Giddily Elated?

In comparing the King to a lottery winner, Earl Spencer is expressing the old aristocracy’s 300-year-old contempt for the Royal Family, although that does not really work now that the monarch is a member of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, the senior surviving branch of the 925-year-old House of Oldenburg. It is still foreign, though, and to that extent arriviste on these shores.

But it is also still the Royal Family. The Heir to the Throne’s phone calls are recorded, and if MI5 existed to do anything, then it exists to protect the Crown. Either King Charles or Charles Spencer is making a terrible mistake, and my money is on the man on my money. No, it is not very regal to reply to one of those books. But nor is it very noble to write one. And Michael Fawcett again? Is this a Greatest Hits album?

Credible and Pragmatic

Paul Knaggs writes:

I was due to have coffee with Chris Williamson this week. Nothing complicated: two old campaigners, a pot of tea gone cold, the kind of unhurried conversation you only get away from the cameras. He pushed it back to next week. Given what he did in the days in between, that was probably for the best. I would have arrived with rather more to say to him than either of us had planned for.

Williamson resigned this week from the Workers Party of Britain, ending three years as one of its deputy leaders, in protest at George Galloway’s decision to stand in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election on 8 October. Writing on X, he said he had “a huge amount of respect for George Galloway” but believed the left should instead get behind Green Party leader Zack Polanski, whom he called the main left challenger to Labour in the seat. His reasoning was blunt: Labour, Reform, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are all, in his own words, “in the pocket of the neoliberal Zionist war machine,” and only a united front behind Polanski stands a chance of shifting them.

It is worth dwelling on the seat itself, because this is not some forgotten corner of the map. Holborn and St Pancras was Keir Starmer’s constituency. Starmer resigned as Prime Minister in July, forced out after a leadership crisis inside his own parliamentary party, and was replaced by Andy Burnham. Six weeks later, on 1 September, he resigned the seat too, taking on the ceremonial office of Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds purely in order to vacate it. The man who delivered Labour’s 2024 “landslide” could not hold together his own backyard, let alone the country, for even one full term. Keep that fact in your pocket. We will need it again before the end.

Fifteen names will appear on the ballot on 8 October. Labour has selected Sagal Abdi-Wali, leader of Camden Council. The Greens have selected their own leader, Zack Polanski. And George Galloway, after months spent outside the country following his detention at Gatwick, has now filed nomination papers in his own name for the Workers Party. His party’s statement on why voters should choose him over Polanski did not mince its words: the Greens, it said, had shown through their “reckless backing for the war in Ukraine” that they could not be trusted, adding, in a line clearly aimed at exactly the coalition Williamson is now urging, “we are a socialist party and not a liberal or ‘leftist’ one.” That is not a private disagreement playing out on a WhatsApp group. It is the public position of the party Williamson just walked out of.

I understand the instinct behind what Williamson has done, because we have all tried the tactic. For years, the rallying cry was GTTO, Get The Tories Out. Socialists, liberals, Greens and Labour loyalists were all invited into one great tent and told to hold our noses for the sake of the shared enemy. We know how that ended. In July 2024, Labour won 411 of 650 seats, 63 per cent of the Commons, on 33.7 per cent of the vote: the lowest vote share ever to deliver a majority government and, on most measures, the least proportional result in British electoral history. That was never a mandate for anything Labour actually stood for. It was arithmetic. Reform and the Conservatives split the right-of-centre vote in seat after seat while Labour’s own support fell. And it produced a government so brittle that its own MPs forced its leader out inside two years: a Prime Minister with a majority of over a hundred, unable to survive contact with a single full term. Now we are being asked to build another broad church, and hold our noses again. This time for Zack Polanski.

I want to be fair to the Greens here, because pretending there is nothing worth taking seriously in Polanski’s programme would be dishonest, and that is not a trade I am willing to make even to win an argument. Public ownership of water and rail, a wealth tax on extreme fortunes, real opposition to Britain’s protest laws: these are positions serious socialists hold, and Polanski deserves some credit for putting them back into a national conversation Labour long ago abandoned.

That credit needs a footnote, though, because when the Greens actually got to vote on it, the socialism turned out to be thinner than advertised. At their March 2026 conference, delegates passed a motion deleting the party’s long-standing commitment to nationalise the five biggest energy supply companies, replacing it with language stipulating that electricity generation and storage should have “diversity of ownership including private.” The party kept its commitment to bring the transmission and distribution grid into public hands, so calling it a wholesale vote against nationalisation, as some outlets did, overstates it. But quietly deleting a specific, long-standing commitment to take the big five suppliers into public ownership, in favour of leaving the actual power stations in private hands, is not the language of a party trying to out-socialist Labour. It is the language of a party trying to sound radical while keeping the door open for private capital. But agreement on some things does not make disagreement on others trivial. And the places where Williamson’s newly preferred party and the tradition he says he represents pull apart are not footnotes. They are load-bearing walls.

It is worth pausing on the man himself before turning to the policies, because his political history does not inspire much confidence in the word “reinvention.” Polanski joined the Liberal Democrats in 2015 and stood as a council candidate for them. In 2016 he was still Lib Dem enough to heckle Jeremy Corbyn outside a rally, calling out over Europe, “Where were you when we needed you?” He joined the Greens the following year. Since then his own CV has needed rather more correcting than most politicians manage in a career: an admitted false claim to have been a Red Cross spokesman, an admitted false claim to have worked at the Ministry of Justice when he had in fact been hired through a temping agency to role-play in mock court exercises for a quango, and a hypnotherapy career he has spent years trying to explain away, including a claim about hypnotising a newspaper reporter into growing a larger bust that he was still defending on local radio six days after supposedly apologising for it. None of that makes him uniquely dishonest as politicians go. It does mean the rebrand deserves rather more scepticism than the coalition-builders are giving it. He is, by training and by trade, a performer, and the “eco-populist” turn reads less like a political awakening than the best part he has ever been cast in. He is not the route to change. He is a continuation of the same politics in another name, which is precisely what makes the choice in front of the left worth taking seriously rather than waving through. 

You would think the Green Party’s defining mission would be stopping environmental collapse. Instead, under Polanski, it increasingly looks more determined to convince the public that men can become women. One of those is the ecological crisis the party’s name was built around. The other is an ideological obsession that has swallowed the party whole. Start with sex. The Green Party’s 2024 manifesto commits it to gender self-identification, allowing people to be legally recognised in their chosen gender through self-declaration, without a medical diagnosis, while scrapping what it calls the spousal veto and reviewing the Equality Act itself. Whatever you make of that policy, and serious socialists hold different views on it, it is not an administrative footnote. It sits at the centre of an argument this country has been having for a decade about sex-based rights and single-sex spaces. Tellingly, when Williamson listed his own differences with the Greens on resigning, he did not mention this one. He named their “pro-EU and pro-NATO stances” instead. The omission does not make the disagreement go away. It only means nobody has had to answer for it yet.

Chris Williamson, Polanski and the Left's Broad-Church Trap

That commitment on paper is one thing. What it looks like in practice inside the party is another, and it has not been pretty. In February 2024, an employment tribunal ruled that the Greens had unlawfully discriminated against their own former deputy leader, Dr Shahrar Ali, over his gender-critical beliefs, the first ruling of its kind ever brought against a British political party: he was awarded compensation and the party was later ordered to pay roughly £90,000 towards his costs. Emma Bateman, a former co-chair of Green Party Women, has now been expelled three times over the same underlying complaint, for questioning gender ideology and mocking invented pronouns, and is suing the party under the Equality Act. Fourteen members of the Scottish Greens, some with forty years of service between them, were expelled for signing a declaration stating that sex is a biological reality. Polanski himself has said people are “not necessarily” born male and female, and has made expelling members he judges transphobic one of his personal red lines. A party that keeps losing in tribunals, and keeps paying out anyway, is not defending a principle. It is running a purge and calling it one.

It’s worth knowing that, given Williamson’s own gender-critical views, he would find himself far from welcome inside the party he is now urging the rest of us to back, and would soon find himself at the sticky end of a disciplinary, if not a tribunal, the moment he said so out loud. I suppose that’s what some would call compromise. On Europe, the Greens describe themselves as “pro-European, and proudly so.” Their 2024 manifesto commits to rejoining the EU Customs Union and restoring free movement, and delegates at their September 2025 conference voted to go further still, backing motions for “much closer relations with the European Union” including re-entry to the single market. That is a perfectly respectable political position. It is also a straightforward rejection of the argument, held by plenty on the socialist left including Galloway himself, that Brussels was never a friend of British workers and that national democratic control over trade, migration and state aid is worth having back.

Zack Polanski, NATO and the Cost of Defence

Then there is foreign policy, where the supposed differences become even harder to file away as merely fraternal. Polanski wants Britain, eventually, out of NATO. Telling Byline Times last year that “the age of NATO is now over,” he has argued that reform from within is impossible because roughly 86 per cent of Britain’s arms imports come from the United States, and has called instead for “an alternative alliance with countries based in Europe, plus Brazil and Mexico.” That sounds like a rupture. It is not quite one. Asked directly whether he would honour Article 5, NATO’s mutual defence clause, while Britain remains inside the alliance, Polanski did not hesitate: “we’ve already signed up for that,” committing British forces to war if another member state were attacked. So the position, in full, is this: stay in, fight if called upon, and leave only once an entirely new European security architecture, with its own weapons and its own guarantees, has been built to replace it. That is not dismantling the machinery of collective defence. It is proposing to build an identical machine next door and move house once the new one is finished, which, as critics on the left have already pointed out, in practice means never.

This publication made exactly this argument a year ago, in a piece comparing Polanski’s contortions to Keir Starmer’s own history of sounding radical for exactly as long as it takes to win power, then quietly discarding the act the moment it becomes inconvenient. The comparison still holds up rather better than either man’s actual foreign policy. Ukraine sharpens the point. Polanski has called Russia’s war “an illegal invasion of Ukraine” and said refusing to negotiate with any head of state would be reckless. Fair enough, as far as it goes. He has also draped himself in the Ukrainian flag on social media while warning against arms-industry profiteering, which is an odd straddle, since one of those things tends to fund the other. But in an interview with the Italian paper Repubblica this year, he went further than most of his own party were comfortable with, saying of Putin, “I’ve never seen him threaten genocide,” in pointed contrast to Donald Trump. His own leader in the Commons, Ellie Chowns, distanced herself within days, telling the BBC that Putin had launched an illegal invasion responsible for tens of thousands of deaths and that the comparison was not her view. That is not a rounding error inside a shared anti-war analysis. It is a live, unresolved fracture inside the party Williamson wants the whole left to fall in behind.

And behind all of it sits a question about money that nobody arguing for a Polanski coalition has satisfactorily answered. Polanski’s economic case leans heavily on the insight, borrowed from Modern Monetary Theory, that a government issuing its own currency cannot run out of pounds the way a household runs out of savings, and that the real constraint on spending is the productive capacity of the economy, not the headline size of the national debt. There is something to that. As the Cambridge economist Dimitri Zenghelis has argued, “what unsettles the bond market is not the level of UK public debt” so much as doubt about the country’s capacity to grow. But that insight cuts against the Green position on defence just as hard as it supports Green ambitions on housing and the NHS. Money is not the resource. Steel, skilled labour, energy and the people to build and operate weapons are the resource, and they cannot build a hospital and a howitzer with the same hands at the same time. Polanski himself has acknowledged as much, warning against “lining the pockets of arms companies with a limitless spending bill” even while insisting proper defence still has to be paid for.

Inside his own party the argument is already open: the Greens Organise faction that backed his leadership bid has called on the party to oppose further increases in defence spending outright, while his parliamentary leader Ellie Chowns has accepted the government’s planned rise and argued only that it should be funded through higher taxes on wealth. Polanski himself has been reduced to insisting the two should not be “pitted against each other,” which is a wish, not a costing. So if the honest answer on NATO is eventually, once something else exists to replace it, if conventional defence spending has to continue in the meantime, and if support for Ukraine continues, as it should, then somebody inside this proposed coalition needs to say what that means for everything else on the list when the bill actually lands. The Bank of England can create pounds whenever Parliament asks it to. It cannot create engineers, steel, or the years of patient investment this country has needed since long before either Williamson or Polanski entered politics.

This is the trouble with the broad church, every single time it gets built. It can win an argument, occasionally even an election, while its members have agreed on absolutely nothing about the morning after. If one wing believes in national sovereignty and another wants deeper integration with Brussels, if one thinks sex is a material fact with legal consequences and another has built self-declaration into its founding programme, if one wants Britain out of the machinery of military blocs and another has already promised, in terms, to fight under Article 5, those are not “fraternal disagreements” to be quietly filed away until after the count. Calling them that does not make them disappear. It only delays the argument until the moment power actually has to be used, and by then it usually arrives too late to matter.

There is something else worth naming, because it does damage that outlasts any single by-election. Telling voters, yet again, that principle has to be suspended because the other lot is worse is exactly how British politics ended up here in the first place: managed decline, administered in turn by whichever coalition currently frightens people slightly less than the alternative. Vote Labour because the Tories were worse. Vote Tory because Labour was worse. Vote Reform because everyone else has failed you. Each election becomes an exercise in prevention rather than construction, until eventually nobody is voting for anything at all. They are only voting against something, and a politics built entirely on fear of what comes next has no destination of its own.

And the trap cuts both ways, which is exactly why it is a trap. Nobody arguing for it seems to have asked what happens the day the right works out how to run the same play. Reform and the Conservatives split the right-of-centre vote against each other in seat after seat in 2024, which is the main reason 33.7 per cent of the vote turned into 63 per cent of the Commons. Psephologists have calculated that under a genuinely proportional system Labour would have returned something closer to 220 MPs rather than 411. Every time the left teaches itself that holding your nose and uniting against a shared enemy is simply how elections are won, it is also teaching the right the same lesson. The day Reform and the Conservatives work out how to stand aside for each other in enough marginals, and nothing stops them doing exactly what Williamson is now recommending to the left, a great many Labour MPs who owe their seats to vote-splitting rather than public enthusiasm will discover how thin their majorities always were. When all anyone is voting for is someone’s removal, everyone eventually forgets to vote for a reason to put somebody in. That is the real cost of a generation spent building broad churches. It has left us with parties that know exactly who they are against and increasingly no idea what they are for.

I sent Chris an early draft of this piece before publishing it, and, to his credit, he engaged with the whole of it rather than waving it away, as is his nature. His actual case, once you strip away the broad-church language, turns out to be sharper than his Facebook post suggested: the Workers Party standing risks helping Labour hold the seat, and propping Labour up delays the harder project of destroying it as an electoral force, which he sees as the precondition for anything better. He also argues that a wave of socialists has joined the Greens over the last year and could shift the party from the inside, that Polanski is the only party leader in Britain talking sense on the monetary system, and, above all, that Green support for proportional representation is a prize worth the trade.

Take the last point first, because it is the strongest one, and because this piece has already spent two sections on exactly the disproportionality PR would fix. Nobody wanting it is wrong to want it. But Labour has just won a stonking majority under first-past-the-post and has no conceivable reason to legislate that majority away, so support for PR is a fine principle for the next decade and no help at all on 8 October, when the system on the ballot paper is still the one everyone agrees is broken. Wanting a fairer voting system some day does not answer what anyone should do under the system that actually exists this Thursday, which was Williamson’s own question to begin with.

On the Greens being reformable from within, perhaps. But that is precisely the bet Labour’s left made in 2015, when a large influx of socialists joined a different party hoping to bend it their way, and nobody needs to be told twice how that ended. A party is not an empty vessel waiting to be filled by whoever signs up in the largest numbers. It has its own apparatus, its own leadership and its own culture, and the disciplinary machinery described above has not slowed down because of the socialist influx, it has continued straight through it. Hoping to out-organise your way to a different Green Party from the inside is just the broad church built one floor down, with the same argument waiting to happen all over again. On the economics, we simply disagree about how much weight one correct insight about currency issuance can carry inside a platform this contradictory everywhere else, and I have said my piece on that already. On drugs, crime and immigration, I will need more than “credible and pragmatic” to go on before I change my mind about any of it.

Chris Williamson has fought real battles over a long career, and I do not for a second doubt the sincerity of the conclusion he has reached. When we finally get that coffee, I will say all of this to his face rather than only in print, because that is the difference between disagreement and dismissal. But I will also tell him plainly that resigning in public, and handing Zack Polanski his blessing in the same breath, did more damage to the prospect of a genuine socialist alternative this week than Labour, the supposed bogeyman, has managed on its own. Resigning from a party because it dared to contest an election, then asking the rest of us to line up behind a party we disagree with on sex, on Europe, on NATO, and on how any of it gets paid for, is not a new strategy. It is the same roundabout the British left has been circling for a generation, with a different face at the wheel and the exit sign still missing.

We do not need another broad church, hastily built to survive one Thursday in October. We need a socialist movement with the nerve to say plainly what it believes, and the discipline to defend it long after the votes are counted. A coalition tells you who it’s against. Only a programme tells you what it’s for. The British left keeps building the first and calling it the second, then wonders, every time, why the roundabout never lets it off.

Red Lines

The Morning Star editorialises:

This week’s TUC Congress in Brighton made important demands on the economic transformation Britain needs and how to achieve it politically.

Despite the decline of two-party politics and the emergence of rivals on the left, it is clear most unions still see Labour as the only viable vehicle for political change in workers’ interests — and believe Andy Burnham offers it a chance to win back public trust.

Multiple unions welcomed his pledge to turn the page on 40-plus years of neoliberalism and pledges to support him in that project came from non-affiliated as well as affiliated unions. Many on the left will be sceptical about Burnham’s actual commitment to change, or else his ability to deliver it, but turning the trade union movement into a militant force for it makes sense either way.

The key motion on reshaping Britain economically — including through public ownership of utilities, sustained rises in public spending on services and public-sector pay rises, higher taxes on wealth and profits and use of state aid and procurement to reindustrialise the country needs to shape all trade union engagement with the government.

It was positive to see such wide union support for a composite which recognised the need for unions to press government on helping bring the Iran war to an end — on one level because of its impact on the cost of living, but bolstered by the (admittedly narrower) victory of the University and College Union’s welfare not warfare motion confirming the TUC is opposed to the militarisation of society and the drive to war.

And votes to organise a national day of action for fairer taxes and public services, and to back coordinated strike action over pay, show thought is already being given to how to put pressure on government to act in line with this programme.

The TUC continues to face both ways, however, on the neoliberal model of globalisation which formed the context for Thatcherism and the market-worshipping policies of every government since the 1980s. 

Delegates voted against “taking the country into divisive debates around both nationalism and EU/single market membership,” to “respect the result of the 2016 referendum on EU membership” and to recognise that “single market membership would reverse the UK’s progress to rail public ownership.”

They then voted the next day for a motion calling for “the deepest possible partnership with the EU” unlimited by “arbitrary red lines” and with “nothing off the table,” moved by a speaker explicitly saying Britain should rejoin the EU.

Coming in the week that the leaders of the devolved Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments tied their calls for independence to “the future of our nations [belonging] in the European Union,” this risks a return to the cul-de-sac of “progressive” (as opposed to hard-headed, class-conscious) politics pitting cosmopolitan against nativist identities rather than workers against the rich.

It is based on a mythical EU associated with tolerance and economic prosperity, when the realities are that EU members such as Germany, Italy and France face the same protracted economic decline and attacks on working-class living standards that British liberals blame on Brexit, and that the EU is increasingly militarist, authoritarian and racist.

It would return Britain to the toxic Brexit debates of the 2010s, rather than using the powers we have outside the EU to redesign the economy. It would also mean tying trade union ambitions to propping up the collapsing architecture of neoliberal globalisation when our economic demands rest on demolishing it.

Rebuilding class politics and anti-imperialism means abandoning liberal delusions about the explicitly capitalist EU — a pillar of an unjust international trading system based on plunder and exploitation of the Global South.

Marshalling The Troops

Even Michael Gove must be close to seeing the light, since he has published Peter Hitchens:

This is how I became a Canadian nationalist. I did it on the rebound. I never wanted to, and it is a strange experience to find myself pounding the arm of my chair when Mark Carney, of all people, defies the Almighty Trump. But it is so. Once, like that poor man who speaks the first lines in The Godfather, I believed in America, arsenal of liberty, land of the free, inheritor of Magna Carta and so on. Then, after a couple of years in Moscow I went to live in Washington, D.C. And it was there that I was gently wooed and eventually seduced by the land of maple syrup.

To begin with, it was the discovery that soppy British sentiment about the USA was not in practice returned. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t like us as that they had barely heard of us. Legally, Britain didn’t seem to exist. I had no credit history in the USA, so could not get US credit cards. I had no American driving record, so had to write begging letters to get insurance. I heard alarming tales of other British correspondents or their wives being thrown into the cells by Highway Patrol for driving with UK documents. And when Mrs Hitchens and I set out to obtain Maryland driver’s licences, we faced an extra hurdle. We could not even take the test until we had attended a four-week series of unsubtle evening classes about the perils of drinking and driving. We were at this time in our early forties, and had done a fair share of driving (and drinking, though not at the same time) in Moscow, where breaking the zero alcohol law could put you in an actual labour camp. Maryland’s logic was that, having not attended one of their superb high schools, we had never benefited from the stern anti-drinking education provided there. Why, we might even have tasted the dreaded devil’s buttermilk before we turned 21.

The lectures were conducted by a female sheep farmer from the Catoctin Mountains, who cheerfully admitted to an alcoholic past. So far, so funny. As was the day when I tried to persuade passers-by in D.C. to change a dollar bill into four quarters for a parking meter. I received nothing but blank looks until I grasped that many Americans could not really hear or understand the English version of their own language, much as I might struggle with a Glasgow accent. As soon as I asked for ‘korders’, they smiled and obliged.

But then came the Clinton White House’s decision to fall in love with Sinn Fein’s uncuddly leader, Gerry Adams. This was not funny. I let my scorn show at a White House briefing, and some days later received a phone call from a senior West Wing official. She cluelessly explained to me that America had a duty to prevent conflict in the world. For example, did I not think they were right to intervene in Yugoslavia, as they were then doing? I asked coldly if she was actually equating America’s oldest ally etc etc with, er, Serbia. A silence fell. I realised this was exactly what she was doing, and she realised at the same time that diplomacy wasn’t for her. We said goodbye. And I was out of love. Not long afterwards, by coincidence, I took the train north from New York to Montreal for the first time, braving the cold Canadian air mass, which is about the only Canadian thing US broadcasters seem to care about.

This was true foreign travel, far more so than I had expected. The line wanders through glorious lake and forest country and passes Ticonderoga, that wonderfully named battlefield where France and Britain long ago tangled for control of North America, a continent I still love, in spite of everything. Then suddenly all the signs were in French.

I was instantly captivated by Canada, even by the coffee-and-doughnut chain called Tim Hortons, unknown in the Great Neighbour to the South. There, I found myself sitting next to a Canadian cop, who to begin with looked much like his US counterpart. But then I noticed the St Edward’s Crown on his badge, and my heart turned over. I have never been much of a Thatcherite or Reaganite, and always felt in the USA that there really is no top and no bottom, that if you fall, you will fall forever.

For me, this has always been the dark implication of all that liberty: Wall Street billionaires at one end, chain gangs at the other. The sight of that Crown, and of the Queen’s face on the blue and purple money, brought home to me that I was now in a monarchy with a parliament, northern and stern but with limits. I was especially captivated by the French bit, full of glorious anomalies, especially in delightful Quebec City, perhaps the only place in North America where streets curve sensibly uphill instead of wasting their breath going straight at the gradient.

It was a dream of France before the Revolution, with a grand bust of Louis XIV on a cobbled square next to a superb wine merchant. And despite years of ferocious metrication, the heights of arches were given in pieds and pouces and I was able to order a steak in onces. In Ontario next door, the motorways were marked by tasteful black and white metal shields proclaiming that this was ‘the King’s Highway’, rather than Interstate 95 or whatever the Americans would have called it.

Then there was the baseball. The Toronto Blue Jays were playing a major game in Atlanta, Georgia and a Marine Corps band marched out into the stadium carrying the Canadian flag upside down. All over Canada there was laughter. For months afterwards, they displayed pictures of their national standard, stalk down, helpfully bearing the words: ‘THIS WAY UP.’ Who could not love a country which responded in this way to America’s inability to grasp that there are other nations with pride and history?

And Madeline Grant:

Imagine, if you will, King Charles in the Deep South. The aesthetics are easy enough: it doesn’t take much to picture His Majesty in crumpled linen, Her Majesty the right side of a large mint julep. But imagine if, in Richmond, Virginia, Charleston or New Orleans, His Majesty makes an off-the-cuff comment about how good it would be if the territories he was speaking in seceded from the United States and that it would be ‘a very great thing’ if claims of the Confederacy were honoured. His Majesty, in a show of tact, acknowledges that Washington D.C. might be a little miffed, but does so with a chuckle. After all, everyone knows that the aspirations of the US are old hat anyway.

Except of course the King didn’t do that. He went to Washington and was the epitome of grace and charm. He sought to honour America’s traditions and history and steered clear of any controversies. He certainly at no point questioned its territorial integrity, even as it threatened the position of one of his realms to its immediate north.

Contrast the King’s behaviour with that of Donald Trump this week in Dublin, where he claimed that the annexation of British territory in Northern Ireland by the Republic would be ‘a great thing’. His comment comes off the back of months of joint sabre-rattling with Israel about the Falkland Islands.

The long, zombified existence of the Monroe Doctrine means that many of the claims to territory now held by the US, at least as valid as republican claims to Northern Ireland, have been brushed under the carpet. If America thinks it’s open season on pulling apart the territorial integrity of its supposed allies, why shouldn’t the Foreign Office or the Quai d’Orsay start endorsing Russian claims to Alaska? Surely now is the time to restore the Hawaiian monarchy, which, after all, the US snuffed out illegally and unfairly, in part because they feared that Queen Liliʻuokalani was too keen on us? I jest, but this is no less deranged than the President’s outburst.

True, Trump’s dyspraxic bull-in-the-china-shop attitude to foreign policy can easily be blamed on his demonstrably flawed personality. It is also true that he says many things which don’t always come to pass. Such is his unpopularity over here that his Northern Ireland intervention may actually help the cause of Unionism. Leftists are already dancing an elaborate polka around this issue as they unexpectedly find themselves on the same side as ‘bad orange man’. Yet the grim reality is that Trump’s comments aren’t so far removed from what might be expressed behind closed doors by the most sensible old-school Republican or the most progressive Democrat. Contempt for allies – especially Britain – is a feature, not a bug, of American foreign policy.

That asymmetry works on a micro and a macro level. Indeed, America’s micro-aggressions are if anything more egregious. This week it was reported that a diplomat based in London had been secretly flown to America with the help of US Marines while under investigation for child sex offences. British police were reportedly informed only after he was already airborne and beyond the reach of extradition requests.

There are echoes here with the case of Anne Sacoolas, the CIA officer’s wife who in 2019 mowed down 19-year-old Harry Dunn while driving on the wrong side of the road. Sacoolas invoked diplomatic immunity and scuttled off to America before Dunn’s family had even learnt the name of their son’s killer. In the event, Sacoolas received a suspended sentence in absentia for taking the life of the British teenager, having been advised by US authorities not to return to face justice. That’ll learn her, as our friends across the pond might say.

Both cases lay bare a striking truth: America doesn’t care about Britain. Ignoring the rule of law in other countries, airlifting alleged paedos at great cost, making mad promises about other people’s territory and being unable to remember any historical event that happened more than about five minutes ago are characteristics not of a global hegemon deserving of respect, but of a third-world dictator. Indeed, the tit-for-tat punishment mode of America’s foreign policy is even more third-world than it first seems. The current undermining of Britain seems a kneejerk reaction to our immediate refusal to join a foreign conflict which came at the instigation of Benjamin Netanyahu. The arguments of the US and Israel for publicly undermining British territorial integrity rely on the acceptance of a deranged and false equivalence. Are we meant to believe that Falkland Islanders are habitually going around beating up the people who used to live there or crushing the homes of long-established penguins beneath bulldozers?

Of course, the specifics of what sparked America’s ire can seem almost irrelevant. Here, revenge for settlement sanctions involves supporting the territorial claims of Ireland, one of the most anti-Semitic countries in Europe. Trump recently made clear his view that the Falklands conflict was a long time ago. (He was, he says, ‘a very young boy’ at the time. He was 35.) Since then, in his eyes, we’ve been less pliant, so essentially deserve our comeuppance, ignoring the immense solidarity shown after 9/11, the sacrifices Britain made in Iraq and Afghanistan. This looks more like an expectation of vassalage than alliance; a demand that your ‘ally’ obeys at all times or their basic sovereignty will no longer be respected. The punishment of erstwhile friends runs in tandem with the indulgence of enemies: as Britain is threatened, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is offered concessions while Iran may soon be given a freer hand in the Strait of Hormuz.

All this should serve as a wake-up call. Right-wing parties around the world have been punished at the ballot box for their pro-Americanism. Given US threats to Northern Ireland, the integrity of which first built the Conservative and Unionist party, and the Falklands, which shored up its power in the 1980s, this is an opportunity for the British right to rediscover a more sceptical realism. The President’s outbursts make conservatives still willing to go out to bat for him look ludicrous. They make Andy Burnham’s vow not to prioritise defence at the expense of welfare appear even more spineless, and the Chagos giveaway even more pathologically stupid. As that essential guide to US statecraft Henry Kissinger once quipped: ‘To be an enemy of America is dangerous but to be her friend is fatal.’ It’s time we listened.

And Paul Wood:

To lose one Middle East sea lane vital for the global economy may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. As every armchair strategist knows, Donald Trump has lost free passage through one strait: Hormuz. Last week he let another slip from his grasp, Bab al-Mandeb, taken by Tehran’s allies, the Houthis. More than a quarter of the global oil supply could now fall under Iranian control – and Trump’s war is more doomed than ever.

For those confused about Middle Eastern waterways, a look at the map. The Strait of Hormuz, conduit for a fifth of the world’s oil, is east of Saudi Arabia and south of Iran. All the way over on the other side of Saudi Arabia, on its western coast, is the Red Sea leading down to the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. This shipping lane is overlooked by Yemen, home to Ansar Allah, the helpers of God, also known as the Houthis. It has assumed increasing importance ever since President Trump got into such expensive trouble in Hormuz.

Last week, hordes of Houthi fighters, wearing flip-flops and carrying Kalashnikovs, streamed down from the mountains onto the plains of the Yemeni coast. They took the town of Mocha (from where the coffee gets its name). The upshot is that a single militiaman armed with a rocket-propelled grenade can sit in a deckchair and threaten tankers carrying up to a tenth of the world’s oil. As CNN reported, quoting a ‘regional source’, this was ‘a Saudi-American fuck-up of epic proportions’.

The Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, called Trump twice to beg for American airstrikes. Trump refused, perhaps remembering the last time he waged an air campaign against the Houthis, to very little effect. (The US reportedly spent more than a billion dollars on bombs and missiles targeting the Houthis in 2025. It could have paid them $50,000 each to go home and would still have saved money.) The Saudis’ own very sophisticated air force was hardly to be seen, either. They may have carried out a few airstrikes, but not enough to make a difference.

The Houthis were supposed to be stopped by the official Yemeni government forces, which had been carefully built up by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. But with no air cover to protect them, the government forces collapsed, their soldiers fleeing in disarray across a stony desert.

There were several reasons for the rout. One is that the Emiratis pulled out their ground forces and advisers in January, following a row with the Saudis. Another is that the Yemeni army is a ragbag coalition of different groups at odds with one another. The Houthis – backed by Iranian knowhow – also put out an AI-generated fake recording of the coastal commander ordering his men to withdraw.

But the most important factor was corruption. According to one estimate, only 20 per cent of the official Yemeni strength was real: most of the troops were said to be ghost soldiers, on the payroll but not actually present. There was one perfect detail: the fleeing Yemeni soldiers did not drop their weapons when they ran; instead, they were seen selling them by the side of the road. Perhaps they even sold them to the Houthis.

Government forces were expensively kitted out with American weapons and vehicles by the Saudis and the Emiratis. The Houthis posted a video on X showing row after row of armoured troop carriers and Humvees that now belong to them. One of their commanders was filmed gleefully driving through rush-hour traffic in an MRAP – or Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle – a towering troop carrier that can protect seven infantry soldiers, but which was being used as his personal runabout.

On Monday, the US vice president, JD Vance, said he was in touch with the Houthis to negotiate. That seems desperate. The Houthis are armed and funded by Iran. There’s little reason to think that Vance would get any further in talking to them than he has in talking to Tehran directly about the wider war. On his visit to Dublin, Trump himself said: ‘The Houthis called, and they don’t want to fight with us.’ A Houthi official denied there were any such contacts.

To pile on the bad news, the main east-west pipeline carrying oil in Saudi Arabia was also hit by drones over the past week. That attack was blamed on Shia militias in Iraq – which are controlled by Iran – but could have been the Houthis. Either way, even if the Iranians didn’t precisely orchestrate all this, they benefit.

The 1,200km east-west pipeline carries as much as seven million barrels a day heading to the Red Sea and then up to the Suez Canal or down to the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. As a result, the wire services reported that portside stores of Saudi oil available for export were days from running out, while repairing the pipeline will take weeks. An acute energy crisis beckons. Brent crude is back above $100 a barrel. Prices for consumers are rising.

Trump used to campaign on lower gas prices. Now he tells audiences at his rallies that paying a little more at the pumps is worth it to stop Iran getting the bomb. ‘I don’t think they’re demoralised,’ he said of his supporters. ‘I think they’re very proud of the fact that I’m not letting Iran have a nuclear weapon.’ The chances of accomplishing that are fading. From Iran’s point of view, it makes sense to race to achieve a usable nuclear weapon as quickly as possible.

Trump’s MAGA base thought they had elected a president who would keep them out of foreign wars. The opinion polls say that only about three in ten voters back his handling of the Iran war – it’s amazing his support is that high. The Republicans are now expected to lose not just the House of Representatives in November’s midterm elections, but perhaps the Senate as well. Trump faces two years as a lame-duck president, under constant investigation. He will probably be impeached as well.

President Trump has shown he’s prepared to start fires, but not to put them out. The MAGA commentator Tucker Carlson said the Iran war marked the end of the American empire. More modestly, it may be the end of Pax Americana in the Middle East. The Saudis have made a new alliance with Pakistan and Turkey, though so far their new friends have not shown up to help with the Houthis.

Meanwhile, President Xi of China will have noticed that the US is running low on missiles. A former CIA director, William Burns, once said Xi had instructed China’s military to be ‘ready’ to conduct a successful invasion of Taiwan by 2027 (the 100th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army).

That doesn’t mean Xi will actually send an amphibious army across the Taiwan Strait. But intent often follows capability, and the US has been weakened as well as humbled. The trouble with losing two straits is that someone else may be tempted to try for a third.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the empire of Sir Paul Marshall, Sohrab Ahmari writes:

Well, it was nice while it lasted. Beginning in 2016, Donald Trump won over large shares of working- and lower-middle-class Americans to the GOP. Eight years later, majorities of non-college voters and those earning between $30,000 and $100,000 a year voted for him, and the quintile of counties with the highest poverty rate shifted most sharply to the Right. Counties in which residents are most reliant on welfare payments were also more likely to pick Trump. 

But now a re-realignment may be afoot. This week’s New York Times/Siena poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans earning less than $50,000 a year intend to vote for a Democratic nominee in the upcoming midterm election, while only about a third support a GOP nominee.

If these numbers hold once voters actually head to the polls, they could spell serious trouble for the President and his party. Already, the smart money is on Democrats easily clinching the House of Representatives. As for the Senate, these are the sorts of polling numbers that could see Abdul El-Sayed winning in Michigan or even James Talarico winning in historically deep-red Texas (notwithstanding Talarico’s now-renounced vegetarianism and belief in a non-binary deity).

Progressive strategists are already planning to reverse the so-called dealignment of working-class voters from the Left — a bond that used to be taken for granted but was disrupted by the rise of Right-wing populism. To be sure, working-class mistrust of the Democrats is deep and will not easily heal. Beginning with Bill Clinton, the party abandoned its New Deal traditions and came to serve as a vehicle for the professional classes and the progressive wing of capital: haughty, censorious, committed to corporate globalisation and exotic cultural causes.

Working-class disillusionment with Trump may not translate into durable support for the Democrats, so much as voters simply staying home. But that itself would be devastating enough for the GOP.

The reasons aren’t hard to divine. Trump won on a platform of lowering costs and avoiding foreign entanglements. Now diesel prices are hovering above $6 a gallon because of a war that predictably squeezed Middle Eastern energy supplies. Fuel prices ripple through the material economy, putting upward pressure on the cost of food, housing, transport, manufacturing, leisure, and much else besides.

This is what war opponents warned about when “Operation Epic Fury” appeared popular with self-identified “MAGA Republicans”, even as it proved unpopular with other groups from the beginning. The Trump coalition, the opponents argued, was much larger than MAGA Republicans: die-hard fans of the President who would cheer if he converted to Shi’ite Islam tomorrow.

Beyond the MAGA die-hards, the Trump coalition included lots of working-class people — including voters of colour — who only supported the President conditionally. Trump’s border crackdown and economic nationalism were popular with downscale America, as was his pushback against DEI and wokeness, which working-class people experience as HR henpecking.

But they didn’t vote for another Middle Eastern war, and they were explicitly assured that they wouldn’t get one if they pulled for Trump. The President himself had described the Iraq War as a “disaster”, and he’d repeatedly railed against the “trillions” wasted in the post-9/11 regime-change wars — funds that, he said, could’ve been spent on hospitals and roads in the homeland.

That message was echoed in the 2024 Republican platform, which included “PEACE IN EUROPE AND THE MIDDLE EAST” among its all-caps planks. For their part, key Trump surrogates such as Stephen Miller had warned about “Kamala [Harris] leaning all in on starting many new bloody wars in the Middle East.”

Promises made, promises not kept — working-class support lost.

Rather Than Spoken Outright

Paul Knaggs writes:

On Tuesday, in a reception room at the Chancellery in Berlin, Friedrich Merz stood in front of a group of teenagers who build things properly, and one of them asked him a question he did not want to answer.

The occasion was Jugend forscht, Germany’s national science competition for entrants aged fifteen to twenty-one. A year earlier, at the same event, Merz had told the assembled prodigies that Germany needed “clever minds” and “brave young people.” This year, one of those brave young people, a boy who had been researching quantum-secure telecommunications with his brother, took him at his word. He asked how a compulsory real-name requirement for internet users, the Klarnamenpflicht the Chancellor has been pushing, could be reconciled with the protection of whistleblowers and investigative journalists, who depend on the anonymity of their sources to do their jobs. It is the single most obvious objection to the policy, the kind of question a first-year law student learns to ask.

Merz did not answer it. He talked instead about bots, about the AfD’s result in Saxony-Anhalt nine days earlier, about how a public square in which nobody can be sure who they are talking to threatens democracy itself. Then he delivered the line that has since travelled across German media: “Bitte komme mir keiner mit Free Speech. Das hat mit Free Speech nichts mehr zu tun.” Please, nobody come to me with free speech. This has nothing to do with free speech any more. 

It was not a slip. Merz went on to describe the American conception of untrammelled expression as a “libertarian” indulgence he personally does not share, and argued that a liberal society has a duty to protect its citizens from “false information, personal degradation, discrimination.” He reminded his audience that he had “grown up in the analogue world,” when a newspaper that printed lies could be sued, and that this, he said, had produced a certain “hygiene.” The implication was left hanging rather than spoken outright: the unregulated mess of the internet needs the same discipline, administered this time not by courts weighing individual claims but by a state that has already decided, in advance, what counts as false.

Call it what it actually is. This is not consumer protection, and it is not really about hygiene. It is the oldest impulse in politics wearing the newest language: the state deciding, on your behalf, which thoughts you may safely hold in public, and calling that decision protection rather than control. Orwell gave the impulse its cleanest name seventy-seven years ago, in the three slogans inscribed on the face of the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Merz is not running a Ministry of Truth. But the reasoning he reached for at that podium, that citizens need protecting from information rather than trusted to weigh it themselves, is the same reasoning, scaled down to the size of a Klarnamenpflicht and a press conference.

Orwell noticed something else worth remembering here, about which freedoms a state actually leaves alone. “You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator,” he wrote, “but you are not free to think for yourself.” Capital crosses the German border in milliseconds, unexamined and unbothered. Consumption, private vice, even the coarsest content Merz claims to worry about, all of it moves freely enough. What his government wants to attach a permanent, traceable name to is the one thing that has always frightened power more than any of that: a citizen thinking something the state has not pre-approved, and saying so where others can hear it.

None of this began with Merz. Fifty-one years ago, an organisation called the Trilateral Commission, founded in 1973 by the banker David Rockefeller and the strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski, commissioned a report titled The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies, written by the sociologist Michel Crozier, the political scientist Samuel Huntington and the Japanese scholar Joji Watanuki. Huntington’s section on the United States argued that the trouble with American government in the 1960s was not too little democracy but too much of it. His diagnosis: “some of the problems of governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy.” His prescription: “the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups.”

He was candid about which individuals and groups concerned him. The report singled out the political mobilisation of “blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students and women,” people who had “become organized and mobilized in new ways to achieve what they considered to be their appropriate share of the action and of the rewards,” and treated that mobilisation as a symptom of the disease rather than a sign of democratic health. Noam Chomsky, reading the same document decades later, called it exactly what it was: the authentic voice of liberal internationalism confronting a public that had started to take democracy seriously, and concluding that the public was the problem. The Commission did not file the report and forget it. Brzezinski became Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser and restated its conclusions in print, and Commission alumni filled out the upper ranks of the administration behind him.

Friedrich Merz is not an outside admirer of that tradition. He is a paid-up member of it. Since 2009 he has sat in the European group of the Trilateral Commission, a fact recorded in the Commission’s own published membership rolls and in German lobbying registers, alongside a decade as chairman of Atlantik-Brücke, the Berlin network built to cement German ties to Washington.

There is a wrinkle here worth understanding, because it recurs throughout this story. To preserve its standing as a non-governmental body, the Commission’s own rules require that any member who takes public office step back from active membership while they serve it. That is the mechanism, not principle, by which Merz’s own membership lapsed into inactive status the moment he was sworn in as Chancellor, and it is why Sir Keir Starmer’s name came off the active roster once he entered Downing Street. It does not mean the worldview absorbed across years of closed-door meetings is surrendered at the same moment a resignation form is filed. The stepping back is procedural, not intellectual. The membership roster functions, more than anything, like a waiting room: people cycling out to hold power, and in plenty of cases cycling back in once they no longer do.

The company that waiting room has kept over the decades is instructive. Henry Kissinger sat inside it for years, a fixture of the same North American group whose past chairs and directors read like a Cold War cabinet reunion. So did Jeffrey Epstein, described in an October 2002 profile in New York magazine, published while he still enjoyed the run of Manhattan and Palm Beach society, as “an enthusiastic member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.” Nobody is suggesting Merz or Starmer ever met the man, and no evidence says they did.

The point is narrower and, in its way, more damning: an institution that vets its members by wealth, connections and a willingness to keep its proceedings off the record had no mechanism to notice, or no apparent interest in noticing, that one of its enthusiastic members was, at the very same time, running a trafficking operation for the rich and powerful. An organisation that comfortable admitting a man like that tells you something about what it actually screens for. Not virtue. Access. Readers who want to hear Epstein describe that access in his own words can judge for themselves from the footage accompanying this piece.

Britain has no grounds for smugness on the wider point either. Starmer joined the Trilateral Commission at some point between March 2017 and October 2018, while serving as Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow Brexit secretary, and the investigative outlet Declassified UK has established that Corbyn was never told. Starmer’s fellow members at the time included two former directors of the CIA, and he shared a platform at one of the Commission’s London gatherings with former heads of MI5 and GCHQ. He stepped back from active membership, by the Commission’s own rule, before entering Downing Street. The pattern that produced Merz’s contempt for free speech in a Berlin reception room is the same pattern that put a Trilateral alumnus in Number 10 without his own party leader knowing about it. This is not a German story. It is the house style of a network that spans both capitals, and readers wanting the fuller map of who sits where in it can find it in our earlier investigation, From Rockefeller to Starmer: Mapping the Trilateral Network in the Epstein Files.

Starmer did not have to wait long to see this pattern cost him something concrete. In early 2025 he appointed Peter Mandelson, who also appears on Trilateral Commission membership lists for its European group, to the most prestigious post in the British diplomatic service: ambassador to Washington. Mandelson lasted seven months. Newly surfaced emails showed a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein far deeper than had been disclosed at his appointment, including a letter calling Epstein his “best pal” and correspondence suggesting Epstein’s 2008 conviction was “wrongful and should be challenged.” On 11 September 2025 the Foreign Office withdrew him “with immediate effect.” As with Merz and Starmer themselves, taking up a government post should, by the Commission’s own rule, have meant stepping back from active membership; it evidently did nothing to interrupt the friendships formed inside it. A Prime Minister who was once a member himself lost his own ambassador to exactly the kind of undisclosed overlap this network is built to keep quiet. That is not proof of a conspiracy. It is a fair question about what this kind of network actually vets for.

None of that makes Germany’s anxieties fake. The AfD’s result in Saxony-Anhalt on 6 September, 43.8 per cent of the vote, more than double its 2021 showing, was a genuine rupture: no party of the far right has won a German state election so decisively since 1945. Merz’s own CDU collapsed to 17.2 per cent. Bot-amplified content and coordinated online abuse are real problems, and Germany’s history gives it particular reasons to fear where unchecked extremism can lead. The Network Enforcement Act of 2017, which obliges large platforms to remove “manifestly unlawful” content within twenty-four hours or face fines of up to fifty million euros, was passed with those fears in mind, and it has serious defenders as well as serious critics.

But none of that answers the question the boy at the Chancellery actually asked, and which Merz refused to answer. A compulsory real-name law does not primarily disarm the powerful. The powerful already speak under their own names, from platforms they own or control, backed by lawyers the rest of us cannot afford. What it disarms is the employee who wants to report fraud without losing their job, the source who wants to talk to a journalist without ending up in a government database, the citizen who wants to criticise a minister without their employer finding out by lunchtime. Strip away anonymity and you have not cleaned up the public square. You have simply ensured that everyone in it can be identified by whoever holds the power to act on that information, today Merz’s government, tomorrow whoever succeeds him. And the deeper question, the one he answered by refusing to answer it, is who decides what counts as false information once the state has the tools to trace every claim back to a name. He is proposing to be the judge in his own case.

It is worth remembering that the powerful elsewhere have discovered the same convenient elasticity in the idea of free speech. The day after Donald Trump’s 2024 election win was certified, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would scrap its third-party fact-checking programme and loosen its rules on subjects such as immigration and gender, calling it a return to free expression. He made no equivalent promise for Europe, where Meta continues to operate under the tighter rules it has never offered to relax. Free speech, on this evidence, is not a principle either side actually holds. It is a resource deployed wherever it serves power and withdrawn wherever it does not. Merz decides that democracy needs less of it. Zuckerberg decides that his shareholders need more of it, but only in the market that rewards him for saying so. In both cases, the public is the object of the decision, not a party to it.

That is the thread running from a memorandum written for bankers and statesmen in 1975 to a Berlin reception room fifty-one years later. The vocabulary changes. Apathy becomes hygiene. Excess of democracy becomes false information. The marginal groups of the 1960s become the anonymous accounts of 2026. The underlying claim does not change at all: democracy is fine, so long as it produces outcomes the people running it can live with, and when it does not, the fault lies with too much participation rather than too little accountability.

The remedy is not to trust the next polished formulation from the next member of that network, whether he sits in the Chancellery, in Downing Street, or steps back onto the roster once he leaves both. It is the Bundestag and Westminster alike doing the unglamorous work of forcing every real-name and online-safety proposal through genuine scrutiny, with the whistleblower and press-protection question answered before a single clause is drafted, not waved away at a podium. It is journalists asking the people who write these laws to answer the questions a fifteen-year-old already knew to ask. And it is voters remembering that when a Chancellor tells you a policy has nothing to do with free speech, he has, for once, told you the exact truth. It has everything to do with power, and nothing at all to do with you.

Merz got one thing right at that podium, without meaning to. This was never about free speech. It was about who gets to decide what you are allowed to say, and who, fifty years after that first quiet memorandum, still thinks the answer should be them.

Zelensky’s Strategy Is National Suicide

Volodymyr Zelensky’s former Press Secretary, Iuliia Mendel, writes:

For Americans who follow the Russian-Ukrainian war, the past few months must look very strange. In the first half of summer, the story from Kyiv – and the many western media outlets that repeated it – was that Ukraine was winning. Then, not long after the NATO summit in July, Kyiv announced it lacked the interceptors to prevent a winter disaster. The country needed 300 missiles to survive, we were told. Even if these 300 missiles arrive, they are unlikely to protect a country as large as Ukraine from the sheer volume of Russian ballistic attacks and glide-bomb strikes. Now it’s September, and Ukraine says it’s facing a $27 billion shortfall in defense funding. There seems to be a vast difference between the public relations campaign and the reality in Ukraine.

I know a little about that public relations campaign. I was President Zelensky’s first press secretary, entering office alongside him in 2019. I left in 2021 and remained sympathetic to the President as he fought the Russian invasion. But by 2025, I’d come to the conclusion that Ukraine will never be able to win this war militarily. The only solution is a negotiated peace.

Under the current Ukrainian regime, the chances of peace seem remote. In late June, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy approved a 40-day campaign of long-range drone strikes within Russia to force the Kremlin to end the war. It was supposed to be an “influence operation,” designed to show the Russian people the true cost of the conflict. But it was Ukrainians who suffered the most. The Kremlin instead escalated, bringing more destruction, more death and none of the negotiations that would ultimately save lives. Russia, it seems, was only emboldened by the attacks. The Kremlin merely reiterated its conditions for ending its aggression.

It is, of course, Russia who started this war. Its forces have tortured, raped, deported and killed Ukrainians. There is no moral symmetry between Kyiv and the Kremlin. Yet it is clear that the Ukrainian heroism of 2022 is long gone. Kyiv’s war policies have hardened into permanent mobilization and superficial PR – empty slogans and moral posturing are all that’s now offered. The desperate situation in Ukraine’s streets is concealed so that the refusal to compromise can be dressed up as courage.

In 2022, when the war began, the whole country stood up to defend itself. Men lined up at recruitment offices, and cities that Moscow tried to seize successfully resisted. All this naturally produced admiration throughout the world – and glorification in the western media and political circles. Today, that same glorification has become an unbearable burden. There is a feeling that the western political establishment would rather see Russia burn than Ukraine saved. Our daily losses are treated as an acceptable price for that end.

Ukraine has lost more than half its population in the 35 years since it declared independence from the Soviet Union. The largest collapse in population has happened since Russia’s full-scale invasion. By the most sober estimates, some 20 to 25 million people remain in the territory Kyiv still controls. Roughly half are of retirement age. At most, four million men are of conscription age. Russia can draw on the recruitment pool of approximately 10 times the number of fighting age men. Waging a war of attrition is therefore national suicide, not valor. Yet this is the strategy that the Zelensky government pursues.

The economy tells the same story. Ukraine is now entirely dependent on western aid, which is shrinking. Money that was supposed to be used to rebuild the country is being consumed by war. Public debt has crossed 110 percent of GDP. Russia, by contrast, has not had to borrow anywhere near this scale to wage its war, and it is still selling energy to the European Union. Since 2022, European countries have paid Moscow well over $230 billion for fossil fuels – more than they have given Kyiv in aid of all forms. Despite the innumerable sanctions packages, Russia keeps earning money and has a much stronger fiscal position than most EU states. Meanwhile, Ukraine is being crippled by the death of its people and the destruction of its productive base, while its debts keep accumulating.

Since the “influence operation” this summer, more than 90 percent of Ukrainian warehouses have been hit, our energy system has been torn apart and a humanitarian catastrophe will arrive with the winter snow. In the fifth year of full-scale war, the state’s offer to civilians in the worst-affected regions is often simply: leave. People on the front line who have no money and no means are told to go somewhere else. Every day Ukraine loses more of its people. Those who want their children to have proper healthcare and education are forced to emigrate. The number of people dying in Ukraine is roughly four times the number of births. The nation is perishing, and yet the war grinds on.

Finland lost land after a devastating war, yet it managed to preserve its nation and its future. Ukraine could still become a frontier between the West and Russia: armed, sober and alive. But the present strategy is pushing us down a different path: that of Afghanistan. The West spent 20 years pouring trillions of dollars into that conflict. All it achieved was flourishing corruption, decades of death and eventually the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. As in Ukraine, there was heavy censorship in western media. Most of those who reported from the region were uncompromising in their support of the Afghan state machine and the war, no matter what. We see many of the same parallels in Ukraine. Extraordinarily, corruption rivals the war in rankings of public opinion as the biggest national problem. There are those in the Ukrainian government who are making millions of dollars from this war. I have just been sanctioned by the Zelensky government for saying so publicly.

Meanwhile, normal Ukrainian men do not leave their homes for months, for fear of press gangs who hunt them in the streets. There are reports of the disabled being pushed into frontline combat, of men dying mysteriously in recruitment offices, of women fighting to save husbands from being kidnapped in plain daylight. According to the Ukrainian ombudsman, only 2-3 percent of those seized in press gang raids ever reach the frontline. Many pay, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, to buy their way out. The corruption around this system runs into the billions of dollars annually. I do not blame my people for refusing to fight for a machine they no longer believe in.

If the purpose of this war was to create a path for Ukraine to join NATO, that prospect is already off the table. If the purpose was to recover territory, Ukraine is losing more of it, not taking it back. If it was to protect democracy, then the wartime martial law has already killed it. Freedom of speech has been greatly restricted, institutions have been corrupted, basic political rights suspended, the constitution violated, political opponents persecuted. All of this with a casualness about human life that would be recognized as deeply authoritarian anywhere else.

The war in Ukraine has lost any plausible theory of victory. At this point, it only lines the pockets of a corrupt and narrow circle of elites while the country itself perishes. Ukraine can still choose the Finnish road: stop the bleeding, hold what can be held, restore the economy and a way of life to which people can return. The other road is already visible. It is a road down which we lose land and people every day – and with them, the chance that there will be a Ukraine left to win.

The Ongoing Fracture

Journalists do not all walk out when one of them is kicked out, so they are in no position to criticise Ed Sheeran’s support acts. But in music and elsewhere, there have always been intensely political acts and at least theoretically nonpolitical ones. Perhaps they were friends behind the scenes, but no one would have put them on the same bill. Did the Wolfe Tones ever support Val Doonican? Or vice versa? And if it is your stadium, then you do get to say who does or does not appear on its stage. That it is your freedom of expression. Again, though, you should have checked before the booking was made. The problem is the economic order itself, as Paul Knaggs writes:

When the machinery of modern stadium entertainment encounters moral conviction, the outcome is rarely subtle. It is swift, administrative, and designed to send a chill down the spine of anyone who mistakes a microphone for a tool of public conscience. It is the cold, hard stamp of cancellation.

The ongoing fracture of Ed Sheeran’s American tour continues. What began as a lucrative stadium run has descended into a full-scale corporate blacklisting. After Seattle rapper Macklemore stepped onto the stage at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, donned a keffiyeh, and uttered two words, “Free Palestine,” before performing his anti-war track “Hind’s Hall,” the corporate immune system of American live entertainment swung into action.

Within days, billionaire stadium owners and cartel-like tour promoters issued an ultimatum. Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots whose Kraft Group operates Gillette Stadium, spearheaded a campaign among venue operators to bar Macklemore from performing. The promoter, Messina Touring Group, duly notified the tour that venue access would be revoked unless the rapper was purged from the line-up.

But in those two words, Macklemore was doing nothing new. He was extending a tradition of using the stage to say what power did not want said: a tradition running from Thespis, the first man on record to step out of the chorus and speak in his own individual voice, through the troubadours who set political satire to music centuries later, to Paul Robeson, blacklisted and stripped of his passport for his politics, to Nina Simone, who turned “Mississippi Goddam” into a weapon, to the 1985 Sun City boycott, when musicians refused to perform in apartheid South Africa whatever the fee, to the anti-war anthems that defined a generation’s response to Vietnam. Live music has always been a contested space where moral urgency confronts institutional power. Macklemore simply took his turn.

Kraft, for his part, has not denied any of it. His statement cites “recent actions,” material “shared from the stage,” and a “broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery” (a reference to a widely criticised 2014 costume), and says Gillette Stadium will not “provide a platform for hate speech.” What his statement does not do is identify a single claim Macklemore made in New Jersey that was false. It couldn’t, because none of it was. What Macklemore said is not a rapper’s private opinion. It is what the United Nations’ own Independent Commission of Inquiry concluded a year ago, after two years of investigation: that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians. It is what the International Court of Justice has already ordered Israel, through binding provisional measures, to prevent while the fuller case proceeds. Israel rejects both conclusions as false. But neither conclusion came from a stage in New Jersey. They came from the two bodies the world built specifically to adjudicate this question, and Macklemore was simply repeating, in front of eighty thousand people, what had already been put in writing.

Ed Sheeran, Macklemore and the Price of Neutrality 

Sheeran is no bystander in his own show. In his Instagram statement, he insisted that “Macklemore coming off tour was the promoter’s decision, it was not mine,” and that he would not abandon “the touring crew and the other support acts and musicians who rely on me for work and to make a living.” He went further, explaining that he uses his platform to be “a place of safety and sanctuary” and that audiences at his shows “do not expect a political forum.” He closed with the declaration: “I am not complicit.”

It is an astonishing sentence for a man whose touring apparatus generates hundreds of millions of dollars to write about his own show. When an artist of that scale insists he is merely a passenger in decisions made in his name, on his stage, with his brand attached, we are watching something close to the complete abdication of artistic leadership to oligarchical power, dressed up as diplomacy.

And the claim to neutrality does not survive contact with Sheeran’s own record. In March 2022, he headlined the Concert for Ukraine in Birmingham, a benefit broadcast on ITV, and used exactly the platform he now says is off-limits to politics to declare where he stood: “I just want to say to all Ukrainians: I love you, I stand with you, and I’m so proud to be playing this fundraising event.” Nobody suggested at the time that this compromised his sanctuary. Nobody accused him of turning his stage into a political forum. He was widely praised for it. The difference between that moment and this one is not that Sheeran discovered a principle against political speech. It is that one cause carried no risk to his stadium bookings, and the other did.

And Then The Stage Emptied 

The Artists Who Walked 

Within days, every remaining act on that tour had gone. Finneas, producer and brother of Billie Eilish, resigned with a single, unadorned sentence: “Artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed. I stand with Palestine and its people.” Lukas Graham followed, writing that “money doesn’t give you the right to own the conversation,” and that nobody’s bank balance should decide “which suffering we’re allowed to acknowledge.” Then came the Irish contingent, and it is here that the tradition Macklemore stepped into found its sharpest voice yet.

Aaron Rowe, the Irish singer-songwriter Sheeran had personally championed, wrote that he could not “stand by and allow billionaires to use their position of power to silence the rightful voices of those who speak up against Israeli genocide.” He invoked, deliberately, his own history: “as Irish people we know all too well about genocide, forced famine and violent occupation.” Beoga, the traditional Irish band who had shared Sheeran’s stage every night of the tour and who describe themselves as founding members of the Irish Artists For Palestine movement, said much the same, framing their departure not as a rupture with Sheeran, whom they called a friend of ten years, but as an obligation to their own inheritance as “Irish people who understand colonialism.” When a nation whose own famine dead were the product of an empire deciding which starvation was politically convenient to notice tells you it recognises the shape of the machine, it is worth listening.

And that is the point both sides of this row keep missing, because both sides are still arguing about Gaza when they should be arguing about Gillette Stadium. One man, answerable to no electorate and no court, used control of physical venues to dictate the political content of a national tour, and reportedly recruited other stadium owners to do the same. No law was broken. No due process was required. A phone call sufficed. This is what unaccountable, concentrated capital actually looks like in practice: not a jackboot, but a booking calendar.

What makes this week remarkable is not that a billionaire flexed his leverage. Billionaires generally do. It is that four acts, none of them obliged to, chose to forfeit a stadium tour’s wages and exposure rather than play along. Sheeran tried to have it both ways and satisfied nobody. His support acts did not reach for that ambiguity. When private wealth can quietly rewrite who gets to speak in public, the correction cannot come from the institutions that wealth already controls. It came, this week, from a handful of working musicians who decided a pay cheque was worth less than the truth they’d watched the UN already confirm.

A stadium can be emptied of artists in a week. That is the easy part when billionaires own the gates, the stages and the contracts. What they cannot so easily own is the point at which people decide the money no longer matters. Macklemore spoke. The owners moved to silence him. One by one, the support acts walked. Thespis stepped out of the chorus to speak alone. Four acts stepped off a stage this week for the same reason. The chorus, as ever, kept singing.