England’s regional differences are notably smaller, and while filled with much variety itself, few doubt that the North is a distinct entity. British history is determined by its two geographic features, with the north and west of the island having ‘older, harder rocks and hillier terrain’, in Robert Bartlett’s words, compared to the flatter and more fertile south and east. But the history of England in particular is also defined by two rivers.

Even thirty-five miles inland the Humber is a mile across, and any army marching from the south had to pass a relatively small corridor between treacherous tributaries and the Pennines, the mountain range that forms a spine down the north of England. This reduced the numerical advantages that southern armies always possessed, and made it much harder for the authorities in Westminster to exert control here than in the Midlands.

The north-south divide actually predates England, and even the Romans distinguished between the semi-Romanised Britanni of the south and the belligerent Brittones of the north. The Britanni probably came to speak a form of Latin like their cousins in Gaul, who had similarly become Romanised; the Brittones mostly still spoke the native Brythonic language. This linguistic divide is one theory as to why Old English took root despite questions over the relatives numbers of Anglo-Saxons.

The Angles of the North shone brightest to begin with, Northumbria home to one of the great early renaissances following the collapse of the West. Here the newly converted Germans produced such works as the Lindisfarne Gospels and Bede’s The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the book that gave the people their name.

The Golden Age didn’t last, and unfortunately the Humber River which defined the region was also vulnerable to invaders from Scandinavia. The northern kingdom fell to the Norsemen in 865, and it was left to the West Saxons to defeat the invaders and unite all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms six decades later, conquering a region that was now heavily Norse in character.

The kingdom of Wessex emerged in the rich wheat-growing soils by the banks of the River Thames, a body of water which has always been intimately linked to the continent - and was long ago a tributary of the Rhine. The Romans had established Londinium at the most downstream point on the river at which a bridge could be built and, having wrestled the region back from the Vikings, Alfred of Wessex refounded the city in 886. As with its Roman predecessor, Lundenburh soon outstripped all rivals and by the time that a Parliament was first established there in the 13^th century it was far larger than any rival.

London was always going to dominate the south, but its authority over the lands north of the Humber might not have been so assured. Tom Holland, author of a biography of Athelstan among other things, has suggested that a united England was not inevitable and that the Scandinavian dominated north was already distinct enough to have developed into a different country (with perhaps the region north of the Tees, which avoided Viking conquest, becoming part of greater Lothian).

It’s certainly possible, and even after English unification rebellious northerners declared ‘that their country has been wont to have a king of its own and to be tributary to none of the south Angles,’ as a contemporary chronicler put it. A king in the North, so to speak. Northumbrian identity remained distinctive, and in the Middle Ages, when there were a number of violent university riots, students from the north and south sometimes organised brawls.

Throughout the medieval period English kings rarely spent much time in the north, and the territory close to the border remained largely in the hands of the House of Percy, while the monarch focussed his attention on the continent. This was where the threat mostly lay, but it was also where the money was, and London owed its relative wealth to it position close to the rich markets of mainland Europe. This ‘blue banana’ stretching from northern Italy to the Rhineland and Netherlands, has economically dominated Europe for close to a millennia. So while much of the north of England’s current travails are blamed on deindustrialisation, historically it has been notably poorer than the south, something noted for almost a thousand years.

Alexander Rose wrote in Kings in the North that when the Percy entourage travelled to London, ‘the Northerners were poorer and rougher, and it showed’. Northern soldiers had ‘outmoded armour; even the earl’s warhorse was a feeble creature compared to the splendid steeds favoured by Southern magnates.’ Earl Percy’s own mount was valued at between £20 and £25, while the southern Earl of Salisbury had mere knights riding £50 horses. In Europe, as a general rule, the closer you are to the Rhine, the wealthier you are.

The Percys – the inspiration for House Stark in George RR Martin’s northern retelling of the English national story - were among the leading players in the War of the Roses, which despite the name was in some ways more of a conflict between north and south than Lancashire and Yorkshire.

By 1460, with order having broken down across the country, the pro-Lancastrian Percy family effectively ruled the North as an entirely separate kingdom. After Henry Percy raised a local army, all of whom would have followed him rather than the southern king, and descended towards St Albans, a chronicler called the Prior of Croyland reported that ‘the northmen… swept onwards like a whirlwind from the north, and in the impulse of their fury attempted to overrun the whole of England… paupers and beggars flocked forth from those quarters in infinite numbers, just like so many mice rushing forth from their holes’.

Songs recall the danger of northern men violating southern women and of ‘the lords of the North’ coming to ‘destroy the south country.’ East Anglian squire Clement Paston told his brother John: ‘In this country [county] every man is willing to go with my lords here, and I hope God shall help them, for the people in the north rob and steal and are appointed to pillage all this country, and give away men’s goods and livelihoods in the south country, and that will ask a mischief.’

The southern-dominated Yorkists won this battle, although one of their number, the future Richard III, spent most of his youth in Yorkshire and was probably the only English monarch to speak with a northern accent. As king, he was also the first ruler to make an attempt at regional devolution with a Council of the North, among many progressive innovations of his reign, and yet all everyone remembers is the nephew-murdering. Richard’s death was greeted with despair in York, and he remained popular in the region among Ricardians convinced of his innocence.

Because of its strong trade links with the continent, the south-east of England was also influenced by political ideas emerging across the North Sea. Even before Henry VIII’s great matter, Protestantism had taken hold in London, Cambridge and Norwich, and the coming religious wars would have a north-south dimension, with the north and west remaining more Catholic, even before the large-scale arrival of Irish immigrants.

The Reformation in England was largely a top down affair, and certainly pushed against the will of local people in the north and south, who often had their cultural heritage ransacked to boot. The dissolution of the monasteries even led to the Lindisfarne Gospels being taken from Durham Cathedral and placed in London, where it remains, the North’s version of the Elgin Marbles.

The most famous Catholic uprisings, the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536 and the Rising of the North in 1569, reflected the popularity of the old religion in this region. Strength of numbers and wealth meant that the South won this battle, although the North’s best years were ahead of it. Indeed, already that decade coal production by the Tyne was accelerating, the first signs of a transformation that would make the wider region the birthplace of the modern world.

Maybe, as one of the Stone Roses (I forget which) once said in an interview, it’s the weather. Because of the rain that characterises life in historic Lancashire, there is nothing to do except either play music or something else I won’t repeat. Maybe it’s just population density, and large cities produce a higher per capita number of musicians, but I would be surprised if London beats Manchester on this metric. Birmingham certainly doesn’t, as much as I loved head-banging in my teens.

Whatever the source of Manchester’s musical talent, it has certainly played a part in the city’s recent economic renaissance. As Dominic Green wrote in The Wall St Journal ‘Manchester was once a working-class industrial powerhouse. After the mid-1970s, it reinvented itself as an indie music mecca: Buzzcocks, Joy Division and New Order, the Smiths, Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, and of course the hooligan nostalgia of Oasis, whose “Wonderwall” accompanied the England team’s traditional flameout at this summer’s World Cup. Manchester’s postindustrial musical boom made the city cool again, as a cultural counterweight to London, and laid the groundwork for the property boom that Mr. Burnham calls Manchesterism in action.’

Manchester’s cultural power has grown in recent decades, not just thanks to music but to football too, and its two monstrous global brands. Now it has achieved a form of cultural supremacy with the coronation of mayor Andy Burnham as Prime Minister, a man whose political brand is essentially Kevin and Perry walking like Liam Gallagher.

Burnham launched his 2024 mayoral campaign at the Salford Lads Club – famously associated with The Smiths – and began his leadership of the Labour party by dancing to New Order, a band whose origins lie in the Sex Pistols’ famous 1976 performance at the Manchester Free Trade hall, attended by over half a million people according to later recollections.

He now becomes Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade - and we are to find out whether this one will solve the Riddle. For Burnham it was that Britain took ‘a series of wrong turns in the 1980s… political power was centralised, economic power privatised, large parts of the country de-industrialised, and they still haven’t recovered.’ Promising to look to Germany and its federal model of redistribution, Burnham quite explicitly appeals to the North in a way unlike any predecessor, following three party leaders who all lived within a few miles of each other in the boroughs of Camden and Islington.

In a Guardian interview in 2010, Burnham said that the ‘bloke’ from ‘Corrie’ would play him in a biopic; chips, peas and gravy were his favourite food and ‘gobshite’ his favourite word. His favourite smell? ‘The streets around Goodison Park on a match day.’ On a more recent occasion he listed his favourite films as Goodfellas, The Big Short, Brassed Off and Pride: a film about the evils of the financial services industry, a film about gay rights and a film about a northern brass band.

Burnham has taken the professional northerner routine to the next level by landing a job in London and refusing to move, pledging to remain in Manchester even as he rules the United Kingdom - the first prime minister to avoid Downing Street since the acutely paranoid Harold Wilson, who believed the secret services were bugging his office (which they probably were). It seems like the ultimate rejection of Thatcherite Essexman Norman Tebbit’s exhortation to ‘get on your bike’; he’s not just refusing to relocate to get a job, he’s refusing to relocate after getting the top job in Britain.

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Reading the Odyssey and Iliad left a lasting impression, I would say a lasting fascination with ancient Greece, although I tend to go through cycles of interest. The most recent came in 2024 when I saw Mycenae for the first time, an experience which I found unusually moving. I could close my eyes and imagine I was in the hall, listening to the poets and feasting on lamb, as they seemed to spend most of their time doing.

The film-watching public have a similar cycle. Every generation a renewed interest in the ancients will be revived by a blockbuster, followed by a succession of increasingly dreary imitations, until everyone loses interest again. The last Sword and Sandals Cycle was triggered by Gladiator in 2000, the perfect action film, after which came the mediocre Troy and Alexander in 2004, and then, in 2006, 300, which worked as high-camp comedy. It looks like we might be starting a new cycle with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which is, dare I say it, epic.

Turning ancient epics into film is a difficult task, and the Odyssey famously so, containing as it does so many confusing narrative threads. Classicist Daniel Mendelsohn writes that Homer ‘has a distinctive way of embedding his elaborate narratives within other narratives. Stories nest within stories; lengthy conversations are reported within other lengthy conversations.’ In Book 19, when an elderly housemaid bathing the feet of a disguised Odysseus recognises a scar, ‘the narrative grinds to a halt in order to loop back through not one but two embedded flashbacks, first to the boar hunt and then to the day of the hero’s birth, before circling back to the present.’

This is obviously the perfect challenge for Nolan, the creator of excellent but baffling big screen productions such as Memento, Inception, and my favourite, Interstellar, a flawed masterpiece which also recounts a lost hero trying to find his way home. Nolan is also a veteran war director, Dunkirk displaying his fondness for embedded flashbacks, while his most recent, Oppenheimer, focussed on the morality of killing. Here President Harry Truman stole the show by dismissing the scientist’s anguish and telling an aide: ‘Don’t let that crybaby back in here.’

There weren’t many crybabies back in Homeric Greece, no Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life, as another 20^th century figure put it. The Trojan War is challenging to turn into a film, not just because of the scale involved and the inevitable risk of camp and corniness, but because the characters are so unlikeable in the the original. Indeed, one joy of the classics is the insight it gives into a culture that was very alien, and in many ways repulsive. It’s not our culture, and our worldview is instead shaped by a different eastern Mediterranean civilisation.

Even the Fifth Century Greeks are strange, let alone their Homeric ancestors. In our classical civilisation A-Level course we learned that ancient Greek attitudes to women were essentially Taliban-like, their view of sexuality repulsive both to traditional Christians and to modern progressives; as for their notions of human rights, the other Greeks disapproved of Sparta’s system of racial slavery, but only because their victims were Greeks.

Stranger still is their religion. As portrayed in the epics, the gods are cruel and unbelievably petty, their relationship with the mortals entirely transactional. And as men create gods in their own image, the Greek warriors are also an unappealing bunch, in particular the domineering, arrogant Agamemnon and the psychotic Achilles. The only Greek I felt for was poor Ajax; he did his best, but the gods just hated him.

Only the Trojan Hector elicits sympathy, and the most moving part of The Iliad comes in Book Six when the hero bids farewell to his wife Andromache before facing Achilles; I remember being especially chilled by his wife’s warnings about what the Greeks will do when they take the city. Watching the Nolan film with my children, I was mildly relieved that the sack shows the Greeks killing the Trojan women, whereas in reality a worse fate obviously awaited them.

Depicting the heroic age even as later Greeks saw them would be too much for modern audiences and the Nolan film, as many have observed, is obviously a Christian interpretation.

Richard Brody wrote in The New Yorker that, ‘rather than try to take the audience inside the ancient Greek mind-set, Nolan chooses a slimmed-down, almost naturalistic approach, tamed and tempered. Violence is rendered largely generic with quick-cut battle scenes merely hinting at gruesome deaths; sacrifice, seen only briefly, is surgically clean; vengeance is bloodless and horror-free, meted out very sparingly; tears drop with maudlin precision down a single cheek; and grief is expressed with the stiff-upper-lip silence of modern martial valour.’

Odysseus is much less the trickster, more like the ideal of a modern officer, portrayed by the all-American Matt Damon. The philandering with Circe is neutered, and he’s too dazed by drugs to understand why he’s spent seven years on a paradise island with Charlize Theron rather than, as I read from the poem as a teenager, because why not? This makes him more palatable but the cost, as some critics have pointed out, is that this Odysseus lacks the wit or banter that characterised the original. Yet it would be jarring to portray a Greek hero as the Greeks wanted; it is not our culture.

The Christian Odysseus is also regretful about the violence unleashed on civilians at Troy, and the destruction of a civilisation. The Odysseus of Homer not only doesn’t feel bad about this, but casually boasts about sacking the odd city on his way home too, just as people in the ancient world generally tended to. When Julius Caesar declared that he had killed a million people in Gaul, it was a boast; a thousand years’ later William the Conqueror, another continental warlord who stepped foot on Britain, exited the world expressing remorse about the horror he had inflicted on his victims, worried about his eternal soul.

For all the criticism, a film that did not reinterpret the story through a Christian worldview would be repulsive. Indeed, the same can be said of other versions of the epic. including the 1954 Ulysses starring Kirk Douglas, where the hero laments that ‘many terrible things have happened to me, Telemachus, but none more terrible than to bring death into my house on the day of my homecoming.’

True to a Christian interpretation, the gods are largely absent in Nolan’s film, except for Athena, who talks only to Odysseus and may well be his imagination. After years stuck at sea and meeting one-eyed giants and witches, we’d probably all start talking to imaginary gods too.

This fits with a tendency for films to seek greater realism, with more attention to appropriate historical technology, dress and location. Of course, there is one exception to this trend – the casting of ancestrally anachronistic actors. Nolan’s Odyssey probably benefitted from the huge amount of pre-release controversy provoked by the casting of black actors (and, to a lesser extent, trans actor Elliot Page). Some of the commentary has been a bit hysterical, as these things tend to be, the most bizarre being Elon Musk calling Tom Holland – the historian, not the actor who plays Telemachus - a ‘cuck’ merely for suggesting that he enjoyed the film. As one wit put it, who would have thought that Helen of Troy could generate so much conflict?

I hugely enjoyed it too, even if my own view is that every actor has a range, and casting someone clearly outside of that can often be distracting. ‘Colour-blind’, implying some artistic devotion either to meritocracy or box office profit, is not an accurate term; the Mexican Anthony Quinn playing Antinous the suitor in the 1954 epic, or Colombian-American John Leguizamo in the current film, is ‘colour-blind’, in the sense that a big-name star can overcome a slight physiognomic inaccuracy. Casting the Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o as Helen, well outside that range, is obviously deliberate, and as Mendelsohn told Tom Holland (the cuck historian), ‘it is clearly supposed to be a provocative choice,’ and it’s ‘disingenuous’ to pretend otherwise.

Of course, I’m sure many Greeks feel that way about blue-eyed actors playing their heroes too, but Homer is not just a Greek or even western story, but a universal epic retold for a global and globalised audience. The Odyssey is also fantasy, featuring fantastical giants, witches who turn men into pigs, and a cyclops; the casting in such a film is obviously less noteworthy than when a black actor plays a historic 11^th century English earl. Besides which, if the casting jars a tiny bit, it doesn’t make a huge difference to a spectacular and brilliantly-made film, and one that has made vast amounts of money. You can find some aspect of a piece of art ‘problematic’ and still not allow politics to ruin your appreciation. Enjoy the film, and ignore the haters.

The Odyssey opens with the American rapper Travis Scott playing Phemius, the court bard in Ithaca, knocking on the floor rhythmically as he tells the story of Troy. ‘Woke nonsense!’ I screamed from the fourth row as my children crawled into their seats in embarrassment and shame.

Admittedly that didn’t happen, and this conceit is arguably in keeping with the spirit of Homer, since pre-literate society would have been rather similar to our post-literate one, filled with boasting and invective, forced to listen to the same stories about fights over and over again. The age that Nolan depicts, like ours, is one experiencing a lurking fear of civilisational decline and of outsiders; in Ithaca and Sparta, Telemachus hears worried talk about the ‘people of the sea’. These menacing strangers are getting closer, and they will bring about the end of civilization.

The Age of Heroes ended sometime around 1100BC, perhaps only decades after the Trojan War, with the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the start of the Greek Dark Ages. Across the known world the Egyptians, Hittites and Canaanites all suffered some sort of calamity, the result either of a natural cataclysm or uncontrollable raiding by the mysterious ‘Sea Peoples’.

As the film progresses, and the story reaches its conclusion, this sense of impending civilisational collapse grows. When Odysseus tells his wife that songs will be sung about their lives, he mentions that it will be only to recall those of us who could still read (James Marriott will like that line, I imagine).

Civilisation is endangered, and so is the home. The Ithacans have obeyed ‘Zeus’s Law’ by helping the strangers in their midst, because they might be gods in disguise, but they have outstayed their welcome. A guest who comes to abuse this hospitality is an interloper, and a threat to the social order, and so long as they remain the young man of the house can never claim his patrimony or save his civilization. Much to ponder.

Many paid tribute to Widdecombe, a former Tory MP who enjoyed a second career as a television star on Strictly Come Dancing, and who later joined Reform to become their immigration and justice spokeswoman.

Among them were her old boss, former Home Secretary Michael Howard, with whom she famously fell out; her description of Howard, that ‘there is something of the night about him’, entered the English lexicon.

‘Ann and I later made up’, he wrote, and we ‘were able to come to terms with the events which by then had begun to fade into the past. The terrible circumstances of her death should not be allowed to overshadow the remarkable contribution she made and the extraordinary human being she was. She leaves a hole in our national life which will never be filled. She will be greatly missed.’

Journalist Michael Crick recalled how a former BBC colleague told him: ‘Of the hundreds of high profile politicians I dealt with as a floor manager Ann stood out as one who was unfailingly sweet and personable.’ And Sky’s Sophy Ridge wrote: ‘I interviewed Ann Widdecombe for my book on women in politics and a lot of what she said stayed with me. It’s easy to forget what a trail blazer she was.’ She noted how, after being nicknamed ‘Doris Karloff’, Widdecombe took to answering her phone with ‘Hello, Doris speaking?’

Perhaps the most moving reflection came from Brexit Party veteran Gawain Towler, who described how:

During that first campaign I found myself driving the country with my son in tow, then twelve years old. We arrived at one rally, at Fylde FC, four hours early, and the poor chap faced an afternoon of terminal boredom in an empty football club. The only speaker already there was Ann. My son was in awe. This was the woman from Strictly. She saw my predicament at a glance and waved him over, and for the next three and a half hours she played with him. She helped him with his homework. I would pop by every now and then to find the two of them engrossed in a book, or laughing uproariously, and at one point playing some strange version of visible hide and seek, the former shadow home secretary and a twelve-year-old boy, in the bowels of a lower league Lancashire football ground.

Widdecombe was certainly an archetype, and it’s hard to avoid the sentiment that she represented a vanished world. The Britain into which she was born was unimaginably different to the one she left, in such horrific circumstances. Even the prurient interest in her celibacy illustrates just what a different age she came from, before the great change.

Mary Harrington was accurate in describing Widdecombe as ‘Britain’s last battleaxe’, noting how once upon a time British ‘civil society was run by people like her. The daughter of a military man, raised between ever-changing military postings and a convent boarding-school in Bath, she embodied a stoical “buck up” attitude that was pervasive in imperial-age Britain, and lingered well into my childhood and youth: one in which private suffering was simply something to be borne.

‘All of 19th-century British civic life was dominated by women of Widdecombe’s stripe, from the National Union of Women Workers, the Mothers’ Union, and the Women’s Institute, to church groups, Sunday school classes, schools, charities, and social reform bodies. Unkindly satirised even in her heyday as “Mrs Grundy”, the Battleaxe dedicated her life to improving, organising, cleaning, educating, and uplifting the world around her, whether or not it wanted to be improved. But the Britain they ran is no longer the one in which we live. The reasons for its demise are complex, though the end of the British Empire, the arrival of TV and radio, the sexual revolution and, latterly, de-industrialization and the internet all contributed.’

Or as one Twitter account put it: ‘Ann Widdecombe embodied a basically vanished type of worldview and manner, one with a totally assumed sense of integrity, an avatar of an unsentimental Englishness belonging to rotund girl guide leaders and lay parishioners. Eccentricities and individualism, RIP’.

I think most people above a certain age will remember the Battleaxe; you were scared of them, and resented their disapproving tone, but as you grew up you came to see that it was driven by love and compassion. After a period of rejection, you also came to see the wisdom in their moral worldview. The problem today is that many people don’t grow up from that intermediate period; they’re stuck on stage 2 for their whole lives.

You also came to understand the layers within. As Niall Gooch put it, people on the left sometimes fail to ‘to understand the strengths and the subtleties of this sort of person; despite a rather strident and brisk exterior, they are (/were) often deeply kind and charitable in a quiet, unsentimental way.’

Widdecombe was a noted social conservative, the real deal, and at the same time a good friend to many gay men. She was driven by compassion, and voted against blood sports for that reason; as an animal lover, she took the correct British side in the Holy Land dispute – supporting neither the Israelis, nor Palestinians, but the donkeys.

Towler observed that:

None of this kindness was soft. It came from the same place as the convictions, a belief that people matter absolutely, that duty is not negotiable, and that sentimentality is what you get when feeling is not backed by action. She opposed what I did not oppose and held lines I would not have held, and she would have considered it a poor sort of tribute to pretend otherwise. She did not require agreement. She required seriousness. Grant her that and you had her loyalty for life, and her loyalty was a fortified position

She once said on a chat show sofa that “we get one go this side of eternity”, and the phrase carries more weight than the setting suggested, because she meant both halves. One go, and she used every hour, the Commons, the Parliament she helped Britain leave, the stage, the page, the donkeys in the Holy Land, the boy in a football club in Lancashire. And this side of eternity, because her faith was the bedrock under the rock, and she was certain that the tide which goes out is not the end of the story. She has gone to the judgement she never doubted, and I would not care to be the advocate opposing her.

She was a serious person from an age that took things seriously, before the country became soaked in overbearing irony and silliness. But you can be a serious person and still bring laughter to people’s lives.

Listen to the episode below…

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When a plane crashes, the aviation authorities sends a highly experienced group of investigators to comb the aircraft and look into every possible reason for what went wrong; once the fault has been identified, new safety systems are recommended to ensure that it won’t happen again.

Because a large number of people are scared of flying, and air crashes are peculiarly terrifying, so the industry suffers collectively when it goes wrong; there are huge incentives to avoid any repeats, and no vested interest powerful enough to prevent the investigators from carrying out their work. Aviation is one of the rare instances of an international body in which corrupt cultures come to behave more like honest ones, rather than the reverse. As a result, the rate of passenger fatalities has drastically fallen.

As Matthew Syed argued in his book Black Box Thinking, the airline industry offers a model of a ‘learning culture’, where everyone is incentivised to honestly admit mistakes – covering up is a far bigger offence. Syed suggested that airline protocol could be applied to the medical sector, education, the drugs industry and the criminal justice system in dealing with wrongful convictions.

I don’t know whether any system could ever be motivated in the same way as the airline industry, but it is interesting to compare how two areas of public safety have progressed over the years.

Despite what many people believe or remember, crime in Britain is considerably lower than it was in the 1990s. This is often taken as some kind of gotcha against conservatives, but in reality, thanks to CCTV and mobile phones, we live in a surveillance society in which it is essentially impossible to get away with murder.

Yet while both criminal justice and air travel have benefitted from huge improvements in technology, only one has seriously taken advantage. The English homicide rate has declined by about a third since the mid-1990s, although with a much older population, and crime is a young man’s game; in contrast, passenger deaths per million flights have fallen by almost 90 per cent. While offending is down from its peak, it is also still far higher than it was in the 1950s, even though detection technology has come a long way, as has trauma care.

The problem is not that Britain is some dangerous hellscape; it’s that its crime rate is much higher than it needs to be, and many tragedies would be avoided if the authorities did the bare minimum to ensure public safety. The majority of crime is committed by a hardcore of repeat offenders who are released back into the community, and whose crimes often escalate. Many are set free despite obviously being very dangerous, resulting in a number of absolutely shocking murders and rapes that an air safety-style approach would prevent. The difference is that the aviation authorities are properly incentivised; the authorities in charge of crime prevention are not.

Imagine if crash investigations were not motivated by a strong desire to ensure that people had faith in the product. Imagine if people were influenced by taboos or ideology related to air travel, such as, for example, a strange sacralisation of pilots. No one could dare to suggest that a pilot was at fault, or could even check a pilot’s qualifications, because that was seen as authoritarian or un-British or something. Maybe there was some convention agreed in the early 1950s and it would be unthinkable to change it.

Every time there was a pilot error, families of the crash victims would be pressured into making statements about how safe flying is; Eastenders would mysteriously come up with storylines about pilots being unfairly stigmatised. MPs would try to restrict social media because it made people scared of flying. The perception that this form of travel was unsafe was more like a narrative problem to be managed than a motivation to improve it. The cause of each disaster was downplayed, and so repeated.

Most of the time you’d be fine, of course, and technological advances would still ensure that the safety record improved. Every few months there would be a disaster somewhere in Europe or the US, as was the case when I was growing up, and members of the commentariat would point out that air crashes are actually down by a third since the 1990s; and you’d point out that, yeah, that’s true, but there was a crash only last month because they let a blind man fly the plane, and you know, I think that could have been avoided.

Where is the black box thinking when someone like Jordan McSweeney, with 28 convictions and a history of violence dating back to adolescence, is let loose to kill an innocent woman? Or Joshua Carney, freed to rape a mother and her teenaged daughter despite 47 convictions, and who will be out again in only a few years. What about the dozens of people killed each year by men released early on probation?

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England and the Netherlands subsequently overtook the south in their levels of literacy, a transformation usually attributed to Protestantism, although this technical solution to a physical disadvantage certainly helped. As the northern countries grew richer, and were able to use more energy, so the climate came to be an advantage. Cooler areas of Europe in particular benefitted from a relative absence of vector-borne disease, dangerous insects and food poisoning, which made hotter regions of the world more lethal.

Yet the biggest curse of the lower latitudes is that heat makes us sluggish - since people struggle to work above 23° centigrade. As Maarten Boudry writes on his substack, ‘For every degree above 25°C (77°F), our cognitive performance declines by around two percent. And if synapses suffer, so does economic activity. At 30°C, office performance drops by almost 9 percent.’

I see that. I’ve been trying to write this in temperatures of up to 34°, which equates to a production level similar to a moderate hangover. If only there was some sort of technology that could make my home cooler.

Until relatively recently the world was dominated by a handful of relatively cold regions, and Paul Johnson observed in his history of the United States that human industry thrives in what Fahrenheit appreciators would call ‘the 60s’, a Goldilocks zone that turned New England and Greater Yankeedom into a powerhouse. The southern states, in contrast, were held back by higher mortality and the impossibility of productive work in the sweltering summer months, and until the mid-20^th century were about 40 per cent poorer than the Union states.

The northerners were especially known for their work ethic and their inventiveness, a characteristic epitomised by the Boston-born Benjamin Franklin. Then in 1902, New York’s Willis Carrier changed everything with the one of the most world-changing inventions, the air conditioning unit; aircon has notably shifted population and power in the US southwards, but Dixieland is just part of a broader, global ‘sunshine belt’.

Among the most notable beneficiaries of this technology are the financial powerhouses of Dubai and Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew famously said of air conditioning that it was ‘perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics... The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked.’ Indeed, it has often been noted as characteristic of the city-state that the aircon is usually set to icy levels, reflecting their determination to be on work mode throughout the day.

While Singapore is the most famous beneficiary of Carrier’s invention, Japan has almost universal air conditioning, with 91 per cent of homes equipped, compared to 88 per cent in the US. China is home to more than 500 million aircon units, is the world’s largest manufacturer, and has also seen an economic shift towards the south. Vietnam, also likely to be a major economic power by mid-century, is as dependent on this technology as it is on its people’s ingenuity. The development of aircon, and medical breakthroughs in the treatment of tropical diseases, has shifted the centre of gravity away from the cold regions of the earth - just as the globe is warming up.

This year’s European heat wave, still ongoing, saw temperatures reach 37 last month in England, a June record. Many schools shut early, although one in Kent instead used air raid tunnels to teach children. London’s Central Line hit 39.4c, presenting a real risk of heat stroke.

Across Europe the hot weather has closed down not just schools but factories, offices and rail lines, and led to an estimated 10,000 deaths, with France top of the heat mortality charts. Indeed as Boudry writes, Europe has the worst heat-related excess deaths of any region - while fatalities in the US have declined by 75 per cent since the adoption of air conditioning.

Europe is catching up, and the percentage of Italian homes with aircon has doubled since 2013, but many countries like to come up with all sorts of odd rules to prevent cooling. Boudry writes how ‘In the Swiss canton of Geneva, installing an air conditioner requires an exceptional permit demonstrating “real need” (such as a doctor’s certificate). During the recent energy crisis, Spain and Italy barred public buildings from cooling below 27°C - hot enough to dull your cognitive powers by 5 percent. In the midst of the current deadly heat wave, my own city of Ghent is officially advising people to “avoid air-conditioners”.

‘In many countries a conventional air conditioner lowers your building’s energy rating. The result is entirely predictable: owners and landlords decline to install units, or rip out the ones they have. Those left without built-in cooling fall back on drafty, inefficient portables that can scarcely make a dent in the temperature. I own one myself - a wheezing box with a fat hose shoved through a rickety fabric covering the window. It is the thermodynamic equivalent of mopping the floor with the tap running, but that’s simply the direction in which Europe’s regulations have nudged me.

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The great drama of 1066, the year of three battles, saw three men fight for the English throne. The charismatic Harold Godwinson had no royal blood but was the choice of the Witan, being both the wealthiest noble in the kingdom and its most experienced and capable commander. Then there was Duke William of Normandy, one of the most frightening and effective rulers of this era of feudal anarchy. Inheriting his father’s land at the vulnerable age of nine, he survived a perilous childhood to rule as duke, even watching as one protector was stabbed to death in his bedroom. William was known to be merciless with those who opposed him, and with the death of his great-uncle Edward in England he now claimed the crown across the water.

The third contender was the most colourful, the Norwegian Harald Sigurdsson. This gigantic Thunderbolt of the North, as he was known, was famed for his great bravado, his violence and his sense of adventure. At a time when few heads of state fell into the liberal democratic bracket, Harald’s nickname Hardrada – hard ruler – suggests he was not a man to cross. One of his (supposed) party tricks was to win a siege by attaching burning wood to the wings of birds, which would then fly back to their nests within the city, starting a fire, a method originally thought up by the Vikings in Russia (caveat: this story may be totally made up).

Standing at 6’6”, Hardrada was described by one chronicler of the time as ‘the strongest living man under the sun’. He had blond hair, a long moustache and gigantic hands and feet, and one eyebrow higher than the other. He wore a distinctive mailcoat that went all the way down to protect his ankles, which his men called ‘Emma’ because it looked like a skirt.

As well as being an enthusiastic fan of violence, Harald was also obsessed with poetry; indeed he saw his whole life in terms of how it would sound in epic verse. Comparing Viking skaldic poetry to rap battles might sound like the sort of cringe-worthy analogy a teacher makes to desperately try to impress a class of bored teenagers, but in oral, pre-literate societies such poetry was often a celebration of masculine prowess. What mattered most to Vikings were the songs people would sing about them celebrating their heroic deeds, and how much they fear they inspired. Harald himself wrote poems, one of which went like this:

Now I have caused the deaths
Of thirteen of my enemies
I kill without compunction
And remember all my killings
Treason must be scotched
By fair means or foul…

Admittedly it’s not Wordsworth, but I’m sure it was well-received by his terrified courtiers.

Hardrada was the half-brother of King Olaf the Large, a notably strong Viking warrior who supposedly tore down London Bridge as a youth (although in the service of the King of England against some other Vikings). As a small boy Harald had shown his precocious side. When he and his two full brothers were asked what they wanted most in the world, the two older boys replied ‘corn and cattle’. Harold stared intensely and said ‘warriors’.

Their mother Åsta Gudbrandsdatter was herself a formidable figure, and once told her eldest son that she would rather he became king, even if it meant dying young, than living to old age and mediocrity like her second husband Sigurd Syr, Harald’s father. She got her wish, and the year that Harald was born, in 1015, his now 22-year-old brother Olaf took the throne.

Olaf endured a turbulent reign dominated by conflict with the leading petty kings, and he was eventually overthrown and exiled by Canute in 1028. Two years later he came to reclaim the throne, bringing with him 2,500 men, among them 15-year-old Harald. It didn’t go quite to plan. The night before the Battle of Stiklestad of July 29, 1030, Olaf had a dream in which a ladder came down from heaven and Jesus beckoned him, which can’t have been very encouraging. The next day that particular dream came true and Olaf was killed.

He won the propaganda war, at least. Canute placed his English wife Elfgifu in charge of Norway, and she proved so unpopular that a cult soon grew around the former king. It didn’t help that a famine hit the country, and eventually there was a campaign to dig up Olaf’s remains, which turned out to be incorruptible, a sign of sanctity; although Elfgifu tried to explain it away as the result of unusual soil content, no one was interested in her rationalist explanation and her husband’s former rival proved more powerful in death than in life. He was eventually canonised.

Young Harald had been badly wounded in the battle, and was forced to hide out in the woods while he tended to his injuries, helped by some local peasants. After he recovered, he did what many unemployed Vikings did and headed east - to Constantinople.

It must have quite an experience for adventurers raised in thinly-populated Scandinavia. The eastern Roman capital was home to perhaps 500,000 people at the time, about half of what it had been at its peak, but still enormous compared to anywhere in Latin Europe; Paris had perhaps 20,000 people and London far less. Constantinople had street lighting, libraries, hospitals, public baths, aqueducts and gigantic water cisterns that can still be seen underneath modern Istanbul. To a northern European this would have been mind-blowing. The city also had seven palaces, including the Triconchus which was roofed in gold, and the Sigma, which had fountains flowing with wine. Here the throne of the emperor was guarded by two lions of bronze, in front of which was a metal tree with mechanical birds.

Miklagard - ‘the great city’, as the Scandinavians called it - was used to the sight of these northmen, who though regarded as a violent nuisance had also come to be employed in the emperor’s Varangian guard. (You can still see Norse graffiti on the upper levels of the Hagia Sophia, and one imagines a bored young Viking forced to endure an interminable Orthodox church service doodling away). It is through their contact with Greek civilisation that the Rus - ancestors of the Russians and Ukrainians - came to be converted to Orthodox Christianity.

Harald became a noted warrior in Byzantium and there are many stories attached to his time there, and some of them may even be true. According to one, he was forced to do battle with a lion in an arena after seducing a noblewoman; in another tale Harald, along with his friends Haldor and Ulf, had to combat a giant snake. He won both, obviously.

Another story involving Harald and his band of Vikings has them besieging an Italian town where they trick some monks by pretending that Harald died during the siege, and that they want to give him a Christian burial and so need to bring his coffin in. This seems like a strikingly unconvincing line, and considering a similar wheeze features in Homer, literally the oldest trick in the book.

Once inside the city, Harald jumped out of the coffin and led the attack, the sagas recording the killing with the glee of old Second World War comics: ‘Thee Norsemen… slew everyone round them, clerk or layman, ravaged the town, slaughtered the men, robbed all the churches and loaded themselves with booty’. Hurrah!

Unfortunately, Harald also became involved in Byzantine imperial court intrigue and upset the Empress Zoe. In typical heroic style, he broke out of jail and took as a hostage Maria, a beautiful young relative of Zoe who may or may not have been in love with him, seized two galleys and set off to jump the Great Chain that crossed the water by the city. In a dramatic scene, Harald had his oarsmen sail at full speed while all the crew ran to the back, causing the ship to tilt enough that it leaped into the air and cleared the chain. When he was safely out of reach, he released his hostage, eventually returning to Norway loaded with gold, and along the way bringing back a Russian wife.

By the time he arrived home, Olaf’s son Magnus was on the throne, which Harald now wanted for himself. Nephew and uncle tried ruling jointly, but it was uneasy compromise and tensions grew when a famous bard, Arnorr Hordarson, was commissioned to recite two poems for the kings in their presence, and it was generally agreed that the one about Magnus was better. Harald was deeply upset.

Magnus died in 1047 and Harald was now sole ruler, acquiring his nickname by his uncomplicated manner of dealing with rivals. One such opponent was Einar Tambarskjelver, ‘wobbly belly’, who came to the court to make demands on behalf of discontented noblemen and farmers. Harald had Einar hacked to death and then burned all the farmers’ houses down. As a poet recalled, ‘flames cured the peasants/Of disloyalty to Harold’.

He had also inherited Magnus’s tenuous claim on the English throne, which was even then quite obscure and went back to Canute’s complicated personal life. Magnus had made various threats to invade but never did anything about it; his uncle would be less reluctant, especially after 1065 when he had finally resolved a long-running dispute with Denmark. This left him free to embark on what would be a totally reckless invasion of England, one that would help to bring to an end the Viking age.

In January 1066 Edward the Confessor died and Harold Godwinson was crowned; by the spring, and now aware that William was building an invasion fleet, King Harold had set off on a tour of the north to drum up support. The English king then returned to Westminster on April 16, in an atmosphere of increasing doom. Many felt that a terrible catastrophe was facing the country, not helped by the appearance of a comet in the sky, and everyone had their own theories as to why. Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, for one, suggested that all the nation’s problems were down to men not cutting their hair. He believed that men who wore their hair long would be as weak as women and so couldn’t defend the country, and when men went to Wulfstan for Mass it was said that whenever they bowed their heads he cut off little bits with a knife he kept with him.

It was at this point that Harold’s estranged brother Tostig turned up. Back in 1055 he had been made Earl of Northumbria but his rule was so harsh that it provoked a revolt, which concluded with Harold making a deal with the northern rebels. Tostig had fled to Flanders, his wife’s home, embittered towards the brother who had supposedly betrayed him. Tostig at some point came up with the harebrained idea of invading England, and spent the spring of 1066 sailing around the North Sea trying to get someone to help him.

He had asked his cousin Sweyn Estridsen of Denmark, and even when Tostig appealed to the king’s descent from the Viking Sweyn Forkbeard, father of Canute, this Sweyn said he knew he couldn’t win, which was hardly the old Viking spirit. Tostig taunted him with cowardice, but Sweyn was so alarmed by the prospect of either Harald Hardraada or Duke William becoming king of England that he may have sent troops to Harold instead to fight on the English side at Hastings; there were certainly large numbers of ‘settled Danes’, English-born descendants of earlier Viking settlers.

Tostig might also have made approaches to the rulers of Normandy and Flanders – the evidence is pretty sparse – until he eventually found someone willing to join his crusade, the king of Norway.

It was a foolhardy mission, but Norway is so distant that Harald didn’t know much about the internal politics of England, in the way the leaders of Denmark or Flanders would have; specifically, he didn’t understand that Tostig was incredibly unpopular. Some have also suggested that Harald knew it to be a suicide mission, and wanted a glorious death in battle; at the very least it would make for a great poem.

Harald was a superstitious man, and before sailing he went to the tomb of St Olaf, unlocked it, unclipped his nails and hair, as was the old Viking custom before battle, locked the tomb and threw the keys in the river. There were said to be lots of nightmares and omens: Hardrada apparently dreamed of his brother, who warned him that there was a difference between an honourable death fighting for a birth right, and falling in battle trying to take from someone else, and telling him this whole expedition would end badly. One of Harald’s sidekicks, Gyrd, had a nightmare where he saw an English army led by a huge troll woman riding a wolf which had a man’s body in its jaw and blood in the corner of its mouth. After it ate the man, the troll-woman consumed them all. (One of my pet theories is that much Norse mythology and storytelling is the result of horrific alcohol withdrawal.)

The English army, or fyrd, had spent the summer guarding the south coast, waiting for the Normans to arrive, but as September went on the likelihood of invasion was starting to fade, as the sea would become too rough to cross. Most of the men were farmers and needed to get home for the harvest, and so on September 8 Harold disbanded the army. He then returned to London with a huge pain in his leg, and two days later received the news that the Norwegians had landed in Northumbria.

Having set sail for the Shetlands and then Orkney, Scandinavian colonies where some dynastic marriages were arranged with the local Viking rulers and Orcadians were recruited, the Norwegians had arrived in Scarborough, which had been founded exactly a century earlier by a Norseman called Thorgils ‘Skarthi’, or hare-lip. Here Harald built a large bonfire at the top of the hill, and then pushed it down onto the roofs of the houses below, setting fire to the town. As historian David Howarth explained: ‘There was really not much point in it, except that it was fun’.

The invaders were met at a village called Fulford by a small English force led by local noblemen Edwin and Morcar, who were easily overcome. Tostig had given his Norwegian allies the impression that that he popular in York, but when they arrived Harald found that his English ally was in fact largely detested; not a single person came out to greet the former earl, so the invaders left and went back to their nearby base for a celebration. They expected that it would be many days, if not weeks, before King Harold arrived. In fact the English army was only a day away by the time York surrendered on September 24. They had either marched at record pace or, as has been more recently suggested, arrived by sea.

The following day came the second battle of the year. The Vikings were in merry mood, so confident that they walked to Stamford Bridge without their protective mail coats, expecting to arrive in the village to be given money and hostages - instead they saw a large body of men meeting them.

Before the two sides fought there was a dramatic meeting between the Godwinson brothers. Much of this story comes down to us from a 14^th century Icelandic saga, Hemings þáttr, which draws on older Norwegian stories, and Norse tales often feature brothers who are deadly rivals, a theme that continues today with the television series Vikings.

In this story Harold pretends to be a messenger from the English leader, and approaches the Norwegians where, spotting his brother, ‘a big strong man, and a man of many words,’ calls out in English that King Harold offers him a third of his kingdom if he changes sides. Tostig replies that he could not desert Hardrada and asks what he could offer the Norwegian king. Harold replies: ‘Since he was not content with his own kingdom, I’ll give him six feet of English ground - a little more, perhaps, since he’s a tall man. But nothing more than that, since I don’t care about him.’ Tostig refuses this offer, and his brother departs; only afterwards does Hardrada learn the messenger’s identity, and isn’t happy about it.

Before the battle Hardrada was thrown from his horse while reviewing troops, seen as a bad portent, but they initially hold their own. The English tried to cross the bridge but were held up by one enormous Viking who stood firm and defended it single-handedly, killing as many as 40 enemy soldiers, until he was speared from below by an Englishman who had sneaked under the bridge. The saga has the defenders apologising for this discourteous way of killing the enemy, which seems very British.

After the shield wall was broken, Harald launched into a trademark Viking berserker fury, in which one man, almost in a state of supernatural possession, would charge forward to attack the enemy - and was immediately killed by an arrow in the windpipe, a rather anticlimactic ending.

As he lay dying and the English came at him Harald decided that now was a good time to compose a poem, dictated to his scribe for posterity. According to the saga-writer, his last words were: ‘We march forward in battle-array without our corselets to meet the dark blades: helmets shine but I have not mine, for now our armour lies down on the ships.’

Afterwards the famous skald Hordarson honoured him with an epic poem, fulfilling a promise he had made when Harald gave him a spear inlaid with gold. ‘May the soul of mighty Harald Abide eternally with Christ,’ the poet says of the fallen king - which seems pretty optimistic, all things considered.

The Norwegians were scattered and killed, and a visitor to the area in the 1120s recalled that there was still a mountain of bones visible on the battle site. Tostig was among those who fell, and Harold solemnly buried his brother at York Minster. He also magnanimously allowed the surviving Scandinavians to go home, the pitiful band filling only 20 or so ships out of 300. Among them were Harald’s sons Magnus and Olaf, free to return home; many years later Harold Godwinson’s exiled son Harold would reach the court of Norway and be given protection by King Olaf, who remembered that Harold’s father had spared his life and now repaid the favour.

Harold Godwinson had won one of the most decisive battles of the medieval era; unfortunately it wasn’t to be even the most important battle of 1066. On September 28 the Normans landed in Sussex, and everything would change. The year came to be etched in English history coming to define our social structure and our language. England was drawn out of the Scandinavian sphere and into that of France, a relationship that would come to define it.

Harald’s death also signified the end of the Viking age. Christianity was now firmly established in the far north, and Norway, like Denmark and Sweden, was emerging as a functioning state: more centralised, more peaceful, more, well, Scandinavian. The likes of Harald Hardrada were now a thing of the past - the next the world hears about Norwegians they’re handing out peace prizes.

Public intellectuals agonised about the social roots of the ‘English disease’, one newspaper comparing the prospects of the two cities represented in the fatal 1985 European Cup Final: the prosperous engine house of Turin and the dismal unemployment and despair that characterised Liverpool. How far England had fallen, both on and off the pitch. The game represented everything wrong with the country.

It’s bizarre to contemplate how unpopular football was in polite society back then, that Margaret Thatcher’s government gave the impression of despising everyone involved and her sports minister Colin Moynihan was trying to force a registration of football supporters like they were sex offenders. Chelsea chairman Ken Bates even tried to have his fans confined behind electric fences, but pinko Ken Livingstone’s woke GLC refused his request.

The impression I got from football fanzines was of a deep resentment towards the authorities, and a sense of pariah status. Forty years later and the cultural and social ubiquity of football is instead overwhelming, to the extent that even the Church of England issued a prayer honouring the real national religion before the World Cup.

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In my teens and early twenties the England team meant a lot to me, just as it now does to my 12-year-old son. I remember feeling devastated by defeat in 1996 and especially 1998, made all the more painful by a delusional belief in victory. As I’ve got older my interest in the sport has waned, but the World Cup is still special, even more than the Olympics a festival of all humanity. I’m at my most sentimental and optimistic when I see groups of people from different countries singing and partying, getting on for 99 per cent of the time. Man is an oxytocin-seeking animal and there is something magically communal about football.

It’s also especially meaningful for little-known countries like Cape Verde, which many people might have found hard to place on a map, or impoverished lands which have endured great hardship, like DR Congo or Scotland, or for first-time hosts able to showcase their hospitality. Indeed, for many young football fans the World Cup is how they learn about the world and all the countries within it - I will always associate Uruguay, on some level, with the country’s spectacularly violent Mexico 86 side.

When I was the same age as my son is now it was the turn of Cameroon, who won a famous victory over Argentina. We actually lived near to the Cameroonian Embassy, and I remember that we all went around after the match, where they were letting any random passer-by come in to celebrate with them. My abiding memory is standing in their living room and seeing a man who looked like a heavy metal fan rocking up with a crate of lager. I’m pretty sure that this wasn’t a dream.

International football matters, and for newly independent countries the national team is often an important aspect of their self-image, and in parts of the world without strong linguistic or historical identities – South America in particular - it remains at its core. When a recently independent country like Croatia reaches the semi-finals, as they did in 1998, it signifies their recognition on the international stage, so that billions of people can finally match some faces to a name they have only vaguely heard on the news. But I also think that people read significance into sporting events that don’t really mean anything - except to the players themselves.

As soon as the 1998 World Cup ended, and Des Lynam had finished his reading of ‘If’, there was a stream of commentary about how France’s multi-racial team would change the country and heal its divisions; four years later Jean-Marie Le Pen came second in the presidential election. Since then, France has grown ever more pessimistic and divided, with many believing it to be heading for civil war; meanwhile, its football team have got better and better, and now look terrifying.

The idea that a sporting victory would paper over a country’s deep divisions was in retrospect fantastically naïve, and I doubt that anyone will say the same thing if France win this year, especially as their game against Morocco this Thursday will inevitably be followed by rioting in Paris. A country can be deeply fractured and ailing and still get behind its national team; citizens across the Soviet Union cheered enthusiastically for their side, a great unifying force who won the first European Championships, but at the end of the day, they still lived in the Soviet Union.

Yet people still have a habit of treating football success as a measure of a country’s political or social health, as representing something more, when in reality they only reflect how good that football team is, or at most its system of sporting academies. It’s a credit to the players and their coaches, but not of deeper significance.

As Irish historian Paul Rouse explained in a recent The Rest is History series, footballing victory says nothing about a country’s greatness or the future success of its regime. Italy’s wins in 1934 and 1938 did not herald the coming of a new order or the greater physical prowess of the fascist superman; quite the opposite.

Brazil’s 1970 team is often viewed as the best in World Cup history, certainly the most beautiful to watch, and this was followed by the collapse of the military regime a decade or so later; Argentina’s came even sooner after its 1978 triumph. Even England’s victory in 1966, at the time of swinging London, took place in a country on the road to financial ruin eight years later (when it didn’t even qualify for the World Cup). If England win this year, it will no doubt be much talked about by the prime minister-to-be Andy Burnham, who will wax lyrical about his memories of Goodison Park as the country continues to circle the drain.

Perhaps we mistakenly apply the lessons of war to football, and war does sometimes say something about the state of a society’s health; countries which are better organised are more likely to win, and better organised societies tend to have a populace more invested in the social contract.

Britain defeated France in the long 18^th century because a more liberal system allowed it to raise money and troops, while the United States of America would not be the global hegemon after 250 years if it didn’t comprise a moral and law-abiding people, as its Founding Fathers were keen to emphasise (although Trump’s current shenanigans show how far they have fallen). You might even say that the British were able to beat Argentina in their crucial 1982 fixture because the latter had more people who think it’s fine to punch a ball into the net rather than play by the rules, a trait reflected in Argentina’s football culture of viveza criolla, translated as ‘native cunning’, or, alternatively, ‘cheating’.

There are no such moral lessons with sporting victories, and success in football says nothing about a country’s prospects or its health. If it was, Poland would be Europe’s football giants now; instead, their record since 1990 has been dismal compared to their time under the Communists. Despite this, I’m not sure the average Pole would swap what they have now for a place in the World Cup semi-finals.

Perhaps the only two World Cup victories that really signified anything were West Germany’s win in 1954, which came to represent their recovery from war, and their victory in 1990, months after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Both were meaningful enough to have been the subject of films, The Miracle of Bern and Goodbye Lenin; I’m not sure what a screenwriter could say about Germany today, a mess both on and off the pitch. Only one of those things really matters, of course, because sporting victory is ephemeral and doesn’t have much impact on people’s lives. Except, possibly, for the thousands of children who will be christened Jude in the coming months.

As with so much of the Blair-era constitutional revolution, things didn’t quite turn out as planned. Sold as a way to quash Celtic separatism, as of this May all three of the United Kingdom’s devolved authorities are led by nationalists. The SNP held onto power in Edinburgh after 19 years, despite their recent scandals and the failure of so many flagship plans. Indeed, the quality of lawmaking in Holyrood has often been embarrassing, and last December the BBC asked why the Scottish Parliament is so bad at drafting legislation which proves unworkable.

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The country was until then largely unknown to many people south of the border, something also true of its trademark drink. ‘Highland and lowland whisky in the early 19th century would have been a mystery to the majority of Englishmen,’ Jeffreys writes: ‘In the literature of the Georgian and early Victorian period it’s apparent that drinking whisky while in Scotland was the modern-day equivalent of licking hallucinogenic toads while in the Amazon or eating rancid whale in Iceland.’

The conflict with revolutionary France proved to be a great boost to Brand Scotland, and not just because of the limits it placed on rival destinations, but also for the dash that the Scots cut on the field. This culminated with a momentous scene in which ‘the Highland regiments dazzled the French when the Allied armies marched into Paris.’

Here they wowed both friends and enemies alike, and Sergeant Thomas Campbell of the Grenadier Company recalled how the Tsar even personally ‘examined my hose, gaiters, legs, and pinched my skin, thinking I wore something under my kilt, and had the curiosity to lift my kilt up to my navel, so that he might not be deceived.’ Thanks to the likes of the Black Watch and Gordon Highlanders, the Scots had arrived on the global stage, and no one would ever forget Die Damen aus der Hölle (Ladies from Hell) as German troops would later call Highlanders.

This period of upheaval and war – the birth pangs of true modernity - was marked by a growing craze for Highlandism, ‘a peculiar phenomenon where lowland Scotland, a predominantly settled mercantile society, took on the trappings of the Highlander as a way of differentiating themselves from Englishmen who they were now yoked to in the Union.’

Previously viewed as menacing, the Highlanders had been tamed by the defeat of the Jacobites and the Clearances that followed, making this once-feared Gaelic culture now safe for English speakers to adopt as their own. Much of this was driven by the romantic imagination of Edinburgh’s Walter Scott, who helped shape both Scottish national identity and the 19^th century resurgence of medievalism. Perhaps more than literature, however, Highlandism was boosted by the region’s most famous export - whisky. As Jeffreys writes: ‘The growth of Scotch coincided with the birth of Highlandism.’

The development of Brand Scotland was also helped by a man widely regarded as Britain’s greatest buffoon and waste of space, the former Prince Regent. Historian John Plumb described a hugely influential visit by the now George IV in 1822, where: ‘He paraded Edinburgh in the kilt, resplendent in the Royal Stuart tartan and flesh-coloured tights, and yet managed to keep his dignity. The Scots loved it! Quaintly enough, George IV had struck the future note of the monarchy... Be kilted! Be sporans! Be tartans! Riding up Princess Street... To the roaring cheers of loyal Scots, he was showing the way that the monarchy would have to go if it were to survive an industrial and democratic society.’

It was the start of a beautifully symbiotic relationship, with the Royal Family immersing themselves in Highlandism ever since, spending much of their summer holidays there and helping to project an ideal of a region famed for its dramatic countryside, castles, distilleries and golf courses. They’re not alone: Donald Trump, whose mother hailed from the Isle of Lewis, has a noted fondness for the old country, even if this is not always reciprocated, and no doubt many more of his compatriots will be making the pilgrimage in the coming year thanks to the country’s newest brand ambassadors. These are, of course, another occupying force of Scots, the fans of the national football team who followed their country’s brief recent appearance at World Cup.

The Scots in Boston marched as proudly as their ancestors. Their bagpipers serenaded the opposition. Some even turned up at a wedding. They came to watch the Boston Red Sox, which one local described as ‘the best thing that’s happened in years’. They attracted many neutrals, including a duck. Folk songs were written about them. Everyone loved them, even if some struggled to understand them.

The Boston Globe published a full-page letter thanking them. One local reported how Scotland fans leaving Boston was ‘almost like a day of mourning for the Americans’. After they left, Massachusetts State Senator Paul Feeney made an emotional farewell, thanking them for visiting children’s hospitals and donating money to local charities: ‘You’ve been great, courteous guests, you’ve been polite and you’ve been fun and I don’t want that to end.’ He invited them to return next year, by which time Glasgow will be twinned with Boston. Indeed, Scottish fans so impressed the Bostonians that the city changed its zoning laws, not an easy task in America. They may even have solved the fertility crisis. Indeed, the Tartan Army charm offensive in Boston has been so overwhelming that I half suspect it’s some sort of devious RICU operation.

I don’t recall a group of sports fans ever doing so much to further their country’s image abroad, a form of popular diplomacy that doesn’t have many parallels. And without sounding unpatriotic, I think it’s fair to say that fans of the England football team have not always been such noted brand ambassadors. This has material benefits, and the Tartan Army’s antics will certainly lead to an increase in tourism to their country, just as visitor numbers to Morocco rose significantly after their team’s performance in Qatar.

It’s not like they’re already short of tourists bringing the Almighty Dollar, and indeed I’m a huge admirer of how the Scots put national identity to its most benevolent and noble purpose: using it to milk wealthy Americans of their money. I was especially taken by this marketing when we took the Caledonian Sleeper a couple of years ago for a holiday which featured some breathtaking scenery (and, as you’d expect, incredible warmth from the locals). As a sign of how one contemporary Anglo-Scottish writer has done more to boost the national brand than anyone since Scott, my daughter informed me that when she told her classmates that we were going to the Highlands of Scotland, one replied: ‘oh cool, Hogwarts Land.’

After a day in Glasgow’s beautiful city centre, we drove up to stay inside a Scottish Baronial house by Loch Lomond, followed by a drive through the dramatically beautiful Glencoe and then Ben Nevis, before heading to Skye. (The Scottish Tourist Board aren’t paying me for this, by the way, although I want to make it clear that I can absolutely be bought).

Hogwarts Land is not cheap, however, and homes on the Isle of Skye seemed to be about as expensive in May half-term as some villas in the south of France in summer. One reason, I learned, was that a huge proportion of hotel rooms and Airbnbs in the Highlands and Islands were occupied by American tourists, driving up prices. Fair play to them - it’s testimony to the clever branding of the country, especially notable at Loch Lomond and Stirling Castle where Scottish merch shops were doing great business selling kilts, flags and, most of all, whisky.

Indeed, Jeffreys points out how much of Brand Scotland was a creation of the whisky industry, a group of exceptionally cunning businessmen who mass marketed their country as a way of promoting their product. They sold a quaint and homely image of Scotland, ‘all of this colourful marketing [disguising] the fact that whisky was made using the latest technology. Distilleries pioneered electric lights, telephones, and later computers. Grain distilleries especially became mechanised. Scotch was as much part of Scotland’s transformations into one of the world’s foremost industrial powers as shipbuilding or steel. Whisky played a part in turning Scotland from a poverty-stricken backwater into an industrial giant.’ Always at the forefront of innovation, one whisky distillery commissioned the world’s first cinema advert in 1898.

The marketing of Brand Scotland even enabled the whisky barons to win over the French, normally loathe to let any produce of Britain touch their lips. ‘Today the French drink more Scotch than brandy,’ he writes: ‘In fact, France is and has been for a long time the single biggest export market for Scotch after America.’ India, where it is highly valued, is not far behind.

Scotch is today so world famous that any visitor from Britain wishing to impress foreign hosts will naturally choose a bottle as a gift, and anyone visiting this island will want to bring one home. I’m more confused as to how Tennent’s Super managed to become a sophisticated drink in Italy, whereas in England it is generally viewed as ‘tramp juice’. No doubt the 9 per cent beer will be de rigueur among Boston hipsters by this time next year.

As for anyone hoping to book a place in Scotland for the summer of 2027, good luck fighting off the American invasion.

Starmer was a failure, but as I wrote this week, just the latest in a line of leaders who could not solve the Riddle of Britain. He was the personification of a consensus that is already dead, and as Patrick Maguire wrote in portrait for the Times, he was unwilling or unable to impose his will. No one really knew what he believed, and if he had any sort of lodestar, it was a sort of pure legalism, often taken to its absurd conclusion; he struggled to even say what a woman was until the courts ruled on it.

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It’s a bit like the Brothers Grimm fairy tale ‘The Riddle’, where a string of suitors attempt to answer the princess’s question, only to be dispatched when they can’t solve it. What is Britain’s riddle? Is it planning and infrastructure, the dominance of financial services, the outdated Westminster constitution, its replacement Blairite constitution, the ‘Blob’, inequality, class, or some deeper, more spiritual malaise, the inevitable slide towards decadence which all once great peoples eventually face? Whatever the riddle, Starmer failed to solve it and is now followed by another hopeful, who has been proclaimed with indecent haste. You’d have to be one of life’s great optimists to imagine he will come closer to solving the riddle; like Boris Johnson, after all, Andy Burnham is a product of the mayoral system which provides a springboard for popular politicians without really testing them, like hiring officers on the western front based on their ability to captain a football team.

Yesterday’s resignation speech by Keir Starmer was marred, as was Rishi Sunak’s damp-squib election announcement, by the terminally annoying nuisance that is Steve Bray, one of a handful of minor celebrities who came to prominence after the referendum, among them Jolyon Maugham, Gina Miller, Femi and Led by Donkeys.

It was Bray, however, who came to symbolise the tribe most of all. As Samuel Rubinstein wrote in UnHerd yesterday: ‘Thanks to 10 solid years of shouting “Stop Brexit!”, the poor man has become the face of the fevered mood of the late 2010s. Anthony Seldon’s new edited volume, The Brexit Effect, portrays him on the front cover, with his EU-flag cape and “Stop Brexit” top hat.’

Curiously, Rubinstein notes, ‘the most interesting thing about Bray is that he was not political before 2016. Nothing could better encapsulate the problem with the Europhile, Remainer ideology. It has no deep roots in British culture. It was a synthetic product of the moment that followed the referendum. Practically nobody in Britain was waving around EU flags before 2016; you would have been looked at funny if you solemnly sang “Ode to Joy”. Nobody in Britain attached any romantic warmth to Brussels. But in the early hours of 24 June 2016, a kind of ethnogenesis occurred: at long last, the “British European” stepped forth. People who had never previously given much thought or care to the EU all of a sudden decided that it ought to be at the heart of their identity.

‘It was, in a sense, a familiar, primitive impulse: initiates to the tribe marked themselves with the acronym “FBPE”, defining themselves against a Faragist outgroup. It became a powerful means of signifying what sort of person you were — softly Left, but in a “moderate”, “sensible” way; attentive to the “experts” and wary of “Russian disinformation”.’

Indeed it is notable how Leave and Remain identity became so firmly established, and even now ‘about 60% of people in Britain identify as a Remainer or a Leaver, and people’s emotional attachments to their Brexit tribe are much stronger than their attachments to any political party.’ This reached a peak in the years following the vote, and at one point close to half of Remainers objected to their child marrying a member of the other tribe. It was like one of the controversial 1960s social science experiments where a group of people were arbitrarily divided into two groups to see how long it took to get them to hate each other.

I felt torn by the whole thing, being a very early Bregretter, Many people agonised about it, and even right-wing publications like the Spectator were divided. That was one interesting asymmetry: Remain voters tended to be more segregated, socially and physically, which is why only about 40 per cent of constituencies had pro-EU majorities but those tended to be bigger – 16 constituencies had a larger Remain win than the most Brexity seat. Remain voters were less likely to be surrounded by people from the other side than vice versa, as is also true of left-leaning political movements generally; if you had Leave voting friends as a Remainer, you were also more likely to ‘bin’ them, as Bray did.

In contrast, if you were a university-educated Leave voter in your 30s and lived in London, you were largely surrounded by members of the other side, and they often had no idea. I remember on one occasion in our local Facebook group in north London, which was often insufferable because of Brexit chat, a local woman commenting casually on how ‘no one in the area’ had voted Leave. But even here one in four people did; she probably spoke to them everyday but they never raised the subject in case she harangued them.

There was a great deal of quite reasonable anger, from people whose domestic situation was upended or whose working life was made much more difficult and poorer. Much of the rage that followed was simply shock at the result, which came out of the blue and reflected deeper problems with the media ecosystem, including the decline of the local press.

The only person I remember calling it correctly was a fellow parent at my children’s school whose family were long-standing Labour supporters and activists in the Midlands, all of whom were planning to vote Leave; he concluded from this that they probably had enough to win. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that he was one of the minority of parents who had not gone to university.

Many shared the shock of former Remain campaign Thomas Prosser who wrote how ‘I took the result badly. On the morning of 24^th June, I wept and, in the weeks following the referendum, my thoughts scarcely became more coherent. Not only was my anticipation of the economic effects very wide of the mark – I predicted on Facebook that unemployment would be 10% by the autumn - but I was convinced that we had experienced a profoundly authoritarian event. Speaking to a Polish friend a few weeks after the result, I told him that I now knew how Poles had felt watching General Jaruzelski declare martial law.’

He was hardly alone - the BBC even produced an Agatha Christie adaptation which linked Brexit to 1930s fascism. The Guardian ran numerous first-person pieces from people leaving Rainy Fascist Brexit Island to escape racism by moving to rural France (ho ho). In fact, all the polling after 2016 showed the public becoming more liberal on immigration, some of it no doubt a reaction to the prejudice they felt was unleashed by the referendum.

What made the post-Brexit fallout uniquely unpleasant was that it obviously divided along the lines of winners v losers. Those who benefited from globalisation wanted one thing, those who lost – allied with the retired who had less interest in economic consequences – wanted another, and the issue was totally binary.

The winners lost, and weren’t happy about it. There is a reasonable amount of evidence suggesting that policymakers respond to the demands of the wealthiest quintile more than any other group. As conservatives, that’s something we accept as a fact of life, even if the social policies favoured by the wealthy often have a destructive effect which they are shielded from. Brexit completely violated that rule, in a genuinely revolutionary way, and enraged people who understandably felt that the country was committing economic self-harm.

The overt snobbery that resulted was often unpleasant, reflecting a general trend towards American-style snark. People who identified as democrats and egalitarians stated quite explicitly that voters with lower levels of education should not have the final say over economic issues they didn’t understand. That would nullify possibly every Labour victory in history.

The hardcore Remainers were among the most unsympathetic movements in history, but it doesn’t make it easier that annoying people are sometimes correct. Right from the start I feared that Brexit might be reckless and economically destructive, that the Leave side were making promises to voters in so-called ‘left-behind’ areas that they could not deliver on, and that this would lead to incredible bitterness. Voters will forgive a lot, but a sense of being tricked, taken for a ride, betrayed even, is fatal. People hate feeling like mugs. I also felt that it was radicalising many young people even more against the Tories; the impression was of mostly older people throwing away their children’s prospects for often contradictory and sentimental reasons, informed by watching too many war films. It meant a brain drain from the Right, something clearly evident in the declining quality of Tory ministers.

I was also not convinced by the ‘money isn’t everything’ argument, that Brexit might make us poorer but it would be worth it. Money is a lot; if you haven’t retired or paid off your mortgage it is rather jarring to hear this line from people who have. I understood the rationale for a more egalitarian economy that might drive down total GDP by restricting the supply of workers. But I also think that if a country grows relatively poorer, and stagnates, that’s a sign of a deeper malaise. National wealth is national greatness, and Britain was at its relative richest when it was well-governed, dynamic and culturally confident. That it is stuck in a rut now suggests a deep cultural rot, while failure begets failure as more dynamic citizens emigrate and a shrinking economy leads politicians to extract from their enemies to reward their friends. A junta of Belgian ticket inspectors would indeed be preferable to rule by Tony Benn.

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‘Rather like blowing on a dandelion,’ O’Brien wrote: ‘the Home Office are dispersing people all over the country. The government hopes this will make the problem less visible.’

As your history scholars in the year 2100 will note – assuming anyone can still read by then - the opposite was true. This dispersal helped to pour fuel on the immigration debate, as people from more rural areas experienced what felt like shocking changes in their local neighbourhood. And they could do nothing about it, other than check out how many Afghan refugees were being resettled in their hometowns (and how few in London where the decision-makers were based).

Many asylum seekers ended up in Belfast, one of the Home Office’s top dumping grounds. This was the background to the most recent tragically iconic image of disorder in the United Kingdom, the attempted beheading of a man in north Belfast, the attack happening in one of the city’s most notorious flashpoints.

Belfast’s Loyalists reacted exactly as you’d expect, by burning out foreigners. The footage was horrifying, although not new in the province, where various forms of ethnic cleansing have been carried out over the past century, sometimes by mobs and sometimes by calculated elimination. The Troubles began in 1969 after one such outbreak, leading the British government to send in troops to protect Catholics – and the rest is history.

Politicians in Westminster famously try to ignore what happens in Ulster unless it spills over into Great Britain, and while there were small disturbances in Glasgow in the days following, it seems unlikely that we will see anything similar. The Belfast rioters were very organised, masked-up and phoneless, and threatening to polite journalists who got too close. Their English equivalents are far more amateurish, and we must hope they remain so, but a key difference is the existence of former paramilitaries – indeed one of the underrated factors in ‘community relations’ is the presence of criminals.

A fear of Ulsterisation has certainly grown since 2024, a development already noticeable in the physical environment. Britain is becoming a more dangerous place, the most recent Global Peace Index attributing this not just to external conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, but ‘intensity of internal conflict’ - political instability, violent demonstrations and polarisation. Widower Brendan Cox is not wrong to worry about the direction of the country, ten years after the murder of his wife Jo.

A major driver of political instability is demographic instability, and when a society experiences change at such a rapid rate, the risk of disruption grows. This has presumably been a recent factor in Belfast’s unrest, a part of the world acutely sensitive to population change. It was certainly a major factor in the lead up to the Troubles, when the Catholic minority was inching upwards due to higher birth rates, leading the Protestant-dominated state to encourage emigration through measures such as housing discrimination. The larger the minority in any state, the greater the risk that the majority will developed an intensified and paranoid sense of group identity, to vote along ethnic lines and vote for parties which assert their traditions and group rights.

The government seems at a loss at how to prevent either disorder or broader public discontent, too constrained by a belief in controlling ‘the narrative’. There are vague threats to tackle social media, blamed for spreading hate and misinformation, and there’s a good chance that Labour will try to shut down Twitter. I don’t support such a ban, which would be both illiberal and unlikely to work, and because it will mean I have nothing to do all day - it will also be very hard to do while Trump is in office. Yet I can see why some people think it necessary to curb the plaything of the world’s richest man. The tone of his social media platform increasingly has the feel of Hutu Power Radio, with incendiary posts most likely to succeed in the attention economy; Only Fans, but for racism.

Changing media habits entail that stories which previously would have been buried or obscured now come to convey a pattern. The essence of public attention is pattern spotting, and once the public notices a trend, each subsequent instance blows up as a story. This became true of Islamic terrorism in the 2000s; now it has become true of crimes committed by asylum seekers and, increasingly, minorities more generally. Each atrocity brings the risk of disorder, since the identity right is now organised both in parliamentary politics and as a street presence, as in the Six Counties.

Another lesson from that province is that community tension does not stem from some nebulous thing called ‘hate’ which can be countered by ‘choosing love’, but from positive feedback loops. Aggression from one side leads to a response from another. Every instance of perceived violence against minorities is amplified by politicians of the Left hoping to combat prejudice. Yet exaggerating the danger to minority communities is not ‘countering hate’, whatever one’s motivation – it’s fuelling it. The major risk of promoting the concept of Islamophobia, aside from the establishment of blasphemy laws, is that it creates a sense of a community under siege. Jihadists repeatedly cite their motivation that Muslims are under threat, and people respond to fear by lashing out.

Social media is the spark that might cause Britain to erupt; the question remains why we have built a society which is so combustible. Inevitably there is a debate that follows unrest about whether the problem is ‘multiculturalism’, by which is meant the state-funded multiculturalism which drives separation. I feel that this is probably less important than people think; Britain and France have approached this challenge with totally opposite strategies, and both have ended up in a similar place. Some form of multiculturalism – using ‘community leaders’ (vomit) as ‘stakeholders’ (even more vomit) – is probably inevitable and necessary. A much more underplayed factor in inter-communal tension is crime.

The British state takes inter-communal violence very seriously, while taking a very unserious approach to the far bigger problem of everyday crime, even though the latter contributes to the former, something which successful multicultural states like Singapore are well aware of.

The Southport riots erupted following the murder of three young girls by an adolescent who, fifty years earlier, would have already been placed in a secure unit, with his history of disturbing and violent behaviour. The particular difficulty in placing black men into psychiatric care has become a lively topic since the Nottingham murders, but more generally it is much harder to section people than it used to be; the number of psychiatric beds fell from a peak of 150,000 in the mid-1950s to less than a third of that by the end of the century, to just 25,000 today. Mental health services have been cut in many vital areas.

A month before the conviction of Henry Nowak’s killer, a white man called John Ashby was jailed for raping a Sikh woman in the Midlands. Ashby subjected his victim to sadistic racial abuse during the ordeal, believing she was Muslim, and the British state treats the racial element of this crime as an aggravating factor. Yet the root cause of the crime was not ‘hate’ but the inability of the authorities to keep a very dangerous man away from the public. This was not an ordinary citizen who had been radicalised: Ashby had ten previous convictions for 18 offences, including carrying weapons, assault and battery, theft, drugs, harassment, and breach of a restraining order. He had recently been released from psychiatric care and immediately went on to offend. It’s not a hate problem, it’s a crime problem.

Similarly, Henry Nowak’s killer could have been incapacitated if police had followed up on reports that he had brandished a gun in 2022 or that he had stolen £1,000 worth of knives the following year, as the local Sikh community had informed them. Had both offences been prosecuted by the state, he might well have been inside at the time of the murder, or at least been given the impression that his behaviour had consequences.

After the Nowak murder convictions, the authorities responded to disturbances in Southampton with some robust sentencing, with one man receiving three years and three months in jail, typical of the long stretches which the British state hands down for public disorder.

Among those jailed was 27-year-old Callum Darch, sent down for two and a half years for throwing a wheelie bin at police. The judge declared that such violence was ‘hate crime, borne out of a hatred of the police and in some cases racist views’, yet Darch had 10 previous convictions for 24 offences, including a 14-month prison sentence for dangerous driving. This was despite leaving his victim on that occasion with ‘life changing injuries’, and being found with a knuckle-duster and cocaine in his system, and already having four previous convictions. That seems worse than pushing a bin at a policemen, yet aggression towards an officer in a ‘hateful’ way is seen as a serious crime in a way that beating up a police officer in normal circumstances is not.

Numerous people convicted after the 2024 Southport riots had long criminal records, including very large numbers who had been reported for domestic abuse. At least one of the men involved in the most disturbing event of those riots, the arson of a Rotherham asylum seeker hostel. had previous convictions for wounding and affray. One rioter in Sunderland had 30 previous convictions and another in Liverpool had 16. The question is not why two-tier Kier’s regime treated them so harshly; the question is why they were free at all.

If the government wishes to reduce the risk of further riots, it might focus less on social media and more on a criminal justice system that allows repeat offenders their freedom. The disconnect between the way the British state regards political offences, and the way it treats ordinary crime, has become vast, and characteristic of authoritarian regimes whose primary purpose is self-preservation. For an increasingly fragile state like Britain, which has come to resemble the later Soviet Union in its paranoia, inter-communal strife is a threat to the system. Someone who commits dozens of offences and makes life a misery for everyone around them isn’t. But the risk of political instability is heightened by the existence of a criminal underclass.

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It’s not just that they committed a crime. Many people find Palestine Action types annoying, similarly to the zealots of Just Stop Oil; even their names manage to somehow irritate. Whatever their actual backgrounds, they have the vibe of virtuous indulged radical children who frighten their liberal parents, and even the recent hunger strikes had all the hallmarks of ‘acting out’.

In many ways the pro-Palestinian movement has indeed been indulged for too long, allowed to take over central London on repeated weekends while the authorities clamp down on counter-protest, sending the clearest signal that the state will side with whoever it fears most. Previous provocations have been met with a whimper or mysteriously ignored. There is suspicion among the public that well-born idealists in keffiyehs are treated with a degree of leniency which working-class protesters who care only for Britain would not be.

Now the state’s patience has snapped, and four young people described by the judge as being of ‘exemplary good character’ and noted for ‘your kindness, your selflessness, and your caring and compassionate nature’ will spend their best years in prison. I can’t help but feel a certain amount of pity, at least for three of them - after all, they were doing exactly what the prevailing moral norms were telling them to do.

I say this as someone not hugely sympathetic to the cause, which makes me think of Julie Burchill’s phrase from the 2000s, the ‘silly led by the sinister’. At best they’re wasting their lives over an unresolvable conflict they cannot influence; at worst they’re helping to dangerously radicalise British politics. I find the sight of young westerners at music festivals flying the flag of the group who carried out a massacre at a music festival slightly chilling, and the willingness of people to make common cause with obviously hostile actors very odd.

I suppose my attitude to the Palestine Action activists is not a million miles away from how political opponents view the people imprisoned for anti-immigration riots. They’re in jail in part they were influenced by the rhetoric around them; words have consequences, and all that, one word in particular.

By most accounts, 75,000 people have been killed in Gaza since 2023, the fourth deadliest conflict of the 2020s and the first to be disseminated through the highly emotive filter of TikTok. This is an immense death toll, and if what Israel is doing in Gaza amounts to genocide, as many politicians and journalists argue, it is hardly surprising that the young and idealistic wish to do something. In the western psychological make-up the word is a mental shortcut to the Holocaust, which is presumably why it is so commonly invoked. This is a generation who have been taught their entire life that Nazism was the greatest moral test in history, and that many failed it; how can they stand by while it happens again?

One can disagree with Zack Polanski that this is merely ‘protesting’ – it obviously isn’t - and still note the severity of the sentences handed out to three of them. It could indeed be argued that turning up armed with crowbars is enough to merit a decent stretch, but the four received far longer sentences than people who otherwise commit violence because a ‘terrorist connection’ was used as an aggravating factor. This was applied, even though they were not actually charged with terrorism, and at the time of the break-in Palestine Action was not a ‘proscribed terrorist organisation’ and membership was not illegal.

While this application is permissible under the Sentencing Act 2020, it is rarely used, and sympathisers regard this measure as ‘chilling and creeping authoritarianism’, as one of the defence lawyers put. Human rights lawyer Michael Mansfield described it as a ‘constitutional threat’.

Admittedly, I don’t always take the words of human rights lawyers with the reverence some do, and the group has committed violence against individuals in order to achieve its goal, while publicising its actions in the hope of inspiring others. That does rather sound like terrorism, although it’s clear that the purpose of these long sentences is to be a salutary warning to others, the equivalent of hanging a horse-thief.

Political crimes are by necessity treated more harshly than ordinary lawbreaking: if people succeed in using violence or intimidation to further their ends, this will escalate and threaten democracy, and MPs have already ceded power to the mob’s veto. Fanatical idealists of a ‘caring and compassionate nature’ are more dangerous to social stability than ordinary criminals, and these things tends to be memetic. It’s clear why they needed to be jailed, just as the Just Stop Oil protesters were, but the measures against Palestine Action go further.

Not only is membership of the group illegal, but even expressing support for Palestine Action is a crime, punishable by up to six months in prison. The protest organisation Defend Our Juries claim that more than 2,700 people have been arrested for holding up signs supporting PA since July last year, a figure which seems plausible considering that 500 people were arrested in just one day for such an offence. The oldest was 87. Although the High Court overruled the ban, yesterday the Court of Appeal ruled on the side of the government. On the same day, coincidentally the anniversary of Magna Carta, Polanski was asked a question by a Labour MP which might constitute a crime if answered incorrectly.

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In a recent post I wrote about how the Right was being internationalised in much the same way as the Left, the result of global English as well as technology. With the United States about to celebrate its 250^th anniversary, I also recently wrote about the English influence on that great country, which still remains humanity’s least-bad hope despite its widespread unpopularity (notably its flag was booed at Thursday’s opening ceremony in Mexico). I hope that political controversy doesn’t get in the way of what is the greatest international tournament on earth.

I also wrote about the surge in British anti-Americanism, ‘the socialism of midwits’; afterwards I appeared on the Spectator Americano podcast talking about it. On a vaguely related subject, I finally published my piece about San Francisco (with one error).

Since the last round-up, I have written about second-order effects and why politicians find it so hard to understand them. I looked at the subject of lame news, and I’m going of start a Twitter thread listing examples – suggestions welcome. I wrote about Ukraine’s struggle, a conflict which has now gone on longer than the First World War. What a horrendous waste of life.

I wrote about pathological accommodation and ‘sickfluenza’, about Hungary and the fall of Orbán, Alec Ryrie’s The Age of Hitler, anti-Semitism in Britain and why we look at the wrong historical models, and my guide to How to save the West. I visited Spain, which has some of the best urbanism in the world, and wrote about overtourism and what to do about it (build more cities that look like tourists would visit). I wrote about the Windrush myth, a post which also features me talking on Louise Perry’s podcast. I also appeared on the Meeting People podcast.

More recently, the British news agenda has been dominated by the murder of Henry Nowak and the police response, which I wrote about here and here. This follows what I wrote about the Nottingham Inquiry and the idea of anti-racism as child sacrifice. Finally, I wrote about why youth and stupidity are treated as mitigating factors by courts. There was yet another dreadful example this week.

I also made the case for a national clean-up campaign (free to read), inspired by my recent visit to Singapore. Since then, Reform have announced plans for such a ‘National Action Day’ to clean up Britain - first proposed in your super soaraway Wrong Side of History. If this happens - and it’s backed by credible deterrence for littering - I think that people will find it fun. My only anthropological political philosophy is that man is an oxytocin-seeking animal and we really enjoy communal activities, even if we have to be pressured into doing so; Jonathan Leaf’s excellent book will explain why. Most of the ‘mental health crisis’ can simply be explained by a hyper-social species suddenly finding itself in an environment where it’s not pressured into interaction.

We just want our bins collected, continued

I love cycling, but in London it’s already a frustrating business. There are constantly people who get in my way on the pavement and others who get angry when I don’t wait for the recommended red light. I do my best to tolerate all this, but the state of the roads makes it much worse; one of the most notable decline-of-the-public realm signs to me is how much worse the roads are now compared to ten years ago, something which is downstream of the world’s most boring subject, the collapse of local government.

Councils don’t have control over their own spending, which is why most of their money gets absorbed into things like social care. The system also encourages people to use local elections to express their frustration with national government by voting for a local council which can do nothing about immigration, the national economy, the NHS and certainly not Gaza.

Instead of having sensible experienced local people who will fix the roads, we end up with paper candidates incapable of doing their job, or who have not undergone proper scrutiny; since my post was published, six newly-elected Green councillors in London have already resigned. We should ban national parties from standing at local elections altogether, and no council should be forced to make any payments that central government decides.

On the plus side, Lewisham will officially become a trans-friendly borough and plans to twin with a Palestinian town. Danny Kruger advises against exchange visits.

PS I will also post the Ask Me Anything soon. My apologies for those who have suggested questions and are still waiting for answers.

Madchester - Britain’s second city?

With Manchester mayor Andy Burnham seeking to return to Parliament and put Starmer out of his misery, James Breckwoldt wrote about how the city turned its economy around. The most startling fact is that Manchester’s city centre population is now 100,000; back in 1990 it was only around 500.

Most of this was not the work of Burnham but Richard Leese and Howard Bernstein, leader and chief executive of the council respectively. It’s also notable that they also achieved their housing goals by ignoring demands that large numbers had to be set aside for affordable housing.

Leese wrote in 2021: ‘If we’d done what our critics wanted us to do, it wouldn’t have delivered affordable housing, it would have delivered no housing at all, zero. If we’d tried to impose 20% affordability on it, it wouldn’t have happened. We wouldn’t have got 20% affordable housing we would have got nothing.’

‘Nothing’ is often what you end up with when you put a de facto 20 per cent tax on housebuilding rather than just concentrating on increasing supply. Allowing the construction of more ‘luxury flats’ reduces the costs of housing across the board.

It’s a great achievement - it’s just a shame that Manchester is so dystopian looking, but I suppose I’m in a minority in thinking this really matters. It’s why I think the correct answer to the question ‘Which is Britain’s second city?’ is Edinburgh. Edinburgh is the only British city other than London which overseas visitors would want to host the Olympics – although it would involve huge infrastructure challenges which I don’t think it could handle. Neither Manchester and certainly not Birmingham are attractive enough to be prestige cities in the same way: neither have the beautiful high-end inner suburbs which make for civic greatness, and which London, Edinburgh and Dublin all possess. This is partly explained by the fact that Manchester and Birmingham were industrial cities, but their aesthetic was further wrecked by 20^th century planners.

Now they replace 2/10 post-war buildings with 5/10 ones, or Cyberpunk stuff that looks dramatic in photos but isn’t very pleasant to be around, rather than just letting me rebuild it by spending the afternoon on ChatGPT.

The worst law in British history?

On a similar subject, interesting thread by Daisy Christodoulou about the East End, social housing and how the system changed in the 1970s. She writes that ‘One of my relatives used to joke that in the past, to get a council house you had to pretend to be respectable. Now you had to pretend to be disrespectable.’

I have a theory that many of the things which the Right blames on the 60s and the Left blame on the 80s are actually downstream of one law, the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977, which made ‘need’ the most important factor in determining a council house. Before that, social housing prioritised the respectable working-class with local roots; being in work, being married and being law abiding were all pluses. The new system came to benefit the most dysfunctional, and I think that particular law did a huge amount to reduce pro-social behaviour and increase mistrust in Britain, a feeling of unease that used to be called ‘broken Britain’. I also think it accentuated class differences in London, too, because whereas middle-class Londoners might have made friends with the working-class family next door, they now avoid people who live in council flats.

It also internationalised social housing, since foreign nationals - by definition homeless - came to have priority status. The Bangladeshi settlement of Tower Hamlets was not some organic process but was facilitated by government housing rules, leading to huge bitterness among native east enders. It is bizarre that a huge chunk of this incredibly scarce resource allocated to foreign nationals, a large percentage of whom are not even working. In my borough, for instance, 60 per cent of social housing is allocated to households led by foreigners, social housing the rest of us pay for and which makes housing more scarce and expensive for everyone else; which, when you think about it, is insane. In contrast, wealthy foreign landlords – an easier target – are not having the same effect.

I recently wrote about the outdated British approach to nationality and how it cannot survive hyper-globalisation, and this is one such example. On that theme, it was recently revealed that Sierra Leone’s first lady has social housing in inner London, something first reported a year ago in the Times. Southwark has now seized the flat, a full year after the paper started the investigation, but I wonder how many other third world elites have similar arrangements in London. It could be worse – Barnet Council housed a leading Hamas official.

The Libtards

James Marriott writes about the Right being more interested in ideas.

It’s strange to recall that the left used to be the natural realm of intellectuals: Marxist bores in leather jackets, turtle-necked university lecturers, champagne socialists squabbling at dinner parties … Labour was the party of Anthony Crosland, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Michael Foot. But in the past couple of decades the left has given up the habit of thinking and arguing.

The anti-intellectual impulse is most pronounced among progressives who have long been happier censoring ideas than thinking about them. When my colleague Decca Aitkenhead interviewed the Green Party leader Zack Polanski a few weeks ago he responded to her questions about trans rights and immigration with a frosty reluctance to engage. Pressed on immigration Polanski reacted by “glaring”.

This is a curious reversal. Conservatives have traditionally been suspicious of ideas. Fifty years ago, if you came across a politician quoting a French philosopher you could have been fairly sure they were on the left. Nowadays you should make the opposite assumption: JD Vance is only the most high profile conservative acolyte of the French theorist René Girard. Kemi Badenoch is prone to citing the philosophy of Roger Scruton. You may doubt she has studied Scruton’s thought in any depth but it is significant his name crops up at all.

I wonder if the left feels intellectually exhausted because they’ve become comfortable with the idea that their opponents are morally wrong, which means that they don’t need to stress test their own arguments. Immigration is an obvious example of this, with so many arguments designed to outwit a dim racist uncle but which prove to be quite inadequate when faced with actual data about historical inflows, relative economic contribution by nationality, per capita crime rates and the literature about social capital and state vulnerability. In contrast, if your side is handicapped by moral distaste, much of it well-earned, you need to think harder to justify your argument.

I suspect that the new moral certainty of the 21^st century has made these feelings more intense. One of the great strengths of Christian teaching was the importance it placed on wrestling with one’s conscience. The good Christian did not bask in his own moral certainty, seeing himself as the lone man who refused to salute Hitler, confident of being on the right side of history; there is more moral certainty among today’s believers. I don’t claim to be a great intellectual or a very moral person, but I do struggle with my beliefs, and I don’t feel good believing what I do. But it’s probably good to feel torn about a subject.

People on the Left are also much less likely to know people with opposing views, something which is harder for educated conservatives who grow up as a minority. A lot of left-wing commentators would fail the Ideological Turing Test, none more so than James O’Brien of LBC, who admittedly doesn’t even try. Michael Murphy recently wrote about O’Brien, the man who epitomises that intellectual incuriosity.

O’Brien squandered the following decade on daily LBC performances that left him with thousands of pyrrhic victories over complete strangers, but none the wiser as to where things go from here. He preferred to win than to listen. Now he is a man armed with an umbrella against a tsunami of inexplicable data points. History is already sitting in judgement on the liberal, multicultural, high immigration model of Britain he made his name championing. His radio booth is becoming more claustrophobic, and his utterances more palpably absurd. He is becoming an anachronism in real time, clutching onto his umbrella, but his God, the God that failed, is nowhere to be seen.

African funerals

A few weeks old, but this was a fascinating post by David Oks on African funerals.

A modest, mid-level funeral in Ghana costs about $5,000 U.S. dollars; a “befitting” one can easily cost $15,000 or $20,000. And all this in a country with a median income of about $1,500 per year. Ghana is known for its particularly ornate funeral culture; but it’s not the only place in sub-Saharan Africa with a culture of exorbitantly expensive funerals. The average household in KwaZulu-Natal in eastern South Africa, for example, spends the equivalent of an adult’s annual income on a single funeral. We see the same tendency for ultra-expensive funerals in a striking number of places: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon, Mozambique, the Ivory Coast. It’s often observed, in fact, that families will spend more money on burying the dead than on keeping the sick alive: indeed, in the Kagera region of northern Tanzania, families spend 50 percent more money on funerals than on medical care.

Religion and the decline of madness

Also a while back, Tove K wrote about religion and mental illness. I’ve thought about this a lot since.

The existence of schizophrenia is a puzzle to scientists, because it is both strongly influenced by genes and highly detrimental. It has been suggested that schizophrenia-causing traits are a bit like sickle-cells: Favorable in lower doses, in which they make people creative, detrimental in higher doses, in which they make people psychotic.

It is very possible that there is a correlation between creativity and delusional madness. Still, there is reason to doubt the theory that some extra scraps of creativity bring such great advantages to people that it can offset the damage caused by delusions and hallucinations. A more likely explanation is that damaging delusions are a by-product of useful delusions. And the limit between what is damaging and what is useful depends heavily on culture.

In other words, perceiving the world as magical is not only fearsome. In societies that value schizotypal and psychotic people for their special senses of perception and imagination, all of those people aren’t necessarily dysfunctional the way they are in present-day Western society. In modern society, people with pervasive hallucinations often struggle to hold down a job. In primitive societies, there are good reasons to believe that men with tendencies to hallucinate were the best positioned for the only specialized trade there was: That of a shaman.

Babies

Our local Catholic primary school closed last summer. If the Catholics aren’t having enough children, there’s no hope for the rest of society.

Hugo Fox of the FT reported recently about how London is running out of babies,

The school, Colvestone, is in Hackney, east London. It is one of four schools that closed in the borough in 2024. Four more closed last year. But not even that accurately shows the declining numbers of schoolchildren here. Earlier this week, parents of four-year-olds across the UK learnt where their child has been accepted to primary school, but in the capital many seats will remain empty. Last year, it was roughly one in five places in Hackney alone — nearly 500 in all.

Since then, yet another London primary has closed, in the borough that was called ‘nappy valley’ in the 2000s but which has now has TFR lower than Japan. It’s really notable if you have children in the capital, how much the catchment areas have widened just in the past few years. As with most things, we can blame the phones.

Everything I Own

Simon Evans wrote beautifully about losing his father

Many of you will know of the particular and singular challenges that my father faced in our relationship – challenges to which I was oblivious until about eight years ago. Unable to father children, my dad was determined that my mother should nevertheless have a child of her own, and so they attended a fertility clinic and I was conceived using a sperm donation. Not easy for any man to bear, let alone in the 1960s, and with the whole thing being a sworn secret. I’ve spoken about it at length elsewhere but in short, he rose to those challenges with a quiet heroism that made me emotional whenever I contemplated it even when he was still alive. He was a mensch, and anyone who saw The Work of the Devil knows the esteem I held him in. I am just glad that he did too.

He came to see the show in 2020, just before lockdown, and so I was able to say the things that millions of sons want to but never quite feel is the right time. And with the amplifying force of doing so in front of hundreds of witnesses. And he was able to squeeze my hand afterwards and tell me – his highest praise, that he thought it was rather good.

I am hugely grateful for that, now more than ever. If there is someone you’re thinking of now, then please, do it. You just never know when the moment will pass.

In brief

Neil O’Brien wrote about political indoctrination in schools. Back in the days of New Atheism it used to be a running conversation that the churches were using schools to indoctrinate children, admittedly an old debate; having been to a Catholic state school in the 90s and seen my children at secular state schools in the 2020s, the degree of indoctrination seems far more extreme in the latter. At least in church schools, religion is largely kept to RE and assemblies, and many of the teachers weren’t believers. The teaching profession is incredibly skewed politically and it shows.

Michael Murphy also wrote about Oldham’s exciting new politics. Eye-opening.

‘Men’s child care time has quadrupled in the past few generations’ and this is good for their brains and may even be protective of dementia. Childcare also reduces men’s testosterone levels, which is good for society as a whole even if it might not feel great when you’re crying over the John Lewis Christmas add.

Maya Sall on the revival of religious identity among young Sikhs in Britain. It’s a subject most of us don’t know a huge amount about, and for example it’s not well known that the deadliest ever terror attack in the British Isles was carried out by Sikh separatists. I was curious to read that this week, despite their ‘martial race’ status, Sikhs are less likely to join the British Army than Hindus are. I was also very surprised to learn, from writing this piece, that while Sikhs have quite average crime levels, Hindus are imprisoned at about one-sixth their rate, something I wouldn’t have guessed. Hindus really are god(s) tier immigrants.

Interviews with people from Guernsey and Jersey. One explains his hostility by explaining that ‘Guernseymen cheat! In the forties- the sixteen-forties - they bribed a Dutchman to make their island look bigger on a map.’

‘Finland tracked every gender-referred adolescent in the country for up to 25 years,’ and found that psychiatric needs increased after surgery. Is this indeed the biggest medical scandal of the 21st century?

An amazing breakthrough on treating pancreatic cancer. Truly we live in an age of miracles.

A selection from the photographer David Plowden. I’d never heard of him, but I love these iconic scenes of American industry (RIP).

A woman from Indonesia made up 15 research papers, got herself invited to a conference in Copenhagen, and then proceeded to present each of them in disguise.

The Straits Times reports

When confronted by Dwi and other Indonesian conference participants, Prihantini struggled to answer basic questions about her own research, which claimed to involve locations as far-flung as the Peruvian Andes, Lebanon or South Sudan, while involving only Indonesian researchers.

Dwi also learnt that Prihantini and three supposed teammates had all been awarded travel grants to attend the conference, but only Prihantini attended – apparently intending to present all 15 of the team’s submitted abstracts herself.

This is what Batman villain Ra’s al Ghul would call ‘will to act’.

Have a great weekend, wherever you are - and enjoy the football! Thousands and thousands of hours of football, each more climactic than the last. Endless, constant, dizzying 24-hour football continues with every kick massively mattering to someone, bringing endless hours of climactic action. All the football is here, all the time, forever.

The decision did not go down well with the public, many of whom have grown restless at court decisions, and struggle to understand sentencing guidelines which seem alien to natural justice.

The judge has form; in 2023 he handed out a suspended sentence to a paedophile found with the most serious grade of child abuse images, despite five previous convictions. As it is, the offender failed to abide by the conditions of his suspended sentence and went to jail anyway. Most people would regard unpaid work as a small price to pay to avoid prison, but many criminals are not future orientated enough to see things that way.

In the more recent case, the judge chose to be lenient because the two rapists were not only young, but too stupid to understand what they had done. This is not unusual – many vicious and violent criminals escape serious punishment because the law sees low intelligence as mitigation.

Indeed, it’s curious that two factors which now routinely lead to lower sentences – or, in the case of the teenage rapists, no punishment at all – are arguably good reasons to keep offenders in for much longer, since both youth and stupidity are suggestive of a higher risk of reoffending.

Take the case of the teenage boy who last year threw a 5-kilo sofa off a balcony in the Westfield shopping centre, his lark filmed by a friend who posted it on Snapchat with the caption ‘No way bro almost killed someone’ and ‘Nahhh’ followed by laughing emojis.

During the court proceedings, the defence lawyer for the boy who filmed the lark said that a psychiatric report had found her client to have low levels of maturity, leaving him particularly susceptible to peer pressure, and that he had ‘some significant learning needs’. Yes, I think you proved that.

Perhaps he hasn’t won first prize in the genetic lottery raffle, but if someone is so stupid that they cannot foresee the consequences of a sofa landing on a person beneath them, is that not an argument for keeping them away from the public?

Last June, an innocent man called Kamran Aman was murdered in a racist attack by two teenage lowlifes who showed no remorse for the horrendous and unprovoked killing. As well as a chaotic home life and history of substance abuse, one mitigating factor put forward by the defence was that one of the killers was of ‘exceptionally low’ intelligence and had ‘limited capacity to consider the consequences’ of his actions. Yet the two murderers will be only 33 and 30 upon release, plenty of time for a renewed and rich criminal career, and indeed the sentences were subsequently sent to the court of appeal for being too lenient. We await their ruling.

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It was true of arguments made about press barons, too, but not to the same extent, because older forms of media had nothing like as much reach. Tech titans have a degree of power which democracies struggle to manage, democracies which were designed for 19^th century communications technology.

Imagine that every telegram our Victorian forebears sent had to include a little message posted by the company’s owner to promote his pet obsession, and you perhaps get some idea of how strange it is. You go to wire your loved one that you are coming home from your travels, and your wife back home receives the message dutifully delivered by the telegram boy: ‘Ship delayed by storm. STOP. Arriving at Liverpool Tuesday. STOP. END WHITE GENOCIDE – ELON. STOP’.

Of course many of them are hypocrites, and when a progressive billionaire interferes in politics, they try to make noticing the fact a conspiracy theory. But being a hypocrite doesn’t stop someone from being right.

The means are bad but the ends are mostly good. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter allowed debates which otherwise wouldn’t happen, because journalists are either biased or too frightened of tackling uncomfortable stories. When not actively lying about events, they couch them in such a way as to give a misleading narrative.

No narrative was so dishonest as that behind the Black Lives Matter movement, which spread memes about policing and crime based on complete falsehoods. Journalists repeated untrue accounts of flashpoints incidents and statistically illiterate politicians popularised claims which only the ideologically-motivated might suspect. Most people, following the heuristic that if prestigious and influential people all say something, it’s probably true, went along with it.

Had Community Notes existed at the time, the Ferguson shooting would not have become a cause célèbre because social media users would have seen that journalists misrepresented the incident. Today, when politicians make claims regarding disparities, everyone can freely see that they don’t understand statistics. Post-Elon, a number of typical BLM-style stories have disappeared from the media narrative thanks to technological fixes, not just Community Notes but also police bodycams.

Indeed, as Ozempic’s destruction of the ‘body positivity’ movement illustrates, much of the turn from peak woke is downstream of technology, just as technology caused the Great Awokening in the first place. New forms of social media, with their conformity-inducing pressure, radicalised elite opinion in the US and reached a peak in the summer of 2020, which felt like being stuck in a global insane asylum, collective madness aggravated by the isolating effects of lockdown.

Britain’s MPs, always desperate to be involved in American politics because it’s so much more glamorous and consequential than ours, seemed very keen on interfering in that country’s affairs back then. Everyone had an opinion about injustice in America, including the current prime minister and the leader of the Liberal Democrats, and its application to life in Britain. Some British politicians were even calling for an arms embargo on the US.

The great Colin Brazier, in the latest episode of his new Outpost Studios show, asks, among other things, why back in 2020 MPs held a meeting over a crime in another country over which they have no control. They even held a minute’s silence, a sign of the intense globalisation of politics in the new age.

George Floyd ended up becoming the most consequential person in British life in the 2020s. His death was met with a public response by a range of institutions, and led to huge changes in many, helping to accelerate a system deliberately designed to create equality of outcomes. This was the result of people spending too much time focussing on American politics.

Now that the American administration takes a keen interest in our politics, British MPs are hardly in a position to complain, although it’s arguably a useful framing for them. Many would like to shift the tale of Henry Nowak’s final moments into a story about MAGA-led foreign interference, when in reality the chief concern remains that British police handcuffed a dying teenager because they were instructed into quite extreme race policies, policies which all three establishment parties supported and promoted.

This is a real problem, and one that naturally interests Americans. Many, especially those with an ancestral link to our country, feel great sadness at what is happening and see Britain as a cautionary tale. It is true that in many cases the have a somewhat distorted view of British politics, most notably true of Americans who support Rupert Lowe’s Restore Party, or believe that Tommy Robinson was jailed for being a freedom fighter. Everyone gets a slightly misleading view of events far away, but nevertheless Britain is indeed something of a cautionary tale and this was far from an isolated case.

As former police officer and thinktanker Rory Geoghegan wrote over the weekend, the concept of equity is now deeply ingrained within the police establishment. He noted how even the Independent Office for Police Conduct, which is currently investigating Hampshire police, have ‘in their own investigations… routinely presented the previous stop and search history of police officers in a desperate bid to suggest that any racial disparities can only be evidence of an officer’s racism.’ It’s not just the police; the health service is riddled with this belief, while across a range of institutions discriminatory hiring policies have been implemented.

This was allowed to happen in part because British politicians were swept away by the hysteria of 2020. Politicians and activists saw George Floyd’s death as a chance to push for change; politicians from the other side now hope that Henry Nowak’s murder will roll them back. It is the nature of politics that shocking events are a catalyst for reform in a way that more consequential underlying problems are not, but it feels jarring to hear people criticising the ‘politicising’ of a murder when they have spent huge amounts of energy doing likewise.

The primary issue is not foreign interference, nor immigration specifically; both the killer and victim were products of migration, and the murder was not representative of any deeper trend within the ‘community’. What needs addressing is the harm caused by anti-racism, which certainly influenced the police in Southampton and played a role in the Southport and Nottingham tragedies. It is obviously true that Britain’s moral leaders, still stuck in 2020, take racism more seriously than other wrongs, including actual crime. It is seen in the same way that the Greeks saw asebeia, an unspeakable blasphemy worthy of hemlock.

But much has changed since 2020, one factor being the internationalism of the Right. Nowak’s death was marked by small vigils across Europe, impossible until recently and a trend obviously downstream of Elon’s huge influence - although there are still cultural peculiarities. At the unruly protests in Southampton last week, which inevitably ended with bins being thrown, one eccentrically dressed young man turned out to be from a small far-right group straight out of The Code of the Woosters, or as some wit observed, an amateur dramatics stage adaption of Indiana Jones. It’s reassuring to know that what George Orwell called the Gilbert and Sullivan tradition of British fascism is alive and well, but everywhere else the trend for the political right is towards globalisation and homogenisation.

Globalisation makes the Right stronger, and for all that Elon’s power is troubling for democratic norms, one suspects that European politicians would like to shut down his website because it would hamper opposition to their project of social engineering. It’s also understandable why British politicians – and the general public – dislike Musk, and indeed Donald Trump. But, to paraphrase Captain Blackadder, I hardly think that we can be entirely absolved of blame on the foreign interference front. You can’t spend your political life opining about US politics and be surprised when the Great Satan takes an interest in you. You might even say that they have awakened a sleeping giant.

This sits at odds with the recurrent theme of many recent real-life tragedies, which repeatedly show how callous the state acts towards ordinary people who have the misfortune to interact with the system. It was especially true of the Nottingham murders, in which the victims and their families were failed by the police, mental health services and the university and had added indignities inflicted on them by the NHS. Not only did the state fail to protect their loved ones, but it often treated them with a baffling cold inhumanity.

That same treatment is what makes the heart breaking case of Henry Nowak so poignant. An 18-year-old student was handcuffed by police as he bled to death, because his murderer had falsely accused him of racism. Pleading with police officers that he had been stabbed, he was told ‘I don’t think you have, mate.’ One couldn’t script a better tale illustrating how the system treats the law-abiding citizen, and how it treats bad actors who push its ideological buttons.

The police were not responsible for Henry’s death – he would have died in any case – but his final moments were made so much crueller. He departed this earth, as Aris Roussinos put it, with the police ‘reading his rights to him as he bled out, the British state’s perversion of the Last Rites’.

On Monday Henry’s father Mark spoke outside court after Vikrum Digwa was sentenced to 25 years in jail for his son’s murder, recalling how: ‘Henry told officers that he could not breathe nine times. He told them he had been stabbed four times.’ His son ‘should not have died on the streets of Southampton in police custody,’ his father said: ‘The way he was treated was inhumane and degrading.’ In his victim impact statement made at the court, Mark Nowak said he was ‘tormented by thoughts of how Henry was feeling lying there bleeding in the road’.

The actions and tone of the police officers certainly reinforces the idea of a state which is both unsympathetic and incompetent; while it is true that the effects of stab wounds are not always obvious, police are still trained to check for them. Once officers realised Henry’s condition, one began desperately applying CPR. It would have been harrowing; it’s a job most of us couldn’t and wouldn’t do.

Comparisons are inevitably to be made with Stephen Lawrence, stabbed to death in 1993, when the initial response of officers was criticised in the subsequent inquiry. This time around, at least, police caught and prosecuted the killer, whereas Stephen’s family endured years before receiving justice.

Digwa’s murder conviction, and subsequent release of the bodycam footage late on Monday, turned the case into national and international news, picked up by media in Germany, the United States and Poland, where Henry’s father is from. The horrific footage of his handcuffed pale, almost lifeless hands has been transmitted around the world; its symbolism hardly needs spelling out.

Nigel Farage gave a press conference on Tuesday in which he declared that Henry’s family had been ‘extraordinarily dignified’ but ‘I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage.’ His Reform colleague Zia Yusuf attacked the record of Tory rivals by distorting what Kemi Badenoch had said about ‘white lives’. A distortion, but perhaps good politics, since Badenoch, like most of her party, is implicated in the old ways of thinking. What a different world it was before 2024, and how much has political language shifted that we now have Labour MPs declaring that ‘all lives matter’.

Many of those condemning this ‘politicisation’ were keen to politicise the killing of Chris Kaba, despite being fully aware of his criminal past. Many were keen to politicise the death of George Floyd, 5,000 miles away in another country. The murder of Stephen Lawrence was likewise politicised, and with much better reason. Murder is a political act, because under English law it is a crime against us all.

In responding to this crime, however, it’s worth noting that it is atypical, and atypical crimes have less meaning for policy-makers, except for the (in my view common sense) suggestion that violent people are locked up for longer. This was not the tip of a cultural iceberg, as with grooming gangs among some Pakistani communities or knife violence among some young men of Caribbean descent in London. Indeed British-Indians commit crime at roughly half the national average, and Sikh are somewhat underrepresented in British prisons, this slight contradiction explained by the fact that British Hindus have extraordinary low crime rates. Many people, in such circumstances, might have found the killer’s claims more plausible than if made by members of other groups.

Unlike the repeated horrors committed by illegal immigrants, who seem to be both negatively selected and from countries with notably higher rates of sexual violence, this murder does not say much about the Sikh community in Britain, any more than the recent rape of a Sikh woman by a white man says anything about the rest of us. It goes without saying that British Sikhs bear no responsibility for the murder, and indeed members of the community had previously reported the killer to the police – but nothing came of it.

The murder has nonetheless led to calls to ban the kirpan, the ceremonial knife which Sikhs are by law allowed to carry. This strikes me as the sort of displacement activity typical of British politics, although on this occasion coming from the Right. It generally isn’t wise to legislate based on isolated or improbable incidents, and it’s very rare for a Sikh religious knife to be used in a crime.

It’s also worth noting that Digwa didn’t use a kirpan to kill Henry, but a longer blade which some sources identify as a shastar, which is not required for religious reasons nor exempt under British law, but which is popular with militant Sikhs. One expert witness quoted by the judge in the trial remarked that there was an increasing tendency among young Sikh men to carry larger knives, part of a niche ultra-masculine subculture that exists on the fringes of the broader British underclass. If this does start to resemble a trend, then it will be worth looking at.

The knife issue is only notable in that it highlights the extent to which the law treats people differently. Some British citizens can carry weapons because of their religion, and some can’t. They can also reasonably expect to escape punishment if stopped by the police, because of their racial background; the rest of us can’t.

I personally tend to favour religious exceptions so long as they don’t make demands on the rest of us, whether it’s circumcision or halal slaughter, although in a country as strictly regulated as ours the right to carry a knife does seem oddly jarring. As a point of principle, it also starts to become harder to justify in a more fractured multicultural society that can only function with further restrictions on freedom.

There is a dark undercurrent in the public response to this crime, and the only comfort from a community relations point of view is that the killer wasn’t Muslim. There is also legitimate rage at a system which has long treated people differently based on race, and one in which there is no doubt which group sits at the bottom of the hierarchy.

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The NHS was founded two months later on July 5, an institution which for many people has come to symbolise what it means to be British. Perhaps most importantly of all, in June 1948 came the arrival of the Windrush, the most famous ship in British history and the subject of my recent discussion with Louise Perry (below the paywall).

The Windrush was more than a ship; it is a national myth, and the myth-making itself is a fascinating phenomenon. Today children across the country are taught that ‘you called and we came’, a quasi-official narrative that is almost uniformly promoted despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Historians who have spent their lives repeating the fashionable (and not wrong) idea that most national stories are myths created for political purposes remain largely silent as one is formed in their own lifetimes.

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