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A refreshingly apolitical Oscars
It is always nice to have a personal connection to the Oscars, however slight and fleeting it might be; hearing Conclave screenwriter give a shout-out to my daughter’s godfather Simon during his acceptance speech for Best Adapted Screenplay was a deeply pleasurable moment. Yet this joyful touch aside, what had initially looked like one of the most wide-open Academy Awards in history eventually proved to be nothing of the kind.
Indie director Sean Baker’s twisted romantic comedy Anora, about a sex worker who marries an oligarch’s son, had won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year. After various twists and turns, it asserted its frontrunner status once again, taking four awards for Baker personally: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Editing. In one of the night’s more notable upsets, its star Mikey Madison triumphed over the more hotly-tipped Demi Moore, resurgent in the acclaimed body horror The Substance.
Inevitably some excellent films are passed over every year. After the return of big-name, big-star classicism in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer in 2024, this ceremony marked a return to celebrating avant-garde, low-budget film, commensurate with the new make-up of the voting Academy. I would have loved to see The Brutalist take Best Picture and Best Director for the indefatigable Brady Corbet, who worked wonders on a tiny budget, but that modern-day masterpiece had to be content with Best Actor for its star Adrien Brody and Best Cinematography and Best Score. Conclave, a big winner at last month’s BAFTAs and a potential Best Film pick here, only took gold for Straughan, although it did engender one of host Conan O’Brien’s best lines (“A movie about the Catholic Church…but don’t worry.)
O’Brien, in fact, proved such a smoothly assured host that it seemed a wonder that he hadn’t been picked for one of the hardest and most thankless gigs in the business. He made self-deprecating gags (“A Complete Unknown, A Real Pain, and Nosferatu…these are just some of the names I was called on the red carpet. I think two were fair”), largely defused the controversy over the once-heralded French-Mexican trans musical Emilia Pérez and its star Karla Sofia Gascón’s career-ending social media history (“Little fact for you, Anora uses the F-word 479 times. That’s three more than the record set by Karla Sofia Gascón’s publicist) and even his song-and-dance number wasn’t entirely embarrassing. Expect to see him return to the podium in the next few years.
What was most interesting, in fact, was how apolitical the ceremony was. O’Brien steered clear of Trump gags. And the general determination not to cause offence might be seen in microcosm by the decision to award Kieran Culkin Best Supporting Actor for his lively performance in Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain and thereby pass up his Succession co-star for his magnetic appearance as Donald Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn in the controversial biopic The Apprentice. Strong would undoubtedly have made an intense, politically charged acceptance speech; Culkin goofed around and, as has become traditional with the actor, asked his no-doubt embarrassed wife if they could have another child now that he has another award.
In fact, the most significant controversy is one that has barely had time to bed in. Several of the actors in Anora are well-known stars in Russia, and just as few of the American winners had anything meaningful to say about the current state of world politics, they have declined to make any comments about Putin, Ukraine or any of the other myriad controversies that their country is involved in. However, given the general antipathy that exists towards all Russians from those sympathetic towards Ukraine – inhabitants of the White House aside, clearly – it is tempting to wonder if the current vogue for standing against that country might have led to a boycott of all their works, including their actors. Such a decision might have made for a more interesting (and, whisper it, worthier) winner at what otherwise proved to be a surprisingly unsurprising Oscars, Moore’s snub aside.
The man with the ‘golden arm’, who saved two million babies
James Harrison, who died in his sleep at a care home in Australia last month at the age of 88, possibly did more good and saved more lives, pound for pound, than almost anyone else born in the last century.
His blood plasma contained a rare antibody, Rho(D) immune globulin (called Anti-D), which can be used to prevent the blood of some pregnant women from doing damage to their unborn babies. But that is under-selling it. Anti-D is extremely rare (fewer than 200 people produce enough of it to donate their plasma in Australia) and the conditions which it helps with are common.
Anti-D injections protect unborn babies from Rh disease, otherwise known as rhesus disease, and haemolytic disease, which affects unborn babies and newborns. In pregnancy, the mother’s red blood cells can be incompatible with the blood of their child. If this happens, the mother’s immune system fights the baby’s blood as though it were a virus or bacteria, attacking the cells of the child. Babies who are affected can end up with anaemia, heart failure, and they can die.
Without the immunisations, roughly half of the babies affected by haemolytic disease would go on to die. With injections provided by people like Harrison, the fatality rate and rate of serious injury drops precipitously. Millions of babies who would have been injured by their mother’s blood can be saved. By donating blood, Harrison saved babies’ lives. He saved millions of babies’ lives: up to two million, it is estimated, across Australia.
Anti-D cannot, so far, be manufactured synthetically. It cannot exist without blood donations. Donors like Harrison are necessary. For many of them, when they are tested and realise they are so vital and their capacity to help so rare, blood donation becomes a moral obligation. Harrison started donating his blood plasma when he was 18 and continued making donations every two weeks until he was 81, at which point – despite Harrison’s stated desire to continue – it was discontinued on medical grounds.
He said that as a boy of 14, Harrison himself received a large blood transfusion in the course of major chest surgery. Someone who had benefitted from blood donation ought to give himself. And then Harrison realised he was blessed, that he had the ability to do far more than ordinary donors. After which, he simply had to continue for as long as he was allowed. It was on May 11, 2018, that he made his 1,173rd – and final – donation of plasma.
In Australia, Harrison was affectionately nicknamed the man with the golden arm. He was a local and national hero, an ordinary man who was capable of helping others in a remarkable way: someone who, once he realised he could help, did so diligently and regularly for as long as his strength allowed him.
Towards the end of his life, Harrison’s blood donations began to attract more publicity. He was given a Medal of the Order of Australia in 1999. He was followed and filmed by more cameras. More and more, as time went on Harrison was asked when he would give it up, and whether there would ever be a replacement for him and his antibodies. He said that he would donate for as long as he was allowed. And he hoped that when he was unable to continue, and when he was gone, there would be new ways found to produce the antibodies.
When they were interviewed by the New York Times in 2018, as Harrison approached the end of his donations, the scientists working on synthetic antibodies said what they hoped to make was a process to produce ‘James in a Jar’.
In his lifetime, the Australian Red Cross said, Harrison had produced tens of thousands of doses worth of antibodies. Every batch of anti-D produced in New South Wales, where Harrison lived, had some of the antibodies derived from his plasma. Harrison’s was a good life, now at its end.
The ‘goodies and baddies’ era of world politics is over
It’s hard to overstate just how shocking, how grotesque and shaming, was President Trump’s outburst against Ukraine’s President Zelensky in the Oval Office. Pop went the last soap-bubble of hope any of us had that US diplomatic policy for the next four years would cleave to anything other than the mad king’s personal whims and grievances.
“Goodies and baddies” is exactly how liberal democracies do see the world
The personal stuff – the petulance and bullying – is priced in with Donald Trump. But the wider drift of what’s happening is, in a way, more alarming. Historians and international policy experts seem to agree that we’re at an inflection point: the chapter is closing on the “Western alliance”, Nato and the so-called “rules-based international order” guaranteed by American power; in its place we’re returning to the primordial condition of great-power competition, spheres of influence, and colonial exploitation.
Trump’s pash on Russian power looks psychological rather than strategic, and it would be funny if it wasn’t so horrifying: in Michael Wolff’s new book All Or Nothing he makes the passing observation that Trump’s worldview is stuck in 1965. That’s in the context of him thinking being on the cover of Time magazine was a huge deal; but it strikes me that it could equally apply to his seeing Russia as a great power with a natural sphere of influence over central and eastern Europe rather than the vicious basket case it is now. Donald Trump’s calculation of his country’s, or his own, interests may be entirely cockeyed because he’s Donald Trump: but it’s clear that calculation of interest is the only game in town now.
Thucydides had the curtest statement of that worldview: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” As Tom Holland has argued, the great distinction between the ancient world and the modern, mediated through the arrival of New Testament Christianity, is the idea that the weak might deserve a look-in. Through most of history, this would have looked like a distinctly bizarre idea. It is, after all, a moral position rather than a pragmatic one.
What we had until a couple of weeks ago, at the level of retail politics, was the luxury of thinking about international relations in terms of goodies and baddies, rather than might makes right. That’s the fork on which poor Sir Keir Starmer is toasted. In his worldview, Ukraine are the goodies and Russia are the baddies, and – broadly – the goodies stick together against the baddies. But how – with America no longer taking any sort of moral position – is that to be squared with a calculation of our national interest?
Would-be sophisticates will scoff at the naivety of framing this as “goodies and baddies”. But “goodies and baddies” is exactly how liberal democracies do see the world. German fascism of the 1940s remains a rhetorical touchpoint because we see it as a unique historical evil, not because we see it as a suboptimal form of government. George W. Bush spoke of an “axis of evil”, and Reagan of an “evil empire”. I hope readers will agree that when I describe Trump and Vance’s Oval Office outburst as grotesque and shaming I am right to be framing the issue in moral terms.
Inasmuch as the US has supported Ukraine, and we and our European neighbours still do, it’s because we think that invading a sovereign state is wrong, and that we express a moral preference for a democratic nation to a murderous kleptocracy. The unique claim democracy has on us as a form of government is a moral one. Dictatorships, technocracies and oligarchies might, as what passes in Silicon Valley for an edgy intellectual will like to point out, may be more efficient. But democracy honours property rights and human agency and, however imperfectly, it restricts both what the strong can, and what the weak must suffer. Its international equivalents – a respect for sovereignty; confidence that treaty obligations will be honoured; a reluctance to shake down for mineral rights a country fighting a bloody war for its very existence – do the same.
Of course large countries as well as small have always put their national interests front and centre. Realpolitik didn’t evaporate when we started talking about international law. But the idea that foreign policy might have a moral component, and should have a moral component, has held sway for more than a century; and to the very great advantage of the world. Much as talk of freedom and democracy and international law can be used cantingly to cloak actions of great cynicism and self-interest, at least national leaders felt the need to bother to talk the talk.
The miraculous thing is that the moral position isn’t antagonistic, in the long run, to national self-interest. The US dominated the second half of the twentieth century, in large part, because it helped to rebuild Europe instead of doing a to-the-victor-the-spoils-style supermarket sweep trolley dash. Restricting what the strong can doesn’t just help the weak: it helps the strong because stability, predictability, and Russia knowing it’ll get a bloody nose if it tangles with Nato are all good for business.
Markets don’t work because of the bully power of monopoly capital and the devil-take-the-hindmost competition that the ultra-libertarians around Trump now fetishise. Markets work because of morality rather than in spite of it: where people can trust each-other, they can do business. The author of The Wealth of Nations was also the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. So I don’t think the goodies-and-baddies worldview is as naive as it sounds. It’s what brought much of the world, over the course of the last century, to peace and prosperity. Morality and realpolitik aren’t opposites. They’re substantially the same thing. And if we abandon the former in pursuit of an idea of the latter, we’re all cooked.
Why was there so little fanfare after David Johansen’s death?
We were twice transported back to the early 1970s this weekend, our memories snagged on the deaths of Roberta Flack and David Johansen. One of the two was afforded quite a send off by the media, the other wasn’t. I think they got it the wrong way around.
Flack, who died aged 88 on 24 February, was a soul/pop crossover artist with a luxurious contralto range and a canny judge of what made a hit record. She had two big solo hits in the UK with “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”, written by Ewan MacColl and “Killing Me Softly With His Song”, a Gimbel/Fox/Lori Lieberman confection written after Lieberman had witnessed a Don McLean concert and, incredibly, seemed to have enjoyed it.
Flack had another hit stateside, as they say, with Eugene McDaniels “Feel Like Making Love”, which didn’t quite make the top thirty over here. Perhaps her finest interpretation was with the exquisite Janis Ian song “Jesse”, a B-side over here. A partnership with Donny Hathaway brought her a couple of further successes. How should we rate her? She possessed a beautiful voice, undoubtedly and was fairly successful in ploughing that soul/pop crossover furrow – although less so than many of her contemporaries, such as Gladys Knight and the mid-period Diana Ross. She fancied herself a songwriter, but her album contributions slowed to a trickle and then dried up.
Instead she went for the tried and trusted talented middle of the road writers – Jimmy Webb, Gimbel and Fox, Simon and Garfunkel – and these afforded her success. Her interpretations sometimes had a beauty, but even by the standards of 1972 were perhaps rather bland. Robert Christgau remarked of one album that she “always makes you wonder whether she’s going to fall asleep before you do”. He had a point.
For me, the interesting thing about her was her collaborations with the genuinely talented Eugene McDaniels, a maverick black songwriter who was considered such a danger to US society that Spiro Agnew wanted him kicked out of the country. Flack covered quite a few of his songs and contributed to his rather wonderful, if dated, albums “Outlaw” and “Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse”.
David Johansen died aged 75 on 28 February, which most people who knew him would consider a miracle. Every other member of the band for which he is most renowned checked out years ago, the earliest being drummer Billy Murcia who died aged 21. His replacement, Jerry Nolan, died at 45 and most people thought that had been a long time coming, frankly. The guitarist, the wonderful Johnny Thunders, died aged 38.
That band was, of course, The New York Dolls. Hits – none. Their two albums made it to about 167 in the Billboard charts. Both were abysmally produced, as was Johnny Thunders’ album with his spin off band, The Heartbreakers. And yet all three albums, if you hear them today, are palpably alive, original, raw, exciting and often hilarious.
More to the point, they had probably as great an influence on rock music as the Velvet Underground. Without the Dolls, no Sex Pistols, perhaps no punk. No Smiths. No glam metal. No glam indie stuff, no Suede. You might blame them for a later epidemic of cross dressing debauchery, for epitomising the idiotic James Dean live fast and die young schtick. But you cannot deny the excitement they provided, nor that wonderful legacy of songs – Lookin For a Kiss, Personality Crisis, Jet Boy, Trash and, my own favourite, Vietnamese Baby.
Johansen was the singer – a fabulous and dangerous parody of Mick Jagger. He was, to me, the very essence of 1970s rock n roll. And I hope that now he is in some kind of heaven, the kind of heaven he would like.
Keir Starmer has had his best week since becoming Prime Minister
Even Keir Starmer’s fiercest detractors (and there are a fair few) must concede that he has had a very good week on the international stage: the best by a long chalk since he entered Downing Street. The Prime Minister, derided by critics as a political plodder, lacking in ideas and charisma-free, is a leader transformed.
The new Starmer is a man with a mission, imbued with the confidence to lead. This was very much in evidence when he met US President Donald Trump for talks in Washington earlier this week. Starmer approached the discussions in the manner of the barrister he used to be, carefully mastering his brief and solely focused on making a success of his case. His standing with Trump was bolstered by the decision to increase military expenditure (Starmer plans to boost defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027), a key demand of the new American administration.
The bonhomie between the two leaders appeared genuine enough; job done, as far as Downing Street was concerned. Some critics accused Starmer of adopting an overly-flattering approach towards Trump, claiming that it might have been better to use the occasion to tell the Americans a few home truths. One has only to look at what happened when Zelensky tried just that in his own Oval Office meeting to see the obvious flaws of such an approach. Starmer was right to focus on the bigger picture. By doing so, he has a voice at the table. That is vital in these uncertain times.
After the White House bust-up between Donald Trump and the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, Starmer was quick to call both men by telephone. More good politics on his part, and fresh evidence of his determination to act as a bridge between the Trump White House and Europe.
Next stop was a warm welcome for Zelensky in Downing Street; there were repeated embraces for the Ukrainian leader in front of the TV cameras. Who knew our prime minister was so touchy-feely?
“You are very, very welcome in Number Ten,” gushed Starmer. There could have been no greater contrast with the brutal and undignified treatment meted out to Ukraine’s leader by Donald Trump in the Oval Office just 24 hours earlier.
Zelensky was also granted an audience with King Charles. All in all, this is smart politics from Starmer, who finally appears to be learning the art of what it means to be a leader.
The events of recent days have served to highlight that this country remains an important and significant force on the global stage. Britain, ever since the Brexit vote in 2016, has been lazily characterised and dismissed as a marginal and irrelevant force in the wider world. Not so. Starmer has just hosted the European defence summit at Lancaster House, a stone’s throw away from Buckingham Palace. The leaders of France, Germany, Italy and Spain were among those taking part. This convening power – soft power, if you like – is vivid testimony to the reality that this country retains a powerful and influential voice. Our neighbours look to us at times of uncertainty and crisis.
The new Starmer is a man with a mission, imbued with the confidence to lead
That being said, no one should underestimate the scale of the task in the weeks and months ahead. Europe’s leaders have a habit of talking the talk but failing to walk the walk. There have been more promises made at the end of the London summit. Only time will tell what these promises really amount to. Starmer warned European leaders that the continent faces a “once in a generation moment for its security”. A unified European response – action not words – is desperately required at this time.
Starmer too is not yet out of the woods. His pledge to increase military spending will be paid for by cuts to the international aid budget. This has not gone down too well with those on the Labour left, and has led to one ministerial resignation. More trouble is brewing on the Labour backbenches.
Starmer’s idea of acting as a “bridge” between the Trump administration and Europe may turn out to be wishful thinking as well. The Prime Minister says he trusts Trump but not the Russians – yet a Kremlin spokesman said on Sunday that the “foreign policy “of Washington and Moscow is broadly aligned now Donald Trump is in office.
Squaring this circle will not be easy. To lead is to choose, as is often said. Even so, it is to Starmer’s credit that he has stepped up during this crisis. It may well turn out to be the defining moment of his premiership. Even Starmer haters should give him his due.
What went wrong with The Archers?
I was once a fan of The Archers, to the extent that the Guardian quoted me in 2007 outlining how ‘an unlikely combination of support from the Queen and Julie Burchill led to the transformation of Britain’s ‘everyday story of country folk’ from a dull and tired format to its present cult status.’ Apparently I wrote that ‘No longer are the women of Ambridge stuck with ‘the gallons of greengage jam that the old-guard male scriptwriters kept them occupied with for over 20 years.’
The BBC seems determined to educate listeners whom they think are ignorant
Look, I know I was taking a lot of drugs back then and my judgement wasn’t the best; witness the pair of jokers I’d been married to already! But of all the wacky attitudes I’ve held during my long, loony life (Tom Robinson was the best thing to come put of punk, I once crazily opined in print way back in the 1970s – again, I’m blaming the drugs), the idea of The Archers as some kind of feminist vanguard vehicle has to be one of the wackiest. Thankfully, I’ve since come to my senses.
After a couple of decades of being a perfectly good soap opera, like every other serial drama, whether on radio or TV, from the BBC or ITV, listening to The Archers on Radio 4 has come to feel like sitting in a doctor’s waiting room without a book, when you’re forced to plough through public-health pamphlets telling you how to think about everything, from breakfast to Brexit. But the storylines of the last few months show just how far The Archers has fallen.
These days you’d swear that there was a mandatory number of mentions of ‘climate change’; a teenager from the Malik family, who joined the show in 2023, has joined the local clandestine ‘re-wilding’ group, showing all the enthusiasm for contraband beavers that young men usually reserve for the teachings of Andrew Tate. I’ve limited myself to a monthly ‘hate-listen’ ever since the strangely mute ‘Xander’ – the test-tube offspring of resident Lovely Gay Couple Adam and Ian – was ‘birthed’ by a Bulgarian fruit-picker whose womb was hired by the hour by the pair. I’m just waiting for ten-year-old Henry to say he’s trans and we’ll have a full bingo card.
But there’s certainly no absence of Islam in Borsetshire. Young tearaway George Grundy is currently languishing at Her Maj’s Pleasure. If he converts to Islam behind bars he won’t be the first to do so. Tellingly, an EastEnders character, Bobby Beale, did this back in 2019, while serving a sentence for killing his ‘wayward’ sister. It was a bit on the nose, which I’m sure the BBC didn’t intend, though here was BBC Sunday Morning Live to make nice:
‘This week saw EastEnders character Bobby Beale begin his conversion to Islam, with the faith set to have a positive impact on his life. The storyline comes at a time when the media’s treatment of Muslims is in the spotlight, with analysis from the Muslim Council of Britain suggesting that the faith is often portrayed negatively in some media, which may be leading to Islamophobia.’
There’s also a somewhat saintly family of Muslims in ITV’s Coronation Street; ironically, Marc Anwar, the actor who played the family’s patriarch, Sharif Nazir, was sacked for making racially offensive comments about Indians on social media.
Back in Ambridge, meanwhile, the storylines about religion are getting a bit much. Lynda Snell has made the decision to start fasting for Ramadan out of respect for her Muslim lodgers. The bum-sucking, supplicating dialogue put into Snell’s mouth was perhaps the state broadcaster’s most sickening, self-immolating demonstration yet of the BBC’s capture by and capitulation to Islam; it was right up there with Sainsbury’s as highlighted by Melanie McDonagh in this week’s Spectator. The supermarket recently asked its customers ‘Are you Ramadan-ready?’ in an advert for its range of fast-breaking foods. As McDonagh pointed out:
‘Ramadan, which starts this week, is now very much part of the calendar, much more than, say, Diwali. For the third year there will be a switch-on of the Ramadan Lights in London – previously on Oxford Street, this year in Coventry Street, where the message will be ‘Happy Ramadan’ until it changes to ‘Happy Eid’.’
Do these people forget that most people in Britain aren’t Muslim? Anyway, Snell, who started out as a Hyacinth-Bucket-type New Money grotesque, appears to share this desire to suck up to minorities. Her character, very much a Lady Muck, must be one of the most annoying on the show. These days she has become far more ‘human’, if that is the word for a grovelling, guilt-ridden gutless wonder who spends an unusual amount of time worrying about being ‘the R-word’. I’m sure that this facet of her character isn’t the wretched writers’ intention – they’re not that suss or subtle – but this new version of Snell illustrates the idea of ‘luxury beliefs’: the term coined by social commentator Rob Henderson to describe the modern trend among the well off to use their beliefs as a way to display their social status.
There had been racism in The Archers before, when Roy Tucker was involved in a series of attacks back in the 1990s on the young lawyer Usha Gupta (since married to a vicar). But it was well-handled, with Roy shown the error of his ways, a sincere apology made and handshakes all round. There were no lectures or re-education back then. Was that because Usha is a Hindu, rather than a Muslim? The presentation of another family, the Gills, certainly suggests that the writers are more relaxed about the way that non-Muslims are presented. The Gills are shown as flash New Money, who bought up a swanky Archer-family home and now leave it unoccupied while they flit around the fleshpots of the infidel world. It’s a world away from their depiction of the Malik family, not least practicing Muslim mum Azra, whom the BBC describes as a ‘no-nonsense local GP’.
Perhaps the most unlikely and comic aspect of the arrival of a Muslim family in town is that it’s become part of Radio 4’s ongoing ridic and ‘beggy’ (as the youngsters say) attempt to appeal to young people or right-on oldies. One sub-plot could be summed up as: ‘Isn’t Chelsea a slag? It’s no wonder she got herself knocked up. If only she were modest and chaste like that good Muslim girl, Zainab, who doesn’t go on these awful immoral dates.’
Once again, the BBC seems determined to educate listeners whom they think are ignorant. But in doing so, they simply reveal their own ignorance; about what young people want to listen to, and about what a soap like The Archers should be about. The programme’s shift from being an everyday story of country folk to a totally fantastical story of everyday Woke folk is complete.
The copyright battle is only part of the AI war
Artificial intelligence (AI) really is the next industrial revolution. In fact, it’s already started, and the technology’s capability is developing faster than anything we’ve seen before. Its benefits mean there is so much more to be excited, than fearful, about. But such is the extent of the technology’s power and potential, it is essential we don’t allow it to be controlled only by a small number of Big Tech companies.
The approach the EU has taken is not the answer
The entrenched incumbents of Silicon Valley have developed some fantastic products and services over the years that we wouldn’t want to be without. But that didn’t give them the right to control who gets to succeed or fail online, or to censor political debate. It should not give them the right to ignore copyright laws – which would destroy the creative industries and cut-off the supply of new ‘content’ (whether that’s music, film, art, books or news) on which the success of of many AI models rely.
One of the great things about the arrival of AI technology is that it presents an opportunity to change the power imbalance which exists between established Big Tech and everyone else. You might find it surprising to hear, but President Trump and Vice-President Vance seem determined to make sure it does.
Don’t get me wrong: Donald Trump needs US Big Tech to remain successful. The prominence of the ‘Big Tech Bros’ on public platforms with him are a show of Western strength. They and he are united in wanting to make sure the West wins the AI global race against the East. They agree that a constant stream of innovation is vital to succeed.
But the President and JD Vance also want and need the benefits of this new industrial revolution to be spread across the US. They don’t want the same Big Tech firms to be the exclusive beneficiaries and dictate the terms of access for everyone else. They are determined to create a level-playing field where new entrants and new innovators – ‘little tech’ – can compete in building and deploying AI. (Vice-President Vance outlined his vision when he spoke at the AI Action Summit in France last month.)
What’s all this got to do with copyright? Well, first, it’s why Keir Starmer should not blithely sell-out UK content-creators in way that – for now at least – would primarily benefit US Big Tech.
Second, some of the best and most innovative brains coming up with great new AI innovations are here in the UK. British spin-out and start-up innovators – our own little-tech – can help accelerate the opportunities of AI, building specialist models and new applications if they are supported to scale.
Third, the UK has some of the richest and most valuable ‘datasets’ (information and content held by public and commercial institutions) vital for training AI models and developing new services and applications. We could incentivise a new, dynamic licensing market for creative and research material and make the UK an attractive AI training destination for all AI models – and offer favourable access terms to ‘little tech’.
Enabling market entry for new tech firms is critical, and it’s an important consideration in deciding how to apply copyright law in an AI world.
But the approach the EU has taken is not the answer. The House of Lords Committee that I chaired, cautioned the government strongly against adopting a similar flawed opt-out regime. We argued that much better means for ensuring technical viability, transparency, consent and enforcement are needed for such an approach to work. In other words, rights-holders would need a better way to protect their works against unwanted web-crawlers.
There are signs that the most successful Silicon Valley Venture Capital investors now accept that copyright must be respected. Though there’s still a debate about how best to do this, and the extent of ‘opensource’ AI could be a determining factor.
Opensource allows anyone to check, refine, and develop their own models using code that others have written. This encourages innovation and competition and, counter-intuitively, makes networks more secure. This open network effect is also how the internet was conceived, before Big Tech firms started to dominate about 20 years ago.
Many argue that opensource AI is critical for recreating the internet’s original level-playing field and opening the market to new entrants. Of course, there are proprietorial AI services and applications that tech firms want to protect and charge a fee for people to use. That’s what content-creators whose intellectual property has been used to build those services would expect. But not if the tech firms haven’t paid them for that content!
When it comes to copyright, the tech and creative industries should be able to find a mutually beneficial way forward that aligns incentives, and it’s essential that they do.
More broadly, the government should seize the opportunity of AI – and the UK’s position as the third most powerful player in the world – to align with the US in helping to create the tech level-playing field so many of us have been campaigning for so long. The real prize from the West winning the battle for dominance in AI is spreading the benefits of this new industrial revolution way beyond Silicon Valley and Big Tech – and the benefits must reach all corners of the UK too.
Last orders: farewell to my 300-year-old local pub
The Cherry Tree on Southgate Green began life as a coaching inn on one of the historic routes from London to York and beyond. It has been trading since 1695, when what are now the north London suburbs were open fields. But the other evening, the pub – my local – rang last orders for the final time. The brewery that owns it is having it refurbished as a brasserie, its pub status coming to an end after 330 years.
I went on its final evening for the closing-down party. It was like being in an episode of EastEnders, in the sense that it was a pub full of faces you dimly recognised from events long past, drinking and being jolly, like the Queen Vic at Christmas.
Becoming a brasserie seems an unlikely route to financial redemption for the Cherry Tree, though. There’s already another quite good one of those only 50 yards away, while another brasserie that was even better, just a little further, recently closed down after struggling for custom.
Of course, the phenomenon of pubs repurposing or rebranding against local wishes is nothing new. I recall, for example, writing an Evening Standard feature about the questions in parliament and local uproar when Dulwich’s historic Plough pub, which had given its name to various streets, businesses and even a bus route, was renamed the Goose and Granite. And that was almost 30 years ago.
That new name was dropped ten years later. And I’m not sure Ye Olde Cherry Tree – as my local lately insisted on calling itself – will fare any better than that ill-fated Goose.
While the premises are listed, it remains unclear if the brasserie will retain the Cherry Tree name. But since the nearby Woolpack became a Turkish restaurant 15 years ago, the Cherry Tree had been the only pub for more than half a mile in any direction in an area of quite high population density. Its failure to be financially viable with that small monopoly seems particularly grim.
But then these are grim times for pubs everywhere. One study found that as many as eight pubs a week were closing by the end of last year. On a recent weekend trip to Suffolk (which was essentially a 48-hour pub crawl) the best-run pub we encountered was the Lion at Theberton. The owner, Tom Lagden, has a background in theatre and it showed. He brings an indefatigable energy to running a pub, having events, ever-rotating local beers and ciders, an interesting menu, fresh daffodils on every table, well-stocked bookshelves and esoteric rather than generic wall art. He offered both metaphorically and literally a warm welcome between his enthusiastic greeting and a roaring fire. Tom’s big personality and energy is carrying the place. And the Lion has won awards as a result.
At the opposite end of the spectrum I have encountered some spectacularly badly run pubs lately, with receptions ranging from frosty to carping or practically hostile. One charmer in Essex left a disproportionately angry note on my car windscreen for having the audacity to park in his large, empty car park before taking off for a short walk. I had been fully intending to spend my money behind his bar on my return. In the event I spent it elsewhere.
Of course not every publican can have a constant real fire blazing, but some have been noticeably cold. Or they are closed at odd hours – like weekend lunchtimes. Or they hit you with something rude as soon as you walk in: ‘This area is for people who are dining only’ when you are still standing, getting your bearings in an otherwise empty room.
As the only pub for more than half a mile in any direction in a densely populated area, the Cherry Tree’s failure to be financially viable seems particularly grim
Lately I have begun to suspect that this kind of incongruously chilly welcome is a deliberate tactic: turn custom away, reduce your takings steeply and thus demonstrate that the pub is financially non-viable before you close it down on this basis. This in turn makes it more likely that you will eventually win planning permission for a change of usage from business to residential. Then you can clean up by converting your pub into flats.
Close to that wonderfully well-run Lion in Suffolk, a derelict pub was recently put up for sale at auction. The Magpie in Little Stonham dates from the 15th century, is Grade II-listed and its premises are quite substantial. But it sold for just £220,000. With planning permission to convert to residential it would be worth ten times as much. This is pub-onomics 2025.
There are also cases like the Crooked House in Staffordshire – or ‘Britain’s wonkiest pub’ as it became popularly known – which provoked national uproar when it was burned down in a suspected arson attack two years ago. The 18th-century pub was a well-known local landmark and while it was not listed, it was registered on the Historic Environment Record as a building of local importance. Its owners are still contesting the council’s order that the pub should be rebuilt to its original condition on the site. They argue the project would be disproportionately costly, and the isolated location and lack of footfall would mean the rebuilt pub would not be viable.
Then there’s the syndrome of chipping away at the amount of pub space that’s publicly open. Just last month we’ve seen this happening to two well-known London pubs. The Magdala in Hampstead (famous for Ruth Ellis shooting her boyfriend) is losing a function room, while the Wheatsheaf off Charlotte Street in Fitzrovia (where Dylan Thomas drank – to excess) is seeing its upstairs bar become flats despite local objections.
London is already full of the ghosts of dead pubs. Just in Tube station names we have Angel, Elephant and Castle, Manor House, Royal Oak and Maida Vale, all named after pubs that no longer exist. And last month a new one was added to this list: Ye Olde Swiss Cottage pub, along from the station named after it, closed down on 1 February, just short of its 200th birthday.
Among the people at the Cherry Tree on its last night was my daughter’s friend Lorcan who has lived just a few doors away since early childhood. He also worked behind the bar for a spell. And Lorcan told us of the person who will be worst affected by its change of use: an old chap who, for years now, has come in every afternoon, seven days a week, to sit at the bar on his own, Southgate’s own Norm from Cheers. The Cherry Tree may not have been a great pub but it was where everybody knew his name. I can’t see them indulging him at a brasserie. And I can’t see a brasserie still being there in 330 years.
The Imperial War Museum’s betrayal of history
The news that the Imperial War Museum is closing Lord Ashcroft’s Victoria Cross and George Cross gallery is sadly not a great surprise. It’s the latest act in the ‘wokeification’ of this once outstanding museum.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph last week, Lord Ashcroft said that the IWM didn’t even have the ‘courtesy to inform’ him of the closure. Rather, it issued a statement in which it thanked him for his generous 15-year loan but said the exhibition will shut permanently on 1 June. The reason, explained the IWM, is to create new space ‘to allow us to share more stories of conflicts that are within many of our visitors’ living memory’.
Lord Ashcroft fears that the closure of the VC and GC exhibition will leave the medals gathering dust in vaults away from the public eye. Instead of learning about the heroism and sacrifice of men and women such as Violette Szabo, the secret agent who was executed at Ravensbrück, and Noel Chavasse, one of only three men to have been awarded a VC and bar, visitors to the IWM will instead be treated to ‘Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict’. This exhibition will explore ‘the contexts in which sexual violence occurs in conflict, exploring how propaganda shapes perceptions of gender and power to shine a light on this often-silenced issue’. It’s an important subject, but does it belong in the Imperial War Museum? Will it have tourists queuing round the corner and will it leave schoolchildren in awe?
Later this year, the IWM will launch its winter exhibition: ‘Emergency Exits: The Fight for Independence in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus.’ To accompany the exhibition, the museum has published a podcast about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. ‘What happened in Britain’s detention camps?’ asks the IWM in the podcast notes. ‘What was decolonisation? And what is the legacy of the conflict today?’ It also advises listener discretion because the podcast ‘contains references to racism and sexual violence in conflict’. The main Mau Mau uprising occurred in the early 1950s. Is that within the ‘living memory’ of most museum visitors?
These two presentations are examples of what the IWM described last year as ‘embedding diversity’ in its exhibitions. Having recently consulted equality and inclusion experts, the museum has spent £100,000 to ‘reflect the diversity of our local communities and the nation as a whole’.
Like Lord Ashcroft, I’ve also experienced the discourtesy of the Imperial War Museum. As an historian of second world war special forces, I contacted the IWM several years ago on behalf of the family of a man who had served in the SAS. They wished to donate his medals – including two awarded for gallantry behind enemy lines – along with his tunic with the SAS wings sewn into the breast, and other wartime memorabilia. It was a unique collection, I explained to the museum in an email. No one ever replied. I advised the family to put the collection up for auction, which they did, and it sold for an eye-watering sum.
Having recently consulted equality and inclusion experts, the museum has spent £100,000 to ‘reflect the diversity of our local communities and the nation as a whole’
I’ve also in the past contacted the IWM to offer my services as a speaker but they don’t appear interested. Having interviewed more than 100 wartime members of British and American special forces, I’ve accumulated a fund of remarkable stories, some of which I’ve passed on to audiences at the National Army Museum. I was also the NAM consultant in 2018 for its exhibition about the history of British Special Forces. The NAM, incidentally, refuses to ‘decolonise’ its exhibitions. ‘I don’t believe we should be ashamed of any of our history,’ said director Justin Maciejewski in 2023. Nor do I.
But the IWM? Although I am unable to get my foot in the door, among those who have been welcomed to speak in recent years are David Miliband, talking about refugees, and human rights barrister Philippe Sands, who recently had a public spat with the Tory party over the Chagos Islands.
I should mention that in all the years I’ve used the research room at the IWM I’ve found the staff to be excellent. The same for the ‘boots on the ground’, the museum’s volunteers who acts as guides. Like the British police, it’s not the rank and file who are the problem in the IWM, it’s the top brass. They set the tone and issue the orders. The long march through Britain’s institutions goes on.
Twenty years ago I donated some of my audio interviews with SAS and SBS veterans to the Imperial War Museum. I wouldn’t donate them today. I would want a home that would cherish them, not one that would find them embarrassing.
Something to relish: in praise of Patum Peperium
In a social media age, certain ingredients – long esteemed by those in the know – suddenly burst on to the scene. One morning we woke up to all the supermarkets stocking Mutti tinned tomatoes. Ortiz sardines and Perello Gordal olives are now in the limelight. I wonder – given the current zeitgeist for all things umami – whether Patum Peperium (Latin: ‘peppered paste’) could be next.
Then again, the ‘Gentleman’s Relish’ – an anchovy paste made with butter and spices – isn’t for everyone. Much like Marmite, it has embraced this contentious reputation: ‘Dividing opinions since 1828’ it declares in its branding.
After almost 200 years on the scene, it has started popping up in trendy spots, like a debonair rake sauntering into a party fashionably late. I saw it recently stocked at the oh-so-fashionable Pophams Home store in Islington. But it’s always been available for those who’ve hankered after its savoury piquancy. The old porcelain pots have sadly been replaced with plastic, but it’ll cost you around just £3 at Sainsbury’s or Waitrose. Pleasingly it has not, yet, experienced Instagram inflation.
First unveiled circa 1828 by John Osborn at the Paris Food Shows, it clinched a ‘Citation Favorable’ accolade and, voila, the rest was history. Brought to London by John’s son where it found favour on Pall Mall, it acquired its moniker. As the brand explains: ‘Originally, it graced the savouries of exclusive gentlemen’s clubs, deemed too robust for the fairer sex and too refined for the common populace.’ Mrs Beeton recommended it as ‘an excellent bonne bouche which enables gentlemen at wine-parties to enjoy their port with redoubled gusto’. Ladies too, from the Mitford sisters to Nigella, have since joined its legions of fans. The late Rose Gray of the River Café enthused about spreading it on toasted rye bread with sweet Italian butter.
It is handmade according to the original recipe: anchovy fillets from Spain (‘In mare internum’ reads its logo), packed in barrels of salt and matured for 18 months before being rinsed in brine, gently cooked, and blended with butter, rusk, and a secret blend of herbs and spices. The manufacturer would not be drawn when I asked after the recipe; it purportedly ensures no single employee knows the full list of ingredients. But a clue can be gleaned from Fortnum and Mason who use dill, garlic and Sarawak pepper in their attempt to rival the classic. I suspect cayenne, mace, cinnamon and nutmeg may lurk within the enigmatic white pots too.
It’s crying out to be rediscovered for canapes. In clubland it never went away, as a long-favoured savoury. You cannot make a Scotch woodcock without it
It is not a looker. Brown and sludgy, it also has a pongy odour, not far off cat food. If taste is 80 per cent smell it’s a wonder it so delights. But, in the traditional preparation, spread on hot buttered toast, it brings a certain savoury – and intensely salty – je ne sais quoi. The packaging cautions to apply ‘very sparingly’ (which makes using within four weeks of opening, as instructed, a challenge except for the most ardent of fans). In combining seafood with butter and spices it has much in common with potted shrimp. Since 1998 there has been a rather good Poacher’s Relish (salmon) and Angler’s Relish (mackerel) too, both flavoured with a whack of lemon. Owned by AB World Foods, the relishes are now sadly made in Poland. The manufacturer couldn’t tell me why. Maybe a Plumber’s Relish will be next in the range.
Its umami character means its uses extend to cooking. You can add a small teaspoon to a shepherd’s or cottage pie, as you might Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce (which it predates) or Marmite. It can be melted into scrambled eggs. It is much more agreeable scraped on to a rosti or pommes Anna than the current chefs’ fashion for topping everything with caviar. It’s crying out to be rediscovered for canapes. In clubland it never went away, as a long-favoured savoury. You cannot make a Scotch woodcock without it.
It still offers proper English cachet, and an air of refinement. It is the height of good paste. It appears in a sandwich in Ian Fleming’s For Your Eyes Only – sparingly scraped, one assumes, rather than shaken or stirred. As Andrew Webb observed in Food Britannia (2011), it is not ‘a product for lavish slathering, but for gentlemanly deportment’. Enjoyed mainly for brekkie or tea, it is sometimes combined with a little cucumber or dainty cress.
Dividing opinions is not necessarily bad. Change is not always good. I take comfort from a divisive product, and an unchanged recipe. I relish this relish. You might too.
King Charles offers his support to Zelensky
This weekend marks perhaps the most turbulent 48 hours that Ukraine’s President Zelensky has ever experienced – and, given the events of the past three years, that is saying an awful lot. After his already notorious reception in Washington at the White House in Friday, and rather more emollient greeting by Keir Starmer in Britain yesterday, he has now visited Sandringham to see King Charles after attending a summit of European leaders at Lancaster House. Doubtless he is running on a mixture of adrenaline and righteous anger at his enemies – whether those of long standing or more recently acquired – but he is almost certainly in need of reassurance that his allies will be steadfast, whatever the circumstances.
Zelensky’s visit to Sandringham was a clear mark of both royal and personal favour
While this has already been offered by Starmer and the other European premiers in London today, the meeting with the King was rather different. The two first encountered one another at Buckingham Palace in February 2023. Zelensky described the occasion as a ‘truly special moment for me, for our country’, even if – forever the former comedian – he could not resist quipping ‘in Ukraine today, every air force pilot is a king’. This was an allusion to Charles’s often-forgotten brief time serving in the RAF, before he transferred to the Royal Navy.
The two also met briefly at a world leaders’ summit at Blenheim in 2024. The King has been impressed by the Ukrainian president, and last year spoke of ‘the determination and strength of the Ukrainian people’, praising their ‘true valour in the face of indescribable aggression’.
Today’s teatime meeting between Charles and Zelensky, which took place in the saloon at Sandringham House, comes at a time of considerable diplomatic tension. Earlier this week, Starmer was praised for apparently handling Trump with kid gloves, not least his offering an unprecedented state visit to the US President, complete with a visit to see the King at his Scottish residence of Balmoral. Under Queen Elizabeth II, this was an honour reserved solely for her own favourite American, Dwight Eisenhower. Charles is more relaxed about Balmoral, viewing Highgrove as his own personal home instead.
Zelensky’s visit to Sandringham, though, coming before Trump’s state visit to Britain either later this year or in 2026, was a clear mark of both royal and personal favour. Whatever Starmer’s involvement in the arrangements, it is obvious from the photographs released that there is considerable mutual respect between the King and the Ukrainian President.
As with the King’s weekly audience with the Prime Minister, there will be no transcript or press briefing released of the conversation, although undoubtedly there will be informal briefing as to the overall substance of their chat. The smiles on both their faces seem perfectly genuine, and it will be fascinating to see whether the King has offered any personal opinion – however diplomatically couched – about Friday’s contretemps in Washington.
Nevertheless, whatever happens, today’s events are a reminder that Charles, for all his apparent neutrality on political issues, has stepped into sensitive international matters in a determinedly partisan way in a fashion that his mother never did. Events over the coming weeks and months will reveal whether this was a masterstroke or a grave mistake.
The harm that DEI has done to public safety cannot be overstated
Firefighters do not run into a blaze like you see on TV. We crawl with purpose like rats in a maze, which is what a well-involved structure fire feels like, the smoke so thick our high-powered flashlights can’t cut through it. We are trained to locate windows and leave furniture in place as reference points while we conduct search and rescue then scurry to the nearest walls. It makes it all the more vital to have another firefighter with you.
The fire was consuming a construction site on Yale’s campus. “The security guard’s inside.” The water company hadn’t arrived yet. No matter, we were going in. I ordered the firefighter to grab the forcible entry saw. He didn’t know where it was. Precious seconds gone. I found it myself and cut my way in. “Let’s go.” He wouldn’t. I went in alone.
The next morning’s Yale Daily News was optimistic: the fire would not prevent students from moving into the dorm that fall; only three firefighters were hospitalized. They didn’t ask who or why. I fell fourteen feet down that stair shaft obscured by smoke. I would have died there had a captain from another fire company not fallen on me. He still calls me “Cushion.”
The man who abandoned me to that shaft owed his job to disparate impact, a legal concept that places all hiring and recruiting at the mercy of statistics. Disparate impact mandates that if a favored class of people fails a test, it is the fault of the test rather than the test-taker. DEI is not a modern phenomena but a direct consequence of disparate impact. On Wednesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division would no longer sue fire and police departments to force them to hire underqualified candidates into their ranks.
The harm that DEI has done to public safety cannot be overstated. For decades fire departments have been sued by women arguing that the job requirements focus too much on physical aptitude. The same trial lawyers then turned around and sued because the fire department’s exams focused too much on mental acuity when it comes to minority hires. The only consistency in a disparate impact case is that the fire department must sacrifice public safety for the sake of politics. There will be no cushion to break the fall.
Common sense crept back into the fore before Bondi’s announcement, but it took a tragedy. The Los Angeles wildfires showed the incompatibility of operational readiness with the LA Fire Department’s focus on DEI. Chief Crowley siphoned millions of dollars and countless hours from the budget, diverting resources from the critical missions of life safety, incident stabilization, and property conservation. HR departments seem more preoccupied with diversity metrics than they are ensuring candidates possess the physical strength, mechanical aptitude and cognitive skills essential for emergency services. LAFD assistant chief Kristine Larson, in a recorded statement, responded to a query about her ability to rescue someone from a fire by saying, “Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? Well, my response is he got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.” I was forced to attend enough DEI classes during my firefighting career to recognize victim blaming when I see it.
Department of Justice prosecutions played an outsized role in the weakening of public safety for political goals. The Trump administration recognizes this trend is not isolated to Los Angeles. Fire departments nationwide took note when the George W. Bush administration launched an investigation into why the FDNY’s firefighting exam did not yield enough minority and female applicants. Federal attorneys, some of whom may have spent time living in the dorm I nearly died in, have dismissed our concerns as abstract bias rather than the reality that a fire does not discriminate.
Starmer has his work cut out bringing peace to Ukraine
Keir Starmer today attempted to make the debate about Ukraine’s future one primarily held by Ukraine and European countries. This came after Donald Trump had suggested at the end of last week that it was for the US and Russia to decide.
In his press conference after the summit of European leaders in London, the Prime Minister said work was now beginning on a deal to end the war with Russia, led by European countries to then be discussed with the US to ‘take it forward together’. He also dismissed suggestions that the US was an ‘unreliable ally’, and suggested that America was at least not opposed outright to the UK leading work on a plan for peace. Starmer told reporters:
The Prime Minister’s tone was not one of any kind of celebration at all
Look, I spoke to President Trump last night. I’m not going to go through the details of that conversation, but I would not be taking this step down this road if I didn’t think it was something that would yield a positive outcome in terms of ensuring that we move together – Ukraine, Europe, the UK and the US – towards a lasting peace.
But the Prime Minister also made clear that while Russia would eventually have to sign an agreement ‘we can’t approach this on the basis that Russia dictates the terms of any security deal’. That is very different to the basis on which Trump was negotiating with Ukrainian President Zelensky last week. Starmer said that there needed to be a ‘coalition of the willing’ to defend the peace in Ukraine, adding that ‘not every nation will feel able to contribute, but that can’t mean that we sit back’.
Starmer also announced £1.6 billion of UK export finance to allow Ukraine to buy 5,000 air defence missiles. As if to contradict the suggestion from the US that Ukraine was just demanding more and more support without any benefit for the countries helping, he also rather pointedly said the missiles would be ‘made in Belfast, creating jobs in our brilliant defence sector’, underlining very directly that this kind of help for Kyiv is also beneficial for the UK.
The Prime Minister’s tone was not one of any kind of celebration at all. He warned at the end of his statement: ‘We are at a crossroads in history today. This is not a moment for more talk. It’s time to act.’ He seemed aware that while the tide of opinion is currently in his favour for not responding hastily to the Oval Office meltdown and instead trying to lead a serious response from Europe, any kind of deal is very far off, and this could all end in failure too.
Watch: Starmer rejects SNP call to cancel Trump state visit
Well, you can’t say they don’t try. With Europe still reeling from Donald Trump’s oval office bust-up with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday, over in Scotland the SNP have piped up to make their feelings known about the American President.
Never ones to miss a chance to try and stay relevant, the party’s leader John Swinney took to the airwaves to insist that Prime Minister Keir Starmer retract the invitation of a second state visit for Trump to the UK. ‘I cannot see how a state visit can go ahead for President Trump to the United Kingdom, if President Trump is not a steadfast ally of ours in protecting the future of Ukraine,’ Swinney told the BBC.
Swatting away the SNP’s clamouring, it appears Starmer is having none of it. Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg, the Prime Minister defended his decision not to retract Trump’s invitation. He said:
I’m interested in what are the practical steps, what are the bridge building that I can do, what are the relationships that I can mend and take forward to take us to lasting peace in Europe. I’m not going to be diverted by the SNP or others trying to ramp up the rhetoric without really appreciating what is the single most important thing at stake here – we’re talking about peace in Europe.
After this, Mr S can confidently assume that Swinney’s invitation to hobnob with Trump in Washington will be, er, lost in the post. Starmer: 1, SNP: 0.
Watch the full clip here:
Starmer’s summit is high stakes for Zelensky
There is only one story dominating the news this weekend following Volodymyr Zelensky’s disastrous meeting on Friday with the US President in the Oval office. After the Ukrainian president’s conversation with Donald Trump and JD Vance descended into a war of words, Zelensky’s trip to the White House was cut short and a planned minerals deal between the two countries went unsigned. Now the future of the Ukraine war has been thrown into doubt as talk grows that the US could halt all military help and a deal could be off the cards.
The hope will be that European leaders can come up with a united response
Since then, there has been a frantic effort by the UK government along with European allies to try to repair the damage and get the peace talks on track. Today Starmer will host a summit of European and Canadian leaders to discuss support for Ukraine. While this meeting was in the diary before Friday’s bust-up, the summit has now taken on a new sense of urgency. The UK Prime Minister hopes to act as a bridge between Zelensky and Trump. Starmer was initially buoyed by his meeting with Trump on Thursday in which the US President showered praise on the Labour leader – later telling Spectator World about Starmer’s ‘beautiful’ accent.
However, any self-congratulation was cut short when news reached 10 Downing Street of Zelensky’s tense exchange with Trump and his vice president. Yet despite the warm words, the UK prime minister did not succeed in winning a specific security guarantee on his visit. Instead, the main positives from the UK perspective were Trump backing Article 5 of Nato on mutual defence and a sense that the positive exchanges laid the groundwork for a good meeting with Zelensky the next day. Given the latter ‘win’ failed to come to fruition, the hope now is that Starmer’s personal relationship with Trump at least allows him to have a conversation with Trump and try to shape events – as evidenced by the fact Starmer spoke to both Zelensky and Trump on Friday evening.
The decision was then made on Saturday to give Zelensky a hero’s welcome at 10 Downing Street, with Starmer going out to meet him and hugging the Ukrainian leader. Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves has announced further funding for Ukraine in the form of a loan of over £2 billion. It shows how Starmer hopes to position the UK government – as a supportive friend to Ukraine who can also be an ally to the United States. It comes after some European figures have spoken out against Trump since Friday’s row. In a sign of the delicate balancing act Starmer must strike, the Mail on Sunday reports on cross-party unease that Trump could still see the red carpet rolled out in the UK and be granted a state visit.
When Starmer meets with European counterparts this afternoon, the hope will be that they can come up with a united response. Speaking to the BBC, Starmer revealed that the UK would work with France and potentially a few others to craft a peace plan that they could then present to the United States. However, that could mean some difficult decisions and calculations, such as whether Zelensky must apologise to get the US back on side, whether European countries could really fund the Ukraine defence without the Americans and how far they could go in sending troops should a peacekeeping force be required.
Can South Korea fix its birth rate woes?
Month after month, it just kept plummeting. The South Korean birth rate last year earned the not-so-holy prize for being the lowest in the world. The demographic crisis faced by South Korea seems hardly the hallmark of the country’s self-proclaimed status as a ‘global pivotal state’. That said, the country’s fertility rate rose incrementally to a high of 0.75 births per woman in 2024, marking the first time in nine years that any such uptick has been seen.
It is too early to say whether the tide is turning. Nevertheless, South Korea faces an unholy combination of an ageing population (with the over 65 year-olds accounting for 20 per cent of the country’s nearly-52 million people) coupled with a catastrophically low birthrate. As is well-known, the demographic crisis is hardly the only one faced by the country, as the South Korean people wait to hear the fate of their impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol.
A low birth rate will also have consequences for South Korea’s national security
South Korea, whose moniker of the ‘Miracle on the Han River’ is testament to its rapid economic growth from rags to riches, is certainly no exception to the typical relationship between prosperity and fertility. As the cost of living rises – particularly with respect to housing and the cost of having a child, let alone more than one – skyrockets, the incentive to do so declines. Add to the situation a hyper-competitive job market, a significant gender pay gap, a lack of appetite amongst South Korean women to get married (let alone bear children), coupled with the inconsistent application of laws discriminating against pregnant female workers, and the reality of an almost non-existent birth rate is perhaps hardly surprising.
Having children in South Korea is not simply about the financial cost of childcare and schooling. In a society infatuated by educational achievement from a young age, private education in South Korea takes on a whole new dimension, as parents send children as young as five to hagwon – or private extracurricular educational institutions – even after a long school day. These classes, whether in English, Mathematics, or otherwise, may not necessarily lead to stronger academic results on the part of the student. But on the part of the education provider, they are a lucrative means of gaining cash. Parents, too, may not enjoy having to send their children to these institutes, often during evenings and weekends, but as one South Korean mother once told me, ‘it is what everyone does’.
Though there may be a shortage of births, there has certainly been no shortage of incentives on the part of the South Korean government to encourage women to have more children. Indeed, one of the few areas uniting the ruling conservative People Power party and the leftist Democratic party is the recognition that something must be done.
In 2023, the government rewarded new parents with cash incentives, giving the equivalent of £420 a month to families which children up to the age of one, and £206 per month for those with children under two years old. These ‘baby bonuses’ rose by 40 per cent in 2024 when the government expanded financial support for working parents to enable them to take leave in order to care for children.
It will take time to ascertain whether the slight increase in South Korea’s fertility rate, coupled with a 1 per cent increase in the number of marriages in 2023 – the first time any such increase took place in eleven years – is an aberration or a result of these policies. But the concern on the part of the South Korean government is clear, particularly as the percentage of the country’s ageing population only looks to grow. If left unchecked, South Korea’s population is expected to shrink by nearly 30 per cent by 2072 to a level last seen in the state’s pre-democracy era in the late 1970s.
A low birth rate will also have consequences for South Korea’s national security, in a country where military service is mandatory for all men aged between 18 and 35. Kim Jong Un has pledged to increase the size and readiness of the North Korean military. As the South Korean intelligence agency highlighted on Thursday, more soldiers have been deployed to Russia to assist Moscow’s war against Ukraine. In the South, a declining birth rate will inevitably mean fewer men able to be conscripted into the military, leading to concerns of how South Korea could hold its ground in the event of any possible inter-Korean conflict reminiscent to the Korean War. Whilst some politicians, such as Lee Jun-seok, the leader of the centre-right New Reform party, have called for mandatory military service for women as a solution to the low birth rate, such a proposal is hardly free from controversy.
Yet before any further decisions on how to address South Korea’s population issues can be made, the country must first have a robust government to make such decisions. Earlier this week, in what would be his final statement at his impeachment trial, President Yoon offered the possibility of cutting short his presidential term, due to end in 2027, if the South Korean constitutional court does decide to reinstate his presidential powers. If enacted, the manoeuvre will likely attract much criticism. But as is the case in Britain, running a democracy is far from easy. Decisions, whether unashamedly allowing a strategic archipelago to fall into the hands of an enemy state or otherwise, must not be taken rashly.
Why won’t supporters of assisted dying use the ‘s-word’?
Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP in charge of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill currently going through its committee stage, has repeatedly called on Tory MP Danny Kruger not to use the term ‘suicide’ in relation to proposed new laws on assisted dying. This is not the first time proponents of assisted suicide have tried to distance themselves from the ‘s-word’. But just this week, Kruger once again had to reiterate in parliament why clarity of language is so important in this debate.
The dictionary defines suicide as ‘the act or an instance of ending one’s own life intentionally and voluntarily’. Throughout medical school, doctors learn the definitions, assessments, causes, and the various forms this can take, ranging from jumping off high buildings to taking massive medication overdoses. Suicide in people who have a terminal illness happens, rarely, and often around the time of learning the diagnosis, even before disease-modifying treatments have begun.
Definitions in the international classification of diseases – an internationally agreed classification of mental disorders designed to improve diagnoses, treatment, and research – can also be a guide to help with wording. Intentional self harm, or injury and poisoning of undetermined intent are classified as suicidal acts according to the code. Organisations like the World Health Organisation, for instance, rely on these classification codes to identify international trends in suicide incidence.
Leadbeater’s belief appears to revolve around the thinking that these terminally ill people are dying anyway, so by engaging in an assisted death they are merely bringing the inevitable forward. The act of actively taking a lethal medication mix to end one’s life then becomes something else than suicide.
‘They are all dying anyway’ may seem like a benign explanation for the avoidance of using the word suicide. But dig a bit deeper and some eligible people under the current version of the Bill could be years away from the actual natural end to their lives, surprising as that may sound. We doctors know that six-month-or-less prognoses are meaningless and largely guess work, so relying on these as the starting gun for assisted suicide discussions is a risk. Similarly, the mechanisms of how these drugs work, inducing a cardio-respiratory arrest and usually resulting in a death from asphyxiation, make this very different to ordinary dying.
When did ‘suicide’ become such a controversial word to use? Is it really still seen as something that needs to be hidden away from society, a source of terrible shame, to be kept secret and under the radar, and to be dealt with only by the thousands of bereaved families unlucky enough to be affected?
Suicide prevention, whatever the reason for wanting to end one’s life, must not be diminished. The Anscombe Bioethics Centre has indicated in its analysis of assisted dying and suicide prevention in other countries that latter becomes much harder to do when the former is legalised.
Being precise with our language is important. This is especially important given that the probably deliberately vague term of ‘assisted dying’ mistakenly means the right to forgo life prolonging or life-saving interventions to some people. At least assisted suicide adds the clarity that this law is intended to allow for individuals to receive a concoction of lethal medications from the state, and that it is to be ingested or released into a vein by the person themselves in order to end their life.
Britain is reliving the 1970s
Is Britain going back to the 1970s? Even under the Conservatives in 2022, the Financial Times was warning we were in danger of reliving that ‘relentlessly awful decade’. Since Starmer’s accession to power, the similarities have become only clearer.
Millionaire hotelier Rocco Forte drew the same comparison in the autumn, saying we’d ‘come full circle’ and that the new Labour government was ‘doing a lot based on socialism, but not a lot on common sense’. ‘They talk about growth, but everything they’re doing is anti-growth,’ he added. Broadsheet newspapers warn us that the return to ‘stagflation’ – that perilous mash-up of high inflation and stalling development – is taking us right back to the dismal era of Heath, Wilson and Callaghan. Dipping into accounts of the 1970s – Alwyn Turner’s Crisis, What Crisis? or Dominic Sandbrook’s masterly two-volume history, State of Emergency and Seasons in the Sun – you can see they have a point.
The sense of national decline, then as now, led to many dreaming of radical solutions
Of course, there are differences of degree. Under the 1974 Wilson government, the highest level of income tax stood at 83 per cent, while in 1975 inflation soared to a staggering 25 per cent, dwarfing the current rates of both. Such body-blows left the country reeling, crippled by industrial action and national debt, and made it widely known as ‘the sick man of Europe’.
‘Britain is a tragedy,’ US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reported to President Ford at the time. ‘It has sunk to begging, borrowing, stealing… That Britain has become such a scrounger is a disgrace.’ The magazine International Insider declared it was ‘fast turning into a borrower to be classed alongside an undeveloped country’. In the Margaret Drabble novel The Ice Age, one character laments the way other nations had ‘turned against England…. Powerless, teased, angry, impotent, the old country muttered and protested and let itself be mocked’.
Meanwhile, professional diarist James Lees-Milne railed that the Labour government did ‘nothing to save the economy, nothing to boost industry. Everything… is intended to placate the trade unions’. In a letter to the press, one woman from Blackburn complained it was the ‘middle people’ who had been hardest hit: ‘If you have any money left to build up the firm, it’s taken away’. It felt, she said, as if it had been ‘diabolically arranged’. Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher put it more succinctly: the Labour government had paid ‘far too little attention… to wealth creation and far too much to wealth distribution’. Plus ça change…
It wasn’t just the government or striking unions who seemed to attack the country from within. When, in 1972, the BBC screened a 13-part series about the British Empire, the one-sided picture caused uproar. Why, asked Charles Gibbs-Smith, head of PR at the V&A, had the BBC only emphasised the ‘so-called past wickedness of British imperialism?’ Another added: ‘’I cannot conceive what the purpose behind this series can be, unless it is to make us ashamed, and our children,’ Gibbs-Smith agreed: ‘Have certain quarters in the BBC decided the time has come, not only to chip away at the nation’s public image, but to erode our patriotism, particularly amongst the young?’
Britons, Sandbrook tells us, took refuge in the past, membership of the National Trust soaring to new heights. It’s doubtful whether today, with its ongoing determination to confront visitors to their properties with the darker moments of Britain’s imperial past, that same organization can provide such solace to anyone.
But there were other, more violent threats to national security to worry about. ‘Acts of casual terrorism,’ said a 1974 Times leader – which might have been written last week – had become ‘part of the texture of our lives… There is no pause in the violence… It is a sign of a civilization in regression, turning back from achievement to neobarbarism.’
Few recall just how prolific the IRA terrorist campaign against mainland Britain was at its height. In 1974, there were 11 bombings alone, from the M62 coach bombing in February (killing nine soldiers), to attacks on pubs, barracks, shops, clubs, the Houses of Parliament and the Tower of London, killing about forty people and injuring countless more. In 1975, the Hilton Hotel was bombed and so was Green Park station, the year ending with the assassination of Guinness Book of Records editor Ross McWhirter at his London home. Anti-Irish feeling in Britain seemed to run off the scale. ‘I loathe and detest the miserable bastards,’ wrote a Tory politician in the Evening Standard. ‘May the Irish, all of them, rot in hell.’
Nor was it just Ireland the British were exercised about. Immigration, then as now, was a hot issue, as the 1972 arrival of 40,000 Ugandan Asians, thrown out of their homes by newly installed dictator Idi Amin, split the UK down the middle. Some called for the Ugandans’ British passports to be honoured, others raised fears of non-integration and pressure on public services. Contemplating the sudden influx, too, of rich Gulf Arabs into Central London, Anthony Burgess in his novella 1985 imagined a future capital – Sandbrook tells us – ‘where the London skies resonate with the call to prayer’, and ‘half-moon banners flutter from street corners.’
Though many in the 70s felt average yearly immigration figures (about 72,000) were unabsorbable, politicians, then as now, flinched from tackling the topic. ‘Fear of being attacked by the press as a “racialist”,’ writes Sandbrook, ‘was much greater than the appeal of pandering to working-class sentiments.’
When Thatcher in 1978 said on World in Action that there was a danger of British people feeling ‘swamped’ by new arrivals, condemnation was swift and brutal. Liberal leader David Steel denounced the remark as ‘appallingly irresponsible’ and ‘really quite wicked,’ while Healey accused her of ‘cold-blooded calculation in stirring up the muddy waters of racial prejudice’. But what, you can’t help wondering, would any of these politicians make of current rates of immigration – at 728,000 net in 2024, just over ten times more?
The sense of national decline, then as now, led to many dreaming of radical solutions. The recent finding that over half of Gen Z would be happy to see Britain ruled by a dictator is, like many other things, a case of déjà vu. In Arthur Wise’s 1970 novel Who Killed Enoch Powell? (which imagines the assassination of the right-wing firebrand), the home secretary muses what Britain needs is ‘a strong man – the iron fist’.
Actor Alec Guinness, who’d just played Adolf Hitler onscreen, saw traits of Weimar Germany in the modern UK, saying that ‘the situation in England strikes every month a decadent, yes, decadent note… People say, why not get someone else to sort it all out for them… a strong man’. In October 1975, David Bowie told the NME that Britain needed ‘an extreme right front [to] come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up’, adding to the press a few months later that Britain ‘could benefit from a fascist leader’. Even a literary penfriend of the comedian Joyce Grenfell – that model of middle of the road English staunchness – wrote that, following a power cut, she had wondered ‘whether democracy is quite the answer!’
Various candidates for ‘strong man’ were floated – the crusty General Sir Walter Walker, ex-Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces Northern Europe or, in one surreal moment, Lord Louis Mountbatten, uncle to the late Prince Philip. Enoch Powell, sacked by Heath for his ‘rivers of blood’ speech, remained the most popular politician in the country – ‘Man of the Year’ in a BBC survey two years running – with many pining for his return. Powell, said the Guardian’s Peter Jenkins, was oddly tuned into people’s fears that ‘the politicians are conspiring against the people, that the country is being led by men who had no idea about what interests or frightens the ordinary people in the backstreets of Wolverhampton’. But it was perhaps appropriate, in an era of Women’s Lib, that it should be a woman, and a strong one at that, who would come to power at the end of this fraught decade to sweep the entire panoply away.
If our own times seem to mirror the 1970s, we should perhaps count our blessings. ‘One of the more frequent recurring fallacies,’ wrote the late Christopher Booker, ‘is people’s belief that their own age is without precedent, that some new order is coming to birth in which all the general assumptions previously made about human nature are becoming outmoded.’ You can only hope, looking round at a rapidly changing world in 2025, that Booker got it right.
Why Henry Kelly was popular
Henry Kelly was a well-loved personality in Britain. The Irish television and radio presenter, who died this week, came to prominence in this country in the 1980s in the ITV show Game For A Laugh, consolidating his popularity on BBC’s Going For Gold and on the airwaves as a presenter on Classic FM. And intrinsic to Kelly’s appeal was his unmistakeable Irish persona.
Kelly has been variously described in his obituaries as ‘jovial’ and ‘ebullient’, blessed with ‘humour’ and a ‘cosy Dublin charm’. Such appraisals could have easily been invoked to described Dave Allen or Terry Wogan, his co-patriots who also endeared themselves to the British public, entertainers who similarly embodied a benign Irish stereotype. When Terry Wogan passed away in 2016, a BBC online report lauded his ‘jocular’ presence and ‘genial manner and Irish blarney’. The same qualities were the making of Henry Kelly here, too.
That Kelly and his forerunners in popular entertainment should have come to prominence and retain such affection in the 1970s and 1980s was remarkable, given the circumstances of the time. This was a decade in which the IRA infamously took its campaign ‘to the mainland’, setting off bombs in London, Birmingham and Guildford. This wasn’t the ideal time to be Irish in Britain.
For centuries the Irish in this country had been subject to mockery, derision and discrimination – even though there is little evidence that there were signs outside hostels bearing the specific combination of words ‘No blacks, No Irish, No dogs’. And even though levels of historical and contemporary anti-Irishness have in recent history been overplayed by the left, the Irish in Britain were a self-conscious lot. As Tim Pat Coogan wrote in his 2002 book Wherever Green Is Worn: The Story of the Irish Diaspora, many Irish in Britain did experience outright hostility after the Birmingham bombing of 1974. But that was, for the most part, an exceptional experience – the year in which the Troubles reached their nadir.
When I was living in Manchester in 1996, a Belfast housemate was met with the casual greeting ‘hello bomber’ the day after the explosion went off in that city. That typified an English attitude that could certainly be ignorant, thoughtless and callous, but not necessarily one grounded in hatred or ‘racism’. My mother, like Henry Kelly, also a native Dubliner, recalls London cabbies noticing her accent in the 1970s and 1980s, but mostly in order to mock it with their own faux-Irish imitation. Again, this was crass, but hardly cruel. It was at once complimentary and idiotic.
This is how stereotypes work: they have their malevolent and benign aspects, with each reflecting the other, with each often seeping into the other. Henry Kelly is remembered as ‘ebullient’, which all seasoned obituary readers will recognise as code for ‘too fond of the drink’. But even if the Irish have been disdained as a bit too partial to the ‘ebullient’ stuff, they have been simultaneously envied for their cheery, Bacchanalian ways. This stereotype was the motor behind the explosion of Irish theme-pubs in the 1990s. It’s why, whenever Ireland win at rugby or football, the English commentator will conclude breathlessly at the final whistle: ‘they’ll be celebrating with a few pints of the black stuff back in Dublin tonight!’
Caricatures of the Irish are grounded in ambivalence, one that goes back to Shakespeare’s Captain MacMorris, the amiable buffoon from Henry V. For every Irishman portrayed as a drunkard, there has been a fun-loving Irishman who enjoys the ‘craic’. For every joke about ‘thick Paddies’ there have been jokes made by Irishmen themselves – a people the English regard as intrinsically funny. Henry Kelly appealed to a long-standing, Janus-faced apprehension. As we read this week, he was ‘cheesy’, and resembled a ‘smoothie confidence trickster’, but that taint of tackiness lent him a cosy and unpretentious air, too.
The 1990s television series Father Ted continued to embody this ambivalence, and its popularity to this day – it was copiously repeated by Channel 4 over Christmas – reflects its persistence. The comedy had three Irish characters that our English forebears would have recognised instantly: the drunken Irishman, the simpleton Irishman and the shifty Irishman. But these characters worked and failed to cause offence, partly because by the 1990s the benevolent Irish stereotype had not only survived the trials of the 1970s and 1980s – it had triumphed.
Henry Kelly is remembered fondly in Britain because, for all its awful failings past and present, this country has never stopped regarding the Irish, in general, with affection.
Ireland is on a knife edge
Is Ireland a powder keg of racist, anti-immigrant sentiment, ready to explode at any moment? That was certainly the dominant narrative after a night of rioting in Dublin city centre in November 2023 that left a trail of destruction along O’Connell Street.
On that occasion, politicians and elements of the Irish media were quick to blame far-right provocateurs for stoking tension and this was used as a convenient pretext to stress the importance of introducing the strongest hate speech legislation in the EU. Yet when it emerged that many of the Dublin rioters may themselves have been from an immigrant background, the politicians swiftly moved on to other matters.
But while TDs and ministers can afford to decide which issue is going to concern them on a day-to-day basis, the ordinary people of Ireland don’t have that luxury and with the number of people applying for entry into Ireland increasing by 300 per cent in the last five years, tensions are inevitable.
When Helen McEntee, then justice minister, told people in November that there was absolutely no evidence that asylum seekers or migrants were responsible for an increase in crime, she was sharply reminded that the reason why there is no evidence is because the government refuses to keep official statistics.
Tensions are running particularly high in Dublin, with many locals complaining of feeling increasingly unsafe. That sense of unease was heightened when, on 15 February, a Nigerian asylum seeker, Quham Babatunde, was stabbed to death during a mass brawl outside a nightclub popular with African immigrants on the normally sedate South Anne Street, which is situated just off Grafton Street and is only a stone’s throw from the Dail.
This followed an incident in Stoneybatter when a Brazilian immigrant, who has been living in Ireland for the last two years was charged with going on a stabbing spree on an otherwise quiet Sunday afternoon, which further inflamed community tensions. The case is ongoing.
While parts of Dublin remain on a knife edge, the picture isn’t much rosier in rural Ireland where tensions have been stoked by the number of hotels which have been converted into migrant accommodation centres.
In December 2023, the Ross Lake House hotel in Galway was burned down when it emerged that it was being turned into accommodation for asylum seekers. Protests have been ongoing in Newtown Mount Kennedy in Wicklow against plans to turn a former convent into a shelter, and virtually every county in the Republic has seen locals rally against local hotels and amenities being converted.
In many areas, the local hotel is at the centre of rural life, with weddings and parties held there. One of the main causes for anger has been the perceived lack of transparency about which venues have been chosen for conversion by the Department of Integration.
The Tipperary TD, Mattie McGrath, recently condemned the department for what he called their ‘deception’ over plans to turn his local hotel, the Kilcoran House, into an International Protection Centre. Speaking this week, he said: ‘It’s such a shame. What really is so upsetting is the denial which took place around this – and now we find out it’s true. It seems that local people were deliberately deceived… It’s a shame and nearly criminal that it would be used now by the present owners for greed, just for greed, not for humanitarian issues, just to make huge money and a quick buck.’
According to the department’s own estimates, there are now around 33,000 asylum seekers receiving shelter in 320 sites around the country. So, with growing concerns about an increase in violence and the decimation of once loved local amenities in favour of providing asylum accommodation, how has the government responded?
Well, to the absolute fury of many, this week saw a ‘refugee job fair’ take place in Croke Park, the home of Irish GAA. It was a co-initiative sponsored by hiring platform Indeed Ireland and the UNHCR. The job fair offered employment opportunities to refugees in traditionally low paid sectors such as hospitality, retail, healthcare and transport. During the event, translation services were provided for refugees who don’t speak English, with the languages on offer ranging from Ukrainian and Russian to Arabic and Farsi.
The head of the UNHCR Irish office, Enda O’Neill, said the initiative was a ‘game changer’ and added: ‘Refugees and asylum seekers bring the skills, talents, and qualifications that Irish employers need and they’re ready and eager to work.’
The fact that such labour tends to drive wages down and make it simply impossible for many Irish people to earn a living when competing with refugees was conveniently overlooked.
As a pre-condition to taking part in the event, potential employers were required to sign a five-point pledge on their commitment to provide opportunities for refugees and, in return, would receive grants for each one they hired.
With public anger now growing to genuine crisis levels the job fair seems, at best, remarkably tone deaf.
Far from assuaging anger, it would appear that this new government is intent on making the same mistakes as the previous administration. Never has the phrase ‘there may be trouble ahead’ seemed so appropriate.