Europe on fire
UK News Report #7: July 2026
I’ve spent the past week in Denmark and Norway, ending up in Bergen where it was 12 degrees and pouring with rain. It almost seemed like a relief to escape the heat wave which has led to wildfires across Europe, including Suffolk. (Dunwich, incidentally, was once one of England’s largest towns, until lost to non-man made environmental change.)
This has created the sort of dystopian scenes only imagined back in the 1990s, made especially chilling when combined with the storming of the Spanish enclave of Ceuta by tens of thousands of migrants. Both man-made climate change and migration represent a threat to Europe’s stability, but each side of the political spectrum has often shown a blind spot to a problem that is only going to accelerate. I recently wrote about global warming in Europe, and I may have addressed the issue of immigration in one or two previous posts, I can’t remember.
It didn’t come home
I love the World Cup, and not just for the football, but also the sense of humanity gathered together representing their nations. I wrote about how we often take wider meaning from sporting success, so that just because a country is good at football it doesn’t mean it isn’t going down the pan. Indeed, just before this current crisis unfolded, a New York Times column was suggesting that Spain’s victory was indicative of a country that was pulling ahead by bucking the Europe-wide turn against migration: ‘As other countries turn their backs on immigrants, Spain is also drawing attention, and praise from liberals, because of its government’s efforts to encourage immigration.’ Those efforts don’t seem to be entirely successful.
I also wrote about Scotland’s cultural pull, and how we English will never be loved in the same way. If I ever wanted to receive a warm reception while holidaying in France, I’d have to put one of those ‘Ecosse’ stickers on the car.
This cultural pull was illustrated by the arrival of the Scottish National Party’s newest MP, who received some mockery for ‘code-switching’ between English and Scottish accents. This is fairly common among people who have moved between dialectic regions, and to a certain degree unconscious: Lara Bird did at least grow up in Scotland whereas Compton Mackenzie, the novelist who co-founded the SNP’s predecessor, was born and raised in England and educated at St Paul’s in London. But, as I wrote in a follow-up piece, nationalist politicians here have not necessarily delivered very successful policies (funny that).
Among the other MPs recently elected to the Common was a man called Andy Burnham, who has since made himself king in the north. Burnham’s establishment of a court in Manchester, in a business park straight out of The Office, is a nice Retvrn to tradition, to the days when the king travelled around the country dispensing justice, and plague. The cost of these travels could be enormous, and often bankrupt the local gentry forced to host them. Indeed Parliament often met outside of London, converging on York, Nottingham and Leicester at various times, until the last provincial meetings took place in Oxford in 1681.
Aris Roussinos suggested that ‘Parliament should follow Burnham’s peregrinations around the country like the court of a medieval king, assembling in various Travelodges as state business requires.’ An alternative interpretation, one suggested by reader Aidan Barrett, is that this is the United Kingdom in its 4th century stage; the elite has accepted the new religion, and now the emperor is moving the capital elsewhere.
One of Burham’s first promises was to end rough sleeping, although he has failed to do so in Manchester and I’m not sure he or anyone in his government is ready to face some uncomfortable truths about why western cities are all plagued by the ‘unhoused’.
Homelessness is a prime example of how second-order effects have deadly consequences. The Government recently repealed the Vagrancy Act, meaning that the police will no longer be able to arrest someone for loitering, although the law was barely enforced anyway. There are already tent cities all over our major cities, and this will make it worse, another example of how lawmakers do not understand, or care about, basic second order effects - so long as they are seen to be compassionate.
Someone with a lot of experience of this subject, former Met special constable Ned Donovan, wrote a piece about the problems of housing the homeless. Many of the solutions to homelessness involve doing things which progressives find distasteful: for example, over half of London’s rough sleepers are from overseas, but Tory government attempts to fly them home were blocked both by courts and uncooperative Labour councils.
Indeed, Heathrow Airport recently unveiled an eastern European Roma Big Issue seller advertising the country to newcomers, which some might not consider as something to boast about - as Will Solfiac wrote about back in 2023. The Euston Road, where many tech companies have set up, now has a giant predominantly Roma homeless encampment, just to make all the Californians feel at home.
The Heathrow advertising is also an illustration of how the country’s cultural elites are deeply parochial, and have no comprehension about what the rest of the world values about Britain. Honestly, I’ve lost track of the number of Chinese and Japanese tourists who’ve told me that they come to London to see beggars from eastern Europe.
A Boy Named Q
I recently wrote about another Scottish politician, Green Party MSP ‘Q Manivannan’, who was allowed to stand for office despite having only limited leave to remain and not having the right to work.
Srivatsan Manivannan is a ‘transgender Tamil immigrant’, who now call himself ‘Q’ and identifies as non-binary, describing himself as ‘passionate about more caring politics rooted in the working class, the queer, and the solidary’. Currently engaged in a research project called ‘Archiving and (Re)imagining Caregiving as Peacebuilding in Third World Social Movements’, at the time of his election he was also crowdfunding £2,000 to pay for his visa, apparently too impoverished to pay for it himself.
And, of course, it turns out he owns a £200,000 house back in India. Once you notice how many progressive activists and politicians are Global South Aristocrats, you see them everywhere. Just watch any footage from the Oxford Union and invariably it will be someone whose family wouldn’t even touch the lower orders, or still owned slaves around the time of the Beatles’ first LP, lecturing the West about its human rights record and racism.
