Douglas Murray

It is always interesting to watch the debates that roil a nation. So far as I can see, the current debate in parliament mainly consists of trying to work out whether the NHS is competent enough to kill people or not. This week one of our greatest Home Office ministers – Jess Phillips MP – was asked about the question of ‘assisted dying’. She said that, naturally, she is in favour of this ‘progressive’ policy. But one qualm held back her support. In Phillips’s estimation the NHS is ‘not in a fit enough state’ at present to kill patients on demand. Many people whose family members have gone through the NHS might beg to differ with Phillips on this point.

We hear a lot about white supremacy these days. But for some reason we rarely hear about black supremacy. I wonder why? There’s a lot more of it around. For Butler, describing someone as white or as trying to be white is clearly a great insult While it is vanishingly difficult to find an overt white supremacist in British public life, it is extremely easy to identify their black counterparts. As exhibit A I would present the Labour MP Dawn Butler. I have written about her once before, in 2020, when Ms Butler was in a car that was stopped by police. At the time I speculated that the coppers may have pulled the vehicle over in the hope of reclaiming the whirlpool bath that Butler had treated herself to at taxpayers’ expense a few years before. But it was not to be.

Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of 7 October, went to meet his maker last week. Having spent a year being pursued through the underground tunnels of Gaza that he had built, he finally put his head up above the surface in the Tal al-Sultan area of Rafah. The world that had told the IDF not to go into Rafah was once again proved wrong. Sinwar was killed in an exchange of fire by a 19-year-old Israeli soldier who was not even in uniform on 7 October. People inside the ICC were annoyed by the way Khan made himself a sort of ‘world policeman’ A couple of days after Sinwar’s demise, I went into Rafah to see the house where he spent his final minutes.

You can tell a lot about a country by who it admires. I was pleasantly surprised some years ago to see a poll showing that the most admired man in the UK was Richard Branson. You may not love all his publicity stunts, or have liked the sandwich selection on Virgin trains, but that poll suggested the British public still liked entrepreneurialism and achievement. It seems mainly to affect people who have really never done very much with their lives I slightly dread a rerun of such a poll today, because I suspect that among the youth vote in particular the winner would be the person with the most perceived disadvantages in life.

In February there was a commotion at Canterbury Cathedral. Or, to be more precise, there was a silent commotion. The cause was a ‘silent disco’ which took place in the nave over two nights. For anyone above the age of 12, a silent disco is where everybody has headphones on and is in their own world. Like the London Underground but with more legroom. There is a DJ as well and so I think (if I’ve got this right) everybody is listening to the same music. In any case, over two nights thousands of revellers came to the cathedral, put on headphones, bought drinks in the side aisles, brushed past the tomb of Thomas Becket and then waved neon lightsabers and danced around to their heart’s content.

What a thrilling number of glass ceilings have been broken this century – with more still to come, apparently. In 2008 America elected its first black president. In 2012 Barack Obama was re-elected and so became the first black president to win re-election. In 2016 America had a chance to elect its first female president but the public blew it and failed to elect Hillary Clinton. Fortunately they somewhat made up for this in 2020 by voting in the first female vice president. A vote that was made sweeter by the fact that, on that occasion, the public had a two-for-one offer and were also able to vote in the first black vice president. Now the public have a further chance to improve themselves by voting for the first black female president.

Not so long ago we went to politicians for politics and comedians for comedy. Today, like many others, I watch politicians for amusement and listen to comedians for their political insights. Whenever I want cheering up, I watch Kamala Harris riffing on a theme of her choice, or sometimes a Labour politician trying to explain why a woman can have a penis. By contrast Joe Rogan analyses political questions better than any of them, as does Noam Dworman, of New York’s Comedy Cellar. So it was that when the question of free speech returned again recently, I did not turn to the hilarious Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood, but instead to the sombre and sage Rowan Atkinson.

As the days slip by, the likelihood that anything will be learned from the recent rioting looks ever more remote. And with that suspicion comes the inevitable sense of déjà-vu. Because we have indeed been here before. In 2011 England was engulfed by riots, originating in London but leading to copycat violence across the north of England. The ostensible cause that time was the shooting by police of Mark Duggan, a charming young drug dealer who was in possession of a gun. The initial unrest in Tottenham may well have started as a result of claims that police had shot an innocent man – and an innocent black man at that. But by the time Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool were going at it, the proximate cause for the violence seemed to have been forgotten.