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Ministers mull overhauling public inquiries
Do you have an issue you care about? You should probably be calling for a public inquiry into it, then. Public inquiries have become so popular in British politics that there are currently 25 running at the moment, and barely a week goes by without an MP calling for a new one at Prime Minister’s Questions. Last week MPs on the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee announced an inquiry into inquiries, which follows another inquiry into inquiries by the House of Lords Statutory Inquiries Committee last year. That inquiry was in part looking at whether the previous inquiry, held ten years before, had managed to have any lasting impact (it hadn’t, and neither had many of the public inquiries themselves in the interim).
Before you run out of breath, I bring you news of another inquiry into inquiries, this time within government. I understand that the Cabinet Office is also examining the inquiries system. The minister responsible, Josh Simons, has been leading a ‘policy sprint review’ (which at least gives us a break for one sentence from the i-word) of the current system, with former chairs and officials offering their own views on what needs to change.
Some of those who have spoken to the Cabinet Office have left with the impression that the government may be open to changing primary legislation, though the chances of this happening imminently seem rather remote, given other priorities (including implementing the findings of other inquiries). I understand no decision has been made on how ambitious reform of the system could end up being, but the review has been timed to coincide with the passage of the Hillsborough Law, currently making its way through the Commons in the Public Office (Accountability) Bill. That law, incidentally, came from a non-statutory inquiry, rather than the form popularly considered to be the gold standard whenever there has been a scandal of a full statutory inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005.
That act has now been on the statute books for long enough that its flaws are reasonably clear, one of them being that while inquiries are popular, they don’t often lead to lasting or well-designed change to prevent a similar scandal happening in the future. These days inquiries are generally quite good at finding out what happened, but given they officially cease to exist once they have published their final report, their chairs cannot have confidence that what they recommended will ever make it off a shelf in Whitehall. Some, like Alexis Jay, have had to become unofficial and voluntary campaigners for their own reports for years after publication. The Hillsborough Law itself came from the independent panel report published back in 2012.
Of course, inquiries also cost a lot to run and even more to respond to when they call for compensation for victims. So there is an incentive for ministers to think quite hard about what merits an inquiry, and what will actually come of it.
When I approached the Cabinet Office about this review, a spokesperson said: ‘The Government must learn lessons from scandals such as Hillsborough and we have been clear about the need to increase transparency, accountability and support for victims. We are passing the Hillsborough Law to do exactly this.’ It is admirable, at least, that this quote does not include the word ‘inquiries’. In the meantime, they’ll probably end up announcing a few more in the next few years, largely because a full statutory inquiry is still one of the best political ways that a government can suggest it is taking a problem seriously, even if that suggestion isn’t borne out in reality.
The problem with Labour’s ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ definition
Some might say that trying to define ‘Islamophobia’ is a foolish enterprise, given that words these days are so wantonly manipulated. Yet this hasn’t stopped Labour from trying. In 2018, the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims called for the following definition to be adopted by the government: ‘Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness’. Now it has been reported that ministers are finalising a new wording which defines it more simply as ‘anti-Muslim hostility’.
In our hypersensitive times, ‘hostility’ is likely to mean anything offence-seekers want it to be
It could be argued that this definition is an improvement, given the wide scope of the previous definition and its implicit conflation of Islam the religion with Muslims as people. It’s that muddled overlap that led many to fear ‘Islamophobia’ was set to be deployed surreptitiously in order to reintroduce blasphemy laws into this country. The conviction (since appealed) earlier this year of Hamit Coskun – who had been found guilty of a religiously aggravated public order offence after burning a copy of the Koran – did nothing to assuage these fears.
Some might also welcome the fact that the racial component of the previous definition also looks set to go. Islam, like Christianity, is a faith welcome to all people irrespective of ethnicity and race.
Although this is technically true, the problem is that in Britain, as opposed to, say, Bosnia or Kosovo, most Muslims are of Asian heritage. And this inescapable fact has been used to justify special protection – or as some might argue, special treatment – for Islam or the mainly Asian adherents to this faith.
Both far-left activists and radical preachers have taken advantage of our society’s grievous taboo on racism, and the fear of being labelled racist, to browbeat well-meaning liberals into accepting that a hatred of Islam and Muslims is rampant and requires harsh disciplinary measures. And our establishment has duly been persuaded. As one spokesman from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government told the Times this morning: ‘With all hate crime on the rise and anti-Muslim hate incidents at a record high, we are tackling hatred and extremism wherever it may occur.’ As one government spokesman also told the Daily Telegraph: ‘This work has always been about stamping out hatred.’
The progressive left have spread a fear of ‘Islamophobia’ to further their own agenda and in order to better tarnish their opponents as ‘racist’. Radical preachers have been scaremongering in order to silence critics of Islam by branding their crude irreverence as ‘offensive’. And it’s this fear of ‘offence’ that’s at the heart of the matter. This taboo has been marshalled by those who want to shut people up. This abhorrence of hurt feelings has now passed into law, so that individuals are collared or put in prison for using nasty words.
Taking offence is so easy these days because of an associated problem: the reign of sentiments, subjectivity and personal interpretation. In a society governed by feelings, in which people talk of ‘my truth’, few dare to question the beliefs of others, especially those who present themselves as vulnerable or victims. Ambiguity and confusion are already present in our current laws: since 2007 a hate crime in Britain has been defined as, ‘any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice or prejudice’.
Redefining Islamophobia as ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ will only perpetuate and aggravate matters. Under the umbrella of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’, this new definition is set to include ‘the prejudicial stereotyping and racialisation of Muslims, as part of a collective group with set characteristics.’ In our hypersensitive times, ‘hostility’ is likely to mean anything offence-seekers want it to be.
Should we see this wording put in place, expect to see it warped and weaponised by those with malign intent. Remarking that Pakistanis are more likely to be involved in grooming gangs will be reinterpreted as ‘hostile’. The same will go for those who dare to link the faith of Islam with terrorists raised and immersed in that faith. Questioning the very concept of Islamophobia is already deemed by many to be proof of it.
We don’t need any definition of ‘Islamophobia’, because nothing will appease the bad actors who exploit our fear of offence for their own divisive ends. Laws already exist to punish racial hatred. The last thing we need is another, third tier of justice giving special treatment to a de facto ethnic minority. What we need is to jettison altogether a culture of offence-taking and hurt feelings.
Keir Starmer must not forget Jimmy Lai
The conviction of 78 year-old British citizen, Hong Kong entrepreneur and pro-democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai yesterday on two counts of conspiracy to collude with foreign powers and one charge of conspiracy to publish seditious publications is one of the great travesties of our time. It was yet another dark day for Hong Kong and a direct assault on the values of freedom, human rights and the rule of law.
It was not, however, a surprise. Ever since Lai was arrested and jailed five years ago on multiple other trumped-up charges, and ever since his trial under Hong Kong’s draconian national security law began two years ago, the verdict has been predetermined. It was a bogus trial in a kangaroo court in a repressive police state. Lai, the founder of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily which was forcibly shut down in 2021, has been jailed for – as the head of his international legal team Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC puts it – the crimes of conspiracy to commit journalism, conspiracy to discuss politics with politicians, and conspiracy to talk about human rights with human rights activists.
Without concerted global action, Jimmy Lai will die in prison
The fact that communications between Lai and various foreigners were presented in court as evidence of his crimes illustrates the Alice in Wonderland absurdity of this charade. I have apparently been named at least 95 times in the judgment and my friend Luke de Pulford, executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, 161 times. For what? Talking to Lai. What were the contents of my communications? In essence, three topics: freedom, journalism, and Catholicism. Not exactly criminal acts in most normal societies.
But Hong Kong today is no longer normal and is certainly not free, as proven by yesterday’s verdict. What you write, what you like, what you wear, what you sing, who you meet, what you believe, and what you say can be a crime if you are not careful.
By going after Lai with such vindictiveness, the Chinese Communist party is sending a message that no one is safe. If they can convict a well-known, well-connected and wealthy entrepreneur for his opinions in a sham trial, they can pursue anyone. Lai has already been in solitary confinement for over 1,800 days, denied his first choice of legal counsel, denied independent medical care of his choice, and denied the right – as a Catholic – to receive Holy Communion. He and his family have already endured five years of hell – and now they face the prospect of his death in jail.
Lai’s health is deteriorating. He is a diabetic who has been denied natural light in his prison cell and is permitted less than an hour a day for exercise in a confined space. In September, his son Sebastien, together with his international legal team, submitted a new urgent appeal to United Nations (UN) experts – the special rapporteur on torture, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, and the special rapporteur on the right to health – in relation to the serious and immediate risk to Lai’s life posed by his ongoing detention. Earlier this month, his daughter Claire highlighted further concerns about Lai’s health condition, including dramatic weight loss.
Lai’s imprisonment was declared arbitrary and unlawful by the United Nations working group on arbitrary detention, which called for his immediate release, as did five UN special rapporteurs. On January 31, 2024 the UN announced that the special rapporteur on torture had written to the authorities in China to address claims that the evidence of a key prosecution witness in Lai’s trial had been obtained through torture. They then called for an immediate investigation into the allegations.
Such declarations by UN bodies are helpful. But now the real work begins. It is the responsibility of UN member states – especially the United Kingdom, given that Lai is a British citizen – to pull out all the stops to secure his release. Strong statements – such as the Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper’s yesterday, which accused Beijing of using its national security law ‘to silence China’s critics’ in Hong Kong – are no longer enough. Empty hand-wringing is marginally better than nothing, but it would be enhanced by a strategy for action. As the last governor of Hong Kong, Lord Patten of Barnes, put it yesterday, ‘I hope that all in the rest of the world who believe in freedom will call frequently and loudly for his release from captivity.’
Prime Minister Keir Starmer must lead the charge. If his visit to Beijing goes ahead as reported in January, then top of the agenda must be to demand and secure Lai’s release on medical grounds. He must make any trade deals, and any agreement on the controversial new Chinese embassy in London, conditional upon his immediate release and his right – should he and his family choose to do so – to leave Hong Kong.
The United States must back this up. President Trump has said that he would secure Lai’s release. Now, he must match his words with action. Other democracies – from the European Union to Canada, Australia, Japan and beyond – must also weigh in.
Lai’s sentence is expected in the coming weeks. Whether he receives the minimum ten-year term or a life sentence, thanks to Lai’s age and with his current deteriorating health, it amounts to the same. Without concerted global action, led by Starmer, Jimmy Lai will die in prison – and his death will be on the Prime Minister’s conscience.
Today, the United Kingdom must act to save the life and secure the freedom of one of its citizens, and should mobilise its allies across the free world to support it. The life of one individual is at stake. But the values upon which our civilisation is built also hang in the balance.
America’s free-speech war on the EU
If I were a bookie, I would be making odds now about when the European Union will finally unravel and die. Unless there is an imminent and drastic course correction, the blessed event cannot be far off. I might need a Doomsday Clock akin to the one publicized by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Their clock hovers near midnight, which signifies nuclear Armageddon, the minute hand pushed closer or farther away from the blast depending on minatory world events. My clock would measure the EU’s proximity to implosion. Its recent decision to fine Elon Musk and his company X €120 million for “non-compliance with transparency obligations” has me nudging the minute hand closer to midnight.
“Non-compliance with transparency obligations.” What do you reckon that means? It means Musk’s commitment to free speech has horned in on the EU’s chief domestic product, which is censorship and its attendant regulatory impositions. In announcing its punitive action against Musk, an EU spokesman was careful to say the decision “has nothing to do with content moderation,” which is bureaucratese for “censorship.”
The commentator Michael Shellenberger got it exactly right. “The EU wants X to give its data to government-selected ‘researchers’ so they can identify which posts and advertisements should be censored. This is a censorship-by-proxy strategy.”
The US pursued a similar strategy thanks to President Autopen when the government leaned on Twitter (as it then was) and other media outlets to throttle unsanctioned opinions about Covid, Donald Trump, the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, climate change, immigration and a host of other issues. Often the pressure came not from the government directly, but from NGOs which were wholly owned (that is, wholly funded) proxies of the government.
The EU’s allergy to free speech, which is a symptom of its allergy to democratic rule, seems terminal. In the US, thanks to people such as Musk and Trump, we have seen a rebirth of free speech. Much of Europe is stuck in the slough of despond, struggling to transform Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from a warning about totalitarianism into a user manual for the elite. Why is that? Because the EU is a profoundly undemocratic regime, run by a bureaucratic elite that is appointed, not elected, and that is accountable only to itself, not to the voters.
Are you interested in voting for the AfD in Germany? Marine Le Pen in France? Sorry: those candidates have not been cleared by the EU’s star chamber. In Romania recently, the high court, with the blessing of the European Commission (the executive council of the EU), actually invalidated national election results because the wrong party won. This is not news. Unclubbable reactionaries – that would be people like me – have been warning about the rise of bureaucratic totalitarianism for the past couple of decades. We like to quote Alexis de Tocqueville on the nature of that “democratic despotism” which prefers to infantilize rather than directly tyrannize its subjects.
What is new is the union of universal surveillance, the regulatory state and the shifting ideology of woke intolerance. They all came together when Covid swept across the world and set the hearts of budding despots pit-a-pat as they eyed the compliant ovine populace cowering under the draconian stipulations of the health police.
There are certainly plenty of enemies of free speech in the United States. Still, this country has taken important steps to escape from that sinkhole of conformity. Europe has embraced it. As several commentators have pointed out, the attack on X may simply be the opening salvo in the EU’s effort to enforce the Digital Services Act, the blandly named blueprint for enforcing political correctness online. As the commentator Jonathan Turley pointed out, EU officials have acknowledged that the fine imposed upon X “will lay the foundation for additional penalties to come to force companies to comply with EU ‘values’ on free speech.” This includes, Turley notes, “investigations for failing to carry out demands for censorship, including of American citizens.”
The ironies abound. Even as the EU sought to penalize X, the platform surged to become the number one news source in all 27 countries of the EU. Moreover, the EU announced its attack on X by logging on to a dormant ad account and posting a link that deceives users into thinking they are accessing a video. In other words, the EU engaged in the same deceptive practices of which they accuse X. Result: the EU’s ad account has been terminated. Who says that schadenfreude isn’t sweet?
I think Musk is correct: “The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries, so that governments can better represent their people.”
The EU is desperately attempting to preserve its undemocratic prerogatives by clamping down on free speech and extending its regime of censorship. Meanwhile, the White House just released its 2025 National Security Strategy report. Europe’s economic performance and military posture are dismal. But that is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Economic decline, the report says, is
eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence. Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.
All of which means that the odds favor Elon Musk. The question is not whether the EU will collapse but when. My book has good odds that it happens before the end of Trump’s second term.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.
Peter Thiel predicts the future
Peter Thiel has been described variously as “America’s leading public intellectual,” the “architect of Silicon Valley’s contemporary ethos” or as an “incoherent and alarmingly super-nationalistic” malevolent force. The PayPal and Palantir founder, a prominent early supporter of Donald Trump, is one of the world’s richest and most influential men. Throughout his career, his principal concern has always been the future, so when The Spectator asked to interview him, he wanted to talk to young people. To that effect, three young members of the editorial team were sent to Los Angeles to meet him. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation.
WILLIAM ATKINSON: Following Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York, an email that you sent five years ago has gone viral. You argued that with accumulating student debt and housing costs, it was no surprise that young people were turning to socialism. How do you explain that there are Gen Zs, like us, who aren’t on the left?
‘The Trump administration is trying to pull off an extremely difficult thing. America is no longer a great country’
PETER THIEL: My sense is that in the US, Britain, Germany and France, the Gen Z voters are less centrist. I wouldn’t say they’re more drawn to the extremes, but they do not believe there are solutions within the Overton window straitjacket, the narrow space that’s been defined between New Labour and the Tories [in the UK] for the past three decades. And then there’s Reform, a party that repudiates that spectrum. For the first time in 200 years, there’s a real party to the right of the Tories. It’s not just a Gen Z phenomenon, but there’s a Gen Z part that is very important.
WE: You first argued in the late 2000s that the backlash from globalization would upend politics. Do you often feel that the world is catching up with Peter Thiel?
PT: These things were coming for a long time. Student debt was $300 billion in 2000, around $2 trillion today. The GFC [global financial crisis] in 2008 was a big watershed. Entry-level jobs became less well paid. For students graduating after 2008, it became much, much harder to get out of the debt. Student debt slows you down from buying a house, getting started with forming a family, becoming an actual adult. You end up with a completely different society. It takes a long time to figure this out. But I started talking about this a lot in 2010… Why did house prices go up so much faster than incomes? Not enough was built. A big part was built as a retirement vehicle for older people. They were happy with the prices going up. The Tory party in the UK is probably completely past the point of no return. The suggestion that I have had was that you must start by throwing everybody out of the party who comes from real estate. You must be willing to purge all the people that are part of this dysfunctional system.
JOHN POWER: What would your advice be to someone in their twenties about how they can have an impact in politics? Should they join Reform?
PT: I think about politics a fair bit, but if I spent all my life on it, I would go out of my mind. I would like people to be more involved in right-wing politics, but I’m not sure that’s the best thing for most. You certainly should work for Reform rather than Labour or the Tories. You can criticize Nigel Farage as too much of a Boomer but he’s less structurally hateful to the young people. But maybe this is not the right way to frame the questions. We’re gonna have a revolution from Gen Z – all these crazy things that they are going to be doing. Is this good or bad? I’ve often said, in the early 20th century you think of both communism and fascism as youth movements that went very, very haywire. In the early 21st century, the reality is we have inverted demographic pyramids. There are not enough young people. We’re not going to get youthful communism or youthful fascism. We have this unbelievably oppressive, powerful gerontocracy. Maybe you can get communism or fascism of old people, but it’s very low-energy. It will avoid some of the defects of the early 20th century.But it’ll have many other kinds of problems. The general challenge for Gen Z is that there are big constraints.
My hope is that there always are some technological fixes, defining technology as doing more with less. If the debate is more with more spending or less with less spending, you end up with runaway deficits or extremely cruel rationing. I have critiques of the three biggest European countries – Germany, France and Britain. France is way too socialist. That doesn’t work. Germany is just insane. People have got caught up in crazed ideological fixations. There’s almost nothing like the Green party anywhere outside of Germany. Britain is neither too insane nor too socialist, but it’s extremely unpragmatic. It is extraordinary how lacking in common sense it is. The optimistic case for the UK is that there are extraordinary efficiencies one could wring out of the state. It has the greatest room for improvement of any European country. But why haven’t these things been done in the past 60 or 70 years?… Maybe the entire population is just too docile.
LARA BROWN: You’ve talked before about Europe’s choice between ‘Greta on a bicycle’ environmentalism, Chinese surveillance and radical Islam. Would you say Europe has chosen one path?
PT: The bad doors for Europe, the three doors of the future. For the future to have power as a cultural or political idea, you want it to be different. You can’t stay in this Groundhog Day, this Tory/Labour thing where we’re never doing anything new. The problem is the three actual pictures of the future. Behind door number one is Islamic sharia law. Behind door number two is the totalitarian CCP surveillance state, a hi-tech dystopia. Behind door number three is Greta with a bicycle, and then there’s no fourth door. This is why Greta’s been winning.
JP: A lot of people on the American right talk incessantly about how terrible Britain and Europe are in general. But I think there’s selective blindness and chauvinism from some people on the American right about the condition of their own country. There is nowhere in Europe as bad as Skid Row in Los Angeles. What do you make of that?
PT: I would defend the Trump version of the Republican party vs the zombie Reagan-Bush era. I don’t think President Trump or J.D. Vance are absurdly optimistic or panglossian about things. Make America Great Again was the most pessimistic slogan any president had in a century, and certainly that any Republican president ever had. The Trump administration is trying to pull off an extremely difficult thing, because the red pill is that America is no longer a great country. But you have to make sure it doesn’t become a gateway drug to a black pill, where you become nihilistic and give up and you’re destined to eat too many doughnuts in a trailer park. I don’t think that the right are overly optimistic in America. I don’t think there’s a problem where people describe things as even worse in other places. People in the US don’t pay attention to the world at all. We are a semi-autistic country. Maybe not quite as autistic as China, but we do not think about anything going on outside this country that much.
LB: You mentioned the UK has undergone 70 years of stagnation. Many on the British right would agree, but may think that the period from 1979 to 1990 under Margaret Thatcher offered a respite from decline – she pursued unpopular but necessary policies such as anti-inflationary measures despite employment implications and her approach to the Unions. Would you question this narrative?
PT: Reagan was very formative for me. I was in eighth grade in 1980 when Reagan got elected and felt at the time he was an incredibly great president and had solved all these problems once and for all. I think if I lived in the UK under Thatcher, I would have felt similarly. But they weren’t durable. We got Clinton and Blair after. The size of government didn’t shrink that much. The government sectors didn’t get weakened.
‘Capitalism didn’t increase inequality but globalization did’
There’s been a slowdown in tech since the 1970s. There was progress in the world of computers, internet, mobile, crypto, maybe now AI, but in a lot of other areas there was a much slower kind of progress. The question is, why did we not notice this faster? I think it’s because Reagan and Thatcher created a big lift. They made societies more capitalist by lowering marginal tax rates and deregulating. Lots of people got fired but the economy grew so most people ended up better off.
Reagan and Thatcher were exactly right for their time. But it wouldn’t work for all time. And to the extent that this distracts us from these science and technology questions, then it was somewhat problematic.
Then there was the Clinton-Blair one-time fix, which was that you could somehow grow the economy and increase productivity through globalization. That also probably gave you a big one-time lift. It came with very big long-term problems. It led to far more inequality. The Gini coefficient in the US went up more under Clinton than any other president post-1945. So capitalism did not increase inequality, but globalization did.
My telling of the 50-year economic history is that we tried more capitalism with Reagan and Thatcher and it was the right thing to do. More globalism with Clinton and Blair was sort of the right thing to do, though it had more negative externalities that people were very dishonest about. We now need to do something very different.
LB: Helen Andrews recently posited that feminism and gender-balance initiatives in the early 2000s led to a “Great Feminization.” She claims this caused the prioritization of safety over risk, a workplace culture dominated by consensus and appeals to emotion rather than logic in decision-making. How much do you buy into this as a theory of stagnation?
PT: I think it’s very courageous of her to tackle something that is relatively taboo… Yes, I think there was a shift towards a risk-averse society. Feminization was part of that. Things also went wrong with educational institutions or too much regulation. The deeper cause is that there was something dangerous and scary about where a lot of science and technology had gone.
By the time you get to Los Alamos and nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, you really wonder whether technology has gone in a very dangerous direction. One cultural history is that there was a delayed response to nuclear weapons. This really kicks in in the 1970s where we are trying to regulate, stop, slow down science. But I would say that feminization was a part of that. You have these high testosterone men that like to push buttons, or the physicists that like to build bigger bombs. If we replace the eccentric male scientists with less talented DEI people, that sounds like a bug, but maybe it’s a feature. We’re going to end up with this really lame world where nothing happens, but it’s maybe harder for it to blow up. My instinct is to push back against all this.
LB: Are you saying that diversity and inclusion efforts were an attempt to derail technological progress?
PT: I think at some point people got very scared of where this stuff was going. Absolutely. It wasn’t just the nuclear thing. I would say that environmentalism as a movement was very focused on the dangers of limitless progress, even though in theory, you could have a lot of forms of environmentalism that would be pro-tech, right? If you’re concerned about climate change, we could build lots of new nuclear reactors that don’t emit carbon. But if we’re worried that nuclear reactors could be dual use and used to make nuclear weapons then you can’t do that. In some sense the energy shifted into this very anti-tech, anti-science direction for the past 50 years or so.
LB: And you think DEI was a good way to achieve anti-tech goals?
‘We’re going to end up with this really lame world where nothing happens but it’s maybe harder to blow up’
PT: It’s always hard to know how intentional these things were. Diversity can function in an anti-tech way. If diversity really means homogenization, let’s apply that to scientists. There’s no heterodoxy allowed, no heterodoxy on climate science, no heterodoxy on evolution, no heterodoxy on vaccines, on masks, on the origin of Covid. Everyone looks different but has to think alike. So diversity means conformity. And conformity is not compatible with science. And if diversity is a shibboleth, which I think is its important meaning, then we’re worshipping this god called diversity. It’s an unknown god. It’s a hypnotic magic trick that redirects our attention. And so we don’t care about science any more.
JP: You seem to have a wider picture of American history, particularly in regard to wokeness. Many MAGA-adjacent people seem to think wokeness, or “cultural Marxism,” came from nowhere in the early 2010s, while you have identified before that it is a postwar phenomenon.
PT: The culture wars are important. And there are ways in which there’s a side that’s right and there’s a side that’s wrong. But the big problem is that’s distracting us from things like housing or the economy generally, or science and tech or maybe even the CCP takeover of the world. This is where I push back against using the term “cultural Marxism.” I always think Marxism was at least about the economy. The focus on identity politics, multiculturalism, affirmative action, starts in the 1970s. That’s when inequality starts to go up. These things were at least correlated with us getting distracted from what I consider to be more important problems.
JP: There are parts of the American right who now look at the changes of the 1960s, such the Civil Rights Act, and think it’s time to re-evaluate the postwar social consensus. What do you make of that?
PT: I don’t think you can ever strictly go back. There are three questions about the history going back to the Helen Andrews piece or my stagnation thesis. First, there’s a question of what happened. Second is a question of why it happened. Then there is a very different question of what should be done now. That’s in some ways very different from the first two. Even if we can agree there’s been stagnation, even if we say the society became too feminized or too risk-averse, we don’t want to just get blackpilled from that. And then the question is: where are the places that you have some agency to get out of this straitjacket?
WA: Are you optimistic that that’s happening? And do you think you’ve contributed towards it?
PT: Somewhat, and very much yes.
LB: Earlier you alluded to three doors we can go through: radical environmentalism, sharia law, or Chinese-style authoritarianism. If none of us wants to go through them then what’s the way out?
PT: It’s a challenge on a political level because when you’re trying to win elections it ends up being about broader narratives. For people in Silicon Valley, in a way it’s more local. You can build a company and solve particular problems in that context. Silicon Valley turned out to be a big place where there was a moderate amount of freedom of action in the past few decades, although it wasn’t a panacea. There’s a part of me that thinks that for some problems you have to go through politics. If we’re going to come up with new cures and new types of nuclear power you have to somewhat deregulate the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] and the NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission]. Some of these things are entangled with politics. But a lot of progress has happened that is decoupled from politics. One of the things that’s still healthy about the United States, unlike Britain and France, is that the political capital, the financial capital, the technological capital are all in different places, so it is very decentered. There are places where these things overlap, but there’s some way where people are able to do things that are independent.
JP: Is tech going to come to the rescue like the Eagles [in Lord of the Rings], deus ex machina, providing abundance that can kind of smooth over some of the economic challenges? And as a rejoinder to that, do you think the AI bubble is about to pop?
PT: There are all sorts of things that I don’t particularly like about the AI revolution. It seems to be very concentrated on bigger companies, so it’s possible a lot of the returns are captured by a few companies, possibly leading to very uneven growth. While it may be a complement to human labor, it is probably more of a substitute than a complement. It will have a zero sum feel to a lot of people. At the same time if there is no other vector of growth in our society, we would be out of our minds not to take it. I don’t think it’s big enough to solve the budget deficit, but if the US embraces AI and Europe rejects it, I think the US is in somewhat better shape than Europe is.
‘There are all sorts of things that I don’t particularly like about the AI revolution’
On the question of whether or not it is a bubble, I get asked this a lot by Europeans and that is how you know that they’re not going to build a lot of AI in Europe. If it’s a bubble, then people are spending too much money on AI, and they’re building too many data centers and buying too many chips, and you’re eventually going to get seriously diminishing returns on that. During the 1990s bubble, it was mainly the telecom fiber-optic infrastructure stuff where people really spent way too much and that had to get dialed back. But maybe it’s the other way around where there are high returns to AI, enabling the automation of certain workflows and enhanced productivity.
If the AI bubble does not burst, it’s possible that it ends up being quite inflationary because you have to use more power for these data centers. The atoms part of our economy is regulated and it’s hard to ramp up the power. But if the returns on power going to AI chips are really high, it will absorb a lot of energy. Interest rates could be higher because there’s more demand for capital. My macroeconomic placeholder is that it’s going to keep going.
I’ve been allergic to AI for a long time because it can be a horrible buzzword. There was a 2016 report during the Obama administration on AI by the National Science and Technology council. If you did a search and replace, and replaced every use of the word AI with computers, it would have read the same way.
AI also meant all these really different things over time. In 2014, [Nick] Bostrom defined it as machines being way smarter than humans. Kai-fu Lee wrote the CCP counterpoint AI Superpowers in 2017, where he defined it as this sort of low-tech, big data machine learning. Then in 2022 it turns out the AI revolution is LLMs [large language models] which can pass the Turing test. People had thought this would be what AI was for 70 years. So in the decade before we were about to pass the Turing test we had forgotten about it.
The dynamic when one has to think through a lot more in company formation is not entrepreneurship as a value. In some ways the important thing is building something scalable. This is where technology is really different from science. Big science is an oxymoron. When you scale science to make it into a science factory, there’s no science going on. Big tech is not an oxymoron. It’s extremely powerful, extremely strong – maybe too powerful, too strong. But from the inside, that’s the great sort of business that one wants to build. Noam Chomsky, the communist linguist from MIT, said that in the US, there is basically one party, the business party, that has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. The intuition is that maybe all men and women are created equal, but not all businesses are.
If you look at the ratio of how many businesses there are per 100,000 people: what part of the US has the lowest number of businesses? Silicon Valley. That’s because the costs of business are higher, so these subscale businesses that are too small to go anywhere are even harder to get started. In a third-world country where there are no good businesses and everyone is an umbrella salesman, they are very entrepreneurial, but not in a scalable way. So you need to differentiate entrepreneurship from scalable businesses.
‘If you’re too focused on history, you don’t pay enough attention to the future’
There’s this economist called Thomas Gür who has researched the idea that immigrants are more entrepreneurial. While that is correct, you have to adjust for the quality of the businesses and the immigrants start businesses by starting a taco truck because there’s nothing else you can do. It’s better than going on welfare. But that’s what you do when you’re not really part of a society. It’s better than nothing, but what you really want to do is scale.
JP: Is there a cutting-edge domain that you would focus your energies on?
PT: One of the lines we had in Zero to One [Thiel’s 2014 book about startups co-written with Blake Masters] is from Anna Karenina. It’s the opening line: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The opposite is true of business. All failed businesses are more or less alike because they fail to escape from this problem of homogeneous competition. They didn’t do anything special. All successful businesses are special in their own way. That’s the closest I can give you to a formula and it’s incredibly hard to figure out what that is, or how to do it. I have some feel for it, I know it when I see it.
To wrap things up, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the past. That’s because it’s important. It’s how we got here. It’s what shaped a lot of these debates. At the same time, there’s also some limit to history. If you’re too focused on it, you don’t pay enough attention to the future. The point is not just to reflect on the past.
There was a medieval play on the Antichrist from 1160 or so, Ludus de Antichristo. It’s not a very good literary production, but there are these three kings, the Antichrist conquerors who focus on things like nationalism or their countries or their history. They lose because they’re too fixated on the past while the Antichrist is thinking about the future, and about what can be done. They don’t see Antichrist coming. So while it’s very important for those on the right to think about the past, to think about the history and what happened – they still should not lose sight of the future.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.
How to fix Oxfam
Amid stiff competition, Oxfam may be the British charity sector’s greatest hypocrite. The charity’s chief executive, Halima Begum, has been forced out by trustees over accusations of bullying. Since being appointed almost two years ago, Begum is alleged to have presided over a ‘culture of fear’ that prompted almost 70 members of staff to sign a letter calling on the board to investigate her.
Begum – who earns over £130,000 a year – also stands accused of compromising Oxfam’s impartiality after appearing on stage with a Palestinian journalist who described the 7 October massacre as a ‘great day’. Naturally, Begum denies everything. Who’d have expected such conduct from the ‘be kind’ brigade?
Of course, this isn’t the first scandal to hit Oxfam. It emerged in 2018 that the charity had covered up widespread sexual abuse by its staff. While working in Haiti following the earthquake in 2010, Oxfam staff, including Roland Van Hauwermeiren – the director of operations at the time – were found to have used prostitutes in a villa rented for them by the organisation. The Charity Commission ultimately opened a statutory inquiry into Oxfam, found that the charity may not have fully disclosed everything it knew about the claims of sexual misconduct and gave it an official warning.
The charity was barred from bidding for government funding as a result. The ban was briefly lifted, only to be reinstated in 2021 after yet more claims of sexual impropriety and bullying, this time in the Democratic Republic of Congo. After Oxfam made ‘significant improvements’ to its safeguarding regime, the government officially removed the ban in November 2022.
It may be this unfortunate history that explains why individual donations make up less than half of Oxfam’s revenue. But it could also be the fact Oxfam seems to increasingly see perpetuating tired myths about capitalism and peddling dodgy statistics as central to its work.
Look at its annual report on economic inequality, timed to coincide with the meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos. This year’s edition, ‘Takers not Makers: The unjust poverty and unearned wealth of colonialism’, claims that between 1795 and 1900 the British extracted $64.82 trillion from India, or around £48 trillion. As the historian Robert Tombs has pointed out, if you probe that claim, it is almost completely insubstantial. In the methodology note attached to the report (which in fact contains few actual details on methodology), it simply cites the work of two Indian Marxists whose work has been widely questioned.
You’ll be unsurprised to learn that what Oxfam proposes to address the inequality that has arisen from ‘colonialism’ and later, ‘neoliberalism’, is a wealth tax. In a petition that you can sign here, the charity protests the Prime Minister’s plan to cut the foreign aid budget from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent of national income by 2027. Rather, ‘Kier Starmer’ (that’s how they’ve spelt his name) should impose an extra 2 per cent tax on individuals worth £10 million or more, which would apparently raise £24 billion annually.
Let me offer a small piece of advice
This, of course, is hokum, but as the rise of Zack Polanski exhibits, it is a dangerously fashionable idea. The truth about wealth taxes is that not only do they not work, they actually make everyone poorer as a result. The French proved this with their own attempt at wealth taxation, which raised just €3.5 billion a year, but cost €7 billion a year in lost tax revenue due to capital flight. In an age when capital is more mobile than ever – Britain has already seen its fair share of millionaires leave to escape Labour’s economic class war – a wealth tax will simply drive out what wealth and innovation we have left.
Whoever the lucky candidate may be, Oxfam’s next CEO has quite the challenge ahead of them. Let me offer them a small piece of advice: start restoring the charity’s credibility by focusing on its founding mission, rather than latching on to the latest left-wing fad.
Epstein, like Russiagate, damns the elite
As President Trump’s first year back in office drew to a close, his enemies had high hopes they’d hit on a scandal that could do to his second term what the “Russian collusion” story had done to his first. Donald Trump didn’t have to be found guilty of any wrongdoing tied to Jeffrey Epstein’s sleaze. All that was necessary was to stain his reputation indelibly and distract his administration from its work.
The Epstein weapon even had an advantage over the Russia allegations of yesteryear – it resonated with much of Trump’s own MAGA base. Trump campaigned in 2024 on releasing the Epstein files, and many in MAGA considered it a betrayal when he resisted doing so once back in the White House. Republicans Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene were among the loudest voices in Congress demanding the files’ release.
Trump relented and signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law on November 19. The ensuing releases were indeed career-ending – not for Trump but for Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard who continued to teach there and cut an imposing figure on campus until his correspondence with Epstein was made public.
The files have embarrassed other academics and Epstein sycophants, too. But have they done any damage to Trump?
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released the day before Trump signed the disclosure legislation found his approval ratings dipping to 38 percent, with only 20 percent of those surveyed – including 44 percent of Republicans – approving of his handling of the Epstein issue. As for rifts within MAGA, Trump’s feud with Massie still simmers, while Greene has chosen to retire.
Much more than Epstein is putting the Trump administration in an awkward place as it begins its second year. While Trump’s tariffs have not brought about the Götterdämmerung conventional economists prophesied, anemic employment numbers and elevated supermarket prices have given Americans cause for discontent. To allay their fears, Trump floated the idea of creating 50-year mortgages – with, hopefully, low monthly payments – and mailing out stimulus checks paid for by tariff revenue (which is booming). Neither idea has found much favor with the public or experts.
While Epstein has been a drag on the President’s popularity, the late and unlamented sex-trafficking financier doesn’t seem to pose the kind of long-term problem the Russia investigations did for Trump’s first term. The liberal hype machine that turned baseless accusations of collaborating with Putin into an unending ordeal for Trump the last time around hasn’t been able to do the same with Epstein-related insinuations.
That shouldn’t be a surprise – if Trump had anything to fear, why would he have campaigned on releasing the files? He may have been embarrassed to discover his name was in them, once he was in a position to authorize release. But there’s never been any reason to think Trump would be inculpated. Now that the files are out, the conspiracy theories about what they might contain are left deflated by what they actually reveal. None of the grand scenarios about what Epstein was really up to finds much support in what’s been made public. Epstein’s ties to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and others are documented, but they fall short of exposing him as an agent of foreign intelligence – not that the new revelations will dampen speculation. Evidence of a sexual blackmail scheme targeting politicians and other powerful people is also lacking.
What’s abundantly attested instead is the eagerness of journalists, scientists, political fixers and institutions such as Harvard University to pander to a rich man who was himself engaged in literal pandering involving underage girls. That should be scandal enough to justify coverage, and outrage, on the scale of the Russia nonsense from eight years ago, but because the truth about Epstein is damning for America’s elite and not for Trump, don’t expect the legacy media’s interest to last long.
In some quarters, the Epstein files are being touted as an outright acquittal of the political establishment and its friends in exalted places. Since these files don’t attest to a pedophile ring operating at the highest reaches of power, any suspicion that such depravity is possible should be dismissed as a kooky conspiracy theory. Such theories abound – recall “Pizzagate,” the legend that a Washington, DC pizza parlor connected to prominent Democrats was the secret center of a pedophile cult. A 28-year-old gunman took the tale seriously enough that he went and shot up the place, though mercifully no one was hurt or killed. No one wants the Epstein files to inspire another Pizzagate. Yet that shouldn’t make anyone complacent about sexual abuse in elite circles. Ten years ago, the former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, went to prison for a financial crime related to paying off a blackmailer who as a boy had been sexually abused by the politician.
Hastert became speaker after the GOP’s first choice to succeed Newt Gingrich in 1998, Bob Livingston, was discredited by a sex scandal uncovered by the pornographer Larry Flynt, who had offered a reward for any dirt on Republicans’ sex lives after the GOP impeached Bill Clinton. Hastert’s speakership ended after Republicans lost the 2006 midterms, in which the biggest issues were the Iraq War – and a sex scandal involving inappropriate conduct by more than one Republican member toward teenage boys who’d served as congressional pages.
There were rumors about Hastert’s sex life, albeit not involving minors, during his speakership. Was he just lucky Flynt hadn’t heard anything earlier? Was it a coincidence he presided over a House in which colleagues were bothering pageboys? Jeffrey Epstein may be dead, but what he represents isn’t buried.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.
Are we really preparing for war with Russia?
Are we really on the cusp of a real, shooting war with Russia? If you believe some of the rhetoric, it would seem so – but does anyone really think it? The war drums are certainly beating. Last night, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, called for ‘our defence and resilience [to be] a higher national priority for all of us. An “all-in” mentality’ because ‘the situation is more dangerous than I have known during my career’.
Armed Forces minister Al Carns warned more picturesquely that ‘the shadow of war is knocking on Europe’s door once more’. Meanwhile, Mark Rutte, the reliably alarmist secretary-general of Nato, evoked the spectacle of million-man armies clashing in apocalyptic fury, sternly instructing Europeans that they had to ‘be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured’.
It sounds like all the great and the good agree, the only question being quite when Putin’s legions will or may come storming westward. Will it be within five years, as Rutte most recently suggested? Or even tomorrow, as German Lieutenant General Alexander Sollfrank claimed last month (in fairness, referring to a ‘small, quick, regionally limited’ attack).
There is no harm in not putting temptation Putin’s way
Yet maybe it is worth looking less at top-line rhetoric and more at revealed preferences – in other words, deeds not words. Nato members have committed themselves to increasing defence spending from the existing minimum of 2 per cent of GDP to 3.5 (and another 1.5 per cent on ‘defence-related’ spending that, in practice, can mean pretty much anything, from healthcare to road resurfacing). That’s by 2035, though, and if past experience is any guide, many countries will fail to reach this target – or at best will have to rely on questionable accounting to make it appear as if they have.
There are clear exceptions. Poland has already committed 4.2 per cent of GDP to defence, and once its shopping spree of US M1A1/M1A2 Abrams and South Korean K2 Black Panthers has been fully delivered, it will have a larger modern tank fleet than the Russians. In part, though, this is a geopolitical move to position itself as Germany’s replacement as the powerhouse of Central Europe – which might explain why Berlin now expects to spend 3.5 per cent by 2029.
And the UK? We are currently at 2.3 per cent, planning to hit 2.5 per cent in 2027, with an ‘ambition’ – not a commitment – to reach 3 per cent by the next parliament. This could mean the end of 2029, just in time for cataclysmic war, if we accept Rutte’s timeline.
If the threat of a Russian invasion is so real, terrible and imminent, then how can one reconcile this with the relaxed pace of rearmament in so many European countries, not just the UK? Are their – and our – leaders either exaggerating the threat in order to justify promising Donald Trump higher defence budgets in an age of austerity, or else criminally negligent in their sluggish response to a real danger? Would you rather think of your leaders as lying to you or betraying you?
The same day as the Chief of the Defence Staff’s ode to warfighting, Blaise Metreweli, the new head of MI6, was discussing Moscow’s attempts ‘to bully, fearmonger and manipulate’. Could this, in its own way, also refer to so many western political leaders?
As ever, though, the truth is more complex. The professionals are often much more nuanced in their understanding of the actual threat. Metreweli, while admitting to an ‘acute threat posed by Russia’, presented this as ‘operating in a space between peace and war’. Meanwhile, Sir Richard depressingly may have had to call on toxic-tweeting has-been ex-president Dmitry Medvedev as his main witness for a Russian commitment to destroy both Ukraine and Nato. But behind the eye-catching quotes that made it into the headlines, he suggested the danger of Moscow attacking some day was no more than a possibility. He cited predictions of between ‘up to 5 per cent’ and 16 per cent. His point was about the catastrophic consequences if it nonetheless happened: ‘Our objective must be to avoid war, but the price of maintaining peace is rising.’
I don’t believe that Putin is the kind of risk-taker tempted into even some smaller-scale test or provocation of the most powerful military alliance in the world – remember, he had no idea his move into Ukraine in 2022 would trigger a major war. But even I can accept the need for European rearmament after such a long period of self-indulgent defence decline.
After all, I could be wrong. There is no harm in not putting temptation Putin’s way – and, considering that this is a process which will stretch into the future, we have no idea who will replace him, and when. Europe has also infantilised itself by sheltering under the US military umbrella and is now discovering how uncomfortable that can be. If the EU and Europe as a continent want to be taken seriously again in an unstable, unruly world, they do need to put on some muscle mass.
But justifying ‘the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the end of the Cold War’ – in Sir Richard’s words – ought not to be on the basis of just dramatic hyperbole and claims that Putin is coming to eat our babies any day now. This is a long-term process which will inevitably entail tough decisions and burdens on society as a whole. Scaremongering is like sugar – a quick rush, which passes just as quickly. Instead of risking a backlash in a year or two, followed by a repudiation of rearmament, this demands a mature, serious national debate. The case for defence should be presented – as Sir Richard did – not just as a precaution but also as a rebalancing: the thirty or so relatively relaxed years after the Soviet collapse were a blessed aberration and not, alas, a peaceable new normal.
Diaspora Jews are no longer free
Jews had gathered on Bondi Beach to celebrate the first night of Chanukah, the festival of light and freedom. Uniquely among Jewish festivals, Chanukah is celebrated in public. Generations of families came to light candles on Sydney’s famous coastline and say: we belong here too. And then two gunmen opened fire: 15 people murdered; 40 wounded. The victims include London born Rabbi Eli Schlanger and Alex Kleytman, who survived the Holocaust but, 80 years later was murdered for being a Jew.
On Bondi Beach, Jews celebrating that freedom were attacked and murdered.
This was not ‘senseless violence’ – the very phrase stupefies us into passivity, unable to name, identify and deal with the specific hatred behind it. This was a calculated attack on Jews celebrating a festival that commemorates our refusal to be erased from the public square, our determination to spread light in the face of darkness and maintain freedom despite tyranny.
The bitter truth, however, is that in 2025, Jews in the Diaspora are no longer free, but shackled by antisemitism. Our children learn lessons no child should: where the exits are, what to do if the glass breaks. We worship behind bulletproof doors and bombproof windows after passing through security guards not because we want to, but because we must. We are sick of explaining this, having our concerns dismissed or minimised and having to go through the same tiresome process after each and every outrage.
It cannot be only our problem. If a society’s Jews aren’t free neither is that society.
But we refuse to give in to the relentless campaign to intimidate and erase us. The message is constant: you live here on sufferance. You may be tolerated, but only if you are invisible. When Jews venture out publicly we are targeted by hostility that too many have normalised.
We have warned that where Jew-hatred is normalised, anti-Jewish violence is inevitable. The so-called ‘pro-Palestine’ marches week after week have been recruiting grounds for those who carry out violence and those who justify it. Hate-filled demonstrations outside synagogues precede bullets through their doors. Calls for murder outside opera houses precede murders on beaches.
Washington DC, Colorado, Manchester, Bondi. Where next?
On the streets of London, Manchester, Sydney, New York and Paris mobs have chanted for violence, glorified terror and demonised Jews with language that would be instantly recognised as incitement if used against any other minority. Jewish students harassed, Jewish businesses vandalised, Jewish events cancelled after being deemed ‘too difficult’ to protect.
We need more than perfunctory condemnation when the drumbeat of hate predictably leads to bloodshed. We need action.
Democracies must allow protest but the language and actions of protests matter. Protests that undermine the rights of others to exist safely are not legitimate dissent but calls for violence.
Who will stand up instead of standing by? We don’t ask that everyone be like Ahmed al Ahmed, the heroic onlooker who with breathtaking courage disarmed one of the shooters and is now recovering in hospital. We do, however, expect those who can act to do so – from government, to police, to music venues, universities and broadcasters.
The authorities and wider public must make clear that it is the antisemites and not the Jews who will be erased from public spaces.
First, call it what it is: antisemitism. Not ‘community tension’, not ‘imported conflict’. Jew-hatred, adapted for modern tastes, laundered through modern slogans, and unleashed on Jews. Saying death to Zionists it is not just violent language but antisemitic. Recognise that saying death to the ‘Zionist entity’ means death to the Jews – the outcomes are indistinguishable.
Second, draw red lines and enforce them. Protect protest, of course, but reject incitement and intimidation. If a march, a concert or public event calls for violence, glorifies Jew-killing terrorist groups, uses antisemitic imagery or vilifies a minority community it is not a protest for democratic rights but a threat to them and should result in arrests and prosecutions far more often.
Who will stand up instead of standing by?
Third, stop indulging and making excuses for Jew-hate because confronting it is inconvenient. Stop the backdoor boycott of ‘safety concerns’ whether at comedy venues or European football matches. If Jews aren’t safe, neither are you.
Finally: choose solidarity that costs something. Not boilerplate statements but the solidarity that shows up – at vigils, schools, synagogues – in daylight, openly, without fear or equivocation.
We get to this point when the majority are silent in the face of evil. Jews are all too aware of those who hate us but it is the bystanders who send a shiver down our spine: universities too cowardly to condemn antisemitic incitement; media companies who platform terrorist apologists; sporting bodies whose response to murdered Jews is pathetic; police turning a blind eye to or failing to recognise virulently antisemitic chants; the friends and colleagues with something to say about everything but nothing to say about this.
And here is perhaps the most pernicious idea of all: that some people possess a unique pain that allows them to disrupt society and deprive Jews of basic freedoms. Freedom of association. Freedom to walk the streets without fear. Freedom to practise their religion. Freedom to have a connection to the only Jewish country on earth without vilification. Freedom simply to be.
The lights of Chanukah are not lights of naïveté, but of resolve. The Maccabees pushed back against a powerful empire because it sought to erase their freedom and identity. On Bondi Beach, Jews celebrating that freedom were attacked and murdered.
Our societies must now decide whether we mean it when we say ‘never again’. And history will record who stood up, and who stood by.
Rachel Reeves can’t escape blame for rising unemployment
Unemployment has risen again. Figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show the UK’s unemployment rate rose to 5.1 per cent in October – the highest joblessness rate since 2021. Payrolled employment fell too by 38,000 in a single month, meaning 187,000 jobs have now been lost since last November, in a blow to Rachel Reeves’s bizarre claim that her tax-raising measures are not harming employment.
Vacancies fell too after having crept up slightly in the previous month’s figures – suggesting we may not be at the bottom of this jobs slump yet. Liz McKeown, director of economic statistics at the ONS said, ‘the fall in payroll numbers and increase in unemployment has been seen particularly among some younger age groups.’
It has become increasingly untenable for the Chancellor to continue to deny that both her £25 billion raid on employer National Insurance and the increases in minimum wage are contributing to not only a weakening labour market but an economy where it is becoming tricky for young people to find work. That’s not a healthy place for any society to be. ‘Businesses slammed the brakes on hiring ahead of the budget, and the Chancellor’s measures haven’t tempted them to restart,’ said Richard Carter, head of fixed interest research at Quilter Cheviot.
Meanwhile, wage growth came in higher than economists had expected, though still lower than the previous figures. Overall wage growth dipped to 4.7 per cent from 4.8 per cent – something that will increase the likelihood that the Bank of England will vote to cut interest rates when they meet on Thursday. They will be concerned that wage growth is still relatively strong but if we see inflation fall when those figures are released tomorrow then we can expect a cut.
On wages though there is a clear gap opening up between the private and public sectors, with the ONS pointing out: ‘wage growth slowed further in the private sector, while increasing again in the public sector.’ In fact, private sector employees received an average payrise of 3.9 per cent compared to a whopping 7.6 per cent in the public sector – though that was partly due to government pay rises occurring earlier in the year than they normally do.
With public sector pay and job numbers up while the private sector slumps it’s clear that this government's actions and decisions are embedding a larger state. What’s really worrying though is how those decisions are disproportionately hitting the young – with graduates and school leavers finding themselves locked out of employment. If Labour don’t address that and instead send our young people down the road to welfare, the future of this country will be a very bleak one.
Why I pity the liberals being mugged by reality
What a mess. This little phrase seems unequal to the task of describing the situation Britain finds itself in after decades of multiculturalism and liberalism.
In a – perhaps surprising – spirit of compassion and generosity, I find myself feeling for some of the liberals who are now regularly being mugged at scale by reality. There is very little time to draw breath nowadays, to reset and forget, between what are still described as ‘incidents’. The Bondi Beach massacre followed on from the news of the two Afghan asylum seekers jailed for raping a girl of 15, which followed the news of the migrant hotel worker stabbed to death with a screwdriver, which followed the attack on a Manchester synagogue…all set against the continual background rumble of the rape gangs.
It’s getting harder and harder for such people to run their cognitive dissonance program
Don’t worry, I don’t feel any sympathy for the daft and the despicable who still blither on about diversity being our ‘strength’ – like Labour MP Lola McEvoy, whose reaction to Bondi was to say this on live TV while the horrifying news was still coming in. Or indeed the Prime Minister telling Lorraine Kelly last month that to be British ‘is to be diverse’. And I certainly don’t lament for the likes of Dale Vince. Or the wilfully oblivious high-status London tweeters who make a point of grandly asserting how safe they feel in the capital.
And I’m not feeling any kind of pang for the deeply silly and tragic cases like Ed Davey, who, with his customs union fantasies, is trying to distract himself and the world by recreating the spiffing fun of the parliamentary shenanigans of the late 2010s. This devotion to an imagined version of the EU is deeply tragic to behold.
No, never mind that lot. But I am feeling generous about the casual, unassuming liberals and progressives that we meet in our daily lives. The people who are basically okay, who rattled along fairly happily until the chickens of liberalism came home to roost, because – well, unexamined liberalism seemed the nice thing to believe in. And who are now being regularly smacked in the face by ghastly reality.
I’m picking up stories from various quarters of such people experiencing horrible, shattering realisations. A friend recently messaged me out of nowhere in some agitation, to say that he was resigning himself to vote for Reform. For context, this was somebody who was totally thrown by the referendum outcome in 2016 and attended the ‘People’s Vote’ parades. Another, Labour voting, friend of mine has been deeply shaken by the recent horrors and how weakly the government has responded to them.
A lot of this is only hitting people now, and they are knocked for six. Lord Finkelstein went from angrily admonishing Rupert Lowe on Saturday for saying London was a ‘desolate shithole’ – and also telling a worried woman that the city is ‘one of the safest places in the world’ – to telling Times Radio on Sunday, after Bondi, that he no longer feels completely safe in London.
It’s getting harder and harder for such people to run their cognitive dissonance program. This must be profoundly disorienting and it can put you at odds with your peers, which is a horrible sensation. There is also facing the unpleasant fact that the people in the outgroup were right. I’ve had a few such episodes myself in the past, and the simplest way to resolve them is to bite the bitter bullet and admit the truth; to yourself first, and maybe then you can begin to state it openly. The temptation for others to crow and say ‘I told you so’ is almost irresistible, but at least on the level of personal interaction with friends, it must be resisted. We are beyond the stage where it matters.
Conservatives are often accused of hankering for a lost golden age that never really existed, and sometimes rightly so. But I’m seeing that kind of wistful sadness a lot more from liberals now. I understand their longing, their rather pitiable – and swiftly dashed – hopes after Labour’s election victory that Britain (as Andrew Marr said) would become ‘a little haven of peace and stability’ again.
Late twentieth century liberal ‘values’ just don’t work any more, and even liberals are noticing.
Ireland’s Jews have never felt lonelier
The massacre of Jews on Bondi Beach was the tragic, yet inevitable, result of rising Jew hatred throughout the western world, including in Ireland. Ireland’s Chief Rabbi, Yoni Weider, spoke of the festering anti-Semitism targeted at Ireland’s Jewish community, as the Taoiseach Micheál Martin and senior ministers fell over themselves to proclaim support for Irish Jews. Their support in the wake of the Bondi Beach atrocity rings somewhat hollow. For two years, they effectively acted as spectators as, week after week, protesters took over Dublin’s streets expressing support for the Intifada.
This hatred has spilled over into acts of violence and abuse against Ireland’s Jews, as a yet unpublished report shows.
Just imagine the public outrage if a minority community, just over 2,300 strong, experienced 128 hate incidents in just six months. The howls of racism and moral fury emanating from parliament, dutifully reflected in wall-to-wall coverage by TV and print media, would dominate the national discourse for weeks. Tragically, we don’t need to imagine such hatred – and yet, will any of that moral outrage come to pass?
A report on anti-Semitism in Ireland conducted by the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland (JRCI), which will land on Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s desk sometime in the new year. Whenever he gets around to reading it, Martin should not be too surprised at the findings. The Taoiseach and other members of his government have been told repeatedly by the JRCI that Irish Jews are facing a rising tide of hate.
The preliminary results, shared with The Spectator, are grim: of the 128 incidents, 77 were recorded within the past six months, with a further 51 within a 12-week period from mid-July to October. The number of anti-Semitic incidents, relative to the size of Ireland’s Jewish community, far exceeds the 1,521 reported by the Guardian during a similar period in the UK, home to 300,000 Jewish people.
Ireland does not have a perceived anti-Semitism problem; it has an anti-Semitism problem
The JRCI report documents incidents of threats and intimidation, verbal abuse, vandalism, physical assault, exclusion, and discrimination across a wide range of settings – schools, universities, workplaces, hospitals, and public spaces. The testimonies make distressing reading. To quote a sample:
My child was chased around the classroom by boys chanting ‘from the river to the sea’. He’s now afraid to say he’s Jewish.
A nurse told my father she ‘hated Israel’ while caring for him after surgery – he was afraid to say he had a Jewish daughter.
One parent described how their children stopped getting birthday invitations after people ‘found out we were Jewish’. Another claimed that a boy in their son’s class ‘did a Nazi salute in my son’s face’. The report also recounts how ‘F*** Israel’ was ‘repeatedly’ spray-painted on the garden gate of a home belonging to a Jewish family, ‘causing fear and distress to the household’. In another incident, an eyewitness described a mental health practitioner who ‘openly said they would exclude all Jewish clients’.
Ireland does not have a perceived anti-Semitism problem; it has an anti-Semitism problem, according to this report. ‘For the first time in generations, Irish Jews are saying aloud that their homeland may no longer feel like home. We find ourselves being lectured on what anti-Semitism is, as though our own history, memory and lived experience were somehow unreliable,’ said JRCI chair, Maurice Cohen:
No other small community would be told how to feel, nor informed that its fears are imagined to slur the county. We are Irish and want nothing that harms this nation. But the first step is recognising the problem. Ireland appears to have adopted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism for appearance rather than action. Until it is embedded in classroom, institutions, and the public sector it remains a line in a press release rather than a tool that protects Jewish people from rising hate.
Inevitably, when the JRCI report is officially published, there will be chatter and cries of ‘we must do something’. But 12 months after the government finally endorsed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism, they have done almost nothing to ensure it is understood or applied. On the contrary, the incessant demonisation and dehumanisation of the Israeli state by government and opposition, the blanket coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict to the exclusion of all others, has fostered an environment where Jews are seen by some as fair game. When a government turns a blind eye to anti-Semitism it invites terror.
To be clear, criticism of Israel or the Israeli government is not anti-Semitic – which is the implication with which one Irish politician chose to preface this remark: ‘The crimes of Israel did not start on 7 October 2023,’ as if it were the Jewish State, not Hamas, which carried out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Not ‘anti-Semitic’ – just utter garbage passing as political discourse. But it’s this sort of tripe trotted out over the past two years that is lapped up by the bottom feeders, the keffiyeh-clad morons who feel sufficiently emboldened to wave Hamas flags on the street and target Irish jews.
The shameful attempt to rename Herzog Park, a tiny patch of green adjacent to Ireland’s only Jewish school in the middle of a Jewish community, to ‘Free Palestine Park’ is not merely symbolic. It is a deliberate replacement of Jewish identity with the politically-charged message that their contribution can be erased at the instigation of a handful of so-called ‘anti-Zionists’. The language is carefully couched in criticism of Chaim Herzog, the Irishman who became the sixth president of Israel, but the message to a vulnerable community is unmistakable.
During parliamentary hearings into the contentious Occupied Territories Bill aimed at banning trade with Israeli settlements, Maurice Cohen was called on to provide testimony. He recalled a friend – whose grandfather was the only Jew killed in 1916 fighting alongside Irish republicans – telling him, ‘I always thought of myself as an Irishman who happened to be Jewish. Now I know I am just a Jew living in Ireland.’
AI will kill all the lawyers
It feels, pleasingly, like a scene from a cerebral James Bond film, or perhaps an episode of Slow Horses. I am in a shadowy corner of a plush, buzzy Soho members’ bar. A mild December twilight is falling over London. Across the table from me sits an old acquaintance, a senior English barrister, greying, quietly handsome, in his mid fifties. And he wants to speak anonymously, because what he is about to say will earn the loathing of his entire profession.
Let’s call him James. I’ve known him for a few years, and over these years we’ve discussed all kinds of things, from politics to architecture to the misfortunes of Chelsea FC. We’ve also discussed technology and AI. James’s views of AI were always like his politics: centrist, clever, moderate, sceptical. But now that has changed. In the past few weeks James has come to believe AI will ‘completely destroy’ the law as we know it: wrecking careers, ending systems, making thousands jobless. And the Armageddon, he says, is coming faster than almost anyone realises.
As he sips an espresso martini, he prefaces his case with some context. ‘You saw the headlines about the Sandie Peggie case? Where the judge allegedly used AI? Well, believe me, this is just the beginning. AI is coming for us all.’
‘How?’
‘Last week we did an experiment, a kind of simulation. We took a real, recent and important case – a complex civil court appeal which I wrote, and it took me a day and a half. We redacted all identifying details, for anonymity and confidentiality, and we fed the same case to Grok Heavy AI. And then we asked it to do what I did. After some prompting, the end result was…’ He shakes his head. ‘Spectacular. Actually staggering. It did it in 30 seconds, and it was much better than mine. And remember, I am very good at this.’
He sits back, wry yet resigned. ‘It was at the level of a truly great KC. The best possible legal document. And all done in seconds for pennies. How can any of us compete? We can’t.’
He finishes his martini. We order two more. ‘With the right prompting, legal AI is now way ahead of people. Barristers or advocates who depend on giving legal opinions and have no client contact are already completely fucked. But more is coming.’
James believes AI will work its way up the legal hierarchy. First the gruntwork, then the drafting, the citation, the argumentation. Eventually the majority of legal jobs will be replaced. ‘Process lawyers are obviously doomed. AI will handle the most complex probate and conveyancing cases in seconds. The most complicated human skill will be,’ he chuckles, sadly, ‘to scan and digitise paper documents. Barristers will make arguments in courtrooms that are drafted by AI, and then people will wonder why they are paying human barristers £200,000, and they too will disappear.’
He concludes, pithily: ‘With rare exceptions, law is finished for almost everyone, maybe even the judges – as we’ve seen the past few days.’
I mention the problem of ‘hallucinations’ – when an AI model presents false or fabricated information as factual – and the need for a human face in court. The Sandie Peggie judgment allegedly contained AI-made errors. He waves this all away. ‘Temporary bugs and sentimental preferences. The economic argument is overwhelming.’
‘It was the best possible legal document. And all done in seconds for pennies. How can any of us compete? We can’t’
There is another obvious question raised here. If James can see what is coming down the line, why can’t everyone else? James knocks back his drink, and explains that the next generation of lawyers are being trained to believe they can use AI, without being replaced by it. They are comforted by the idea that AI is just another tool, like LexisNexis with better teeth. James is certain they are deluded. He says maybe 1 per cent of his peers have any idea what is about to happen.
He has another argument, even more pressing. ‘Lawyers are arrogant. Lawyers run the country. Keir Starmer is a quintessential lawyer. So these are people used to being respected, and they commonly have, let’s say, very high self-esteem. For them to admit they aren’t so special, at all, and that they can be replaced by a free robot, is going to be torture.’
I ask what he thinks this will do to his colleagues – psychologically, economically, emotionally. ‘At first, they will fight, like radicals. A losing battle. There will be attempts to outlaw the use of AI in various legal areas. But it won’t work, the economics will see to that. So lots of people who make a lot of money will, suddenly, not make that money. God knows what that might do to property prices, to politics, to all of us. Because it won’t just be the law.’
We are nearly at the end of our second martinis. I am now sufficiently unnerved to want a third. I look around at the sleek, clever people in this posh London drinking hole, with its elegant modern British art, its very excellent wine list. What happens when the ecosystem that supports all this – rich metropolitan people using their capable brains – is shaken to the core? Or collapses?
James seems surprisingly cheery, given his theme. ‘To be honest, a lot of lawyers deserve what’s coming. Too many of them are greedy, selfish – yet not self-aware. They create complexity purely so they can make more work for themselves. And activist judges are a curse, which will soon be lifted. Maybe in the end this will all be a good thing, even if 100,000 unemployed barristers will be…’ He laughs. ‘A bit destabilising. Think of an army of penniless, pompous, progressive lawyers – with nothing to do.’
The club is now loudly buzzing, and James is heading off for dinner with colleagues. ‘Obviously, I’m not going to say any of this to them. They would hate me. But someone has to be honest.’
I have one last question. Right now, young people are studying law, or considering doing so. Does James have any advice? He sits up, full of passion.
‘My niece is a lovely girl, really smart, great at school, and the other day she told me she wants to be a lawyer. And I thought, “Oh my God, my little niece wants to be a lawyer”, and I flat out told her. I said please do not destroy your life. Do not get into a lifetime of debt for a job that won’t exist in ten years. Or less.’
Table manners are toast
Food courts appear to be everywhere in London at the moment and, for reasons too boring to go into here, I found myself at three of them across the capital in the space of four days last week. (Yes, before you ask, I am beginning to question my life choices as a result.)
Not that there is anything innately wrong with food courts as a concept, of course. If you’ve been to one, you’ll know the drill, which is essentially that they are semi-industrial spaces lined with vendors plying all manner of street food from locations that aren’t too challenging to the average British diner.
The fashionable new breed of food courts are often branded as ‘food halls’ or ‘food markets’, but essentially they still offer the same sort of experience as the shopping mall and airport food courts of old. There’ll be lobster rolls, there’ll be ‘premium’ fried chicken (a misnomer if ever I heard one); there’ll be California rolls, pad Thai, pizza and the kind of gout-inducing burgers that look better on Instagram than they feel in your stomach. There’ll also be a bar, music that is just slightly too loud for anyone to comfortably hold a conversation and a lot of non-plastic ‘sustainable’ cutlery.
But although, at 47, I’m probably too old to truly enjoy the whole food court experience, my reason for never returning to the likes of Mercato Metropolitano (in Elephant and Castle) and Between the Bridges (on the South Bank) is down to something else entirely: the truly unedifying spectacle of being in close proximity to Gen Z while they eat.
Table manners, I regret to report, have gone the way of Rodney Bewes and rotary dial telephones. I can’t decide if the incoming generation of diners never learned how to use cutlery, or they have simply elected to dismiss it as being an antiquated, recondite invention as relevant to their lives as weaving or making eye contact.
Either way, let me recount what I’ve witnessed over the past few days. People chewing while somehow letting half their tongue hang out like a pink ticket stub to a destination nobody in their right mind would ever want to visit. Khaki-teethed men making mastication noises that put me in mind of a bag of cat litter being tossed around a spin dryer. Spongy, mozzarella-coloured, unwashed hands plunging into seeping cardboard tubs of nachos.
Most young diners seem to believe that serviettes should be used as something to rest your phone on while you wipe your hands on your jeans
There seems to be complete bafflement as to the purpose of serviettes (there’s no napkins here, trust me), with most diners believing that they should be used as something to rest your phone on while you wipe your hands on your jeans. Perhaps the nadir was having to watch a man with a face the colour of withered lichen attempt to lever an entire pizza slice into his mouth in one go. He failed, rendering the narrow end of the wedge to take on the form of a second tongue. His mates didn’t seem to mind. I, however, nearly fetched up my salt cod fritters on the spot.
Of course, I understand that ‘dude food’ is supposed to be messy, and nobody is expecting diners to eat their deep-fried chicken wings with a knife and fork, Donald Trump-style. But something has clearly gone awry when people, evidently dressed to have a good time, are leaving food courts with their attire speckled as though covered in guano deposit due to their total inability to get food from tray to mouth without disaster.
Well, you may argue, so what if there’s a generation upon us who have no table manners whatsoever? They barely ever eat at a table anyway. But in the end, table manners are not about snobbery but signalling. They are a shorthand for attentiveness, self-restraint and a basic willingness to meet others halfway. When Gen Z waves them away as oppressive or pointless, it isn’t so much the napkin that’s being rejected as the social contract it represents.
Older generations like mine still have the ability to read these cues instinctively. If younger eaters fail to observe them they may still get the thing they’re after (a promotion, a financial gift, a better hot-desk location at work) – but they won’t get much respect. And respect, inconveniently, remains something that’s not available to order on Deliveroo, or in a food court alongside the gyros and gelato.
The Reith lectures are a new low in BBC history
This year’s Reith lecturer is the historian and activist Rutger Bregman. Given the way things work in the BBC, it comes as no surprise that a Dutchman, however charismatic, has been chosen to lecture us on modern British history. There are dozens of extremely well-qualified historians in British universities who could have spoken rather more insightfully.
Given the way things work in the BBC, it comes as no surprise that a Dutchman has been chosen to lecture us on modern British history
It isn’t surprising either that in Bregman’s first lecture on ‘Moral Revolution’ he should have declared himself to be a social democrat. The BBC simply cannot understand real diversity of the mind and they ‘turn left’ reflexively. At the moment of Bregman’s declaration, half the audience at home will have winced; some will have switched off – not because they are of a different party, but because no one talking about history should need, or want, to declare their political affiliations. The facts, presented properly and fairly, speak for themselves.
Bregman deserves credit for his second lecture, at least, on the history of British anti-slavery. It is a corrective to all the many BBC programmes and broadcasts that berate Britons, then and now, for having traded or owned slaves at a time when slavery was ubiquitous across the globe. The really important historical question, as Bregman understands, is not why the British owned slaves but why they came to see that slavery was wrong.
It’s in Bregman’s third lecture, released this week, that the problems with his approach and the limitations of his knowledge become clear. Bregman told us in his first lecture that his aim is to ignite a moral revolution in the West. He attempts to do this in his latest lecture by comparing the Fabian Society, the famous socialist think tank founded in 1884, with the neo-liberal movement that emerged after the Second World War to counter the growth of state socialism. Like so much BBC history, Bregman presents it simplistically as ‘goodies versus baddies’, the joyless Sidney and Beatrice Webb versus Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. But it’s Bregman’s misunderstanding of Fabianism which is most revealing and, from the mouth of a self-declared moral reformer, most concerning.
There are the expected errors, of course. The eight-hour-day, votes for women, and public education were ideas that reached the public sphere in the 1860s and 1870s, long before the Fabian Society was founded. They were certainly not, as Bregman suggests, ‘utterly fringe’ ideas, apparently awaiting the Fabians to implement them. The Tyneside engineers had won the eight-hour day in 1871. Elementary education was compulsory by 1882. Unsuccessful amendments to the 1866 and 1884 Reform bills had tried to enfranchise women.
Worse, Bregman ignores inconvenient – because immoral – facts about the Fabians. Mentioning by name H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, he fails to tell us that these two Fabians, along with the Webbs themselves and many more in the society, were enthusiastic eugenicists. Wells and Shaw would not just have limited the family size of those they deemed degenerate: they would, out of their own mouths, have sent them to their deaths.
Nor is there anything about the Fabians later on. In 1935, after a visit to Stalin’s Potemkin villages and at a time of mass starvation and the purges in Russia, Sidney and Beatrice Webb returned from the Soviet Union and published that classic of political and moral blindness, Soviet Communism. A New Civilisation. Bregman refers to the Fabian Society as a ‘Conspiracy of Decency’. Really?
But for a self-declared moral revolutionist, Bregman’s worst failing is that he doesn’t understand either the Fabians or the other traditions of British socialism, many of which were deeply critical of Fabianism as anti-democratic, top-down, socialist elitism. The Fabians believed that by taking control of the state, pulling the right levers, and constructing the correct apparatus, they could dragoon everyone into the ideal socialist society of the future. Morality and consent had nothing to do with it: the people would be reformed whether they liked it or not by policies and structures that the Webbs thought good for them, and all in the name of socialist efficiency.
Writing in his notebook in 1912, the Christian Socialist and genuine moral reformer, R.H. Tawney, probably the most widely read and admired British socialist of the 20th century, had this to say:
‘This is where I think the Fabians are inclined to go wrong. They seem to think you can trick statesmen into a good course of action, without changing their principles, and that by taking sufficient thought society can add several cubits to its stature. It can’t, as long as it lives on the same spiritual diet. No amount of cleverness will get figs off thistles. What I want to do is to get clear in my mind what those moral assumptions or principles are, and put others in their place.’
Bregman has told us in each of his lectures that he wants just such a moral transformation, and he’s used history to exemplify it. But to put it bluntly, he’s backed the wrong horse. There was indeed a strong tradition of ethical socialism in Britain: that of John Ruskin, William Morris and Tawney, to which the earnest, Christian working men who really created the Labour party looked for inspiration. But its focus was on the principles by which we should live, not on the structures of the state. As Eric Hobsbawm (who scorned and derided the Fabians) pointed out long ago, true Labour ignored the salon socialism that Bregman thinks will save us.
The real problem with all of this is the conception of history shared by Bregman and by the BBC: that it is raw material for a message, a creed, a call to arms, a social-democratic crusade. The BBC will continue to present history badly and incorrectly for as long as it tries to use it to enforce an approved message. History is nobody’s fool and it certainly cannot be bent to the will of BBC executives living off licence fee payer handouts as if in some Fabian paradise.
Professor Lawrence Goldman is Executive Editor of History Reclaimed and author of The Life of R. H. Tawney. Socialism and History (Bloomsbury, 2013)
Strong suit: men are rediscovering how to dress
The demoralising decline in the office dress code is long established. Nowadays, stockbrokers and estate agents are the only workers reliably in a suit and tie. For everyone else it’s chinos and knitwear – on a good day. But welcome news is afoot: among a growing legion of men, especially young men, there’s a revival of interest in dressing smartly.
Inevitably, the driving force is social media. Instagram accounts such as @askokeyig, @ignoreatyourperil, @tfchamberlin and many others are extolling the virtues of a sharp silhouette and the perils of collar gap. Most famously, ‘the menswear guy’ (@dieworkwear) has become something of an international name on X by blasting the (usually dire) sartorial standards of politicians and others.
He has plenty of targets. In the UK we went from Boris Johnson’s (deliberate) shambolic chic to Rishi Sunak’s appallingly tight suits, skinny ties and too-short trousers. Keir Starmer’s dour suits are often too long at the sleeve as if he’s ashamed of his cuff. The world of A-listers is no better. The inability of celebs to pull off a suit or dinner jacket never fails to astound me given looking the part is basically their job. Compared with our predecessors, we live in a sartorial wasteland.
But, online, the aesthetic is slowly shifting. It draws inspiration from Mad Men, or City bankers of yesteryear. Politicians too are illustrative of the vibe shift: Donald Trump and Nigel Farage are evidence that the public don’t want their political leaders dressing down. Power-dressing is back in vogue.
What drives the new trend? Sean Dixon of Savile Row’s Richard James told me: ‘Younger men see wearing a suit as a statement of intent. With a weak economy and a highly competitive working environment they are looking to impress and impart confidence.’ The proprietors of Thom Sweeney point out that dressing up ‘feels special again’. They’re cutting their jackets a touch longer and trousers have gone a little higher on the rise. At Dege & Skinner, William Skinner told me that younger customers, educated through Instagram videos, are surprisingly discerning. Navy, wool worsted, two-piece, single-breasted suits are in strong demand.
It’s not all about work, of course. Some Gen Z and millennials have concluded that a well-cut lounge suit is more likely to get them a girlfriend than parading about in bucket hats and tracksuit bottoms worn somewhere around their knees.
Younger customers, educated through Instagram videos, are surprisingly discerning. Navy, wool worsted, two-piece, single-breasted suits are in strong demand
Finding a partner aside, there are good reasons to encourage dressing smartly. G. Bruce Boyer, the great authority on men’s fashion, lamented that we have lost a sense of occasion in how we dress. Dressing suitably is a sign of respect – at weddings, at funerals – but can also elevate the banality of everyday life.
It is also one of the surest ways to acquire that elusive thing, ‘charisma’. Make a habit of sporting a bowtie – veteran thinktanker Dr Madsen Pirie is one well-known devotee in Westminster – and suddenly you’re both recognisable and thought a maverick. Neckties are coming back. Pocket squares too – and, done right, they are perhaps the most affordable way of elevating one’s suited appearance (even if the FT has decided they’re a sure sign you’re dangerously right-wing). The understated details are often the best, to show a little flair without being showy: Sir Christopher Meyer, our late ambassador in Washington, famously wore red socks to stand out (having decided a bright scarf was too uncomfortable in summer and his head too big for a hat).
It was Tom Ford who said that dressing well is a kind of good manners. If so, perhaps this quiet revolution among young men rediscovering the joy of dressing the part could have impact beyond the sartorial world. Might it lead my generation to pay corresponding attention to elegance of speech and etiquette as we once again see distinction in adopting the ways of an English gentleman? In The Englishman’s Suit, Sir Hardy Amies said: ‘The man’s suit – an English invention, I must add – is still worn by men at all times when respect for tradition and hope for an ordered future prevails.’ Some men have decided that an ordered future would be rather nice.
If nothing else, dressing up can make us feel better about ourselves. There’s much chatter nowadays about ‘dopamine dressing’, that is, wearing outfits that enhance our mood. It’s become a cliché of motivational talks by hot-shot entrepreneurs that making your bed in the morning is a good start on the path to professional success. I think putting on an ironed shirt has the same disciplining effect. As Karl Lagerfeld said, sweatpants are a sign of defeat: ‘You lost control of your life so you bought some sweatpants.’ Take back control. Don a suit.
Where is the violence against women and girls strategy?
There was a revealing moment in today’s Liaison Committee session with Keir Starmer where the Prime Minister was asked about violence against women and girls. The government’s VAWG strategy is ‘due’ this week – in fact, it has been ‘due’ since the summer – and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood did the Sunday morning broadcast round heralding it yesterday. But when Home Affairs Committee chair Karen Bradley asked Starmer about the strategy itself, he still couldn’t say when it would actually be published. All he would say was that it would come out ‘as soon as possible’, adding: ‘I was in Downing Street when we brought together all the various bodies that are helping, working with us on that, the week before last, and so now we are looking at very shortly in the future.’ That ‘very shortly in the future’ sounds more like the kind of thing a journalist behind on their column might tell a comment editor, rather than a prime minister whose home secretary has already given interviews about a major and overdue strategy.
Bradley complained that given Mahmood had been ‘talking about things that would be in the strategy, I expected we would have a statement today on it.’ Liaison Committee chair Meg Hillier then pointed out rather dryly that Starmer had spent some time earlier in the session telling another chair, Alberto Costa, that he agreed that it was important to make statements to parliament first. Bradley continued, telling Starmer that she knew of three rape crisis centres that had closed because they could not commission services while the strategy was delayed. ‘I do want the strategy to be out as soon as possible,’ insisted Starmer again, adding that ‘we just need to finalise it’.
Why hasn’t the government finalised something it was already announcing at the weekend? I understand that things are even more fluid than just some last-minute spellchecking: sources working in the sector tell me that they have been warned to expect more cuts to their services. One says: ‘The sector is deeply concerned that we are being sidelined in the government’s new violence against women and girls strategy. In the same week that they strategy is due to be published, the Home Office has informed us of fresh cuts to funding for vital support services. We’re now worried that more services will be forced to close their doors.’
There seems to be a shift away from the current way of tackling violence against women and girls, and a belief among ministers and advisers that this current way isn’t working, so there needs to be a big shake-up. That’s always difficult for figures in any sector to take, but they have been left a long time wondering what exactly will be expected of them. (I wrote about this back in July.) Bradley pointed to this shift in her next question, telling Starmer that ‘£53 million has been committed to perpetrator programmes for highest risk perpetrators. There hasn’t been a similar amount of money for victims’ services. And there’s a real disquiet in the sector that the victims are being forgotten.’
Starmer disagreed: ‘Certainly the victims are not being forgotten. They are at the centre of the strategy on violence against women and girls.’ Bradley replied: ‘There’s no money that’s been committed for them so far.’
‘Well,’ replied the Prime Minister. ‘I’ll look at the money commitments again and make sure that we’ve got that right. This is a commitment of the government in relation to violence against women and girls. It’s a personal commitment of mine, I’ve been working on this since I’ve became the director of public prosecutions…’
This exchange was the most revealing: Starmer is someone who has a high regard for his own ethics and mission, though the problem with this is that he often forgets to check he’s living up to his opinion of himself. He has determined that the government is doing a good job in tackling violence against women and girls, but hasn’t checked whether that’s really the case. Currently, it isn’t, or at least there is no real evidence either way because a strategy that’s been due for months still doesn’t have a firm publication date, there has been total confusion over funding behind the scenes, and in the meantime, services have been closing. That Starmer doesn’t quite want to say that the strategy will even come out this week should make him question his deeply personal commitment, rather than continue repeating it.
Starmer’s liaison committee grilling revealed three things
Today’s liaison committee meeting was not one for the history books. It was a fairly lacklustre affair, with some of the questions asked being so technical that they bordered on the soporific. The likes of Helen Hayes and Bill Esterson sounded more like attendees at a conference panel than the respective chairs of the Education and Energy Security select committees. ‘In Demark, people grow up to be told that a “good Dane is a green Dane” – do we need something similar here?’ was one such lowlight from Esterson. Yet despite such underarm bowling, today’s session did teach us three things.
The first is the gap between Starmer’s stated and revealed preferences. In one quite remarkable exchange, he was asked by Ruth Cadbury about what he had found ‘most difficult’ in delivering his ‘Plan for Change’. ‘Speed and ability to get things done,’ he replied instantly. ‘We’ve got so many checks and balances and consultations and regulations and arms-length bodies… Every time I go to pull a lever, there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arms-length bodies.’ Yet it is Starmer’s own government that has set up more than two dozen quangos, enhanced red tape across a swathe of areas and established four consultations on welfare alone. Meg Hillier’s wry intervention ought to have told Starmer the implausibility of his answer.
This showed just how much Starmer’s authority has drained away in the past year
It was a habit that the PM demonstrated in other answers too. Alberto Costa, one of the few Tories in attendance, opted to lob a few googlies by grilling Starmer on standards. One such question was about the number of political appointees to the House of Lords – something which Labour pledged to reduce in their manifesto. Starmer brushed it aside. He suggested that his party’s mission to reduce the size of the Lords is ‘ongoing’ by citing the removal of the hereditary peers. However, as the Electoral Reform Society notes, as prime minister, Starmer has already created 96 peers – more than the outgoing 92 hereditaries. It may be right, as Starmer argued, to create more Labour peers to ‘rebalance’ the Upper House – but on his watch, membership numbers have only increased.
A second revelation from Starmer’s appearance was where his attention is actually focused on. His two most enjoyable exchanges were when he was asked about the abolition of jury trials – a debate on which he can claim genuine expertise – and his summary on the situation in Ukraine. But on other matters, he clearly was far less aware of what his government is actually doing. Karen Bradley, the Home Affairs chair, asked about the violence against women and girls (VAWG) strategy, noting that delays were impacting service provision: ‘The government said it would come out before the summer, then it was going to be in September.’ Starmer’s answers here were unconvincing and short of detail – despite this being a long-running and very vocal debate in the sector.
Finally, the liaison committee showed just how much Starmer’s authority has drained away in the past year. In his first appearance before this panel, twelve months ago, the PM was relaxed and unabashed. Yet today there was a sting when Alistair Carmichael grilled him – again – on the family farm tax. The senior Lib Dem MP pointed to the number of Labour MPs against him on this issue. ‘I do listen to party colleagues all the time,’ said Starmer, coldly. It was an uneasy moment which highlighted the uncertainty of the PM’s long-term political fate. Asked about the resident doctors’ strike, Starmer gave himself a ‘ten out of ten’ for how ‘gutted he was’. ‘I’d appeal to the doctors themselves to push back against the BMA,’ he said – a plea which is likely to fall on deaf ears.
Perhaps the most telling reflection of this political weakness came when Starmer was asked by Costa about special advisers briefing about party political matters. ‘Can you confirm that Labour party leadership speculation is a purely party political matter?’ ‘No, I’m not sure I can,’ said Starmer, adding with a laugh, ‘It seems to be pretty rife.’ Uneasy, unsure but forced to make light of it – that question and answer was the moment which summed up Starmer’s position. With the mercy of Christmas recess now looming, he will be forced to hope for new tidings in the new year.
RIP Rob Reiner
The death of the director and actor Rob Reiner in violent and unexplained circumstances is one of the most horrific and surprising stories to have emerged from Hollywood in living memory. One of the reasons why its elites live in areas such as Reiner’s exclusive neighborhood of Brentwood in California is precisely so that they will not be subject to the possibility of random violence in a way that less wealthy Americans face daily. Yet if news reports are to be believed, Reiner and his wife Michele were the victims of intrafamilial strife: a situation that all the gated walls and security cameras in the world could not ameliorate.
It is particularly ironic that Reiner met such a horrible end, stabbed to death in his own home, because the vast majority of the films that he made, especially earlier in his career, were infused with a sense of all-American joyfulness and hope that made him, for a while, a filmmaker talked off in the same breath as Frank Capra and Steven Spielberg. Son of Hollywood royalty Carl Reiner, he began his career as an actor, most notably in the role of Meathead in the Norman Lear sitcom All In The Family. It made him a household name, but also contributed to a sense of Reiner as a dumb, good-natured left-winger: he once remarked that “I could win the Nobel Prize and they’d write ‘Meathead wins the Nobel Prize.’”
It was in part in an attempt to escape from this straitjacket of typecasting that Reiner switched from acting to directing – although he continued to appear onscreen throughout his career, both in his own films and in those of others – and the first picture that he made was a particular triumph, in the form of 1984’s rock mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. With a script that was co-written by Reiner along with its stars Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, it resulted in endless quotable lines – not least the description of an amp that “goes up to eleven” – and Reiner’s own performance as the hapless documentary maker Marty Di Bergi demonstrated his ability to play both warmth and uselessness on screen with great skill.
The film’s modest success led to a new and hugely successful second wind for Reiner, whose first seven films as a director represent one of the most interesting and accomplished runs of form that any 20th-century filmmaker ever managed. He excelled at romantic comedies, which included the John Cusack vehicle The Sure Thing and, of course, the peerless When Harry Met Sally, but his varied repertoire included everything from Stephen King horror (Misery) and swashbuckling meta-comedy (The Princess Bride) to all-American military courtroom drama (A Few Good Men). Another King adaptation, the coming-of-age drama Stand By Me, is commonly regarded as one of the seminal films of the Eighties, and his pictures made huge amounts of money at the box office.
Although Reiner never won an Oscar – he was nominated for producing A Few Good Men – and was probably, ironically enough, too versatile a talent to be seen as a true auteur, it was once a dependable badge of quality to see A Rob Reiner Film. He was also a skillful producer of high-end cinema through his Castle Rock production company, which was responsible for such modern-day classics as In The Line of Fire, The Shawshank Redemption and the loopy Malice, in which the Aaron Sorkin-doctored script allowed Alec Baldwin to declare, histrionically, “You ask me if I have a God complex? Let me tell you something. I AM GOD!”
Any suggestion that Reiner had traded his soul to anyone – be it a deity or a devil – to achieve success came crashing down with his first megaflop, the Bruce Willis family comedy North, which attracted bemused reviews and repulsed audiences. He rebounded with the Sorkin-scripted The American President, a slick, assured piece of entertainment that inadvertently led to The West Wing, but his directorial career never reached the same heights again. Instead, for the next three decades, he either made undemanding comedies or soft-focus issue dramas that played to his status as one of Hollywood’s premier liberal filmmakers.
The major exception was 2015’s Being Charlie, an unusually gritty drama about addiction and familial conflict that was explicitly autobiographical; it was co-written by his son Nick and was based on his life as an addict, as well as dealing with his strained relationship with his successful, distant father. The film was both a commercial and critical flop, and most journalists observed that there was a tension, both on and off-screen, between Reiner’s attempts to bring about reconciliation and a real-life happy ending for his troubled son, and Nick himself, who had clearly undergone experiences that no swell of orchestral music could compensate for. If reports of Reiner’s murder are accurate, then it will be this film – not this year’s lackluster Spinal Tap sequel, or indeed anything else in his great, distinguished career – that will be remembered, for all the wrong reasons. Which is an undeserved end to what was a fine life – right up until its horrific ending.
There are bin liners with more empathy than Keir Starmer
The liaison committee is always a laugh. It’s sort of like a year in review for the government’s litany of failures. Like an advent calendar but behind each door there’s a little puddle of cat sick. The specific aim of this particular roundup was ‘the work of the Prime Minister’, and so as a festive treat our very own pig in a blanket was dragged in for an extra big Christmas helping of his least favourite thing in the world – scrutiny.
First up was Alberto Costa, appropriately the chair of the Standards Committee, which during this parliament must be like being the person whose job it was to keep the deck dry on the Titanic. Mr. Costa made sure to ask him very slowly and deliberately if he understood specific parts of the ministerial code, as if he were asking a toddler whether they were absolutely sure that they could go to the toilet on their own. This was a perfect hoisting of the PM, being exactly the sort of ‘letter not spirit’ legalism which he spent most of his career doing. The PM assented with a sort of worried, constipated nod.
Mr. Costa began with one of the PM’s social media posts about bus fare caps, which appeared to take credit for a Tory policy. It might seem small in the scheme of things, but lest we forget, they got Al Capone for his tax return. It’s also indicative of the PM’s general attitude to the truth: i.e. it’s always dispensable if it serves the purposes of what he believes to be right in the long run. He then moved on from buses to the verisimilitude of Sir Keir’s statements in the House and the sources of leaks and speculation in his government. All of it painted a picture of a generationally dishonest politician; the Pinocchio of Kentish Town.
Nothing matters at all to Starmer other than getting his own way
Cat Smith, one of his own MPs, brought up the family farm raid. She begged him to change his mind in light of reports of elderly farmers planning to kill themselves to avoid the government’s deranged spite tax.
‘You are a prime minister who has been admirably willing to change course,’ she said, which is an understatement, like saying Mr Blobby was ‘admirably willing to confront obstacles in his way’. Starmer declined to do so. In response to whether he knew or cared about the potential for people to kill themselves, he said, ‘I have had discussions with a number of individuals who have drawn all manner of things to my attention.’ Truly, there are bin liners with more obvious human empathy than this man.
Smith was not alone in grilling the PM on this vindictive policy. As is often the case, one of the stars of the show was Alistair Carmichael, that rarest of creatures – a Lib Dem Big Beast. Mr Carmichael brings the Calvinistic candour of Orkney and Shetland to his role as chairman of the Rural Affairs Select Committee. He asked a series of coruscating questions about whether this was actually what it appeared to be – a targeted bit of spite against farmers which will raise no money at all. Starmer did his usual fleshy clucking about ‘sensible reforms’. He looked like an uncooked chipolata as he did so.
Mr. Carmichael reiterated Cat Smith’s question about whether it was a commendable state of affairs that some farmers felt they might be better off dead. ‘No, of course not,’ replied the PM. ‘But governments have to bring about sensible reform.’ There’s the whiff of Robespierre about such psychotic dismissals of human life in favour of ‘progress’. Of course, there are differences between the two. One’s a widely despised lawyer who managed to screw up his country in a couple of years before inevitably being betrayed by his own colleagues, and the other is Maximilien Robespierre.
Mr. Carmichael was angry and not finished. He pointed out that Starmer was unlikely to listen to him or to farmers but asked why, given that several committees with Labour majorities had unanimously asked for reconsiderations of the Bill, ‘do you not listen to your own party colleagues?’
‘I do listen to party colleagues all the time.’ The Prime Minister delivered this line with sullen insistence, as if he was telling people that he did have a girlfriend, but she went to another school. Carmichael snapped back: ‘And then you do what you’re going to do anyway.’
That’s the crux of it: nothing matters at all to Starmer other than getting his own way. For every criticism, you can imagine him making a mental note to push even harder against those who oppose him; whether it’s assisted suicide, the House of Lords, farmers or the Chagos, for every insane or wicked policy he has, the more people try to point out the obvious flaws in them, the more determined he is to ram them down the public’s throat. It might be a delight to watch Starmer getting a roasting but one gets the unpleasant sense that he rather enjoys it.