Stephen Pollard

If, like me, you spend too much time on social media you’ll have noticed a recurring theme in recent days: horror at the phenomenon of flags with the cross of St George starting to appear across much of the country. That’s hardly a surprise; social media has always been awash with left-wing types, for whom patriotism is racism under a different name, and who seem to do nothing but parrot all the usual dull cliches. But today’s version of those cliches turns out to be interesting – because it reveals a double standard so jarring as to be off the scale.

When I learned that the Royal Opera House had booked Russian soprano Anna Netrebko to sing Tosca in the new production which opens its 2025/26 season next month (and, later in the season, Turandot), I felt a surge of anger. How could they be so callous, so blasé, about the boycott of Russian artists with close ties to the Kremlin. How shameful for Britain that our internationally renowned opera company should treat Ukraine with such contempt. And how damning that its decision to hire Netrebko should be subject to an open letter organised by Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s first deputy foreign minister, and signed by hundreds of Ukrainian writers and artists, British MPs and the likes of Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French public intellectual.

According to the National – a worrying phrase, I admit, given the Scottish newspaper’s obsessive adulation of anyone pro-Scottish independence and its obsessive hostility to anyone who opposes it – this weekend saw a Scottish Reform councillor share a platform with a member of a far-right group at a protest outside a Falkirk hotel housing asylum seekers. While Cllr Mackie-Brown may have been out of her depth and blindsided by what she heard, one might expect that Reform itself would have a ready-made response to such issues What is most interesting about this story is not the protest itself, or even the Reform councillor’s presence. It is the response of Reform to one of its councillors sharing a platform with this person and saying or doing nothing about it.

There have been some interesting takes on Saturday’s protest in London by supporters of Palestine Action. The police arrested 522 people for expressing their support for the organisation, which has been proscribed under the Terrorism Act. But shockingly, according to a social media post by German comedian Henning Wehn, those arrests include geography teachers. ‘I can’t believe the police are put in a situation where they have to arrest hundreds of harmless pensioners and geography teachers,’ he wrote. I have never previously encountered the argument that geography teachers should be exempt from terrorism laws.  But Herr Wehn has hit upon one truly absurd aspect to the protest, albeit unwittingly.

We often think of Sir Keir Starmer as the dull bureaucrat, all at sea in politics – a Prime Minister who is elevated from the concerns of so many of his colleagues, and who just can’t relate to them. Starmer is certainly a leader on the defensive: pushed around by his backbenchers, rather than the man who delivered a Labour landslide who has then plotted his government’s direction of travel. If Starmer is judged on his actions, a damning picture emerges of a man incapable of sticking to any one position But in any meaningful sense, the 'worthy but dull' caricature of the PM is plain wrong – and demonstrably so.

Two Jewish comedians have had shows cancelled by venues hosting the Edinburgh Fringe. Whistlebinkies told Rachel Creeger that she and her show Ultimate Jewish Mother were no longer welcome, while Philip Simon’s Jew-O-Rama, a rotating line-up of Jewish comedians, was also barred. Another venue, Banshee Labyrinth, followed suit, cancelling Simon’s solo show, Shall I Compere Thee in a Funny Way? It could hardly be more blatant: two Jews have been cancelled because they are Jewish The reason? 'Safety concerns' for staff. Those of us with the Jewish mothers of Creeger’s title can certainly understand why others might have concerns over our mental safety, but I don’t think that’s quite what the venues had in mind when they banned a Jewish son and a Jewish daughter.

This isn’t a sentiment you’ll have read much in recent weeks, given the BBC’s series of appalling misjudgements and editorial disasters. But here goes: Three cheers for the BBC. Its critics are completely wrong and its decision making is spot on. The BBC is quite right. The party conferences don’t need the broadcast army of hacks they’ve always had To be clear, I’m not referring to its coverage of Bob Vylan at Glastonbury, the Gaza documentary narrated by the son of a Hamas minister or the BBC’s sacking of the two Masterchef presenters. I’m talking about something it has actually got right – but for which it is nonetheless being lambasted: the decision not to decamp its entire political team, and all its political programmes, to this year’s party conferences.

For any Jew – or anyone who is alive to Jew hate – a report from the commission on anti-Semitism to be published tomorrow will make for uneventful reading. That is no slur on the report or its authors. The Board of Deputies of British Jews asked Lord Mann, the Labour peer who is the government’s anti-Semitism adviser (incongruously often described as the ‘anti-Semitism Tsar’) and Penny Mordaunt, the former Conservative cabinet minister, to look at the state of anti-Semitism in the UK today. John Mann and Penny Mordaunt have done Jews and those who care about Jew hate a great service Their findings have already made front page news, even before the report has been officially published.

There could be no more deliciously appropriate start to the new party supposedly co-led by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, than the news that the ex-Labour leader is said to be 'furious and bewildered' that it was launched without him even knowing that he is a member of the party, let alone that he is its leader. Although I’m not sure it is really news that Jeremy Corbyn – who has yet to comment on the new party – is either furious or bewildered, since he has spent his entire career being both.

The Holocaust Memorial Bill returns to Parliament for its report stage in the House of Lords today. The legislation marks the end point in a – so far – eleven-year process that began when David Cameron set up a commission in 2014 to consider what Britain should do to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and ensure its lessons are never forgotten. The commission recommended building a memorial and learning centre, with a site chosen next to Parliament, in Victoria Tower Gardens. The proposal has been deeply controversial, both because of the site – which Lord Carlile, the former independent reviewer of terror laws, described as a 'self-evident terrorism risk' – and, even more so, because of the likely content of the learning centre.

My son has a penchant for fantasy movies, especially Marvel. It’s an expensive taste. The cinema isn’t cheap once you add in food and parking. So in a way I am grateful to Sir Keir Starmer. Because there’s now no need for my son to visit the cinema again. If he wants a fantasy, all he needs to do is listen to the Prime Minister speak about defence.  To be fair to the PM, he isn’t the only one. Pretty much the entire political class is, to varying degrees, living in a fantasy – that we have even started to get to grips with the requirements for defence spending, let alone decided to do something about it.