Every time I see a photo of Sally Rooney, I think of the scene in the BBC adaptation of Normal People where the protagonist is being tied up by her Swedish boyfriend. Marianne has some psychological issues that can only be relieved by being beaten during sex, brought on by childhood neglect or somesuch. It’s always struck me that Rooney doesn’t look the type, but given her books are about young, sensitive, literary, politically conscious graduates from Trinity College, Dublin, you cannot help but wonder: has she heard of BetterHelp?

By strange coincidence, Rooney’s books are disappearing from British retailers at the same time that the government is planning to ban strangle porn. Earlier this month, Rooney’s publisher Faber announced it would withdraw her books from sale, following the author’s decision in 2025 to pledge that she would financially support Palestine Action after it was designated a terrorist group. Facing the prospect of not being able to pass on royalties – ‘an unconscionable situation for a publisher’ – Faber and Rooney agreed to take the books off sale, which is where they will remain until she recants or Palestine Action’s prohibition is revoked.

Cruel, heartless cynics have suggested this is all a publicity stunt. Given Rooney’s aching sincerity, I think this is unfair, though it is true that Rooney’s books are flying off the shelves in Northern Ireland, and some will wend their way across the Irish Sea. Ireland’s foreign secretary Helen McEntree said she would have a word with Ed Miliband about it, though I’m sure he’s more of a Harry Flashman guy. The American press has even noticed, which is usually a bad sign.

Few would have predicted that an Irish producer of glorified chick lit would become the centre of events when home secretary Yvette Cooper banned Palestine Action in July 2025. The decision had ostensibly been prompted by the group’s decision to break into RAF Brize Norton and cause millions of pounds worth of damage to planes, though various government analysts had already recommended that the group be prohibited as it became more willing to embrace violence.

To government critics, the prohibition was overkill. The designation puts Palestine Action alongside 100 other groups, including Islamist big hitters like Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas, and old favourites like the Irish Republican Army. Palestine Action’s defenders said – and still say – that their members are just a bunch of harmless One Piece extras running round with cans of red paint. If anything, the designation was disrespectful to the demolition experts behind 9/11.

In fact, if you actually read the list – which as a hardworking hack, I did – many of the groups on it are jumped up shitposters. One set of budding Substackers, the Atomwaffen Division, ‘celebrates a collection of essays which advocate the use of violence in order to bring about a fascist’. The subtly-named Maniacs Murder Cult, proscribed at the same time as Palestine Action, is also ‘predominantly online’, where it encourages racist violence. Similarly dedicated to content creation is the Feuerkrieg Division, another white supremacist group, though in that case there have at least been arrests abroad for bomb plots.

Palestine Action may not be planting bombs, or trying to trigger ‘an apocalyptic race’ war. Most of its violence qualifies merely as criminal damage, as government reports concede. But its ambition to prevent external military collaboration with Israel would jeopardise the existence of the world’s only Jewish state, in turn strengthening Palestine, which is unlikely to be run by secular liberals any time soon. Through vandalism it also hopes to damage the British defence industry and military capabilities. This all sounds quite terroristy to me.

Earlier this year, the National Police Coordination Centre reported that Palestine Action had taken 385 direct actions since its founding in 2020. Three attacks are cited as terrorist incidents in court documents: on Thales in Glasgow in 2022, on Instro Precision in Kent in 2024, and on Elbit Systems in Bristol that same year. It is unclear whether RAF Brize Norton is being treated as a terrorist incident, and a court case involving five alleged attackers is scheduled for trial in January.

The most infamous of these is the attack in Bristol, glamorously termed the Filton Raid. The attackers were hoping to damage the production at Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer, but the incident is most notable for the actions of Samuel Corner, who broke a police officer’s spine with a sledgehammer. Apologists say he panicked, but this defence is not supported by the court judgement, where Corner comes across as quite the psychopath.

After crashing through the loading bay in a former prison van, Corner swung his sledge hammer at a security guard who’d suffered a head injury and was armed only with an umbrella. Corner then set to work smashing up a disabled toilet, aiming to cause a flood. He then swung his sledgehammer at PC Buxton, ‘defenceless on the floor with his arms outstretched, mercifully causing only a minor injury’.

Corner then swung his sledgehammer ‘twice at Police Sergeant Kate Evans. She was on her knees seeking to arrest one of your co-defendants. She had her back to you. You raised the sledgehammer above your head and swung it all the way down so that it struck her on the back. She did not have any chance of seeing or escaping the blow. Fortunately, she was wearing a stab vest which dissipated some of the force of the blow, but you could not have known that she was wearing a stab vest.’

This is the calibre of person that Rooney has elected to fund the activities of. It is not the grannies waving placards and being carted off by police, which has of course made the British government look foolish. Nor is it splashing a bit of red paint around. As Jonathan Hall, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, put it in a Radio 4 appearance, this is a group that organises in cells to plan coordinated attacks on defence manufacturers, all of which is confirmed in their Underground Manual.

Despite all this, public attitudes to Palestine Action are mixed. According to an Opinium poll from September commissioned by Zeteo – an anti-Israel media group founded by British journalist Mehdi Hasan – only a third of British adults believe it is a terrorist organisation, with a quarter saying the opposite and the remainder being agnostic. Unsurprising, given their disdain for Zionism, 60% of Green party members do not believe Palestine Action is a terrorist group.

It’s an attitude that has been embraced by various of Rooney’s defenders in the press, none moreso than Tanjil Rashid, culture editor at the New Statesman and author of a deplorable piece on the withdrawal of her books. As he puts it: ‘The High Court has already ruled that proscribing Palestine Action was out of proportion with its activities – a judgement since overturned in a still ongoing judicial process.’

As journalistic sleights of hands go, it is audacious. One might better put it that a lower court was found to have erred in its judgement by a higher one, the Court of Appeal, which found that proscription of Palestine Action was justified. And even if you read the High Court judgement, you’ll see it agrees that Palestine Action was engaged in terrorism, as per paragraph 137:

‘Real weight must attach to the fact that Palestine Action has organised and undertaken actions amounting to terrorism as defined at section 1(1) of the 2000 Act … It is significant that Palestine Action has not suggested that its actions that have been assessed to comprise terrorism were either a mistake or an aberration. Rather, Palestine Action has lauded those who took part in those actions. It is, further, significant that the contents of the Underground Manual provide good evidence of Palestine Action’s continuing intention to promote the use of violence regardless of the risk that this will result in serious damage to property or serious violence against members of the public.’

That the High Court found the decision to proscribe was disproportionate was largely because terrorism comprised a small portion of Palestine Action’s activities, and the proscription conflicted with the Home Office’s Proscription Policy. It’s hardly surprising that a higher court took a different view. The Court of Appeal found that the home secretary’s decision to proscribe was proportionate, and that the lower court had misinterpreted her Proscription Policy. As it said at paragraph 206 of its judgement:

‘It is … a fundamental mistake to overlook the fact that Palestine Action overtly promotes unlawful violence amounting to terrorism. It is not, as it claims, a direct action civil disobedience protest group like the suffragettes operating transparently in the open. It is a covert organisation that operates using secret cells to avoid the detection and prosecution of those using violence to destroy the property of third parties.’

As the group’s operational manual puts it, more colourfully: ‘Dream up crazy ideas in your cell, remember that your action is to [disrupt], damage or destroy your target.’ And the targets have not been confined to the military and defence industries, most scandalously including an attack on a random Jewish business, in what appears to have been an example of antisemitic violence.

While Huda Ammori, a Palestine Action founder, told the courts that the manual had been written ‘in a deliberately dramatic and tongue-in-cheek way’, I sense not all the humour is intentional. To give one example, activists are encouraged to give their cell a fun name. ‘This can be named after a Palestinian freedom fighter, a play on taking action against the war machine, or anything else that’s appropriate.’ It is unclear what the name was for the cell who cracked Evans’ spine.

All this is evocative of an organisation that isn’t merely testing the edges of the law as a form of political theatre. As the more sympathetic High Court judgement puts it at paragraph 23:

‘Its campaign is intended to close down the operations of a company pursuing a lawful business. The campaign has not been pursued with restraint. The wide range of targets is significant. It lays bare that Palestine Action’s campaign and pursuit of criminal damage is designed to intimidate the persons and businesses targeted so they end their commercial relationships with Elbit. Palestine Action is not engaged in any exercise of persuasion, or at least not the type of persuasion that is consistent with democratic values and the rule of law.’

Palestine Action is therefore an organisation engaged in terrorism, whether or not it remains proscribed. Again, this is the activity that Rooney, an Irishwoman, is attempting to fund on British soil. What this leaves Palestine Action’s supporters with is the defence that the terrorism is justified to stop the alleged genocide in Gaza, against which snapping the spine of the odd police officer is small potatoes, and the wider security interests of Britain and her allies are irrelevant.

For the sake of brevity: I believe Hamas’s attack on 7 October necessitated a massive, lethal response from Israel to ensure its citizens’ security: the first priority of any state, and one that Hamas has neglected in Gaza. I think it likely that Israel has probably committed war crimes since, though war always entails innocent civilians being killed. Some of Israel’s leadership appears to be intent on killing or displacing Palestinians, or doesn’t care what happens to them. I’m unclear whether this amounts to genocide, and I’m sceptical the average Palestine Action activist could demonstrate that it was.

Some will say that’s a cop out, but when you read the remarks of some Palestine Action members, it seems that the alleged genocide is anyway besides the point. While there’s no doubt that the Gaza War has radicalised younger people, the old hands have spent long years fulminating against Israel and wishing its destruction. According to the BBC, the day after the 7 October attack, Palestine Action founder Richard Barnard told an audience in Manchester: ‘When we hear the resistance, the Al-Aqsa Flood [the 7 October massacre], we must turn that flood into a tsunami of the whole world.’ These do not seem like the remarks of a man who is averse to sweeping a country off a map.

As for Britain’s military involvement in Israel, it’s true that it is extensive. Declassified recently reported that ‘over recent years the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has awarded scores of major tenders to Israeli weapons firms, worth hundreds of millions of pounds.’ This included procurement programmes related to training simulators, radar, naval anti-missile defence, night vision goggles, drones and counter-drone systems.

Britain and Israel also collaborate on the F-35 fighter plane programme, joint training exercises, and intelligence sharing. The British government monitors all these activities for evidence that they contribute to Israel’s war effort in Gaza, and has occasionally revoked export licences as a result. Government spokespeople have argued that Israel is a legitimate target for military export due to its need to defend itself from Iran and Hezbollah. But the likelihood that British military collaboration with Israel does inadvertently contribute to atrocities in Gaza seems high.

What this doesn’t axiomatically mean is that we could sever military ties with Israel. As the Declassified report notes, ‘the closeness of Israel’s arms industry with Britain’s military raises further questions … about how difficult it would be to separate the two’. It is hard to believe that we could do so in short order without massively weakening our own military capabilities, as well as our ability to support Nato allies and Ukraine in its fight against Russia. That is without considering the diplomatic fallout and weakening of our alliances more broadly, and how it would embolden our enemies, most notably in the Middle East.

And frankly, I doubt whether it would change Israel’s behaviour much anyway. Only this weekend, Israel decided it would support Argentina’s claim for the Falkland Islands. Clearly, it doesn’t care that much what we think. The hard truth is that the war in Gaza only stops when America wants it to stop. Britain can shred its own military capabilities, and it will be to little effect.

Palestine Action members would of course disagree with most of that. They are certain there is a genocide. They are certain that Britain is knowingly involved. They would perhaps concede that extracting ourselves from Israel’s war machine would damage our own military capabilities, but I suspect they wouldn’t care. All they care about is Gaza, and they are willing to stop it through violence.

Somehow, this brings us back to an Irish author of millennial fiction who has garnered widespread support for her insistence that she should be able to give money to people who want to attack our defence industry.

The week just gone, the New Statesman published an open letter demanding that Rooney’s books ‘be available to the public’, and that the government amend its terrorism legislation to make it so. The accompanying opinion piece by Rashid, quoted briefly above, is risible, not merely for the case it makes but how poorly it understands what’s under discussion. Almost everything it says is wrong, and obviously so.

The starting point of this debate, culturally or otherwise, is not that ‘Sally Rooney’s books must be available to all who desire to read them.’ Terrorism legislation should be ‘draconian’ against people who use violence to subvert democracy. Whether holding up a sign is terrorism or not depends what is written upon it. Rooney is a terrorist financier because she has indicated she will finance a terrorist organisation.

Most egregious is of course the Salman Rushdie comparison which frames the piece, not least because the attacker who stabbed Rushdie blind in one eye was frequently overheard muttering ‘Free Palestine’ during his court appearances. To quote Ian Leslie on how Rushdie has suffered since his publication of The Satanic Verses prompted a fatwa against him:

‘Rushdie was targeted by an Islamist head of state for the content of his art. He lived under credible threat of murder for decades. He saw mobs of angry men burning his book. He came horribly close to losing his life when a terrorist attacked him with a knife. He has lost an eye and a good part of his best life because of what he wrote in a novel. His allies put themselves at risk to publish his work and some of them paid a price for it. His Japanese translator was murdered, his Italian translator stabbed, his Norwegian publisher shot.’

Rooney, of course, has suffered nothing for what is written in her novels. What income she is about to lose is because she has expressed her desire to fund terrorism in another country. Alas, reasoning like Rashid’s has become emblematic of a movement that has no sense of proportion, direction or where the argument actually lines.

I come back to Rooney, because something else she said struck me as telling about the wider enthusiasm for Palestine. Speaking at an anti-Israel conference in March, Rooney self-servingly responded to being questioned about the price she has paid for showing ‘solidarity’ with Palestine. In fact, she said, supporting Palestine is an opportunity ‘to participate in some small way in a struggle for human liberation, to stand for what we know in our hearts is right, and try not to be complicit in what we know is wrong. What else can make our lives endurable in times as dark as these?’

Call me self-involved, but I find my life quite endurable as it is, and would find it even moreso if I had been dubbed the voice of a generation for writing thinly-veiled autofiction about my time at university and paid millions to do it. If Rooney can’t find life endurable without co-opting a conflict in a far away land, of which she knows little, perhaps that’s her problem.

Recent reading: Riotous Assembly by Tom Sharpe; The New Dark Ages by James Marriott

Recent listening: The Who By Numbers by The Who; If My Wife New I’d Be Dead by CMAT; Tapestry by Carole King

For all that the establishment is accused of speaking de haut en bas, there are still some topics that provoke a sudden onset of epistemic humility. What constitutes a woman is one example. How one reduces mass migration is another. And not unrelatedly, there has been a rash of confusion of late over what exactly the term ‘ethnicity’ means.

I was unaware that the term was so obscure among Oxbridge grads until a recent edition of Question Time, a panel show in which random members of the public – or at least, those prepared to waste a serviceable Thursday evening – ask vetted questions of politicians alongside a token comedian and/or journalist. The results look something like this.

Before this kerfuffle, I’d quite forgotten that Suella Braverman existed, and was enjoying it. The two time Conservative home secretary has been a mercifully quieter presence as a Reform MP. But repeating an old tune, she told the audience that she was not English on the grounds that none of her ancestors are from England, her parents claiming descent from different parts of India.

This caused predictable consternation. Fiona Bruce asked Braverman whether you had to trace your lineage back to 1066 in order to claim Englishness, as sure a sign of allegiance to the Norman yoke as you’ll find among a BBC lifer. A black audience member argued that he was in fact ‘indigenous’ to England, on the grounds he had spent his whole life here. Speaking for the liberal consensus, the New Statesman’s Oli Dugmore declared that: ‘The political function of what [Braverman] was saying earlier is that you can only be English if you are white and that, and I regret to say it, is a racist point of view.’

I would quibble the word ‘regret’; calling Braverman a racist on television was probably only slightly less exhilarating for Dugmore than the birth of his second child. And while I agree that Braverman is a ludicrous figure, I found her definition of ethnicity in the segment fairly reasonable, if not the only one available. Even the British census from five years ago also seems to think that whiteness is a precondition of English ethnicity, and I’m unaware of the Office for National Statistics being captured by the National Front, even if it is now based in Newport.

The census does nonetheless rather ignore a widespread ambiguity around the concept of English ethnicity. Among a certain kind of white middle class person it is now fashionable to emphasise any smidgen of foreign ancestry, in a kind of strange inversion of the one drop rule. Only the other day I met a woman who was born and grew up in England, but insisted that she was wholly Scottish due to her parentage. Some of this comes from a desire to distance oneself from the flagshaggers of St George’s Cross, both for reasons of politics and class snobbery, but I suspect it is also sincere: people like Alastair Campbell genuinely do not feel English, and purely for reasons of ancestry.

The trouble is that these kinds of people usually keep two sets of books on the matter. Although Campbell grew up in England, that does not make him English. But when Rishi Sunak grows up in England that does make him English, despite the Indian parents. You will see the inconsistency.

Much of this comes from an unwillingness to grapple with the fact that ‘English’ can describe the cultural situation somebody grew up in, and also where their ancestors hail from. As the impeccably liberal Ben Judah puts it: ‘It’s obvious Englishness is both a wider identity for those for whom the nation is home and a narrower description of lineage in different contexts.’ But it is in fact not obvious to some people, or at least they are pretending that it is not obvious.

When Scottish journalist Alex Massie asks how the English ethnicity differs from that of Scotland, is he genuinely unsure, or just playing dumb? He’s certainly right that the Anglo-Scottish borderlands contain a spectrum of identity more than a hard line, as Rory Stewart’s book on the borders will tell you. In a wider sense, and much to the annoyance of Scottish nats, the cultural distinction between the English and Scottish is slim even when you get further away from Hadrian’s Wall. But there is still a distinction in cultural and ancestral terms, and it’s not nothing.

I, after all, have no claim to Scottishness, even the English city of Edinburgh. I have no known ancestors there, my father’s side turning up residents of Oxford and Portsmouth for the last few hundred years. (I’ve not checked with my mum for secret Jock ancestry, but will report back.) That would make me less Scottish than somebody who could trace their ancestors through Highland parish records until the trail goes cold, even if they had grown up next door to me. The concept of time immemorial goes for family trees too.

There is a tendency among people to attempt to negate this logic by pointing out that it inevitably goes fuzzy at the edges. Bruce’s question about how many generations of ancestry establish an ethnic claim is one example. You might also look at how DNA testing reveals clusters that don’t easily map on to political borders. And that is obviously before we go into discussions about people with mixed parentages, or whether the notion of ethnicity as cultural rather than ancestral is more appropriate.

I agree with some of these objections to the extent that an objective observer will struggle to put down neat lines. But it is equally very easy to declare what you are not. I am, for example, not Japanese, by any definition. It is reasonably likely none of my ancestors have ever lived within Japan’s current borders. Nor have I ever lived in Japan. If this makes sense, the fuzziness of ethnic boundaries isn’t fatal to the concept of them.

None of the above is especially complicated, even if there is nuance to be had. What causes people to affect confusion is that it can seem to imply that certain people have a stronger claim to Britain than others, or a superior status, by dint of their ancestry. White liberals are reluctant to concede the point because of a reflexive suspicion that the English are only a few pints of lager and a packet of crisp away from organising a racial pogrom.

This fear has been idle for most of my lifetime. Mainstream British politicians were ruthlessly effective at ostracising the far right during the noughties, as illustrated by the lacklustre electoral success of the British National Party. While Nigel Farage can claim to be one of the most influential politicians of the post-war era, he has been continued to be tainted (somewhat fairly) by accusations of racial bigotry, so much so that Ukip, the Brexit Party and Reform have all been obliged to bar former members of the BNP from joining their ranks.

But that fear of racial conflict has grown less irrational in recent years. This has been illustrated most dramatically by various Englishmen dressing up as Belfast paramilitaries on their trips to spot migrant dinghies by the seaside. You can also see it in the spread of overt racism on platforms like Twitter, where outriders of Reform and Restore campaign for explicitly ethnonationalist policies. Connor Tomlinson is one example of a far right commentator calling for mass deportations in pursuit of ‘demographic security’, which would take the form of sending migrant families who have lived here for four generations back to the country of their ancestors.

All this is bad, but I don’t think it’s the natural conclusion of admitting that some people living in Bradford don’t have any English ancestry, or even Scottish, Welsh or Irish. People like Tomlinson might use this fact to campaign for an ethnostate, but polling data on British attitudes to race gives no indication that is anything other than a fringe position.

What the existence of English ethnicity does concede is the fact that multiculturalism is a recent phenomenon, and Britain’s demography has changed massively in recent decades. And the difficulty for the English ethnicity denier is that these changes have generally been unpopular. Contra the ‘you called, we came’ myth, mass migration has been widely opposed from Windrush onwards, and there has been a consistent majority in favour of reducing levels for the last decade.

This is a problem if you are what David Goodhart called an ‘anywhere’ who wants to create a Star Trek future in Britain. While people the British have accustomed themselves to multiracialism and to some degree of multiculturalism, there is no consensus for accelerating the changes that have occurred in recent decades. Quite the opposite. It may be a euphemism to claim that what people oppose is solely the rate of change, but the rate of change is nonetheless something that people disapprove of.

The past few days have seen the Green Party begin to implode over its opposition to Zionism and support for Palestine. At the heart of the issue is whether Jews or Arabs are allowed to maintain a ‘homeland’. Viewed from the position of a Western liberal, the difficulty is that the conception of homeland pursued by both sides entail demographic majorities of competing ethnic groups, grounded in ancestry and religion.

Britain, to my mind, does not need a demographic majority that shares an ancestry. But I share the right’s view that there should be a demographic majority that shares a cultural heritage and outlook, and one that be acquired regardless of ancestry. The problem with the current migration policy is that many recent arrivals are not culturally British in a meaningful sense, and that they show few signs of wanting to move in that direction.

You do not need to agree with that. But you can concede there is such a thing as an English ethnicity while also being comfortable, even glad, that people whose ancestry fits that description are a declining proportion of the United Kingdom. Many people move to places like London exactly because it is diverse and multicultural, and find rural areas bland and staid by comparison. Such people are entitled to their preferences, but some honesty from them about what’s going on would be most welcome.

Currently reading: The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe; Rebels and Redcoats by Hugh Bicheno

Recent listening: L.A. Woman by the Doors; America by America; Paris in the Spring by Alexis Taylor

Much of artsy London descends on the Brecon Beacons in August, home of the Green Man Festival, which is occasionally termed the Glastonbury of Wales, and usually not as an insult. For the most part this is a typical rumpus of wine, women and song, though not in that order.

At the festival’s climax the aforementioned verdant gent is set alight, representing the circle of life for people too trendy for Christianity. Alas, a summer of heatwaves, wildfire and drought meant the conflagration was cancelled this year, onlookers instead treated to aerial acrobatics and a rendition of The Whole of the Moon by Pictish Trail.

Cremated separately, and no doubt carefully, were the paper slips that festivalgoers attach to the Green Man with wishes for the future. Some of these are rather touching, notably those wishing for a baby in the coming year and those bemoaning the £8 pints being served up at the well-stocked craft beer tent a minute’s walk away.

Clearly some of the attendees were indulging too much in the ale, with several tickets asking for relief from gout. Perhaps such people might consider whether others might be more deserving of faux-pagan sympathy – not least those unable to stump up £300 for a weekend of music.

Taking sprogs to a music festival is what the euphemists refer to as ‘challenging’, as evinced by my two abortive attempts to watch indie rockers Lime Garden at Green Man. Tiredness has likewise imposed a curfew on both my sessions watching alt country band Wilco, though the crowd that remained were also a tad somnolent, frontman Jeff Tweedy heckling them for being too cool to clap along.

Headliners nonetheless tend to be better bets for enjoying the music in peace, as was the case for Sorry’s late appearance on the Walled Garden stage. The band’s description as indie rock belies their weirdness, the rock canon influence being injected with weirder sounds. There was something especially evocative about seeing them in the bracing Welsh weather as midnight approached, probably enhanced by the 6.7% Mighty Merlin cider I’d just drunk.

My other pick of the festival is Sparks on Sunday night. They are somehow the most English sounding American band in existence, though it is perhaps their Stateside sincerity that makes you forgive their undoubted naffness. With the band’s older brother already in his eighties, this felt like the last chance I’d have to see them, justifying the sacrifice of Wolf Alice on the main stage.

I’ve sworn off doing Green Man and End of the Road back to back every time I’ve done it, but given this is already the third instance I may have to accept my fate. Having barely unloaded the rental car from the first festival, we were back on the road a week later, this time to the Dorset-Wiltshire border.

Due to what the AA man enthusiastically described as my car’s many computers failing to communicate nicely with each other, I had to trade in the rental at Heathrow. The resulting delay meant that car queues into the festival were trailing back by at least two hours by the time we arrived. Apparently the appearance of alleged industry plants Geese had brought all the kids down on Thursday night, catching the organisers unaware.

We decided to repair to a pub to have a nice cold pint and wait for all of it to blow over. With the internet signal being slightly less reliable than my house in Zone 4, we headed towards Swallowcliffe, according to Wikipedia a former “rural backwater”, though it is now home to as many as 167 people.

There we happened upon The Royal Oak, a pub part-owned by James May, former Top Gear and Grand Tour presenter who has moved onto the more respectable trades of YouTube content and gin production. I can confirm the building was attractive, the beer selection solid, and the baby changing facilities of a high standard.

Less positive was the claim by the fresh-faced bartender that without a reservation we’d have to wait an hour to be seated for food in the largely empty venue. If an establishment with a kitchen cannot serve chips at short notice, is it a pub or a restaurant with a few benches out front?

While they’d spoiled the first part of my Thursday evening, Geese made up for it later. It is heartening to see a proper new rock band get a good slot at End of the Road. Cameron Winter is one of the most compelling frontmen I’ve seen for a while, and the music is fun and creative while recognisably of its genre. I will not hold their generous marketing budget against them.

Pulp were also fantastic, though Jarvis Cocker had strangely decided to intersperse the earlier songs in their set with a photo slideshow, a gimmick which fell away as the festival curfew loomed. For all that musos are snooty about popular acts, there is something glorious about watching a field full of people singing along to Common People – the irony given the ticket prices again noted.

Sunday’s pop artist CMAT was likewise an exceptional headliner, if not entirely my thing. Less impressive was Mac DeMarco, whose music sounds like an extended jazz backing track in B major. We also saw a bit of Caroline, an eight-piece folk act whose every tune sounded like the intro or outro to a song that they’d forgotten to write.

Further down the bill, I’ll mention Prewn, an indie rock act with a pleasingly dark vibe, and the similarly gloomy Irish folk act ØXN. No doubt there were other good acts, but I was probably off changing a nappy somewhere.

I enjoyed Pete Brown’s talk at Green Man comparing beers to bands, mostly because it justifies the beer snobbery that is financially ruining me. But I was more intrigued by an interview given by Ian Leslie at End of the Road on his Beatles’ book John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. Cynically, I purchased this for my brother last year hoping he’d read it and lend it to me, but the swine continues to be absorbed in worthy Russian novels.

Leslie’s focus is on the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership, the exceptional closeness of the pair, and how the relationship between the two shifted over time. He has many good insights on the subject, but I must confess to finding the overarching thesis a bit obvious. I would expect two young men would become very close after the loss of their mothers in swift succession, even amid the emotional constipation of Britain in the 1950s.

I wondered if this was partly generational: Leslie started the session by joking that Generation X, his own, were clearly the rightful owners of the Beatles. I think it’s fair to say young Millennials are more touchy-feely than those that came before us, even if it’s overshadowed by the overblown therapy culture of Gen Z. Bromance has always existed, but perhaps it is more warmly embraced now.

By the time I was listening to the Beatles in the early noughties much of the propaganda about McCartney being a commercial phoney had also let off. On social media it’s not unusual to see Lennon condemned as a wife beater, and I think it’s obvious that McCartney was technically the better musician. As Leslie said, being shot dead was a great move reputationally for Lennon, but McCartney’s decision to live into his eighties may prove wiser in the long run.

When I heard Rod Liddle had died, I was in the incongruously named Churchill Square shopping centre in Brighton discovering that I can no longer squeeze into a 32-inch waist. An alleged friend of mine tried to console me after texting me the news (of his death, not me getting fatter). “Try to look on the bright side: you can start positioning your work as homage instead of derivative pastiche.”

Readers may make their own assessments of this barbarous remark, but I must acknowledge a debt to Liddle’s columns. When I first started flicking through my mum’s copies of the Sunday Times, Liddle was one of those who jumped out to me, suggesting that even then I was a grumpy old man trapped in the acne-marked, scrawny frame of a teenage boy.

For Liddle, who was 66 when he died, something of the reverse was going on. Offence is supposed to be a young man’s game. As Martin Amis, no stranger to literary argy-bargy, put it: “Insulting people in print is a vice of youth.” By that standard, Liddle never grew up, as he half-admitted in column published in the Speccie this week.

What marked him out as a columnist was a desire to say the worst thing, as is the wont of callow youths. To quote a line which has been deployed by every British schoolboy against various targets: “So – Harriet Harman, then. Would you? I mean after a few beers obviously, not while you were sober.”

In that instance, even Liddle later reflected that he’d taken things a bit far. But lines he didn’t apologise for included his view that “there is not nearly enough Islamophobia within the Tory party”, his New Year’s resolution “to become disabled” in order to claim benefits, and his questioning how a Labour parliamentary candidate could have known she was transgender given she was blind.

Listing his gags like a prosecuting barrister does them no justice, of course. What allowed Liddle to get away with them is that he was funny, and often hilarious. Over the years he probably made me laugh more than any other British columnist, which given the rampant disrespect among British journalists is saying something.

His critics will disagree, and many of them have done so. Some of this can be put down to the stubborn illiteracy of a certain kind of progressive humanities grad, who despite having spent three years studying semiotics cannot detect the irony in a piece that starts with an apparent confession that Liddle avoided the teaching profession because he “could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids”.

No doubt some of this is a matter of taste. But many of the objections are political rather than humorous. In a gratifyingly critical piece, journalist Mic Wright put the case for the prosecution strongest, arguing that Liddle “was not some genius satirist but a bloviating bully with a taste for bigotry who could always fall back on the excuse that he was ‘only joking’.”

If satire has any meaning – and I tend to agree with Al Murray that it doesn’t – it is that there is some political target in front of you. And among Liddle’s defenders, there is no doubt his targets were intentional, with his Spectator colleague Douglas Murray arguing that Liddle was driven by “deep moral causes”. Liddle joked about Muslims because he was opposed to mass immigration, about welfare claimants because he disliked spongers, and about transgender people because he found their condition ridiculous.

For all the protesting from former colleagues, I think there’s no doubt this slipped into genuine prejudice at times, and that some of his readers were not enjoying it ironically. His former editor Fraser Nelson’s claim that in person Liddle was the “least racist person you could imagine” does not pass the smell test, even if he might have qualified as “soft-hearted” among those he was close to.

Some of the obfuscation no doubt comes from the fact both political wings often lapse into the same fallacy: that humour and morality must align. The pious Guardian journo will argue that something isn’t funny because it attacks a beleaguered minority, the Telegraph hack that there is no mean-spirit undergirding a riff on refugees. But jokes are often at others’ expense, and sometimes even unpleasantly so. That is no comment on whether or not they are funny, witty or true.

Liddle’s saving grace is that his ultimate target was legitimate. Many of the jokes seemingly aimed at minorities were implicit rebukes to a liberal ruling class that continues to produce its fair share of cant based on how they think the world should work. In making such jokes, Liddle doubtless made it easier for others to say offensive things, but also true ones.

My sense is that he wouldn’t have minded an obit that totted up the balance sheet fairly. There is also something fitting for us to be squabbling over his legacy while the corpse is still cooling, given he spent so much of his life writing rude things about the great and the good, alleged or otherwise. Rod Liddle lived by the keyboard. It is right that he dies by it.

Currently reading: Still Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut; The War of Wars by Robert Harvey. The latter is 900 pages, okay?

Recent listening: The Greatest by Cat Power, Hackney Diamonds by The Rolling Stones

“The American is the Englishman left to himself,” is my favourite quote about the early era of the United States, the work of French writer and later government minister Alexis de Tocqueville. Its only competitor, and perhaps a less telling choice, comes from Admiral George Cockburn. The Royal Navy having invaded Washington, DC, in 1814, he sat on the speaker’s chair in the House of Representatives and asked: “Shall this harbour of Yankee democracy be burned?” The British seamen, good democrats all, assented.

Anglo-American relations have mostly been cordial since, perhaps especially so since Britain lost the ability to go rampaging around Capitol Hill. From this side of the pond, what is striking is that, as many of our elites have developed an embarrassingly servile attitude to American affairs, we have still retained a cultural snobbery towards a people that old boys will still occasionally call our “cousins”.

Gripping onto this sense of superiority may have become more important as the wealth gap between Britain and America has become embarrassing. An unpatriotic think tank recently pointed out that were Britain to become the 51st state we would be poorer in per head terms than every single other state. There are regional retail managers in the US who earn more than our prime minister, even if he could still drop a nuke on any burgeoning commercial empire in the Midwest.

At the risk of offending my American readers, I’m afraid some of the snobbery is justified. Brits who visit the States will frequently remark how fucked up the homeless are in the world’s richest country. A book I just finished on England’s 17th century noted in passing that our homicide rate by the end of that period was already lower than America’s is today.

That is before you get to the food, a hill on which the Americans have bemusingly decided to die despite the fact that most of their nutrition comes from high-fructose corn syrup, and the tragedy that no European has ever identified a substance in the US that would qualify as cheese. In many areas of life, the Yanks seem to confuse abundance for quality, Donald Trump’s personal style exemplifying that there is half a continent filled with the nouveau riche.

All that said, America is a deeply compelling country, and I think especially so for a Brit. De Tocqueville’s quote highlights a point that has become contentious in the UK as the country sought to extract itself from the EU. As originally conceived, America was a British project, and chiefly an English one.

Lending irony to what has later transpired, the growth of the Thirteen Colonies was a symptom of failure back home. While pioneer spirit is essential to the early United States, the territory was perhaps more frequently a place where the British could send their surplus young men, especially political agitators, religious extremists and petty criminals.

Life was not easy for those who survived passage across the Atlantic. Many of those who travelled did so under contracts of indentured servitude, the only distinction from slavery being that there was an end point, and the promise of land. Deadly disease was rife, sex ratios were not propitious, and in many cases the religious hardliners who escaped persecution in Europe were keen to impose it in their new home.

Even so, it was attractive for many Brits compared to staying in Blighty. The Thirteen Colonies were home to 2.5 million people at the start of the American War of Independence, a bit less than a third of the population in Great Britain. France had lost its foothold in North America a few decades previously in large part because life was too nice back home for its people to fancy moving to Quebec.

Ironically, it might have been better for the Brits if they hadn’t won the Seven Years’ War so convincingly and removed the old enemy from North America. The conflict led ministers in London to demand that Yanks chip in for the defence of the continent. They also wanted the pioneers to stay to the east of the Appalachians to prevent further conflict with Native Americans and Spain, the other European power still in the region.

Having been neglected from childhood by London, the Americans understandably felt upset at this sudden imposition of authority. But frankly it was reasonable for London to ask its American subjects to pay some more tax, which would still have left them less fiscally burdened than their counterparts in Britain, and with much more say over how they were governed.

As Andrew O’Shaughnessy argues in The Men Who Lost America, where ministers were less justified was in assuming it would be easy to impose rules on an armed population 3,000 miles away. While the British won most of the battles in the war, they discovered that even the world’s mightiest empire couldn’t quash a hostile population with intimate knowledge of their homelands and a lethal will to die for it – a lesson the Americans are committed to relearning at least once a decade.

What’s less remembered than the outcome of the war is that the British offered fairly generous terms by the end, still wanting access to the raw materials that the Americans had traded prior to the war. In fact, the countries’ economies remained intertwined even past the War of 1812, a conflict in which – Cockburn’s arsonist tendencies notwithstanding – the Brits were in places reluctant to mistreat people with the same language, surnames and customs.

This is to say that America remained a very British place for a good half-century after the divorce, and probably longer. Yes, there were African slaves and their descendants, and a scattering of other Europeans, but during the early years of the United States the majority of the country was British, and even more so their leadership, as a glance down the list of US presidents can testify.

Much of this is unfamiliar to your average Brit, beyond what they may have heard Lin-Manuel Miranda sing about. We are dimly aware of the American Revolution, and the fact we lost. I suspect most haven’t heard of the War of 1812, the Great Rapprochement, or much after that until the Americans arrived overpaid, oversexed and over here.

Within my intellectual corner it has become hack to draw a line between the English Civil War, the American Revolutionary War and the American Civil War, treating them as an effective trilogy in inter-Anglo conflicts. But it’s still true that for the average person the rapid demographic change experienced in both countries has obscured the very British nature of the American experiment.

It is also cliche to note that Boston is the American city with the most European feel to it, a fact I confirmed eight years ago when I visited the inevitably named Freedom Trail. The appeal of early American history to me has always been its apparent fulfilment of a particularly English liberalism, even if the subsequent quarter of a millennium suggests the Englishman should never again be left to himself.

Last month, I stumbled across a new political compass test. The creator of the 2020s Political Compass argues that we are in an era of “post-materialism”, the old left-right split having shifted to “vibes-based politics”. Sixty-four questions hope to divvy things up anew, pitting chud against woke, techbro against neoluddite, hopepilled against doomer, and Davos against Dubai.

Both times I got Rishi Sunak, which at least means the test replicates. That landed me mostly on the chud side, middling between techbro and luddite, hopeful for the future, and more Davos than Dubai – though the World Economic Forum has unaccountably failed to invite me to their little freemasonry get-togethers in recent years.

I mention this quiz because one of the questions summarises an event that has just passed its tenth anniversary. Offering quizzers options from strongly agree to strongly disagree, the author puts this statement to them: “I would surrender my right to vote in exchange for a guaranteed high standard of living.”

Of course, this is no idle question. A decade ago this was the choice presented to Brits by each side of the Brexit campaign. While leavers said exiting the EU would free us from the Brussels yoke, remainers said the effort would bankrupt us. The then chancellor George Osborne even proposed a ‘punishment budget’ to fill the £30bn black hole that would drag us into the abyss if we voted to quit the bloc and end his political career.

You’ll recall the democracy enjoyers carried the day, to much consternation. But a decade on, the matter seems to have slipped into Osborne’s black hole, taking some of the British state’s finances with it. While a scattering of articles marked the anniversary of what critics call the dumbest thing a country has ever voted to do, mainstream politicians now pay it as much heed as Northern Ireland when the Ulstermen are not setting things on fire.

This might be put down to the small matter of the prime minister resigning, even if half of us suspect Andy Burnham will prove a continuity Keir Starmer with a northern accent and a more convincing interest in football. Hacks are currently fixated on the prospects of a snap general election, a proposal Sir Humphrey would describe as “bold”.

That’s despite public opinion drifting in a clear direction on Brexit. For some years, surveys have indicated we have Bregrets. Some of this is of course what euphemists call ‘generational churn’, but the fact is that most people think it was a mistake and would happily rejoin if we could retain the opt-outs we had before we left, such as the one that let us keep the pound.

It’s some vindication for the rump remain campaign, which can still muster Stop Brexit pest Steve Bray to play Ode to Joy loud enough to interrupt the prime minister’s resignation speech. They were right, they would say, that Brexit would hamper the economy, piss off our allies, and oblige people on skiing holidays to queue a little longer at passport control.

Frankly, I’d expected this much when I voted to leave the EU. Unlike the more buccaneering Brexiteers, I didn’t deny it would cost me money. My commitment to persuading people to join my side was weak enough that I forwarded an Economist PDF to my sister forecasting the bad things that would happen.

My old podcast The Right Dishonourable pivoted to capitalise on having a remainer and a leaver hosting, making us rather more distinct that the disagreeable agreers chewing the cud at Goalhanger Podcasts. But the commitment was always lopsided; Jazza remains a genuine Europhile, while my Euroscepticism is more muted.

This was partly because I was resigned to remain winning, and could happily have lived with it. My objection was always that the British had never been asked whether they supported the growing integration of the bloc. Had remain won, the Brits would have at least agreed to what had happened so far.

As for my own choice, I vacillated in the weeks heading to the vote. I’m still drawn to some aspects of European integration. In many respects I’d prefer a full-blown federation to the half-arsed government led by civil servants, in which national voters are liable to being asked a question until they give the right answer.

That sense of being dragooned was echoed in the referendum itself. The tone of the remain campaign was patronising, but the great graduate sulk that followed revealed the weight of anti-democratic sentiment felt by the haut towards the bas – a hissy fit sufficiently offensive that a few remain voters I know even regretted their choice.

To the extent I regret mine, it’s that it would have been more socially convenient to have reluctantly backed remain. Yes, the EU is contemptuous of democracy, I’ve never felt politically European, and the bloc is frequently sclerotic and inept. But how much easier to point out those things while having voted against deplorables like Nigel Farage?

In the end I concluded that Tony Benn was right: the EU failed the last of his five questions. At no point during Britain’s membership was it clear how we got rid of anybody actually making decisions on our behalf. The democratic deficit in Brussels remains, and not being subject to it is the only clear Brexit benefit.

Not that we’re running a surplus of democracy in Blighty, of course. The Brexit vote was primarily about immigration. But part of the reason immigration remains a sore point is that it continues to run high, whatever the colour of the prime minister’s rosette. Brexit didn’t change the governing class’s addiction to cheap foreign labour, nor how it flattered their cosmopolitan mores.

And it’s not the only thing that has stayed the same. Brexit hasn’t massively increased the housing stock in places where it is needed. Nobody has broken us out of our productivity stagnation, and AI may make our jobs market even more dysfunctional. Defence spending remains too low even when it’s clear that geopolitics is at its most dangerous since the end of the Cold War.

Without Brexit, the UK would have been richer. It might have had more migrants from Europe, and fewer from the Commonwealth. Osborne might have recently ended his second term in office. Farage might have begun his first. Perhaps I’d be political editor of the Times. A decade is a long time in politics.

But for all that, and looking at our European peers, it seems to me that if we’d remained we’d still be facing the same problems listed above, and with not a pol who knows how to fix them. People think that the most dismal perspective is that Brexit was a disaster. In fact, it’s that it didn’t matter much at all.

Currently reading: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut; The War of Wars by Robert Harvey

Recent listening: Frozen, mostly, but also Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane

There’s this little thing millions of us do. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it: it’s called being normal. It’s alright, though I’m not sure I’d recommend it to everybody.

If you’re in the statistical majority like the admirably normal Drunk Wisconsin, you’re probably already doing it. Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. The people who choose otherwise, after all, are smackheads.

It sounds drab when you list it, but Wisconsin – who I guess has one of those weird American first names – is right that such things are both attainable and regularly brought to your attention, and that if you’ve failed to obtain them, it’s clearly on you. “You’re upset you can’t make ends meet financially because you’ve opted out of literally every reasonable path to success out of a misguided belief that you’re too special to simply do the bare minimum required?” he asks. “You’re too good to be normal?”

I consider it bad form to stoop to cod psychology when dealing with a rhetorical opponent. But do I detect a shade of projection here? Is there a little artistic Drunk trapped in a middle-aged man’s body, dying of thirst as the years drag on?

Well, no, it’s ragebait, albeit in agony aunts’ clothing. This “lukewarm take that is perfectly calibrated to cause maximum outrage”, in the words of one commenter, is only incendiary because it describes a pain at the heart of every wounded creative who gave up a potential career in the civil service to strum cowboy chords for the Home Counties’ answer to a question nobody was asking about Bruce Springsteen.

I, at least, have found myself increasingly pondering the quandary, and not merely because the pebbledash at the front of the house needs replacing. My bank account would be looking a little healthier had I become a civil engineer like my daddy done. While business journalism is often the best paid role in journalism, it is also the worst paid job in business, to quote Tom Chivers.

I’d have ignored the advice at the time, but there’s also something to be said for an aspiring creative to get a proper job for a while and dabble in watercolours in the wee hours. Spend too much of your youth immersed in books and your breakout novel will be about some bookish types from Trinity College, Dublin who have mistaken engaging in BDSM for having something to say.

Though punchily put, Wisconsin’s message is ultimately anodyne. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. These are all good things to choose, as all starving artists must eventually concede.

Where I disagree is in the implication that anybody who’d rather have a life than a career, in Christopher Hitchens’ phrase, thinks they are better than anybody else. As Russell Walter puts it, in a similar piece to Wisconsins’s:

“Often, the man-child was a ‘gifted child’. The gifted child is distinguished from his peers by his curiosity, intelligence, and imagination. He is told, repeatedly, that he is special. That he can do anything he sets his mind to. And so, he begins to imagine himself as a hero, artist, statesman, or explorer. He imagines himself, in short, as something extraordinary. This makes it very difficult for him to engage with anything ordinary. Indeed, many gifted children develop contempt for ordinary people, whom they consider sheep, normies, goycattle, and so on. They also develop contempt for ordinary life, which they consider—dare I say it—the matrix. Marriage. Mortgages. Monday morning commutes. All these things are dismissed as bourgeois trifles.”

This passage reminded me of a cutting profile of the British Green party leader Zack Polanski. Accused of “chafing at his dreary provincial adolescence”, Polanski is said to have “struck out to join the ranks of the beautiful and cosmopolitan people”, moving to London as a jobbing actor and picking up other odd jobs. As Chris Bayliss argues, the psychological squalor of this bargain is what was really exposed when Polanski was caught not paying the tax on his canal boat.

“The majority [of aspiring actors] make the decision to cut their losses and get out of the city where they will never be able to afford to live a tolerable life, and go and become a school drama teacher in the sort of town they came from,” he writes. For those like Polanski, “it would be far too painful to accept defeat … so, they live this sort of half-life, of cramped flat shares, and minimum wage odd-jobs topping up a series of vaguely dramatic roles sustained by Arts Council funding.”

This is as thorough a character assassination as I’ve seen in the British press. But it still concedes it would not have been good for Polanski to crawl home to Greater Manchester and resign himself to a life of quiet desperation. Get born, get schooled, get job, get car, pay tax and find a wife was never going to be an option for Polanski, and not merely because he’s gay and doesn’t understand how council tax works.

To some no doubt it is a character flaw, and perhaps they are right. A man in his twenties can wear his half-life with a certain style; at forty, usually not. But at the risk of prematurely joining the ranks of middle-aged sensibles, past a certain age you must learn such failings can only be accommodated, rather than overcome. For some being abnormal is the only option, even at a steep cost.

We can talk about whether there’s an epidemic of delusional wannabe creatives, caused by social media, godlessness, lack of bowling clubs or whatever peccadillo your politics prefers. But perhaps at the same time we can let the abnormals embrace their true nature as one of millions who recognised the value of being abnormal, and let them ride into the sunset with their honestly earned sense of bitterness and disillusionment.

Were I handling the estates of bands like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd – all cited as influences by MacDonald – the libel lawyers would already be on retainer. For while I’m no connoisseur of this kind of rubbish, even I can tell this track is garbage.

But my reason for bringing up MacDonald is not to fixate solely on the abysmal quality of his music. Rather, I’m intrigued by his status as a pioneer of what is sometimes called ‘Maga rap’, a genre that might well be broadened out to ‘Maga music’. As you might expect, such tracks are marked by their repetition of Maga talking points, creating some of the worst lyrics you’re ever likely to hear in pop music.

“They say America ain’t safe if you’re black or trans or gay/I think it’s way more dangerous to be a Christian” is representative of the general vibe of Pray for the Left, as well as the wider oeuvre of what one writer described as MacDonald’s “white victim complex anthems”. The titles of other tracks are equally suggestive, examples including Politically Incorrect, White Boy Sh*t and Snowflakes.

In fairness to MacDonald, not everything he’s made is as hammy as his more obviously Maga-inflected output. Whiteboy – there’s a theme here – is profane and abrasive, but its message is in the same ballpark as that of Martin Luther King’s most famous speech, and the lyrical flow is at least tolerable.

What jars across the worst of MacDonald’s material is the aforementioned crowbarring of contemporary political references from the Maga right. Facts, a song which features the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, known for his “facts don’t care about your feelings” slogan, touches on wokeness, abortion, transgenderism, queerness, and Black Lives Matter, none of which sit purposefully together.

In that respect, MacDonald shares something with his peers. Within Maga rap are the likes of Adam Calhoun, who MacDonald has collaborated with; the black rapper and ex-serviceman Topher; and Tyson James, who in 2021 released a track celebrating Kyle Rittenhouse, an American gun enthusiast who was unsuccessfully prosecuted for killing two men at a protest about police violence against black men.

Similar lyrics can be found in Maga tracks from alternative rock, a genre closer to my own heart that is generally progressive when it talks about politics. Try That in a Small Town caused a mild media fuss when it was released in 2023, threatening vigilante reprisals against the violent leftwing protests that occurred in the wake of Black Lives Matter’s pomp.

As for country music, a longtime haven of American conservatism that rarely troubles the British market, you have the likes of Oliver Anthony. In Rich Men North of Richmond, what starts as a touching lament about lives of desperation across the American flyover states turns into a bemusing attack on taxes, welfare and the undeserving poor.

Some of what makes these lyrics crap is undoubtedly true of any music that leans on contemporary references. Rap in particular is awash with nods to social media trends and other newsy ideas that are irrelevant a month after release. Lyrics like this seem instantly dated, preventing them from acquiring the charm that some time-bound genres absorb through graceful ageing.

You can also get away with this sort of thing if your vibe was consciously dated on arrival. When Mumford & Sons emerged in the late noughties, flannel-clad and banjos in hand, they were deliberately harking to an imagined past where people sat around in medieval taverns or on prairie porches, strumming lutes and looking wistful. Heck, even Bob Dylan started as a Woody Guthrie tribute act.

The other part of Maga music’s problem is that the invective it draws on is so gormlessly unpleasant. Rap may be no stranger to aggression – it coined the term ‘diss track’, though John Lennon was writing angry poems about Paul McCartney as early as the seventies – but for such lyrics to be worthwhile they need to be witty and interesting, rather than merely mouthing slogans re-posted on X that morning.

There is also the fact that Maga’s general ethos is such a deviation from the sixties counterculture that forms the ideological bedrock of modern pop music. This is not the case for many genres, even those that do not ostensibly conform to the template.

A lot of metal trades in themes of violence, alcoholism and even satanism. Mainstream rap and hip hop of my era has been unashamedly and garishly capitalistic. Pop’s defining feature could well be its bland conformism. The contrarian – and I would say accurate take – is that all of these things flow from the sixties counterculture, which had its fair share of violence, drug abuse and devil-worship, gave way to a liberal individualism perfectly attuned to consumer capitalism, and eventually yielded the thoughtless conformity that all successful reformations must.

At the risk of being controversial, Maga’s ethos is repugnant and reactionary in a way that discords with the sentiments of pop, as well as being mean-spirited, bigoted and obnoxious in ways that lack redeeming features. For all their political success, the alt right still can’t write a decent tune.

Currently reading: Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe; The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England by Jonathan Healey

Recent listening: Between Us and Heaven by Cult Figures; Harvest by Neil Young

A man without shame. A disgrace on every level. A coward, not a leader. A prime minister mired in deceit and deception. The single biggest threat to the future of the United Kingdom.

These are, verbatim, all descriptions of Boris Johnson by his erstwhile Commons adversary Keir Starmer. In fact, many of the lines above are phrases that the then leader of the opposition levelled at the prime minister in parliament – though, in timorous fashion, Starmer was obliged to withdraw the charge of cowardice on grounds of unparliamentary language.

It is hard to disagree with most of it. Johnson’s shamelessness could cause Frank Gallagher to blush. His career history is littered with postings brought to an abrupt end after being caught lying about some indiscretion. His only defence against charges of disgrace is that he never gave anybody reason to believe he’d behave.

And yet there is an irony. What sort of man misleads people to win high office, gathers a stonking majority at a general election, and then ruthlessly squanders it through shoddy comms, inept party management and more U-turns than a carousel?

Keir Starmer, of course.

It is never a good sign when you have to start the year telling the BBC that you’ll still have your job by the end of it. While talk of the next leader begins before the latest victor has made their acceptance speech, Starmer’s premiership has been notable in how public those mutterings have become so shortly after the general election.

Some of that, in fairness, is attributable to the increased volatility in British politics of recent years. The turmoil of negotiating Brexit has reduced the shelf life of prime ministers – perhaps literally, given the stress. Between Liz Truss’s implosion, Theresa May’s self-inflected injury after the snap general election, and the jostling below Rishi Sunak, British politics has recently taken a decidedly Australian approach to shuffling through leaders.

So it was in some ways no surprise that last May saw the Guardian speculating on whether tax arbitrage expert Angela Rayner was “positioning herself for a Starmer succession race”. It took only a few months for the debate to go public, the same newspaper reporting that “an operation to dethrone Starmer is now under way”.

Most recently it’s been suggested that Andy Burnham might finally return to the Commons after Andrew Gwynne MP vacates his seat. The Manchester mayor had previously said Labour MPs were privately urging him to challenge Starmer for the top job – the kind of Cincinnatus cover story that sounds akin to remarks about balls falling from the back of scrums.

Starmer could survive until the next election, of course. Anthony Seldon, a quasi-official biographer to 10 Downing Street, wrote six months after Starmer’s election that “many great prime ministers overcome a shaky start” – not entirely reassuringly.

The difficulty is that Starmer has not overcome his shaky start. His approval ratings are catastrophic, pulling the kind of negative figures that only the outbreak of global war could reverse. Added to that, he has also effectively lost his majority in the Commons, unable to pass legislation as MPs fret over losing their seat at the next election.

That it’s all rather Johnsonian is bemusing when you consider the ostensible contrast between the men. While Starmer is the human rights lawyer who became director of public prosecutions, Johnson is a scoundrel, liar, cheat, thief, coward and toady who has spent his life fumbling between Fleet Street and high office.

Starmer is certainly a man you’d trust to complete his red box, an act that Johnson would only do inadvertently. In Johnson’s plus column, he would at least be good for a book recommendation, while Starmer has probably not picked up a novel since his parents stopped reading him Spot the Dog.

Cut below the surface though, and there are a remarkable amount of similarities between the men in office.

Both are known liars and cheats. Starmer at best misled the Labour left about his intentions to unite the party before he crushed them. Then there is the bemusing case in which he denied that he’d said Israel had the right to cut off water and power from Gaza, despite being caught on tape doing exactly that. Critics can probably supply further examples of him not telling the whole truth, and you don’t need me to tell you about Johnson’s relationship with reality.

Both men have proven inept at riding out the news cycle, as well as keeping their parliamentary colleagues on side. When accused of misbehaviour in office, Johnson’s government would drag out a scandal as long as possible, denying and obfuscating before belatedly fessing up – ensuring maximum PR damage.

Starmer has repeated this trick, putting out controversial policy announcements, drawing criticism from within Labour and without, before eventually capitulating. The reversal on mandatory digital ID cards is one such example; the likely collapse of the Chagos handover, prompted by criticism from Donald Trump, would be another.

Perhaps all this stems from the fact that neither man seems to have a strong idea of how they wanted to govern. Johnson wanted to be ‘world king’, and being British prime minister was as near as he could come to it. Starmer’s motivations are less clear to me. On winning the last election, he promised a “government of service”. His political cackhandedness and career history speak to a natural technocrat, rather than somebody capable of harnessing the animal spirits that drive much in politics.

Either way, both Starmer and Johnson’s administrations have landed roughly in the same place: the men widely disliked among the British public, without a clear idea of how to improve the country, and with their colleagues prepared to oust them before immolation at the next general election. As the cod psychology has it: you criticise most severely the qualities you most dislike in yourself.

Currently reading: Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell; The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England by Jonathan Healey

Recent listening: Ocean Avenue by Yellowcard

Marking the start of the year, I went on a cancelling spree. Not an attempt to inflict professional ruin on my political enemies, fun as that would be. Instead it was a bonfire of the subscriptions, the devil’s bargains that steadily siphon funds from your bank account, the service forgotten after a few months.

Out went several bolt-ons to Amazon Prime, which as a good person I don’t pay for myself. After more than a decade of loyalty, Netflix is gone too, much as I enjoyed the streamer’s ability to stretch one hour’s worth of material into a ‘limited’ documentary series. Once we find the cable for the DVD player, Disney Plus can count its days too.

Finances were one motivation. But the main reason is that I’d like to spend less of my time grazing on dross. From Instagram to Netflix via way of Spotify, modern media has committed itself to the shallowest forms of consumption, serving up small plates when people need three square meals a day.

Shallowness has its place, as I’m obliged to say as a journalist. But, dare I say, you can have too little of a good thing. Back in the olden days, you had at least to walk to the newsagent to flick through the news in briefs. Now you can wake up, roll over and be scrolling before your eyes have even adjusted to the daylight.

Much of this is amusing, of course. There are few things funnier to me than browsing Reddit comments after some catastrophe has befallen a future footnote in British political history. (Yes, I’m talking about Robert Jenrick.) And yet I will not be alone in spending far too much time in the shallows, when I should be wading through War and Peace.

Since becoming a journalist back in 2014, my commitment to long-form has been as variable as Boris Johnson’s loyalty to his wives. The odd conquest of door-stopping histories has alternated with unplanned abstinences, my book collection reduced to the mere backdrop of an ill-advised remote appearance on Newsnight.

I plead professional commitments. News is famously not a genre that lends itself to depth, the average hack having arrived with ADHD or acquired it out of economic necessity. Combine that with the emergence of Twitter, Reddit and more recently Substack, and books have easily grown dusty on shelves in the past decade or so.

Thankfully, not that many people are journalists. But I get the impression a lot of people have had a similar experience. While in the first half of the teens Twitter reduced everything to 140 characters – the length of a text message, you’ll recall – latterly cheap internet connections have slimmed down video to 15-second bursts. Suffice to say, it has not gone entirely well.

The political impacts we can leave to one side. But the internet’s effect on art has been dismal in many places. Musicians have become obsessed with the first 30 seconds of the song, knowing that if listeners skip you’ll be punished by Spotify’s recommendation engine and miss out on your streaming fee. Netflix has likewise been telling its scriptwriters to write for an audience that has one eye on their smartphone, while its directors are told to put the action in the middle of the shot so that it can be cut for vertical video.

All this, you’ll have noticed, is about attention. It’s a cliche to point it out, but the decision to fund the internet largely off the back of ads meant that users’ eyeballs became the key commodity, rather than paid subscriptions. Even the streamers have turned ads on belatedly, such is our enthusiasm for subsidising our online kicks by donating advertisers our time.

It’s funny to think that when the internet still belonged to weirdos, much of this was hailed as a kind of liberation. The open nature of online allowed anybody to set up a website. (I first did so in around 2010.) And as places like YouTube gathered momentum, the promise was that people could bypass the cloistered gatekeepers that prevented the average Joe from getting a record deal or book contract.

No doubt some people have broken through who otherwise wouldn’t have done. The arts, being frequently unprofitable and having more aspiring suppliers than the demand can handle, has always been vulnerable to nepotism, patrons’ whims and other chicanery. Many people who would have been excluded outside the old system have been able to build followings which are at least notionally independent.

Consumers were likewise promised a personalised but endless array of entertainment options. Where once your choices were limited to whatever local TV and radio was broadcasting, or what your local bookshop and video rental place was stocking, you now allegedly had access to everything the human race had ever produced.

As someone who spends a lot of time on my headphones listening to random men gab about pointless bollocks, I can’t entirely complain. But I do complain somewhat. For every podcast like The Rest is History there are dozens of dozy discussion podcasts fronted by enthusiastic young men who barely know what they are talking about, and most of these aren’t even shows I’ve appeared on.

And it’s not even like we’ve removed the gatekeepers. In a foreshadowing of our coming AI revolution (which may, depending on who you read, have been cancelled), honest, hard-working, drug-addled aficionados have been replaced by lines of code written by mildly autistic dorks. Where once you had knowledgeable, passionate people taking a survey of what was happening and making biased, prejudiced choices about what’s important, you now have software clocking what you’ve already enjoyed and slinging you similar stuff ad infinitum.

Some years ago I was an avid reader of N64 Magazine, a snarky love letter to Nintendo that came through my letterbox every month. This came out so long ago that much of it existed before normies discovered the internet. And because the editors didn’t have to care about clicks, they could afford to direct your attention to things that were worthwhile, even if you’d never have typed them into Google.

Writing a monthly print edition also made it easier for the journalists to construct a coherent story about what was happening in the games industry. This is much harder to do online. People don’t flick through a website like they do a magazine, your audience is more transient, and their attention is more fractured.

This is really what’s been lost in the transition from analogue to digital media, whether in art or more broadly. The splintering of attention has made it much harder to construct coherence. The collapse of any context, splicing, dicing, and staccato rhythm of the internet is antithetical to synthesising ideas, even if it does lend itself to a certain cut-and-paste creativity.

You might think, well, the world is chaotic, and perhaps it is better that our media reflects that. But humans are not built for this, and it stresses us out. A coherent but inaccurate worldview is probably better than an incoherent one (as might be inferred from the fact religious people live longer). Better still is a solid base that can flex where it’s required.

When I consider what the internet has done to us, I can’t escape the Ludovico Technique scene from A Clockwork Orange. The psychopathic protagonist, Alex, is placed in a straitjacket, his eyelids are prised open, and he’s forced to watch disturbing violent footage while being made to feel nauseous.

I feel slightly ill watching TikTok, but I understand that is not the intention. For most of its young users it is disturbingly engaging. Rather than having to wait for the boxer to limber up, they can skip straight to the knockout punch. And when they are bored of that they can flick straight to another clip of a milf baking cookies, or whatever.

There are no doubt techno-optimists that see this as a natural half-step towards plugging ourselves into the Matrix full-time. But you’ll recall that the first iteration of the Matrix was too perfect: humans kept trying to wake up from their virtual bliss. There is a value to struggling for something, even when it comes to the media we ‘consume’. It is not good for us to have only the sweetest and sourest components of a dish directly injected into our stomach for several hours a day.

And so this year I’m attempting to go another way. I’ve turned off most of my phone notifications. Subscriptions have been put on the bonfire. I might even start eating fewer crisps. But more importantly, I’m intending to be more deliberate about the art I spend my time on. I’m putting aside more time for reading – a mix of classic novels with newer non-fiction. I’ve committed to listening to albums over singles, again divided between classics and artists from recent years. Even with films and TV, I’ll be trying to undo more than a decade of bad habits. Wish me luck.

Currently reading: Some short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson; The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England by Jonathan Healey

Recent listening: Back in Black (album) by AC/DC; Viagr Aboys by Viagra Boys

Predicting politics is a fools’ game, no better illustrated than by Philip Tetlock’s image of the dart-throwing chimp. Having challenged various professionals to make clear predictions on future political events, the political psychologist found that their success rate was little better than chance (though certain techniques can improve things).

In any case, what is life without a little foolishness? Having capped off 2025 with a summary of the year that was, it is amusing to guess at what might happen in 2026. Consider these somewhere between predictions and notes on what to notice in the coming year.

Keir Starmer in jeopardy

British politicians and journalists have acquired a taste for regicide in recent years. This is most literal in the case of the New Statesman’s Will Lloyd, but more obliquely true when it comes to our rapid succession of prime ministers, five having occupied 10 Downing Street in the last decade.

Now that Labour is dipping into third place in the polls, many of the party’s MPs have realised their seats are not secure at the next election. Keir Starmer seems to be without direction, either unable or unwilling to impose a coherent strategy on the country now that he is actually in charge of it. The prime minister’s “stonking majority”, to quote a phrase, has even proved a hindrance, many Labour MPs rebelling to spike his welfare reforms.

Since the conference season in autumn, Starmer has repeatedly been asked whether he will see another Christmas in Downing Street. Things are expected to come to a head at the local elections in May, where Labour will likely receive a drubbing as support moves to Reform and the Greens.

Even so, Labour has a track record of failing to remove underperforming leaders, and leadership race rules favour an incumbent. This is compounded by a lack of obvious successor, even if Manchester mayor Andy Burnham and health secretary Wes Streeting are interested. Starmer may be in office for some time yet.

The cementing of five-party rule

However, Labour’s problems are the tip of the main political story of this parliament: the emergence of a five-party system in British politics. Voting intention polls have been putting Reform around the 30 per cent mark in terms of public support, with Labour and the Conservatives struggling to make 20 per cent, and the Lib Dems and Greens on around 13 per cent each.

Such division is both a symptom and a cause of continued volatility in British politics. Where previously the Tory-Labour duopoly made for fairly predictable elections, seats are being increasingly contested by other parties. And with tactical voting having previously been rife owing to first-past-the-past, it is becoming increasingly unclear to voters how to best exclude their least-favoured candidates from office.

Forecasting this precisely is a waste of time, especially more than three years out from the next mandatory general election date. But it seems most likely that Reform will win the largest number of seats next time, barring a shock return to form for Labour or the Conservatives. A majority is possible, though it seems likelier Nigel Farage will have to partner up with the Tories, the only party who find Reform palatable.

Green gains are likely to be more modest, but will continue to give the impression of momentum that Zack Polanski has generated since becoming leader last year. For this, he can expect more monsterings from centrist dinosaurs who have retreated from the arena to make podcasts. But given he is already better known than his predecessor Caroline Lucas, he probably won't mind.

Age of explicit empires

It is optimistic to think that the world has not been governed by imperial motives since the end of the Cold War. Whatever credit you give to other influences, we have lived in a world primarily formed around American interests since the end of the Second World War, which have given us the international monetary system, mass cultural exports, and numerous military misadventures.

The kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro at the start of this year was extraordinary, but is not wildly out of line with recent history. Only a quarter of a century ago, the leaders of the free world invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, the latter without the approval of the world’s other big dogs. And America has been involved in armed conflict, including outright war, throughout its entire history.

Given Russian belligerence in Eastern Europe, and Chinese expansion in Southeast Asia, the vibes are indeed bad. Donald Trump’s refusal even to gesture towards self-serving international norms has made the world a more dangerous place. But ever since the first states began emerging we have always lived in an imperial age, even if a few occasionally well-meaning hypocrites pretended otherwise.

Trough of LLM despair

Anybody from Silicon Valley who makes it into the public eye is far more likely to be a salesman than a technologist. And good salesmen are always flexible with the truth, as the current occupant of the White House could confirm.

How apt then that the computer industry's latest wheeze has turned out to be a machine for constructing superficially-pleasing bullshit. As large language models (LLMs) slide from the peak of inflated expectations to the trough of disillusionment, what a few years ago was hailed as an extinction level event now looks little more than another tech bubble.

There are of course plenty of areas in which AI is doing great things, mostly when it comes to highly-specialised tasks that can be supervised by a qualified human. But for most consumers the AI revolution’s most obvious effect has been to flood the internet with glib and inaccurate prose, uncanny imagery, and soulless tunes.

Outside of the meme economy, whatever value university degrees once had has been eroded by students using ChatGPT to write their essays. And business life is likewise being hampered by even more needless and ill-conceived paperwork – a friend of mine boasting that he now routinely sends over AI-generated ‘research’ reports as part of his sales technique.

Businesses will eventually grow wise to AI slop, and hopefully figure out where it does and doesn't work for them. The technology will also improve. But the easy gains promised by Sam Altman and friends look unlikely to materialise.

Congratulations to everyone who has made it to the end of 2025 – and commiserations, I suppose, to everyone reading this from the void beyond. Whether alive, dead or undead, I’m grateful to anyone who has continued to read Poke the Bear this year, and hope you’ll stick around a while longer.

It’s become common for other newsletter writers to collect together some of their best pieces from the year, both in lieu of writing anything original and as a means of reminding readers that there is some gold in the vaults. While this newsletter is in favour of flouting many conventions, opportunities for self-promotion are not among them. Enjoy, and see you in 2026.

January: The slacker’s manifesto, Substack

It was perhaps not the greatest idea to publish an anti-work manifesto at the beginning of a year in which I was looking for gainful employment. A combination of economic woe, AI shenanigans and ‘screening calls’ has since made this period the worst for job hunting I’ve ever seen. Some regrets then, but the piece is good.

I accept that someone, or at least something, needs to do many of these jobs. The internet pipes must be cleaned regularly so this email can land in your inbox, alongside other important jobs. But I think we can acknowledge a lot of the work sucks, for reasons listed above, and that slacking off is ultimately an acceptable response to a broken social contract kept aloft by bullshit jobs.

February: A ‘reckoning’ on grooming gangs won’t satisfy the right, Substack

Growing tension over multiculturalism has perhaps been Britain’s key story this year. After this piece was published, a proper enquiry into grooming gangs was called. King’s College professor David Betz suggested that Britain has the ingredients for civil war (meaning a Troubles for the mainland). We end the year with a poll that the public are trending towards a narrower view of who counts as British, but the fact is we are a diverse country.

British migration policy for decades has led to some ethnic communities that sit uncomfortably alongside mainstream society. Even if the grooming gangs scandal is successfully incorporated into a wider pushback against migration – finally “treated like A Big Deal”, to quote the writer Louise Perry – this is what Britain is now like.

March: Corporate bullying is good, Substack

I’ve read that modern corporate names are as much about avoiding copyright disputes as anything else. But there is something dismal, even offensive about a world where you are forced to buy goods not from Smith & Co but from SmiCo or some other abomination. It was therefore welcome when Aberdeen decided to restore the vowels in its name after a ghastly rebrand coincided with a share slump. Many more cases of this would be welcome.

Some of us pretended to have practical complaints about the name, including that it read as ‘a burden’, which was certainly true in reputational terms. This is because journalists hold humanities degrees and can cover their prejudices with fancy lingo. Mostly we disliked it because it was butt ugly, the work of ‘brand consultants’ deranged on TikTok who in previous generations would have dismissed, correctly, out of hand. As one respondent to a 2021 poll put it, the rebrand was an “act of corporate insanity”.

April: I don’t want to read your novel, Substack

Having recently taken delivery of several non-fiction doorstoppers you could commit murder with, I don’t entirely resile from the argument in this piece. Modern fiction remains an effeminate business, distracting from the manly endeavour of reading through five different volumes on the English Civil War. But having finally finished John Niven’s Kill Your Friends and cracked open a copy of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy bought more than a decade ago, I’ll concede some fiction is worthwhile, if unlikely to turn everyone into an empath.

Putting a book into somebody’s hands and expecting them to empathise with your worldview, and perhaps even at the margins change their voting habits, seems optimistic, to put it mildly. No amount of thumbing through The Bonfire of the Vanities will grant an optimist the kind of black-hearted cynicism that Tom Wolfe needed to write the novel, and no amount of Sally Rooney is going to prevent me scoffing at bookish grads absorbed in each others’ navels.

May: MPs are trying to legalise full-term abortions, The Critic

For several years I’ve written with about the attempts to fully decriminalise abortion in Great Britain. Prompted by delusional fears about the influence of American evangelical Christianity in the UK, MPs this year voted through an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill to this effect, with the legislation currently at committee stage in the House of Lords. For reasons elucidated in the piece, I think this is immoral.

I suspect if an MP did openly advocate for NHS abortions up until the due date, it would rather expose the brutality of the current amendment. British abortion law has until now struck a sensible balance, accepting termination in the early months as morally neutral, while protecting an unborn child’s right to life in the final trimester, with appropriate medical exemptions.

June: It’s time to ban the Chelsea tractor, The Spectator

Since moving towards central London and fully embracing public transport, I’ve harboured growing suspicions about cars. It is a common view that their presence has made pedestrian life less pleasant, encouraging kids indoors and making everyone likelier to die of lung disease. I only voted for Sadiq Khan entirely because he had promised to punish drivers via the ULEZ charge, and it was a great pleasure to further antagonise them with this piece.

Ironically for a vehicle so closely associated with mums doing the school run, the Chelsea tractor is a clear danger to primary-aged children, making it much likelier that the driver will squish them into the tarmac. A similar fate awaits adults, though the lucky ones will merely absorb the impact in their torso, where they keep their vital organs. This shows there’s only one thing for it: it’s time to ban four-wheel drives from Britain’s cities.

July: Make 16-year-olds adults again, The Critic

With concrete achievements rather scarce in the first 18 months of Keir Starmer’s premiership, the decision to give 16-year-olds the vote in the next general election might rank as one of his signal successes (assuming the necessary election bill materialises). The voting age is of course arbitrary, but this proposal cuts against the increasing trend to treat 16- and 17-year-olds as minors in other situations: the military, marriage, smoking and much besides. As I advocate here, let’s take the government’s proposals to their conclusion.

[…] we should embrace 16 wholeheartedly as the end of youth and beginning of adulthood. While many of us look back fondly to our adolescence, when our bodies didn’t creak and somebody else was doing the dishes, most teenagers crave the opportunity to be treated as fully-functioning members of society. I say we give it to them.

August: Why is it still acceptable to abuse men with long hair? The Spectator

With the real journalists on holiday, I used the summer to tackle the burning injustice of being heckled for my luscious locks. As you can tell from the comments, this greatly impressed the readers of Britain’s leading conservative magazine. You may draw your own conclusions as to the motives of such critics, or simply read my own psychological diagnosis.

[…] I suspect at its heart the verbal attacks on the long-hairs owe most to sexual jealousy from the baldies. Certainly many women cannot resist a floppy fringe after a few drinks, if only for the shampoo recommendations.

September: Cask ale is running dry, The Spectator

The Campaign for Real Ale has been a fixture of British beer and pub culture for more than half a century, defending the virtue of cask ale against all comers. During this time it has earned an unfortunate reputation as the home of curmudgeons, and dwindling interest has put it into something of a financial crisis. A pity, as I like a good cellar-temperature beer, even if my preferred ales are of the surreal kind.

Noted beer writer Pete Brown once recounted an almost implausibly perfect story of two alleged train video-wielding members in a Sheffield bar, demanding a discount in the manner of a Chicago mob boss. Crawl around the internet and you won’t struggle to find similar tales of entitlement, pedantry and general arseholery associated with real ale fans. Even Viz’s ‘Real Ale Twats’ strip, which is told with a certain amount of fondness, suggests drinking cask should be added to the diagnostic criteria for autism.

October: Slaves’ descendants don’t deserve reparations, The Critic

Almost as if there was a conspiracy, the comedian Lenny Henry and philosopher Nigel Biggar released books simultaneously on the reparations debate, the former pro and the latter anti. Biggar’s book is much the better volume, both in terms of writing and historical robustness. But I can’t help thinking the background is irrelevant to all of this.

[…] the main problem is moral: why should Henry, who has done better than most as a result of Britain’s imperial legacies, expect any kind of compensation from a white 18-year-old stacking shelves in Tesco? The fact he has no doubt experienced racism and discrimination is not a good enough reason, not least because of the growing evidence that the British state has now been discriminating against white people in public jobs, social housing and justice for several years.

November: David Beckham doesn’t deserve a knighthood, Substack

It feels a little ungallant to be picking on an ageing footballer, especially the nice-but-dim David Beckham, who unlike many of his nineties contemporaries you wouldn’t be embarrassed to introduce to your mum. But in Qatar, Golden Balls has lent his glossy image to a rather ugly regime, making the drunken antics and louche behaviour of his footballing buddies seem rather harmless in comparison.

It does at any rate not strike me as especially chivalrous to align yourself with Qatar, not least because in the past knights were committed to slaughtering Arabs and taking back the holy lands, rather than signing brand endorsement deals. Becks may well doff his flat cap to Lizzie’s corpse and shoot the odd clip for Unicef, but in backing Qatar he has proven he’s a money-grabbing wrong’un, protected by his nice-but-dim demeanour.

December: What’s so great about juries? The Spectator

Robert Conquest’s dictum that “everyone is conservative about what he knows best” is often taken as a defence of right-wing caution, experience breeding a wisdom about settled systems. The quote can of course be taken the other way: leave anyone for too long in a system and they go native, mindlessly defending the groupthink of their peers. This is completely the case with jury service, an institution worshipped by lawyers but treated ambivalently by laymen.

That there is something unserious about jurors is effectively conceded by Lammy’s decision to take juries off any case involving dread phrases like ‘financial derivative’. Observers of existing trials will already have noticed how cosseted juries are, contextual information being carefully rationed lest they make a statistical inference about the guilt of the man in the dock. This is Schrödinger’s juror: a cornerstone liable to break if too much weight is placed on it.

When it comes to Eurovision, the British have long considered themselves the black sheep of a European family. Long accustomed to hearing ‘nil point’ when the scores roll in at the end of the night, the Brits grumble that the perfidious continentals are ever ganging up on them. Even when we do produce a winning act, the Russians invade Ukraine and shower its victim in sympathy votes.

But at least we aren’t Israel. Last week a meeting of the European Broadcasting Union confirmed that Eurovision’s least European member would be allowed to compete, despite several peers calling for a vote to exclude them. This vote would have been secret, though the aggrieved parties somewhat outed themselves by publicly and noisily quitting the contest, Spain leading while Ireland, the Netherlands, and Slovenia followed.

The issue has been bubbling away ever since 7 October 2023, since when Hamas has been made to understand the folly of attacking a much better-equipped neighbour. As a man like Zack Polanski would say, Israel has been committing genocide. As members of the Israeli government would say, the country has been waging war. Call me a soggy centrist, but I reckon Israel’s probably only guilty of occasional war crimes, and what imperial power hasn’t been?

Whatever you call it, the Spaniards, Irish, Dutch and Slovenians have said they cannot share a stage with a Jewish – I mean, er, Israeli – chanteuse. The counter-argument that Kan, the Israeli broadcaster, provides an opposing voice to the government and is bolstered by its inclusion in Eurovision, appears not to have convinced the haters.

Indeed, the fever that has gripped many Europeans after the breaking out of the Gaza War has often approached mania. Some time ago I heard a friend of a friend had dropped out of life to focus on protesting Israel’s campaign in Gaza, presumably radicalised by what he was seeing in his social media feed.

While there’s plenty of absurdity to go around, at the apex are the various ‘Queers for Palestine’ initiatives that have popped up. One Instagram account under that name boasts 40,000 followers, describing its mission as being: “Queers committed to the struggle for a just world, free of settler-colonialism, Zionism, and capitalism.” Struggle may be the key word here, I fear.

Given its embrace by LGBT people and its television audience of 166 million, Eurovision is arguably the biggest queer event in the world. And with its studio audiences having spent the past two years booing at Israel, it is therefore the most prominent instance of ‘Queers for Palestine’ in the world.

That makes it, in a sense, deeply leftwing, perhaps the most openly leftwing public broadcast that has ever claimed to be apolitical. And in fact it has always been deeply leftwing, as has to be the case when you combine homosexuality, internationalism and art that is aesthetically horrendous.

And yet with Eurovision fans considering whether it’s time to boycott the show before the Jews – I mean, er, Israelis – win the contest and set up the next year in Tel Aviv, could it be that watching marks you out as a callous right-winger who supports genocide, the arms trade and looking fabulous? If so, I may have to burnish my leftwing credentials by indulging in another piece of light entertainment that scares off straight men. I hear Tom Daley’s knitting programme is good.

Amid an otherwise banal PR exercise posing as a Netflix documentary, one moment of Beckham stood out. Chastising his wife as she attempted to claim the pair were working class, David snuck his head through the door to ask Victoria: “What car did your dad drive you to school in?”

Even as a child the Rolls-Royce was something of an embarrassment to Victoria and her siblings, who preferred to be dropped off in his white van. But whatever the precise class credentials of Posh Spice, there is something rather déclassé about hawking a white t-shirt emblazoned with “my dad had a Rolls-Royce” in black letters, especially when the price tag is £110.

Not that it matters what I think, as shown by the success of the Beckhams’ long-running campaign to join the British establishment. Earlier this week David was rewarded with a tap on the shoulder, King Charles presumably using a different blade to knight Golden Balls than the one he had run his brother through in the days beforehand.

It’s in many respects a turnaround worthy of Sir Gareth Southgate, best known as a defender who flubbed a penalty before his turn as England manager and pundit on race relations. Almost three decades ago now, Beckham was subject to a nineties press monstering after being red carded during an England game against Argentina for kicking Diego Simeone. England were subsequently knocked out of the 1998 World Cup on penalties, the public reacting so mildly that only one pub created an effigy of Beckham – football being much more important than life and death, after all.

Golden Balls’ reputation is rather improved these days, and not just because of the knighthood for the inevitable “services to sport and charity”. When the curtains fell on Queen Elizabeth, Becks was conveniently discovered hanging around in the queue with the rest of the plebs for a whole 12 hours, happy to talk up his monarchist credentials to any bored hack who would listen.

“I grew up in a household of royalists and I was brought up that way,” Beckham told ITV, Roundhead-style haircut hidden beneath a flat cap. His grandparents “would have wanted to be here”, Becks added, “so I’m here on their behalf and on behalf of my family and obviously just to celebrate [sic] with everybody else here.”

Frankly, I must congratulate the flacks who made it all happen, and this is hardly their only trick. In other charitable endeavours, Becks has been working for Unicef, Malaria No More and The King’s Foundation, none of which can have hurt his long-held ambition to be called Sir David on BBC News reports.

But there is one area in which things have not been so glossy for Golden Balls, even aside from the alleged affair with Dutch model Rebecca Loos. When Qatar hosted the World Cup back in 2022, it was Beckham who stepped forward to front it as an international ambassador (alongside many others from the footballing establishment who participated in the festivities, not least Beckham’s best man Gary Neville).

Beckham was widely reported to have made in excess of £100m from this deal, though The Athletic reported that the figure was only £12m a year for the first three years. In any case, the brand deals that the footballer has secured following the endorsement of Qatar appear to be considerable, and The Athletic’s report suggested that his links to the country go fairly deep.

Qatar remains a backwards place: socially repressive and wildly unequal economically, as most poignantly evinced through the deaths and mistreatment of migrant workers building stadiums and other infrastructure for the world cup. These fatalities were estimated to be in the thousands by The Guardian, though I suppose I’m obliged to say that the people who caused said deaths claim the figure is much lower.

Those like Beckham who endorsed or otherwise participated in the World Cup argued that it was better to go over there and tell the Qataris what a bunch of shits they are than stay at home. Rarely has Upton Sinclair’s remark on the difficulty of understanding things when your salary depends on not doing so been more appropriate.

It does at any rate not strike me as especially chivalrous to align yourself with Qatar, not least because in the past knights were committed to slaughtering Arabs and taking back the holy lands, rather than signing brand endorsement deals. Becks may well doff his flat cap to Lizzie’s corpse and shoot the odd clip for Unicef, but in backing Qatar he has proven he’s a money-grabbing wrong’un, protected by his nice-but-dim demeanour.

That’s quite apart from the argument that it’s pointless to hand clebs gongs for things everybody already knows they did. Despite having not played professionally since 2013, Beckham is conceivably the most famous English footballer in the world. I suppose the Rolls-Royces don’t service themselves.

In The Critic today you’ll find my review of two books about reparations that came out earlier this autumn. The Big Payback by Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder argues that Britain should pay money to black people for the enslavement their ancestors suffered as part of the Atlantic slave trade; Reparations by Nigel Biggar argues that this is neither historically justified nor morally required.

I was unimpressed by Henry and Ryder’s effort, which mostly consisted of speaking to racial justice activists and accepting their claims uncritically. The writing style was also rather painful at points, with the frequent self-deprecation patronising the reader and the gags barely qualifying as dad jokes.

Biggar’s book is better, I think even for somebody who disagrees with his perspective. He lays out the history of the transatlantic slave trade, including what the British did to stamp it out and how certain colonies have fared since becoming independent. This is complemented with direct discussion of the ethics of reparations, which I largely agreed with.

What follows are some of my notes from reading Reparations. All quotes unless otherwise stated are from Biggar.

• Biggar argues that what brought recent discussions on reparations to the fore was the murder of George Floyd, a black man killed by a Minneapolis policeman in the summer of 2020. This set off a chain of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, including in the UK, and more discussion about racial justice.

• The crux of what Biggar is arguing against is the contention that “in order to exorcise themselves of racism […] the British must repudiate their colonial past, which can be summed up in one word: slavery.” (p8) Given the breadth of British imperial activities, the focus on slavery suggests an American influence. There is no corresponding claim from India that the British need to pay up, though perhaps they are satisfied that we gave them cricket.

• While a lot of people – myself included – reject reparations largely on the basis contemporary Brits aren’t the perpetrators of slavery, Biggar attacks the historical argument directly and rejects the notion that black people living in Britain today are suffering because of slavery. As he writes: “the simple equation of British colonialism with slavery […] is historically untenable. Indeed, it is cartoonishly simplistic. Equally, the BLM claim that British society today is systemically racist is empirically untenable.” (p10)

• On the latter point, Biggar notes that many senior British politicians are ethnic minorities. Recent examples from Boris Johnson’s government include Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel, Sajid Javid, Nadhim Zahawi, Kwasi Kwarteng and Kemi Badenoch. (Unmentioned in the book, Labour’s rather whiter cabinet still features David Lammy and Shabana Mahmood in senior roles.) “Racist, white supremacist countries just do not fill the highest offices of state with members of ethnic minorities,” is a contention that is hard to dispute. (p11)

• One of Biggar’s central arguments is that throughout history “slavery was a universal institution that had existed from the dawn of time.” Slavery existed in empires run by Romans, Spaniards, Portuguese, Arabs, Africans, Aztecs and Incas, to name a few examples. (p17)

• Biggar mostly doesn’t emphasise his religious views, but he does make an early reference to “my Christian ethical viewpoint” which yields an “objective moral reality” and “universal moral principles”. “If that were not so, the Nuremberg Trials were merely victor’s vengeance dressed up as justice, and all talk about the moral authority of universal human rights nothing but hot air.” (p18) My more pagan viewpoint leads me to suspect there was an element of victor’s vengeance in the Nuremberg Trials, though I don’t think it invalidates the exercise.

• “Belief in the basic equality of human beings does not imply that all cultures are equal.” (p20) Biggar points to technical achievements, such as being able to write; scientific knowledge, such as knowing the earth is round; and more controversially moral superiority, such as being a culture that repudiates slavery.

• On an individual level, Biggar defends hierarchy even in a moral system of fundamental equality between people. “Any large-scale human society will need to work out a division of labour, whereby some sit in a planning office while others dig ditches. The moral challenge is to prevent a functional hierarchy, where relations of authority and subordination are justified by organisational efficiency, from ossifying into an essential one, where those relations are thought to be natural.” (p20)

• In defence of self-interest: “The pursuit of what is valuable or good is basic to the moral rightness of anything we do, even if it is not sufficient for it. What is good for us is in our genuine interest. Therefore, there is nothing at all wrong with pursuing our own genuine interests – indeed, we have a duty to do so.” (p21) Biggar adds this also applies to governments, and I suppose other organisations, though the duty is tempered against other people’s interests.

• “History contains an ocean of injustice, most of it unremedied and now lying beyond correction in this world.” (p22)

• On judgement: “We are moral beings; we cannot help but make moral judgements and react negatively, say, to historic instances of excessive violence. If we pretend not to judge, we will judge anyway, but obliquely.” (p23)

• On historical judgement: “We can make sure, however, that our present ethics are informed and moderated by a sensitivity to human limits and frailty and by an historical imagination that enable us to enter sympathetically into the moral constraints and demands of circumstances very different from our own.” (p25)

• Given slavery manifested in different ways throughout history, it is not all equally immoral. “Even if we think all slavery bad, it was not always equally bad.” (p27)

• Early colonial life in North America was brutal even for white Europeans. Survival rates for indentured servants – that is, people who agreed to a long-term working contract of several years – were not especially encouraging, but you did get land if you survived. “Between 1650 and 1780, 50–66 per cent of Europeans migrating to North America did so under contracts of indentured servitude.” (p29)

• This kind of labour is mentioned because it is comparable to slavery, but better in many respects. In the “pure form or paradigm of slavery […] it is the treatment of another human being as absolutely disposable property that makes it categorically worse than other forms of unjust employment.” (p31)

• Even so, in some contexts slavery was better than the alternative. Before the development of prisoner of war codes, and the allocation of resources to meaningfully keep said prisoners, slaughter of defeated enemies was the default option in conflict. “Therefore, however counter-intuitive it may seem to us and however difficult to swallow it might be, enslavement sometimes represented a measure of moral progress.” (p34)

• For fans of the noble savage: “In the Americas, the peoples of the Pacific North West practised [slavery] from before the sixth century AD, the Incas and the Aztecs extracted forced labour from subject peoples from the fifteenth century, and the Comanches ‘built the largest slave economy’ in what is now the south west of the US from the eighteenth century.” (p35)

• Biggar argues that reparations activists ignore the universality of slavery “in order to pretend that the British enslavement of blacks was something extraordinary and that it was the origin of the white-versus-black racism that infects British and other anglophone societies today”. (p37)

• I’ve read elsewhere that slaving conditions were generally worse in the Caribbean sugar plantations than in the southern US. “Slaves commonly toiled for their owners for up to twelve hours a day, six days a week, without pay. They were malnourished, labouring in a very debilitating climate and prey to a wide array of diseases. Unsurprisingly, they suffered a high rate of mortality. As a result, before the ending of the slave trade, none of the sugar colonies in the West Indies managed to achieve a natural increase in the slave population. That is why they had to keep on bringing in fresh supplies of slaves.” (p43)

• The bluntness of this made me laugh: “can we say that transatlantic slavery involved a greater aggregate quantity of suffering than its Arab counterpart? Not really. Human suffering is only as great as an individual human being can experience it.” (p45)

• Reparations activists frequently claim that slavery was the key to the economic development of the British Empire. Biggar says historical opinion largely disagrees. From historian Kenneth Morgan: “It would be incorrect to claim that the wealth flowing home from the slave trade was a major stimulus for industrialization in Britain, but it would not be unfair to claim that the slave-sugar complex strengthened the British economy and played a significant, though not decisive part, in its evolution.” (p48)

• While conceding slave labour made some contribution to British wealth, Biggar minimises it, noting that “nameless medieval serfs and Victorian industrial workers” were also exploited. “The truth is that little of what anyone, anywhere inherits is untainted by some historic wrongdoing or other. We cannot scrub out the stain. All we can do is strive to use our tainted inheritance better.” (p53)

• The complicity of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade is controversial, but what historical record there is suggests some involvement. “Commercial and political elites in West and Central Africa ‘appear to have made large profits from helping to meet the American demand for slave labour’,” Biggar writes. (p59)

• On the Christian roots of abolitionism: “Whereas Enlightenment philosophers influenced the literate, educated elite, the inspiration of the extraordinarily popular movement to abolish the slave trade and slavery in the late eighteenth century was Christian. Anti-slavery sentiment flourished widely among English Dissenters or Nonconformists – especially the Quakers – and the Methodist or evangelical wing of the Church of England.” (p64)

• The fact that the British government paid slave-holding families while it was legislating abolition is often seen as a moral outrage. Biggar sees it a political expediency: “The shadow of the French Revolution and its Terror was long and made unthinkable the idea of the state riding roughshod over the right to property. The payment of compensation to the slave-owners was considered a distasteful but necessary political compromise.” (p70)

• The compensation can also be seen as a subsidy to keep plantations in business once the owners had to start paying workers wages, with many slaves opting to remain on their plantations after they were freed. “Even with compensation, many planters sold up within twenty years of emancipation, which suggests that their business model was indeed precarious.” (p71)

• Britain spent even money suppressing the slave trade after it was abolished: “in absolute terms, the British spent almost as much on suppressing the trade in the 47 years of the peak period, 1816–62, as they received in profits over the same length of time leading up to 1807. And by any more reasonable assessment of profits and direct costs, [historian David] Eltis reckons, the nineteenth-century costs of suppression were certainly bigger than the eighteenth-century benefits.” (p85)

• Later in the book Biggar brings in a theme from his previous book Colonialism, highlighting the alleged opportunities that imperialism offered natives in its colonies. “CARICOM’s wild claim that the imperial British were resolved to suppress the development of industrial production in their colonies hardly squares with facts such as that the Tata Group, which now owns what remains of the steel industry in Britain, was established by English-educated Indian entrepreneurs in Bombay in 1868 and went on to set up both cotton mills and iron and steel factories under the Raj.” (p89) I take the point, but my suspicion is that Biggar overstates the opportunities available to colonial subjects.

• Critics blame the British Empire for the poor economic performance of many of its colonies post-independence. Biggar counters that: “Between decolonisation in the 1960s and 1970s and the present, many causal factors other than the legacy of colonial government have come into play. Those include the agency of the members of independent Caribbean governments. It is reasonable to presume that this helps to explain the fact that different post-colonial states have performed differently.” (p95)

• Contrasting this, Biggar notes that Jamaica has suffered poor economic performance because pre-independence most black people were excluded from institutional power due to direct rule from London. Meanwhile “in Barbados most cultivable land was already under sugar production, forcing freed slaves to continue working on the plantations. This had the – eventually fortunate – effect of ‘enculturating the Barbadian workforce to capitalist work norms’. It enabled post-colonial Barbados to make the disciplined, free-market, neoliberal choices it did.” (p98)

• Ultimately former slaving colonies had very different experiences after independence. “There was no uniform colonial legacy and there is no uniform post-colonial condition. Not every post-colonial state languishes economically: Barbados flourishes, thanks to its colonial inheritance. And even in Jamaica, which has languished, the record of imperial government was not entirely bad.” (p100)

• On intergenerational trauma: “There is nobody on earth whose ancestors did not suffer grievous injuries of several sorts.” (p101)

• Biggar does not rate Hilary Beckles, chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission and author of Britain’s Black Debt, regarding the latter as a “cartoonish reduction” of Britain’s colonial history. On Beckles’ claim that slavery played a decisive role in Britain’s rise, Biggar writes that it is “riddled with flaws”, also criticising Beckles for dismissing the views of conservative economic historians “as distorted by political ‘ideology’ (unlike his own) and by racism.” (p109)

• The Brattle Report on reparations claims that the compensation due for transatlantic slavery is between $100tn and $113tn (USD), with the British share at $26tn (£20tn). Quantifying the financial damage of slavery is to me a ludicrous exercise, but Biggar attacks the report specifically for ignoring African complicity and British efforts at abolition, while also contesting the claim that transatlantic slavery is the worst atrocity in history. (p113)

• On the principled point: “Of course, for reparations to make sense, a plausible case needs to be made for strong causal connections between historic slavery and the present woes of the descendants. […] [The Brattle report] argues for a causal connection – but mainly between wrongful acts perpetrated by slavery and injuries suffered by the original victims, not between historic wrongdoing and the victims’ descendants.” (p115)

• On apologies, in 1997 prime minister Tony Blair’s apologised for the London government’s inaction during the Great Famine of Ireland, which lasted from 1845 to 1852. Biggar writes: “Mr Blair himself was not responsible for the famine and no one alive in Ireland had suffered it. […] So, strictly speaking, Tony Blair did not repent or apologise, and the Irish people did not forgive him. And yet a measure of reconciliation was achieved.” (p119) This description seems to tally with the thinking of British and Irish at the time.

• Returning to the crux of the argument, Biggar does not believe that slavery is a significant enough factor in black deprivation in modern Britain. “Can we be sure that they would have been better off had their ancestors remained in West Africa – some as slaves and sacrificial funeral fodder? Are there not some descendants of slaves who now prosper rather more than some descendants of slave-owners?” (p121)

• Compare other historic wrongs. “As [academic] Richard Vernon puts it, the list of all those who suffered at the hands of ‘the states of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whose failures of responsibility were almost universally appalling’, is long and includes women, children, industrial workers, religious minorities, soldiers and sailors. Out of all the eligible candidates, how can we justify selecting black slaves?” (p122)

• Biggar is unimpressed by the rationale offered by the Church of England for its reparations programme announced in 2023. After reiterating some of his arguments about slavery’s small contribution to British wealth, he queries whether the church’s own financial investments were that exposed to the slave trade. (p125)

• Contrasting much of what is written, Biggar is still open to international development aid. “It is right that those with more should give to those with less, if the latter need help and the former can afford to give it – all other things being equal.” Amusingly, he is happy for this to be targeted towards former colonies, since Britain “retains cultural, institutional, legal and sometimes constitutional links with post-colonial Caribbean states”. I daresay a skilled diplomat could make use of this. (p143)

• In what is effectively a post-script, Biggar wonders why many British intellectuals have a “lust for self-condemnation”. In effect, he accuses them of disloyalty, writing: “intellectuals’ criticism is entirely unrestrained by any sense of gratitude or loyalty towards the country that enables them to lead their privileged lives. They speak of it as if it had nothing to do with them, as if it were alien.” (p158)

• “Which has led me to wonder – though I cannot prove it – whether the present tendency to rub British noses in exaggerated guilt over slavery and racism is partly Remainers’ revenge for Brexit.” (p159) This line made me chuckle, and I suspect he is somewhat correct, but it risks discrediting the rest of the book.

• Musing on the vogue for virtue-signalling, Biggar says: “To that end, more religious faith would help, since a great advantage of believing in a God is that the believer is less likely to mistake himself for one.” (p161) Plausible, though the downside of believing in God is that you may inflict that belief on others.

I will probably repeat this format at a later date, but expect normal service to resume in the meantime.

I appreciate as a privately-educated man formally called James, it’s hard to criticise others for having a poncy name. But there is something quite funny about Bob Vylan, one of Britain’s angriest bands, being fronted by a man named Pascal Robinson-Foster.

I don’t entirely dislike the cut of Robinson-Foster’s jib, either. It’s easy to snicker that he started his creative life as a poet, performing for a police conference back in 2005 at only 14-years-old. But his provocations are nonetheless amusing: wearing shirts of rival football clubs as you roll around the English provinces is, as I think nobody still says, top banter. Telling Glastonbury to “eat the rich” back in 2022 is also pretty funny – the current ticket prices for the world’s biggest festival coming in at £378.50, including a £5 booking fee.

Having caused a minor international incident with his condemnation of the Israeli military at this year’s Glasto, Robinson-Foster’s latest outrage came off the back of the murder of Trump activist Charlie Kirk. Speaking at a gig in Amsterdam last week, the Bob Vylan frontman said: “I wanna dedicate this next one to an absolute piece of shit of a human being. The pronouns was/were. Cos if you chat shit, you will get banged.”

I’m of the view that if you dish it out you have to take it, and even were that not the case for Kirk the pronouns joke is pretty funny. I suspect many of Kirk’s fanboys are fans of the phrase ‘fuck around and find out’, so they can hardly complain about the British rendering. It is free speech after all. And given Bob Vylan has already suffered US visa cancellations, gig withdrawals and the concurrent financial hit, even their haters must concede they are willing to suffer for their principles.

My criticism of the band’s whole pose actually comes from a different direction. Lyrically, much of Bob Vylan’s material concerns the usual progressive shibboleths of poshos, inequality and various bigotries (they are anti, in case you were unsure). Obviously they are opposed to Israel’s defence policy, as well as the British and American sort. You’d easily make up your score card on progressive bingo.

Most of this is terribly cliched for British musicians operating today. Only last year, more than 100 bands boycotted The Great Escape music festival in Brighton at the last minute over sponsor Barclays Bank’s tenuous connection to the situation in Gaza. Some of them barely knew what was going on, but decided to join in lest they be thought of as pro-imperial, or something.

While women continue to argue that the music industry is too male, the truth is that its attitudes are fairly feminine. Even the straight men have long haircuts, skinny arms, and loosely-fitting garments, and sing about their feelings. And so the politics is similarly effeminate: less angry shouting and more #BeKind. A softly, softly, slowly, subtly shaming of people into doing the right-kind-of-thing politics.

That’s one reason Bob Vylan stands out. Punk is angry by nature, but it’s rare for something this abrasive to cut through to mainstream culture. It’s performed by two muscle-bound self-described “violent punks” who need to get their “message across with violence”, with lyrics calling to “kill the fucking queen”, “lynch your leaders” etc. No doubt Robinson-Foster would claim much or even all of this is performative, much as the terminally-online claimed it was all ironic – until somebody got shot in the neck.

Somebody else can litigate all that. The point I want to make is that Bob Vylan’s art, from the lyrics to the crunchy guitars to the aggressive on-stage patter, doesn’t gel with the progressive agenda. You cannot sing about toxic masculinity while looking for all the world like a toxic man.

Not that Bob Vylan are the only act doing it. Idles – a band who, hilariously, were attacked by Bob Vylan for being insufficiently antisemitic anti-Israel – have something of the same vibe, despite also singing about how toxic men are. Without wishing to cast aspersions on his actual behaviour, when performing frontman Joe Talbot doesn’t look like a man who wouldn’t hit you for spilling his pint.

I’m reminded of a Rob Henderson line about Jackass. The TV show begins with a warning that people don’t try any of this at home. What follows is men accruing kudos from their buddies for injuring themselves in creative ways. To paraphrase Henderson, having lost the original quote, it’s obvious which of these segments will make a stronger impression in viewers’ minds.

No doubt some fans of the toxic masculine progs ponder deeply on the thoughtful lyrics, and what they tell us about society, man. But as frightened Substackers are increasingly warning us, we are not a naturally literate species. We evolved to assess others for signs they were about to thump us, not to hear their treatise on supreme executive power deriving from a mandate from the masses. If the medium is the message, the vibe is the view.

Do I think the average fan of Bob Vylan is about to become a regicide? No. But I do think cladding yourself in virtue while parading masculine aggression gives licence to other men to do the same. And there’s no force on earth more regressive than young men’s superior capacity for violence.

I had no occasion to form an opinion of Charlie Kirk when he was alive, but I must say I’ve disliked a great deal of what I’ve read since he was gunned down at a speaking event in Utah. His boosters, including those on the American left, tout his willingness to turn up at universities and have arguments with students. His detractors parry that this was generally in the manner of James O’Brien taking apart the witless unemployed who call into LBC.

I’m sceptical that encouraging people to think more about politics is necessarily a good thing. But in the case of Kirk, the Trumpist political programme he endorsed rather undercuts any claim he might have at virtue. As summarised by James Bloodworth:

“Charlie Kirk was a bigot and a misogynist and a promoter of too many conspiracy theories to list, including that of a plot to replace white people in America. To posthumously (and euphemistically) describe him as a ‘divisive figure’ simply won’t do. The organisation he founded, Turning Point USA, was a knock off John Birch Society, dedicated to the same paranoid vision of rooting out ‘communists’ and ‘subversives’. […] Forgive me if I don’t think much of a ‘legacy’ as paltry as this.”

Bloodworth is likewise right that Kirk ceased to be a significant person as soon as he was unable to post, if only for the drab reason that this fate awaits almost everyone. Pundits on both sides of the Atlantic may claim that “some sort of invisible line has been crossed”, to quote Triggernometry host Konstantin Kisin. But I’m neither convinced that killing someone over their politics is an invisible line, nor that this is an epoch-shifting moment that will last much beyond next week.

What I do think Kirk’s death does prove relates to the American right’s activities in Britain, which continue to be significant. Several times this year, vice president JD Vance has criticised the UK and Europe for our regulation of speech. He’s right enough that there are worrying curtailments of free expression in Britain. But we do beat the drafters of the First Amendment on this fundamental point: you are not going to get headshotted while debating the intricacies of gun crime statistics on an Oxford quad.

It is of course true that the UK has seen two political murders in the past decade, David Amess stabbed to death by an Islamist, Jo Cox stabbed and shot by a far right activist – both while attending their constituency surgeries. Security for MPs has been tightened since then, and government ministers have more protection still, but Cox and Amess’s deaths nonetheless illustrate how accessible British politicians remain. Only the other week, Popbitch reported a sighting of George Osborne milling around the tube eating a burrito, presumably without any fear for his safety despite his role crippling public services for six years.

The country’s former finance guy can do this in part because almost nobody has a gun in Britain. Pundits can rock up at Question Time, university events and much besides without needing a bullet vest. Nobody is gunning for Nigel Farage as he stands on the top deck of an open top bus, unless you consider milkshake a lethal projectile. While you hear the odd story of somebody hiring security to attend a public engaegment, there’s no need to station snipers on surrounding roofs to provide covering fire.

What problems the country has with free speech tend to revolve around how it is policed. In recent weeks, former comedy writer turned full-time poster Graham Linehan was apprehended at the airport over some fairly innocuous tweets. In November 2023, police handcuffed a Kentish man in his house while rifling through his “Brexity” book collection. Last year Lucy Connolly was jailed for a tweet that is at worst ambiguous in its incitement.

These cases have become infamous partly because many people are left alone for much worse. Councillor Ricky Jones, rather perplexingly, was let off by a jury after calling for fascist throats to be cut. (I’m a longtime sceptic of punishing people for incitement, but this seems as straightforward as it comes.) Accusations of two-tier justice may not be quite right, but the patchwork of rules is inconsistent. Libel laws, restrictions on protest and the Online Safety Act only contribute further to the mess.

Yet it’s a small price to pay when the alternative is having some toothless hick/blue-haired antifa standing in front of you with a holstered gun while you blaspheme against his gods. Americans are fond of saying things like: “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” But taken literally, as is the practice, this phrase is obviously ridiculous. Thomas Hobbes knew before the founding of the American Republic that freedom is impossible without the reasonable expectation that A Clockwork Orange isn’t being repeatedly enacted outside your doorstep.

This is not to say America’s gun laws are completely wrongheaded. If I were living an indirect flight away from the nearest police station, I might well appreciate having a firearm in the house. The US’s widely-armed population probably does provide some protection against oppression by the country’s overpowered military, even if it also holds the potential to make civil war likelier and bloodier. Either way the Yanks are entitled to their exceptionalism.

But they should concede that the Second Amendment is a threat to the First, and always will be. Kirk’s death, while mere grit under the wheel of history, at least demonstrates this more forcefully than any essay could. Had Kirk been a limey, he could have expressed all his terrible opinions without fear of anybody using his neck for target practice. Indeed, he addressed the Oxford Union just months ago, and the worst that happened was that its incoming president laughed at his shooting. I’ll take the banter over the bullet.

If you live in Britain and follows politics, you’ll have been struck by the rather large gap between what people voted for on 23 June 2016 and the recent migration statistics. While there is some argument about what exactly people read into the leave/remain ballot during the European Union referendum, most everyone would agree that a major reason to vote to exit the bloc was to bring down migration. Fast forward seven years, and in the year to June 2023 net migration hit 900,000.

As you can imagine, people were rather annoyed by this. Indeed, migration levels have remained buoyant for the past two decades, defying political gravity like no other issue. People continue to vote for parties who promise to bring down the numbers, stop the boats, build a wall etc, and yet they continue not to, either due to a commitment to global welfare/diversity/oikophobia (the left/civil service), or a commitment to cheap labour (the Tories/big business).

The point is that the relationship between political intention and outcomes is not straightforward. The British public basically want lower migration. A much smaller but more influential and powerful group(s) want the same or higher migration, for reasons of ideology, greed, or a sincere belief that it is required to provide other things the public likes, such as accessible healthcare or a ready supply of Deliveroo drivers.

You would not think that politics was this complicated if you were following the evolving creed of Substack writer Cartoons Hate Her. In a series of recent posts, CHH (who I generally find an entertaining, astute writer) has advanced the view that, whatever people’s complaints about the current state of things, we are living with them because ultimately it’s what we want, at least once tradeoffs are considered. It’s all for the best in the best of all possible worlds:

“…we have liberalism and all its associated gender and sex-based evils because we wanted it. We saw arranged marriages, multigenerational living, religious dogma, and other vestiges of traditions past and said, ‘Ehhh… I’ll pass.’ Modern liberalism and all its ‘depravity’ is an amalgamation of our revealed preferences.”

It follows a similar post which argued that most nuclear families do not in fact want a notional village to help raise their children, which I found myself both nodding and hmming at. While CHH conceded that most parents crave readily available (and free) childcare, they tend not to want the attendant downsides of having to put up with rellies popping by without warning, unwelcome social events, and the expectation of helping people move house and sundry other chores. Parents may carp about the toll of modern parenting, she argues, but in practice they wouldn’t trade for the alternative.

This reasoning has a rather whiggish lilt to it. If it’s not quite giving Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, it’s at least reminiscent of its common caricature that all societies are inexorably bound towards liberal democracy, one-day Amazon deliveries and universal OnlyFans accounts, because it’s the best way of doing things and aligns ultimately with what pans narrans really wants.

That Fukuyama’s essay is now a punchline tells you something about the progress of liberal democracy globally, though if you want a more quantitative figure you can check the Economist’s Democracy Index, where last year the average national score “fell to 5.17, its lowest since the index began in 2006”. American culture may continue to be pervasive, but the leaders of the free world have been taking consistent Ls implanting democracy abroad, as the Iraqis and Afghans could tell you.

Partly that’s because, to quote the old George Orwell phrase, many nations are families with the wrong people in control. But less conveniently, it’s also the case that many people are not that interested in democracy, including those who enjoy little to no political power under traditional arrangements. Both explanations rather suggest that far from being captains of our fate, we are merely making decisions from a cage of economic, technological, scientific, religious and cultural circumstances.

We can argue that arranged marriages are a gross infringement on the right to enjoy reduced tax liability with a person of your choosing, but that is to miss the point. For Westerners, arranged marriages are repulsive because we’ve been marinated in a liberal culture that prizes romantic and sexual autonomy. Had we been born in another place and another time, we’d probably have another view.

The point applies to just about anything. Someone I know once had a Chinese colleague with a rather different take on democracy. For her, it was completely obvious that she wasn’t sufficiently informed to have input into national decisions on economic strategy, infrastructure planning or whatever other avenues the Chinese Communist Party is currently using for embezzlement. No doubt she’d have been welcome as a contributor to the New European (or the New World, to give it its colonial new moniker), but the idea is anathema to the average Brit, or indeed Westerner.

And in fairness to the Chinese, the fact is that most people even in the West have negligible political power, especially outside their immediate community (meant in the sense of the place where they live, rather than whatever globe-spanning subculture they fancy themselves a part of). Politics is for Power, a book by Eitan Hersh that I should probably read, argues that people should focus more on local politics, rather than musing grandly on national or international matters. (Yes, yes, I’m aware). But in doing so it also makes the point that most people don’t even bother to exercise the influence they might have nearby.

At the other end of the spectrum, it’s a common complaint from politicians that when they finally get their hands on the levers of power they discover that they are not connected to anything. This speaks of course to the fecklessness of many Western states, both ossified and enclosed by bureaucratic blocks. But even autocrats are mostly only riding the public herd, all too aware that if they are thrown off they will be trampled underfoot by the masses, whose movement has a logic all of its own. Such people are following the migration at least as often as they are directing it.

In British politics, and I suspect many other Western kinds, we are uncomfortable acknowledging these various lacks of agency, which are disempowering to the beleaguered and emasculating to the would-be great (wo)men. With Western culture led by novelty-seeking ‘disruptors’, we prefer to downplay the fact that human impulses tend towards inertia, familiarity and copying. Like the AI slop currently polluting the internet, we are not so much originals as repositories for whatever has come our way, outputting habits, opinions and whatever else based on the inputs.

In a sense I agree with CHH’s conclusions – that Westerners tend to prize autonomy too much to trade it in for the benefits of the dependency that has characterised most of human history. If you were to run a poll, lots of people would sincerely tell you that they loved the benefits of liberalism, myself included. But celebrating this as some kind of triumph of revealed preferences is parochial and naive.

In recent weeks, in connection to nothing much, two middle-aged men separately complained to me about ‘white guys’. Both were bemoaning the tendency of some white men to crowd out others, specifically in music venues and, er, music promotional services. Neither of them has met Jon Snow, not even at Glastonbury, but I guess they’d have some things to discuss.

Perhaps it’s because I’m not out the house so much these days, and certainly not on Twitter as often. But I’d almost forgotten the attitude of the pasty, ageing man, keen to maintain his progressive credentials in a fast-changing world. Usually this takes the form of snide jibes (think Stewart Lee), but in more extreme cases you’ll find a white guy actively discriminating against his cohort, as was the case with one boss I had, who told me he was hoping to replace me with a more diverse hire after I quit. (He failed.)

Clearly such men have not disappeared, but they are facing a new kind of irrelevance. Last month, Douglas Carswell tweeted that we should deport all Pakistanis from Britain. Though he’s hardly a central figure in British politics, as a former Kipper in exile at some think tank in Mississippi, his willingness to say this out loud says something. As a Yankee journalist might say, the vibe has shifted.

Carswell was responding to some of the ethnic data unearthed by freelance civil servant Louise Casey in her inquiry into whether there should be an inquiry into the grooming gangs crisis. (Like a good mandarin, she concluded there should be an inquiry. Months of fruitful work…) Inconveniently for councils, police and now Keir Starmer, a disproportionate number of the groomers have a Pakistani ethnic background, which has rather riled up the British right.

The past year have seen considerable reversals for progressive politics. Casey’s publication of data on the ethnicity of grooming gangs is part of a wider trend where connections between different groups and certain crimes are being discussed in public. Earlier this year the Supreme Court excluded trans people from certain protections under the Equality Act, in a ruling that politicians and officials have extrapolated from generously. And while I’ve no scientific measure of this, it feels like the risk of losing your livelihood for expressing rightwing views has sharply fallen – though good luck to anybody criticising Israel.

This is all to say that the casual slandering of ‘white guys’ now sticks out as a relic of the teens. Indeed, discussions around race are taking a rather unsavoury turn in the opposite direction. Chaps like Matt Goodwin, former academic and current Reform hype man, are now pushing ancestral definitions of Englishness as they warn that white Brits will soon be outnumbered in cities across the country.

As stats boffs like Georgina Sturge have noted, you should always be suspicious of predictions that amount to plotting a graph and extrapolating a straight line from it, as often happens in population debates. Many factors influencing migration will change in the coming years: policy, enforcement, labour markets, economic conditions, climate change, World War Three. The top lines from these models may also not account for people with only one white British parent, or indeed people with two British parents who were born abroad and came home.

Technical quibbling aside, it’s an astonishing break in formerly robust taboos that made it difficult to discuss race in this way. As the former Observer journalist Nick Cohen writes:

“[…] increasingly and without a blush of shame, the right fantasises about a blood-and-soil version of English nationalism that Conservatives once abhorred. Apparently you cannot be English unless your parents, grandparents, great grandparents and who knows how many more generations back before them were English as well.”

This is overstating it a bit, but it’s not far wrong. So who to blame for this sudden turn? Well, the race grifters, first off, and not only the likes of Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson. Most media outlets have encouraged British people to see themselves in racial terms, reflecting an appetite for social justice and shifting policies among corporations and public sector employers. Even ahead of claims of two-tier justice, it has become evident that anti-white discrimination is present in institutions as establishment as the Royal Air Force – an organisation, to replay my favourite Ed West quote, whose point is to kill foreigners.

Then there is mass migration. Centrists sensibles who enjoy The Rest is Politics were extremely relaxed about the hundreds of thousands of people moving to Britain, but the general public has consistently believed that immigration levels are too high. (Although I should mention that the degree to which this is true changes depending on what survey data you look at, to say nothing of our eagerness to welcome foreign-born doctors and other useful folk). While the Brexit vote did allay concerns, the large influx of migrants known as the ‘Boriswave’ and the steady arrival of men on small boats from the Channel has made the issue salient again.

Although we have frequently talked of migration since I started following politics, most of the debate has concerned economics. “Who would be serving our coffee in Pret?” is as neat an encapsulation of the debate as you can find. The taboos around race made discussing much else very uncomfortable, and those taboos are no longer in force.

Thankfully, I reckon those talking about the ‘white British’ in Powellite terms are overplaying their hand: survey data gives little reason to believe that the British want to return to a racial conception of citizenship or ethnic nationalism. While Carswell’s intervention is significant, I think it’s unlikely to gain traction as a mainstream political policy, even if the concept of ‘remigration’ – deporting citizens of foreign ancestry – is alive in Germany.

Where I think Reform and its sympathisers are likelier to find opportunities is in pushing a kind of cultural nationalism which is already recognised. For all the talk of ‘civic’ or values-led nationalism, culture is clearly the way we understand other people’s nationality. People like Farage and Robinson may be racists, fascists or whatever -ist you like: nobody really questions their Englishness (or at least their Britishness, to the extent the latter is just the former writ a bit larger). Politics is not a disqualifying factor for having grown up in Luton.

This is in contrast to a kind of cultural agnosticism around nationality that has effectively dictated migration policy. Even Ben Ansell, a political scientist who lately proclaimed that all British citizens are equal regardless of birth, concedes the centrality of culture when it comes to the sons and daughters of empire returning home. Rory Stewart’s birthplace is less relevant to his identity than the fact he was raised in a British cultural milieu, in common with many sons of empire who have since come home – Carswell among them.

Wherever their birthplace, it’s these ‘white guys’ and the ‘white girls’ who make up the bulk of the cultural English, the rest mostly coming from second-generation immigrants who have largely not adopted their parents’ culture. Some of my own friends fall into the latter bracket, having been born in Britain and spent their formative years swimming in British culture. Were they to make a trip to their parents home, in the style of Romesh Ranganathan, they would find themselves aloof from the home of their ancestors.

To me this is a good trend, the ideal trend for migration, and one that’s undermined when the numbers get too big. As Paul Collier argued in Exodus, the more culturally isolated migrants find themselves when the move, the more they are obliged to muck in with the natives. Likewise, where migrant communities grow in one place it becomes easier for people not to adapt to mainstream culture. It’s this migration at scale that has led to the grooming gangs scandal, as well as British Muslims’ attempts to impose blasphemy laws. It has also contributed to discord around Israel’s assault on Gaza, though of course there are plenty of white people who feel as aggrieved as those living here who have Arab connections.

The tolerance for this growth of distinct, even incompatible ethnic cultures within Britain has coincided with the derision towards whiteness, Englishness and Britishness that has been common as long as I can recall. (The Scots, Welsh and Irish are usually let off.) Perhaps it’s due to a culture of self-abasement, or a more calculated awareness that ethnic narcissism is that much more dangerous when the majority adopt it. Probably it is both.

And in fairness, barbed comments about ‘white guys’ are often funny. Perhaps we do keep pushing to the front of Coldplay gigs, among other sins. But encouraging a culture of resentment towards the ethnic majority was surely a move destined to end in disaster. First, because it reinforces grievance from others; second, because it encourages that majority to see itself as distinct and apart from newcomers. You can count the results in Reform’s polling numbers, and perhaps by 2029 the party’s seats in the House of Commons.

I watched Robert Jenrick’s speech at the Now and England conference last week with some curiosity. Not because the speech was interesting. Rather, it’s because he might be the next, and perhaps even last, leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party – to use the full name of what is on course to become Britain’s third or even fourth party next time we go to the polls.

Since the general election last July, Reform has become the most popular party in Britain. Dissatisfaction with Labour now it’s in government is one cause, with YouGov’s recent MRP forecasting that almost 200 Labour seats would flip cyan if election results reflected current polling. The other big cause is a collapse in support for the Tories, who in that same projection would bag only 46 seats.

Those numbers mean that Kemi Badenoch has faced regular calls to take an early exit from her leadership of the party, a mere eight months after she started. Recovering from the electoral slump of 2024 is a difficult task, and some of her critics have been agitating for her downfall since she won. But if your job as leader of the opposition is to win the next election, she is failing.

Jenrick, as runner up to Badenoch last November, is favourite to succeed her, albeit in a sparse field. And indeed the speech he gave at a conference supposedly dedicated to English nationhood sounded more like another pitch to become Conservative leader (much to the chagrin of at least one man I passed on my way out the lecture hall).

To be fair to the man nicknamed ‘Generic’, he gave some attention to the “low ebb” within England. There is, he said, “too much pessimism” and “fatalism” in the country, a “malaise”, if you’re of Norman bent. Migration is too high, too many people are on benefits, housing is too scarce, degrees no longer lead to good jobs, petty crime is endemic etc etc.

I agree with him that the Conservatives have inflicted tremendous damage in only 14 years in office. His response was less compelling. Declaring himself an “Anglofuturist”, he pledged to restore the industrial base, transform the country into a tech leader, improve public services, instil us again with a sense of patriotism – and shrink the state, because it is still the Tory party after all.

It is at least futuristic in the sense of believing this country has one. But the Englishness was harder to detect. Indeed, the conference itself was compered by a Californian named in the traditional American style: English job title + Armenian surname = Fisher Derderian. Such people do little to quieten the rumours of American money pouring into British politics through conservative think tanks, the underlying motives being not entirely wholesome.

The audience were at least of traditional Toryboy stock, “legions of gelled Malfoys, spotted with misshapen Crabbes and Goyles”, as the New Statesman put it. One more sensitive chap I spoke to asked me if I was disillusioned by “the betrayal” of the last Conservative government(s). I said yes, though as somebody for voted for Keir Starmer last year, perhaps not in the same way as him.

While even Starmer can half-heartedly complain about us becoming an “island of strangers”, Englishness remains an uncomfortable thing to praise. Unlike Britishness, we cannot pretend it is just a matter of values. When the audience applauded Jenrick’s condemnation of recent migration policy, I felt uncomfortable. I suspect even among the majority who want migration reduced, that discomfort with any hint of nativism is widely shared.

That is at least evidenced by reports of the afternoon’s proceedings, which I didn’t attend, with speakers that had some public reputation to lose demurring from more provocative audience questions. As Laurie Wastell writes in the Spectator, these is a division between those “who prefer to ignore ethnicity, ancestry and demographics on the grounds that such topics are both immaterial and icky” and “those who are unapologetic about believing that the English are an ethnic group, that England is our home”.

Dominic Cummings would tell Jenrick that he will struggle to straddle both groups. The Vote Leave director’s strategy during the Brexit campaign was to sideline Nigel Farage, whose nativist stench put off the middle classes. Right now it looks like voters will hold their noses and elect the king of the gammons as the next prime minister, and accept some unpleasantness. As for rosier futures of Englishness, it looks like Jenrick’s the one dreaming.