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 campaign 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.

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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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This ‘Four Pests’ campaign is often cited as the quintessential example of second-order effects and unintended consequences – lawmakers unable to see what their policies might entail beyond the immediate impact, because causal chains are complicated.

India’s ‘cobra bounty’ is another often cited example, whereby the British sought to wipe out these dangerous snakes by paying natives for every dead one; instead, they bred them. This is regarded as apocryphal, although I have also heard this story about the Americans in Afghanistan, paying locals for a potato-eating bug in order to discourage them from growing opium (the Afghans likewise bred them).

Nothing brings more unintended consequences than war, because conflicts have so many different factors and actors, which is why leaders should be very wary of starting them. In the past few weeks many people have mentioned the example of Croesus, King of Lydia, who asked the oracle whether he should attack Persia, and was told ‘If you cross the river, you will destroy a great empire’. (His empire, as it turned out.)

The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan indirectly led to 9/11 and the War on Terror, and the subsequent invasion of Iraq led to a strengthened Iran and, at home, arguably, the rise of Donald Trump. The September 11 attacks also left many people too scared to fly, and who took to their cars instead - as a result of which there was anywhere between 300 and 2,300 extra driving fatalities in the months following. The fall of Gaddafi, meanwhile, aided by Britain and France, led to a migrant surge which – again arguably – led to Brexit.

Not all second order effects are the result of laws or wars. The invention of ultrasound, designed to check for foetal abnormalities, led to a huge number of sex-selective abortions in India and China, and the gender imbalance is probably a factor driving Indian emigration now, much of which involves young men unable to find a wife back home.

Birth rates in the West were impacted to a lesser extent by car seat laws, which resulted in 8,000 fewer births in the US because couples with two children were put off having a third, which necessitated a bigger car. Although a second order effect, this is at least somewhat different in that the stated goal of the legislation – reducing car accident deaths among children – was achieved, although there were some early studies suggesting that mandatory seat belts for drivers led to an increase in pedestrian fatalities, as people drove more recklessly. (If this was the case, it was certainly neutralised by the introduction of speed cameras).

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Of San Fran itself, I remember that the Chinese food was incredible, the Indian food was awful, and the city seemed full of homeless people, many of them quite mad. This was the 2000s, and things have got notably worse since, making the northern Californian metropolis globally infamous; indeed, San Fran has become both the richest city in history and also a cautionary tale, a symbol of dysfunction. On a roadside in Virginia earlier on my trip, I saw signs put up by Republican activists warning voters not to ‘Californicate’ the state ahead of the governor’s elections (the voters weren’t sold).

The Bay Area is an extreme example of the American urban trap, whereby the very people a city most needs to thrive, the highly educated and culturally refined, are most likely to vote for the sort of politics which drives away families and businesses. This is a national problem, at least outside of the old South, because certain beliefs have become a badge of group identity and a moral framework to the college educated - a trend accelerated by the behaviour of a president who understandably confirms feelings of righteousness in his enemies. Indeed, San Francisco might be seen to epitomise Rob Henderson’s theory of luxury beliefs enacted on a grand civic scale, and with vast resources to indulge.

Among its policies, San Francisco spent $5 million a year providing free vodka and beer for the homeless, and gives away about $3 million per year on payments to 150 trans people. It also plans a scheme of ‘reparations’ worth $5 million each to eligible black residents, plus additional basic income for the next 250 years, and to qualify for these generous freebies racial lottery winners would only need to identify as black and have endured such traumas as attending a state school.

This figure was apparently arrived at without doing any cost calculations, which says something about the quality of legislators in a city which possesses the greatest concentration of brain power in human history: the concept of second-order effects certainly seem to be completely beyond the reach of California’s lawmakers.

In a remarkably unwise move, the state made theft of $950 or under a misdemeanour, hugely disincentivising police officers to investigate shoplifting - which became a plague. In one notorious incident, in 2023 a Whole Foods Market in the centre of the city had to close down after a year due to constant crime. Police logged 568 emergency calls over 13 months which included repeated fighting, employees being threatened with guns and knives, as well as public defecating on the shop floor; one day a 30-year-old man died of an overdose in the store toilets. The owners of city’s Westfield shopping mall also gave up, citing ‘un­safe con­ditions for cus­tomers, re­tail­ers, and em­ploy­ees’.

After the former mayor convinced a Safeway not to close, one observer noted that the standards of civility in the city ‘are so low that keeping a grocery store open for an extra few months as it closes due to crime is considered a mayoral press conference achievement’.

One of the strange things about American life is that, while its young progressive aristocracy – university students – live in conditions of luxury, able to enjoy the sort of urbanism most are denied, insulated from the outside world by campus police and even legally protected from speech that offends them, low-paid retail workers are subject to relentless crime and disorder. But then, of course, one of those groups has far more influence in shaping political choices than the other.

Addiction is the primary problem, and San Francisco brings to mind the Onion joke about drugs winning the war on drugs. The city was at the centre of the great social revolution of the 1960s, when a few free-thinkers began to experiment with marijuana and LSD, but as bohemian mores passed down the social hierarchy so America’s drug problem became a catastrophe by the 2000s, and San Fran is among the worst affected.

Again, its lawmakers have not helped, and in 2014 Proposition 47 downgraded drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanour, with predictable results: as the Free Press’s Nellie Bowles wrote in 2022, ‘San Francisco saw 92 drug deaths in 2015. There were about 700 in 2020. By way of comparison, that year, 261 San Franciscans died of COVID… In addition to the supervised drug-use facility in the plaza, San Francisco has a specially sanctioned and city-maintained slum a block from City Hall, where food, medical care, and counseling are free, and every tent costs taxpayers roughly $60,000 a year. People addicted to fentanyl come, too, because buying and doing drugs here is so easy.’

To visitors it is striking how many drug addicts there are in the downtown area, some walking with that characteristic stoop, many more passed out, including one I saw near Market Street lying inside a sort of human sized hot box while he smoked something. This has become the city’s international image, and social media is full of videos of drug addicts making the city their own; in many ways San Fran has suffered unduly from the negative image portrayed by social media video shorts, just like Britain. Perhaps this is unfair, but it doesn’t help its image that the homeless are very visible in the areas of downtown where the most tourists congregate.

San Francisco’s crime problem had become such a online focal point by the time I visited that there was talk of President Trump sending in the National Guards to restore order. In one of the tiny little Bart trains I struck up a conversation with a British Asian woman who was going to a protest against the proposed occupation (he didn’t, as it happens).

In her book Morning After the Revolution, Bowles wrote: ‘I’d gotten used to the crime, rarely violent but often brazen; to leaving the car empty and the doors unlocked so thieves would at least quit breaking my windows. A lot of people leave notes on the glass stating some variation of Nothing’s in the car. Don’t smash the windows. One time someone smashed our windows just to steal a scarf. Once, when I was walking and a guy tore my jacket off my back and sprinted away with it, I didn’t even shout for help. I was embarrassed - what was I, a tourist? Living in a failing city does weird things to you. The normal thing to do then was to yell, to try to get help - even, dare I say it, from a police officer - but this felt somehow weak and maybe racist.’

She recalled how friends saw a man bleeding in the street and, recognising him as a rough sleeper, called 911: ‘Paramedics and police arrived and began treating him, but members of a homeless advocacy group noticed and intervened. They told the man that he didn’t have to get into the ambulance, that he had the right to refuse treatment, So that’s what he did. The paramedics left; the activists left. The man sat on the sidewalk alone, still bleeding. A few months later, he died about a block away.’ She also cited the case of another homeless man, Dustin Walker, whose body was found in February 2020, having lay there for over 11 hours, just a few feet from a house soon to sell for $4.8m. Yet, as the city’s homelessness budget has rocketed, so numbers have gone up and up.

Bowles wrote how ‘I used to tell myself that San Francisco’s politics were wacky but the city was trying – really trying – to be good. But the reality is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting – or at least ignoring – devastating results.’

Smart minds and good intentions are lethal when combined with moral competitiveness, one of contemporary America’s overriding characteristics; this in part explains why such a rich and beautiful city, blessed with an incomparable setting, has taken an ideology of kindness to such destructive extremes.

Indeed, all of this dysfunction is bizarre because San Francisco is the richest city in human history. It’s fantastically wealthy in parts, has an enviable location and an aesthetic like no other. Bowles wrote of ‘The cliffs, the stairs, the cold clean air, the low-slung beauty of the Sunset District, the cafes tucked along narrow streets, then Golden Gate Park drawing you down from the middle of the city all the way to the beach. It’s so goddamn whimsical and inspiring and temperate; so full of redwoods and wild parrots and the smell of weed and sourdough, brightly painted homes and backyard chickens, lines for the oyster bar and gorgeous men in chaps at the leather festival. The beauty and the mythology – the preciousness, the self-regard – are part of what has almost killed it. And I, now in early middle age, sometimes wish it weren’t so nice after all.’

The city’s beauty is related to its topography, the hilly terrain offering spectacular views of the bay and what looks like Tuscany across the water; visiting here, one thinks of the first settlers who arrived this far west, and how they might have felt that they had reached paradise. She quoted Herb Caen, ‘the town’s beloved old chronicler’, who once said that if he ever made it to Heaven he’d look around and say, ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.’

It also makes a glorious setting for films, including one of my favourites, Vertigo, which showcased landmarks such as the Legion of Honor. When I visit, there is an eccentric-bordering-on-insane person listening to a Left-wing political podcast on a miniature stereo on full volume outside; the talking heads are excitedly discussing a race scandal involving Republican students and quoting a Richard Hanania article. The Coit Tower is another wonderful spot, set in what feels like remarkably quiet residential streets, and I notice while walking up the steps the names of all the benefactors, a reflection of the competitive civic pride that once drove American urban greatness.

The lifestyle is also envious - for some. Near my hotel in North Beach, historically an Italian neighbourhood although now quite Asian - nearby Columbus Avenue is lined with pizzerias, churches and green-white-red tricolours - People Like Us play ‘soccer’ with their kids in the park on the route to the Golden Gate Bridge. I mentally try to calculate how much they must earn to afford nearby housing, nannies and possible school fees - an astounding 30 per cent of children in the city attend private schools.

At the Ferry Building I meet a subscriber who lives across the water and is on his way to work, and it sounds like such a lovely way to commute - you can even get a beer on the way back. I’m reminded of how the upper-middle-class lifestyle in the US is so much better than in Britain, with one caveat: crime makes much of their cities off-limit. In this sense, urban Americans are the least free people in the western world.

Walking past the ‘R-Evolution’, a giant mesh steel statue of a naked woman which he describes as ‘demoralisation sculpture’, the local describes a blackpill moment when President Xi visited the city and they cleaned out the homeless encampments, a telling Potemkin display of civility. They can fix the city’s problem – they just don’t want to. He also points out that it’s a lot better than it was two or three years ago, which is saying something.

The amount of money in the city is mind-blowing to British visitors. From conversations with tech people later in the day, it sounds like companies are poaching staff in deals that seem more like something from the world of football. The extremes of wealth and poor here are awesome, and I can see why so many are now communists, except that it’s the rich who are communists.

The city is not quiet, but it’s not bustling either. The shops certainly seem pretty empty. San Francisco was hit hard by lockdown, and especially the move to working from home, which further harmed retail outlets and restaurants. Even in 2023 its downtown activity was only a third of pre-pandemic levels, way lower than most cities. This has the effect of making the homeless people more visible, and near to Sacramento Street, not far from the Substack Head Offices in fact, I see a woman screaming in the street while having a psychotic episode. With immaculate timing for my dystopian instincts, I soon pass by an ad telling people to ‘Stop Hiring Humans.’

This is, in fact, already happening. While Austin has had the highest rate of job growth since the pandemic, San Fran is bottom among major US urban areas. Although the city has low unemployment rates, at just 3 per cent, California as a whole keeps losing tech jobs at a time when employment in the sector is falling fast. The state, more generally, has seen a large exodus of the middle class; once the best place to be an average man, as Eric Hoffer famously observed, it has become Brazilianised, with a very rich overclass and large numbers of poor migrants. Both groups tend to vote Democrat, furthering the cycle.

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Calocane had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2020, sectioned under the Mental Health Act several times between that year and 2023, ‘and was involved with a number of violent incidents before his killings’ according to reports.

Yet, as the Times recently stated, the inquiry was told that ‘the Nottingham triple killer carried out an earlier violent attack after being released by mental health professionals’ worried about the ‘over-representation’ of young black men in custody.

The newspaper noted that Calocane had ‘tried to batter down a neighbour’s front door, frightening her so much that she jumped out of a first-floor window and badly injured her back.’ While the mental health service had been ‘leaning towards’ sectioning him, he was released after ‘the team of professionals considered the research evidence that shows over-representation of young black males in detention’.

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They survive because of the honour system, so that cheating carries the risk of disgrace within quite a small community, and that is a terrifying thought to most human beings. It is also because the rewards are so low: on the rare occasion when our team has won, the individual prize money was barely enough to cover the price of a London pint. But outside of these limited, high-trust circles, where individual reputation matters more than financial reward, the proliferation of knowledge has been catastrophic for social norms.

In a recent essay for Engelsberg Ideas, education specialist Daisy Christodoulou argued that the democratisation of cheating had placed an impossible strain on the school system. She wrote how, in her previous role as a secondary English teacher, she had her experience of pupils copying essays, usually from Wikipedia, and used as an example how ‘in 2014 a university lecturer complained about students who overused the thesaurus function on their word processors and ended up with absurdities like “sinister buttocks” replacing “left behind”.’

Large Language Models have changed all this, however, and now everyone is cheating. Perhaps not everyone, but enough to make coursework impossible to assess. ‘Institutions can cope with elite rule-breaking,’ Christodoulou wrote: ‘When everyone breaks the rules, it causes a crisis. It is theoretically possible that there will be students graduating with good degrees this summer who have not written a word of their own during their entire degree course. What should universities do in response?’

I was quite surprised to learn that my eldest daughter is still expected to do a large amount of coursework for her A-Levels. I can’t imagine that this will continue much longer, either at sixth form or university level, because coursework has become an unreliable measurement of knowledge and merit.

The democratisation of cheating goes way beyond education. There is a sense that much of the apparatus put in place over the past 70 years or so is now undergoing systems failure, most notably the welfare state and asylum system - and a huge part of this is due to freely available communication technology which allows far more people to benefit from the system.

In a Bagehot column last year, Duncan Robinson wrote how: ‘The British government has long assumed people are, in general, ignorant about the state’s obligations. Increasingly, the opposite is the norm: people know too much. The knowledge comes from peculiar sources. TikTok is a font of information for people trying to claim asylum. Reddit forums, such as r/DWPhelp, offer expert guidance to people navigating the Department for Work and Pensions. Memes about welfare entitlements, shared on WhatsApp and Facebook, which is increasingly an old-people’s home, cut through better than any government campaign. What happens when people are savvier than the state assumes?’

He noted that the number of people signing up to pension credit increased by 81 per cent in just one year, a result of older people being more informed through social media, and that the number of children on learning difficulties plans ‘has risen from under 240,000 in 2014 to nearly 600,000 in 2024. Partly, this is due to an increase in cases. Often, it is awareness. People have realised help is on offer. They are guided on their way by a slew of advice, from Reddit to Mumsnet, an influential messageboard, to TikTok. The result? About 20 councils are at risk of bankruptcy solely from special-needs provision.’

In Britain the cost of disability benefits to taxpayers has grown by 45 per cent in real terms since Covid, and the number of young people unable to work because of ‘mental health’ has rocketed. The cost of the state’s Access to Work programme, designed for people with mental health problems and other disabilities, is now £321 million a year, twice what it had been before lockdown.

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It is this analogy which has often made me unsure of the ethics of Britain funding the war, if the end result was always going to be the same. Perhaps that’s where we’ll end up, but the blame for those deaths lies squarely with the country, and the man, who launched the war of aggression. Besides which, Ukraine has consistently proved wrong the analysts who predicted that they would fold or be worn down; their military tech sector has become a world leader, they’ve made considerable gains these past few weeks, and the Russians are suffering battlefield loses which they can’t replace. The Ukrainians have responded to invasion with a level of courage and determination many thought impossible, a national spirit that inevitably brings to mind heroic narratives from our own past.

I recently visited Kyiv, and felt a deep sense of admiration and awe for the people. I don’t pretend that I came as an impartial observer; I wanted them to win from the start, and I still do.

As the conflict has dragged on, attention has waned, now competing in the attention economy with the war in Gaza. Judging by the number of flags outside houses, far more people care about Palestine. They don’t just fly the Palestinian flag everywhere - they vote in MPs who promise to speak for Palestine, as if someone in Birmingham or Blackburn could make any difference. Even London ignores what people in Blackburn think, never mind Jerusalem.

I admit that I’m not hugely invested in the Gaza War, chiefly because it’s too morally ambiguous. The side which is militarily stronger, and therefore capable of far greater violence, places more value on human life. I imagine that even the dimmest partisans would concede that if you’re an enemy civilian it would be preferable to be captured by the IDF than by Hamas - maybe not publicly, of course.

That conflict is also tied up with the disruptive population transfers that followed imperial collapse, rather than the simple colonial narrative many claim it to be. Some people see it through this lens because one side has a political and military elite dominated by people of European descent (the Poles won the Six-Day War, as people in that country used to boast) and because it has the backing of the world’s foremost military power. In reality, it’s far messier.

Ukraine’s struggle is closer to the righteous Star Wars fantasy of the modern western imagination, with a band of rebels fighting off a ruthless empire, a modern myth that fits with a Ukrainian identity tied up with the Cossack history of unruly horsemen: ‘May the force be with you’, as the air raid app announces each time the coast is clear. (Having said that, Ukrainians seem to much prefer the Lord of the Rings as a heroic myth.)

In Ukraine, the stronger, more violent side is clearly less ethical. You do not want to be captured by the Russians. You do not want to be their cannon fodder. The Ukrainians do not go into enemy towns and shoot civilians, as the Russians did in Bucha.

Nothing is entirely black and white, and there are analogies with Britain which might make the Russian case more understandable. Crimea should certainly have remained part of Russia; yes, I’m sure the CIA were involved in lots of things; and yes, NATO set a precedent by forcibly cutting off a region off Serbia, even if the Serbs were behaving rather badly.

Ukraine’s fight is also important to Europe’s security in a way that conflict in the Middle East is not, at least not directly. It’s unfortunate that comparisons with the 1930s have been overdone to boredom, because we do now face an aggressor in Europe, one riled by humiliation and defeat and with claims to co-ethnics in neighbouring countries. Russia has proved itself willing to act violently across Europe, and has attacked British soil. Ukrainian collapse in 2022 would have certainly made our continent more vulnerable, for which we owe them a debt of gratitude. As Kaja Kallas, then prime minister of Estonia, put it at the time: ‘what is our neighbour’s problem today will be our problem tomorrow. We are in danger when our neighbour’s house is on fire’.

There is another reason to care more about Ukraine than the Holy Land. Although the Palestinian cause gives meaning to many westerners, none of them have any realistic solution; there is no ‘victory’ for the current Palestinian administration in Gaza that offers a better future. Anyone who campaigns for a ‘democratic’ Palestine is condemning the people there to life under a little Afghanistan by the shores of the Mediterranean, as Salman Rushdie pointed out. (Some sort of emirates modelled on the UAE seems like a much better idea). Ukraine does have a path, and there is a reasonable prospect that it might one day emulate Poland, even if it faces awesome challenges.

Support for Palestine and Israel has come to correlate quite strongly with the Left and Right in Britain, while the Ukraine/Russia split tends to be more one of centre v extremes. Sean Penn swerved the Oscar ceremony this year to hang out with Volodymyr Zelensky; Robert De Niro recently gave a talk of encouragement to the Ukrainians. I wouldn’t normally agree with the world’s acting community on political issues, and in the polarised political climate of the US it is natural that people feel suspicion about whatever their opponents support. Yet Republicans are only somewhat less hostile to the Russian regime than Democrats are, even if it’s notable how people follow partisan cues from their leader. In Britain, support for Ukraine is almost universal, and even Reform voters – the least anti-Russian- tend to favour continuing aid to Ukraine.

I like to think of the Ukraine question as a bit like the midwit meme:

Halfwit with an IQ of 90 who knows nothing about geopolitics except what he learned from James Bond movies and Rocky IV: Russia is bad.
Midwit with an IQ of 105 whose brain has been melted by social media: NATO expansion, CIA-backed colour revolutions, Russia a based Christian civilisation.
Genius with IQ of 130: Russia is bad.

Obviously, this fantasy flatters me, as the meme is always intended to. Maybe ‘slava Ukraini’ is actually the midwit position - it was certainly the ‘current thing’ when the invasion started.

Active support for Russia among the Right is actually quite a fringe affair, although heavily promoted by influential figures like Tucker Carlson, most notably with his interview with Vladimir Putin in which the Russian president went into a 1,000-year monologue on how Borislav the Bold’s victory in 1280 justified his invasion of a neighbour in the 21st century.

In reality, the ‘trad Russia’ idea, at least based on raw statistics, is totally wrong, and its hostile neighbour Poland is far more conservative by any real measure. There is certainly something deeply attractive and fascinating about Russia and its culture, especially its literature, although I always wonder if the complexity of the country’s psychology is overplayed. As Dominic Sandbrook once said, everyone talks about the ‘Russian soul’, but they never talk about the ‘Belgian soul’ for some reason.

Perhaps some Americans have a natural affinity for Russia as another great continental landmass of extreme weather and crazed religious mystics. In contrast, even before the Salisbury poisoning, there has long been a deep and pronounced history of Russophobia among the British, sometimes a bit hysterical and overblown, and the feeling was often mutual. The British were always up to some trick, cunningly manipulating subject peoples to do their dirty work, puppet masters of the world, a view the Russians still retain, much as we sadly don’t deserve such an accolade anymore.

It certainly represents something of a return to historical norm for my own family. My English grandmother’s people were old Liberals, of non-conformist origin, supporters of free markets and religious tolerance, and like many of their ilk regarded the Tsar of Russia as the supreme tyrant. (The Turks were also beastly, but at least they were charming.)

Anglo-Russian tension had been building for some time before the invasion, and during the summer of Covid, when Putin unveiled a new cathedral dedicated to the country’s armed forces, complete with material sculpted from German tanks, a video produced alongside music from Warhammer gave me a strange chill about what the 2020s heralded. This was not Christianity, but paganism from the Steppes, something that felt very threatening to my European ‘soul’.

During the visit to the Ukrainian capital I walked around the old citadel from where the people of Kievan Rus’ would have watched with terror the approaching Mongol hordes in 1240, and I couldn’t help but feel the continuity of history. That catastrophe, to many Ukrainians, is seen as a pivotal moment when east Slavic civilisation went two different ways: their nation remained part of Europe, even if its Orthodox faith cut it off to some degree, while to the east a new Slavic-Tartar entity arose in Muscovy. National stories tend to be simplistic, but they’re truthful enough to be compelling.

Today Ukraine wants to be part of Europe, not subject to a Eurasian empire, and I find it hard to understand why any westerners would not support them. When the Mongols invaded Europe, would you have supported the Kievans or would the Great Khan drinking from an enemy’s skull seem more ‘based’?

I brought with me two excellent histories on my travels, one being Serhii Plokhy’s The Russo-Ukrainian War. He described how Putin justified his actions by talking of a ‘genocide’ committed by ‘the forces that staged the coup in Ukraine in 2014… against the millions of inhabitants of the Donbas.’

Putin’s argument was that ‘the leading NATO countries are supporting the far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine, those who will never forgive the people of the Crimea and Sevastopol for freely making a choice to reunite with Russia.’ He compared the Euromaidan protesters with the ‘punitive units of Ukrainian nationalists and Hitler’s accomplices’, and talked of ‘denazification’.

This argument has often been used by Russian sympathisers, and was certainly not helped by the naive Canadian politicians who invited an anti-Soviet veteran of the Second World War to speak in the House of Commons. (Gosh, who was it fighting the Soviets on the Eastern Front again? Should we look that up?)

The first half of the 20^th century in Ukraine was hell on earth, a period of pogroms and massacres, many carried out by Ukrainian militias, against not just Jews but also Poles and Germans too. If the country was a hotbed of anti-Semitism in this period, this was due not just to its position in the ‘bloodlands’ between competing empires but a quasi-feudal system characterised by ethnic niches: the Poles as landlords, the Ukrainians their peasants, and Jews as middle-men and rent collectors, a set-up almost guaranteed to fuel toxic hatred.

It is true that many of Ukraine’s most zealous fighters at the start of the Donbas conflict were ultra-nationalists; the Azov Brigade’s insignia certainly looks a bit ‘reminiscent’ to western eyes. Yet, as Yaroslav Hrytsak argued in Ukraine: Forging of a Nation, it is not the 20^th century anymore and the Second World War no longer acts as a useful guide to current events.

He wrote how during the 1970s and 80s many Jewish and Ukrainian dissidents formed friendships in Soviet camps and prisons, both now seen as enemies of the state, and ‘the final chord in their convergence’ was the Euromaidan, which saw the formation of a new group: the Zhidobanderovtsi, a satirical name based on the Russian slur for Jews as Zhids and the derogatory term for Ukrainian nationalists, Banderites, synonym for ‘Nazi’. Hrytsak cited a 2018 poll which found Ukrainians to be the least anti-Semitic of post-communist countries; for a few months in 2019, it even had a Jewish president and prime minister. This is not typical of countries in desperate need of ‘denazification’.

While many of the early Ukrainian volunteers certainly weren’t inspired by a universalist soft-left vision of the West, apparently even the Azov Brigade has become more moderate, partly because many of its more zealous fighters have been killed. I’m sure it’s all just non-stop gender studies seminars at brigade headquarters these days.

People who claim that their opponents are ‘Nazis’ are not always fighting the good fight, in Ukraine or elsewhere. Plokhy writes how before the war the US had warned that Russian intelligence were compiling lists of people ‘to be killed or sent to camps’. These included ‘Russian and Belarusian dissidents in exile in Ukraine, journalists and anti-corruption activists, and vulnerable populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons’.

When the Russian troops arrived, they had been told they would be welcomed as liberators, and when they weren’t, many – ill-equipped, hungry and scared – responded with violence. Several hundred were killed in Bucha, and among the many other atrocities, Mariupol theatre was struck despite a huge sign reading ‘children’ painted on the plaza outside.

Why did the Ukrainians resist? Because they saw their historical destiny as being part of Europe, and because they believed in the western idea of a nation state. Indeed, the conflict between Ukraine and Russia might be seen as a battle between nations and empires.

Hrytsak described how Putin was influenced by the ‘Eurasianism’ ideology rooted in Russian intellectuals exiled after the Bolshevik Revolution: ‘Eurasianism sought to re-create the former Russian imperial and now post-Soviet space on the basis of Russia’s imperial heritage, Russian culture, and Orthodox Christianity, which might integrate the non-Russian parts of the former empire into the present-day Russian Federation.’

Many Ukrainians saw things differently, and indeed had already begun to revaluate their own history as characterised by the ‘wrong turn’. He quoted the Ukrainian poet and dissident Vasyl Stus, who wrote that ‘I believe that the first mistake was the adoption of the Byzantine-Moscow rite which brought us, the easternmost part of the West, into the East. Our individualistic Western spirit, stamped by despotic Byzantine Orthodoxy, could not free itself from this duality of spirit, a duality that eventually became hypocrisy.’

Stus admired Poland, and predicted long before the fall of the Iron Curtain that the country would lead the way in bringing down communism, because ‘there is no other nation in the totalitarian communist world that has so passionately defended its human and national rights’. He wondered whether Ukraine would ‘follow the Polish example’ and, in Hrytask’s words, ‘he believed that Ukrainians were psychologically closer to Poles, but they lacked the most important thing: national pride.’

Despite the bitter history between Poland and Ukraine, intellectuals and politicians from the neighbouring countries made concerned efforts at reconciliation in the late 20^th century, and when Ukraine declared independence in 1991 Poland beat the Canadians to recognise it first. In contrast, relations with Russia only went downhill as the two republic walked different paths.

Ukraine suffered immensely from the post-Soviet fall-out, with economic contraction worse even than that of Russia, as well as runaway inflation. It was mired in corruption and deeply divided along its east-west axis, politically, culturally and linguistically. As Stus had lamented, it suffered most of all from a weak national identity.

That changed with the 2013-4 Euromaidan protest, a popular uprising against a president who was both deeply corrupt and intent on drawing the country closer to Russia – the two things were usually linked. Most Ukrainians, and not exclusively those in the west, saw their future in Europe, and with the Russian annexation of Crimea and the Donbas these regional divisions didn’t grow, as the Kremlin hoped, but eased. Putin had written himself into the Ukrainian national story, though not in the way that he’d hoped - but then, of course, there is no script in wartime.

Hrytsak argued that ‘Ukraine’s Euromaidan was one of the few successful popular protests in the 2010s’, attributing this to the ‘quest for national identity’. He wrote how ‘revolutions that have a national and anti-global dimension are more likely to be successful. Euromaidan participants fought not only against Yanukovych but also against Putin and Russia. Anne Applebaum has written that democracy wins when citizens feel a deep sense of belonging to their own language, literature and history. The opposite is also true: regions without nationalism tend to be corrupt, anarchic, full of rent-a-mobs and mercenaries, like Donbas.’

This national spirit has been demonstrated by Volodymyr Zelensky’s ‘without you’ speech, by the sight of victorious Ukrainian soldiers singing together their national hymn, and by their tributes to Winston Churchill, the embodiment of national defiance.

While nationalism can inspire terrible inhumanity, I believe liberal nationalism to be a force for good - it gives men courage to fight for their homes, and it gives them the honesty to build a country free from corruption. As I wrote the year the war started, ‘Nationalism is a belief that there is a “We” worth dying for, a sense of We forged in wars and celebrated in songs and stories extolling heroes. National identity is in part a story that people tell about themselves, and in Ukraine that story is still being written; whatever the military outcome, it seems unlikely that many Ukrainians will feel part of Russia after this, or that the desire for nationhood will ever now recede.’

I’m still optimistic about the future. The EU has offered Ukraine a path to membership, although there are huge obstacles along the way. As well as the corruption issue, Ukraine is far poorer than any country in the union, and it has suffered not just horrendous battlefield casualties but the loss of so many exiles who aren’t likely to return. Yet Ukrainians have faced down far greater challenges in the past four years, and their courage and patriotism has inspired even those in the West normally embarrassed by such feelings. Ukraine’s heroes have written their national story, and they might still win, because sometimes the goodies do. May the force be with them.

Bearing in mind that, as a BBC scriptwriter of the 1970s you’re probably in the Socialist Workers Party, would you have made your imaginary totalitarian junta run by Labour or the Tories?

The British Government indeed wants to abolish trial by jury for crimes carrying less than three years in jail; this will be especially bad news for the various Yookay citizens arrested for things they write on social media, for whom juries are their main hope of escaping prison. It was notable that Justice Secretary David Lammy talked about ‘offenders’ rather than ‘accused’ when justifying this change.

Tory MP Geoffrey Cox recently made a powerful speech in the House defending the right to jury trial, met with a depressing response by Labour MP Catherine West, who called it ‘pompous’. As the Spectator’s Madeline Grant put it: ‘Disoriented by a rare display of brilliance in the Commons, she can only call him patronising (inevitably, before reading off a sheet) and her colleagues can only jeer.’

Niall Gooch has a theory of pomposity: ‘“Pompous” in modern parlance just means “precise and solemn and not relentlessly undercutting everything with jokes and winks to camera because you’re scared of seriousness”.’ Everything has to be ironic and unserious, and yet many things – like our freedom – do require seriousness and solemnity. When you have no reverence for tradition and history, when you dismiss ‘men in suits clinging on to a Magna Carta myth,’ it makes it easier to take away our hard-fought rights.

The week in Parliament

In a future Adam Curtis documentary, images of Britain impotently unable to protect its Cyprus base against attack - which has led the Cypriots to suggest we leave - will be illustrated by scenes of politicians dancing in Westminster. They’re allowed to dance, of course, but it all adds to a sense that these are not serious people, as Logan Roy would say.

The Hereditary Peers Bill finally passed the Lords, ending centuries of tradition.

Britain has also legalised abortion up to birth, something Neil O’Brien wrote a beautiful post about.

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‘In one model, immigration is a right. You need a very strong reason to take it away from anybody, and such decisions should be carefully inspected to make sure no one is losing the right unfairly. It’s like a store: everyone should be allowed to come in and shop and if a manager refused someone entry then they better have a darned good reason.

‘In another, immigration is a privilege which members of a community extend at their pleasure to other people whom they think would be a good fit for their community. It’s like a home: you can invite your friends to come live with you, but if someone gives you a vague bad feeling or seems like a good person who’s just incompatible with your current lifestyle, you have the right not to invite them and it would be criminal for them to barge in anyway.’

Most people tend to agree with the home model, and indeed by a margin of two to one the British public think that ‘citizenship is a privilege which should be revocable by politicians in certain circumstances’. And if you view your country as a home, that implies certain house rules, rules that need to be generally understood and clear to everyone.

I sometimes wonder if the British are hampered in the integration process by their tendency to avoid directness. ‘You must come and visit’ doesn’t actually mean what you think it means, nor does ‘don’t let me keep you’, nor ‘make yourself at home’. Many people see this as British duplicitousness, but it is just the way we like it and the directness of the Dutch, for example, can come across as rude to us. In such a culture, what appears as tolerance may actually be bubbling resentment that has no way of being expressed, at least until the arrival of a political entrepreneur capable of riding the wave.

If you’re a recent minority in a country, you want the majority to feel at ease with your presence and the surest sign of that comfort is to never be talked about. In that sense we have failed: Islam is a constant subject of discussion in British politics, and hardly a week passes without the needs of the religious minority being a subject of contention, and with voluminous warnings about the problem of Islamophobia.

Much of this seems avoidable, and in truth it could be said that the worst friends that British Muslims have are the politicians who claim to speak on their behalf. These spokesmen are often prone to make maximalist demands for their community, take every criticism as an example of unreasonable prejudice, and encourage the sort of behaviour most likely to offend the host population – even if people are too British to say so. In many cases no offence is intended, but the national dialogue lacks a means for effective feedback mechanisms.

I thought about the Home Model this week after London Mayor Sadiq Khan took part in the adhan, or call to prayer, in Trafalgar Square. If I had infinite finances to conduct psychology experiments, I’d be interested in testing the hormonal reaction of the British public to this image: I suspect that in many it causes unease, and within that group some even feel a sense of threat. No doubt that’s irrational, but human beings are irrational and indeed territorial.

One of those who took umbrage at the sight was Tory MP Nick Timothy who, describing how ‘Trafalgar Square belongs to all of us... It is a national memorial to our independence and our salvation’, called the public prayer ‘an act of domination and therefore division.’

Many people in urban areas of Britain will have become used to seeing local Muslims breaking the fast at Eid al-Fitr in local parks, especially when Ramadan coincides with the warmer months. It’s a very wholesome affair, and in my experience strangers are often invited to take part and to share in the feast; to many secularised Brits, this must provoke a vague sense of envy and sadness at their own loss of ritual.

Yet other people’s religions often provoke mixed feelings, and the adhan, segregated by sex, inspires different emotions. I suspect that many British Muslims probably aren’t aware that their compatriots view it as territorial, when that’s not the intention. It would be useful for them to know this, but politicians are incentivised to speak for and to their base, which for no one now is the median person. Trying to frame this unease as a moral failing – Islamophobia – is electorally the most rational thing to do, and for society as a whole the most divisive.

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And did they teach you about Steve Sailer’s concept of ‘lame news’, I asked her, whereby the facts of a story are deliberately made as opaque as possible to prevent readers from drawing the correct conclusions about who’s doing what? Remarkably, and to my surprise and disappointment, her north London school wasn’t using unz.com as a resource to teach its pupils media literacy, and indeed most people will have never heard of the concept - but it’s arguably more useful.

Recent events serve as an example. The United States has suffered four Islamist-inspired attacks already this month, although the death toll has been limited by displays of heroism on the ground. Security guards outside a Michigan synagogue prevented mass slaughter and students in Virginia subdued and killed the attacker. In another incident, a bomb launched in New York luckily failed to detonate and no one was hurt, apart from the reputation of the country’s media, who excelled themselves in the art of lame news.

The incident occurred after a right-wing provocateur called Jake Lang organised a protest outside Gracie Mansion, the official residence of New York’s mayor, which was countered by a peaceful counterprotest. Just as a comedian/political activist called Walter Masterson was speaking through a megaphone about how immigrants are welcome in the city, two young men jumped up from behind him to hurl home-made explosives, filled with bolts and screws, at the anti-Islam protesters.

Many remarked on the symbolism of the image, of a liberal in New York City ‘yelling about how everyone is welcome’ when a man shouting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ uses him as a ‘literal springboard to throw a homemade bomb’, the threat of Islamic terrorism literally going right over his head. As another observed, ‘using a progressive white guy as a shield to commit Islamic Terrorism would get you laughed out of a writers room for being a bit too cliché.’

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‘No one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,’ Dr Johnson once said. I do like writing for its own sake, but I admit that I also do like money and would like more of it, and for my fellow writers too (he adds, insincerely). It’s for this reason I recently made the case for bundling substacks. (Arnold Kling may have been the first to suggest this.) I’m not sure that it would actually work, and the comments were mixed, but I’m all about maximising the customer experience.

The largest substacks in the US tend to be Democrat-aligned, although as I mentioned in this piece, centrists rather than radicals predominate. In contrast, six of the eight largest British substackers on the World Politics leaderboard are on the Right; it might be that conservative writers over here were quicker to adopt the platform, and that they will be outnumbered eventually. The reading public tends to be somewhat centre-left.

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With Britain failing to join in Donald Trump’s war on Iran, I wrote about the ‘special relationship’, and I also looked at the importance of language on a shared culture. I produced another round-up of demoralising news reports from the UK and wrote about the meaning of replacing Churchill with badgers on our currency.

Niall Gooch suggested that the ‘growing reluctance of Official Britain to assert a concrete identity, grounded in history and the achievements of a particular people. Instead, we are told to embrace universal abstractions.’ Stella Tsantekidou made the case that it represents modern capitalist enshittification, a process where all beauty is eroded from public life, and I think there’s some truth in that.

Incidentally, I’m surprised by how much cash is still in circulation.

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As part of my Ukraine homework, I recently read Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Imperium, which was published in 1993 and describes his travels around the former USSR soon after its collapse. The Polish writer sneaked into the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh disguised as a pilot, flew to Arctic mining towns where thousands had died in the construction of railways, travelled around the unforgiving deserts of central Asia, and stood on the ruins of a former Greek colony on the Black Sea coast in Abkhazia (also disputed). He met the first Tajik woman to receive a degree, in 1963, and describes how hundreds of women who had bared their faces were publicly executed by local men until the Soviets successfully enforced women’s rights on them. The former gulag towns were among the worst places, and he describes how in Yakutia:

Fiodorov speaks about terrible things. When criminals escaped, they would persuade one of the political prisoners – naïve and unsavvy – to go with them. This they did as insurance against death from hunger, which was always a threat. At a certain point they would kill the victim and divide up his flesh.

The good news is that you’ve escaped Stalin’s prison complex. The bad news is that you’re now a human larder.

The description of central Asia makes it sound irresistibly romantic:

Bukhara is brownish; It is the colour of clay baked in the sun. Samarkand is intensely blue; it is the colour of sky and water. Bukhara is commercial, noisy, concrete, and material; it is a city of merchandise and marketplaces; it is an enormous warehouse, a desert port, Asia’s belly. Samarkand is inspired, abstract, lofty, and beautiful; it is a city of concentration and reflection; it is a musical note and a painting; it is turned toward the stars. Erkin told me that one must look at Samarkand on a moonlit night, during a full moon. The ground remains dark; the walls and the towers catch all the light; the city starts to shimmer, then it floats upward, like a lantern.

I’ve started watching the Israeli television series Tehran, after hearing it mentioned on The Rest is History – and it’s fascinating to realise how accurate some of it is. As this detailed account of the plot to kill Khamanei recounts.

When the highly trained, loyal bodyguards and drivers of senior Iranian officials came to work near Pasteur Street in Tehran — where Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in an Israeli air strike on Saturday — the Israelis were watching.

Nearly all the traffic cameras in Tehran had been hacked for years, their images encrypted and transmitted to servers in Tel Aviv and southern Israel, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Long before the bombs fell, “we knew Tehran like we know Jerusalem”, said one current Israeli intelligence official. “And when you know [a place] as well as you know the street you grew up on, you notice a single thing that’s out of place.”

The fact that Israel can target anyone on the street in Tehran with drones is very sci-fi, both impressive and quite disturbing. Pity the poor obsessives with schizoid paranoia about the Zionists controlling the world, and what this is doing to their minds. They probably can read your thoughts now, mate!

Apparently Khamenei’s son and heir is in a coma following the airstrikes and has no idea he has become supreme leader. If things go well for the Iranian opposition, this could be the basis for a remake of Good Bye Lenin!

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John Bew writes sagely about Britain’s decline.

In his 1975 book on political thought in the Atlantic world, JGA Pocock introduced the concept of a “Machiavellian moment” to describe a point in time in which a republic confronts its vulnerability and instability in the face of decline, decay, internal tumult or external threats. Importantly, he also described how the most effective responses to such moments came through a careful interrogation of the lessons of history and an appeal to the civic religion that binds us together in a shared fate.

So as one world collapses around us, what are the shape of things to come? Here are some hard truths. The current social contract – particularly around welfare, health and pensions – is unsustainable on current levels of growth. A domestic and international legal system that does not allow us to control our borders has lost legitimacy at home. We have the highest energy prices in the Western world, just at the moment when energy is vital to our ability to take advantage of relative national strengths in technology. And there is currently no route to higher defence spending – which is inevitable unless the nation is content to continue on a path towards greater insecurity and irrelevance – without major cuts elsewhere in the public spending stack.

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Fred Sculthorp explores the huge drop in recruitment in the northeast of England, historically - along with Scotland - one of the most fertile grounds for the military. In Sunderland, where he visited, numbers had fallen by 40% over the past decade.

To help hit targets, there are plans to lift caps on Commonwealth soldiers from places like Ghana and Fiji. The desperation for squaddies is not unfounded. Last year, according to the local MP, the entire city of Sunderland, which boasts the largest Remembrance Day service outside of London, sent just ten people into the British Army.

“You used to have ‘Marra’, this word that means close friend,” says Bonallie. “That sort of talk, that’s all gone. There’s no one saying those words amongst the young’uns now.” He points to how visibly the military has receded from the city: recruiting stations have closed and the air show has fallen victim to the city’s push to be carbon neutral by 2040.

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This is very interesting: Daisy Christodoulou on the democratisation of cheating.

I used to be a secondary English teacher, and remember one student submitting an essay that was copied and pasted from SparkNotes. What gave him away? He hadn’t bothered to delete the advert for teeth whitening that was on the webpage.

Another time, a student submitted an essay with a series of paragraphs in the middle that had been copied and pasted from Wikipedia, with just a couple of words tweaked.

In 2014 a university lecturer complained about students who overused the thesaurus function on their word processors and ended up with absurdities like ‘sinister buttocks’ replacing ‘left behind’.

Large Language Models have changed all that…

Institutions can cope with elite rule-breaking. When everyone breaks the rules, it causes a crisis. It is theoretically possible that there will be students graduating with good degrees this summer who have not written a word of their own during their entire degree course. What should universities do in response?

It’s a set of circumstances which is capable of destroying institutions. In the 16th century, the sale of papal indulgences was democratised by the printing press. This led to a focus on the theological first principles of sin and forgiveness, which upended religious institutions across Europe. Theologians ended up with their own validation problem: did indulgence certificates or purple vestments or beautiful buildings or polyphonic motets say something meaningful about the state of your immortal soul? Or were they just proxies whose link to reality had been broken – worse, proxies that not just failed to measure good behaviour, but actively rewarded bad behaviour?

Martin Luther’s use of the printing press to create viral pamphlets is often seen as the emblematic example of how technology sparked the Reformation. But Luther’s pamphlets were a reaction to an earlier and equally innovative use of the printing press: the indulgence certificate template. This was a printable pro forma that dramatically expanded access to indulgences and enabled Luther’s antagonist, Johann Tetzel, to raise money for the grand building project of St Peter’s Basilica.

So many system failures, including those afflicting welfare and asylum, are down to far larger numbers of people being able to game the system thanks to freely available communication technology.

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Sally Rooney’s comments in this Brendan O’Neill piece were telling.

‘These people who long to crush our valiant efforts to save Gaza are the “same forces” who are driving “catastrophic climate change” and “destroying the very basis of our shared survival”. “By standing in solidarity with Palestine, we are learning how to fight for life on earth”, she said.

‘She told her fawning audience that Palestine solidarity is the great cause of our time because: “What else… can give us a reason to go on, to fend off despair, to live with ourselves, and to fight for our future?” Standing with Palestine is the only thing that can “make our lives endurable”, she said.

This is what Hadley Freeman called the ‘omnicause’, and it also points to a real underlying driver behind much of the activism we’ve seen in recent years – a search for meaning. This is obviously true of much political agitation, of left and right - a desire to fight for some noble and existential cause against overwhelming evil. It’s why the rapid decline in American churchgoing has led to a sharp increase in political extremism. Most great conflicts and not morally clear-cut, and there are no easy solutions as such; very few of these activists have actually thought through what Palestinian ‘freedom’ might entail.

As has been pointed out, this is a total vindication of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. In his book, often misunderstood, he warned that among the threats facing western democracies would be a lack of meaning driving people towards zero-sum prestige competitions, especially through thymos, broadly defined as a ‘desire for recognition’.

Men seek not just material comfort, but respect or recognition, and they believe that they are worthy of respect because they possess a certain value or dignity. A psychology, or a political science, that did not take into account man’s desire for recognition, and his infrequent but very pronounced willingness to act at times contrary to even the strongest natural instinct, would misunderstand something very important about human behaviour.

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Joseph Heath on why Americans react badly to do-gooders.

America is sometimes described as the “land of liberty,” and yet a great deal of the “liberty” in question arises, not from a principled commitment to individual freedom as a political value, but merely from heightened tolerance for anti-social behaviour. Based on the belief that their institutions are capable of constraining a race of devils, they proceed to act like devils. I’ve always thought the most emblematic example of this is “rolling coal,” where the drivers of diesel trucks intentionally bypass the anti-pollution devices on their emissions system, in order to emit gigantic clouds of black exhaust upon demand. That way, when you pass a Prius (or perhaps now any EV), you can emit a cloud of pollution, helping to undo any beneficial effects of the other driver’s environmentally conscious driving habits.

The best way to understand the Trump administration is to see the major actors as rolling coal at a national level (their climate change policy – subsidizing coal, while blocking renewable energy projects – self-evidently so). Trump channels this ethos more clearly and profoundly than any other American politician. Whether it’s wearing a blue suit to the Pope’s funeral, staring straight at an eclipse, taking his mask off during Covid, or assassinating foreign leaders, the same underlying “fuck you” impulse is at work. For a lot of Americans, telling them that they are not allowed to do something just really, really makes them want to do it.

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What demographic collapse looks like (via subscriber Akiyama)

In 1960, Yubari, a former coal-mining city on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, had roughly 110,000 residents. Today, fewer than 7,000 remain. The share of those over 65 is 54%. The local train stopped running in 2019. Seven elementary schools and four junior high schools have been consolidated into just two buildings. Public swimming pools have closed. Parks are not maintained. Even the public toilets at the train station were shut down to save money.

Abandoned houses are photogenic. It’s the first image that comes to mind when you picture a shrinking city. But as the population declines, ever fewer people live in the same housing stock and water consumption declines. The water sits in oversized pipes. It stagnates and chlorine dissipates. Bacteria move in, creating health risks. You can tear down an abandoned house in a week. But you cannot easily downsize a city’s pipe network. The infrastructure is buried under streets and buildings. The cost of ripping it out and replacing it with smaller pipes would bankrupt a city that is already bleeding residents and tax revenue. As the population shrinks, problems like this become ubiquitous.

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Ruxandra Teslo on the consolation of equality

There are many other ways, in my mind, in which the disenchanted world makes things hard for the “losers” of this world. One obvious loss is eschatological. In the older, enchanted imagination, earthly failure did not exhaust a life’s meaning. The poor, the humiliated, the obscure could inhabit a story whose resolution lay beyond mortal time. Salvation, not success, was the final measure. An inversion of status, even, was heavily hinted at: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Michael Young warned that a system of ‘meritocracy’ would be far more psychological brutal towards the poor, and we’re still working out ways to resolve the fact that he was right.

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Jeremy Jennings on ‘the West’.

Nonetheless, according to Varouxakis, it was the French philosopher Auguste Comte, writing in mid-century, who was the first to develop a comprehensive concept of the West, ‘both as a supranational cultural identity and as a proposed political entity’. Comte is now little, if ever, read, but his ideas attracted wide attention during his lifetime, attracting devoted followers (including in Britain). For Comte, the use of the term ‘l’Occident’ rather than Europe was a conscious decision and one integral to the introduction of the broad-ranging institutional reforms he was proposing. In geographical terms, Comte’s ‘West’ included most of the peoples of western Europe plus the peoples descended from them in the Americas and Australasia. Crucially, this new world order was intended to abolish European empires and replace them with an altruistic and peaceful ‘Western Republic’.

The tragedy underlying the increasing chasm between the mainstream and the populists in Europe is that both believe that they are fighting to save ‘the West’.

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Alice Evans on Oxford, medieval England’s equivalent to Detroit or Baltimore.

London and York’s estimated rates of homicide were 20-30 per 100,000 inhabitants - on par with contemporary Mexico. By contrast, Oxford’s was 90-100 per 100,000 inhabitants. Though for context, it was only a small town of 6,000 souls, so that worked out as 5 or 6 killings a year.

Over 90% of victims were male. Most killings were executed by groups. As was common across pre-modern Europe, attacks sometimes involves disfiguring someone’s face, so as to destroy their honour.

Oxford students were indeed incredibly violent.

In brief

• People born after the late 1970s are not becoming more conservative as they age, but the opposite. This was the thesis of my book Small Men on the Wrong Side of History, something I came to notice among contemporaries as I approached middle age. What people used to mean by ‘conservative’ was that they were ageing into the values of their society. That still happens, it’s just that the dominant values are post-revolutionary and ‘countercultural’. When young people violate those values by breaking anti-sexism or anti-racism taboos, the middle aged react in a way familiar to 1950s maiden aunts faced with gyrating rock and roll stars.

• An amusing election in France, reflecting the great realignment.

• ‘Communities that lost more soldiers became less likely to produce patents in the decades after the war.’ Interesting new paper measures the tragedy of 1914-1918 in a new way.

• La Marseilles sung on a nuclear submarine. Is anything more rousing?

• American religious revival is a myth.

• English language music is losing its stranglehold on the charts, according to new data from music streaming giant Spotify. Interesting, and counter-intuitive.

• A clip from Ross Kemp’s documentary on incels where the host, to his credit, is open to the idea that the premise of the documentary is a bit of a myth.

• Four newborns were christened ‘Bonnie Blue’ in 2024. I think they won’t thank their parents for that.

• ‘While the main reason for France’s low TFR was secularization predating the revolution, inheritance laws reduced the TFR further.’ If true, this must have been one of the most consequential laws of modern times.

• Half of young voters in Britain will vote Green. I guess the brilliant Labour wheeze to give votes to 16-year-olds has really paid off then. Oh well.

Thanks for subscribing, and have a great weekend.

Historical figures only first appeared on our bank notes in 1970, and when I was growing up the ‘Series D’ issue featured Newton on the pound note, Wellington on a fiver, and Florence Nightingale, Shakespeare and Christopher Wren on the higher denominations.

I imagine that most people are nostalgic about the currency they grew up with, and the design provokes a warming chemical reaction not just because we associate them with childhood but because everyone likes having money - but still, this was a stellar cast.

Banknotes need replacing to counter the counterfeiters, typically after about 20 years, and so a new batch of English heroes took their turn after Newton and Wellington, before giving way to our current crop, a still-impressive line-up featuring not just Churchill and Austen but J.M.W. Turner and Alan Turing.

Banknotes are a little window into a country’s soul, and instructive. In Israel, the changing face of the shekel reflects the evolving self-image of a country ‘from the early project of Labour Zionism, confidently secular and progressive, to a more conservative, capitalist and hawkish’ state.

Apartheid-era South African notes honoured Jan van Riebeeck, the Dutch explorer who founded the trading station that would one day become Cape Town, a statement about the central importance of the country’s dominant Afrikaner minority. With the arrival of the ‘rainbow nation’ he was replaced with suitably non-racial pictures of animals, but from 2012 these gave way to images of Nelson Mandela. As South African Reserve Bank Governor Gill Marcus explained, ‘a country’s currency is a fundamental component of its national identity’.

Indeed, and that is precisely why states with weak or fractured identities tend to feature animals and natural objects. In Sri Lanka, I noted, the paper currency contains scenes from wildlife and generic figures in traditional dress. It’s a beautiful country, with the kindest people you’ll ever meet, but it’s deeply divided and scarred by inter-ethnic hatred, and the banknotes reflect that sad fact: any historical individual would be too divisive for its population, unacceptable to at least one group.

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Just twenty years earlier Britain had won a long struggle with its old enemy for control of North America, in large part because it had already won the demographic competition to colonise the continent, and this would indeed prove crucial. A century later, and just before the German statesman’s death, Otto von Bismarck astutely (although apocryphally) pointed out that ‘The most significant event of the 20th century will be the fact that the North Americans speak English.’

The nationalist wars of the 20^th century had an ideological element, with liberal democracy proving triumphant, but they also might be considered a struggle between the English and German-speaking peoples, a struggle decisively won by the former.

Without the United States’ entry into the first war, Germany would inevitably have dominated the continent and German would still be the language of the middle classes in Prague, Riga and Tallinn. At the time of the Mayflower, five times as many people spoke German as English; by the end of the 20^th century, with millions of Müllers and Schmidts turned into Millers and Smiths, that figure was reversed. While New York replaced London as the world’s most important city, perhaps no metropolis fell in importance so much as Vienna, once the intellectual centre of the continent and now a place that feels almost marginal.

Language inevitably creates a common sense of sympathy and – quite literally – understanding. In his book about the political legacy of English political freedom, Daniel Hannan mentioned an amusing anecdote about a friend of Teddy Roosevelt who went off to fight for the Boers against the British. He was inspired – like many idealistic young men at the time – by the courage of the plucky David in this unequal struggle, but when he reached South Africa he found that he had more in common with Goliath.

‘Dear Teddy, I came over here meaning to join the Boers, who I was told were Republicans fighting monarchists,’ he wrote to his friend: ‘but when I got here I found the Boers talked Dutch while the British talked English, so I joined the latter.’

He was not the first to feel a sense of commonality among the jabbering foreign tongues. In The Warm South, about the British discovery of the classical world in the 18^th and 19^th century, Robert Holland observed how these proto-gap years helped forge a common sense of English-speaking identity, especially between the English and Scots but also the Americans too.

‘Robert Adam first discovered his British identity in the Mediterranean,’ Holland wrote: ‘Adam went to Rome as a Scot and came back a rather self-conscious Briton. His reasons were not least commercial and professional, but more profoundly, expatriate society in the superheated cultural world of the papal capital provided a venue in which those from the British islands cleaved to each other with a new intimacy, obscuring all sorts of accumulated differences among themselves. “Britishness” and its nuances often evolved with a Mediterranean imprint on it.’

On top of this, he noted, ‘travellers from the United States often found themselves cohabiting for long periods alongside their transatlantic cousins with their finicky old-country ways and sometimes opposed political instincts.’ Catherine Sedgwick observed in Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home that ‘Americans are, for the most part, merged into the English.’

Today, one might say that the reverse is true. In much of the agonised debate about culture and immigration, it is often forgotten that the two most important characteristics of identity historically are language and religion. People living in the polyglot empires of eastern and central Europe might be called Poles, Greeks or Romanians based on what dialect they spoke and the rite their church followed; before the 19^th century, at least, they might never have seen themselves as such.

In England, which has a far older national identity, recognisable even in the early medieval period, this sense of self was much more distinct and so much less defensive, but even here the rites and rituals of the Church of England played a huge part. Robert Tombs cited remarks by one historian that ‘with only slight hyperbole, for centuries to come it would be possible to check one’s watch at 11.08 on a Sunday morning and know that at that moment everyone in the land was intoning the same psalm’.

One reason why questions about national identity and ‘culture’ are tricky now, especially in the English-speaking world where language is a bit of a red herring, is that we are all sort of Anglo-American now, whether we like it or not. What is the ‘culture’ of someone raised in England who is not a member of a particular religious community? How is it different to someone in New York or Toronto or Sydney, who all consume the same media? What do newcomers to this world integrate into, except some Anglophone global mass or a particular subculture within it?

Language creates belonging, and an anthropologist visiting the Appalachians in the early 20^th century noted that people still used the word ‘foreigner’ to describe people from beyond the region, distinguishing them from non-English speakers, who were ‘outlandish’. British visitors, or Canadians or Americans from another state, were foreigners; a Russian or German would be outlandish.

British people today employ a similar distinction when viewing other English speakers. The Irish and Australians are not seen as ‘outlandish’, although that view is influenced not just by a common language but by the huge numbers of people with relatives in both countries; ethnic drift may ensure that Australians become more distant to us, as Canadians already have, now rather indistinguishable from Americans in a way they once weren’t. As for Americans themselves, they are viewed are somewhere in between the two categories; very familiar foreigners you might say, and this familiarity often gives the British a misleading idea about how alien the United States actually is.

Although I am rather sceptical about the ‘special relationship’, it’s natural that a shared language invites sympathy, and this explains why the British are still the most pro-American people in western Europe. This closeness is perhaps strongest when it comes to military matters, because by its very nature combat requires precise and concise understanding - and even more so when it comes to espionage.

Yet even here there are difficulties. In one notable example during the Korean War, miscommunication between the Anglophone allies resulted in disaster when a British brigadier told a US general that things were ‘a bit sticky’. The American took this to mean that they were in control of the situation, but what the understated Briton actually meant to communicate was that they were getting absolutely massacred and needed help.

Well, he said they would all speak English - he didn’t say that they would speak it properly.

It’s War

A remarkable opening sentence from former Foreign Office official Ameer Kotecha.

Nearly five years ago, on the day Kabul fell to the Taliban, I was among several thousand officials invited to mark World Afro Day (for those unaware: “a global day of celebration and liberation of Afro hair”) with a panel discussion featuring a director charged with matters of national security.

This week, with war raging in the Middle East and the RAF base in Cyprus under attack, the main news on the Foreign Office internal intranet was about the “New FCDO Capability Framework and self-assessment”, with all staff urged to “Take charge of your development”.

It’s a mystery as to why Britain has become such a laughing stock on the global stage, a sense reinforced by recent events. While France sent anti-drone systems to Cyprus to protect the island from Hezbollah attacks, HMS Dragon won’t arrive in the region for a week.

The response to the plight of the British in Dubai has been interesting. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said that British ‘tax exiles’ in the United Arab Emirates should have to pay for their rescue: ‘As we protect them, it’s only right for tax exiles to start paying taxes to fund our Armed Forces just like the rest of us do’.

It’s notable that they didn’t complain when we evacuated people from Sudan with far less claim to the British taxpayer’s largesse. As a locked account on Twitter put it, the Lib Dems are the most ‘populist’ party in Britain, possessing no real ideology or vision, only gimmicks that play well to their base - people who listen to The Rest is Politics and feel class antagonism against the crabs who have escaped the bucket.

He wasn’t the only one who felt unsympathetic to Deano; one left-wing journalist even used the line ‘No representation without taxation’, an idea once put forward by Alan B’Stard in an episode of The New Statesman. So you’re saying that the state should only help people who are taxpaying members of society? Interesting idea.

Incidentally, I’m off to Dubai next month, inshallah. Get in touch if you’re a subscriber and want to meet for a coffee. After that, I’ll be in Singapore, so likewise.

Hey, whatcha readin’ for?

It was World Book Day on Thursday, one of the less harmful made-up modern calendar events, even if Tony Blair had a hand in its creation. To mark the event YouGov put out yet another depressing poll about reading habits, showing that in the last year 40 per cent of Britons hadn’t read a single book. This is for the entire population - young people read far less than the average, so that book-reading is now considered genuinely eccentric among some teenagers. I’ve become very pessimistic about this subject since I started reading James Marriott’s views, and await his upcoming book with great interest. I used to observe my fellow Tube passengers’ ‘reading’ habits with mild sadness, but now I’m turning into Kevin Spacey’s character from Seven, filled with genuine disgust at all the people watching reels on their slop dispensers.

I know that some schools already do this, but perhaps they should all have compulsory reading time where everyone sits in silence and reads a book. Now that we’ve got the tech, we could use cameras to monitor their eyes to check they’re actually reading, and if the sensors detect that they’ve drifted off they could get a detention or, I don’t know, mild electric shocks. It would really install a love of reading in young people, but I imagine that the Woke Left would object.

Disproportionately cruel

In their 2024 manifesto, Labour pledged to counter the ‘disproportionate’ sectioning of black men detained under the Mental Health Act, a proposal based on the belief that any inequality of outcome must be proof of racism.

Rates of psychosis vary hugely by race in Britain, and this tragic condition is far more common among black men, although to what extent this is environmental depends; there may be underlying genetic factors, but we know that minority status can be a trigger for mental health problems, because many people find it alienating. Whatever the cause of this disparity, to deliberately not section the mentally ill for the sake of equity is incredibly irresponsible and cruel. Anti-racism has real world consequences.

On June 13, 2023, a severely mentally ill man named Valdo Calocane fatally stabbed three people in a rampage in Nottingham, two of his victims being teenagers.

Recently, the Times reported that:

The Nottingham triple killer carried out an earlier violent attack after being released by mental health professionals who had considered the “over-representation” of young black men in custody, a public inquiry has been told.

Valdo Calocane was in the grip of psychosis when he tried to batter down a neighbour’s front door, frightening her so much that she jumped out of a first-floor window and badly injured her back.

Mental health professionals had been “leaning towards” sectioning Calocane, who had been arrested for criminal damage earlier that day for attacking another neighbour’s door. However, he was released after “the team of professionals considered the research evidence that shows over-representation of young black males in detention”, the inquiry was told.

It also emerged that an officer claimed that the police could not ‘link two prior violent incidents, which occurred on the same day, investigated by the same force, because of the suspect’s “data protection” rights.’

I previously wrote about the Nottingham murders, and how the aftermath was co-ordinated by the authorities to give a sense of spontaneous unity; that sort of smoke and mirror routine just doesn’t work anymore, as the subsequent Southport tragedy showed.

In brief

A new report has found that racism and ‘poor’ staff relationships are factors in maternity care failings. And what is the proof of that racism?

Muslim families described feeling discriminated against on the basis of their religion and feeling unable to raise concerns due to fear that discriminatory attitudes may result in poor treatment for their baby. For example, a parent listening to Qur’anic recitation was told by a nurse to “turn it down; I don’t want to hear it”.

LGBTQ+ families reported a lack of inclusivity, with some reporting that services focus narrowly on “mothers” and “fathers” and fail to reflect diverse family structures.

There are 45 groups of pro-Iran extremists operating in universities across the UK.

‘Whereas the graduate premium has increased in most rich countries, it has plummeted in Britain since 1997.’

An immensely sinister TikTok from the Yookay terrorism police. Incidentally, in the USSR domestic enemies were prosecuted under the guise of countering ‘disinformation’.

An interesting report from Horden, County Durham,

In the past three years, a group of Nigerian families has moved into the area. Most are employed as engineers or health and social care workers, and many have sent their children to Cotsford Primary - of its 182 pupils, as many as 30 are now Nigerian. But they’ve become embroiled in the country’s immigration debate.

Historically most immigration has been to dynamic large cities which already experienced a great deal of churn. The key difference with the Boriswave is that migration has accelerated in poor regional towns, driven in part by the fact that these areas are heavily reliant on public sector organisations which are keen to recruit cheaper staff from overseas. This in part explains the sudden shift in public mood.

Since 2002, stripping out the effects of inflation, the number of households getting over £40,000 a year in benefits has grown from 45,000 to 192,000.

More prisoners have been recalled to jail than have been released early since Labour took office, according to a Tory Party analysis. Reoffending is a big problem in every country, which is why prison works.

The Free Speech Union ‘has won a landmark High Court victory against the Police Federation for unlawfully suspending police officers Richard Cooke and Rick Prior after they questioned whether the police were “institutionally racist”.’ The British police are, in fact, institutionally anti-racist.

The BBC has really surpassed itself, filming a 44-minute documentary, in Gaelic, about a ‘“black trans woman activist” who has left “her career as a drag performer” in Glasgow in order to carry out research for a university on how indigenous people in South America have “fought against ignorance”. Can someone explain the BBC’s obsession with drag queens? They seem to have a whole department purely devoted towards drag-related news.

And in yet another case of ‘worth the licence fee alone’, there was also this first person soft focus story. As I’ve said before, the BBC needs to stop producing this sort of slop; these hard-luck stories are uninteresting morality tales designed to promote the beliefs of the regime, and frequently misleading.

Thanks for subscribing, and below the paywall my beloved paid subscribers can access the podcast.

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I thought of my weasel phrase when Donald Trump suggested that Britain ‘is not such a recognisable country anymore’ and that Keir Starmer ‘could be’ pandering to Muslim voters in failing to back his attacks on Iran. It’s true that British foreign policy is influenced by the Labour Party’s desperate need to win back Muslim voters, who have the power to unseat several members of the cabinet at the next election. As with France, it may also be true that an escapade in the Middle East could lead to unrest. But in this case, one doesn’t have to look at changing demography to understand why Britain might be reluctant to join in with Trump’s military adventure, either for strategic or political reasons: Labour voters of all stripes strongly oppose the action and there doesn’t seem to be any clear end goal in sight. I’m not even sure that this time he is ‘directionally correct’.

Besides which, Trump has hardly given Britain much reason to support him, having hit us with huge tariffs, threatened to invade the territory of a neighbour and close ally, and insulted our soldiers’ contribution to the Afghan mission.

But after Britain refused the US use of its military bases, Trump lamented that ‘Keir has not been helpful. It’s very sad to see that the relationship is obviously not what it was.’ The Sun, historically a very pro-American newspaper, framed this as ‘putting the special relationship in peril’, yet this term, so often loved by politicians and ambassadors, is most often most loathed by British conservatives

The ‘special relationship’ has been described as ‘rhetorical nonsense, sometimes majestic and often moving, yet nevertheless nonsense’, as British diplomat Ray Raymond characterised the framing, and it provokes much cynicism among British commentators. Two years ago, after the US ambassador invoked the special relationship following yet another series of missiles strikes in the Middle East, the Telegraph’s Madeline Grant expressed her loathing for a phrase that represented our country’s servile attitude to its ally.

American appeals to the ‘special relationship’ certainly feel cynical. When President Joe Biden was asked by Beth Rigby in 2023 if the ‘special relationship’ is still in good shape, he gave a thumbs up and said ‘in real good shape’. Yet Biden didn’t give much impression of valuing that relationship during his presidency, especially when it conflicted with ancestral loyalties to Ireland. (Even if, in fairness to him, as a senator he was among Britain’s firmest supporters during the Falklands War.)

At the time of Biden’s visit to Dublin in 2023, a triumph of Irish hospitality and diplomatic cunning, Rod Liddle wrote about ‘the damaging myth’ of the ‘“special relationship” between the US and the UK, which is not true now and never was. We are the only people who speak of it — in needy, clingy terms — and I feel a little embarrassed every time it is mentioned.’ In truth, as he pointed out, whether it was with nuclear technology, Suez or the Falklands, the Americans always served their own interests.

The British Right would prefer that we acted in a similar manner, and indeed the argument is that Britain’s submissiveness gives us less bargaining power, encouraging the Americans to court other European nations. It doesn’t help that Britain also has a ruling class who seem strangely averse to the idea of the national interest.

Yet it’s not untrue to point out that Britain and the US have had very similar foreign policy aims much of the time. The phrase first appears in Churchill’s Fulton speech of 1946, a point at which the two countries were, in Kenneth Minogue’s words, ‘almost uniquely focused [on] hostility to totalitarianism.’ The first George Bush described the special relationship as ‘the rock upon which all dictators this century have perished.’

In 2010, US diplomat Eric Edelman talked of the four pillars of the relationship, which he listed as ‘cultural leaders and political elites’ who were ‘committed to the notion that the English-speaking peoples have a special mission in the world; a will to wage war together; the British nuclear deterrent; and close intelligence cooperation.’

So while the term ‘special relationship’ may be galling, it does reflect something real, even if the relationship is very unequal. There may be a special mission to fight the ‘isms’, but there is also the fact that in many parts of the world Britain effectively handed over its empire to Pax Americana, and Mark Steyn even suggested that future historians might see British and American rule as two parts of the same political era. There is some truth in that, and Iranian politicians clearly see the two empires as linked (although we might grumble that the Americans, committed to liberal democracy and more optimistic about human nature, tend to be less suited to the managing of empires).

Indeed, even as far as back as the 1890s John Hay, U.S. Ambassador to Britain, said that the two countries ‘are bound by a tie we did not forge and which we cannot break; we are joint ministers of the same sacred mission of liberty’. As Raymond argued, this pointed to ‘the three pillars of the relationship - the shared common law heritage, the mutual economic investments, and the diplomatic and security ties.’

The triumph of the English-speaking worldview against Soviet communism could have weakened the relationship, but instead Britain became an even more loyal ally as its European neighbours shied away from the ‘special mission’. As Robert Singh wrote in the American Interest: ‘When Washington has needed the legitimacy that allies confer, London has mostly been there. The UK joined nine of the 12 operations the U.S. military conducted between 1991 and 2018, as the second-largest force contributor in all of them… To the extent that London has had a grand strategy since World War II, staying close to Washington has been at its core.’

In the eye of many Britons, this made us ‘poodles’, a term most commonly used against Tony Blair, a man who was unusually religious by the standards of his countrymen and possessed a certain messianic quality when it came to spreading liberal democracy - an idea most British imperialists would have regarded as dangerously unhinged.

Blair’s loyalty to the Americans probably did more than anything else to weaken the ‘special relationship’ in British eyes, and he was also notably guilty of perhaps its most cringeworthy aspect, the tendency of British politicians to view the US as always willing to support Britain. In the most notorious incident, in a joint press conference with George W. Bush soon after 9/11, Blair said: ‘My father’s generation went through the experience of the second world war, when Britain was under attack, during the days of the Blitz. And there was one nation and one people that, above all, stood side by side with us at that time. And that nation was America, and those people were the American people.’

As Geoffrey Wheatcroft noted in his polemic Yo, Blair!, ‘Apart from Soviet Russia, just about the only important country on earth which was not “side by side with us” that winter was the United States, which was very profitably neutral.’ Indeed, the lesson of the war might have been that our real special relationship is with France, with whom we have fought side by side in at least 21 conflicts since 1815.

Blair’s enterprise damaged the special relationship, but I wonder to what extent it’s a generational idea. I grew up during the high watermark of Atlanticism, and one of my first political memories was the US bombing of Libya in 1986, which – aged eight and raised on war films – I took to be some sort of victory for ‘us’, since we’d allowed them to use British air bases. A few months later, and visiting the Berlin Wall with my parents, I was very conscious of seeing the American soldiers and having a sense that they were protecting us from sharing the miserable life I saw on the eastern side.

Reagan and Thatcher were intensely close and embarked on a shared crusade, and that’s not too strong a word, against the Evil Empire. I doubt that many people my children’s age grow up feeling that their country is fighting for a righteous cause in the same way.

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The ability to write and the ability to pitch, network and self-promote don’t always align. The success of a particular Substack post is not driven by the individual’s ‘fit’ for an article, and very often the most interesting analysis comes from someone who has no particular lived experience nor a background in politics or journalism; they’ve just thought about the issue and come up with an interesting theory. Unlike with blogging in the 2000s, financial incentives attract more highly-skilled writers and the paid subscriptions model allows them to devote more hours to the pursuit.

The downside of the model is that it is expensive to subscribe to a range of writers, and the typical reader will follow at least half a dozen and may have a variety of non-core interests. Every writer is limited in their specialisation, and as I’ve got older I’ve become far more reluctant to touch on areas in which I don’t feel I have enough expertise, and can offer nothing more than a bar room opinion. How will the new war in the Middle East work out? No idea.

So while a brilliant model, some Substack readers with a broad range of favourite writers feel that they can’t afford the current system. I think that this might explain why a number of writers have struggled to expand their paid subscriptions in the past year or so; alternatively, maybe a number of us have just reached a natural plateau. The most common explanation I get from former paid subscribers is that they already spend money on a number of substacks and they simply cannot afford it; of course, maybe they’re being polite, and don’t want to say ‘it’s because you’re rubbish now’ and are well into Season 10 of your career.

Half of my paid subscribers come from Britain, which is currently enjoying successive quarters of zero economic growth and a mood of overwhelming pessimism (which I’m probably not helping with, to be fair). In hard times we naturally make cuts to non-essential spending, and I’m having constant tussles at home with my desire to cancel one of the streaming services we pay for, and which my children seem to think are vital. Do I really need to spend that £5 a month to read about how Britain is in terminal decline, one might ask? (To which I would reply, YES.)

It’s complicated because, if you’re a Substack writer, your paid subscribers are both consumers and patrons; some are happy in the latter role, supporting writers who raise issues that need to be raised, but most are not wealthy enough to see it in those terms.

The platform has also got more competitive, and this is observable from following Substack Notes, which I’ve started using more as an alternative to Twitter, not out of any principled stance but because Elon blocked links to Substack. Notes seems to be full of writers complaining about poverty, a sign of the intense competition within the platform (which makes me want to reply ‘what did you expect from a writing career?’).

From the consumers’ point of view, the ideal system would allow them to pay a monthly subscription fee and read anything they want, as with Spotify. Yet even if Substack were far more generous than the music streaming service, this would be disastrous for the ‘creators’, as I suppose we’re supposed to call ourselves. Substack has attracted a lot of very good writers because it offers a great deal of money to those who succeed, and the top earners would refuse to take part in such a system. Some customers would like to pay per article, but that would also translate into a significant pay cut, unless they were perhaps allowed only one such purchase per writer; after that, you need to subscribe. A pay-per-article system would also change the incentives which currently make Substack interesting, encouraging far more clickbait.

Perhaps the alternative is bundling, whereby consumers buy paid subscriptions to 3 or 5 or 10 substacks at much reduced rates, with the income shared between the writers. Maybe it could be distributed based on how much time the consumer spends on each, although that sounds complicated, or just shared evenly.

There would need to be restrictions on how often people were able to change their line-up, either every three, six or 12 months, whatever is required to stop them endlessly switching in order to read everything. Perhaps the system could allow you to read one free article from a writer outside of your bundle, if the author agrees, to test them out for the next period.

Writers would have to opt into the bundling system, and the very high earners might not feel the need to join, but that probably wouldn’t matter; there might be issues about contrasting prices between substacks, but this doesn’t sounds like an insurmountable problem.

When I recently posted this suggestion on Notes, many people replied that I’m just reinventing the magazine. There are certainly examples of successful substack ‘magazines’, the Free Press being the obvious example, such a triumph that it has come to outgrow the New York Times by certain measures. This shows the extent to which digital media can lead to rapid scaling. There are also smaller examples like the excellent Pimlico Journal, which offers a perspective not readily available in any mainstream media, and so adds a richness to the commentary world. But this is not the ideal format for all writers.

Magazines are a wonderful invention, but they are complex organisms. They involve infrastructure. If I got together with four or five other writers, eventually we’d need to co-ordinate what subjects we were covering, ensure that no one was slacking, or getting too extreme (or maybe not extreme enough). Magazines have their own brand that needs to be protected. We’d need to have, God forbid, ‘meetings’. Just as many people within this trade are not naturally gifted salesmen or networkers, writers aren’t necessarily organisational geniuses.

The biggest difference between a magazine and a bundle is that the latter allows consumers to build their own ‘publications’, the whole purpose of Substack. Most magazine or newspaper readers will have their favourite writers, and they will have writers they have no interest in; there are also the writers they actively hate, and newspaper comments sections are full of them. Bundling would abide by the spirit of Substack, of matching readers to writers organically while also offering financial rewards for consuming more.

The main argument against bundling, from what I’ve read, is that Substack fears it would undermine writers’ earnings, and the people in San Francisco will know more about the market than I do. Having said that, I wonder if it would work out better for some medium-income writers.

I currently charge £5 a month, or £50 a year, which is near the lower end of the range, and would like to reduce this to the very minimum - roughly £4 a month or £25 a year - if I didn’t fear that demand is quite quite inelastic. I also wonder if this will give the subliminal impression that my writing is cheap, when in all honesty I do labour over every piece, which is why my hot takes are often three weeks late. (I’m still working on an article I started in 2023 about the Claudine Gay drama at Harvard, and it will be a work of history by the time I get around to posting my opinion piece.) With bundling, I would have to bet that I can double or triple the number of paid subscribers on reduced rates, and my knowledge of the economics just isn’t strong enough.

I’m sorry to end inconclusively, but this is one of those areas where I have to admit that I just don’t know. I can’t even think of a tenuous historical analogy as a hook.