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It’s the last chance for levelling up
‘The policymakers that live in London and stuff, they don’t really care about a small town like Rochdale. I just feel as though, for many years it’s been one of those forgotten things, we live under the shadow of Manchester.’
This quote, from a teaching assistant in his 30s with young children, is from a recent focus group we ran in Rochdale. But in truth it could easily be from any focus group in any town across provincial Britain over the past ten years, such is the national feeling of malaise.
The government is right to revive levelling up. Why it ever went away is baffling
People in these communities have long felt that their towns, high streets and public spaces are in decline. They have aired their frustrations loudly in that time. These were the areas that overwhelmingly voted to leave in the EU referendum; backed Boris Johnson’s Tories in 2019; and after ‘levelling up’ failed to materialise, unenthusiastically backed Keir Starmer’s promise of change in 2024.
One year on from that victory, few think much has changed. Our research finds these voters remain vehemently angry about the state of their local areas, and, frankly, the state of politics. Many say they simply will never vote again.
Yet, if rumours are to be believed, levelling-up is back. The Chancellor is supposedly about to change economic course and spend big, investing in left-behind towns and the red wall. Something the previous governments talked big on, but failed to do.
No doubt this is in no small part driven by the rise of Reform. Arguably Nigel Farage’s party is the only benefactor of years of government failure in these places. A woman in a focus group in Blackpool explained why she was voting Reform. ‘
‘I went from Conservatives to Labour. I feel like I’ve been gaslit and lied to and now I’m thinking, do you know what? Who hasn’t had a turn in office? I’m going Reform because they haven’t had a shot. And I’m not being funny, they can’t do any worse than what the past governments have done.’
The government is right to revive levelling up. Why it ever went away is baffling. The chance of voters backing an incumbent party while all they see locally is decline is vanishingly small. Still, there is understandably huge sceptisim that anything will improve. Visit any pub or cafe in these areas, as we regularly do for our work, and ask people if they think the government cares about their area, and you’ll likely be laughed out of the room.
This really is last chance saloon for levelling-up. Voters in these towns have been let down too many times. Promises and platitudes won’t cut it anymore. People need to see real changes. They’re not asking for the world. Clean streets, shops not left empty months on end, historic buildings not enveloped in graffiti.
Do this, and there’s a small chance the heat from Reform will start to feel a little less hot. More importantly, do this and people in provincial Britain might just finally start to feel the change they have been promised for so long.
Trump bids Elon ‘the DoGEfather’ farewell
Sporting a black eye and a shirt with the words “The DoGE Father” on the chest, Elon Musk joined President Trump in the Oval Office Friday afternoon to announce the formal departure from his role in the Department of Government Efficiency. While Musk will no longer be a special government employee and will direct his workday back to his several companies, the world’s richest man will remain a “friend and advisor” to the President when needed.
“Today it’s about a man named Elon, and he’s one of the greatest business leaders and innovators the world has ever produced,” Trump said, opening the press conference. After reading a long list of DoGE findings and their purported savings price tags, the President described DoGE’s efforts as the country’s “most sweeping and consequential government reform program,” adding that the department is “going to be much more substantial with time.”
Trump praised Musk’s business ventures including his space chopsticks, the Boring Company, Starlink, the Twitter-to-X transition and more. “He happens to be a very good person who loves his country,” Trump said after presenting Musk with a gift: a massive gold key.
While the government position’s originally allotted 130 days have drawn to a close, Musk added that the department’s mission will not conclude with his departure. “This is not the end of DoGE, but it is really the beginning,” he said. “I’m confident that over time we will see $1 trillion in savings”: a reduction from his original target of $2 trillion.
Musk added that although he believes colonizing Mars is likely more difficult than eradicating fraud, waste and abuse from the federal government, he described the DoGE process as tedious. “It’s going through millions of line items and saying, does each one make sense?” he said.
President Trump cut in, referencing the anti-Elon movement spurred by his involvement with DoGE, and praised the entrepreneur for withstanding “slings and arrows” from both the media and the American people. A reporter then asked Musk about his black eye, which he said came from playing with his five-year-old X. The child apparently has a more powerful right-hook than Musk was anticipating.
However, Musk and his associates have been taking hits from people with a longer reach than X. “We became the DoGE boogeyman,” Musk said. Since Trump’s inauguration, Musk has seen a violent worldwide movement against Teslas and massive instability in his companies’ share values. Model Ys adorned with “Anti-Elon Tesla Club” stickers now silently drive city streets from LA to DC, and can be bought on Red Bubble for less than $5.
As Matthew Lynn noted Thursday, however, Musk may not be leaving Capitol Hill with his personal finances in as rough a spot as anti-Musk agitators may have hoped.
Reporters at Musk’s Oval Office farewell also asked the President if he was pleased with the “big, beautiful bill,” which passed the House by one vote and is now waiting in the wings in the Senate. Musk had previously expressed dissatisfaction with the bill, which he believes effectively nullify most DoGE cuts. “I think a bill can be big, or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both,” Musk told CBS.
The President defended the bill, maintained it will deliver monumental tax cuts for Americans and added that “some” of the DoGE cuts were put into the bill, “but most of it is going to come later. We’re going to federalize it in Congress,” he said.
Trump also notably offered President Emmanuel Macron of France a word of marital advice after he received a very public slap from his wife. “Make sure everything happens behind closed doors,” the twice-divorced Trump said with a chuckle. The President added that he’d talked to Macron about it earlier: “He’s fine; they’re fine.”
I Dream of Lamu
An hour after the propeller plane lifts away from Wilson, Nairobi’s regional airport, it is arching over the blues and greens of the Lamu archipelago; a pattern of islands that extend 130 kms to the Somali border. Views of Lamu, which is also the name of the island and the stone town, have the dreamlike quality of an acid trip; the candy-pink minaret of the main mosque rising over coralline houses in the oldest, continuously inhabited, settlement on Kenya’s Swahili coast. And beyond the hazy shoreline, confetti-scatterings of white are the dhows that powered the fortunes of this former hub and deep-sea port. These criss-crossed the Indian Ocean on seasonal monsoon trade winds swapping ivory and slaves from the African hinterland for silks and spices from India, Yemen and Oman. The mercantile, cultural and societal cross-fertilization went on until the early 1900s, when the abolition of slavery led to the collapse of the surrounding plantations and Lamu fell into obscurity.
Skyward Express scoots low, hardly ruffling the statue-like composure of an egret beside the runway. With our hold luggage deposited by handcart onto a grassy verge at the terminal shack, barefoot boatmen, keen to make a shilling, jostle to feed the bags onto the gondolas waiting at the pier. “Plus, ça change” says a French jeweler and Lamu returnee, a fellow passenger fumbling for small notes. “It is always the same; always a transaction moving from A to B.” Without tarmacked roads, nor cars, getting around is slow; on foot, occasionally on the back of a Manda Island piki-piki (motorbike), by donkey or dhow. The same solid handcrafted dhows with almond-shaped hulls and triangular lateen sails that fuelled the slave trade still work their cargo of fish, mangrove wood and coral rag for the construction boom. Our water-bound “Uber,” with kanga-covered cushions, moves at the sedate pace of Cleopatra’s barge in low tide – “pole pole” as they say – shucking its way around the emerging sand backs and new mangrove stubble; cleaving through water as glossy and opaque as the local rock oysters. Then there is the unceremonious decanting of man and bags at Shela’s main beach. Beneath the shaded pier; a few donkeys are asleep standing up, whilst elders in kozia pillbox hats have spread themselves out on makuti mats to shoot the breeze, to pray and to follow the Chelsea score on their mobile phones.
I have been coming to Shela, the small fishing outpost and escapists’ enclave near Lamu Town, for decades. The otherworldly strangeness of the place was always part of the allure. I considered it a privilege living cheek by jowl within this strongly Islamic community, where houses backed – and still do – onto sandy alleyways or onto other houses without window-glass or proper doors so that you can hear a baby sigh, a donkey hee-haw or the 5am call to prayer. For me, Shela, in back of beyond, has always exuded a kind of mystique, even glamor, conjured on that first visit by a vision of the so-called “London It-Girl” of her generation, Lady Liza Campbell, wandering barefoot down the endless, empty beach. Walking beside an equally tawny, Tarzan-like husband, Willie Athill, with their baby clinging to her back, this was an image of marriage, motherhood and freedom that I aspired to, and we became friends. They’d occasionally make the expedition from their makeshift fishing camp in the remote reaches of the archipelago to Shela, for a shower, and catch some idle island chit-chat at the legendary hotel and watering hole, Peponi.
Peponi remains a most vivid landmark on the skyline, against ranked series of dunes and the endless beach, a bolt of gauzy white-gold, unspooling to the distant horizon. The terraces of the 1930s structure strain at the awnings that overhang the tideline, like a ship in full sail, even if the addition of an upper-level last year, fairy lit, is more cruise-liner than dhow. Today, we are staying at the venerable Moonhouse villas behind the hotel, Mama Daktari, with lovely terraces overlooking the sea and the leafy gardens that once belonged to Anne Spoerry, the original Flying Doctor. It is still in family hands. But it’s to Peponi we all descend, for the only decent drink in town.
I recognize some familiar Notting Hill faces in the the kikois and loose shirts that are a hangover from a former Peponi era, when the dress code was ordained by the late Lars Korschen, the charismatic owner of the hotel. He wore his own hand-woven Somali kikoi and faded, oft-torn linens with stylish insouciance – mostly to discourage the fishermen in caps and sweaty board shorts at the bar. Today, amidst lingering old-school riff-raff and rogues, the space is filled with a younger, shinier crowd drinking caipirinhas, listening to a different playlist directed by Korshen’s smilingly efficient thirty-year-old daughter, Kaila, at the helm.
Mr Babu English, as ever elegant in panama and starched kanzu, looks up from his backgammon board to welcome me back; he’s got me, he says, the perfect rental. Is it Falcon on Ras Kitau? I ask, or the charming Bembea tower beside the dunes? The revamped Dhow House? For there are indeed some sensational houses to stay in Shela, if you manage to have the ear of the owner. Babu won’t yet be drawn.
By the second margarita however, we are into more serious issues: Lamu’s successful bid in 2019 to prevent the building of a giant coal plant has just been reversed. Ask any regular or expat at Peponi and they’d tell you that the coal plant would spell disaster for the island’s fragile ecological status quo, which is challenged by burgeoning populations, drought, deforestation, dwindling fresh water sources and a challenged wildlife.
A few decades ago, tales of elephants skidding down the sand dunes at Kiwayu were not apocryphal; in the early 1980s there were some 26,000 pachyderms roaming the county. Now, according to Save the Elephant, only a shockingly small number, 300 max, remain. There are other elephants in the room; the multi-billion dollar, recently constructed, deep-sea port ; a blight on the horizon, casting a sodium glow that extinguishes those once blazing starlit night skies. Locals blame it for the degradation of fish stocks among other ills. Certainly, the industrial units and docks, which still stand empty, make a farce of governmental predictions for an economic and tourist boom that was to follow in the wake of LAPSETT’s promised, improved transport links.
Meanwhile, the outer reaches of the archipelago remain on the UK and USA “red list”, somewhat incomprehensibly, given the high levels of security in the area, due to the isolated Al Shabab incidents over a decade ago. Lamu’s Old Town, Shela and Manda Island are “safe-to-visit- zones.” Manda Bay Lodge on the latter’s northern tip, remains still almost the only luxury hideaway on the island; some 22 palm-frond bandas on an idyllic stretch of beach and creek, with a private dhow to explore the pristine inlets and reefs of these remote seas and marine reserve, where an astoundingly untampered wilderness waits to be discovered.
The luxury here is living close to nature in its rawest state; paddle-boarding down the mangrove creeks before breakfast with only kingfishers for company, being able to potter around Manda Toto island on foot without seeing another soul. There’s also the healing oxygenated energy and a clarity of the light in a place without doors or windows to filter the pleasure. You are, literally, rinsed clean, by tides and the kaskazi breezes. On Lamu island, this kind of exposure to nature on a daily basis attracts growing numbers of community-minded conservationists and philanthropists as well as the obligatory colonies of healers, yogis and mystics. Every morning, back in Shela, I swim with one of them, a Norwegian self-styled “reader of souls” called Annette Sturk, through the unpolluted waters of the mangrove channels. She may be on every visiting A-Lister’s speed dial as a sought-after clairvoyant, but she insists on living off-grid, on a self-built hut on stilts, deep in the mangrove forests where the weekly commute to get her supply of water takes half a day round-trip. On the high tide, with her anchor chain draped around her neck, we drift on the current that pours into the open channel at Ras Kitau, drawing a waft of jasmine and the odd surfacing turtle in our wake. Sand banks speckled with waders extend to the palm-tree studded glamorous confines of The Majlis. Expats complained when it was built, but more squeamish visitors who find the donkey dung and ramshackle charm of Shela too much are pleased to beat a retreat to this beautifully designed, if slightly undermanaged resort, with its giant pool beside a refitted Indian temple; to get their sushi fix, to lie in the only air-conditioned rooms on the island or to enjoy a hot stone massage and bikini wax in the immaculate new spa pavilion.
But I am headed further down the beach, to seek out Marcella Anselmetti and her gongs beneath a 700-year baobab tree. This is sound therapy, which is said to heighten the sense of being alive and being connected to planet earth as if, just being in Lamu weren’t enough.
Yet, inevitably, for all the gongs and private swims, there will come a time when small town mentality becomes claustrophobic. Then it’s time to break for the hills, when the temperate climate of a metropolis like Nairobi can seem like a balm. The gated community of The Social House in the leafy neighborhood of Lavington is another form of therapy. For, in complete contrast to the mad chatter and clatter of the rumor-mill of Peponi, here, in the hushed tranquillity of the Courtyard bar and garden, you’re handed an easel, a paint palette, a cocktail for a peaceful afternoon of ‘Sip and Paint’. It’s an innocuous way of bringing people together, I guess; in a world away from the Lamu dream.
Lord Hermer is preposterously wrong about international law
Lord Hermer KC has done it again. Delivering RUSI’s annual security lecture this week, the Attorney General set out to ‘depolarise’ the debate about international law, before promptly comparing those who are open to withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) with Carl Schmitt, the notorious German jurist who joined the Nazi party in 1933. If Lord Hermer’s intention truly was to lower the political temperature, and to help to broaden the base of support for the government’s approach to international law, his speech must be judged a failure. Perhaps his choice of words was simply clumsy, as he has since said, although the text as a whole suggests otherwise.
Lord Hermer’s approach to international law is incompatible with our political history and constitutional tradition
The Attorney’s speech mentions Schmitt, and a Schmittian approach to the rule of law, four times, linking him not only to the Nazis but also to Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. Carl Schmitt is not, mercifully, a household name in Britain but he does still feature in scholarly debate, often when an academic lawyer wishes to smear his or her opponents without evidence or argument. Tim Owen KC and Lord Macdonald KC, two liberal lawyers in good standing, rightly decry this tactic in their podcast, Double Jeopardy, in conversation with Lord Wolfson KC, the shadow Attorney General.
Despite Lord Hermer’s willingness to play the Schmitt card, we should welcome his thoughtful exposition of the legal underpinnings of ‘progressive realism’. Ministers and law officers should think deeply and write clearly; this speech warrants close attention.
The RUSI lecture is framed around a contrast between two ‘temptingly simple narratives’ about international law – the ‘romantic idealists’ on the one hand and the ‘pseudo-realists’ on the other. Both narratives, the Attorney tells us, ‘misunderstand our history’, ‘misunderstand international law’ and are ‘reckless and dangerous’. The argument of the lecture is that the government’s commitment to international law is the golden mean between these two dead ends.
The argument is preposterous, first because Lord Hermer has set up a straw man in the ‘pseudo-realist’ position, and second because he very obviously is a ‘romantic idealist’ about international law.
Lord Hermer’s Bingham Lecture in October last year made clear his unwavering commitment to international law and his conflation of this commitment with the ideal of the rule of law. So too his speech in the Lords in November last year. His expansive, undisciplined account of the rule of law was challenged by a succession of legal peers.
The centrepiece of Lord Hermer’s RUSI lecture is an attack on the idea that one can adopt a pick and mix approach to international legal obligations. This approach, Lord Hermer warns us, will lead to the disintegration of international law and the triumph of Putin – and of Schmitt. There are many problems with this line of argument. Notably, it is routine for states, including Western states in good diplomatic standing, to sometimes fail to comply with some of their international legal obligations, say under double tax treaties or international trade law or international conventions on drug use. This does not somehow license or legitimise international aggression.
Lord Hermer fiercely opposes withdrawal from the ECHR, as does the Prime Minister, although the logic of his position is that if a member state is unhappy with the Strasbourg Court’s decisions then it should withdraw. It would be interesting to know whether he opposes withdrawal from international agreements in principle. As Lord Hermer was speaking at RUSI, General David Petraeus (retired), the great American soldier, was addressing Policy Exchange on the subject of land mines and cluster munitions, strongly supporting Policy Exchange’s argument that the UK should withdraw from treaties on them in order to strengthen our deterrent capacity.
Many questions arise. What does Lord Hermer make of Nato states bordering Russia, who fear Russian aggression, withdrawing from these treaties or thinking seriously about doing so? If the government’s position is that the UK should remain subject to these treaty commitments, and should criticise our allies for withdrawing from them, then progressive realism would seem to fail at the first hurdle, viewing international law through the romantic, absolutist lens that Lord Hermer purports to avoid and failing to protect the UK’s national interest. Ironically, on Lord Hermer’s analysis it would seem to be Ukraine – fighting for its life and using land mines despite its treaty commitments under the Ottawa Convention – that is guilty of pseudo-realism. In Lord Hemer’s world, Zelenskyy would have to join Lord Wolfson as a fellow Schmittian.
Lord Hermer’s approach to international law is unconstitutional. His attempt to assert that ministers (and possibly civil servants) have a constitutional duty to comply with international law is flatly incompatible with our dualist legal order, which disables ministers from bypassing Parliament. Lord Hermer quotes his predecessor, Dominic Grieve KC, who is said to have defended such a duty by saying that ‘it is Her Majesty’s intention that her servants should observe the binding agreements that her previous servants have entered into’. But the King’s intentions do not determine the constitutional duties of the ministers on whose advice the King is constitutionally obliged to act.
International law is important and ministers and Parliament rightly take it seriously. One should keep one’s promises and it would be unconscionable to enter into an agreement intending not to comply with its terms. But international law is a more complex, interesting and challenging body of law than Lord Hermer’s ‘temptingly simple’ narrative would suggest. Not every international obligation is made equal and it has always remained open to sovereign states to determine when or whether to comply with a particular obligation, a calculation that should of course consider the relative importance of the obligation and the likely reaction of other states. And in a democracy, it must remain open for elected parliamentarians to deliberate about the national interest, to which international order is highly relevant, and to decide what must be done.
The obvious risk with Lord Hermer’s approach to international law is that it sacrifices self-government and the national interest on the altar of unthinking compliance, especially compliance with some international tribunal. The risk has manifested in relation to the government’s decision to cede the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, abandoning a principled legal position and the UK’s vital strategic interests for the good opinion of Philippe Sands KC and other public international lawyers.
One sees a similar muddle in the Attorney’s approach to the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Prime Minister Netanyahu, where the government looks set to breach the International Criminal Court Act 2001 and customary international law, because it cannot contemplate disagreeing with the Court itself.
Lord Hermer’s approach to international law is incompatible with our political history and constitutional tradition. Whatever happened to social democracy and the life and liberty of British people being the first goal of British foreign policy? And what do those in No. 10 make of Lord Hermer trying to define the organising goal of British foreign policy a few days ahead of the Strategic Defence Review and a few weeks ahead of a new national security strategy? What they should think is that Hermerism is an irresponsible approach to governing that should be firmly rejected.
How can France ban outdoor smoking?
Faced with a cost-of-living crisis, rising delinquency, failing public services, and riots in the suburbs, the French government has finally sprung into action – it’s banning smoking outdoors. Not entirely, of course, just in places where children might be. The new rules, coming into force in July, prohibit lighting up in any space ‘frequented by children’, which is as vague and self-important as it sounds. We’re told this includes parks, beaches, bus stops and pavements near schools. Where else? No one knows. What is clear is that the state is now more concerned with puffing parents, than with knife crime or collapsing hospitals.
This isn’t really about second-hand smoke. It’s about control, dressed up as compassion
The announcement came courtesy of the minister for labour, health, solidarity, and families, Catherine Vautrin, who described it, without irony, as a ‘new dynamic’ in France’s anti-smoking campaign. It’s hard to imagine a better illustration of political displacement. Unable to fix anything that actually matters, the French state contents itself with issuing €135 fines to middle-aged women having a Marlboro Light on a bench.
The rationale is, of course, health. But the real objective seems to be moral purification. France is trying to smoke-shame us into righteousness. It’s no longer enough to discourage smoking, smokers must be pushed out of sight. What was once a vice is now treated like public indecency. This isn’t really about second-hand smoke. It’s about control, dressed up as compassion.
The country once romanticised the cigarette as a symbol of insouciance and rebellion. France smoked with style. Remember Jean Gabin and Brigitte Bardot, smouldering through scenes, cigarette in hand. In the early 2000s, cigarette haze in restaurants, and even cinemas, was as much a part of Paris as zinc countertops and surly waiters.
Now, though, the mood’s changed. Anti-smoking campaigns have been joined by aggressive taxation, with packs now averaging €12.70. That’s over twice the price of 15 years ago. And yet, despite the crackdown, France still insists on a cultural exception. Smoking may be banned at the beach, but on a café terrace, it will remain not just tolerated but ritualised. A Gauloise with your morning espresso will still, somehow, be part of the national DNA.
Maybe the government realised it couldn’t quite get away with banning smoking on terraces. You won’t be able to smoke on a beach, but slide into a wicker chair with a noisette, right up against other patrons (children included), and suddenly your cigarette is safe again. The state may rule the streets, but the terrace belongs to the people. Ironically, café terraces are the only place where second-hand smoke bothers me. Perhaps it’s the wind always blowing in the wrong direction.
This selective puritanism is uniquely French. It’s moral in tone and arbitrary in application. Britain, by contrast, treads a less dogmatic path. Smokers pay dearly for the privilege – on average £16.50 a pack. But smoking in outdoor spaces remains largely unregulated. Beer gardens and pub patios are still safe havens for smokers, and while some schools ban smoking nearby, there’s no nationwide dictate against smoking away in parks or on beaches.
How France will enforce these new rules remains murky. Will gendarmes patrol parks, fining rogue pensioners with Lucky Strikes? Will lifeguards turn snitches over a stray Camel? France’s 2008 indoor ban saw uneven compliance at first. I recall getting into plenty of arguments at the time with smokers blatantly ignoring the new rules. This outdoor gamble feels even shakier.
What began as health policy now feels like a moral crusade, or perhaps even social engineering. You’re not just lighting a cigarette, you’re committing a civic transgression. While this ban is dressed up as protecting children, its true target is the adult who still thinks they should be allowed to behave like one. Can’t adults decide for themselves if their beachside cigarette might bother anyone nearby?
France’s technocrats, like their counterparts in Brussels and Westminster, have discovered that once you frame something as ‘for the children’, it’s nearly impossible to oppose. Resist it and you’re selfish. Question it and you’re dangerous. It’s about the symbolism. The adult must be reformed, the pleasure neutralised.
This is what Macron’s government does best: a crackdown for the cameras, a reform for the press release. The real vice isn’t tobacco, its liberty taken too far. And perhaps that, more than cigarettes, is what the state wants to extinguish.
So when in France, light up – if you must – but do it sitting down, espresso in hand, in one of the few places left where the government hasn’t yet confiscated adulthood. For now.
How much is ‘Truss Social’ learning from Truth Social?
Zuckerberg, Musk, Trump… Truss? Cockburn was surprised to hear from across the Pond that Liz Truss – who served as prime minister of the United Kingdom for just 49 days – had plans to set up a social media site. “What I am doing is establishing a new free speech network, which will be uncensored and uncancellable, to actually talk about the issues people don’t want to talk about,” the former PM said at a conference in England last month.
The move would see Truss compete with X, Parler, Gettr, Gab and, yes, Truth Social, Trump’s social media app. How will she pull it off? With some American assistance, it seems. Cockburn understands Truss’s network is set to be part of the media conglomerate John Solomon and Mark Meckler are working to establish. Perhaps parading around the Trump inauguration in a MAGA hat actually paid off. Truss did not respond to a request for comment.
“Liz Truss is taken as seriously in America as she was in Britain,” one MAGA insider with knowledge of both countries told Cockburn. “All we know about her is she shows up at every conference trying to sell some book. Last time she was in a room of MAGA people, everyone thought she was there to take coffee orders.”
Solomon is the founder of JustTheNews – and SEC records list Solomon’s firm TAME as a vendor for digital ad sales on Truth Social. Solomon is also in the good graces of President Trump, who has regularly shared Solomon’s articles on the app. Meckler is one of the co-founders of the Tea Party movement and also served as interim CEO of Parler in 2021.
Earlier this month, the American Thinker published a blog saying that “a well-financed effort is underway to acquire several major conservative outlets, including Human Events, the Post Millennial and the Daily Caller, to roll them up under a single owner.” The site’s managing editor Andrea Widburg names Solomon as being behind the effort – and says that while she has “no beef” with Solomon, he is “a man with a vision that he pursues relentlessly, but no matter how much money or authority he gets, he never fulfills that vision.” The same website published a rebuttal from Solomon this week, in which he contests several of Widburg’s characterizations of him and his prospective donors. He renews his “request for a retraction” (how free speech-y!). Yet Solomon also refers to “the company Mark Meckler and I am seeking to build” and does not push back on the description of the proposed roll-up. Human Events and the Post Millennial already share ownership.
Given how initial media reports branded the former PM’s planned site “Truss Social,” Cockburn finds it intriguing that someone with a role at Trump’s site is set to be involved. How many lessons will Solomon’s new venture take from his previous experience with the President’s app?
Cockburn reached out to Solomon, Truth Social and the approached outlets for comment – and will update you if he hears back…
On our radar
MUSK YOU LEAVE? The White House is having a farewell press conference for departing senior advisor Elon Musk shortly. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt and her deputy Margo Martin marked the occasion by posing in Trump’s Tesla.
IF YOU KNEW SUSIE The FBI are probing an attempt to impersonate White House chief of staff Susie Wiles through texts and calls to senior Republicans.
ERNST AND OLD Senator Joni Ernst told an Iowa town hall that “we all are going to die” during a heated discussion about the reconciliation bill’s cuts to Medicard.
MAHA’s ‘cite’ for sore eyes
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services released its “MAHA Report” two weeks ago – and Cockburn commends the department’s art directors. The fonts are to die for! There’s just one problem with the dossier, which addresses chronic diseases among American children: it’s riddled with discrepancies and cites several sources that don’t exist.
The report asserts the multi-generational deterioration of health among young Americans is a direct result of ultra-processed ingredients, synthetic chemicals and over-medication. However NOTUS found seven of the cited papers seem solely to exist in the report itself, including one titled, “Changes in mental health and substance abuse among US adolescents during the Covid-19 pandemic.”
NOTUS reached out to epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, who was listed as an author for the article, and she denied any knowledge of a paper under that title. “The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” she said. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”
During Thursday’s White House press briefing, Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the errors in the report are due to “formatting issues,” adding that the report will be updated. Leavitt did not address speculation that AI could have led to errors in the document. “Minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected,” HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said Thursday. Cockburn can’t wait to see which supercomputer RFK deploys in his fight to defeat autism…
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The real reason why academics write in gobbledygook
Why can’t academics write properly? Why can’t they express themselves in language that normal people can understand? These are questions that have echoed through the ages, and ones that still resonate today – so much so that even academics are starting to ask them.
In an address to the Hay Festival this week, Professor Kehinde Andrews of Birmingham City University lamented how the work of so many of his peers is written in ‘devastatingly bad’, ‘mind-deadening’ and ‘over-convoluted’ prose. Taking one book as an example, he asked why it ‘kept using the word “quotidien”. What does “quotidien” mean? “Everyday”. Why not just say “everyday”?’
While many will welcome this intervention by Professor Andrews, and many have for decades groaned at the tendency of academics to lurch into gobbledygook, this misses the point. Academics in the humanities today don’t write in order to be understood by the public, or even by their students. They write the way they do primarily to signal fealty to an ideology. Indeed, gibberish is intrinsic to that purpose.
This has been especially the case ever since the advent and dissemination of postmodernism in the 1960s, one that was reliant on giving new meanings to old words – with Foucault talking of ‘epistemes’, meaning unspoken rules which govern knowledge – or just making words up, famously with Derrida and his neologism différance (look it up).
If professors and students at universities couldn’t understand what these philosophers were actually talking about, then at least they could repeat the voguish words to give the appearance of intelligence, or parrot them to indicate tribal affiliation to an elite. These two base human compulsions have been the motors in the what the late Sir Roger Scruton called ‘the nonsense machine’ in academia, one that set off in the 1960s and subsequently went into global overdrive.
Scruton was not afraid of difficult ideas or demanding prose, being an authority on Immanuel Kant, a thinker notorious for his difficult style, so he could well recognise when perplexing prose served not to illuminate fresh ideas, but to mask their absence. He saw it in Derrida, Foucault and in their countless contemporaries whom he wrote about in his 2015 work Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of The New Left.
It is in his assessment of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser that we see Scruton elucidate most concisely the true function of meaningless words and bewildering syntax: ‘His constant laps into nonsense is not, in the eyes of his disciples, a fault, but a deep proof of his intelligence. He provides a way of writing in which political allegiance is all that there is, but which also has the form of intellectual enquiry’.
Scruton, a philosopher who was a master of prose and languages (he who would have read his antecedents in the original German and French), had inserted the word ‘disciple’ quite deliberately here. He knew that strange-sounding ideas can bewitch and entrance people, working in conjunction with a yearning to belong to a tribe imbued with a sense of mission.
This is why wokery, that off-shoot from academia, is so fond of bizarre-sounding words and neologisms that the man in the street doesn’t understand. Hyper-liberalism represents a continuation of the same, elitist, tribal mindset. It’s no coincidence that the guru of woke, the transgender writer Judith Butler, is notorious for her opaque prose, a style in which ‘obscurity creates an aura of importance,’ as the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum has characterised it.
Today’s hyper-liberals use jargon and obfuscation for the same reason the dimmer type of postmodernist did: to signal affiliation to a class who appear to understand big words that you don’t. They have rolled out the likes of ‘intersectionality’, ‘heteronormativity’, ‘microaggressions’ not with the primary intention of making a point or changing your mind, but to make themselves look clever to their peers and superior to you.
This is why they are given to weaponising words, either by using neologisms to identify their enemies – ‘terfs’ – or keep changing the conventions of language in order to catch out those they would like to cancel. If you innocently use the wrong pronoun, be prepared for punishment. If you use a dated word, even one that was formerly meant as a polite euphemism, such as ‘coloured’, you will face the consequences. And don’t even think of curiously enquiring of a stranger: ‘where are you from?’ In Ivy League and Red Brick universities that is an invitation to social death.
Professor Andrews is on the right track when it comes to academic writing, but his lament side-steps larger questions that still need answering. Does higher education today teach you how to think, or what to think? And is the primary purpose of going to university to make you more clever, or make you appear more clever?
Melania Trump is phoning it in
There’s something admirable about Melania Trump’s commitment to doing absolutely nothing. While America obsesses over her husband’s latest provocations, the First Lady has opted for absence – and turned it into a pretty lucrative enterprise.
Consider this month’s rare emergence from her self-imposed exile. As rumors swirled that Donald’s vendetta against Harvard stemmed from the university rejecting their son Barron, Melania was finally compelled to issue a public statement. The denial was characteristically terse: Barron never applied to Harvard, and all such assertions are “completely false.” How fitting that the woman who spent a mere 14 out of the first 108 days of her husband’s second term at the White House should surface only when the family brand requires management.
When Melania does deign to appear publicly, it’s hardly worth phoning home about. Her recent Rose Garden ceremony alongside Trump to sign the Take It Down Act – legislation criminalizing revenge porn that she championed – was a masterclass in minimal engagement. She described the new law as a “national victory” for protecting children online, yet managed to convey the distinct impression that she’d rather be anywhere else. Even her advocacy feels performative, a carefully choreographed appearance designed to tick the “caring First Lady” box before retreating once again to Manhattan.
But Melania’s true masterstroke came last week with the announcement that her memoir’s audiobook would be narrated “entirely using artificial intelligence in my own voice.” She heralded this as the future of publishing – apparently unaware of the irony. Nothing quite captures the essence of a deeply personal memoir like having a computer read your most intimate thoughts with all the emotional authenticity of a satnav announcing the next junction.
The AI narrator serves as the perfect metaphor for Melania’s entire tenure. Why engage in the tiresome business of actual participation when you can simply outsource it to a machine? She has managed to author a book about herself without even troubling herself to read it aloud. Fitting for the woman who once wore a jacket reading “I really don’t care, do u?” on an official trip to visit migrant children in detention. At least required her physical presence; now she can broadcast her indifference without bothering to show up at all.
What’s remarkable is how Melania continues her masterclass in having it both ways. She remains simultaneously the most absent First Lady since Bess Truman and one of the most entrepreneurial, launching cryptocurrency tokens and securing a reported $40 million documentary deal with Amazon while maintaining her aristocratic distance from the vulgar business of governance. Political wifehood is just personal branding, the constitutional role as just an optional extra.
She’s the anti-transparency First Lady, someone who’s figured out how to be present while absent, engaged while disengaged – and apparently, how to write books without actually writing them. It’s a kind of genius, really.
Dan Patrick’s war on weed gummies could endanger Texas Republicans
In a press conference that veered into awkward sketch comedy in Austin, Texas, yesterday, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick railed at reporters over a table full of THC snack products sold in the state as he demanded the media alter their reporting on Senate Bill 3, which he’s called “the most important bill this session” – an effort to effectively ban the sale of any THC products in the state.
“This is everything you can buy at a smoke shop and a vape shop that will either cause potentially paranoia, schizophrenia (or) tremendous health issues,” Patrick said. “Why have I called you here today? Because I don’t think the media has taken this issue seriously. I don’t think the story has been told. You talk about jobs being lost, you talk about a big industry, a big industry selling all of this to kids.”
Patrick, whose effort could still be vetoed by Governor Greg Abbott, invited the press under the auspices of “end-of-session beverages and snacks,” ended up flinging a bag of cereal bites in frustration at a reporter, saying: “I don’t think you want it. You wouldn’t dare buy it. You wouldn’t let your children, your grandchildren buy it. And by the way, come September, all this will be illegal anyway, so I’ll be turning this over to the police before I leave here.”
Patrick invoked the flavor of THC and CBD mango and peach gummies, and their form, such as gummy worms, as proof that the industry is purposefully targeting products at children, not adults. He also claimed that no adult should be purchasing these products either – that no one knows what’s really in them, and that they can cause mental damage and schizophrenia – claims the industry strongly disputes.
Patrick’s crusade for a ban puts Abbott and Texas Republicans in a difficult position. The state’s $8 billion THC industry, which currently employs ten of thousands of Texans, has enormous support from the veteran community and others who purchase THC products as an alternative to opioids or other addictive pain management drugs. And the push for a ban is directly at odds with the views of Texans according to polling from the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Politics Project:
In April, polling by the organization found 50 percent of Texas voters opposed an outright ban, while just 34 percent expressed support. The share who said they strongly opposed the ban was also more than double those who said they strongly supported a ban, 35 percent-17 percent. Meanwhile, 51 percent of Texas voters supported legalizing at least a small amount of legal marijuana. Only 15 percent said it should not be legal.
For decades, Texas Democrats have been trying to find a path to turning the state blue, seeking openings on abortion, immigration and other issues as key to unlocking a potential backlash to Republican rule. Patrick’s unpopular effort could finally provide that path, as well as angering many who flocked to Texas in recent years fleeing the authoritarian policies of blue states. And a crackdown on products this ubiquitous and popular in the state will require a heavy amount of enforcement to be at all effective. Maybe the Texas Rangers can start by frisking people outside of Joe Rogan’s Mothership?
Has Serbia really fallen foul of Moscow?
Is it getting harder for Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić to maintain his balancing act between Moscow and the West? Why else, after all, would Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) suddenly revive a year-old story about covert arms supplies to Ukraine?
Back in June of last year, the Financial Times splashed the story that Serbia had exported around €800 million (£673 million) worth of ammunition to third parties that then ended up being transferred to Ukraine. At the time, Vučić did not try to deny this, but said that it had nothing to do with Serbia. ‘We have had many contracts with Americans, Spaniards, Czechs, others,’ he said. ‘What they do with that in the end is their job.’
This is a warning and a gift all in one
This is nonsense. Ammunition, like weapons, is covered by the international system of end-use certificates, which control their re-export. It is, of course, possible for unscrupulous facilitators to find some loopholes in the system, but €800 million worth? Hardly.
Yet at the time, Moscow offered only the most muted of responses. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov simply suggested that they would be having discussions with ‘our Serbian friends’, while the Foreign Ministry’s Maria Zakharova, usually a reliable source of impassioned vitriol, overlooked it altogether. Ultimately, the Russians recognise that Vučić is one of their last best friends in the Balkans, and his efforts to maintain a working relationship with the European Union also work to their advantage. ‘The closer Serbia is to the EU, the more useful it can be for us,’ asserted one Russian thinktankers close to the Kremlin bluntly.
Besides which, Serbia is useful for so many Russian agencies and individuals, from the intelligence agencies using it as a base for operations across the Balkans, to the sanctions-busters who use it to move goods to Russia and launder their profits. This is particularly an angle that Aleksandar Vulin, Vučić’s loyal henchman — who, in his time, has been deputy prime minister, spy chief, interior minister and defence minister — has pushed hard during his numerous trips to Moscow. Meanwhile, Serbia remains dependent on Russian gas and has not joined the wider sanctions campaigns against Moscow.
It might seem strange that the SVR is now reopening this issue, especially considering that Vučić attended Putin’s Victory Day extravaganza, despite threats from Brussels that it would jeopardise Serbia’s chances of joining the EU and a diplomatic illness that looked as if he was laying the groundwork for an eleventh-hour change of heart. Yet it is doing so with enthusiasm.
The ‘Serbian arms industry tries to stab Russia in the back,’ it said, ‘in defiance of Belgrade’s officially declared “neutrality”.’ Even though ‘Russia has stood by Serbia during the most critical moments in its history,’ nonetheless ‘the desire of Serbian arms makers and their backers to profit from the blood of their fellow Slavs has made them forget who their real friends are, and who their real enemies are’.
While challenging some elements of the SVR’s report, Vučić has said that if it does transpire that Serbian arms and ammunition are indeed ending up in Ukraine, he will cancel the relevant contracts. Nonetheless, he doesn’t seem quite as discomfited as one might expect. Two distinct conspiracy theories are doing the rounds in Moscow to explain this.
The first is that this is all performative, that Putin is helping Vučić out with a carefully staged row. The Russians realise that he has to play a double game – and that the Serbian economy cannot afford to curb its arms exports. Given, then, that Vučić blotted his copybook with Brussels by going to Moscow, this is intended to restore his credibility with the Europeans.
The second is that it reflects the slow decline in the influence of Nikolai Patrushev, former secretary of the Security Council. A hawk even by Kremlin standards, Patrushev had become the informal ‘curator’ – manager – of Russia’s Balkan policy. A frequent interlocutor with Vučić, Patrushev had been the main driver behind Moscow’s ‘Serbian Trojan horse’ strategy. However, with the prospect of EU membership for Serbia as distant as ever and hundreds of thousands of Serbian-made tank and artillery shells flowing into Ukraine, others are now suggesting that the current policy benefits Vučić more than Moscow.
There is likely some truth in both explanations. There is a degree of impatience with Serbia that can now be expressed within the Kremlin more easily now that Patrushev is just a presidential aide, a position giving him influence rather than power. Nonetheless, there is also an awareness that Moscow has severely limited options for influence in the Balkans, and it is Serbia (and Bosnia’s Respublika Serbska) or nothing. Hence the use of the SVR to lead this campaign, an agency still close to Patrushev and with numerous back-channels into Belgrade. This is a warning and a gift all in one, a case study of just how complex the geopolitics of the Balkans remain.
Hermer admits Nazi comments were ‘clumsy’
As if the Attorney General hadn’t proven his ability for conjuring up negative headlines enough, Lord Hermer took it upon himself on Thursday to compare political threats to leave the ECHR to the Nazis. Speaking to the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RUSI) defence think tank, Hermer earnestly told his audience: ‘The claim that international law is fine as far as it goes, but can be put aside when conditions change, is a claim that was made in the early 1930s by “realist” jurists in Germany.’ But today, after a momentous backlash, Hermer has finally apologised for his, er, ‘clumsy’ language. You can say that again!
Now Hermer’s spokesperson has issued a short statement on the Attorney General’s comments, noting brusquely that:
He rejects the characterisation of his speech by the Conservatives. He acknowledges though that his choice of words was clumsy and regrets having used this reference.
It’s hardly a full-throated apology, eh?
The row-back comes after the Conservatives and Reform UK politicians alike slammed his remarks – with Nigel Farage fuming that the comments were ‘disgraceful’ while Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s spokesperson noted that ‘it was ironic’ that Lord Hermer had said he hoped to depolarise the debate and ‘simultaneously called everyone he disagreed with Nazis’. Quite!
Why Gen Z is converting to Catholicism
Both of my parents are Jewish, as were theirs, going as far back as anybody remembers – probably to Abraham.
As with many secular, Jewish-American families, God was practically non-existent in our house, though we still observed holidays like Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Passover. There came a point, however, when I had to ask why we partook in any of these traditions if God, who commanded their observance, wasn’t real.
I figured that the Greeks had Zeus, the Romans had Jupiter, the Norse had Odin, and now we have God. This one will pass, too.
In college, I studied progressive politics and devoured the writings of Marx and Engels, forming a firm foundation for my socialist beliefs. It wasn’t until I decided to engage directly with conservatives to discover exactly why they were wrong. Over the course of several months, my entire worldview collapsed piece by piece.
This metamorphosis changed everything.
After shedding my leftist politics, I studied logic and classical philosophy for the first time, soon becoming convinced of Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover” – a first cause that is pure, uncontingent existence. It wasn’t long before I cracked open the Old Testament and was completely enraptured by the God of the Israelites and how he chose to reveal himself, particularly in the burning bush.
The burning bush shows us who God is: He is simultaneously creation and destruction, life and death, and ultimately, the first cause, which Aristotle reasoned. His essence is revealed as both ever-present and wholly separate from the world, that he is the Master above creation, in which these paradoxes do not exist for him.
This thirst for truth then led me to the gospels, where I discovered Jesus. He was loving yet authoritative, and his parables struck me as deeply true.
It didn’t take long until I was a Christian. However, it took roughly three years of studying Christian history and listening to hours of debates to finally decide that the Catholic Church was the real deal – divinely instituted and the bride of Christ.
After I got baptized last Easter, I did not tell my friends or family right away. One day, my dad looked up some of my published work and discovered my X account, where he saw a viral post of my priest baptizing me.
His reaction, as was the rest of my family’s when they soon found out, was not rage or dismissal as much as it was confusion. I’m not Irish or Italian, so why would I be Catholic? To many secular Jews, Judaism is your culture, your blood – not primarily your religious beliefs.
So, are so many of us in Generation Z hungry for Catholicism?
We were raised by generations who rejected their conservative upbringing. Our parents unshackled themselves from tradition, orthodoxy and the established order. They inherited the hippy movement of the ’60s, which deconstructed the world and remade it.
Those of us in our 20s grew up in the nuclear winter of a world devastated by postmodernism and relativism. Our culture is saturated with vulgarity and pornography, shaping the music we listen to, the TV shows we watch, and is ubiquitous on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Many are now rejecting this culture for something true, good, and beautiful. We want to be grounded in principles that acknowledge and confront the societal decline unfolding around us.
Catholicism, with its 2,000 years of firmly rooted beliefs, has largely stood athwart the post-Enlightenment world yelling “stop.” But even the Church, in many ways, succumbed to modernity after the Second Vatican Council.
In recent days, young, traditional Catholics have been delighted to find an ally in the new pontiff, Pope Leo XIV. The pope’s “aura” has been celebrated, with one influencer optimistically proclaiming, “Millions will convert under Pope Leo XIV.” Popular meme accounts have already declared the new pope to be “based” for affirming standard Catholic doctrines.
Anecdotal evidence suggests Catholic parishes across the United States are seeing anywhere from 30 to 90 percent increases in conversions. And the more traditional churches are seeing the largest booms.
This kind of growth isn’t unique to Catholicism. Pew Research conducted a massive survey in 2020 on Jewish Americans, which discovered that 17 percent of Jews under 30 are Orthodox, compared to 3 percent of those 65 and older.
In other words, young people crave authenticity and tradition, not the watered-down religion handed down from bygone generations.
Gen Z intuits that among the great material achievements of modernity come demonstrable negatives. And these negatives are crushing to the spirit and the flesh. Abundant comfort and a manic dedication to a “you do you” morality have instilled a relativism and nihilism in young people, desperate to find solid ground among sinking sands.
Today, young people want to stand for something larger than their own immediate pleasure and material gain. They want to fix their eyes to heaven and say, Not my will, but thine, be done.
The growing militancy of the BMA
To understand what’s really going on with the latest British Medical Association strike threat – it is currently balloting 50,000 doctors over a putative six-month strike in support of a 29 per cent pay claim for ‘resident’ (formerly called junior) doctors – it’s instructive to look at what happened to Liverpool City Council in the 1980s.
The local Labour party had effectively been taken over by Militant entryists, who then exerted de facto control of the council. One of their aims was financial: they argued that cuts to the Rate Support Grant meant that £30 million had been ‘stolen’ from Liverpool by the government. But they also had a broader political aim: they saw conflict with the government as an end in itself.
The parallel with the BMA is far from exact; before Militant, the local Liverpool Labour party was perfectly normal and respectable. The BMA, on the other hand, has always been a byword for trade union militancy so over-the-top that it makes the rail unions seem timid in comparison. But there is one parallel that really does work: that broader political aim of causing trouble for the sake of causing trouble.
A key player in the BMA’s militancy is Emma Runswick, the deputy chairman of the BMA council, who describes herself as an ‘unashamed socialist’. She is joined on the council by Rebecca Acres, who describes Labour under Sir Keir Starmer as ‘proto-fascist red Tories’. Runswick makes no bones about what she sees as the role of the BMA: ‘successful unions’, she says, are ‘in dispute often.’ She has been open that the demand for more pay is part of a wider political battle: ‘Organising for pay restoration also improves our strength as a union to fight for all sorts of changes, locally and nationally.’
Runswick and her colleagues in the BMA’s Broad Left group used classic hard-left entryist tactics to win election, securing 26 of the 69 council places to achieve what they refer to as ‘multiple changes at multiple levels of the BMA’, and being ‘politically very astute’ by ‘inserting candidates sympathetic’ in key roles. With their political influence they have pushed the BMA to weigh in on an array of hard left causes, such as publicly critiquing the Cass Review into gender identity services for children and young people – despite the BMA, as a trade union, not having any role in the interpretation of medical evidence.
They also directed BMA funds to support the RMT strikes and issued a statement expressing the BMA’s ‘solidarity with rail workers and the RMT in their ongoing dispute.’ As the chair of the BMA’s council, Philip Banfield, put it, this demonstrated ‘the essential bond shared between organised workers today.’
Leaked BMA documents have shown how they operate in classic activist fashion, instructing supporters to compile files on fellow doctors to ‘build up knowledge of every junior doctor who works at your NHS Trust’, giving each a score to represent the extent of their support for strikes.
The 29 per cent pay claim itself is objectively preposterous. Earlier this year, doctors were given a 4 per cent rise, with resident doctors also receiving an extra £750, lifting the rise to 5.4 per cent. This is less than a year after they were handed a 22 per cent rise within days of the Labour government taking office, as Health Secretary Wes Streeting sought to halt the strikes.
But preposterous as the latest claim is, it is not remotely surprising. For one thing, another strike has always been planned by some. Last year a series of leaked WhatsApp messages revealed that Robert Laurenson, the co-chair of the BMA’s junior doctors’ committee was suggesting a strike to start this summer: ‘I would consider striking with a low threshold for 25/26 when Labour’s honeymoon period ends and they make some sort of mistake that leaves them politically vulnerable.’ Streeting had, of course, sent a clear message to the BMA that its militancy worked by offering them an enormous 22 per cent rise with nothing in return.
Even before the hard-left takeover the BMA was a byword for greed and obstinacy. Now that many of its key positions are held by hard-left activists who see the organisation as being in the front line of a broader political battle, it is inconceivable that it would now, of all times, resile from militancy. That is its aim.
Britain’s Gulf trade deal is not the place for virtue signalling
Rachel Reeves announced that a trade deal with the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) – in other words, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states – was imminent last week. It was then leaked that, even though the deal was with unashamed petrostates with no time for net zero and, in some cases, a distinctly doubtful record on rights, the text imposed no legal duties in respect of human rights, modern slavery or the environment.
The trade unions and human rights groups are unhappy. The TUC wants any deal to be conditional on workers’ rights protection; the Trade Justice Movement and other earnest humanitarian activists are demanding binding commitments on human rights and pollution. So far, the government has stood its ground. In the Lords, Baroness Jones said bluntly that whatever our concerns might be about the GCC states’ record on liberty, human rights or the environment, trade talks were not the right place to raise them.
Trade deals should take account of our national interests and not much else
We must give credit where credit is due. Despite the fact that Labour in opposition frequently trumpeted the idea that trade deals needed to reflect political ideals, Baroness Jones is absolutely correct.
For one thing, the progressives’ moral arguments against the deal may sound good when you first read them. But on a closer look, they turn out to be highly dodgy. True, it’s pretty clear that some of the GCC states do indeed brutalise their people, their atmosphere or both in ways we don’t like. But it’s not as if our government is encouraging or supporting this. On the contrary, it makes it quite clear that it doesn’t.
What the activists are actually arguing is that Starmer’s government is under an imperative moral duty, because of what some GCC governments do, to impoverish the people of the Gulf states (who may not even support the regimes they live under) by increasing the price they pay for goods and services. They also want the Prime Minister, in effect, to imperil productive jobs in the UK and elsewhere, and to decline to ease burdens on companies here and in the Middle East, for the same reason. Many people will find such arguments not so much morally upright as priggish and ethically incoherent.
Nor, for that matter, are they likely to be very effective. Anyone who believes that a country gains admiration or influence by lecturing another about its internal practices should think again. We only have to look at the reaction in this country to the clumsy attempts by the US administration of Donald Trump to strong-arm us into changes in our laws about speech: however much you may like free speech, our feeling is rightly that this is our business and not Uncle Sam’s.
Or, indeed, imagine that the GCC was foolish enough to insist that, as a condition of signing any deal, this country should take steps to suppress what they see as Islamophobia. This would clearly kill the deal stone dead, and rightly so. It is a racing certainty that not only the governments but also the people of the Gulf states would think exactly the same about any attempt by the UK government to tell them how to run their internal affairs.
Suppose, too, we did say to the GCC that because of our commitment to an ethical foreign policy we would not sign a trade deal unless it contained binding provisions on workers’ rights, the environment and other matters. What would happen?
Whatever fond ideas the TUC or other political pressure groups may have about the influence of Britain as a force for good (or their idea of good) in the world, it’s difficult to see that it would have any effect whatsoever. The idea that, say, Saudi Arabia or Qatar would change their internal policies for the sake of preserving free trade with an economically second-eleven country like the UK is for the birds. They would simply shrug their shoulders and walk away, to the benefit of neither side.
Ironically, the beneficiary in such a case would very likely be the EU, which is also said to be closing on a deal with the GCC. Do we really want a situation where, because of a desire to virtue signal, we concede to EU companies more privileged access to Middle Eastern markets than UK ones?
Put simply, trade deals should take account of our national interests and not much else. The fact that such countries as China and Russia, for example, are no friends to us should make us think twice about making any arrangement with them. (Indeed, there is one feature of the national interest that might give us pause for thought about the Gulf deal: namely, that apparently the government has conceded the possibility of foreign governments holding up to 15 per cent shares in our newspapers.)
Labour, however, is right to take the view that, exceptional cases aside, governments should hard-headedly separate morality from trade. They may not be loved if they do – but they will certainly be better understood and respected. And that, in the long run, is what matters.
Lord Hermer’s ‘Nazi jibe’ at Reform won’t work
It is an axiom of political debate that once you compare your opponents to Hitler’s Nazis you have definitely lost the argument. That golden rule seems to have escaped the notice of the Attorney General Lord Hermer, who, in a speech to the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RUSI) defence think tank did just that.
Hermer, a close friend and fellow human rights lawyer colleague of Sir Keir Starmer, told RUSI that both Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and Kemi Badenoch’s Tories were echoing Nazi ideology that placed national law above international agreements with their threats to withdraw Britain from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR):
But does Lord Hermer really have Britain’s best interests at heart?
Our approach is a rejection of the siren song, that can sadly, now be heard in the Palace of Westminster, and in some spectrums of the media, that Britain abandons the constraints of international law in favour of raw power… The claim that international law is fine as far as it goes, but can be put aside when conditions change, is a claim that was made in the early 1930s by ‘realist’ jurists in Germany, most notably Carl Schmitt, whose central thesis was, in essence, the claim that state power is all that counts, not law. Because of the experience of what followed in 1933, far-sighted individuals rebuilt and transformed the institutions of international law, as well as internal constitutional law.
In the 1930s, Hitler did pull Germany out of the League of Nations, forerunner of the UN. But to draw parallels between that and the debate over the UK’s membership of an organisation staffed by unelected judges and lawyers that overrides the wishes of an elected parliament is going wildly over the top.
Both Farage and Tory Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick have floated the possibility of withdrawing Britain from the ECHR over its obstruction of the deportation of illegal immigrants, on the grounds that their human rights come first. Founded in 1950, in the wake of the defeat of Nazi Germany in the second world war, the ECHR was, however, designed for a very different world to the one that we find ourselves in today. Mass migration by land, sea and air was unknown and national borders were strictly guarded.
Hermer’s smearing of Reform with the taint of Hitler’s Nazis is a clearly coordinated stepping up of Labour’s campaign against the insurgent party that was launched this week. Keir Starmer attacked Reform’s economic plans, which he compared to Liz Truss’s ill-starred and short-lived premiership.
But does Lord Hermer really have Britain’s best interests at heart? If you wished to construct a model of a caricature human rights lawyer representing and defending this country’s declared enemies, then Hermer would be your man.
In the course of his long legal career at Doughty Street and Matrix Human Rights chambers before entering government last July, Hermer represented such figures as Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader and apologist for the IRA’s campaign of terror; spoke out in favour of Isis bride Shamima Begum’s return to Britain; and defended a whole host of convicted Isis and al-Qaeda operatives and activists. He has also advised Caribbean countries on obtaining reparations for slavery from Britain.
Since his elevation to the House of Lords and his appointment as Attorney General by his chum the Prime Minister, Hermer has overseen the prosecution of people involved in the riots that followed the Southport killings last summer and approved the equally controversial ceding of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.
Nigel Farage lost no time in hitting back at Hermer’s speech. The Reform leader told the Daily Telegraph that it was ‘disgraceful’ for him to compare the growing campaign for withdrawing from the ‘outdated’ ECHR to 1930s Germany. He said that Britain’s national interest was endangered by the arrival of ‘dangerous young men crossing the Channel’ and added that ‘Starmer and Hermer are out of touch with British public opinion and these insults can only strengthen our case’.
Starmer’s welfare cuts are nothing like ‘Tory austerity’
Keir Starmer has already folded on the winter fuel payment, promising a partial reversal of the policy by reinstating it for pensioners in receipt of pension credit. How much longer before the proposed £4.8 billion cuts to welfare benefits go the same way?
This morning, the Health Foundation think tank has issued a pronouncement that will be a red rag to critics of Labour’s welfare cuts: that the effect of Starmer’s reform of disability benefits will be four times as great as changes proposed by the Conservatives before the election and on a similar scale to George Osborne’s benefits cuts of 2015. Those cuts, announced in Osborne’s July budget of that year, after the Conservatives had unexpectedly been returned with a 15-seat majority, ending the coalition with the Lib Dems, were designed to save £9 billion over four years.
While Osborne made benefits a little less generous, he did nothing to curtail demand from people claiming them
Osborne’s benefits cap, which was supposed to limit the amount any household could receive in benefits to £26,000, was cut to £23,000 in London and £20,000 elsewhere. Working-age benefits were frozen for four years, Employment and Support Allowance for people with disabilities was cut by £30 a week and the under-21s were to be stopped from claiming housing benefit. The policies didn’t just upset opposition MPs, however; they set in train the resignation of then work and pensions secretary Ian Duncan Smith the following March, who declared that for him to vote for a further round of cuts would be a ‘compromise too far’.
If there is one thing Labour MPs will not want to hear, it is their own government compared with what many regard as evil ‘Tory austerity’. You don’t have to be a mind reader to detect that many are already feeling a bit like Duncan Smith did in 2016: they fear it is demeaning their principles to support their government’s welfare cuts, however much they might want to be, as Duncan Smith put it, a ‘team player’.
But here is the thing. While Osborne’s welfare cuts were damned by the opposition and even some within his own party, in the event they did nothing to cut the welfare bill. In fact, the benefits bill failed to save very much at all. Taking 2019 prices, welfare spending fell moderately from £137.5 billion in 2015 to £128.2 billion in 2019 before rebounding to record levels of £152.7 billion this year.
While Osborne may have made benefits a little less generous, he did nothing to curtail demand from people claiming them. On the contrary, the switch to Duncan Smith’s Universal Credit system seems to have encouraged claims. The numbers of people on out-of-work benefits reached a low of 3.6 million in August 2017 before rebounding (before the pandemic) to reach 5.95 million now. Disability benefits grew from just over 1 per cent of GDP then to over 1.5 per cent now.
If it is politically impossible for a government to trim a modest £4.8 billion from a budget which the OBR expects to reach over £100 billion by the end of this Parliament, what hope is there of any government keeping a lid on welfare? It is easy enough for an advocacy group like the Health Foundation to preach about the iniquities of benefits cuts, but then it doesn’t have to draw up a public budget or manage a deficit which is running at £150 billion a year.
No one should be surprised if Starmer backtracks on the £4.8 billion of cuts to Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and others; that is looking more likely by the day. But it will be yet one more hammer blow for fiscal responsibility and yet one more step down the road to national bankruptcy.
Labour ministers averaging a union meeting a day
Whatever happened to that £22bn black hole, eh? As yet more pay rises are dolled out to workers across the country this month, Mr S has been scouring the government’s transparency data to take a closer look at just how many times ministers have met with union barons. The conclusion? Quite a lot. In fact, in just six months, ministers tabled over 220 meetings with their trade union representatives – working out at just under 40 meetings a month and 1.3 a day. Talk about up the workers…
Between July and December 2024, some 222 meetings were held between union representatives and Labour ministers. The Department for Business and Trade was kept busiest, with 41 meets scheduled across Labour’s first six months in power, while the Department of Health and Social Care came a close second on 38 discussions and the Department for Education hot on their heels with 37. Unions including Unite, Unison, GMB, BMA and Prospect became regular Whitehall visitors during Sir Keir Starmer’s first half year in power – and their reps proved effective negotiators, with union wins like the resident doctors calling off industrial action after they received rises worth over 22 per cent over two years. Alright for some!
Yet despite all these chummy chinwags, the Starmer army are under pressure to fork out yet more cash for UK workers. Pay review bodies made their recommendations this month and after inflation rose to 3.5 per cent, the government agreed to lift wages for NHS staff on Agenda for Change contracts by 3.6 per cent, gave a 3.25 per cent rise to civil servants and bestowed a 4.5 per cent uplift on members of the armed forces. Meanwhile the government agreed to gift nurses and midwives a 3.6 per cent uprise, while teachers and doctors have been handed 4 per cent.
Not that the workers agree. Nursing staff are infuriated that their senior colleagues have been awarded more than them, calling it ‘grotesque’, while medics are frustrated by what they see as a dismal offering. In fact, despite meeting with the BMA 12 times last year, Health Secretary Wes Streeting has found himself in a stand-off with the union – which has insisted that another 20 per cent rise is required to bring physician wages back to where they were in 2008. As the BMA leader, Dr Ross Nieuwoudt, told Times Radio: ‘It is generous. But I mean, it needs to be more generous.’
Streeting boasted last year that he stopped the junior doctor strikes – but more could be on the horizon now a new ballot for industrial action is underway. The Health Secretary has urged union members to vote ‘no’, warning them that the public no longer support their demands, but it remains to be seen whether BMA doctors will heed his calls. Education unions, meanwhile, have broadly welcomed the pay rises offered by Starmer’s army. You win some, you lose some…
Bets for France and Haydock
Jockey Kieran Shoemark and trainer Charlie Fellowes are two talented men who deserve a change of fortune. Shoemark lost his job as first jockey to John and Thady Gosden after being blamed for Field of Gold’s narrow defeat in the Betfred 2000 Guineas at Newmarket four weeks ago.
Shoemark then rode Fellowes’ filly Shes Perfect to victory in the French 1000 Guineas at Longchamp, only for the three-year-old filly to be demoted from first to second for interference. To add insult to injury, the decision was appealed and despite evidence from both men that they had been hard done by, they failed to get the result overturned.
On Sunday, Fellowes and Shoemark will return to France, this time to Chantilly, for the Qatar Prix du Jockey Club, or French Derby (3.05 p.m.), when they hope LUTHER will land the French Classic over a distance of 1 mile 2 furlongs. The horse was fourth in the French 2000 Guineas earlier this month. Fellowes told the Racing Post earlier this week:
For me he [Luther] ran almost the best Derby trial out of any of them in the French Guineas. We sat closer to a very strong pace than the other three who reoppose and we had the widest draw. He did everything the hard way and he ran an absolute screamer.
The step up in trip has to be a positive on pedigree and he got a little bit outpaced coming into the straight at Longchamp and then stayed on really nicely all the way to the line – having used up a lot of petrol early doors to hold his position, with the speed they were going. The other three sat a long way off a very fast pace.
The soft ground at Chantilly would be a slight concern to me as would the fact Luther is running in two big races in France in just three weeks. However, the suggestion, even though he may go off a bigger price on the day with more places, is 1 point each way Luther at 12-1 with bet365, William Hill or Unibet, all paying three places.
What do you do with a horse like CHILLINGHAM? Trainer Edward Bethell’s horse has plenty of talent as he showed when fourth at Royal Ascot in a hot handicap, the Copper Horse, nearly two years.
Then a four-year-old gelding, he pulled too hard that day and yet managed to run an really encouraging race off a mark of 95 on ground than was quicker than ideal. At that point in his career, Bethell saw his charge as worthy of lining in the prestigious SkyBet Ebor at York.
The trouble is that Chillingham has run more poor races than good ones since his Royal Ascot fourth and he was disappointing on his seasonal debut this term when only tenth of fourteen runners at Musselburgh.
Tomorrow Chillingham, now six years old, lines up in the Betfred Play Fred’s £5 Million Handicap (Haydock, 1.13 p.m.) race. He sports a first-time visor and, in the hope it does the trick, I am tipping him as a value bet off a rating of just 92. The horse has stable jockey Callum Rodriguez in the saddle and there should still be some cut in the ground by the off too.
At the time of writing only one bookmaker, William Hill, had priced up the race so the suggestion is 1 point each way at 14-1, four places with that firm. Once again, there may well be bigger prices and more places available by race day tomorrow. Chillingham is certainly not one for the mortgage but he is more than capable of winning a race like this off his current mark.
I also want to have another ante-post bet for Royal Ascot at a huge price. The form of last year’s Britannia Stakes at Royal Ascot, for three year old horses over a mile, could not be working out much better. The third horse that day, behind Mickley and Skukuza, was trainer Karl Burke’s NATIVE WARRIOR. He was actually the first runner home on the near side after the field split.
Native Warrior’s form has been mixed since then but he had an encouraging prep run for Royal Ascot on Monday, when second in a five-runner Windsor handicap. This horse is much better suited to a fast-run, big-field handicap and the perfect race for him is therefore the Royal Hunt Cup on June 18.
The one worry is that, with a rating of just 92, he may not make the cut for the race because last year the lowest rated horse to get a run was off 93. In the hope, that he does get a run, he’s worth backing 1 point each way at 50-1 with William Hill, paying four places. Make no mistake, this horse, owned by Wathnan Racing, is still well handicapped and connections love nothing better than a Royal Ascot winner.
However, make sure your bet is only struck with a bookie, such as William Hill, that refunds your stake if the horse is declared at the 48-hour declaration stage but does not make the final line-up because the race is oversubscribed. The horse’s trainer has indicated this race is Native Warrior’s target and, if he does line up next month, there is no way he will go off at 50-1 on the day.
Incidentally, as I suspected last week, one-time favourite Kyprios will not line up for the Ascot Gold Cup next month having been retired because of injury. Meanwhile, the horse I put up for the race, Trawlerman, won at Sandown yesterday and is now a top-priced 5-1 for his big Royal Ascot target. Here’s hoping…
Last weekend: – 4 points
2 points win American Affair at 5-1 for the Temple Stakes. Unplaced. – 2 points.
2 points win Ghostwriter at SP for the Tattersalls Gold Cup. Unplaced. – 2 points.
Pending:
1 point each way Chillingham at 14-1 for the Betfred Play Fred’s £5 Million Handicap, paying ¼ odds, 4 places.
1 point each way Luther at 12-1 for the French Derby, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Native Warrior at 50-1 for the Royal Hunt Cup, paying ¼ odds, 4 places.
1 point each way Trawlerman at 8-1 for the Ascot Gold Cup, paying 1/5 odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Duke of Oxford at 33-1 for the Northumberland Plate, paying 1/4 odds, 4 places
2025 flat season running total – 11.8 points.
2024-5 jump season: – 47.61 points.
2024 flat season: + 41.4 points on all tips.
2023-4 jump season: + 42.01 points on all tips.
2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.
2022-3 jump season: + 54.3 points on all tips.
Lord Hermer’s ‘Nazi jibe’ shows his naivety
Amid talk of a summer reshuffle, I recently asked a senior member of the Labour party if he thought the Attorney-General was likely for the chop. He paused and reflected. ‘No’, he eventually replied. ‘But he’s going the right way about it.’ Similar sentiments will no doubt be expressed in Downing Street today as they pore over the morning papers. ‘Law chief in Nazi jibe at Tories and Reform’, screams the splash headline of today’s Times: Richard Hermer KC has done it again.
Hermer showed a naivety of how his remarks would be interpreted
The cause of the headline is a speech which Hermer made to the RUSI think tank yesterday on the government’s commitment to international law. The Labour peer made a thoughtful, lucid speech critiquing Bismarckian notions of realpolitik and offering a reasoned defence of the rules-based order – including Britain’s commitment to the European Court of Human Rights. But one section of the speech leaps out from the page:
Our approach is a rejection of the siren song, that can sadly, now be heard in the Palace of Westminster, and in some spectrums of the media, that Britain abandons the constraints of international law in favour of raw power… The claim that international law is fine as far as it goes, but can be put aside when conditions change, is a claim that was made in the early 1930s by ‘realist’ jurists in Germany, most notably Carl Schmitt, whose central thesis was, in essence, the claim that state power is all that counts, not law. Because of the experience of what followed in 1933, far-sighted individuals rebuilt and transformed the institutions of international law, as well as internal constitutional law.
Schmitt’s work was used to provide ideological justification to the Nazi regime, as Hitler unwound the protections of the Weimar regime. Hermer did go on to say that ‘I do not for one moment question the good faith, let alone patriotism, of the pseudo-realists.’ But the choice of Schmitt – when other theorists were available – was both clumsy and unhelpful to his colleagues. Robert Jenrick is among those queuing up to criticise the speech, telling the Times that is ‘appalling that Hermer would insinuate those who think we should leave the ECHR are like the Nazis.’
Hermer showed a naivety of how his remarks would be interpreted. He is no longer a lawyer or academic, able to make such remarks to a like-minded audience. Hermer is now a politician who ought to be keenly aware of the sensitivities around the ECHR, answerable to parliament, the public and, yes, the ‘spectrums of the media’ that he so disdains.
The case for looking back in anger
Last week marked the anniversary of the Manchester Arena bombing – the deadliest terrorist attack on British soil since the 7/7 London bombings. Twenty-two people were murdered, most of them children and teenagers, at a pop concert targeted with deliberate cruelty. Among them was Saffie-Rose Roussos, just eight years old – the youngest known victim of terrorism in UK history. It was the first time a jihadist attack in Britain had deliberately targeted a music venue, the first of its scale in Northern England, and the deadliest ever on a civilian crowd in that region.
Our love, we’re told, must be stronger than their hate. But I believe, deeply, that this is part of the problem
The attacker used a homemade nail bomb – built to kill, but also to maim and disfigure. While such weapons had been used before in Britain, including by far-right extremists in the 1999 Soho bombing, this marked the first time an Islamist terrorist deployed one in a UK mass-casualty attack. It brought the methods of war zones into the heart of civilian life.
On Tuesday evening, I joined a vigil in London organised by students at King’s College – young people of many backgrounds and faiths, united not by politics, but by principle. They gathered to remember the victims of Manchester, and to honour those killed in Islamist terror attacks around the world – from the UK to Israel, from Iran to India. Alongside speakers of Iranian and Indian origin, I was invited to speak not only as a journalist who has reported on the aftermath of such attacks, but as someone who refuses to ignore what we are truly confronting. What follows is the speech I gave:
I’ve seen too many Islamist terror attacks with my own eyes. As a Jew, as a Briton, and as a journalist, I’ve stood at the wreckage in the aftermath – from Paris to Brussels, from Manchester to London, and in Israel. I’ve seen the twisted metal and the torn lives. I’ve interviewed the survivors. I’ve reported from the streets while the blood was still drying.
And yet, time and time again here in Britain, we’re offered the same advice. Or, let’s be honest, command. Don’t look back in anger. Don’t hate.
Our love, we’re told, must be stronger than their hate. But I believe, deeply, that this is part of the problem. Because what kind of people are we if we feel nothing when children are blown apart at concerts, if we do not burn inside when worshippers are stabbed in synagogues, when partygoers are butchered in fields? If we cannot hate that – what can we love?
Let me be clear: the battle we fight against Islamist extremism is not a war against any religion, any race, or any community. On the contrary – among our ranks in that battle are Muslims, Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, and those of no faith at all. Good people of all backgrounds, united not by what they are, but by what they reject: barbarism.
Because what we hate, what I hate, is not a people or a faith. It is a violent ideology. One that glorifies death. One that murders children and calls it victory. One that rapes, burns, takes hostages, slaughters – and dares to do it in the name of God. And yes, I hate it.
I hate what they do to us. I hate that they kill us. I hate the belief system that tells them they must. I hate their persistence – their pride in returning again and again to tell us: we will keep killing you. But most of all – I hate that they force us to fight.
War is always brutal. Always dehumanising. It costs not only lives, but something of our souls. And yet, when we are faced with a death cult, a creed of blood and fear, we have no choice. To fight back is not only necessary. Sometimes, it is righteous.
Lately, many of us have watched the tide of opinion shift unjustly against Israel – a nation dragged again into war 600 days ago on 7 October 2023, not by choice, but by necessity. A nation fighting not against civilians, but against Islamist terrorists who slaughtered civilians in their homes, in their beds, at a music festival. They took hostages, and every one of them must be returned. We must force them to return the hostages.
That fight is ugly. It is painful. But it is just.
I’m not much of a poet, but in the middle of thinking through all this – as a citizen, a human being, and someone who has simply had enough – I found myself hearing the echo of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous sonnet: ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.’
So if you’ll indulge me – here is my own version. Not about love, I’m afraid, but about hate. Not about romance. But about the fury of the living who will not bow to the killers of the innocent.
How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.
I hate you to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can stretch to meet you in the night,
Where shattered lives lie buried in your blaze.
I hate you through the echo of the praise
Your martyrs crave before they go to fight;
I hate your calm deceit, your twisted rite,
Your bloodstained creed, your hunger for death’s gaze.I hate you in the names the dead still wear
From Be’eri to Nice, and London’s heart;
In Manchester, where music met despair,
And Paris fell beneath your evil art.Yet most I hate the fight you make me face, That stains my soul, yet touches not our grace.