Douglas Murray

Of all the blights on our politics, there are few more tedious than the left-wing campaign group that masquerades behind some poorly constructed frontispiece. The Resolution Foundation – run by the gloriously named Torsten Bell – is a fine example. Torsten allows his publishers to call his Foundation ‘an enormously respected and influential economic research charity’. You may have heard of it, or you may be one of those who focuses your enormous respect elsewhere, but you will probably have seen the BBC and others regurgitate its press releases in lieu of doing actual journalism. The Resolution Foundation routinely discovers things like many people in Britain are poor or ill or suffer from mental health problems. The cause is always Tory cuts. The solution is always more money.

I’m not sure I recognise this country any more. Characteristics that I grew up with have been eroded to the point of disappearance. What were those characteristics? I’d say they included a certain doggedness – an indefatigability, a quiet strength and resilience. Where did they go? We have decided that the men of violence are winning and we must just keep our heads down A little over two years ago, when Sir David Amess was murdered, I remarked here on the appalling ‘tribute’ that his colleagues paid in the parliamentary session given over to eulogies to their recently butchered colleague. Of course the MPs all spoke warmly of the man, but you might have come away with the idea that he had died of natural causes.

A lot of people dream of having what is known as ‘screw you’ money. In my observation, this is not simply in order to be able to live in a castle or own Ferraris or Van Dycks, or whatever is your wont. It is in order to be able to say those fine, demotic words to whomever you like. It should be noted that most people dream of saying the words to someone who is perceived to be above them: someone to whom they might once have been subservient in some way. A boss, for instance. Yet one of the strangest things about the mega-rich is that they do not actually say ‘screw you’ when they ought to.

Some people may have noticed the happy new guidance released between Christmas and New Year by the National Police Chief’s Council. This guidance to police in England and Wales was that police officers ought to try to go to properties that have been burgled. Even better, they should try to do so within an hour of the burglary being reported. This seems to me to be an eminently sensible piece of advice. After all, if you get to the scene of a robbery within an hour, you might be able to track down the stolen goods, log evidence while the crime scene is fresh, or even – imagine – find a burglar. You might wonder why this guidance needed to be given in the first case. After all, there are more than 1,000 break-ins every day in this country.

There’s an old joke about the United Nations having a football team. ‘But who would they play?’ it goes. ‘Why, Israel of course.’ There may not be much humour in it, but there’s plenty of truth. Despite Israel being set up by UN vote, it has been the world’s premier forum for Israel-bashing, particularly since the country won wars of self-defence in 1967 and 1973. Perhaps the most notorious moment was the ‘Zionism is racism’ resolution in 1975, when the foundations of the Jewish state were suddenly under assault. On that occasion the late great Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave one of the best counter-blast speeches ever given on the floor of the UN. As did Chaim Herzog, the father of Israel’s current president.

Does anyone remember ‘Free Tibet’? Way back when, in the olden days of about the 1990s, if you knew nothing much about the world or politics but wanted to show you generally had the right outlook on things it was normal that you might have a sticker or a poster, or even go on a protest saying ‘Free Tibet’. It didn’t do any good, of course. Tibet remains doggedly unfree. For it turns out that the Chinese Communist party is not especially interested in the opinions of a few Devon-based sandal-wearers. The CCP occupies Tibet still, and continues to torture, repress and kill anyone there who stands against its brutal occupation.

There is a stage direction in The Glass Menagerie in which Tennessee Williams describes a tune that will recur through the play. Like a piece of delicately spun glass, he says, it should summon the thought of ‘How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken’. The cleverer young people want to live lives of hope, not demanding solutions, but finding them I think of that line often. Not least this week when two young protestors from Just Stop Oil took their hammers to the ‘Rokeby Venus’ of Velázquez at the National Gallery. Last year their cohorts threw soup over Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’. Others glued themselves to the frame of another Van Gogh and others still to the frame of Constable’s ‘The Hay Wain’.