Douglas Murray

It is said that since Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office, it is once again possible to use the word ‘retarded’. Or at least to use it without being cancelled by a group of demonic online third parties pretending to be woefully offended by the use of an often-useful term. I don’t know how long this window of opportunity will remain open, so let me note while I can that it is hard to think of a country in the world that has a more retarded public discourse than Britain. Almost everyone in public life aims to stop any discussion of the issues via obfuscation and misrepresentation The journalist Andrew Norfolk died this month at the age of 60. For once the term ‘brave’ deserves to be used of a journalist.

Regular readers will know that I have an obsession with home burglaries. Specifically those occasions when a burglar goes into a British home, helps himself to the contents of the household and finds that the last people on his case are the British police. Scanning some recent burglary statistics, I was struck again by the almost miraculous failures of force after force. Take Kent Police. In a recent breakdown of crime statistics, the force managed a career high. In one of the areas where they are meant to have oversight, there were 123 home burglaries. Of those 123 burglaries, they managed a great, round zero in their detection rate of the burglars. Or 0.

They say that death and taxes are the only certain things in this life. I would add BBC bias into that mix. It was probably about 20 years ago that I first went on Newsnight. In those days Jeremy Paxman ruled the roost and taught me an early lesson in live television. Jeremy asked me my view and I gave it. He then turned to the other guest and duffed him up a bit. I made the mistake of smiling briefly, only for Paxman to turn on me and say something along the lines of: ‘I don’t know what you’re grinning about.’ He then proceeded to duff me up a bit too. Lesson learned. Back then, when you left the Newsnight studio, your phone would explode. Like Question Time some decades ago, it was must-watch television.

A few years back, a friend from Newcastle was down in London and I was giving him a tour of the town. At various points I stopped and pointed out where various friends had lived. ‘That’s where my late friend X used to live.’ ‘That’s where my much-missed friend Y had his shop.’ Eventually my delightfully straight-talking friend stopped me and said: ‘Are any of your friends fucking alive?’ I’m happy to report that the answer was ‘yes’, but it did make me think about something I’ve unwittingly done all my life – which is to have a disproportionate number of friends who are much older than me. One of my closest friends died last week at the age of 93.

Some readers may have noticed that it takes rather a long time to get anything done in Britain these days. For example, if you added them all together, I wonder how many hours of Prime Minister’s Questions and BBC Question Time – under consecutive governments – have been taken up by a discussion of HS2. The debate over whether the country could construct a faster way to get out of Birmingham seems to have dangled over us for decades now. It is always we who must become impoverished and everyone else who can become enriched It is the same with almost every other major infrastructure project. That is because the UK is not just caught up by a sclerotic officialdom, legal overreach and much more, but because we seem to be caught between ideas.

One of the most controversial things that can happen at any American table is to start talking about the JFK assassination and then say: ‘I think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.’ Thanks to decades of theories, counter-theories and Hollywood movies, a majority of the American public have for many years believed that there was a conspiracy to kill the 35th president. In their view, even if Lee Harvey Oswald was the gunman (which some dispute) then he must have been acting as part of a larger plot involving the CIA, FBI, LBJ, KGB, KKK or KFC. OK, I threw in the last one to check you were still with me.

Almost every nation has a national poet. The Russians have Pushkin. The Persians have Ferdowsi. The Albanians have Gjergj Fishta. But it would be a very odd thing if any of these peoples had their national poet taken away from them or were forced to have their national poet insulted. Indeed, it might be considered rather bad form if someone told the Russians that the author of Eugene Onegin should be held accountable for the era of serfdom. Or told the Persians that the author of the ‘Shahnameh’ should be as nought because his era did not have all our views on gay marriage. Yet the English. Ah – the English. We are allowed to be treated with a unique type of disrespect. And so naturally that disrespect can even be levelled at our national poet.

In its infinite wisdom, the Labour government appears to be reconsidering the introduction of a blasphemy law in the UK. It has picked up this idea despite it being so idiotic that it was even rejected by the last Conservative government. That well-known theologian Angela Rayner has decided to set up a council to look into the question of ‘Islamophobia’. As mentioned, there was a push to do this during the Conservative era, when a committee including some of the worst people then in public life – Dominic Grieve, Naz Shah, Anna Soubry – looked into the same thing. Their scholarship foundered, as it always will, on how you protect Muslims without simply protecting the feelings of Muslims.

A poll out this week found that only 41 per cent of those aged 18 to 27 are proud to be British. Frankly I’m surprised the figure is that high. After all, if you add together the immigration of recent decades and the concerted effort to demoralise the population that has gone on, that is exactly the sort of result you would expect. It has been achieved in a remarkably short space of time. In 2004, some 80 per cent of young people in the same age cohort said that they felt proud to be British. So within 20 years we have managed to halve our sense of national self-worth. What explains it? Perhaps I should get the most dangerous explanation out of the way first.

The new administration in Washington has somewhat startled its critics by issuing a blizzard of executive orders during its opening weeks in office. So far the reaction from the American left might be summed up by the sentiment: ‘That’s not fair – it’s only us that are allowed to do things when we are in power.’ The American left are in a particular funk about the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) – as though railing against the proposed reduction of federal spending and reduction of the American deficit is a natural vote-winner. But good news does just keep on coming. On Monday, Elon Musk said that President Donald Trump had agreed to shutter USAID – the US government money spigot that sprays money around the world, much of it to people who hate America.

How hard is your soft power? According to David Lammy, Britain’s soft power is so strong and underrated that he has decided to set up a ‘soft power council’ to show just how hard we are. Put aside such details as waste and futility for a second. Surely there is something rather embarrassing about boasting about such things? It reminds me of the phrase ‘muscular liberalism’. A person may define the political concept of muscular liberalism. He may even be described by others as a ‘muscular liberal’. But no one should go around declaring themselves to be such a thing, without expecting to be greeted with a chorus of ‘I don’t doubt it, dearie’ and the like.