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.

Read more

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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Henry’s injuries had left a trail of blood, and he repeatedly cried out that he had been stabbed - but when the police arrived, they put him in handcuffs. Digwa told them he had been racially abused, that the student had knocked his turban off, a claim also made by his brother Gurpreet in a 999 call.

Henry passed out soon after being handcuffed, and The Daily Telegraph reported that ‘As the teenager lay there, unable to breathe as his lungs filled with blood, begging officers for help, they ignored his pleas and placed him under arrest. He died less than an hour later.’ The eighteen-year-old’s final words were ‘please brother, I can’t breathe’.

At Digwa’s murder trial this week, prosecutor Nicholas Lobbenberg KC recalled that: ‘Put simply, Henry drowned in his own blood with his lung having been cut by the knife going eight centimetres into him.’

Henry had been a popular student studying Accountancy and Finance, and was out celebrating with one of the two football teams he played for on the night of his murder. Friends describe a cheerful and pleasant young man, and he had consumed only a small amount of alcohol that evening, described as being below the drink-driving limit. In February, a charity fundraising match was organised between the two sides he played for.

Digwa was convicted of murder yesterday, while Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary is now under investigation by the police watchdog. The force’s assistant chief constable, Robert France, told reporters after the trial: ‘I’m sorry that Henry’s life couldn’t be saved that night, and I’m sorry that he was handcuffed and arrested. He was the victim.’

Mr France said the injuries were ‘deep and hard to find’ and as the bleeding was ‘happening internally’ it would not have been immediately obvious: ‘There wasn’t anything the officer [could] have done that night that would have saved Henry.’

There is much public confusion about the details, and many rumours circulating, confusion which will only be resolved when police release bodycam footage from the night - which they have so far not done.

The police claim that Henry’s injuries were so serious that he would have died anyway, but at the same time that they could not notice them; this is certainly possible with internal bleeding, but one might still wonder how they did not notice. The police also argue in their defence that they were lied to by the perpetrator, but isn’t it the job of officers to judge for themselves? Why did they feel the need to handcuff a young man who was crying out in pain and distress, just because racism allegations had been made, and without any evidence?

The murder was horrific, but the police response was also shocking. Many have speculated on what the public reaction might have been were the victim and perpetrator of a different skin colour. The Critic’s Tom Jones put it well when he pointed out that ‘Were the races reversed, this could be a story from the Jim Crow South that became a cause célèbre of the Civil Rights movement.’

It would be etched in the public consciousness, but this won’t become a cause célèbre because the source of the injustice is not something which society already believes to be wrong – racism – but instead a worldview the powers-that-be are firm believers in.

The prosecutor, describing a perpetrator with an unhealthy interest in knives, said that ‘This is not a case about Sikhism. This is not a case about racism. This is a case about murder.’ It is certainly not about Sikhism, it may not be about racism, but it is about anti-racism.

Will Solfiac recently wrote about the need for an inquiry into the harms caused by this worldview, including its role in the tragedies in Southport and Nottingham, both of which might have been prevented were it not for the effects of anti-racism. This is an ideology which was best summarised by the Macpherson Report: that group disparities are evidence of racism, and that racism has occurred if anyone believes it to have occurred.

As a result of that inquiry, the ideology has become institutionalised in the police force. Since an accusation of racism is far more damaging to an officer’s career than an accusation of incompetence, individuals are hugely incentivised to do everything possible to avoid it, with often tragic or perverse outcomes. The ideology turns the accusation of racism into a magic word which any bad actor can use to their advantage, in many cases without any personal cost.

At the trial, prosecutor Nicholas Lobbenberg said that the killer had used the ‘trump card’ in making the allegations of racism. Such a trump card should not exist, but the sin of racism has undergone runaway moralisation, growing out of all proportion to its real harm. It clouds people’s judgement and in many cases places the public at risk.

We still don’t know the full details of what happened that night, and won’t do until police release the footage. But the story of a young student in handcuffs as he died of his injuries is a powerful indictment of a society’s perverse ruling ideology.

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Other states bear witness to their links to the Mother Country, among them New Hampshire, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, although William Penn wanted to call it New Wales and Quaker modesty would never have allowed him to name it after his own father; this honour was imposed on him by Charles II. To the south of that colony, Maryland was founded as a haven for Catholics and so-called in tribute to Charles I’s consort Henrietta Maria.

On top of this, hundreds of towns in the north-eastern United States in particular still testify to the Great Migration of settlers from eight eastern counties of England, the Puritan heartland that stretched from Lincolnshire down to Essex – ancestral homeland to both the Washington and Bush families – and Kent.

This was the subject of the current King Charles’s brilliant speech in Washington last month, which for all my pride nonetheless left me feeling bittersweet. His joke, that ‘If it wasn’t for us, you’d be speaking French’, was the title for a book idea I had, and gave up on, many years ago. The document is still there on my desktop, last opened on 10 May 2007 at 11.30. It’s safe to say that I’ve missed the hook of the 250^th anniversary of the United States, now only six weeks away. In fact, my book idea is now so deep into the backburner that its genesis is about eight per cent as old as the United States itself.

The story would start in the 1750s. The first truly world war is in full flow, as Britain and France battle for supremacy of the continent and the oceans. In North America, British colonial troops fight side by side with soldiers from the old country, who mock the bumpkin locals with their ditty ‘Yankee Doodle’. But, rivalries aside, they both know what they’re fighting for: if Louis XV’s absolute monarchy wins, all their liberties will be gone.

In a heroic battle the British regular and colonial forces take the French stronghold of Fort Duquesne and rename it Fort Pitt, after cabinet minister William Pitt ‘the elder’ – it later becomes Pittsburgh. By 1763 the French are driven out of North America altogether. The British colonies are safe. One officer particularly shines during this war, and diarist Horace Walpole writes how ‘The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.’

That Virginian was George Washington. Born in Wakefield in Westmoreland County, this British hero was the great-grandson of an Essex clergyman thrown out of the church for drunkenness, and who had landed in that colony in 1657. Washington was an impressive man in every way – standing at 6’2”, with enormous hands and feet and a massive nose, he was notably strong and able to throw objects immense distances (although many of these accounts improved in the telling).

Despite having almost no teeth, like any good British patriot, Washington was very proper about his appearance, insisting on bringing a selection of fine linen shirts even into the backwoods. A conservative by nature and with ambitions to serve as an officer in His Majesty’s forces, he didn’t like the new fashion for shaking hands, preferring the more formal bow.

A major at 21, Washington’s first job was to lead his men into the Ohio Valley to warn away any Frenchmen they found there. The following year, 1754, and now a lieutenant-colonel, he went back and built Fort Necessity close to Fort Duquesne, where he stumbled upon a contingent of enemy troops. They ran for their muskets and Washington ordered his company to fire. Ten Frenchmen were killed, including their lieutenant, and the incident would spark a war in North America between the two great powers, which in 1756 linked up with a Europe-wide conflict later known as the Seven Years’ War. It’s strange to think that, as well as being the first president of a future global superpower, Washington basically started the world’s first global war.

But what if France had won that struggle? Would French-controlled colonies in North America have formed constitutions centred on the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not to mention the often-overlooked right to property? Would they have enshrined religious tolerance or the right to free speech? Trial by jury? Innocence until proven guilty? Hell, no! And if it wasn’t for us, my thesis went, you’d be speaking French.

Without England’s history of Parliamentary freedom, habeas corpus, Magna Carta and the jury system, the colonies would never have developed as they did. Neither would they have the same commercial spirit, downstream of their Puritan and Quaker inheritance.

I think I came up with the proposal after reading David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, one of the most discussed and popular analyses of American culture. This great work of history and anthropology charts the foundation of the country’s cultural folkways through four migrations – East Anglian Puritans to New England, Cavaliers from England’s south and south-west to Virginia, the mostly northern Quakers to the middle colonies, and Borderers from Ulster to the Appalachians.

I was always very interested in founder effects, whereby colonies come to take on aspects of the mother country which subsequently disappear back home. This is reflected in the fact that many ‘Americanisms’ are actually old English words, like fall, trash and garbage, even ‘gotten’. It’s also true to some extent of the American accent, developing out of various regional dialects which have since been flattened by the dominance of London. This is especially the case with Ocracoke Island in North Carolina, which apparently is the closest thing to Shakespearean English, although I fear that if I went there this would no longer be true, and they’d all say ‘like’ four times in every sentence and tell you they’re ‘reaching out’.

The most culturally influential of these groups were the ‘Puritans’, many of whom were actually Separatists who believed that the Church of England was too riddled with popery to save. Their story begins with the Mayflower which arrived in modern-day Massachusetts, although they were supposed to land much further south. Only around 35 of the 102 people on board the Mayflower were actually ‘pilgrims’, but they brought with them a powerful sense of divine mission, a religious zeal mixed with a particularly English sense of national destiny, a feeling that they were a chosen people.

Famously, they didn’t bring much else of use. As well as one bible per family, Captain Miles Standish brought Caesar’s Gallic War and a Historie of Turkie, while William Mullins helpfully packed 126 pairs of shoes. But not seeds that would suit the new climate.

But they had God on their side, or so they thought. William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony, later reflected that: ‘Our Fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in the wilderness, but they cried unto the Lord, and he heard this voice and looked on their adversities.’

They also brought with them political ideas that would be of huge influence, and this small colony had an outsized founder effect on the gigantic nation of the 21^st century, seen in every aspect of its unusual political culture. On November 21, 1619, the ship’s passengers gathered together in the main cabin and drew up a social compact, to provide ‘just and equal laws’. This was influenced by church teaching, the contract being based on the covenant between God and the Israelites.

In July 1629 it was decided that the new colony should be self-governing. They would meet four times a year at the General Courts, pass laws, elect new members, choose their officers and a governor, deputy governor and eighteen assistants, and do what they want so long as it wasn’t ‘contrary to English lawe.’

The future America’s national culture was downstream of the earliest leaders of this colony, men like John Winthrop, elected governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company in October 1629. A native of Suffolk, a Cambridge graduate and already twice-widowed, Winthrop was imbued with a religious zeal that verged on utopianism and which co-existed with great pessimism. Like many Englishmen down the years, he felt that the country was going to the dogs, lamenting that ‘Most children, even the best wittes and fairest hopes, are perverted, corrupted and utterly over-throwne by the multitude of evil examples and the licensious government of those seminaries.’

Winthrop believed that the corrupted Church of England to which he belonged could only be redeemed in the New World, and so he coined the phrase ‘a City upon a Hill’ to describe a new political community built on righteousness.

The Pilgrim Fathers would shape the country’s strong sense of morality, still notable today in its puritanical attitudes to sex, alcohol and idleness. These Congregationalists brought with them a strong work ethic, and a Calvinist respect for money-making. Many believed that being poor was a sign of evil; when Winthrop went bankrupt, some people suspected it was a sign of God’s disfavour. Nevertheless, his community-minded neighbours supported him and he got back on his feet, a classic American story.

In the 20^th century the United States would be the driving force of feminism, and from the earliest days there were opportunities for women not available elsewhere. New England even had female preachers, among them Anne Hutchinson, who held religious discussion groups every Sunday afternoon. Typically half of the people present were women, and according to their Calvinist theology both sexes could be part of the elect - and it wasn’t the church’s place to decide otherwise.

The colonists brought with them an intensely English sense of their rights, one that was long remembered by their descendants. On the door of the US House of Representatives in Washington, one will today see the portrait of Simon De Montfort, leader of the English barons in their conflict with Henry III. De Montfort was something of a monster (and, even worse, French), but he played a central part in the creation of the English Parliament in the 1250s. De Montfort lost the Second Barons’ War – in fact he ended up having his testicles chopped off and hung around his nose – but parliamentary rule came to pass and would find especially fertile soil in the new world.

Another tradition which the English settlers brought with them was the jury system, which dates to the time of Henry II in the 12^th century. Earlier still, in Anglo-Saxon England, the law was enforced by a system in which men within the hundred (the smallest administrative area) were responsible for each other’s behaviour. This became the basis of a system called the posse comitatus, the force of the county, a term that survived in that other lawless frontier zone, the American West. All able men were expected to follow the ‘hue and cry’ and to catch a wrongdoer.

The 1283 Statue of Westminster declared that every man was a policeman, and spelled out which weapons each subject was expected to possess to defend the realm and keep the peace. Everyone had to serve their time as constables, except ‘religious persons, Knights, clerkes and women’. This right to bear arms survived longer in the New World than in old England, and it wasn’t the only aspect of English tradition to do so. Grand juries have long been abolished here, as has the process of impeachment, dating back to 1376 but last used in old country in 1806: the British consider it too spiteful; the Americans love it.

Perhaps most important of all was Magna Carta, which ensured that by 1600 even the poorest in England had some basic freedom, such as the right to be tried by jury and to consent to taxes (the latter more in theory than practice). Many saw their rights as ancient, a nostalgic view of Saxon freedoms trampled on by a Norman yoke. Even if this was 17^th century myth-making, it was one that fuelled a real sense of national rights; besides which, the real sources of anti-Norman demonology – hostility to an absolute monarchy and French tyranny – were real.

In contrast to Puritan-Yankee New England, the earlier colony of Jamestown, Virginia, established in 1607, seeded a different America. This folkway was less egalitarian and less literate, although also less fanatical, but even here representative government developed at an early stage. As early as July 1619, 22 men, two from each borough in Jamestown, met in the first participative democracy in the New World.

Virginia struggled at first but blossomed when settlers stumbled on exporting tobacco. The native version of this crop was unpleasant, but John Rolfe, who is perhaps most famous for marrying Pocahontas, experimented – a great American trait – with an imported Caribbean variant instead. Rolfe only did this because he feared he was going to be prosecuted for idleness, a crime in the colony, but by 1616 Virginia tobacco was being sold to the old country and the colony was profitable. Virginia would be joined by the Carolinas, semi-tropical colonies characterised by languid, fun-loving towns that maintained an English aesthetic. The South, suited to the hard work of planting rice and later cotton, would also go down another path with the arrival of the first African slaves in 1619.

The English ran their colonies differently to other European countries. More accurately, they didn’t run their colonies at all. Much of the political direction of the proto-United States resulted from the fact that the British government was too tight-fisted to fund the project, as is typical of British governments down the ages. Unlike with the Spanish or French, the English settlements were largely works of private enterprise promoted by a growing class of merchants.

Their French and Spanish counterparts were characterised by huge state interference, and King Louis’s government also involved itself with unhelpful edicts such as that of 1717 stating which ports could trade with the colonies. From the 1660s the French colonies were run by royal governors and intendants, following from their provincial system of government. Intendants were appointed royal officials in charge of finance, usually middle class, while governors were local aristocratic soldiers. In New France the capitaines de milice, militia officers, had civil as well as military powers, and ruled as local agents of the intendant.

In contrast, there was no real organisation in the English colonies, which were established in a haphazard way. While the governors of New Spain acted like viceroys, with life and death powers over the population, in Anglo America local people paid for their governors, and so wielded power. These governors were assisted by a council, which developed into clones of the House of Lords.

James I astutely saw that this would be a problem for his worldview, calling America ‘a seminary for a seditious Parliament’ - and as on a surprising number of issues, including tobacco, he turned out to be right. The wily monarch didn’t like the Virginia Assembly and ‘the populousness of the government’, but in 1621 he also denied that Virginia was Parliament’s business when they debated the colony. This would set a royalist precedent ironically taken up by the colonial rebels almost two centuries later.

Virginia’s representative government in 1619 was followed by Bermuda the following year, Maryland in 1638, Barbados in 1639, Jamaica in 1663, New Jersey in 1668, New Hampshire in 1680, Pennsylvania in 1682 and New York in 1683. These lower houses of elected officials came to be called the House of Burgess, although South Carolina had a House of Commons Assembly, and they felt a strong sense of their own rights.

Over the course of the 18^th century the new world lower houses, especially in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, New York and Massachusetts, took over the running of the colonies, setting the order of business, including their elections, press releases, money bills, and tax raising. In acquiring power, the colonists were inspired by the Parliamentarians back home, and most assemblies had copies of John Rushworth’s Historical Collections, a subversive book that recorded the 17^th century struggles between King and Parliament. They sometimes even pushed at royal authority, and Maryland and New England both overthrew their governments during the reign of James II.

From the establishment of the first of the thirteen colonies, Virginia in 1607, to the last, Georgia in 1732, England itself had gone through a political transformation. The divine right of kings was now so distant as to be absurd, with power very much resting with an oligarchy of landed gentry and merchants through Parliament. Now a constitutional monarchy, the new United Kingdom of Great Britain was de facto a republic with a king. In contrast, the Estates-General of France hadn’t met since 1614, and wouldn’t until the revolution.

English philosophers had also developed a new political theory that would become the foundation of the future United States – liberalism. Emerging after the religious bloodshed of both the Thirty Years’ War and English Civil War, liberalism’s central figure was John Locke, who argued that government should defend ‘life, liberty, health and indolency [freedom from pain] of body, and the possession of outward things such as money, land, houses, furniture and the like’, which became ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ in the Declaration of Independence. Typical Americans – take an English concept and make it snappier.

As the now united Britain evolved into a liberal oligarchy, it grew increasingly wealthy, and globally dominant – and that dominance would prove its undoing in North America, where Albion’s seed no longer need the mother country to protect them. What was emerging was the making of a sequel to the civil war between the progeny of Cavaliers and Roundheads, the theme of Kevin Phillips’s The Cousins’ War, which framed the American revolution as the second of three civil wars in the English world – the ‘Whigs’ would score a hat-trick of victories in 1865.

The colonies didn’t rebel because they were harshly treated: Spain crushed colonial rebellion far more brutally. They rebelled because they’d inherited an English sense of political rights, its religious inheritance and high levels of literacy, just more so; as Neil Postman pointed out in Amusing Ourselves to Death, until the advent of the television the United States was considerably more book-orientated than almost any other country.

Just as Americans today obsessively read about their own febrile politics, the colonists were highly politicised by a proliferation of newspapers. John Campbell set up the first colonial publication, the Boston News-Letter, in 1704, and by 1750 there were 20 of them. One, the Pennsylvania Gazette, was bought in 1729 by a young man called Benjamin Franklin.

This is why the British made such a huge mistake when in 1765 prime minister George Grenville introduced the Stamp Act. The new tax most affected newspapermen, lawyers, publicans and publishers – all the colonies’ biggest loudmouths. Grenville had form when it came to bad laws – his previous master stroke, the Sugar Duty, cost four times as much to raise as it received in revenue. This, among many other gripes, led over the course of the 1760s and 1770s to a growing conflict between Parliament and the colonies, especially Massachusetts.

On July 6, 1775, Congress issued the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, although at this point it still rejected independence. On January 1, 1776, the flag was raised over Prospect Hill in Boston – the Grand Union Flag, with thirteen stripes and a Union Jack in the corner. They continued to use this until June 1777, and even afterwards some flag designers put the stars in a pattern based on the Union Jack.

Increasingly the colonists started to think of themselves as American, a word popularised by Virginian Patrick Henry who declared that ‘The distinction between Virginians and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian but an American’. In reality, more of the second Continental Congress delegates had been to London than to Pennsylvania.

Still the Continental Congress declared that ‘we mean not to dissolve the union which has so long and happily subsisted between us.’ Even the Declaration of Independence only mentions ‘the present King of Great Britain’ responsible for ‘a history of repeated injuries and usurpations’, reflecting their bitterness at a constitutional monarch who could not do what they were asking - overruling Parliament. (Poor George III was subject of all sorts of invective, despite being an obviously kindly man who lavished love on all his subjects. Sadly, I was the only one cheering among the audience of Hamilton when he came up to sing.)

The Founding Fathers considered themselves British; they epitomised a practical English political philosophy, without the dogmatism or anti-clericalism that marked continental revolutions. The Founding Fathers were indeed the greatest generation of British philosopher-statesmen, perhaps the greatest collection of people to walk the earth.

Among them was Benjamin Franklin, a best-selling writer, publisher, postmaster and inventor. Paul Johnson described how ‘he crossed the Atlantic eight times, discovered the Gulf Stream, met leading scientists and engineers, invented the damper and various smokeless chimneys - a vexed topic which continued to occupy him till the end of his life - designed two new stoves, but refused to patent them from humanitarian principles, invented a new hearth called a Pennsylvania Fireplace, manufactured a new whale-oil candle, studied geology, farming, archaeology, eclipses, sunspots, whirlwinds, earthquakes, ants, alphabets, and lightning conductors. He made himself one of the earliest experts on electricity, publishing in 1751 an eighty-six-page treatise, Experiments and Observations on electricity made in Philadelphia, which over twenty years went into four editions in English, three in French and one each in German and Italian, giving him a European reputation.’ One biographer reflected that ‘he found electricity a curiosity and left it a science.’

In the late 1760s Franklin underwent a political transformation after visiting London, where he was disdained by the British elite, and angered by a newspaper calling American colonists a ‘mixed rabble of Scotch, Irish and foreign vagabonds, descendants of convicts’ and ‘ungrateful rebels’.

Then there was Thomas Jefferson, an especially impressive figure who played a key role in the development of religious freedom. A British officer said of Jefferson that ‘if he was put besides any king in Europe, that king would appear to be his lackey.’

The third president was radical in many ways – some of his views were cranky – but he was also a British patriot of sorts, and would refer to ‘our mother country’. He saw himself as an inheritor of English freedoms that stretched back to Alfred the Great and the Witenagemot, and wished to have Horsa and Hengest, ‘the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed’, placed on the seal of the United States. The other side would have ‘the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night’. American exceptionalism, that oddly religious sense of being a chosen people, is impossible to understand without its English roots.

In 1786, now citizens of an independent United States of America, Jefferson and his long-standing frenemy John Adams even went on a tour of English Civil War battlefields. Adams complained in his diary that ‘The people in the neighborhood appeared so ignorant and careless at Worcester, that I was provoked, and asked, “And do Englishmen so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for? Tell your neighbors and your children that this is holy ground; much holier than that on which your churches stand. All England should come in pilgrimage to this hill once a year.” This animated them, and they seemed much pleased with it. Perhaps their awkwardness before might arise from their uncertainty of our sentiments concerning the civil wars.’ One can only imagine the thoughts of the bemused local villagers at this strange American tourist with his odd questions about local sights of interest.

Like that earlier conflict, the American War of Independence had a strong sectarian undercurrent, with low-church Protestants in revolt against the crown once again. George III called it ‘a Presbyterian Rebellion’, and indeed the Calvinist Scots-Irish and Huguenots were the most pro-patriot section of the population, while Scots Highlanders were the most loyal to the crown. The Dutch were divided, the Germans were neutral. English-Americans were split along sectarian lines; Anglicans tended to be loyalists, especially in New York but not so in Virginia, while Catholics tended to be patriots. The Quakers sided with the king – a fat lot of use they were in any case. Quebec also took the side of Britain, so that after the French intervention Britain and the French colonies were fighting France and the British colonies. But what is certainly true is that one side of this second English Civil War was far more English than the other.

Many families were torn. Benjamin’s son William Franklin, governor of New Jersey, was a loyalist, and died destitute and in exile in 1813, cut out of his father’s will. Many more loyalists, facing mob justice, fled to England or to Canada, where they formed a major folkway of that country.

Yet the Americans had plenty of sympathisers back in England. Edmund Burke agreed with Jefferson, that Parliamentary rule of the colonies was an abuse of power. By ‘a succession of Acts of Tyranny’ and ‘Governing by an Army’, he said of his government, ‘you drove them into the declaration of independency’, because what they put up with ‘was more than what ought to be endured.’ After the Declaration of independence Burke was so disturbed ‘that I courted sleep in vain’.

The younger William Pitt was praised for a speech lamenting ‘the accursed, cruel, unnatural, wicked American war, a war of injustice and moral depravity, marked by blood, slaughter, persecution and devastation’. The radical John Wilkes subscribed to the Constitutional Society which held meetings in Cornhill in London, inaugurating a fund for the ‘relief of widows [and] orphans… of our beloved American fellow subjects… inhumanely murdered by the King’s Troops.’

Even Edward Gibbon, a supporter of Lord North’s government who considered the colonists to be in the wrong, concluded that it was ‘easier to defend the justice than the policy of’ the government’s ‘measures’ and that ‘it is better to be humbled than ruined’. Even if the policy was good in theory, in other words, it didn’t work in practice.

Although all wars are marked by cruelty and crime, there were moments of fellow-feeling even among the fighting men. General William Phillips wrote that when he struck an American he ‘wounded a brother’. After British Lieutenant General John Burgoyne surrendered to General Horatio Gates at Saratoga in 1777, he announced that ‘the fortunes of war, General, have made me your prisoner’, to which Gates politely replied: ‘I shall always be ready to bear testimony that it has not been through any fault of Your Excellency.’

The Essex-born General Gates then wrote to the Marquess of Rockingham, the most senior opposition members who spoke up for the colonists, ‘presuming upon former friendship’, and stating: ‘Born & Bred an Englishman, I cannot help feeling for the misfortunes brought upon my country by the wickedness of that Administration who begun & have continued this most unjust, unpolitic and unnatural War… the United States of America are willing to be the Friends but will never submit to the Slaves of the Parent Country. They are by Consanguinity, by Commerce, by Language & by the Affection which naturally flow from these more attached to England than any country under the sun.’ Withdraw the fleet, he advised, ‘and cultivate the Friendship and commerce of America.’

It took another four years for them to see sense, after the surrender at Yorktown. When the British finally laid down their arms, one of their officers recorded how ‘to do them justice, the Americans behaved with great delicacy and forbearance, while the French, by what motive I will not pretend to say, were profuse in their protestations of sympathy… When I visited their lines immediately after our parade had been dismissed, I was overwhelmed by the civilities of my late enemies’. (Maybe, and I know it’s impossible to contemplate, the French were just being nice.)

Despite everything, well after the Revolution began Washington and his officers toasted the mother country. When the great man died in 1799, the British fleet fired a salute of twenty guns in his honour. Today a statue of the first president can be found in Trafalgar Square, a gift to the British people from the Commonwealth of Virginia, her oldest colony.

Just as Gates advised, Britain instead cultivated the friendship and commerce of America, and soon the two nations were major trading partners again. After a brief hiccup when, as the King said, ‘we British made our own small attempt at real estate redevelopment of the White House in 1814,’ relations grew stronger and stronger, helped of course by a share language which created natural empathy between the two countries. It’s easy to be cynical about history, and I normally am, but two and a half centuries on the creation of the United States remains a magnificent achievement. We should be proud of it.

Although ‘suicidal empathy’ is a useful phrase, the trait is not new; just like many tendencies, it accelerated over the course of the 2010s as progressive moral norms shifted drastically. As a result, we live in a world with a far greater emphasis on sins of the heart, or prejudice, often crowding out all other forms of wrongdoing.

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A number of those on board were disturbed and upset by the poor man’s cries. Someone shouted that they should ‘take him off the plane’. Others followed, and over three and a half minutes, a dozen passengers hurled insults at the man’s captors and whistled at them.

Some began filming, and footage shows one man telling an officer that ‘people die in Mogadishu’. A bearded man with a T-shirt approaches the young Somalian before telling the other passengers: ‘He says they’re separating him from his family, his family’s here.’ Another man is seen jabbing his finger at an official and drawing his hand across his throat as a gesture of execution, barking ‘when he gets to Mogadishu, they’re going to kill him.’ Passengers continue arguing with the Home Office staff until the captive is eventually removed from the plane: the passengers cheer and one is heard to shout joyfully that he is now ‘a free man’. The deportation is prevented; the young man is saved and can return to his family.

The man they saved was called Yaqub Ahmed. In 2007, Ahmed and a group of three other men had found a 16-year-old girl who was lost in Leicester Square, separated from her companion and without her bus pass or phone. They invited her back to a flat in Crouch End, north London, where – they told her - her friend had already gone with one of their number.

When the girl arrived, she realised that her friend was not there. Ahmed and his three accomplices held her down and took turns to rape her. She fiercely resisted, biting and clawing her attackers; after one of the men punched her in the face, she managed to escape, falling down a flight of stairs and alerting neighbours to the sounds of her desperate screams.

Police arrived immediately and arrested the four men on the spot but, despite the overwhelming evidence, they denied the charges, forcing the woman to relive her agony in court. The cross-examination was brutal, and she recalled how the four barristers allocated to her rapists ‘were saying some awful things to me. The things they said to me messed me up for years.’

The men were from the Somalian diaspora in Britain, the majority of whom arrived as refugees; most likely they were living in housing at taxpayers’ expense in some of the costliest neighbourhoods in the country. Britain had given them protection and life; they repaid the kindness by raping a girl.

Ahmed’s victim was left too traumatised to travel far from home, too overcome with anxiety to work: when she saw footage from the aeroplane rescue, she was devastated. ‘You think that was a bad scream?’ she said of the passengers: ‘Try hearing the screams that I made. How could you defend a rapist? How could you intervene? He was in handcuffs, he was being taken out of the country… who are you people to interfere with justice?’

None of Ahmed’s rescuers have ever been charged or prosecuted, despite being clearly identifiable on video, and air passengers often being fined or jailed for much less serious disturbances. The English law works in mysterious ways.

Many people who saw the footage will echo the woman’s sentiments about their motivation. It is incredibly hard to deport people to Somalia, and only a handful were removed during the 2010s; one has to wonder if the passengers ever questioned why the man they chose to save was considered a priority, and if the authorities perhaps had good reason. They might be excused for their ignorance, but the same cannot be said for the BBC journalist who helped Yaqub Ahmed, along with 14 other Somalian criminals, fight deportation.

Mary Harper, who worked as Africa editor for the World Service, was paid to give evidence for Ahmed during the rapist’s five-year battle to remain in Britain. She also stood as expert witness for three other sex offenders trying to avoid deportation. The Daily Telegraph reported how ‘in one case, she reportedly cautioned that the criminal’s repeated history of offending in the UK – 39 convictions for 80 crimes over a period of 17 years – would result in him being shunned by his clan if he was returned to Somalia. In another, it was reported that Ms Harper warned that a 29-year-old Somali man who sexually assaulted a deaf girl aged 17 would be at “severely heightened risk” if he was sent back to Somalia because he had committed a sex crime.’

God forbid that a compulsive criminal is ‘shunned by his clan’.

Several deportation appeals in recent years have involved rapists or paedophiles who might suffer ‘stigma’ back in their own countries; some have won their cases on human rights grounds. Many face the wrath of the societies they have shamed, and Harper warned that Ahmed faced ‘punishment’ at the hands of militant Islamists Al-Shabaab. I’ve no doubt that jihadis take a firm line on crime, but one might still question why, in a world full of suffering and injustice, someone would go out of their way to help a rapist. I don’t think it’s the money. More likely it’s a mindset referred to as ‘suicidal empathy’, a term coined and popularised by the Canadian academic Gad Saad: empathy directed at people who not only won’t reciprocate, but will actively cause harm to you, your family and the society around you.

This was not even the only incident of airline passengers blocking the deportation of criminals. A flight carrying a Jamaican man was halted in 2023, preventing the British state from removing an individual with a history of firearms and drugs offences. In July 2019, Swedish student activist Elin Ersson boarded an aeroplane at Gothenburg and livestreamed her pleas to stop the deportation of an Afghan man convicted of assaulting his wife and children.

Such empathy is especially found among the journalistic profession. The New York Times recently lamented the deportation of a Jamaican man, reporting that ‘Nascimento Blair felt like a stranger in a little-known land’ and that ‘this was not the homecoming he imagined’, one’s sympathy slightly diminished by the fact that Blair had carried out a kidnapping the year after his arrival in the United States. ‘They don’t look at you like a Jamaican,’ Blair told the paper: ‘They look at you like a criminal.’ I hate to say it, but that might be because you are a criminal. The New Yorker similarly ran a heartbreaking story about a man whose American dream was ending with deportation, his own crime being armed robbery, theft with a deadly weapon, and murder.

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International tourist numbers to the US have indeed fallen, and although the strength of the dollar is surely a major factor, as far as explaining the huge decline in popularity I don’t think you’d need to commission an extensive think-tank report to find out why: yes, it’s him.

British favourability dropped sharply sometime around 2016 and then further declined in 2024. Trump is clearly the main driver of negative feelings, although not the only one. There was much antipathy in 2020, which may have been related to the election but seems more likely due to the chaotic scenes that followed George Floyd’s death.

I imagine that many Britons were outraged by the institutional racism that became a daily, hourly, minutely subject of discussion in our media. For some British conservatives, in contrast, the summer of Floyd led to a moment of clarity that the United States was the source of our ills - that the country’s institutions, its fanatical universities and grossly dishonest media, were the driver of a mania sweeping across the Atlantic. But then again, I’m not sure how widespread the view actually was, or whether it was just the dozen or so weirdos I was talking to online during lockdown.

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Westminster is especially overrun, and in August can be maddening. I’m not sure if it’s getting worse, or if I’m just getting crankier, but walking through the area can start to feel like getting through the crowds at Carcassonne. I accept that in grumbling about this I’m like one of those people who moves to Soho and complains about the nightlife, but it’s still annoying.

I can never decide whether we should ban tourists from Parliament Square altogether by cordoning it off, or just give up on the Palace of Westminster (which is falling apart anyway) and turn the whole thing into a tourist site; get some out of work actors to play Parliamentarians in front of Chinese visitors, the way that Romans used to watch Spartans cosplaying as members of their ancient assembly.

However much Londoners might resent the visitors, it’s nothing compared to Barcelona, where I’ve just been on a city break, admiring the architecture and generally being an annoying tourist; getting in people’s way on the metro because I don’t know how to work the ticket machine, gawping around outside all the obvious Gaudí spots along with about a million other people. That sort of thing.

I last went to the Catalan city with my then girlfriend around 2005 and two decades later I returned with our daughter (along with some of her friends and their dads). Barcelona became hugely popular in the early 2000s, as the British embraced city breaks with great enthusiasm, thanks in part to the genius of Michael O’Leary. Overnight, everyone seemed to be talking about the place, and visitor numbers to the city doubled in the first few years of that decade.

Today it’s the fifth most visited city in Europe, and with good reason. Barcelona has a beautiful aesthetic, heavily influenced by Paris but also by Gaudí’s unique bohemian genius: wide pavements filled with restaurants and cafes, those distinctive grids with seven or eight story apartment buildings lined with balconies especially designed to kill British tourists. (As an aside, I wonder if one reason that they have never been popular in Britain, apart from the weather, is because too many people would fall off while drunk.)

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Maybe that’s why I feel an attachment to the ‘West’ as an idea, a shared heritage, which shapes my views on Ukraine and my mixed feelings about closer ties with Europe. I love the West (me), but like Kenneth Clark talking about civilisation, I’m not sure I can define it – and I often feel some confusion or even cynicism when people claim to speak on its behalf (see also: British values). If you see yourself as saving the West, the chances are that some people believe they’re saving it from you.

Conor Fitzgerald recently wrote about the popularity of the Save the West discourse, pointing out that ‘Everyone who seeks to make a profession from channeling the populist instinct, or sees it as a part of their job to do so, talks about “The West” continually. We see it in JD Vance’s address to the Munich security in February 2025 where he argued a retreat from western values like freedom of speech was a greater threat to Europe than Russia; we see it in the recently published American National Security Strategy which states part of its aim as supporting “our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.”

‘We see it constantly in mass media from books (Charlie Kirk’s “How to Beat Woke and Save the West”, Liz Truss “Ten Years to Save the West”, Douglas Murray’s “The War on The West”) to YouTube videos… At the bottom of the barrel you have various statue-faced posters on Facebook and Twitter with names like Revenge of the West or Save the West who exist to monetise pornographically demoralising short-form video content on the collapse of European identity.’

Many on the Right do genuinely believe that the West is under threat, and with good reason; in contrast, for liberals such as Francis Fukuyama, it is the national conservatives who more likely threaten the West, both by their rejection of tolerance and human rights, and their at-best ambivalence towards the Kremlin – ‘the West’s’ great enemy.

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The new arrivals had heard this all before; back home these sorts of rumours were usually the trigger for the pogroms which had forced them to leave. Expecting the police to round them up and frame one of their number, many within the community went to ground, closing their doors and waiting for the inevitable. It didn’t come, and instead they reemerged into city life to a new realisation: that wasn’t how things worked in England. The police were not in the business of mob justice; there would be no pogroms, no scapegoating. The process of law and order worked – although, as it happened, they didn’t catch the killer, so not all that well.

Life in Tsarist Russia was different, characterised by a system of policing that ruled by fear rather by consent, a society of low trust, an intense suspicion of out-groups, a zero-sum approach to prosperity and so a particular hatred of anyone whose wealth was seen to be earned on the back of other people’s labour. There was also deep-seated religious prejudice, manifested in, and fuelled by, a range of beliefs about such things as the ritual murder of children, which spread easily among an illiterate population credulous to outlandish stories.

Although the blood libel had originated in medieval England, such thinking had long been suppressed there. There were still people who believed in such things – I’m sure if you polled east enders in 1888 many probably did think the Ripper was engaged in some wacky Talmudic ritual murder - but politicians ignored them and the police made sure to crush them.

Most of Britain’s 300,000 or so Jews today descend from those Russian refugees who settled in the East End; as they became more established and less impoverished, they migrated in an anti-clockwise direction, the most religious settling in Stamford Hill in north-east London and Golders Green to the north-west, with the more secularised thinly populated in the areas in-between. These suburbs were always noted for their tranquillity: cosy, safe and peaceful.

Golders Green today still has the highest concentration of Jews in Britain, accounting for half the local population, but is not so tranquil. On Tuesday a local memorial wall to the victims of Iranian oppression was firebombed, and on Wednesday two men were stabbed in the street, with a suspect now charged with attempted murder. The latest incident follows a number of anti-Semitic attacks in the wider area which began following the war in Iran.

Such violence is contagious and memetic, as the Victorian authorities knew, and seems only likely to escalate, so that anti-Semitism has now been declared a ‘national security emergency’ by a government advisor and Britain’s terror alert has been raised to ‘severe’. The situation is alarming, but also perhaps predictable.

One mistaken idea held about multiculturalism was that, as a country became more diverse, so it would become safer for minorities. Up to a point this may be true, but not as a rule. People looked to the history of the United States and assumed that, with such an ethnic mix, no single group could be singled out and persecuted. They got this wrong because they saw the state, backed by the main ethnic group, as the only danger, while an equally plausible threat comes from an absence of order and political stability.

Taking a look at our own continent’s history, the opposite is true; until the First World War at least, Jews were much safer in relatively homogenous states like Britain, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian kingdoms than they were in the diverse regions of central and eastern Europe. In the west of the continent Jews might be a visible minority, they might even be excluded from certain institutions, and suffer all the usual minor prejudices that outsiders suffer, but they were not subject to state violence or extortion, nor the mob; they could depend on a fair legal system, and stable politics in which ethnic tension was not a driving force. They were not pressured into siding with one political movement because their opponents wanted to oppress or kill them.

This misreading of history may be due to our overriding civilisational memory being that of the Third Reich, which did indeed involve a relatively homogenous European state persecuting its one (highly-integrated) minority. Yet in the wider historical scheme of things Nazism was extremely unusual: it was not an idea whose time had come, but the creation of an evil political genius exploiting a particular set of circumstances, and one whose genocidal beliefs were formed among the the ethnic hatreds of Austro-Hungary.

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I’ll write about ‘the Lion City’ at a later date: it’s an impressive place, although the culture is very different. Whatever its relative merits, it’s just nice to be in a country in which you never have to think about crime, and while there two locals mentioned that friends visiting London had recently been victims of street theft.

I think London is the best city in the world (he says, having never visited many major cities), and strolling down the riverside on a Saturday afternoon in spring is one of the best urban days out to be had. It is also true that petty and mid-level crime is a real issue, and the mayor should not be blaming anxieties on ‘misinformation’, even if there are plenty of dishonest slop merchants out there; propagandists make a living not by making things up, but by exaggerating real problems. I love my city, but I would like it to be more like the ‘well-ordered and disciplined society’ which Lee Kuan Yew famously admired when he lived here in the 1940s. This is clearly not the case today, and Britain suffers from a plague of low level crime like shoplifting, and many of the rarer and more serious crimes we read about are preventable.

Much has been written about the lengths to which Singapore goes in order to make multiculturalism work, but an underrated factor is simply having a very low crime rate. Most people otherwise get along if the authorities remove the small number of wrongdoers from each community. Incidents of violence are historically a trigger for inter-communal bloodshed across the world, most notably (and bizarrely) in 1980s Yugoslavia.

Last week a white man in the Midlands was sentenced for a brutal and sickening rape carried out specifically against a woman he believed to be a Muslim (she was in fact Sikh). The offender had been released from psychiatric care, despite 10 previous convictions for 18 offences, including carrying weapons, assault and battery, theft, drugs, harassment, and breach of a restraining order. Even with continually disturbing behaviour, he was released into the community, and three days later carried out an unspeakable crime. While relations between the communities are placid and so did not escalate, an innocent young woman had to endure hell because the authorities failed to incapacitate a clearly dangerous individual.

An absence of order can sometimes prove explosive. Britain’s worst race riot in recent years, during the summer of 2024, was triggered by the murder of three young girls by a black man incorrectly believed to be an asylum seeker. Just as with the Nottingham murders, Southport might have been prevented if the state was more effective and less captured by ideology. As I wrote last week: ‘Whenever an ideology is embedded into any sort of public service, when the aim of the institution is not just to carry out its primary function but to advance some social goal, then the ideology comes to take precedence over the service.’

Ideology, when used in a derogatory sense like this, simply means ‘sticking to a pre-ordained worldview even when the results show it is not working’. This is most true with regards to one particular area, the asylum system, which risks creating a repeat of 2024, as barely a week goes by without a fresh horror committed by interlopers. Last week, three men from Egypt were sentenced for raping a woman on Brighton Beach; one had already been convicted of murder back home. Remarkably, the men are now appealing their denial of asylum.

This system doesn’t work: it creates huge injustices against victims, and builds an air of fear about strangers in our midst. It’s downstream of a system of human rights which has become sacrosanct, which I wrote about recently on the subject of Alec Ryrie’s The Age of Hitler.

Human rights aren’t self-evident, and to most they aren’t God-given; they depend on an impartial law and a state which enjoys legitimacy, as well as reciprocal ideas of obligation and loyalty; the human rights of some inevitably clash with the human rights of others.

While the international community has a moral duty to be alert to warning signs of persecution, and to act accordingly, the idea that someone can just turn up in another country is absurd, bringing a huge cost to social tranquility and undermining political legitimacy. An absolutist belief in human rights has created a totally unfair, untenable and perverse asylum system, and tinkering around the edges only creates new incentives to game the system.

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Concerned that he would be accused of racism, the young man went with his doubts and let the British-born Libyan Salman Abedi walk on. The rucksack was packed with homemade explosives, mixed with nuts and bolts to maximise the suffering they would inflict on human flesh, and fifteen minutes later Abedi pressed the detonator, killing 22 people, ten of them under 20 and the youngest aged just eight.

The poor security guard, barely more than a child himself, will have to live with his decision for the rest of his life, but the anxieties he felt were real and understandable. Many others would have made the same decision, and indeed it would take an unusual person to act otherwise. While millions of years of evolution has installed in us a sixth sense about danger, a hard-to-rationalise bad feeling about certain people, social pressure can often force us to overcome our instincts.

Perhaps he remembered all the times he had warned about racial profiling, how this was the characteristic of a deeply immoral person, and how it had detrimental psychological effects on those being stereotyped. He was no doubt aware that profiling a Person of Colour could lead to accusations of racism, causing public shame and career damage to him and put his employers at risk of legal action. His life might well have been ruined for breaking the gravest sins, when the chances are – as with anyone who looks ‘dodgy’ – that it’s probably nothing. Even with the most effective profiling, the probability of innocence is high; evolution has made us over-sensitive to danger, but it’s usually worth paying attention to our gut instinct.

The security guard had internalised the most powerful taboo of our age, the anti-racism prohibition, and this was by no means the only occasion when the taboo led to tragedy.

In 2023, mental health services in Nottingham became aware of a young man with an extensive history of alarming violence. Valdo Calocane had attacked his flatmate on one occasion, and assaulted strangers on others. He was clearly very dangerous, and while mental health professionals had been ‘leaning towards’ sectioning him, he was released after they ‘considered the research evidence that shows over-representation of young black males in detention’. Calocane went on to butcher three people in broad daylight, including two 19-year-old students from the same university.

In the case of the Nottingham massacre the university, the police and mental health services had all failed in some way to incapacitate a man who was a danger to those around him, the minimal requirement of any institution with a protective role. In many societies with far more basic state provision, including our own from just a few decades ago, an individual who behaved in such a manner would have been incapacitated by the authorities. The university would have expelled him, police would have detained him, and mental health authorities had him securely removed from the public. Any public servant who failed to act would have feared the consequences to their career, as well as the wider danger of public shame – but what happens when there are worse disgraces than failing to protect the public, like breaking the anti-racism taboo?

Around the same time that Calocane’s history of violence was reaching its inevitable conclusion, a similar tragedy was unfolding in Lancashire. At the Acorns School in Ormskirk, headteacher Joanne Hodson said she felt a ‘visceral sense of dread’ about new pupil Axel Rudakubana. The teenager had been caught bringing a knife into class in his previous school, and when Hodson asked him why, had replied coldly: ‘to use it’.

Hodson thought him to be ‘very high risk’, with a manner ‘devoid of any remorse’. He had not only repeatedly brought knives into school, but had threatened other pupils and expressed a sinister interest in violence, as well as racial animosity towards Europeans. When she raised the risk posed by the dread-inducing young male, mental health workers accused her of ‘racially stereotyping’ him as ‘a black boy with a knife’. Hodson was ‘shut up’ by professionals for the crime of ‘ profiling’, in many sectors a career-ending accusation. Her instincts were correct, and Rudakubana went on to murder three young girls in Southport.

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I was a bit annoyed when I first heard of Alec Ryrie’s The Age of Hitler, as it sounded exactly like a book I wanted to write, about how the Nazis have become the basis of our entire moral system, our civilisation’s origin story and foundation myth. The war against Hitler was, as French writer Laurent Binet called it, ‘our Trojan Wars’. This is The World Hitler Made, as I had provisionally titled my book, which would presumably be the British publishing industry’s 100,000^th on the Nazis. Just that month.

My thinking was in part inspired by Tom Holland’s 2021 essay arguing that Hitler had taken the place of the Devil, with Auschwitz standing in for Hell. The German dictator has become the moral lodestar of our world, as Renaud Camus pointed out in ‘Hitler’s Second Career’, and the decree ‘to do whatever He wouldn’t have done’ has warped many people’s political sense (there was even a notorious case in 1970s Germany when authorities placed children in the care of convicted paedophiles, partly motivated by the guiding sense that the Nazis would have opposed the scheme - you’ll never guess what happened next). Paul Gottfried’s Antifascism sought to define the prevailing political ideology which united both the left and mainstream right, while R.R. Reno argued in Return of the Strong Gods that the dominant belief system of our age, the ‘open society’ which denied and condemned deeper loyalties, resulted from post-Nazi trauma.

I also think that for Britain in particular, 1940 - our finest hour - has become the defining moment in our national identity, psychologically tied up with subsequent rebirth via the foundation of the NHS and the arrival of the Windrush. The Britain of before and after that ordeal are in many ways different civilisations.

‘The Second World War is not only our Trojan War,’ Ryrie argues: ‘It is our Paradise Lost: the sacred story we tell and retell and reimagine so as to keep immersing ourselves and our children in what evil truly is, in how our parents and grandparents and now our great-grandparents fought to defeat it and how we must do so again. Those are our shared values, and in them we will be content to live and die.

‘In the post-war world, the story of Jesus has been displaced as the defining narrative of our culture by the story of the Second World War. Our culture’s ‘“greatest story” became the anti-Nazi rather than the Christian narrative.’

This is obviously reflected in popular culture which casually makes use of the Nazis as archetypes of evil, a theme found in Indiana Jones and Star Wars movies, Harry Potter and Dr Who. If future archaeologists knew nothing of life before 1945 from direct history, they would be able to work out via popular culture that our civilisation was scarred by some sort of memory involving people who liked to dress up in black.

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Monarchs have from time-to-time berated city authorities for the state of their streets, one of the first known being Edward III’s instructions to the City of London after the Black Death complaining about the filth. But the first state to instigate a national clean-up was arguably Singapore, from where I’m writing now.

Other countries had voluntary anti-litter movements, including Keep Britain Tidy, which developed out of the Women’s Institute in 1955, while Keep America Beautiful scored some success with its famous ‘Crying Indian’ advert.

But the Asian city-state was the first to instigate a national campaign, in 1968, with Lee Kuan Yew’s ‘Keep Singapore Clean’ scheme. Citizens were urged to keep bus stops and toilets free of rubbish, and for a further campaign in 1976 teachers, pupils and parents were even encouraged to tidy up schools over the weekend. It’s still an important consideration for the authorities, and there are signs everywhere urging people to keep the place clean. Lee was so concerned with standards of cleanliness that he demanded a weekly report from Changi Airport about the state of the toilets.

A zero-tolerance approach to littering went hand-in-hand with the deliberate cultivation of a green aesthetic, turning Singapore into a ‘tropical garden city’.

In his memoirs From Third World to First, Lee expanded on how important the appearance of the environment was to a country’s health and wealth, writing that ‘after independence, I searched for some dramatic way to distinguish ourselves from other Third World countries. I settled for a clean and green Singapore.

‘I recounted how I had visited almost 50 countries and stayed in nearly as many official guesthouses. What impressed me was not the size of the buildings but the standard of their maintenance. I knew when a country and its administrators were demoralized from the way the buildings had been neglected - washbasins cracked, taps leaking, water closets not functioning properly, a general dilapidation, and, inevitably, unkempt gardens. VIPs would judge Singapore the same way. We planted millions of trees, palms, and shrubs. Greening raised the morale of people and gave them pride in their surroundings. We taught them to care for and not vandalise the trees.’

Lee planted his first tree in 1963 and would ceremoniously plant one each year for the next four decades. He even set up a department to care for the trees, and came to take a keen interest in the subject, developing opinions on which trees better suited particular surroundings; besides the small-scale gardens which line the streets here, there are signs informing passers-by about the species, for those interested.

A clean environment was important for the nation’s health, Lee reasoned, but it was also important to appearances and confidence. His belief was that if a city was clean and green, it would look richer and therefore it would also become richer, by attracting investors. That seems obviously true, and the converse is surely true too; the aesthetic of poverty creates poverty.

One of the very notable changes of my adult life is how much more rubbish there is almost everywhere in Britain; not just in urban high streets lined with take-aways, but also on the side of motorways and even on quiet country roads. I’m perfectly willing to believe that my pessimism screens out a lot of progress, but littering has got much worse and it adds to a sense of enshittification in public life.

A lot of people notice it, and are troubled by the problem. American comedian David Sedaris recently remarked that ‘Britain has the worst litter problem in the developed world’ and ‘it’s bad for the spirit to walk through filth’. Jeremy Clarkson called for snipers to be put in trees to shoot people who drop litter in the countryside. I’m not sure that Lee would have gone so far, but I think many would sympathise.

Fly-tipping has become endemic, a problem which reached widespread public attention last November when someone dumped a grotesque mountain of garbage in Oxfordshire, around 170 metres long and estimated to be somewhere around ten thousand cubic metres in size. It wasn’t the only large-scale waste atrocity even that same month; tons of rubbish was dumped in Avonmouth, outside Bristol, costing the taxpayers tens of thousands of pounds.

Fly tipping is now so endemic that just one London borough, Brent, recorded 35,000 incidents in a single year. The number across the country reached 1.15 million in 2024, up 20 per cent in five years.

Many of our major cities are now covered with rubbish, although Birmingham is especially squalid, not helped by the fact that the binmen are on strike because judges ruled that cleaners had to be paid the same under equality laws.

The city has become notorious to a global audience due to YouTubers like Benjamin Rich, aka Bald and Bankrupt, who portrayed high streets filled with overflowing bins. Last year Robert Jenrick chose the city to highlight the national trash problem. How would VIPs visiting Britain’s second city judge the country? How likely would they be to invest?

It seems instinctive for many people to see the growing problem of rubbish and equate it with spiritual and moral decline. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and the declining environment symbolises a country fallen in some way. It is true that garbage mounds suggest a population with little investment in wider society, and ‘private splendour, public squalor’ is a characteristic of low trust societies, the quintessential third world trait Lee wished to escape from.

With this in mind, many naturally point to immigration as a source, since people who come from countries where littering is the norm bring that culture with them, but also that diverse neighbourhoods have the low social capital which ensures that no one cares about the public realm: there is no incentive to clean up, if you reasonably believe that no one else will clean up. Perhaps it’s symbolic of declining social trust and the apathy this brings: it is certainly true that immigrant-heavy cities like Bradford are the worst affected.

My impression is that the spread of rubbish is far too extensive to blame on immigration, except as an aggravating factor, and I’m not sure that one can even attribute it to moral decline either. People are probably more concerned about the environment than ever, even if anxiety about the global environment doesn’t always correlate with concern for the local - as anyone who lives near a self-proclaimed Green voter can attest.

The most likely explanation is that the state has ceased to function, that authorities do not have the resources to keep the streets clean, that Britain has very high landfill taxes, and there is a basic lack of enforcement, with only 0.14 per cent of fly-tipping cases ending with prosecution.

In Singapore, littering is punished firmly (obviously - everything is punished firmly here), with fines starting at £200 and rising substantially for the second offence. People have a reasonable fear that if they litter the environment, they will be punished, and without such a deterrence it’s much harder for the well-intentioned majority to keep the place clean; I personally know volunteer litterpickers, but in London it has become essentially a hopeless and demoralising task.

Public cleanliness is an important signal for which way a country is heading, and Lee was surely right that if a city looked clean and green, it would likely grow wealthy. It’s notable that Polish cities have become the cleanest in Europe, at a time when that country is the continent’s economic success story. I’ve been struck in recent visits by how wealthy Poland looks, but perhaps what I’ve been processing is its cleanliness.

If I were advising Nigel Farage and he won the general election, the first thing I’d suggest is to invest in some heavy gloves and litter-pickers, and announce on day one that the entire country is going to be cleaned up. Just as Jordan Peterson advises young men stuck in a doom loop to tidy their room as the first step, so it is with a nation. Many people would enjoy the sense of community and self-respect that this brings, but more importantly a great clean-up would signify the reversal of our slide into third world squalor.

The inside pages of the Daily Mail and Sun always seemed to be full of stories about Lambeth or Hackney council giving taxpayers’ money to Nicaraguan lesbians or banning the word ‘family’ because of political correctness gone mad. Many of these stories may have improved in the telling, to put it mildly, but there certainly was a radical undercurrent in local government.

While this genre of story was usually treated as a bit of a joke, I suspect that the impact on national politics was not insignificant; just as political correctness came to embed itself in the academy and spawn the Great Awokening a generation later, local government served as an incubator for identity politics. Many of the activists went on to have roles in Westminster under Blair, even if they’d replaced their youthful enthusiasm for Latin American revolutionaries with talk of ‘stakeholder engagement’.

We don’t hear much about the loony left these days, but local government remains a laboratory for national politics, a training ground for future politicians and, most damaging of all, a mechanism for voters to express their frustrations with Westminster, as will be demonstrated again next month. The system seems obviously dysfunctional, but the impetus to change it is hampered, I suspect, by how boring the subject is.

Many local authorities are one-party states, with all the downsides that brings: Haringey, where I live, has been Labour since 1971, because the two constituencies that broadly comprise this north London borough (although there have been boundary changes that make them slightly mismatch) are heavily, tribally Labour: David Lammy’s Tottenham in the east, and to the west Hornsey and Friern Barnet, represented by Catherine West (no relation).

The two sides of the borough have very contrasting social make-ups, the western half wealthy and BoBo, and quite continental – you hear a lot of French and German spoken in the streets. The eastern part is poor, historically quite Caribbean but with a smaller population of Orthodox Jews; the middle third, especially the neighbourhood confusingly spelt ‘Harringay’, has a large Turkish population, and is especially famous for the array of outstanding restaurants in Green Lanes.

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‘There’s really no requirement for non-Hungarians to be familiar with Hungarian history or its state. But non-payers of attention shouldn’t pretend they’re payers. Americans or Britons would find it absurd if a Hungarian who didn’t speak a word of English, who’d spent a weekend visiting their countries, started pontificating about their nations.’

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