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Are you tough enough for the school run?
Nothing in life prepares you for the school run. In theory, on paper, it ought to be idyllic. What could be better than feeding a nutritious breakfast to your nine- and five-year-old, before scrubbing their cherubic upturned faces and combing down their buoyant hair, and then helping them get dressed and out to the car for the short drive to school, whereupon they can skip through the gates happily to education-land?
Instead, it’s a Thursday morning – by which point the week has taken its toll – and you find yourself shouting ‘GET YOUR SHOES ON’ for the 30th time at the sort of level that would be a serious breach of health and safety regulations were the noise emanating from a hairdryer or lawnmower.
But your children aren’t wearing ear protection. And all you really want to do is to repeat the exhortation, even more loudly – until their little angelic ears bleed and the neighbour’s windows shake. Because you’ve been trying to get them dressed for half an hour already. And you have to be out of the door in five minutes, otherwise they’ll be late for school and go on the list. And then you’ll suffer the indignity of having to state – typed on the computer – the reason for their lateness, which is in fact your lateness, not theirs at all, as you are the parent and meant to be capable of arriving somewhere on time.
But it is not only the pending shame that weighs on your mind and makes this – perhaps of all routine tasks associated with parenthood – the one most likely to shred the sanity of even the most level-headed individual. It runs deeper. Because this moment of frustration is underscored by long-buried, subconscious pains and angsts of your own which rise up from the recesses of the mind and get to the brain’s top floor just in time for you to be assailed by the shame and guilt that comes with the realisation of your own rank failure, once again, to have your children dressed at 8.25 in the morning. You also realise that despite years of trying, you have so far failed to teach them anything except for how to be late, of course.
So your only recourse is to seize them and forcefully push their protesting limbs into sleeves, trouser legs, socks and shoes while repeating the mantra: ‘GET DRESSED!’ But before you get there, as they leap on the parental bed with joyful abandon, you still hope that a stern instruction or some other encouragements might do the trick. You try bribing them with the promise of their own body weight in sugar at the end of the day or another £7 magazine that will be disregarded the moment they have assembled the small plastic toy torn from its cover. All to no avail.
Of course, you remind yourself, being late doesn’t matter. It’s just school. But it does matter. Because if you teach your children to be late for school, you are teaching them to be late for life – for every meeting or working day henceforth. And that won’t do. So getting them into school before the shutters come down at 8.50 really matters.
Then you suffer the indignity of having to state the reason for their lateness, which is in fact your lateness, not theirs at all, as you are the parent and meant to be capable of arriving somewhere on time
But by 8.29, with no progress in sight – and the school gates opening in 11 minutes – the pain in your temples becomes acute. You visualise the headmistress shaking her head as she surveys the list of late children, and then perhaps nodding because she knew it all along. They are late people, she will be thinking; that father, especially.
Then the bouncing youngest rockets towards the ceiling and gleefully swats at the light fitting, while the eldest roars ‘I’m not going to school today!’ and kicks his tie high across the bedroom. The sight of the tie is enough to give me an aneurysm. And I see the clock, It’s 8.32! There isn’t time for an aneurysm. ‘GET DRESSED!’
This time I shout loudly enough to pop my youngest’s grommets. Which is when the tie-kicker starts crying. ‘I don’t want to go to school,’ he wails, tears erupting from eyes. Oh God… not now. Surely not real emotions, ones that require steadying and love and understanding – not when we have 17 minutes to get dressed, teeth brushed, faces cleaned, shoes found, water bottles filled (schools no longer having cups and running water, seemingly) and actually there on time.
So I take a deep breath and cuddle him. It won’t be as bad as all that, chum. I kiss his tears, pick up his tie and do it up for him… it’s then that the youngest slips off the bed and lands headfirst on the dog which is currently on heat again and madly bonking a heap of washing.
Never let a disaster go to waste. In the 85 seconds that follow – with the youngest dazed from pain and shock and the dog beside herself – the final pyjamas are removed and school clothes affixed. A minute later their teeth have seen the brush, breakfast and toothpaste remnants have been smeared across their faces with a flannel and hair has been patted with a comb. They are downstairs and now the search for the shoes begins. Followed by the car keys.
Eventually, as the clock ticks down, the last shoe is unearthed – usually knotted so ferociously only Alexander’s solution will do. With relish you slash the knot free with a kitchen knife – hah! – then shove the shoe on the child’s foot and gaffer tape it so tightly it won’t come off for a week. Then you lift, carry and drag the whole caboodle of children, bags and coats to the car.
It’s at this point, finally seated and panting at the wheel, that the youngest chirps: ‘Daddy, I need a poo…’
The Volvo races from the drive at precisely 8.44. We have fewer than 360 seconds to get to the school gate and somehow, out of breath, running, faces like Sally Gunnell at Barcelona in 1992, we make it. Just.
Be under no illusion, the school run will break even the strongest spirit. Ant and Dec don’t need to fly micro celebrities around world to ingest elaborately plumaged wildlife to entertain the masses. They should instead just follow their Z-listers for a week on the school run. Whichever parent breaks last wins. Ant and Dec’s Celebrity School Run would be a television sensation. It would be quite a leveller, too, because as another father said to me the other day: ‘I’m always rather suspicious of those parents who look too together at drop off.’ One day, I dare say, I’ll look back and laugh. But not yet.
Inside London’s transport time warp
The illustration shows a smiling couple on a yacht, the wind ruffling their hair and the coastline receding into the distance behind them. Above it are the words: ‘Work out of London – get more out of life.’ Something from the post-Covid work-from-home era, perhaps, or Boris Johnson’s 2019 ‘levelling up’ election campaign? No – this is the work of ‘The Location of Offices Bureau’, set up by the Tory government in 1963 and abolished by Margaret Thatcher.
The advert appears on the wall of a decommissioned Tube carriage that’s one of many frozen in time in a warehouse in west London. In the latest issue of The Spectator, Richard Morris writes that museums often have a ‘wealth of treasures… hidden away in storage’ and argues that more should open their vaults. The London Transport Museum Depot in Acton is an object lesson in how to do this. The 65,000 sq metre unit exists primarily to store, catalogue and preserve objects from the London Transport Museum’s collection – and three times a year, it opens its doors to the public.
With live music, food stands and a programme of talks and activities, these ‘open days’ have a vibe more like a festival than a museum. But the main draw is the 320,000 items kept here, which include road and rail vehicles, engineering equipment and drawings, signs and maps, tiles and ticket machines, signalling systems, original artworks and posters, and all kinds of transport ephemera – as well as anything that doesn’t fit into the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden. Exhibits range from a cavernous tunnel lining ring that was used in the 1880s to build London’s first Tube railway to the electrical equipment that was installed under the floor of the first automatic passenger trains in the world, placed on stilts so visitors can see it in operation.
But it’s stepping inside the vehicles themselves that most vividly evokes the Britain of days gone by. Each bus and Tube carriage is like a time capsule, with everything from the upholstery and flooring to adverts and signage offering a snapshot of life on the day it left service.
‘A Double-Decker responds just as well to a woman’s touch – we already have a band of lady drivers to prove it’
Inside a surprisingly luxurious 1938 Tube stock car, varnished floors and deep-cushioned seating give a teasing glimpse of a much more comfortable commute – beneath adverts promoting ‘Embassy Number 1. Every time’ and ‘Don’t wait… Dial 168… for Racing Results’. (Though some things haven’t changed – another poster reminds passengers: ‘When waiting for your train, please let people off first.’)
A 1967 Tube stock train that went out of service in 2011 offers adverts for an Aer Lingus flight from Gatwick to Dublin for £29.99 and ‘The All-New Kindle’ for £109. There’s also a ‘Smart phone, smart plan’ for an HTC Wildfire Red with 3.2in touch screen and ‘packed with Facebook, Flickr and Twitter’ – yours for £30 a month.
On a fleet of buses from the past century and beyond, adverts for Wills’s Capstan cigarettes, Brymay safety matches and Watneys beer abound. A gleaming 1880s horse bus (top speed 8mph, capacity 28) and 1910s B-type motor bus (top speed 16mph, capacity 34 – though 18 of these had to brave the uncovered top deck) sit alongside a double-decker ‘Blitz bus’ with anti-splinter netting on the windows to protect passengers from shattering glass in a bomb blast. Nearby is a 1920s ‘pirate’ bus, a reference to the days when multiple bus companies operated in London and smaller firms would run services a minute ahead of rivals to try to steal passengers. (Imagine that next time you’re stranded at the bus stop at rush hour.)
A 1966 issue bus has an on-board turnstile that demands 20p in 5p and 10p coins for entry – fortunately deactivated in these cashless days. The route map on the wall inside comes from the days when retail stores constituted landmarks and is littered with London’s ghosts: ‘HIGH HOLBORN (Pearl Assurance)’, ‘PICCADILLY CIRCUS (Swan & Edgar)’, ‘MARBLE ARCH (C&A), FLEET STREET (Daily Telegraph).’ Beside it is an advert showing a smiling woman at the wheel of a bus. The caption? ‘Who needs women drivers and pays them really good money? London Transport do. A Double-Decker responds just as well to a woman’s touch – we already have a band of lady drivers to prove it.’
Today, Londoners’ commutes are wallpapered with images warning against ‘intrusive staring’ and promoting assisted dying. The late American comedian Bill Hicks once said ‘If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses’. I’d suggest you also could also take a good look at the adverts on its public transport network.
The next London Transport Museum Depot Open Days are 6-8 June.
The fight to make science great again
If one were looking for dismal assessments of the Trump administration’s contributions to the vitality of American intellectual inquiry, the editorial eructations of Holden Thorp would likely be at the top of the list.
Thorp is the editor-in-chief of Science, the weekly journal of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). This makes him one of the most influential figures in the academy and in American science as a whole. Few weeks go by without an editorial from Thorp denouncing the havoc wrought by Trump. The May 8 issue is mildly titled, “The New Reality for American Academe,” but the mildness ends there. The editorial commences, “The endless churn of damaging actions from the Trump administration toward science – from freezing and canceling grants to ending programs that encourage greater participation in science – has wreaked havoc in American universities and reverberated around the world as worries about international collaborations and access to American scientific resources threaten the global scientific enterprise.”
Science, science, science, science – the word shows up four times in that one sentence, so that we don’t forget what is at stake. Let’s say Dr. Thorp has an interest in stoking a certain kind of panic. He is not alone. Governor Maura Healey of Massachusetts recently warned that Trump’s policies are “bad for science” and will drive American scientists abroad. Donald Ingber, founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, speaks of Trump’s “unrelenting attack on science and medical research.”
But it isn’t just Massachusetts politicians and Harvard scientists who are concerned. The august authority of Rolling Stone magazine has warned: “Brain Drain: Scientists Are Fleeing the US As Trump Cuts Funding.”
The forecasts of cultural disaster are so prolific that they may well outnumber the “little red dots” that the James Webb Space Telescope has spotted in the early days of the universe. President Trump has plainly succeeded is perturbing the complacency of comfortably grant-funded seekers of nature’s deepest secrets.
But let me focus for a moment on the chief seeker-in-chief. Dr. Thorp is a 1986 graduate of the University of North Carolina, where he earned his undergraduate degree in chemistry, before completing his PhD at Caltech in 1989 and doing a post-doc at Yale. His record of youthful accomplishment was impressive, and it says something of his aplomb that as a child he played on stage in regional theater and before college he spent a summer studying guitar at Berklee College of Music. His skills in acting and music continue to serve him.
I met Dr. Thorp only once a few years ago when he stopped briefly at a booth I was manning at the annual meeting of the AAAS. He hurried away when he realized that skepticism about DEI, climate change, massive federal funding and Big Science might be found. But I don’t blame him. His life is built around these causes and he need not squander time on non-believers. The question at hand is whether he is right about the state of affairs that now confronts American science.
His gloomy editorial actually achieves a measure of optimism. He writes that Americans as a whole still love higher education and “70 percent of the public opposed reduced funding for biomedical research.” What’s needed, he says, echoing Harvard philosophy professor Danielle Allen, is for science faculty to show more appreciation to the masses. Presumably we masses will respond by restoring those grants to Harvard profs and ditching ideas such as capping overhead rates at 15 percent and taxing engorged endowments.
Thorp’s editorial was followed in that issue of Science by a procession of doleful articles. (I’ve imitated the typography which might be in FRANTIC CATACLISMIA):
Trump Proposes Massive Cuts to research Spending
NIH Bans Future Grant Sharing with Foreign Scientists
Report Questions Trans Care
Harvard Barred from Grants
NIH Dismantled Training Pipeline for Deaf Researchers
Trump Slashes Studies of Online Lies – And How to Counter Them
How Trump UPENEDED SCIENCE: A chaotic 100-day push to remake federal research will have lasting consequences
NIH under SIEGE: Agency scientists say Trump’s assault has left the health institutes demoralized and diminished, their future uncertain
The Human IMPACT: Behind the myriad upheavals US science has faced during the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s administration, countless researchers are fighting for their careers and aspirations (The stories include “Equity in Jeopardy,” “Goodbye Research Dreams,” “Data Blackout” and “PhD Interrupted.)
The Next 100 DAYS: Budget fights and court rulings could shape Trump’s science agenda
I should add that this is not a one-off display of “Mars Attacks” panic, but a more or less weekly feature of America premier science journal. It seems that under Dr. Thorp’s steady hand, we are all doomed. Cancer would have been cured. Global warming chilled. Interplanetary peace ordained. But for Donald Trump.
I don’t have the space or inclination to deal with all these charges ad idem, but I’d like to venture a few general points. First, some of the “science” de-funded by Trump amply deserves to be eliminated. Funding diversity, equity and inclusion projects as science is mislabeling on the order of packaging sawdust as building material. The legions of personnel who conjured and enforced the national shutdown as a public health measure in the face of Covid were not practicing science. They were playing with compliance. Multitudes of federally funded research projects were and are trivial, redundant or just wrong-headed. The majority conjure irreproducible results that are created either to preserve the favor of bureaucrats who want to advance a regulatory agenda and need the façade of “science” to justify it.
Second, Trump hasn’t launched a general war on science. Rather, he has used the over-dependency of universities on federal research dollars as a lever to get them to comply with his executive orders on DEI and antisemitism. The funding for truly important research will be restored the moment that Harvard and other recalcitrant institutions decide to comply. The Holden Thorp Hysteria is an attempt to hold onto the illegitimate programs and projects by making it seem the whole boat is sinking. It is not. If there is a cure for cancer in the offing it isn’t going to languish for lack of NIH funds.
Third, there is no law of nature that says all scientific research needs to be underwritten by federal tax dollars. For most if human history, including the scientific revolution, people sought out new knowledge and invented new drugs, machines and processes without federal funding. The explosion of such funding after Sputnik has led to oceans of stagnation in which occur small islands of innovation. We might well have more and better innovation on a trimmer R&D budget.
And last, a huge portion of the results of our federally funded science research flows unimpeded across the waters, often to our adversaries. China has aggressively mined American research for its own advantage, sometimes stealing intellectual property outright, sometimes acquiring it by enrolling inquisitive students in out sensitive programs and often by seducing members of our research faculty and even whole research programs with funding. China is not the only player in this arena but it is the dominant one.
And not a word about that from Dr. Thorp who is a champion of science as a shared international endeavor, cooperative inquiry and American funding of foreign scientists. There may be prudent ways to go about such things, but you generally won’t find them in American universities, where a little bit of funding from a foreign source will often yield millions or even billions of dollars in research paid for by the American taxpayer. How did China vault from last place among world powers in space exploration to near the front of the line? Not by means of homegrown research. Until we solve that problem, I will be content to see Trump pursue his so-called “unrelenting attack.”
Ash Regan’s prostitution blunder
To Scotland, where once Britain’s greatest schools were found. These days, sadly, that can no longer be said, thanks to the SNP’s mismanagement over the past 18 years in office. One of those who served as a minister in its wretched regime was Ash Regan, who held the Scottish Government’s Community Safety brief from 2018 to 2022. Having failed to win the party leadership in 2023, she now sits as an MSP in the Alex Salmond fan club that is the Alba party.
Her latest Holyrood initiative is to restart the debate on prostitution north of the border. Regan is championing a new ‘Prostitution (Offences and Support) (Scotland) Bill’ which aims to criminalise the buying of sex in Scotland while decriminalising those selling sexual services. The 51-year-old is in the midst of a big publicity push for her Bill. But it seems she has now come unstuck in her latest interview with the Herald.
For its Sunday edition today contains the following glorious exchange:
Asked about concerns her bill could drive prostitution to an unregulated and underground system, Ms Regan said: “There is no basis for any of those assertions. If you even think for one second, you cannot possibly drive prostitution underground. If you had a lot of women in underground cellars with a locked door, how would the punters get to them?”
The Herald clarified that the point being made was that if someone wants to buy sex, they would simply do so illegally. Asked if that made sense, Regan replied: ‘No. It does not really make sense whatsoever.’
You can say that again Ash. Perhaps an Oxford English dictionary is required for this diehard Scottish nationalist…
John Healey: ‘Russia is attacking the UK daily’
John Healey: ‘Russia is attacking the UK daily’
Defence Secretary John Healey was interviewed today ahead of the government’s publication of the Strategic Defence Review, which will warn that new technology is significantly changing the nature of war. On the BBC, Laura Kuenssberg asked Healey if there is a risk that Russia would attack the UK. Healey said the UK defence system already deals with thousands of cyberattacks, many of which come from Russia, which is why the government is putting in ‘an extra £1bn to create a new cyber command’. Healey warned we are in ‘a world of growing threats’, and that the Strategic Defence Review will set out how UK forces must respond.
Healey admits army size target will not be reached until the next parliament
Healey was also asked about the size of the British Army, which has been in decline. The current target is 73,000 troops, but Healey admitted to Laura Kuenssberg that he did not expect to meet that target until the next parliament. He said there had been ‘15 years of a recruitment and retention crisis in our armed forces’, and that he had to reverse the trend of ‘more people leaving than joining’. Healey said he had given an above inflation pay rise to the armed forces, and had committed £1.5bn to upgrade armed forces housing, saying the families of army personnel and their families are currently living in conditions that ‘you or I would not tolerate’.
Healey: ‘Britain lost control of its borders five or six years ago’
On GB News, Camilla Tominey asked John Healey about boat crossings, after Saturday saw a near-record number of migrants cross the channel. Healey said that the Tories had left the asylum system ‘in chaos’, and that the UK’s new agreement with France was part of the government’s strategy for dealing with the smuggling gangs. Tominey pointed out that although the UK is paying the France £480m, interceptions by the French have gone down this year. Healey said that once the new operation with French police is in place, ‘it will start to help’, and argued that the Rwanda scheme had cost £700m with no results. Tominey suggested that if the scheme hadn’t been scrapped it might have worked as a deterrent, but Healey said it had ‘failed’, and that the government had been able to reinvest that money to deport more people who have ‘no right to be in this country’.
Robert Jenrick’s plan to ‘crack down on Islamist terrorists in jail’
On Sky News, Trevor Phillips interviewed Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick about his proposals to arm prison officers and deport foreign criminals. Phillips asked what would happen if the criminals’ home countries didn’t ‘want them back’. Jenrick said he would ‘use every lever of the British state’, to get prisoner transfer agreements, such as withholding foreign aid, and would ‘disapply the human rights act’ to allow for deportations. Jenrick claimed we are ‘losing control’ of our maximum security prisons, in which dangerous criminals are ‘running riot’. Phillips asked why Jenrick’s press release mentions ‘Islamist terrorists in jail’ and not just maximum security prisons in general. Jenrick said the proposals did apply to all maximum security prisons, and argued that prison officers should have ‘access to lethal weapons in extreme situations’.
Reform Chairman Zia Yusuf: All of Reform’s cuts would ‘improve the lives of British people’
Speaking to Reform Chairman Zia Yusuf, Trevor Phillips asked him to elucidate on his party’s claim that they could cut £350bn from public spending, saying that getting rid of DEI initiatives would only save ‘£10m’. Yusuf disagreed, describing the cost of DEI as ‘pernicious’. He told Phillips that £5bn was being spent on asylum seekers a year, net zero costs £45bn, and Reform would also cut 5% from the £265bn spent on quangos. Phillips pointed out that the Chancellor is only putting £7bn into the Green Prosperity Plan, and asked where Yusuf was finding the other £38bn. Yusuf said Reform would get rid of the state subsidies that go towards the ‘electrification’ of the car industry, which is a ‘very significant amount’.
Thom Yorke has exposed the intolerance of the ‘pro-Palestine’ set
Thom Yorke has done us all a great service by exposing how unhinged, intolerant and, frankly, bigoted much of the supposedly ‘pro-Palestine’ set is.
The Radiohead frontman and bandmate Jonny Greenwood have for years now been locked in a bitter beef with Israelophobic fans and fellow musicians, due to their dogged refusal to treat Israelis like moral lepers and insistence on still playing to – and with – them.
In 2017, Radiohead ploughed ahead with a big tour show in Tel Aviv, despite outrage from all the usual suspects. Roger Waters even called Yorke a ‘prick’, which I suppose would only really sting if you subscribed to the old adage ‘it takes one to know one’.
One suspect his critics aren’t opposed to this war – or even really in favour of Palestine
Yorke’s perfectly rational, liberal argument – ‘we don’t endorse Netanyahu any more than Trump, but we still play in America’ – fell on deaf ears among those who see Israelis as uniquely, collectively, responsible for the actions of their political leaders.
He walked off stage in Melbourne last October, after being heckled by an activist, demanding he ‘condemn the Israeli genocide of Gaza’. Now, Yorke has published a thoughtful statement on Instagram, responding to the incident and laying out his thinking on this issue.
His ‘silence’ isn’t complicity with anything, Yorke says. He’d just rather ‘not trivialise’ the suffering of those on both sides of the conflict by uttering ‘a few words’. He condemns ‘social-media witch-hunts’ and activists who are ‘pressurising artists and whoever they feel like that week to make statements’ about Israel and Palestine, because it can only lead to ‘fear and over-simplification of what are complex problems’. (If only more musicians – or ageing football pundits – felt the same way.)
Still, he also slams ‘Netanyahu and his crew of extremists’, insisting ‘the international community should put all the pressure it can on them to cease’. And he slams Hamas, for choosing to ‘hide behind the suffering of its people’, adding: ‘[T]he unquestioning Free Palestine refrain that surrounds us all does not answer the simple question of why the hostages have still not all been returned.’
If the pro-Palestine movement were actually the peaceniks they pose as, this statement would have been met with a collective shrug. But for daring to say the Middle East’s most intractable conflict is actually quite complicated, and gently reminding people of Hamas’s murder of Jews, hostage-taking and use of human shields, he’s been slammed across social media.
One suspect his critics aren’t opposed to this war – or even really in favour of Palestine. They’re just opposed to the existence of Israel and are remarkably, tetchily, sensitive to any admission of Israeli Jewish suffering.
Indeed, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the anti-Israel movement struggles even to see Israelis as actual human beings. What else could explain their insistence on singling Israelis out and treating them differently to the citizens of any other nation?
When Erdogan bombs the Kurds, Turkish artists aren’t picketed and bands aren’t hounded out of playing in Istanbul. And yet Greenwood recently had two UK shows with collaborator Dudu Tassa cancelled, after the venues were threatened by activists. Tassa’s only crime, you’ll have guessed, is being an Israeli Jew. Remind me who the progressives are here again?
So let’s give it up for Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood – two islands of reason and genuine anti-racism in a sea of music-industry Israelophobia. Telling Roger Waters and Co to do one is their greatest gift to culture since OK Computer. Here’s to more kicking against the pricks.
What is Robert Jenrick up to?
It has been another good week for Robert Jenrick. At a time when many of the shadow cabinet are struggling to make an impact, his video on fare-dodging in London has certainly caused a stir. The 58-second clip – in which Jenrick, like some Tory Batman, accosts Tube passengers walking through barriers – has now been viewed nearly 15 million times. It prompted a Newsnight discussion, acres of coverage and begrudging private praise from opposition politicians too.
Such videos are not some mere fluke but rather, the product of much time and effort by Jenrick and his aides. He has learned from masters of the craft like Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Canadian Conservatives. Polievre believed in trial-and-error, going from homespun YouTube clips in 2020 to producing slick mini-documentaries by 2023. Similarly, Jenrick has built a team sophisticated in identifying zeitgeist issues, crafting snappy narratives and packaging them online in a way designed to go viral on X, TikTok and Facebook.
Good communications come from good policy. The Shadow Justice Secretary is developing both a compelling diagnosis of Britain’s fraying social contract and a political economy to fix it. His Tube clip highlights a potent political issue: the degradation of the public realm. Many voters can see the visible decline of the high street and their local transport network. The Spectator’s recent ‘Scuzz Nation’ cover prompted much comment by Tory MPs, who think that a manifesto to tackle lawlessness at a local level would be both popular and a useful campaign tool.
Jenrick is aided in his mission by elements of what one might call the ‘Angry Young Men’ of the right. Clever, passionate and ever-online, they are often found in the world of think tanks and policy institutes, toiling away on subjects such as immigration and the rule of law that will likely form the bedrock of Britain’s next right-wing government. The Newark MP has worked hard to develop links over the past 18 months, including writing a major CPS paper and fronting the Prosperity Institute’s ‘Free Market Road Show’ last summer.
A symbiotic relationship with such places helps with Jenrick’s campaigns and policies. Amid talk of ‘JudgeWatch’ – a potential project to focus on activist members of the judiciary – the Shadow Justice Secretary has started posting such threads on X, to call out such figures and highlight what he calls ‘mounting evidence of a highly politicised legal system’. It is the modern equivalent of what Business for Sterling did 25 years ago: an online, low-cost version of a campaign group that aims to shift public opinion.
Helping Jenrick in all this is a loyal team of dedicated aides. His communications chief is Tom Milford, one of the diminishing number of Tory political advisors who served in government. Dov Forman, his social media strategist, a 21-year-old student who racked up millions of views on TikTok as a teenager. Their ranks have been bolstered by the arrival of Sam Bidwell from the Adam Smith Institute. He is credited by some with influencing Tory thinking on Kemi Badenoch’s policy of reforming Indefinite Leave to Remain.
Having a compelling vision helps attract staff; money is another. Jenrick registered more than £800,000 in donations between May 2024 and May 2025. At a time when Tory finances are tight, and shadow cabinet members complain of a lack of staff, the optimism of those around Jenrick is a striking contrast with others. A good team helps the Shadow Justice Secretary identify ostensibly dry policy issues with potentially explosive political appeal. The row over ‘two-tier’ Sentencing Council guidelines is one of the few issues on which the Tories, not Reform, has made the running.
Stunts like the fare-dodging clip are useful in ‘cutting through’ too. At a time when much of the government and opposition seem almost paralysed by paranoia, Jenrick has demonstrated a refreshing willingness to embrace guerilla tactics. The decision to project a two-tier ‘countdown clock’ onto the Ministry of Justice in March was an eye-catching and successful effort to grab some precious media airtime.
All of this is what a good shadow cabinet member should be doing: scrutinising government, developing policy, thinking clearly and winning publicity. But as other frontbenchers struggle to do exactly that, talk of a second leadership Jenrick bid will only increase in Westminster, as his hard work continues to impress both his party and his colleagues.
The Limitless Pendant is an uncool trip into the tech nerd future
The problem with the future is it is very obviously no longer being created by cool people. Instead, it belongs to autistic nerds who want nothing more than to be a computer.
Cool people invent things like surfboards, Ray-Bans and Triumph Spitfires. Nerds make profoundly uncool things like cars that drive themselves and the absurd Limitless Pendant device that I have been attempting to wear.
The Pendant records everything you say, and everything anyone near you says
Let me start this review by stating I hope the Pendant – yours for $199 – fails very hard. It is an awful and life-negating device that subjugates any human stupid enough to place one around their neck to an AI processing unit. It’s all too easy to imagine a not too distant future in which each of us is compelled by authoritarian governments to put one on in order that social credit scores can be apportioned based on activity behind closed doors. It’s a terrible thought.
The Pendant records everything you say, and everything anyone near you says. That’s it. It then feeds the captured data into AI and sends you a summary of your daily performance. I first put mine on last Friday ahead of an evening during which my nine year old daughter would go to a school disco and my football-obsessed seven year old son would be allowed to stay up past his bedtime to watch a match.
While I had it on, I also confessed to my wife that in the afternoon I had lost control of myself after eating half a chocolate brownie and consumed three Twix, one after the other. I told her the effect was to make me feel both catatonic and deranged.
This is what the Pendant had to say: ‘Your day was a wonderful mix of family time, sports, school events and meaningful conversations. There was a lot of laughter, some bedtime wrangling, and a sense of pride in your children’s activities and confidence. The evening ended with a bit of reflection and planning for the days ahead.’
I asked it how I could ‘be better’.
‘You mentioned feeling ‘hit by such a wave of tiredness’ – the three Twix – and ‘being so done with this’. Don’t forget to take care of yourself!’ it replied. Other bromides included the suggestion to incorporate a ‘gratitude moment’ into the kids’ bedtime routine and to try ‘a new family activity, a creative project or a shared learning experience (like cooking a new recipe or exploring a new park).’
So far, so anodyne.
The following day I wore it to our neighbours’ house during a mid-afternoon family visit and then to the shops while I searched for a fancy dress outfit for a Rivals-themed party in the evening. The Pendant gave a bland ‘friendly summary’ of these events. When I asked it for an ‘unfriendly summary’, this is what it said:
‘You spent the morning arguing with a child about socks, then hustled everyone out the door for yet another round of football. The sock drama was only matched by the chaos of trying to find water bottles and footballs. Football was played, but mostly it was a lot of talk about who’s better, who scores first and who cheats. You had a random chat with a dog walker about how many dogs they walk and how many steps they do a day. Riveting stuff. The rest of the morning was spent obsessing over football fixtures, arguing about which games were on, and making a big deal about going to the shop for milk because the kids drank it all. Lunch was a noisy affair with more bickering. The afternoon was dominated by a frantic search for 80s party costumes. You bought wigs and a fake moustache in a panic, then spent way too long in a vintage shop trying on hats that cost more than a small car. Back home, you fussed over which wig to wear, debated the merits of various party themes and generally overthought the whole thing. You herded the family to your neighbours, which was as chaotic as ever – lots of yelling about shoes, doors and who’s knocking. Once there, you all talked about how tired you were. The kids ran wild, you talked about TV shows you don’t really watch. Hide-and-seek was played, but mostly it was just an excuse for the adults to sit around and complain. The FA Cup final was the main event. You tried to watch the game while also lighting a barbecue and fixing a tap. The evening ended with more football, more family squabbles and vague plans for tomorrow that will probably change anyway.’
Who needs this? Not me. I took it off and am yet to put it back on. Clearly, this is not the response those behind the product expect. Limitless co-founder and CEO Dan Siroker has spoken recently about how he expects very soon that ‘millions, if not billions,’ of people will wear listening devices like the Pendant and make their lives into searchable documents. The company, launched last year, recently raised $33 million, and the sinister-seeming tech overlord Sam Altman sits on its board.
Tech nerds have taken recently to talking in public – without discernible embarrassment – about the idea that what we think of as life is actually a simulation, by which they mean we are all living in some kind of computer game. Elon Musk, for example, has said ‘we are most likely in a simulation’ and it has become increasingly common to hear these people denounce anyone of whom they disapprove as trivial ‘non-player characters’. This is very much the reality into which the Pendant fits – a device that makes you feel as if you are living within a mainframe and not in the kingdom of nature.
‘Our vision is to free the human mind from its biological limitations’ reads the blurb that comes with the device, without specifying what those limitations – emotions? forgetfulness? individuality? – actually are. Perhaps the answer to the complexity of the human condition is go through life recording every encounter we have, the better to analyse it later, but it’s hard to see how this approach could facilitate the things that matter most, and that ultimately make life worth living – things like friendship and romance and trust.
Don’t wear the Limitless Pendant. It’s deeply uncool.
Reeves could leave farmers with Diddly Squat
The powers that be at Amazon seem to have an uncanny talent for releasing each new series of Clarkson’s Farm just as British politics descends into fresh farming chaos. The new series is no different. At the exact moment that I am watching Jeremy Clarkson and the cast of Diddly Squat farm get their government-funded agri-environment schemes in order for the year, over in Whitehall, Rachel Reeves is plotting how to cut the budget that pays for them.
A recurring theme so far in the show’s fourth series has been the jibes directed at the government for paying farmers for seemingly non-food things, like establishing wildflower meadows. Initially, this does seem strange. That is, until you realise that farming is not just about the end product. It is about ensuring that the land that grows this food is stewarded well. Other options he discusses, like planting herbal leys, benefit food production directly, by providing forage for livestock, alongside improvements to soil health.
The greatest tragedy of this cut would not be that something went wrong, but that it was finally going right
Government schemes now pay farmers public money to farm in a more environmentally-friendly way. This approach not only delivers a public good for the taxpayer footing the bill, in the form of cleaner water and healthier soil, but it is also good for the farmer. As the devastating clips of the deluged Cotswolds can attest, British farmland is no longer resilient to the impacts of flooding and drought. By prioritising the health of the soil – a farmer’s most important asset – these schemes are helping to build resilience back into the land.
You may be wondering where our resilience went. The answer lies in the perverse incentives set by the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, by which farmers received subsidies based on the amount of agricultural land they managed. This resulted in 50 per cent of the budget going to just 10 per cent of farmers.
It also meant that farmers were incentivised to remove nature from their land to maximise the area in production. By removing hedgerows, ploughing right up to the margins of a field, and making fields into more perfect rectangles to accommodate modern machinery, farmers were responding to incentives that would deplete the land.
In the wake of Brexit, English farmers are now paid to deliver a service, not subsidised merely on the basis of the amount of land they farm. This subtle distinction is lost on some, but it is an important one. Our new environmental land management schemes (ELMs) will deliver far better outcomes for the countryside, for taxpayers and for farmers, who want to continue farming the land for generations to come.
As has become abundantly clear in recent months, Labour – and especially Rachel Reeves – are less fussed about these things than the Tories were. Labour’s changes to agricultural property relief (APR) demonstrate a lack of care for the vital intergenerational mindset of family farming that had allowed farmers to keep the long-term picture front and centre. With no APR u-turn on the horizon, Reeves has now set her sights on the farming budget.
This budget has remained essentially unchanged since before Brexit. After years of high inflation, it means that this £2.4 billion budget has actually decreased in value. This has led to an unlikely alliance of the NFU and environmental NGOs calling for it to be increased. But instead of listening to them, Reeves is rumoured to be cutting the budget in her upcoming Spending Review.
Jeremy Clarkson’s engagement with the new schemes fits with the experience of farmers across England. Farmers were gaining confidence in them and over 55,000 ELMs agreements were in place. With a £100m reduction in funding meaning 239,000 fewer hectares of nature-friendly farmland supported by ELMs, this move be disastrous for the environment and for farmers.
In defending ELMs, I am not saying that the schemes are perfect. Largely because they are new, teething problems are inevitable. Minutes into the first episode of the latest series, Clarkson is inspecting some big bags of wild bird seed mix wondering what on earth is going on. The likely answer is that one of his team was responding to a perverse incentive within ELMs which saw the government making the payment to plant wild bird seed too generous. This saw some farmers planting whole farms with wild bird seed mixes. Prior to the general election, the Conservatives spotted this abuse of the system and stopped it.
The initial rollout of ELMs was imperfect, but ultimately it was carried out, by successive Conservative ministers who were passionate about delivering this fundamental shift in how the government distributes public money to farmers. ELMs are a genuine example of politicians saying they would do something positive and then actually getting on with it.
If this farming budget cut goes ahead, Reeves won’t merely be trimming some fat – she will be betraying a genuine Brexit dividend, and further undermining her government’s supposed commitments to both farmers and the natural environment.
As I watch Clarkson wrestle with new tractors and attempt to plough his sodden fields, the parallel with Whitehall feels inescapable. He is trying to make a complex new system work, just as Reeves is on the cusp of tearing it down. The greatest tragedy of this cut would not be that something went wrong, but that it was finally going right. Somehow Labour still chose to break it.
Paris Saint-Germain’s win was a triumph for sportswashing
Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) are champions of Europe for the first time in their history. They demolished Inter Milan 5-0 in the Champions League Final in Munich.
Football clubs have become the playthings of autocratic nation states with bottomless pockets
Forget the Premier League and the sporting abomination that is the revamped Fifa Club World Cup. The Champions League is the pinnacle of club football -the competition that every top team wants to win.
The final was billed as a mouth-watering clash of opposites: youth and free-flowing football (PSG) versus experience and the nous to always find a way to win (Inter). But the final was a huge anticlimax: PSG dominated the match from start to finish.
The French quickly took the lead in the 12th minute with a goal from Achraf Hakimi – likely the best right back in world football right now. The second goal came in the 20th minute, a deflected strike from Desire Doue, the 19-year-old wonder kid. Doue scored the third in the 64th minute. It became 4-0 in minute 73, courtesy of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. The fifth and final goal came from Senny Mayulu, a youngster fresh out of the PSG academy. The final was as one-sided as it gets, an utter humiliation for Inter who looked lost and bereft of belief. The French were simply too good.
PSG’s manager Luis Enrique deserves special mention. He has already won the Treble with Barcelona, and has now repeated this extraordinary feat with PSG. Only the great Pep Guardiola has previously achieved the Treble with two different teams. The new all-conquering PSG is entirely Enrique’s creation, built to press high and dominate possession. The prima donna superstars of old (the likes of Neymar) have been jettisoned and replaced by a team of young strivers. They are the ones who delivered on the biggest stage of all.
This wasn’t just a game of football though. The match took place against a backdrop of big money. In the case of PSG, it’s not just any money but nation-state money courtesy of Qatar. PSG have spent an estimated €1.9 billion (£1.6 billion) since Qatari Sports Investments group (a subsidiary of Qatar’s state-run sovereign wealth fund) bought the club in 2011.
The purchase price for PSG back then was €70m (£60m). The club is now valued at somewhere around €4.25 bn (£3.7 bn). Winning the Champions League has always been the ultimate goal for PSG’s super-wealthy Gulf owners. Nasser al-Khelaifi, the club president and a former professional tennis player, also happens to be a minister in the Qatari government.
The Qataris have been ridiculed in recent years for spending huge sums but still failing to win the Champions League with PSG, a club that only came into being in 1970. Rival fans like to mock it as a ‘plastic’ club with no real history or soul. Who’s laughing now?
Even so, PSG’s triumph casts a darker shadow. It is an uncomfortable victory for ‘sportswashing’, the term used for authoritarian regimes investing in football and other sports to enhance their global image. Winning European football’s most prestigious club competition — together with the praise and global profile this brings— amounts to the ultimate sportswashing triumph.
Football clubs have become the playthings of autocratic nation states with bottomless pockets. Manchester City is owned by Abu Dhabi; Newcastle have Saudi owners. Few fans seen to care much that their clubs are being taken over by profoundly undemocratic states. They might be too busy counting the trophies.
No footballing neutral will begrudge PSG their moment in the sun. Less welcome is that the victory amounts to an undeniable triumph for Qatar, a country with an authoritarian political system and a dismal human rights record. Is it any wonder that the Qataris would rather everyone focused on the time and money they’ve spent helping PSG win the biggest prize in European club football? That’s what sportswashing is all about, after all.
Welcome to the golden age of conspiracy theories
There’s never been a better time to be a conspiracy theorist: government funded plans to dim the sun; a pop star embarking on a questionable space flight; supermarkets stripped bare after Spain and Portugal were plunged into a catastrophic blackout; Robot policemen on the streets of China; the US admitting to the existence of UFOs.
Like a lot of people my age, my gateway drug to the murky world of cover-ups was The X Files. For an hour each week, my young mind was exposed to alien abductions, secret societies, cannibal cults and paranormal phenomena. And my interest in the other worldly – and the people who wholeheartedly believe that humanity is being misled en masse – has never abated.
Since the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, I have been an avid reader of conspiracy theories about all sorts of topics, from the ludicrous to the mundane. I’ve attended hush-hush meetings in pubs to watch engineers and architects discuss the temperature at which airplane fuel burns, had a numb bum as I sat through an eight-hour talk by David Icke about the ‘Reptilian agenda’, counted down to Doomsday (twice), and loitered on Alex Jones-backed forums where I learnt about Americans who were digging out bunkers and filling them with weapons, ammo, water purifiers and canned food for when SHTF.
And when I’m not doing that, I’ve been watching Ancient Aliens on The History Channel, chatting to flat earthers, and scouring eBay for out of print magazines and books about cryptozoology. These days, mind-bending conspiracies are just a few taps away, with Telegram groups, TikTok and YouTube turning your phone into a pulsating mass of unbridled paranoia. Despite the low level hum of doom that propels my daily life, my geekery of choice has long been reading about worst case scenarios, built on dubious facts with little credible evidence. Tolkien fans can keep their Middle Earth, the Hollow Earth theory is much more my vibe.
It’s important to draw a clear line between the things we’ve been exposed to in dystopian science fiction and a true conspiracy theory. By definition, the latter involves a plot carried out by a secret organisation – and crucially, the theories sometimes turn out to be true. Most recently, geoengineering conspiracists were punching the air when the Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (Aria) announced that they wanted to use solar radiation modification to try and ‘dim the Sun’ in a bid to tackle global warming and thicken arctic ice.
Weather modification has long been a conspiracists’ favoured topic. You’ve probably heard of chem trails, the thick, straight, lines of cloud-like vapour we often see criss-crossing the sky, and you’re likely to have heard people sharing their (unsubstantiated) beliefs that they are evidence that toxic cocktails are being fired into the atmosphere. Why is this supposedly done? Well, to placate society and make us unwell of course. The attempt to lessen the sun’s impact on our planet confirms that geoengineering is real – or at least being considered – and leaves one wondering weather chem trail spotters really are just loons.
I’ve read countless theories about the shady meteorological going-ons at the US military’s mysterious HAARP base in Alaska. Are their experiments on the Earth’s ionosphere behind freak weather events? Is weaponised weather being used by countries to target hostile states or distract enemies? So far, this kind of thing is still obviously a conspiracy theory. But it’s starting to seem like the technology, at least, is getting there.
For many years, Katy Perry has been caught up in numerous unfounded theories about being somehow connected to the Illuminati
Some of the most vivacious conspiracy theories focus on Ancient Egypt and the Pyramids. Beyond the puzzle of who (or what) built them, many conspiracists have argued that there are mind blowing secrets hidden beneath the sands. And it looks like they were right. In March, researchers published a paper that used radar imaging to show some kind of structure lying 4,000 feet below the pyramids, including eight vertical cylinders standing 2,100 feet tall.
But a wad of fresh ‘evidence’ is not enough for a long-running conspiracy to get a big fat FACT rubber stamped on it. Earlier this year, pop star Katy Perry was at the epicentre of a tornado of conspiracies after joining the crew of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin mission, which took the singer and five women 66 miles above sea level to the Kármán line, the internationally recognised boundary of space, where they teetered in zero gravity for a few moments.
For many years, Katy Perry has been caught up in numerous unfounded theories about being somehow connected to the Illuminati (a clandestine organisation who really pull the strings of world governments, and who may or may not be Satan-worshipping reptiles). The evidence? Symbolism in her music videos and costumes which are allegedly favoured by the group and used in the drugs-based mind-control programme MK Ultra, which was developed by the CIA in the early 1960s.
Did Katy even go to space at all? Or was it all faked, like the 1969 Moon landing (allegedly)? Why did she cover one eye with a butterfly-shaped setlist for her forthcoming tour? Why does the New Shephard mission badge look like Baphomet from a distance? Did Katy kissing the goat-like emblem pre-flight symbolise her allegiance to the Dark Lord himself?
Britain urgently needs an Antarctica strategy
Now that a deal has been struck with Mauritius over the Chagos Islands, the government’s focus should be on the UK’s southernmost overseas territories. There are three of them: the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (SGSSI) and the British Antarctic Territory (BAT). As increasingly tense geopolitics make the world more hostile, these territories are becoming ever more vulnerable. If Britain wants to secure its presence here in the face of the looming shadows of Argentina, Russia, China and the US – to name a few – Labour urgently needs to start thinking about how it does so.
The Strategic Defence Review (SDR) for 2025 is expected to be published this coming week. It will reveal where the Labour government believes the future direction of the UK armed forces lies. In any strategic audit, crises and conflicts such as Ukraine will loom large, as will the Middle East. But the UK’s overseas territories will also continue to demand policy- and resource-related attention.
Any UK Antarctic strategy will need to grapple with some uncomfortable truths
In the final days of the last Conservative government, a commitment was made to publish for the first time the UK’s Antarctic strategy. Labour didn’t carry forward the pledge, almost certainly because it is focusing on the SDR. They would, however, be wise to consider publishing an Antarctic strategy this year.
For the last seventy years, the UK has enthusiastically supported the internationally agreed 1959 Antarctic Treaty prohibiting any military activity on the continent. This is because it provides a cost-effective mechanism for ensuring that the polar continent is kept demilitarised and largely informed by scientific decision-making and policy development. For many years, this worked well alongside a robust commitment to maintain a military presence in the Falkland Islands to ensure that Argentina was deterred. And yet while the Falklands and the other British overseas territories are separate, with their own distinct local governments, Argentina claims they belong to them. Chile’s Antarctic claim also overlaps with the BAT.
The challenge posed by Argentina in and around the Falklands has waxed and waned over time depending on the presidential leadership in Buenos Aires. What will be a source of concern, however, is the Chagos Islands deal. From the 1960s onwards, local communities in Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands were keenly aware that any apparent concessions on sovereign authority to either Spain or Argentina, respectively, could trigger consequences for other then-colonies.
Creditable deterrence remains a priority for those communities as well. As many Falkland Islanders recall, the decision to withdraw HMS Endurance in 1981 as part of that year’s defence review was perceived as a ‘signal’ that the UK was not serious about its presence in the South Atlantic. A year later, the Argentinian junta launched their full-scale invasion of the Falkland Islands and sought to take over South Georgia as well. Now, post-Chagos, the Falklands will be nervous that Argentina could try its luck once again.
Over in the BAT, if the UK is committed to maintaining its sovereign presence there, it needs to recognise explicitly that this region is changing rapidly. The Antarctic peninsula is warming and becoming increasingly ice-free. This means that third parties, including China and Russia, can operate for longer and more extensively.
In recent months, the UK and other allies have had to confront some uncomfortable realities. China and Russia are increasingly not inclined to support ocean conservation initiatives and China is pushing hard for further exploitation of fish and krill in and around the northern tip of the peninsula. Russia has flagged an interest in the mineral resource potential of Antarctica. All of this is going to place further stress and strain on the consensus-based model that is the Antarctic Treaty system. Argentina and Chile are digging in and remain committed to the southern edges of their national territories. Most unsettlingly, from the UK perspective, the US under President Trump is proving to be an unreliable partner, seemingly hell-bent on slashing its polar science and logistics budgets.
Any UK Antarctic strategy will need to grapple with some uncomfortable truths. Thanks to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), based in Cambridge, the UK is one of the world’s most preeminent polar science powers with three research bases and two logistical facilities in the BAT. But this requires ship- and air-based support to maintain and support, with the most notable being RRS Sir David Attenborough. The Royal Navy’s HMS Protector, which is prone to breaking down, also supplements this effective presence.
In the next decade, however, this operating environment is going to be more challenging. The Antarctic peninsula will be busier. With that comes the risk of accidents, alongside the danger that rival parties miscalculate each other’s intentions and accidentally trigger escalation.
Deterring China and Russia was never going to be straightforward. China considers the Antarctic to be a strategic frontier, which contributes to its food security and economic advantage. It wants to recast the Antarctic Treaty system from one shaped by American diplomatic power in the 1950s and 1960s to one with a more distinct Chinese look and feel. Russia is a bad-faith actor which is currently trying to dismantle the ability of the South Georgia government to run its fishing licensing operation. Moscow has made baseless accusations about ‘illegal fishing’ and will try to discredit the UK’s claim to running a responsible living resource management.
Maintaining an effective presence in the southernmost UK overseas territories will require a clear-eyed assessment of risk and deterrence. There will need to be a long-term investment programme in science, logistics and manned and unmanned platforms. The BAS will need to work closely with the UK armed forces to ensure that air- and ship-based capabilities are used strategically. Ensuring a safe and effective scientific presence requires investment and vigilance. HMS Protector cannot be expected to travel back and forth between the Arctic and Antarctic. And we already ask a great deal of BAS personnel stationed in UK facilities with long deployments on physically remote Antarctic stations.
China, Russia and the United States have not made a formal claim to any part of the polar continent yet. But that could change in the Putin-Trump-Xi era when the great powers are calculating and negotiating their respective spheres of influence. So far, Donald Trump’s gaze has been northwards rather than southwards. One of those parties might decide to walk away from the Antarctic Treaty in the next three to five years and pursue their own agenda. Britain and allies including the EU, Norway and Australia will need to work hard to ensure that the treaty prevails.
If we want to make sure the UK stays both a polar science superpower and guardian of the BAT, ministers will need to recognise that operational capacity and scientific reach are under pressure in the region. Chile and Argentina are increasing investment in their Antarctic footprint, China is a major polar power, Russia will continue to be disruptive, and no one knows what will happen to America’s Antarctic operations. The government must publish a UK Antarctic strategy without delay.
Is the ‘woke’ movement really over?
‘I was with some doctors last week who said there is no such thing as biological sex.’ It sounds like the rambling of a madman or a drunk, but these words were uttered last week at the Charleston literary festival in East Sussex by Lady Brenda Hale, former president of the Supreme Court. Personally, I would avoid doctors who lack this rudimentary knowledge of the human body. They might start asking me about the regularity of my menstrual cycle.
Wokeness has destroyed lives. Children who are gender nonconforming have been persuaded that they are ‘born in the wrong body’
The ubiquity of wokeness has meant that we have grown accustomed to hearing these kinds of deranging remarks from figures of authority. This ideology was always imposed from the top down against the wishes of a subdued population. A recent study by More in Common found that progressive activists of the ‘woke’ kind comprise as little as between eight and ten per cent of the population, and yet their power is such that medical professionals will spout their hogwash.
It all sounds frivolous, until we consider the full extent of the havoc that this movement has wreaked over the past decade. Wokeness has destroyed lives. Children who are gender nonconforming have been persuaded that they are ‘born in the wrong body’ and put on a pathway to irreversible harm. Women’s rights to single-sex services have been eroded in order to accommodate men who identify as female. Racial division has been heightened in the name of ‘anti-racism’. The principle of free speech has been all but jettisoned by the ruling class, with the UK police arresting over 12,000 people per year for offensive speech. Society has regressed in the name of ‘progress’.
For all that, woke appears to be dying. Of course, commentators have often made the mistake of declaring the ideology to be on its last legs, only to discover that it is a centipede with an indefinite surplus of limbs. Yet there have been too many seismic events that suggest the jig is very nearly up.
The Supreme Court has ruled that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act means a biological reality that cannot be changed with a certificate. The findings of the Cass Review has led to the banning of puberty blockers for children. Major corporations are stripping away their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. LGB rights groups are rejecting the parasitical TQ+ that has hijacked and undermined their cause. The death rattles of woke are loud and sustained.
Woke activists will doubtless cling to their precious beliefs like barnacles to the keel of sinking ship. Already, we are seeing various companies and charities openly pledging to ignore the Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act, groups so captured by ideology that they are willing to break the law.
The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has pledged to ‘decolonise’ its collections to warn visitors that some aspects might contain ‘language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful’. The NHS is still insisting that toddlers can be transgender.
The title of my new book – The End of Woke – is therefore more aspirational than prophetic. It is possible, of course, that woke will return in a different guise. After all, its practitioners accrued their power largely through shapeshifting and word games. When they called for ‘diversity’, they meant ideological homogeneity. When they called for ‘inclusion’, they meant exclusion of their opponents. When they created their cruel system of retribution known as ‘cancel culture’, they called it ‘accountability’.
Many liberal-minded people were gulled into endorsing these illiberal ideas, but the tricks have mostly been exposed. Debates that would have seemed impossible five years ago are now being held with some frequency. While the BBC has studiously referred to male rapists as ‘she’, and applied a rainbow gloss to the damage being wrought by gender ideology, at last we are hearing the likes of Helen Joyce – Director of Advocacy of campaign group Sex Matters – being platformed on Radio 4. The cries of ‘No Debate!’ from trans activist groups such as Stonewall are now fading.
With the woke in retreat, there is also the possibility that the vacuum may be filled by unsavoury elements on the right. In The End of Woke, I have made the case that the culture war has persisted for so long because it has been widely misapprehended as a conflict between left and right. In truth, there are identity-obsessed authoritarians on both sides of the political spectrum. If my definition of ‘woke’ is accurate – a cultural revolution that seeks equity according to group identity by authoritarian means – there is no reason why this would not apply to white nationalists as much as it does to DEI zealots.
The woke movement was a catastrophe in every respect. We are now staggering through the debris of a culture war that most of us never sought. As we near the end of woke, we need to be vigilant against successive ideologies that will likewise attempt to curb our freedoms. We might not be able to anticipate how exactly the authoritarian instinct will next manifest, but that it will do so is an inevitability.
The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution by Andrew Doyle is available now (£25, Constable). You can buy it here
Why is your pension fund so obsessed with net zero?
Legal & General is Britain’s largest asset manager, with over £1 trillion on its books. Every pound it manages should be dedicated to achieving the highest possible returns. This matters a lot: L&G manages over five million pensions in the UK.
But in recent years, the asset manager has been particularly concerned with fashionable causes, instead of being entirely focused on making sure your retirement is secure.
Individuals already fund net zero schemes via their taxes. They should not be forced to pay an effective additional tax, via lower returns, to fund net zero with their retirement savings
That is why I recently attended their AGM. I wanted to learn why the board is wedded to net zero, despite their fiduciary duty to clients, and whether they would consider reprioritising saver returns instead.
At the Q&A I highlighted that US competitors have dropped their net zero ambitions. Most have pulled out of the ‘Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative’ – a consortium of asset managers committed to achieving net zero within their investment portfolios by 2050 or sooner.
L&G – along with most other British pension fund managers – is still committed to this. But their promise to decarbonise their portfolios and to advocate for ‘a supportive policy environment that aligns with the goal of achieving global net zero’ are premised on a net zero consensus that no longer exists.
At the moment, roughly half of the public support either Reform or the Conservatives. Both parties oppose net zero by 2050. It is therefore reasonable to assume, as I told the board, that many with L&G pensions, do not want their retirement outcomes subordinated to the green agenda.
In response, the board told me that its clients want to align with net zero by 2050. Whilst the board acknowledged that complex trade-offs exist, they did not explain what these were. Instead they doubled down, reaffirming their net zero commitment, before asserting that decarbonisation offers stellar investment opportunities.
The problem is that these opportunities rely on government subsidy. Let’s set aside the moral argument regarding investments in rent seeking schemes reliant on a taxpaying base. The reality is that green investments are hugely exposed to policy changes, and so don’t reflect sound financial management.
This was evident in the USA last week as Trump’s tax bill slashed renewable subsidies. The consequence was the immediate crash of renewable energy shares. Enphase Energy, a NASDAQ renewable energy posterchild, had over $1 billion, or 20 per cent, instantly wiped from its valuation.
Compare this to the hydrocarbon industry. Far from receiving subsidies, oil companies in Britain been subject to a windfall tax since 2022. They currently pay a 78 per cent tax. Despite this, they have fared well. Shell for example has outperformed the market, delivering returns of 30 per cent since 2022.
The market mechanism should reward these companies for their success. Instead, the focus by investors on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) either excludes them entirely, or pressures them into decarbonising. L&G has used savers’ money to vote against both BP and Shell for failing to be sufficiently green.
L&Gs recent Climate Pledge laments that, ‘The pace of transition is neither fast enough nor smooth enough,’ and that ‘inaction is not an option.’
But inaction is and should be an option for the firms managing your pension. Hayek was right: business managers do not manage for their own sake, but on behalf of ‘those who have entrusted [them] with their resources.’ In this case, pension savers.
At the moment, individual pension savers already fund net zero schemes via their taxes. They should not be forced to pay an effective additional tax, via lower returns on their assets, to fund net zero with their retirement savings.
It is for government to pursue manifesto commitments, and for private companies to pursue profit.
Following the L&G AGM, there was a light lunch, during which several individual investors thanked me for raising this issue.
Multiple members of the board also approached me. They asked why I had asked my question and what I would have them do. Again, I urged them to stop blackmailing private companies into decarbonising. I said their net zero goals are out of step with public opinion and that they are violating their fiduciary duty. Some back and forth ensued. The conversation was civil, but the disagreement was clear. They appear to have accepted the orthodox thinking around climate change, that catastrophe looms and all else is secondary.
The irony is, that many of the green investments being made are only possible due to the dirtiest forms of energy. Asset managers praise and invest in China’s booming electric car industry. They rarely acknowledge that it is only booming due to China’s reliance on coal, which results in lower energy prices.
The public increasingly rejects climate alarmism, yet the managerial class embraces it. They are convinced they are saving the world, and the ends will always justify the means. The means, in this case, is imperilling the retirement of millions.
Since attending the AGM, many have told me that they will be selling their L&G shares. They shouldn’t. Instead, they should exercise their rights as owners of the company to demand change. As should anyone else who has a pension with a company obsessed with net zero.
Can you beat The Spectator’s quizzers?
This week, the Spectator Club hosted a quiz night for subscribers – with the ‘Charles Moore’s red corduroys’ team the eventual winners.* The night was such a success we thought other readers would enjoy doing the quiz as well.
There are four rounds of questions below. We’d like to think the questions are fun to work out, and pass the ‘even if you don’t get them, you’ll kick yourself when you hear the answer’ test. If you can beat the winning team’s score we’ll enter you into a draw for a bottle of Pol Roger champagne. Enter your answers here by Friday 6 June.
Round one
1. Which type of pasta was banned from menus for those attending the 2025 papal conclave, because of ancient fears that it could be used to smuggle in notes from the outside world?
2. Which British rock star said in a 1999 interview with Jeremy Paxman that even he didn’t know how to pronounce his own surname?
3. In 1995, a British journalist published a biography of a leading British politician. At the 2005 general election the politican stood down as an MP, while the journalist was elected as an MP. They share the same Christian name. Who are those two men?
4. May 30th was Harry Enfield’s birthday – how old is he now?
5. A report in March 2025 found that recent years have seen a significant drop in children needing surgery after swallowing which item? The item in question historically accounted for 75 per cent of objects swallowed by children, but has undergone a dramatic reduction in everyday use.
6. Between 2002 and 2015, about whom were the following statements made? ‘He appears on high-value stamps in Sweden… he can catch fish with his tongue… he never blinks… he’s confused by stairs… and his left nipple is the shape of the Nürburgring.’
7. Muggsy Bogues, who played for several NBA teams between 1987 and 2001, is the shortest player ever to play in the league. How tall is he?
8. At around midnight on the 14th/15th April 1912, about 425 miles south-southeast of Newfoundland in Canada, some people put some ice in their drinks. Where had that ice come from?
9. James Finlayson was an actor who appeared in 33 Laurel and Hardy films, often uttering a three-letter expression of dismay. In 1988 that expression was adopted, in tribute to Finlayson, by the creators of which fictional character?
10. This musical instrument is played on ‘It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock and Roll)’ by AC/DC. A quote often attributed to Oscar Wilde states that the definition of a gentleman is someone who can play this instrument, but doesn’t. Which instrument?
Round two
1. This website and app, launched in 2003, had a five-letter name beginning with S. It was closed in May 2025 due to competition from rivals offering the same service. Which site?
2. Which footballer, who played for England between 1996 and 2007, has the first name Sulzeer?
3. June 1 is Jason Donovan’s birthday – how old is he now?
4. A Donald Trump quote, February 2025 – which word is x? It’s a verb. ‘I try and walk off sometimes without x-ing and I can’t. I have to x.’
5. In 2024 the American author Johannes Lichtman commented on his visit to the headquarters of which organisation, saying that its branch of Starbucks is the only branch in the world where staff aren’t allowed to ask your name?
6. Noel Coward was born in 1899 – in which month?
7. Tony Blair wore the same what for every PMQs of his premiership?
8. Which position in the British cabinet derives its name from the pattern on a cloth used to cover a table in medieval England?
9. Until 1981 the band The Alarm were named Alarm Alarm. They decided on the change after John Peel, grouping them with two other bands, said he was wondering if he should start calling himself John John Peel. Which two other bands?
10. In May 2025 it was announced that, in a bid to tackle a shortage of train drivers, the minimum age for the job would be lowered to what?
Round three
1. In February 2025 Andy Murray revealed that after retiring from tennis he tried a sport he’d always wanted to try, but had never been allowed to because of the risk of injury. At the end of his first day he had to be rescued. Which sport?
2. The Princess of Wales was given one of these items as a Christmas present last year, to help her with her gardening. Its name is the third word of four in the title of a controversial 1974 film. Which item?
3. June 3 will be Jill Biden’s birthday – how old will she be?
4. A very few entertainers can claim the title ‘Egot’, having won at least one award at each of which four ceremonies?
5. How did the 20-year-old American Thomas Matthew Crooks make the news in 2024?
6. In January 2025, Rocky Flintoff, the son of Andrew Flintoff, became the youngest player ever to score a century for the England Lions cricket team. He was 16 years, 291 days old when he achieved the feat against a Cricket Australia XI. Whose record, set in 1998, did he beat?
7. Why, in September 2022, did Morrisons turn down the volume of the beeps on their tills … a West London school postpone its Guinea Pig Awareness Week … and Norwich City Council close a bicycle rack?
8. Which song did George Harrison write while sitting in Eric Clapton’s garden on a bright spring morning in 1969?
9. Which country achieved independence from Spain in 1822, and took its modern name from the fact that it lies on the equator?
10. The Serbian version of which British TV show is called ‘No One Thought of That’?
Round four
1. Which three Presidents of the United States were born in 1946?
2. In 2021, who became the first artist ever to achieve UK top 10 singles in six different decades?
3. Which is the only English county whose name contains five consecutive consonants?
4. Winston Churchill’s first speech to the House of Commons as Prime Minister, on May 13th 1940, didn’t actually contain the phrase ‘blood, sweat and tears’. Instead Churchill said: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, x, tears and sweat.’ Which was word is x?
5. Which 1975 hit single had the word ‘Mongolian’ in its working title, but replaced it with another four-syllable word?
6. June 4 is Angelina Jolie’s birthday – how old will she be?
7. He was a Conservative MP between 1992 and 1997. In 2000, when he was created a life peer, he chose, as the place to go with his title, Ranmore in Surrey. Although this wasn’t a deliberate joke, many people commented that Ranmore was very appropriate. Who are we talking about?
8. The last ever case in Britain of a woman suing a man for breach of promise to marry was in 1969. The woman bringing the case was 19 year-old Eva Haraldsted, described by one magazine as ‘an au pair with the emphasis on pair’. The man she sued was 23 and very probably the most famous man in the country. Who was he?
9. Colonel Gaddafi named his yacht after which 20th century revolutionary leader? Diego Maradona had a tattoo of him, as does Mike Tyson.
10. Which British man, born in 1967, once said of his younger brother that he is ‘a man with a fork in a world of soup’?
*Charles Moore has clarified that he does not own, and has never owned, red corduroy trousers.
Disposable vapes are fantastic. Naturally, they’re demonised
Forty a day for forty years – that’s a hell of a lot of cigarettes – but je ne regret rien. I loved smoking. But note the past tense because, eventually, for all the clichéd health reasons you can imagine, I had to give up. Despite always knowing it was a matter of life or death, I dreaded packing it in. Smoking has been so much part of my persona for decades; I just couldn’t imagine life without puffing away. All the usual smoking cessation options didn’t work, from gum to patches, Alan Carr to NHS counselling. Until eventually, on the recommendation of no less than two NHS doctors, I tried disposable vapes. Miracle upon miracle, they worked. And I am now a happy chain vaper.
At last, I thought, I would stop being demonised for my bad habit. I have endured years of sanctimonious lectures from public health policy-wonks about how the dangers of tobacco meant smokers could be treated as pariahs, which – by the way – made giving up even less attractive. Who wants to succumb to bullying nanny state interference? Smoking was and is a personal choice, and in a free society we should be allowed to indulge in a legal bad habit, however risky or unhealthy. However now, newly virtuous as an ex-smoker, I imagined that at last I might get a pat on the back for being responsible.
How naïve. The modern state can’t help itself. It simply has to regulate and interfere in people’s personal choices. Never mind the public health benefits of vapes that have helped millions of people to stop smoking, DEFRA now finds them ‘extremely wasteful’. Disposable vapes are apparently a potential litter hazard and ‘blight our towns and cities’. Forget the real blight of derelict high streets, homelessness, boarded-up shops, widespread crime – the government’s focus is on disposable vapes.
Last October, when the government announced a forthcoming ban on 1 June, Mary Creagh, DEFRA’S Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Nature and ‘the circular economy minister’ (eh?), justified the prohibition as helping to ‘accelerate the path to net zero and create thousands of jobs across the country’. Which is a stretch when we are all waiting with bated breath for a growth strategy that will actually accelerate meaningful employment.
Meanwhile, when it becomes illegal to sell or supply disposable vapes, Trading Standards enforcement officers will have powers to seize non-compliant products, give out compliance notices and fines of £200, with serial offenders facing criminal charges, including unlimited fines or a prison sentence of up to two years. But as convicted criminals are being released early from prison, and enforcement of laws already in place to deal with black market cigarettes, are to say the least, patchy. This surely means scarce resources are being spread far too thinly. And for what?
The main aim of the ban seems to be to deal with environmental waste i.e. to reduce litter. An estimated five million disposable vapes were thrown away every week last year. So yes, I know many people do get very annoyed about unsightly discarded colourful plastic tubes on pavements. But for goodness sake, a whole range of less punitive solutions could have been explored; from special vape disposal bins to deposit schemes (each empty vape could mean £1 off next purchase or whatever) rather than deploying the whole paraphernalia of the state to deal with a minor waste issue, on a par with empty coke cans, crisp packets or – dare I say it – Waitrose sandwich wrappers. And if the Government are really worried about unseemly detritus on our streets, maybe it might tackle councils that have halved their bin collection service, creating domestic mounds of overflowing garbage, (please don’t blame Birmingham’s litter mountains on vapers).
What’s more, the whole scheme seems to be a waste of time because if policymakers had done any kind of cost / benefit analysis (or just used common sense) they’d know that vapers will buy the technically compliant new refillable, rechargeable vapes and won’t bother fiddling around with replacement pods and recharging. Who wants to have yet another device to remember to charge? They’ll be thrown away, effectively becoming disposable, and that’s because one of disposable vapes’ big attractions is they are easy to use and there’s no faff.
The truth is that the creator of disposable vapes should have been awarded a public health innovation award. Finally, a smoking cessation device that works for smokers. Instead, his invention is vilified, and we seek to ban it in order to tick some environmental box. At what cost? In one poll of UK vapers, almost a fifth said if they couldn’t get hold of disposable vapes, they’d go back to smoking.
So, it’s shocking that anti-smoking lobbyists like Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), not only support a legislative move that threatens to hinder smokers giving up the evil weed, but they say that the ban doesn’t go far enough. Indeed, ASH’s CEO Hazel Cheeseman urges the government to make use of powers within the Tobacco and Vapes Bill to clamp down further. The numpties in parliament are happy to oblige, promising an especially egregious ban on flavoured vapes.
In the House of Lords Second Reading debate, it was argued that these are especially wicked because they are designed to appeal to the young, as if only children like brightly coloured, sweet things. Have ministers not noticed the exponential rise in the flavoured gin market for adults? As I argued at the time, research shows that 65 per cent of adult vapers find fruit and sweet liquids preferable, often because they don’t want to be reminded of the taste of tobacco that they are quitting.
So, as we speak, like other vapers, I am stockpiling strawberry and banana disposables and predict the growth of a massive black market, or an uptick in smoking. And all because governments of all shades seem to be addicted to interfering with legal behaviours, carelessly indifferent to whether civil liberties – or indeed our health – go up in smoke.
No, Zoomers: life wasn’t better before the internet
Almost half of 16 to 21-year-olds wish they had grown up without the internet. A similar portion are even calling for a social media curfew, with a quarter wanting phones banned in schools, according to research from the British Standards Institution. Really? The truth is that Zoomers – those born between 1997 and 2012 – don’t know how lucky they are to have come of age during an era in which they had access to the web.
The truth is that Zoomers don’t know how lucky they are
While my own generation of Millennials were early guinea pigs for Facebook, Twitter and – for the connoisseurs out there – MSN Messenger, much of our teenage lives remained firmly analogue. Having first snuck online to the sounds of a dial-up connection, my recollection is that life before the internet was often quite dull. Many teenagers today blame their woes on social media and smartphones. But teenagers have always been quite capable of being listless, alienated and angsty, even before Silicon Valley started designing algorithms to monetise it.
Yes, modern technology has its problems. Too many young people waste time scrolling through social media. But there is no doubt in my mind that life with the internet is better than it was before. It has given us more experiences, more opportunities and even more life – literally so, in the case of Tinder babies.
Consider the luckless fan of vintage Korean dramas in the nineties, struggling to watch the shows and unable to find likeminded enthusiasts in his town. The internet has solved both these problems, making what was once esoteric commonplace, opening more and more to the masses.
The privations suffered before the internet are almost shocking to recall. Only five TV channels? Book selections controlled by Waterstones and the local library? New music flitting briefly across the airwaves, later lost in an obscure corner of HMV? It was no way to live.
Nor is the internet merely a glorified bazaar for clueless tourists. Much as people love to mock the creator economy, it is an incredible achievement to have equipped a majority of the world’s population with a printing press, recording studio and video camera, and the ability to distribute the results globally. The means of production are already being liberated.
So why do we continue to malign the online world as a Wild West, a swamp of AI slop stalked by Russian cyber gangsters and flooded with fake news, pornography and scenes of ultraviolence? The conventional reading, championed by the likes of psychologist Jonathan Haidt, is that we can’t look away because the technologists have become too adept at stealing our attention.
It’s true that the techies are experts at distraction. But fundamentally the problem is not technology. It’s our inability to manage its downsides. When half of BSI’s Gen Z survey respondents call for a social media curfew, we should be asking them why they cannot impose one on themselves.
No doubt there is social pressure to engage, and no cohort in life is more conformist and biddable than the young. Every teenager wants to fit in, and a lot of that fitting in now happens on Instagram, Minecraft or whatever else the kids are into these days. We can and probably should blame the parents, the schools and even society that so many struggle not to open the app, start scrolling and hit the post button.
But these groups didn’t fail because they allowed the internet to exist; they failed because they have not taught the younger generation that they must deal with the downsides. You can delete your account, hit the gym and lawyer up, to quote an old internet phrase. You can take responsibility for your own life.
The alternative is a world nobody wants. Whether it was checking the weather through Ceefax, flicking through a recipe book to remind ourselves how to make an omelette, or going to a travel agent to book a trip to Poland, people switched to the newer technology because it is better.
As Wikipedia will tell you, the Wild West era did not conclude with the Americans falling back to the East Coast to protect themselves. Instead the pioneers tamed and domesticated the new territory, which stretched out all the way to Santa Clara in California. Had they sounded the retreat, Silicon Valley would not have been invented. And you would not be reading this.
The DoJ is wise to deploy the False Claims Act against colleges
Like Papal encyclicals, many statutes are known by the opening words of their Latin formulation. One that I just learned about is known as a “Qui tam” action. By itself, it is an enigmatic expression, since it just means “Who so” or “Who as.”
If you look it up, though, you will discover that “Qui tam” is shorthand for “Qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur,” which makes much more sense: “Who prosecutes in this matter both for the King and for himself.” That tam, as is often the case, is balanced with quam, “as x, so y.” Spinoza contains a famous example toward the end of the Ethics: “Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt”: “For all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” And then there is sequitur. I remember when I learned that the deponent verb sequor, “I follow,” also means “prosecute,” as in the motto of the Department of Justice: “Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur,” “Who prosecutes for Lady Justice.”
But I digress…
The origins of “Qui tam” statutes are ancient. Noting that they were intended to “enlist the public to sue to recover civil penalties and forfeitures from those who have defrauded the government,” one historical overview cites King Wihtred of Kent who in 695 declared that “If a freeman works during the forbidden time [i.e., the Sabbath], he shall forfeit his healsfang [fine, mulct], and the man who informs against him shall have half the fine, and [the profits arising] from the labour.”
Nota bene: “The man who informs against him” profits.
How do you spell “incentive?”
This aspect of the procedure – what we might call the “snitch provision” – has always attracted criticism. Because they rewarded private individuals for informing against their fellows, qui tam actions were long ago castigated as a “breeding ground for ‘viperous vermin’ and parasites.” Nevertheless, English law sometimes resorted to qui tam actions when the enforcement of certain statutes appeared “beyond the unaided capacity or interest of authorized law enforcement officials.”
It was the same in America. The colonists frequently employed qui tam actions to curb instances of fraud, rewarding an informer with some portion of the funds recovered from his revelation.
Modern instances of qui tam center around so-called “False Claims” actions. In 1863, in the Civil War, an act was introduced by Senator Jacob Howard to address a spate of “false claims, false vouchers, false oaths, forged signatures, theft, embezzlement, and conspiracy.” The act, Howard explained, deliberately employed “the old-fashion idea of holding out a temptation… ‘setting a rogue to catch a rogue.’”
The False Claims Act has been revised several times in the succeeding century an a half, most recently in 2010. Its provisions are set forth in 31 US Code § 3729.
All this might seem like an arcane bit of legal history. In fact, false claims actions, especially against defense contractors and the health industry, have been something of a growth industry in recent year. In 2024, such actions quietly brought in more than $2.9 billion. And the Trump administration, as part of its effort to purge American colleges and universities of illegal and discriminatory practices, has just turned up the volume to 11 and brought the False Claims Act back to center stage of public consciousness.
On May 19, Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General issued a memorandum announcing that the administration would begin employing the False Claims Act to investigate those “who defraud the United States by taking its money while knowingly violating civil rights laws… and falsely [certifying] compliance with such laws.”
Have you ever witnessed verbal dynamite being detonated? Here is an example:
Accordingly, a university that accepts federal funds could violate the False Claims Act when it encourages antisemitism, refuses to protect Jewish students, allows men to intrude into women’s bathrooms, or requires women to compete against men in athletic competitions. Colleges and universities cannot accept federal funds while discriminating against their students. The False Claims Act is also implicated whenever federal-funding recipients or contractors certify compliance with civil rights laws while knowingly engaging in racist preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities, including through diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that assign benefits or burdens on race, ethnicity, or national origin. While racial discrimination has always been illegal, the prohibition on such policies became clear after the Supreme Court stated that “[e]liminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.
And here, courtesy of Attorney General Pamela Bondi, is the kicker:
The Department strongly encourages anyone with knowledge of discrimination by federal funding recipients to consider filing a qui tam action under the False Claims Act… When a qui tam action is successful, the whistleblower typically receives a portion of the monetary recovery. The Department also encourages the public to report instances of such discrimination to the appropriate federal authorities.
The woke weenies at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT and all their apes and epigoni, might prattle on about how they will resist Donald Trump and all his works. But this new initiative, enlisting all and sundry to spill the beans about violations of the law in exchange for a possible monetary award, is sending a justified shiver of fear down the collective spineless backsides of these woke redoubts. It is amusing for the rest of us to see various big law firms fall over themselves to offer their services to the soon-to-be sued.
It is a delicious irony that the left, which for decades has used Civil Rights legislation to harass and defund conservatives, is now facing a reckoning under the very same laws it so brazenly abused. Best of all is that the Trump administration has upped the ante. Now individuals who have signed off on compliance certifications may be liable for substantial penalties. In an excellent précis in the Wall Street Journal, Edward Blum, the man who has done more than any single individual to rid academia of the toxins of racial discrimination and woke identity politics, observed that:
recipients of federal funding aren’t entitled to obey civil-rights law selectively. A university can’t accept taxpayer dollars while condoning antisemitism on campus or treating applicants differently based on race. A nonprofit can’t benefit from federal tax exemptions while maintaining programs that exclude applicants from disfavored racial groups.
These efforts to circumvent the law will carry substantial legal consequences. Under the False Claims Act, any school, corporation or nonprofit that falsely certifies compliance with civil-rights law while operating discriminatory programs can be held liable for civil damages and penalties. Claims can be brought by private citizens or membership organizations acting as whistleblowers. This critical provision creates incentives that enable enforcement where government might be overstretched or inclined to look away.
A new day is dawning in academia. As Blum concludes, “The Supreme Court wisely gave the nation a constitutional directive for a colorblind legal order. Now the Justice Department is bringing it to fruition.”
Why President Trump shouldn’t pardon Derek Chauvin
Five years ago this month, anarchists set on fire my adopted town of Minneapolis in the wake of Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd. Now, as President Donald J. Trump has made a triumphant return to the Oval Office, some of the blogosphere are calling for him to pardon Chauvin for his crimes. Article II, Section 2, Clause 1, of the United States Constitution grants the President the “Power to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.” President Trump should respect the verdict of the people and protect his own legacy by rejecting the ignoble calls to absolve the fired officer of his guilt.
Chauvin is currently imprisoned for both state and federal crimes of multiple counts of murder, manslaughter, and civil rights deprivations. State and federal courts have dismissed Chauvin’s appeals. To be clear, President Trump possesses only the power to pardon Chauvin for the latter federal violations, not the arguably more serious state charges, over which Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, erstwhile Democratic candidate for vice president, holds authority.
The evidence against Chauvin at trial was compelling. Three pieces of the litigation record are worth recounting why Chauvin was convicted beyond a reasonable doubt of murdering Floyd.
First, Dr. Martin J. Tobin, an internationally renowned doctor, pulmonologist, and academic, testified as a pro bono expert witness. Dr. Tobin stated that the cause of Floyd’s death was the position in which Chauvin detained him; bringing to bear four forces from 1) Floyd’s prone position 2) the handcuffs around Floyd’s wrists and officers’ knees on Floyd’s 3) back and 4) neck; all of which caused a “low level of oxygen,” and ultimately, death. Dr. Tobin concluded, “A healthy person subjected to what Mr. Floyd was subjected to would have died.”
Second, even the bystanders in the crowd that day could see what the police officers ignored: George Floyd was not resisting, and he could not breathe. Off-duty Minneapolis firefighter Genevieve Hansen testified that she identified herself, offered help, and pleaded with officers to take Floyd’s pulse, only to be discounted and ordered to stay back. Among the most dangerous of Chauvin’s negative impactful actions on law enforcement is that bystanders may be more likely to ignore officer commands and intervene in future altercations. That will surely make the work of honorable officers so much harder in the days to come.
Third and perhaps most damning, as the President himself noted contemporaneously, was the distressing video taken by young Darnella Frazier, later admitted into evidence at trial. For at least nine minutes and 29 seconds, Chauvin held his knee on Floyd’s neck until Floyd died due to asphyxia. The President promised vindication, taking to the Rose Garden to say: “All Americans were rightly sickened and revolted by the brutal death of George Floyd. My administration is fully committed that, for George and his family, justice will be served. He will not have died in vain.” Some 26 million Americans marched in response to what they saw with their own eyes, the largest collective movement on American soil.
Beyond the fact of Chauvin’s guilt, President Trump has built hard-won capital in the minority community, in the face of constant mainstream media bias. President Trump’s economic record for African Americans is spectacular. In his first term, black unemployment hit record lows. Black poverty hit all-time low numbers. Black homeownership set historic highs.
This president has performed better at the ballot box with minority voters than any Republican before him. One in three people of color voted for him in 2024. Among black men under the age of 45, the demographic that mirrored most closely George Floyd, President Trump received an astonishing 30 percent of the vote in the last election. President Trump has shown the Republican party the path forward to a multicultural, middle-class coalition at a time when the demographics of the United States are shifting rapidly under our feet.
President Trump has proven himself the boldest Republican executive since Abraham Lincoln. Like our greatest president, he has staked his political survival, indeed his very life, on the sanctity of human life and the dream of economic prosperity. The next four years bring the hope of unleashing global American dominance and equal dignity for every citizen here at home. President Trump should not allow a man as base as Derek Chauvin to burn it all down.
Could the French Revolution have been avoided?
In the middle of the 18th century, on the north side of the Palais Royal gardens in Paris, there stood a magnificent chestnut tree called the Tree of Cracow. In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 2000, Robert Darnton explained that the name Cracow probably derived from the heated debates that took place in Paris during the War of the Polish Succession, but also from the French verb craquer: to tell dubious stories. News-mongers or nouvellistes de bouche, agents for foreign diplomats and curious members of the public gathered round the tree, which was at the heart of Paris’s news network, a nerve center for transmitting information, gossip and rumors. If you wanted to know what was going on, all you had to do was “stand in the street [or garden] and cock your ear.”
Throughout his brilliant career, which began in 1964 with a doctoral thesis “Trends in radical propaganda on the eve of the French Revolution (1782-1788),” Darnton has been cocking his ear to 18th-century debates, tracking “the flow of information at street level.” He has negotiated a totally independent path through all the historiographical trends that have come and gone over the past half century, keeping his ear to the ground and immersing himself in primary sources: diaries, correspondence, gazettes, street songs and informal newssheets known as nouvelles à la main. When he published George Washington’s False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century in 2003, he admitted to spending so much time in the 18th century that the 21st sometimes disorientated him and claimed he would happily time travel on two conditions: high birth and no toothache.
Darnton admits that the bloodshed defies understanding – with the guillotining a relatively small part of it
The Revolutionary Temper is a riveting synthesis of Darnton’s life’s work that reckons with the weightiest of 18th-century questions: what caused the French Revolution? He argues that there was no clear line of causality, but the emergence of a revolutionary temper that was “ready to destroy one world and construct another.” By 1789, the people of Paris were collectively in the mood for a revolution. This was because there had been a slow but steady build-up of revolutionary sentiment for decades, consisting variously in: commitment to the nation, love of liberty, indignation at depravity among the aristocracy, hatred of despotism, dedication to virtue, disenchantment with the monarchy, resistance to taxation, detachment from the church, belief in the power of reason, a penchant for moralizing and familiarity with violence.
Darnton’s painstaking academic work has long appealed to a broader popular audience because he writes beautifully and has a weather eye for quirky detail. In the last months of 1749, for example, child beggars started to disappear from the streets of Paris, a nightmare scenario that recalls the child-catcher scenes in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Word spread that the urchins were being rounded up by the Parisian police and sent across the Atlantic as laborers. No one much cared until May 1750, when some wealthier children of artisans and bourgeoises also disappeared:
Paris exploded in the most violent riots anyone had known, an uprising that overwhelmed the police and that lasted, off and on, for a week. At its height, for a few hours on May 23, Paris was in the hands of the crowd.
In the wake of these riots, people spoke openly about their hatred of the police, the government, King Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour. The city’s highest judicial body, the Parlement, published an edict denying that the police had been abducting children, but advising parents who had lost their children to contact the police to get them back. One barrel-maker paid a police officer 60 livres in ransom for his kidnapped son. Then two silly soldiers on a trip to Orléans announced as a prank that they had come to seize some children. The crowd spontaneously beat one of them to death and the other was later condemned to be whipped, branded and sent to the galleys for nine years. Jokes in the 18th century could be costly, and as Darnton, quoting Voltaire, points out, it was important to “get the laughter on one’s side.”
Building on his essay about Rousseau in The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984), Darnton describes the flood of “sweet” tears released as readers responded to the epistolary novel La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). After its publication, Rousseau received many letters from people who refused to believe that his characters weren’t real, demanding to know what was happening to them beyond the confines of the novel. Darnton describes this as “a new realm of experience, unmediated contact with emotions.” Earlier novelists, such as Prévost and Marivaux, had “maintained an ironic distance between themselves and their characters,” but Rousseau reached into his readers’ hearts and “spread sentiments powerful enough” to turn them against the established order. Under the socially stratified ancien regime, people began to realize that “whatever their status, they shared the same emotions and sensed a common equality beneath the artifice of social conventions.”
To celebrate the end of the Seven Years’ War, the city of Paris commissioned a giant equestrian statue of Louis XV to be positioned in the new Place Louis XV (now Place de la Concorde) on a huge pedestal. During its installation, several people were arrested for “indecent talk” about the king and afterwards the pedestal became a convenient place to post subversive verses, such as: “Grotesque monument, infamous pedestal!/ The virtues go on foot, vice rides on horseback.” When Louis XV died in 1774, Parisians welcomed his successor, Louis XVI, a younger, undebauched monarch who might usher in a new regime of thrift and prioritize the welfare of his people. But it wasn’t long before the police were ordering all the cafés in Paris to silence chatter about the new king and his ministers. Rumor had it that one of Louis XVI’s most trusted domestic servants warned him: “Sire, no matter what you do you will never be loved by the people as long as bread is expensive.”
Darnton evokes the cost-of-living crisis that was the immediate context for the revolutionary crescendo of public anger in 1788-9. It was the coldest winter in living memory, food prices had dramatically risen and around 80,000 Parisian workers were unemployed. The snow kept falling throughout March, but Paris did not explode until later in the spring, even though it was clear to many that a “horrible revolution” was coming. Once it began, with the opening of the Estates General, the Third Estate’s definition of itself as the nation, and the storming of the Bastille, there was an end to many things, including laughter. “The Revolution in general had no sense of humor,” Darnton writes. Jokes, always precarious under the ancien regime, could slide a wisecracker under the guillotine during the Revolution.
Darnton honestly admits that “the bloodshed defies understanding.” The guillotining was a relatively small part of it – approximately 17,000 lives condemned by revolutionary tribunals. Beyond that there were wars, mass drownings and massacres. The September Massacres of 1792, in particular, “took on the character of a ritualistic, apocalyptic mass murder.” While he cannot explain the ultimate cause of revolutionary violence, Darnton has shown that it was a long time coming, and when it arrived “it released utopian energy.” There was, he argues, a sense of “boundless possibility” that had built up before 1789, “and it was not restricted to popular emotions in the streets.” Lawyers, men of letters and intellectuals felt it too. From a distance of almost two-and-a-half centuries, “it seems incredible that an entire people could rise up and transform the conditions of everyday existence.” For Darnton, that is the bright light of the French Revolution, “when anything looked possible and the world appeared as a tabula rasa.”