Rishi Sunak has lost his fizz

A harrowing session at PMQs. Rishi Sunak seemed subdued and de-energised. His fizz had gone flat. The usual hip-wriggling shuffle at the despatch had been replaced with a hunched, anxious pose. Heavy shoulders. Head drooping. The Middle East crisis has snapped his elastic.

Sir Keir, by contrast, was beaming like a City embezzler celebrating his daughter’s wedding. Spreading one arm wide, he turned munificently towards his backbenchers and welcomed the victors from last week’s by-elections. He poked fun at the defeated Tory in Tamworth, Andrew Cooper, who had dismissed the complaints of voters who can’t buy food but can afford a mobile phone.

Sir Keir said that Labour won last week because it ‘had not told constituents to eff off if they’re struggling with the cost of living.’ He pulled a look of outrage. ‘Throwing expletives at struggling families?’ he tutted. He asked Sunak to call a general election. ‘They’ve heard the government telling them to eff off and they want the chance to return the compliment.’

Sunak tried to expose inconsistencies (or lies if you prefer) in Labour’s housing policy. Sir Keir claims that he wants to build, build, build, except when he doesn’t want to build, build, build. His party has hit on a formula that works in constituencies across the country. ‘New housing everywhere – but not here.’ Sunak quipped that Nadine Dorries’s replacement would be a welcome change. ‘I hope the new member may actually support me a little bit more than the last one.’

Tory backbenchers chortled at that, but not very loudly. Their mood was funereal. Muted cheers greeted their leader when he arrived. No one called for ‘more’ when he’d batted away Sir Keir’s six questions.

The issue Sir Keir had ducked was Gaza. Too hot to handle. One false step could ruin his prospects. He’s decided to pretend that the Middle East, like his housing policy, doesn’t exist. Other MPs filled the void. Stuart D. Macdonald of the SNP said that ‘two million people cannot be sustained with just twenty-odd aid lorries.’ He mentioned Israel’s right to self-defence and he called for ‘a humanitarian ceasefire.’ His point about aid conceals an issue that no one wants to raise. Why does Gaza have limitless supplies of weapons but no food?

The SNP’s Mhairi Black used a simile from the arsonist’s lexicon. ‘We risk pouring petrol on fire in a place that only requires a spark to ignite.’ She referred to UK citizens stuck in Gaza with, ‘no food, no water, no medicine and no way out.’ And she raised the stakes by adding a ticking-clock device as if the crisis were a Hollywood thriller. ‘Forty-eight hours of fuel are left to keep the hospitals going but that was 28 hours ago.’ The fuel, she added ominously, ‘runs out tonight.’

Yasmin Qureshi read an email from a fugitive in Gaza. ‘We’re being massacred, relentlessly bombed, homes being destroyed.’ Qureshi said that ‘130 babies in incubators are in danger if fuel doesn’t reach the hospital.’ One child, by her reckoning, is being killed every 15 minutes. Then her question: ‘How many more innocent Palestinians must die before this Prime Minister calls for a humanitarian ceasefire?’

This makes a crude assumption: Sunak is personally slaughtering children but chooses to prolong the massacre rather than call it off. That’s neither true nor helpful. As the session ended, John McDonnell, the former shadow chancellor, asked for a recall of parliament if a ground invasion begins. There could be more of this.

The shameful desecration of Israel’s kidnapped children

We have seen many grim images over the past two weeks. Images of the apocalyptic, Isis-style violence visited upon the people of Israel by Hamas. Images of destruction and grief in Gaza as Israel hammers Hamas for its crimes against the Jewish people, as is its right.

And yet it is an image from London, not Sderot or Gaza City, that has haunted me all day today. Which has made me feel a visceral revulsion. It’s a photo of two sisters who were kidnapped by Hamas. Emma and Yuli are their names. They are twins, just three years old. They are hugging and smiling in the photo. They are a picture of innocence.

Then you notice the black scrawl above their smiling mouths – someone has daubed a Hitler moustache on them.

Read that again. A photo of two Jewish girls has been desecrated with Nazi-style imagery. Infant sisters violently seized by the anti-Semites of Hamas have been grotesquely maligned on the streets of London. Hamas violated their lives, then some scumbag in London violates their likeness.

The cruelty of this, the sheer malice of it, feels unfathomable to me. Try as I might, I cannot comprehend the mind that would denigrate children in this way. In fact, in reimagining little Emma and Yuli as fascists, with Hitler-style taches, whoever did this has not only defamed these poor mites – he has completely dehumanised them.

It happened on the Finchley Road, an area with a large Jewish population. This is where a mob of ‘pro-Palestine’ activists drove through the streets in 2021 shouting ‘Fuck the Jews! Rape their daughters!’ over a loudspeaker. And now this. Is nowhere safe for Jews now?

Of course it is possible the poster was defaced by dumb kids. The police are reportedly investigating. However, the graffiti scrawled on other ‘kidnapped’ posters on Finchley Road suggest something more sinister is at play. For example, the image of 17-year-old Tomer Eliaz Arava has been defaced with horns. And where it says ‘kidnapped from his home by Hamas’, someone has crossed out ‘Hamas’ and replaced it with ‘real men’. This would appear to be a very serious incident of racial hatred. (Young Tomer was not in fact kidnapped. He was murdered.)

And yet, even as we are shocked by this desecration of the innocents, we should not be surprised by it. One of the most disturbing trends of the past two weeks has been the defilement and destruction of posters showing the Israelis who are being held by Hamas. In the UK and the US, on the streets and on university campuses, there have been many incidents of poster desecration.

In Leicester Square last night, people were seen tearing posters down. Two young women in Camden ripped up posters and shouted: ‘This is for Palestine.’ Also in London a man was seen writing ‘coloniser’ on a poster featuring a two-year-old child who is being held hostage. Again, imagine how far a person must have fallen, morally, to dehumanise a literal infant as a ‘coloniser’; to imply that a kid had it coming.

In the US posters have been torn down in New York. In Brooklyn a furious woman confronted a couple who were ripping down posters. Some of these hostages are ‘American citizens’, she said, pleading with the couple to show a little humanity. The man just smirked. Radical students have been spotted attacking posters too. ‘Get the fuck out of my way’, said a man at the University of Pennsylvania when someone asked why he was taking posters down.

What is going on here? How do we explain this hateful violent uprising against images of the Israeli victims of Hamas barbarism?

To my mind, it is grim proof of the extent to which Israeli Jews have been dehumanised in many people’s minds. Courtesy of the cultural elite’s myopic loathing of Israel, the good people of that country have come to be viewed as an inferior species, essentially. As ‘colonisers’, not civilians. ‘Settlers’, not citizens. Legitimate targets, not human beings.

How else do we explain the spoiling even of images of Israeli-Jewish children? All of them are guilty, you see. All have been damned as players in the ‘evil’ of Zionism. The chattering classes’ relentless demonisation of Israel as a uniquely wicked state has led inexorably to the demonisation of Israeli people as uniquely lacking in the features of humanity. The end result is unconscionable. Hitler moustaches on children. Toddlers branded colonisers. And sympathy notable by its stark, pitiful absence.

The irony is horrendous. The West’s agitating haters of Israel pose as ‘anti-colonial’ and yet they dehumanise Israelis in a way that would have made even the colonialists of old balk. They have come to see Israeli Jews virtually as subhuman. That has been the drip drip effect of the Israelophobia that’s rampant among the elites, and it is now playing out on our streets.

Where are the anti-racists? ‘Silence is violence’, they said during the Black Lives Matter uprising in 2020. And yet now they are silent on the surge in anti-Semitic hate and the public mockery even of persecuted Jewish children. Their silence will haunt them. They will not be able to escape it. ‘Daddy, what did you do when the child victims of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust were being demeaned in London and New York?’ ‘Son, I said nothing.’

Inside Biden’s plan to regulate the open internet

The sun sets slowly over rural Indiana. In a quaint, sunlit kitchen, a concerned family gathers around a laptop. The pixelated face of a doctor fills the screen, her voice crackling with urgency. She’s discussing critical, life-saving interventions for the family’s patriarch, the victim of a recent, unexpected stroke. As she tries to explain the diagnosis, the video starts buffering, the voice breaks up and the screen freezes.

Why was the internet struggling? Dissuaded by an onerous regulatory environment, investors wouldn’t take a risk on rural infrastructure projects. Lacking incentives to develop new technologies, the local providers fell behind the curve. Meanwhile, in his parent’s basement in nearby Chicago, a lonely boy joins his guild in a multiplayer streaming game of Warcraft. Vying for the same bandwidth, each packet of game data is treated with the same urgency (or lack of) as the emergent medical situation. 

Welcome to the world of network neutrality: the recycled Obama-era policy that may dismantle the open internet as we know it. 

In this hyper-digital age, where the internet has intertwined inseparably with our lives, the same woke sloganeering that has crumbled our universities and kneecapped our once vibrant metropolitan centers may claim the internet as its next victim. The consequences here, though, may be even more dire. 

Net neutrality — the philosophy that holds every packet of data should be treated equally — is the Biden administration’s latest infatuation. It’s a timeless dance: drape an issue in the comforting garb of fairness, of “for the people,” and the masses rally. But when the curtains are pulled back, what’s revealed isn’t an altruistic fight for the downtrodden, but a strategic maneuver to annex more control. 

Our story begins in the 1930s with the Telecommunications Act of 1934, where the intent was simple: oversee and regulate the telephone monopolies that loomed large over communication landscapes. Title II of this Act, specifically, was designed to categorize such lumbering telecom monopolies (think MCI, AT&T, Southern Bell) as “common carriers,” putting them in the same category as railroads and public utilities like water and sewer providers. This designation allowed the government to monitor and regulate rates, created onerous reporting and transparency requirements and offered vague restrictions on behavior that gave the FCC near endless power to weigh in on decisions.

Fast forward to the early twenty-first century, and the specter of net neutrality begins its initial stirrings. Noble in its intent, the neutrality policy sought an egalitarian internet where every byte of data was treated equally. 

Regulators began looking for ways to grab hold of the levers of control on the internet and enforce this new ideal; however, the mechanism of its implementation was questionable. How would they do it? Rather than allowing Congress its say, they’d simply leverage that vague, nearly century-old telecommunications law to define internet service providers, or ISPs, as another “common carrier.”

These regulations, conceived in an era of rotary phones and built to protect consumers against forced monopolies, could scarcely foresee the internet’s sprawling digital expanse, nor its technology-driven competitive landscape. The internet now beams down from Elon Musk’s satellites, radiates over cell networks, travels along coax cables, pulses through fiberoptic cables and buzzes into our homes through telephone lines. But despite Title II’s designation being built to protect against monopolies, the internet’s competitive landscape was nary enough to abate ceaseless regulators.

By 2015, this debate reached fever pitch, and net neutrality was officially codified, draped in the garments of outdated regulations. Critics, like Brendan Carr of the FCC, lamented this decision, dubbing it “one of the greatest regulatory hoaxes in US history.” Carr’s own feelings on neutrality have been scathing.

Then, in a twist, 2018 saw the repeal of net neutrality. Carr reflected on the apocalyptic way the media treated the event. “CNN’s banner headline said, ‘End of the Internet As We Know It’,” Carr told The Spectator in an interview. Yet, the digital doomsday never arrived. Instead, the internet thrived: speeds increased, prices dwindled, and the prophecies of chaos were debunked.

Now, as we stand on the cusp of 2024, history will assuredly repeat itself. Rumblings of recodifying net neutrality have surfaced and the Biden administration has quickly turned to executive action. Current FCC chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, made her plans to revive the failed policy known just last week. Yet, the words of former FCC chair and Carr’s colleague, Ajit Pai, resonate more than ever: net neutrality is “a solution that won’t work to a problem that doesn’t exist.”

In the poetic caution of Ajit Pai, we find a deep truth. At its core, the internet relies on a ceaseless volley of data packets. These packets, carrying everything from the most trivial memes to the most crucial of medical data, aren’t created equal. Some are urgent; some can afford a delay. An email may patiently wait, but a surgeon in the midst of a telemedicine procedure cannot.

The political left frequently lean on oversimplifications and flawed analogies to make the case for net neutrality. The frequently cited “slow lane” and “fast lane” metaphor, where a world without net neutrality creates an internet caste system, falls drastically short in capturing the true intricacy of the web. As noted by the American Enterprise Institute, this slow lane fast lane depiction “is more dystopian fiction than reality.” The truth is that the internet isn’t a two-lane highway; it’s a complex, multilayered ecosystem. Packets of data are all flowing at the same speed, but the challenge is figuring out what to do when there are more packets flowing than can be handled in a given moment? Of course an increase in bandwidth is the dream, but it’s expensive and often uneconomic to bring to life. So, what are the options? 

Well, as AEI suggests:

One can drop packets randomly, which seems to align with net neutrality’s ethos that all traffic should be treated the same. But there’s a problem with this model: different internet content and applications have different susceptibility to congestion. A user loading an email or a webpage is unlikely to notice if some packets are dropped and resent. But streaming video or FaceTime may buffer, which erodes the consumer’s experience and makes the product less reliable. As Jeffrey Campbell [Cisco Systems VP] notes, an alternative would be to drop packets intelligently, by deprioritizing traffic that is less sensitive and prioritizing traffic that is more sensitive to congestion. This would improve the experience for streaming video (for example) without measurably degrading the web surfer’s experience.

This sort of intelligent and real-time prioritization of internet traffic has been nearly singularly responsible for the huge upswing in performance over the past decade. And, as Carr points out, it is only getting simultaneously more effective and more complex. 

“So as you look at 5G,” Carr said, “we have all these technologies like ‘network slicing’ and other complex approaches that are very pro-consumer and are really going to make the networks form even better and more reliable. And now you have bureaucrats like me in Washington in a position to second-guess those really sophisticated network management decisions that we want engineers to be making.”

Just the implication of it will quash private investments in those new technologies and create a bureaucratic stranglehold on the internet. Future investments would likely be worked into higher pricing or pushed off onto taxpayers.

Worse yet, if neutrality truly mandates the equitable treatment of data packets, it would mean a much slower experience for everyone and likely the end of investments in edge technologies like FaceTime and telesurgeries. As Carr rightly points out, this ignorant treatment of data is “not the way the system is engineered… It’s not how the internet works — that’s not how it ever worked.”

The underpinning fabric of the internet is a work of technical brilliance, shaped and refined by engineers who have dedicated their lives to understanding its every nuance. Every decision is deliberate, based on technical necessity and efficiency. Mandating data packet neutrality would cripple it. Net neutrality is a solution that simply will not work.

Since the repeal of net neutrality, America has not only evaded the doomsday prophecies that were predicted, but the internet has flourished. US broadband infrastructure has seen an unparalleled expansion. Internet speeds have seen a significant rise. Prices have become more consumer-friendly. Against the backdrop of a cacophony of naysayers, the internet’s capability has grown tremendously.

Carr provided a simple breakdown: “They told us it was the end of the internet and we’d be getting our websites one word at a time. Well, internet speeds are up something like six-fold on the mobile side.” This isn’t the fragile, monopolized realm of slow and fast lanes that detractors had prophesied. In fact, the opposite has happened. “Prices, in real terms, are down,” Carr said. “They haven’t kept up with inflation.” In essence, the consumers are the true beneficiaries.

When we pull back the curtain on the Biden administration’s fervent push for net neutrality, you can’t help but detect an undertone of irony, perhaps even self-interest. The president, after all, owes a significant debt to the very non-neutral strategies employed by Big Tech during his election run. The near-silencing of the story surrounding his son’s laptop, with its litany of questionable content, cemented his campaign’s control over a narrative.

The political elegance is almost Shakespearean: a president, bolstered to power through the very non-neutral strategies of Big Tech, now champions a drive for “net neutrality.” But at its core, is it genuinely about ensuring a “fair” and “equitable” digital space for all? Or is there a deeper, more Machiavellian goal at play?

Reflecting on the original Obama-era push for net neutrality, Carr shed light on the politicking of it all: “People in this town knew better. But they let all that go because they were after one thing and one thing only: increasing government control of the internet.”

The truth is painfully simple: net neutrality is coming; it’s inevitable. As Carr said, “This is happening, and it will move very quickly.”  He says we can plan on seeing it brought to life by next spring. 

Carr’s sentiment looms large: “The policies the administration is pushing… it’s going to lead to a slower internet. It’s going to lead to fewer Americans getting connected.” But the stakes may be much higher. Price controls, decreased innovation, stagnant investment, and an executive branch with the power and means to act on anything they deem a “threat.”

At this crucial juncture, we must ask ourselves: will we allow the siren song of anti-capitalism to blind us to the very real consequences of our choices? The internet’s fate hangs in the balance, with freedom, innovation and access teetering on the edge.

Who is Mike Johnson, the new House speaker?

At long last, House Republicans finally selected their new speaker: Mike Johnson, the Shreveport native who resembles nothing so much as the pale casseroles ubiquitous to Baptist fellowship halls across the American South. They could be white cheddar cheese and boiled potatoes, they could be whipped cream and banana with Nilla wafers — you won’t know ’til you take a scoop, but you won’t have to chew very much to enjoy it.

Mike Johnson is perhaps the furthest thing from Kevin McCarthy in experience. He has no record as a fundraiser. He is a strong social conservative, a version that has not been updated since the mid-2000s. He is opposed to gay marriage, no contest divorce and legal marijuana, and became known nationally primarily as an attorney for Alliance Defending Freedom (then the Alliance Defense Fund), a very active social conservative legal group at the center of hot button fights. 

Johnson ascends to the speakership after a series of dick-punch events for the House GOP. Matt Gaetz’s personal animus led to Kevin McCarthy’s very public shivving, but with Johnson as speaker, the House needs McCarthy’s fundraising prowess more than ever. The attempt to make Jim Jordan speaker was disastrous — and might even have made him too toxic to ever get the gavel. Steve Scalise and Tom Emmer flamed out early and chose to stick to their positions as leader and whip rather than risk meandering failures. So Johnson — unaffiliated with the most active fiscally conservative groups, viewed as a genuine Christian and in a sense anti-Machiavellian, is the conference’s fallback choice. Had Johnson failed, the only real choice left to Republicans was to elevate Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry — who did his level best to avoid the job — and that really was the last resort. 

Johnson has set an ambitious schedule for the House GOP, with a number of fiscal fights that will immediately come into play. What I suspect Republicans are about to learn is that their fiscal animosity, expressed by House Freedom Caucus types over the past decade, are all on the outs now. Johnson is simply not a fiscal conservative, nor does he have any of the libertarian-ish tendencies of the blue-state Republicans of recent years. Ideologically, the closest thing in national politics to Johnson is Mike Pence. 

If Kevin McCarthy brought a PowerPoint to the job of speaker, Johnson brings the adult Sunday school workbook. At his church in Louisiana last week, his pastor announced to the body “a prayer for any leader who is in a position of authority in America, if their heart is to bring harm to Israel, God that you would deal with them accordingly, and we need people who will unashamedly courageously boldly say: we stand with the people of God.”

So I’m thinking Israel will get that aid. Speaker Johnson, the floor is yours. Good luck keeping it. 

What’s missing in America

I’m back! As I mentioned in my last newsletter, my husband and I recently set off on our ten-day honeymoon to Morocco. We went to Casablanca, Meknes, Fez, Marrakesh, the Agafay Desert and Essaouira. I didn’t travel much growing up and so this trip was really special for me. We toured one of the largest mosques in the world and a fifteenth-century synagogue that is still active today, visited the Roman ruins of Volubilis, trekked through the Medinas, haggled in the souk, watched artisans create their handmade crafts with techniques handed down for centuries, rode camels and enjoyed traditional Berber food and music.

Before we left for our trip, we fielded a lot of safety concerns. We were warned in our guide books that women should dress modestly — no big deal for me — and to beware of pickpockets and scammers who target naive tourists. We booked our trip through a local travel agency that equipped us with a personal driver and a local guide for our official tours each day, but even at times when we ventured out on our own, we never felt unsafe. Honestly, the precautions that I took — storing valuables in a a crossbody bag, keeping to well-lit areas, mapping out walking routes before leaving, saying “no” politely but firmly to street vendors or beggars — were no different from things I might do when traversing downtown DC or New York City. The murder rate in Morocco is far lower than that of the United States, and while there are drugs and theft like anywhere in the world, all of the locals we spoke to seemed shocked and disturbed at the stories we told them of random violent crime in American cities. That doesn’t really happen here, they echoed.

That’s not totally surprising given the emphasis on community, even in the larger cities (with the exception of maybe Casablanca, which is sort of the business center of Morocco and houses a lot of weekly commuters). In the Medina (translated to “Old City” in English), families share a communal oven where everyone bakes their bread for the day or week. At least once a week, Moroccans go to the Hammam for a special washing day and might find themselves scrubbing someone else’s back. It is an unspoken rule in the markets that there is one price for Moroccans, and another for outsiders. A huge part of the Moroccan economy is dependent on tourism, and it was quite funny to watch our guides interact with other locals and be able to tell from their body language that they were in on the “game” together, so to speak. The locals also seemed to have no patience for the migrants from sub-Saharan Africa who panhandled on the street while awaiting possible entry to Europe. Several noted to us that they don’t have respect for people who ask for handouts but don’t want to work.

The importance placed on community also translates, of course, to family. Many Moroccans live in multi-generational homes and share their earnings with the entire family. In the Medina, family members operate their shops downstairs and live together upstairs. We met one woman whose family home was destroyed in the Atlas Mountains because of the recent earthquake. She moved her mother and siblings into her two-bedroom apartment in Marrakesh without hesitation. 

The official motto of Morocco is God, Country, King. While it is officially an Islamic country, they are proud of the fact that they are tolerant of other religions. During our tour of the famous Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca, our guide spoke with reverence of the similarities between the three Abrahamic religions. In Marrakesh, we took time to pray in a local Catholic Church and to reflect at a historic Jewish cemetery. The five daily Islamic calls to prayer echoed loudly throughout the streets, and while for most, life continued on as usual, tens of thousands would make their way to their local mosque to pray. And everyone we spoke to was not shy about their belief in God and identified it as a unifying and stabilizing force in their country. 

Moroccans are an extraordinarily proud people who, in addition to valuing tourism for its economic potential, genuinely enjoy sharing their country and culture with others. Morocco is mostly comprised of two distinct peoples: the indigenous Berbers and the migrant Arabs. Although Moroccans say they can immediately tell the difference between a Berber and an Arab, there was no tension or resentment between the groups. One of our Berber guides explained to us that the Berbers all speak Arabic, but not many Arabs speak the Berber language. When we asked if that bothered him, he replied, “No, Berber is hard.” Unlike in America, where annoying college children cry about oppression and colonization that was ubiquitous throughout world history, Moroccans also don’t seem to hold resentment toward their French and Spanish colonizers, instead viewing the cultural and architectural influences of this unique history as yet another point of pride. (This doesn’t mean they love the French tourists, who were overwhelmingly snobby and rude. Sorry, but it’s true.).

On our last day in Morocco, our driver, Abdellatif, had a surprise for us. He drove us to a local family’s ranch near Sidi Kaouki. Once inside, a woman who spoke no English dressed us in traditional Berber wedding clothes. We took new “wedding photos,” including some of us pouring the universal symbol of hospitality: Moroccan mint tea. It was a special experience and a very thoughtful way for Abdellatif to share his culture with us. Later on that day, we explained the American concept of “cultural appropriation” and the Halloween-related catchphrase “my culture is not your costume.” He was horrified by the idea that offense could be taken at the sharing of culture. 

Morocco seemed to be the melting pot that we were promised America would be. Different groups retained their cultural practices and traditions, but the country is united under the same set of basic values: religion, family, community and patriotism. In America, we all seem to operate under a different set of values these days. Religiosity is declining, so faith in God is no longer a unifying principle. Communities are fractured and hollowed out by the offshoring of manufacturing jobs, drug and alcohol addiction, the decimation of small business and migration to big cities. Families no longer reign supreme as we embrace hyper-individualism and reject marriage and children. Most young people are taught in school to hate our country and believe it is evil. Americans increasingly replace what once united us with subjective and relative views of the world and our place in it. 

This no doubt contributes to the fact that the Moroccan people generally seemed much happier while having much less. Despite America being the wealthiest country in the world and its citizens having a higher standard of living than at any time in history, we increasingly abuse substances, have high levels of anxiety and depression and have a suicide rate that is twice that of Morocco. When we took a sidecar tour through Marrakesh, our French guide told us that he is from Paris and used to be a lawyer. He moved to Marrakesh seven years ago and quit his job to run a Riad with his wife and give sidecar tours part-time because he likes riding motorcycles. He makes a lot less money, but gets to spend more time with his family and enjoying life. 

That’s not to say that Morocco is a perfect country by any means: there is a lot of poverty and unemployment, women are not always treated with respect, the approach to food safety leaves a lot to be desired — and man did I miss American public restrooms. The people we met on our honeymoon, though, demonstrated the importance of shared values and the power of finding joy in simple, non-material things. That is an art that we are losing back home. 

Dave Courtney and the grotty reality of true crime

The death of the gangster Dave Courtney – found in his bed with a gunshot wound at the age of 64 – has once more brought to the fore the odd fascination with ‘gangsters’ which certain strange sorts harbour. Call me dirty-minded, but as with the ever-growing fascination with ‘true crime’, I can’t help thinking it’s all about sex.

Before we were modern, mean men with brawn rather than brain would have been the best ones to bag; now that bookish Musks and Zuckerbergs rule the world, the Neanderthal has found himself somewhat surplus to requirements. But he still rings a primeval bell with the dimmer members of society, who were never going to be leaving their brains to science anyway. Though money may appear to be the most appealing thing about dating a bank robber, there’s always the feeling that he’s going to be better in bed than a bank clerk. DH Lawrence, bless him, believed that the proletariat had better sex than the bourgeoise and the posh; I can only assume he never got a ghostly glance at the nocturnal side of my first marriage.

Those women who write love letters to serial killers are obviously taking it to extremes and rightly reviled as freaks, but the fascination with the ‘hard man’ (note the double entendre) persists right into the highfalutin’ realms of art. Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino have built careers on them; some of Morrissey’s best songs are about them. The girls of The Only Way Is Essex invariably parrot that ‘I like a Bad Boy, me’ as though it’s as ‘cheeky’ as getting a spray-tan in one’s lunch hour. But the reality is somewhat different and involves risking your endorsement deals when your baby-daddy throws acid in peoples’ faces in a nightclub.

Are these nasty young men really gangsters, as we understood the Krays to be – psychos who built empires of fear and make fortunes from ‘protection’ rackets – or are they ‘plastic gangsters’ who have seen too many Vinnie Jones films and which the Urban Dictionary defines thus:

‘A wannabe gangster. The sort of things that a Plastic gangster might get up to are; 1. Telling other people to do things. 2. Getting other people to fight for them. 3. Generally doing everything that real gangsters would do, but with less conviction and intent. And then, when they get in real situations, they always wuss out of the whole thing. Like if they could smash up a fence, they’d be like, nope, sorry. Gotta go home for a bath. or…something.’

Courtney himself was probably the real thing. The child of decent working-class people – ‘I wish I could blame coming from a deprived background — too much concrete, not enough love — but I can’t’ – he started out shoplifting from Woolworths where his mother was a store detective. At 13, he robbed a toy warehouse; he graduated to burglary.

He worshipped the Kray twins – ‘’They were treated like royalty…losing someone like Ronnie is like losing a monarch’ – and stood guard over the gay gangster’s body before comparing his funeral to Churchill’s. He went on to become a ‘debt collector’ and bouncer before establishing an agency which supplied ‘doormen’ to pubs and clubs. He made a fortune and bought a schoolhouse which he remodelled as ‘Camelot Castle’ and over which flew the flag of Saint George.

The conservatism of the gangster is striking. Though they are outsiders, they are never rebels; they invariably believe that society has gone ‘soft’ and that they, in some weird ways, are striking a blow for decency – even when, as Courtney did, they are attacking innocent Chinese waiters with machetes.

‘They only ever hurt their own’ is the usual mindless justification for the way they terrorised ordinary working-class people such as shopkeepers; the implication is that in some strange way they kept the peace, but it’s always a mistake to make the law of the jungle appear benign. In the current repulsive epidemic of the abuse of shop workers by thieving parasites too lazy to get a job, we see an echo of the protection rackets.

It’s understandable that TV Tarquins who’ve never had to live among these thugs would romanticise them – like Alan Partridge getting excited by the idea of tough men in balaclavas. But in common with many people of working-class origin, I favour capital punishment. I grew up with the smiling faces of the legions of lost little girls, murdered by some scumbag for kicks, branded on my brain; I hated those posh women from the Howard League for Penal Reform or similar outfits who were forever on television explaining why some rapist or murderer deserved the freedom to have sex in jail, the right to vote, and get out of prison. When I grew up and went to That London and started working in the shockingly middle-class media, I wondered why people who considered themselves on the side of the weak and the poor – card-carrying members of the brotherhood of man – repeatedly took the part of the mugger, the molester and even the murderer.

Now we live in a society where rape has effectively been ‘decriminalised’ according to Dame Vera Baird, the Victims’ Commissioner and where it has just been announced that thousands of prisoners serving short sentences will be released early due to jail overcrowding. But as the domestic abuse commissioner for England and Wales, Nicole Jacobs, told the Guardian: ‘Many of those serving short sentences will be in prison for domestic abuse and stalking offences. The Ministry of Justice must seriously consider the safety of victims of domestic abuse and set out clearly how they will be protected.’ Yet women are still lapping up True Crime in their droves – and Dave Courtney never went short of female company.

At the risk of sounding like Horrified of Hove, I’m going to stick my neck out and state that the fetishisation of and fascination with violent crime is a sign of something very wrong with someone – whether they’re a commuter reading about ‘Diamond Dave’ and thinking what fun he must have had, or a hipster whose default date-night setting is Netflix-and-kill.

Who has the best side hustle?

Side hustles

David Solomon, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, said he would stop DJing in clubs, following criticism from the bank’s board. For years he had performed under the alias D-Sol, playing electronic dance music. Some other unlikely side hustles:

– In 2017 King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands revealed that for the past 21 years he had been a co-pilot for KLM.

– While prime minister in 1971, Edward Heath both captained the British yachting team to victory in the Admiral’s Cup and conducted the London Symphony Orchestra.

– Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross has worked as a referee and linesman in the Scottish football league.

– Devi Sridhar, professor of global health at the University of Edinburgh, who became the public face of the Scottish government’s Covid response, also worked as Nicola Sturgeon’s personal trainer.

Big borrowers

Government borrowing came in lower than expected in September. Nevertheless, it has had to borrow £143.3 billion in the past 12 months. How does that compare with department budgets?

Health and Social Care            £181.7bn
Education                                      £81.7bn
Defence                                          £52.8bn
Scotland                                         £42bn
Transport                                       £30bn

In other words, we could close every school and dismantle the armed forces – and still we would have a deficit.

The price of food

Are the poor spending more of their money feeding themselves than they used to? Per cent of total spend on food and drink by lowest 20 per cent of households by income:

2008 – 16.8%
2010 – 15.8%
2012 – 16.2%
2014 – 16.4%
2016 – 16%
2018 – 15.2%
2020 – 14.7%
2022 – 14.8%

Source: Defra

Rain, rain, go away

Parts of Scotland were forecast to have 250mm of rain in a day. In the event, 175mm was recorded in Angus in 24 hours. How does that compare with the records?

– The highest ever recorded in a single day in Britain was 279mm on 18 July 1955 at Martinstown, Dorset. The Scottish record is 238mm at Sloy Main Adit, Argyll and Bute, on 17 January 1974.
– The UK record for a 24-hour period is 341.4mm at Honister Pass, Cumbria from 6 p.m. on 4 December to 5 December 2015. The two-day record is 405mm, also on 4 and 5 December, at Thirlmere, Cumbria.

Identity Crisis: why doesn’t the West know who to back in the Israel-Hamas war?

When two planes flew into the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, the world stood in solidarity with the United States. In London, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ was played at Buckingham Palace. ‘We are all Americans,’ declared Le Monde. In Berlin, 200,000 people took to the streets to express their sorrow. This makes it all the more striking how different – and how morally obtuse – the reaction to Hamas’s slaughter of around 1,400 Israelis has been.

Major news outlets were strangely reluctant to dwell on the horror before jumping straight to the Israeli response. Instead of declaring that we are all Israelis, Le Monde editorials fulminated against Israel’s ‘desire for vengeance’. And when huge demonstrations filled the streets of Berlin, London, Paris and Brussels, they were not in solidarity with those who’d been brutally murdered, but in support of the terrorists.

Was this an expression of a desire to protect Palestinian civilians from the likely Israeli reaction? Were those on the steps of Melbourne’s state parliament or rallying outside the US Consulate General in Toronto speaking up for the dispossessed? Were the protests in Cairo and Islamabad concerned with the plight of fellow Muslims?

That is the most charitable interpretation. And it is beyond doubt that the conflict provoked by Hamas’s gruesome attack has, in turn, claimed the lives of many innocent Palestinian civilians. But if that is the demonstrators’ true motivation, where were the throngs of people mourning the hundreds of thousands of Shias (or, for that matter, 3,000 Palestinians) murdered by Bashar Assad in Syria? Where are the mass protests about the millions of Uighurs oppressed by the Chinese government in Xinjiang? Why did no one seem to care when, only last month, Azeri forces expelled 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh?

The simple, sobering truth is that the international left has barely paid attention to any of those conflicts. Instead, it has reserved its rage for the actions of the only state in the world that happens to be Jewish.

What explains the difference between the reactions to 9/11 and 10/7? Part of the reason is the genuine complexity of the Middle East conflict. Given its long and intricate history, people can honestly come to different conclusions about who is to blame for why a lasting peace now feels so desperately out of reach. There need be nothing anti-Semitic about criticisms of Israeli governments, the current one very much included.

But many journalists and ordinary citizens seem to have allowed their awareness of the moral complexity to translate into an unwillingness to accept that particular episodes within the conflict may nevertheless be crystal clear. Reasonable people can have serious disagreements about many questions regarding Israel and Palestine. But they should not have serious disagreements about whether the cold-blooded slaughter of 1,400 people – some of them babies or grandmothers, and many so mutilated as to be unrecognisable – is justifiable.

This lack of the very ‘moral clarity’ that many journalists have agitated for over past years can help to explain some of the media’s failures – such as the shamefully erroneous reporting of the tragic explosion at al-Ahli Hospital. But it is hard to suppress the suspicion that, especially on the left, another factor is at work: a bias rooted in the demands of an increasingly influential ideology. To understand how such big swaths of the left could have ended up reluctant to condemn Hamas at best, and outright celebrating its murderous spree at worst, we need to understand the rise of a new set of ideas that put simplistic identity categories at the centre of how to see the world – and end up distorting our ability to comprehend it.

In the past three decades, the nature of the left has fundamentally changed. For much of the 20th century, it was universalist. While the record of communism tended to be one of repression and mass murder, the promise of the left was for people to stand in solidarity: Jew with gentile, black with white. The most famous communist exhortation was for the workers of the world to unite – not for them to form racially segregated affinity groups.

But when the promised revolutions didn’t materialise, a section of the left became disenchanted with the notion of equality. Instead, they adopted a focus on categories of ascriptive identity: gender, race, sexuality and more. They came to believe that progress is possible only if how we treat each other – and how the state treats us – depends explicitly on the groups into which we are born.

In my new book, The Identity Trap, I trace the intellectual origins of these ideas and how they have reshaped the culture and politics of many western democracies. What I call the ‘identity synthesis’ goes a long way to explaining the transformation of the rules and practices governing much of life in Britain and the US. It can also help us to understand why the left, driven by supposed support for the underdog, has proved so unwilling to condemn Hamas.

The left – and, increasingly, parts of the mainstream – has embraced a very specific definition of racism that blinds people to injustices against any group that is perceived to be dominant. It divides the world into simplistic categories of oppressors and oppressed, of whites and people of colour, of colonisers and the colonised – and then concludes that any kind of cruelty is justified on behalf of the marginalised. And it claims that all the injustices in the world are somehow linked, giving every activist a moral obligation unquestioningly to support all of the left’s most fashionable causes.

These strains of thought account for why some protestors believe that ‘reproductive rights means a free Palestine’; how the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter tweeted a hagiographic picture of the paragliders who murdered more than 260 people at a festival in southern Israel; and why dozens of student groups at Harvard could assign Israel the ‘entire’ responsibility for the worst murder of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust.

In other words, to understand why so many struggle to believe that Jews can be the victims of discrimination or terrorism, we need to know how the meaning of racism has changed. In the classic definition, somebody is a racist when they believe that members of a particular racial group are morally or intellectually inferior. The same, by extension, is true of a collective entity or institution that endorses such beliefs.

This conception of racism allows us to understand important things about the world. But as social scientists have pointed out, members of disfavoured racial groups can, under certain circumstances, experience serious disadvantages even though nobody involved holds deprecating views about them. The traditional example – now somewhat outdated due to the rise of services like Uber – concerned a black person who is trying to hail a cab in the streets of New York. If most taxi drivers (rightly) believed that this passenger is more likely to live in a poor neighbourhood, they would have feared that it would be harder to pick up another fare at the end of the trip. Even if most cabbies did not hold bigoted beliefs, they might still discriminate against black passengers.

Social scientists coined the term ‘structural racism’ to describe this phenomenon, and it is a useful addition to our conceptual apparatus for understanding the world.

But in recent years, substantial parts of the left have gone one step further. Rather than adding to our conceptual apparatus by recognising that both individual and structural racism exist, they insist that the correct definition of racism is exclusively structural. As Vice magazine put it in a recent article: ‘It’s literally impossible to be racist to a white person.’

This, by contrast, makes it impossible to understand many aspects of the world. It mistakenly suggests that people in supposedly dominant groups can never experience any form of racism – making it harder to realise that members of any and all groups, whether white or black, Christian or Muslim, supposedly dominant or supposedly marginalised, are capable of being consumed by racial hatred. And such wilful blindness has turned out to be especially pernicious because, even though in both Britain and the US Jews are far more likely on a per capita basis to experience hate crimes than other ethnic or religious groups, the identity synthesis ensures that they are wrongly coded as white.

In America’s racial discourse, the world is split into two categories: ‘whites’ and ‘people of colour’. According to this view, whites are members of a privileged group that has historically oppressed minorities and people of colour are members of marginalised groups that are by definition incapable of committing racist acts.

The problem with this view is that it fails to make sense of a huge variety of political conflicts. It does not, for example, contain the conceptual resources to capture what is going on when one non-white group oppresses another – as the Chinese government is now doing in Xinjiang. And the failure becomes even more acute when the victims of racial hatred are considered to be white.

Six million European Jews were exterminated because they were not considered part of the majority ethnic group. Racial prejudice against Jews limited their opportunities in virtually every country where they lived, including Britain and the US, for centuries. Many Jews in Israel today, having recent roots in the Middle East, do not have lighter skin than Palestinians. A sizaeble minority are black, having immigrated from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Among those slaughtered on 7 October, 30 were migrant Thai workers. (Another 17 are missing.)

But none of this seems to matter. In the imagination of the global left, Jews are ‘white’ and Palestinians ‘people of colour’. By this logic, Palestinians are incapable of being racist towards Jews.

Little wonder, then, that mainstream institutions end up being blind to racism directed at Jews. In the past days, many New York Times stories about Gaza were written by a freelancer who has repeatedly praised Adolf Hitler on social media. When Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, was asked about a potential rise in anti-Semitism in America, she answered by claiming that ‘Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fuelled attacks’.

Granted, the obsession with these simplistic racial categories is especially stark in the US. But it has also been exported to the UK. So it’s not surprising that the British left has started to see the Middle East through American glasses.

We can expect these dynamics to become more inflamed in the coming weeks and months. More than 1,700 sociologists in Britain, the US and beyond recently signed a letter expressing their solidarity with Gaza. They did not condemn Hamas’s terror attack. Nor did they acknowledge the plight of the 220 hostages. Instead, they emphasised the need to ‘contextualise this past week’s violence in the context of 75 years of settler colonial occupation and European empire’.

The claim that Israel is a European power engaged in ‘settler colonialism’ has become a ubiquitous part of the rhetoric against the Jewish state. But like the claim that the conflict pits whites against people of colour, it fundamentally warps the issue at hand. In fact, the idea that Israel is a settler colony in the way that America once was is doubly distorting.

For one thing, Jews trace their origins back to Israel. They have been present in the region for thousands of years. Far from being analogous to the English who set sail for a supposedly virgin continent, they – like the Palestinians – have a strong claim to being indigenous inhabitants of the area.

For another, the description of Israel as a ‘European’ project fails to grapple with the country’s present-day demographic composition. After all, millions of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi rather than Ashkenazi. They are descendants of people who have, over the course of the last three quarters of a century, been violently expelled from Middle Eastern countries, had nowhere else to turn, and would today be neither safe nor welcome if they sought to return. There is also the fact that 21 per cent of Israel’s population are Arabs – many of whom were also murdered by Hamas on 7 October.

There is a bitter irony to all of this. The progressive left claims to be fighting colonialism. And yet it is so uninterested in the reality of non-western countries that it winds up blindly imposing conceptual categories that were forged in the context of American history and society on the rest of the world. The identity synthesis may be dressed up in postcolonial clothes; but it is itself a neo-colonial enterprise.

There is one final factor in how these moral errors could come to be so influential: the concept of intersectionality. Originally coined by the academic and campaigner Kimberlé Crenshaw, the idea of ‘intersectionality’ says that various forms of disadvantage can reinforce each other: that, for instance, the discrimination suffered by black women can, in some contexts, be more than the arithmetic sum of the discrimination suffered by white women on the one hand, and black men on the other.

That is true so far as it goes. But Crenshaw’s theory quickly took on a life of its own. If people can face disadvantage based on belonging to more than one identity group, activists claimed, then the only way to liberate them would be to fight against all those forms of disadvantage at the same time. These activists came to see every type of oppression as linked – and to demand that anyone who cares about one kind of injustice must simultaneously fight against all other kinds.

Many people have, in the past weeks, been surprised by how many protests held banners like ‘Queers for Palestine’. After all, Israel has an excellent record at respecting gay rights, while the authorities in Gaza heavily penalise homosexuality. But the logic of intersectionality helps
to explain why, at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, these causes can appear to be at one with each other. Since they see both sexual minorities and Palestinians as oppressed, intersectional activists posit that the fates of both groups must be inextricably linked.

As a broader and bloodier conflict looms on the horizon in the Middle East, it is time for a simple willingness to recognise the messiness of the real world. The idea that all supposed victims of oppression do, or should, see each other as allies is fanciful. Neither Israelis or Palestinians have a monopoly on moral virtue. It is not possible to press them into a simple schema of white or black, coloniser or colonised, good or evil. The murder of 1,400 innocents in Israel has already provoked a broader conflict in which a lot more innocents are likely to perish.

It is not possible, either, to expect any state to tolerate the cold-blooded murder of so many citizens without doing what it takes to re-establish its security. Nor would any other state accept talk of a ceasefire while hundreds of its people remain in the clutches of a brutal terrorist group. But that does not mean that it would be wise for Israel to stumble into a wider regional war – nor does it absolve the country from its moral responsibility to do what it can to protect the lives of civilians on the ‘other’ side. How to balance these imperatives without abandoning any of them is a fiendishly difficult task.

While the future of the conflict remains unclear, its first weeks do already offer one clear lesson. Nobody, neither Israeli or Palestinian, forfeits their humanity by virtue of the group into which they are born. And an ideology that is incapable of recognising that basic fact loses any claim to moral superiority.

The Tory vote squeeze

When the cabinet gathered on Tuesday morning, the meeting started as a sombre affair. Just days before, the Conservatives had suffered – in the words of polling expert Sir John Curtice – ‘one of worst nights any government has endured’. The Tories lost both the Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire by-elections to Labour. The Environment Secretary, Thérèse Coffey, managed to lighten the mood when she intervened to say that it hadn’t gone unnoticed that it was Rishi Sunak’s 365th day as Prime Minister. Loud banging on the table ensued, led by Jeremy Hunt.

A year into Sunak’s premiership, neither he nor his supporters are where they would have liked to be. Aides said in January that they wanted to get Labour’s lead down to ten points in a year. That looks ambitious. The Tories are currently 20 points behind. And the Prime Minister’s approval ratings aren’t much better. The day before Sunak entered No. 10, 29 per cent of voters said they expected him to be ‘poor’ or ‘terrible’ at the job. A year in, 50 per cent say he falls into the latter category. At the moment, any talk of a springtime battle at the ballot box looks like electoral suicide.

The Australian election strategist Isaac Levido, who ran the Tories’ 2019 campaign, told those assembled at political cabinet that one of the party’s big problems in last week’s by-elections was voter apathy. In Tamworth, turnout was just 35.9 per cent. In the South Staffordshire by-election in 1996 (as the constituency was then known), which saw a similar vote swing, turnout was 62 per cent. So, Levido argued, the party’s challenge ahead of a general election is to give their voters a reason to turn up. He said this will require message discipline. They need to remind voters of the things they have done so far and link them together: for instance, the reason the government was able to help in the pandemic is because of tough decisions made by previous Tory governments. Sunak’s mantra that he would change the ‘30-year status quo’ could still bear fruit: Levido said Sunak’s decision to delay net-zero commitments and axe the second stage of HS2 plays well to the voters the party is aiming at.

While those who attended the meeting say it was ‘constructive’, not everyone is convinced. ‘It’s what I call the “zero votes” strategy,’ complains a former cabinet minister. ‘Last year things were bad, but at least there was a sense of what we stood for.’

No. 10 say Sunak’s full strategy will come good in time. His first year was focused on stabilising the party. Next year he will reap the benefits of falling inflation and rising real wages. The party conference didn’t lead to a bounce in the polls, but Sunak supporters say it moved the Conservatives in the right direction. They cite the most divisive pledge, a ban on future generations ever smoking, as proof that Sunak’s strategy looks beyond core voters. But some MPs worry the mix of pledges risks isolating everyone. ‘The strategy lacks any clear narrative,’ says one minister. ‘We were told conference would be a big moment, but it hasn’t changed anything.’

The mainstream opinion in the party is that to pull off a surprise victory – or substantially stem losses – the Tories need to reunite their 2019 coalition of Red Wall and Blue Wall voters. But this coalition was enabled by three unique factors: getting Brexit ‘done’, the fear of Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister and the charisma of Boris Johnson. Polling by YouGov indicates that Sunak has a long way to go. He has managed to keep the number of 2019 Tory voters who say they ‘don’t know’ who they’ll vote for at the next election below 25 per cent, but when it comes to winning back those who switched to another party, he has made little progress. Although Sunak has regained some of the voters who moved to the left, he is losing voters on the right. In both Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire, the Reform party – founded by Richard Tice following the demise of the Brexit party – won more votes than the size of either of the Labour majorities. This has led some Tory MPs to worry that in a general election, Tice’s party could divert key votes away from them in tight marginals.

What is the best plan for a party bracing itself for a devastating defeat? As a senior Labour politician puts it: ‘The question is whether Rishi thinks he can win or whether he should protect losses. If he wants to protect losses, then the strategy is to move to the right in the culture wars. If he thinks he can win, it’s big picture.’

MPs in seats with slender or middling majorities would prefer Sunak moved right rather than pursued a wider strategy that risks not swaying voters. But voices supportive of him warn that the 2019 coalition fell apart a long time ago and there’s no point trying to put it back together. ‘We should worry less about this coalition. Every election is different. Doing a load of sensible things makes the most sense,’ says a former minister.

What kind of ‘sensible things’ do the Tories want? Some hope for tax cuts in the Autumn Statement or a reshuffle. The former is unlikely to happen until inflation drops further. A reshuffle will probably happen before the end of the year. Senior Tories are agitating for a change in No. 11. ‘Jeremy [Hunt] was more front-footed when he was health secretary,’ says a former cabinet member. ‘The election will be about the cost of living. We need a chancellor out there with enthusiasm [while being] focused on comms.’ A new chancellor may well be wishful thinking. The next shake-up is more likely to focus on the junior ranks, removing ministers who plan to step down at the next election or who need time to work on holding their seats.

Yet neither tax cuts nor a reshuffle will be the game-changer the Tories need. As a minister puts it: ‘In the end, no by-election, King’s Speech or swapping of anonymous faces for unknown ones in cabinet will change what the election will come down to: does the public want Sunak or Starmer?’

Portrait of the Week: Tory by-election misery, ‘jihad’ chants and emergency aid

Home

Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, on his return from Israel (where he spoke with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister) and to Saudi Arabia (where he spoke with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince), told the House of Commons: ‘Hamas is not only a threat to Israel, but to many others across the region. All the leaders I met agreed that this is a watershed moment. It’s time to set the region on a better path.’ Twelve Britons had died in the Hamas attack, and five were missing. Of the blast at Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital on 17 October, which killed numbers of people into the hundreds, he said it was likely to have been caused by a missile fired from within Gaza. He announced £20 million extra in emergency aid to Gaza.

Mr Sunak said: ‘Calls for jihad and Muslim armies to rise up are not only a threat to the Jewish community but also a threat to our democratic values.’ That remark followed an incident at a Hizb ut-Tahrir rally (during the pro-Palestine march in London of perhaps 100,000) in which a speaker, in front of a banner saying ‘Muslim Armies! Rescue the People of Palestine’, asked, ‘What is the solution to liberate people from the concentration camp called Palestine?’ to which more than one person could be heard chanting ‘Jihad’. The Metropolitan Police said: ‘The word jihad has a number of meanings but we know the public will most commonly associate it with terrorism’; yet police counterterrorism officers had assessed a video clip and not identified any offences. Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, had words with Sir Mark Rowley, the Met Commissioner.

The Tories were heavily defeated in two by-elections: at Tamworth, the Conservative majority of 19,634 of Chris Pincher (who unwittingly brought down Boris Johnson) was turned into a Labour majority of 1,316 in a turnout of 35.9 per cent (the Lib Dems polling 417 votes); in Mid Bedfordshire the Conservative majority of 24,664 of Nadine Dorries (author of The Plot: the Political Assassination of Boris Johnson) became a Labour majority of 1,192 in a turnout of 44.1 per cent. Unemployment rose from 4 per cent to 4.2 per cent. The cap on bankers’ bonuses would be removed on 31 October. Heavy rain brought flooding to several counties. King’s Cross station in London was closed, Network Rail said, ‘to manage passenger numbers on the concourse’. Members of the RMT union voted for six more months in which rail strikes could be held. Sir Bobby Charlton, who played in the 1966 World Cup final, died aged 86.

Abroad

The horrors of war multiplied as Israel continued its response to the Hamas attack on 7 October. An 85-year-old hostage, Yocheved Lifschitz, was released by Hamas and told of ‘hell that I could not have known’ after her abduction by motorbike and captivity in tunnels. Another Israeli hostage and two Americans were also released, but 220 remained captive. Israel released bodycam footage from Hamas gunmen carrying out a massacre.

‘We are working together as an iron fist for one objective – to eliminate Hamas,’ Mr Netanyahu said. Israel said that in one 24-hour period it had hit more than 400 targets of Hamas infrastructure in Gaza with air strikes. Khan Yunis, the city in the southern half of Gaza, came under bombardment; this and the use of human shields were ‘clear violation of international humanitarian law’, according to Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary-General. Hamas said that between 7 and 23 October, 5,791 people had been killed in Gaza. Lorries carrying a small amount of aid were allowed to enter the Gaza Strip at the Rafah crossing. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees said 600,000 people had come to its shelters, mostly ex-schools, and they needed water and sanitation; Unwra lacked fuel. President Emmanuel Macron of France, visiting Mr Netanyahu, proposed that the international coalition that had fought the Islamic State group could also fight against Hamas. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, set off for Washington for talks with Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State. Hezbollah and Israel exchanged fire across the Lebanese border. In southern Lebanon, 20,000 people had been displaced and villages in Israel near the border were evacuated.

A Russian missile killed six postal workers at the Nova Poshta sorting office in Kharkiv. A Chinese coastguard vessel collided with a Filipino supply boat on its way to an outpost in the Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.          CSH

Starmer avoids Israel in knockabout with Sunak

It was revealing that Keir Starmer decided not to ask Rishi Sunak about Israel at Prime Minister’s Questions today. The Labour leader headed straight from the session into a crunch meeting with Muslim MPs and peers who are angry at the way he has handled the conflict (more from Katy here), and so he clearly decided that repeating last week’s series of statements about Labour’s support for Israel’s self-defence wouldn’t help internal party tensions. Instead, he went for a proper old political knockabout, and spent the entire session talking about the failed Tory candidate in the Tamworth by-election.

Labour’s victory lap after the two by-elections that it won last week has been rather muted as a result of the situation in the Middle East, but Starmer decided to make up for that today. He riffed on the comments by Andrew Cooper, who while trying to defend the seat for the Conservatives ended up being exposed for sharing online comments saying that people struggling to feed their children should ‘fuck off’ if they still pay £30 phone bills. ‘Where does the Prime Minister think his candidate got the idea in the first place?’ he asked in his second question to Sunak. The Prime Minister kept insisting that he was ‘proud’ of what the government ‘is going to support the most vulnerable’, and even joked that the new Labour MP for Mid-Bedfordshire might support him more than the previous incumbent (Nadine Dorries is no doubt penning a riposte for the Daily Mail right now). He also remarked that Starmer’s ‘prepared lines really aren’t working for him any more’, accusing him of reading ‘from his script to say that we hadn’t answered the question’. The questions weren’t quite working, either: by the time the Labour leader reached his pay-off, the Tamworth theme was exhausted. He said:

The truth is, his candidate in Tamworth summed up perfectly just how he and his Tories are treating the British public. So will he just call a general election… they’ve heard the government telling them to eff off, and they want the chance to return the compliment.

The Israel-Hamas conflict did come up in other questions, including those immediately before Starmer rose, and from the SNP’s Mhairi Black. There was also a heartfelt question from Labour’s Yasmin Qureshi, who said Israel was carrying out ‘collective punishment of the Palestinian people in Gaza for crimes they did not commit. How many more innocent Palestinians must die before this PM calls for a humanitarian ceasefire?’ Sunak’s response might or might not have been intended as a dig at Labour’s tensions: he remarked that ‘there is in fact unity across these dispatch boxes on Israel’s right to defend itself in the face of an unspeakable act of terror’. He and Starmer are continuing to resist calls for a ceasefire, but the levels of tension within Labour may well mean that the Leader of the Opposition has to find another way of reflecting his party’s anxieties.

What Hamas promised to its electorate

Things you do not hear very often, number one: a pro-Palestinian protestor denouncing Hamas for the barbarity of its incursion into Israel on 7 October, appalled at the savagery of those attacks upon children, grandmothers, etc. It may seem as if, in saying this, I am stating the obvious – because support for that pogrom was, I would suggest, strong among some of those carrying Palestinian flags on marches through London and elsewhere. Six Arab language journalists were suspended by the BBC when it was discovered that they retweeted messages glorifying in that day’s murder. They were not members of Hamas. Ordinary Palestinians interviewed, cowering in the rubble of Gaza, were not quoted condemning the attacks which led directly to their present misery. And so here we have a big problem, another non-sequitur to pile upon all the others which bedevil attempts to bring peace to a region of the world which shows very few signs of wanting peace at all.

The appropriate line to take right now, assuming you are not one of those out on the streets calling for jihad, is to insist that the hideousness of 7 October justifies Israel’s attempts to ‘root out Hamas’ from the Gaza Strip, while holding that it is only right to provide medical assistance, aid and power to ‘ordinary Palestinians’. But what if the problem is bigger than Hamas? Where does that leave us? We dutifully regurgitate the line that Hamas predates upon the Palestinians and in doing so make what is perhaps a false dichotomy, believing that the aspirations of Hamas are not shared by the people they govern. But is this true? My suspicion is that it is not quite true and that even if Israel were to destroy Hamas, some similarly genocidal and violent entity – Islamic Jihad? Isis? Campaign for a Free Galilee? – would spring up to take its place.

We cleave to that false dichotomy, though, because in our wish to be kindly we must exculpate ‘ordinary’ Palestinians. But where are these ordinary Palestinians, drowned out by more extreme voices, who are perhaps not riven with a racial and religious hatred of the state and people next door? The ones who condemn the attacks on Israel and want peace? When will we hear from them?

There is some evidence of opposition to Hamas in Gaza, but it seems small to the point of near invisibility these days. Perhaps that is because those who are opposed stay silent out of fear, sure. But still, there is no great evidence to suggest that this tiny proportion which opposes Hamas does so because of its genocidal wish to wipe Israel and Jews from the face of the Earth: the objections are to Hamas’s bullying and fascistic behaviour in its governance of Gaza.

It is certainly true, mind, that in the 2006 Palestinian elections, voters backed Hamas primarily because it was believed to be markedly less corrupt than Fatah and might also afford the enclave better security. Exit polls suggested that while Hamas won, some 75 per cent of voters wanted it to drop its insistence that Israel should cease to exist and a similar proportion wished for peace with Israel. On the face of it, this seems to refute directly my suggestion that the aspirations of Hamas are shared by those ‘ordinary Palestinians’.

But that was 17 years ago and at a time when a two-state solution seemed if not probable, then at least remotely possible: much has changed. The people of Gaza have since then been absorbing the Hamas mantras of intransigence and hatred on a daily basis. And it is also the case that even then, Palestinians were still willing to vote for a party which wished to kill all Jews and which proclaimed its intention to do so in that infamous 1988 charter which was drawn directly from Nazi propaganda:

‘With their money, they [the Jews] took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money, they formed secret societies, such as Freemason, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonise many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.’

Perhaps we might excuse these voters because they didn’t look at the small print. The trouble, though, is that Hamas is hardly unique in its rank anti-Semitism. Only a month ago, the Palestinian president, the grizzled old thug Mahmoud Abbas, rolled out the Jew-hating stuff in a speech to Fatah party members. He denied that anti-Semitism had anything to do with the Holocaust: that had been occasioned, he said, by the roles of Jews in society. He said: ‘They say that Hitler killed the Jews because they were Jews and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true,’ adding that the Europeans ‘fought against these people because of their role in society, which had to do with usury, money… In his [Adolf Hitler’s] view, they were engaged in sabotage, and this is why he hated them.’

This speech, which received little or no attention over here, mined precisely the same Nazi tropes as those which form the core of Hamas’s belief. Abbas even went on to suggest that the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe who were murdered in the Holocaust were not actually Jews at all.

All of this accords with my many interviews with Palestinians, ‘ordinary’ and otherwise, in documentaries I have made over the past decade: give it a moment and the Jew-hatred stuff will often bubble up to the surface. The only place where I didn’t find this bitter and corrosive loathing was among Israeli Arabs.

The Tories didn’t lose Mid Bedfordshire – Labour won it

In 1975 I travelled as an undergraduate to Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and finally to Israel. I visited refugee camps and met a Palestinian militant, Bassam Abu Sharif, who had been blinded in one eye by a Mossad parcel bomb. I talked to policymakers in each country and heard a range of Israeli opinion. On return I wrote in the Jewish Chronicle of the need to address the plight of the Palestinians caused by their displacement. I made the case in favour of a two-state solution five years before the 1980 Venice declaration on Palestinian statehood. One of today’s many tragedies is that Hamas’s barbarism has pushed that solution even further from grasp. In principle, it remains the only way to end the chaos. But security for Israel is not reconcilable with the current fractured Palestinian leadership. The demand for Palestinian statehood cannot cease, but more creativity will be required from other voices in the region, all of whom will be needed to counter Iran’s sponsorship of terror and violence. The United States remains the indispensable actor but China also sees a much larger role for itself. Europe’s approach lacks coherence. As ever, real change must come from within. What seems like Benjamin Netanyahu’s inevitable political demise may yet offer the seeds of progress.

Just over a week ago I was out on the doorsteps in Mid Bedfordshire and was surprised not to hear more mentions of its erstwhile MP, Nadine Dorries. Silence reflected simmering contempt and electors were preoccupied by how best to vote tactically to punish the Conservatives. It was by no means obvious how to do so. Even Labour and Liberal Democrats were unsure. Normally they would have their target seats understood and divided between them. But Mid Beds was a conundrum. When Dorries first announced her intention to resign, both parties’ leaderships assumed it was Lib Dem for the taking. Peter Kyle, Labour’s rising frontbench star, was sent to show willing and mount a campaign that would probably fade away quietly after a few weeks. But on closer inspection, he discovered that an unexpectedly large number of Tory defectors were looking to Labour instead. There ensued some scratching of Labour heads and further energetic canvassing. The result, driven by the party’s street-fighting campaign head Morgan McSweeney, was a decision to go hell for leather to take the seat. I take my hat off to the Tory spin machine’s dismissal of the 20 per cent swing to Labour as merely a function of too many devoted but shy Conservative voters staying at home. It reminded me of how, decades ago, I had to explain the success of the Lib Dem candidate in ousting the Tory in the 1993 Newbury by-election. It was Labour’s brilliant campaign, I said, that had shaken the Tory tree and the apples had merely fallen into the Lib Dem basket. I almost managed to convince myself.

It seems to come to us all and I have succumbed to appearing in a political podcast produced by Times Radio for which publicity is under way. I am appearing beside Danny Finkelstein, who is not just a seasoned pundit and successful newspaper columnist with a vast reservoir of stories, jokes and insights but also now an acclaimed author. His book Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad is a thoroughly readable history of his family as he weaves light through the darkness of pogroms, mass population removals and the Holocaust. I am excited to present with him, yet I took some persuading – partly because of the growing glut of podcasts, but also because I naturally hate being outshone.

My week is ending with something else I never thought I would do: I am getting married to my partner of 27 years, Reinaldo. I am not sure why it has taken so long but Reinaldo has always wanted to guard his privacy; and perhaps behind my north London liberal exterior I am a bit of a social conservative. It is certainly testimony to both Tony Blair’s and David Cameron’s belief in marriage equality that it is possible for us to make this commitment to one another and they deserve the gratitude of many like us. Both these liberal-minded prime ministers took risks, Cameron especially, and in this respect Britain is a happier place as a result. Thank you.

My dinner with a glamorous Taiwanese MP

I arrive here shortly after Taiwan National Day, which is 10 October. The day might seem strangely chosen, because the date commemorates the Wuhan Uprising in 1911, the spark for the revolution which overthrew China’s last imperial dynasty and created the Republic of China. At that time, the island of Taiwan did not benefit. It had been ruled since 1895 by Japan and continued thus until Japan’s surrender in 1945. The reason 10 October is the National Day is because the ‘nation’ referred to is the whole of China, not Taiwan. When Chiang Kai-Shek, the Kuo Min Tang (KMT) generalissimo, was defeated by the communist revolution in 1949, he fled to Taiwan. He ruled Taiwan, but laid claim to the entire Republic of China (ROC) – the mainland plus Taiwan – and repudiated Chairman Mao’s People’s Republic of China (PRC). In formal terms, and despite the loss of diplomatic status after the United States switched horses and recognised communist China in 1979, Taiwan is still the ROC, still laying claim to the mainland. The PRC still lays claim to Taiwan. So Taiwan has never been formally recognised as a nation by either claimant. Beijing hates its regime and wants to ‘reunify’ island and mainland. The KMT hates the Chinese Communist party, but also dreams of China reunified.

This ambiguity has always been dangerous and currently threatens world peace, but when you get to the place itself, you find it in good working order. Modern Taiwan is a prosperous, democratic, innovative, low-crime and cheerful place in which people tell you directly what they think in a way which challenges the stereotype of the Oriental mind. After three quarters of a century, it has perfected the art of the impossible. The competing parties at the coming January presidential and parliamentary elections are fierce in their differences, yet seem to have the same goal – to preserve and advance independence in fact though not in name. The phrase ‘the status quo’ is usually disparaging in the West. Here it possesses a magical potency.

The KMT remains the strongest party in local government. Indeed, Chiang Kai-Shek’s youngish great-grandson is the mayor of this city. But the longer Taiwan and mainland are dissevered, the less real becomes the KMT’s chief aspiration. By a paradox, the party which fought communism so fiercely has become the friendliest towards the communist entity. The KMT line is that it alone has the necessary ‘cross-strait’ connections to manage the increasingly uneasy relationship with Beijing. Its critics’ rejoinder is that the KMT has partially corrupt links with the mainland power. The KMT shares with Xi Jinping a belief in ‘One China’. The two differ about who should run it. The writer and former culture minister Lung Ying-tai tells me that a ‘unified China’ has been the ‘norm ideology’ for 3,000 years. ‘It’s so deep-rooted, it’s tribal. While most Taiwanese have moved away from this ideology, the Chinese are still used to it.’ She thinks this boat should not be rocked.

The currently ruling DPP sees things differently. Its doctrine is that Taiwan should be independent. More and more Taiwanese people see their country as a full nation. DPP supporters have the economic and cultural confidence to promote a Taiwanese identity. But because they fear Xi’s wrath, their policy is not markedly different from that of the KMT. Independence is already the reality, they say, so there is no need to provoke Chinese fury by formally declaring it.

The most amusing of the politicians is the leader of the third party, the TPP. Dr Ko Wen-Je is a famous former surgeon, and he loves to deploy medical metaphors about the body politic (‘I’m addressing a cancer’, he tells me). Daringly, to a western ear, he advocates for elites: ‘An elite has to rule the country.’ His elite consists largely of young graduates. They love the fact that he took part in a video with a well-known rapper, where both sing ‘Do the right things. Do things right,’ repeatedly and in English. Dr Ko, too, is cautious. Unification and independence, he says, are both ‘false issues’: the United States will never allow the former and China will never permit the latter. He speaks, rather obscurely, in favour of ‘dynamic’ rather than ‘static’ equilibrium, meaning the status quo run by him.

Chiang Kai-Shek’s vast but impressively simple mausoleum is well worth visiting, but is no longer, in the public mind, a pilgrimage site. The National Palace Museum carries a greater emotional charge. Before he fled the mainland, Chiang contrived to move vast quantities of the state art collection to Taiwan and there – calligraphy, porcelain, paintings, much more – they reside. The collection is so vast that the great majority is hidden in hillside caves beneath the museum. One Taiwanese mother of young children, seriously worried about possible Chinese attack, tells me she wants to live in a gardener’s cottage there, since it is the only place that Xi will definitely not bomb.

Taiwanese manners are delightful because they combine western frankness with Chinese decorum. People bow when they meet, and women smile with downcast eyes as they greet you. In my hotel, even the lavatory is deferential. As you approach it, it raises its seat cover rather as men used to raise their hats. Once used, it flushes without one having to ask it.

Taipei is surprisingly cosmopolitan. I sat next to a glamorous Taiwanese woman at dinner. This year, she has had her first baby and become an MP for the first time. She told me she has hunted with the Limerick and the Warwickshire. I doubt you could find a young British MP who could say the same.

The Tories are slowly turning the tide on immigration

For years the government has appeared to be setting itself up for failure with its promises to crack down on illegal immigration. The plan to process asylum claims in Rwanda was always going to excite immigration lawyers. Sure enough, it remains mired in the legal process. Even if the government wins its case in the Supreme Court, there remains the vast obstacle of the European Court of Human Rights.

The promise to ‘stop the boats’ was a hostage to fortune. The boats continue to arrive; it is not possible to patrol every square inch of the English Channel. The discovery of legionella bacteria on the Bibby Stockholm, the barge on which the government is planning to house asylum seekers, seemed at the time to be the final straw for the hapless Home Office.

And yet there are glimmers of hope that the government’s strategy might finally be working. At the start of the year, the Border Force expected 65,000 asylum -seekers to arrive on small boats during 2023. The real number now looks like being half that: 26,000 have arrived so far, two-thirds of the number who had come by this stage last year. Meanwhile there are reports that the processing of applications has sped up. The government was able to announce this week that 100 hotels will no longer be used to house asylum seekers.

This may be too late to revive the Conservatives’ electoral fortunes. To judge by last week’s by-elections in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire, many voters have already decided that this government has run its course. Anyone who lives in a town where the main hotel has been turned over to asylum applicants – leading to lost jobs, cancelled weddings and a sense of decay – is unlikely to be impressed by the latest statistics, or even notice that there has been a substantial fall in arrivals.

Even so, it is important to acknowledge success, and as a magazine which has often been critical of government migration policy, we are pleased to be in a position to do so. One of the biggest breakthroughs was a deal made with Albania last December to rapidly return illegal arrivals from that country – as a result, numbers have fallen by 90 per cent. A deal with French border officials seems, for once, to have paid off, with more boats being intercepted in French waters.

It is remarkable that the UK government has succeeded in turning the tide on illegal migration while being outside the EU. Critics regularly claimed that Brexit would make it more difficult to persuade other European countries to cooperate with Britain on efforts to confront migration. Yet whether we are inside or outside the European Union, our neighbours have a vested interest in interrupting the chain of migration towards Britain. It is not in France’s interests to allow the Calais area to be used as a staging post for asylum applicants. And we do not need the EU to broker agreements of mutual interest, especially when they involve Britain paying French border officials.

The real opponents of the government’s efforts to tackle illegal migration are not in France; they are in Britain. There is a powerful lobby for which all migration is an unalloyed good, and any attempt to thwart it is evil. For this group of lawyers and campaigners, no migrant has ever sought to misuse the asylum system by claiming to be in danger when they are not; no criminal or terrorist has ever tried to slip into the country under the guise of false claims of persecution in their homelands – and anyone who claims they do is bigoted.

It is very difficult for a government to do anything to tackle illegal migration in this atmosphere, when every home secretary is portrayed as more heartless and extreme than the last, and when any new initiative attracts a flurry of human rights claims, supercharged with legal aid.

Nevertheless, ministers have a habit of making life more difficult for themselves than it needs to be. The very worst thing they can do is announce tough policies which they know cannot be delivered. Before embarking on the Rwandan scheme, it should have been obvious that something would first need to be done to head off legal claims, whether that meant withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights or protecting the government from its judgments, or curtailing the availability of legal aid for asylum claims. Without the government being prepared to think through the consequences, the Rwandan scheme should never have been contemplated at all. If the aim was to provoke a battle with the pro-asylum lobby and thus earn public support, it has failed miserably. The government has merely made itself look weak.

In the meantime, however, lower-profile initiatives such as the aforementioned Albania deal have begun to bear fruit. The biggest problems with the asylum system are the slowness of the decisions and the failure to deport failed applicants in a timely fashion. The case of the Liverpool bomber Emad al-Swealmeen is an example of everything that has gone wrong. It was not that he managed to slip through the application process: his lies were exposed and he was rejected, but he was then able to drop off the radar while he planned his attack.

The fact that asylum claims are reportedly being handled more quickly is a promising sign. The system is still far from satisfactory, and there are still far too many people arriving in small boats and by other means. But the long campaign against illegal migration does seem finally to be achieving some success, and that deserves to be recognised.

Britain should back a ceasefire

00:00 06:17

Peter Oborne has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Six weeks ago, I invited Ahmed Alnaouq, a young diplomat who recently joined the Palestinian mission in London, to stay for a cricket weekend in Wiltshire. He resisted all entreaties to play the game but was in every other way a delightful guest. On Sunday, Ahmed learnt that his family in Gaza has been wiped out by an Israeli bomb. His father, siblings, and more than 15 nieces and nephews had all been killed. Twenty-three dead, no injuries. Another brother was killed by an Israeli bombing in 2014. His mother died three years ago because, he says, Israel denied her medical treatment. When I sent him a text message saying that he and his family were in my thoughts and prayers – it felt hopeless, but what else can one say? – he replied: ‘My family is gone Peter. All of them. My father, brothers and sisters and all their children. Everyone is gone.’ The Gaza health ministry says the death toll from the Israeli bombing is now over 5,000, more than 2,000 of whom are children. Those who die at once are fortunate. Many endure slow deaths crushed in the rubble. Gazans write their names on their limbs as a precaution so that when their bodies are found they can be identified.

Many Palestinians outside Gaza live in fear. In some areas they dare not speak Arabic in the street. The police tour the streets entering shops, demanding to see Palestinians’ mobile phones. Any sign of support for Gaza and they are bundled into vans. WhatsApp groups call for violence against Palestinians. One Telegram channel is publicising the names, photographs and addresses of prominent Palestinians, demanding that they be killed. Those identified include politicians, religious leaders, activists and public officials. One of them is Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, imam of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque. Across the West Bank, more than 90 Palestinians have been killed over the past two weeks by the Israeli army or by settlers. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, has arranged for assault rifles to be issued to ‘civilian security teams’. He personally oversees the distribution with the benign air of a headmaster at an awards ceremony.

Last Sunday I attended a communion service at St George’s, the Anglican cathedral in East Jerusalem, taken by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The theme for his sermon was Jesus’s advice to ‘render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s’. His Grace used this text to argue that the church must involve itself in the messiness of human life, arguing against what he called ‘false binaries’. After the service he issued, jointly with Jerusalem church leaders, an unambiguous statement demanding an immediate ceasefire.

This demand has opened a rupture between church and state because Britain’s Prime Minister takes the opposite position. On his recent visit to Tel Aviv, Rishi Sunak was of course right to condemn the unspeakable and depraved barbarity of the Hamas atrocities, as well as to extend deepest sympathy to Israel and assert its duty to defend itself. But Sunak also had a responsibility to remind Benjamin Netanyahu, erratic leader of the most far-right government in Israel’s history, of his duties under international law. Margaret Thatcher would have done so. Though a passionate admirer of the Jewish people, she was never afraid to challenge Israel’s war crimes, for instance calling the Phalangist massacre of Palestinian refugees and Lebanese shia at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, with IDF troops standing idly by, ‘sheer barbarism’. Britain’s abstention on last week’s UN vote for a ceasefire is a disappointment. Sunak’s insouciance is all the more shocking because of the language from Israeli high command. The defence minister Yoav Gallant says that Israel is fighting ‘human animals’, promising that Israel ‘will eliminate everything’ in Gaza. President Herzog says that ‘nobody is innocent’ in the enclave. Such remarks send a chilling message to troops poised to invade. No wonder Palestinians fear a repetition of the Nakba (‘catastrophe’) which saw 750,000 driven out of their homes in 1948.

Yesterday a Muslim friend and I walked along the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We found the chapel where, according to tradition, Jesus Christ was crucified. For a long time, we prayed. There are almost no tourists in Jerusalem. But a few locals joined us and prostrated themselves. Christ’s message of love and forgiveness is ultimately the only resolution to conflict. It has never seemed so distant. Land invasion feels inevitable. If that happens, the carnage thus far may seem a drop in an ocean of blood.

How serious is Keir Starmer about devolution?

With a general election – and the prospect of forming a government – now firmly on the horizon, the Labour party has no shortage of long-standing policies that it is quickly seeking to recast, review or revoke entirely. 

Sir Keir Starmer’s earlier pledges to abolish tuition fees, increase taxes on higher earners and scrap the two-child benefit cap have all been unceremoniously dumped. Other commitments, such as a £28 billion per annum ‘Green Prosperity Plan’, have been significantly watered-down, while proposals for a tax raid on US tech giants have shifted to a wider review of business rates.

This is, in many ways, a natural and prudent process for a party that – for the first time in more than a decade – is seriously contemplating actually having to implement its commitments. In strained economic circumstances, the Labour party is determined not to write policy cheques it cannot cash. Yet this zest for revising the party’s prospectus is, it seems, not limited to expensive policies alone. 

Significant changes to devolution – often branded as ‘a radical rewiring’ of the UK – had been a central part of Starmer’s platform. In December 2022, former prime minister Gordon Brown published his long-awaited review of the UK’s constitutional position, which included plans to considerably extend the scope of the current devolution settlement. 

While there were inevitable frustrations with the process of Brown’s report (Starmer’s office returned an early draft saying it was too long, only to have it refiled days later with further additions), the current Labour leader was generally enthusiastic about his predecessor’s contribution. 

After all, success in Scotland was – and remains – vital to Starmer’s chances of reaching No. 10, and it was felt Brown’s report gave Labour an opportunity to recover ground from the SNP by opposing both independence but also the status quo. Starmer heralded many of Brown’s proposals, which are currently being reviewed for inclusion in the party’s manifesto, suggesting they showed a Labour government would bring about ‘real economic empowerment for our devolved government, the mayors, and local authorities’.

Fast forward to today, however, and that has all changed. Quite unpredictably, the SNP has imploded almost entirely of its own volition, largely negating the need for Labour to try and buy off Scottish voters with more devolved powers. 

The resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, the police investigation into the SNP’s finances and the general incompetence of Humza Yousaf have all pegged the nationalists back and pushed Labour closer to the lead in Scotland. Earlier this month, Labour won the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election with a swing of more than 20 percent from the SNP – a prospect unthinkable when Brown first published his report. Such a rapid and unexpected change in the electoral landscape could naturally prompt a rethink of the need to ‘radically rewire’ the UK. And there is growing evidence such a rethink is already underway. 

The shadow secretary of state for Scotland, Ian Murray, recently rejected the notion a Labour government at Westminster would devolve more powers to the Scottish Parliament, arguing the Scottish Government needs to ‘use the powers it has got’ rather than demand more. 

Equally, in recent months Starmer has not shown himself particularly enamoured with devolved decision making either. The Labour leader’s response to the Ulez shambles, which cost his party victory in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election, has been to castigate and overrule his devolved mayor, recently branding the policy ‘disproportionate’. So, while both statements might be sensible politics, neither seems to indicate a party that remains determined to ‘radically rewire’ the UK.

With the SNP facing an electoral abyss, they will undoubtedly attempt to weaponise this subtle volte face and try and cast themselves as the defenders of devolution. Yet given the nationalists’ current difficulties, it seems unlikely this will work. But it nevertheless remains the case that Labour’s commitment to further devolution – like so many other Labour policies – is still far from a settled issue ahead of the coming general election.

2625: Playtime – solution

The unclued lights and the four lacking their definitions (7, 20, 35 and 36) are MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS.

First prize Wendy Meredith, Exeter, Devon

Runners-up C.S.G Elengorn, Enfield, Middlesex; Rhidian Llewellyn, London SW14

2628: Customary taxes

The unclued lights (one hyphened and plural, and another in the past tense) are of a kind, all verifiable as such in Chambers, most of them on a specific page.

        Across

   1    One son half-naked, at first, during old broadcast (12)

10    Bird losing head and part of foot (4)

12    Series of files from Game on BBC once (10)

14    Return of low relative from abroad (3)

17    Fruit found when Christmas in over, Frenchman penned (5)

26    Find fault with husband and unnamed folk’s cellular radios (3,6)

27    Bess and Isaac worked out geometrical co-ordinates (9)

29    Craftsman for two generations (5)

31    Stage of journey in tea wagon in Russia (6)

34    Exam result, we’re told, was looking old (6)

36    Two drugs for leading actress (7)

38    Main target, regularly, for an aspiring cleric? (5)

39    ‘New Deal’ with parliamentary assistant in city (8)

40    Aussies regularly take drugs (3)

41    Material dries white, sadly (5,5)

42    Neat cut (4)

         Down

   2    Like a Turin-Bern trip? (10)

   4    Involved oneself endlessly in German trade fair (5)

   5    Patients treated outside hospital way back when (2,3,4)

   6    Variety of ivy from state with another name cut short (6)

   7    Recently turned up, adopting one Amazon business, say (5)

   8    Record sleeve’s last in box (4)

   9    Land initially seen as useless (6,6)

11    Flatten lint pad (8)

16    President at furniture company dropped one (3)

19    Preparing for plastering on reef in Gabon (6)

20    Produced a sound copy (6)

23    Wild notion of wild aide? (5,4)

25    Free from fine nut-tree, felled (8)

28    Tree is beginning to topple – one on volcano (2,5)

30    Pants are not highly decorated (6)

32    Primitive plough in circular ditch (3)

33    Old motto – English or not (5)

35    Kuwaiti prince backing some agreement (5)

37    Nobleman nearly at the centre (4)

Download a printable version here.

A first prize of £30 and two runners-up prizes of £20 for the first correct solutions opened on 13 October. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2628, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Spectator competitions: poems about the Sycamore Gap tree

In Competition No. 3322 you were invited to submit a poem reflecting on the fate of the Sycamore Gap tree, planted in the late 19th century by Newcastle lawyer John Clayton.

Antony Gormley, who has a studio in Hexham near the site of the felled tree, has described it as ‘a marker in the lie of the land’. Talk of replacing it with a sculpture is wrongheaded, he said, quoting fellow artist Mark Wallinger: ‘A sculpture and a tree are very different, and in most cases a tree is always preferable.’

Several competitors drew to great effect on Manley Hopkins’s 1879 ‘Binsey Poplars’, inspired by the felling of a row of poplar trees on the bank of the River Thames. David Shields earns a commendation.

The winners below scoop £25.

If you’re a photogenic, striking tree,

rejoice! We have in Hexham, by a wall,

a full-time role for you, a vacancy,

you must be landmark-worthy, ancient, tall,

adept at being honoured, hugged, admired,

a sentinel and shelter, resting-place.

Stargazers will enthuse, their nights inspired,

you’ll symbolise resistance, nature’s grace.

For generations you will proudly stand,

beloved, famous; hikers by the score

will trek to you across the wild northland

to view one leafy, lush, lone sycamore.

Branch out in your career, put roots down, grow,

be vandal-proof until your late retirement –

a vital skill, for since a recent blow,

it is, in fact, our number one requirement.

Janine Beacham

Sycamore, sycamore, beautiful sycamore,

How can it be that you’re felled in your prime,

Target of evil or psychopathology,

Prey to an odious, hideous crime?

Towering, flowering pride of Northumberland

Loved by romantics and dreamers galore,

Ally of artists and astrophotographers,

What in the world were you sacrificed for?

Prominent, eminent, elegant sentinel

Guarding the wall as the centuries passed,

How could the teeth of a 21st-century

Chainsaw have torn through your heartwood at last?

Sycamore, sycamore, beautiful sycamore,

Why are you pallid and drained of your sap,

Leaving behind you an incomprehensible

Wound, and a heartrending sycamore gap?

Alex Steelsmith

Our experts find the sycamore to be

non-native and invasive, since it came

after the flood in Doggerland. The tree

was planted by a plutocrat whose name

was current in the eighteenth century

and must assume its portion of his blame.

This alien growth usurps ecology,

appropriates the natural Great Whin frame,

won’t host our lichenous community,

and shades our flora with its spurious fame.

It stands moreover on a boundary

of empires, where it greenwashes the shame

of Angevin and Roman primacy,

while blocking up a gap that shows the claim

of Pictish folk to that diversity

that is the Trust’s philosophy and aim.

Nick MacKinnon

Wee treasured, long-lived sycamore,

For centuries your leaves you wore

And showered affection from your core

Looking sae braw.

Alas, you heard the awful roar

Of man’s cruel saw.

You thought to live a thousand years,

Alone and loved and free of fears,

Now those you charmed are shedding tears.

You cease to please.

The sweetest hope oft disappears

Of men and trees…

Frank McDonald

A sycamore, so dearly held,

alas, alas, has just been felled,

and now, alas, there is a gap –

murdered, murdered, in cold sap!

A bird that nested in that tree

became, alas, a refugee.

And yet the stump’s surviving lumber,

vitalised and disencumbered

of the weight that it once bore,

will sprout again, and then, once more,

in years to come, a tree as good

and fine as any made of wood

and leaves and limbs will gain renown –

till someone cuts the new tree down.

Robert Schechter

Bell Scott tells it as it was –

Centurion on Wall –

Clayton dressed in Roman coz –

Britons loll and sprawl –

Clayton buys a Wall-side farm –

Plants one stunning tree –

Fills the U-dip like a charm –

Which Clayton will not see –

Clayton saving Grainger’s bacon –

Here’s Newcastle’s spoor –

In the country, godforsaken –

Plants his sycamore –

Chopped and stumped and merely firewood –

Clayton can’t be beat –

I think of saplings shooting skyward –

While crossing Clayton Street –

Bill Greenwell

No. 3325: I spy

You are invited to describe an encounter between Bertie Wooster and James Bond in the style of P.G. Wodehouse. Please email entries of up to 150 words to lucy@-spectator.co.uk by midday on 8 November.