Under The Counter

Have we the right to speculate on the death of Ann Widdecombe? Not if it might prejudice a criminal trial, but even if we did, then we have the right to do all sorts of things, and therefore the responsibility in how we exercised our rights. Now that National Counter Terror Policing has taken over this investigation, then it has never been more important to hold our tongues. If by choice, then by choice.

Elsewhere in counterterrorism, proscription is a lot cheaper than rebuilding the real means of countering or deterring the Armed Forces of other sovereign states. But as the proscription of Palestine Action was an all-or-nothing measure that also banned the Russian Imperial Movement and the Maniacs Murder Cult (and how are the presumably urgent battles against those progressing?), so the proscription of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps should be an all-or-nothing measure that also banned, not only Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia and the GRU Volunteer Corps, but ICE and the IDF as well. Why not?

HAYI is a Telegram channel that in Britain may or may not have had a role in setting fire to four empty and decommissioned ambulances in Golders Green, in failing to throw an ignited container at the offices of Volant Media in Park Royal, in throwing two bottles of petrol at Finchley Reform Synagogue while it was empty in the middle of the night, in discarding of two jars of harmless powder in Kensington Gardens and thus close to the Israeli Embassy among numerous other venues, in failing fully to ignite a bag containing two bottles of fluid at the former offices of Jewish Futures in Hendon, and in throwing a bottle containing an accelerant through the window of Kenton United Synagogue at midnight. Its attempt to claim responsibility for the nonfatal Golders Green stabbings in April was immediately dismissed as opportunistic. Had it also been responsible for the same attacker’s attack, on the same day, against the unmentionable Ishmail Hussein?

The ban on the GRU VC is presumably because, after we had laughed out the suggestion that the Wagner Group would have had nothing better to do than to pay two-bit South London drug dealers to set fire to an East London warehouse, the blame for that and similar has had to be shifted to the GRU. But no one would have had any such interest if our Government had not been sending the Starlink satellite equipment that that warehouse contained to Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Brigade, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, and all the rest of them, including the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps. When are we going to ban those agencies of a foreign state? Pavlo Lapshyn is still in His Majesty’s Prison, and will be for decades yet, because of his 2013 murder of 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham. Lapshyn went on to put bombs outside three mosques in this country. He belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Battalion, being led by its “political ideologist”, Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell.

By all means ban HAYI, the GRU VC, and indeed the IRGC, none of which has ever done anything like that in this country. At the same time, ban ICE, which detained Becky Burke for 19 days before deporting her in leg and waist shackles, which detained the valid visa-holding Karen Newton for six weeks before sending her to the plane home in handcuffs and leg shackles, and in whose custody Ben James Owens died while awaiting deportation proceedings. And ban the IDF, which killed James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman while those British veterans were unarmed and delivering humanitarian aid, bombing them three times to make sure that they were dead, using British-made Elbit Hermes 450 drones, and using intelligence from the over 600 nightly reconnaissance missions flown for the Israelis, yet free of charge to them, from RAF Akrotiri. The New York Times casually referred to the presence of the SAS in Gaza.

Believe that the Hillsborough Law will apply in practice to the spooks when you see it, and make yourself see it by charging Keir Starmer at least as an accessory to the murders of Kirby, Henderson and Chapman, as well as with incitement to genocide and with anything else that could be thrown at him for his assertion of Israel’s right to cut off the water and power supplies to Gaza’s entire population.

And Vickrum Digwa’s murder weapon was just one of his and his family’s extensive collection of non-ceremonial bladed articles. Families like that are not peculiar to any one community. That said, the family does belong to the Akali-Nihang warrior order within Sikhism, though not at all essential to it. With its obvious attraction to Digwa’s type of weapons-obsessed young man such as might accrue to Active Clubs and the like, many members of that order reject the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee’s 2001 ban on shaheedi degh, their traditional drink to aid meditation and, interestingly, to make them fiercer in battle. Interestingly, because its base is cannabis, the hashish taken by the members of the Order of Assassins when they set out to murder the enemies of the Alamut state.

Proscribe that order under the good old Terrorism Act 2000, while introducing 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 included 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 we need Peter Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought to be taught in schools, as pro-drugs propaganda is routinely.

Brief and Sudden?

Lindsey Graham is dead, so the Strait of Hormuz is closed as a mark of respect. An AI-generated image of Mitch McConnell has been issued as a reassurance. And Graham lived alone, so who called the ambulance?

Graham, whose father’s Christian name was Florence, did not change. Either Donald Trump did, or Trump revealed what he had always been. The only British member of his Board of Peace is Tony Blair. Think on.

10 Years On

As far as it went, we still need her original Prime Ministerial agenda of workers’ and consumers’ representation in corporate governance, shareholders’ control over executive pay, restrictions on pay differentials within companies, an investment-based Industrial Strategy and infrastructure programme including greatly increased housebuilding, action against tax avoidance including a ban on public contracts for tax-avoiding companies, a real cap on energy prices, a ban or significant restrictions on foreign takeovers, and a ban on unpaid internships; we do now have an inquiry into Orgreave. But Theresa May has been patronising an incoming Prime Minister who was in the Cabinet before she had ever sat for a governing party. She says that Andy Burnham needs more of the foreign policy experience of which she herself had absolutely none when she entered Downing Street, her entire Ministerial career until that point having been six years as Home Secretary. And as Bagehot writes:

On July 13th 2016 Theresa May strode to a podium in Downing Street and launched an assault on the “burning injustices” of Britain. Under her government, young black men would no longer fear the police; women would no longer endure lower pay than men. Social concerns would trump economic ones. Their systemic causes would be eradicated. It was a hymn to identity politics. It was, in short, woke.

Mrs May—now Lady May—was Britain’s first and probably last woke prime minister. It is a strain to accept this, at first. The thought makes both her allies and enemies wince. The mp who in 2000 voted against the repeal of Section 28, which forbade the “promotion” (or rather acceptance) of homosexuality in schools? The authoritarian home secretary, rigidly in favour of the Conservatives’ attempts to reduce immigration at any cost? The prime minister who railed against “citizens of nowhere”? How can Mrs May, a creature of curtain-twitching suburban England, be woke?

If the idea seems absurd, it is because Britain has drifted so far from the ideas and ideologies that dominated the country barely a decade ago. The policies Mrs May pursued—from trans rights to hammering the police for anti-black racism to pursuing “net zero” and eliminating “modern slavery”—are now seen as excesses from a different era. Mrs May is Britain’s only woke prime minister in the same way that Richard Nixon—responsible for environmental reforms and affirmative action as well as the carpet bombing of Cambodia—is probably America’s last truly liberal president. Mrs May was right-wing and right-on. An iron fist wrapped in a Pride flag; Britannia in a rainbow lanyard. Mrs May was woke.

Consider the way she treated the police. During one speech at the Police Federation, the de facto trade union for coppers, she in effect labelled them racist for unfairly targeting young black men and misogynistic for calling a domestic-abuse victim a “slag”. “It is an attitude that betrays contempt for the public,” said Mrs May, the then home secretary. She had entered the stage to polite applause. She left it to silence.

A decade on, and such a speech by almost any politician would be impossible. The police are racist against black people? Britain in 2026 is a land where the police are seen on the right as, if anything, racist against white people. Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, which tops the polls for now, has attacked the police for an “obsessive commitment to anti-white discrimination” in a 7,000-word screed decrying “two-tier” Britain. It is woke means, with group identity and systemic injustice shaping everything, for unwoke ends.

In her moral crusade against the mistreatment of British ethnic minorities, Mrs May in 2016 commissioned a “racial-disparity audit”, which would reveal the everyday inequities against ethnic minorities. “There isn’t anywhere to hide,” she said. “If these disparities cannot be explained, they must be changed.” Now prejudice against the majority is of utmost political concern. “Anti-white racism is embedded into the heart of the state,” wrote Mr Farage.

What Mrs May sees as her crowning achievement, her successors now see as a pain in the neck. The Modern Slavery Act was a world first, rolling various anti-exploitation laws into a single act. Mrs May shone a light on the miserable existence of people forced to work in brothels, nail bars or building sites and car washes. Now, in British politics, claims of “modern slavery” are painted by each major party as little more than a ruse to dodge deportation.

In Downing Street Mrs May was a staunch advocate of trans rights. She considered adopting self-ID, allowing trans people to change gender without the say-so of a doctor. At the time, her position was mainstream. Today such views leave her on the fringe of British politics. A decade on, and a vociferous backlash to Mrs May’s proposals has left Britain with a de facto “bathroom ban” for trans people. Front-rank politicians who once baldly declared that “trans women are women” now cower when it comes to the subject. Cynical they may be, but it is probably for their own good: Mrs May’s views would likely bar her from high office today.

When politicians rail against the excesses of woke in 2026, they are often railing against the May government. Sweeping changes were adopted unthinkingly. In one of Mrs May’s final acts in office, Britain bound itself to being “net zero” by 2050, the first big economy to do so. There was a quick 90-minute debate, marked by broad consensus—a sharp contrast with the Brexit rows that curtailed her tenure in Downing Street. Now “net zero” is a fundamental fracture, with even Labour split on it.

Woke whiggery

Social change is not a ratchet. The woke world over which Mrs May briefly ruled has collapsed. “Who would not want to be woke?” she asked in her 2023 memoir “The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life”. Well, all her successors for a start. Boris Johnson’s government started a “war on woke” [although it delivered the exact opposite]. Rishi Sunak promised to “take on this lefty woke culture”. Sir Keir Starmer shuddered at the accusation that he, a human-rights lawyer, was in any way woke.

Politics is downstream of culture. In office Mrs May reflected society; she did not shape it. The shibboleths of her era were accepted with little introspection. Perhaps progressivism provided an oasis of political calm compared with the hysterical rows about Brexit, which defined her premiership. Now society has shifted and Lady May cannot move with it. Out of office, prime ministers become frozen in time, stuck in the period they ruled. In the House of Lords Lady May appears only occasionally to defend her modern-slavery reforms or to despair at racial disparity in the Mental Health Act, little more than an ermine-clad ghost from an era that is now long gone.

What A Time To Be Alive

Whatever happened to Flattop Bob Conley? Perhaps Governor Henry McMaster will track him down and appoint him to serve the remainder of Lindsey Graham’s term? But they no longer have any of that in Kentucky. Mitch McConnell had already declared his intention to retire at the election on 3 November, but should the vacancy arise within 56 days of that date, then there would be too little time to hold a special election. To keep Thomas Massie out of the United States Senate, McConnell cannot be declared dead before 8 September. Such is the country that, 250 years ago, was founded in no small measure by those whose ancestors had fled Ulster because the victory of the Papally supported side at the Battle of the Boyne had unleashed discrimination against Presbyterians and even persecution of them.

Yet who are we to mock? William Hill has just cut to 5/1 the odds on Count Binface’s victory at Clacton. And what legitimacy could Andy Burnham claim as Prime Minister? The legitimacy of the victorious 2024 Labour manifesto, which promised to abolish leasehold, to make employment rights begin with employment and apply regardless of the number of hours worked, and to equalise the national minimum wage regardless of age, but which did not mention the erosion of the right to trial by jury, or the abolition of the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court, or the imposition of digital ID, of live facial recognition, and of access to our NHS data on the part of Palantir? Burnham is making the right noises on jury trials, so hope springs eternal. But his intention to bring back James Purnell and Josh Simons suggests that he is the Wigan Keir.

Fallout

Susie Boniface writes:

New emails show that Government lawyers knew that troops were exposed to radioactive fallout, but never admitted it in court.

Senior officials at the Treasury Solicitor's department were sent a whistleblowing report in November 2014, just three weeks after a judge had ordered fresh hearings.

But the data was never shared with the court. The case failed two years later over "insufficient evidence" that servicemen were exposed.

It comes as campaigners anticipate an announcement in Parliament on Tuesday about the results of a two-year review into missing medical records and human experimentation in what has become known as the Nuked Blood Scandal.

Widow Anna Smith, who was one of those fighting the Ministry of Defence for a war pension, said: "It's evil. It's perverting the course of justice. There's no moral compass.

"We spent years in court, the grief and the burden of it, the solicitors who spent hours fighting on our behalf, and it was a waste of time. And all these people knew. Why didn't they say?"

Anna's husband Barry was sent to Christmas Island by the RAF in 1959, to cut the hair of troops involved in decontamination. In the decades that followed the skin on his arms kept itching and shedding, and he got a small payout for "sunburn".

Then he developed pancreatic cancer, but died before the Ministry of Defence would agree to a hearing. They later rejected Anna's claim, on the grounds he had never been in a contaminated area.

In March the Mirror revealed how two whistleblowers found evidence of fallout in the main camp at Christmas Island, where the MoD had always denied there was any risk.

It was found in fish, rainwater, seawater and the air after a series of thermonuclear blasts codenamed Operation Grapple.

Emails obtained under Freedom of Information show an early version of their report was sent to a desk officer at the war pensions agency Veterans UK on November 27, 2014. He spotted the official position on 'zero' fallout had changed and asked: "Is this of significance with regard to our current defence? Should I be bringing this to the attention of lawyers etc."

A line manager at the Atomic Weapons Establishment replied that he had "undertaken a review", and as a result the official denials did "not accurately represent the totality of this original data". He refuses to discuss it further over email, asking for an in-person meeting.

The email is then forwarded on by the desk officer to his boss, and then senior civil servants in the MoD, including assistant heads of department, medical advisors, and senior policy officers considering war pensions and armed forces compensation.

It is then sent to the Treasury Solicitor's department "for advice", with the whistleblowing evidence attached. In all, nine MoD staff had the email.

Less than a month earlier, an appeals judge had allowed the veterans to go back to court, finding that there may be a "reasonable doubt" about fallout. He also urged the government to consider sharing classified records that would establish the truth.

The report was only found after a tip off, and was kept in draft format on an internal server.

Oli Troen of law firm McCue Jury which is acting for the veterans in their fight for justice said: "These documents should have been disclosed during live legal proceedings and the fact they were not is deeply concerning.

"We have reported this matter to Thames Valley Police as we believe it may constitute the offence of perverting the course of justice, and we have urged the Prime Minister to take swift action to investigate it."

The Dismal Truth

I only ever met Ann Widdecombe once, more than 20 years ago, but what struck me was that she was tiny. Everyone in her rural community will have known that she was a little old lady living alone. And daytime burglary is far more common than many people realise. But still, most of its victims are not murdered. Let the Police do what the Police do.

The present Parliamentary Labour Party is replete with boys who are as obviously virginal as their female colleagues are not. They appear to be experiments in the medication of teenage girls to turn them into some semblance of men. Similarly, Widdecombe thought that men who had “undergone extensive surgery” should be sent to women’s prisons even though every cell of their mutilated bodies still contained a Y chromosome and they themselves had been socialised as males.

Widdecombe was a faithful Junior Minister under John Major, a Minister of State under Michael Howard as he began the shredding of civil liberties in a bidding war with Tony Blair, a Shadow Cabinet stalwart under William Hague, twice a cheerleader for the putative Leadership of Ken Clarke, a scourge of foxhunting, the only Conservative MP to vote with Gordon Brown for 42-day detention without charge, an autobiographical praiser of Michael Heseltine for having killed off the British coal industry, and an avowed opponent of the Assisted Suicide Bill only because it contained insufficient “safeguards”. And why not? Reform UK has welcomed the endorsement of Bonnie Blue, and there was no transmania when Andy Burnham was Health Secretary. For that, you had to wait for a Conservative Government that was really quite aggressive about it, complete with the then Jamie Wallis, Britain’s first and so far only transgender MP, though not Britain’s first transgender parliamentarian, since that was Nikki Sinclaire, elected as a Member of the European Parliament as long ago as 2009 under the Leadership of Nigel Farage, having twice sought election to the House of Commons under that banner after having left the Conservative Party.

Richard Tice wants to legalise cannabis, Farage concurs with the Green Party in wanting to legalise drugs across the board, and Lee Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023. Although Anderson changed sides having initially supported assisted suicide, Tice and Sarah Pochin voted for it all the way to Third Reading. That Farage felt the need to stop courting Ben and Zac Goldsmith indicated how far that courtship had advanced. Numerous Reform figures were fanatical supporters of the Prime Minister of Net Zero, of very big spending long before Covid-19, of the highest net migration ever, of Stonewall, of the lifting of the requirement that jobs in Britain be advertised first in Britain, of the lockdowns, of the Northern Ireland Protocol, and of the war in Ukraine. If the line is that “immigration hasn’t gone down, it’s emigration that’s gone up”, then not only is that factually incorrect, but emigration was around double its current level when the Minister responsible was Robert Jenrick.

Jenrick was so bent that even Boris Johnson felt obliged to sack him, but their differences were not political. Nor were those between Johnson and Scott Benton, whom Reform nevertheless refused to take, and who ran Restore Britain’s by-election campaign at Makerfield, where he told canvassers to move on if anyone told them that they intended to vote Labour, since the point was to take votes from Reform. Extremely right-wing gay men with Theology degrees are of course routine, and among Old Testament specialists arguably especially so, but Benton came out to his parents just before his wedding to one Harry Symonds. Perhaps they had assumed until that point that he was going to be marrying Carrie Symonds? Indeed, have Harry and Carrie ever been seen together? But I digress. Peter Hitchens writes:

While I have never liked Nigel Farage’s politics, I have admired his toughness in adversity. Never forget that he survived a terrifying plane crash and a very nasty bout of cancer. He is often attacked in public places, in ways which must be unnerving even if they end up with no more than a ruined suit.

Also never forget that one major newspaper made a sort of joke out of that cancer. So I look with a certain amount of sorrow on his current plight. I think he must be very tired and very drained. His recent petulant snarling at TV reporters shows that he has reached the end of his tether.

I think I know why. He has now realised the dismal truth – that his entire huge and, so far, successful movement relies entirely on him, and on his good fortune.

It is a brilliant one-man act. It has all but destroyed the Tory Party. It has split the Labour Party. It has been the pillar of no fewer than three rebel movements. But it has relied on two key things.

Mr Farage himself has always been the mocking rebel and the outsider. And he has never really had to explain what he would do if he got real power.

He won his enormous vote in last year’s General Election because so many Tories suffered a wild emotional spasm, and decided to punish themselves by having a Labour government. He must suspect that they won’t do that again, and helium is plainly beginning to leak from his once-impressive political airship, which sags and wrinkles in the wind.

Now he is the one being mocked. He must spend the next few weeks being teased and provoked by a Left-wing comedian wearing a dustbin on his head.

This will harm him anyway, but if he handles it badly or loses his temper, he can lose his self-inflicted by-election in an afternoon. And on top of that, he appears to have become enough of an insider to attract the colossal sums of money which established politicians control. But he lacks the advisers and financial bodyguards to help him avoid the difficulties he now faces. He has nobody to tell him, ‘Don’t meet x’ , ‘Don’t take money from y’, ‘Get rid of z’ or ‘Don’t resign’. The mocker is mocked. The outsider has been dragged into the establishment.

And this exposes the real problem. Mr Farage really has nothing much to offer the country. He is a male Margaret Thatcher tribute band – amusing to watch on a summer evening, provided you don’t listen too carefully.

He expresses, in a shrug, a wink or a smirk, the opinions of millions, as long as he says as little as possible. But he has no idea what to do about mass immigration, let alone the economy, or defence or the police or drugs (especially drugs).

And now things have got a little rough, he cannot cope. This is sad for him but probably good for this country. It would be really good if those who oppose our horrible cultural revolution realised that Thatcher worship and Trump worship will not get them anywhere.

As Count Binface, Jon Harvey is now polling ahead of Farage. Between them, they are pushing an always absurd state of affairs to the point of destruction. Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war, while Fascism is inherent in both of them, only ever arising by their joint enterprise. They constitute a single milieu. But the circus at Clacton ought to be the end of it.

Instead, the truly popular centre ground seeks to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. In the struggle for economic equality, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class, while in the struggle for international peace, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class and the youth.

Social solidarity is an expression of personal responsibility, personal responsibility is protected by social solidarity, international solidarity is an expression of national sovereignty, and national sovereignty is protected by international solidarity. Equality and diversity must include economic equality and class diversity, regional equality and regional diversity, the equal sovereignty of diverse states, and equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law with the presumption of innocence, requiring that conviction be beyond reasonable doubt.

All of this is opposed by and to the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the anti-industrial Malthusianism and misanthropy of the Green agenda, the treatment of identity politics as equal or superior to class politics, the treatment of gender identity as equal or superior to sex (“biological sex”), the cancel culture of which our people have always been the principal victims, the erosion of civil liberties, the stupefaction of the workers or the youth, the indulgence of separatist tendencies in any of the three parts of Great Britain, the consideration of any all-Ireland settlement that failed to preserve the NHS and other such achievements, or the failure to recognise that a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency had as much of that currency as it chose to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore needed to be under democratic political control.

Behind The Anthems And The Flags

In anticipation of tonight’s Lindisfarne grudge match, 1233 years of hurt, consider that Norwegian membership took NATO to the land frontier of the Soviet Union from its inception, six years before that of the Warsaw Pact, which it has outlived by 35 years. Far from NATO’s having kept the peace, its expansion has directly caused the war in Ukraine, as Nigel Farage used to have the wit to say, but no longer does. Finland looks silly for having joined. Sweden looks downright irresponsible for having sacrificed its work and reputation in peacemaking and in aid. Membership of NATO subjects our military personnel to the command of officers who were ultimately answerable to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or to Donald Trump, or until recently to Viktor Orbán. As a member both of the Executive Board and of the Gaza Executive Board of Trump’s Board of Peace, does Tony Blair retain a Labour Party membership card? If so, then why does anyone else? And does Trump’s British fan club now love Blair, who is the only British member of the Board of Peace?

The canonisation of NATO “because of Attlee” does not extend to the NHS, or to the public ownership of the utilities. That NATO was founded by Ernest Bevin on the principles of British trade unionism is a pious if self-regarding fiction that has a parallel in every original member state, including what was then Salazar’s Portugal. And it is comical to assert that NATO was devised by Denis Healey, who was all of 31 when it was created, and who in any case went on to inflict monetarism on Britain, after he had perpetrated against the Chagossian people the evil that was later compounded by David Miliband of extraordinary rendition infamy. Nobody just gives up a million dollar salary in the capital of the world for the £67,505 of a British Cabinet Minister, and that without even the £98,599 of a member of the House of Commons. Indeed, a peerage would in practice prevent Miliband from ever becoming Prime Minister, which David Cameron had already been in addition to being independently wealthy. At 60, why is Miliband considering this? There must be something very badly wrong with the International Rescue Committee, and he needs to get out of town. Who is going to look?

From a P5 state, Keir Starmer never could have become Secretary-General of the United Nations; that delusion was in the tradition that stretched back through the fantasy that Blair was going to be “President of Europe” to the hallucination that Elizabeth II was going to be “Queen of Europe”. But the position of Secretary General of NATO (why does that have no hyphen when the UN job has one?) is within Starmer’s grasp, and that says everything about them both. Albeit with a disappointing coyness about the prominence of senior Nazis in the early decades of NATO, Lily Lynch writes:

The Nato summit in Ankara was a showcase of Turkish hospitality and ruthless authoritarian efficiency. Journalists were showered with Turkish delights, perfumes, and porcelain coffee cups, and even Turkey’s cats were enlisted in the charm offensive: white Angora kittens were introduced to cooing journalists in the press centre. The roads were freshly paved and the shiny Nato shuttle buses all ran on time. The entire spectacle was sustained by staggering levels of security: roughly 70,000 personnel secured the event — almost double the number present at last year’s Nato summit in The Hague. In the weeks leading up to it, all protests were banned and hundreds of Nato critics and Left-wing activists were arrested. While Trump praised the spectacle, some liberal Atlanticists present told me they were a touch squeamish about the entire display. In their view, the Ankara summit was a deviation from enlightened Euro-Atlanticist democracy, something supposedly intrinsic to the alliance.

However, a better assessment would have understood the Ankara summit as Nato returning to its roots. In recent months, the theme of Nato reverting to its original Cold War purpose — European deterrence and defence — has been advanced by the Trump administration. The idea was rolled out in February as “Nato 3.0” and is the brainchild of Undersecretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby, a restrainer who advocates for limiting military interventionism and who has therefore been maligned by the liberal Atlanticist set and reportedly spied on by Israel. As Colby describes it, Nato 3.0 is not an abandonment of Nato but rather “a return to and validation of its foundational purpose”. In other words, “make Nato great again” by ensuring Europeans pour billions into defence industrial production and technological innovation so they can take care of their own conventional (non-nuclear) defence.

At this year’s summit, I witnessed the transition to Nato 3.0 in real time. The Trump administration surely regards Europe’s acceptance of its shift in policy and philosophy as a major foreign policy “win”. Multiple senior Nato officials spoke of the need to build “a stronger Europe in a stronger Nato”, and repeatedly recited figures testifying to leaps in European defence spending in accordance with Trumpian demands. One senior Nato official spoke of the “simultaneity problem” — the Trump administration’s concern about a scenario in which the US military would be forced to fight multiple major conflicts at once, which he described as the reason “why Europeans are stepping up and taking more responsibility for their own defence”. Whatever their distaste for Trump’s bullying rhetoric, it was clear that Nato officials and allies are now taking the Trump administration’s words very seriously.

A few weeks ahead of the summit, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth echoed Colby at the Nato defence ministerial meeting in Brussels, tying Nato 3.0 to Washington’s demands that allies raise defence spending. “That’s what defence spending commitments are all about,” he said, “transforming Nato into a real military alliance that’s focused on hard power and real deterrence, a Nato 3.0 modelled on the Nato 1.0 that won the Cold War.” During the same meeting, Hegseth gave trans-Atlantic allies an ultimatum. Going forward, he said, American Nato dues would be contingent on allies meeting their own defence spending targets. “Where other allies do not spend with urgency, our dues contributions will go down,” he warned. He also told allies to expect a review of their progress in six months. If insufficient strides had been made by then, the US would spend less on Nato. This threat contributed to a sense of elevated fear in Ankara. It wasn’t an entirely irrational one either: the Trump administration is dramatically scaling back its involvement in other multilateral institutions. In January, the United States withdrew from 31 UN entities and is currently withholding around $4 billion in mandatory UN dues.

To understand “Nato 3.0”, it’s essential to understand the alliance’s evolution. Nato’s founding was rooted in Cold War ideological and military competition with the Soviet Union. As such, Nato 1.0 was a firmly Right-wing organisation, one interested above all in strengthening American dominion over Europe and confronting the Soviet threat. But it also had several other functions, among them spreading the gospel of free markets and crushing internal Left-wing subversion. The North Atlantic Treaty signed in April 1949 established the military alliance and outlined Nato “values”; the pact promised “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law”. From the very beginning, not all members lived up to the pompous rhetoric. Founding member state Portugal was then ruled by dictator Antonio Salazar, whose one-party regime Estado Novo, or New State, employed a menacing secret police and outlawed all opposition parties; the dictatorship’s “new” name was an irony, as according to Tom Gallagher, the puritanical Salazar “manifested the true reactionary’s horror of change”.

The United States was often the alliance’s biggest proponent of working with unsavoury regimes, pushing for Franco’s Spain to become a member of Nato with overwhelming support in Congress and the Senate. The US saw Francoist Spain as an ideal ally owing to its “strategic location and furiously anti-communist sentiment”. When some European member states objected to admitting Franco’s regime into the alliance, the United States signed the Pact of Madrid with Spain in 1953, furnishing the dictatorship with aid and allowing the US to build military bases on Spanish soil. French colonial Algeria was also an original part of Nato, with Article 5 extending to the colonised country where systematic torture and concentration camps were used to subdue the population. Meanwhile some former Nazis from West Germany’s supposedly “clean Wehrmacht” — the alliance shamelessly propagated the myth that Wehrmacht officers fought honorably during the Second World War — were also integrated into the pact, with some rising to Nato’s senior leadership. In the face of the Soviet threat, there could be no enemies to the Right.

Nato 2.0 covered a period we might describe as the “long Nineties” and was characterised by End-of-History hubris and excess: rapacious eastward expansion, self-aggrandising rhetoric about liberal values, and zealous out-of-area operations. Nato’s “out-of-area” actions — operations undertaken beyond the territorial limits of member states — undermined its claim to be a “purely defensive alliance”. As “humanitarian” operations, their results ranged from mixed to disastrous. While the 1999 Nato bombing of Yugoslavia forced Serbian security forces from Kosovo, it did not bring down President Slobodan Milošević; he wouldn’t fall until a contested election several months later. Indeed, Milošević’s own Minister of Information during the bombing, Aleksandar Vučić, has been leader of Serbia in some form for 14 years, and his regime employs Serbian nationalist rhetoric barely distinguishable from that of his former boss. In 2011, Nato intervened in Libya with even more catastrophic results: though sold to the public as a “humanitarian intervention” to protect civilians, the real goal was regime change, with the removal of leader Muammar al-Gaddafi judged a strategic imperative worth many Libyan lives. In the end, a report from Harvard’s Belfer Center determined that “Nato’s action magnified the conflict’s duration about sixfold and its death toll at least sevenfold”. Nato 2.0 also included the Great War on Terror, which meant the emergence of non-state actors as a new threat; costly cross-border operations and occupations ensued. If Nato 1.0’s main purpose was containing the Soviet Union in Europe, then Nato 2.0 represented the mother of all mission creep.

“If Nato 1.0’s main purpose was containing the Soviet Union in Europe, then Nato 2.0 represented the mother of all mission creep.” The summit in Ankara was the alliance’s response to Trumpian demands for a Nato 3.0: a scaled back, “Europe-led” pact that doesn’t rely on the United States as the guarantor of Europe’s conventional defence. As such, the summit kicked off with a grandiose Defense Industry Forum, where Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte repeatedly invoked the term “defence industrial revolution”. The event was an opportunity for Turkey to hawk its indigenous defence industry wares, but it was also an opportunity for Europe. As one official from a European defence ministry wryly put it to me, the forum allowed allies to make a big show of complying with Trumpian dictates to spend more on their defence.

Just to drive the point home, President Zelensky gave a speech at the event likening the current revolution in drone technology to the invention of missiles. He described Ukraine as a reluctant defence industrial powerhouse forged in war and asserted that it should therefore be admitted to Nato. In other characteristically immoderate statements, the Defense Industry Forum was widely touted as a success. A Nato official confirmed that “at least” $50 billion in new defence deals were announced at the forum; among them were $40 billion worth of investment in counter-drone capabilities and multi-country initiatives for the continued militarisation of space. The pivot to Nato 3.0 would appear to be well underway.

Turkey is perhaps the model Nato 3.0 ally, which makes its hosting of the first summit of this new chapter richly appropriate. Though Turkey has contributed to Nato 2.0 peacekeeping missions and interventions in places like Kosovo and Bosnia, Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, like Trump, has no time for liberal internationalist pieties. Like Trump, he would like to see Nato stripped bare to its raw essentials of defence and security, ditching democracy promotion and the dissemination of “Western values”. Turkey has the second largest army in Nato and a burgeoning defence industrial base: Turkish defence and aviation exports broke records last year, exceeding $10 billion. All of this has won admiration from Trump. Throughout the summit, Trump repeatedly praised Erdoğan, calling him “really a great man”, “a great leader”, and “a strong person”. Trump’s affinity with Erdoğan suggests that what is most valued in Nato 3.0 is a capacity for deterrence and defence; democratic deficiencies are of little concern in an ally that is seen to be pulling its weight.

Despite the notable absence of liberal rhetoric in Ankara, elements of Nato 2.0 remain for now, including the tradition of the annual summit. During the Cold War, Nato held just 10 summits. Today, it holds a wildly expensive summit every year. Last year’s one in The Hague reportedly cost about €1 million per minute, with some media reporting that it was the most expensive meeting in the alliance’s history. Preparations for this year’s summit reportedly cost €235 million. In addition to being expensive, international relations scholar Patrick Porter believes that annual summits present risks. “The curse of regular summitry…wasn’t a feature of Cold War Nato,” he tells me. “There are these relentless opportunities for trouble and mischief and misunderstanding.” It’s a critique now shared by some other allies. While Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte told journalists in Ankara that the next summit will be in Albania, he would not confirm that it would happen next year.

Whatever the similarities between Nato 3.0 and Nato 1.0, there are also a few striking differences. Nato once justified itself with the Cold War platitudes of prosperity and liberty. This was propaganda to be sure, but it was still integral to winning an ideological battle that once divided the world. Now, the rhetoric of prosperity and freedom has been replaced with the cold, uninspiring promise of “security” — a nebulous, constantly expanding concept emblematic of an ideology that has lost the ability to excite or be believed, and must now rely on coercion, censorship and repression to get its way. While Nato holds a lavish summit each year and member states ramp up spending for a “defence industrial revolution”, people living in allied countries are being told they must endure brutal cuts to health care, education, and social welfare to pay for it all. Alliance boosters like to boast that Nato “protects one billion people”. If it does, it does so at a steep cost.

And Peter Hitchens writes:

The holding of a Nato summit in Ankara is so ridiculous that nobody dares say how absurd and insulting it is. For Ankara is not a democratic city on the side of freedom and peace.

It is the grim capital of an aggressive despotism whose former democracy has been cut to ribbons over the past 20 years. It represents pretty much everything Nato is generally believed to stand against.

The story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, in which everyone is too scared to say that the vain tyrant is in fact naked, has nothing on the story of Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In Ankara, everyone is too cowed to admit he is a repressive despot who scares his neighbours.

Mr Erdogan is as near as anyone gets to being the twin brother of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. His troops sit on someone else’s soil, in Northern Cyprus. He shows his muscle in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Azerbaijan. He likes to pose as the new leader of the Islamic world, the heir of the Ottoman sultans who once ruled much of the globe from Istanbul.

He keeps surprisingly good relations with Putin, and has bought advanced military equipment from Russia, against strong US objections. His prisons contain several journalists and dissidents. His main political opponent likewise rots in a jail cell.

Pro-freedom campaign groups report that the Turkish state made multiple attempts to suppress dissent in the weeks before the Nato summit. They said reporters were placed under house arrest, restricted by suspended sentences, or put through long, drawn-out trials for critical commentary on social media. The campaign group Reporters Without Borders accused Turkey of using ‘all possible means’ to undermine its critics.

It placed Turkey 163rd out of 180 on its world press freedom index (the UK is 18, Russia is 172 and North Korea 179). Turkey used to be 100th but Erdogan and his Islamist backers worked hard to change this. Around 90 per cent of Turkey’s national media – once diverse and full of rivalry – are now under direct or indirect government control.

But the repression goes wider and deeper. The very idea of opposition is unwelcome in Erdogan’s Turkey. You can, and probably will, go to prison for it. A huge new courthouse has been built at Silivri, next to Marmara prison, on the far western edge of Istanbul’s colossal urban sprawl.

This spree of repressive construction has much to do with the shocking crushing of Ekrem Imamoglu, the most significant rival to Erdogan in Turkish politics. Mr Imamoglu became a successful mayor of Istanbul and looked likely to be the opposition’s candidate in the presidential election due in 2028.

Last November, he was arrested on astounding charges of corruption and espionage, which it is very hard to take seriously – except that the Turkish courts obviously do. The state prosecutor accused him of running a criminal organisation and called for him to be sentenced to more than 2,000 years in prison.

Yet Nato, which likes to pose as the great defender of democracy and freedom, and spits defiance at Moscow, welcomes Turkey as a member and politely ignores its similarities to Russia. Yet it is very hard not to notice that Turkey is not a normal country.

You might have glimpsed Mr Erdogan’s spectacular military display yesterday on the TV news, a crazy mixture of Ruritania and Genghis Khan, as his troops welcomed Nato big cheeses to the country’s capital. But you probably haven’t heard of his gigantic, vainglorious new White Palace – Ak Saray in Turkish – three million square feet of it, and featuring lots of top-grade imported marble and silk wallpaper.

Despot? Can this be just? Surely the Turkish president is democratically elected? Yes, he is. But don’t make too much of that in a state so skewed and suppressed.

Early in his long march to power, mainly fuelled by militant Islamism, Erdogan said: ‘Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.’ He said this when he was the mere mayor of Istanbul, which has a fine tram network.

Opinions differ about when exactly he alighted from his Istanbul tram and slipped into a much more luxurious and secluded vehicle for his ride to the very top. But it is a long time ago, as anyone who has ever crossed him can testify.

So this summit raises the seldom-asked question ‘What is Nato?’ which we all might do well to try to answer. It has never been totally democratic, though its founding nations were dominated by democracies.

In its early years, when the shadow of Stalin lay across Europe, it was not fussy about who joined. The grim Salazar dictatorship in Portugal was welcome, as were the Greek colonels who overthrew democracy in Athens in 1967, and continued to stifle it until they fell in 1974.

Entry to the alliance is, in reality, controlled by the US. Nato has no actual procedure for expelling an errant member, though a country may quit if it gives a year’s notice.

Another pressing question is whether Nato is truly defensive any more? Its 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia probably wasn’t legal and certainly wasn’t defensive. Nor was its 2011 attack on the Gaddafi regime in Libya, which undoubtedly did more harm than good. Its deployment in Afghanistan remains puzzling. It is hard to get much further from the North Atlantic than Kandahar or the Khyber Pass. Nato is also that strange thing, an alliance that might get weaker as it grows bigger. The much-boasted, much misunderstood Article 5 of the Nato Treaty says an armed attack against one or more member ‘shall be considered an attack against them all’, and permits retaliation ‘as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force’. Yet the wording is in fact far from binding.

The US would never have agreed to anything tougher. The Nato member can – if it wishes – defend another member with armed force. But it can equally well send a rude diplomatic note to Moscow, or demand a meeting of the UN Security Council. There is no actual commitment to fight.

The real question has always been ‘will the US, or any of Nato’s nuclear powers, risk a Soviet (or nowadays Russian) nuclear attack on its capital for the sake of, say, Lithuania or Denmark?’ To which the answer can never be more than ‘perhaps’. And the great paradox is that the more small, weak countries Nato allows in, the feebler this airy commitment is.

In the Cold War, Nato was a quiet organisation with a modest HQ and a believable threat. Now, it is a rather noisy body with a huge eco-friendly £1billion head office in Brussels, which looks like a spaceport, and at least one very dubious member.

Behind the anthems and the flags and the parades, is this alliance actually what we need?