Lionel Shriver

A sanctimonious liberal like any other respectable 16-year-old, I made a seminal lurch to the right the first time I opened a pay slip. I was manning the register weekends for the Ice Capades Chalet in Atlanta and made about $40 a week. Or so I imagined. Then where the hell was it? The significantly lighter payment was my rude introduction to taxation at source. Indignation at being fleeced at a minimal income persisted into my adulthood. I lived on a wing and a prayer for decades, and having to pitch anything whatsoever in the communal pot was consternating. I fancied that I asked for nothing from government; in trade, they should ask for nothing from me. I wasn’t yet a grown-up. By that definition, a large portion of Britons are still not grown up, either.

You’d think when your country goes to war you’d want it to prevail, but these are topsy-turvy times. Thus the dominant American commentary on Donald Trump’s ‘excursion’ in the Middle East – or should we call it a ‘special military operation’? – has come from pundits who yearn for Epic Fury to fail. Close-up and personal antipathy for their President far outweighs theoretical distaste for a tyrannical theocracy in another hemisphere. For these critics, the glaring deficiencies of the ‘Memorandum of Understanding’, Trump’s already shaky negotiated peace deal, are gratifying. I’m not one of those people.

Last week’s headline in the New York Times was obfuscating: ‘In the UK, a Violent Cycle: Hateful Attacks, Right-Wing Agitation and Riots.’ Because hatred is now irrevocably associated with the ‘right-wing’, innocent American newspaper readers will have presumed that these agitating, rioting reactionaries were also the authors of the ‘hateful attacks’. The New York Times and the PBS News Hour delivered such twisted, incomplete and minimised versions of recent incendiary events in the UK that I was obliged to tell the stories of Henry Nowak and Stephen Ogilvie to more than one ordinarily up-to-date American friend, because the salient details had been omitted from left-leaning reports.

Forgive the doom-mongering, but the US, and especially the UK, may be dangerously on course for a sovereign debt crisis. Yet debt and deficits play a surprisingly minimal role in our countries’ politics. Overspending on borrowed money hardly featured in either nation’s elections of 2024. Last week, a Labour MP hoping for Andy Burnham to challenge Keir Starmer for her party’s leadership told Times Radio that investors would see the UK as ‘the best place to be’ if only the government pursued ‘progressive policies that do speak to our communities’. She added darkly, ‘The markets will have to get into line’ – which was like brandishing a sabre at the heavens and threatening that the weather ‘will have to get into line’… or else!

During last September’s freshers’ fair at Royal Holloway, University of London, two students got into a brief verbal tiff that became subject to the administration’s immediate alarm. Our characters: Brodie Mitchell, a self-described non-Jewish Zionist, and Huda El-Jamal, the female president of the Friends of Palestine Society who is of Palestinian descent. Mitchell says El-Jamal taunted him – ‘Here’s the wannabe Jew’ – and questioned why he wasn’t wearing a yarmulke. Referring to the keffiyeh El-Jamal was wearing as a headscarf, Mitchell taunted back: ‘You’re wearing a tea towel over your head.’ A monstrous exchange, we can all agree. Naturally, Royal Holloway suspended Mitchell for nine weeks – nine weeks!

In 2012, California was the first US state to ban ‘conversion therapy’ for minors, the better to stop the forcible brainwashing of gays and lesbians into fancying the opposite sex. Picture kidnappings, violent fundamentalist interventions, gruelling electric shock treatments and Clockwork Orange aversion therapy. But here’s the rub: most of this stuff was 1) already illegal and 2) not really happening. A solution in search of a problem, then. Successive UK governments have also entertained a conversion therapy ban. Yet among 108,000 respondents to a governmental LGBT survey in 2018, just 5 per cent claimed to have been ‘offered’ such therapy, while only 2 per cent said they’d undergone it. Even there, the survey didn’t define what constituted ‘conversion therapy’.

Late last year, I was notified that one or more of my novels might have been fed to an Anthropic large language model, because in a class-action suit the company had reached a copyright settlement with authors who’d never given an AI Goliath permission to gorge on their work. Sure enough, a website verified that 11 of my books had been used as silage for this insatiable digital leviathan. Each of the LLM’s tasty Shriver mouthfuls may merit compensation of about $3,000. But before I take out a loan against that $33,000 sure thing to buy myself a Chinese EV, I should read the fine print: ‘court-approved costs and fees’ will be deducted, meaning I may garner funds sufficient to buy a whole new packet of extra-fine felt-tips. Fees or no, this is chump change for Anthropic.

This is a two-parter, albeit linked. If you’re interested in the duplicitousness of British journalists, then keep reading. If you’re only interested in self-destructive British tax policy, skip to the middle. Burnt repeatedly by hacks who pretend to be enraptured by my latest novel while snooping through my cupboards, I long ago learned the hard way not to let British journalists into my home. Thus for years I only conducted interviews in the safely impersonal lobby of a West End hotel. But lessons learned are too often lessons lost. That may be an overly kind formulation of: I am an idiot. In my new hang in Portugal, I reverted to gormless naivety last month and let a British journalist into my house.

Every couple of years a columnist-cum-novelist will inevitably stoop to shameless self-promotion. In my defence, at least the novel released this month is germane to the political moment. Lest its simple title, A Better Life, come across as lame, I asked the designers of my British and American hardback covers to use imagery that conveys the book’s focal subject matter: immigration. See, proponents of unfettered mass migration have eternally assured us that most illegal immigrants – or as the Biden administration instructed federal law enforcement to call them, ‘newcomers’ – are merely seeking ‘a better life’. This explanation is routinely trotted out as an irrefutable justification for a potentially near-infinite imposition of foreigners on western polities.

No matter how many jurisdictions discover the hard way that wealth taxes backfire, in California an initiative is collecting signatures to put a ‘one-time’ (ha!) 5 per cent tax on the net worth of the state’s roughly 200 billionaires on November’s ballot. Hey, those guys are rich. They won’t even notice. But the funny thing about people and money is that even folks with lots like to keep it. The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act is slyly retroactive, a variety of pre-crime legislation – applying to anyone resident in California on 1 January this year, looping a bungee cord around the ankles of would-be absconders. Thus billionaires such as Peter Thiel scrambled to establish a presence in a lower tax state before midnight on New Year’s Eve.

Convicted last month of plotting what could have proved the worst terrorist attack in British history, Walid Saadaoui had hoped to murder at least 50 people in Prestwich, because ‘Prestwich is full of Jews’. He was caught purchasing four AK-47s, two handguns and 1,200 rounds of ammunition. For Saadaoui’s fires of righteousness on social media had earlier drawn the eye of British law enforcement. ‘Avenge your religion Oh Muslims in Europe,’ he posted. ‘I pray to you not to catch me until I break my thirst with Jews, Christians and their proxies’ blood.’ Thus Saadaoui instructed an undercover officer: ‘Grab a Jewish person and slaughter him and remove his head, rub blood on my body, throw it away. That is the least we can do.

Many years ago, a friend described one of my serious literary novels as ‘clever’. I was offended – but I shouldn’t have been. The friend was from across the pond, where I now understand ‘clever’ simply means smart. For Americans, cleverness infers a shallow, facile intelligence. Applied to people, it often hints at sly, calculating deviousness or cunning. It has no positive moral qualities, as westerners understand them. Tax evasion can be ‘clever’. Let’s move on to ‘culture’ – a big, fuzzy word we throw about with careless abandon that often summons images of traditional clothing and cuisine. But, parsed in its most profound sense, culture might best be defined as ‘what a people admire and what they deplore’.