Severe?

Sixty-eight. My father died when he was 68. Yet we are allowing the retirement age to go all the way up to that, whereas France stands on the brink of revolution at the suggestion of an increase to 64. Emmanuel Macron is demonstrating how violently authoritarian "centrism" is when challenged, a foretaste of any Starmer Government that we might ever have the misfortune to suffer, yet we are coming to realise that the reason why the French will never be made to work until they dropped, or reduced to a pension such as ours that was less than half their present one, was precisely because this was how they reacted to the suggestion of far less than that.

We also look approvingly at the Dutch farmers, and while some of us are baffled as to how this Israeli Government was supposed to be different from its predecessors, we cannot deny our admiration for those who have risen against it. We observe all of this against the background of our own strikes, which will soon have been running for a year. Lo and behold, the terrorist threat level in Northern Ireland, and thus in practice in the United Kingdom as a whole, has been increased to severe. From a Government already possessed of powers beyond those which the Israeli Government was seeking to give itself, prepare for the clampdown. And prepare to be told to blame it on the New IRA.

Yet early this month, four Protestants, at least one with known Loyalist paramilitary connections, were arrested in relation to the attempted murder of Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell. There has always been a school of thought that the New IRA was a false flag operation. The old IRA was riddled from top to bottom with Police informants, MI5 assets, and so on, as was the Real IRA, and as at least has been the much older Continuity IRA, which goes back to the split over abstentionism in 1986. The recent documentaries about David Rupert, and about "Robert" by the superlative Peter Taylor, undeniably broke ground, and were a reminder of how good the BBC could be, but they could not have surprised anyone.

The Far Right is the most constant and the most potent, but by and large real and perceived terrorist threats come and go. 20 years ago, imagine the suggestion that the Mayor of London and the First Minister of Scotland would both be Muslims, with the very Prime Minister two of three South Asians from three different parties. I did have to laugh at the recent AUKUS event, and not only at the idea of Britain's striking fear into China by sending submarines to the other side of the world sometime around 2040. That was the Tricontinental WASP Empire, was it? Anthony Albanese, Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak? The only thing funnier was that the Australian Labor Party, the American Democratic Party and the British Conservative Party were now fully interchangeable. Would you surrender your gun to any of them, any more than to Peter Dutton, Donald Trump or Keir Starmer?

Sunak is not wrong that the violence that affected most people in Britain was not terrorism, but antisocial behaviour. Two Prime Ministers in the last 10 years, one of whom was also the last Mayor of London, have been members of an organisation that existed specifically in order to commit criminal damage and other offences, even including assault, just so that its members could prove their ability to pick up the bill. Imagine that a group of youths the same age, but on a council estate, were to organise themselves into a club, complete with a membership list, officers, some sort of uniform, the works, all for the express purpose of smashing up pubs. They would rightly go to prison, and I do not say that lightly. Not so the longest-serving Chancellor of the Exchequer of the last 15 years, like those two Prime Ministers a known user of illegal drugs. Like them, he had in his time burned a £50 note in front of a beggar such as the Government is "cracking down on", though not by giving them homes and jobs. Tony Blair lives.

It is always about class. About 70,000 children are reported missing right here in Britain each year, yet the Home Office is to allocate hundreds of thousands more pounds to the search for Madeleine McCann, whom there is no realistic chance of finding dead, never mind alive. Did her parents have their other two children taken away? Those twins were two when their parents left them with their not quite four-year-old sister in a foreign country and went out on the town. People without the McCanns' advantages lose their children for far less.

Charles Dickens would have done as well with the McCanns and their sycophants as he would have done with the Bullingdon Club and its Old Boys. Great Expectations is about the corrosive effects of snobbery on the character, and those of us who were already fans of Steven Knight can only find ourselves wishing that he had written something completely original on that theme. His latest offering is shaping up to be good Knight. Sadly, it is bad Dickens. 

Now, there were brown people in the England of the period, including of Estella's standing. It is not unfaithful to the novel to make her as Jane Austen made Miss Lambe in Sanditon. The book does not say that the Gypsy-born Estella is white. Nor does it specify Pip's age, and putting him at the start in his late teens rather than the usual 12-ish is not a bad idea in relation to the narrative timeline. But while a youth of that age in the early nineteenth century would indeed have sworn fulsomely and all the rest of it, Dickens allows us to presuppose that, in the way that he never expressly says that Oliver Twist's Nancy is a prostitute, or that Fagin is pimping out the boys, both of which were as obvious to his original readers as they are now.

If Knight, the Dickensian influence on whose work has always been glaring and glorious, had wanted to include those things expressly, then he ought to have done that from scratch, of which he would have been more than capable. As it is, what he has written is worth watching as an example of his work, though not as example of Dickens's, and we may look forward to his treatment of phenomena such as gave rise to the McCanns or to Boris Johnson. The hugely popular and highly populist Dickens would indeed have been writing for the nine o'clock evening slot on television today. It is a noble aspiration to be his heir.