “I said they were working like ants. We cannot live like that, in miniscule apartments with a two-hour journey to work like animals. Work and work and work and producing children to work like animals. We want to keep our social security, our holidays, and live like human beings.”

Long work hours have been correlated with low fertility rates, and East Asia has some of the lowest birth rates in the world. In 2024, South Korea won the dubious honor of being the country with the lowest fertility in the world for six years in a row — 0.75, far below the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a national population without mass immigration. In response, South Korea has imposed a 52-hour work week — compare that to the 35-hour work week in France and 36 to 40 hours a week in Germany. Likewise, Japan since the Seventies has suffered from an epidemic of karoshi — stress-related death by overwork.

Which brings us to Silicon Valley. The tech tycoons who have emerged as the dominant oligarchy in 21st-century America have contradictory views of work and life in the future. Many predict that automation will eliminate most jobs, making it necessary to create a universal basic income that allows citizens to enjoy a minimal level of subsistence without working at all.

Other tech leaders, however, want to import the East-Asian model of overwork and fanatical schooling to the United States (and the West more broadly). According to Elon Musk, who despises labour unions and laws protecting American workers, Chinese factory workers “won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They’ll be burning the 3am oil. So they won’t even leave the factory type of thing. Whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all.”

Vivek Ramaswamy, initially appointed by President Donald Trump as co-director with Musk of the ill-fated Department of Government Efficiency, has claimed that East- and South-Asian students are superior to American students. In an X post that likely doomed his political career, he wrote: “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers…. More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of Friends. More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin’. More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall’.”

Ramaswamy is confused. Individual Indian-Americans excel in many areas, but national productivity is the result of well-designed economic, legal, and political institutions, not overwork by particular individuals. That explains why India, with the longest work hours among the top-10 economies (49 hours or more per week), is much poorer than the United States (38 hours) and Canada (32.1 hours). Indeed, thanks to their productivity, countries with high per-capita GDP in general have lighter workloads.

Not content with opposing organised labour and wage-and-hours laws, many of today’s techno-libertarians dream of carving up democratic nation-states into “freedom cities” or “charter cities” — privately owned cities free to create their own regulations without interference by the countries in which they are geographically situated. This is the revival of an old and very bad idea, formerly embodied in the United States in early-industrial-era company towns and mining towns policed by private detectives — and symbolised today by the high-tech despotism of city-states like Singapore and Dubai.

If the new city-states were bottom-up democratic versions of Athens or Florence, the idea might be appealing. But the tech oligarchs have something more sinister in mind — top-down autocracies in which privileges bestowed on workers by investors and managers replace civil rights in a given territory.

Curtis Yarvin, treated as a guru by some tech executives, has popularised the acronym RAGE (Replace All Government Employees) and called for a “Butterfly Revolution” to centralise “absolute sovereignty” in a corporate state with a dictator-CEO. And foreshadowing Trump’s appointment in 2025 of Musk to head DOGE, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney in 2014 called on then-President Barack Obama to appoint Google boss Eric Schmidt as CEO of America, terminate all federal employees, turn federal power over to the tech industry — then resign.

Symbolising the convergence of libertarianism with the libertine drug culture in Silicon Valley and the Burning Man festival, Peter Thiel has funded a project to promote private “seasteads” unregulated by nation-states, which might allow medical experiments on human beings that are banned elsewhere: “Could you have something where you use psilocybin” — the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms — “or MDMA” — better known as the rave culture drug ecstasy — “as an antidepressant drug? Or could you get new medical treatments where you break the FDA monopoly on medicine worldwide?”

A comment on X by a Thiel protégé, Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, suggests the danger of replacing liberal, constitutional democracy with the tyranny of an all-powerful tech-industry Wizard in a private charter city of Oz: “If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law. We will try and quickly hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others. Our society needs balance. It’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.”

Public executions and deregulated experimentation on human beings, combined with technological innovation as a goal in itself — it is hard to imagine a better example of bad growth.

Then there is the Freedom Cities Coalition, which calls for states to cede land to new private corporate governments exempt from selected federal and state laws and regulations, no doubt including labour laws. President Trump, who in his second term has largely abandoned his working-class voters in favour of tech plutocrats like Musk and Ramaswamy and David Sacks, has called for 10 such post-national, privatised corporate zones on the soil of the United States.

In this dystopian fantasy, America’s federal lands — divided in the 19th century by Lincoln and his allies into homesteads for free family farmers who were considered to be the bulwarks of bottom-up democracy — would now be given over to capitalists and managers to create special economic zones like those in China that host Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, which has had to install “suicide nets” to prevent overworked and underpaid workers from jumping to their deaths from their dormitory towers.

In Honduras, experimental corporate-controlled charter cities like Prospera, which drew more than $100 million in investments from tech libertarians including Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Adam Draper, were seen as so menacing by locals that the Honduran government has repealed the laws that enabled their establishment.

Undeterred by the popular rebellion against Prospera, libertarians bankrolled by tech plutocrats are promoting new, semi-sovereign company towns in places like the Presidio in San Francisco and Guantanamo Bay.

In the “Immigration and Workforce Strategy” section of its Orwellian proposal for a Guantanamo Bay Charter City, the Charter Cities Institute proposes using it as a probationary detention center for potential immigrants to the United States: “this model also introduces a phased approach to immigration: Individuals demonstrate their skills and reliability in Guantanamo Bay before transitioning to the US mainland.”

The new Guantanamo Bay charter city would combine Dubai’s indentured-servant workforce with the pleasing façade of a Potemkin village: “by controlling the narrative — weekly media updates, tours for foreign dignitaries, and televised speeches from the new city — administration officials can shape the story of ‘America’s frontier spirit, revived.’”

A humane and enduring society doesn’t resemble a mining boom town or a slave plantation or a nightmarish “freedom city” of the kind promoted by ketamine-dosing, harem-collecting, neurodivergent tech oligarchs. Technological innovation and economic growth are means to an end, not ends in themselves. Good growth is economic growth that balances desirable technological progress and economic innovation with equality of condition and worker bargaining power. Bad growth increases GDP at the cost of the powerlessness of most citizens in the workplace, as well as the voting booth.

Edith Cresson inadvertently spoke for all human beings, French and Japanese and Hondurans and Americans alike. We are not ants.

Galatians 6:10

There will be no enduring Christian revival in this or any other Western country without the seed of enormous immigration from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, and increasingly also Asia.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s spiritual guide is Rikki Doolan, and Doolan’s is Uebert Angel, who is a black Zimbabwean immigrant and a naturalised British citizen, as well as a heretic and probably a crook.

But like his excellent Nigerian predecessor, our excellent Nigerian priest in Lanchester is neither a heretic nor a crook. He was one of 15 diocesan priests ordained together 19 years ago, and 12 of them are now missionaries in the West. Twelve Apostles, indeed.

Resistance To The Captivation

In the meantime, a gamer has been raised to the altars by the body that at least two of Calvin Robinson’s former affiliations were forever having to explain why they were not. You can keep your console and still find consolation. And no one has yet raised Robinson to the purple since he expressed his opposition to immigration by moving to another country, his monarchism by moving to a republic, and his integralism-without-the-Pope by moving to the land of Article VI Clause 3 and of the First Amendment. But in January, I wrote:

When Donald Trump was last President, then Calvin Robinson was an ICT teacher at a North London comp, with a sideline in videogames. It is always videogames. Robinson is clearly a tortured soul. Since the Church of England refused to ordain him, then he has joined a different denomination every year. He is in Old Catholic Priest’s Orders, so the late Richard Williamson might have raised him to the Episcopate in 2025. Someone probably will. Then watch Robinson ordain any and every fanboy. It is a story as old as the Church Herself.

The key to understanding Williamson was that he had been existentially a Catholic for only a very few months, if ever. The Authorised Version is that he was received from the Church of England in the usual manner in 1971, and that he was then briefly a postulant at the Brompton Oratory. But he was one of the Society of Saint Pius X’s first ordinations to the Priesthood in 1976, meaning that by then he had completed the six-year seminary course at Écône. The SSPX had lost its canonical status the year before, so that those ordinations resulted in Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s suspension a divinis. And even before 1975, it had always been a thing apart, participation in which was a very different matter from being part of a diocesan parish, or even of being at a mainstream seminary, whether before or after the Second Vatican Council. Yet Williamson really does seem to have gone straight there from the Church of England. In practice, he was always in opposition to the Pope. He was never less than a de facto schismatic, and he was a de jure one most of his life. To him, that was normal.

The rise of the online and populist Right has given an odd political prominence to this particular world of overlapping subcultures. Yet against what does all of that think itself a bulwark? An apostate from the Syriac Catholic Church, Salwan Momika had sought asylum in the Schengen Area, not “the Anglosphere”, on account of the newfound militant atheism that moved him to burn the Quran. That act would have been a straightforward public order offence in this country, yet it is defended by those who screamed about the Nazis when people burned The Satanic Verses. Momika would as gladly have burned the Bible, as his defenders still would. His lies about his terrorist connections on his Schengen visa application made his immigration status questionable in Sweden, and led to his straightforward deportation from Norway. A martyr for something, I suppose. But certainly not for conservatism, or for Christendom, or for Christ.

And now, one of the several alumni of The Lanchester Review who quietly delight me by having gone on to greater things, Fergus Butler-Gallie, writes:

“Tommy Robinson’s Christmas Carol Service” sounds like a cutaway gag from Shooting Stars. 15 years ago it probably would have been just that. Now, it is a reality. Robinson has been inviting his followers to help put Christ back into Christmas and sing, in the words of his advisor-cum-chaplain, Ceirion Dewar, “carols of victory” at an undisclosed central London location. As surreal as it sounds, it is part of a concerted effort which Robinson has made of late to co-opt and promote a specifically Christian angle to his nationalism. The cast of clerical characters he has found to support him in these efforts is predictably bizarre.

Dewar refers to himself as a “confessing Anglican missionary bishop”. It is unclear what the provenance of his consecration was, nor what his ministry involves other than attending Robinson’s rallies and making online content in which he gives stirring exhortations for people to join a movement for Christ. Where he emerged from is lost in the annals of the world of the online right, but we do know that Dewar was subject of a court case in 2012 after a pensioner lent him money to pay a driving fine. He is very present on X, where he puts out videos on a regular basis aimed at those who are or might be Robinson adjacent. His profile has a tagged post of an AI picture depicting him on a very small horse with the word “reconquista” above him.

In his video promoting Robinson’s carol service, he stands in a room that looks like a level from the crystal maze and with an American Christmas carol being played in a harmonica and xylophone arrangement. He makes invocations of strength and courage in a pantomime voice, claiming that the carols will be an act of witness. It is a strange scene, but clearly effective in the world of the very online.

Other figures in this movement include Brett Murphy, who has fallen out with a number of small and fragmented offshoot churches and who also focuses on the production of online content. Over the pond there is the tragicomic figure of Calvin Robinson. Given that all of their ministries seem to have been defined by fallings out with congregations and other clergy, there’s little surprise that the subculture of online hard-right clergy are generally defined by their loathing of each other. There was a major split – with catty tweets galore – with another figure purporting to be a bishop, Matthew Firth, a former CofE vicar who now lives online, challenging people to nominate him to the House of Lords. They are figures who are sad, angry and ridiculous in equal measure.

All of them, however, conform to the type of a very old and recognisable Christian fringe figure: the episcopus vagans or “wandering bishop”. These were clerics who set up their own denomination having fallen out with everyone else. Historically these have, via the rogue ordinations in the 1960s of French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and British Holocaust denier, Bishop Richard Williamson, often had links to far right movements. However these latest wandering clerics seem to combine this ancient pedigree with a closeness to the very new world of online fringe culture and the Americanised Right. This, unsurprisingly, has led to some contradictions.

Christianity may have been co-opted by a number of these movements, but actually very few of them seem to understand it. There is much noise from Robinson and his supporters about saving Christianity as a foundational stone of Western culture. The problem is that they routinely make remarkably basic mistakes about what it is. They don’t seem to know what Christianity actually entails. This is not just in the failure to obey the command to “love thy neighbour” but also from a theological or doctrinal point of view. Neil Oliver, the TV presenter with a history of conspiracy theory promotion, posted on X what he clearly thought was a profound and new thought, challenging the pairing of the Old with the New Testament in the Bible. Oliver mused that, despite the New constantly quoting the Old and indeed presenting itself as a fulfilment of its prophecies, he thought the two an ill-matched pair. Elsewhere, US podcaster Joe Rogan has suggested that Christ could come back as AI because Mary was a Virgin and you can’t have sex with a computer. I suspect some of his listeners might be proof that one can at least try.

What is absolutely fascinating to the Church historian is watching a new generation of grifting, online personalities make all the same mistakes that their equivalents in past ages made. Oliver’s was rejected as heresy by Tertullian in the year 208. Rogan’s brain farts on the nature of the Virgin Birth sound like a sort of steampunk Apollinarianism, a heresy about the mind of Christ rejected by the Council of Constantinople in 381. Early Christianity was filled with different theories about the nature of Jesus – decisions on these were made by a series of councils and gatherings. Almost all Christians have viewed these as settled questions. Not so the faith’s new enthusiasts on the hard right. This ignorance of basic doctrine comes from the fact that they’re often doing this for grift or without actually attending church or have only ever experienced Christianity as an online fringe culture, they fall into the same doctrinal traps that people did thousands of years ago. There is nothing new under the Sun (or Son..) and all that.

So, these warriors for Christ seem to have neither the dignity of order nor the security of orthodoxy. Where, then, does this trend come from? Well, it is in part a response to the Americanisation of the more extreme parts of British politics. Having imported a number of tropes and tactics wholesale from the United States, they now have the incongruous task of tacking on a tradition – the Christian Right – which is alien to British politics, to existing aspects of their movement. Historically, whether Oswald Mosley or the skinheads, the British extreme right has often been very hostile to Christianity. This is perhaps reflected by the fact that these current advocates for a Christianised politics on the British right are not using the traditional methods or organisations. Ironically, their tactics mirror most closely those used by radical Islam. Lengthy, rambling filmed sermons conflating grievances and anger with a doctrinally dubious expression of a global faith is a tactic long used by extremist imams to recruit disenchanted young men. It is perhaps unsurprising then, that the Christian theology on display is dubious.

Yet this movement does pose a problem for the actual national Church. The C of E has made recent attempts to “combat” the pseudo-Christian narrative which Robinson is trying to propagate. What this actually entails is a “rapid response resource pack” and an online page of “brand guidelines and logos”. As far as resistance to nascent fascism is concerned this is less Maximilian Kolbe and more David Brent.

It has a patronisation problem too. Much of the Church’s online output is delivered in a tone reminiscent of Come Outside, the 90s educational series where Pippin the Dog and Auntie Mabel would learn about the production of soap or the breeding of geese. All very nice in its own way but completely inadequate for the missional task it needs to perform on the Wild West of the internet. In the pronouncements of its Bishops, it appears out of touch and hectoring, simply parroting the playbook of a governing class who despise it anyway.

There will be the argument that the Church is showing “another way”, but the precise problem is that it isn’t. For as long as it’s led by people who look, sound and believe that they may as well be running an NHS or multi-academy trust or a medium sized district council, it simply isn’t going to appeal to those who are howling into the void of postmodernity.

If the faith seems to be just another political tool, but for the opposite side, then it will simply only add to the problem rather than help soothe it. Only a coherent communitarian vision of the Church rooted in the particularities of the places it serves will suffice to combat hate. One can see why the bishops don’t want to do this; it would involve focussing on the work done by parishes on the ground, the very parishes which they routinely undermine and deep down would rather defund in favour of vast religious hubs. The response really ought to be two fold – a cold, hard deconstruction of the theologically dubious claims by scholars who actually do know what they’re talking about (and few bishops now do) followed by a more joyous attitude, a positive affirmation of why specific places – the streets and byways that the hard right claims to love more than the people who care for them – do matter in the Christian faith.

Resistance to the captivation of faith by the far right is happening. It is not being done by the official statements and poster campaigns but by priests and communities on the ground, who quietly, faithfully model a love for their communities rooted in the idea that the love of God in Christ might be encountered by anyone, anywhere. At the heart of this quiet resistance is the fact that churches in England remain one of the few places where people with radically different political views, varied racial backgrounds, ages, classes and cultural assumptions still actually do come together, united by something which they believe is bigger and more important than any of those supposedly conflicting identities. Their practical faith – so misunderstood by Robinson and his acolytes, and so dismissed by the bishops – will be the thing that really keeps “Christ in Christmas” this festive season.

Further to the decriminalisation of abortion up to birth, Lord Falconer has given the House of Lords the logically inescapable assurance that “pregnancy should not be a bar” to assisted suicide. Dame Sarah Mullally had already said that she might table an amendment to deny Third Reading to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, and might force a vote on that. She ought now to do so. All of the Lords Spiritual should then take that opportunity to defeat this Bill. Or why are they there? And why should the rest of us maintain any formal relations with the Church of England as such?

Down the corridor, Sarah Pochin voted to give that Bill a Third Reading. Did they know that in the Conservative Evangelical citadel of St Michael, Cornhill? Of course they did. But did the Reverend Henry Eatock-Taylor preach to it? Challenges to “the woke liberati” should be addressed to the woke liberati. Supporters of assisted suicide need to hear challenges to assisted suicide. And “Christian Nationalists” need to hear challenges to “Christian Nationalism”. As for “cancelling Christmas”, I for one have never noticed any such cancellation in any shop owned or managed by Muslims. Have you?

Social Democracy, Indeed

I have never met Milo Yiannopoulos, and I hope never to do so. But although James Delingpole and I have rarely met, when we have, then we gave got on. Yet while I almost never think about my brief and long-ago stint on Telegraph Blogs, it is worth mentioning, every once in a while, that Yiannopoulos and this were kept on when I was let go. On this of all days, James seems determined to make the case for Anthony Albanese’s war on social media. It is almost a relief that no one under the age of 16 could legally have read his tweet in Australia.

Almost. But not quite. The restriction of adolescents’ access to social media would intentionally deprive them of any political perspective beyond the ideology purveyed by the schools and by the official media. In Australia, it is therefore being watched closely by those in Britain who, having raised the school-leaving age to 18, which was not in itself a bad idea, now wanted to lower the voting age to 16, which in that context would be literally preposterous. Moreover, young Australians often study or work abroad, where they will no longer have shared a key formative experience of their peers. In any case, for this to work, then we would all have to prove that we were over 16.

The threats to youth include economic inequality, that capitalist system’s politically chosen “free” market in drugs and pornography with their attendant street and sexual violence, that system’s wars of choice, and the assaults on civil liberties in order to enforce austerity and war, increasingly to include conscription. Social media are part of the global corporate order with its Big Tech projects such as digital ID and facial recognition. Yet they have the potential to be fundamental, not only to the oppression, but also to the resistance.

There is going to be plenty to resist. For example, one among horribly many, this ban is also being considered Denmark, while Tony Blair’s anointed Shabana Mahmood is seeking to introduce Denmark’s “parallel societies”, until 2021 officially called “ghettos”. Race is not the primary indicator in an industrial or postindustrial country such as Britain or Denmark, so Britain is to copy Denmark’s “parallel societies”, and Denmark will return the compliment once we had expanded the scheme. The whole thing will then be adopted in Australia, among a frightening array of other places.

The first criterion for a “parallel society” is that more than 50 per cent of the inhabitants originated or “descended” from “non-Western countries", defined as everywhere apart from “all 27 EU countries, the United Kingdom, Andorra, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, Vatican City, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand”. But the other four are socioeconomic. Once it had met the racist first one, then a community has to meet only two of those four to have all of its children from the age of one upwards required to undergo 25 hours per week of instruction in “Danish culture”, and to be declared liable to mass eviction and demolition in the manner of Sharpeville, District Six, or the West Bank. After a few years, Britain would drop the whitelist and just ghettoise everywhere with two or more of unemployment at 40 per cent or above, criminal convictions more than three times the national average (as if the criminal justice system were class-neutral), 50 per cent or more of over-30s without tertiary qualifications, and an average gross income below 55 per cent of the national average. Adjusting for different education systems, Denmark and elsewhere would follow suit.

Not that the change would be that enormous. It was Durham County Council, then the jewel in the right-wing Labour crown, that imposed Category D status. Even if not in detail, everyone in these parts has always known about Medomsley Detention Centre; we are shocked but not surprised. Parallel societies are nothing new to us. The British State inflicts sexual violence on working-class, predominantly white males as the American State inflicts sexual violence on African-American and Hispanic males, as the Australian State inflicts sexual violence on Aboriginal males, as the Israeli State inflicts sexual violence on Palestinian males, and so on. That, and false allegations of sexual violence. Fear of the black male is fundamental to the capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade, and the slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle.

In The Bleak Midwinter

Flu. Snow. No small boats for four weeks. Winter always surprises the British. But are such foibles alone enough to be worth dying for? “Would you fight for Starmer’s Britain?”, asks GB News. Enoch Powell baffled Margaret Thatcher by telling her that he would have fought in the Second World War even if Britain had had a Communist Government. He would still have fought for his country. With no Tory roots, that was beyond her. With deep Liberal roots, she thought that wars were about “values”. Her view has prevailed, and here we are.

Would you fight for fiscal drag and for a 50 per cent increase in bus fares? For falling Gross Domestic Product, and for galloping food and fuel inflation? For the failure to guarantee employment rights from day one of employment, and for the failure to cap ground rents at £25 per year? Or for increasing employers’ National Insurance contributions so as to destroy charities and small businesses while making it impossible for big businesses to take on staff or to increase wages, and for forcing working farmers of many decades’ standing who formally inherited their parents’ farms to sell them to giant American agribusinesses?

Would you fight for digital ID and for facial recognition? For the cancellation of local elections, and for the denial of self-determination to the Chagossian people? For the abolition of almost all trial by jury, and for the removal of the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court? For the experimental use on children of puberty blockers that had been banned in sheep, and for the haranguing of teenage boys in place of who knows what in the school day while the girls were doing who knows what else? Or for assisted suicide, for decriminalised abortion up to birth, and for Lord Falconer’s therefore logically inescapable assurance to the House of Lords that “pregnancy should not be a bar” to death at the hands of the State?

Would you fight for a State that had conscripted you? Ignore anyone who advocated a military intervention unless you could imagine that person as an 18-year-old in battle. The call for war always comes primarily from the liberal bourgeoisie. That is the class least likely to join the Armed Forces voluntarily, or to see combat even in periods of conscription. Operationally, that is of course just as well. Yet if there is not a strong enough case for conscription, then there is not a strong enough case for war. Unless a country needed to mobilise its entire healthy and able-bodied male population of fighting age, then it is not under sufficient threat to justify going to war at all. But it would take this country 50 years to reindustrialise for war. De facto American withdrawal means that NATO has effectively ceased to exist. And Russia has taken nearly four years to capture 20 per cent of Ukraine, so it is not going to be parking its tanks on anyone’s Atlantic coast anytime soon, an aspiration that in any case it has never expressed.

Wiser Heads

One of these articles is by Peter Hitchens, and the other is an editorial in the Morning Star. Can you guess which is which? Here is the first:

We don't have a Transport Ministry in this country. We have a Ministry of Roads, Cars and Lorries which has for decades waged a dedicated war against trains, trams, pedestrians and cyclists. That does not mean it makes a good job of the roads. Far from it. They are terrible. But it often needs to curry favour with one group of voters by annoying other groups.

This is one of the reasons for the petty, stupid gestures such as 20mph speed limits, congestion charges and ‘Low Traffic Neighbourhoods’, which do no good and annoy so many. By inflicting misery on drivers, the Roads Ministry tries to pretend it is fair to all means of transport. It is not. These measures do nothing to help those without cars or who, like me, prefer not to use them.

The Government assumes that most important journeys will be made by car and that freight will go by road. It ignores 90 years of research which shows that the more roads they build, the more they fill up with traffic. Every motorway, every bypass, every inner ring-road just makes the problem worse and will carry on doing so until the end of the world.

If you want to reduce traffic, build more trains and trams. Meanwhile we have yet to recognise that it was a mistake to close thousands of miles of railway lines and rip up hundreds of miles of tramways, which were far greener, safer and better suited to our landscape than the California-style freeways we keep building.

So from time to time a futile gesture is needed. The latest is to pretend to renationalise the railways. The resulting shambles is to be called ‘Great British Railways’ (GBR) as if it is a TV baking contest.

It is always wisest to let other people decide whether you are ‘Great’ or not. I once worked for a newspaper which boasted for years that it was the world’s greatest, when it was not. This bragging did not save it from shrinking to its current sad level, so sad that I will not name it.

Then there is ‘British’. Thanks to the Blairite folly of devolution, GBR will only run in England. Passenger services remain devolved.

ScotRail stays under Scottish government control and Transport for Wales rail under Welsh government control. Freight trains will stay private but run on taxpayer-funded rails. So will the notorious Rolling Stock Companies (Roscos) which lease carriages and engines to operators. I am not sure the headquarters of these highly profitable bodies are reachable via GBR trains.

This crass mess is beautifully summed up in the garish, cheap red, white and blue livery of the new GBR trains, revealed to us last week.

It looks to me like the railway of some newly-independent Balkan statelet. British trains, when they were great, used to be beautiful and dignified, their engines in glorious shades of green or deep red, their coaches similar. This is not a proper state railway – as the slandered but generally efficient British Rail once was – and I predict it will become another bad national joke.

And here is the second:

‘Russia is already escalating its covert campaign against our societies,’ says Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte. ‘We must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured.’

Why do people say these things? It’s as daft as saying (as people do) that there were ‘pro-democracy protests’ in Kiev in 2014. Actually a key part of these crowds overthrew Ukraine’s freely-elected president in a violent, lawless putsch. People are constantly saying the opposite of the truth and getting away with it.

Those who desired and financed the horrible Ukraine war (don’t get me started) chose it as the battleground precisely because it is not in Nato.

They were pretty sure it would not escalate into a nuclear war, for that very reason.

Nato members remain immune from it and will stay that way as long as they don’t openly join in.

If Mr Rutte and people like him are stupid enough to want the sort of war my parents endured, then they need to be talked out of it by wiser heads. If they don’t, why do they ceaselessly talk like this?

Russia is poor, its armed forces are rusty and crude. In conventional terms, Europe hugely outweighs Russia in money, ships, aircraft and guns.

But nations can fall into danger through self-neglect. It was King Charles II who said: ‘It is upon the Navy under the good Providence of God that the safety, honour and welfare of this realm do chiefly depend.’

In 1667 he quickly found out how true this was when, with the Navy unprepared and neglected, the Dutch stormed up the Medway, towed away the fleet flagship and occupied Sheerness.

Our current Navy, conked out, ancient or immobilised, is not much better, its resources swallowed up in absurd vanity aircraft carriers with no known purpose and in a vast, tottering ‘nuclear deterrent’ that probably does not work.

The sea has for centuries spared us from having to train and pay a giant conscript army, as our continental neighbours often must. But the sea only keeps us safe if we have a Navy to protect and defend it. And we haven’t got one now.

Instead of shouting about war, we should quietly and firmly prepare strong defences, the best way known to man of ensuring lasting peace. Which is surely what we want.

Skripal and Novichok: What Didn't Happen

Even a public meeting in Salisbury last night was almost entirely sceptical of the official story.

A-Leaping Like A Lemming

Labour peerages for having been Keir Starmer's Director of Communications, the Labour Party's Chief of Staff - Operations, Chief of Staff to Rachel Reeves, an adviser to Jeremy Hunt, Leader of Newcastle Council until your local party deselected you, Leader of Southwark Council when it sold an estate worth £150 million for only £50 million and then spent a further £51.4 million clearing the site for the new owner, the Labour candidate who kept Iain Duncan Smith in Parliament and Faiza Shaheen out, and the mother of the Labour candidate against Jeremy Corbyn. And those are among the more distinguished. 14 per cent after another two and half years? Dream on.

Shrink Wrap

Gross Domestic Product fell by 0.1 per cent in the three months to October 2025, and by 0.2 per cent in the three months to August 2025.

I cannot imagine who had been expecting growth of 0.1 per cent.

Services showed no growth, production was down 0.5 per cent, construction was down 0.3 per cent, and no one is remotely surprised.

Footing?

Al Carns was still a serving Royal Marines Commando and thus prohibited from joining any political party when the last General Election was called, yet he came out of it a Labour MP with a majority of 11,537. Not bad for a former adviser to Michael Fallon, Gavin Williamson and Penny Mordaunt. This is plain and simple entryism, and not by a Trotskyist groupuscule in the corner of a backstreet pub.

But to prepare for a war such as these people desired, it would take this country 50 years to reindustrialise. Yet who deindustrialised it? Moreover, on 1 October 2025, the entire British Armed Forces stood at 182,060 souls. Again, whose fault is that? One or more of the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, and the right wing of the Labour Party have been in power forever, and the last Conservatives to have been so are taking over Reform UK, if they have not already done so.

De facto American withdrawal means that NATO has effectively ceased to exist, but even the SNP wants war with Russia, and even the Greens and Plaid Cymru are not against it. Yet the country that has taken nearly four years to capture 20 per cent of Ukraine is not going to be parking its tanks on anyone's Atlantic coast anytime soon even it wanted to, and that is not an aspiration that Russia has ever expressed.

Ignore anyone who advocated a military intervention unless you could imagine that person as an 18-year-old in battle. The call for war always comes primarily from the liberal bourgeoisie. That is the class least likely to join the Armed Forces voluntarily, or to see combat even in periods of conscription. Operationally, that is of course just as well. Yet if there is not a strong enough case for conscription, then there is not a strong enough case for war. Unless a country needed to mobilise its entire healthy and able-bodied male population of fighting age, then it is not under sufficient threat to justify going to war at all.

"Can The Cushite Change His Skin?"

The sanctioning of four commanders of the Rapid Support Forces is welcome as far it goes. Now stop arming the United Arab Emirates. And Saudi Arabia, which arms the other side among other unsavoury characters, by no means all of them three thousand miles from Britain.

While centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences, they do sometimes need to take opposite sides, in the manner of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, to maintain the deception.

British centrists have long supported the Saudi Arabia that supported them handsomely, while the British populist Right is so closely tied to the UAE that it largely resides in Dubai, from which it tweets its hostility to immigration and to Islam. But Britain always arms them both. Such are both main parties in the House of Commons.

Here Is The Harsh Truth

Like Peter Hitchens, I have never understood why people thought that Belgium, Switzerland or Canada was either boring or superfluous, but Belgium no longer has its own free-floating, fiat currency, so this is the risk that it runs:

What you do to others will in the end be done to you. It is true of all life and very true of world affairs. The creditor becomes the debtor. The invader is invaded, the empire falls and its mighty capital echoes to the tread of the troops of a new ruler.

Britain by being an island and by sheltering behind the US, has managed to avoid some of these fates – so far. But strong, cold, hard winds are about to blow across the world we once knew. And I gape in amazement at Sir Keir Starmer’s enthusiasm for stealing Russian money to keep the Ukraine war going a little longer. There is so much wrong with it.

Why, in any case, do the nations of Europe want to buy a used war from Donald Trump? Trump has lost interest in fighting in Ukraine, at least partly because he cannot win, and may actually lose. America once wanted this war. Now, with a new leadership and after years of failure, it no longer does.

Russia, though far from being a superpower, has turned out to care about Ukraine more than Washington thought it did, and to be better at fighting than they expected it to be. As with Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the US will always quit when it decides it is wasting its time and money on any foreign intervention.

Yet the Starmer government, we are assured through leaks, is ready to hand over £8billion of Russian assets frozen in Britain to support Ukraine. Sir Keir seeks to stitch together a deal with the European Union and other countries that could ‘release’ as much as £100billion for Ukraine’s war effort.

For ‘release’ read ‘steal’. This money does not belong to the countries where it was placed by Russia for safekeeping, under the normal rules of law and civilisation. We may claim a ‘moral’ justification for this action, but there is no certainty that the courts will not rule it unlawful. They could even, many years hence, force the countries involved to pay it back.

This would devastate Belgium, where most of the cash is held, and which would almost go bankrupt if compelled to make good on the money. The Euro would suffer greatly as a currency if things went wrong. And behind all this also lies the danger that other countries, especially China, will see and take note – and one day do the same to us at a time when it will hurt greatly.

Challenged, they will smile and say sweetly that they are only following our example. This is how what remains of international law can easily rot away if we choose to let it. And for what?

Advocates of the raid say the money would cover more than two-thirds of Ukraine’s cash needs over the next two years. They cannot seem to make up their minds about what it would be used for. Some think it should be spent to carry on the war. Others say it should be used to rebuild Ukraine’s demolished cities, factories and power grid if a peace deal is agreed.

But what would be the point of that? Even if Russian claims of major advances in the key city of Pokrovsk are false or exaggerated (and they may be), Ukraine’s basic military problems are manpower and weapons. Its casualty figures are secret but appallingly high. Desertion is a major problem, also kept secret. Recruitment is faltering as men of military age hide from press gangs.

Ukraine’s Army, put simply, will carry on shrinking however much money the country has. And the West’s capacity to make the sort of weapons Ukraine needs is still poor. Money will not save it. And how much will just go astray, never to be seen again?

War means chaos, and war mixed with chaos is the ideal condition for corruption, as Ukraine already knows. After Britain and the US invaded Iraq, the distinguished foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn reported that US authorities were investigating senior military officers - he did not specify from which side - over the misuse of up to $125billion (£94billion) in reconstruction efforts.

A lot of this crisis is caused by emotion. The major European countries are embarrassed that they have so little power and can be treated with contempt by Donald Trump. They shrink from admitting there is in fact nothing they can do to change the course of the war – apart from escalating it into a dangerous and possibly nuclear conflict.

They rage a lot against Russia but very few of them could explain how Europe will benefit from them buying this war from Uncle Sam and trying to keep it going. Why can’t they grasp that the Americans have dumped it by the roadside because its big end has gone? The entire purpose of the war, the defeat and removal of Vladimir Putin, has failed. President Trump didn’t even agree with that aim, and he won’t help anyone else pursue it.

Similar folly can be seen in the reaction to the White House’s mischievous new ‘National Security Strategy’, published last week. This peculiar squib seems to have been designed to annoy idealistic Left-wing warmongers, a type now common in the capitals of the EU.

Sandwiched between slices of tripe about the brilliance of Mr Trump, it states some ancient truths about foreign policy – especially these words: ‘The affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests’.

The document asserts that there is nothing inconsistent or hypocritical in refusing to impose ‘democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories’. Righteous voices cry out in wrath at this. But it is, quite simply, true. The US doesn’t actually care about repression in Turkey or Saudi Arabia or China. It invades countries illegally when it feels like it.

Its position is remarkably similar to the policy which, for much of the Victorian age, kept Britain free, prosperous and at peace. Lord Derby, Britain’s then foreign secretary, told the House of Lords in July 1866: ‘It is the duty of the Government of this country, placed as it is with regard to geographical position, to keep itself upon terms of goodwill with all surrounding nations, but not to entangle itself with any single or monopolising alliance with any one of them; above all to endeavour not to interfere needlessly and vexatiously with the internal affairs of any foreign country.’

It was only when we began moralising on the world stage in the years before 1914 that we blundered into the stupid war which swiftly impoverished us, created some of the most beautiful and extensive war cemeteries and memorials ever seen in the history of the planet and reduced our once-unmatched power to a memory in a few decades.

Here is the harsh truth. Ukraine is losing the war into which it was manoeuvred and shoved by others - both from the West and in Moscow - for their own cynical ends. One of those others has lost interest. The other will fight on indefinitely and mercilessly if the conflict goes on.

Much of it is in ruins. Multitudes of its best people have gone for ever, killed in battle or fled abroad. Most of us could not bear to see the legions of maimed and disfigured people which grow daily amid the wreckage.

Yet we lightly support dangerous, tricky, actions which will extend this hell for long years to come. Have we utterly taken leave of our senses?

Scott Free?

With Reform UK projected to gain Blackpool South, Zia Yusuf has had to warn Scott Benton that he would never be permitted to become a Reform parliamentary candidate. Oddly enough, though, his membership application would not simply be rejected.

But Benton has other options. Precisely one sitting Conservative MP has joined Reform; twice as many MPs have left it. In the last Parliament, however, three Conservative MPs joined the Labour Party, at least two of them firmly on the right wing of their original party.

One of those is now a Government Whip, while the other had three years earlier been suspended from Parliament for a day because she had sought to influence the judges in the sentencing appeal of her constituency predecessor, who was then her husband, following his conviction for sexual assault. Compared to that, Benton is an angel.

Who Are They Kidding?

The questioner asked why it mattered that "apparently" one in three children in Glasgow did not speak English as a first language. Fiona Bruce changed that to the child's having "English as a second language". Then the caption was this.

"1 in 3", not "one in three". "Kids", not "children". "Don't" where it should have been "doesn't", although "does not" would have been better. That one child in three must have written this.

Mutated Virus

So Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth can seize "the largest tanker ever seized", but they have to blow fishing boats and their crews to smithereens? Say what you think of that on your social media, and then apply to visit the United States, not with any view to going there, but just to make someone have to read it. Anyone who did wish the place harm should be recruiting early teenagers in the Visa Waiver Program country of Australia, who on their sixteenth birthdays will be able to Waltz like Matilda past Uncle Sam's border guards having left no trace.

Not so Derbyshire County Councillor Stephen Reed, who drew the tumultuous applause of his Reform UK colleagues when he denounced immigration in his Australian accent. Reform was already facing the fury of its own supporters because one of its candidates for Portsmouth City Council was Addy Mo Asaduzzaman, a Bangladeshi who is exercising his rights as a Commonwealth citizen. I had wondered how they would react when a Reform candidate was an Anglo-Australian or a white South African. Over to them. Meanwhile, Advance UK is dependent on Elon Musk, none of whose three nationalities is British.

A certain Britain showed itself at the Unite the Kingdom rally, and will attend Stephen Yaxley-Lennon's carol concert. With the flu running rampant, then nothing would suit that Britain better than another lockdown. I am fully vaccinated, I adhered strictly to the previous lockdowns, and I would adhere strictly to another one. But a lot of people are not, a lot of people did not, and between the unpopularity of this Government and the memory of the Downing Street parties, an awful lot of people would not. They would be ripe for recruitment.

If their violent reactions made them subject to juryless trials, or to Magistrates' Courts from which they had no automatic right of appeal, then their supporters would explode. Town centres and housing estates would burn. Yet on any given day, between 10 and 20 per cent of Crown Courts are sitting idle. On its own, opening them up may not fix the backlog. But it would be a good start. Whereas abolishing almost all juries would make no difference, because they are not the problem.