To Weed And Pluck Away?

So much for the heroine of Kemi "All Our Oil And Gas" Badenoch. He would have had a job against the First and Second Lords of the Treasury who had introduced monetarism in December 1976, but if Labour had won the 1979 General Election, then Tony Benn was to have been the Minister responsible for putting the North Sea oil revenue into a sovereign wealth fund.

By that means, Norway has acquired many things, including the ability of its fund, the world's largest, to induce neither laughter nor yawning by its divestment, both from Caterpillar due to the use of that company's bulldozers in the Occupied Territories, and from five Israeli banking groups. Reactions are covering a wide range, but they all involve taking this with the utmost seriousness. That could have been Britain. It still could be. It still should be.

And Norway has never been in the EU. Once again, Benn was right, and Margaret Thatcher was wrong.

To Weed And Puck Away?

So much for the heroine of Kemi "All Our Oil And Gas" Badenoch. He would have had a job against the First and Second Lords of the Treasury who had introduced monetarism in December 1976, but if Labour had won the 1979 General Election, then Tony Benn was to have been the Minister responsible for putting the North Sea oil revenue into a sovereign wealth fund.

By that means, Norway has acquired many things, including the ability of its fund, the world's largest, to induce neither laughter nor yawning by its divestment, both from Caterpillar due to the use of that company's bulldozers in the Occupied Territories, and from five Israeli banking groups. Reactions are covering a wide range, but they all involve taking this with the utmost seriousness. That could have been Britain. It still could be. It still should be.

All Our Oil And Gas

Does Kemi Badenoch want to harness the power of the State to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal? Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of clean coal technology, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State.

There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. In Britain, we must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985. Is Badenoch? Is Nigel Farage? Is Ed Davey? Are Rupert Lowe and Ben Habib?

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with it. Let there be solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, pipelines, or power stations. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners’ Strike. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all he rest of it. Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed. The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs.

Where is the limit? The sky. Ours is an improbably dominant species. Something much bigger, and endowed with fangs, or claws, or talons, or venom, or what have you, should have seen us off long you. Yet we are still here, and we alone have been to the Moon. Within two generations of that, though, we are afraid of words. Either we go to Mars, and then beyond, or we accept that we have entered our decline, the endpoint of which could only be extinction.

Yet space is being both privatised and militarised, a very common combination but always a lethal one, and that by the country that does not recognise it as a common resource for all humanity. There needs to be a return to President Eisenhower’s proposal, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 22 September 1960, for the principles of the Antarctic Treaty to be extended to Outer Space.

If God had not intended us to be a spacefaring species, then He would never have put anything up there for us to find. People who think that these missions impoverish anyone, even as an initial outlay, do not understand how the money supply works. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, Britain has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect.

Why, though, spend that currency on this? Welcome to the Anthropocene, that is why. Life is the geological force that shapes the Earth, and the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere, not least by the uniquely human phenomenon of economic growth, so that human mastery of nuclear processes is beginning to create resources through the transmutation of elements, enabling us, among other things, to explore space and to exploit the resources of the Solar System. Vladimir Vernadsky and Krafft Ehricke will yet have their day. They may be having it now.

“To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man,” said Leon Trotsky. “Dominion,” says the God of the Bible. Dominion over the beasts, thus over the land, and thus over everything on and under the land. Dominion over the fish, thus over the waters, and thus over everything in and under the waters. And dominion over the birds, thus over the sky, and thus over everything in the sky, as far up as the sky goes, and the sky goes up a very long way.

That dominion is entrusted so that we might “be fruitful and multiply”. Entrusted as it is to the whole human race, its purpose is, “To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man.” Celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. That means growth, industry, what someone once nearly called “the white heat of technology”, and the equitable distribution of their fruits among and within the nations of the world, for everyone to enjoy at least the standard of living that we ourselves already enjoyed.

A Time To Roar

The Archbishop of York, as such, is a Member of Parliament and a Privy Counsellor, so it is preposterous to suggest that he ought not to comment on certain issues. Until Euro 96, only the Church of England flew Saint George’s Flag with any regularity. Before that, although nearly everyone incorrectly called it something else, the English regarded the Union Flag as their national flag without complication. Look up the 1966 World Cup Final.

The present Medieval revival began 30 years later, to sell new beer to new football fans, who took up both the beer and the Flag with tremendous enthusiasm. Not least because banners bearing the Three Lions are also now appearing at demonstrations, it is high time for the English national football teams to decry the misappropriation of a central part of the culture of players who had been born in the 1990s or in the twenty-first century.

To Safeguard Those Who Are Most Vulnerable

David Alton, Lord Alton of Liverpool writes:

Throughout my time in parliament, first in the House of Commons, and now in the House of Lords, assisted suicide has been a subject of serious and sustained debate. My views are well known, and my basis for them is based on principles and practicalities.

First, legalising assisted suicide undermines the inherent dignity and worth of every human life, regardless of capacity or perceived utility. Secondly, and irrespective of my personal views on the principle, there is simply no means by which to implement a “safe” regime, with safeguards set out in legislative proposals that, while well-intentioned, often reflect aspirational safeguards rather than ones grounded in the complexities and pressures of real-world practice.

I was saddened by the recent decision made by MPs to pass Kim Leadbeater’s bill. Bearing in mind the strength of the opposition outside the commons from experts as to the workability of the legislation, particularly from the Royal College of Psychiatrists and disability organisations, I was disappointed that — on a matter of life and death, affecting many vulnerable people — a more cautious and considered approach was not taken. Instead, of MPs applying the precautionary principle and rejecting the bill, the House of Lords is now being asked to pick up the bill and address its failings.

Having said this, the fall in support for the bill between second and third reading was remarkable. I cannot think of another example in the past 160 years where a private members’ bill has seen such a large proportional collapse in support between second and third reading. The reduced majority — from 55 to 23 — is unusual and indicative of the challenges this flawed bill has experienced as it has been shepherded through the parliamentary process.

Almost as soon as the bill passed its third reading in the commons, questions arose concerning the role the House of Lords should now play. Some cheerleaders of Kim Leadbeater’s bill — which will be taken forward in the Lords by Lord Falconer of Thoroton — have argued that it would be constitutionally inappropriate for the Lords to vote down or even significantly amend the bill. Others have made the case that the Lords is within its rights to do what is necessary to make the bill safer for vulnerable people and, if necessary, to reject it entirely.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, assisted suicide is not an issue that was in any party’s manifesto at the last election, and the bill is not a government bill covered by the Salisbury-Addison convention. In contrast, writing in The Times, Lord Falconer argued that it would not be appropriate for peers to vote down the bill. I respect Lord Falconer, and we have been on the same side of important debates over the years, but on this occasion, his track record of voting against government bills in the Lords that were covered by the Salisbury convention raises questions about the consistency of that position, given his own voting record.

The Leadbeater bill arrives in the Lords plagued by numerous continuing concerns and unanswered questions. Its narrow victory in the commons — including the failure to secure an absolute majority — will not have gone unnoticed. Peers must not feel cajoled or rushed by campaigners to give uncritical assent to a bill that, in its current form, would inevitably put some of the most vulnerable people in our society at risk.

It is very telling that some of the most vocal critics of the bill in the Lords so far have been peers who are either disabled themselves or have close relatives who are disabled or have significant learning disabilities or life-limiting conditions. Baroness Grey-Thompson and Baroness Campbell, have made clear their determination to advocate for people with disabilities who are put most at risk by this bill, as has Lord Shinkwin. This is not a matter of political manoeuvring, but a reflection of deep-seated concerns of many vulnerable and disabled people, and the determination of peers to be a voice for those whose voices too often go unheard on this subject — including on this bill.

I have the privilege of working closely with and supporting people with Down’s syndrome and their families, and serve as a member of the all party parliamentary group (APPG) on Down’s syndrome. I was very struck by a statement that actor Tommy Jessop released outlining many of the concerns that people within the Down’s syndrome community share about assisted suicide and Kim Leadbeater’s bill in particular. My colleague, Baroness Monckton, who has a 30-year-old daughter with Down’s syndrome, has also spoken with great conviction about the risk the bill poses to people with Down’s syndrome and learning disabilities.

Such risks have been repeatedly dismissed by Ms Leadbeater and pro-bill MPs. My friend and the co-chair of the APPG on Down’s syndrome, Damien Hinds MP, sought to amend the bill at both committee and report stages to address some of these concerns. His very reasonable amendments were disappointingly rejected at committee stage, and not selected for decision at report stage. As a consequence, the bill continues to present a significant threat to people living with Down’s syndrome and learning disabilities.

Polling commissioned by the Down Syndrome Research Foundation, and published shortly before third reading, demonstrated that this is an issue of genuine concern for the public. Overall, 75% of those polled said they were concerned that if assisted suicide were to become legal, it would be difficult to establish whether a person with a learning disability, such as Down’s syndrome, was expressing voluntary informed consent if they applied for an assisted suicide.

Separate polling by the disability organisation Not Dead Yet UK, also highlighted the scale of public unease about what Kim Leadbeater’s bill might mean for disabled people. For example, 63% of respondents agreed that some disabled people may feel a sense of responsibility to access an assisted death if they felt they were a burden on family, friends or society (only 16% disagreed). Moreover, 57% of the public agreed that disabled people who struggle to access the support they need, in light of the current state of the NHS and social care funding, may become more likely to seek an assisted death instead (only 17% disagreed).

The Leadbeater bill has its second reading in the House of Lords on 12 September and will subsequently be scrutinised in depth by Peers during committee stage. The Lords has a duty to assist the commons in producing good legislation — a task which I anticipate will be particularly important and difficult given the stakes and state of this bill at present.

The Lords’ duty to scrutinise such bills means it must not simply rubber-stamp legislation it receives. Whenever this issue arises, as it has done on countless occasions in my time as a parliamentarian, I am reminded of the words of Lord Walton of Detchant, who chaired the medical ethics select committee 1993/94 which examined this issue in detail. In presenting his report to the House, Lord Walton noted that the inquiry believed the arguments in favour of legalisation of assisted suicide were “insufficient reason to weaken society’s prohibition of intentional killing which is the cornerstone of the law and social relationships”. I have seen nothing to date in the passage of this bill to convince me that the situation now is any different.

A direct outworking of our duty as peers to ensure the production of good legislation is sometimes to urge the commons to stop, consider, and think again. As a member of the Lords, I will engage in good faith with this bill and endeavour to improve it. However, there is currently no settled parliamentary view on its merits — indeed, the direction of travel is towards increased opposition to the bill rather than support for it — and experts from key relevant fields have warned against it. Far from enriching our society, the bill risks diminishing it, offering a perceived freedom to a few, while endangering the voiceless and vulnerable, some of whom may ultimately pay the highest price.

As members of the Lords, we take our responsibility seriously. We must and will do what is necessary to safeguard those who are most vulnerable in our midst.

Hope, Not Dope

Peter Hitchens writes:

Within hours of the Minneapolis murders, it was revealed the shooter had been working at a ‘Marijuana Dispensary’, of the sort campaigners want here too. Cash or debit cards accepted. Kerbside pick-up available, offering an amazing variety of vape cartridges. This is almost certainly the most important thing you need to know about this unhinged crime and its perpetrator.

Yet it was barely reported. Forty years hence, if we still have media and police, or indeed a civilisation, people will be astounded at the complacent stupidity and indulgence with which we regard this terrifying mind poison.

I refer readers again to the book Attacker Smoked Cannabis, by my friend Ross Grainger, who studied some of the many insanely violent crimes in this country carried out by marijuana users.

Laura Ingraham writes:

Author and journalist Alex Berenson raised concerns about marijuana use and its possible connection to violent crime during a recent appearance on The Ingraham Angle on Fox News.

Speaking with host Laura Ingraham after a deadly school shooting in Minnesota, Berenson argued that cannabis is increasingly tied to psychotic disorders that can lead to violence. He pointed to evidence from both U.S. cases and international studies that suggest a troubling trend. 

Cannabis and Psychosis

Berenson noted that the accused shooter, Robin Westman, worked at a medical marijuana dispensary and wrote in his manifesto about heavy cannabis use. He explained that the drug’s active ingredient, THC, has been linked to psychotic episodes.

“We know that cannabis can cause psychotic episodes in people,” Berenson said. “There’s increasingly strong evidence. When I wrote Tell Your Children in 2019, there was evidence, and now there’s more and more.”

He referenced research from Denmark showing that cannabis use contributes to new cases of schizophrenia. According to Berenson, psychosis — marked by delusions and hallucinations — can raise the risk of violent behavior. While most people with the condition are not violent, he said, some may commit extreme acts.

Evidence From Past Shootings

Berenson also tied cannabis use to several high-profile American mass shootings. He said autopsy reports have found cannabis in the systems of shooters, including Nikolas Cruz, who carried out the Parkland massacre in 2018.

“I can point you to several of the highest-profile mass shootings in the United States in which cannabis use was found in people’s bodies,” Berenson explained. “Over and over you see cannabis.”

By contrast, he argued that alcohol is not as commonly linked to these kinds of crimes. While alcohol often escalates existing violence, Berenson said, cannabis shows up in incidents where innocent people are targeted.

Pushback From the Marijuana Lobby

Ingraham noted that critics often argue alcohol is more dangerous than cannabis. She predicted the “weed lobby” would flood social media with attacks on the idea that marijuana could be connected to mass shootings.

Berenson responded that causation is difficult to prove in any one case. However, he maintained that the pattern across multiple tragedies cannot be ignored.

“In no single case can you ever prove causation,” he said. “But having looked at these autopsy reports, you see cannabis use, you rarely see alcohol. Sometimes you see prescription drugs, but over and over you see cannabis.”

Policy Debate Under Trump

The exchange comes as the Trump administration reviews federal cannabis policy. Regulators and lawmakers have debated whether marijuana should remain classified as a controlled substance or be reclassified to a less restrictive category. Such a move would expand opportunities for the industry to market and sell cannabis products.

Berenson warned that loosening restrictions would carry serious risks. “I hope President Trump understands that we are likely to see more crime like this if there is more cannabis use,” he said. “And I know public safety is important to him.”

Trump’s Position

Ingraham emphasized that President Trump remains skeptical of marijuana legalization. She said Trump understands the dangers drug use poses to young people and has long opposed efforts to mainstream cannabis.

“Legitimizing this, mainstreaming it even more, I don’t think any good is going to come of it,” Ingraham said. She thanked Berenson for highlighting research and evidence that challenge the perception of marijuana as harmless.

A Growing Debate

Berenson’s comments reflect a broader national debate over cannabis legalization. Supporters argue marijuana is safer than alcohol, while critics warn that downplaying risks could have severe consequences. With Trump’s administration expected to make key decisions on drug policy, Berenson said ignoring evidence of cannabis-linked psychosis would be a mistake.

“There is a correlation here and we’re seeing it more and more,” he said.

The New York Post Editorial Board writes:

News that Minneapolis monster Robin Westman worked at a pot shop until just two weeks ago should give pause to those in the White House reportedly pushing President Donald Trump to take a landmark step toward federal approval of marijuana use.

Westman, 23, was apparently fired from Rise, an area cannabis dispensary, on Aug. 16 over chronic tardiness and absenteeism.

If you know anything at all about the culture of this biz, that tells you the odds are awfully good that he was using, too.

And medical research in recent years keeps producing fresh evidence strongly suggesting that heavy marijuana use exacerbates other mental-health issues, perhaps making young men five times more likely to become schizophrenic.

Heck, any New Yorker’s experience with some of the clearly crazed folks roaming the city indicates some link, even if the drug use starts as amateur self-medication.

Baby Boomers’ fond memories of their college years shouldn’t guide policy: Today’s pot delivers as much as 10 times as much THC as the weed sold in past decades — and the plethora of new pot products are far more potent.

Yet by all accounts the president is considering shifting marijuana from a Schedule I drug to Schedule III — an upgrade that would make it far easier for Big Weed to operate in the states that have legalized and doubtless fuel legalization drives in the rest. That move would open up major tax deductions for the $33 billion industry, and generally boost its expansion — one reason the CEO of corporate-pot firm Trulieve bought his way into a recent $1 million-a-plate fundraiser at Trump’s Bedminster club.

But it’d be a very odd thing for the prez to do when he’s pushing to fight urban crime.

Pot only fuels crime because it’s outlawed, the legalizers insist.

Yet the latest study on this, by South Korean scholar Sunyoung Lee, found that crime levels rose in US states that legalized.

Auto accidents thanks to DUIs spike, too.

We’re not prudes, demanding that no one ever have any fun, but we believe science needs to guide drug policy — not the corporate interests behind Big Pot. Please play this one carefully, Mr. President.

And Horace Cooper writes:

Many on the left argue that drug legalization — particularly for marijuana — is somehow “pro-Black.” Far from it. Although legalization is a windfall for the corporate pot industry, it also deepens racial educational and income disparities, hinders Black family stability and harms inner-city communities.

It’s time to end the folly of decriminalizing and mainstreaming marijuana sales and use.

The left rails against redlining and credit card usury, yet by unleashing corporate pot dealers on Black and inner-city communities, they open the door to some of the most predatory forces targeting the poor.

Removing marijuana from the federal list of controlled substances — or even lowering its classification — would effectively make it legal and send a damaging signal to young people in Black neighborhoods that marijuana use is normal and harmless. It would also create messy challenges over past marijuana-related convictions, sowing legal confusion and undermining respect for the law.

The health risks alone should give pause. Research shows marijuana is a gateway drug. The National Epidemiological Study of Alcohol Use and Related Disorders found marijuana users are more likely to develop addictions to alcohol and nicotine products. Laboratory studies demonstrate that cannabinoids alter dopamine levels in young brains, fostering more addictive behaviors. Once marijuana use is normalized, the door opens to patterns of dependency that can last a lifetime.

Legalization has also fueled youth usage. A California study found marijuana use among grade and high school students began climbing in 2016 — after years of decline — and linked the rise to the legalization movement. The consequences are serious: marijuana increases the risk of heart attack in young users, can lead to emphysema, and carries an immune-suppressing effect that raises pneumonia risk. For those who vape instead of smoking, THC products are responsible for 80 percent of the e-cigarette or vaping use-associated lung injuries known as “popcorn lung.”

Experience has shown that even with legalized sales, street-dealing remains a threat unless the corporate product is dramatically cheaper than what’s being sold illicitly. And as long as illegal sales persist, so does the risk of fentanyl-laced marijuana — a danger that has already claimed lives. Just this year, a 27-year-old woman in Warwick, R.I., died after unknowingly consuming fentanyl-laced cannabis. Connecticut has similarly reported multiple related deaths in recent years.

The costs also extend far beyond physical health. Marijuana use is strongly associated with depression, particularly among Black males. It undermines job growth, skill retention and educational attainment. Chronic use has been linked to anxiety, elevated stroke risk and psychosis.

In Black communities, where untreated mental health issues are already a challenge, increased marijuana availability can worsen conditions and fuel behaviors that increase the risk of incarceration. The argument that legalization will keep Black men out of prison collapses when legalization fosters the very circumstances that land them there.

There are public safety concerns as well. In Colorado, a study published in BMJ Open found traffic accidents increased after legalization. Another highway safety analysis showed that Colorado, Washington and Oregon saw a 5.2 percent jump in combined crash rates compared to neighboring states that kept marijuana illegal.

Marijuana’s psychoactive effects process differently than alcohol, and impairment can linger well past the point users feel “sober,” raising the risk of workplace accidents. As occupational health expert Robert Goldsmith observes, “You can’t assume that evening or off-shift use is not associated with residual impairment during the next shift.”

The truth is that Black youth — and all young Americans — cannot afford the broad acceptance and normalization of marijuana. Jesse Jackson’s “Up with Hope, Down with Dope” message of the 20th century is far more relevant to Black communities today than the “legalize and expunge” approach championed by many policymakers.

States that have relaxed marijuana laws should take a hard look at the social, health and economic costs — particularly for Black communities — and reverse course when they ultimately conclude that the risks outweigh any supposed tax revenue benefits.

In this new Golden Era, American policymakers should do everything possible to protect Black communities and young Americans from the harm caused by marijuana legalization. This will allow them to take advantage of the amazing opportunities headed their way, not check out and miss out while indulging a case of the munchies.

There cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature.

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.

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. Richard Tice wants to legalise cannabis, Nigel Farage wants to legalise drugs across the board, and Lee Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023.

Instead, we need a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of two years for a first offence, three years for a second offence, four years for a third offence, and so on. I no longer believe in prison sentences that include the possibility of release in less than 12 months; in that case, then your crime was not bad enough to warrant imprisonment, which the possession of drugs is. We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one’s premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. And Peter Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought should be taught in schools, as pro-drugs propaganda is routinely.

Reduced To A Mere Spectator

Thomas Fazi writes:

“For years,” Mario Draghi proclaimed last week, “the European Union believed that its economic dimension, with 450 million consumers, brought with it geopolitical power and influence in international trade relations.” But this year, he said, would be remembered for when that illusion evaporated. As the former European Central Bank president and erstwhile Italian premier explained, the EU has been pressured by the United States into accepting damaging tariffs and needlessly high military spending “in ways and forms that likely do not reflect Europe’s interests”, even as it had been reduced to a mere “spectator” everywhere from Gaza to Ukraine.

Draghi is often praised for his rare bluntness in assessing Europe’s condition, a quality that has earned him a reputation as one of the continent’s most insightful thinkers. And, certainly, he is right in arguing that the neoliberal architecture of the EU — grounded in “a conscious reduction of the power of states” in favour of rules-based market mechanisms — has left Europe woefully unequipped to navigate a world where military and economic power are increasingly deployed to protect national interests.

The problem is, Draghi’s so-called analyses usually amount to little more than stating the obvious — facts that are evident to anyone not blinded by ideology or vested interests. The acclaim, in short, says less about Draghi’s brilliance than about the poverty of European public debate. But even more importantly, while Draghi may correctly grasp the surface symptoms of Europe’s malaise, he consistently fails — deliberately so — in properly diagnosing their underlying causes.

For if he is right to say that the EU’s neoliberal framework — based upon state retrenchment, fiscal austerity, wage compression and an obsession with boosting exports — has weakened Europe, it’s a policy cocktail that he himself helped blend. He was an architect and enforcer of that model. Already in the early Nineties, when he was director general of the Italian finance ministry, he emerged as a leading advocate of the concept of vincolo esterno (“external constraint”) — the idea that only by “tying the hands” of national governments via a political-economic straitjacket could neoliberal reforms, which lacked popular support, be forced through. That external constraint was, of course, the European Union, and above all the single currency, whose roadmap was laid out in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. In that position, Draghi was also instrumental in driving forward the large-scale privatisation of Italy’s state-owned enterprises.

Over the next three decades, moving between the private sector (notably Goldman Sachs) and senior public posts, Draghi established himself as one of the foremost champions of neoliberal orthodoxy. This role reached its fullest expression during his tenure as president of the ECB from 2011 to 2019, and the act that symbolically marked the beginning of his tenure couldn’t be more paradigmatic.

In August 2011, at the height of the so-called “euro crisis”, Draghi and his outgoing predecessor Jean-Claude Trichet sent a letter to the Italian government. Intended to remain secret, it was subsequently leaked. The letter claimed that Italy’s post-crisis deficit-cutting plan was “not sufficient”, and set out detailed demands, including “the full liberalisation of local public services”, “large scale privatisations”, wage reductions and even “constitutional reform tightening fiscal rules”. Giulio Tremonti, Italy’s then-minister of economy and finance, later privately told a group of European finance ministers that his government had received two threatening letters that year: one from a terrorist group, the other from the ECB. “The one from the ECB was worse”, he quipped.

Draghi must have concluded that the conditions set out in the letter had not been met, because a few months later he “forced” (to quote the solidly neoliberal Financial Times) Silvio Berlusconi to leave office in favour of the unelected Mario Monti. Draghi achieved this by discontinuing the central bank’s Italian bond purchases — thus deliberately causing interest rates to rise above safety levels — and by making Berlusconi’s ouster the precondition for further ECB support of Italian bonds. This was belatedly admitted by none other than Monti himself, who claimed in a 2017 interview that, in late 2011, Draghi “decided to stop the purchases of Italian government bonds, which had kept the Berlusconi government afloat in the summer and autumn of 2011”.

It is hard to imagine a more disturbing scenario than a supposedly “independent” and “apolitical” central bank using monetary blackmail to oust an elected government from office and impose its own political agenda. Yet all evidence suggests that this — a monetary coup d’état — is exactly what happened in Italy in 2011. Just a few years later, Draghi deployed the same tools against Greece, effectively shutting down the country’s banking system to force the government to comply with EU-demanded austerity policies, which Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s then-finance minister, likened to a form of “economic waterboarding”.

Even in his brief role as Italian premier, between 2021 and 2022, Draghi continued these policies. The few “structural” measures enacted by his government were all aimed at promoting privatisation, liberalisation, deregulation and fiscal consolidation — while he imposed on his country some of the most draconian Covid policies in the world.

Overall, then, few figures over the past decades have been more unwavering in their commitment to advancing undemocratic neoliberalism than Mario Draghi. But his responsibility for Europe’s downward spiral extends well beyond his role as neoliberal enforcer-in-chief. In his speech last week, he effectively conceded that the EU had been vassalised by the United States. Yet, once again, Draghi omitted any mention of his own role in bringing about this sorry state of affairs: he has always been a staunch Atlanticist, and as such has played a key role in ensuring the EU’s structural subordination to Washington.

The EU’s response to the Russia-Ukraine crisis is a good case in point. In his much-discussed report on European competitiveness, published a year ago this week, Draghi highlighted high energy costs as one of the main reasons for the EU’s loss of competitiveness. The report emphasised that European companies face significantly steeper prices compared to their US counterparts, seriously hindering industrial growth and investment.

Fair enough — yet this was hardly an act of God. Rather, it was a direct consequence of the EU’s decision to decouple from Russian gas, which before the war accounted for almost half of the bloc’s supply, in favour of much more expensive American liquified natural gas (LNG). More to the point, this policy was vehemently supported by Draghi. Shortly after Russia’s invasion, he defended as prime minister the EU’s decision to impose a gas embargo on Russia, from which Italy imported around 40% of its gas. “Do you want air conditioning or peace?”, he asked, the logic stark in its dubiousness. Draghi was likely suggesting that sanctions would soon cripple the Russian economy and force an end to the war — a scenario that anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of economic and geopolitical realities could have dismissed from the outset.

A few months later, in a speech at the UN that in retrospect appears almost comically misguided, Draghi doubled down, claiming that the sanctions had imposed “extremely harsh costs on Russia” and had “a disruptive effect on the Russian war machine and on its economy”, making it “harder for Russia to respond to the defeats piling up on the battlefield”. As we know, none of this came to pass — the Russian economy proved resilient, the war machine kept churning, and the defeats mounted not in Moscow but in Draghi’s delusional forecasts. All of this was easily predictable, and indeed was predicted by many of us.

All this raises an obvious question: how is it that Draghi continues to be lauded for denouncing the consequences of flawed policies he himself promoted? In a normal world, he would be laughed off the stage — or pelted with rotten eggs. That he so easily evades accountability is the clearest expression of the kakistocratic nature of EU politics, where failure is not punished but rewarded, and where incompetent leaders routinely fail upwards.

But if Draghi’s refusal to acknowledge responsibility for the EU’s problems is bad enough, his proposed solutions are worse still. For Draghi, the cure for the EU’s dysfunction is — to give the EU even more power. “The European Union will have to move towards new forms of integration”, he declared in his latest speech. Translation: yet more political, fiscal, military and technological centralisation. In other words, then, Europe’s problems, in Draghi’s view, can only be solved by transferring still more authority to Brussels and further sidelining national governments and parliaments.

But the last thing Europe needs is to give even more power to people like Draghi. On the contrary, if the continent is to have any chance of reversing its decline, it must reject the delusional dogma of “more Europe” and finally hold to account the very technocrats who built the crisis-ridden order they now pretend to diagnose.

And:

The EU was sold to Europeans as a means of collectively strengthening the continent against other great powers — particularly the United States. Yet, in the quarter-century since the Maastricht Treaty marked its birth, the opposite has occurred: Europe is today more politically, economically and militarily vassalised to Washington — and therefore weaker and less autonomous — than at any point since the Second World War. One might say that what we are witnessing is in fact a case of hyper-vassalisation reminiscent of the dynamics of traditional colonial rule. In recent years, on virtually every major issue — trade, energy, defence, foreign policy — European countries have consistently acted against their own interests in order to comply with Washington’s strategic agenda, or outright diktats.

Speaking of the recent EU-US trade deal — under which American industrial goods will enter Europe tariff-free, while European exports to the US will face a blanket 15% tariff, coupled with the EU’s pledge to purchase $750 billion worth of US energy and invest $600 billion in the US economy — Greek economist and former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis called it Europe’s own version of the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing. This was the first of several “unequal treaties” imposed on China by Western powers, granting Britain significant concessions and marking the beginning of China’s “century of humiliation”. Similarly, Varoufakis wrote, the EU-US trade deal is a “humiliation that will cast a shadow for decades upon the continent”, marking the beginning of Europe’s own century of humiliation — with the noticeable difference, however, that “[u]nlike China in 1842, the European Union has chosen permanent humiliation freely”, not on the heels of a crushing military defeat.

The French entrepreneur and geopolitical analyst Arnaud Bertrand made a similar parallel in relation to the Trump-Putin peace summit that recently took place in Alaska. Despite the fact that the summit yielded little in concrete terms, Bertrand rightly argued that Europe’s exclusion from negotiations about the continent’s own future — with European leaders, according to the Washington Post, “scrambling to respond” and relegated to begging for scraps of information through secondary diplomatic channels — “represents one of the most humiliating moments in European diplomatic history”. “[T]here are very few examples — if any — in Europe’s millennia-old history of a military defeat against an external power where it wasn’t even at the table to negotiate the conditions for its future”, Bertrand wrote.

“It’s so bad that the best historical parallel — especially if you pair this with other recent events — can’t be found in Europe but ironically in the imperial practices Europe once perfected against weaker nations”, he added. “From the Alaska negotiations to the recent trade capitulation, Europe is being subjected to the same treatment it once meted out to colonial territories — a somewhat karmic, if deeply humiliating, historical reversal.”

As with the EU-US trade deal, the paradox is that Europe has largely engineered its own predicament: by aligning with Washington’s decade-long strategy of destabilising Ukraine — and, since 2022, embracing NATO’s proxy war against Russia, including the self-inflicted blow of severing access to cheap Russian gas — and then sabotaging Trump’s peace overtures by committing to open-ended financial and military backing for Kyiv, European countries have not only undermined their core economic and security interests, but have also alienated both Moscow and Washington, effectively excluding themselves from any major role in the negotiations.

Europe’s entire handling of the Ukraine crisis can only be described as self-destructive. While European leaders presented their actions as serving the “collective interests” of the transatlantic West, the truth is that no such unified interest exists. Indeed, one could argue that Washington’s objectives in this war went beyond weakening and “bleeding” Russia: just as crucial — perhaps even more so — was the goal of undermining Europe itself, by severing the economic and strategic ties between Europe (especially Germany) and Russia, and reasserting US dominance over the continent. This has been achieved both by reviving and expanding NATO — an institution effectively controlled by the US whose core function has always been to guarantee Europe’s strategic subordination to Washington — and by locking Europe into long-term dependence on US energy exports.

Nothing illustrates this strategy — and Europe’s subordination to Washington — more starkly than the Nord Stream bombing, an operation either executed directly by the US or outsourced to its NATO proxies. Germany’s — and Europe’s — silence over the worst act of industrial terrorism in the continent’s history, coupled with their likely complicity in covering it up and insistence on permanently banning Nord Stream, epitomises Europe’s entrenched subservience to the US.

From this perspective, the NATO proxy war in Ukraine can be seen as a strategic triumph for Washington — achieved squarely at Europe’s expense, with large parts of Western Europe, first and foremost Germany, being pushed into recession and even outright deindustrialisation. The erosion of Europe’s industrial base not only cements US geopolitical dominance but also opens the door to the economic cannibalisation of the continent by American capital, spearheaded by giants like BlackRock and other US mega-funds.

As Emmanuel Todd wrote in his latest book: “As its power diminishes worldwide, the American system ultimately ends up burdening its protectorates more and more, as they remain the last bases of its power.” With European industry crucial to US interests, Todd warned, we should expect more “systemic exploitation” of the European economies from the imperial centre in Washington. The EU-US trade deal — which even contains what are effectively colonial tributes disguised as “investments” — laid bare this reality.

Equally emblematic of Europe’s subservience is the EU’s rearmament drive and its pledge to meet Trump’s demand that all member states boost NATO defence spending to 5% of GDP. Presented as a step towards the “strategic autonomy” and “geopolitical independence” of a Europe capable of acting without external supervision on the international stage, the reality, as various leading intellectuals on the Spanish left recently wrote, is that the strengthening of the European arm of NATO, far from signifying a break with the existing order, “tends to reinforce the Atlanticist apparatus and consolidate the structural subordination of the European continent to North American power” — its adherence to Atlanticist commitments, its automatic alignment with Pentagon directives and its technological dependence on the US arms industry. In this context, the EU’s rearmament project represents the further functionalisation of European states — in a clear subordinate position — within the US global containment apparatus.

A final point worth underscoring is Europe’s alignment with the US in providing unwavering political, diplomatic, economic and military backing to Israel throughout the ongoing genocide in Gaza, now approaching its second year. This stance has laid bare the bloc’s flagrant double standards — the contrast with its response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could not be starker — and has shattered what little moral credibility the EU still possessed on the world stage, deepening its isolation from the global majority. In light of the delegation of European heads of state that rushed to Washington to reassert their support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, can anyone imagine that European leaders would have rushed to the White House to plead with President Trump the cause of the Palestinian people as they were pummelled and starved, not by a strategic foe of the West but by one of its allies, Israel?

Where Are The Adults?

Caroline Farrow writes:

This week, a video emerged of a young Scottish girl brandishing what appeared to be a machete in one hand and a hatchet or axe in the other, while screaming “get away from me, you paedo, you kiddy-basher” at the man who was filming her.

Naturally, the reaction was one of outrage and horror. There was something deeply incongruent and jarring about a tiny wee girl, who did not even look as though she had reached puberty, wielding such terrifying weapons.

When the video inevitably popped up in my feed, together with the caption that this poor child had been fending off a sex attacker and was now the one unfairly under arrest, my natural inclination was to repost and express similar horror.

Fortunately, years of social media dopamine have not yet entirely stripped me of curiosity and critical thinking, and so I decided to take a pass on feeding the algorithm and jumping on the righteous outrage train.

Why?

Firstly, there can be no doubt that the child in the video was deeply distressed, terrified, and dysregulated. As the parent of autistic children, I have witnessed similar meltdowns, though admittedly not with lethal weapons.

When a child is in such an agitated state, there can be no reasoning with them. While it would be all too easy to believe the accepted narrative that she was terrified as a result of having been the victim of previous gang rapes, totally freaked out by the attentions of this man, and bravely sticking up for her sister, it is just as plausible that the situation had tapped into a different trauma.

By way of contrast, one of my children was asked to leave their autistic support group because they had a similar violent meltdown, one that involved throwing objects around the room and then attempting to climb out of the first-floor window, because they were told they were not allowed to use their scooter. 

That may have sounded unreasonable, but the background was that the group had been planning a trip that involved a walk to the bus stop. Said child has a genuine aversion to walking even the tiniest distances and instead wanted to use her scooter. The leaders of the group were concerned that she was scooting so fast that she was not staying with the group, and so they would not be able to keep her safe.

Her expectation was that she would be able to use the scooter, and when reality did not live up to it, chaos ensued.

There will inevitably be those who want to place that on my parenting, asking whether or not I have over-indulged a child to the extent that they cannot cope without getting their own way. To them I would suggest that they undertake some research into neurodiversity.

One of the things that perplexed us, prior to getting a clinical psychologist involved, was why our child was behaving like Veruca Salt on steroids, because it was not as if the frequent meltdowns ever achieved their stated objectives. If anything, they made us far less inclined to give in.

Anyway I digress. The point is that when I saw the image of that child brandishing such terrifying weapons her obvious emotional dysregulation struck an immediate chord. It was clear something was badly wrong, and sharing the video would have been deeply irresponsible, as she may later come to regret her actions. This child was not in a position to to consent to the release of the video nor predict its virality and any potential future consequences.

The man behind the camera

The video was shot by a man with a foreign accent, later identified as a Bulgarian. The Daily Mail has written a bizarre piece portraying him as an upstanding married Christian, who is here legally and was on his way to the shops with his wife, when he was accosted by a gang of young female hoodlums. We were treated to photos of his young 19 year-old wife, their newborn baby and his family.

His TikTok tells a very different story: that of a flaky young man waving wads of cash, which does not sit well with his claim of being about to start work in a restaurant, and using decidedly un-Christian language about wanting “pimp hos" and "buy p**sys" in his car. He has also posted less-than-salubrious videos of himself wearing a balaclava while flipping the bird to his audience, and dressing in sharp suits, true gangsta style.

Far be it from me to disavow his faith, but let us just say that this is not the sort of traditional Catholic gentleman I would be thrilled for my daughters to bring home.

He appears shady and was clearly antagonising the girls in his video, wanting to ensure that he captured them on film, with taunts of “yeah, show me the knife, show me the knife.”

Releasing the video as proof of how evil these girls were, without any thought as to their welfare, has massively backfired. I would not be surprised if, as a result of going to the Daily Mail, he needs to go into hiding. Play silly games, win silly prizes.

Witnesses claim that he continued marching towards the girls even when they were backing off, and even needed a hood to be placed on him to prevent him from hurling spittle at the police when they turned up.

Not quite the upstanding paragon of Christian virtue, that the 'nothing to see here, it's just the far-right' brigade would have you believe.

The friend's account

One of the girls’ friends gave her account of what had happened in two videos on TikTok. She released the videos because she was fed up with being mistakenly named as the girl with the weapons.

Her account was lucid and convincing, especially considering that she was applying impressive, albeit distracting, makeup skills at the same time! I watched transfixed as she spent twenty minutes applying every single colour of the rainbow in various intricate patterns across her lovely face, only to blur it all together and look no different at at the end as she had at the beginning.

What she had to say, and again I am not naming her, seemed believable.

The man filming the video had been engaging in street harassment, calling the 12-year-old “sexy,” and these Scottish lassies from the hard streets of Dundee were rightly not having any of it.

Prefacing every statement with “I’m not going to lie” the girl admitted that their group proceeded to shout at the man and became confrontational. Again, completely understandable, even if it wasn't objectively the wisest approach.

Anyone who has ever had anything to do with groups of teenage girls can picture the scene. Things then began to escalate, drawing the attention of shoppers in the local supermarket.

This is where things get sketchier. Apparently the man’s sister appeared from around the corner and got into a physical confrontation with one of the girls, pulling her to the floor and together with her brother began kicking her in the head such that she later had to be taken to hospital with concussion.

Amid the shouting and general fracas, one of the girls pulled out these two-foot-long weapons, a machete and an axe, that she had hidden in her belt. The girls then seemingly walked away, only to be followed by the man, who whipped out his phone to record the viral 40-second clip.

What I found extremely telling was that the teen was very keen to condemn her friend’s weapons, to disassociate from her actions, and to make it clear that she had no idea she was carrying them. She also did not think it at all unreasonable that the police should get involved and arrest her friend.

She also said that she was going to put some distance between herself and her young friend, after talking things through with her mum. Sound parenting there, mum!

At no point did this girl complain that her friend’s arrest was in any way unfair or unjustified. And most ordinary Brits would agree. Carrying offensive weapons in public is a serious criminal matter. Even our American cousins lay down similar rules about carrying guns which must either be concealed, or properly holstered, you can't just stroll down the street with a gun in your hand.

Another thing that stood out was that the girl seemed very aware of police procedure. For example, she said that she spoke to the police on the scene as much as she could, but because she is underage, there is a limit to how much the police are allowed to interact with her without a trusted adult present.

That is not something I would have been aware of at that age, but then again, it might have been a fact she had only recently learned.

She was also very keen to remind everyone listening that she was just a 14 year-old child although I was struck by her maturity and confidence. She has the ability to go far in life.

Police Scotland

Police Scotland is asking people not to share misinformation and has said that, having reviewed CCTV, no crime has been committed. Given the public’s lack of trust in the police, there is understandably disquiet, especially given this particular force’s reputation for being woke - think Pride parades and diversity initiatives.

It is not unreasonable to wonder whether some kind of cover-up or whitewashing is going on here, by a force nervous about simmering tensions due to immigration. It seems strange that if the girl needed to go to hospital due to a head injury sustained by this man and his sister, and if accounts of his needing a spit hood and also allegedly urinating in the police van are to be believed, that no further charges will be brought against him. Of course this is an active investigation, caution needs to be exercised, and perhaps the police have access to more information and witnesses than has been put in the public domain.

Culture and context

Kathleen Stock has written that Dundee is a rough area. Count Dankula made the same point with dark humour, adding with a chuckle that it is not unusual for kids there to be “tooled up.”

According to those in the know on Scottish Reddit, the headline about a young girl being arrested for possession of offensive weapons is pretty unremarkable in those parts. It is likely that she was being a “wee shite” or a “ned” (non-educated delinquent), waving around weapons to look hard and gain some attention.

The girls, their background, and Bulgarian/Roma grooming gangs

A number of allegations and statements about their background and previous behaviour have been made online. They are not hard to find, but amount to hearsay, so I am not going to repeat them, given that we are still talking about children who have all been openly named on the internet, in what is a massive safeguarding failure.

Internet sleuths have dug up recent news reports purporting to show that the girls have gone missing from home twice in the past month, and have suggested that because they were wearing the same clothes in their missing persons photos as they were in the video, they may have been through some terrible ordeal involving grooming.

Possibly. Or it could be that, not having much money, they do not own many clothes. Their clothes did not look particularly dirty. Or it could be that, like many teenagers, they tend to stick to one preferred outfit.

Noting the recent conviction of a Bulgarian/Roma grooming gang in the area, some have speculated that the man was somehow involved, and that the girl with the axe must have been a previous victim of child sexual abuse, giving how she was protectively defending her sister from what was believed to be an aggressive sexual predator.

That could be the case, but then again, I am reminded of the various autistic meltdowns I've witnessed over the years and the fact that there can be a multitude of other stressors which get a child so heightened, that they end up in an irrational, terrifying to witness outburst.

The Braveheart myth

All of this has fed into simmering cultural tensions about immigration and reopened the festering wounds of Britain’s grooming gangs, whereby girls were systematically raped and abused by Asian gangs while the authorities turned a blind eye. As case review after case review has revealed, very often these girls were from troubled and chaotic backgrounds, and their testimonies were disbelieved and it was deemed that they were consenting to prostitution.

Images of this young girl brandishing her weapons, dressed up in Scottish tartan on the moorlands, were created and disseminated on social media as though she was some kind of brave heroine leading the fight back against marauding foreign invader attempting to defile her baby sister.

She was romanticised as a heroic icon of our time; the Queen of Scots, Boudicca, Braveheart - a seductive and culturally appealing meme, allowing everyone to see themselves reflected in her heroic courage.

I suspect the truth is rather more messy, nuanced and dare I say, mundane.

It is absolutely not the case that the only way for girls to be safe is to be tooled up. Our Scottish Queen was not carrying offensive weapons because she had no other choice, or because she was specifically fearful of foreign immigrants (Dundee's level of immigration is not proportionately higher than any other area of the UK), but because, sadly, that is the culture for young people on the mean streets of Dundee.

There is also the possibility, though it goes against the grain, that young people know how to weaponise their vulnerability and status. Those of us embroiled in the gender culture wars are all too familiar with lumbering great lads masquerading as vulnerable young children. Just yesterday, Kellie-Jay Keen published a video of adult transactivists protesting about J K Rowling outside Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, falsely accusing Kellie-Jay of touching them and shouting “they are children” as they pointed to a bunch of what appear to be fully grown six-foot men.

Similarly, children know the effect of accusations of paedophilia and calling people paedos, kiddy fiddlers, or kiddy bashers. Jaded teachers have many a tale to tell of how “I know my rights” has been the clarion call of disruptive children facing sanction.

People automatically believed that these girls were fending off a sexual assault from an illegal immigrant, instead of exercising their critical faculties, because it fed into their innate biases, which to be fair were not entirely illogical. This is the difficulty of “believe all women, or believe all girls” mentality; thanks to the human condition, nobody can be trusted simply on the basis of their identity.

The Uncomfortable Truth

It is extraordinary and extremely worrying that people are defending a child's actions as being entirely necessary and proportionate. When that defence comes from people who know nothing about the UK, aside from what they have read, this insistence is particularly grating.

I was discussing young Boudica with a dear American friend yesterday, who also had automatically and instinctively bought into the idea that you could not blame these little girls for feeling they needed to carry weapons.

There is a distinct difference between carrying, for the sake of argument, a can of hairspray in one’s bag that could be used in extremis, and carrying offensive weapons. There is also a case to be made that people ought to be allowed to defend themselves - cases like that of Tony Martin demonstrate that the legal balance needs to be tipped. But as a general rule, children, who by their very nature have low impulse control, cannot be relied upon to exercise sound judgement, especially in a fight-or-flight situation. They should not be given offensive weapons or put in a position where they have to decide whether to seriously maim or kill another. And that is before we even consider the danger they put themselves in.

We also need to ask a deeper question: why do young people believe that carrying weapons is necessary in the first place? What does it say about our culture that children are being socialised to see violence as the only reliable form of protection? If we truly want to equip them for a dangerous world, surely there are better ways. Disciplines such as martial arts, sport, and community programmes can foster resilience, confidence, and self-defence without normalising the idea that survival depends on wielding a machete or an axe.

If it is really too dangerous for children to go out alone without a weapon to protect themselves, then parents need to exercise judgment. My local Facebook page is full of regular calls for parents to keep an eye on their teens, as gangs of them regularly maraud, set the local Army ranges on fire, attack, kill wildlife with catapults by the canal, and commit random acts of vandalism in our village.

Much of this could be alleviated with better police funding and a return to community policing, rather than arresting people for social media posts. But the calls for parents to rein in their children and keep an eye on their whereabouts are not unreasonable.

Stating that if you cannot trust your children to be safe while out, without some kind of offensive weapon, or to keep control of them, is not akin to the introduction of Sharia law, chaperones, and burkas. It is simply common sense.

We need to ask why children are sucked into a culture where they feel they need to carry weapons. Is this simply about illegal immigrants or migrant cultures, or are there other factors in play? Are some areas no-go zones, and if so why?

The messy reality

I suspect the uncomfortable truth of the matter is that here we had some lairy teenage girls who got into a confrontation with a creepy young man. Perhaps he is a product of a misogynistic culture, or perhaps, like many men, he was shaped by social media and pornography, which teach that young women and girls are objects for gratification. In that moment, fuelled by her heightened emotions and inability to self-regulate, (for which she should bear no blame) one girl went too far and started brandishing her weapons.

She should no more be blamed than lionised. But situations call us to exercise judgment. There is obviously some chaotic parenting going on, and nothing is worse than claiming that people from very poor backgrounds or in straitened circumstances have no other choice than to be wandering the streets with weapons.

The idea that we should all celebrate a child clearly in need of intervention, engaging in dangerous and antisocial behaviour, indiscriminately waving machetes and axes as an icon for our times, and an example for our children is one that should trouble us all.

Conclusion

A child with machetes is not a heroine, any more than a man with a cross tattoo is automatically an upstanding trad Catholic. Yet sections of both the left and right are applauding chaos, excusing dysfunction, and leaving children to fend for themselves with blades in their hands.

The deeper issue is cultural. Decades of multicultural dogma have eroded shared values and undermined authority, leaving whole communities caught between chaos at home and disorder imported from abroad. If men are here illegally or causing trouble, they should be deported, swiftly and without apology. Children should not be left to face down the consequences of failed immigration policies with weapons in their belts.

The real question is where are all the adults? Until we recover the courage to enforce the law, uphold our culture, and pass on a clear code of responsibility, we will keep mistaking children in crisis for icons of resistance.

Fraser Myers writes:

Two young girls are on film, screaming, seemingly being chased by an aggressive migrant with a cameraphone. ‘These are kid bashers’, one says. ‘Get the fuck away from us!’ ‘Show the knife’, the man responds. And then the viral moment: one of the girls brandishes a knife in one hand, an axe in the other. ‘Don’t fucking touch my little sister’, she says. ‘She’s fucking 12!’

For the terminally online right, this 44 seconds of footage from Dundee, Scotland was enough to confirm their most nightmarish fears. Britain, it seems, is now so overrun by illegal-migrant child molesters that pre-teen girls are forced to carry weapons to defend themselves from the constant onslaught of foreign rapists. Worse, when reports emerged that the girl had been arrested on suspicion of possessing a weapon, this too was seized on as proof of the UK’s slide into anarcho-tyranny. The corrupt British state might ignore the threats to young girls, many an X user mused, but it will spring immediately into action to protect the migrant paedos.

Now, anyone with an ounce of common sense or credibility should have felt at least some scepticism about the footage. It surely seemed to fit almost a little too neatly into the ‘rape of Britain’ narrative.

And, as it turns out, the footage was not all it seemed. As the Daily Mail – hardly a bleeding-heart liberal outlet – uncovered this week, the ‘illegal migrant’ behind the camera was a 21-year-old Bulgarian who was with his wife at the time of the incident. They were on their way to the shops when the two young girls got in their way and started swearing at him, one of them carrying the weapons. The police and CCTV footage have since confirmed that he committed no offence.

Yet by the time all this had come to light, the footage had been shared, retweeted and memed thousands of times, all around the world – helped along by the likes of Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson. The young girl with the axe was christened as ‘Sophie of Dundee’ – a modern-day, female ‘Braveheart’, defending herself, her sisters and her homeland from the predatory migrant hordes. A crowdfunder was set up for the girls, which has raised £62,000 from credulous onlookers at the time of writing.

‘Sophie from Dundee’ is hardly a one-off, either. The right-wing bullshit machine has been in overdrive in recent weeks. It isn’t so much reflecting genuine and understandable public anger about Britain’s broken borders, as it is monetising dystopian fantasies.

The misinfo has ranged from the silly to the sinister. On the daft end, we recently had Rupert Lowe, the MP who was kicked out of Reform UK, mistaking a group of charity rowers off the Norfolk coast for a stray migrant-filled dinghy. ‘Enough is enough. Britain needs mass deportations. NOW’, he tweeted, after sighting an ‘unknown vessel’ of some men raising money for motor-neurone disease.

On the dodgy end, we’ve seen Tommy Robinson tweeting a video of two black men and two white children playing in a park. ‘WTF is going on here? Where are the parents?’, Robinson asked his 1.4million X followers earlier this month. Subtext: these are foreign paedo kidnappers. In truth, one of the men was the girls’ grandfather and the other was his brother. Two entirely innocent men smeared as child abusers to an audience of millions, purely because assumptions were hastily made because of the colour of their skin.

The tarring and feathering of entirely innocent people is bad enough on its own terms. But it is also poisoning the discussion we really need about Britain’s border crisis. The public is right to be furious about the never-ending flow of small-boats arrivals. About the unknown, unvetted men being housed in hotels in their towns. About an asylum system that puts the rights even of foreign criminals above the public’s right to be safe.

Pushing back against this will need credible arguments and clear-sighted demands, not lurid fantasies about girls battling migrant paedos with axes. Those peddling this nonsense are helping no one but themselves.

And Kathleen Stock writes:

Scotland in 2025: a fearless young warrior queen known only as “Sophie of Dundee” is facing down hordes of Islamic immigrants ravaging her once noble city. Spurred into action by the failures of elites to deal with rampaging grooming gangs and asylum-seeking rapists, the tiny but indomitable Celtic maiden staunchly vows to make her swinish aggressors bow before her, or else feel the punitive sting of cold steel.

This, more or less, was a popular US take on a viral video circulating this week, showing a very young girl in Dundee menacing the person filming with an axe and a knife, plus a lot of high octane swearing and shouting. Though no potential migrant attackers could be visually detected, at least one heavily accented male voice could be heard urging the girl to “show the knife”, while she and another girl, said to be her sister, volubly accuse him of “battering kids”. The girl with the weapons was later arrested by police, the video put online, and its chaotic events processed by the meme factories to be served up frothing hot.

One typical image — mainlined into American veins via Elon Musk’s new pal Tommy Robinson — showed “Sophie” transplanted to a Highland setting, still brandishing weapons enthusiastically in the heather, but now tartaned-up in the colours of Clan Mel McGibson and with face daubed in saltire blue. Meanwhile Musk himself was busy describing the police officers involved as “traitors to their own people”, as if a more responsible constabulary would have given the axe-wielding pre-teen a pat on the head and sent her on her way. A puzzled American discourse has since erupted about why Scottish people, or the men in particular, don’t adequately defend their women from tribes of marauding foreigners roaming unchecked across their ancestral lands. A donor page has been set up for the two girls, real names Lola (12) and Ruby (13). As I write, the fund stands at nearly £35,000, which is a lot of money for young Lola and Ruby to spend on machetes and Irn Bru. “May God save your country from the terrors happening there”, writes one plaintive donor.

At the same time, people who actually live in Dundee have been discussing what happened there, with less mythologising and more weary familiarity with the city’s longstanding social problems. Though the local tourist board is probably not shouting about it, the place has the highest rate of child protection orders in Scotland, the highest national incidence rate of domestic abuse, the second lowest life expectancy, and the second highest rate of drug misuse deaths in Europe (beaten only by Glasgow). “A significant proportion of the difference in life expectancy between Dundee and many other [places] can be accounted for by deaths at a young age from drugs, alcohol and suicide”, notes a 2024 health and social care report.

On the city’s subreddit, one poster said she had watched the whole thing kicking off from the Farmfoods carpark — a place not remotely heather-strewn — and described witnessing “lots of swearing and aggressive behaviour between both parties”, but no physical clashes. Another pointed out that the same girls — again identified as “Ruby” and “Lola”, ages 13 and 12 respectively — were reported missing in the Scottish press at the end of July, then traced shortly by the police afterwards. “Clearly there is a lot going on for them”, was one more sympathetic verdict. Mostly, though, there was a distinct lack of surprise about why a young girl might be walking about the city’s backstreets tooled up like a video game character. Said one: “I’m 31 this year and seen loads of that kind of pish growing up, average [housing] scheme behaviour… Mostly just troubled kids left to fend for themselves tbf. Just more people filming it now.”

In the end, then, febrile visions of the tomboy queen, Sophie of Dundee, have proved as accurate as that time in 2019 when the American Left collectively hallucinated MAGA-behatted students aggressing an “indigenous elder”. In both cases, it seems it is easy to make up self-serving things about young people you don’t know. The Daily Mail has since found the film’s cameraman, who turns out to be a Bulgarian Christian — which is to say, not Muslim — with legal residential status. The police, with the help of Farmfoods CCTV cameras, have confirmed “there is no evidence to support the online rumours Mr Dumana… committed any offence”. Rumours of migrant hordes have also been exaggerated: it is true that Dundee City council houses some Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan and Ukrainian refugees, but a quick look online shows the numbers are apparently in the hundreds not thousands. In 2019, 18% of babies in the city were born to mothers from outside the UK, a figure only marginally higher than the national average at the time.

So: whatever the ultimate truth about what went on in the video, or about the fraying social contract in Dundee, it is clearly a lot less childishly simple than the feverish projections of people like Musk. Twenty-five years ago, I lived in the city, in a neighbourhood full of nice houses left over from the prosperous 19th-century jute trade. I worked in an electrical retail shop in the centre, from which hollow-eyed drug users would sometimes nonchalantly emerge with stolen stereos to sell in the alleyways off the main street. Back then it was a starkly divided place — and still is — though the major social divisions have little to do with skin colour.

On the one hand, there are the hipster West End coffee shops and the fancy waterfront V&A museum, the backdrop to fictional native son Logan Roy’s surprise party in HBO’s Succession. On the other, there’s the scary tower blocks in places like the Hilltown and Lochee — known locally as “multis” — their stairwells adorned with “human shite, junkies shooting up, groups of neds and a dead dog”, as one disgruntled local resident recently described the situation. I had female friends who grew up in the multis; they were frequently plied with alcohol in their early teens then assaulted and raped by groups of local men. Safe to say, then, that the idea of sexually exploiting vulnerable minors didn’t start with brown-skinned incomers.

To make such obvious points seems to drive the online Right on both sides of the Atlantic into a spitting fury; as if, through a strange Tinkerbell-like alchemy, every time a white man is identified as responsible for sexual exploitation, an Asian-born culprit gets exonerated. When the objectors are from North America, there often seems to be an accompanying insult felt to self-identity and amour propre: as if some great-grandfather from Linlithgow or Leicester were being held personally responsible, and by extension all of his descendants. It is perfectly true, to our national shame, that Asian rape gangs have operated here with impunity, and been enabled by authorities in many cases. But it is also true that the strategies used by the perpetrators to lure young girls were hardly new or innovative, and nor was what they did to their victims afterwards. Sexual exploitation of minors has been rife in places like Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Dundee for decades — if not centuries — without the authorities getting a proper grip on it; and the perpetrators have usually been homegrown.

All but the most economically insulated of Scottish citizens already know this. Contact with everyday local reality, plus a phlegmatic, humorous outlook makes most of them constitutionally unlikely to fall for simplistic a priori narratives imposed from elsewhere, whether these be about existentially noble refugees or existentially noble working-class white people. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many radical Right-wing onlookers, who seem neither in touch with reality, nor particularly phlegmatic or humorous. Credulously swallowing every bit of agitslop thrown their way by activists like Robinson, and without any apparent awareness of the high potential for being led up the garden path, they are now as desperately wedded to images of white British victimhood as foreign tourists generally are to the sight of Buckingham Palace or Harrods. And their current vision of Scotland is about as accurate as Brigadoon.

There was perhaps a time not long ago when Musk-powered overseas attention to the scale of UK immigration and the scandal of grooming gangs was a bracing correction to elite inertia and denial about it over here. Perhaps it even briefly provided us with that most precious of gifts, according to Robert Burns: “to see oursels as ithers see us”. But if so, that time has definitively gone.

Though the aimlessly simmering political energy generated may look attractive, sober-minded British Right-wingers should be careful to avoid projected psychodramas about their home turf that come with twanging accents and the inability to pronounce “Edinburgh” correctly. Curbing immigration is increasingly seen as a commonsensical position, even in Scotland; it would be a shame to spoil things by associating the position with the havering of ill-informed numpties. In the immortal words of imaginary Dundonian Logan Roy about his American children, these are not serious people; and it shows.

The Devil We Know

Of course Queen Elizabeth II was a Remainer, in the way that of course the King is a Green at least in a nonpartisan sense (he and his father practically invented it) and, like Green Parties from the Bundestag to the House of Commons, a supporter of the war in Ukraine.

I have always said that the eventual threat to the monarchy would come from the Right, although I had always assumed that that would be because it was blindingly incompatible with Thatcherite meritocracy. As it is, though, note what those Raising the Colours, no beneficiaries of Thatcherism unless you reasonably counted lifelong and intergenerational benefit dependency, are saying online about the King, and note what they are not saying, for God to save him or for him to live long, either there or on the streets.

The political neutrality of the monarchy is like the impartiality of the BBC. When, exactly, has there ever been any such thing? The monarchy keeps sweet a lot of people who need to be kept sweet. But I am entirely at a loss as to why it has that effect on them. Either Elizabeth II or her equally revered father signed off on every nationalisation, every aspect of the Welfare State, every retreat from Empire, every loosening of Commonwealth ties, every social liberalisation, every constitutional change, and every EU treaty. Charles III will sign off on assisted suicide and on decriminalised abortion up to birth, and would have signed off on gender self-identification, as he may yet.

If they could not have done otherwise, then why bother having a monarchy? What is it for? I support public ownership and the Welfare State in principle, even if the practice has often fallen short. The same may be said of decolonisation, as a matter of historical interest. I find some social liberalisations and some constitutional changes a cause for joy, and others a cause for horror. I abhor the EU, and the weakening of the Commonwealth. But this is not about me. Is it the job of a monarch, if not to acquire territory and subjects, then at least to hold them? If so, then George VI was by far the worst ever British monarch, and quite possibly the worst monarch that the world has ever seen, with his daughter in second place.

And is it the job of a British monarch to maintain a Protestant society and culture in the United Kingdom? If so, then no predecessor ever began to approach the abject failure of Elizabeth II, a failure so complete that no successor will ever be able to equal it. For all her undoubted personal piety, I am utterly baffled by the cult of that Queen among Evangelical Protestants and among those who cleaved to a more-or-less 1950s vision of Anglicanism, Presbyterianism or Methodism. What did she ever do for them? What has the monarchy ever done for them? During the last reign, Britain became history’s most secular country, and the White British became history’s most secular ethnic group, a trend that has been even more marked among those with Protestant backgrounds than it has been among us Catholics. The next monarch is not a regular churchgoer, meaning that the one after that is not being brought up as one.

This has implications for the Windrush debate, and with eight Commonwealth Realms in or on the Caribbean, a fat lot of good being the Queen’s loyal subject did anyone there; Barbados, proportionately the most Anglican country in the world, became a republic in 2021. It also has implications for aspects of the debate around Brexit. If you wanted to preserve and restore a Christian culture in this country, then you would welcome mass immigration from the Caribbean, from Africa, from Latin America, and from Eastern Europe.

On balance, I would not abolish the monarchy. A Presidential Election would be a choice between the next Bullingdon Club member in line and someone who had casually given a trifling £50,000 to the most recently successful candidate for the Leadership of the Labour Party. No one else would even make it onto the ballot paper, and I would not want either of those as my Head of State. There would have to be a nomination process. Candidates would certainly require nomination by one tenth of the House of Commons, 65 MPs, and very probably by one fifth of that House, 130 MPs. Even in the first instance, in the wildly unlikely event of more than two candidates, then the House would whittle them down to the two who would then be presented to the electorate. Almost certainly, only two parties are ever going to have 65 MPs. Certainly, only two are ever going to have 130. In practice, they would probably arrange to alternate the Presidency between them.

Nor would want to I abolish the Royal Prerogative. Rather, I want it to be exercised by a Prime Minister who aspired to strengthen families and communities through economic equality and international peace. But the monarchy, and with it the exercise of the Royal Prerogative by persons who most certainly did not share those aspirations, does not depend on the support of people like me. It depends on the support of people who, as long as the monarchy were simply there, have been prepared to overlook the fact that hardly anything that they really wanted ever happened, while all sorts of things that they did not want did happen, no matter who was in government.

The Order of the Garter is entirely in the gift of the monarch, so the then Queen alone chose to confer it on Tony Blair. Prince Andrew chose to move in the circles of Jeffrey Epstein, of Robert Maxwell’s daughter, of Peter Mandelson, and of the Clintons. It is the Anglo-American liberal elite, the right wings of the Labour and Democratic Parties, that are the Royal Family’s sort of people, even if they would never stoop to voting for those parties. Culturally, no one is more Tory than a liberal Tory; politically, no one is more liberal. The people on whose support the monarchy depended have chosen to ignore the fact that that was what their heroes must have been, and openly were. But we may be living through the end of all that.