Columns

When war is in the air, young men traditionally sign up – and they traditionally sign up, disproportionately, from the northeast of England, where I grew up. The country must be prepared for war, says Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, head of our armed forces. But what use is all this puffed-up talk of a battle-ready Britain if we have no soldiers? In the northeast, the supply of soldiers has slowed not just to a trickle but to a drip. Sunderland, for instance, home to nearly 11,000 veterans, sent just ten men into the army in 2025. A reporter called Fred Sculthorp went to Sunderland for Dispatch magazine last month, to work out what had happened to the northeast’s fighting spirit, but all Fred found was apathy: why sign up when you can sign on?

I have spent a small portion of my time lately wondering what I would do if I thought communists were about to take over Britain. At the more civil end of things, I could see myself going on an anti-communist protest, though I would shrink away if I noticed that my fellow marchers were flying swastikas. I don’t exactly know what I would do next. Perhaps I would hope for another election soon, and do what I could to unite other anti-communists. One thing I am fairly sure I would not do would be to dance. In fact, were this country facing the prospect of Stalinism coming at us full force, the last thing I would do would be to get a DJ, book a stage in Trafalgar Square, hire some go-go dancers and rave it up.

“Listen to what the man on the left of the camera has to say about Israel, the man who is addressed as Nick,” a radical Corbynista friend suggested to me the other day in a social media message designed to change my mind about the Middle East. It’s part of a sustained campaign on his part which dates back at least ten years and is usually conducted with good grace, if never accord. So I listened to what this chap Nick had to say, with growing hilarity. Not because of what he said – which was what you might expect from a rank anti-Semite, but because of who he was. For it was none other than Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National party. Mr.

Twenty minutes into what seemed a routine softball literary interview for Bloomberg TV in London last month, the conversation took a prickly turn. My interviewer had tripped across some remark in one of my podcast appearances that set her off. So much for talking about my new novel. For the following 20 minutes, leaning over the table and poking at the air between us, she proceeded to hector me about why I seemed to discuss Muslims in general terms rather than as individuals. I objected that she was being disingenuous. Journalists regularly address issues involving groups of people in general terms. (For an opinion piece, I’m to interview all 2 billion Muslims individually and cite each in turn?

Sometimes the obvious is so obvious that people forget to state it. So let me observe one small footnote among recent obvious things. At the end of February, Donald Trump killed the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and most of the senior leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary government in Iran. There are many things to be said against the Ayatollah and his friends. Since 1979 they have repressed the population of Iran and hurtled one of the great civilizations backward by a millennium. From the start of the revolution they have murdered their domestic opponents by the thousands. They have shot students in the head when they came out onto the streets in protest. They have massacred, raped and tortured prisoners. They have exported terror around the world.

About a decade ago, the people I dreaded meeting most at parties were the ed tech evangelists – men and women who lit up with zealous excitement about bringing screens into schools. If only every schoolchild had a laptop, they thought, then humanity could flourish, nurtured by the great river of the internet and by an exciting stream of educational apps. It was as if a school laptop was a Mary Poppins bag out of which whatever they most wanted was sure to appear. For the ed tech utopians of the right, what they dreamt of was a great stream of savvy little Einsteins, liberated from turgid teachers. For those on the left, it was about equal access, fairness, "pupil-centered learning.

Every couple of years a columnist-cum-novelist will inevitably stoop to shameless self-promotion. In my defense, at least the novel released this month is germane to the political moment. Lest its simple title, A Better Life, come across as lame, I asked the designers of my British and American hardback covers to use imagery that conveys the book’s focal subject matter: immigration. See, proponents of unfettered mass migration have eternally assured us that most illegal immigrants – or as the Biden administration instructed federal law enforcement to call them, ‘newcomers’ – are merely seeking ‘a better life’. This explanation is routinely trotted out as an irrefutable justification for a potentially near-infinite imposition of foreigners on western polities.