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Will my generation still remember D-Day?
In the town of Sainte-MĂšre-Ăglise, just inland of Utah Beach on the coast of Normandy, a crowd had gathered before an outdoor projector to watch the British, French and American heads of state pay respects to those who served and the thousands who gave their lives on D-Day. While the dancing and drinking and celebration of the townâs 80 years of liberation went on around me, I was caught off guard by the small, dignified faces of the veteransâ broadcast on screen.
Watching the royals, Sunak, President Biden and President Macron lean down to shake the weathered hands of veterans in wheelchairs, I saw them, for a moment, as leaders whose first duty is to serve with humility and devotion. I felt much less sentimental after news broke later that evening of Rishi Sunakâs early departure from France for an ITV interview.
Sunak urged his opponents not to politicise his absence. Obviously they did, considering it felt political enough on his end, putting his campaigning before the evening memorial at Omaha Beach. The D-Day coverage back home quickly turned into another tedious election battlefront, shifting its attention towards the prime minister, descending into absurdity as Nigel Farage accused him of not believing in Britain, its history or its culture.
The shame is that Sunak, whatever his personal sentiments, squandered the opportunity to bring people in Britain â especially the young, whom he senses have lost pride in their country and its military â into a richer appreciation of that greatest generation. Instead they have become little more than the backdrop to a political scandal. It was possibly the last opportunity of this kind for any leader, as these celebrations take place only once every five years, and the youngest D-Day veteran is now 96.
I grew up in a US Army family, and still decades and peacetime have distanced me from the courage and sacrifice that D-Day demanded. Though the men and women my father served beside were prepared to make that sacrifice again, I saw them as ordinary: uniformed strangers in the supermarket, neighbours, friendsâ parents, Dad. For those who grew up in civilian families, I imagine this distance is even greater.
I spent six years of my childhood at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, home to the 101st Airborne Division who parachuted into France around midnight on D-Day, clearing the way for the infantry landing at Utah. Their âScreaming Eaglesâ insignia was present everywhere at Fort Campbell â from the gates leading onto the base, to the patches I saw on soldiersâ arms as they picked their children up from school, to the banners in our gymnasium. Yet it wasnât until I saw it flying all over Sainte-MĂšre-Ăglise that I understood the heroism it represented â flying into the darkness, landing in this German-occupied town, having their ârendezvous with destiny.â
Sainte-MĂšre-Ăglise was the first town liberated during the Battle of Normandy â a memorial here marks kilometer zero on the path to freedom. In the townâs church, a stained glass window depicts Saint Michael, patron saint of soldiers, with sword and shield against a backdrop of parachutes. Beneath the window, the words âIN TERRA PAXâ are written on the memorial organ dedicated to the victims of the second world war. Re-enactors sat in the pews, seeking a place to cool down in their khakis and boots, possibly to pray. What these soldiers died for was not just honourable but holy: peace on earth, freedom.
Later, from the ramparts of Le Mont-Saint-Michel, I watched paratroopers jump from A400Ms down to the tidal flats. The British Red Devils flew down with a massive Union Jack and the American Golden Knights with their Stars and Stripes, almost comical in size (a fellow Yank shouts, âMurica!â). Itâs for show, yes, but these soldiers know their sport prepares them for the possibility of real air assault. A young American around my age stood next to me and my father. He asked, âIs there some kind of big event going on?âÂ
Soon, D-Day will pass out of living memory. As that hour approaches, we lose touch with the past and begin to doubt the virtue in patriotism. This has been true throughout history â that peace brings complacency. But the solemnity of that promise following the second world war, of ânever againâ, is unique in history, as does the magnitude of sacrifice and the respect we will always owe those who served.
Why Bidenâs Gaza ceasefire proposal failed
Ceasefire deals to end the war in Gaza have come and gone. President Bidenâs unexpected announcement of the latest formula for a settlement, supposedly proposed by Israel, has already fallen by the wayside.
In fact, Bidenâs three-stage ceasefire deal looked remarkably like the previous ones: a six-week halt to fighting and withdrawal of Israeli troops from populated areas, with a release of some hostages in return for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners; a negotiated Israel/Hamas settlement for a permanent end to the war; and finally, comprehensive reconstruction of Gaza.
However, Israelâs attack on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, the growing hostility around the world towards Benjamin Netanyahuâs grim determination to destroy the terrorist-designated organisation and the perceived failure to stem the deaths of Palestinian civilians added a new sense of urgency.
Netanyahu has made it absolutely clear that he intends to complete his military objectives before a ceasefire can be contemplated
Bidenâs move was unusual. First, he claimed the latest ceasefire proposals were from Tel Aviv, not Washington. Second, it seems the White House had not warned the Netanyahu government that Biden was planning to tell the world about the new proposed deal. Third, there appeared to be a large element of psychological arm-twisting involved, presenting a fait accompli to Tel Aviv.
The strategy didnât work. The reason is, there is a fundamental flaw in the behind-the-scenes negotiating between Washington and Tel Aviv, and also in the wider ceasefire talks involving the US, Egypt and Qatar: only Israel, and specifically Netanyahu, is really committed to the total destruction of Hamas as a designated terrorist organisation and as the governing body of the Gaza Strip.
Biden signed up to this objective, but he has now wavered. He has publicly stated that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have caused such damage to Hamas that as a military group it would no longer be capable of carrying out another 7October attack, when 1,200 Israelis were killed, women were brutally raped and disfigured and more than 250 hostages were seized.
Netanyahu clearly doesnât share this assessment. Despite Hamas suffering a huge death toll approaching 15,000 of its fighters, the group remains resilient. The IDF has had to return to areas of Gaza which it thought had been cleared of Hamas fighters, and because of restrictions on military operations in Rafah, imposed by Washington, there are still enough surviving combat battalions to continue the war with Israel.
Most importantly, the two main Hamas leaders in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, the overall leader in the Strip, and Mohammed Deif, commander of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, are still believed to be alive and orchestrating the battle with the IDF from a labyrinth of underground bunkers. Netanyahu says they were the architects of the 7 October atrocities.
Israel has a reputation for pursuing its enemies, however long it takes. After the slaughter of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 by the Black September Palestinian terrorist group, Mossad, the secret intelligence agency, spent years trying to track down and kill those responsible.
From Netanyahuâs point of view, agreeing to a ceasefire involving the eventual withdrawal of all Israeli troops, while Sinwar and Deif are still functioning as Hamas leaders, and while they have under their command perhaps 10,000-12,000 fighters, would be impossible to digest.
It would also lead to Netanyahuâs political downfall because the two most conservative members of his coalition cabinet, Bezalel Smotrich, finance minister, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, national security minister, have vowed to resign and bring down his government if he succumbs to pressure from Washington and agrees to the ceasefire deal.
There is another significant problem causing a seemingly intractable divergence of view between Washington and Tel Aviv.
Biden who has his own reasons for wanting to bring the war in Gaza to an end â growing antipathy towards him among young pro-Palestinian American voters opposed to US arms sales to Israel â has a grand scheme in mind for realigning and remodelling relations in the Middle East to create greater stability and a more effective anti-Iran alliance.
At the heart of this Big Idea is for Saudi Arabia and Israel to form close diplomatic relations, a potentially historic development which would also involve a hugely expanded strategic partnership between Washington and Riyadh with increased advanced weapons sales and help with building a civilian nuclear industry.
The potential breakthrough agreement was getting close, according to the US State Department, when Hamas launched its 7 October attack on Israel. As a consequence, all bets were off, or at least suspended for the foreseeable future which was a blow to Biden because he would have been counting on the diplomatic coup for his re-election campaign.
However, no such deal was ever going to be on the cards unless Netanyahu agreed to the formation of a Palestinian state as part of the grand bargain. That was always going to be the trickiest ingredient because the Israeli leader was against it, and now, after 7 October, itâs not going to happen. Not on Netanyahuâs watch.
So, all in all, Washingtonâs hopes of pressurising Tel Aviv into agreeing a ceasefire and a permanent end to the war in Gaza would seem to be premature, if not hopelessly unrealistic.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu has made it absolutely clear that he intends to complete his military objectives before a ceasefire can be contemplated, let alone discussions about any sort of meaningful future for the Palestinian people.
Tragically, that means there will inevitably be more civilian Palestinian deaths, more destruction of property and the shelving of Bidenâs hopes for reshaping the Middle East.
Whether Netanyahu will ever succeed in eliminating Hamas is a moot point. Some elements will probably survive, and, of course, the political leadership of the organisation is residing in safe refuge in Qatar, beyond Mossadâs reach, or at least while ceasefire negotiations are carrying on and have a hope of succeeding.
French healthcare shows thereâs another way for the NHS
Nigel Farage says the NHS âisnât workingâ and has suggested the UK adopt a French-style heathcare system. Heâs evidently been reading my articles here and here. French healthcare isnât perfect but compared to the bedlam of what most British politicians refer to as âourâ NHS, itâs fabulous. I speak from knowledge. I have experience as a patient in both Britain and France. I know where Iâd rather be sick.
Nobody here seems to be waiting 84 hours in an emergency room, as one NHS patient did in Scotland in 2022. When I was unfortunate enough to attend A&E at the Royal Surrey Hospital a few years ago after falling off a horse, the wait was interminable and the toilets were filthy. My complaint was met by an indifferent shrug.
The toilets are sparkling at the Polyclinique Pasteur, 20 minutes from my house in rural Occitanie. I took my wife there a few months ago after sheâd broken a small bone in her foot. The wait to see a triage nurse was five minutes. She was in radiology 20 minutes later. She saw a doctor 20 minutes after that, and was discharged just over one hour later. With her French health insurance card, the indispensable Carte Vitale, the co-pay cost was âŹ22 plus âŹ2 for paracetamol.
My own experience has been equally fantastic. Just over a year ago I was feeling exhausted and lethargic. I booked in to see my private MĂ©dĂ©cin GĂ©nĂ©raliste at the medical center next to the local supermarket. The phone was answered immediately. I saw her that afternoon. Cost: âŹ7.50. (I pay âŹ40 to take my dog to the vet.)
My doctor sent me to the private medical laboratory in nearby PĂ©zenas for a blood test. The result was sent to her with a copy to me within four hours. The test showed severe hypothyroidism. She phoned and asked me to stop by the surgery where she gave me a prescription for levothyroxine, âŹ6 a month, which effectively restored my thyroid function to normal. She also suggested I get a radiograph to check my thyroid gland for cancer.
Using an app called Doctolib, I was given the choice of three nearby clinics, all of them private. I booked an appointment at the radiology center in Clermont HĂ©rault. Wait time, four days. Arriving at the clinic, I inserted my Carte Vitale into a device that looked like an airport check-in post. At my appointment time of 9 a.m. precisely, a nurse escorted me to the radiology suite where a young consultant manning equipment that looked like a SpaceX control room took an image of my wonky thyroid.
He saw nothing untoward. I left the centre 20 minutes later. I paid âŹ22. His e-rays were emailed to me and my gĂ©nĂ©raliste by lunchtime.
This is insurance-based medical care, in which premiums are paid by employers and a 9 per cent payroll tax. It costs roughly the same as the NHS. The money follows the patient, the patient has choice between public and private providers (all operating to the same tariff), and even the miniscule co-payments can be offset with private insurance, which cannot exclude pre-existing conditions. There are no rainbow lanyards or diversity officers anywhere in sight.
Perhaps Iâm just lucky. So I asked my neighbours. And without exception, they are content. Dodo, a retired firefighter who lives opposite, had a myocardial infarction and within 15 minutes a crash team from the local fire station had arrived to stabilise him and 15 minutes after that he was in a yellow helicopter that landed on the village football pitch to take him to the University Hospital in Montpellier. Heâs now as fit as ever. I see him running most mornings when I walk the dogs.
Another neighbour, unemployed with long-term health problems, was involved in a nasty accident resulting in a fractured spine. He was hospitalised for weeks, and subsequently visited at home daily by a nurse. Heâs much better and it cost him nothing. He has no complaints. A Swedish friend who moved to France from Britain where she had her first child had her second here and describes the difference as akin to being upgraded from economy to business class. And I have heard similar stories again and again.
France is also innovating with the model of private polyclinics and small hospitals covering basic procedures, solutions to the seemingly intractable difficulties of health care delivery. The established university and public hospitals are thus in competition with agile newcomers. Privatisation? Absolutely. Why wouldnât this work in Britain?
A crucial element in the French system is private provision, provided on the same terms as public hospitals. The Polyclinique Pasteur in our nearby market town of Pézenas is a typical example. Founded by healthcare entrepreneur Lamine Gharbi,a pharmacist by training, his health group, Cap Santé, treated 120,000 patients last year in 18 clinics, including 70,000 patients in its four private emergency rooms. Perhaps some Cap Santés in the UK could help. While there are some one-stop or multispecialty clinics in the UK operated by Bupa and Nuffield Health, they are entirely private and not integrated into the public medicine system as here.
I donât claim that the French system is entirely without problems
The secret sauce of the polyclinic model is that itâs a community, not a referral hospital, and is vastly smaller than the public and university hospitals which undertake the most difficult procedures. The polyclinic is not the place for open-heart surgery or oncology, but it does have everything most patients need, most of the time, under one roof. The building is clean. The administration is slick and computerised. The medical team of contracted doctors and nurses offers surgery, general medicine, an emergency suite and a âhospitalisation at homeâ service with a team of itinerant nurses who drive around visiting patients not blocking beds in hospital.
Even in France itâs hard to please everyone all the time. But the polyclinic model, long ago renounced by the NHS which closed cottage hospitals to concentrate on vast, bureaucratic ones, proves that private provision can deliver services to millions of patients without being part of the failed National Health Service.
I donât claim that the French system is entirely without problems. Some remote parts of the country have a shortage of GPs. The village doctor is disappearing, replaced by more centralised clinics. The elderly who find it hard to get to these are transported there by private ambulances or taxi drivers who have specialised training. Thereâs certainly room for improvement here. Dental care is definitely a problem made worse because, bizarrely, dental hygienists are illegal in France. Legally, only a qualified dentist is allowed to treat teeth. This is literally bonkers.
Thereâs not a great deal of difference in average life expectancy between the UK and France â 82.4 years in France versus 81.3 in the UK. As a percentage of GDP, France spends slightly more than the UK. So it could be argued that an underperforming health care system like the NHS isnât that significant. Itâs merely miserable.
Without doubt, those of us who have experienced healthcare in France and Britain will not hesitate to declare that itâs vastly preferable on this side of the Channel. And from what I hear from friends in Spain, Holland, Australia and beyond, this insurance-based model is always superior to the dreadful NHS. The wearisome pleading of NHS fanatics that the only alternative to the NHS is the American system is simply dishonest. A serious debate is years overdue. Throwing more money at it will do nothing to improve âourâ NHS.
Nigel Farageâs Tory manifesto
Iâd say that Nigel Farage gave the best performance in last nightâs debate. You might expect that: heâs a full-time television host, so he talks politics to cameras for a living. But of the seven that were on stage, heâs also the most experienced street fighter. He knew how to use humour and had a sense of insurgency to set himself against the rest. But what struck me wasnât so much his style, as his message. On every single issue, his message was one of classic Conservatism.
Iâve written already about his distasteful suggestion that Rishi Sunak is not patriotic. In my Daily Telegraph column I also point out how a Reform surge in the Westminster voting system will win Farage three MPs at most, so fewer seats than Sinn Fein. But a Reform surge would hand Labour unprecedented political power (with the Tories potentially reduced to the third-largest party) that they will be sure to use to make it harder for Conservatives to get back in the conversation. I regard Farage, in the context of this election, as the Labour partyâs most potent asset.
But as he ends the first week as leader of Reform UK, itâs worth noting his message: Toryism without the Tories.
The NHS model isnât working, he said. Extra money doesnât work: weâre now spending more than 11 per cent of our ânational cakeâ on the NHS. He cited the French insurance scheme: and said their returns on stroke, heart and cancer are better than ours. This is a point that my colleague Kate Andrews makes a lot: the model is broken and America isnât the only alternative. You can go almost anywhere else in Europe and find a better system.
Taxes are so high that people are opting not to work, he said. Energy bills are so expensive because we load tax energy bills to subsidise wind energy companies. During Tony Blairâs time in office, the top rate of tax was 40p and it was paid by 1.5 million people; by the end of 2027, 8 million people will be paying 40p tax â Sunak is dragging more and more people doing middle-income jobs into higher taxation. He added that hearing Penny Mordaunt â whose party has taken the tax burden to the highest level since 1948 â pretend they are a tax-cutting party is âdishonesty on a breathtaking scaleâ. The Spectator has been saying precisely this for a long time.
On climate, Farage didnât trash net zero like he might have done but sought to advocate a Sunak-style third way. Weâre pursuing completely unrealistic climate policies, he said: Labour have pledged to decarbonise the grid by 2030, and the Tories ban buying diesel cars by 2035. If we get new technologies to give us cheaper energy, thatâs great â but weâre sacrificing economic growth and destroying British manufacturing. He was wrong to say that we havenât reduced carbon emissions more than any western countries, and that weâve exported them to India and China. I wish Mordaunt could have picked him up on this: even if you look at consumption (rather than territorial) the UK does better than any G20 country other than Italy (as The Spectator data hub tells you). But his overall line is, again, very similar to that we have advanced in The Spectatorâs leader columns over the years.
Even Farageâs points on migration were fairly mainstream. He resisted the anti-Muslim language that he sometimes serves up and stuck to more basic points. Most who coming in are not directly productive members of the economy, he says. Most of those that come in are actually dependants. A fair point, consistent with recent visa figures on The Spectator data hub.
Nothing to do with race, he said, itâs to do with getting net migration down to an even figure for the next few years, and maybe then we can catch up with housing and health. This is not a populist message; similar points are being currently made by the leaders of Canada and New Zealand.
Not only did Penny Mordaunt fail to defend Sunak when Farage accused him of not being patriotic, she twisted the knife over D-Day saying he was âcompletely wrongâ and had in fact let down the whole country. Sheâs expected to lose her seat and perhaps feels no loyalty to the man who defeated her in a leadership race where she was, briefly, the favourite. Letâs remember that Sunak foisted this election upon his stunned cabinet and told them after he had told the King, not even attempting to seek their endorsement of the decision.
Even Farageâs points on migration were fairly mainstream
The ministers now campaigning, many expecting to lose, are still furious. I know of at least one who is now telling voters on doorsteps not to worry because Sunak will soon be gone â but please vote for the local Tory candidate to stem Starmerâs majority. I suspect one of them will soon be recorded by one of these doorbell videos making the point. Anyway, the resentment Sunakâs ministers feel over this election and the accident-prone campaign is translating into Tories making a halfhearted defence of their leader. Or, in Mordauntâs case last night, joining the attack against him.
But Mordaunt should have jumped in when Farage suggested that stop-and-search was no longer happening. She was at least able to say that crime levels have fallen but should have added that, fraud excepted, itâs at an all-time low. Itâs an amazing achievement: like the school results, also not mentioned. And being the first G20 country to halve carbon emissions: also not mentioned. If the Tory on the panel wonât list Tory achievements, then who will?Â
Nigel Farage said nothing that you would not expect to hear in a Conservative party leadersâ debate. Might we, one day, hear him doing just that? After last night, I would not rule it out.
A short history of cricket in Ukraine
Since the start of Vladimir Putinâs cold-blooded invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the stories and images being broadcast from the country are horrifying. War is gutting Ukrainiansâ lives, but the ambitious and quirky place where I have lived and worked is still there. Many people are surprised, for example, to learn that Ukraine has several cricket teams.
The father of cricket in Ukraine is a man named Hardeep Singh, who brought the game to the city of Kharkiv in 1993. After first arranging hit-arounds in local parks, where he and other expats from India could stave off homesickness, Singh went on to create a cricket league with several teams. If in the 1990s his most important task was bailing his players out of police cells before matches, by the 2010s he was making plans to build an international-standard ground. The land he ended up buying used to belong to a rugby union team.
Instead of preparing to host international cricket in Kyiv and Kharkiv, those cities were being hit by Russian bombs
Cricket really took off in the country when Ukrainians got involved. In a rural town outside Kyiv, an Australian church pastor of Ukrainian descent, Wayne Zschech, taught the game to the members of his congregation. Practicing in a barn, Zschechâs friend Yuri Zahurskiy became a big-hitting batter and an off-spin bowler. Zschech also leased his own cricket ground from the baffled town mayor, and then put together a team of native Ukrainians. The team that he captained, Kaharlyk CC, secured Ukrainian cricketâs biggest victories, and its players have taken its most famous wickets and catches.
Meanwhile, Kyiv had a busy cricket scene thanks to another Indian expat, Thamarai Pandian. Like Hardeep Singh in Kharkiv, Pandian had spent half his life in Ukraine. His tournaments may have been held in a decrepit football stadium, but that didnât stop an array of minor celebrities from turning up to watch them. Spectators over the years included a Ukrainian prime ministerâs daughter, several Test cricketers, and a billionaire from Donetsk, who ended up scoring a few runs himself. Kyiv Cricket Club was founded by Pandian and the then British ambassador to Ukraine, Roland Smith. Its main rival was a team from the British Chamber of Commerce.
In recent years, cricket had been on the curriculum at several of Kyivâs private schools. The principal at one of them, a South African named Kobus Olivier, had once coached international players, but turned his hand to teaching Ukrainian children. Equipment was provided by Shyam Bhatia, a steel industry mogul whose charity Cricket for Care has also helped the game get off the ground in Japan and Indonesia.
By 2022, Ukraineâs application to join the International Cricket Council (ICC) as an associate member had been all but accepted. The country was poised to become the worldâs newest national team. But come that February, instead of preparing to host international cricket in Kyiv and Kharkiv, those cities were being hit by Russian bombs. That was when Ukraineâs cricketers really showed their mettle.
While Russian soldiers were carrying out massacres in the commuter town of Bucha, one of the volunteers evacuating people was Yuri Zahurskiy, the all-rounder from Kaharlyk CC. Zahurskiy repeatedly drove into the besieged town in an ordinary Toyota car, and took dozens of children to safety. On one occasion he came within centimetres of being shot to death. Back in Kaharlyk his captain Wayne Zschech converted his church â his teamâs old pavilion â into a refugee centre for families escaping the war zones.
More dramatic still was the fate of the teamâs young wicketkeeper, Oleksandr Romanenko. I spoke with Romanenko as he was fighting on the front lines in Ukraineâs eastern Donbas region. He told me stories from the war zones in Bakhmut, and from the counteroffensive in Russiaâs Belgorod. But cricket was still on his mind. One message from him read: âAs strange as it sounds, what I want to be doing most of all right now is playing cricket. But I have a sniperâs rifle in my hands right now instead of a bat, and a grenade instead of a ball.â
Elsewhere in Donbas, it was a cricketer who evacuated hundreds of foreign students from university dorms in Kharkiv. Faisal Kassim was once one of Indiaâs most promising schoolboy bowlers, and since training as a doctor in Odesa and Kharkiv he would have opened the bowling for Ukraineâs national team. When Russian tanks arrived outside his dorm in central Kharkiv, Kassim kept the students safe inside the buildingâs basement for a week, before organising an escape route out of the country for all of them.
Cricket has played a part in helping some Ukrainian children and their mothers settle into new lives in other countries. This has happened not only in Britain, but also, incredibly, in Croatia. In a park in Zagreb in the summer of 2022 a young woman from central Ukraine called Anna Murochkina organised evening cricket sessions for refugee children. While the kids got some exercise, their mothers got together on the boundary. These sessions became a form of trauma therapy for everyone.
When the Russian invasion is finally extinguished, Ukrainians will be free to enjoy their lives once more. Hopefully this will include playing cricket again. The lower rungs of international cricket, and the ICC as a whole, would be a better place with Romanenko, Murochkina, Kassim and others in it. As one of the players, known by the nickname âZackâ, put it to me: âThe work, the effort, the time we spent on developing cricket in Ukraine is not something that can be ignored because of a freaking war.â
Why was George Orwell a socialist?
When George Orwellâs publisher, Fredric Warburg, read the manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four in December 1948 he wrote a rapturous report to his colleagues, saying that the book was âworth a cool million votes to the Conservative partyâ. He described it as âa deliberate and sadistic attack on Socialism and socialist parties generally. It seems to indicate a final breach between Orwell and Socialismâ.
Warburg had known Orwell for more than a decade. If he believed that Orwell had swung to the right, it is hardly surprising that other readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four got the same impression. Orwell was too sick with tuberculosis in 1949 to write more than a few book reviews. He told Warburg that he had âa stunning idea for a very short novel which has been in my head for yearsâ, but he was never able to write more than a few pages of this book â titled A Smoking-room Story â before he died in January 1950. The notes he left behind show that the novel was to be set in Burma in the 1920s and was in the style of his non-political pre-war novels, but since it was never completed his two anti-communist masterpieces Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four became his swan song. Within a few years the CIA had secretly funded cinematic versions of them both.
As Orwellâs reputation grew after his death, conservatives, socialists and libertarians were all keen to claim him as one of their own. His fans on the right got a boost in 1996 when it was revealed that he had given a list of âcryto-Communists and fellow travellersâ to the Foreign Office while in a sanatorium in April 1949. This was the final straw for some on the far-left, but Orwell had made never made any secret of his contempt for Stalinists and his friend Richard Rees said that the list was complied as âa sort of game we playedâ rather than a serious effort to uncover reds under the bed. Nevertheless, Orwellâs notorious list included at least two people who turned out to be Russian agents.Â
Throughout his career, Orwell spent more time squabbling with his comrades on the left than attacking capitalists. His first political book, The Road to Wigan Pier, is most memorable for the extended rant about the state of the socialist movement which, he wrote with dismay, attracted âevery fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, âNature Cureâ quack, pacifist, and feminist in Englandâ. But this was friendly fire. There is no evidence that Orwell was warming to capitalism towards the end of his life, nor did he ever abandon what he called Democratic Socialism (always capitalised). Â
He could not have been clearer about this. In June 1949, he put out a statement â the last thing he ever wrote for publication â to set the record straight, saying: âMy novel is not intended as an attack on socialism or on the British Labour party (of which I am a supporter)â. As Christopher Hitchens put it, âOrwell was a conservative about many things, but not politics.â He was, wrote Hitchens, âa libertarian before the idea had gained currencyâ. True enough, but he was unquestionably a left-libertarian.
It is, of course, tempting to speculate about whether Orwellâs politics would have changed had he lived a few more decades, and such speculation has the added benefit of being impossible to gainsay. Orwell was certainly capable of changing his mind. In âThe Lion and the Unicornâ, written in 1940, he predicted that once the economy was nationalised âthe common people will feel, as they cannot feel now, that the State is themselves.â He could dismiss the tyranny of the Soviet Union as a revolution betrayed â as being not ârealâ socialism â but by the time he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four he was having grave doubts about whether tyranny could ever be avoided when so much power was put in the hands of so few people.
You can see him grappling with this in âThe Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivismâ, Nineteen Eighty-Fourâs book-within-a-book that seeks to explain how the Party came to power. Through the voice of bookâs supposed author, Emmanuel Goldstein, Orwell explains that: Â
It had long been realised that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called âabolition of private propertyâ which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with the difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals.
Orwell could clearly see the dangers of socialism, but since he believed that capitalism was doomed and socialism was the only game in town, he had to believe that these dangers could be avoided and that his own brand of libertarian collectivism could prevail. And so he reached for the same comforting explanation for Big Brotherâs tyranny as he had for the Bolsheviksâ â that they were bad actors from the outset and had never really believed in socialism.
Up to a point, this was fair enough. In 1948, communism was still an n=1 experiment. It was still possible to believe that economic liberty could be divorced from civil liberty. The question is whether Orwell would have changed his mind if he had lived to see what took place beneath the hammer and sickle in China, North Korea, East Germany, Albania, Romania, Venezuela, Cuba and many other countries in the twentieth century. The answer, of course, is that we donât know. My belief is that he would.
Can a government dating app solve Japanâs birth crisis?
The Tokyo metropolitan government has announced that it will soon be in the online matchmaking business. It is launching a dating app, which will hopefully appear in the summer, its latest attempt to get people to do their duty to the nation by finding a partner, getting married and procreating ASAP.
The rules of the app will be a bit stricter than most commercial equivalents â you will be required to submit documentation establishing you are single and sign a pledge stating that you are willing to get married. Itâs not Tinder. Youâll also need to attend an interview and provide a tax slip to indicate your salary.Â
Companies here increasingly pander to the singles market
And thatâs not all, as well as establishing your marital aspirations, you will need to enter 15 items of personal information including height, background, and occupation, which will be disclosed to potential suitors â along with a photo ID (it’s unclear whoâll see that). It will apparently be a fee-based system but we donât know how much it will cost yet.
The move has been endorsed by none other than Elon Musk, an amateur demographer and Japanophile who was one of the first to draw attention to his favourite travel destinationâs population crisis in a 2022 tweet. Musk foresaw a day when the Japanese would âcease to existâ as a result of the falling birth rate. Last year there were twice as many deaths as births in Japan and the population is currently in free fall dropping by about 2,000 people a day. Marriages are out of fashion too: falling to 474,000 last year from 504,000 in 2022.
This is all scary stuff but the figures alone are not especially remarkable in the modern world. The UKâs are hardly any better, though we compensate, controversially, with mass immigration. What causes real panic here is the belief that Japan has a unique culture, which it is commonly supposed, only natives are capable of understanding and sustaining. When your language is spoken only in Japan, population decline is that much more serious â existential in fact. The Japanese and their culture could go the way of the Mayans. Â
Government intervention in the dating game sounds like a desperate response, but it isn’t unprecedented and, in many ways, the app is a logical step. Municipalities have been organising match-making events for years and there is a counselling service for lovebirds advertised on the government website.Â
As for central government, itâs has been offering all sorts of inducements to singletons such as free childcare, paternity as well as maternity leave, and a free house in the country if itâs Tokyoâs cramped living conditions and high rents that are putting you off settling down. Matchmaking has a long tradition in Japan with âomiaiâ (arranged marriage) being how many elderly citizens in Japan found their partners, and some still do. A more modern variant âgokonâ (a form of group blind dating) is popular with students.
The reaction from the public has been mixed, though. Elon may be impressed but online responses here have questioned whether this is an appropriate use of taxpayerâs money. Many are wondering whether it will work. The government imprimatur may be a stumbling block. If there is something a bit naff about finding a partner through a dating app (or am I hopelessly old-fashioned?) there is surely something naffer still about doing so on a government dating app.
It could be too that the app idea misses the point. Channels for online courtship are hardly in short supply and itâs arguably never been easier to find someone (though one of the benefits of the government app is that you should have more chance of finding a genuine marriage seeker). The real challenge is persuading people to make a lifelong commitment, in a world of increasingly uncertain work prospects and hectic schedules.
Another problem is that companies here increasingly pander to the singles market and images of women doing very well indeed without partners or children dominate advertising. One long-running ad on Train TV, which is representative and mesmerises commuters every day, shows a beautiful woman in a spacious apartment, cooking for herself, polishing her surfboard on the veranda, and then leaving for work (with a hard hat suggesting sheâs an engineer or coal miner) before returning home to luxurious and very much single bliss in her immaculate, uncluttered living space. Thatâs the ideal. Few ads for anything show large families.
As for entertainment, young pop and TV idols are forbidden from marrying or even dating for fear of disappointing their fans. And in the soppy TV dramas there is romance, and discreetly portrayed sex, but rarely storylines that culminate in good old-fashioned nuptuals. Gay storylines are in vogue too: the most popular TV show on now is a romance between a lawyer and a hairdresser. The theme is food â they cohabit and cook up delicious meals. The kids are out of the picture.
The government will have its work cut out then. The app plan reminded me of Rishi Sunakâs national service wheeze â and starting a family is beginning to feel like a form of national service â a nice idea in theory but not practical and probably, sadly, doomed to failure.
The troubling truth about the Greens
Wind farms. Heat pumps. Hamas apologism. Itâs a curious combination, but one that an alarmingly high number of Green party candidates seem keen to pursue at this General Election.
Yes, the political party nominally devoted to a single issue â âsaving the planetâ, at the cost of ordinary peopleâs living standards â has landed itself in another anti-Semitism scandal, after a bunch of its candidates for parliament were caught posting pro-Hamas or Israelophobic things online.
The Greensâ anti-growth, anti-fossil-fuel, anti-car agenda would immiserate the working classes
Around 20 would-be Green MPs have made rancid statements about Israel, Hamas and 7 October, according to a devastating report in the Times. Adam Pugh, candidate for Deptford and Lewisham North, took to X on the day of the pogrom, saying âthere is no peace without freedom. Resist.â Kefentse Dennis, candidate for Birminghamâs Perry Barr, praised a âpro-Palestineâ demonstration that disrupted a Holocaust remembrance march. At Auschwitz. âItâs because never again means never againâ, Dennis said. To add insult to injury, heâs also the Greensâ equalities and diversity coordinator.
Then there’s Simon Anthony (Barking), who compared Hamas to the Home Guard and the French Resistance (he has since said he condemns ‘all forms of violence’); Nataly Anderson (Woking), who wondered out loud if 7 October was âorchestratedâ, presumably by Israel; and Chris Brody (Chingford and Woodford Green), who shared an article claiming the worst atrocity committed against Jews since the Holocaust may have been a âfalse flag engineered to open the way to the genocide of the Palestinian people of Gazaâ. The post has since been deleted. Incredibly, I could go on.
A Green party spokesman has said the allegations are âserious and are being treated as suchâ. But thatâs a little hard to believe, given the Greensâ recent form. Last month, Mothin Ali, a Green party councillor elected in the May local elections, was exposed for his own despicable comments about Israel and 7 October, and he still doesnât appear to have been suspended.
You remember Ali, he was the gentleman who declared his election a âwin for the people of Gazaâ and chanted âAllahu Akbarâ at his count. Shortly after his victory speech went viral, it emerged that he had posted a video on 8 October, saying âPalestinians have the right to resist occupying forces’.
It got worse. Ali had also joined in an online campaign against Zecharia Deutsch, a Jewish chaplain at Leeds University. This was because Deutsch, a reservist in the Israeli Defence Forces, was called up for three months following 7 October. Ali falsely claimed Deutsch had deliberately tried to kill women and children in Gaza and called on Leeds to sack him. âYou should be protecting students from this kind of animal, because if he’s willing to kill people over there, how do you know he’s not going to kill your students over here?’, he said. Deutsch returned to the UK to a bombardment of death threats, forcing him and his family into hiding.
Green party co-leader Carla Denyer has called Aliâs comments âvery concerningâ. Ali has made a vague, utterly unconvincing apology. An investigation is ongoing. But what is there to investigate? Hounding an innocent rabbi and whitewashing an Islamist, anti-Semitic pogrom as âresistanceâ are hardly on the subtle side. As it stands, Ali is still listed as a Green councillor on the Greensâ and Leeds City Councilâs respective websites.
Most disturbingly, the Greens were presented with a dossier of evidence about Ali, by the Daily Mailâs Guy Adams, in February â and seemingly did absolutely nothing about it. We are within our rights to raise a sceptical eyebrow at Denyerâs shocked response after Aliâs comments resurfaced following the locals.
So this is the niche the Green party is keen to fill now, is it? And how do these views square with the Greensâ particularly fanatical embrace of misogynistic transgenderism? How is any of this remotely âprogressiveâ, the political tradition the party claims to represent?
In a way, it all makes a perverse kind of sense. That extreme environmentalism has come to be seen as even vaguely left-wing is crazy when you think about it. The Greensâ anti-growth, anti-fossil-fuel, anti-car agenda would immiserate the working classes â and kneecap the poor of the developing world â to salve the consciences of bourgeois, Farmersâ Market aficionados. It is an ideology of knowing oneâs place.
Whatâs more, British environmentalism has many â often unacknowledged â historical connections to disturbing movements. Jorian Jenks, co-founder of the Soil Association, was a card-carrying member of Oswald Mosleyâs Fascists. Writer and naturalist Henry Williamson, best known for his book Tarka the Otter, was an admirer of Adolf Hitler (another early eco-nut), and believed âusurial moneyed interestsâ not only caused war but were also destroying the British countryside.
How grim that todayâs Greens have been caught making excuses for the primary fascistic, Jew-hating threat we face today â namely, radical Islamism. Indeed, Islamofascism â like plain old fascism â has always had a strong environmentalist bent: Osama bin Laden would often rail against âcatastrophicâ climate change, which he laid at the feet of ‘Satanic’ American capitalism.
Perhaps the rampant Hamas apologism among the Greensâ General Election candidates isnât all that surprising after all.
Nigel Farage will be disappointed by his BBC debate performance
It had been called the dinner party from hell. A seven-strong convention of the also rans. But only one dinner guest really mattered: Nigel Farage. The populist politician’s last-minute decision to stand as a Reform candidate in Clacton has struck fear into the hearts of Conservative MPs across the country, but especially in the 60 marginal seats that Professor John Curtice says Reform could help the Tories lose on 4 July.
The surprise of the night was a new coalition on electoral reform between Farage and the Lib Dems
But none of tonightâs participants in the BBC debate were going to allow the debate to turn into the Nigel Farage show. He was largely closed down by the other six politicians who were determined to paint him as an anti-immigration ‘bigot’ as the Plaid Cymru leader, Rhun Ap Iorwerth, put it, who would privatise the NHS as soon as look at.
Farage did actually say the NHS model is ‘broken’ and called for insurance-based funding as in France. He got in some Trumpist jeering. Sir Keir Starmer is ‘Blair without the flair’, he said, and he branded the PM, ‘Rishi slippery Sunak’. He also said Angela Rayner is the real Labour leader.
But the audience didnât warm to Farageâs claim that this is ‘the immigration election’ and that it is causing a ‘population crisis’. The SNP Westminster leader, Stephen Flynn, earned one of the few spontaneous outbreaks of applause for saying we need more immigration not less. No doubt Farage will think the audience was rigged by the BBC globalists.
Penny Mordaunt agreed that with Farage that ‘immigration is too high’ and warned that there would be ‘uncontrolled immigration under Labour’ because they have ‘no plan’. Angela Rayner also seemed to agree with Farage that immigration is too high and blamed 14 years of Conservative government for it. Her plan is a border force and scrapping the Rwanda scheme.
Rishi Sunakâs early departure from the D-Day commemorations was inevitably the first question from the audience. Was the Tory leader of the house, Penny Mordaunt, a naval reservist, going to defend her leader? Not a bit of it. ‘What happened was completely wrong and the PM has rightly apologised to everyone’. Nigel Farage said the PMâs ‘desertion’ of the D-Day event revealed him as ‘an unpatriotic Prime Minister’.
The liveliest exchanges of the evening, if you could call them that, were unsurprisingly over Sunakâs ÂŁ2000 tax bombshell, which has blown up in the Prime Ministerâs face after the Treasury permanent secretary, James Bowler, suggested the costing was misleading. Mordaunt tried to mobilise the tax artillery but it led to an incoherent shouting match between her and Angela Rayner. ‘That was terribly dignified wasnât it,’ said the Green co-leader, Carla Denyer. It wasnât.
Mordaunt accused Rayner of voting to scrap Trident. She denied it. ‘We will keep (the) nuclear deterrent’, she said, though only this week the Labour deputy leader said that âshe hadnât changed her mind on nuclear weaponsâ. Stephen Flynn too called for the abolition of Trident. He also unveiled a new SNP slogan: ‘Itâs Scotlandâs wind and Scotlandâs waves’, he said, that is powering the green energy transition. Everyone supported the transition except Nigel Farage who said it was too expensive. Mordaunt had a poke at Labourâs new state owned energy company, GB Energy. It stands for Giant Bills, she said. Boom boom.
The surprise of the night was a new coalition on electoral reform between Farage and the Lib Dems’ deputy leader, Daisy Cooper, though neither of them seemed very interested in celebrating it. Cooper tried the old trick of accusing the big parties of being unable to keep their promises. That was until the moderator, Mishal Husain, asked her if she remembered that promise about abolishing tuition fees. Ouch.
Mordaunt’s debate strategy was to pretend Farage wasn’t there
How is it possible that a seven-way debate between the main parties in this election was more civilised than the two-way stand-off between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak earlier this week? Tonight’s BBC debate was bizarrely better viewing. Sure, the party representatives interrupted one another, attacked each other, and flung about fake figures. But it was easier to follow.
Mordaunt did not defend or praise Rishi Sunak
It was also fascinating to see who attacked who. Penny Mordaunt largely pretended Nigel Farage didn’t exist, but interrupted Angela Rayner frequently. Farage â who was in much better humour and shape than the 2015 election and 2016 Brexit debates, which he largely sweated through â obviously went for the Conservatives the most, saying in his closing statement that this election wasn’t just about the government, but about who would be in opposition. Tory MPs listening to that will have heard a threat, given the Reform leader’s desire to take over their party when it is in the post-election defeat doldrums.
Everyone based their statements on the premise that Labour was going to win the election and that the Tories were doomed, and Mordaunt didn’t do that much to fight back, instead offering regular critiques of what she saw as being the key Labour policies. That included the dodgy ÂŁ2,000 tax claim that Sunak made earlier in the week, as well as a memorable line that Labour GB Energy company stood for ‘Giant Bills’.
Farage took issue with Mordaunt’s claim about tax, saying the Tories claiming that they believed in lower taxes was ‘dishonesty on a breathtaking scale’. Rayner also said it was a lie, and that the Tories had put taxes up. That was another theme of everyone’s response: lies. Lib Dem deputy leader Daisy Cooper in particular accused the Tories of lying, but so did the other speakers.Â
The two nationalist parties â Plaid Cymru and the SNP â both wanted to accuse the Tories and Labour of being the same. Stephen Flynn, always impressive as SNP Westminster group leader, was crisp and clear as he spoke about his own experience of disability and later as he critiqued Labour’s energy policy and what it meant for Scotland. He glossed over the SNP’s own ambiguities over licences for oil and gas in the North Sea. Plaid Cymru’s Rhun Ap Iorwerth similarly accused the Tories and Labour of speaking the same language. Carla Denyer for the Greens had the knockout blow on this, though. In her closing statement, she said: ‘Angela Rayner said Keir Starmer had changed the Labour party. She’s right. He’s turned them into the Conservatives.’
Notably, though, Mordaunt did not defend or praise Rishi Sunak. The first question inevitably ended up being about D-Day, and she simply said that what had happened was ‘very wrong’, adding: ‘The Prime Minister has rightly apologised for that, apologised to veterans, but also to all of us because he was representing all of us. I’m from Portsmouth. I’ve also been defence secretary and my wish at the end of this week is that all of our veterans feel completely treasured.’
Both she and Rayner are class acts, and often benefit from their respective leaders’ misfortunes. Perhaps Mordaunt was quite happy to address the D-Day question early on because of this. But by the end, she seemed rather downbeat. The assumption shared across the room that the Tories are about to lose very badly seemed to be weighing on her.
Watch: Sunak heckled by local GP
When it rains for Rishi Sunak, it pours. Just hours after the Prime Minister was forced to apologise for leaving D-day commemorations early to film a pre-recorded ITV interview, Sunak was faced with more challenges on the election trail.
During a campaign visit, a frustrated member of the public â who is also a local doctor â had a go at the beleaguered PM over his party’s NHS workforce plan. It supports the training of physician associates to work in the health service, which has caused outrage in the medical community amidst fears that doctors in the country are not being adequately supported by the government.
In a rather robust rant, the GP raged:
What are you going to do about that? 37,000 GPs will not vote Conservative because of the constructive dismissal of general practice that is currently occurring. You cannot employ lesser qualified people instead of GPs. They cannot be replaced. The country is not stupid.
That’s him told…
Watch the clip here:
As it happened: Mordaunt clashes with Rayner in BBC election debate
Nigel Farage traded blows with Labour’s Angela Rayner and the Tories’ Penny Mordaunt in tonight’s seven-way BBC election debate. Rishi Sunak’s decision to leave D-Day commemorations in France early was also a big talking point in the debate which involved Daisy Cooper, deputy leader of the Lib Dems, the SNP’s Stephen Flynn, Rhun ap Iorwerth of Plaid Cymru and Green party co-leader Carla Denyer. Here’s all the action and analysis as it unfolded on our live blog:
Farage is wrong to question Sunak’s patriotism
It didnât take long for Nigel Farage to weaponise Sunak’s D-Day debacle. ‘Rishi Sunak pops into Normandy but omits to go to the big international commemoration,’ he says in a pre-debate warmup video. ‘He doesnât really care about our history. He doesn’t really care, frankly, about our cultureâŠThis man is not patriotic. Doesnât believe in the country, its people, its history or frankly even its culture. If youâre a patriotic voter, donât vote for Rishi Sunak.’
Jeremy Corbyn was frequently attacked for being unpatriotic but thatâs more to do with his links with Sinn Fein and taking the non-British side in a few too many international disputes. It is absurd for anyone to question the patriotism of Sunak who, like Sajid Javid, is the son of immigrants who quit a very successful financial career in hope of giving back. Both of them went into politics in hope of doing what they could to make their own success stories less rare. Sunak has spoken repeatedly and movingly about the debt his family owes this country having pursued their British dream.
But Farage is trying to be inflammatory. The idea is to turn the conversation to the subject of your choice (Sunak’s patriotism) by making vile accusations that will get people talking by sheer shock factor. This is the Tump playbook, a standard populist election technique. Here’s his Sky News version of the same attack line.
So itâs perhaps worth mentioning what Sunak really did in the D-Day commemorations. Leaving early was a big miscalculation, for which he has apologised and I donât demur from the critiques published on this website. But given that so much weight is being placed on what happened, it may help to put things in context.Â
Skipping the afternoon ceremony (where no veterans were due to be present) was always Sunakâs plan
His programme of commemorations started in Portsmouth on Wednesday, where he welcomed the Prince of Wales to the D-Day ceremony and sat with the king. This was the event where the Queen wept. Sunak gave a reading: General Montgomeryâs letter to the troops just before the invasion. He then met veterans and their families, others who read in the ceremony and servicemen and women. After that, there was lunch with veterans and their families â where he went to every single table.
Sunak arrived at the British Normandy Memorial the next day and gave a speech, then headed to the British ceremony in the small coastal village of Ver-sur-Mer. The PM addressed veterans and their families, greeted Emmanuel Macron and walked down with him. Both then went to the memorial and spent half an hour meeting veterans: Sunak offered to wheel one of them through the memorial. After that, he and his wife spent an hour with veterans in a tent: again, they went to every single table. Finally, Sunak and the King went to unveil a plaque at the newly-opened Churchill Centre, part of the Memorial. Yet again, he was talking to veterans whilst they waited for the king to arrive.
The British side of the ceremony then concluded. The King left. Sunak (fatally) followed soon after. The international ceremony in Omaha beach in the afternoon then was far more developed than No10 had originally believed. David Cameron stayed and the resulting photos are, now, notorious: a foreign secretary, standing next to three G7 world leaders while his boss was in London being interviewed by ITV. Sunak didn’t go back for the interview: skipping the afternoon ceremony (which No. 10 had been told would not be attended by any veterans) was always Sunakâs plan, set before he called the election. ‘I stuck to the itinerary that had been set for me weeks ago,’ he said in his Sky News apology. ‘On reflection, it was a mistake not to stay longer â and Iâve apologised for that. But I also donât think itâs right to be political in the middle of D-Day veterans.’
Would it have been âpoliticalâ to change his itinerary,? Of course not. The big mystery is the Foreign Office. It is very good at diplomatic protocol and will have been able to alert No10 when the afternoon event quickly became a Macron-Sholtz-Biden-UK photocall. The FCO know the disrespect implied in sending a Foreign Secretary to meet three G7 world leaders. If Zelensky could make that ceremony while fighting a war for his country’s survival, Sunak could surely spare an afternoon. Did the election (and purdah) somehow stop this being pointed out to him? And what about Cameron, who knows a thing or two about campaign mistakes. Did he try to have a quiet word with Sunak? Or had he stopped caring and happily accept his last photocall with world leaders?
Sunak believes in speaking through actions, and is more interested in policy than the ceremonial aspects of the job. Underestimating the importance of optics and ceremony may have been his undoing here. When it comes to policy, he has an extensive veteransâ agenda; his wife works for such charities â his actions, for veterans, are not in doubt. Perhaps actions should speak louder than ceremonies. But in politics, they don’t – as Sunak will now indelibly learn.
But to stretch this misjudgement into proof that Sunak somehow doesnât care about Britainâs history, people or culture is a revolting slur impossible to reconcile with the Prime Minister’s policies, record and character. Farage really should be ashamed.
Watch: Galloway blasts ‘believers’ who support Labour
Oh dear. While Prime Minister Rishi Sunak struggles to fend off criticism about leaving Thursday’s D-day commemorations early, another party leader is causing controversy elsewhere. A video of George Galloway of the Workers Party of Britain is doing the rounds in London WhatsApp groups. In a heated campaign speech, Galloway blasted Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party in an angry tirade:
Anybody who considers themselves to be a religious believer, who intends to vote for Keir Starmer, the genocide agent, should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves, should forget about the Eid, should forget about fasting, should forget about praying. You think God is listening to someone who’s praying one day and voting for Keir Starmer the day before? What kind of a believer would that be?
Good heavens. ‘Isn’t this illegal? Using religious arguments to sway an electorate?’ asked one Twitter user. It seems ‘Gorgeous George’ might have got himself into a rather sticky situation…
Watch the clip here:
Sunak is out of touch, and always has been
Rishi Sunak says it was a âmistakeâ to leave the 80th anniversary commemorations for D-Day early. Thatâs one way to describe ditching a memorial to the liberation of Western Europe to record an election interview for the telly. We have heard the various reasons as to why this was such an error. It was dreadful judgement. Terrible optics. Anathema to the very Silent Generation and Baby Boomer voters his election campaign is tailored to.
But while I have no designs on defending him, I suspect this is just who Sunak is. As one highly astute commentator, who isnât above saying âI told you soâ, once observed: âHe combines the perception he is out of touch with the fact of actually being out of touch.â It would not have occurred to him to stay and talk to the few surviving British veterans of D-Day, to grin for endless photographs as he listened to the same accounts over and over again. That would have required a quality Sunak lacks, and itâs not judgement as his other critics keep saying. Itâs empathy. Empathy for the old boys, of course, but empathy also for the public and the reverence with which it regards these men. Empathy for a common, unspoken instinct about how the British prime minister should conduct himself on a D-Day anniversary.Â
Sunak computed events very differently. He had a problem: his ÂŁ2,000 tax claim was coming unstuck. There was a solution: going on ITV News to defend his assertion. But there was an obstacle: the Normandy events. So he opted for a workaround: leaving early. I have no doubt that in Sunakâs mind he executed the only logical course of action. Given his chilly, unfeeling apology, I get the impression he still doesnât understand why he is being lambasted.
Recall the reports, which he denies, that as chancellor he suggested England secede from the UK because the Union âdoesnât make financial sense to himâ. The most woad-caked, saltire-hugging, Braveheart-quoting Scottish nationalist, even as he agitates to break up Britain, understands the emotional investment Tories and Unionists have in its history, shared destiny and constitutional character. A Conservative chancellor, now prime minister, saw only a balance sheet with assets and losses. As our astute commentator also noted: âItâs like the Economist set up a chatbot that accidentally got elected Prime Minister.â
Sunak has no real feeling for D-Day, no feeling for the British people, no feeling for Britain. I wrote the previous sentence with great reluctance because I know some will hear it as a dog-whistle against the first British Asian prime minister. All I can say is that there is no coded meaning here and certainly no racist intent. It is Sunakâs flaws as a politician, not his heritage, that make him stand apart from the nation he leads.Â
Sunak is not an evil man. He comes across as a loving husband and a devoted father. He is easier to pity than to hate. He is just singularly unsuited to the office he holds and plainly unable to fake his way through. In that he fails to meet even the low bar cleared by the leader of the opposition. The D-Day commemorations were Sir Keir Starmerâs first official engagement as Prime Minister. He stayed, he listened, he showed respect. He represented our country in a way our prime minister could not.
The Labour leader will not be long in Downing Street before his own faults become undeniable even to his army of columnist fan boys. To mistake him for a person of character or courage or moral leadership requires a lobotomy for the period 2015 to 2019 inclusive. He is a man of no discernible quality save an instinct for personal survival and that public sector speciality of managing mediocrity. But after 19 months of Rishi Sunak, mediocrity looks prime ministerial.Â
Why are Europeâs progressives often intolerant?
For Robert Fico it was a bullet, for Nigel Farage it was a milkshake. The targeting of both men demonstrates the alarming rise of intolerance spreading across Europe. Most of it is perpetrated by people whose political ideology can best be described as progressive, but they are extremists, prepared to make the leap from words to acts.
Across the West, elite society is dominated by progressives, overwhelmingly middle or upper-middle class graduates
Fico, for example, the prime minister of Slovakia, describes himself as the leader of a left-wing populist party. The man charged with shooting him last month is a 71-year-old poet and supporter of the liberal party, Progressive Slovakia. The party has denied any links with the accused, who has reportedly said he didn’t intend to kill Fico. It is alleged that the gunman didnât approve of Ficoâs plan to abolish the public broadcaster RTVS or his pro-Russia position.
The 25-year-old woman who has been charged with assaulting Farage outside a pub in Clacton had previously expressed her support for Jeremy Corbyn. She said of the Reform party leader: âHe doesnât stand for me, he doesnât represent anything I believe in, or any of the people around here.â Farage was the victim of a similar incident in 2019 as he toured Newcastle. On that occasion the man who threw the milkshake, Paul Crowther, told reporters as he was arrested: âItâs a right of protest against people like him.â
On the same day that Farage was attacked in Clacton, a local election candidate for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was stabbed in Mannheim. According to reports, 62-year-old Heinrich Koch was set upon after he challenged a man who was tearing down his partyâs election posters. Last week in Mannheim a policeman was killed, and several others wounded, at an anti-Islamism rally.
There have been other incidents in other countries. Last November in Madrid, Alejo Vidal Quadras, the co-founder of the right-wing Vox party was seriously wounded when he was shot in the face. Police have made several arrests but the motive for the assassination attempt remains unclear.
In the same month a Tory councillor in Glasgow, who has faced years of intimidation and abuse, was assaulted allegedly because of his views on the conflict in Gaza. Also in November, Thierry Baudet, the leader of the Dutch Forum for Democracy, was attacked with a beer bottle as he campaigned ahead of the general election. A few week earlier he had been assaulted during a visit to Belgium by a man with an umbrella who was shouting anti-fascist slogans.
In March this year police in Amsterdam arrested a man in connection with death threats made against the winner of the Dutch election, Geert Wilders. Eric Zemmour, leader of the right-wing Reconquest, has been assaulted twice in recent years, both times by people throwing eggs. The latest incident was last month in Corsica by a woman who shouted âfascists outâ as she threw the egg.
One canât help but laugh coldly at the absurd irony of people railing about fascism as they attempt to prevent a politician from going about their democratic business.
Some progressives find these attacks genuinely amusing. There has been a lot of mirth on social media about Farageâs latest soaking, as there was the first time. âI’m thinking, why bother with a milkshake when you could get some battery acid?â quipped the light entertainer, Jo Brand, on a BBC radio programme in 2019. Brand had her knuckles very gently rapped by the BBC; the media regulator Ofcom investigated her remark but concluded it was âunlikely to encourage or incite the commission of a crimeâ.
Fico this week made his first appearance since the shooting, and he blamed the media for creating a climate of contempt and intolerance that led to the attempt on his life. There is some truth in that accusation. Across the West, elite society is dominated by progressives, overwhelmingly middle or upper-middle class graduates. They are driven by snobbery. When they rage against âpopulismâ, they mean the Proles. The âgammonsâ, âKarensâ and âsans dentsâ who voted for Trump, Brexit, Meloni, Le Pen, Zemmour. Wilders et al.
They try to censor the few broadcasters who go against the progressive grain, like GB News and, in France, CNews, which this week became officially the Republicâs most watched news channel. In response, the progressive newspaper Liberation called the popularity of CNews âa major shift in the media and political landscape and a real threat to democracyâ. It accused the channel of âfuelling fear, hatred and angerâ.
CNews attribute their spectacular success to the fact that they voice what the Silent Majority thinks. For years, the State-owned TV and radio stations â have pumped out an endless stream of Progressive dogma, which goes down well in the more upmarket Parisian arrondissements but says nothing to the provinces.
CNews is the mouthpiece for those who have been impoverished by globalism, who experience first-hand the result of mass uncontrolled immigration and who feel they are governed by a small elite who hold them and their country in contempt.
The woman who threw the milkshake at Farage objected to his presence because he doesnât represent her views âor any of the people around hereâ. Really? Seventy per cent of Clacton residents voted for Brexit in 2016.
This explains so much of the progressivesâ angry intolerance. They are in the minority, and it drives them mad, and increasingly violent.
Hunter Bidenâs gun trial nearing its end
The gun trial for Hunter Biden will likely wrap up early next week as the prosecution rested its case on Friday. The defense expects to call about two to three witnesses, including an employee of the gun store at which Hunter purchased a firearm while allegedly being an active drug abuser, Hunterâs uncle James Biden and Hunterâs daughter Naomi Biden.
Naomi took the stand Friday afternoon and testified that her father seemed âhopefulâ in October 2018, the month he purchased the gun, and that she did not personally observe any drug paraphernalia or other signs of abuse in her fatherâs car. She had previously visited Hunter at a rehab facility in the summer of 2018 and told him she was âproudâ of him. Under cross, the prosecution got Naomi to admit she had never seen her father use drugs and would not be able to tell whether or not he was actively using.
However, Naomiâs testimony stands in stark contrast to witnesses brought forth by the prosecution, which aims to prove that Hunter is guilty on three federal charges related to firearm possession while using narcotics. A DEA agent testified to the âcoded languageâ Hunter used in text messages to refer to drugs around the time he purchased the firearm, including âbaby powder,â âparty favor,â âFentenâ and âchore boy.â Hunter also texted in October 2018 that he was lying on top of a car âsmoking crack.â There was also cocaine residue found in the leather pouch where Hunter stored the gun, according to a forensic chemist.
Hunterâs ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, testified that she would often search his car for drugs after she discovered he was addicted to crack. Hunterâs sister-in-law turned affair partner, Hallie Biden, revealed that she found drug remnants and paraphernalia in Hunterâs truck at the same time she discovered the firearm in October 2018.
The star of the trial, at least on social media, was gentlemanâs club dancer Zoe Kestan. She said she met Hunter in December 2017 when he booked her and another woman for a private dance, during which he played the band Fleet Foxes on his phone and smoked crack. Kestan said she found Hunter âcharmingâ even though he smoked crack âevery twenty minutes or so,â and stated that there was not a noticeable difference in Hunterâs behavior when he was high. The pair had numerous encounters after their initial meeting, with Kestan saying, âI felt really safe around him.â
Initial reports from the trial seem to suggest that few witnesses have faced the kind of badgering that took place at Trumpâs criminal trial in New York, with the exception of a gun store employee who Hunterâs attorney Abbe Lowell tried to pin down on the timeframe between when Hunter filled out a background check form and when the gun purchase was complete. âYouâre trying to set a time frame â thatâs not gonna happen,â the employee said, adding that the sixteen-minute gap came from him filling out the rest of the form: âI write slow.â
The employee also accused the defense team of being a âmessâ that âcanât be on time for nothing.â
-Amber Duke
On our radar
NAACPâS WARNING TO BIDENÂ The NAACP urged President Joe Biden to pause sending weapons to Israel to aid in its war in Gaza as progressive pollsters claim Bidenâs position on the war is alienating black voters.Â
SILICON RALLY Former president Donald Trump reportedly raised north of $12 million at a San Francisco event for techies. Tech entrepreneur David Sacks hosted the event at his $20 million home. Â
OUT OF COURT The 2023 financial disclosures of eight out of nine Supreme Court justices were released this week; Clarence Thomas disclosed two 2019 trips paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow. Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown-Jackson all reported six-figure earnings from book deals, and Jackson said BeyoncĂ© gifted her $4,000 worth of concert tickets.Â
Washington Post dying in dishonesty?
Things have gotten fiery but mostly peaceful at the Washington Postâs headquarters following the abrupt ouster of executive editor Sally Buzbee on Sunday.
âItâs as bad as Iâve ever seen it, truly,â one staffer said Thursday, noting that WaPoâs previous ârough patchesâ have never led to anything resembling the current chaos.
Staffers were furious that the paperâs publisher, Will Lewis, brought in a Wall Street Journal editor to oversee the newsroom until the November election. They demanded to know the reasons for Buzbeeâs departure in a town hall with Lewis. Lewis told them, in short, that he couldnât sugarcoat things anymore â the paper could no longer go on hemorrhaging money and losing subscribers.Â
Reports this week put an even bigger flame under the newsroom. Weeks before Buzbeeâs ouster, Lewis allegedly had pressured her to refrain from publishing a story that described his alleged involvement in the UK phone hacking scandal. The scandal had consistently been described as a Rupert Murdoch-headed âright-wing media” project. It involved lots of unethical practices, including the hacking of Prince Harryâs phone.
Lewis called the reports âinaccurateâ and denied pressuring Buzbee in any way. He said the story went through the normal editorial process and he merely offered standard input.Â
Whom are we to believe? Democracy dies in darkness, but dishonesty thrives in it.Â
–Juan P. Villasmil
Clooneyâs White House relationship Up in the Air
As the war between Israel and Hamas continues, one new casualty may be George Clooneyâs relationship with the White House. Following the unprecedented arrest warrants sought by prosecutors at the International Criminal Court for Israeli orime minister Benjamin Netanyanu, his defense minister and the terrorist leadership of Hamas, the actor called in to express his disappointment that President Joe Biden dubbed the warrants âoutrageous.â
Clooneyâs rationale? His wife may be harmed. Amal Clooney, while far less well-known than her silver fox of a husband, worked on the arrest warrants of Netanyahu. Were the United States to follow through on sanctions against the ICC, she may be targeted. Fortunately for her, the White House currently opposes a Republican-led bipartisan bill that would sanction the ICC.
This is all immensely awkward for Biden and Clooney, who donated over half a million dollars to Biden campaign entities in 2020 â and who remains slated to co-host a fundraiser with the president later this month. It is unclear if Amal Clooney will be joining her husband and the president who sometimes sounds willing to sanction her at this upcoming event.
–Cockburn
SNP’s musical campaign efforts fall on deaf ears
With only four weeks to go until the general election, party campaigns are rapidly ramping up. Politicians and staffers are desperately searching for more creative (and crazy) ways of getting voters’ attention â and north of the border the Nats have mobilised the musical wing of their party.
Taylor Swift is in town for the start of the UK leg of her Eras tour and the SNPâs Swift-mania is in overdrive. One press release from the Nats managed to include a whole, um, 11 references to the starâs songs, including a line from social security secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville that read:
Thereâs no question that the Tories are out of Style in Scotland â and as the main challengers in every Tory-held seat, only a vote for the SNP can send Sunak packing in his Getaway Car with a clear message that We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.
Goodness. This morning First Minister John Swinney continued the cringe-fest by insisting that renaming the loch in his Scottish constituency to âLoch Tay Tayâ creates âa new bond between me and the Swiftiesâ. The newest SNP leader went on to announce his favourite Taylor song was âYou Need to Calm Downâ, in which the American singer croons: ‘You just need to take several seats and then try to restore the peace.’ Easier said than doneâŠ
The SNP candidate for Falkirk, Tony Giugliano, is trying to woo voters with a song titled âWe are Scotland – Special Versionâ
And over the last 24 hours it has transpired that Scotlandâs First Minister, who was dubbed ‘sexy’ by an activist at an election campaign launch last weekend, has served as many a songwriter’s muse himself. In 1982 Nocturnal Vermin, a punk band from Edinburgh, wrote âJohn Swinney (We Salute You)â about their classmateâs quest to save Scotland. More recently the Daily Recklessâs Tommy Mackay â himself a punk musician-turned-comedian who founded âThe Sensational Alex Salmond Gastric Bandâ â released a less flattering tune about the new First Ministerâs rather dull presentation style. The sedative-referencing lyrics include: âHere comes Swinney, pass the mogadon.â
The SNP is of course no stranger to musical MPs, with Runrig bandmate Pete Wishart having represented Perth and North Perthshire since 2001. Might he have inspired one of the SNP’s parliamentary hopefuls? Mr S has discovered that the partyâs candidate for Falkirk is trying to woo voters with a song of his own. Tony Giugliano joined forces with Scots group The Bletherin to produce a âWe are Scotland – Special Versionâ that came out last week. âCome and join us,â the long-standing SNP activist warbles. âPeople say itâs time to write a new constitution. And find our way out, escaping from this broken union. We have a voice, and time is on our side.â Crikey. Itâs certainly one way to campaignâŠ
But the Nats will need more than music to save their seats. Labour is consistently polling ahead of the SNP in Scotland, ahead by an average of six points, while pollsters predict Sir Keirâs lefty lot could wipe out most of the nationalist presence in the central belt. One pro-independence activist has even put money on the Nats returning less than 10 seats at the election. Mr S reckons the SNP needs more than Swinneyâs Swiftie credentials â and Giuglianoâs impassioned vocals â to help them out of this messâŠ
Nigel Farageâs biggest gift to the Labour party
Labour has a lot of reasons to be thankful for Nigel Farage. Reform was already creeping up on the Tories in the polls, even before the partyâs honorary president announced this week that he would take up the role of leader and stand in Clacton. Now the polls are nearly neck-and-neck. The most recent YouGov survey â published on Wednesday, accounting for Farageâs announcement but not Tuesday nightâs debate â showed Reform on 17 per cent, a mere two points behind the Conservatives.
As Katy Balls notes in this weekâs magazine, Farage likes to insist that Reform tends to take more votes from Labour than the Tories, but the main bloc up for grabs seems to be 2019 Tory voters. âThose people who are saying theyâre going to vote Labour wonât when they see that Iâm here and what Iâm standing for in this electionâ, Farage told Channel 4 this week. Perhaps, but Boris Johnsonâs supporters in the Red Wall are just as likely to see him too.
This is one of the many gifts Farage has handed Labour by entering the race this week. Another is on tax: by sucking all the oxygen out of the campaign, the persistent pursuit of Labourâs tax agenda has let up. The momentum building to the big reveal about the partyâs tax and spend plans has largely subsided, as the focus â and entertainment â has pivoted to Farage.
Last week â before Farageâs announcements â Labour were being forced to grapple with their plans for tax. Asked repeatedly what taxes would rise under a Labour government, both Keir Starmer and his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, came very close to ruling out any more increases within a matter of days. Reeves once again ruled out income tax rises on Sunday and by Tuesday she was promising what had already been announced â including a bigger windfall tax on oil and gas companies and VAT on private-school fees â was âthe sum of the tax changesâ that Labour was bringing in.
But the focus shifted. In the ITV leadersâ debate, Starmer was only asked to rule out the taxes he has already said he will not raise over the next parliament â leaving a long list of questions about what else Labour might do. Only yesterday the Guardian revealed growing pressure from shadow ministers on Starmer and Reeves to commit to other major revenue raisers, including an increase to capital gains tax. These are questions Labour still needs to answer, but not as quickly or with as much focus on these issues, with Farage in the game.
Of course it isnât just Reform enabling Labour to have an easier ride. But for Starmer, keeping tax out of the headlines â and avoiding particular tax commitments â is the best outcome his party can get. The irony is stark: Farage entered this race, in part, to draw attention to the near-record high tax burden that he thinks could be made even heavier by Labour. But since jumping into the campaign, Labourâs had far fewer questions to answer.
How many more houses will Labour actually build?
Is Labour really going to help get 80,000 people on the housing ladder over the next five years under its Freedom to Buy scheme, as it is claiming this morning? Given the rather light ambition of this target, I would say it probably has a chance of hitting that target, although it wonât transform the life-chances of young people.
According to the ONS, 51.4 per cent of 20 to 24-year-olds were still living with their parents, along with 26.7 per cent of 25 to 29-year-olds. That is several million people who in past generations might have been expected to be making their own way in the world â indeed, the figures above have grown substantially over the past decade: in 2011, 44.5 per cent of 20 to 24-year-olds and 20.1 per cent of 25 to 29-year-olds were living with their parents. As for those who have managed to move out of the parental home, many are renting rather than buying. In 2022, 39.1 per cent of 25 to 35-year-olds owned their home, down from 56.5 per cent two decades earlier.
To promise to create an extra 80,000 homeowners, then, would not reverse the long-term decline in home-ownership among young people. Moreover, the way Labour is promising to do it may merely make things worse in the longer run. Labourâs Freedom to Buy scheme is really just a reheated version of the current governmentâs Mortgage Guarantee Scheme, which itself is just a rehashed form of the mortgage guarantee element of George Osborneâs Help to Buy scheme. The purpose of each of these has been to underwrite high loan-to-value mortgages so that the banks feel more confident about advancing these loans, thus enabling first-time buyers to buy property without having to wait in order to amass a huge deposit.
But there is a reason why banks have become shy of offering 90 or 95 per cent mortgages â they burned their fingers on them in the past. Immediately prior to the 2008/09 financial crisis, Northern Rock was even offering a 125 per cent mortgage â and we know how that ended. The problem with 90 or 95 per cent home loans is that it doesnât take much of a fall in house prices to leave buyers in negative equity â and banks with loans on their books which are no longer fully secured by assets. The collapse of the US housing market in 2008 was enough to destabilise much of the financial system, so much so that after the crash there was serious consideration in government circles as to whether high loan-to-value mortgages should be banned. Gordon Brown decided against it, and then George Osborne came up with an alternative idea: letâs encourage these loans by having the taxpayer take on the banksâ risk instead. As for homebuyers, they remain at risk of negative equity, whoever is bearing the risk of them defaulting on their debt.
On its own, mortgage guarantee schemes do little to solve the housing problem because they are merely helping to boost demand. If the supply of housing remains tight, they run the risk of inflating prices further, making life even more difficult for the next generation of homebuyers. Look at what has happened since Osborne introduced Help to Buy in 2013: the rate of housebuilding rose slowly after 2013 but has never matched government ambitions for long. Last year, 149,000 new homes were built in England â just half the 300,000 which Boris Johnsonâs government had promised â before Rishi Sunak abandoned the target. Given that net migration has hit record highs over the past couple of years, you can see the problem.
What is Labour going to do to boost housebuilding? It is talking about building on âgreyfieldâ land, by which it seems to mean abandoned car parks in the green belt. I donât know how many abandoned car parks there are around the M25, but I would guess not enough to house Britainâs growing constituency of frustrated would-be homebuyers. And even if there were, it would not solve the problem of rising construction costs, a lack of construction workers â many of whom Labour might well find are diverted onto its programme to insulate existing homes. Without resolving the fundamental shortage of supply, Freedom to Buy merely risks stoking house price inflation further.