There are some grounds for optimism. They are:

• The Supreme Court (how I hate that stupid Tony Blair name for the highest court in a country where the constitution consists of three words – "Parliament is supreme") has thrown the entire public sector into turmoil by answering a question so obvious that every sane person is embarrassed it was ever asked.
• President Trump is a brilliant negotiator, a reasonably competent businessman but an economic illiterate, it seems. Still, he's shaking up the corrupt parasites preying on American taxpayers pretty well. I find it hard to imagine that his term will end without seriously positive changes to the behaviour of the US Federal government. Let's hope so. At least, for the first time since Ron Reagan left office, the American people have a President who is on their side.
• President Milei in Argentina, the only politician in the world I could vote for entirely without reservations, is achieving undeniable success. It seems likely his democratic mandate will be renewed despite the vicious campaign against him by the parasitical classes in Argentina and elsewhere. 

Yet still I fear the endarkenment – my word for the sustained attack on Enlightenment values that seems to represent current standard thinking.

I had dinner with two good friends this week. The guy is my best friend in the world and I have known him and his wife since they first met. They know two of my three friends in London and asked about them. I mentioned that I had feared losing one of them because of her inexplicable (to me) pro-"Palestine" stance. "Let's stop you there" they said. "We're pro-Palestine too". The wife continued "We can't side with genocide."

We changed the subject and moved on, but my heart sank. If you thought the trans issue was embarrassingly simple, it's as nothing when you consider the war in Gaza. If not indoctrinated in an Islamic country, the morality of the situation is incredibly obvious.

Israel is a free, democratic country. Its citizens - many of them Arabs – all have equal civil rights. Arguably, the only Arabs with civil rights in the Middle East and certainly the only female Arabs, are those in Israel. It's not a problem for an Arab to live in the Jewish State, yet Israel's enemies scream "apartheid". To do so honestly, requires blind stupidity. It is near impossible for a Jew to live in an Arab state. Jewish populations have declined to near zero in all of them. Yet an Arab judge on Israel's Supreme Court could and did sit in judgement on Prime Minister Netanyahu. There are Arab members of the Knesset. There are Arab Israelis in every national institution - including the Israel Defence Force. It's deceptive to call Israel an apartheid state. Clever propagandists are using the term maliciously because "apartheid" is one of those concepts that everyone in the West agrees is wrong. It's a smear.

We all agree that "genocide" is wrong too. Genocide is very wrong. That's why the propagandists of the "Palestinian" cause dishonestly use the word constantly. Yet the IDF's success in minimising civilian casualties in Gaza – despite the fact that Hamas systematically uses civilians as human shields – is arguably the most remarkable aspect of this story. The IDF's  rate of civilian casualties in Gaza is lower than that of the United States Armed Forces and their allies in urban warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's actually lower than the Allies (the last warriors all my friends would agree were fighting a just war) achieved in World War II. The IDF is actually the only army in history to risk greater casualties on its own side by alerting the enemy to their next targets to give civilians the chance to get out of the way. That's nuts. It's also a waste of time because Hamas kills them if they try to run. Hamas wants civilian casualties for propaganda purposes and its leaders boast that "the wombs of our women will replace the dead".

Genocide – the systematic elimination of an entire people - is the actual goal of Hamas, Hezbollah and all Islamist terrorists. It's also the goal of their chief state sponsor - the Islamic Republic of Iran. When their side screams "genocide" at Israel, they're either lying (if they're intelligent) or projecting (if they're ignorant). The indoctrinated morons amongst them assume their enemy wants to do to them what they would do to the Jews if they could. 

As my best friend in Israel once said – "Imagine the Arab Muslims were magically disarmed. You would have peace. Imagine Israel was magically disarmed. You would have genocide."

This simple thought experiment is really all you need to know. My educated and intelligent friends have the capacity for such thought. of course. They're just not using it. They're soaking up as gospel the mainstream narrative from Western Academia and the media, which is that – in simple binary Critical Race Theory terms (facts notwithstanding) Israel is white and therefore an oppressor, whereas the Arabs attacking her are brown and therefore oppressed.

Israel may be the only modern state established without violence or conquest. It was formed by a UN resolution setting out a two state solution under which the Jews gave up most of the historic land of Israel to the Arabs. The Jews in Israel accepted that solution. Their Arab neighbours rejected it and attacked over and again – attempting to wipe out the Jewish state. They have repeatedly been defeated and have lost lands in the process. David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of modern Israel, invited Arab locals to stay. Those who did are the only Arabs in the region with equal civil rights. Those persuaded to flee by their Arab brothers promising to wipe Israel out, have been kept in camps as "refugees" and turned into a new synthetic people – the "Palestinians". Their Arab brothers have othered them, keeping them and their descendants in camps when they could have been accepted either in Israel (which would have taken back those who formerly lived there) or in the Arab states that actually took over the land allocated by the UN in 1948 for them to live in. 

Until Yasser Arafat with advice from the KGB, came up with the propaganda concept of Palestine in the 1960s, there had never been a state of Palestine even in imagination. Arafat was an Egyptian and his passport that showed him as born in Jerusalem was a KGB forgery. The lands naifs and scoundrels now call "Palestine" were territories of first the Roman and then the Ottoman Empires. Palestine was geography not politics. Like Leicestershire, but without even a local authority. 

Gaza is a former Egyptian territory captured by Israel during one of these many genocidal attacks. It ceded the territory voluntarily to its Arab occupants, not in the hope that they would do anything different than they actually did (Israel's history of being constantly under attack does not allow for such naivety) but under pressure from the "international community" to allow for the possibility for an independent "Palestinian" entity to emerge there. International aid has poured into Gaza in billions. None has been used to build the mediterranean Paradise it could have been. Billions have been stolen by the Hamas leadership to fund their lifestyles in Quatar and London. Fewer billions have been diverted into building tunnels for military purposes and raining missiles constantly on Israel. 

This war didn't begin on October 7th, Israel's enemies say. In this they are right. The war has never stopped. Israel has simply adopted a defensive stance and sheltered beneath its "Iron Dome" of anti-missile defences. It's accepted regular modest casualties in order to avoid all out war. I suspect it has done so partly because – pressured in some cases by electorally-influential Muslim populations in former Western allies – it's aware that support for it defending itself is weakening.

The brutal inhumanity of the October 7th pogrom, the worst genocidal violence against the Jews since World War II, simply triggered the current campaign to wipe out Hamas's military capabilities and to rescue the hostages. Gaza is under the iron grip of Hamas. There are no independent journalists in there. All the statistics and "information" reported in the Western press and accepted as gospel by my intelligent, well-meaning but misinformed friends, emanate from Hamas. One dead civilian is too many. One dead civilian child is too many. But if you don't want civilian casualties, just don't start a war. And in particular don't start one sheltering your fighters and their weaponry behind your civilians, in their homes and in your hospitals.

Before Hitler made anti-semitism unfashionable, it was common on both Left and Right. Stalin began World War II as Hitler's ally. He would have ended it as such, were Hitler not (thank God) a fool. International Socialism's problems with National Socialism were doctrinal – the kind of factionalism common - thank God - on the Left. Stalin didn't believe that socialism in one country (even a big, resource-rich country such as Hitler planned to make by murdering his way into lebensraum) was possible. It wasn't Hitler's attitude to the Jews that was a problem to Stalin. It was his lack of global ambition!

The greatest propaganda feat in history was the Left's post-war success in disassociating themselves from their erstwhile ally. Hitler was a man of the Left. Those of us on the Right have been demonised forever by the notion – now universally accepted  – that he was the extreme version of us, not yet another extreme version of them. So perhaps it's not surprising that, as the last survivors of VE Day pass away, antisemitism (mostly unconscious and/or euphemised as anti-Zionism) is back. 

I am genuinely afraid just how deep is the darkness that is coming.

I have spent some time on the website of The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) over the years. The purpose of MEMRI is:

Exploring the Middle East and South Asia through their media, MEMRI bridges the language gap between the West and the Middle East and South Asia, providing timely translations of Arabic, Farsi, Urdu-Pashtu, Dari, Turkish, Russian, and Chinese media, as well as original analysis of political, ideological, intellectual, social, cultural, and religious trends to the governments of the U.S. and its allies, and to their counterterrorism officials, law enforcement agencies, militaries, and other authorities. 

This is not some crazy partisan propaganda outfit. Past US Presidents have served on its board of advisors. Its current board of directors includes a former US Attorney-General. It serves an important function (or could, if more people would use it) in helping us understand the thinking both of people in the Middle East and people from the region who now live among us.

Their content is depressing. You can see children being indoctrinated. You can see how issues in the region are portrayed in their everyday media. If someone grows up in these countries, constantly exposed to hatred – even in classrooms – they're in for a shock if they move to the West. If, that is, they make any attempt to expose themselves to local culture. If they don't then it's you and I who are in for the shock. Here's a mild sample. 

Having watched a few hours of MEMRI content over the years, I should not have been surprised when Muslim neighbours – the Mohammeds and Ahmeds who routinely deliver me and my goods or serve me in their shops in West London – took to the streets to celebrate the October 7 pogrom in Israel. Half a mile from where I live, they danced for joy and called for the destruction of Israel. This, before the Jewish state had responded in any way – making a nonsense of the line taken by most Palestinian apologists that they don't support Hamas's actions (to the extent they don't actually deny them) but are merely protesting the alleged ferocity of Israel's response.

I had a wonderful career overseas but in retirement there's a price to pay. I have only three good friends in London and two of them are older than me. Most of the people I could socialise with in my retirement live in Warsaw, Prague or Moscow. My London friends and acquaintances are not woke (one is a Catholic who is hoping Pope Francis will be replaced by an actual Christian) but their thinking is informed by the relentless statist propaganda of Britain's mainstream media. They automatically hear the word "unregulated" as a criticism, for example. As if only activities supervised by state employees could ever be good. They would all agree that regulators sometimes go "too far," but also think that I go too far in supporting Montesquieu's view that:

When it is not necessary to make a law it is necessary NOT to make a law

They consider me an extremist for holding views that were perfectly ordinary throughout the rise of Western Civilisation. The ideas, in my view, that caused that rise. They would all instinctively chuckle at Ghandi's famous reply to a journalist who asked him what he thought of Western Civilsation, which was:

I think it would be a good idea.

They're not as extreme as many of my contemporaries in London. Not that I selected them for their views. I can be friends with any decent human. I don't need them to be free from error. But I often pick up on things that remind me they've been exposed to two decades more of indoctrination on multiculturalism than I was when I was working as a proud Englishman among proud Poles, Russians and Chinese.

The Ancient Greeks said you can never step in the same river twice. While I was away for twenty years, blithely praising the superiority of Western thought to the survivors of Soviet socialism, Britain was changing behind my back. The greatest culture shock I ever received was not moving to Poland, Russia or even China. It was moving back home when I was done.

Only one of my friends is so far gone as to have imbibed the narrative of the intifada and support the notion that Israel, in seeking to liberate its hostages and defeat the terrorists who were attacking it constantly even before October 7, is committing "genocide". I try to avoid the topic. She has many virtues and I love her as a friend, but she won't let it drop. I have tried to explain that I operate on NATO's "no first strike" policy. If she doesn't read my blog, she's never going to hear me bang on, unprovoked, about the justice of Israel's cause. Unless, that is,  she bangs on herself about the rectitude of terrorists.

Yet she insists on sending me snippets of kefiyah-wearers justifying evil. Her late husband moved in London Labour circles and all her friends are very much of the Left. Among themselves they don't speak of Right and Left these days, of course. They speak of Left and Wrong. They don't review the actual rate of civilian casualties in urban warfare in Gaza - though the Israel Defence Force (IDF) is performing better than the Allies in WW2. They just assume uncritically that the brown people are right and the nasty (ideologically-white, if not all actually so) Jews are wrong. They don't need to say any of this out loud, you understand. It's just the political water in which they swim. 

The British Left seems to have worked its way back to where it was before Hitler (we all thought finally) discredited anti-semitism. Stalin would have ended WW2 – as he started it – on Hitler's side – had Hitler not favoured (as Socialists often do) schism over solidarity. If you spend some time in the stacks at a university library (as I once did) and read the English newspapers of the 1930's, you'll find that Hitler's views on the Jews did not cause as much alarm as you might think. He was a worry, with his talk of a master race and lebensraum, but the "blame the Jews" stuff was seen as superfluous seasoning in his rhetorical soup. Rather like my London friends today on regulation, the intellectuals of the time took the view he sometimes went "a bit too far".

If I had spent my whole life here, instead of abroad, I would firstly be more acclimatised to this horror and would secondly have a deep enough pool of friends to throw this one back. I  am reluctant, however, to lose 33% of my close friends at once. Nor, at the age of 68 – and with the cautious pace at which we English make friends – am I ever going to make any more.

I sometimes wonder if my exciting overseas career, unalloyed joy at the time, was a mistake. My father, a man firmly rooted in the place our family seems to have lived since prehistory, made very different choices and was always puzzled by mine. At his funeral, a normally-dead church that can't afford a vicar came to life by being filled with everyone he'd ever known still capable of walking (or being wheeled) up its path. His choices made a lot of sense to me at that moment. I could understand his marvelous statement to the family at his bedside, hours before he died, that he was "the happiest man alive". He was rooted in family and community. He had friends "for fetching out" as they say up North.

I have made a temporary peace by getting my friend to agree not to raise the subject again until she's read a book from the other point of view. I chose this one and have sent her a copy. I give her credit for agreeing to that, though I fear she'll – with no sense of irony – dismiss it as extremist propaganda.

I do not understand how a kind and caring person can find herself on the side of evil. Yet, to watch the BBC or read the Guardian, you'd think (as she does) that every educated person in Britain is.  That brings me to another piece of my late father's wisdom. He once told me that – whatever medical advances may come – it's better that we all die because the world changes so fast that if we live too long, we won't fit in. 

Today was only a half day. We began with a session entitled Defeating Net Zero and other enemies of Freedom in which the panellists exposed some of the stupidities of government policy. Like so much of the weekend's discussion the policy is as much the former "Conservative" government's as the present Labour one's.

Defeating Net Zero panel

Catherine McBride OBE, an economist and member of the UK Trade & Agriculture Commission made the point that, if emissions matter, they matter everywhere. We have deindustrialised the UK and sent our emissions to China. On any analysis, that doesn't help the planet at all. We pay people to plant trees in Scotland where they will die from lack of CO². What we should have done is planted them along our motorways, including on the central reservation where they'd not just absorb CO² but help screen drivers from the bright LED headlights of oncoming cars, which are themselves a consequence of net zero policies.

As a nation, we have only three  natural resources: coal, oil and natural gas. We've decided not to use them. Meanwhile Europe is giving Russia more for gas than it’s giving Ukraine to fight Russia. If we don't want to use our gas ourselves we could have sold it to our European neighbours rather than having them become more reliant on a hostile country. There are countries where solar makes sense. The UK is not one of them. Solar operators are only making money from subsidies. It's a government-sponsored Ponzi scheme. We ourselves import fracked LPG from the US while concreting over our own frackable reserves to ensure we can never get to them – even perhaps in some future military emergencies when we couldn't import what we need for our own war effort. This is, she said, insane. 

Christopher Howarth of the European Research Group explained that for a new government to undo Net Zero in 2029 is an extremely difficult proposition. It's not embedded in any one piece of legislation but in many acts of Parliament. The most recent revision to the target didn't even have a proper debate in Parliament. It was done by statutory instrument and there was no vote at all.The few opponents who might have voted against didn’t even know it was happening. Even when it becomes apparent the damage that Net Zero is doing to our national economy (while making zero difference to global emissions) it will be hard to undo it in a country where it's desirability is taught in the National Curriculum as fact.

I found many of this weekend's discussions interesting and educational but the best speech of all was from Claire Fox (Baroness Fox of Buckley) an "old Lefty" (her words) from my home town in Wales. Claire used to be a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party and the editor of Living Marxism magazine. She remains on the Left but is reviled by her new identarian comrades because she regards freedom of speech as – not a right-wing excuse to allow hate speech to flourish – but part of the essential inheritance of the Enlightenment. She finds it infuriating that people tell her she's now a Conservative because she believes in free speech. It's a value that's central to our civilisation and does not belong to the Right. 

She warned us that we were in danger of falling down the same rabbit hole as her tribe. It's all too easy (and tempting if you've been under attack for a long time) to join in with the identarian game, but if we start to pursue remedies based on our identity groups being oppressed we will legitimise the whole "woke" movement. We must resist the temptation to pick up their weapons and try to win arguments based on reason, not identity-politics points-scoring.

She gave the example of the current row over the Netflix drama Adolescence. Before she realised it was going to be politically controversial she tweeted that it was a good drama. She is now getting hateful comments from people who want it cancelled because the protagonist is a white, working class teenager and they consider that an attack on everyone in that group. Whatever the producers' reasons for casting it as they did, calling for the show's cancellation and condemning it without watching it is a dangerously familiar, irrational approach.

She thought President Trump was going in for cancellation of his opponents too but warned that "sticking it to the libs" can and will backfire. We must hold onto the idea that words are not violence. The only reason the Left is arguing that they are is to justify the use of actual violence against words! 

Gawain Towler, former Head of Press for UKIP, the Brexit Party and Reform UK followed on from Claire and commented that he'd been horrified by the tactics used by both sides of the Reform UK split. Calling in the police, leaking private WhatsApps and other such attempts at mutual cancellation were indeed echoes of the civil wars on the Left. He made the interesting observation that there was too much talk about hate in politics whereas what really drove most people in politics – in his experience – was love. On the Right, people loved their country and their way of life and the very British tradition of not seeking a perfect society but of muddling through in an imperfect one, which was ours and which we loved. He didn't explain what it was that those on the Left loved (apart from spending other peoples' money) but he made it clear that civilised political debate needs an acceptance that one's opponents are humans with whom we disagree, not monsters. 

Organising for Freedom panel

The closing discussion on Organising for Freedom was interesting in that it came closest to addressing the problems facing the divided Right in Britain. There's not much doubt that the British electorate is going to be ready to ditch Labour at the next election, but would the parties of the Right be ready to offer them that option? I asked again how the Conservative Party was going to win back the trust of the electorate. I said its traditional voters were furious they'd wasted fourteen years of opportunities and were bound to ask – even if offered an excellent programme – why they should believe it would be implemented based on past non-performance? I was disappointed with the response. Mumbling about acknowledging error and apologising really didn't cut it for me. The panel was much happier talking about reforming the Conservative Party's organisation than its ideology. 

People seem to have forgotten that Margaret Thatcher was not just an excellent PM but a cunning Leader of the Opposition. She'd circumvented the Tory Grandees, Central Office and the Conservative Research Department (none of whom were her friends). She'd assembled, together with Sir Keith Joseph, a team of academic advisers and policy wonks at the Centre for Policy Studies and produced a programme for a future Conservative Government. I led my university's student Conservatives to control of our student union for the first time in its history during her period in opposition. We were enthused both by her leadership and the policies the CPS was producing. All of us had read, for example, its pamphlet "Why Britain needs a Social Market Economy."

In a Britain where net zero, critical race theory and gender fluidity are taught as fact at secondary school, some similar effort is going to be needed to win the trust of the electorate in general and particularly the young.

I have funded my two daughters through bachelors' and masters' degree courses at the Universities of Cambridge, London and the LSE. Ideologically, they might as well have attended KGB staff college under Beria. A lot of students these days tick ideological boxes to win their degrees while privately dismissing the crap they're taught, but still some of it sticks. The challenge of winning them over is greater than Thatcher ever faced. I think it's a legitimate criticism of Margaret's legacy, much as I admired her, that she took on the wrong foes. Rather than fighting the soon-to-be-irrelevant coal miners, she should have fought the Marxist infiltrators of our schools, universities and - most-insidiously - teacher training colleges. The Education "blob" is at the heart of the Leftist deep state and a primary cause of our national decline. 

It was an interesting weekend and it's always uplifting to be among like-minded people of goodwill. However I heard nothing to convince me that Reform UK and the Conservative Party will have united or allied and agreed a programme to give voters the weapon they'll want by 2029 (if not sooner) to beat Labour to an electoral pulp.

A state is a regional monopoly of legal violence. It is a necessary evil and should therefore be constrained. If it is allowed to become too large, the resulting concentration of power will attract the worst members of society to work within it. These are not statements of political theory. This is written into the political history of the United Kingdom in recent decades. At its root, I would argue, is a failure of democracy itself. And not just a failure of politicians in power. A well-functioning democracy requires an effective opposition.

When I was a boy, there was a scandal going on in the children’s homes of North Wales where I grew up. It might as well have been Communist China for all the chance there was of any party but Labour ever winning an election there. North Wales was a one party state. If you know you’re always going to win, you also know there’s no chance of ever being held to account.

Paedophiles were able to take over the running of local children’s homes. Public sector workers are Labour’s favourite children (the party is pretty much the political wing of the public sector unions) and — as long as no one ever accused them of being bloody Tories (growing up there, I never heard the word  “Tories” without “bloody” or “fucking” in front of it) — they could use the children as they pleased. They could operate the homes as brothels, providing children for sex at will. And they did.

In the context of the current Muslim rape-gangs story, let’s make clear that this was a pre-immigration horror. The victims and criminals were almost all white. I’m not making a point about about race or religion here. The common factor is state power unchallenged by effective and informed opposition. Every community has monsters in its midst. It’s the job of government to protect vulnerable citizens from them. In both these cases, government prioritised its own reputation over the protection of innocent working-class children. Why?

What was done to those children in the North Wales children’s homes, and what has been done to the children in the rape gangs scandal across the country, was in each case a serious crime. The problem is not the law but that a corrupt and unchallenged state apparatus failed to enforce it. This time it’s happened, not just in Labour strongholds, but across the UK. Why?

I would argue the the apparatus of the British State is out of political control. The Deep State, Establishment or permanent staff of the state is its own thing — operating in the perceived interests — not of the citizens it’s supposed to serve — but of its own members. Therefore, even in areas of the country where opposition politicians might be expected to scrutinise the performance of their opponents, nothing can be done to oppose the state apparatus itself. 

Thanks to the unexpected intervention of a foreign billionaire, an issue the apparatchiks have successfully suppressed for decades has come unexpectedly to the forefront. Government is making concessions — authorising funds for piddling pretend enquiries. They will be staffed (as would a full national enquiry) by people who can expect future honours and benefits from the state if they take long years to bury the issues in Egyptian-scale pyramids of bullshit.

The only thing that should happen now is what should have happened in the first place. All offenders should be prosecuted without fear or favour and with zero regard to their culture or ethnicity. If I were PM, I would appoint a credible recently-retired police commissioner and allocate a budget of a billion quid or so to organise investigations and prosecutions nationwide to bring the offenders to justice. Including, by the way, the policemen, school teachers, social workers, council officials and other apparatchiks who were accessories after the fact to the offences of statutory rape. They didn’t rape the children themselves but, in assisting the rapists to escape justice, they became parties to the crime and should sit in the same dock with the alleged rapists as their co-defendants.

Nothing short of that will do. No number of enquiries, august pronouncements or— God help us — “lessons to be learned” will suffice. Justice must be done, must be seen to be done and must be seen to be possible even where the over privileged employees of an over mighty state are concerned.

Miss Paine the Elder and her life partner have chosen the name of my granddaughter - due to join us on December 9th - but will not share it with anyone until she is actually born. So for now she is codenamed "Boudicca" – Miss Paine the Younger's jocular suggestion when told they wanted a "traditional English name, not too commonly used." I have been thinking of her as Boudicca now for so long (and, trust me, I think about her a lot) that I may keep calling her that.

Regular readers will recall my unalloyed joy at the news of her impending arrival. She's not even born yet and she's making me a better man. For the first time in years, I'm thinking about the future. It will be her world now and I want it to be great. I also want to live long enough for her to remember me and am constantly planning ways to be as memorable and beloved a grandfather as my dad was to my girls.

That's the good news. The bad news is that our civilisation is still in jeopardy. Our enemies mass at the gates. Our leadership is execrable. It's so stupid it can't understand the importance of the freedoms that made the West. It lacks morals. Its public policy ideas would shame a sixth-form debating society - even one formed (as my admissions tutor – looking at the crap comprehensive I was "educated" in – rightly guessed) just to look good on an application to a law faculty. 

I had resigned myself to the fact that a great civilisation was coming to an end (as all must) and that it was my destiny to live in its final years. Statistically Boudicca is likely to live more than a century however, so my concerns now reach beyond that feared end. I'd always assumed my American-educated daughters could flee there if Britain and Europe fall into a new Dark Ages. Now I have to pay attention to trends in American politics that make it seem doubtful as a refuge.

Arguably the most optimistic thing I ever did – a decade and a half ago in Moscow – was to start this blog. I uttered the optimist's favourite cliché: that it was better to light a candle than curse the darkness and set out quietly to try to change minds. I remembered how one pamphlet – Tom Paine's "Common Sense" – had shaped a new world and took his as a pen-name in the hope of pamphleteering digitally to similar effect.

How many minds have I actually reached? A few thousand at best. A few hundred regulars. Remember how the internet was going to allow us all to escape the wicked grasp of press barons and those whose spittle they lick? Well it kind of happened – consider the reach of Guido Fawkes or Ian Dale these days, let alone Elon Musk on X – but it wasn't to be for most of us. My candle is still a candle and the ideas it was supposed to illuminate – Enlightenment notions that were uncontroversial for centuries – are more in the dark than ever.

I would love it if you, gentle readers, could help me back from the negative mindset to which, in such circumstances,  I have descended. I don't hope to recover the arrogance or optimism of my youth. I quite accept that the wisdom of age largely consists of realising how little you really know and how stupid you used to sound. There's nothing wrong with a bit of humility or perspective, for sure. I just need to recover some hope that, for the sake of my Boudicca and yours, good ideas can prevail.

The only hopeful straws I see in the current winds are Elon Musk, a friend's son's explanation to his dad of all the "bullshit you have to pretend to believe at school to get marks" and the fact that – last July – the utter collapse of the Conservative vote in Britain didn't increase the numbers voting Labour. In fact, in the only part of this realm with a Labour administration (my native Wales) their vote went down. Only in Scotland did Labour gain – from the laughably incompetent (and left-wing) SNP. 

Also, while critical thinking has been hounded out of the Establishment and the dreaming spires of academe by the clerisy of a new religion rivalling Scientology for weirdness and stupidity, it lives on among the laity. The ordinary people of the West lack leadership however. The more thoughtful among us live in fear that they may acquire some of a nefarious kind. The more the Leftist Establishment cries wolf about the "far right" the more likely a real wolf is to spy an opportunity. All non-leftists have now been called Nazis so often that it's lost the shock it should command. I hate to end on a negative note, but that seems almost as dangerous as the religious and ideological threats calling such demons forth.

So, gentles, if you have seen other straws in the wind that might give me hope, please let me know in the comments. 

Margaret Thatcher famously quoted Kipling's Norman and Saxon to President Mitterand of France in an EU meeting;

The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow – with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, 'This isn't fair dealing,' my son, leave the Saxon alone.

She was trying, perhaps not as delicately as her diplomats would have wished, to explain how the apparently calm British will react – eventually – to being wronged. 

I spent twenty years in three other countries and worked closely in business with people from many more. I have often smiled to myself since returning when I hear British people speak of our unique sense of fair play. It's not unique at all. Everyone has it. We do not own fairness. We do not own tolerance.

We do, however, traditionally pride ourselves on both and the way we see ourselves has shaped our reactions over the last twenty-five years as we welcomed more immigrants than in the previous two millennia. A few years ago I listened quietly to a Bangladeshi friend – a would-be human rights lawyer – talk about racism in our country. I asked her where in the world was a better place to live as a member of an ethnic minority. On reflection, she agreed with me that there is nowhere.

I am not saying we couldn't treat each other better. Of course we could and should try. But let's take a moment, as our streets burn and our elites condemn us as far-right racists, to be proud of how we've behaved in general towards so many new arrivals in such a short time.

Britain, like Europe's other social democracies, was, when this process began, not producing enough children to maintain our population. That wasn't intrinsically a problem. Depopulation would mean cheaper land and housing, more room for nature and a cleaner environment for example. It was however a major problem for our political elites because of what Nye Bevan called "the big dirty secret about the National Insurance Fund." Which is, there is no f***ing fund.

The "from the cradle to the grave" welfare state was a mis-sold insurance product. We and our employers paid something called National Insurance on our salaries, which was supposed to fund benefits when we were sick, unemployed or too old to work. However, none of that money was ever actually set aside and invested. Politicians spent it in ways they thought would win votes. They counted – like the founders of a Ponzi scheme – on future contributors. When they realised those contributors weren't coming in sufficient numbers, they knew their scheme would collapse. The demographic crisis was theirs.

One day history may reveal which politician in the capital of an old European empire realised there was a ready supply of workers in the former colonies. People who spoke our languages and were familiar with our systems of government – because both had been forced on their ancestors. It was a perilous idea that may yet prove to be the end of European civilisation but he must have looked like a genius to his peers.

The doors were opened and cheap labour flooded in. From the lofty heights where the elites survey us, it looked like a perfect solution. On the ground, not always so much. Mostly we've been welcoming, accepting and tolerant. We've sometimes even gone beyond tolerance and flattered our new arrivals that they've enhanced our magnificent old culture with their jerk chicken and curries. 

Yet already when I was a youngster practising criminal law problems had begun to emerge. A custody sergeant with whom I used to chat when waiting to see clients in the cells told me suicide rates among Muslim girls in our Midlands city were disturbingly high. Asked why that was, he said they were not suicides, but honour killings – the first time I'd heard that phrase. No-one, he said, commits suicide by pouring paraffin over themselves and setting themselves alight. It's just too painful.  Muslim men were killing their daughters and sisters. Asked why there were no prosecutions, he said senior police officers made it clear to their subordinates that it was "racist" to suggest the dead girls' families' stories of suicide were untrue.

Fresh out of my university law faculty, I sneered that his bosses were right and he was a racist. I will never forget the last words he said to me;

Young man, then you're part of the problem.

And I was. In that moment, I'd turned away from murdered women to preserve my smug world view. Just as, decades later, council staff and police officers in cities all over Britain turned away from young girls groomed and raped by Muslim men, for fear of being called bad names.

Decades later, our elites are still sneering. Yes, skin colour is irrelevant to moral worth. Yes, other religions can and should be tolerated. Yes, immigration can be a good thing – if managed properly. Our island story is peppered with immigrants who made this a better place. But flooding the country with people who don't even aspire to share our values and doing so at a speed that gives no chance – even if we were trying – to assimilate them into our society, was always crazy.

We've long been cowed into submission. We watched as our present PM "took the knee" in solidarity with one black American thug who sadly died an unlawful death, when he'd said not a word about myriad British victims of grooming gangs or honour killings. We watched swastika-bearing pro-Hamas protestors be protected by police from "obviously Jewish" passers-by who might upset them. We watched police run meekly from violent ethnic minority protests against children being taken into care and heard our elites make excuses. We watched our authorities cave into that violence and hand those children back.

Then, when three innocent girls were recently murdered by a second-generation immigrant, we watched the ferocity of the police response to protests. We thought they'd gone soft. We thought they didn't know how to respond to illegal violence. We were wrong. They know how to do it but only to those who challenge the state's political narrative.

It's been called "two tier policing." That is a mild term indeed for open, shameless injustice. Call it what you like, to come back to Kipling, it isn't fair dealing. That's why anger – simmering quietly for so long – is boiling over now. Terrible things may be done, which I will not support or excuse. I am not going to stoop to our elites' disgusting level by excusing wickedness on identarian grounds. I will just say the British State created this dangerous situation.

Our country didn't become the best place to be in an ethnic minority because we are bad people. Calling us bad names and unleashing the state's thugs on us for crimes so readily excused in others is unjust. The government never shuts up about equality, but the most important equality of all is equality before the law. When that fails, as it is failing, there is good reason to ask once again what it really means to be British – and this time get the answer right. 

Why the French are so pessimistic | The Spectator.

The most striking thing is the skilled and marvellous way France maintains the public realm. From pavements to lighting, to high streets and motorways and serious infrastructure, France gleams. Frankly, given the choice, I’d rather live in a French roundabout than the average redbrick Barratt Home new-build, with its three-inch-wide windows. The former, the French roundabout, is likely to be prettier, and better designed, and it’s guaranteed to have superior stonework.

Just as I noted here during my recent road trip!

French taxes are as high as ours, but more of them get spent on things French people need. Their elections are showing however, that good infrastructure, housing and lifestyle are not enough. The French are not becoming politically more extreme in search of a better material life. They are doing it to ditch a treacherous establishment that does not respect them. The Énarques have strutted and preened long enough, while filling France's cities with enemies who openly despise her in order to prop up their state-sponsored Ponzi scheme.

We all care (pause here for leftists to call us racist) about our culture and our way of life and want to see it preserved. In the final analysis we will all – even the relatively pampered French - rise up and fight for it. The French people are saying "non!" at the moment and I wish them luck. Vive la France!

As I recently watched Tucker Carlson tell an Australian journalist,

Happy people have children and a functioning economy allows them to do that.

Rather than import new citizens to prop up the numbers, perhaps our governments should try to make it so young people can both afford to have children and believe enough in the future to want to? If, for example, housing costs and high taxes mean it mostly takes two incomes for young people to afford a home, it's hard to sacrifice some or all of an income to have a child. Importing low-income households while restricting housing supply with planning laws, will never make that easier. So maybe let's not, eh?

Sadly the betrayal of everything they should hold dear by the so-called "Conservative" Party is about to give Labour a five to ten year untrammelled chance to build a massive demonstration – a sort of Leftist theme park – of every vice and folly that has been dragging down the West for decades. I am afraid we're going to be late to your party, mes amis. Do your best without us for now.

When our time comes, however, watch out! By the time Labour has further impoverished us while robbing us blind, denigrating our way of life, rubbishing our values, castrating and mastectomising our healthy children and rewriting our history to make us the world's monsters, we'll be ready.

This is not what I personally want, of course. I'd love a thoughtful national review of the scale and role of the state followed by a slow, gentle move towards liberty. My whole ethic is based on the non-aggression principle, and I despise social division and violence. However it's clear our Deep State parasites will no more remove their blood-sucking proboscises than will France's without weaponising some version of Le Pen against them. The Left's culture wars also dangerously shift focus from rational issues to defending our way of life. Resisting that is more obviously a task for a Le Pen or (God help us) worse than an economics professor like Javier Milei in Argentina.

The Leftist shit-show and inevitable economic car crash we're facing without even an adequate Opposition to resist, makes it sadly more likely that when our Le Pen materialises, she is likely to make cuddly old Nigel Farage seem milquetoast.

An Enemy of the People starring Matt Smith extends at the West End’s Duke of York’s Theatre | West End Theatre.

Things are better in my world. The Misses P are back in my life and that was the only real reason (my divorce having gone through with goodwill on both sides) for me to be sad. The ex-Mrs P is remarried and I sincerely wish her and her new husband every joy. 

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.

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.