The Eve of Liberation Day?

France is now the third NATO member-state in rapid succession, and the second member of the EU, to have disqualified its leading Opposition politician from public office. France and Turkey, which has the second largest armed forces in NATO and which is strategically vital to it in a way that Britain simply is not, have both criminalised those leaders, in the Turkish case even locking him up.

Like Donald Trump, there is nothing attractive about the Rassemblement National, or about Kemalism (Turkey has two Far Rights, and not much of anything else), or about Călin Georgescu. There are other ways of holding the line on Ukraine. But what are the odds that the candidates whom liberals disliked would all be turning out to be disqualifiable crooks just when it looked as if they might have been about to win? That is a lesson to us all. As it is unintended to be.

Such is the background to calls to ban teenage boys from social media. Showing Adolescence in schools, of all places, is the most hilarious point-missing that I have heard in a very long time. Mr Bates really existed. He still does, and, though knighted, he remains uncompensated. Jamie Miller, on the other hand, is completely made up. So was Oliver Twist, and so was Étienne Lantier. But even so.

How could you be a 13-year-old incel, anyway? A padmate of mine had become a father at 15 having been fully sexually active since the age of 12, but even he admitted that that was altogether exceptional. No one lies about sex, or drugs, or what have you in prison, a refreshing frankness that I had otherwise experienced only when I had stayed a weekend in a Jesuit novitiate, so long ago that the VCR had refused to play The Life of Brian.

Banning teenagers from the devices that might present them with alternatives to neoliberal economic policy, to identitarian social policy, to neoconservative foreign policy, and to anti-industrial Malthusianism, is of a piece with the defenestration of Jeremy Corbyn, with the subjection of Boris Johnson to a kangaroo court, with the incitement of violence against Nigel Farage, with the attempted murder of George Galloway, with the plot to imprison the late Alex Salmond for the rest of his life, with the persecution of the world-historical figure of Julian Assange, and with the lawfare against Marine Le Pen, against Ekrem İmamoğlu, against Georgescu, against Trump, and against whoever was next on the hit list. It could be you. Already, interviewing Corbyn, the award-laden Sophy Ridge of Sky News has pretended to have mistaken the Independent MP Iqbal Mohamed for the former Labour Councillor Mohamed Iqbal, who was suspended from his party for alleged anti-Semitism, although even in apologising neither Ridge nor Sky has mentioned that he was exonerated.

Like Farage, Trump has extolled the virtues of Keir Starmer. Trump has accepted the credentials of Peter Mandelson after all, and now he has signed off on Starmer's Chagos Islands deal, by which Britain surrenders any moral ground from which to argue for the self-determination of Canada, Greenland, Panama, or anywhere else. The Labour line is that a governing party is simply not allowed to criticise the United States, but it is delicious to watch the discombobulation of the British Right. Empire Loyalism or "the Special Relationship". They cannot have both. This time tomorrow, both main parties and Reform UK will know how Special the Relationship was not.

Will others who might be even more crestfallen? Well, if Israel has today felt moved to lift its tariffs on American goods in the hope of reciprocation, then that means that it must have been levying them. Who knew? As for tariffs themselves, between the 1860s and the 1970s, the Hamiltonian American School, as expanded by the American System of Henry Clay, worked to make the United States the world's largest economy, with the world's highest standard of living, culminating in the glorious achievements of the New Deal, which in turn made possible the Civil Rights movement. But Trump understands none of that. The best that can be said of him is that at least he is not an avowed enemy of such things, as Starmer and Mark Carney are. Yet whatever may be wrong with Britain, it is our country. And whatever may be wrong with Canada, it is family.