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Robert Jenrick is right
I’ve just got back from doing a spot of shopping in my local town – and do you know what struck me? How white it was. Absolutely heaving with ghostfaces. In fact, in the hour or so that I spent there I don’t think I saw a single non-white person, apart from some young ladies leaving the local tanning salon who were the colour of a glass of Tango and that doesn’t really count.
It is OK to say this, incidentally, if you then use it as a basis to attack the town’s lack of diversity and demand the government ship a few ethnics in, regardless of whether or not they fancy the idea. It is not OK if you are expressing happiness in the fact that the town is all white – if, for example, I had written the words ‘Thank the living Lord Jesus Christ!’ after my second sentence. That would be bad and I’d lose my job and all hope of employment anywhere else, except perhaps as the person who takes the minutes at regional meetings of the Ku Klux Klan, or as the factotum who empties Katie Hopkins’s bed pan every morning.
A famous journo interviewer once came to my local town and wrote about how depressingly white it was and even asked me: ‘How can you live in a place like this?’ I replied with a sad shake of the head: ‘I don’t know, really. I just try to struggle by. Take each day as it comes. But it’s not easy. It’s really not easy.’ The article which eventually emerged was kindly enough and only hinted that because I chose to live in a town which was homogenous in its ethnic make-up I might be a white supremacist bastard, so no harm done. That is of course the view of all decent liberal people – that anyone who prefers to live somewhere which is overwhelmingly white must be a racist – and they see no irony in the fact that they themselves choose to live in Richmond or Wimbledon rather than Tower Hamlets.
If, however, you are not white and choose to live in an area that is almost exclusively not white, you are not a racist at all. Indeed you could not be further from being racist if you tried. Moreover, if a white person was to point out that an area was almost entirely not white, he (or she, or them, choose your pronouns etc) would be a racist simply for identifying that fact – for noticing.
This is the fate which befell Robert Jenrick this week, when the Guardian reported comments he had previously made after a visit to Birmingham. Earlier this year he had wandered into the Handsworth area, perhaps in the belief that the place was full of hard-working white-skinned navvies driving forward the industrial revolution, whereas in fact the bit he went to was reminiscent of the back streets of Karachi. He didn’t actually say that – he’d be in more trouble if he had – but merely noticed that he hadn’t seen a white face in an hour and a half. Who’dathunkit, huh?
These double standards serve only to infuriate the ordinary mass of people
Hell duly rained down upon him. He had been racist. Just for actually describing the ethnic make-up of an area. One of the politicians first to bleat out that ovine accusation was Richard Parker, the chairman of the go-getting, hugely successful, fiscally pristine West Midlands Combined Authority. Asked if he thought that Jenrick’s comments were racist, this political colossus replied: ‘I do. Because he’s set out intentionally to draw on a particular issue – people’s colour – to identify the point he wanted to make.’
I don’t know. Maybe Parker lost half of his brain cells while posing as a Bengal tiger in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and has now only 11 left. But it is a ridiculous and odious observation to make. It would mean, for example, that if I described an area as being predominantly Bangladeshi, or German, or white British, I too would be racist. It is asinine.
And yet the baton was taken up with some avidity. On the BBC Newsnight programme, Victoria Derbyshire put on that slapped arse face she keeps in her handbag, resembling for all the world a minor People’s Judge in a People’s Court in Omsk in 1922 faced with a miscreant who had committed some ideological malfeasance. She looked cross and disgusted, as if someone had belched in the presence of Lenin.
Even before we get to the question of integration, or the lack of it, which was the point Jenrick intended to make, these double standards serve only to infuriate the ordinary mass of people. Especially the argument that Britons who are opposed to a huge influx of immigrants from diverse cultures being brought into their local town because it will change the character of the place are antediluvian racists for advancing such opposition – despite the fact that their fears usually turn out to be absolutely correct. But this is the means by which mass immigration has been foisted upon the indigenous people of the UK: one word of complaint, the slightest reservation expressed – racist! And so people become cowed and resentful and we store up trouble for the future. Incidentally, the refusal to acknowledge any potential problems associated with inward migration lay behind the failure, for more than a decade, to investigate the Muslim rape gang scandal (which is still going on, we are told).
It is a matter which is absolutely beyond dispute that people prefer to live among other people who have cultural backgrounds, habits and of course a language which is similar to their own. It’s why we have areas in our cities called ‘Little Italy’ and ‘Chinatown’. It’s why the Korean diaspora who came here homed in on New Malden. Many people prefer to live among their own – and that’s why integration is not quite the simple answer that Jenrick seems to think. It is a question of sheer numbers, and the indigenous population being enjoined to keep its collective gob shut and punished if it doesn’t.
The civil service is killing restorative justice
Failing institutions don’t like challenge, let alone being shown up. Few institutions are failing more tragically than our prisons – and the situation is getting worse. This is because the officials who preside over this debacle are purging the few people who have actually been making a positive difference.
The latest organisation to be banned from prisons is Sycamore Tree, a Christian charity which arranges meetings between prisoners and people who have been the victims of similar crimes to those they committed. It charged prisons nothing and had operated successfully for more than 25 years, running courses for more than 40,000 prisoners. The story of its banning was broken by Inside Time, the prison newspaper read by inmates and staff at jails across the country.
The Sycamore Tree case is a far from isolated one. The evidence has been building for some time that the Ministry of Justice is opposed to any programme or intervention, however innovative or successful, that originated outside the civil service.
In the spring I wrote for The Spectator about Unlocked Graduates, a charity that recruited hundreds of high-calibre graduates into the prison service and which now faces closure after it was unable to agree a new contract with the MoJ. In June, Prue Leith described the plight of The Clink, a charity that trains prisoners to be chefs and runs restaurants attached to prisons in which members of the public can eat. The charity has had to close three of its four restaurants and faces an uncertain future. It is currently bidding to keep its last site at HMP Brixton open.
Restorative justice too seems to be under attack. The process, dramatised in the West End and Broadway play Punch, whereby people who have committed crimes communicate with and even meet their victims, relies on cooperation between prisons, probation and specialist charities. When managed properly it helps victims to understand the crime and ensures that criminals face the reality of the harm they’ve done. According to recent reporting by Inside Time, one MoJ department named ‘re:hub’, meant to oversee restorative interventions, ‘is in fact blocking’ them from taking place.
Specialist restorative justice practitioners from across the country tell the same story. It is getting harder and harder to run interventions. Victims are frustrated by lengthy delays. While the MoJ believes it is best placed to safeguard victims, Charlotte Calkin, a practitioner with 15 years’ experience, says: ‘Re:hub is systematically blocking the development of this field. It is making decisions on suitability based on limited knowledge and experience… and a lack of trust in the skills of facilitators.’
The evidence is that the MoJ is opposed to any programme that originated outside the civil service
Each of these examples might seem distinct, but they all point to a culture within the MoJ that is fundamentally hostile to, and distrusting of, outsiders. In each case the civil service has seemingly chosen to block activities that make the justice system work better.
Sycamore Tree, taking its name from the Gospel story of Zacchaeus, did something which is absent in most of our justice system: it made prisoners face up to the harm they’d done and encouraged them to change their lives as profoundly as the tax collector Zacchaeus did.
The testimonies from participants are inspiring. One man who had been imprisoned for a serious driving offence met a widow whose husband was killed by a dangerous driver. This shocked the prisoner, who in that moment swore to change his life. He now works to keep men away from drugs, alcohol and crime.
Rachel Treweek, Bishop of Gloucester and Bishop for HM Prisons, said that she ‘cannot understand how this decision has been taken. The [MoJ] ignores the good things the scheme achieves in getting people thinking about the harm their offending has done’.
Some sources have indicated that the charity was excluded from prisons because ‘it is run by a Christian organisation and the volunteers were predominately white’. The official line from the MoJ is that the decision was taken because the National Framework for Interventions panel determined that Sycamore Tree did not meet ‘international standards’. The MoJ is insistent that neither diversity nor demographics had anything to do with the decision. However, the official policy framework document says that ‘panels will be required to consist of experts able to consider the equality and diversity issues affecting the intervention’.
Unlocked Graduates is another organisation driven out by process – in its case, an entirely legally compliant procurement process. Despite winning a tender to provide graduate recruitment for the prison service, the charity’s contract was not renewed after the MoJ demanded it relinquish control of its brand and IP, something no such organisation could reasonably agree to. While the MoJ insists that this requirement was made clear before bidding took place, the department has not sought to re-tender the contract and has not begun creating an internal graduate recruitment scheme.
When I asked the MoJ for comment I was told: ‘It’s plainly wrong to suggest we don’t value our charity partners – our partnerships with charities and social enterprises are vital to cutting crime and reducing re-offending.’
Senior civil servants, however, are canny. No one will have told a minister: ‘We want this organisation gone.’ Instead, they wear a cloak of procedure. A tender has been issued. A framework has been followed. Legal advice recommends. Ministers who trust the process too readily may find they are rubber-stamping hidden agendas as they destroy programmes which do much good.
It is an intolerable situation. But with a new Secretary of State, David Lammy, who is widely believed to be more positive about justice charities than his predecessor, perhaps there is still time for him to overrule the civil servants and save Unlocked Graduates, Sycamore Tree and restorative justice.
Scotland doesn’t need independence. It needs rid of the SNP
The SNP government in Edinburgh has published another white paper on the constitution, ‘A Fresh Start with Independence’. It’s a bold title when your last white paper on this issue was published a whole 34 days ago. Indeed, between June 2022 and April 2024, the Scottish Government produced 13 white papers on independence. Putting out yet another and branding it ‘a fresh start’ is a bit like Taylor Swift releasing an album of diss tracks about her exes and calling it A New Direction. (Not that I’m comparing John Swinney to Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift has actually contributed to the Scottish economy.)
‘A Fresh Start’ is decidedly stale in substance, replete with the same magical thinking and evasive language that have been the hallmark of the SNP’s independence white papers since Scotland’s Future in 2013. It’s not like there isn’t a case for Scottish independence, just that there isn’t the kind of case the SNP wants to make, namely that Scotland can leave the United Kingdom on its own terms, retaining all the advantages of the British state (intra-UK free movement of goods and labour, the state pension, the pound) while ditching things the public dislikes (Tory governments, child poverty, the cost-of-living crisis). After 18 years at the helm of the Scottish government, with an army of civil servants at their disposal, the SNP is still promising every voter a unicorn that egests gold. It’s risible, yes, but it’s also insulting.
An example: the latest white paper claims that ‘a new model for the Scottish economy could see your living standards begin to rise to match those of other, comparable independent nations in Europe’. Now, set aside the prose, which sounds like those daytime TV ads that sell life insurance to the over-50s, and appropriately so since both can drain your savings and give you back less than you put in. No, pay attention to the suggestion that living standards ‘could… begin to rise’. No government, those of ‘comparable independent nations in Europe’ or otherwise, can guarantee an increase in living standards because while the state plays a role via public services, welfare, and redistribution, the market plays an even bigger role — even in social democratic Scandinavia, which the SNP likes to talk about but has no credible plan to imitate.
Ah, but it does say ‘could’. That it does. What it doesn’t say is that living standards could just as easily drop if an independent Scotland failed to generate prosperity, increase skills, invest in infrastructure, and better manage health inequalities. ‘Could’ does not absolve them when their rhetoric is geared towards households which are struggling financially and those in even sharper desperation. The nationalists did the same thing during the 2014 referendum. They went into all the big council estates in Easterhouse, Castlemilk, Ferguslie Park and Torry, home to some of the most poverty-stricken families in Scotland, and peddled a cruel fantasy of untold wealth and utopian equality just waiting on the other side of the ballot box. In many cases it worked, and if these voters were disappointed in the final result, at least it spared them the economic punch in the gut that independence would likely have delivered at that time.
Of course, this white paper is not a sincere piece of argumentation for Scotland exiting the UK. It is about pandering to the SNP’s impatient grassroots ahead of the party’s conference in Aberdeen this weekend. The Scottish government can’t deliver for Scotland; the best it can do is deliver for the SNP leader’s internal party management needs. Westminster has nothing to fear from this white paper or any of the others, just as it has nothing to fear from Swinney and what remains of the SNP machine. Swinney has neither the capacity nor, it seems, the drive to secure another independence referendum. That’s why he’s handing out white papers and not ballot papers.
There are three routes to independence. First, convince Westminster to keep giving you referendums until you win. Frustrated Scottish nationalists have soured on this approach, convinced Westminster would never risk another vote, but this is to underestimate a) Westminster’s capacity for constitutional self-harm and b) the prevalence in Whitehall of PPE wide-boys and fridge-temperature-IQ lanyard drongos who think the North begins at Luton but know all about Scotland because they once got proper wrecked at a mate’s wedding in St Andrews. Remember Daisley’s Law of Inadvertent Masochism: the more harm a policy does to Britain’s interests, the more convinced Westminster becomes that Britain must adopt it. This remains the SNP’s best chance of achieving Scexit.
Second, run the Scottish government effectively, prioritise economic growth and public service reform, make modest promises and fulfil them, earn a reputation for competence. Do the hard work on the outstanding questions about secession and come up with credible, if not universally loveable, answers on currency, deficits, borders, pensions, defence, and Europe. Be optimistic about demographic trends but take nothing for granted, then, in time, reintroduce independence as the continuity option to secure and build on a record of improvement. This is what should have happened after the SNP lost the 2014 referendum. What happened instead was Nicola Sturgeon.
Third, the Catalan option. Defy the UK Government and the Supreme Court and hold a wildcat plebiscite, a referendum not only on independence but the principle that the Scots should decide their own future. Leverage Westminster’s disregard of the vote, or, even better, Barcelona-style scenes of police seizing ballot boxes, to bring even Unionist voters into the independence camp. Follow up with mass marches in London and non-violent civil disobedience until Downing Street figures the Union is more hassle than it’s worth. The late Alex Salmond might have pulled this off but there is no one in Scottish politics today with the popular support or political nerve to try this.
Beyond these three strategies, nothing else matters. Not white papers, not speeches, not votes in Holyrood, not the 879th National front page unveiling the latest super-duper, same-but-different, sure-to-work-this-time independence plan. Until the SNP gets serious about the constitution, and gets a leader capable of moving the secession agenda forward, it’s all just ink on paper. Scotland might need a fresh start, but not half as much as the SNP.
The haunting of Tory conference
Spooky season came early to Manchester this year. Outside the convention centre, a baffled, shattered city reels from the latest round of political violence, but inside, eyeless mannequins of Margaret Thatcher stare out over an empty exhibition hall where what remains of the Conservative party tries to understand what went wrong.
There’s something macabre about this Tory conference. It could be one of those pre-crash horror films where the protagonist doesn’t realise they’ve been dead all along. I’m reminded of Nicole Kidman, rattling mad-eyed around that dark mansion in The Others, fretting through her old routines, refusing to accept the reality of her self-made hell where she slaughtered her children, and then herself, and then the world moved on. The shadow cabinet should watch it. They might learn something.
The modern Conservative party has functioned as a machine for clinging to power at any cost it can persuade someone else to pay; it exists to win, believes it deserves to by definition, and cannot understand itself in defeat. That sort of doltish entitlement metastasises the harder you believe your own hype.
And that’s what’s happened here. The Conservative party assumed that, as the ‘natural party of government’, it would always exist. For the first time in three centuries, they’ve Tracy-Emined the bed so badly that they’re not even the opposition any more.
Power has moved on. The few remaining careerists who haven’t slunk off to a lucrative post on the lecture circuit are jumping ship to Reform. The closest they have to a young gun is Robert Jenrick, currently most famous for making asylum centres paint over their cartoon murals, because God forbid a child who came to this country seeking safety should experience a moment’s joy. Ambitious young right-wingers are not joining the Tories. They’re grifting on YouTube or flirting with the far right, who might let them run their very own local council into the ground.
Before the mortifying conference footage started sliding across my screen, I hadn’t thought about the Conservative party for weeks – which is extraordinary, given how they’ve squatted over my entire adult life. As they are still technically a party, they have to have a conference, where the latest woman to be handed the broom and expected to clear up Boris Johnson’s mess did her bit of cargo-cult Thatcherism, ritually insisting that ‘the facts of life are conservative’ to an audience of 12.
On an ordinary day, Kemi Badenoch talks like she’s auditioning to be a robot in the school play. Her leader’s speech was Frankensteined together out of the sort of desperate affirmations your best friend sends you when you’ve just been dumped and even your dachshund has left you for someone newer, meaner and madder. I almost expected her to start chanting ‘I am enough’ into the autocue. Incredibly, she opened by insisting that her party ‘has always loved Manchester’ – a city that has not elected a Tory since 1984 or trusted one since Peterloo. Badenoch fawned over the Churchillian legacy of the European Convention on Human Rights she promised to destroy, then insisted that ‘terrorists will never destroy our democracy’ – presumably because her own party has beaten them to it.
After that, a succession of navy-suited non-entities got up and stammered platitudes, like drunk teenagers trying to explain to their parents how they managed to trash the house. Mel Stride daringly described how he benefited from the education, housing and social mobility his party has taken away from generations to come. Mercifully, someone bundled him offstage before he got a chance to yell ‘We’re all in this together’, but not before he announced that his was, and always would be, the ‘party of fiscal responsibility’.
People vote Tory when they have a stake in the status quo – property, security, assets to pass to their children
The fact that he seemed to believe it is embarrassing. The fact that he expects anyone else to is insulting. That barefaced, blundering contempt for the electorate is precisely why Partygate was the nation’s breaking point. Fifteen years ago, when the carnage began, much was made of Cameron, Osborne and Johnson’s history in the Bullingdon Club. The cabinet recruited heavily from the infamous Oxford drinking society for posh boys who liked to get hammered, smash up restaurants and then performatively pay for the damage. They behaved the same way in office – gleefully vandalising the economy, wrecking our international reputation and plunging our previously stable democracy into a decade of cack-handed constitutional crisis, messy-drunk on their own audacity. But when presented with the bill, they vanished.
Somewhere in a hall in Manchester, a ghostly voice is whispering ‘Broken Britain’, which turned out to be the one campaign promise the party managed to follow through on even before the omnishambles of Brexit. By sheer incompetence, the Tory party has created the conditions for its own extinction.
For fourteen years, a haunted merry-go-round of maliciously incompetent leaders failed to understand what Thatcher knew: that the facts of life are only conservative in specific circumstances. People vote Tory when they have a stake in the status quo – property, security, assets to pass to their children. Somewhere between austerity, Brexit and the Truss mini-Budget, it became clear that you cannot run an economy on vibes. This is now a country with collapsing infrastructure, crumbling school buildings, an actually broken healthcare system and a population that has been too poor, too angry and too hopeless for too long. This week, even the protesters couldn’t be bothered to show up.
Empire might begin at home, but it ends there too. The remains of the British Conservative party have stuck to the proud imperial tradition of ransacking a country, wrecking its political settlement and then expecting gratitude. The definitive Tory skill is self-preservation, and those with any talent for it have long since bolted for the Home Counties. The only thing the Tories could have left to offer this country is an apology.
Kemi’s speech was good. But is anyone listening?
Prior to Kemi Badenoch’s arrival the Conservative party played us recordings of her voice piped over dramatic lift muzak. Conference seasons are always bizarre – gatherings as they are of remarkable sub-species of people who look at British politics and think ‘wow, that’s exciting’ rather than ‘oh God, what now’ (and I include myself in this category). It isn’t showbusiness for ugly people, it’s trainspotting for maniacs. Yet by the standards of conference weirdness, the soundtrack aside, Mrs Badenoch was, well, quite normal.
As she arrived on stage in person she seemed genuinely surprised by the warmth of the welcome. Her ‘thank you conference’ was uttered in the tone of someone taken aback by a group of friends jumping out from behind a sofa to wish them happy birthday. Even more surprised, I suspect, were some viewers – surprised by the fact that Mrs Badenoch delivered a first-rate speech.
She hit Labour where they needed hitting – ‘our weak, useless Prime Minister’ – she gained cheers for listing all the people she was in politics for, farmers, small business owners, parents who want better for their children – ‘these’ she said ‘are our people’. She correctly identified the main problems facing the country and repeated them again and again: the economy and borders. Numerous ministers were singled out for praise, even and especially her own personal Fortinbras-Burnham mash-up. Robert Jenrick was praised for stopping ‘more fare evaders than Transport for London.’
Apart from anything else, this was also an audition for the Conservative party’s continued existence. Ms Badenoch delivered a potted history of Toryism’s achievements throughout the centuries – notably not allowing that history to start and finish with Mrs Thatcher, in a conference accused of dwelling too much on the Iron Lady in her centenary year. She spoke of Disraeli’s franchise extension and inverted Winston Churchill’s line to describe Sir Keir and his cabinet of goons: ‘Never in the field of human history have so many been let down by so few.’
There were even some gags, albeit rather depressing ones at the state of the nation’s expense: ‘While Britain was defining what a woman is’, she observed, ‘China built five new nuclear power stations.’ Presumably the trans lobby thinks we can heat the country by burning Harry Potter books. The main downside was what wasn’t mentioned. Personally, I’d have liked a firm pledge to send Jonathan Powell to the Tower of London on high treason charges, but you can’t have everything.
Yet for all the success of the speech, there was still a morbidity in the room. Tory conference this year felt like the waiting room of a Viennese funeral parlour: polite, formal, decked with past glories and with the ominous stench of death.
Badenoch’s plan will doubtless be unpalatable to the public
The fact is that it isn’t the ever-shrinking cadre of Tory faithful that Mrs Badenoch needs to persuade, but the voters who left for Labour last time and seem certain to flock to Reform next time. For all that this conference will have provided a much needed internal morale boost, she is still between the Devil and the Deep Turquoise Sea.
Her diagnosis might be absolutely bang on but two problems face Mrs Badenoch. Firstly, very few people trust the Tories to sort out the mess, instead looking back at the last 14 years and quite reasonably noticing that the people involved in failing to stop the country’s decline were generally wearing blue rosettes. The Tories are in a difficult position here: as if the person who has just cut your thumb off comes over and says: ‘actually I’m a pretty dab hand with a sewing kit, why not let me have a go putting it back on?’
Secondly, and perhaps even more intractable, is the British public’s jam addiction. They want it today, tomorrow and forever. Mrs Badenoch’s treatment plan will doubtless be unpalatable to the public, just as Mr Sunak’s was, and so they delivered a landslide to people who shouldn’t be allowed to run a soft play centre, let alone a major economy, on the basis that they liked the sound of the lies they were told. Therein lies the quandary of modern British politics. Mrs Badenoch isn’t its first victim, nor will she be its last.
The Democrat who fantasized about killing a Republican
When it was revealed that Jay Jones, Virginia’s Democratic nominee for attorney general, joked in text messages about shooting a Republican lawmaker, Democrats didn’t rush to condemn him. They scolded the comments, sure. But they didn’t demand he drop out. That hesitation tells you everything about the new Democratic mindset: they don’t see this as hypocrisy. They see it as adaptation.
For years, Democrats have insisted that Donald Trump changed American politics – that he shattered the old civility and made rage fashionable. Now they’re quietly admitting that rage works. They’re not abandoning their moral high ground; they’re repaving it with something harder and sharper. In their eyes, the game changed – and if the only way to win is to play by Trump’s rules, so be it.
Trump has said and done outrageous things, no honest conservative would deny it. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Democrats have grown addicted to the very aggression they once claimed to despise. They just market it differently. Republicans call it “fighting back.” Democrats call it “meeting the moment.” Either way, the temperature keeps rising – and both sides pretend they’re only reacting.
Jones’s texts weren’t vague or flippant. He name-dropped a Republican House speaker, fantasized about shooting him, and even joked about desecrating Republican graves. Then came the apology tour: “I’m embarrassed, ashamed and sorry.” But the Democratic Party’s response has been careful – too careful. Condemnation without consequence.
That’s not cowardice. It’s calculation. Democrats know the old etiquette of politics – the days of “when they go low, we go high” – died sometime around 2016. They believe their voters want fighters, not philosophers. So, as one strategist put it off the record, “you don’t disarm yourself while the other side is armed to the teeth.” In other words, the rhetoric might be ugly, but so is the world Trump built – and Democrats think they’re just learning to survive in it.
It’s a seductive logic: that moral restraint is weakness, that power justifies posture. But it’s also the same logic that Democrats once accused Republicans of using. The Jones story doesn’t just expose one man’s lapse; it exposes a cultural conversion. The party of “norms and decency” has decided those luxuries can wait until after the next election.
The most revealing part of this scandal isn’t what Jones said – it’s what Democrats didn’t say afterward. No leading Democrat has publicly called for him to step down. No one wants to be the first to demand accountability in an election season. Instead, they offer the usual script: “We reject violence in all forms.” Then they pivot to whataboutism – Trump’s language, MAGA threats, January 6 – as if pointing to the other side’s sins somehow cleanses their own.
But moral credibility doesn’t work that way. You can’t condemn the fire while holding a lighter behind your back. The Jones controversy shows how both parties have lost the ability to be embarrassed by themselves. It’s not that Democrats no longer see rhetoric as dangerous – it’s that they’ve convinced themselves it’s necessary. In this new order, politics isn’t about persuasion anymore. It’s about dominance.
Here’s where conservatives have to be careful. It’s tempting to gloat – to treat every Democratic scandal as proof of hypocrisy. But that’s not enough. The goal shouldn’t be to meet Democratic aggression with equal fury. The goal should be to model the discipline they’ve abandoned.
If Democrats are determined to sound like the revolution, conservatives must sound like civilization. Strength isn’t shouting louder; it’s refusing to let outrage define your argument. Conservatives win not by matching the moral chaos, but by outlasting it – by showing voters that reason and restraint are still forms of power.
We’re told this is just politics as usual, but it’s really a culture war over tone – over how far a person can go to prove they “care.” The louder and angrier the rhetoric, the more “authentic” it sounds to the base. But that kind of politics is self-consuming. It rewards fury, not vision. It mistakes destruction for passion.
Jay Jones may survive his scandal. But Democrats won’t survive the culture that excuses it. Once you start believing you must become what you hate to beat what you hate, you’ve already lost something more important than an election – you’ve lost the moral language that made your cause worth fighting for.
So let’s be clear: the danger isn’t that Trump made Democrats meaner. The danger is that Democrats now think meanness is a virtue. And if that’s the new rulebook of American politics, we should all be terrified at who’s keeping score.
Has Katie Porter just tanked her chances of becoming California governor?
How do you give an interview so bad that it tanks your chances of winning an election by nearly 40 points? Ask former California congresswoman Katie Porter, who until yesterday was the presumptive favorite to become the state’s next governor.
In a sit-down with Porter that resembles an old-school satirical Daily Show segment – before TDS turned that show into another partisan screed-fest – CBS News California Investigates correspondent Julie Watts asks Porter, simply, how she plans on winning Republican votes. “How would I need them in order to win, ma’am?” Porter sneers. “I have stood on my own two feet and won Republican votes before.” That’s a fairly standard answer, but then Porter pitches a fit as Watts asks follow-ups, saying the interview has become “unnecessarily argumentative.”
“I don’t want to keep doing this, I’m going to call it,” Porter says.
For anyone who’s followed the career of Porter, who showed up at a Trump impeachment vote in Congress in 2019 dressed as Batgirl, this exchange isn’t really a surprise. Her divorce filing from a few years ago, after all, revealed that she’d dumped boiling potatoes over her husband’s head and had berated him because he was bad at making Jell-O.
Divorces, as Cockburn knows from experience, get messy, but the personal can also tip over into the political sphere. An infamous photo surfaced of Porter reading the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F**k in the halls of Congress; she appears to have taken that to heart, without the subtlety part. There was the time Porter publicly fired a staffer, a Wounded Warrior veteran, because he forgot to follow protocols and was accused of giving her Covid. The congressional gossip account “Dear White Staffers” posted in 2022 that it’s “widely known across the party/consultants that Katie Porter is abusive. Unable to cope with basic demands of being a member so she takes it out on staff.” Given the era, they said, the worst possible thing about Porter was that she made jokes about black people to try and seem “edgy.”
Is this your next governor, California? Porter told Watts that she wanted to have a “pleasant positive conversation.” But that would be out of character. Watts is lucky there weren’t any hot potatoes in the studio. Now Porter’s career is the hot potato, as she’s suddenly trailing nondescript Senator Alex Padilla in betting markets. Cockburn has never been a fan of Porter’s, but he does enjoy a good political meltdown and hopes for a comeback. He wouldn’t bet against her just yet.
Will Dwayne Johnson always be The Rock?
Over the past couple of weeks, two expensive, auteur-driven films with big stars have been released at the American box office, both conscious throwbacks to the kind of Seventies cinema that isn’t supposed to be made any longer. In the case of Paul Thomas Anderson, his Leo DiCaprio-starring Thomas Pynchon fantasia One Battle After Another seems to have been a success by the skin of its (yellowed) teeth: it has already made over $100 million worldwide, helped by excellent reviews and strong word of mouth. But in the case of another A-lister, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, the critical and commercial reception of The Smashing Machine has been rather more muted, suggesting that audiences know what they want from Johnson, and it sure as hell isn’t arthouse fare.
There comes a point in the careers of many actors who are so bored of being pigeonholed as musclebound lunks that they take on an altogether more challenging and interesting role. Stallone did it in Copland, Jean-Claude Van Damme appeared as himself in the decidedly meta JCVD and Mickey Rourke nearly won an Oscar for The Wrestler, the picture that most closely resembles Johnson’s attempt at respectability. While the last of these was based on a fictitious wrestler, Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine tells the life story of the wrestler and MMA fighter Mark Kerr – who is still very much with us. It is constrained by biography, as well, inevitably, an obligation to present its protagonist in a reasonably positive light.
Johnson is an actor who has always excelled at being liked. Even reports of some of his more bizarre off-screen behavior – urinating in water bottles and handing them to assistants, tardy timekeeping on set, a strange feud with his Fast and Furious co-star Vin Diesel – have done little to tarnish his appeal. His blockbuster films are usually successful, though he was unable to begin his own superhero franchise with DC’s Black Adam, in which he was more convincing as the heroic than villainous incarnation of the character. He appeared to be sliding into well-paid self-parody over the past few years, coasting on screen with a practiced charm that at times saw him turn into a more musclebound version of “Alright, alright, alright” era Matthew McConaughey. Escaping from a straitjacket was a skill that Houdini perfected; might Johnson do the same?
The major problem with The Smashing Machine, and the reason for its lackluster box office performance, is that it does not appear to know who it has been made for. Audiences who want a rousing sports film with their hero in the lead will be disappointed, on the grounds that Safdie – best known for co-directing the anxiety-inducing Uncut Gems with his brother Josh – has made a strangely muted, decidedly unheroic version of Kerr’s life, which offers almost random vignettes of his existence rather than sticking to any conventional biographical narrative, and concluding in a downbeat, almost shrugging fashion. Yet A24 habitués, who are far more likely to enjoy the film, are also not the obvious audience for a film about MMA that stars the man formerly known as The Rock. Hence the disappointing opening weekend (a mere $6 million at the box office, a third of what it was expected to make) and the indifferent-to-poor response from audiences, who awarded the picture a poor B- CinemaScore.
There is no denying Johnson’s commitment to the part, which he undoubtedly hoped would win him an Oscar. (The film won the Silver Bear at the Venice Film Festival, the second highest accolade.) He is unrecognizable as Kerr, thanks to prosthetics and a wig, and he manages to strip away any vestige of his usual persona to portray a big, frustrated man whose almost comical disparity in size with his wife, Emily Blunt’s Dawn Staples, makes their scenes together both humorous and poignant. It is, by any reckoning, a brave, even daring performance, which attempts to shrug off the bondage of The Rock forever, but audiences refuse to accept him, or it.
Johnson will, of course, be fine. There is a supposedly final Fast and Furious film coming in 2027, which he will be returning for, and, more interestingly, there is a new Martin Scorsese film, billed as a Hawaii-set answer to Goodfellas and The Departed, which is also set to reunite the wrestler-turned-actor with Blunt again alongside Scorsese’s usual collaborator DiCaprio. Yet The Smashing Machine’s failure will undoubtedly hurt more than all his various bouts in the ring, and even this most cheerful and charismatic of public figures might be forgiven for experiencing a twinge of self-doubt as a result. Can Dwayne Johnson, actor, ever be taken seriously? The jury, alas, remains out.
Badenoch’s conference speech will calm Tory jitters
Kemi Badenoch wrapped up Conservative conference with a well-received speech that was bursting with policy ideas. The Tory leader’s hour-long address in Manchester was intended as a rejoinder to critics of her leadership. Having been accused of lacking spirit, imagination and vigour, Badenoch today demonstrated all three. The main headline grabbing announcement was her plan to abolish stamp duty – a surprise ‘rabbit’ that sparked a standing ovation.
Had her speech been a disaster, one can imagine a flurry of letters being triggered by nervy Tory MPs
The £9 billion commitment would be funded from the £47 billion savings shadow chancellor Mel Stride unveiled earlier this week. It is intended to be the answer to the question which has long bedevilled various Tory leaders: how do they get young people to vote for them? Badenoch said her move would help young Britons get on the housing ladder – and builds on the Tory tradition of a ‘property-owning democracy.’ It has echoes of the 2007 conference when George Osborne pledged to scrap inheritance tax.
There was plenty of other red meat, too. Badenoch announced a new fiscal ‘golden rule’: for every pound the government saves, half will go towards reduce the deficit and half towards tax cuts or spending to boost the economy. Doctors would be banned from going on strike and stop-and-search powers would be tripled if she became prime minister. ‘British benefits’ will be, in her words, for ‘British citizens’ only. Disability benefits will be stripped back to those with the most severe conditions while motability vehicles – a particular bugbear of the online right – would be restricted to people with serious disabilities only.
Policy was not the only interesting thing in Badenoch’s speech. There was a marked shift in tone with regards to her party’s record in office. She and colleagues have spent much of their time admitting that the Tories got it wrong on tax and migration between 2010 to 2024. Today she argued that the Conservatives cut the deficit, got millions of people into work and can be proud of its record on Ukraine. Nigel Farage – the great spectre of British politics – got just one mention, with Badenoch loftily dismissing the Reform leader with a quote from George Bernard Shaw. ‘Never wrestle with a pig’, she said. ‘You both get dirty and the pig likes it.’
The focus on Labour and the economy throughout this speech was indicative of how she would like to frame the next four years. The stamp duty announcement is telling too: it gives London campaigners something to sell on the doorstep next May. Good results in places like Wandsworth and Westminster could help insulate Badenoch in the event of a drubbing.
The Tory leader has been hesitant to set out a policy agenda so far from the election. But her speech today will be portrayed by her team as proof that she is using the space and resources of opposition effectively. Among most senior Tories, the feeling is that she has bought herself time with this conference. Had her speech been a disaster – comparable to Theresa May in 2017, or Liz Truss in 2022 – one can imagine a flurry of letters being triggered by nervy Tory MPs. Her assured performance today will calm some of the jitters.
For the past 12 months, the Conservatives have struggled to get much of a hearing. Today’s flurry of announcements ought to ensure they now do.
Why gold is at an all-time high
Gold is in the middle of what looks like an unstoppable bull run. It has already punched through $4,000 an ounce. At the rate the price is rising, it may well go to $5,000 within a few weeks, and perhaps even $6,000 as the next year unfolds. There have been lots of different explanations for this, from the looming collapse of the dollar, to secret Chinese buying, to the conspiracy theories circulating on the wilder fringes of the internet, such a secret plot to re-establish the gold standard, or attempts to replace all the metal that is meant to be stored at Fort Knox, America’s official gold reserve, which apparently went missing decades ago. But the real explanation is very simple: it is the only way to hedge against soaring government debt. So long as spending remains out of control, gold is a one-way-bet.
At $4060 an ounce, gold is already at an all-time high, and looks set to go a lot higher before this bull run is over. Why? It may reflect a weakening of confidence in the dollar, although President Trump seems to have given up on his fight with the Federal Reserve, and the US economy has taken tariffs in its stride. Or it may reflect buying by central banks, although given that the Polish central bank is the largest buyer this year that may be exaggerated.
But the main reason is that government debt is spiraling out of control. In the US, the deficit is likely to remain above 5 percent of GDP even with the government shut down. President Trump shows no interest in bringing that under control. He even looks set to give away all his tariff revenue with $2,000 checks to every household instead of reducing the deficit. In Britain, the Labour government has clearly lost control of its spending, and it is now at the mercy of party rebels who insist they shouldn’t be bossed around by the bond market. In France, a succession of Prime Ministers who attempt to merely slow the rate at which spending rises are kicked out of office. Japan’s new PM Sanae Takaichi looks set to start spending again. Even Germany, the last man standing, has suspended its debt brake, and will borrow up to €900 billion this year to fund investment in infrastructure and defense. All those governments range across the right and the left of the political spectrum, but they are all united on one point: they are determined to keep borrowing more and more.
Perhaps it will all work out fine. The extra spending may accelerate growth, as the UK’s Labour Party and Germany’s Christian Democrats hope it will. Or perhaps it can just be rolled over in perpetuity, which seems to be the strategy of the MAGA Republicans. We will see. The important point is this: if any of those plans go even slightly wrong, and the growth doesn’t materialize, or a recession hits, then gold will be the only asset worth holding. The only real surprise is that it has taken so long for gold to start soaring in price – and now that it has started, it won’t stop until borrowing comes under control again.
The problem with Lenny Henry’s demand for reparations
The desire to seek restitution from those who have harmed or wronged us is normal. Our instinct for justice is inbuilt. Yet, in recent decades, there has emerged in the West a perverse distortion of this impulse: the demand for financial compensation from people who have done no wrong, made by people who have not been wronged. Long-established campaigns calling on Britain to pay reparations for slavery are founded on this strange premise, and the latest figure to join their ranks is Sir Lenny Henry.
The comedian and actor makes his case in a new book, The Big Payback, co-authored with Marcus Ryder, a television executive and charity boss. He argues for the UK to hand over £18 trillion in compensatory payments. As reported in the Telegraph this morning, Sir Lenny not only calls for this huge transfer of money to Caribbean nations, but for cash to be given to individual black British citizens, because ‘all black British people… personally deserve money for the effects of slavery’.
He elaborates: ‘The reason we have racism today and also… why black British people are grossly over-represented in the prison population [is] all because of the transatlantic slave trade’.
Really? First of all, the assumption that Caribbean nations underperformed since independence because of the economic and mental legacy of slavery is highly debatable. Their post-independence fortunes owed as much to the competence of their rulers as any putative ancestral memories: Barbados largely flourished, while others, such as Jamaica, didn’t, because the latter was governed badly. As for the popular hypothesis that the descendants of slaves have, through mysterious osmosis, ‘inherited’ the mental scars of that far-off experience, this merely echoes another fashionable yet highly contested theory prevalent in our therapeutic age: that the ‘trauma’ of our own past and of our ancestors irrevocably determines our behaviour today.
Sir Lenny is on even flimsier ground in arguing that all black people in Britain deserve compensation because slavery and its folk memory has condemned them to a life of underachievement, failure and incarceration. This is refuted by the simple fact that most black people in Britain aren’t of Caribbean heritage. The majority of black Britons today are of African descent, constituting 2.5 per cent of a total 4 per cent black population. Some, therefore, will be the descendants of those who were active and complicit in that era of mass human trafficking.
During the transatlantic slave trade, West African states sold in profusion their captured enemies to European and Arab traders. Among the big players were the kingdoms of Dahomey and Whydah (both located in modern day Benin). King Gezo of Dahomey, who reigned from 1818 to 1858, even once boasted – in the face of British demands to end this practice – how his kingdom owed its prestige to the business of selling humans: ‘The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth.’ Those who cleave to the logic of reparations based on ancestral crimes should also be asking modern states in West Africa to make financial recompense.
We are all descendants of sinners and the sinned against
Campaigning for the offspring to compensate for the sins of their forefathers is an enterprise fraught with difficultly. Not only will some black Britons today be the offspring of slave traders, but the very category ‘black’ has become ever more fluid and elusive, considering the generations of intermarrying and mixing that have taken place since the 1940s. ‘Mixed race’ may be an imperfect-sounding category, but it does increasingly represent a more accurate description of a large demographic in Britain today.
In the long run, also, we are all descendants of sinners and the sinned against. To crudely bracket people living in Britain today as belonging to either camp makes no sense. My mother is Irish and my father was English. So should I demand compensation for the Potato Famine, or should I be required to atone for it? Am I a victim or a villain? I would be grateful if Sir Lenny could answer that one. Activists, actors and governments who make noisy demands for reparations, motivated often by grievance and resentment, and sometimes by greed and opportunism, never seem to move beyond emotive language and simplistic arguments riddled with holes. Their solutions only beg more questions.
Who would dare mock Paddington?
The State of California v. OJ Simpson, Oscar Wilde v. the Marquess of Queensberry, Galileo before the Inquisition… now our age will be able to add its own entry to the annals of famed legal proceedings. Because Paddington is suing Spitting Image.
It is the barmiest news story of late against fierce competition. The Telegraph has revealed that Canal Plus, the holders of the rights to Michael Bond’s furry Peruvian, are launching an action against Avalon, the makers of Spitting Image. You may be surprised to hear that Spitting Image is still a thing. After an ill-advised revival on ITV in 2020, via the now-defunct streamer BritBox, it has recently returned yet again, this time on YouTube.
The Spitting Image Paddington is co-host (with puppet Prince Harry) of a fictional podcast – titled ‘The Rest Is Bullshit!’ – that acts as the anchor to the show. He is depicted as a wild-eyed, foul-mouthed coke fiend – South American, you see.
I’m making it sound funnier than it is. This latest revival of Spitting Image, though technically free from the direct oversight of Ofcom, is hobbled in much the same way as the last one: it has to toe the line of the polite media consensus, which is very far from reality. The huge elephants in the nation’s room cannot really be mentioned. We still can’t even say in public what we’re terrified of, though everybody knows what it is.
This renders Spitting Image, for all its surface raucousness, equivocal and timid – something satire cannot successfully be. It has followed other formerly brash brands like the Onion and Viz into pretend-naughtiness while complying with the progressive consensus. We are indeed swamped by ancient programmes and publications that cannot function in the modern world; in the mainstream, only South Park retains its edge.
It’s a cliché that reality is now so strange that satire is almost impossible, but it’s also true. Many of the political or public figures of today are outlandish, contradictory and difficult to sum up. And fame just doesn’t operate in the same way any more: you can’t rely on celebrities being recognised by viewers. Mass market satire is a defunct model (and I’m not sure what a new, functional one would look like, because it hasn’t yet been invented). It’s rather as if ITMA or Much Binding in the Marsh were still around in the 1980s.
We hear a lot about how the age of deference ended in the 1960s, but it’s made a comeback in the past decade. We just defer to different people and ideas this time – and Spitting Image doesn’t go anywhere near them. The Harry and Paddington podcast gag should last about 20 seconds, but instead it goes on and on, and on. Putting a beloved kiddie character on drugs is crass and obvious – very early-teen humour – but it could still be funny, maybe? Yet it is only tedious.
Still, Spitting Image couldn’t have asked for better publicity than this silly court case. Is Paddington so very sacred now that his holy image cannot be profaned, like a marmalade Mohammed? How could this daft YouTube sketch possibly affect the Paddington ‘brand’? It’s perfectly capable of parodying itself. The looming musical sounds ghastly; I chanced to catch the preview of the first song, released the other day, ‘The Explorer and the Bear’. Things I’d rather hear than go through that again include that government emergency signal, and an unexpected ‘Allahu Akbar’ on a crowded tube.
Is Paddington so very sacred now that his holy image cannot be profaned, like a marmalade Mohammed?
What possible legal basis can there be for this action? The Telegraph reports that Canal Plus are citing ‘design and copyright concerns’. But nobody is going to confuse the Spitting Image Paddington for the real thing. In fact one of the big problems is that it doesn’t look enough like the original, and not even enough like a bear. It’s more like a rat – a sort of chubbier Rizzo from The Muppets.
The rude or inappropriate parody of fictional characters, particularly children’s characters, is a long-established part of our culture. There were Victor Lewis-Smith’s gay Daleks, the ‘real Mr Men’ poster that adorned many a student bedroom, endless tedious riffing on the druggy aura of The Magic Roundabout. This is no different.
Where will it end? Can we now sue puppets – can puppets sue each other? Can we have a judicial review of Sooty, issue a restraining order on Sweep, or sue Soo? Could I sue Paddington for excessive tweeness and polluting the discourse with his ghastly, simpering platitudes? Reparations are surely in order.
If this does come to court, I want to see character witnesses in the stand vouching for Paddington’s ethical integrity – Basil Brush, Metal Mickey, Postman Pat – and support from the wider bear community, Rupert and Bungle. What a glorious waste of time and money. But in a frequently bizarre and scary world, at least this particular insanity is trivial – which is a great relief. Let the fur fly.
Should Stephen Lawrence’s killer be freed?
David Norris was convicted of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in April 1993 and now wants to be released from prison. Should he be? That is a question the Parole Board will consider as Norris has now served the minimum custodial term of a life sentence imposed in 2011. This body has the power to direct his release or refuse it on the grounds of risk to the public. While it is independent of politics, the profile of the perpetrator and the seriousness of the case means the new Justice Secretary, David Lammy – who has described the murder of Lawrence as a ‘seminal moment’ in shaping his understanding of racism in the criminal justice system – might well attempt to appeal any direction to release Norris. Norris and his co-accused Gary Dobson were convicted of a slaying that stunned Britain due in no small part to a series of botched investigations by the Metropolitan police, themselves later found guilty of ‘institutional racism’ after a public inquiry.
Lammy is right to object to release at this stage. Whether he is the right person to make that decision is another matter
The parole hearing is in public which happens now when a case comes before them that has significant public interest. While in most cases, those affected by crimes committed can make representations through their solicitors, Norris is in the presence (via videolink) of Stephen Lawrence’s mother Doreen who has devoted her life to campaigning for justice for her son and wider antiracism awareness. She now sits in the House of Lords and has publicly stated that she does not wish Norris to be released.
Her former husband Neville Lawrence has indicated that Norris should only be released if he discloses the names of three other suspects thought to have been part of the gang who chased down and stabbed Stephen to death simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong skin colour. Norris for his part while admitting his guilt in being party to this feral attack has refused to name names claiming it would put his life at risk. At yesterday’s hearing, Norris said: ‘In an ideal world I could tell them the whole truth of my part and others. I can’t give them everything they wish as it would pose a risk to me and my family.’
The case throws up many questions. Should a decision on Norris’ release be based on his conduct in prison alone or his refusal to implicate others? To what extent should the public profile of the case influence the decision makers? Should David Lammy effectively recuse himself from the process because of his previous long involvement with the campaign for justice for Stephen?
The Lammy Review of race and the criminal justice system published in 2016 had a specific recommendation on mercy and age: ‘There should be a presumption to look favourably on those who committed crimes either as children or young adults but can demonstrate that they have changed since their conviction.’
Norris was just 16 when he helped murder Stephen Lawrence. Should that presumption extend to him?
The Parole Board’s basic function is clear. It is conducting an assessment of future risk based on current evidence. This test focuses on factors such as the Norris’ behaviour in custody, his insight into offending, remorse, engagement with rehabilitation programs, and any ongoing threat he may pose, rather than solely on the original offense. Their objective is not to assess whether he has suffered enough punishment. Many people would think fourteen years is far too little for taking an innocent life in a racist attack. It is to ask, is it still necessary to detain this man in custody for the protection of the public now and into the future?
Norris has presented himself as a changed man, far from the caricature of the swaggering thug who baited onlookers at the Stephen Lawrence public inquiry in 1998 when he stonewalled all questions about his complicity in the crime with ‘I can’t remember’ answers. His prison reports disclosed in open session reflect some progress in understanding the enormity of his crime. Other reports detail the use of racist epithets and drug taking. Norris has begged forgiveness from the Lawrence family and has said he is remorseful. It is for the Parole Board to determine whether this contrition is real or not. His refusal to confirm others widely suspected of being perpetrators but never brought to justice is painful and wrong but should not be the overriding factor here.
It might be an unpalatable thing to say but David Norris is entitled to justice too for atrocious acts committed when he was a teenager that has blighted so many lives, his own included. But still, taking all the available facts into consideration, I think that it is still right to object to his release at this stage.
Britain’s steel industry must die
It already faced tariffs in the United States, and it has been struggling to cope with some of the highest industrial energy prices in the world. Now what remains of the British steel industry faces what could well be a terminal blow. The European Union is about to impose tariffs of 50 per cent on steel imported from the UK. Labour ministers will no doubt start cobbling together rescue packages, and trying to devise a new strategy to rescue the industry. But perhaps it would be best just to be honest – and let the industry die.
The EU has set out plans to cut the amount of steel imported into the bloc by half, and impose 50 per cent tariffs on anything over the quota. The reason is simple. With President Trump imposing steep levies on American imports, it is worried that all the extra steel will be diverted to Europe, undermining a major industry. The trouble is, British manufacturers are likely to be among the biggest victims. The EU is the largest market for British made steel, with exports to the continent worth nearly £3 billion a year.
The industry was already struggling. The US has imposed steep tariffs, and it faces energy costs that are twice those in France, and four times America, as well as a raft of green levies. The government took control of British Steel, with a plant in Scunthorpe earlier this year, while Liberty Steel, with plants in Rotherham and Stocksbridge, collapsed into government control last month. Half the industry has already been effectively nationalised, and the other half may not be far behind. Gareth Stace, the director-general of the trade body UK Steel, said the industry was facing a ‘disaster’ and ‘the biggest crisis in its history.’
That is certainly true. The catch is, it may be too late to do anything about it now. Sure, ministers will no doubt try and cobble together some kind of deal to keep the plants, and the jobs that depend on them, alive. It can threaten retaliatory tariffs against the EU, although it seems unlikely that anyone in Brussels will pay very much attention given that the UK is a relatively small market (and given the accelerating collapse of its industrial base). The UK can dish out some soft loans, but given the Treasury is strapped for cash, it can’t keep that going forever. It can try and find buyers for the plants already under its control, but it is hard to imagine that anyone will want them now. In reality, it would be better to take the tough decision to let the industry die.
The blunt truth is this. Successive governments have made a mess of the industry, ignoring the impact that soaring energy prices would have on its cost base, and imposing green levies and targets that were based on little more than wishful thinking. Add those all up, and throw in EU tariffs as well, and it is impossible for the British industry to compete on global markets.
A ‘rescue package’ now is just throwing money away – and that money would be better spent trying to bring down the UK’s catastrophic energy costs instead of bailing out an industry that no longer has a viable future.
Prince Harry’s white saviour complex has been dealt another blow
You’ve got to feel sorry for Prince Harry. After some of the best headlines he’s had in years during his well-received return to Britain last month, that goodwill has swiftly been dismantled under a blizzard of bad publicity. There was the accusation that he or someone around him leaked sensitive information about his brief meeting with his father to the papers. And now the revelation that one of the charities he’s closely linked to, African Parks, has been described as no longer fit for purpose. Or, to be exact, ‘indelicate and disrespectful’.
The calamitous and scandalous collapse of Sentebale earlier this year has now been followed by this less dramatic but equally humiliating withdrawal
The hoo-ha has arisen because it has been reported that the charity, which was founded in 2000 to look after protected parks throughout the continent, has been dropped as a partner by Chad’s government, on the grounds that it has displayed what its environment minister calls a ‘recurring, indelicate and disrespectful attitude towards the government’ and has been acting less in Chad’s interests and more in its own.
A jaw-dropping document has been released that accuses the charity of all kinds of malfeasance, including pocketing revenues from tourism, which it prioritised over conservation activities, and even transferring money overseas, ‘to the detriment of Chad and in flagrant violation of national banking and tax regulations’.
African Parks issued a bland statement suggesting that they were ‘listening and learning’ from Chad’s criticisms, but the damage has been very much done. And while there have been many international luminaries involved with the charity, including the philanthropists Howard Buffett – son of Warren – and the billionaire Bill Ackman, it has been Prince Harry who has been front and centre of African Parks for several years. He served as the organisation’s president from 2017 until 2023, and has since been on its board of directors. While, naturally, there is no suggestion that the Duke of Sussex has had any direct or personal involvement in any of the failings the charity has been accused of, it contributes to a growing and persistent sense that he is less an asset to these organisations and more an Ancient Mariner, bringing disaster wherever he goes.
In Spare, Harry details the arguments that he and William had over their involvement in various African charities, and in particular their different attitudes towards conservation. William favoured community-led schemes whereas Harry thought that top-down intervention was more effective. The impression given by the duke, who at that stage was also responsible for the Sentebale charity, is that he was the one truly carrying on their mother’s work in the continent, and that he was the man who really cared about his work.
However, 2025 has seen all that fall apart. The calamitous and scandalous collapse of Sentebale earlier this year, when Harry was accused and then cleared of ‘bullying and harassment at scale’, has now been followed by this less dramatic but equally humiliating withdrawal, all of which might leave the duke wondering what, exactly, is the point of his continued involvement with these organisations.
Well might he ask. Although it is possible to suggest that his high media profile, and indeed willingness to go above and beyond for charitable activities when the mood takes him, are positive attributes, we also live in an age when African countries and organisations are understandably wary of the idea of the white saviour, cheerily appearing from America or Europe and suggesting that they, and only they, have the savvy to sort out problems that have persisted for generations.
Harry is far from a malicious man – except perhaps where his family are concerned – but he is a thoughtless and arrogant one, as we have seen time and time again. The latest humiliation that he and his charities face is a reminder that blundering in amateurishly can cause trouble. A dose of humility, and good judgement, would be extremely welcome in the future.
Kemi is right to preach fiscal responsibility
At the mausoleum that is this week’s Conservative party conference one of the bodies has just shown a slight muscular twitch. Kemi Badenoch will this morning try to reclaim the one subject on which the Tories can reasonably hope to base a revival: fiscal responsibility. Mel Stride has already proposed £47 billion worth of spending cuts. His boss will now announce a ‘golden rule’ whereby half the proceeds of those cuts will go to reducing the deficit rather than on tax cuts.
I know that for the Tories to try to make a thing of fiscal responsibility is a bit rich given that public spending was allowed to balloon out of control during the latter years of the last Conservative government. Even the supposedly small-state Liz Truss strangely shy about contemplating spending cuts to go with her tax cuts – while committing the government to underwrite the energy bills of 27 million UK households. But then who else is going to make the case for reducing Britain’s burgeoning public debts? Obviously not Labour. Rachel Reeves couldn’t even persuade her party of the need for a modest £6 billion trim from the welfare budget. But not Reform UK, either. Nigel Farage’s party is increasingly positioning itself on the centre-left economically, promising to do away with the two-child cap on child benefit and proposing to renationalise the utilities and the steel industry. While the party’s manifesto at the last election made the vague promise to cut £5 in every £100 from public budgets it also proposed an extra £17 billion for the NHS and £14 billion for defence and so on. All in all Reform’s costing proposed £150 billion of gains for the public purse (spending cuts) but also £141 billion worth of losses (through tax cuts and spending rises). What’s more, the proposed spending cuts – such as £35 billion from stopping paying interest on quantitative easing reserves – were a lot dodgier than the spending rises. The Governor of the Bank of England insists the QE trick wouldn’t save any money, and Reform UK seems to have downgraded its expected savings for the policy to £20 billion. Reform UK’s policy is an enormous fiscal black hole in the making.
It is entirely logical why Reform UK should want to tack to the left economically. The party cannot gain power by going after disaffected Tories alone. It has successfully bagged a lot of the golf club vote but it also needs to eat into the Labour vote, by going after the same Red Wall voters Boris Johnson successfully won over in his 2019 election victory. But that does leave an opportunity for the Tories. If they can apologise profusely for their fiscal record in their last years in office and make a firm plan to balance the books they will have a very distinct offering. It might not seem a very popular cause now but it will be very different when the increasingly likely full-on sovereign debt crisis arrives. International investors are already losing patience, with bond yields above the levels they were after Kwasi Kwarteng’s ill-fated mini budget. If we end up in a Greek-style crisis before the next election, with deep public sector cuts forced by the terms of an IMF bailout, it will be a very different matter.
Only thing is, why aren’t the Tories being more ambitious about repairing the public finances? If Badenoch commits half of the proceeds from £47 billion worth of public spending cuts to reducing the deficit, that is only £23.5 billion to be chopped from a deficit which last year reached £150 billion. She should think bigger and come up with a plan to eliminate the deficit altogether. She would be shouted down with cries of ‘austerity’ now, but when the fiscal crisis arrives for good she would be in the right place – and Tories and Reform very much in the wrong one.
The Freedom Convoy trial has disgraced Canada’s justice system
In a disgraceful conclusion to a disgraceful trial, Freedom Convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber have been sentenced to 12 months of house arrest and 6 months of curfew (with credit for the 49 days Lich has already spent in jail) – plus 100 hours of community service.
An ironic addendum. For in the packed courtroom on October 7, there was likely not one person who has served the community with greater generosity than the two defendants.
Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, organizers of the most successful protest in Canadian history, kept their cool, kept the peace and brought national unity, patriotism and common sense back to Canada after the pandemic – this, despite the sustained efforts of the most aggressively controlling, divisive government the nation has ever had. They achieved this under intense pressure and at great personal cost.
They’re national heroes, and the persecution waged against them is destroying trust in the Canadian judicial system, though the judge involved does not seem to realize it. Justice Perkins-McVey said in court that if she discharged the defendants, it would “undermine confidence in the administration of justice”.
But it’s quite the opposite. Though left-leaning outlets have portrayed the sentence as light, compared to the outrageous seven and eight years of jail time demanded by the Crown, any conviction and sentencing of the obviously innocent Lich and Barber only serves to confirm that Canadians with the wrong political views will not receive equal treatment before the law.
We all know that in Canada, axe-wielding saboteurs, railway blockaders, rioters, traffic disruptors and violent protestors have escaped without so much as arrest, as long as the government views their cause with complaisance.
Can you believe that Lich was convicted for saying things like “hold the line”, “stay united” and “don’t give in to fear”? Dangerous words indeed. And Barber? He was convicted for telling truckers not to honk unless their trucks were raided – this was defiance of the court order against honking. Three weeks of protesting, all recorded on thousands of devices, and those were the only charges that could be made to stick? It’s a good thing they didn’t try jaywalking.
Thankfully, Lich’s lawyer, Lawrence Greenspon, says they are seriously considering an appeal of her conviction, on grounds that “constitutionally protected freedom of speech which encourages peaceful assembly should always prevail over any rights to the enjoyment of property”.
There was another ironic moment at the sentencing. The judge announced, “Politics has no place inside this courtroom” – yet the trial has been widely viewed as nothing more than the political vengeance of Doug Ford and the Ontario government.
If it weren’t for politics, Lich and Barber would never have been arrested, let alone put through jail time, solitary confinement, loss of employment, years of drawn-out, costly legal proceedings, onerous bail conditions and emotional strain.
They inspired a movement that made the government look bad in the eyes of the world, they challenged its pandemic management and the government was forced to back down. Now the government wants to make an example of them – whatever the cost.
And the cost, so far, has been $21 million. That’s how much tax money Doug Ford and his government have spent to date on prosecuting Lich, Barber and others involved with the trucker protest. His targets are all working-class people of modest income. Many have lost their livelihoods because of the drawn-out legal proceedings against them.
The only way they have been able to afford a defense and cover the cost of travel to and from the Ottawa court, is through donations from the public. This means the public is paying twice – once as taxpayers, with money intended to pursue real criminals wasted on a political vendetta – and once again, voluntarily, to support the brave people who stood up to ask for an end to lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
This is the same public that already gave $24 million to the truckers to help them go to Ottawa and protest vaccine mandates and lockdowns: $24 million that never reached them, because politicians colluded with fundraising sites and banks to freeze the money, debank the protestors and doxx the donors, all without a court order. No criminal charges have been laid in Canada, to this writer’s knowledge, against the perpetrators of these deeds, though they damaged national institutions far more than any protest ever could.
Justice Perkins-McVey is right to be concerned about confidence in the administration of justice. Many Canadians share her concern. Sadly, her handling of this case has done little to dispel their fears.
Belgium has joined the battle against the ECHR
Belgium’s federal Prime Minister, Bart De Wever, is not your average European leader. A conservative intellectual with a sharp tongue and a taste for historical analogy, he is perhaps the only European statesman to cite Edmund Burke more readily than Brussels regulations. A long-serving mayor of Antwerp – one of Europe’s great port cities – and leader of the moderate nationalist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), De Wever stitched together a national coalition after topping the 2024 federal elections.
The alliance includes both centre-right and centre-left parties, drawn from both of Belgium’s major linguistic blocs – no small feat in a country that barely speaks to itself. De Wever brings to the job a sardonic sense of humour, a historian’s depth, and a coalition-builder’s patience. Now, he’s turning his attention to one of Europe’s most intractable crises: unchecked immigration.
Though a Flemish nationalist – and secessionist – at heart, De Wever has long edged into the mainstream of Belgian politics. He speaks fluent French in public and now addresses Walloon audiences, even joining their national celebrations. But the symbolism only goes so far: De Wever has pointedly avoided certain events on Belgium’s national day, and declined to say ‘Vive la Belgique!’ when prompted by the country’s French-speaking state broadcaster. In Belgium, language is politics.
That reluctance may seem odd for a man tasked with holding the country together, but it is electorally strategic. De Wever’s real battle is not just against the left or other centrists, but against the hard-right Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest, formerly Vlaams Blok), who view him as insufficiently radical. His voters, hard-won and sometimes even on loan, must never mistake him for a Belgian patriot. Instead, he prefers to speak about the advancement of both the Flemish and Walloon regions – conveniently, the constitutional role of a Belgian prime minister.
Meanwhile, De Wever’s government has hit the ground running. On defence, Belgium is belatedly inching towards Nato’s spending targets, lifting its military budget from a languid 1.3 per cent of GDP. On welfare, cuts to Belgium’s generous and prolonged unemployment benefits are aimed not just at saving up to €2 billion, but at pushing the people back into the labour market. New fiscal measures aim to stimulate businesses and the self-employed. De Wever’s coalition also agreed to shut down the Senate of the country’s parliament by 2029, transferring most of its tasks to the Chamber of Representatives.
On Europe, De Wever styles himself a ‘Eurorealist’. He opposes a Brussels superstate but supports a well-functioning single market, a united front against Russia, and serious reform of the EU’s asylum system. Here, his ideas are bold. The Australian model is his North Star: asylum seekers should be processed outside Europe, in ‘third countries,’ and barred from claiming rights upon illegal entry.
Indeed, under De Wever’s watch, Belgium has unveiled what he proudly calls ‘the strictest migration policy ever’ – with curtailed rights for refugees, tougher residency rules, stricter language and integration tests, and tighter limits on family reunification. And he is not going it alone. A bloc of like-minded governments – including Germany, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom– is forming around his Eurorealist stance.
The legal foundations, however, remain a minefield. De Wever’s core objection is to the current interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights, which he argues was never intended as a backdoor for mass migration. ‘It was written in an era of closed borders and Cold War,’ he said recently, ‘and meant to protect a Russian ballerina fleeing through the Iron Curtain – not to open a migrant highway to Europe.’
To that end, De Wever commissioned a legal opinion from Marc Bossuyt – former judge and grand éminence of Belgian constitutional law – on how to navigate, reinterpret, or eventually amend the relevant treaties. Bossuyt’s suggestions include pushing for judicial restraint in Strasbourg, and even nominating less activist judges. Unsurprisingly, the Council of Europe was less than thrilled. But the battle for the ECHR is only just beginning, and mind you, Australia’s model was possible because it is of course not part of the Convention.
Whether De Wever can deliver on his ambitions remains to be seen. His governing style is not revolutionary but evolutionary: piecemeal reform, patient coalition-building, and Burkean caution. Indeed, were he alive today, Edmund Burke might well nod in approval – although with one caveat. Burke was no fan of secession. He regarded it as dangerously destabilising. Reform, for him, was a matter of conserving what works, not dismantling it.
And here lies the paradox – some would say genius – of Bart De Wever: a man using Burkean means to pursue nationalist ends. His confederal vision for Belgium – two self-governing regions with minimal federal glue – is a soft break-up in all but name. Though delivered with civility and constitutionalism, the direction of travel is unmistakable.
Yet, recent opinion polls suggest De Wever is again losing ground to Vlaams Belang. To hardline Flemish nationalists who want outright secession, he will never move fast enough. To voters fed up with immigration, the Burkean approach may be too slow to grasp. But De Wever has beaten the far right before – and stole their thunder decisively in 2024, after trailing them for months.
He is, in short, the man to watch – in Flanders, in Belgium, and perhaps in Europe too.
Islam and the Bible are fuelling France’s ‘baptism boom’
You have probably heard that something extraordinary is happening in the Catholic Church in France. The French bishops’ conference announced in April that more than 10,000 adults were due to be baptised in 2025 – a 45 per cent increase on the year before.
France is seeing what the media call a ‘boom biblique’: a rapid rise in sales of the Bible
It’s not just adult baptisms that are booming. A record 19,000 people, many young, attended this year’s Paris to Chartres pilgrimage. An unprecedented 13,500 high school students took part in the 2025 Lourdes FRAT pilgrimage, a major annual youth event.
The country is also seeing what French media call a ‘boom biblique’: a rapid rise in sales of the Bible. Religious bookstores report a 20 per cent increase in purchases since 2024.
It’s easy to state these facts. But it’s harder to discern their cause. Why are young people flocking to the Catholic Church more than 200 years after it was violently ejected from the public square during the French Revolution?
News reports – both in France and the English-speaking world – have only scratched the surface of the phenomenon. But the most in-depth investigation to date has just been published in France. It’s called Enquête sur ces jeunes qui veulent devenir chrétiens (Inquiry into Why Young People Want to Become Christians) and the author is Antoine Pasquier, a journalist at the French Catholic weekly Famille Chrétienne.
Pasquier explores what young French adults seeking baptism as catechumens say about themselves. He mixes their observations with his own insights as a catechist who saw the wave arrive in his parish and watched as it took on breathtaking proportions. The dynamics he uncovers are unexpected.
For example, through his interviews with catechumens, Pasquier finds that reading the Bible plays a more fundamental role in conversions than the internet and social media. Also, many young seekers arrive at church with an idea of religion shaped not by Christianity but by Islam.
The book, currently available only in French, offers guidance to Church leaders as they grapple with this unforeseen influx. Pasquier calls for a deep transformation of French Catholicism, from a community resigned to decline to a ‘catechumenal Church’. He sees signs that this shift may be beginning.
Pasquier spent ten years as a reporter for a French regional weekly newspaper before joining Famille Chrétienne in 2013. He has coordinated the Catholic magazine’s investigations into topics such as the abuse crisis. He is married, with four children, and has accompanied young catechumens at his church in the Paris region since 2020.
In an interview with the Pillar, he discussed the genesis of his book, what surprised him about the catechumens, and the French Church’s lessons for Catholics elsewhere.
Catholics around the world are fascinated by what’s occurring in France. How would you explain briefly what’s happening to someone living outside of France?
Since 2020, France has seen a significant influx of catechumens from all ages and social backgrounds. The figures speak for themselves: in 2025, the number of adults seeking baptism is the highest ever recorded since the French bishops’ conference began tracking catechumens in 2002. For the first time, the symbolic threshold of 10,000 adult baptisms has been surpassed.
Over two years, the growth is remarkable: 5,463 baptisms in 2023, 7,135 in 2024 (+30.6 per cent), and 10,384 in 2025 (+45.5 per cent). In other words, the number of adult baptisms nearly doubled between 2023 and 2025 (+90 per cent).
Among these 10,384 newly baptised adults, the 18 to 25 age group now represents the largest share, with approximately 4,360 catechumens (42 per cent). Adolescent baptisms (ages 11-17) also show strong growth. In 2025, there were 7,404, compared to 1,547 in 2022 (+76 per cent). In just three years, the numbers have multiplied nearly fivefold.
Paradoxically, this phenomenon occurs in an ecclesial context marked by the sexual abuse crisis and a decline in vocations. This completely unexpected influx has caught parishes off guard, forcing them to adapt quickly. Initially taken aback, French Catholics are now seeking the best ways to welcome and support these seekers of God.
Is your book the first in-depth exploration of why so many young people are becoming Catholics in France?
Until now, this phenomenon has only been analysed by media outlets, whether Catholic or secular. Drawing on the statistics published and interpreted annually by the French bishops’ conference, these media have attempted to explain the reasons behind this influx of catechumens. Numerous testimonies have also been published.
As a journalist for Famille Chrétienne magazine, I began working on this topic three years ago. However, my book is the first comprehensive investigation that seeks to deeply analyse the reasons why these young people are choosing to become Christians.
I deliberately focused on the 15-25 age group, first, because it is the best represented demographic (45 per cent of French catechumens in 2025, or more than 8,000 young people), and second because their pathway differs from that of older adults.
When did you first become aware of this phenomenon?
Since 2020, I have been accompanying high school students preparing for baptism in my parish in the Paris region. As a catechist, I’ve seen a growing number of young people in my group who are seeking God and eager to become Christians.
They often came in groups, frequently with friends. We also began noticing them more often and in greater numbers at Sunday Masses, approaching during Communion with their arms crossed to receive the priest’s blessing.
This personal observation was echoed by other catechists in different parishes and towns. After doing some research, this time as a journalist, it quickly became clear to me that this phenomenon was nationwide and completely unprecedented.
Many reports stress the role of the internet in the new wave of conversions. But you’ve discovered that the Bible plays an even more important role. Can you explain why this is the case?
Gen Z is raised on social media. Influencers on these platforms share increasingly specific and well-crafted content, created by Christian influencers, which provide answers to their existential and spiritual questions.
But these networks are not the place of their conversion. The conversion happens earlier, in a natural way, I would say. Social media and the internet complement and support their conversion.
The Bible, on the other hand, plays a role much earlier in their journey. Once they decide to deepen their spiritual search within the Christian faith, the Bible becomes essential for them. Almost all the young people I accompany or have interviewed tell me they bought, opened, and read the Bible before taking any official steps with the Church.
Alongside the church and Mass, the Bible is a reliable and easily identifiable reference point for them. They think, ‘I want to be Christian, how do I do it?’ And the answer is obvious to them: ‘I need to read the Bible and go to Mass.’ The strong growth in Bible sales, both in France and abroad, reflects this new enthusiasm.
You note that many young French people who approach the Catholic Church come with an idea of religion that’s shaped by Islam, with its stress on fasting practices, etc. Why is that, and what challenges does it bring?
It’s primarily the public and overt expression of Islam that challenges them. Some of their Muslim friends openly embrace their faith and religious identity without reservation. This prompts our young people to also make their growing Christian faith visible. This is expressed through wearing a cross necklace, sometimes a chapel veil for young women, or by observing the practices of various liturgical seasons, particularly Lent.
Lent, with its radicalism, attracts these young people searching for guidance and meaning. They sometimes tend to view this period as a ‘Christian Ramadan.’ Catechists must take care to explain the differences clearly and remind them that Christianity is not primarily a religion of observance but of personal and inner conversion.
What surprised you most about the young people becoming Catholic?
Their determination and patience. Some have been on a journey for years, hidden from view, out of fear of being misunderstood by friends or family.
I think of a young woman who waited nine years between her first time entering a church and her official request for baptism. Another took three years between her first reading of the Gospel, alone in her room, and attending her first Mass with a friend. Their faith is already so strong that they are not afraid to wait this long to receive baptism.
You call for the French Church to be transformed into a “catechumenal Church.” What would this look like?
The early Church, the Apostolic Church, was by its very nature a catechumenal Church. When the Apostles and the Virgin Mary received the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, they immediately left the Upper Room to proclaim the Good News of Christ and performed the first baptisms (Acts 2:41).
In the early communities, Christians – who were therefore neophytes — listened to the teachings of the Apostles. This teaching was centred on proclaiming the kerygma, the core of the Christian faith. These communities were also attentive to each other’s salvation and to the work of the Holy Spirit among them.
A catechumenal Church is a Church attentive to proclaiming the kerygma, to the salvation of each and every person, and listening to the Holy Spirit. These dispositions will help our Church today to be ever more attractive and open to those who seek God.
Is there anything that other countries that are also seeing a boom in adult baptisms could learn from the Church in France?
The Church in France is gradually coming to terms with what is happening. I’m not sure it has many lessons to teach other Churches.
The first to understand what was happening were the catechists, those closest to the grassroots. They reacted quickly and took steps to address this unexpected wave. If there is a lesson to draw from France, it is this adaptability on the ground.
The Church must be careful not to remain trapped in old patterns or reflexes. The mindset of ‘We’ve always done it this way!’ is no longer viable. Without losing its essence, the Church must adapt to these new Christians, responding to their questions, expectations, and thirst.
Pope Leo XIV himself says it well: ‘The crisis of faith and its transmission, together with the hardships related to ecclesial belonging and practice, invite us to rediscover the passion and courage for a new proclamation of the Gospel. At the same time, various people who seem to be distant from the faith often return to knock on the doors of the Church, or open themselves to a new search for spirituality, which at times does not find adequate language and forms in the usual pastoral offerings.’
This article was originally published in the Pillar
Leave Barbour alone
Please, make it stop. No sooner had I dug out my Barbour for the wet and windy winter months than I saw another of the brand’s distressing collaborations, this time with fashion designer Sir Paul Smith. Sir Paul, luvvie fashion grandee and founder of the eponymous line that began as a Nottingham-based shirt outfit in the 1970s, has teamed up with Barbour to distil ‘the wit and character’ of both brands.
But I don’t need Sir Paul’s ‘signature stripe trims, colour pops and patchwork’ to be persuaded to wear a Barbour. And I’m pretty sure most people who live in the country would say the same. I like my 12-year-old Bedale Barbour as it is: pretty bashed up, in need of a re-wax, the pockets stuffed with bits of rope, chocolate buttons, dog poo bags and lighters. This is not, and never will be, a fashion item. I wear it because of the pockets, because it is waterproof and, most of all, because it confers a slightly shambolic tone to my look. What a shame that Barbour can’t understand, moi, its faithful base.
This isn’t the first time that Barbour have insisted upon a bizarre tonal shift that leaves its customer base behind. The brand’s long collaboration with Alexa Chung, model and London-based trendsetter, has always been, in my opinion, a huge mistake. In an interview with the Telegraph, Chung sneeringly reveals that the collaboration came about, in large part, because she was wearing her Barbour ironically: ‘I found it ironic to like them because they were the domain of the granny in the country. I thought it was amusing to wear it in London as a young person.’
Ha ha, but plenty of people – including the late Queen – didn’t wear their Beaufort Barbours as a joke: they wore them because they kept you dry on a shoot, or walking the dogs, or feeding the horses. Such contempt for the brand’s DNA is surely a mistake. With Sir Paul, they have presumably chosen someone ancient (he is 79) to confer a certain ‘heritage’ to the project. But is a champagne socialist who once dressed David Bowie really the right choice? I find it hard to believe.
Sooner or later, all fashion brands succumb to the marketing lure of what is known in the industry as the ‘collaboration’. The upsides – when they materialise – are credibility by association, piggybacking off another brand’s customer database and garnering media and celebrity attention that ensures that a British brand like Barbour, founded in 1894, feels part of the zeitgeist. But the downsides are manifold: confusing the brand message, sacrificing long-term loyalty for short-term gains and even bankruptcy.
I like my 12-year-old Bedale Barbour as it is: pretty bashed up, in need of a re-wax, the pockets stuffed with bits of rope, chocolate buttons, dog poo bags and lighters
One need only look at the graveyard of Designers at Debenhams or the questionable Cath Kidston team-up with Care Bears to see that the bods in marketing can (and do) get it seriously wrong. Sadly, this isn’t enough to stop the lure of the collaboration in ever more surreal and cloth-eared ways. Collaborations that have no clear logic for their existence other than the noise of a press release are an insult to the consumer; the Balenciaga and Crocs or Nike and Tiffany collaborations spring to mind.
In the case of ‘Barbour loves Paul Smith’, as it is embarrassingly labelled, there is something particularly tone deaf about the notion of Britishness on offer, a kind of paint-by-numbers idea of our national spirit that could only appeal to someone who knows nothing about Britain.
Witness a Friesian cow on the lining of a jacket, a tartan mash-up umbrella that gives me a headache just looking at it, and an Oasis tribute patchwork bucket hat, all designed to combine Sir Paul’s ‘irreverence’ with the brand’s ‘country credentials’. Nobody – and one presumes least of all the King, who wears a Barbour from time to time – asked for this; it’s not stand-up.
An instructive Reddit thread on the Barbour collaborations that customers would actually like to see came up with some far more logical suggestions. These included a plea for Barbour to collaborate ‘with its extensive history and bring back the trench coat’ and many requests for Barbour to team up with gunmakers such as Holland & Holland or James Purdey, which are deemed more proximate to the Barbour legacy. I don’t know if the marketing brains at Barbour want my tuppenceworth, but here it is anyway: leave the Barbour alone; stop it right there. Their best brand collaboration that has yet to happen? A Nigel Farage collection, of course.