Politics latest news: People want immigration controls, Tony Blair warns Keir Starmer.

I think there is a centre ground that can hold which is where people understand there are enormous benefits to immigration, and by the way a lot of what we are talking about, these great AI innovations, look at the people leading them, many of them are immigrants into this country. 

I studied French at A level fifty years ago. The only lines of French poetry that have stuck in my mind all those years are these;

Les sanglots longs des violons de l’automne blessent mon coeur d’une langeur monotone. 

It’s from Chanson d’automne by Paul Verlaine, who was born — I found out this week — in Metz. I visited his birthplace; an unassuming apartment building near the Palais de Justice. It wasn’t open so I didn’t go inside. Interestingly, given the 80th anniversary of D-Day currently being celebrated, those lines were broadcast by the Allies to signal the imminent landings to the French Resistance.

My first conversation with the late Mrs P. was on that A level course. Her father later told me I'd made quite an impression. She was the star student and teachers pet. I was comme çi, comme ça — I eventually scored a C. She was infuriated by my dominance in the conversation classes and protested too much about me to her family for the importance of the grievance.

I’ve been expecting to see you for some time,

her father wryly observed, when first I met him. 

The teacher whose pet she was, was a cynical careerist. He later escaped the boredom he never bothered to conceal by becoming Director of Education for our County Council. It was not he who introduced us to Verlaine and Rimbaud (who had a passionate romantic affair in their youth). That fell to a prudish lady whom I teased with constant sly references to the affair. In the 1970s teachers had not yet been trained to praise and promote homosexuality. The poor lady loved their poems and — blushing furiously — defended their “honour” from my insinuations.

A more influential teacher for me was an eccentric who took his three best male pupils to France every year in his Renault 4. My worst enemy, a friend and I qualified when we were 12. After inviting our parents over to meet his wife (and thus be reassured) it was he who took me to France for the first time. It was my first visit abroad. We camped our way down to the Loire Valley and its chateaux — and back.

I remember being impressed by the flying buttresses of Chartres Cathedral and the beauty of the Château de Chenonceau. From the Eiffel Tower in Paris we looked down to watch him be arrested for sunbathing shirtless while he waited for us. Skin cancer was no more discussed than gayness back then. He sunbathed constantly to maintain his nut brown tan. Quite a character, who wouldn’t last ten minutes in suspicious modern times, but a good teacher who believed in what he did.

I wonder what influence these teachers had on my eventual international career — all unforeseen then in rural Wales. As I sit in the lawyers’ quarter of Metz I’m pretty sure they didn’t know France’s legal system differs more profoundly from ours than its language does.

Given a year living here, language would not be a problem. I love the lifestyle, good manners and culture. However I’d miss the organic, bottom-up nature of English Common Law and the way it informs our attitudes. Abolish Parliament, repeal every statute made by our politicians and within five years we’d once more have the best legal system in the world, grown organically in the soil of our everyday experiences.

We have humble courts of law. They have palaces of “justice” (yes those are sneer quotes). Our laws grew like mushrooms. Theirs are gifts from on high for people to submit to gratefully (or evade). Just as Shariah is a gift from Allah, so Civil Code is a gift from Ancient Rome, rewrapped by Bonaparte. You can build a civilisation on it — they have and I am fond of it — but I couldn’t breathe their legal air for long.

One good reason to leave the EU was to prevent more generations of our politicians being infected with the pompous self-importance of theirs. It may take decades to get our MPs back to humility, but our future depends on it.

Before returning to my hotel to process photos and blog, I had lunch at La Bistro de la Cathedrale, TripAdvisor top pick for Metz. I had my most substantial meal for days and thoroughly enjoyed it, staying on afterwards to enjoy a Ricard in the sunshine.   

My album of Metz photos has been updated.

The Football Association was asked to light up the iconic arch at Wembley Stadium in the colours of the Israeli flag. They refused. This has been widely condemned. In my view sport should never "do" politics. When a friend asked me to write to the FA in support of the request to light up the arch, I politely refused on those grounds. So, in a sense, I think the FA is right. However, having virtue-signalled relentlessly on other non-sporting issues for years, there is something sinister about the fact that it won't in this case.

The FA had footballers kneel in solidarity with a single foreign criminal who was unlawfully killed, but won't express sympathy with more than a thousand murdered innocents. After the terrorist attack in Paris in 2015, the FA's officials lit up the arch in French colours. They were happy to express the support many of us felt for a nation that, if presented with a big red magic button that would erase England from history, would lose lives in the stampede to press it. Yet they choose to remain neutral between the vicious, anti-semitic, baby-butcherers of Hamas and their victims. 

It was undoubtedly a mistake ever to mix sport with politics. I should not be put into a position at Craven Cottage where the nice young asian guy who sits next to me has to wonder if I am a racist when I don't stand when our players "take the knee." My refusal to acquiesce in virtue-signalling at the behest of the Marxist monsters of BLM isn't racist at all but I am not at the Cottage for a political discussion. I'm there for the joy of sport and an escape from the tedium of my politically-polluted life. I deeply resent the Premier League, Football Association and indeed the club putting me in an awkward political position at a football match.

The truth is that the FA's inconsistency arises from cowardice. On the day of the Hamas invasion, its supporters were dancing for joy (as captured on video by Countdown's Rachel Riley and published on her Twitter feed) on a street 0.6 miles from where I live in West London. According to the 2021 census, our city's cultural diversity is enriched by the presence of 1.3 million adherents of "the religion of peace." Quite a few – it seems from such celebrations – take pleasure in Hamas barbarism. The FA is unsure of how many fall into that category and – given their history of violent response to perceived slights - is afraid to annoy them.

The FA might also be justified in worrying that The Metropolitan Police force service is so afraid of offending British Muslims that – if they did kick off at Wembley in the non-football sense – it wouldn't hold them to the same legal standards as other Londoners. I wouldn't personally be surprised to see the Met – firmly a part of Britain's Leftist Establishment – side with them.

I don't agree with those calling for the police to suppress pro-Hamas celebrations or demonstrations. Hamas is legally designated as a terrorist group in the UK and it is a crime to support them, but I think that's a legal mistake. They are no more revolutionary, violent or bloodthirsty than many social science lecturers in our universities and no-one is calling (nor should they) for their vile Marxist ideology to be suppressed. Besides, I welcome their free speech. As a practical matter, I need to know who are the murderous sorts among my neighbours. I need that knowledge to inform my decisions about my socialising, my shopping and indeed whether I choose to keep living where I do.

I have every confidence in the Israel Defence Force's ability to respond appropriately to Hamas. I am on Israel's side – as every civilised human should now be – and simply wish them (as they would wish themselves) a speedy victory with minimum bloodshed. I am more interested in what I have learned in the past week about the state of my own nation and its capital city. Evil is among us and our response to it is – as evidenced by the FA's pusillanimity – far too naive, timid and weak. I fear we are going to pay a price for that before too long.

The key battle of ideas is (and in modern times has always been) between collectivism and individualism. Gentle reader, you know which side I favour.

We have a problem though. Humans are pack animals, hard-wired to approve of those who sacrifice for the greater good of family, friends or nation. I am as thorough an individualist as you could hope to meet, yet everything in my own life that I am proud of involved serving the interests of others.

It's all too easy to denigrate individualism as selfishness.

Collectivists play on those instincts with their constant talk of "community" but their collectivism is not about kindness and willing self-sacrifice. It may have always taken a village to raise a child, but only willing villagers of whom the parents approved were involved. When that homely expression is used by those seeking to disempower parents and force state intervention, it should be seen for the cynical propaganda it is.

Some people are brown, black or white. Some people are gay, some straight and some trans. Humans espouse a wide range of religious faiths and some have none. Within those groups there is such a range of morality, productiveness and creativity that they simply don't – except in rare cases where they face a common threat – function as communities. They don't think or act as one unit. There is no reason why they should.

To use the modern jargon, their identities as member of one or other group intersect with all the other ways they think of themselves (and others think of them). Those intersections are not only on the lines approved by woke academia. They also intersect with all their other – far more important – characteristics; such as their kindness, generosity, morality, prudence, wisdom, industry and knowledge.

It's all far more complicated than collectivists would have us believe. So complicated that the only sensible way to treat everyone we meet – whatever their visible or claimed attributes – is as someone who might turn out to be anything (or nothing) to us – i.e. as an individual. The only rational way to deal with a new human is quietly to assess what Dr King called "the content of their character" and then behave accordingly.

Collectivists simplify hatefully in order to justify their love of force. Collectivists pioneered the concept of the hate crime and constantly accuse opponents of hatred. Given their constant attempt to set group against group, it's hard not to think the whole concept is largely projection.

A gay criminal should be (and I am sure, is) no less a criminal to another gay person. If you're black you don't (and should not be able to) expect the unconditional approval of other black people. The only reason these "communities" are spoken of so constantly is that collectivists want to move them as pawns on the political chessboard.

There are undoubted political efficiencies in this. On average black and brown Britons are more socially conservative than white ones. Judging by the number of small businesses run by ethnic minorities, I'd venture to guess that more of them are economically conservative too. Yet the Labour Party has played the race card so effectively that it's caught in unguarded racist moments saying someone was only "superficially black", because he'd left their political reservation. All over the Western World, collectivist parties behave as if the votes of ethnic minorities are their property. Indeed as if the members of those minorities are themselves their property. 

In the end, the serious danger of collectivism and its "identity politics" is that it leads to demands for collective punishment. No-one uses that dreadful expression because it brings to mind totalitarians in history punishing kulaks, Jews or others deemed enemies of their cause indiscriminately. The favoured euphemism for collective punishment now is "social justice", which is always – without exception and by definition– unjust.

True justice looks at the actions and intentions of individuals and decides on their individual guilt or innocence. Social justice says "Group A hurt Group B and all members of Group A must pay" – even the descendants of the alleged wrong-doers who could not – rightly understood – be any more innocent. 

If you follow an ideology that justifies the punishment of innocents among a class, race or creed just because of their membership of that group, you have gone morally astray. Your ideology is – in your own terms– a hate crime.

I was picked for a jury in the end. Our verdict was delivered last Thursday. I can now discuss the case and the proceedings in court but it remains illegal to discuss our deliberations. I will say nothing here about what went on in the jury room. All opinions are my own. I do not speak for other jurors.

I won't identify the case though you may guess from the details here. I am sure the defendant will be pleased if you do. He's a full-time political campaigner and told the court repeatedly that he wanted to be arrested and charged so he could have his "day in court" to speak out about "the real criminals" in HM Government. He claims to have played the Metropolitan Police and Crown Prosecution Service for fools in order to achieve that goal.

I suspect he will have been disappointed. The trial attracted little press interest. All accounts I have seen since it ended (I didn't look while it was in progress, as directed by the judge) are identically worded so probably came from a single agency. The defendant will have hoped for more journalists to show up. 

The defendant estimates his impact on the world very highly. On the day he was arrested, he was protesting a suggestion that HMG might send teams armed with COVID-19 jabs into the homes of the unvaccinated. He believes that plan – which he described as terrorism – was never implemented because of his actions that day.

I doubt the idea would ever have been acted upon. Even taking needles to the doorsteps of the potentially unwilling would not have gone down well, let alone the forced vaccinations he seemed to think were intended. The vaccination teams would have needed police protection and the "optics" in a world where people film such things on their mobile phones would have been awful. 

The defendant's motivations were only relevant to understanding why he was there that day. They were not relevant to his guilt or innocence. He wasn't prosecuted for his opinions. In fact, his own video showed the police officer waiting patiently while he expressed his opinions on a FaceBook live stream.

He was arrested outside the home of a prominent politician. His arrest was for criminal damage due to a miscommunication between police officers. Accepting he had not committed that crime, the CPS authorised an intent charge instead. He was indicted for taking objects (posters and glue) to the scene with intent to cause criminal damage. 

He had been arrested fourteen times before but never brought to trial. It would have been easier to get his day in court if he had been more robust in his actions. He was keen to point out that he abhorred violence and differentiated himself from the "Stop Oil" protestors prepared to commit crimes to make their point. He seems to have been carefully calibrating his actions so as to get arrested without offering any violence. I think he might well have been released without charge for a fifteenth time if it were not for the police miscommunication.

He claimed in court he brought the posters and glue to give the impression that he was going to put them up. He did so to get arrested and charged. The Crown's evidence was his video saying he would put up the posters and redacted extracts from a police interview in which he said several times that he would have done so. He had lied to the police so that he would be arrested and charged. He never intended to cause criminal damage. He just wanted his "day in court". 

It seems to me he was guilty of wasting police time by telling those lies. The Criminal Law Act 1967 says;

Where a person causes any wasteful employment of the police by knowingly making to any person a false report tending to show that an offence has been committed, or to give rise to apprehension for the safety of any persons or property, or tending to show that he has information material to any police inquiry, he shall be liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for not more than six months or to a fine of not more than two hundred pounds or to both.

So his defence to Crime A was that he had committed Crime B.

The defendant was the only defence witness. I found it hard not to smile when his counsel earnestly pointed out her client didn't have to give evidence. It was obvious that time on the stand was his goal. Prosecution counsel tried to keep him to the point in cross-examination but his own counsel (probably on instructions) let him ramble. The judge was polite to the point of indulgence in this respect, but did cut him off a couple of times when he strayed too far from the subject at hand.

His opinions were irrelevant to his guilt or innocence. It didn't matter what was on his posters or why. All the jury had to decide was whether we were sure he intended to glue them to the politician's home. The judge's summing up and directions were clear and painstakingly impartial. He said the defendant claimed to have been "bluffing" to the police about his intentions, rather than "lying", for example. There were three components to the alleged crime; having the materials, intending to use them and lacking a lawful excuse. There was no dispute about his having the materials and no suggestion of a lawful excuse. 

We returned a verdict of not guilty and I am comfortable with our decision. I am also comfortable with our jury system. After this experience, I am happy and relieved still to retain my confidence in this ancient institution. We took our responsibilities very seriously. We discussed all relevant issues at length and came to a mature conclusion on the evidence. I was actually rather impressed.

From time to time, especially when juries don't deliver the results our establishment would like, there is pressure to "reform" the jury system. Such suggestions should be resisted. In general, though as Kant said "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made",  juries do justice rather well. If I were charged with a crime of which I was not guilty, I would want a jury to decide my fate.

There's much scope for reform of criminal justice in our country. The courts could certainly be far better run. The time wasted is horrifying. That horror is amplified by the calm acceptance of it by officials to whom it is obviously normal. To be fair perhaps that's because my life was spent in the private sector where time is money and money is survival? Maybe fellow jurors from public sector backgrounds were not nearly as shocked by all the faffing about?

I don't think so though because this was not my first experience of it. I began my legal career in the 1980s doing criminal defence work. The partner who offered me that job was a renowned specialist. The law had recently been changed to allow specially-qualified solicitors to appear in higher courts. He found out I had done well in the first advocacy training course for solicitors to lead to that qualification.

I enjoyed advocacy and was probably suited to the work. I had wanted in my youth to be an actor and, to be honest, I liked the performative aspects. I gave it up after a year to do commercial work partly because I hated the amount of time wasted on waiting around. The courts were as organised as any monopoly needs to be – i.e. not at all. I couldn't imagine a life driven by that. This week reassured me I chose correctly all those years ago.

As someone with a real estate background I was also shocked by the poor design and layout of the modern buildings housing the court.

In the private sector HM Government is known as "the simple shopper." All its spending is in Milton Friedman's fourth category of "someone else's money spent on someone else." It's famously useless at purchasing; typically securing neither quality nor value.

I can only assume, from the sublimely inefficient layout, that the architects who designed our court building saw "the simple shopper" coming a mile off.

The biggest difference from my long-ago experience of the courts was all the technology. Not only are there laptops and tablets everywhere, it has affected evidence-gathering too. Back in the day, the jury would have heard about the events in this case from policemen reading (with permission) from their (paper) notebooks. We got to see the events over and over again on video from FaceBook.

As in so many aspects of modern life, we have more data to process. The question is whether it leads to better decisions or just wastes more of our time. On that, gentle reader, the jury is still out. 

Celebrity gossip is not my thing. This case has been particularly unedifying. In a rational world, people would now pay less attention to the opinions of play actors, having seen what shallow, narcissistic souls (and I speak as a devoted theatre person who admires their professional skills) they often are.

What has been interesting about the trial is the MSM vs Social Media aspect of it. Wounded journos bemoan the fact that people have followed the trial – not through the lens of their analysis and opinion – but via such odd channels as TikTok. I understand their point of view. They are professionals and would like people to trust them. However, they just don't seem to understand the role they played in losing that trust. They would do better to work hard to win it back, rather than insult the customers they've so clearly lost. The intense social media interest in a defamation trial shows the demand for coverage is there. Perhaps they should begin to think about how best to meet it? No-one (as the Remain campaign has still not learned) was ever insulted or abused into agreement. It's just bad advocacy. 

I have watched a couple of the videos of which they complain out of curiosity. They consisted of people I had never heard of pointing fingers and raising eyebrows in the corner of a screen showing video from the court. Every so often they'd point downwards to a "subscribe" button. Having practised law myself, I was just as unimpressed as the journalists with this approach to court reporting. Unlike the journalists, I recognised that their customers' preference for it is a profound critique of the MSM. Just how much trust have you lost, dear journalists, that people trust these clowns more?

I formed a strong suspicion that the "influencers" in question had a very limited understanding of what was going on. That didn't particularly concern me. Most people don't understand most laws and still less most court procedures. That "influencers" can make money grimacing thus doesn't bother me. Good luck to them. What was really amusing however was the reaction on social media to the outcome of the trial. The "believe the victim without ever establishing they were a victim" mob is in uproar. Some hilariously misguided points are being made.

Firstly this bubble of fanatics is convinced that the ravings of their social media foes during the trial somehow influenced the outcome. If only people had read their tweets and not those of the Nazis*, Ms Heard would have won. Firstly, she didn't entirely lose. Mr Depp's suit succeeded. She did defame him. Part of her counter-suit succeeded. He did defame her. Whatever damages he wins will be offset by the damages she wins. They've both damaged their careers with this nonsense and (as so often) only the lawyers have really won. As a retired lawyer, I am relaxed about that. I am confident both legal teams will make better use of these idiots' wealth than they would have done themselves. I see excellent private educations in their offsprings' future!

Secondly, the jurors were among the few people in America without access to the social media (or indeed the mainstream media) coverage. They were probably (statistically) also among the majority of Americans who don't pay much attention to the enraged rants of people correcting other people's errors on the internet. The jurors formed a view on the evidence presented to them in court. They did so with guidance from the judge as to its relevance. Legal process is not perfect in America or anywhere else but it wouldn't have to be very good to be a more reliable route to truth than Twitter etc.

I read an exchange today where someone told a tweeter saying the jury had not believed Ms Heard that it might be true "in his bubble" but evidence from agencies in the field proved otherwise. I have never seen a point more spectacularly missed. Statistical evidence from social work or law enforcement agencies in the field may or may not prove that most domestic abusers are male and most victims female, but that says literally nothing about the facts of this (or any other) specific case. That some women are abused does not prove this one was. 

When studying law I was taught that modern civilisation began when legal relations stopped being determined by status and were instead determined by contract. Much energy is now being expended to reverse that. Rather than reviewing their evidence to determine what happened between two equals in law, we are being asked to accept that Ms Heard is telling the truth because she's a woman and that Mr Depp is an abuser because he's a man. Let's pass over for the moment that the very people insisting women can't lie can't define a woman. They are essentially reviving the medieval concept of "nobility" to ascribe inherent moral superiority to new categories of nobles. 

Surely they can see this is a route back to the "status" oppressions of old? If someone is always to be believed because of their status (rather like a feudal prince or lord) they will be able to oppress those of lesser status with false accusations. As in the story of Robin Hood, where a lie about the outlaw's father allowed a superior lord to seize his land, so modern lesser humans will lose out to unscrupulous members of the new "nobility".

Economic equality is a crock of shit. All attempts to enforce it will create poverty at best. Equality before the law, however, is the beating heart of a healthy civilisation. If you are claiming legal privilege on the basis of your status being anything other than just "human", you are an enemy of civilisation itself. What are now called "protected characteristics" may (or may not) be significant politically but, to be just, the law should be blind to them.

*Anyone who disagrees with them.

Firstly, some sad news. Some of you will  – like me – have once followed JMB's Blog Nobody Important. It's open only to invited readers now but back in the heyday of blogging (when we all thought citizen journalism was going to change the world) you will remember her often mentioning her husband, whom she dubbed "The Old Scientist". I am sorry to report that he has passed away at the age of 89. I had the pleasure to meet him just once, when I stayed at their home in Vancouver on my North American road trip in 2013. He was a decent man who lived his life well and I feel for my friend in her loss.

Secondly, as I seem to have exposed more of my personal life than usual of late, just a brief report that – though my situation is as sad as before – I am getting on with my life and feeling better. I had a good run in Speranza to visit my parents last weekend. There are not many Ferraris in the world with over 91,000 miles on the clock, but (touch wood) she's in fine fettle and running well. I don't know why I don't drive her more. Call me shallow and materialistic, but she lifts my spirits every time. It is hard to feel sorry for yourself on the open road at the wheel of a bella macchina. I can't wait for borders to be properly re-opened so I can visit my friends on the Continent. 

Thirdly, a brief "state of the nation" summary from my point of view. If you think I am wrong, please tell me. Trust me; I would love to be wrong. 

It is gradually dawning on the British public that they've been had over COVID. They still don't tell the pollsters so but it's becoming an object lesson in the difference between stated preferences (which often signal "virtue" or seek to give the questioner what s/he wants) and revealed preferences (shown by how we behave in practice). For example, when out and about in London it's clear that only state fanatics and submissives are still wearing masks. I dutifully obeyed when on public transport in London for most of the Scare, but now I just carry one to wear if challenged by an official. Most travellers are not wearing them and the submissives now dare to do no more than cast a stink-eye. I hope the divisive hatreds stirred up by Government propaganda will now die down but I fear that many friendships have been irremediably broken. 

Most of the West panicked in a very similar fashion, though Florida has thankfully provided a control group for an experiment that would otherwise have lacked one. As data reveals the ineffectiveness of non-medical interventions (the use of state force) we can therefore expect a united front from the global establishment and its lickspittles in the media. Data will be spun. Evidence will be bought, paid for and rigged. Every government will point at all the others and say "we followed global best practice based on the data we had at the time." That may have been true for a month or two at the beginning but it's clear now that the British Government, for example, knew damned well that its tyrannical measures were not necessary. The real scandal of "partygate" is not that Downing Street civil servants at the heart of the state apparatus ignored the law. It is that their conduct reveals they knew their propaganda was false and/or wildly exaggerated. 

If they believed what they told us, the law would have been irrelevant because they would have been too scared not to comply. 

The British Establishment is safe however. Not least because, as it metaphorically thrashed the British public, HM Opposition's only complaint was that the whip was not thick enough, was not applied soon enough and was wielded with insufficient vigour. The Labour Party is not going to hold HM Government's feet to the fire for forgetting our every liberal tradition because HMG's ripostes will all be examples of Labour's demands for more, more, more state violence. 

It's hard to say now (as I have believed my whole life) that Labour cares less about Liberty than the Conservatives. I am not sure the latter has left any space at the authoritarian end of the political spectrum for Labour to occupy. The "Conservative" knee-jerk reaction to a perceived threat was to boss us all about in excruciating detail, while borrowing on a colossal scale to throw public money at the problem. If a Labour manifesto were ever to be written in plain English, that's pretty much what it would say. As "Conservative" support for government tyranny weakened, Boris Johnson, in effect, became the Leader of the Labour Party – herding its lobby-fodder to vote for his measures. Every time he wrote about Liberty (and he has done so many times in his career as a journalist) he lied. He may be the cleverest PM we've ever had, but he's also (and I recognise this is a huge claim) the least principled.

Intelligence without principles is more dangerous than the politicians' usual dozy uselessness. I see no better replacement from either side of the House, but he must go. 

I cannot imagine ever bringing myself to vote again. I have always voted (as I remember explaining to my Polish teacher as she prepared to vote for the first time in the immediate post-Communist era) in the cynical manner of an intelligent citizen of a long-standing democracy. I know them all for rogues. Their aspiring to have power over their fellows while living on them parasitically reveals them as such. So I have always voted for the robbers who would steal – and the thugs who would bully – less. I never saw my vote (except perhaps during the Thatcher years) as anything more than a damage-limitation excercise. When push came to shove, however, it seems – even in my world-weary cynicism – I was deluding myself.

Can we hope for any useful lessons to be learned from the pan-panic? When the butcher's bill is received for the non-COVID patients killed by state action, will it give politicians pause for the next emergency? We can hope so. I fear what they have mostly learned, however, is that if they deploy their psychological-warfare "nudge" units effectively enough, they can get us to put up with far more than they'd previously dreamed of. Buckle up, friends. I suspect you're going to see more of your governing classes than you previously feared.

Every stage of life has its joys, sorrows and consolations. Looking back, I smile at how stressful I found it to be young. I was so afraid of failure; so anxious to get things right. In middle age, with those anxieties largely allayed, I found myself burdened with responsibility for others; a responsibility I had campaigned earnestly to assume, by the way. As I approach old age, those responsibilities are gone too. No-one depends on me. My children are independent. I have no employees to worry about providing with work. I can even glory in the triumphs of the young people I mentored, who are now achieving their own successes. I could shuffle off this mortal coil today with no sense of a task left undone. 

Before COVID, I was enjoying that. I was as carefree as in my youth. In fact, more so as I was without the burden of parental, societal or –most onerous of all – personal hopes and expectations. I could reflect on my life and that of my nation or even species. I could read, think, visit museums and galleries, travel and engage in my photographic hobby. I could meet with my friends and smile during our conversations at the truth of the old joke that "the older we get, the better we were." Looking back on lives lived so anxiously at the time, our triumphs seem inevitable and perhaps even (after a few good drinks) deserved.

Post-COVID, things are different. I have not personally been directly affected by the disease itself. Only one friend contracted it and he, thank goodness, survived. Actually I should not thank goodness as he lives in a corrupt post-Soviet state and crimes had to be committed to save his life. He survived a seven hour wait for an ambulance by virtue dint of another friend paying a bribe for oxygen to be brought to his home. Best not to ask from where that was procured. Let's just hope it was not from the bedside of someone who still needed it. Then he avoided admission to a lethally-unhygienic state hospital that would have killed him by bribing the ambulance-driver to take him to a private facility. There even cash would not have secured treatment were it not for luck. He happened to have been the lawyer for the oligarch who owned that facility in connection with its financing and still had his phone number. Calling him and then handing the phone to the doctor denying admission finally saved the day – and his life. His story tells more about statism and the corruption it brings than it does about disease. 

At a micro level then, I continue to be blessed. I have a comfortable home in which to be confined. I have a loving wife with whom to be confined. I have every technical facility to stay in communication (I first wrote "touch" but that of course is forbidden) with friends and family. The only real cost to me has been the death of my last illusions. 

COVID has been a wet dream for every statist, apparatchik and thug. I have long said that an over-mighty state is a magnet for the worst in society. COVID has proved it. 

My nostalgic vision of the British Bobby protecting honest citizens from crime has long been out of date, I know. Yet it was hard to shake the feeling for the boys in blue my parents instilled in me. My mum would make a point of stopping and talking to the local policeman whenever we encountered him when I was a child. She would tell me this was the person I should go to if I were lost, in trouble or just needed to know the time. He was my protector and friend. Sorry Mum, but he isn't and never was. His true nature has been revealed as he has gleefully leapt on the chance presented by COVID to bully and swagger.

I was taught to revere teachers too. There is, I always used to say, no more valuable profession in any civilisation. A society could be judged by the value it placed on its teachers. COVID has exposed that as sentimental tosh too as the teaching unions have used the opportunity to dodge work and to hell with the education and welfare of the children in their members charge. All other public sector unions have done the same. Our public "servants" are our actual deep state masters and their contempt for us has been revealed beyond all reasonable doubt.

This is not COVID related, but has happened during the same period. The Court of Appeal destroyed my faith in the judiciary. I personally witnessed the Shrewsbury pickets in action. I know the truth, but to write it again would now be actionable – so I won't. All I can say here is that the law is an ass. 

Though I remember well how upset they were by the death of President Kennedy and how they grieved the death of Winston Churchill, my parents never taught me to love and trust politicians, thank God. So that disillusionment has not been so severe. In fact COVID has not made me think any worse of them. In fact, I have some sympathy with HM Government's plight as a panicked population has cried out for ever-more-tyrannical measures and HM Opposition has only ever opposed them for not acting harshly enough.

I have repeatedly said in the run up to elections that, this time, I will not vote. I have always gone on to do it. I was brought up to treasure democracy as something my ancestors fought for. I felt a duty to their memory to exercise my right. This time I didn't. Perhaps I would have done if I lived in Hartlepool; not from any affection for the party that won but to enjoy the discomfiture of the entitled villains who have so long believed they own the Northern working class among whom I grew up.

In London, there was no point. Khan was a nailed-on winner. There were no credible candidates running on a platform of more liberty and less state. It was – as all elections now seem to be – a menu of different poisons. None of the thugs, bandits and rent-seeking hoodlums in power can say this time that I supported them. Not that they care, but it gives me some small satisfaction.

The wisdom of age is the realisation of how little we can know and the humility that comes with that. It seems I am finally wise but I was happier being foolish.

I joined the Conservative Party as a young man (having recently recanted my teenaged Maoism) because of Margaret Thatcher. She was not headed to the same destination as me, ideologically, but she was at least pointing in the right direction to be my fellow-traveller. She was socially-conservative in a way that I was not (I led my University Conservative Association on a gay rights march, for example and supported the Federation of Conservative Students' policy on legalising drugs that led her to shut us down) but she was clear-sighted, principled and above all moral.

Her morals were not entirely mine, but I would rather be led by someone with morals than without and she was the only moral Prime Minister of my lifetime so far. Most, like the current incumbent, were amoral going on sociopathic (fairly usual for high-achievers in most fields, to be fair) and some, like Gordon Brown or John Major, were actively immoral. Once she was hounded out, I left the Party. I was, for some years, a Thatcherite but I was never a Tory.

So I am not blind to the lady's faults. Leaving aside her inclination to use the state as an instrument of her personal morality, she also made some policy misjudgements and we still live with their consequences. 

She misidentified the key threats to liberty in Britain. Hindsight is cheap, I know, but the trade unions in mining and other productive industries were already on the way out. The real threat to our future was in our schools and colleges, where children were already being consistently taught a warped view of history and a contempt for economics in general and the market system in particular. In my education during the 1960s and 1970s I may perhaps have had a Conservative teacher. It's possible, but even then their discretion was by far the greater part of their valour. I can only surmise because no possibly Conservative school teacher dared say so. My Socialist teachers, of course, never shut up about it and when I studied Law at university, there was not even one discreetly-silent lecturer I could optimistically imagine to be non-Left.

Margaret, as Education Minister, should arguably have grasped that generation after generation of our youth could not be processed through such a thoroughly infiltrated, ideologically-monochrome system without lasting damage. Such was her own strength of character that I suspect she simply didn't understand the problem. She was not weak and pliable. No leftist teacher impeded her ideological journey. Why should others not see through them too? She was also focussed on achieving one of the great offices of State, and probably regarded the Ministry of Education as a "woman's job" with which she had been fobbed off. She may even have had a point. For myself, I regard education as supremely important – all the more so for having had to get so much of mine from independent reading, in spite of (and it really was quite often for the perverse pleasure of spiting) my would-be indoctrinators.

I recently finished reading the excellent book "Factfulness" mentioned in my last post. The research that was the life's work of its author Hans Rosling demonstrates that leaders in both public and private sectors waste much effort addressing problems that no longer exist. Like many people achieving power or influence in late middle age, Margaret was often focussed – at best – on the problems of her own youth, and – at worst – on those of her teachers' youth.

Arguably, a consequence of another of her errors is in the news this morning. Focussed as she was on reducing the state's area of operations, Margaret was resisted at every turn by the Deep State. As a leader who wanted a smaller state apparatus her main advisers throughout her premiership were the leading members of that apparatus, whose success in life was not gauged by their productive contribution to society but by the size of the department under their control.

So when the trendy idea of "care in the community" came forward it must have been a relief to have some advice that was consistent with her small state ideology – or at least that could be made to seem so. There was an undoubted need for reform of mental healthcare. There are well-documented cases of people who were unable to escape from what used to be called "lunatic asylums", despite having fully-recovered from the problems that led to their admission. In some cases, people were trapped in them for decades on the basis of a misdiagnosis. So the radical idea of closing them down and entrusting the care of the mentally ill to their families, local social services and other community institutions must have seemed attractive – especially as the real estate boom of the time (in which my career as a property lawyer was incubating) offered good returns from the large buildings in larger grounds that would be "liberated."

In fairness to the Deep State Leftists behind the idea, her government seized mainly on the "close and sell off the mental hospitals" idea and less on the "build community resources" part. If she had implemented the policy as they had wished (and I don't know why I bother to say so as it's true of everything they ever propose) it would probably have cost much more than the old system and would certainly have added to the Deep State voter-farm of public sector workers who can be relied upon to vote Labour in order to secure an ever-growing state for them to feed on.

According to Jonty Bravery's prosecutor

“He said he had to prove a point to ‘every idiot’ who had ever said he did not have a mental health problem; that he should not be in the community.”

I do not blame my local council's social workers for this psychopath's misdiagnosis, even though evidence was given during his trial that he told them he intended to kill to make his point. People say crazy things and, sadly, it's best that they are not taken too seriously unless and until they act on them. With hindsight we can all wish the poor Ealing employee (who must feel terrible right now) that Bravery told his plan had acted differently. So differently that his poor child victim and his family had been spared their insufferable horrors. In truth if they had made a fuss they would more likely have been criticised for it. I doubt it would have affected the outcome. I am not known for my empathy with state employees, but social workers do a job that, mostly, can't be done. They're often on a hiding to nothing whatever choice they make.

Yes, it's now clear that Jonty Bravery is a psychopath. He's crazy but he's not stupid. Yes, he was prepared to kill if it served his purpose. That's what differentiates psychopaths from the often high-functioning sociopaths I worked alongside in my profession and the various businesses we served. His essential point seems to have been (and in this respect he was right) that given his condition he could not be expected to live "in the community". He was one of those monsters Nature occasionally sends among us and well beyond being socialised. He needed to be in permanent, secure, residential care away from the community and under the supervision of trained carers.

Now he is.

From his tragically-warped perspective, everything is working out precisely as planned. It's horrific and scarring for his victim's family, but it's no surprise that he has smiled his way through his trial. His sentence is no punishment. He now has what he wants for the rest of his life. My point is that – without the Thatcher government's mistake in seizing upon a crazily misguided Deep State policy proposal, he could have had it without killing anyone. Maybe she should have stuck to her principles even more strictly than she usually did?

Racism is stupid. Humans come in different shades for obvious biological reasons to do with the intensity of sunlight where their ancestors grew up. Apart from calculating intake of Vitamin D when living in cold climates, it shouldn’t matter. Yet people keep on making it matter — for all kinds of reasons; few if any of them good. 

America’s race relations problems arise from its shameful history with slavery. Black Americans clearly feel a sense of solidarity based on that history. I can understand the magnificent language of the Declaration of Independence or the majestic ideas behind the US Constitution are tainted for black American students knowing, as they learn about them, that they didn’t apply to their ancestors. It must be hard for them to take the same pride in the foundation of their great nation as white classmates. I get that “Plymouth Rock landed on us” idea. 

Many White Americans do feel a corresponding sense of shame but it’s daft to feel guilty for stuff people who share some random attribute with you did. Short people are not to blame for Napoleon and nor (fun though it is to tease them about him) are French people. No doubt we all do feel pride and shame about our ancestors’ achievements and sins, but it’s nuts to base law or policy on those irrational feelings or to allow them to taint relationships today. 

Even if we were to go down the mad road of punishing people for the sins of the fathers, we’d have to find out what those ‘fathers” actually did, person by person. To do it skin tone by skin tone would itself be racist. It would involve, for example, some British people being heroes because their ancestors sailed with the Royal Navy squadron detailed to suppress the Slave Trade while others are villains because theirs crewed slave ships. There would be no way of knowing if you were hero or villain until you played that historical lottery. 

As I told a Jewish American friend who teased me one Fourth of July about losing the American Revolutionary War, “That was a dispute between two sets of my ancestors — yours were in Germany at the time. Stay out of our family quarrels.” That’s a good joke but it would be dumb to base a social science on it. Yet America’s “grievance studies” types have done something remarkably similar in creating the wicked notion of “white privilege”.

In a purported response to the evil stupidity of racism its proponents attempt to justify the punishment of innocents for the past sins of their race. My Jewish-American friend has white privilege even though his ancestors had nothing to do with the historical oppression of black Americans and even though his family arrived as refugees from oppression themselves. This wicked idea’s proponents say having privilege doesn’t make you bad per se, but then go on to tell whites that, simply because of the colour of their skin, they must be silent when a person of colour speaks, they cannot join their race-based movements and can aspire to be no more than an ally — and not an equal one at that. For the sins of their race they must pay — perhaps even actual financial restitution. Solidarity of a black man with his brother is a good thing. A white man thinking of another as his race brother is racism. In truth, both are racist. Both are stupid. Both are lethally divisive. 

An interesting sidelight on this insanity was cast when, during President Obama’s first election campaign some black Americans argued that though American and black he wasn’t a black American. This, because his family arrived as voluntary immigrants from Africa and had not been shaped by the history of slavery. By this logic Obama enjoys some kind of black privilege and can never hope to be more than an ally to black Americans. It’s not how most think I am sure — indeed many black Americans seem to take a pride in Obama’s presidency that would be sinister if white Americans felt it on the same basis for a white President. Still, it’s a self-inflicted reductio ad absurdam on an already absurd idea. 

A definitive proof of the evil of social “science” is that — faced with the real problem of racism — it has come up with the insane idea of racist post mortem justice; demanding that living white people compensate living black people for what some dead white people did to some dead black people. If you question the logic of this then — boom — you confirm the whole crooked theory because it’s your “privilege” that blinds you to its truth. It’s like the ducking stool as a test for witchcraft. Guilty or not, you’re done for. Oh and by the way, you can’t just ignore this piffle and quietly get on with your harmless life because “white silence is violence”. 

This very American problem is poisoning the world through the dominance of US popular culture and the influence of the wealthy US universities.  On this side of the Pond we have our own problems. We really don’t need a whole raft of America’s too. But white privilege is such a wonderful tool for creating and exploiting division that our leftists can’t leave it be. It’s a social A-bomb just lying there waiting to be detonated.  

The Left is an immoral political movement. It seeks to divide. It seeks to promote hatred between classes and other groupings in society in order to create problems that can only be “solved” by employing legions of leftists with no otherwise marketable skills to direct us to the “correct” path. The extent to which it’s already achieved its real, unstated aim of creating a well-paid cadre of apparatchiks is visible in the present pandemic. The only jobs that are safe are of those employed by the state and rewarded by reference to almost anything other than economic contribution. Those thus paid for are “essential workers.” Those who pay for them are not. Anyone who points this scam out is monstered by a leisured army of social “scientists” and their graduates in the media — also paid for by us “inessential” saps. 

Judge them by the outcomes of their policies and governance and the theorists and politicians of the Left are clear failures. The squalor in which poor black Americans live is almost invariably presided over by them just as a Labour council in Britain is a promise of continued poverty for all but its apparatchiks. If the poor are your voters, the more poverty the better. If the oppressed are your voters, the more (real or imagined) oppression the merrier. 

The perfect symbol of Leftist politicians in this respect is the character of Senator Clay Davis in “The Wire” — perhaps the greatest TV show ever made and (among many other marvellous things) a searing indictment of American racial politics. It’s a show that couldn’t be made today because it reeks of white privilege. By the way, the fact that this concept would have prevented The Wire being made is by itself a small proof that it’s a wicked one. 

This post is clearly prompted by the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota but I have neither mentioned his name nor expressed any anger about that. Why? If the facts are as they now seem, his killing was a crime. The policeman who killed him was immediately fired and is now being prosecuted. If found guilty he will be punished. I feel sorry for Mr Floyd and his family just as I do for other victims of crime and their families. If his killer is the criminal he certainly seems to be, I’ll hate him just as I hate all criminals — white, black, uniformed or not. 

There are many unlawful homicides every day and this is probably one of them. A jury will decide. There are many injustices every day but this isn’t (yet) one of them. It is a crime and it’s being prosecuted. As for the storm of hatred, robbery and destruction — cheered on by witless celebrities and evil, exploitative politicians — that has followed it; that involves thousands of injustices. The wicked doctrine of white privilege makes it dangerous for anyone but black Americans to call them out as such. All praise to Mr Floyd’s family, they have. I thank them for that. All shame to the race-baiting vermin of the American Left, they haven’t and they won’t. The looted, burned-out shopkeepers of America (or, if they’re lucky, their insurers) are in practice making involuntary campaign contributions to the real Clay Davis’s who will protect the looters and thugs in return for their continued loyalty at election time. It’s an insult to decent black Americans. It’s an insult to humanity. 

So, if I unfollowed you on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram in the last week it’s not because you mentioned poor Mr Floyd. I still follow many who did — expressing the sympathy for him and his family that all decent humans feel. It’s because you mentioned white privilege. it’s not because I’m a racist, it’s because you are.