Matthew Carr's Blog

Last week I turned seventy - three score and ten. There was a time when I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would feel like to be this old. Looking forward, seven decades on earth seem like an impossibly distant landmark. In retrospect, those decades seem to have passed in a flash. As Constantine Cavafy once put it:

The days of our future stand in front of us/like a row of little lit candles - golden, warm, and lively little candles/The days past remain behind us, a mournful line of extinguished candles.

I don’t feel quite so desolate about the candles. They may be extinguished, but they did burn, and so many of those lost days still shine brightly in my memory. I feel lucky to have had them and lucky to still be here, when so many who deserved to live this long did not get the chance. At the age of seventy, I am probably more aware than I once was of my ephemerality and inconsequentiality, but I try to let that awareness sharpen my appreciation of the time I still have.

Much of my life has been based around writing, and I am grateful, beyond measure, that I have been able to do this for so many years. It would be an understatement to say that my writing career hasn’t always gone smoothly. But the career part has never been my dominant concern. Writing has always been something I felt compelled to do, regardless of where it led or the constant uncertainty that the writing life entails.

In my bleaker moments, this compulsion has felt like a curse, an illness, and a trap that I walked blindly into. At the same time, writing has steered and guided me through times of personal and political crisis, and it still does. Contrary to the opinions of more than a few people I’ve known, writing is not a flight from the world. It is not an act of self-indulgence, self-gratification or an expression of my self-importance.

It is not escapism or a substitute for ‘action’. It is action. It is engagement, communication, and persuasion - a social activity conceived and executed in solitude. It is - for me at least - a space of absolute freedom. It is a bridge between myself and the world, an instrument for making sense of the world and its contradictions, a lifelong conversation with readers who I may or may not know.

I write because life is too important not to write about, because life for me, is not complete unless I write about it. Writing is my weapon. It is how I try to find light in a world that is often dark, and which is getting noticeably darker, and where I try to combat what is vicious, cruel and ugly.

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In the week that I turned seventy, a former Disney star named Calum Worthy, announced an app that would enable bereaved people to speak to their loved ones for three minutes through AI. This not the first such innovation, but Worthy’s app was spectacularly inane. ‘What if the loved ones we’ve lost could be part of our future?’ he tweeted, in a video showing a pregnant woman presenting her baby bump to an AI representation of her dead mother.

Then the baby grows up and becomes a child, and the child becomes an adult who also speaks on his phone to an AI grandmother and great grandmother. The app is free to download. But – no surprises here – you need a paid subscription if you want to ‘text and chat in real-time with fictional, historical and celebrity HoloAvatars in a safe and secure environment.’

Hollow indeed. And there is so much more where this came from, in an ever more cynical technopolis that seeks to exploit human vulnerability, override biology, and replace the dead with the vapid creations of AI dreck.

Because let’s not kid ourselves here: that avatar on the phone can never be your dead mother. It can never be a person or a sentient being. It cannot be the person you once loved, and it would be a grotesque insult to that person - and a reductionist parody of humanity itself - to believe that such ‘resurrections’ are possible.

These innovations do not offer the prospect of eternal life, but eternal idiocy in the never never land of the post-human. According to Worthy, the 2Wai company is building a ‘living archive of humanity.’

I beg to differ. These avatars that ‘look and talk like you, and even share the same memories’ are another indication of the dystopian future that awaits our atomised, lonely, disconnected society where AI lovers take the place of the lover you don’t have, and the friends you don’t have, and death capitalism sells you the illusion that you can escape the human predicament and find eternal life in your iPhone or computer screen.

I have to admit, I did not see this coming.

But then so many things have surprised me. Last week, the leader of the most powerful nation on earth met with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, who the US intelligence services once identified as the intellectual author of the brutal murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Prince Salman was in Washington as part of a $1 trillion deal, organized under the auspices of Trump’s sinister son-in-law Jared Kushner.

While Prince Salman looked on, Trump said that Khashoggi had not been popular, that ‘many people didn’t like him’ and that ‘things happen.’

No wonder Prince Salman was smiling. He knows that money has made him untouchable, and he’s right. No world leader criticized Trump for the deal, or for mocking a murdered journalist. This is what you get, if you abandon even the possibility of virtue and embrace the dumbest, nastiest, most corrupt politicians you can find simply to make the libtards cry.

That same week, the US announced that it had blown up another boat in Venezuelan waters. So far, Don Mangolini and his made guys and gals have killed more than 90 alleged drug traffickers, without offering any evidence that they are drug traffickers, or any legal justification for killing them even if they were, when the US navy could have issued a warning and detained them.

At present, the US appears to be openly plotting regime change in Venezuela - without any legal or moral justification. It has just announced an evil ‘peace plan’ which may have been written by the Putin regime, and which would give Russia everything it asked for, erase the criminality of the invasion, and effectively leave Ukraine at Putin’s mercy.

I have no illusions about the murderous consequences of US military and covert power during and after the Cold War, but this brazen arrogance, lawlessness and corruption still shocks. It heralds the end of the (flawed) international post-World War II attempts to reign in the destructive nationalism and geopolitical thuggery that wrought such havoc in the first half of the twentieth century, and a return to the rule of the strong and the logic of brute power.

Closer to home, last week the British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, introduced the cruellest and most draconian anti-asylum legislation in British history. These measures earned the praise of Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage, but not the Conservatives, who did not consider them draconian enough. Leaving aside the immorality of these proposals and the degrading, dehumanising language that has accompanied them, there is no guarantee that these measures will ‘work’ even in their own terms.

The Home Secretary even had the temerity to try and justify these policies on anti-racist grounds – as though racist insults and attacks are just a wrongheaded response to legitimate concerns, rather than a product of the poisonous ‘debate’ about migration that has polluted our country for so many years.

We are used to this from Mosley-Farage, and from the Conservatives, but this was a Labour government, trying to defend its own political interests by abandoning the Labour movement’s principles of solidarity and internationalism.

This is how so many countries are reacting to a world where the ‘migrant’ has become a universal political scapegoat. That same week, the first round of the Chilean elections pointed towards a clear victory in the second round of José Antonio Kast – a far-right would-be strongman who plans to build a thousand-mile ditch along Chile’s northern desert frontier to prevent undocumented migration.

These are just a few random examples from a single week - the week in which I happened to turn seventy - of a generalised moral, political and intellectual collapse that is spreading across the so-called developed world, fuelled by a tidal wave of misinformation, disinformation and manufactured ignorance.

In this amoral, philistine, post-truth world of the gangster, the demagogue, the shyster and the influencer, it is tempting to turn away, to conclude that humanity is heading for obsolescence, and that the humanities belong to another age. This is what Karl Kraus once concluded, at the outbreak of World War I, when he called on writers to step forward and say nothing, because there were no words left to address the unfolding horror.

Kraus found the words. And it is precisely in times of crisis, collapse and disarray that we need writers most. From an early age, writers explained and revealed the world to me. They made me feel its weight, and helped me understand the privilege as well as the tragedy that is part of the experience of being human. Writers provided me with a window on the past. They took me into other people’s skins, and helped me see the world through other people’s eyes.

I grew up in a world shaped by genocide, fascism and war, by revolution, colonization, and decolonization, at the birth-pangs of the consumer society, beneath the shadow of the Cold War and Mutual Assured Destruction. Even in those early years, writers denounced oppression, gave voice to the voiceless, and addressed questions that I was asking. They reminded me, again and again, that humanity was worth saving. They helped to persuade me that there were better ways of doing things than the ways that my generation had inherited. They showed me that what Gramsci called ‘this great and terrible world’ was too important to go unspoken about.

Decades later, they are still doing that. And that is why I am still doing it. I am still writing and reading. Still looking for the writers - and there are many of them - who can make me believe that even when the worst of humanity seems to be winning, they have not won yet.

Writers cannot change the world by themselves. But they can inform the conversations that make change possible. At the very least, they can call the bastards out. They can persuade, convince and inspire. They can remind us that we are not avatars, but humans, with the gift of thought and speech. They can light what Auden called, ‘an affirming flame’ and provide a counterpoint to ‘negation and despair.’ They can remind us that we are not alone in this wilderness.

They can help us to remember, as Theodore Roethke once put it in his poem ‘In a Dark Time’ that:

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;

I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

I live between the heron and the wren,

Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

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It’s a well-established trope in vampiric folklore that you don’t invite bloodsuckers across your threshold, and anyone who has ever watched a vampire movie knows what happens when you do. The BBC has clearly not watched these movies. Again and again, the vampires show up at its door and it invites them in, even when it knows who they are and what their intentions are.

This hospitality owes more to cowardice than ignorance, naïveté or good manners. Faced with criticisms from right-wing politicians and media outlets that accuse it of ‘elitism’, and left-wing and liberal political bias, the BBC routinely puts out the red carpet to its enemies in an attempt to placate them. For years it has regularly invited Mosley-Farage and his cohorts onto Newsnight, Question Time and other emblematic talk shows.

The BBC doesn’t mention that some of its regular guests, such as Claire Fox or the ubiquitous Kate Andrews, come from well-funded right-wing thinktanks with very specific political agendas. Desperate to demonstrate its balance and impartiality, it routinely normalises the abnormal, and gives space to people who hold the corporation and its values in contempt.

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Even when Farage relentlessly attacks the BBC from his platform on GB News, and whines on that he and Reform have been marginalised or victimised by the ‘metropolitan elite’, the BBC continues to seek out his opinions on the great and small matters of the day. Like the bullied playground child, it gives sweets to its tormentors in the hope that they will leave them alone.

Fat chance. As Labour has yet to learn, the more you capitulate to these bastards, the more they want to take from you. In 2024, BBC presenter Geeta Guru-Murthy referred to Farage’s ‘customary inflammatory language’, in response to a Reform party speech in which the Great Man referred to immigration as an ‘invasion’ and ‘flood’ perpetrated by a ‘large influx of young males.’

Of course, there’s nothing remotely inflammatory about that. And Mosley-Farage immediately began to bray, as he does, that he was being victimised once again. ‘What happened to impartiality?’ he thundered on X. Mosley-Farage’s thuggish sidekick Lee Anderson, the man who claimed that Sadiq Khan was in thrall to ‘Islamists’ joined in. ‘Shocking stuff here from the BBC,’ he declared. ‘Time to scrap the license fee and sack the lot of them.’

Two hours after the speech, Guru-Murphy issued what the Mail gleefully described as a ‘grovelling apology’ on live tv for using language ‘which didn’t meet the BBC’s editorial standards on impartiality.’ That same year, the Beeb apologized to Reform for calling the party ‘far-right’ - a claim that the arrogant public school lout Richard Tice had called ‘defamatory and libellous’.

The BBC has occasionally had to apologise to Farage for reportage that it genuinely got wrong. Fair enough. That is what you would expect any credible media outlet, let alone the nation’s flagship public service broadcaster, to do. But its pitiful willingness to bow and scrape whenever Reform says ‘boo’ has done it little credit, and has done nothing to appease those who hate it.

And then there is Israel. In 2010, Panorama produced ‘Death in the Med’ - an account by the journalist Jane Corbin of the Israeli attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla ship, the Mavi Marmara, in which nine activists were shot dead. Corbin effectively accepted the Israeli view that these activists were armed jihadists, and this persistent deference to Israeli talking points has been a consistent hallmark of the BBC’s reporting on the latest horrific chapter in the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’.

Earlier this year, the BBC pulled its superb and deeply-moving documentary on the Gaza war from the point of view of Palestinian children, following criticisms that its young presenter’s father was a member of the Hamas Agricultural Ministry. A more courageous broadcaster might have acknowledged this, and kept the documentary on air, on the grounds that its content was sound, and presented Palestinian perspectives that were rarely heard.

But the BBC is not that kind of broadcaster - particularly under the direction of a board riddled with Tory appointees. In June this year, a report by the Centre for Media Monitoring on the BBC’s coverage of the Gaza war found ‘systematic language bias favouring Israelis’, ‘suppression of genocide allegations’ by BBC presenters, and the ‘minimisation of Palestinian suffering and perspectives and the amplification of Israeli narratives, victimisation and emotive stories.’

In an essential article in Equator on the BBC’s coverage of the war, based on more than two dozen interviews with BBC staff, Daniel Trilling presents much the same picture:

For two years, millions of people have shared the same jarring experience: we have seen death and destruction live-streamed from Gaza, then seen that same violence sanitised, excused, qualified and debated on air and in print. Some of the West’s major media outlets have been nakedly partisan, even propagandistic, on behalf of Israel.

Trilling does not include the BBC amongst these ‘nakedly partisan’ outlets, and he attributes the corporation’s willingness to toe the Israeli line on Gaza to a ‘culture of fear’ driven in part, by ‘top-down interference’, inside the corporation, and a constant barrage of accusations of pro-Palestinian bias from Israel and its right-wing supporters in the UK.

As with Farage and Reform, the BBC’s attempts to pre-empt or neutralise such criticisms have not worked in its favour. Earlier this month, the Telegraph reported a leaked internal memo from the BBC advisor Michael Prescott, which accused the BBC of being anti-Trump, pro-Hamas, and demonstrating an LGBT bias that led to ‘effective censorship’ of ‘gender critical’ voices in the transgender rights debate. The memo cited a Panorama programme from last year’s US presidential campaign, that had spliced together two separate segments from Donald Trump’s January 2020 speech at the Capitol building, which highlighted his exhortation to his followers to ‘fight like hell.’

In response, Trump’s cynical press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the BBC ‘100 % fake news’ and a ‘propaganda machine’, while the Israeli Foreign Ministry railed against the BBC’s ‘deep-seated bias’ against Israel, and its role in spreading ‘disinformation that fuels antisemitism and radicalization.’

So far the BBC’s Director-General Tim Davie and its News CEO Deborah Turness, have resigned, and there may be more resignations to coke. The immediate reason for these resignations is the Panorama documentary, which no one had complained about until Prescott’s memo. Everything about this fiasco - from the memo to the leak itself - smacks of a coordinated transatlantic coup. As Byline Times has reported, the former PR executive Michael Prescott has ties to Boris Johnson’s appointee Robbie Gibb - former GB News executive and part-owner of the Jewish Chronicle - who joined the BBC board of directors in 2023.

Gibb appears to have been instrumental in the ongoing attempt to clamp down on the BBC’s supposedly liberal bias, and it is probably not coincidental that the Prescott leak was accompanied by a fierce denunciation of the BBC from Johnson - Britain’s authentic truthseeking missile. The man who lies virtually every time he opens his mouth raged against the ‘palpable untruths about Britain’s closest ally’ and threatened to stop paying his license fee, unless Tim Davie ‘comes clean on how Panorama doctored Trump’s speech.’

Farage - of course - also used the occasion to attack the license fee, and a host of other right-wing lowlifes joined the chorus. Trump, as most readers will know, threatened to sue the BBC for between $1-5 billion for traducing his ‘beautiful speech’ - a threat that he now seems poised to pursue.

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It is a deeply dispiriting experience to read media outlets like the Telegraph, the Mail and the Jewish Chronicle , with a long track record of lying and disinformation, amplifying Trump’s fake-victimhood and bleating about ‘trust’. Even the reporting of the Panorama documentary has been entirely dishonest. In some quarters it has even been suggested that Trump never actually said the words the documentary attributed to him. But despite the BBC’s egregiously-foolish decision to splice sections from Trump’s speech, it did not put words into his mouth. Trump did tell his supporters to ‘fight like hell’ on January 6 and some of them took him at his word.

In addition, these words are only one element in the case against him. In his final report to the attorney general on Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, special counsel Jack Smith claimed that ‘the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.’

Smith also noted that Trump was guilty of an ‘unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power’, and accused him of directing ‘an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election and then leverage rioters’ violence to further delay it.’

In other words, Trump is precisely the criminal insurrectionist that he claims not to be, as some commentators, including Boris Johnson and some Telegraph journalists recognized at the time. But now, thanks to the BBC’s stupidity - and the outrageous dishonesty of its critics - he has been able to accuse the corporation of ‘defrauding the public’ - a claim that ought to be greeted with universal belly laughter. Once again, a more courageous broadcaster might have apologized for the Panorama error - an error that received no attention at the time - and left it at that. Instead the BBC offered up Davie and Turness as sacrificial offerings to the Trump-beast.

To its credit, the BBC has so far refused demands for compensation, which means it may end up in court. No prizes for guessing the outcome its enemies want. When the BBC apologized last week to the ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe for misquoting one of its speeches, Lowe responded with characteristic grace:

Let’s see what Trump can extract from them – I wish him well. I hope he goes for a billion. The BBC isn’t just biased. It’s institutionally biased. Seeped in an ideology that despises traditional Britain. The answer is simple: Defund it. End the licence fee. If that means the BBC can’t survive, then so be it. Remove the crutch. Let’s see how it gets on. I don’t care anymore. I have one word for the BBC. DEFUND.

Leave aside, for a moment, the slovenly mental idiocy that makes it possible to believe the BBC ‘despises traditional Britain.’ Because this is the game the BBC’s critics are playing. They don’t want it reformed. They don’t want it to do journalism better. They are not interested in ‘restoring trust’. They want the BBC gone, and if it takes Trump to do it, they will have no problem with that. Because ‘sovereignty’ means nothing less than the ability to side with a corrupt autocrat intent on destroying your country’s institutions.

To politicians like Farage and Lowe, the destruction of the BBC is another potential ‘victory’ in the Brexit process. As in everything else, they seek to destroy it, in the belief that they will inherit the ruins. For the millionaires and billionaires who are funding the right-wing press and its newer incarnations such as GB News, any media outlet that smacks of ‘public’ and which pays even lip service to the idea of impartiality is a red flag.

For all its fake bleatings about trust and impartiality, these ‘populists’ are not interested in any facts or any views except those that are useful to its agenda. They don’t seek truth, or even the idea that truth is something that can be determined or agreed on. They aim to create a ‘woke-free’ media landscape in which their culture wars and talking points can be disseminated freely. To achieve this, they will bribe, bully and cajole anyone who gets in its way, as MAGA has done with some success in the US. The accusations of ‘pro-Palestinian bias’ are also part of this agenda, to which the Israeli right is firmly committed.

Anyone who doubts this should consider last week’s special question granted to GB News by Karoline Leavitt. In a clearly-orchestrated encounter, Leavitt abandoned her usual puff adder demeanour, and smiled benignly as GB News US presenter Bev Turner asked a garbled series of soft questions regarding the BBC and Trump’s response to it.

To see Leavitt describing the BBC as a ‘leftist propaganda machine’ is on one hand a grim reminder of the depths to which America has sunk. At the same time, the message was clear: MAGA hearts GB News - a platform whose commitment to ‘journalism’ owes much more to Goebbels than it does to HL Mencken.

That same week, Turner interviewed Trump himself, in an obsequious and shameful conversation that one would expect to find in North Korea or Stalinist Russia. It includes interactions like this:

BT: The state visit was beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it. Incredible.

DT: The whole thing was it couldn’t have been more beautiful. That room with a long table. It was amazing. I’ve never seen a room. I got to build one of them someday.

And this:

BT: You’re obviously a really good dad. Your children really like you, which is obvious. Or love you. Everybody loves their parents. But they don’t all like their parents. And they clearly have so much respect and warmth towards you. And I often think watching you that actually being a good president is a bit like being a good father. Yeah. Tough love, clear boundaries in the interests of the people that you’re looking after.

And this:

I’ve spent a little while in America now, and I’ve been really struck by the sense of positivity here. That can-do attitude is really in contrast to the UK and more broadly, Europe actually, which feels like it’s in the doldrums at the moment, economically, socially, really struggling.

And a final abject flourish:

Thank you. Have a lovely weekend. Well, you too, and good luck with oil, energy and illegal immigration.

This sickly sherbet was sprinkled with obtuse or leading questions, which enabled Trump to ramble freely about climate change, immigration, and crime fighting - and, of course, his response to the BBC. At no point did Turner push back against Trump’s crazed ramblings about state governors, Europe, falling crime rates or Shari’a law ‘and worse’ in Sadiq Khan’s London - a city where, according to Trump, they ‘stab you in the ass.’

Dazzled by her proximity to the Sun Bed King, even in his malignant dotage, Turner soaked up these rantings without even attempting to push back on anything at all, untroubled by any concern with with facts or accuracy. It’s the kind of journalism that makes Laura Kuenssberg look like Bob Woodward.

On one level, the content didn’t really matter. The mere fact that Trump conceded an interview to GB News was intended to demonstrate to the world - and particularly to the British public - that unlike the BBC, this is where the ‘truth’ can be found.

This is the howling epistemological wilderness that GB News’s financier Paul Marshall would like us all to inhabit - a desolate simulacra of ‘news’ and ‘journalism’ where here nothing means anything and the most abject lying garbage finally finds its rotting place in the sun.

This is where we are headed, especially if Reform get into government. There might be those on the left who are tempted to see the BBC’s self-inflicted crisis as some kind of justifiable karma. I’m not going to shed any tears over the departure of the hapless Tory plant Tim Davie. Like Boris’s Johnson’s crony Richard Sharp, men like this will always find well-paid employment no matter how much they fail.

But faced with an increasingly fascistic right-wing that is arrogant enough to believe its time has come, it is essential in the media, as in politics, to be able to distinguish the flawed from the unsalvageable, the bad from the worst. So criticize the BBC, by all means, for its many failings, from Jimmy Savile to Gaza. But if the BBC can make programmes like Death in the Med, it can also make documentaries like Once Upon a Time in Iraq and Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, that the likes of GB News could not even begin to emulate.

The BBC may be many things, but it is not GB News. It is not even Fox News. And the vultures who are now seeking to take advantage of its cowardice and stupidity are no friends of journalism or the public sphere.

At worst, they are brazen propagandists, puppets of millionaires and billionaires who are quite prepared to support the corruption, venality and depravity of the Trump regime, in order to sweep away the last vestiges of liberal democracy in this country, and put Farage in Downing Street.

At best, they are blowhards and opportunists, incapable of distinguishing journalism from propaganda as they seek to build well-paid careers out of the rubble of the ‘legacy media’. Either way, a society that values its own health and survival should resist their attempts to wreck a national public broadcaster, which, with all its faults, remains superior to anything any of them could come up with.

Don’t expect this cowardly government to defend the BBC - it is Trump after all. And the BBC leadership - with Robbie Gibb at its heart - is unlikely to defend itself. Nevertheless, in a fight like this, it shouldn’t be hard to decide which side to support.

And it shouldn’t be difficult to see this fabricated crisis as another horrible symptom of the diseased political world that we are all forced to inhabit, in which too many people who should know better, invite the bloodsuckers across their threshold in the hope of appeasing them, only to find themselves well and truly bitten.

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Hope is an overused word in politics, which I tend to regard with suspicion, not only because I have spent a lifetime living with political disappointment, reversals and defeat, but because there are too many politicians and political movements that offer no real possibility of transforming the hopes they claim to offer into realisable outcomes.

In such cases, hope can be downright delusional - the political equivalent of a comforting bedtime story or a soothing balm on our unbearable present. Too often the left - because it tends to be the left that invokes the idea of hope into its political messaging - conflates its own aspirations with those of a wider population that doesn’t necessarily share them.

None of this can be said of Zohran Mamdani and the astounding movement that has brought him to power. This is one of those rare occasions when it becomes possible to appreciate the beauty of politics, and its ability to achieve spectacular outcomes that seem impossible. It’s also – and this is equally rare – when the young enter politics with fire and passion and find a politician who sees them, understands them, and shares their concerns, because he is one of them.

All this has been achieved despite the billions of dollars that have been poured into the coffers of Mamdani’s opponents. The death threats; the racial and Islamophobic slurs; the pathetic rantings in the Murdoch media about Marxism and communism and a possible mass exodus from New York; the sinister mutterings of Mangolini and his fascistic minions; the tepid and clearly reluctant support from Mamdani’s own party leadership - none of it worked.

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The serial sex abuser was comprehensively and gloriously beaten, and whatever happens next, this outcome is a something to savour. Finally, the left has learned how to speak to people outside its comfort zone and build wider voting coalitions, without renouncing certain core principles. In the spiritual homeland of capitalism and the big buck, it has elected a Muslim socialist who supports the Palestinian cause, who dances to Kendrick Lamar and Wu Tang Clan to New York City Hall, with an openly socialist agenda

To paraphrase Buffalo Springfield, there’s somethin’ going on right here, and even though it might not be exactly clear, it has opened up possibilities that were not available at the beginning of last week. For decades now, politicians have been powerless or complicit in maintaining a status quo built on a shrinking public sphere and unlimited acquisition of wealth, in which even the most incompetent and corrupt private institutions are ‘too big to fail’.

The main victims of this dynamic – and not only in New York – are the young. They must navigate their way through our already-existing dystopias, who must get used to a lifetime of debt, declining public services, ever-longer working lives, unaffordable houses and unaffordable rents, precarious labour. They must choose between octogenarian politicians or bloodless technocrats who promise only more ‘tough choices’ or tinker at the edges of a decaying society, while leaving them largely to fend for themselves.

In the US, a moribund Democratic Party establishment could not even summon up the urgency required to fight the gravest threat to the Republic since the Civil War, until it was too late. For two years, that same party leadership facilitated the massacre of Gaza, and largely stood by when students who protested it were detained and deported, or depicted as naïve, antisemitic or extremist.

And now a charismatic, skilled and engaging politician as upended this morbid consensus, and convinced voters who previously spurned politics that a different future is possible. If he succeeds, even in part, then 21st century politics may just stand a chance of getting out of the deadly trajectory that is dragging so many democracies to ruin.

Some will roll their eyes at this ‘leftwing populism’ as if it were another distraction from the supposedly serious politics of the centre. But Mamdani’s victory is a response to the collapse of the centre, represented by so many Democratic Party politicians who unforgivably paved the way for the horror of Trumpism and then went on to normalise it.

Mamdani is not promising the impossible. He is not offering utopia. He is seeking solutions to the social deformations caused by unbridled capitalism and de facto oligarchical rule that ought to be at the heart of any democratic socialist program. Throughout his remarkable campaign, he has demonstrated an ability to win people over, with a willingness to fight his opponents with the weapons that will defeat them.

He called out Andrew Cuomo’s sleazy record of sexual harassment and humiliated him in debate, because 1)unlike the Clintons or Chuck Schumer, say, he clearly believed that such behaviour made Cuomo unfit for office and 2) he knows that when you are fighting with politicians who are contemptible enough to suggest you might support a new 9/11, you do not owe them politeness or decorum.

Mamdani’s acceptance speech was a tour de force of political oratory: eloquent, defiant, brave, indignant, celebratory, compassionate and humane. An immigrant himself, he hailed the immigrants who have made New York City what it is. Quoting from Eugene Debs no less, he hailed the city’s workers, and beautifully and powerfully invoked the physicality of their labour:

For as long as we can remember. the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands.

Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars. knuckles scarred with kitchen burns: these are not hands that have been allowed to hold power. And yet, over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater.

How long has it been since a politician spoke like this? Mamdani called some of these workers by name, and made it clear that his administration would fight for them. He talked about exploitation and division, affordability, high rents, and the cost of living

Mamdani’s working class is not the white working class dishonestly invoked by reactionary populists like Maurice Glassman or Matt Goodwin in the service of a (white) nationalist agenda. The immigrants he described are not the dog-eating criminal intruders targeted by Trump and Noem and their ICE hit squads - they are the men and women whose labour built New York and built America.

Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city, who made this movement their own. I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties Yes, aunties.

To every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point. know this: this city is your city, and this democracy is yours too.

Once again, a message and a tone conspicuously absent in our desert of the real. Mamdani celebrated the multicultural and multiracial America where it was possible for someone like him to become mayor, and he also criticised that same country for its failings. He called out antisemitism and promised to fight it. He denounced the persecution of trans people and promised Trump that ‘if you come for one of us, you come through all of us.’

No wonder the ridiculous Trump minion Sean Hannity was in tears discussing the result on Fox News. No wonder MAGA commentators were melting down. They haven’t heard language like this for a long time, and they haven’t seen a movement like this for a long time. Both Steve Bannon and Trump have denounced the ‘anger’ of Mamdani’s ‘angry’ speech, like two nuns who stumbled into a brothel.

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The hypocrisy of these bloated moral voids is only matched by their brazen gall. Their entire movement relies on mobilising and weaponising white anger and hatred in order to target marginalised groups. This is what has been happening ever since Trump crawled out of his gilded swamp and proceeded to turn America into one. But when a member of one of those groups speaks defiantly and uncompromisingly of his solidarity with the people they have targeted, they claim to be offended by his tone.

As the world has always known, bullies are always like this.

So Mamdani’s victory – in addition to the other Democrat victories on Tuesday – is a boost for his party, even though his party leaders may not see it that way. But it is also a victory for progressive America, and a victory for progressive forces across the world. It shows that the left can do more than protest – it can actually win.

Of course, being in power is not the same as campaigning, and it remains to be seen whether Mamdani will be able to do what he has promised to do. His enemies will do everything they can to stop him from achieving anything at all. They will use every trick in the book and many that are not yet in the book, because this is who they are, and because they know that if this movement succeeds, even a little, then others will follow.

But whatever happens, right now, this is a time for celebration. And a time to feel hopeful. Because without movements like and moments like this, there would be no hope at all.

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Nowadays, in America at least, the metaphors write themselves.

First Trump, without any form of public consultation with anybody, orders the demolition of the East Wing of the White House in order to create a ballroom. Never mind that the White House, at least in theory, is the people’s house, whose occupants, at least in theory, are there temporarily, at the behest of the American electorate.

The monstrosity who currently occupies the White House recognises no such limits. So the transformation of America’s ‘sacred’ – in constitutional terms – most emblematic physical space into Mar-A-Lago on the Potomac, is first of all a symbolic manifestation of the political triumph of the Trump crime family. And the trashy vulgarity of the new ballroom is the perfect expression of a Mafiosi regime whose gaudy, soulless decadence makes George W. Bush look like Kenneth Clark in comparison.

From gold elevators to gilded ballrooms – it’s not much of a leap. And it’s an entirely natural leap for the madman in the White House to make. It’s a demonstration that he can do whatever he wants, with the full support of the political party that once supported the constitutional order he is trampling on, and which recognises no limits or checks on the arbitrary whims of the orange ape and his grotesquely corrupt minions.

But the symbolism of Trump’s ballroom blitz goes beyond Trump himself. It’s not for nothing that Jeff Bezos accused its critics of nimbyism. Of course the billionaires who funded Trump’s campaign are going to support the creation of a ballroom in the White House. Why would the main beneficiaries of America’s new gilded age reject the chance to trip the light psychotic in the company of America’s gangster-president and his sinister wife?

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They know that the triumph of Trump is the triumph of oligarchy, and they are entirely comfortable with that. Some of them were guests at Trump’s ‘Great Gatsby-themed party’ last week. Once again, some might think that it in poor taste to celebrate reckless vapid acquisitiveness at a time when millions of American are facing hunger due to the shutdown of the US government. As USA Today noted:

Guests were seen mimicking “Roaring 20’s” era attire, a period just before the Great Depression that historians note for its staggering income inequity. History.com notes that in 1928 the top 1% of families received 23.9%of all pretax income and about 60% of families made less than the income level the Bureau of Labor Statistics classified as the minimum livable income for a family of five.

Does that seem a little obscene to you? Congratulations, you still have a moral compass. But the billionaire class is as devoid of taste and morality as their gibbering host. Many of its members were found on Epstein’s guest lists, in Virginia Guiffre’s memoir and in Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People. They are not good people, and if they ever knew what goodness was, they have been perfectly willing to turn their backs on it in return for tax cuts or whatever else Trump and his minions have offered them.

They think this is their time. And this is why the richest men the world has ever seen attended a party named after a novel that most of them have probably never read. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tom and Daisy, these are people who ‘smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their vast carelessness or whatever it was that held them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.’

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And given that they have gleefully helped Trump and the Republican Party break America, why not flaunt it, as Trump’s goons terrorise American cities, as paramilitary ICE teams brutalise immigrants, as millions of Americans are denied food stamps, as the US military murders ‘drug dealers’ in the Caribbean?

Like, who cares really?

This has been accomplished with breathtaking speed. I cannot think of anything like it in democratic politics. The closest parallel would be Nazi Germany, but Germany’s democratic institutions were much younger, and much more fragile than America’s. Nazism followed military defeat, and came to power in the shadow of the Great Depression.

It’s twenty-five years since a gaggle of neocons called for a Reaganite rearmament program to lay the basis for a ‘new American century.’ Throughout the last quarter of a century, American politicians, and many world leaders, routinely echoed Madeleine Albright’s description of America as the ‘indispensable nation’ and the guarantor of international ‘order.’

Even now, many world leaders are so conjoined with the American military colossus that they prostrate themselves before it, whenever the degenerate takes a decision which even vaguely aligns with their interests.

But the fact is that America is broken. Its leaders have broken it, through their own arrogance and hubris, their violence and militarism, their unwillingness or inability to reverse or halt disparities of wealth that have enabled the worst people in American society to take control of the state and wield it entirely in its own interests.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be entirely surprising. Even at the high point of American greatness during the Cold War, America’s political class routinely overthrew democracies that produced political outcomes they didn’t like. In Indonesia, Chile, El Salvador and Brazil – to name but a few - America supported the mass killing of communists and leftists without any qualms of conscience. More recently, the US military reserved the right to assassinate anyone designated a ‘terrorist’ anywhere in the world, without any need to justify such actions.

Shooting Venezuelans in boats is not the exception, but the brazen continuation of that tradition.

I don’t say this to argue that Trumpism is no different from its predecessors. It clearly is. Nor do I take any satisfaction from America’s democratic implosion. Too many people are already suffering from the consequences, and many more are likely to suffer – both inside and outside America - unless this momentum is stopped and reversed.

But Trump did not emerge from nowhere. The American oligarchy did not emerge from nowhere. Reckless profiteering and militarism did not emerge from nowhere.

The pitiful reluctance of the Democratic Party leadership to endorse Zohran Mamdani’s brilliant campaign makes it clear that there are too many party leaders who regard an eloquent, charismatic socialist who also happens to be a strong supporter of the Palestinians, as a greater threat than Trump himself.

So I hope Mamdani wins. And if he does, I hope his victory has an inspiring and galvanising effect. I hope the Americans who are mobilising against Trump win, whether they are leftists, liberals or Republicans, and not only for their own sake, but because a defeat for Trumpism would be a victory for progressive political forces across the world.

I hope I live to see the Trump crime family and many of its minions behind bars, or at the very least forced to live with the ignominy of what they have done for the rest of their wretched lives.

And if that ballroom gets built, I hope it gets knocked down, by politicians who will serve the people who elected them, instead of mocking them. And I hope America will become a better place. But none of this will happen without the recognition that the sickness of Trumpism was already prevalent in the American body politic before Trump and his oligarchic buddies finished it off.

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Good evening! I’m Katie Lam, the deputy leader of Reform. As some of you may know, I used to work in finance many moons ago, and I was also a special advisor to Suella Braverman and Boris Johnson - two of the finest politicians this country has ever produced. And I am so excited you to talk to you tonight about how Britain became great again, and why Great Britain is the best place in the world to invest in right now.

As you know, it hasn’t always been like this! Indeed, there was a time when many of us didn’t feel as great as we used to be and didn’t think we’d ever feel great again. Some of you may remember back in 2025, when I was just a rising star in the Conservative Party - as it was known before the merger - and I suggested in a newspaper interview in a discussion about illegal immigration that:

There are also a large number of people in this country who came here legally, but in effect shouldn’t have been able to do so. It’s not the fault of the individuals who came here, they just shouldn’t have been able to do so. They will also need to go home. What that will leave is a mostly but not entirely culturally coherent group of people

What a kerfuffle that caused! You can’t imagine. Before that interview, the only thing most people knew about me was that Boris’s dog once weed on my handbag! But when I had the temerity to speak up for Britain, how the liberals clutched their pearls! James O’Brien - bless - got awfully upset, or pretended to, and said it was a breach of ‘basic tenets of decency’ to take away rights that had been given to immigrants by previous governments.

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Others said I was being ‘racist’! I know! Someone said it was just like the 30s! Well, as someone whose Jewish grandmother came to this country as a refugee, and whose grandfather lost his family in the Holocaust, let me tell you that I know what the 30s were all about. And there is no comparison!

How did that slide get in there? That’s what happens when you let Chris Philps set up your PowerPoints! Chris? Thank you.

There were even members of my own party who said I’d gone too far. Seriously?

As I made clear at the time, you can’t just come and live here for ten or twenty years or whatever, and then call this country your home, because some irresponsible government said you could. Especially as most of them weren’t making nearly as much money as anyone in this room. Some of them - family members, grandma and the mother-in-law and other hangers on - never worked at all. And most of those who did work, were barely making between £20,000 to £25,000 a year.

Yet somehow we were expected to believe that people like that were contributing to our country, and had the right to call themselves British? Please.

Had these people heard of the Bard or Jane Austen or the two Ronnies? Had they read The Railway Children? Did they know who won the Battle of Hastings or who Anne Boleyn was? No they did not. But they just walked across our borders, and the diversity commissars put out the red carpet and told them, ‘have a house’, ‘see a doctor’, ‘claim benefits’, ‘stay in a four star hotel.’

It. Was. Insane!

When our own people couldn’t get on the housing ladder or even see a dentist or fix a pothole, because of the tough choices that my party had to make! And of course, there was no integration. Half of these visitors couldn’t even speak English. Or they spoke it with an accent, because they were speaking their own languages in their own homes!

They came in, and turned our country into the Island of Babel. And let’s not forget religion. This is, and always has been a Christian country, but there were people coming here from alien cultures and bringing all kinds of alien creeds with them. And I’m not only referring to Muslims. Our Christian heritage was also being displaced by wokeism, which, as our Faith Minister Danny Kruger once wisely observed:

is a combination of ancient paganism, Christian heresies, and the cult of modernism, all mashed up into a deeply mistaken and deeply dangerous ideology of power that is hostile to the essential objects of our affections and our loyalties: families, communities, and nations.

That’s where cultural incoherence leads you. Paganism. Heresy. Mosques and empty pews.

That’s why I spoke up. And luckily, there were also those who were ready to put their heads above the parapet and support me. David Frost, now Minister for Integration, agreed that too many people were coming here who didn’t know what Britain is, and that it should be incumbent upon all of us - all of us - on these islands to embrace the values that define us: King. Country. Flag. Shakespeare.

Because without those markers of identity, who are you really? What country do you belong to? The problem was, as David recognised:

We have all so deeply internalised the state ideology, that diversity is strength, that it surprises us when someone says coherence might also (or, even, instead) be a desirable goal of government policy.

Well that was then, and this is now. And since Nigel became Prime Minister, all that has changed. In only two years, we’ve achieved so much. Look around you. Have you ever seen so many flags in any country? Union Jacks. St George crosses. Flags painted on roundabouts. Even 10 Downing Street was painted red, white and blue, before Nigel wisely turned it into a Weatherspoons.

It’s a spiritual renewal and a national renewal. And it didn’t just happen by accident! Under our National Flag Law, every school, charity or public institution must fly the flag at all times - or don’t expect funding! Thanks to our Patriot School Bill, every school assembly must sing the National Anthem, and hear a reading from the Bible, a select example of British greatness and/or a British feat of arms.

No more of that ‘white people are so awful’ wokery.

As David once said, nothing wrong with Islam or Hinduism, but it was Christianity that made this country what it is today. Since we started our Soldiers to Headteachers scheme, teachers are a little more wary about teaching children how to be lesbians and homosexuals! And those of you who watch the riveting reality tv series Born Again, on GBBC, will know that adult deviants are now seeing their lives transformed by the King’s Army and Ant Middleton’s rehabilitation boot camps.

And as for the immigrants, well! 400,000 deported so far - legal and illegal - and we’ve barely got started! Even President Trump - isn’t it wonderful that Robert Kennedy’s cyborg program has replaced all his internal organs to give him a third term? - has praised our remigration and removal program, which we modelled on ICE’s splendid work.

Our Removal Corps have been picking up so many legals and illegals that our detention centres can’t keep up!

Since we left the UN and the ECHR - our Go Home Airline flights are taking off 24/7. Afghanistan, DRC, the Gobi Desert and the North Pole - all safe countries. Not that it’s any of our business one way or another.

Right now, I can confidently say that there’s not a single legal immigrant who makes under our new income threshold of £100,000 a year, who can take their future in this country for granted. And the boats have stopped coming since the navy blockaded the channel, and as for the illegals who got through - we are coming for you. We are taking our country back.

And we are also becoming more or less culturally coherent once again.

Nowadays, if you take the underground, you won’t have to feel uncomfortable when foreigners speak their own languages, as Nigel once did - not since we introduced fines for speaking your own language in public. Go out into the shires, and the churches are filling up again. Yes, last summer’s Patriot Day celebrations got a little out of hand.

There will always be a few hotheads when the lion roars. But there is also a positive sound. Now every foreigner knows that you don’t something for nothing, and you don’t get to be British just because you feel like it. Even a consultant surgeon has to put in 500 hours of voluntary work to show that they’re contributing, thanks to our new mandatory community service threshold for indefinite leave to remain. And every migrant has to take a language exam and speak English to university standard, no matter how long they stay here.

And no, the taxpayer does not fund it.

That’s what it means to take back control. And because of what we’ve done, so many things we thought were lost are coming back:

Look at those street urchins with their puppy dog eyes! So many more of them on our streets in the last two years, the little scamps:

No wonder the Morris Dancers are jiggling their bells!

They know that this isn’t an island of strangers anymore. This is not the land of DEI and cities of sanctuary and refugee rapists are welcome here. This is not the country of wind farms and the climate scam. This is not a country where Marxist universities teach multiculturalism and transgender ideology, and make money from nonsense degrees in Media Studies, English and Anthropology.

This is a country of pride, community and belonging. A country with common values and a common purpose. And all thanks to one man - the voice of the common people, whose face you see on every high street:

Of course, some of you will have heard about the blips - wildly exaggerated as always by the left, and by woke economists and civil servants bitter at Dom and Dicky’s DOGE cuts. You may have read about councils going bankrupt, universities and GP surgeries closing, fiscal deficits and the sterling crisis.

The left do love to moan. But as someone who used to work for Goldman Sachs, I can tell you that there is money to be made here. Ask Elon Musk and Peter Thiel! Low taxes, no red tape in anything at all, a compliant and flexible workforce, respect for entrepreneurship - all this and you get Downton Abbey, Wimbledon and the Royal Family too!

That is what cultural coherence means. It means cleaving to your values. And if there’s one value that we in this country hold more dearly than anything else, it’s wealth.

We simply adore the wealthy, and we’re not fussed where their money comes from as long as it comes here! And that’s we invited you here tonight. Millionaires, billionaires and trillionaires - we will always welcome you with open arms. You will always have a home here, for as long as you like. Indefinite leave to remain? A fast track to citizenship? Whatever you need.

So come to Great Britain. Believe in us. Invest in us. And now I’ll hand you over to our Home Secretary, who will tell you how he brought white faces back to our tv screens and put migrant children in cages!.

Thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, a big hand for Bob Jenrick!

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I didn’t particularly want to write about the upcoming Maccabi Tel Aviv versus Aston Villa Europa League cup tie on Nov 6. On a sporting level, I could care less about it, and in the greater scheme of things, it ought to be nothing more than a minor blip on everyone’s horizon.

I hope it remains that way, but as things currently stand, this match has demonstrated yet again the Labour government’s unerring inability to do the right thing, coupled with an equal ability to make a bad thing worse. And the game has also become the object of a torrent of outraged commentary, much of which is steeped in the bad faith, malicious political opportunism and intellectual dishonesty, that is invariably on display when anything to do with Israel becomes a subject of national political debate.

As many people will now know, this outrage has been directed at the decision by West Midlands Police (WMP) to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from Villa Park in the forthcoming match. In its statement, the police justified the ban on purely operational grounds, following a ‘thorough assessment’ which found the game to be ‘high risk’. The statement also explained:

This decision is based on current intelligence and previous incidents, including violent clashes and hate crime offences that occurred during the 2024 UEFA Europa League match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel-Aviv in Amsterdam.

Based on our professional judgement, we believe this measure will help mitigate risks to public safety.

Contrary to much of what has been said since, this was not the first time that fans have been banned from away matches. In December 2023, UEFA banned Legia Warsaw fans from five away games, following clashes between Legia fans and police at Aston Villa. That same year, UEFA imposed a fine and suspended away game ban on Galatasaray, in response to violent fan behaviour at Old Trafford, and Italian police imposed a blanket ban on Red Star Belgrade fans attending Inter and Milan games in Italy, because of fears of clashes between rival ultras.

This year, Glasgow Rangers fans were given a suspended away game ban by UEFA following excessive ‘pyrotechnics’. In 2024 and again in 2025, Leeds fans were banned by German police from attending friendlies in German on the basis of unspecified security concerns, and Italian authorities ordered Napoli not to sell away tickets for next month’s Champions League clash with Eintracht Frankfurt fans because of local police fears of clashes between rival fans.

I could go on, but you get the drift.

In all these cases, fans were banned or threatened with a ban, not because of their race or nationality, but because of what they had done, or were likely to do. The jury is out as to how effective such bans are - the Legia Warsaw violence at Aston Villa was partly a response to anger from Polish fans that they hadn’t been given enough tickets. It’s also true that blanket bans will affect fans who are not violent, but that is the nature of sanctions (Russia anybody?) and also of bans driven by security concerns.

This has clearly been the case in the police decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from Aston Villa, based in part on last year’sriots in Amsterdam. As most people familiar with this event will know, the 2024 Ajax-Maccabi game become a three-day street brawl in which Maccabi fans were attacked in the streets by mostly young men of Arab, North African and Turkish descent.

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What is mentioned less often, is that Maccabi fans chanted ‘death to the Arabs’, burned a Palestinian flag, attacked an Arab taxi driver, mocked dead children in Gaza, and celebrated the IDF before and after these riots erupted. Even the very pro-Israel Jewish Chroncle makes it clear that these provocations took place.

Does this behaviour ‘justify’ what happened afterwards? No. But it does provide a context of provocation -response that was generally missing from media and political coverage which presented the violence as an antisemitic pogrom that recalled ‘Europe’s darkest days.’

This context is clearly behind WMP’s decision to ban Maccabi fans from the Villa match, in a city with a large Muslim population. The decision was apparently known to the Home Secretary, more than a week before it became the object of political and media outrage, and nothing happened. But last Monday, Keir Starmer announced on Twitter:

It was then announced that government ministers, including Lisa Nandy and Alan Holden, were seeking to overturn the West Midlands Police decision. This was even more unusual - highly irregular old chap - than the decision to ban the fans in the first place. Governments do not generally intervene in operational police matters. Yet here was Starmer’s government, without the slightest evidence, choosing to make this a line-in-the-sand moment while portraying the police decision as a concession to, or even as an expression of antisemitism.

As always, a host of bad actors rushed in to express their outrage - clearly sensing Muslims or ‘unintegrated’ dark-skinned foreigners behind the police decision. Israeli government spokesman David Mencer declared it a ‘sad state of affairs’ that Jews and Israelis ‘would feel in some way unsafe at a football match.’

The detestable mediocrity Robert Jenrick immediately joined in, and so did Kemi Badenoch, Ian Austin, and - inevitably- Nigel Mosley-Farage. In his salad days, Nigel allegedly tormented Jewish pupils at his school with taunts of ‘gas the Jews’ and ‘Hitler was right’. Now, he was outraged, outraged I tell you:

This is a man who like his racial discrimination served pure, when it suits him. But he isn’t the only one. Here was ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe, declaring: ‘We shouldn’t be banning groups of football fans from Britain because Muslims might get offended.’

This is the crux of the matter for the likes of Lowe and Farage. And the great British press also tumbled out of bed to attend reveille at the first bugle call, and began hitting the keyboards to condemn the ‘shame’ and ‘disgrace’ the police decision had brought on Britain. There was John Rentoul, the Renfield to Tony Blair’s Dracula (‘Master, I’m waiting for you master’) showing more passion than I have seen him express about anything at all:

And elsewhere, less salubrious voices also joined in:

Not since Cable Street have so many brave antifascist fighters rushed to the metaphorical streets. Even Ed Davey, and more thoughtful writers like the Guardian’s Barney Ronay, worked themselves into a lather at the shame of it all, and the rocky road to ruin that it represented.

It should be pointed out, because it is not at all irrelevant, that you will have to look long and hard amongst most of the people in this chorus to find a single voice expressing the same level of indignation at what has been done to Gaza these last two years. And I don’t include handwringing invocations about Gazan ‘suffering’ as a moral position here. None of them had a thing to say about the reports of gross mistreatment of the Sumud convoy activists - even when the thuggish National Security Minister Ben Gvir all but admitted these reports were true.

Yet all of them have accepted, without any scepticism at all, the argument that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans have been banned, not because they are Israelis, but because they are Jews, and that this ban is part of an ongoing attempt to ‘appease’ Muslims and drive Jews from British public spaces.

There is nothing in WMD’s statement to suggest any such intention, but the government and much of the British commentariat have aligned themselves so closely with Israeli depictions of the ‘conflict’ that they now appear willing to believe that even the mighty British police are indirectly succumbing to antisemitism..

As the Manchester synagogue attacks made clear, antisemitism does exist. But it is equally true, that successive Israeli governments- particularly this one - and routinely use antisemitism to smear its opponents.

The horrors of the last two years have made even more essential on all of men and women of good will to maintain the firewall between the Israeli state and Jews as an ethnic/religious category. That does not mean that anyone should be gaslit and browbeaten into accepting the propaganda of an Israeli state that is losing the battle of opinion on the ground.

But at the top, it’s another matter. And the reaction to the Maccabi Tel Aviv ban suggests, once again, that there are powerful supporters of Israel who are more willing to see antisemitism even where it doesn’t exist, than they are to acknowledge their own complicity in the horrors that Israel has perpetrated in Gaza.

The result, again and again, is that Israel gets carte blanche to do whatever it wants, wherever it wants, and sometimes without even asking for anything at all. This is why an attempt to ban Israeli football fans with a history of racism and violence has been transformed into an example of creeping antisemitism. .

It’s worth noting that Starmer’s intervention took place in the same week that Palestine Action won the right to continue its appeal against the Labour government’s decision to categorise it as a terrorist organisation.

Both these events in their own ways, point towards future outcomes that are likely to end in humiliation for the government. If the Palestine Action appeal goes ahead, it is very likely - unless the government really does have the intelligence information that Yvette Cooper claimed it has - to be successful. At which point, more than 2,000 arrests may be overturned and the government will be made to look not only grossly authoritarian, but also stunningly inept in picking a fight it did not need to have.

And if the government succeeds in overturning what appears to have been a decision to ban Maccabi fans which is supported by the Police Federation, and anything happens - fights, riots, deaths - then it will bear the full political responsibility.

I stress ‘political responsibility’. The moral responsibility for acts of violence always belongs to those who perpetrate such acts.

But politically and morally, the sensible thing for the government to have done regarding Palestine Action would have been not to categorise it as a terrorist organisation, but to respond to its actions on a case by case basis, using the criminal laws it already has.

And the sensible thing to do with Maccabi Tel Aviv would have been to say nothing at all, and let the police do what it saw fit.

Instead, we got the opposite of that. Yesterday, Ed Miliband was asked on the Trevor Phillips show whether Villa Park was ‘no go area for Jews.’ A politician with moral backbone might have replied that Villa Park was no such place, and that the police had made its decision to ban a group of Israeli football bans on public safety grounds. Instead he replied:

We cannot have a situation where any area is a no-go area for people of a particular religion or from a particular country, and we’ve got to stamp out all forms of prejudice, antisemitism, Islamophobia, wherever we find them.

Does this mean that the bans imposed on Legia Warsaw and Red Star Belgrade were ‘no go areas’ for all Poles and Serbs? And how does overruling an attempt to prevent possible violence equate with combatting prejudice?

It doesn’t, but these are the kind of self-defeating cycles that a government without a moral compass can find itself swirling round in. And this exchange took place on the same day that police in Tel Aviv banned a derby match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Hapoel Tel Aviv, after fans rioted and fired flares and smoke bombs onto the pitch. Even Labour will not accuse the Israeli police of antisemitism.

But here in the UK, we have the ludicrous situation of a government seeking to overturn its own police in allow Maccabi fans to a match that will be even more volatile and charged with toxic emotions than it already was - with possible support from Tommy Robinson’s ultras.

If this happens, we can only hope that it doesn’t kick off. But if it does, a government that throws dust in the eyes of others can’t be surprised if it blows back in its own face.

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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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