Matthew Carr's Blog

I’m thrilled to be here with you in Copenhagen tonight, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. You know, for a while I thought you were going to give it to Greta Thunberg!

Just kidding. It’s a truly great honour, really great, and I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I gotta say, what took you so long? Because I love peace. I really do. Nobody loves peace more than me. All my friends and family know how much I love it. Freddo of course, I mean, Don Junior. Jared. Vladimir. Crown Prince Muhammad. Prince Tamim. They all love peace.

And Bibi. Yes, Bibi loves peace too. A lotta people don’t know that, but they don’t know him like I do.

But now it’s over, thanks to me. 3,000 years they’ve been fighting in the Middle East and now it’s over. Now the sun has risen on the holy land and there will be peace for all eternity, and the enemies of civilization have been defeated, and there will be no more terror ever again. How about that? It’s such a glorious, joyful moment. So much joy. So much. It’s beautiful to see it. Even Jesus couldn’t do this. Buddha, what did he do?

Martin Luther King, you gave him the peace prize. Why? Three letters: DEI. Of course nobody says that. You can’t say that. And Obama? You gave it to him before he even did anything!

Barack. Hussein. Obama. Let that sink in. But you gave it to him anyway. You gave it to Malala and she was only 17 - wasn’t she still a minor? And my wife has done more for peace than she has.

But nobody has done more for peace than me. When I think of all the wars I’ve stopped…it’s just fantastic, you know?

So many wars.

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World War I. Who ended that? Nobody knew how. They’re in the trenches. There’s gas. One million people dead in half an hour. So I call the Fuhrer. The leader. In Germany they call ‘em the Fuhrer. It’s kinda cool. And Willy, he’s on his horse in the forest and he picks up, and I say Willy, let’s make a deal. And he takes it. Next day he’s gone, the generals are on the train talking, and it’s Christmas and the soldiers are playing soccer in no man’s land. It’s beautiful to see. You had to be there.

Japan in World War 2. They’re killing our boys in the islands. So we drop two atomic bombs. Boom! And I call the Emperor. I say, take the deal. Next minute they’re making cars and motorbikes.

Did I get any credit?

India and Pakistan. They got nukes. They’re running round, all fired up. Like they’re gonna start World War 3 and I tell them, guys, guys, you need to calm down. And they stop. And you know, it’s a funny thing. A man in the Pakistani government, a very important man, he says, Mr President you know you just saved the world?

Can you imagine that? And that was this year!

Romania and Agrabah. Who even remembers that? They’re killing each other for years. It’s been going on for years. Really brutal. 2 million dead in a week, and they’re like, help us we can’t stop! And the world is like, we don’t know how to stop this!

And then I call them up and I say, it’s Donald. Let’s make a deal. And they made the deal. And now they’re happy. So happy. It’s beautiful. And the Prince of Agrabah. Prince Aladdin. He says, Donald you have the heart of a lion. It’s true. I’m not boasting. I’m a modest guy.

And you didn’t give me the prize for that. But it’s ok. I don’t feel bad. I’m pleased to be here in Hamburg.

But when I think of the wars I stopped you could’ve thanked me for. So many. Democratic Republic of Rwanda. I stopped it. Korea. Stopped. Genghis Khan. I called him and he picks up. I say, Genghis, let’s build some casinos. And the Mongols just went back home.

China should be grateful. Europe should be grateful.

You think Confunctius could do that? Even Winston Churchill couldn’t do that.

And you know how I can do this? Because I’m strong. America is strong. Iran’s building nukes. The Mullahs are gonna wipe out Israel. We send some B2 bombers. Beautiful planes. Boom! Totally obliterated the entire program. It’s the greatest thing. Tren de Aragua? They’re eating the dogs and they’re sending fentanyl and it’s killing us. Five million Americans dead last year.

Boom! We smoke a few of their boats. Fentanyl boats. Enough fentanyl in one of those boats to kill two million Americans. And we blow ‘em out of the water, and now they don’t go fishing anymore, and I can’t blame them! I wouldn’t!

We change the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and the cartels stop. No more drugs in America. It’s beautiful. When you’re strong, people respect you.

It’s what I told Secretary Hegseth. It’s what I said to my generals. You see the boats and you take ‘em out. It’s what I tell ICE. Someone gets in your way, you do whatever you need to do.

Because it’s war out there. Even in America. It’s bad. Really bad. Our cities were out of control.

Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, Portland. They were war zones. Total anarchy. Worse than Gaza. They got Molotovs. They got snipers on the roofs. Antifa is killing our people. Democrats are running wild. The cops won’t let Kristi use the restroom. A guy in a chicken suit staring her down. It’s worse than ISIS. Moms can’t take their kids to school. They’ve got machine guns and barricades, they’re cooking the dogs and it’s awful.

In Portland they’re dressed up like frogs. Frogtifa, they call themselves. And you can’t see their faces, so you don’t know they are. Maybe Hezbollah. Maybe Tren de Aragua. You just don’t know.

It’s hell. They’re jumping up and down. They’re making frog sounds and dancing and terrorising our officers, and the people are begging me for help. So I send in the soldiers and it stops. Antifa is gone. The frogs are gone. People are walking their dogs again. It’s beautiful. So beautiful.

Did I get a peace prize for that? You know the answer. You know what my friend Vladimir says - and he knows a lot about peace - this award has lost credibility.

But hey, I don’t hold a grudge. I love you guys and I’m thrilled to be here in Holland. And you should be thrilled too. And Gaza should be grateful. The Palestinians should be grateful. Because I called ‘em up. I call up Hamas in the tunnels and he picks up, and I said you gotta take the deal. You give up your guns and you take the deal.

If you don’t take the deal, Israel is gonna keep killing your people and we’re gonna keep giving them the bombs to do it. And he says ok, ok.

And then I call up Bibi, I said take the win, and he took it.

That was me. No one else did that. Not Sleepy Joe Biden who couldn’t walk down the stairs. Not Barack Hussein Obama who wasn’t even born in the USA. Not the European Union or the Arab League or the United Communist Nations.

But me. And what do the fake news say? Epstein, Epstein. Epstein, Epstein, Epstein. Even though I hardly knew the guy. I met him at a party one time and I’m out here saving the Middle East and that’s all they can talk about?

But it’s so great that you give me the prize. Though really, I shouldn’t have had to beg for it. I called up NATO. I said Jens, get me the peace prize. I told Keir, and Georgia, and Manny, get me that prize or its tariffs for you, baby.

I called up Alfred Nobel at the Danish Academy. I said, you owe me, Alfred. Big time.

I said to Bibi, you owe me. And I told the president, give that guy a pardon. Give everybody a pardon! Because he’s done so much for Israel. And so much for Gaza.

And the Israelis owe me. Hamas owe me too. And the Palestinians owe me. Because now they can go back to their rubble that we helped create. They can eat, as long as they exile the wicked forces of hatred in their midst. And if they don’t, there are plenty more bombs where the others came from! And the ones that still have arms and legs, they can work in my casinos.

But the best thing about all this? The rest of the world can just forget it ever happened. Put it all behind you. Because who wants to think about that? Who wants to watch that on tv every night? Now you don’t have to. And like Keir says, that’s down to me. Go me. Yay me.

And we’re gonna get that rubble cleared, we’re gonna build some beautiful things in Gaza. Right on the waterside, it’s gonna be so great. Atlantic City, eat your heart out. We’re going to make money. So much money. Jared. Tony. Muhammad and Aladdin. The Palestinian Authority. They’re all gonna make so much money, because they took the deal.

Sleepy Joe Biden didn’t do that. Guy didn’t know what a deal was. The European Union didn’t do it. NATO didn’t do it. The Eurovision Song Contest couldn’t do it.

3,000 years of war and nobody else could do this but me.

And so I wanna thank Sweden for giving me this award. I wanna thank Maria for thanking me. Don’t worry Maria, we’ll keep on smoking those boats and we’ll be coming to Caracas very soon! I wanna thank Bibi - he did so much to make this happen. I wanna thank the IDF - bravest army the world has ever seen.

Because you know, America makes some beautiful bombs. Bibi was always calling me up and saying, we need this bomb, we need that one. Weapons I didn’t even know we had!

But it takes people that know how to use them — and Israel obviously used them very well. So many that Israel became strong and powerful, which ultimately led to peace. That’s what led to peace. So I wanna thank our bombs. Because if it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have peace.

But you know most of all, I wanna thank me. Because if it wasn’t for me, none of this would have happened. So thank you me. Go me. You saved the world. Isn’t that fantastic? And I think every country in the world should celebrate this every year with a holiday.

They should call it Trump Day. Why the hell not? Make it a happy happy day for everyone forever and ever.

Blessed are the deal makers.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

It’s a beautiful world.

So beautiful.

God bless America.

STRAINS OF YMCA. STANDING OVATION.

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Today, it is exactly two years since 6,000 Hamas and Hamas-affiliated militias carried out its Operation al-Aqsa Flood attacks on Israeli army bases and settlements in southern Israel. In the course of these attacks, 1, 175 Israelis were killed, most of whom were unarmed civilians, and 247 civilian and military hostages were kidnapped and taken to the Gaza Strip. In response to the bloodiest single day in Israel’s history, the Netanyahu coalition government unleashed a punitive war of annihilation on the largely defenceless Palestinian population of 2.4 million people, that has reduced much of the Gaza Strip into a heap of rubble.

According to data gathered from the Gaza Health Ministry and the Israeli authorities by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) , there were 65,062 reported fatalities in Gaza as of 17 September this year, and 165, 697 maimed and injured. These confirmed casualties include 18,430 children, 9, 735 women and 4,2429 elderly. Many more bodies are buried under the rubble.

The OCHA’s figures paint a staggering picture of devastation and societal collapse that is difficult to comprehend. 78 percent of all structures in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged, 92 percent of housing has been destroyed, and 1.98 million people are currently in need of emergency shelter. At present, 500,000 people in Gaza are living in Phase 5 food security conditions characterized by ‘starvation, destitution and death’, 454 Palestinians have already died of starvation, and Gaza now has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world.

In the course of these operations, Israel has razed entire towns and neighbourhoods, wiped out families, and deliberately targeted aid workers, doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers and journalists. According to a study by Brown University’s Cost of War Project (CWP), more than 250 journalists had been killed in the Strip by August this year - a figure higher than all the journalists killed in two world wars, and in the wars in Vietnam, Laos, Korea and Cambodia.

By October 2024 alone, Israel had bombed 40,00 targets in the Gaza Strip, and its estimated tonnage had exceeded the combined bomb tonnage dropped on London, Dresden, and Hamburg during World War II. All this, according to Israeli figures, has resulted in the deaths of between 17,000 and 23,0000 of Hamas’s estimated 30,000 fighters.

Given Israel’s very loose and often evidence-free definition of what constitutes a combatant, these figures can be taken with more than a pinch of salt, and the military and counterinsurgency objectives of this war have long been subsumed into what has become a war of massacre, of killing for the sake of killing, destruction for the sake of destruction, aimed at humiliating and starving the entire Palestinian population, and eradicating the material basis of Gazan society.

All this has taken place in full view of the entire world, despite Israel’s ban on foreign journalists entering the Strip, and with the direct complicity and collusion of some of the most powerful democratic governments in the world. It was not many years ago, when these countries launched wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, because, their leaders insisted, the world could not stand idly by and watch dictators and autocracies oppressing women and minorities, or carrying out massacres against ‘their own people.’

These were heady days, when British politicians filled with interventionist made lofty Gladstonian speeches in parliament, and liberal and conservative journalists alike took time off from long lunches to tap out urgent calls for cruise missile strikes on the latest dictator du jour.

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For the last two years, Britain and its allies have provided direct military assistance, diplomatic cover, or merely the silence that enabled Israel to wage a war that scholars, international and Israeli humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations have denounced as a genocide. All this was underway long before the Trump gangsters took power. Samantha Power, the author of ‘“A Problem from Hell”: America in the age of Genocide, had nothing to say about his one when she served in Biden’s administration, and nor did her boss. This time, we knew, people used to say, about the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides. This time, we also knew, but the governments that might have stopped or condemned it were too busy enabling it or averted their eyes.

Until recently, Conservative and Labour governments alike were ready to join in any war at the drop of an American hat, in order to prevent massacres that had not even happened. Now they can barely raise the voices to condemn a massacre that is staring them in the face. Last month, David Lammy solemnly announced that HM government ‘has not concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza’ and that therefore, ministers were absolved of any responsibility to act in accordance with the 1948 genocide convention.

Clearly the government has given the matter some thought, though one suspects the process didn’t take long. And like its counterparts in Europe and the United States, the British government has been less circumspect, and considerably more energetic, in repressing protests against the genocide that it has concluded is not happening, than it has in condemning it.

The most egregious example of this was the banning of Palestine Action as a proscribed terrorist organization. So far, neither Yvette Cooper nor Shabana Mahmood has offered any substantive evidence to justify a decision that has effectively placed vicars, pensioners and disabled protestors on the same level as Islamic State, resulting in hundreds of arrests that have done nothing but confirm the cowardice of the government that introduced this shameful legislation.

Last week, Mahmood was at it again, when she called on protestors to cancel Saturday’s Defend Our Juries protest, because of the despicable attack on a synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur. The organisers refused to accept the implication that their protest was directed against Jews, and the protest went ahead anyway, resulting in hundreds more arrests, Mahmood doubled down, and promised to introduce further restrictions to prevent such protests in the future.

On one level you can’t blame her. Labour has now reached the point when the political costs of drawing back from this confrontation are greater than those of withdrawing from it. The government will lose in the end, because the law makes no sense, and its authoritarianism is a confirmation of cowardice, not strength.

And throughout all this, both Conservative and Labour governments have continued to back Israel to the hilt. Despite Starmer’s recognition of a Palestinian state - a gesture which is effectively meaningless when Palestinians are being slaughtered in unprecedented numbers - there has literally been nothing that Israel has not been allowed to do that this government has not found a way to accept.

Even when Israel unilaterally bombed Iran, Starmer immediately offered to help Israel ‘defend itself’, even though Iran was the country being attacked. From time to time, ministers have frowned and used a few cross words to criticize Israel’s failure to observe humanitarian protocols or protect the civilian population .

But for the most part, the British government, like so many others, has accepted such deaths as a tragic necessity for which Hamas, not Israel, is primarily responsible. Even when Starmer has described the ‘suffering’ in Gaza as ‘unspeakable and indefensible’, neither the British nor any other government has taken any serious action regarding the country responsible for this suffering. In July, Britain was one of 25 Western countries condemning the ‘inhumane killing’ of hundreds of Palestinians trying to collect food at the lethal food distribution sites that replaced UNRWA.

Inhumane is the very least you can say about shooting starving unarmed civilians to a food distribution site that you have set up. Of course, Britain doesn’t have the power to compel Israel to do anything by itself. As the world well knows, the United States is the main supplier of weapons to Israel, regardless of whether the government consists of Biden Democrats or MAGA mafiosi. Labour’s collusion and cowardice is part of a generalized moral failure.

We tend to associated genocide with extremist movements from outside the ‘international order’, with Nazis and the SS, with the Ustashe, Serb paramilitaries or machete-waving Hutu. This one has been entirely different. It has been carried out within the liberal democratic framework of treaties, rules, and conventions that were supposedly designed to prevent such acts, with the passive or active support of countries that are part of this framework.

How did this happen? The most obvious answer, is the horror of 7 October itself. Most defenders of the war cite the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas, including the taking of Israeli hostages, as a justification for everything that followed. But this is only part of the explanation. If the hostages were the point of Israel’s operations, there have been opportunities to negotiate their release, which Israel has either ignored or deliberately sabotaged, essentially because the Netanyahu government has no interest in bringing the war to an end, and saw it as an opportunity to achieve wider political objectives.

There is no doubt that Hamas carried out horrendous crimes on 7 October, even if some of these atrocities were fabricated. But the brutality of these operations was a consequence of a conflict that is more than a century old. Too many governments and too many people have refused to recognize this, either because they already supported the Zionist project, or because of sheer ignorance and laziness. Some of the most bloodthirsty commentators - you know who they are - have made spurious comparisons between Hamas and Nazi Germany or Japan, the better to present Gaza City as the 21st century’s equivalent of 1939 Berlin, Dresden, or Tokyo.

But Hamas is not the government of an industrialized, militarized state with the capacity to engage in aggressive wars of conquest against its neighbours. It is the political representative of one section of the Palestinian people living under occupation - segmented and isolated under the guise of the Gaza ‘withdrawal’ for nearly two decades in order to postpone - indefinitely - the realisation of Palestinian political aspirations.

Throughout those years, the ‘international community’ denied the legitimacy of a government that Gazans had voted for, and accepted Israel’s framing of Hamas as a threat to its security and existence. In the months leading up to 7 October, Israel and the Gulf States were on the brink of normalising relations, which would have marginalised Gaza even more than it already was.

None of this makes Hamas good guys or heroes. It doesn’t mean that what Hamas did on 7 October was inevitable, or that the world should ‘rejoice’ in the 7 October raid, as the SWP once disgracefully suggested.

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Hamas bears moral responsibility for the crimes carried out against civilians on 7 October, and also for exposing the population of Gaza to the killing and devastation it knew would follow. That was a political choice, and Israel also made a political choice, when it unleashed a war of total destruction, and no amount of propaganda about national survival and Palestinian ‘terror’ can conceal who is the most powerful protagonist here.

Too many governments that should know better had already accepted every Israeli cliché about Arab/Muslim terrorism as the primary cause, rather than a symptom of the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ even before 7 October, and too many saw the Hamas raids as a confirmation of this framework. Too many have acted as if Hamas was al-Qaeda or Islamic State. By denying any rationality to Hamas as political actors , and presenting Hamas as a threat to its national survival, Israel has created a moral climate in which blowing the limbs off children, burning patients in hospital beds, and shooting five-year-old girls in their parents’ car could seem justifiable, or at least unavoidable consequences of the ‘horrors of war’.

Israel had its own reasons for framing the conflict as a war against terror, and nothing else. But it beggars belief that so many governments have accepted this disingenuous and shallow version of political conflict. However much some politicians and commentators who support the war, may whitter on about Palestinian ‘suffering’, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that too many people simply do not see Palestinians, especially Gazan Palestinians, as human beings with the same rights as Israelis or citizens of their own countries.

They may wring their hands. But in practice, Palestinians always come second, and this is why Gazans have been killed, maimed and starved for two years. Now, Western democracies and Arab autocracies are falling over themselves to support the ‘peace plan’ concocted by a venal cabal of real estate magnates and billionaires, with the inevitable participation of Tony Blair.

These are the vultures now circling over Gaza’s field of corpses, some of whom are looking to make money out of it. And the fact that this plan has been devised without any Palestinian participation, demonstrates once again that Palestinians are seen by Israel and its supporters -regardless of who they are - as savage children, pawns to be moulded and shunted around by Israel, or the sinister cabal of Gulf autocrats and pseudo-humanitarians who are now dreaming of building skyscrapers, freeways and casinos on the bones of Gaza’s dead.

Everything about the plan is framed to suit Israel, from its proposal to make Gaza ‘a deradicalised terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours’ to its call for ‘an interfaith dialogue process…based on the values of tolerance and peaceful co-existence to try and change mindsets.’

The fact that Israel has bombed Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran and Qatar, might suggest that Israel, not Hamas, is the greater threat to its ‘neighbours’. And ‘interfaith dialogue’ reeks of Tony Blair’s happy clappy Christianity, and will not do a single thing to resolve a conflict based not on the absence of dialogue, but on occupation, displacement and competing claims for the same territory.

The Trump plan also intends to ‘reform’ the Palestinian Authority and make it fit to govern Gaza, regardless of whether Gazans want it. Should Israel also be ‘reformed’, as settlers and the army seize more and more territory in the West Bank, killing Palestinians and destroying their homes in territories under the Palestinian Authority’s control? None of this interests the ‘international community’, which, to paraphrase Brecht, is once again trying to dissolve the Palestinian people and make another.

The ‘plan’ has one single virtue: it may halt the slaughter and bring relief to the people of Gaza. It will also bring some political relief to governments that have supported all this throughout, despite rising public sympathy for the Palestinians and horror and outrage at what Israel has done.

Some of these governments may well try to give the orange gangster his peace prize, and in these crazed times, he might even get it. But the ‘peace’ in this plan is not the negotiated peace that brings conflicts to an end. It is the peace inflicted on the Biblical Amelekites, in which ‘Nothing could serve as a reminder of Amalek’s name—not even an animal about which it could be said.’ It is the desolation that Tacitus once put in the mouth of a British chieftain.

It is a peace that merely confirms the moral bankruptcy of those who inflicted this devastation, of the individuals and countries that facilitated it, and who have between them created a moral calamity and a humanitarian catastrophe that will haunt the 21st century, just as the 1948 Nakba haunted the twentieth.

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There was a time when fascists and the far-right were generally regarded as morally abhorrent forces on the fringes of British society, when historical memories of Nazism, the Holocaust and World War II were still recent enough to invoke condemnation whenever these groups appeared, and overt expressions of racism within mainstream politics were seen as something shameful and contemptible.

This is not to say that racism didn’t exist in the UK, or that the far-right has not been a persistent threat to communities in this country. The post-war history of immigration is filled with examples to the contrary, from racist riots in the 1950s, to the rise of the the National Front in the 1970s, and the long struggles of first and second generation immigrants against street and state level racism. Nor was racism absent from the political mainstream. British politicians - both Labour and Conservative - have a long tradition of making coded statements or enacting legislation based on racist premises, that did not mention race overtly.

But there was a reason why Enoch Powell was sacked by Heath for his ‘rivers of blood’ speech, and why, beyond the open racism of the likes of John Tyndall, Nick Griffin and Colin Jordan, it was once considered unacceptable in any respectable platform to openly express racist views in an openly racist way. The publication of the 1999 Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence was a watershed moment, not just because of its findings of ‘institutional racism’ in the Metropolitan Police, but its 70 recommendations intended to ensure ‘zero tolerance’ to racism in society were broadly accepted.

For some years now, that wall of shame has been steadily collapsing, and ideas and attitudes that were once confined to the margins have moved steadily towards the centre. In an article for Al Jazeera in July this year, the writer and former Asian Youth Movement activist Tariq Mehmood warned that Britain was on its way to becoming a ‘racist dystopia’, and recalled the Bradford of his youth in the 70s and 80s:

Knife attacks and fire bombings were not uncommon, nor were the demands by far-right groups, such as the National Front and the British National Party, for the repatriation of Black (ie, non-white) immigrants’. Attending school sometimes meant running through a gauntlet of racist kids. In the playground, sometimes they swarmed around, chanting racist songs.

A former member of the ‘Bradford 12’ is not someone you would expect to idealise the Britain of his youth. Nevertheless, Mehmood noted a qualitative distinction between the present and the past:

The overt, street-level violence of those years was terrifying, but it came from the margins of society. The ruling political class, though complicit, avoided openly aligning with these groups.

Today, that distance has disappeared. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other prominent members of Labour regularly echo far-right rhetoric, promising to ‘crack down’ on those seeking sanctuary here. His Conservative predecessor, Rishi Sunak, and his ministers were not different. His Home Minister Suella Braverman falsely claimed grooming gangs had a ‘predominance’ of ‘British Pakistani males, who hold cultural values totally at odds with British values’.

The closing of this distance has been going on for decades, as a result of the toxic ‘debate’ about immigration and asylum that has steadily poisoned British politics and society, to the point when there is almost no difference in the rhetoric of ‘respectable’ Conservative politicians like Robert Jenrick, and the Farageist ‘insurgents’ and your average Katie Hopkins tweet.

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Ideas that might once have been considered shameful are now paraded as expressions of patriotism and pride. Even Labour politicians now attempt to out-compete Reform in boasting how many refugees they can deport or detain, how patriotic they are, how much they love flags, and how many draconian new policies they can introduce to make life harder for immigrants.

All this is carefully coded to avoid suggestions of racism or xenophobia. All you have to do is express concerns about immigration and any concern becomes valid. Are brown men with ‘medieval attitudes’ a threat to white women and children? Check. Is it true that asylum seekers - most of whom are brown men - are not ‘genuine refugee’, but parasites and usurpers looking to steal ‘our’ jobs or access benefits? Check. Is it racist or xenophobic to want to put ‘our people’ first, or demand that people speak English in ‘our’ public places? Check, check.

Ideas like this have become so commonplace, that hardly any politician dares challenge them. As a result, immigration has effectively become the Trojan horse, through which the far right has infiltrated once-fringe ideas about ‘remigration’, ‘great replacements’ etc closer to the political centre. Without this toxic ‘debate’ we would not have had Brexit. And now, the UK is poised for something far worse. Polls now suggest that Reform could win an outright majority. Two weeks ago, the violent felon Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and his cohorts were able to mobilize more than 100,000 people in the largest far-right demonstration in British history.

As a result, the UK is facing a uniquely dire situatio: On the one hand a mass political party that routinely propagates the most vicious lies about immigrants is on course to form the next government, with a Trump-like mass deportation program as its flagship policy. At the same time, a far-right street movement, backed by the richest man on the planet, is mobilising unprecedented numbers around a flag-waving pseudo-patriotism in order to ‘unite the kingdom.’

To understand how this is likely to play out in the future, consider what has been going on for the last few years. In 2011/12, according to government figures, there were 35, 845 police recorded racial hate crimes in England and Wales. In 2023/24 there 98, 799. With one or two exceptions, the numbers have shown continual growth ever since, particularly since 2016/17. In Northern Ireland, there were 2,049 racist incidents and 1,329 race hate crimes in the year ending June 2025 - a year that Amnesty International called ‘a year of hate and fear.’

In August this year, a 42-year-old Filipino nurse named Apple Moorhouse was racially abused in a Halifax park while walking with her daughter and elderly relatives A video taken by Moorhouse shows a white woman jeering at her father that he ‘can’t even speak English.’ When Moorhouse tells the couple that she is an NHS worker, the woman snarls, pushes her, attempts to grab her phone and calls her a ‘slave.’ At one point, the man makes a Nazis salute, asks ‘Have you got a rubber boat’ while mimicking someone rowing, and then begins calmly throwing water at Moorhouse.

The most striking thing about this assault, apart from the primitive rage and hatred on display, is how brazen and out in the open it is. The couple clearly don’t care that their actions are being filmed. They believe they have right on their side, and that they are entitled to abuse a random stranger who happens to look like a ‘migrant.’

That same month, two elderly Sikh men were assaulted and kicked to the ground by three teenagers outside a railway station in Wolverhampton. Earlier this month a Sikh woman was raped in Oldbury, in the West Midlands, by two white males, who shouted at her that ‘You don’t belong in this country, get out.’ On 2 September a nine-year-old girl in Bristol was shot three times in the face with an airgun by two white males on scooters who subjected her to racial slurs. On 12 September, a gang of pissed masked youths subjected an Indonesian woman and a group of female relatives in the centre of Glasgow to racial abuse, making stabbing motions, using racial slurs and threatening to put her in a body bag.

These assaults took place at the end of a summer in which anti-migrant ‘protesters’ have demonstrated outside hotels housing asylum seekers, and one asylum hotel has been set on fire. Not all the participants in the protests are members of far-right groups, but their ‘concerns’ have been echoed, fomented and exploited by the far-right, both on the streets and also in its more mainstream iterations in Reform and a dying Conservative Party.

Don’t expect the likes of Farage, Jenrick and Yaxley-Lennon to accept the claim by Somerset’s Police and Crime Commissioner, that these marches were ‘emboldening other people to commit verbal and physical attacks on people.’ But this emboldenment - already evident during and after the Brexit referendum - has become clearer with every passing year.

It was clear in 2024, when vigilante mobs dragged people of colour from their cars to check if they were ‘immigrants’. It was clear during this month’s ‘unite the kingdom’ march, when groups of ‘coked-up, drunk’ white men intimidated black and brown people on the London underground.

If Farage’s party forms a government, the attacks and protests we have seen this summer will morph into levels of street violence unlike anything this country has ever seen. Expect to find MEGA ‘patriot’ mobs and vigilantes looking to finally take their country back. Expect levels of terror and intimidation directed at communities across the country and against anyone who looks and sounds like a migrant. All this will take place alongside a militarised deportation and detention machinery modelled on what Trump, Miller & Co have been doing in the US.

We’ll see how ‘patriotic’ the flag wavers are then.

In effect, we are facing a looming political and social emergency, yet far, there has not been any coherent national response to this threat, and no leadership whatsoever from the Labour government. Last week, Keir Starmer belatedly recognized the danger that the country is in, and called on his party to fight ‘the fight of our lives’. This development can only be welcomed - up to a point. But it should also be acknowledged that Starmer and his team have so far proved themselves painfully incapable of fighting anyone or anything - unless you count Palestine Action.

And even when Starmer tries to sound tough and forthright, he inevitably undermines. Take Laura Kuenssberg’s show on Sunday, when Starmer rightly condemned Farage’s plan to abolish indefinite leave to remain as ‘a racist policy. I do think it is immoral. It needs to be called out for what it is.’ Like everything Labour does, this apparent boldness was immediately qualified. Asked if Reform was trying to appeal to racists, Starmer replied: ‘No, I think there are plenty of people who either vote Reform or are thinking of voting Reform who are frustrated.’

Millions of people in this country are frustrated, but they don’t necessarily want to vote for a party whose only serious policy is that it intends to deport 600,000 people. And as for trying to appeal to racists - of course that’s what Farage is doing and what he has always done. It’s what he did during the Brexit referendum. It’s what he did last year, when he legitimized the Southport racist riots by ‘asking questions’ about ‘two-tier Britain.’

But Starmer cannot bring himself to say this, for fear of emulating Hilary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ comment and alienating Reform voters who already loathe him, and so he added this little gem:

It is one thing to say we’re going to remove illegal migrants, people who have no right to be here. I’m up for that.

It won’t warm many Reform voters’ hearts to know that Starmer is ‘up for that’. Nor are these voters likely to be impressed by Starmer’s condemnation of attacks on ‘people who are lawfully here…They are our neighbours. They’re people who work in our economy. They are part of who we are. It will rip this country apart.’

Farage and Tice won’t be losing much sleep about that possibility. And immigrants were not part of who we are, in Starmer’s dreadful ‘island of strangers’ speech in May this year, when he described immigration as a ‘squalid chapter for our politics, our economy, and our country’ and a ‘one nation experiment in open borders conducted on a country that voted for control.’

Starmer has said since that he regrets making that speech, but he has not explained why he made it, or what he regrets about it. And his belated change in tone sounds as hollow and inauthentic as his previous embrace of far-right nostrums.

Last Thursday, Starmer urged progressive politicians to confront the ‘lies’ and ‘industrialised infrastructure of grievance’ of the right-wing populists. Fine. But at no point has Starmer or his party ever confronted or even acknowledged these lies. Again and again, he has echoed them or given credence to them.

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That same day, Starmer announced his plan to introduce ID cards in…(drum roll) the Telegraph, in an op ed that claimed that

left-wing parties, including my own, did shy from people’s concerns around illegal immigration. It has been too easy for people to enter the country, work in the shadow economy and remain illegally.

The simple slogans offered by Reform will not do anything to resolve the problem. There is no silver bullet, but we must enforce every possible measure to deter migrants from entering British waters.

He then went on to argue:

Equally, the belief that uncontrolled legal migration was nothing but good news for an economy should never have been accepted on the Left. It is not compassionate Left-wing politics to rely on labour that exploits foreign workers and undercuts fair wages.

And then came the warning:

At its heart – its most poisonous belief, on full display at the protests in London two weeks ago – is that there is a coming struggle, a defining struggle, a violent struggle, for the nation. You don’t need to be a historian to know where that kind of poison can lead. You can just feel it.

To counter it, we must make and win the case for patriotic national renewal, based on enduring British values. Our country is still the proud, tolerant, diverse island it has always been, full of fierce and fair-minded Britons.

There is so much wrong with this awful piece, it’s difficult to know where to start. Whatever you think about ID cards, it is not at all clear how they can help stop ‘illegal working’, or why Starmer felt the need, yet again, to introduce this policy by presenting migrants as job thieves, in the most crazed of all Tory newspapers.

We could also ask when ‘the Left’ - or at least any section of it with power and influence - had ever argued that ‘uncontrolled legal migration was nothing but good news’. Or what a ‘patriotic national renewal’ consists of, apart from a cluster of three words. Or why Starmer is promising to ‘enforce every measure to deter migrants from entering British waters’, when successive governments, including his, have been doing just that for years, without success. Or why he use the word ‘migrants’ to describe people crossing the channel who are technically refugees until proved otherwise.

As for the concern about exploiting migrant workers, does Starmer think that the Telegraph is Tribune? Because this is a newspaper that could care less. And if Starmer thinks he is playing to the Labour base, there is abundant evidence to suggest that harsh immigration enforcement actually facilitates the exploitation of migrant workers instead of preventing it, by creating what a study at the University of Birmingham calls ‘a compliant workforce at the state’s margins.’

The study found that, since March 2025, the Labour government’s crackdown on ‘illegal working’ in the gig economy has created an array of ID checks that have made working conditions harsher and ‘effectively embedded the “hostile environment” into the architecture of [delivery] platform work.’

If Labour knows this, it doesn’t seem too bothered. A recent Home Office video actually outdoes the Theresa May ‘hostile environment’ rhetoric, with its footage of migrant workers being arrested by immigration officers, accompanied by the caption ‘The British people work hard every day to better their lives and pay into a system that delivers for them.’

Migrant workers work hard too, and they also try to better their lives, and a Labour government seriously committed to prevent exploitation in the workplace would not recycle hardworking Brits versus undeserving foreigners rhetoric of the type that Reform engages in.

A government that wanted to confront Reform’s ‘infrastructure of lies’ would challenge Reform’s unreliable claims that there are 1.2 million illegal immigrants in the UK. It would refute manipulated statistics suggesting that refugees are more likely to be sexual predators than British nationals. It would call out lies about Eastern Europeans eating swans.

Labour has done none of this. And as for migrants stealing British jobs; in March this year, the AIM group, which specialises in providing training, employment and apprenticeship opportunities for the government, reported that 13.3 % of businesses are experiencing Labour shortages. AIM also reported that there are currently 300,000 labour shortages, particularly in construction, health and social care, and hospitality and tourism - shortages that it attributed not immigrants undercutting British workers, but to Brexit, skill gaps and early retirement.

Any serious debate about immigration ought to include points like this, but Labour never makes them. Unable to bring about the social and economic renewal that this country so badly needs, this government has preferred, like its predecessors, to pander to the ‘concerns’ that are now leading the country towards another self-inflicted calamity.

But Starmer remains right on one thing: the political battle against Reform and the resurgent far-right is ultimately a battle for the soul and character of a country that can no longer fall back on the comforting cliché that ‘this is not who we are.’ The coming years will define who we are, and what kind of country we want to be.

Labour must be part of that struggle, and this is a real pity, because as things stand, the government is tragically ill-equipped to lead it. Yesterday, an open letter from 100 charities warned the new Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood that:

Targeting refugees will do nothing to tackle these structural issues or improve people’s lives. It only serves as a dangerous smokescreen to scapegoat the most vulnerable and distract from the very real dangers to our society.

A Labour government should not need to be told that. And the fact that such a letter was written is another testimony to the tin-eared inadequacy of an administration that must now fight a battle for the country’s soul, even though it seems to have no soul of its own.

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Last week I re-watched the spy flic Three Days of the Condor, to mark Robert Redford’s passing at the age of 89. I always liked Redford, because it was difficult not to. There was something about him that exuded honesty, good intentions and a complete absence of cruelty or malice.

All these qualities obviously stand out by their absence from the malignant lying gargoyles who are making America great again. These are people you can expect to find when a society is rotting in front of your eyes. Redford was the product of different times. Like James Stewart before him, he embodied the possibility of a different America. Even when he appeared in films that criticized his country’s failings, his artistic trajectory always contained the hopeful idea that America contained values worth defending.

Three Days of the Condor belongs very much to the liberal Hollywood tradition that he was part of. It’s something of a period piece, from its funky jazz soundtrack to its historically-rooted critique of CIA overreach

The film came out in September 1975, just over a year after Richard Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal, and 6 months after the North Vietnamese Army rolled into Saigon. In 1971, the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI burgled an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and passed on information on the agency’s covert and illegal COINTELPRO program, which the Washington Post famously published. In January 1975, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, also known as the Church Committee, began its investigations into the CIA’s activities abroad.

In short, this was a moment of American vulnerability and introspection, when the US government and its institutions were subject to unusual levels of critical public scrutiny. It was against this background that Hollywood also began to hold the government up to scrutiny, in a slew of films like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), and Alan J. Pakula’s ‘paranoia trilogy’: Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974), and All the President’s Men (1976).

The paranoia in these 70s conspiracy films was not the rightwing ‘paranoid style’ of the Palmer Raids, McCarthyism or the John Birch Society, which Richard Hofstadter analysed in his seminal 1964 essay. Combing neo-no Irish cynicism with liberal disenchantment, these films plucked their conspiracies from the headlines, and turned them into critiques of their own government.

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Three Days of the Condor’s script was written by Lorenzo Semple Jr, a former intelligence officer, who also scripted The Parallax View, and the two films have a very similar vibe. Where Warren Beatty’s dogged reporter discovers a corporation that recruits psychopaths to kill politicians, Robert Redford’s bookish college boy Joe Turner, codenamed ‘Condor’ works for the American Literary and Historical Society in New York - a CIA front which reads books and then feeds them into a computer. It’s not clear - to me at least - why the company does this. Is it in order to detect potential enemy operations by seeing who might be imagining them in fiction? Or is it to see if actual CIA operations are being written about in spy fiction and pulpy novels?

Once you put that somewhat implausible scenario aside, we are in familiar early 70s territory: the truth-seeking individual trapped in a dangerous, unfathomable world in which no institution or individual can be trusted, where even the mailman might be trying to kill you. When Turner goes out to buy lunch, he returns to find that his colleagues have been massacred, and he must then find his way through the conspiratorial maze in order to find out what happened and also to save his life.

Redford is perfectly cast as the all-American innocent who finds out that the agency he works for is not innocent. It’s no good him protesting that ‘I just READ BOOKS!’, when he realizes that one of his own reports has led elements high up in the CIA to murder his colleagues, using the freelance assassin Joubert, played by Max von Sydow with an icy amorality.

Naturally, these elements are intent on murdering Turner, in order to cover their tracks. With the initially unwilling help of Faye Dunaway’s lonely photographer, Turner stumbles through the labyrinth, and gradually shines a flashlight into the darkness. Using his Signals Intelligence background, he eventually find his way to the architect of his colleagues’ destruction: Leonard Atwood, CIA Deputy Director of Operations for the Middle East.

It turns out, in those post-OPEC years, that Turner’s readings have inadvertently revealed a secret CIA plot to invade the Middle East. ‘You mean this whole damn thing was about OIL?’ Turner yells at Cliff Robertson’s New York CIA deputy director chief Higgins - a question that has a new poignancy in the 21st century.

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Even then, it was about oil, and Higgins is also in on it, even as he tries to bring the Condor back in from the cold. In the final scene, Higgins claims that the plan to seize the Middle East oilfields is just a war game. At the same time, he suggests that if it was real, most Americans would support seizing the oil fields in order to perpetuate their high standard of living.

Turner then tells Higgins that he has given details of the plot to the New York Times. Checkmate to Turner, or so it seems. Except that Higgins asks him,’ How do you know they’ll print it?’

‘They’ll print it,’ Turner replies, with more confidence than he actually feels. ‘How do you know?’ Higgins yells, as he fades into the crowd - a fugitive for the rest of his life unless the New York Times can save him. This is Parallax View ‘deep state’ conspiracism - the suggestion that every American institution is subordinate to the all-powerful secret forces that pervade American life.

It’s all a bit of a mess, and even though it lacks The Parallax View’s atmosphere of claustrophobic dread, it’s engaging nonetheless, once you suspend disbelief, and abandon yourself to the charms of Redford and Dunaway. At the time, the critic Roger Ebert called it a ‘well-made thriller, tense and involving, and the scary thing, in these months after Watergate, is that it’s all too believable.’ Ebert also saw the film as a symptom of a cultural shift:

Conspiracies involving murder by federal agencies used to be found in obscure publications of the far left. Now they’re glossy entertainments starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway. How soon we grow used to the most depressing possibilities about our government - and how soon, too, we commercialize on them. Hollywood stars used to play cowboys and generals. Now they’re wiretappers and assassins, or targets.

How soon indeed, and it’s interesting to consider these premises in an era in which the American republic is collapsing in front of our eyes, under an administration whose criminality and corruption makes Watergate look like the political equivalent of parking on a double yellow line.

To some extent, films like Three Days of the Condor were a liberal counterpoint to right-wing movies such as Death Wish and the Dirty Harry films, which also came out in the same period. These films were also critiques of systemic failure, that presented the lone man with the gun as the solution to liberal America’s failings. Nevertheless, for a brief period in the second half of the 70s, it seemed as though the liberals were actually winning. In April 1976. the Church Committee published its findings, and concluded that there was no constitutional authority for intelligence services to break the law and carry out assassinations in pursuit of US foreign policy objectives.

That same year All the President’s Men (Redford once again) seemed to answer Higgins’ question ‘How do you know they’ll print it?’ in its heroic account of the dogged reporting of the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story. In 1977, Jimmy Carter won the presidency. And in 1978, the US government enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which attempted to provide judicial oversight to intelligence-gathering and warrantless surveillance.

Under Carter’s human rights policy, the US government attempted to bring a new moral dimension to American foreign policy, and curb the excesses of the ‘national security state’ doctrine that had dominated the thinking of successive administrations since the beginning of the Cold War. For the first time in American history, a US government set out, as Secretary of State Cyrus Vance put it, to ‘speak frankly about injustice, both at home and abroad.’

This policy often fell short, but it also had real impact. These were the years in which the US cut off military aid to the Uruguayan ‘torture chamber of Latin America’. Where Henry Kissinger had given the Argentinian military carte blanche to do murder and torture its opponents in order to fight ‘terrorism’, Carter’s intrepid and outspoken Assistant Secretary for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs Patricia Derian infuriated the Argentinian generals with her denunciations of the ‘systematic tortures’ and ‘summary executions’ practiced by the regime.

ThenSoviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions, and the revolutionary tide in Central America brought an end to these efforts, and an end to Carter. Like Dirty Harry or Charles Bronson’s murderous avenger, Ronald Reagan portrayed all these outcomes as the result of American weakness in the face of ‘Soviet aggression’, and launched what was effectively the world’s first attempt to ‘make America great again’ in the 1980s.

Under Reagan, the CIA recovered all the powers it had lost, and gained others it had not had, as it implemented Reagan’s ‘rollback’ agenda, by conducting the most wide-ranging and expensive covert operations in its history in Afghanistan and Nicaragua. Throughout the 80s, America gave direct military and political assistance to some of the worst regimes in the world. These were the years that produced Contragate, the global jihad in Afghanistan, support for both Iran and Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, and the massacres that drowned the Central American revolutions in a sea of blood.

By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the liberal critique of the national security state was more or less erased by America’s ‘victory’, and the conspiracies in the paranoia movies of the 1970s already seemed like quaint relics of a distant era. In the early 1990s, tens of thousands of Americans joined survivalist groups and ‘patriot militias’ to fight the government they called the Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG), and the United Nations black helicopters that heralded the New World Order.

This was conspiracy thinking on an entirely different level to the grounded conspiracies in Three Days of the Condor and the other 70s paranoia movies. In 1976 a Gallup survey found that 72 percent of the American public trusted the media - an outcome that was a direct consequence of the Woodward and Bernstein investigation into Watergate, and the release of All the President’s Men that same year.

Last week, the Washington Post - a newspaper now owned by a billionaire who has pledged allegiance to the Trump administration - sacked the columnist Karen Attiah for criticizing Charlie Kirk. To millions of American voters, the mainstream media is now the ‘legacy media’ and a purveyor of fake news, compared with the Internet, Fox News, and theninfluencers and podcasters who now dominate the MAGA media landscape.

Today, misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories have rotted the American mind, to the point when millions of voters who believed in a shadow-world controlled by child-eating celebrities helped elect the worst president - and the first American president to be accused of paedophilia - in American history.

All of which brings me back to Robert Redford. When Redford died, Donald Trump was unusually fulsome in his praise, declaring:

Robert Redford had a series of years where there was nobody better. There was a period of time when he was the hottest. I thought he was great.

These feelings were not reciprocated. Given Trump’s propensity to vengeful mean-spiritedness, it is likely that he had forgotten Redford’s 2019 op-ed for NBC News, in which Redford denounced Trump’s government as a ‘monarchy in disguise’, which was launching a ‘dictator-like attack…on everything this country stands for…our shared tolerance and respect for the truth, our sacred rule of law, our essential freedom of the press and our precious freedoms of speech.’

It’s unlikely that Redford saw anything to change his mind in the years that followed. He was on every level, the moral and intellectual opposite of the man he denounced, a principled and generous campaigner as well as an actor, who defended environmental causes, lobbied for clean energy legislation and stood up for Native American rights for decades. He created the Sundance Film Festival as a space for independent filmmakers. He used his celebrity platform with grace, humility and integrity, to try and make his country a better place and help people who had not had the same luck he had.

None of that can be said of Trump and his fascistic minions. And perhaps now, more than ever, we need to remember the man who played Jeremiah Johnson, the Condor and the Sundance Kid, and remind ourselves that not every rich man is a sociopath, and that Americans like Redford have always existed, and still do.

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If there’s one essential rule for these relentlessly dispiriting and perilous times, it’s this: that no matter how bad you think things have become, they can always be made into something worse. I recognise that this is not the most uplifting message, but if we are to have even the slightest chance of getting to a better place, it’s essential to recognise exactly what we are up against.

The response to the horrific murder of the MAGA troll Charlie Kirk is another demonstration of this rule. I should lay my cards on the table here. I never could stand Kirk when he was alive, and I certainly haven’t changed my opinion now that he’s dead. I dislike smirking grifters as a matter of principle, whether they are on the right or the left. And Kirk was a horrible representative of a horrible movement: a white supremacist, a racist, a misogynist, a bully and a conspiracy theorist, who recycled every MAGA talking point and enriched himself in the process.

This was a man who supported the January 6 insurrection; who published a sniggering tweet mocking the near-lethal assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer; who considered that murdered schoolchildren were a price worth paying to preserve the Second Amendment; a free speech advocate whose organization drew up lists of academics and teachers who ‘discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.’

Many of these academics were bombarded with death threats and racist or misogynist language as a result of those lists. Of course, Kirk didn’t participate in violence himself. That’s not for the likes of troll-provocateurs like him. Their job is merely to keep the rage boiling over, and encourage white folk to see themselves as victims of immigrants, Palestinians, minorities, women, feminazis, transpeople and all the other godless hordes that make up the ‘radical left’ - a category that can include anyone from Joe Biden and George Soros to Kermit the Frog.

This was what Kirk did, and no one can say he didn’t do it well. He was a troll dressed up as a democratic debater, the willing servant of a movement that conspired to overthrow an elected president, and which has been actively dismantling American democracy since January this year.

When did you hear Kirk defend the foreign students in the US who were arrested and deported because of what they had said about Gaza? Or the universities that have had funds cut for refusing to cooperate with Trump’s political or culture war agenda? Or the journalists and media organizations attacked by Trump and his government and subjected to vexatious lawsuits?

You didn’t, because he didn’t. Last week an Israeli general coolly admitted that his army had killed and wounded 200,000 Gazans - a shattering admission that barely raised a political eyebrow in the United States or anywhere else. Kirk entirely accepted and supported this insane slaughter, on the usual shallow grounds that Hamas was like Japan and Germany in World War II, and therefore had only itself to blame ‘for everything that results.’

No one should be surprised that Kirk also had a history of antisemitic remarks - because antisemitism is not incompatible with fervent support for Israel. His attitude to free speech belonged to the tradition that Goebbels once expressed:

We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons. If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and salaries for this bear's work, that is its affair. We do not come as friends, nor even as neutrals. We come as enemies. As wolves to the flock, we come.

The ‘new’ far right works in much the same way. To achieve power, it presents the right to offend as a test of democratic freedom and the limits of liberal discourse. In power, no one should offend or insult them. This is why Georgia Meloni routinely sues journalists. It’s why, in January 2017, Steve Bannon called the media ‘the opposition party’, whose only role is to ‘be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.’

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Kirk was on board with all of that, and a bullet in the neck doesn’t make him into a saint or a martyr. Nor does it mean that he deserved to be killed, or that his death is something to be mocked or celebrated, though some people have done this. However repellent Kirk’s views may have been, his murder is a repugnant crime, and the movement that he belonged to will not be defeated by apeing its worst features, let alone by propagating baseless fantasies that Israel was responsible.

All those features have been on display over the last few days. Kirk’s death has ignited a firestorm of fanaticism, dishonesty and bad faith that threatens to become MAGA’s Reichstag moment, and which perfectly illustrates the moral, political, and intellectual sewer that American society has become in the Drumph/MAGA era.

Let’s get the gaslighting out of the way first.

No one need take any lessons on compassion or moderation from anyone involved in the MAGA horrorshow. A few days before Kirk’s death, Pete Hegseth was boasting that the US had ‘smoked a drug boat’ supposedly containing 11 Venezuelan ‘terrorists’ - regardless of the complete absence of evidence to suggest that it was anything of the kind. Asked by journalist Brian Krassenstein whether this strike might be called a ‘war crime’, JD Vance replied: ‘I don’t give a shit what you call it.’

The macho posturing, savagery and vulgarity of this administration and its supporters are only matched by their brazen and relentless dishonesty. When two Democrat representatives were murdered in their Minnesota home in June by a deranged Trump fanatic, Elon Musk and various Republican politicians tried to blame it on the left. So it was no surprise that within hours of Kirk’s murder, Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, and an array of political lowlife were gleefully predicting ‘civil war’ and a crackdown on ‘the left’, before anyone even knew anything about the perpetrator.

Jones posted a video of himself weeping, and declaring ‘We’re in a war’. This is not Achilles mourning Patroclus. You are entitled to weep when your friends are shot, but if you film yourself weeping, then it is very likely that your tears are entirely fake and performative, especially when they come from a man who actually declared the victims of school shootings to be ‘crisis actors’, and accused their parents of faking their grief.

But nothing can ever shame these lying clowns, whether it’s Steve Bannon calling Kirk a ‘casualty of war’, or Infowars host Harrison H. Smith declaring: ‘The left is evil and insane and needs to be crushed with the force of the state.’ After reading that Tyler Robinson’s shell cases indicated ‘transgender and antifascist ideology’, the MAGA influencer and Trump pal Joey Mannarino, tweeted:

If the person who killed Charlie Kirk was a transgender, there can be no mercy for that species any longer. We’ve already tolerated far too much from those creatures.

That species. Those creatures. No mercy. It doesn’t take much for these MAGA tough guys to locate their inner psychopath. Never mind that these messages did not exist (thanks Wall Street Journal!), or that the messages on the shell cases referred to memes used to torment the furry community.

MAGA thought it had hit ‘the left’ bang to rights when it was revealed that Tyler Robinson’s shell cases contained the chorus from the Italian partisan anthem ‘Bella Ciao’ and the message ‘hey, Fascist! Catch', with arrows. Now it turns out that these messages are lines from a computer game, which a 22-year-old’s Internet-raddled brain as parsed into a justification for homicide.

This is not antifascist resistance, but the plot line from some unwritten JG Ballard dystopia.

Don’t expect Trump and his minions to care, any more than the Nazis cared about who set the Reichstag on fire. In July, the MAGA vampire queen Laura Loomer was attacking Kirk on X as a ‘charlatan, claiming to be pro-Trump one day while he stabs Trump in the back the next.’ On the day his death, Loomer was prowling the X deathscape and summoning her demons from the underworld:

It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund & prosecute every single leftist organization. We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The left is a national security threat.

And then there was Nick Fuentes, the Nazi sleazebag leader of the Groyper movement to which Kirk’s assassin seems to have belonged. It wasn’t long ago that Fuentes could be heard denouncing Kirk because he wasn’t white supremacist enough. But there he was last week, gazing up to heaven and asking his followers to ‘pray for Charlie Kirk’s soul, his young family and for our country. The violence and hatred has to stop. Our country needs Christ more than ever.’

You can’t make this stuff up, except these hollowed-out simulacra of human beings never stop doing just that, and not only in America. On Saturday, ‘Tommy Robinson’ called on his ‘unite the kingdom’ marchers to ‘march for freedom, for your children, and march for Charlie Kirk.’

Robinson raged against ‘the bastard who has murdered him, or the organisation, the corporation or the government it is that killed him.’

Was it a bastard, organisation, corporation or government? No one cares, least of all the man who asked the questions. At the same gathering, Elon Musk - the Ketamine Krupp himself - exorted the crowd by video link to - ‘fight or die’ because ‘the left are the party of murder’.

Unlike some of the mocking responses to Kirk’s murder, these threats and lies are not coming from the Internet fringes. They begin at the very top and reach across the MAGA spectrum. Trump was already promising to crack down on all those who ‘contributed’ to the murder, before he or anyone else had the slightest idea who was responsible, let alone who ‘contributed’ to it. Trump also declared:

Those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.

Asked a few days later, how Americans might ‘come back together’ and whether its fractured political landscape could be ‘fixed’, Trump told his interviewer, in a rare expression of honesty: ‘ I couldn’t care less.’

The Great Man went to compare the patriotic radicals of the right who ‘don’t want to see crime’ with the radical left who are ‘ vicious, and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy — although they want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders.’

When these people show you who are, believe them. Except that Trump and his movement have shown many times who they are, and too many Americans refused to see it or liked what they saw. Kirk’s murder is unlikely to change this. Already, someone - god knows who - has set up a website called: charliesmurderers.com with the following message:

The US government is following this lead. Flags are flying at half-mast. People are losing their jobs for expressing what MAGA regards as inappropriate responses to Kirk’s death. The more Kirk advances towards secular canonisation, the more his death will be used by the government as a pretext for repression. Last week, Trump’s sinister henchman Stephen Miller told Fox News’ Sean Hannity:

Let me tell you something I've not shared with anybody, the last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven. He said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence. That was the last message that he sent me before that assassin stole him from all of us, and we are going to do that!

Miller is very likely lying about that ‘last message.’ But whether Kirk said this or not, the ‘radical left’ [Clue: anyone who is not MAGA] will pay the price for it. Just in case there was any doubt, JD Vance - the Hillbilly Faust himself - told The Charlie Kirk Podcast yesterday:

We have to talk about this incredibly destructive movement of left-wing extremism that has grown up over the last few years, and I believe, is part of the reason why Charlie was killed by an assassin’s bullet. We’re going to talk about how to dismantle that and how to bring real unity, real unity that can only come when we tell the truth.

Vance has about as much interest in the truth as Stephen Miller does in his ‘creator in heaven.’ And the only unity that they have in mind is the unity that Adolf Hitler promised on February 27, 1933, while watching the Reichstag burn:

This is a God-given signal! If this fire, as I believe, turns out to be the handiwork of Communists, then there is nothing that shall stop us now crushing out this murder pest with an iron fist.

This is what Trump and his cohorts will now try to do, and no one should be fooled by their crocodile tears. When a reporter on Friday offered his condolences to Trump on the ‘loss of your friend’ and asked him how he was ‘holding up’, the Great Man responded:

I think very good. And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get for about 150 years. And it’s gonna be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.

Such is the man Charlie Kirk helped to make president, who Karoline Leavitt says has been ‘hurt’ by his assassination. And we should not pretend that the movement he belongs to has any more concern for Kirk than it does for the republic it claims to be making great again. And we should not expect a kumbaya moment of collective soul searching.

On the contrary, Americans should brace themselves for further repression, and quite possibly more deaths, as some of the most despicable and dangerous politicians in America’s history unleash their war of vengeance in the madhouse that they have done so much to build.

In his searing first-hand account of the 2014 ‘Operation Protective Edge’ Gaza war, The Drone Eats With Me, Atef Abu Saif describes how he and his wife watched an Israeli missile attack on the Italian Complex tower in Gaza City’s Al-Nasr neighbourhood. Alternating between their television and the view from their flat, Abu Saif concluded:

They are stripping the city of its beauty. They want to make us ugly, to drag us from the clean spring to the polluted water downstream. The Italian Complex has now entered the past. The lovely café at the base of the tower is gone. The spacious, flowered gardens I used to sit in have now said their farewell to this anxious city. The wooden tables and chairs, the nargilah pipes that would fly off the shelves of the cafés, have all blown away. No evidence remains to support our memories of this place.

Beauty is not a word that many westerners associate with the Gaza Strip; the intimate memories and experiences that Abu Saif describes so movingly have too often been obscured by Israeli propaganda depictions of Gaza as a barbaric terrorist enclave. But there was beauty in Gaza. There were neighbourhoods with their own individual characteristics, and communities that lived in them, and buildings that Gazans were proud of. There were sunsets and the beach, families and children. There were cafés, such as the beachfront Al-Baqa Cafeteria, which Israel destroyed in July, killing twenty people and wounding dozens.

Since October 2023, these quotidian Gaza’s worlds have been largely obliterated, and in the last week the devastation has taken an insidious new turn, as Israel has begun ‘strikes on multi-storey buildings in Gaza City’ as part of its ongoing assault on the Gazan capital. These strikes, according to military analysts consulted by the Helsinki Times, represent a ‘shift to targeting tall structures’ that is intended to ‘create panic and disorientation’ and ‘remove elevated positions that could threaten ground troops.’

Beyond these ‘military’ objectives, it is difficult to separate the levelling of Gaza City from the wider debates about Gaza’s post-war future. As early as December 2023, an Israeli real estate company produced a video showing images of future Israeli settlements superimposed on the ruins of Gaza, accompanied by the message: ‘Wake up, a beach house is not a dream.’

The video invited its viewers to imagine a Gaza without Gazans, and without the buildings that Gazans lived in. And in February this year, Donald Trump announced his intention to ‘take over’ Gaza and turn it into a giant casino, whilst also removing its population. This scheme was illustrated with AI-generated images to highlight what Jared Kushner once called Gaza’s ‘very valuable’ potential as a ‘waterfront property’:

In March, Egypt presented an alternative to Trump’s mafiosi dystopia, which was endorsed by the Arab League at an Extraordinary Summit in Cairo. Unlike Trump, the Arab scheme did not call for the removal of the Gazan population, and insisted on Palestinian governance of the Gaza Strip during and after reconstruction. But once again, its proposals were accompanied by utopian AI-generated imagery of a reborn Gaza rising out of the rubble:

Though the EU and even the UK accepted these proposals, both Israel and the US rejected them. And since then, governments and private individuals and institutions in both countries have been working on plans of their own. In July, Reuters reported that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) - the same organization that created the lethal ‘bait and kill’ aid points where 2,000 Palestinians have been shot trying to get food - had submitted a proposal for ‘Humanitarian Transit Areas’ in Gaza.

Extending the notion of the IDF’s ‘humanitarian zones’, this proposal called for Palestinians to be rounded up in ‘large-scale’ and ‘voluntary’ places where they could ‘temporarily reside, deradicalize, re-integrate and prepare to relocate if they wish to do so.’

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Ominously for the Palestinians, these US-Israeli discussions appear to be taking advice from Tony Blair. This is never a good sign. From the Iraq war to his post-prime ministerial career as Middle East ‘Peace Envoy’, Blair’s trajectory has been marked by a persistent willingness to participate in or support any level of violence directed against Arabs and Palestinians, while all the time maintaining a sickly veneer of humanitarianism and peacemaking.

In July, the Financial Times reported that two staffers from the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) had participated in a joint project organized by a group of Israeli businessmen, in collaboration with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which had been presented to the Trump administration. Some of these businessmen had been involved in the creation of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation - a connection which did not seem to bother Blair and his fellow-humanitarians. Though the TBI initially denied any involvement in the project, it later admitted that its staffers had contributed to these discussions in message groups and calls as the discussions developed.

According to the FT, one of the documents presented during these discussions was written by a TBI staff member, and proposed ‘the idea of a “Gaza Riviera” with artificial islands off the coast akin to those in Dubai, blockchain-based trade initiatives, a deep water port to tie Gaza into the India-Middle East-Europe economic corridor, and low-tax “special economic zones”.’ Haaretz also reported that Jared Kushner and Tony Blair were advising Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, and that the two men attended a policy meeting with Trump ‘to discuss all aspects of the Gaza issue, including escalating food aid deliveries, the hostage crisis, post-war plans, and more.’

And last month, the Washington Post reported that a plan for post-war Gaza had been presented to the Trump administration, which envisaged a US-led trusteeship calling itself the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust (GREAT) governing the Gaza Strip for the next 10 years. The 38-page ‘prospectus’ containing this proposal retains much of Trump’s original proposals, with the usual utopian/dystopian AI images of a future Gaza transformed into ‘a Mediterranean hub for manufacturing, trade, data, and tourism’, powered by Israeli, US, and Gulf state investment:

These echoes of Dubai are not coincidental. The futuristic fantasy imagesmofmglass towers, offshore islands, agricultural lands, solar panels, and freeways initialled after the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are aimed, in part, at attracting potential investors from the Gulf.

In 2007 the late Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk famously analysed the Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism’ that had sprung up across the world since 1991. Writing long before a Donald Trump presidency was even thought possible, the authors wrote of city-states, gated communities and urban makeovers created by the rich, for the rich, with a common aesthetic steeped in ‘utopian greed - shades of Paris Hilton, Bernie Ebbers, and Donald Trump’. In these products of a ‘savage, fanatical capitalism’ purged of ‘any ghost of the labor movement,’ the authors wrote, ‘the rich can walk like gods in the nightmare gardens of their deepest and most secret desires.’

The GREAT trust’s Gaza plan belongs to the same tradition. Its AI visualisations recall Davis’s pithy description of Dubai as a gilded dystopia in which ‘Speer meets Disney on the shores of Araby’. And against the background of Israel’s genocide, its language oozes a casual obscenity, with its glib references to blockchain, broadband, AI-powered smart cities, and ‘self-generating revenue streams’, that will transform Gaza ‘from a Demolished Iranian Proxy to a Prosperous Abrahamic Ally’, and into an ‘asset’ that will ‘create significant value for all involved shareholders.’

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Brand names and logos like Tesla, AWS, Ikea and IHG are sprinkled like holy water throughout the test, alongside evocations of a ‘Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands’ modelled on the Dubai Palm Islands, and an ‘Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone’ connected by an ‘Abrahamic Gateway’ to Israel and Egypt, through which American EV companies will supply cars to Europe, using minerals and material shipped from Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Like any upscale real estate proposal, these maniacal scenarios are accompanied by precise calculations from the cost and size of future housing, to the length of time it will take to clear the rubble, and numbers of Palestinian families who will remain in the Gaza Strip and the numbers who will leave, or inhabit ‘humanitarian transit’ camps inside the enclave.

The plan envisions a temporary relocation of all of Gaza’s inhabitants to other countries or ‘restricted, secured zones’. In return for ‘voluntary’ departures to other countries, Palestinians will receive a $5,000 cash payment and subsidies to cover 4 years rent and a year of food.

The ‘vetted’ Palestinians who remain will be policed by private security contractors, with a long pedigree in the war on terror, who will work alongside the IDF and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to create ‘Hamas-free secure aid and temporary housing’ and ‘Hamas-free Humanitarian Transition Areas.’ Such measures will eliminate any possibility that Gaza may remain an ‘Iranian outpost in a moderate part of the region’ - an outcome which could undermine both the scheme’s ‘Abrahamic architecture’ and the possibility of ‘future Palestinian self-governance.’

These lines are aimed at a readership that is unlikely to remember how Israel, the US and the Quartet refused to allow Palestinian self-governance in Gaza for seventeen years because local elections in 2006 produced a democratic result that Israel didn’t like. Those elections had nothing to do with Iranian interference, but there is little indication in the GREAT trust’s proposals to suggest that Palestinians have any political aspirations of their own.

Nor, despite its stated aim to ‘reconstruct Gaza and finance humanitarian efforts and development’, do its proposals have much to do with humanitarianism. On the one hand, the plan represents what Haaretz 'called ‘a Trumpian Get-rich-quick Scheme reliant on war crimes, AI and tourism.’ At the same time, it is intended to transform Gaza into a subservient ‘polity’, which, as Imad K. Hard, Director of Research and Analysis at Arab Center in Washington, put it, ‘effectively erases the question of Palestine.’

None of this will bother Blair and his cohorts, and it certainly won’t bother the Trump administration, which appears to have welcomed what Steve Witkoff called a ‘very comprehensive plan’. Though the US has not yet formally adopted it, Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s Minister of Strategic Affairs, has already called Tony Blair ‘the future ra’is [boss]of Gaza’ - a compliment that may indicate his contribution to the scheme and a possible role in its implementation.

From Israel’s point of view, this would be a terrific result, and the IDF’s attacks on high buildings may well be intended to replace these buildings with the proposal’s AI glass towers.

At the end of the Third Punic war, Roman soldiers under Scipio Africanus the Younger razed defeated Carthage, and supposedly scattered the ruins with salt as a message to Rome’s enemies. In Gaza, the demolition of tower blocks and high buildings is part-war, part-urban redevelopment, and part-real estate opportunity. The latest iterations of the ‘Trump Riviera’ fantasy are both the corollary of genocide and also its logical outcome.

In these powerpointed AI dreamscapes, there is no indication of the violence that have made these fantasies possible. There are no dead Palestinians, no women set on fire in hospital beds, no children blown to pieces, no trauma, famine or amputees, no Palestinian homeland, and no war crimes.

In effect, Gaza will become another ‘evil paradise’ where the 21st century’s Kubla Khans seek to turn genocide, ethnic cleansing and neo-colonial slaughter into another pleasure dome, from which Palestinians have either been killed, expelled, or ‘vetted’, and the bodies under the rubble coated over with Abrahamic freeways named after the new masters of the universe.

This is why Gaza’s high buildings are being demolished, and this is why the pseudo-humanitarian vultures are circling over the ruins. And if this sounds monstrous, that’s because it is.

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I never much liked the expression the ‘wrong side of history.’ As much as we might want it to be otherwise, history doesn’t have an intrinsic moral direction leading to the arc of justice or anywhere else. If progress can be made, it can also be undone. Because no matter how enlightened or civilised we think we are, every society contains the potential for barbarism, and when the barbarians appear they may not be wearing leather boots and a black uniform with a death’s head insignia.

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Nowadays, they may take the form of a sweaty, fake-tanned rapist felon, spouting lies and gibberish and promising to make you ‘great again’ while his balaclava-clad minions snatch fathers outside their children’s schools or stand grinning for moronic Instagram selfies in front of men in cages.

Or they may stand before you in a suit and tie against the ludicrous and sinister background of a giant flag, proudly announcing their inhuman proposals to deport ‘hundreds and thousands’ of immigrants, while vigilante mobs terrorize asylum seekers in hotels that they never wanted to be in, and daub St George’s flags on roundabouts and pavements in the name of Inger-land.

We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be distracted by discussions about the workability of Farage’s proposals, or the ‘despair’ and ‘legitimate concerns’ that these proposals are supposedly addressing. The men in balaclavas shouting Rule Britannia and hanging flags from lamp posts are expressing hatred, not despair - hatred incited by Farage and his far-right cohorts, with the gleeful assistance of the right-wing press, and some of the grubbiest politicians this country has ever seen.

‘Operation Restoring Justice’ was an attempt to capitalise on the hatred that they have incited. This brutal reduction of men and women seeking asylum to disposable objects who can be dumped anywhere but here, has nothing to do with justice. What Farage is offering, like Enoch Powell’s corpse with a pint and fag in hand, is state-sanctioned barbarism, and the final transformation of the UK into a dystopian pariah that proclaims its nastiness to the world and doesn’t give a damn.

Because make no mistake about it, barbarism is what will be required if this UK Deportation Command’ becomes operational. Barbarism will be the consequence of the UK’s withdrawal from the ECHCR and the Refugee Convention. There are people - too many people - in this country, who do not care: fascistic goons and reality to stars who will be only too happy to cheer on Farage’s carnival of detention and deportation; pampered Telegraph columnists and Mail rent-a-bigots who think packing refugees off to the Taliban is challenging the ‘elite’; Tory politicians looking to save their party from oblivion by emulating Reform’s brainless savagery; Labour MPs who will say anything, or more likely, say nothing, in order to hold onto their shaky seats.

None of this will make the UK ‘proud, prosperous and powerful’ (again), but it will make it more vicious, more isolated, more shameful, and more arrogantly racist than it already is. Farage’s proposals are not the product of his own depraved imagination. These proposals could have been written in Mar a Lago or the offices of the Heritage Foundation. They are part of an orchestrated attempt by the ethnonationalist right and its billionaire funders to destroy the liberal international order and all the treaties and conventions associated with it, using ‘border sovereignty’ as the battering ram and organising principle.

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Farage has promised that the boats will stop as soon as his policies are enacted. There is no evidence at all to suggest that he can do anything of the kind, and no indication of how this leering fascist-in-a-suit plans to persuade other countries to accept the 600,000 immigrants he plans to deport.

But the details don’t matter. The cruelty is the point, and when these policies fail, the cruelty will be cranked up.

‘It’s about whose side you’re on’, Farage brayed last week. This, at least, is true. And a country that aspires to even the most basic norms of morality, legality and decency should not be on the side of the Pied Piper of Clacton and his band of bastards. Asked by an ITV reporter whether the UK should be deporting migrants to dictatorships, war zones or the Taliban, Dubai Dicky - a man who could easily imagine eating popcorn and watching an immigrant drown in a puddle - responded: ‘There are uncomfortable things that happen elsewhere in the world. It is not our job to govern the whole world.’

No it isn’t. But nor is it our job to send people back to countries where they are likely to be killed and tortured. And if this happens, we will be seeing many more ‘uncomfortable things’ in the next few years, right here in the UK. We should not be surprised that this is happening. The seeds have been sown, and re-sown, over many dismal years. Though Reform has succeeded in turning small boat arrivals into a national emergency - the better to reap political rewards from it - the events of this summer are just the latest episode in decades of anti-immigrant ‘take our country back’ rhetoric, in which one group of foreigners has been after another has been described as dangerous and problematic.

None of the three main political parties have seriously challenged this. Very few politicians have even attempted to counter the misinformation and disinformation that constantly surrounds immigration and asylum. On the contrary, every government has responded to public ‘concerns’ with ever-more draconian border policies, to the point when the whole principle of refugee protection is now being called into question.

Labour has been as bad as its predecessors, and in some cases worse. At no point in the government’s response to Farage’s speech, has any Labour minister attacked Reform’s essential premises on moral grounds. All they have done is boast that they can deport and detain more people, do it better, and that they love flags too.

This is the opposite of moral leadership, and Farage’s ICE-style deportations-on-crack are the logical outcome of this collective cowardice.

In allowing the border to become the centre of the national ‘debate’ about undocumented immigration, the entire political class has locked itself into a trajectory that can only lead downwards - to further repression, exclusion, and violations of rights in pursuit of an unacknowledged policy of deterrence that has not succeeded even in its own wretched terms.

The same can be said of the United States, and the European Union. The EU has allowed tens of thousands of men, women and children to drown in the Mediterranean in order to maintain the ‘compensatory’ hard border policies that followed the Schengen agreements. None of this will ever be enough for the likes of Vox, Gert Wilders or the National Rally.

The Obama and Biden administrations were deporting even more people - including children - than Trump has been able to deport - so far. Now, in the US, the mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants has become the catalyst for a ruthless fascistic shakedown, which has placed the future of American society in jeopardy.

This is how they roll. And the same outcome is perfectly possible here, in a directionless country that cannot face up to the damage it has inflicted on itself,where council budgets have been so badly cut that even Reform cannot figure out how to cut them any further. In this land without vision, hope or glory, asylum seekers, refugees and foreigners make easy and convenient targets.

Until we have a government prepared to refute the lies and misinformation from which Reform draws its toxic power, the so-called ‘debate’ about immigration will be dominated by the likes of Farage and Jenrick, and this country will continue the collective descent into vigilanteland that we have witnessed this summer.

As in the past, Labour has repeatedly tried to placate the ‘concerns’ of one sector of the public, with harsher and mean-spirited acts of deterrence, while rejecting the concerns of a wider constituency that - in spite of everything - does not view migrants as invaders and criminals, which supports the right to refugee protection, and does not want the country to sink into a racist swamp.

No one should be fooled into thinking that the ‘protesters’ will go home if the hotels close and the boats stop, or that Reform voters will gratefully switch back to Labour. This is a movement that - emboldened by MAGA fascism - feels its time has come, and is gearing up for power.

Put these people in government and, like their mentors in the US, they will find other pseudo-emergencies and other targets, and no community will escape the wrath of the men in balaclavas who are seeking to take ‘their’ country back.

It’s up to the rest of us to do whatever we can to stop this from happening, and become the moral backbone that this pitiful government is sorely lacking.

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I wrote this piece just under a year ago, and after everything that has been happening this summer, and the brazen encouragement by politicians and the right-wing media of what is in effect a far-right racist uprising - all going on with no pushback whatsoever from the government - I think these points are worth repeating. I’ve changed a few things for clarity. But one point needs qualifying and revisiting: Though I still think the rapid suppression of the riots last year (assisted by an equally rapid popular mobilisation against it) was a rare example of ‘competence’ from a generally spineless Labour government, that has not been the case since.

On the contrary, the government has echoed many of the far-right talking points that I mention in this piece, and failed to push back against the despicable ‘save our children’ moral panic. Their cowardice, absence of moral compass, and shallow pursuit of their own political interests have all contributed to the disastrous situation we are now witnessing, in which asylum-seekers are being set up as objects of persecution for racist-patriots, and the whole concept of asylum is being called into question.

Without moral leadership, we are moving rapidly towards a Trump-like ‘MEGA’ Farage government, with all the cruelty, authoritarianism and racism that Trump has already demonstrated. We should not deceive ourselves that such things are not possible here. Farage has just promised mass deportations of ‘hundreds of thousands’ if Reform gets into power.

Let no one think he wouldn’t do it, or that he could not find people willing to do to anyone who looks like an immigrant or an asylum-seeker exactly what ICE is doing in the United States.

And if that happened, be in no doubt that the people that I described in this piece last year would absolutely love it.

It’s a truth, generally unacknowledged, yet demonstrated time and time again in British politics, that there is a certain breed of very right wing politician or commentator who will always love the working classes - or at least that section of the working class that shares their racism, bigotry and xenophobia.

Ex-Etonian vicars, army officers from the Raj, gouty Thackerian squires, assorted lords and ladies, hedge fund managers mouldering on the Dubai sea front, ex-pat newspaper editors ensconced in their French chateaux - there is a long history of men and women of means who will always find time to amplify ‘concerns’ about certain categories of foreigner from those of little or no means at all.

These friends of the common people will rarely, if ever, be heard opining on bread-and-butter issues that effect the working class, such as de-industrialisation, stagnant wages, poor contracts and working conditions, zero hours contracts, high rents, the lack of social housing, youth services, social care, child care, maternity leave, or access to public services - unless any of these issues can be linked to immigration.

Don’t expect them to be on your side if you lose your job. End up on benefits and they will likely suggest, as Boris Johnson memorably did back in 1995 in an article on the ‘appalling proliferation of single mothers’ (ahem), that ‘blue-collar men’ are ‘likely to be drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless, and perhaps claiming to suffer from low self-esteem brought on by unemployment.’

Take a tea break, and they’ll say you’re slacking, as the Gordonstoun alumnus Isabel Oakeshott once did, about NHS nurses. Go on strike, and you become a greedy train driver, a greedy doctor, a union bully boy etc.

But if you’re white and working class and you loathe the EU, immigration, or the liberal/woke ‘elites’, then these same people will swoon over you, politically-speaking, like Constance Chatterley over her gamekeeper.

And when violent racist mobs go on the rampage, only a few weeks into a Labour government, some of these politicians and commentators will inevitably see opportunities in the chaos and disorder - though don’t expect them to express these possibilities out loud. Because riots and pogroms, like collecting the bins, are work for the proles, not them. Their role is to stand on the sidelines and see how far they can go and how much they can get away with.

All of which brings me inevitably to Nigel Mosley-Farage.

Some of Reform UK Party Limited’s critics have looked askance at the ‘anti-elite’ credentials of this man of the people, just because he happens to be the highest-paid MP in Parliament, elected by one of the poorest constituencies in the UK where he has yet to hold a surgery.

Such criticisms are unfair. Mosley-Farage did find time to ‘represent Clacton on the world stage’ at the Republican Party Convention, just as I found time to represent Sheffield on the world stage when I went to Barcelona on holiday this summer - though my trip wasn’t paid for. And, equally importantly, he also found time to ask important questions during the riots, about what the police ‘weren’t telling us.’

Who cannot be grateful for that? Who would be cynical enough to think that he does these things merely for his own political gain? Who can doubt that he genuinely feels the pain of our salt of the British earth, when they feel the need to attack a mosque, rip off a hijab, throw bricks though windows, or burn down a hotel housing asylum seekers, in order to express their ‘concerns’ about immigration?

Not that the frog man would ever condone such acts, but he understands that the oppressed (white) masses - like him - have had enough - enough I tell you - of having to share his country with people who aren’t like him.

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For a few days, Farage saw himself as the man on horseback, bringing severity and order to a troubled nation even as he dripped petrol onto the flames. But now the riots have ended, and the government didn’t collapse. Farage was not called upon to save the nation. And no sooner has all this become clear, than his ‘party’ and all the other pundits and politicians who called on Starmer and Cooper to resign, are now portraying the rioters as victims of state tyranny.

In an article in the Spectator on ‘The persecution of “the plebs”’, Douglas Murray condemned the government’s response to ‘this month’s spontaneous and grass-roots riots’ as ‘anything but intelligible, clear or predictable.’

In cracking down on these ‘grass roots’ riots, the ex-Etonian could not help feeling for “the plebs” who have been marched to court sharpish during the ‘unexpected speeding up of our justice system.’

Not since Enoch Powell quoted the ‘decent, ordinary fellow Englishman’ who predicted that ‘the black man will hold the whip hand over the white man’, has such concern been expressed for the men and women who would normally only cross Murray’s threshold through the tradesman’s entrance.

The only example of these ‘plebs’ in Murray’s piece is Bernadette Spofforth, the wretched Twitter/X conspiracy-monger who was arrested for posting the following incendiary tweet, immediately after the Southport murders:

If this is true, then all hell is about to break loose.

Southport Stabbings suspect, Ali-Al-Shakati, was on MI6 watch list and was known to Liverpool mental health services. He was an asylum seeker who came to UK by boat last year.

I’m done with the mental ‘health excuse’. You should be as well!

Spofforth is not the most obvious representative of the plebeian class. The owner of a swimsuit company who lives in a £1.5 million house in Chester, she had a long history of out-there Twitter activism, related to pandemic conspiracy theories, climate change denialism, 15 minute cities and globalist plots, before the analogue world exploded in her face.

Spofforth deleted the tweet when she realised that ‘Ali-al-Shakati’ did not exist, was not on an MI6 watch list, or known to Liverpool mental health services, or an asylum seeker who came to the UK in this or any other year. But the key issue in deciding whether or not she is actually charged, relates to her prediction that ‘all hell is about to break loose’, and her final exhortation regarding the mental health ‘excuse’ - a reference to a widespread conspiracy theory, in which the British police (Deep State!) is supposedly concealing the identities of murderers who happen to be Muslims and asylum-seekers.

Spofforth clearly expected her readers to feel as angry as she did, and tweeted in order to feed that anger and build her following. That doesn’t mean she wanted to cause a riot, and it’s up to the police and the CPS to decide whether or not all this amounts to a criminal offence. But that hasn’t stopped this obnoxious troll from becoming a free speech martyr amongst the upper-crust defenders of the proles.

Toby Young’s ridiculous Free Speech Union has promised to pay her defence costs if she is charged. In the Telegraph, Isabel Oakeshott accused Keir Starmer of embarking on a ‘terrifying crusade against free speech’ akin to McCarthyism’ and described Spofforth as ‘the victim of a witch hunt – and it’s all because the Prime Minister is desperate to shut down uncomfortable debate.’

Oakeshott doesn’t say what debate Labour is trying to close down, but she does say this:

This is not about the remarkable acceleration of the normally glacial judicial process for carefully selected “far -Right thugs”. Though there is something quite sinister about the gleeful public parading of a particular cohort of (white) criminals, most voters will be pleased to discover that justice can be so swift when ministers want to make a political point.

It’s a bit much to hear Oakeshott opining about ‘McCarthyism’ when she once helped remove Kim Darroch from his job as US Ambassador by publishing his emails that revealed him to be critical of Trump, but her ‘road to 1984’ hysteria has already become part of the right’s default position on the riots.

In the same paper, ‘Lord’ Frost declared that the UK is ‘no longer a free country’, and quoted Javier Milei’s claim that ‘those crazy socialists in Britain are putting people in prison for posting on social networks.’

Elon Musk, who did do much to try and undermine the government during the riots, has also attacked its treatment of the rioters. When a Sellafield worker was jailed for eight weeks for posting three ‘grossly offensive’ and ‘racially aggravated’ memes on Facebook relating to the storming of a hotel housing asylum seekers, Musk tweeted to his 194 million followers on Twitter/X: ‘The judge is the one who should be arrested!’

Musk has also criticized what he calls the ‘messed up’ sentences handed out to some rioters. Yesterday, he claimed ‘The UK is turning into a police state’ because of the government’s ‘Operation Early Dawn’ plan to hold defendants in police cells before trial. This measure was adopted to relieve pressure on prisons, but Rocket Boy has now dubbed it ‘Operation Orwell’.

No one familiar with the relentless intellectual dishonesty of Brendan O’Neill, will be surprised to find him in the Spectator, discussing the wretched Julie Sweeney, who received a fifteen-month sentence:

The post-riots climate is turning ugly. Yes, many of the rioters deserve stiff sentences, especially the weapon-wielding bigots who descended on mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers. But when I read about a 53-year-old carer being banged up for a gross post online, and a 13-year-old girl being convicted of violent disorder, and people getting jailtime for ‘dancing and gesticulating’ at a line of police officers, I can’t help but wonder if this is morphing into a judicial shaming of the lower orders.

O’Neill’s tears for the 53-year-old carer would shame most crocodiles, but there is a lot more where this came from in his Spiked columns. Take his observation that:

It is the identity of the rioters that determines whether they receive sympathy or hatred, pity or bile, Starmer’s slavish genuflection or Starmer’s promise of a savage law-and-order clampdown. The reason the post-Southport rioting so horrified the cultural establishment is not because of what was done but because of who did it. Them. The white lower orders. The people we never want to hear from. Ever.

I suspect most people were horrified by the riots because of their racism, their cruelty, and their lawless violence, not because of any animus towards the ‘white lower orders’. Claire Fox, another Spiked luminary, lent her strident contrarian tones to the choir, describing the sentence handed out to Julie Sweeney on Newsnight as an example of ‘judicial activism.’

Just to recall, Sweeney was arrested for posting on a Facebook group, after seeing people repairing the mosque in Southport on television, ‘ Don't protect the mosque, blow the mosque up with the adults in it.’ The maximum sentence for the offence ‘sending threatening communications’, under Section 181 (1) of the Online Safety Act 2023, is five years if the message ‘which conveys a threat of death or serious harm is sent with the requisite intention or recklessness.’

It’s difficult to see how a judge could not interpret Sweeney’s message in these terms, regardless of her background. And in these circumstances, her sentence is actually fairly lenient. For an example of ‘draconian’ sentencing’, look at the 55 riot charges that were once handed out to striking miners at Orgreave - an offence which was punishable with a life sentence at the time.

So far only two people involved in this month’s disorder have been charged with riot (a charge which now has a maximum ten year sentence). Yet a grotesque gallery of right-wing pundits have all suggested that (white)working class people are being singled out for special treatment, here:

And here:

Yes that is Turning Point quoting Nelson Mandela in order to legitimize bigots, racists and bullies. Further to the fringes, there is now a go fund me crowdfunder ‘supporting the families of political prisoners UK’ and ‘the recent wave of people being sent to prison for social media posts’ which has so far raised £6, 850. If that ‘political prisoners’ tag sounds familiar, it should. This was how the seditionists at the US Capitol building were and are described.

The UK crowdfunder was set up by Laura Melia, a white nationalist, ‘counter-jihadist’, and co-leader of the white nationalist Patriotic Alternative group, whose husband Sam Melia was sentenced to two years imprisonment in March this year for stirring up racial hatred.

These are not the kind of people that respectable politicians and commentators like to associate themselves with in public, but the ‘persecution of the plebs’ oratorio has room for many different voices. None of these commentators have expressed any sympathy for the men and women of colour - also members of the working classes - up and down the country who were frightened to leave their homes in case some white mob attacked them.

What do these critics of ‘judicial activism’ think might have happened if these mobs had broken into the Holiday Inn in Rotherham or the Mercure hotel in Bristol or blown up a mosque? What, if anything, should a government do when misinformation, disinformation are routinely pumped through social media, with the support and collusion of the richest man on the planet, that result in actual harm to real people?

These aren’t questions that most of them ask, for the simple reason that most of them don’t care.

Where they once sought to undermine the ‘enemies of the people’ who opposed Brexit, and portrayed lawyers defending asylum seekers as ‘activist lawyers’, they now portray (white) rioters are victims of a tyrannical government, in order to keep the resentment boiling over, and detract from a (Labour) government’s competent response.

It’s possible - though none of them would ever admit it - that they know the ‘plebs’ who exploded onto the streets this month were expressing hatred and resentment that they helped nurture.

In this sense, the ‘sympathy for the plebs’ choristers do have a point. It will always be the little people who get punished and go to jail.

Most of those who pretend to care about them, like the world’s richest man, will never pay any price at all, for whatever they have said or will say.

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You might have thought, after last summer’s riots, that certain politicians would be more careful about their pronouncements on migrants and migration, but that has not been the case. Since the arrest of a 38-year-old Ethiopian asylum seeker on three counts of sexual assault in Epping in July, protests have taken place outside ‘asylum hotels’ up and down the country. And alongside the usual clusters of Union Jacks and Saint George’s flags, and the familiar demands to stop the boats and take our country back, one theme has repeatedly featured in these protests: migrants as a collective sexual danger to women and children.

Not since Sir Lancelot and the knights of the Round Table rode out from Camelot, have so many men been willing to defend ‘their’ women: Arise Sir Robert of Jenrick, already dinning is armour in the Telegraph in January:

We have imported thousands of people from alien cultures who possess mediaeval attitudes towards women. It’s astonishing that so many self-described feminists continue to defend mass migration, directly or indirectly, even when the risks are now so clear. When forced to choose between the two, they seem to always choose mass migration over the interests of women in this country.

Yes, even the ‘self-described’ feminists won’t defend the ‘interests of women’ as well as Honest Bob can. And here is, more recently in the Mail on Sunday, warning of the migrant threat to his daughters:

I certainly don't want my children to share a neighbourhood with men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally and about whom we know next to nothing.

And being a man of action as well as words, Honest Bob has been taking time off from his hols to seek out the evil ones. Here he is, on a beach near Dunkirk, in a video calling on the French police to arrest some migrants - accompanied by dramatic music to emphasise the drama and the courage of this bold knight, holding the line at Dunkirk against the new invader.

And here is again, at Epping:

Who says chivalry is dead? But what did Bob get for all this? On Radio 4’s Thought for the Day last week, the woke metropolitan elite theologian Dr Krish Kandiah accused him of promoting xenophobia. When Bob pretended to be outraged, the BBC, once again showing the courage that has so often come to define it in these dismal times, issued a grovelling apology.

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There was no apology required. Jenrick was promoting xenophobia, and he has been doing this for a long time, ever since he realized that it could boost his chances of becoming Tory leader.

Others are playing the same game. All summer, Sir Nigel of Farage has been recycling dubious statistics from the Centre for Migration Control suggesting that Afghans and other migrants are more likely to be rapists and sex offenders than us Brits - the better to present ‘broken Britain’ as a dystopian nightmare that only he can save us from.

These statistics have been critiqued here and also here, for their misleading and inaccurate conclusions. But no one is bothered with facts amongst this crowd. And it’s not just the men. Here is Reform MP Sarah Pochin, one of ‘Farage’s fillies’, as these women inexplicably call themselves, claiming that migrants put ‘women at risk of sexual assault.’

And here is Andrea Jenkyns, a politician as malignant as she is dim, in an interview with Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru Murthy, who asked her:

Krishnan Guru Murthy: I mean the vast majority of sexual crimes are committed by British-born people, aren’t they?

Andrea Jenkyns: Well I think the issue there, I’d correct you there in the fact that the issue there…

Krishnan Guru Murthy: Well that’s a fact, there’s nothing to correct.

There is indeed nothing to correct. According to Rape Crisis England and Wales, 1 in 4 women in the UK have been raped or sexually assaulted since the age of 16, and 1 in 6 children have been sexually abused. 1 in 2 rapes are carried out by their partner or ex-partner, and 6 in 7 rapes against women are carried out by someone they know. Out of the 71,227 rapes recorded by police last year, only 2.7 percent resulted in charges. When Guru Murthy suggested once again that these figures ‘had nothing to do with migrants or anything like that’, the following exchange occurred:

Andrea Jenkyns: No, but some have. Of course.

Krishnan Guru Murthy: Some have, but they’re to do with society and everybody here.

Andrea Jenkyns: No, but it’s… Yes, to do with society, one is too much.

Krishnan Guru Murthy: Exactly, what I’m saying is the vast majority of these crimes…

Andrea Jenkyns: But some is cultural as well.

Could the fact that so many women are raped by people they know be ‘cultural’, as well? Don’t expect the likes of Jenkyns et al to care. As ex-Reform MP-turned-migrant boatstopper Sir Rupert of Lowe posted on Facebook last week:

Of course there are British rapists. OBVIOUSLY we know that. Sadly, they are our problem - they are scumbags, and should be treated as such, with an incredibly harsh sentence.

The usual suspects seem to think that just because there are British rapists, we must blindly accept the foreign ones too.

The existence of British rapists does NOT mean that we have to continue importing thousands and thousands of foreign rapists.

STOP importing, START deporting.

There will always be British rapists. That is a fact of life.

We do not have to harbour foreign rapists.

That is a choice.

Deport them all.

It’s safe to assume, when a man dismisses ‘British rapists’ as a ‘fact of life’ while calling for the deportation of ‘thousands and thousands of foreign rapists’, that the protection of women is not his primary concern. In a debate on Europe’s consent laws in 2020, Amnesty International’s Women’s Rights researcher Anna Blus called for ‘a society where we are free from rape, and where everyone’s sexual autonomy and bodily integrity are respected and valued.’

This is what we should all want, but the radical right’s knights in shining armour have a very different agenda: to convince the native population that they are being ‘invaded’, and possibly ‘replaced’ by non-white immigrants who might also be sexual predators.

This is why, in 2015, Gert Wilders described young Muslim immigrants as ‘testosterone bombs’ intent on ‘a sexual jihad.’ In Germany, in 2015-16, a wave of robberies and sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, sparked widespread condemnation of ‘rapefugees’. In the US, ‘angel moms’ whose daughters had been killed by ‘criminal illegal aliens’ were paraded in support Trump’s deportation agenda. In Spain, the Vox leader Santiago Abascal tweeted last year:

SPANIARDS are fed up with being victims of assaults, machete attacks, robberies and rapes. Almost always at the hands of the same people; illegal immigrants that the PP party and the Socialist Party insist on bringing to Spain with a pernicious magnet effect that is only growing.

These iterations of the foreigner as sexual predator have a long and toxic historical pedigree, in the ‘white slavery’ stories that accomapnied anti-Chinese ‘yellow peril’ campaigns in nineteenth century America (note the bestial features of the Chinese here):

In the American south, both during and after slavery, the image of the black sexual predator haunted the white imagination. DW Griffith reprised it in his love letter to the Ku Klux Klan, The Birth of a Nation:

In Nazi Germany, the figure of the ‘lustful Jew’ as a threat to women and young girls was a persistent theme of antisemitic propaganda and publications such as Der Sturmer:

This is the bottom-of-the-historical barrel that the likes of Jenrick, Farage, Abascal and Lowe have been scraping from. By representing migrants as a ‘cultural’ sexual danger to the (white) community ’, radical right politicians can stir racist hatreds and phobias without ever mentioning race. By attracting mothers and even children to anti-migrant protests, far right activists on the ground can present these protests as the expression of legitimate public concerns.

To recognize this usefulness is not to deny that sexual crimes have not been carried out by migrants and asylum seekers, but the safety of women and girls is not enhanced by exaggerating the scale of such crimes in order to portray them as an ‘ethnic’ phenomenon.

And the movements that do this are rarely as committed to women’s rights or the safety of women as they claim to be. For years, Tommy Robinson and the EDL presented themselves as the protectors of British children against ‘Muslim paedophiles’ and ‘rape jihad’, but at least 20 members of the EDL have been convicted of child sexual exploitation - 10 of whom were active members while Robinson led the organization. Over 40 percent of men arrested during last summer’s riots had previously been reported for domestic violence. In Bristol, two thirds of the 60 arrests between July-August 2024 had been reported for a range of similar offences.

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Such men were clearly a danger to women and children before they went out to burn mosques, and terrorize asylum-seekers. Reform is equally infested with these types, and who can be surprised, when its leader has described Andrew Tate - a man actually charged with rape and sex trafficking in two countries - as an “important voice for emasculated men”?’

In the United States, the American electorate - fuelled in part by QAnon conspiracy theories about elite paedophile networks - elected a convicted rapist as their president, who promised to protect American women and children.

For the last few months, Trump has frantically trying to conceal his historic involvement with the most notorious paedophile of the modern era, while moving towards a pardon of that paedophile’s closest associate. Hypocrisy is the very least you can say about an administration in the midst of the biggest rollback of women’s rights in the modern era.

Its supporters include Christian nationalist groups that believe women should be subordinate to their husbands and fathers, and should not even vote. Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has also been accused of sexual assault. Hegseth has previously attacked ‘woke’ generals and DEI programs that have left the US military weak and ‘effeminate’. And earlier this month, this paragon of masculinity reposted a video about a Christian nationalist church, in which various pastors said that women should not be allowed to vote, with the accompanying message ‘All of Christ for All of Life.’

Trumpism has also breathed rancid new life into the toxic manosphere, where white supremacists like Nick Fuentes taunt women with the slogan: ‘Your body, my choice. Forever.’ Following Trump’s victory in November, Trump supporters in Texas State University raised signs proclaiming ‘women are property’, and school officials in Minnesota warned parents of an upsurge in ‘misogynistic…transphobic, and homophobic memes and messages,’ in which young boys echoed the phrase ‘your body, my choice.’

In Brazil, the former president Jair Bolsonaro once described his only daughter as a product of his wife’s ‘weakness.’ Bolsonaro has also said that women should be paid lower salaries for getting pregnant and should stop ‘whining’ about femicide. In Spain in 2019, Vox refused to sign an agreement on violence against women because it supposedly focussed exclusively on women and assumed that men were guilty.

Vox’s main representative in Andalusia is a former judge named Francisco Serrano, who has denounced ‘gender jihadism’, ‘female-chauvinism’, and ‘feminist supremacy’.

This how they roll. And when these knights in shining armour come riding to the rescue of ‘our’ women from migrants, we should be very clear about the game they are playing. Because sexual violence is a serious issue - too serious to be left in the hands of men (and women) who use the acts of a handful of individuals as a pretext for the dehumanisation of thousands.

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There was a time when diplomacy was a confidential and very hush hush business, conducted behind closed doors by a handful of men whose decisions affected the destinies of entire countries. Writing in 1922, in the aftermath of World War I, the political scientist Paul Reinsch asked whether secret diplomacy was ‘the evil spirit of modern politics’ or whether the concept was merely a ‘clever method of surrounding with an aura of importance the doings of the diplomats, a race of men of average wisdom and intelligence who traditionally have valued the prestige of dealing with “secret affairs of state”.’

In any case, Reinsch considered secret diplomacy to be ‘incompatible with the democratic theory of state’, and he was contemptuous of the diplomats of the early 19th century who ‘while they talked much about humanitarian principles, continued to play a barren game of intrigue.’

In the 21st century, diplomacy is neither entirely secret nor entirely public. In democratic societies, the diplomatic intrigues of the past have been replaced by photo ops and staged spectacles in which politics and media overlap. This may not constitute intrigue, but it is often equally barren. We may not get to hear what is said behind closed doors, or we may hear part of what is said, such meetings tend to conclude with pre-prepared statements and tv appearances in which diplomatic correspondents analyse the body language, handshakes, smiles and scowls, of the protagonists.

Was the atmosphere frosty or warm? Was there evidence of rapport or bonding? Did they like football? Was there something in their past that might indicate a friendly relationship? As Britain seeks to navigate its way through the stormy seas of Donald Trump’s America, such nuances - and banalities - have become even more important than usual.

Over the last few weeks, a number of commentators have congratulated Keir Starmer and his team on their skills as ‘Trump whisperers’ - a dreadful insult to the men and women who work with wild horses instead of criminals. A state visit; Peter Mandelson’s PR accent purring in Trump’s ear; ‘shared prayers and tears’ between David Lammy and JD Vance - two Catholic bros with a ‘similar working class background’ - at Chevening- all these strands are part of the silken web that Starmer and his team have supposedly woven around the rapist criminal-in-chief.

The UK is not the only country to respond to Trump’s madness with flattery and guile. ‘I want to thank President Trump personally for his personal commitment and his leadership to achieve this breakthrough,’ gushed Ursula Von der Leyen last week, after the US president imposed a fifteen percent tariff on EU imports while also obliging the EU to buy US weapons. ‘He is a tough negotiator, but he is also a dealmaker.’

He is many other things, but don’t expect the likes of Von der Leyen to mention them. Nor do the Brits, who often like to imagine themselves as the intellectual guiding force in the ‘special relationship’, bringing centuries of imperial diplomacy, accumulated wisdom and good breeding to an untamed and headstrong America. So when the president of our most powerful ally happens to be a convicted felon and an authoritarian lunatic, it’s only to be expected that our leaders will attempt to stroke, cajole and soothe the kicking beast in the collective stall.

Some commentators have suggested that this was real diplomacy conducted by grown-ups, who understand how the world works, as opposed to the one we little people would like it to be. In an article for Foreign Policy in 2023, the then-shadow foreign secretary David Lammy coined the term ‘progressive realism’ to describe Labour’s approach to foreign policy:

Progressive realism says we must use realist means to pursue progressive ends. Instead of using realism for transactional purposes and the accumulation of power, we want to use it in the service of progressive goals: countering climate change, defending democracy, advancing economic growth and tackling inequality.

Lammy warned that ‘progressive policy without realism is empty idealism’, and that ‘realism without a sense of progress can become cynical and tactical’. He nevertheless insisted ‘that when progressives act realistically and practically, they can change the world.’ At a time when the US election was yet to be determined, Lammy reminded his readers that ‘the US will remain the UK’s most essential ally, whoever occupies the White House. Pursuing ideals will be futile, without first guaranteeing our own security.’

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These seem to have been the underlying principles behind Labour’s attempts to court Trump. So how do they stack up after more 200 days of Trumpian mayhem? As Lammy well knows, but no longer admits, the rapist-criminal-in-chief doesn’t share any of the ‘ideals’ that Lammy lays claim to. Trump doesn’t believe in climate change, but he loves the fossil fuel companies which funded his campaign. His administration is in the throes of the fiercest assault on American democratic institutions since the Civil War. He has more in common with authoritarian leaders and dictators than he does with democratic leaders. He is only interested in advancing American economic growth, has no compunctions about inhibiting or even crippling the economic growth of America’s competitors, and is more concerned with exacerbating inequality than he is with reducing it.

It’s difficult to win a president like that over to progressive goals, and it’s difficult to be ‘realist’ if you don’t accept that this is the kind of president he is, and that these are the goals that America now has. Like the US Democrats, Labour continues to act as if Trumpism is an aberration, and that Trump’s arbitrary, erratic and downright insane decisions all emanate from his ‘unpredictable’ character. But there is a broader picture here. America’s transformation into the bully-in-chief is part of a wider assault on the post-World War 2 liberal democratic order that goes way beyond the monstrous current occupant of the White House.

To say that that order was flawed is something of an understatement, but it contained things worth keeping: the United Nations; conventions and treaties that attempted to limit the impact of war and the military treatment of civilians; new legal concepts such as genocide and crimes against humanity enshrined in international law; refugee rights; multinational economic alliances and agreements that set out to avoid the brutal nationalist confrontations of the first half of the twentieth century; attempts at international cooperation to address global problems such as climate change.

Now all that is vanishing in front of our eyes. Some of the damage was already done before Trump came to power, in the reckless and lawless violence of the war on terror, and the Biden administration’s support for the Gaza genocide, in the cruel border policies enacted by wealthy democracies. If Trumpism is the product of a global political and moral gangrene, it is a qualitative escalation of the disease, that has brought ethnonationalism, authoritarianism, white supremacism, Christian nationalism, and savage libertarianism to the heart of the American government.

After decades in which fascist and far-right movements were tarnished by the experience of World War II, the beast is well and truly back in the political mainstream, fuelled by an international movement that is driving country after country, including the UK, towards the same disastrous path. If ‘progressive realism’ means anything, it means recognizing and understanding these developments, working out how to combat them, and facing them unflinchingly by building the alliances and coalitions, both inside and outside the country, that can chart a way to a better course.

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The Trump whisperers have not even begun to do this. In the UK, Labour has mimicked Trumpism in its treatment of migrants and protesters, in an attempt to scoop up votes from the party which has borrowed most obviously from Trumpian rhetoric and practice. Instead of fighting the nativism of Trump and Farage, it has echoed it. Too cowardly to denounce the horrors unfolding in Gaza with British complicity, it has placed a protest group engaging in direction action on the same plane as al Qaddafi or Islamic State.

It may only be coincidence that Palestine Action was banned only a few months after defacing Trump’s golf resort in Scotland, but this grotesque judicial overreach was entirely in keeping with Trump’s paranoid style, and there is nothing ‘progressive’ about it.

Last week, the Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) announced that it would be broadcasting GB News in the US. A government that aspires to ‘realism’ might ask itself why the US president that our diplomats are courting is facilitating a media outlet that is platforming the government’s most dangerous domestic opponent. But there is no sign that Labour is concerned with such questions, as it continues to look at Trumpism through the narrowest conception of the national interest.

For a brief period this summer, the Trump whisperers, both in the UK and Europe, could claim some success. After hectoring NATO and being comprehensively played by Putin, Trump seemed to be turning against Russia. First, he engaged in a little nuclear headbutting with the monstrous mediocrity Medvedev. Then he hinted at further sanctions on Russia and the possibility of resuming weapons deliveries to Ukraine. When Starmer threatened Israel with the recognition of a Palestinian state, apparently with Trump’s acquiescence, there were those who argued that this was another skilful démarche - an adult response to the childish protesters whittering on about genocide.

Never mind the ethics of using recognition as a bargaining chip. Never mind the fact that recognition is a useless symbolic gesture, in the face of the calamitous massacre that Britain has helped to enable. Never mind that when Israel and the US bombed Iran, Starmer instantly offered to ‘defend Israel’, even though Iran had not attacked it in the first place. We got a ten percent tariff, compared with the EU’s fifteen, didn’t we?

Yet now Netanyahu is preparing to escalate the assault on Gaza, with US acquiescence. And Trump, who seemed at first to accept Starmer’s recognition proposal, even if he didn’t endorse it, has criticized the UK for ‘rewarding Hamas.’ And as for Ukraine, Trump has invited Putin to a one-to-one in Alaska, in which he has already promised ‘land-for-peace’ - a key Russian demand, before the meeting has even taken place.

All this suggests that the Trump whisperers have not been so strategic after all, and that regardless of the ten percent, it may not be possible to be Greece to America’s Rome, especially when Rome is ruled by Caligula.

No country is obliged to behave like this. It is possible to stand up to Trump, instead of flattering and pandering to him. The Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum has repeatedly drawn red lines in her dealings with the new administration. So has Mark Carney in Canada.

Both these countries are even more exposed to the malign power of this radicalized lunatic administration than the UK. Yet they defended their national interest on the basis of principle, rather than unctuous sycophancy. And a Labour government that really wanted to be ‘progressive’ would not remain silent in the face of the egregious horrors being inflicted on American society by the Trump gangsters.

And when we see the Trump whisperers being played so comprehensively, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that they aren’t realists who see the world as it is - they see the world as they want it to be, a world where the old rules and expectations still apply, if only our leaders can be unctuous enough and connected enough to charm a few concessions from the rapist-in-chief.

But America is no longer what it once was, and it will take more than flattery to turn it round. And unless this government, and so many others, face up to the dangers that are now looming, the world will not become the better place that David Lammy predicted, and may become very much worse than it already is.

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