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Anxiety is good for you
These are some of the things I worried about this morning. Should I brush my teeth while drawing the curtains, to save time? Should I get out of the bath at 7.40 a.m. or 7.45 a.m. to be fully clothed for the Tesco home delivery between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.? Should I instantly pick up the coat hanger that fell off the door handle as I left my bedroom or wait till I return this evening? These are mind-staggeringly boring things to think about. They’re even more boring to write down.
That is the life of the worrier: a new worry dropping into the brain roughly every five seconds. Life is one huge to-do list for us worriers. Once you cross off one worry – spoiler alert: I went back into the bedroom to pick up that coat hanger immediately – another six spring up, Hydra-like, in the frontal cortex. What a life! What a waste of a life.
Except… recently, I’ve started to be grateful for being a worrier. Yes, those examples I’ve listed are a stupidly trivial way to fill your time. Who cares if I throw away a minute of my time by drawing the curtains and brushing my teeth consecutively rather than concurrently? But the itch to do boring things as quickly as possible – which is father to the worry – is a good itch. If applied incessantly, the principle frees up time to do interesting things in life. I’m going to have to pick up the coat hanger eventually. Why not do it now?
My inspiration in these matters is the late Nigel Nicolson (1917–2004), MP, publisher and writer of The Spectator’s Long Life columns. When I was a lazy 20-year-old undergraduate, I read one of those columns that changed my life. When Nicolson was a lazy 20-year-old undergraduate, he had, like me, lived in chaos: dirty clothes on the floor; unanswered letters; unwritten thank you notes. It’s one thing not to care in the slightest about the clothes on the floor; to live in untroubled bliss as the socks rise up alongside you. But the worst thing is to be like the 20-year-old Nicolson and me: not bothering to clean up the clothes but at the same time feeling guilty about not doing it.
And then, in a flash, Nicolson realised that if he did these things immediately – put his clothes directly in the washing machine at the end of the day; send the thank you letter on the Sunday night when you get home – then the boil is lanced and the guilt is killed. Immediately and for ever. The socks that once shouted at you a dozen times before you finally washed them after a week on the floor now don’t get a chance to open their mouths. Overnight, I became a boring-job-killer. But also, overnight, I began that never-ending to-do list, and created the attendant worries that went with it.
My hero became Simon Lotion, Time and Motion Man, the efficiency-obsessed Viz character. Always put your keys in the same tray on the bedside table, so you never lose them. Turn your bike lights on after you’ve unlocked your bike, saving you 0.00001p in battery time and, more crucially, putting off the admin agony of having to buy new bike lights by 0.000001 second.
Of course, obsessive worries over things that will never happen are a waste of time. Will an LA-style wildfire hit my Oxford Circus office? Erm, no. And I don’t suffer from those kinds of apocalyptic worries. But there is a good sort of worry: the worry caused by that itch of guilt or obligation or the feeling that you ought to follow the social contract – do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The main reason I did well in my exams at school and university was worry. The main reason I send those thank you letters is worry that I will have offended my host. The reason I don’t get run over is because I worry about being run over.
The non-worriers end up in a world of chaos and – often, if not always – misery
And look at the people who don’t worry. The morons who cross the road without looking, glued to their phones. The plumbers who don’t come at the time they said they would come – or don’t come at all. The narcissists who are incapable of being punctual. Yes, they get their way – for a moment. Yes, they luxuriate in the bath for an extra hour until the Tesco driver rings the doorbell at 8.45 a.m. Who cares if the poor driver has to wait on the doorstep while you get out of the bath? Who cares if the driver has to see you half-dressed? But there are other penalties for the non-worrier. I won’t use those plumbers again. Who wants to meet the narcissist who’s always late?
The non-worriers end up in a world of chaos and – often, if not always – misery. The socks pile up. The bills never get paid. Non-worriers tend to have high opinions of themselves – so they’re convinced that never-ending to-do list will sort itself out. I’ve got a non-worrying artist friend who was convinced her next exhibition would net her a fortune – while living in her car. Why worry if all your possessions are squeezed into the boot and the glovebox is full of dirty socks? One day, mega-success will come and someone else will wash your socks for you.
I can spot the non-worrier a mile off. They can be charming – the best company. But don’t ever rely on them. And I’ve got an anxious person radar, too. That shy man behind the counter at the bookshop, with the nervous smile playing on his lips? He’s the one to ask whether they’ve got the new Who’s Who in stock. He’s the one who’ll know where it is in the shop. He’s the one who’ll go and get it for you. Want to get ahead? Get worrying.
Of course my dog sleeps with me
It’s 4 a.m. and my German shorthaired pointer, Percy, is lying on top of me. This isn’t a giant infraction on his part. Percy and I have long shared a bed. We start the early evening as we always do – me reading and he beside me at my invitation, the light on his side of the bed is on too, in case he wants to read as well; something German perhaps, like Thomas Mann. Later, when I decide to go to sleep, I turn out both of our lights and we glide off – his paw often in my hand – into the great unconscious.
At some point during the night, he leaves his designated strip and inches towards me, which is probably why my dreams always seem to orbit around being strangled with a velvet ribbon. I should point out here that neither of my children has ever been allowed to co-sleep next to me, something I consider deeply unnatural and a bad habit. Sharing a bed with Percy, though, is entirely as I would like it.
The market, it seems, has different ideas. Mattress maker Silentnight has released a pod for dogs to share with their owners. Neither dog basket nor beanbag, it is designed for humans to spend quality time with their dogs and is aimed at Gen Zers and their pandemic-bought canines. Since Percy and I already share a basket called my bed, I can’t see how I will have need of such an item. But I’m still curious. In the promotional pictures, the Silentnight is marketed as multi-use: a young woman in her pyjamas lies in the pod, looking at her iPhone or notionally asleep. A dog appears in just one image, captioned as ‘cosy cuddles’, its face faintly stressed and panting.
As in Wallace and Gromit, the dog acts as prophet, warning the human of imminent danger or alarm. Like Wallace, too busy eating Wensleydale cheese, we do not heed him. Reviews of the Silentnight pod on Amazon are mixed. Most applaud the size – big enough for three German shepherds and their owner – some decry the confusion: ‘my dog didn’t know where to sit’. To me, the panting dog says it all: what on earth is wrong with the old arrangement?
Typically, when the question of dogs on beds is raised, it brings back the following response: absolute filth. ‘Your dog can’t wipe its arse,’ says one friend, matter-of-factly, while another points out, darkly, that ‘you don’t know where he’s been’. It’s hard for me to respond to the logic of these points: no, he can’t wipe his arse and no, I don’t know exactly where he’s been because he runs at great speed across farmland. What I can and do point out is that I don’t care. Correction: I do care about hygiene, but I believe my dog to be entirely fastidious and immaculate. Other dogs may have turd hanging out of their backsides or stink of fox shit, but not mine. To me, he is perfect. My dog-on-bed policy operates at a level of self-delusion and denial that I think other people call love.
Denial aside, dogs on beds is – like so much else in this country – about class. Look at Annie Tempest’s Tottering by Gently cartoons in Country Life, featuring Daffy and Dicky at Tottering Hall, whose four-poster bed is so laden down with dogs that they can hardly see each other. Or interior designer Sibyl Colefax’s belief that damask cushions and brocade sofas in a drawing room look better with a light dusting of dog hair. Allowing dogs to trash your furniture and eat your brown furniture is a very Mitford U flex; or as Gen Z might say now, ‘if you know, you know’.
Growing up in an impoverished aristocratic and bohemian household, I was always told that it was extremely petit bourgeois and naff to care about dogs lying on the furniture – on a par with being asked to take your shoes off at the front door, forbidding dogs upstairs or covering things with clingfilm. All very well, of course, until the dining room sideboard collapses from dogs chewing one leg or you step, as Charles Mosley, editor of Debrett’s, famously did, on a dog poo as you get out of bed. No matter; in our famously contrarian class system, slumming it in your pile with your dogs is quite simply the grandest thing of all.
Percy and I won’t be investing in a Silentnight pod to spend ‘quality’ time together. Our time à deux will continue to be spent with him leaving paw prints on the pillows and pellets of dog food in between the cushions on the drawing room sofa. The arrangement works – like all the best things do – by invitation, not by engineered mutual consensus. Now, if you don’t mind, we’re off to bed.
How Star Trek invented DEI
Values. Whenever some poor soul gets cancelled, sacked, scalped etc., there’s almost always a bland, impersonal statement from the institution carrying out the scalping. In third-person corporatese, from the moral high ground, such pronouncements will conclude with the sentence: ‘The comments of Person X do not align with the values of Institution Y.’ Where do these mysterious values originate? From which particular pile of decomposing matter were the spores of these holy secular values spontaneously generated? Frankly, for a lot of this, I blame Star Trek.
It seemed so innocent back in the day, this story of the crew of a massive space warship in the 23rd century. (Hilariously, the series’ creator, Gene Roddenberry, and his inheritors always denied that the Starship Enterprise even is a warship. It was just bringing peace and harmony to the galaxies on a mission of friendly exploration, which is why it used US naval ranks and was bristling with phasers and photon torpedoes.) 1960s Star Trek was, first and foremost, colourful, rip-roaring fun.
But even then, in its original raw-dogging 1960s version, something rather peculiar happened at the end of every episode. About three minutes before the credits, either as events climaxed or in their aftermath, Captain Kirk would start pontificating, delivering one of his moral proclamations, usually to do with peace, love, the Californian way, etc. My dad’s face whenever this happened – and it always seemed to come as a surprise to him – was a picture. He would turn red and start to hurl critical comment in the face of William Shatner. ‘Here comes the sermon,’ he’d groan.
We keep hearing about how Britain has changed in the last decades, and it surely has. One of the big ways in which it has changed is that we used to laugh at this Kirkian moralising. It was culturally very alien to us. Nowadays it’s everywhere, in its #BeKind form, from politics to pop. (To be fair, even Americans could find it a bit sickly too. The Shatner sermons are not all that different from what Star Trek’s exact TV contemporary Batman was satirising.)
Star Trek itself – in all its multifarious and dwindling, shagged-out incarnations – has become consumed by it, as if those end-of-episode platitudes were what it was actually about, and why people were tuning in. Younger readers can’t know how genuinely popular Star Trek was in the 1970s (when it wasn’t even being made). It was a mass culture phenomenon, not a nerd cosplay lifestyle.
What were these values? It was a series made in a western liberal democracy, so you’ll be surprised to hear they were the values of western liberal democracy, with a dash of non-specific, non-religious ‘do as you would be done by’. This is utterly mainstream stuff; mostly it was cant, a fig leaf for American military domination.
Ordinary, then. But something about it being set in the future puffed the thing up, and particularly in retrospect, it is viewed as groundbreaking, progressive, etc., when it was merely mirroring prevailing trends. The claims made for Star Trek are extraordinary, as if its racial mix and better roles for women were daring and gobsmacking. Meanwhile, literally in the very next studio on the lot, the ethnically integrated cast of the original Mission: Impossible series were doing exactly the same thing, without any of the hoohah or homilies, in a series set in what was then the present day. Surely that’s more notable for 1966?
I would urge President Trump to sign an executive order declaring a moratorium on studios wheeling out aged properties
The big problem with Star Trek’s precious values is that they mistake the very specific cultural mores of postwar western liberal democracy for human nature. Everyone is just like us, or they want to be just like us. There are no enemies and no bad cultures, just friends we haven’t met yet and customs we don’t understand. If they don’t like us, it must be our fault. But apologetic and aggressive is a terrible combination. It’s what drunks are, after all.
The terrible category error of mistaking ethnicity for culture infuses Star Trek, the warmed-up Rousseau noble savage fetish that’s behind many of the hugest mistakes that western liberalism made, and continues to make, over the last 60 years. The Vulcans even have a fetish object called the IDIC – ‘infinite diversity in infinite combinations’. How’s that working out for everybody?
I looked in on the first series of the recent Star Trek reboot Discovery, and the syndrome was even worse, with the added horror that the family-friendly bonhomie of its predecessors, their saving grace, had been exchanged for nerdy, involved plots and bowel-loosening dollops of 2010s diversity, equity, and inclusion waffle. I imagine this was how being bombed by Obama must felt.
The Star Trek franchise, as it nears its 60th anniversary, is in trouble; the recent TV film Section 31 has received stinking reviews and ratings, and the multiple strands of its expanded universe are flailing. I think this is because it’s an old concept from a lost age, a problem with many of the tired, superannuated brands that haunt modern popular culture. I would urge President Trump to sign an executive order declaring a moratorium on studios wheeling out aged properties. We desperately need new stories and characters, brand-new thoughts. The long 20th century finally feels over, for good or ill. Star Trek, with its tedious and discredited utopian DEI waffle, belongs there as a fond memory – not in the 23rd century, or even the 21st.
The Einstein family atrocity
What’s in a name? Well, if it’s Einstein, quite a lot. For Roberto Einstein, it was to prove a devastating connection, even though he had lived in Italy all his adult life, was married to an Italian Christian woman, Nina, with whom he had two children who regularly attended church, and was father to two motherless nieces who were brought up Catholic. In 1944, the increasingly paranoid German occupation decided that Roberto’s whole family was Jewish and inextricably linked to the world-famous Nobel prizewinning scientist Albert Einstein, now in America and high on the Nazi death list.
There were connections, of course. Roberto and Albert were first cousins — their fathers were brothers — and were both committed atheists. Their fathers had moved from Germany to Italy in the 1890s when the family engineering business was hit by financial decline. Albert was educated in Germany and Switzerland and was at the University of Berlin when Hitler came to power in 1933; he stayed in the United States after a visit that year. Roberto, trained as an engineer, was a gentleman farmer in Tuscany — he had always loved the countryside and in 1937 bought a large estate crammed with peach trees surrounding his beautiful villa Il Focardo outside Florence.
Italy had a Jewish population since ancient times; in the late 1930s, there were about 44,500 Jews there. Although at first Mussolini did not seem especially antisemitic, his growing closeness to and subsequent military alliance with Hitler and the Nazis soon changed that.
In 1943, after Allied forces landed in Sicily, Mussolini was deposed but managed to escape and reassert himself just as German forces were sweeping into northern Italy. As the situation for Jews became ever more fraught, Roberto and Nina resolved at first to stay together in the villa. But when German soldiers came looking specifically for “Robert Einstein, the cousin of Albert Einstein” it was a threat they felt they could not ignore. Roberto decided it was best if he went into hiding in the nearby woods, believing the Christian women in the villa could not possibly be a Nazi target. He was unfortunately mistaken.
Albert Einstein was not only the most famous Jew in the world, he was especially despised by the Nazis because, since he was helping the US military, he was a direct threat to the Reich. They put a price on his head. He, however, was unreachable; his Italian cousin was a much easier target.
When a German unit arrived at Villa Focardo in the early days of August 1944 looking for Roberto, they were met by a dozen or so women who refused to give away his whereabouts. Furious at their obstinacy, the Germans brutally executed Roberto’s wife and children in cold blood, locked the nieces in a barn, and then set fire to the house. Harding’s book, based on evidence he has pieced together from numerous sources, makes for deeply shocking reading. Having accused the women of spying, the soldiers presumably believed their actions were justified. They moved on from the atrocity, confident that their identities would never be known. Having heard the gunshots, Roberto was overcome with guilt at his decision to leave the women in the villa. He took his own life less than a year later.
Thomas Harding has carved out a significant reputation as a prize-winning writer in a variety of genres including crime and children’s books. His major successes have used his own family narrative to evoke the wider significance of a story. In his latest book, he has taken the appalling tragedy of the Einstein family and described in gripping detail not simply the violent deaths of the women but examined why it has taken so long to bring the perpetrators to justice or secure any kind of recompense for surviving relatives, a battle that is unbelievably still ongoing eighty years later.
The first investigation took place in September 1944 when Major Milton Wexler, a former New York criminal attorney, arrived in Italy with four members of the newly established US War Crimes Commission to take witness statements including a long, occasionally rambling, one from Roberto himself. Albert Einstein, according to a hitherto secret US government file Harding reviewed, was extremely worried about the fate of his cousin. But, once the war was over, the crimes against the Einstein family went largely forgotten and the files were closed. Nations needed to move forward and rebuild.
It was not until 1994 that interest in the case revived after an entire cupboard full of war crimes files was discovered. This “wardrobe of shame” provided the spur for several dogged individuals to pursue the likely murderers more than sixty years later. One Italian historian was convinced after years of research that he had identified the captain responsible, only to find that his painstakingly acquired evidence was impossible to prove conclusively.
Nina’s nieces, Lorenza and Paola, who were rounded up with her that day and locked in the nearby barn, were questioned and requestioned well into their old age. There was even a call for witnesses made on German national television, hoping to attract those who might know some of the junior soldiers not directly involved in the killing, and Italy’s leading war crimes prosecutor, Marco de Paolis, also entered the fray.
In 2016 there seemed to be a breakthrough. Nina’s then eighty-nine-year-old niece, Lorenza Mazzetti, requested a further interview, believing she had identified the murderer from newspaper photographs.
But not even the most advanced twenty-first century fingerprinting techniques (scraps of paper from the death scene had been preserved but were too degraded to use) proved conclusive.
Harding feared that finding any form of justice for the Einstein family now appeared more hopeless than ever. Three possible names of perpetrators had emerged, but none could be proven without doubt to be the man who pulled the trigger.
And yet, although the book might have ended on a downbeat note, with Harding admitting that no individual soldier or officer will have been found guilty of the murders, it is possible that some resolution may be found. Roberto Einstein’s great-niece, Paola’s daughter Eva Krampen Kosloski, filed a claim for up to €250,000 on behalf of the Einstein family with the Italian government more than sixty years later, and may yet be successful. She has insisted that her fight is not about money, but about both the Italian and German governments finally acknowledging that what happened on August 3 1944 was indeed a terrible war crime and must be recognized as such.
It is not too late for that at least, and if Harding’s finely researched, superbly written and deeply important book fulfills its purpose, this particular vendetta will have found a resolution.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.
Who shot the world’s first openly gay imam?
Muhsin Hendricks, the world’s ‘first openly gay imam’, was shot dead in Bethelsdorp, South Africa, on Saturday. While the police are still probing the murder, Imam Hendricks had repeatedly cited death threats – including in the 2022 documentary The Radical – owing to radical Muslims finding his preaching, and officiating of same-sex marriages, as an affront to Islam. According to reports, he had recently performed the ceremony of a lesbian couple, and was on his way to officiating the wedding of a Muslim woman with a non-Muslim man, which too is deemed against Islamic teachings.
In addition to sanctioning unorthodox marriages, Hendricks’s Al-Ghurbaah Foundation provided support to those marginalised on the basis of sexual orientation, and gender identity. After coming out as gay in 1996, the imam began endorsing the rethinking of his religion as one that wasn’t antagonistic to women and the LGBT community, underlining the need to ‘unplug patriarchy from Islam’. This advocacy for a tolerant Islam created mortal enemies for Hendricks, as gay and female-led mosques receive threats around the world, from South Africa to western Europe. The menace is further underscored by Islamic organisations’ reaction to Hendricks’s murder, punctuated with a reminder that Islam unequivocally prohibits same-sex relationships’.
Today, Islam is the only religion that still codifies death for homosexuality, with 11 Muslim-majority countries upholding the death penalty for same-sex relationships. The Sharia codification of violence against the LGBT community comes from the Quran’s derision of ‘the people of Lut’, and verses which criminalise ‘illicit sex’. As a result, gay Muslims can suffer incarceration in Qatar and Bangladesh, flogging in Malaysia and Indonesia, and execution in Iran and Saudi Arabia. While the sharia enforcement means that the LGBT community within the Muslim countries remains overwhelmingly within the closet, Imam Hendricks’s killing is a reminder over the threat of Islamist homophobia even in countries that have legalised same-sex marriages.
The gory Islamist hostility to homosexuality was brought to the global limelight by the Islamic State hurling gay individuals off buildings a decade ago. Since then, multiple jihadist attacks have taken place against members of the LGBT community in the West, from the Orlando nightclub massacre to the Dresden stabbing. The US FBI continues to issue warnings of a potential jihadist attack on Pride rallies, amid intelligence reports of Isis urging attacks on LGBT events in Europe, with the group increasingly calling its followers to take out ‘soft targets’. But where the radical Islamic targeting of the LGBT community has increased, so has the appeasement of Muslim homophobia in the West.
Global brands that have commercialised human rights are quick to surrender to Islamic homophobia, whether its Disney, Warner Bros or Marvel Studio censoring their productions, or companies such as Pfizer or BMW sidelining rainbow logos. In sports, not only are Qatar and Saudi Arabia hosting world events, headlined by the Fifa World Cup, even the English Premier League is allowing Muslim exceptionalism on LGBT rights as witnessed by Manchester United backing out of the rainbow laces campaign in December owing to the religious beliefs of Noussair Mazraoui.
Even policymaking in many western states has betrayed quasi-enactments of Islamic Sharia. Hamtramck, the first US city with a Muslim-majority council, dubbed a liberal success story not too long ago, has banned LGBT flags, with imams across North America signing a statement underlining Islam’s disapproval of homosexuality. In the UK, educational institutes have stopped LGBT lessons over Muslim parents’ protest and withdrawal of their children from school. Today, gay Muslims in Britain are receiving death threats over everything from delivering reformist lectures in school to performing in clubs, while the UK practically allows a parallel justice system in the shape of Sharia courts that not only refuse to acknowledge the existence of LGBT Muslims but also enforce anti-women rulings.
Far too many western states are abandoning hard-earned fundamental human rights in order to appease radical Islamists. Global organisations are selling out to Middle Eastern states that still have violence against entire communities codified in law. Even LGBT rights groups limit their activism in the Muslim world to little beyond tokenism, instead of prioritising the single biggest enemy of gay rights today. Muslim representatives, progressives and conservatives alike, would spend much of their energy shielding Islamic scriptures, instead of delegitimising the violent commandments. All of this puts a bulls-eye on the head of anyone looking to challenge Islamists, with Imam Mushin Hendricks the latest casualty of a life-endangering quest to reform Islam.
Thousands splurged on government diversity training in 2024
President Trump has been hard at work scrapping diversity courses stateside and international companies have followed suit – with Goldman Sachs and Deloitte some of the latest corporations to bin off their inclusion schemes. Whether the UK government will take a leaf out of Trump’s book is quite another matter, however. The Tories have called on Prime Minister Keir Starmer to ‘unshackle’ Britain from equality initiatives while Reform’s Rupert Lowe has been busy quizzing the government on their DEI spend in 2024 – which, Mr S can reveal, has taken a not insignificant sum from the public purse…
In 2024, more than £1,000 of taxpayer’s cash was splurged on average every month on diversity training schemes by government departments. In 2024, the Culture Department spent a whopping £6,600 on a sign language course for 12 staff while the Ministry of Justice splashed over £2,000 on DEI courses. The Department for Business and Trade also racked up costs of £2,000 on inclusion initiatives last year, while in September alone, the Attorney General’s office spent £2,500 on a discrimination course for all of, er, nine staff members – working out at £300 per person. Crikey. It’s hardly money well spent, eh?
A number of other departments were rather reluctant to reveal their diversity spend last year, however. The Department for Work and Pensions admitted it had spent almost £70,000 on ‘supporting employees with specific equality and diversity related training needs’ in the 23/24 financial year. The Department for Energy Security insisted it doesn’t ‘theme’ learning records by equality, diversity or inclusion labels while the Home Office protested that it would be too difficult to separate the costs of its diversity courses from a bigger package of training. While the Treasury and the Cabinet Office both stated they had spent nothing on DEI training in 2024, the Department of Science and Technology wouldn’t quite say the same – instead noting that the sum was less than £25,000. The Department for Transport also dodged the question, noting instead that it provides an online training course focusing on diversity, ‘Civil Service Expectations’, is ‘free at the point of delivery’.
As The Spectator’s cover piece revealed last week, there is a rather lot of frivolous spending occurring in Her Majesty’s government at the moment – and DEI courses are merely the tip of the iceberg. Will Starmer follow Trump’s lead and crack down on unnecessary costs? Watch this space…
Why do Australian doctors want to kill Israeli patients?
Imagine the uproar if a white Christian doctor refused to treat a Muslim Arab patient – or worse, boasted of killing them under their care. The public would be outraged, not only at the cruelty but at the sheer incongruity of such malice from a profession defined by care and a faith defined by compassion. Yet when two Australian nurses – Ahmad Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh – publicly declared their willingness to kill Israeli patients, the horror was accompanied by something more chilling than shock: recognition. Their depravity felt like an affirmation of the darkest fears about imported hatreds and their place within our institutions.
The video that surfaced of the pair talking online to an Israeli man on Chat Roulette was harrowing. Nadir, an Afghan refugee who became an Australian citizen in 2020, boasted that he had sent ‘Israeli dogs’ to hell, while Abu Lebdeh vowed to kill any Israeli patient in her care. Tragically, this incident partially confirms the fears of many Jews who since 7 October have seen unabashed antisemitism reappearing in all parts of their lives, including in hospitals and clinics.
No one suggests that most Muslim healthcare workers would ever act with such malice, yet the reality is that such hostility within medical settings is not without precedent. In fact, these Australian nurses join a troubling pattern of incidents that reveal how entrenched hatreds can still be harboured by medical workers, and even pervert their most sacred human duty: to heal without prejudice.
Palestinian doctors have a troubling history, for example. Waleed Mustafa, a Palestinian doctor and Hamas commander, used his medical credentials to plan terror attacks. Similarly, Dr Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, a paediatrician, co-founded Hamas. Dr Fathi Shaqaqi, a physician by training, co-founded the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in 1981, which under his leadership orchestrated numerous attacks against Israeli targets. Last December, Israeli forces arrested Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal-Adwan hospital in northern Gaza, accusing him of being a Hamas operative and using the hospital to shield terrorist activities. Dr Mahmoud Abu Nujaila, an employee of Médecins Sans Frontières since 2020, was found to have expressed support for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and terrorist activities on social media.
It is not only in conflict zones that such hatred manifests. In Pakistan, in 2024, a Muslim doctor at the Civil Hospital of Sahiwal in Punjab told Yousaf Masih Gill that he would not treat his father: ‘had I known he was Christian, I would not have touched him,’ he said.
The Australian case feels especially terrifying because it confronts a cultural reality often ignored. In some corners of the Middle East and beyond, the dehumanisation of Jews is commonplace – taught in schools, broadcast on television, and preached from podiums. When individuals raised in such an environment become doctors or nurses, is it truly shocking that some carry those hatreds with them into their professional lives?
If the discussion of culturally or religiously inspired medical malpractice feels uncomfortable and politically incorrect, it may feel even more so to point out that Israelis, by contrast, are renowned for upholding medical ethics even when treating their enemies. Consider the case of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader responsible for orchestrating countless terrorist attacks. In 2004, he was saved by Israeli surgeons who removed his brain tumour while he was an Israeli prisoner. During the 2014 Gaza War, Ismail Haniyeh’s granddaughter was treated in an Israeli hospital. The contrast is stark: Israelis routinely uphold the value of life – even the lives of those sworn to destroy them.
Hatred must have no place in our hospitals
For Jews, this is not an academic concern but a visceral fear. Since 7October, the spectre of medical bias looms larger than ever. Jewish patient and staff in the NHS have voiced growing anxieties that the people entrusted with their lives may carry the same contempt that animated the Australian nurses. Last year at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital, a nine-year-old Jewish boy receiving treatment for a blood disorder was allegedly forced to sit on the floor by nurses displaying pro-Palestinian insignia. The British Medical Association is also investigating claims that its president Mary McCarthy, a leading GP, ‘repeatedly amplified’ allegedly anti-Semitic posts on her social media account, creating a ‘hostile environment’ for Jewish doctors.
British Labour MP Jess Phillips claimed she recently received preferential treatment in a Birmingham hospital when recognised by a Palestinian doctor, who remarked approvingly, ‘I like you. You voted for a ceasefire.’ Phillips, who had supported a halt to Israel’s defensive war against Hamas, felt her politics had bought her swifter care. But what if she had voted the other way? What would that doctor’s hands have done? Yet this chilling confession led to nothing – no investigation, no disciplinary action, no assurance to Jewish patients that their lives would not be weighed against their politics.
The difference lies in cultures that either sanctify human life or degrade it through ideological hatred. To say this is uncomfortable. To admit it is necessary. Hatred must have no place in our hospitals, but to ensure that, we must confront hard truths about where such hatreds come from, how they travel, and why they sometimes surface in the most sacred spaces of care. The Australian scandal is not an anomaly; it is a warning.
British troops won’t help Ukraine
Sir Keir Starmer’s proposal to put British troops on the ground as part of a peacekeeping force in Ukraine is a principled and politically bold move. But the sad reality is that Britain is in no position to act as Ukraine’s peacekeeper. Starmer is playing with an empty deck and singing from obsolete songbook.
Starmer has few options left other than gesture politics
Starmer’s offer to put British troops on the ground is, in practical military terms, a very small promise. As former British Army chief Lord Dannatt pointed out last night, the UK’s armed forces are ‘so run down’ that we could not lead any future peacekeeping mission in Ukraine. Ukraine’s President Volodymir Zelensky has estimated that a peacekeeping force of 200,000 foreign troops would be needed to police a 1,250 kilometre long line of contact. But the entire deployable force that Britain has is a mere 56,000 – compared to 1.1 million Ukrainians currently under arms. Realistically, estimates Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the whole of Europe can come up with just three brigades, or less than 15,000 troops deployed at any one time. But the bigger question is ‘what should this force do, and how does it deter?’ asks Kofman. ‘If it is a tripwire, what does it attach to?… What is this force backed by, and what happens if it is attacked?’ Without American backing, a European force would have limited credibility as a deterrent.
Inexplicably, and unhelpfully, Sir Keir also continues to insist that Ukraine is on an ‘irreversible’ path to Nato membership – though it’s becoming increasingly clear that Nato membership for Kyiv is dead in the water. Ukraine’s joining the alliance has been ‘the reddest of red lines’ for the Kremlin since before Putin took power, according to former CIA director (and US Ambassador to Moscow) William Burns. Kyiv’s own negotiators were willing to concede that Ukraine should remain neutral during the aborted talks in the aftermath of Putin’s invasion in March 2022. Yet despite the fact that the new Trump administration has signalled decisively that Nato membership for Kyiv is decisively obsolete, Starmer continues to stick to Europe’s now-defunct party line.
France’s Emmanuel Macron has summoned European leaders – plus Starmer – to Paris to discuss their response to Donald Trump’s plans to negotiate directly with Putin. But Europe on its own doesn’t have the economic resources to bankroll Zelensky’s war-effort beyond this year. Nor does it have the political resources to block any proposed peace deal that Trump brokers with Putin. Most crucially, Europe lacks the military and military-industrial resources either to step in to defend Ukraine against Russia or to keep Ukraine supplied with the weaponry it needs. And despite Starmer’s offer of UK troops there is little sign that European electorates are ready for direct involvement in Ukraine.
‘The tragedy of Europe’s position vis-a-vis Ukraine is, as things stand, Europeans are not willing to die for Ukraine,’ says Sergey Radchenko of Johns Hopkins University. ‘They are not willing to die, they are not willing to send their children there to die. Not in the uncertain future, but now, at this time.’
Then there is the question of whether, and how, Putin could ever be compelled to accept a peacekeeping force made up of Nato troops. Preventing Nato boots on the ground in Ukraine is the single most fundamental reason that Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. There is only one way that the Kremlin could accept such a deal and that’s by being compelled by overwhelming force to do so. Instead, Putin’s forces continue to advance steadily in Donbas – and hopes of an imminent collapse of the Russian economy, or of support for the war in Russia, are still distant prospects. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov quickly poured cold water on suggestions of a European peacekeeping contingent. ‘These are Nato member countries,’ said Peskov. ‘Consequently, Nato troops would be stationed on the territory of Ukraine. Therefore, this is a very complex issue.’
There was a time when the UK’s intervention in the Ukraine conflict was a true moral – if not practical – game-changer. Boris Johnson led the charge in April 2022 with assurances of military help for as long as it took for Ukraine to win, and shamed both Brussels and Washington into massively upgrading their initially lukewarm support. There’s no doubt that made a huge difference – though the UK’s actual financial contribution was a drop in the bucket compared to Washington’s.
Now, three years on, Starmer has few options left other than gesture politics. Sending UK troops is an offer he can make in the knowledge that the chances Putin will ever accept such a deployment are slim to none.
However, there is one major shift in Starmer’s policy, and it’s a welcome one. Until very recently the UK government – which unlike the rest of the West has seen unanimous cross-party support for arming Ukraine – repeated the mantra that we would support Ukraine until victory, for ‘as long as it takes’. It’s been clear for a while now, as the front lines froze and US support waned, that this assurance was an empty one. Yet many Western politicians – including our own – continued to signal their virtue by writing verbal cheques to be paid in the blood of young Ukrainians.
Starmer has now acknowledged that the war is likely to end soon, and will end with a partitioned border that may need international peacekeepers. That’s a major shift – some would say capitulation to the new Trumpian reality – that Starmer has cleverly covered with the sensational possibility of British lads patrolling in Donbas.
Psychiatrist shortage could derail assisted dying bill
Uh oh. Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill appears to have hit another bump in the road as it now transpires there may not be enough psychiatric doctors in the profession to make it work. Last week, an amendment put forward by the bill’s sponsor proposed that, instead of having a high court judge investigate each case, a panel of social workers and psychiatrists among others should oversee applications. But experts have warned that there may not actually be enough psychiatrists for this to work. Nice to see the pro-euthanasia crowd has done its research…
Professor Allan House, professor of liaison psychiatry at Leeds University, and Professor Gareth Owen, honorary consultant psychiatrist at King’s College London, have both given evidence to the committee scrutinising the legislation. Whether their advice is being listened to is quite another matter, however. Speaking to the Telegraph, House remarked that it was ‘not at all clear’ whether there would be enough doctors to sit on expert panels and oversee cases, while Owens warned that it was ‘probably not’ feasible for every case to be seen by a psychiatrist ‘given the current workforce’. Indeed, in NHS England and Wales there are just over 3,000 substantive consultant adult psychiatrists according to records from the Royal College of Psychiatrists – a third of whom work part time.
One might query why Leadbeater did not consider this issue before she suggested swapping out high court judges for psychiatrists. It transpires that not only did the Labour MP not consult the Royal College of Psychiatrists before putting the profession at the centre of her legislation, the Spen Valley politician relied on a rather thin RCPsych survey to guide her decision-making. The poll had a 10 per cent response rate with only a third of psychiatrists saying they would participate in an assisted dying service. It hardly bodes well, eh?
Professor House remarked scathingly:
Does psychiatry have the capacity for this? Well, one of the other things that the Royal College census shows is that, across the UK, 28 per cent of all consultant jobs are either vacant or filled by non-substantive staff. So you are asking a profession that can’t fill a quarter of its consultant jobs with full-time consultants if they want to release 30 people to do this work.
Is there sufficiency capacity? It is not at all clear that there is.
Crikey. It’s a rather damning indictment on the fastidiousness of Leadbeater’s legislation. Last week’s removal of the high court judge safeguard has left MPs who supported the bill at its second reading a little uneasy. This latest revelation is hardly going to help matters…
Should burning the Quran be against the law?
There are worrying signs in Britain that a blasphemy law – abolished in 2008 – might be sneaking in through the back door. Last week, a Turkish man allegedly set fire to the Quran as part of a protest against the Turkish government outside its consulate in Rutland Gate, London. He was then attacked by an outraged zealot with a knife, arrested and charged with a similar offence. He has pleaded not guilty and remains to be tried.
Earlier this month, a Manchester man filmed publicly burning pages from the Quran in protest at Islamist excesses was also very swiftly arrested and locked up. Two days later, the man pleaded guilty to a religiously-aggravated offence under the Public Order Act for abusive behaviour likely to cause distress. He will be sentenced in April.
Whether Quran-burners are guilty of a religiously-aggravated public order offence is open to some doubt
These are worrying developments, for lots of reasons. For one thing, they contradict at least the spirit of the suppression of the blasphemy laws: that at least in the eyes of the law, all religions need to accept that they are a legitimate target for full-throated scandalisation, derision and satire.
Moreover, abusive behaviour charges, if brought here, could serve as cover to suppress almost any forceful protest to which an opponent takes strong objection, thus creating a kind of legal heckler’s veto on steroids. Think of publicly burning the Bible, the Communist manifesto, or the Book of Mormon, over the objections of opponents who make their distress and their objection clear. Should these really be criminal offences?
Of course, in contrast to Quran-burning, arrests and prosecutions for that kind of thing are unlikely. But while this might at first sight look like good news for free speech, especially for atheists, anti-Communists and the like, on a deeper level it actually makes it worse. Contrary to the liberal idea that if there are to be bars to free speech, they should be at least content-neutral, allowing public order law to act as a kind of catch-all makes space for protest to be selectively policed and the prosecution of demonstrators to be conducted according to the political or social sensitivity of the cause being advanced or attacked.
Unfortunately, despite all the arguments on free speech, there are plausible reasons to think that at least two institutions may be quietly delighted that a way has been found to make life awkward for Quran-burners. One is the government. Always seeming to look for ways to reassure militant Islam, a growing influence in a worryingly increasing number of constituencies, Keir Starmer’s administration is already mulling a definition of Islamophobia that would be highly intrusive on speech critical of Islam. One suspects it would welcome with open arms a de facto rule saying that anything which distresses religious (read Muslim) sensibilities can be prosecuted under public order laws.
Ministers will no doubt add sanctimoniously that protesters always retain the protection of the free speech provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights. In fact, as they know well, the convention is a broken reed here. The Strasbourg court solemnly decided six years ago, in a case about the bad-mouthing of Muhammad, that forceful insults to religion do not count as free speech. But unfortunately few, apart from human rights experts, are going to see through this exercise in disingenuity.
The other group likely to celebrate is, regrettably, police top brass – or at least some of them. Many forces have more or less official contacts with groups claiming to represent the Muslim community, which will exert pressure at every instance of what they see as unwarranted attacks on Islam. What better than a wide-ranging public order law that will allow them to assure such groups that they have been taking fast and strong steps to nip in the bud anything that upsets their sensibilities?
There is one ray of light. Whether Quran-burners are actually guilty of a religiously-aggravated public order offence is, to say the least, open to some doubt. It might be seen as stretching matters to say that merely burning a book is abusive. Also, to be religiously-aggravated an offence must be motivated by hostility to the adherents of a religion rather than the religion itself, which Quran-desecrators may well not be. As previous defendants have generally chosen to admit the offence, these points have not been fully aired. The Rutland Gate defendant, however, has pleaded not guilty.
We can at least now hope to have some proper legal argument about whether we take seriously the abolition of blasphemy and the right that should go with it to mock, belittle and attack religious beliefs we disagree with. An acquittal would no doubt please Elon Musk: more to the point, it would be splendid news for those of us in Britain who take freedom seriously.
Parliament is embarrassing itself
Sidney Low said that ‘government in England is government by amateurs’, and parliament seems to be doing its level best to vindicate that view. The Assisted Dying Bill being rushed through the Commons with sinister alacrity has exposed structural flaws in our legislative procedures, not least the vulnerability of private members’ bills to exploitation by those determined that proper parliamentary process not hinder their legislation’s path to the statute books. Whether through truncated debate, a stacked committee, a lopsided witness list, unreliable undertakings, or the resolute incuriosity of scrutineers unwilling to scrutinise, the bill reminds us that institutions are only as reliable as the fidelity of those who populate them to a common ethos.
Parliamentarians are not expected to forgo ideology or intrigue – such things are the lifeblood of a parliament – but to pursue them in a parliamentarian spirit, a temper of mind that respects process, cherishes debate, solicits scrutiny, and volunteers candour. A parliamentarian understands that these conventions confer legitimacy on lawmaking, satisfying opponents that they lost in a fair fight and are morally obligated to accept the result, but they also ensure that the act which goes for royal assent is a more robust instrument than the bill that was introduced. A parliamentarian wants not merely their bill to pass but the best possible version of their bill.
Those behind the Assisted Dying Bill might be members of parliament but none of them is a parliamentarian. At every opportunity, the peddlers of premature death have revealed their impatience with the parliamentary process and their disdain for those who see things differently. Assurances given are cast aside without compunction, evidence to the contrary is disregarded, and good faith efforts to improve the bill are dismissed with zealous certainty. They don’t want the best possible version of their bill. All they want is for assisted dying to be legal, unintended consequences be damned.
Consultation: skipped. Policy development: avoided. Disability advocates: ignored. Judicial safeguards: dropped. The scheme proposed has yet to reach the statute book and already it is falling apart. Some have raised the spectre of Harold Shipman in this debate, but that increasingly seems unfair to Dr Shipman. His assisted dying scheme managed to kill hundreds before it fell apart.
Good intentions can make bad legislation, and when MPs are drunk on them it is the duty of parliament to interrogate those intentions soberly, conscious of the harm that comes from hasty, emotive lawmaking. It is to parliament’s profound shame that, with honourable exceptions such as Diane Abbott, the most robust scrutiny of this bill is coming from Dr Yuan Yi Zhu, a Canadian national who teaches international law at a university in the Netherlands. Dr Zhu, who takes an interest following his country’s experience with medical assistance in death (MAiD), has approached these proposals with more diligence, scepticism and analytical rigour than many privileged enough to have been elected to the Commons. Why shouldn’t the public hold parliament in contempt when so many MPs appear to do the same?
The Assisted Dying Bill is especially egregious, but there are other emergency flares being shot into the sky over Westminster, signalling to us that our parliamentary democracy is in distress. The government’s relentless, almost fanatic, campaign not only to surrender the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius but to ensure Mauritius is paid handsomely to accept it, is another tale of parliamentary inadequacy. Strong attitudes for and against the surrender mostly reflect party affiliation, but in parliament there aren’t all that many strong attitudes. The prime minister is hellbent on relinquishing sovereign and strategically valuable British territory and many MPs can barely muster interest. Here is another ready-made opportunity for parliament to prove its worth to a cynical public. Yet again, it is failing.
Consider, too, a recent string of news stories highlighting the absurdities of our immigration, refugee and asylum regimes. The Palestinian family granted asylum under the scheme set up to give shelter to Ukrainians. The Nigerian woman who was denied asylum eight times, joined a terrorist group to bolster her case, and was successful on her ninth application. The Ghanaian holidaymaker given the right to remain in the UK thanks to a three-year marriage to a German national and despite the fact she did not attend her own wedding. Whether these were cases of the courts trying to make sense of parliament’s ill-conceived and inconsistent legislative outpourings or examples of judicial overreach by a liberal bench, we know that no one ever voted for these outcomes. At no general election has the winning party put to the electors that their country should become an international doss house with no locks on the door.
There could not be a less opportune moment for parliament to draw attention to its shortcomings
Parliament ought to be stirred to action in defence of our people, borders and laws. MPs should be drafting legislation to make it harder to enter the UK informally, remain here after committing serious crimes, or abuse our generosity with spurious claims. Again, however, parliament is found wanting. Whether through indolence or ideology, the UK parliament appears thoroughly uninterested in fixing our broken immigration and asylum systems.
Every time another poll shows growing disillusionment with parliamentary democracy, liberal commentators file the same 1,000 words scolding the public for siding with The Bad People. They’ve been duped by Russian misinformation. Elon Musk brainwashed them with the X algorithm. They should listen to the experts who will explain why their every concern is wrong, dangerous, far right, or actually a good thing.
Instead of browbeating the masses into revering parliament, shouldn’t we be asking what parliament is doing to earn respect? There have always been voters who regard MPs as crooks, frauds, rogues and worse, who dismiss the Commons as thoroughly out of touch with the general public. We’re talking about something of another order entirely: voters who have given up on parliament as the national decision-making body. Who regard it as an obstacle to and not a guarantor of scrutiny, an institution which reflects the priorities of a permanent managerial elite and which lacks the calibre of MP necessary to check the executive and legislate wisely.
These are precarious times. A fug of authoritarianism lingers over much of the West, threatening to choke democratic institutions and popular consent for liberal norms. There could not be a less opportune moment for parliament to draw attention to its shortcomings. Sidney Low’s characterisation was meant to distinguish England’s government by generalists from the rule of technocrats on the Continent, but parliament is coming to resemble an unfortunate fusion of the two. Government in Britain today is government by amateur technocrats, an aloof aristocracy of the inept and the inadequate. If this is the best you can offer the public, don’t be surprised if they go looking for more sinister amateurs and less reputable technocrats, those who appear willing and able to do what parliament cannot or will not.
Kemi Badenoch is more interested in liberalism than conservatism
Kemi Badenoch made a speech today which mentioned the terms ‘liberal’ or ‘liberalism’ seven times before the word ‘conservative’ got a look in.
The liberalism she was extolling in her address at the ARC conference in London was not of the leftist kind, but the ‘classic liberalism of free markets, free speech, free enterprise, freedom of religion, the presumption of innocence, the rule of law, and equality under it’. And there is not much to cavil over in that little list. Although when one person’s desired ‘freedom of religion’ impinges on other people’s basic freedom of expression then clearly there are priorities to be ranked.
Since the Brexit vote, the rate of inundation has massively increased
But the bigger point, given parlous Tory poll ratings right now, is that this kind of liberalism – classical or ‘Gladstonian’ liberalism – is very far from being a potent, election-winning cocktail. Back when I was reasonably influential in Ukip, I lost count of the number of senior party figures who told me they were ‘classical liberals’ and asked me what I was. ‘I’m someone who wants to get Britain out of the EU,’ was my customary reply.
It wasn’t classical liberalism that achieved that but the innately conservative force of old-fashioned, pro-nation state patriotism. The most dynamic impulse within this was the distaste of working-class people for having their communities inundated without their consent by foreign nationals from different cultures.
Since the Brexit vote, the rate of inundation has massively increased and the ‘otherness’ of the cultures involved has become much more marked: Polish Catholics had far more in common with everyday Brits to start off with than Afghan Muslims do. Consequently, the intensity and range of this culturally and socially conservative objection to the mass immigration of recent years has further increased.
So the logical starting point for a ‘big C’, Conservative party leader setting out her stall would seem to be supporting the ‘small c’ conservatism which values culturally cohesive neighbourhoods, inter-generational kinship ties and a sense of pride in and obligation to the nation.
In her speech, Mrs Badenoch eventually got on to this stuff. ‘Immigration is far too high…Our country is not racist. We don’t need to apologise. We don’t need to pay reparations or give away the Chagos Islands. Free speech matters. Some cultures are better than others,’ she said.
In the middle of that section, she jammed in two other points: that we need ‘smaller government and smarter spending’ and that ‘the world owes no-one a living – millions of people cannot just sit on welfare and expect to be paid to do so’.
In the current circumstances, both social conservatives and classical liberals would subscribe to each of those.
Yet one was left with the impression that, deep down, it is liberalism and not conservatism which is the primary force driving Badenoch’s mission.
It seems increasingly obvious that she is not going to recommend setting aside the European Convention on Human Rights despite it laying at the heart of numerous legal farces and indignities being visited upon the British people.
‘We were members of this convention for half a century without this madness. What’s changed? It’s not the values. It’s the people. They are afraid of creating any kind of conflict, they use the most novel and expansive interpretations of human rights law to avoid it,’ she claimed.
Are the likes of Hugo Norton-Taylor, the upper tier immigration judge who granted a Palestinian family the right to live in the UK after they applied through a scheme originally meant for Ukrainian refugees, really afraid of conflict? Surely believing so underestimates the audacity of their intent.
Badenoch was today speaking to an audience of think-tankers and right-leaning intellectuals and her contribution seemed to land quite well with them. Speaking to – and for – the British people as a whole is her primary task. Right now that mission can be charitably described as a work in progress.
Read: Kemi Badenoch’s full speech at the Arc Conference
Western civilisation is in crisis. Our ideas and our culture have dominated the world for well over two centuries. This is not a crisis of values. It’s a crisis of confidence that has set in at exactly the same time that we face existential threats on the left. This self-doubt manifests as an embarrassment of the West’s legacy and in extremists, a hatred of western history and even its culture.
But what about the right? We know that the West has given the world amazing ideas and values, from democracy and free markets to our banking systems. Yet around us we see so much cultural and economic decline. We doubt ourselves. We doubt our ability to build like our predecessors did. We doubt liberal values of tolerance or free trade demanding a post-liberal world. It’s not liberal values that are the problem. It’s weakness.
Last week, two surveys were released that should alarm everyone in this room. Almost half of young Brits think their country is racist. Nearly 60 per cent of them are not proud to be British. Nearly 40 per cent of the fighting age population wouldn’t fight for our country under any circumstances. More than half of those aged between 13 and 27 said the UK would be a better place, with a strong leader was in charge. Who does not have to bother with parliament and elections? A dictator? We shouldn’t be surprised.
Young people see a parliament obsessed with presiding over stagnation despite making more and more laws. A parliament with only a few defending our values and many more too scared to challenge those who attack what we believe in.
I would say to those young people: I understand your anger, but be careful what you wish for. I was born in London, but grew up in a country with a military dictatorship and strong leaders who did away with pesky liberal values like democracy, because people voted in bad politicians. They stopped free speech because some used it to offend. In the 1960s, many former British colonies in Africa decided to move on from British values. A lot of people preferred strong man politics and ethnic nationalism to democracy and pluralism.
But when they got it, they didn’t like it. The strong men had lots of words, but no plan. They ran everything and delivered nothing. They flogged teachers, shot journalists. People disappeared. Dead bodies were found on the streets. Without the ability to speak freely or trade freely, the government controlled everything. And wealth became hard to create and easy to destroy.
So let’s remember what we are defending here. Not just our wealth, but our culture. A culture built on those values we’ve taken for granted. Classic liberal values. Not left-wing liberalism, but classic liberalism of free markets. Free speech. Free enterprise, freedom of religion, the presumption of innocence, the rule of law and equality under it. No matter who you are or where you come from.
As the world becomes more complicated, we need to bravely fight for these values now. Instead, we are distracted, too busy critiquing and deconstructing what previous generations built, rather than making sure that the very best of our inheritance is left intact for the next generation.
This is the real poison of left-wing progressivism, whether it’s pronouns or DEI or climate activism. These issues aren’t about kindness. They are about control. We have limited time, and every second spent debating what a woman is, is a second lost from dealing with these challenges?
In order to fix things, we need to know what went wrong. I believe that loopholes in liberalism have been found and easily exploited. We have been hacked. Rule of law is what built so much of the West. It is in the corruption of the rule of law itself that we see where the problems begin.
The most extraordinary example is how the European Convention on Human Rights, designed to stop the persecution of individuals by the state, is now weaponised by those who wish to erode our national identity and border security. The current system is being exploited. The public are enraged at the perception that the UK has become a haven for foreign criminals. One case involved a man who was allowed to stay. It was claimed that his son disliked foreign chicken nuggets. It’s in another, a drug dealer reportedly avoids deportation because of his daughter’s gender identity issues.
But we were members of this convention for half a century without this madness. What’s changed is not the values, it’s the people. They are afraid of creating any kind of conflict. They use the most novel and expansive interpretations of human rights law to avoid it. And we see that lack of confidence now in everything from law and order to national defence. A fear of sticking up for young girls, being abused by rape gangs over so many decades, so as not to upset community relations. Totalitarian states like Russia, Iran and North Korea are coordinated in their efforts. Failing to spend more on defence is not peacemaking, it is weakness. And it only emboldens their threats to democracy and global stability.
So how do we defend? Conservatives are the guardians of western civilisations. We do need to defend what we have, but many have forgotten how to do so. It requires bravery and not endless compliance at the threat of legal challenge.
So I’m going to give you a brilliant example of a woman who has done this. She is known as Britain’s strictest headmistress and runs the Michaela School, the best school in our country. Her name is Katharine Birbalsingh. The Michaela School is secular. However, religious tolerance was being exploited to harass and bully others. This led to segregation and tensions, with some students beginning to pray in the playground, violating school rules, pressuring their peers to follow religious practices they hadn’t before, like wearing a headscarf or stopping choir practice.
In response, Katharine banned those prayer rituals to restore order and refused to provide a dedicated prayer space, aiming to maintain the school’s secular environment and treat all pupils equally. The response was an orchestrated attempt to destroy her reputation and her school. She was sued by one child’s parents. The BBC ran a headline saying the school made being Muslim seem toxic. Most politicians are afraid of that sort of headline for fear of being labelled Islamophobic. Most teachers would have relented the minute they were challenged. Katharine Birbalsingh took her case all the way to the High Court and she won. Katharine showed how you defend western civilisation.
Our country is not racist. We don’t need to apologise
Contrast this courage with Keir Starmer, the prime minister who took the knee during Black Lives Matter protests in response to a problem that was not in his country and did not apply. Why? Because he was cowed by the mob. The problem isn’t liberalism. The problem is weakness. Millions of people all around the world want to live in the West because they want the benefits. However, some of them bring behaviours, cultures and practices that will undermine the West and the values that helped make us great. They find common cause with our useful idiots who don’t appreciate their own inheritance. The Conservative party in Britain has just lost an election. We have a crisis just like the West.
People ask me what difference new leadership will make. Well, take a look at President Trump. He’s shown that sometimes you need that first stint in government to spot the problems. But it’s the second time around when you really know how to fix them. And it starts by telling the truth. A country cannot be successful if its people and its intellectual elite don’t believe in it. This means dealing with the poisoning of minds that is happening in higher education. We have been naive on economic growth. We have been naive on issues from net zero to immigration. Weakening ourselves and strengthening our competitors. Immigration is far too high. We cannot support all those who wish to come to our to our country. We have no obligation to do so.
The British people must come first. We cannot keep racking up debt for our children. It was fiscal weakness, not just war, that led to the decline of the Roman Empire. We need smaller government and smarter spending. The belief that the state and not business creates wealth has become normalised. The world knows owes no one a living. Millions of people cannot just sit on welfare and expect to be paid to do so. And if they don’t like it, that’s their problem, not the state’s. Our country is not racist. We don’t need to apologise. We don’t need to pay reparations or give away the Chagos Islands for. Free speech matters. Some cultures are better than others, and it’s only contentious to say this because honesty has become impossible.
People should not be afraid to speak out. We will be proud of our country. Most of all, we need to get up off our knees and start fighting not just for the UK, but for the West and our values. Again, we will have to decide between the true but hard way that needs tough decisions and bravery, or whether we have more slogans and announcements, but no plan.
Don’t listen to the media class complain about populism. The very essence of democracy is acknowledging the will of everyday people and then actually making it happen. Populism becomes corrosive if it is just words without thought, rage without reason, anger without the ability to action.
For those of us who seek leadership, we must do better. And that is why in the United Kingdom, my party is starting the largest renewal of policy and ideas in a generation. This conference is part of finding those answers and it fills me with hope. If we get this right, we stand at the dawn of a new conservative century with so much opportunity and possibility. If we throw this opportunity away because of anger or self-doubt or weakness. Our country and all of western civilisation will be lost. And that is why we, the next generation of conservatives, must lead the world back from the precipice. It is time to speak the truth. Thank you.
Daily Mail dominated by Elon’s baby mama
Rumors of a romantic entanglement between the Texas-based conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair and Elon Musk have been buzzing around MAGA circles for some time. Yet St. Clair, a former Turning Point USA ambassador and Babylon Bee staffer, decided to go public with a Valentine’s Day statement on, where else, X, the website her child’s father owns.
St. Clair wrote that she had not previously disclosed her infant’s parentage “to protect our child’s privacy and safety, but in recent days it has become clear that tabloid media intends to do so, regardless of the harm it will cause.” One atypical aspect of St. Clair’s plea to be left alone: the inclusion of an email address for crisis PR guru Brian Glicklich. “The first advisor that Ashley sought on this was Elon and Elon’s people but they chose not to make themselves available,” Glicklich told Cockburn. “She needed professional communications assistance and that’s where I came in.”
Cue banging of heads on keyboards at the Daily Mail, the British mid-market tabloid, whose reporter Josh Boswell had been pursuing the St. Clair-Musk story, Cockburn can confirm. To make matters worse, St. Clair then popped up in rival tabloid the New York Post a day later to offer more of her side of the story.
“Ashley has wanted to raise her children privately and she cooperated with Elon and Elon’s people about how she managed that privacy,” Glicklich said. “It had been increasingly clear that a tabloid publication was preparing a story on this. They sent a reporter to physically stalk Ashley, her neighbors and her family members, asking intrusive questions — putting her in genuine fear.”
St. Clair’s rep stressed that his client went public only as a last resort. “Ashley went to Elon and Elon’s people to say that privacy was no longer going to be an option, wanting to do media cooperatively with them,” Glicklich said. “She reached out to them many many times, as did I — they have refused all communications.” He added that the Valentine’s Day timing of her post was “a coincidence based on the tempo of how she was being chased around — it was our opinion that they were hours away from publishing.”
The triple-bylined Post exclusive comes with a photo shoot in the Financial District apartment St. Clair says Musk provided for her — including photos of the conservative influencer barefoot on the windowsill and sitting at a table before a wrongly set-up chessboard. (For what it’s worth, Glicklich says the online chatter about the barefoot photograph is “a ridiculous thing to be worrying about.”) The Mail then had to rewrite the Post story that they had so diligently been working on. DailyMail.com did not respond to a request for comment.
St. Clair’s decision to tell all to the Post represents an amusing volte-face: just weeks ago, she was branding their hotshot political reporter Jon Levine an “idiot & hack” over his phone interview with Trump regarding the H-1B visa issue — ie, the Twixtmas rift between Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and the tech right on the one hand and Steve Bannon and “MAGA” on the other. A few weeks later, Levine was interviewing her. The Post newshound declined to comment for this story.
The X CEO has yet to respond publicly to St. Clair’s revelations — with the exception of writing “Whoa” under one of the many posts fellow right-wing influencer and Kanye West representative Milo Yiannopoulos has made about St. Clair after her statement.
“Elon, we have been trying to communicate for the past several days and you have not responded,” St. Clair wrote under Musk’s reply, in a since deleted tweet. “When are you going to reply to us instead of publicly responding to smears from an individual who just posted photos of me in underwear at 15 years old?”
“If Ashley’s going to have to tell this story, she wants it told accurately,” Glicklich told Cockburn, regarding her decision to speak to the Post.
Two of Musk’s thirteen (to date) children have found themselves in the public eye of late. There’s Musk’s trans daughter Vivian, who regularly criticizes her estranged father on rival social media app Threads. There’s X, Musk’s child with his most recent ex-wife Grimes, who is being shown around events at the White House and Mar-a-Lago. Are X’s appearances are an adorable testament to the importance of public fatherhood? Or a cheap and exploitative political stunt? The answer shouldn’t depend on your politics. Yet it probably does.
Can Europe stand on its own two feet against Russia?
The United States is no longer an ‘ally’ of Europe, according to a former high-ranking figure in Nato. In an interview with Times Radio, Stefanie Babst, erstwhile deputy assistant secretary general of the alliance, said President Trump has ‘switched sides’ and aligned the US with Russia, led by the ‘war criminal’ Vladimir Putin. ‘I don’t think that the Trump administration is prepared to really commit any longer to Nato, to the trans-Atlantic alliance as such,’ said Babst, ‘and he couldn’t care really less for European security.’
Babst’s remarks appear to contradict what she said in an interview exactly twelve months ago with a Washington think-tank. ‘With a few exceptions,’ said Babst, ‘most European politicians are true masters in paying lip service to strengthening Europe’s defence.’
The US remains an ally of Europe – but it’s no longer prepared to play mother
She gave a series of examples, stretching back to 1999, of European leaders promising to invest more in its defence. ‘Yet more than twenty years later, Europe still lacks a credible military posture,’ said Babst. Perhaps, she suggested, it would be good for Europe if a ‘powerful disruptor’ like Trump won the 2024 US election. ‘The gloomy prospect of no longer being able to rely on US security support could push Europeans out of their comfort zone and make them seriously invest in defence.’
Europe has been disrupted, all right, and its response is a hastily-arranged summit in Paris today to discuss the war in Ukraine. Outraged that they have not been invited by the US to attend talks with Russia about Ukraine’s future, European leaders want to show that they are still relevant. ‘Given the acceleration of the Ukraine question…it is essential for the Europeans to do more, better and in a coherent way for our collective security,’ said a spokesperson for President Emmanuel Macron.
The BBC reports that only those European countries with ‘military heft’ will be present in Paris: Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and Denmark, along with the EU Council president and the secretary general of the defence alliance. One of the EU nations not present, Hungary, criticised the summit on Monday morning. Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto described it as ‘frustrated, pro-war and anti-Trump European leaders…meeting to prevent a peace agreement in Ukraine’.
Is there any military ‘heft’ left in Europe? Germany doesn’t have any, according to Stefanie Babst (herself German), who singled out her country for criticism last year. ‘Even external shocks like Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 did not prompt Germany, Europe’s largest economy, to take serious steps toward rebuilding its cannibalised armed forces,’ she commented.
Germany’s defence minister from 2013 to 2019 was Ursula von der Leyen; so incompetent was she that Germany became a global laughing stock in 2015 when it was revealed that its soldiers were reduced to using broomsticks on training exercises because they lacked machine guns. Von der Leyen’s reward for six years of failure was to be appointed president of the European Commission in 2019, the most powerful political position in Europe.
France, the EU’s sole nuclear power, is paying the price for years of under-investment in military spending; a parliamentary defence committee report in 2023 noted that ‘the overall deterioration in French ammunition stocks since the end of the Cold War is now untenable given France’s military ambitions’.
A similar report by the Commons defence committee last year stated that the British military had been ‘hollowed out’ to such an extent that the army is incapable of fighting a peer-to-peer war beyond eight weeks.
If Europe is to start restoring its reputation in the eyes of the US, it will need to spend more on defence and send troops to Ukraine once a ceasefire has been negotiated. Keir Starmer has promised to do both, writing in the Daily Telegraph today that ‘Europe must step up further to meet the demands of its own security… we have talked about it for too long’.
There were similar pledges last month from Germany and France. Sébastien Lecornu, France’s armed forces minister, admitted that not only has Europe been ‘too slow in rearming’ but that the money spent had often been wasted ‘to buy weapons to fill hangars and not know how to use them’.
Understandably, the Americans will treat these promises with scepticism: they’ve heard them before. In September 2017 – four months after his election to office – Macron gave an address at the Sorbonne entitled ‘Initiative for Europe’. The young president told his audience that the US had embarked on a ‘gradual and inevitable disengagement’ from Europe. Consequently, Europe must ‘act in concert… our aim needs to be ensuring Europe’s autonomous operating capabilities, in complement to Nato’.
This was one of ‘six keys to sovereignty’ outlined in Macron’s speech that he deemed essential to Europe in the years ahead. Another was controlling the continent’s borders. ‘Only with Europe can we effectively protect our borders, take in those eligible for asylum decently, truly integrate them, and at the same time quickly return those not eligible for such protection,’ said Macron. In both domains, Europe has failed miserably.
The US remains an ally of Europe – but it’s no longer prepared to play mother; Trump has cut the apron strings and, to paraphrase Stefanie Babst, kicked the continent out of its comfort zone. Is it capable of standing on its two feet? Today’s Paris summit is the first opportunity for Europe to show that it can.
What does Kemi Badenoch believe in?
Kemi Badenoch likes a good Thatcher comparison. The current Tory leader is presently reading Patrick Cosgrave’s account of the Iron Lady’s rise to the top.
It was another book – John Ranelagh’s Thatcher’s People – that recorded how in one 1970s Conservative policy meeting, a speaker started to argue that the party should adopt a pragmatic middle way. Thatcher removed her copy of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty from her handbag, slammed it down on the table and declared, ‘This is what we believe.’
This morning was Badenoch’s attempt to do something similar. Appearing at the Arc conference in London, the Tory leader used a 1,700 word speech to set out her vision to some of the 4,000 attendees assembled from across the globe. It was the kind of big picture, Manichean address which Badenoch relishes: lots of talk about the West in peril, free speech in decline and a crisis of confidence in national institutions.
She cited recent surveys showing Brits under-30 would favour a dictator as leader and refuse to fight for King and country. Blaming politicians, Badenoch railed against the ‘media class’ and ‘a Parliament obsessed with trivia presiding over stagnation’. ‘I believe that loopholes in liberalism have been found and easily exploited’, she said, citing how the ‘rule of law’ and ECHR have ‘been hacked’ and ‘weaponised by those who wish to erode our national identity.’
The benefit of these big-set piece speeches is that they allow Badenoch to showcase her credentials as a thinker. The drawback is the need to mix domestic concerns with international talking points. Thus, in a few lines the speech jumped from blaming ‘fiscal weakness’ for ‘the decline of the Roman Empire’ to insisting that ‘our country is not racist. We don’t need to apologise. We don’t need to pay reparations or give away the Chagos Islands.’ This can produce jarring headlines as Tory woes are juxtaposed against the collapse of Western civilisation.
But it did lead to effective moments of political communication too. Perhaps the most striking moment from Badenoch’s speech was when she talked of the superficial allure of dictators and their ilk:
In the 1960s, many former British colonies in Africa decided to move on from British values a lot of people preferred strong man politics and ethnic nationalism to democracy and pluralism. But when they got it, they didn’t like it. The strong men had lots of words, but no plan. They ran everything and delivered nothing.
‘Lots of words but no plan’ – who might Kemi Badenoch be thinking of there? In likening her Reform rivals at home to foreign despots abroad, the Tory leader was showing how she intends to tackle the threat posed by Nigel Farage. She and her team want to portray him as an attention-grabber who, ultimately, is writing checks he cannot cash. As she continued:
The very essence of democracy is acknowledging the will of everyday people – and then actually making it happen. Populism becomes corrosive if it is just words without thought, rage without reason, anger without the ability to action. For those of us who seek leadership, we must do better.
That, her allies argue, is what Mrs Thatcher would have demanded. Tomorrow, Farage will get his turn to respond when he addresses this same conference. But today, Badenoch gave perhaps the best insight into her worldview in her leadership to date – and illustrated just how she intends to fight him over the next four years.
Why people kill
Why did he do it? Over the last few weeks, many of us have asked that question following a series of horrifying acts of violence that have been difficult to comprehend.
Why was 15-year-old Harvey Willgoose fatally stabbed at a school in Sheffield? Why did Axel Rudakubana slaughter three girls at a children’s dance class in Southport last summer? And why did the father and stepmother of ten-year-old Sara Sharif abuse, torture and murder her?
Violent deaths are so shocking and alarming it’s natural that we search for explanations. But in the early stages, as details are pieced together and information about suspects isn’t known or publicly available, those answers often can’t be found. It’s not until the case comes to court that the full story can be told.
For two years I’ve been collecting details of court cases to try to understand more about why people kill. My focus was on London, where every year there are between 100 and 150 homicides – about 20 per cent of the annual total across England and Wales. I gathered information from 147 cases from January 2023 to December 2024, where defendants had been convicted of, or sentenced for, murder or manslaughter, over the deaths of 157 people.
Five of the court cases were about killings in the 1970s, 80s or 90s, but the vast majority concerned people who had died in the last five years. Most of the information came from official press releases distributed by the Metropolitan Police at the end of court proceedings, with other details from judges’ sentencing remarks and media reports. I don’t claim that every murder and manslaughter case in the capital over those 24 months has been covered but I believe the research has captured most of them to give an insight into patterns of homicide.
The most striking finding is the large number of killings perpetrated by gangs or groups of three or more people. Out of the 147 murder and manslaughter cases I looked at, 51 were gang or group-related – 35 per cent of the total – the largest category by some distance. The next most common type of killing was domestic abuse and family-related violence, comprising 18 per cent of cases, with non-gang confrontations and revenge attacks making up 14 per cent. Drugs were directly responsible for 8 per cent of killings, 8 per cent centred around a robbery, burglary or fraud. In 5 per cent of cases, the mental illness of the perpetrator was the key factor.
The prevalence of lethal gang violence is particularly troubling. There has rightly been much coverage about gangs across the country who have groomed, abused and raped girls, but the violence meted out on boys and young men by groups of other males deserves urgent attention too. Over the two-year period in London, 145 individuals were jailed for murder or manslaughter following gang killings, with a further 24 convicted of other linked offences.
In at least 14 of the cases, the main reason was rivalry between gangs or a row over territory. The murder of 18-year-old Abubakarr ‘Junior’ Jah, who was shot and stabbed in Newham in April 2021, was typical. Detectives said Jah’s two killers did not know him but had ‘set out that day on a “rideout”, intent on carrying out the most brutal act of violence against anyone they believed may be linked to rival gangs.’
A further nine gang killings revolved around a dispute about drugs. Among them was the case of 43-year-old Naython Muir, who was ambushed and stabbed with a Zombie-style knife, after being used as a ‘pawn by a drugs line’, according to police. Three men were jailed for murder and one for manslaughter. Other gang killings appeared to be acts of vengeance for a slight or an attack that had taken place before, while some occurred as part of a spontaneous and unplanned confrontation between different groups. Gang culture is embedded in parts of London and other cities too; addressing the reasons which propel young people towards gangs and disrupting their activities before they escalate must now be a priority if we’re to combat serious violence and knife crime.
What the research also reveals is a significant gap in our knowledge about motive. In 11 homicide cases, 7 per cent of the total, there was no explanation at all for what had happened. The terrible case of 20-year-old Jamie Gilbey is one example. His dismembered body was found in bags in South Norwood Country Park in 2022, but police were unable to fathom any reason for the murder, even though they managed to secure the conviction of the man responsible.
So it was with dozens of other cases I looked at, including many of the gang killings. Police made no reference to a motive when the court case concluded and if they did it was along the lines of, ‘We’ll never know why it happened’. It wasn’t just that the perpetrators refused to provide a motive, it simply wasn’t necessary for police to find one in order to solve the case. Instead, the investigation focused on locating witnesses, gathering CCTV footage, analysing data from mobile phones and comparing DNA and fingerprints from the crime scene with the profiles of suspects.
That single-minded determination to follow the evidence helped bring offenders to justice in the 147 cases I examined. But because police didn’t know the full background of many of the killings they missed out on potentially vital intelligence. A better understanding of the motive for an attack, the circumstances leading up to it and what the trigger was could help prevent further crimes, by ensuring resources and services are directed at those who pose the greatest threat.
It might also provide some answers for those of us struggling to make sense of the recent acts of violence that have cost so many young lives and affected countless others.
Watch: Trump critic cries at Munich
The Munich Security Conference has come to a close, but not before generating global headlines after US Vice President JD Vance’s speech on Friday. Reform MP Rupert Lowe lauded the American as a ‘hero’ after Vance warned that free speech was ‘in retreat’ in the UK and Europe – but not everyone feels the same. In fact, chairman of the Munich Security Conference Christoph Heusgen was positively distraught at Vance’s intervention as he closed the 61st conference on Sunday.
Taking to the podium, Heusgen began solemnly:
After the speech of Vice President Vance on Friday, we have to fear that our common value base is not that common anymore. I’m very grateful to all those European politicians that spoke out and reaffirmed the values and principles that they are defending. No one did this better than President Zelensky.
Wrapping up, the chairman started: ‘Let me conclude and this becomes difficult…’. But no summarising sentences were to come, as Heusgen, er, teared up and was unable to continue.
While his audience applauded and hugged the conference chair, Mr S would point out that Heusgen has not always been so respectful towards the Trump administration himself. There’s even photographic evidence of Heusgen previously mocking the US President’s concerns about Germany’s dependence on Russian oil. Perhaps if the German diplomat had spent more time heeding Trump’s warnings and less time smirking at them, his conference wouldn’t have been overshadowed by Vance. How the tables turn, eh?
Watch the clip here:
Ethics tsar must probe Hermer, say Labour MPs
Well, well, well. After a rather rocky ride in the Sunday papers, Lord Hermer is back in the spotlight this week – for all the wrong reasons. It has emerged that Labour MPs are now calling on the Prime Minister’s ethics tsar to probe the Attorney General over potential conflicts of interest. Talk about a bad start to the job, eh?
Richard Hermer has only been in post for seven months and yet he’s managed to ruffle a rather lot of feathers. The Attorney General has refused to reveal details of payments he has received since becoming a minister, including any earnings from his list of former clients, in a position not in keeping with his predecessors. More than that, Hermer has refused to tell MPs whether he has recused himself from offering advice on cases in which he previously was involved in as a lawyer. How very curious…
Questions about Hermer’s potential conflicts of interests have been floating around for quite some time now. As Mr S pointed out in January, the Attorney General landed himself in a rather sticky spot when he appeared unable to comment on his links to his former client and ex-Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams and whether he had a ‘conditional fee agreement’ with the Irish politician. Steerpike also has a list of Lord Hermer’s most, er, controversial clients here…
For its part, the Attorney General’s office has explained:
It is a feature and cornerstone of our legal system that legal professionals operate the cab rank rule when it comes to clients, and barristers do not associate themselves with their clients’ opinions. There are robust systems for declaring interests, as well as considering and managing any conflicts that may arise, in line with the professional obligations of law officers.
That hasn’t satisfied everyone, however. Speaking to the Telegraph, Labour politician Graham Stringer insisted that the PM’s independent ethics adviser Sir Laurie Magnus must probe the Attorney General. In a hint that Hermer’s job could be in a precarious place, he remarked: ‘I hope that these questions will be answered as quickly as possible by Sir Laurie so that we can end the current uncertainty around the Attorney General’s position.’ Another Labour MP was a little more forthright, blasting Hermer: ‘It’s an absolute aberration to have a senior minister avoiding that transparency. I’m surprised this still hasn’t been sorted.’ Tick tock…
Starmer must protect Britain’s defence industry
When David Frost led UK negotiations with the EU on a free trade agreement five years ago, he was supported by a 100-strong Cabinet Office team. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘EU reset unit’, also based in the Cabinet Office, is 100-strong too, including two permanent secretaries. Given Labour’s insistence that it is not seeking to renegotiate Brexit, but merely to improve relations with the EU, why appoint such a large, high-powered unit?
Setting aside the harsher criticism that the ‘EU surrender unit’ is a machine to reverse Brexit, government ministers and the PM remain tight-lipped about the officially titled ‘European Union relations secretariat’. It does not appear on the Cabinet Office website. Nick Thomas-Symonds, minister for the Cabinet Office and for European Union relations, was evasive about headcount and role when recently asked a written question by Conservative MP Richard Holden. Lord Kempsell’s tabled question met a similar response. Yet the direction of travel is clear.
Joint procurement with the EU is a risk Starmer is likely to take
Keir Starmer’s high-level visits to EU leaders since coming to power have been clearly designed to signal to the EU publicly that the UK wishes closer relations. Domestically, however, the Prime Minister and the EU reset unit are working to a different agenda. The unit is preparing for a significant summit scheduled for 19 May in Britain, where both the EU and UK hope to establish a political declaration as a precursor to a comprehensive legal trade and cooperation agreement.
What is clear is that Britain’s biggest and prized asset, and the one the EU would love to control – defence and security – is also in play. Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s 26 November letter to Emily Thornberry (Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee) clearly states that foreign and security cooperation with the EU is ‘one important track of the reset’.
Of the 27 EU members, only one has Britain’s assets and clout: France. Both are permanent members of the UN Security Council, military nuclear powers with global force projection via nuclear-armed and powered submarines, aircraft carrier strike capability and world-competing defence industries. Most recently, EU member states – if not always Brussels – were impressed by Britain’s demonstration of initiative, leadership and military capability over Ukraine. Meanwhile Macron’s France vacillated, remaining to this day way down the league table of military and financial contributors to Kyiv.
British voters should rightly be fearful that in exchange for paltry embellishments to the EU Trade and Cooperation agreement on, for instance, phyto-sanitary, veterinary or professional qualifications mutual recognition, Britain will sign up to EU defence and security agreements certain to hamstring its independence and sacrifice its defence industries. This will not only restrict British sovereignty long-term but also her ability to sign future agreements with allies not of the EU’s choosing. The Australia, UK, US (AUKUS) military partnership might not have been allowable had Britain been in a restrictive defence agreement with the EU. The partnership was stigmatised by the EU in a show of solidarity for France after Macron’s fit of pique at losing its diesel submarine contract with Australia.
France is pushing very strongly – more so since Trump’s election – for an EU defence procurement programme banning member states from purchasing non-EU military materiel (for which read French). It is whispered in French military circles that Britain will sign up to this. With Labour finances dire for the foreseeable future and the Strategic Defence Review in sight, joint procurement with the EU is a risk Starmer is likely to take. This could see, for instance, the end of Britain’s sixth-generation fighter aircraft built in collaboration with Japan and a general winding down of British defence industries as the armed forces buy European.
France, the world’s third largest arms exports, will ensure it secures the lion’s share. Britain’s arms industry will continue to go the way of Racal (bought by France in 2000 to become Thales), GEC-Marconi (merged in 2001 with, amongst others, French Matra) now headquartered in France as MBDA. This one-way street for British defence industries characterised Labour’s last term in power.
Keir Starmer’s hazardous strategy to redefine Britain’s post-Brexit relationship with the EU, driven by the shadowy EU reset unit, risks a fire sale of British interests and assets in return for marginal concessions from Brussels. Ironically, Labour’s quest for the warm glow of internationalism and Europhilia is being pursued just when a far more formidable international ‘reset’ is underway likely to put the EU and Britain, were it tied to Brussels, on the wrong side of history.