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Israel? Meh ...

5/6/2026

It’s not every day you read a book and think, ‘goodness me, I never thought of that’. But that’s what happened when I read David Baddiel’s ‘Jews Don’t Count’.

What hadn’t I thought?

Well, let’s start with the acronym BAME. This stands for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic. Baddiel points out that Jews are an ethnic minority - and proceeds to give dozens of examples of how they are neither considered nor treated as such. Here’s just one example of this invisibilisation: ‘in Britain, recently, Sajid Javid was hailed as the first BAME Chancellor of the Exchequer, despite the fact that Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor Nigel Lawson was and is Jewish’ (p.52; ‘was’ is now more appropriate: Lawson died in 2023).

So that’s what hadn’t occurred to me: I knew that Jews were an ethnic minority but to be honest I’d never noticed how invisible they were in the Nigel Lawson sense, or thought that they should be treated like other, ‘better known’, ones.

Baddiel is wearily familiar with this position, which is that there’s effectively a hierarchy of racism and that anti-Jew discrimination is a ‘second-class’ racism.

I’m guilty as charged.

So why are Jews denied the special treatment afforded other ethnic minorities. Are they too white? That can’t be it because ‘Jews are not white. Or not quite. Or, at least they don’t always feel it’ (p.43). Because they’re wealthy? No, because not all Jews are rich and anyway, ‘fuck off about money’ (p.27) because ‘it doesn’t protect you against racism’ (p.27).

So it seems there’s no good reason why a) Jews shouldn’t be regarded as an ethnic minority on a par with others, and b) they shouldn’t receive the treatment afforded other ethnic minorities.

So far, so persuaded.

Two comments on all this.

First, Jews in the UK are now receiving some of the special treatment they’ve been demanding. As a downpayment (literally), the UK government has earmarked £25m for increased security for Jewish communities, and London’s Metropolitan Police has announced a new dedicated Community Protection Team of initially 100 extra officers for the protection of Jews. This brings the Jewish community into line with Muslims who two years ago were granted £117m over four years for the protection of religious sites and community buildings.

Second, while Baddiel’s argument about Jews being a BAME has stuck with me, so has this two-word comment: ‘Israel? Meh’ (p.93). This comes when he’s discussing the question of whether he should care more for the plight of Palestinians because he’s a Jew.

Winding back a couple of pages, Baddiel asks, isn’t most of this ‘new Jew-hatred actually about Israel’ (p.90) and its oppressive practices? ‘Well, yes, they are,’ he writes, ‘but I kind of think: Fuck Israel. I call Israel, on Twitter, stupid fucking Israel, which tends to upset some Jews, but it isn’t really a comment on the country itself. It’s more to do with the debate, the way that everything anyone says about that subject so quickly gets drawn into the stupid fucking shouting match’ (pp.90-91; my emphasis).

So he’s criticising Israel - except that he’s not. What he’s really criticising is the annoying way people keep wanting to call Israel, its government and its army to account when they should skip past all that and focus on what really matters, which is the treatment of Jews in the UK (in particular). Does Baddiel care about the Palestinians? Of course he does: ‘I do care, but not more than I care about the Rohingya, or people suffering in Syria … etc etc’ (p.92).

Should he care more about the Palestinians than other suffering peoples? No, he says, ‘because that smacks of something weird. It smacks of an idea that somehow Jews - non-Israeli Jews - must apologise for Israel: that Jews - non-Israeli Jews - should feel a little bit ashamed of Israel’ (92). Baddiel says that ‘Israel [has] done many things to be ashamed of. But here’s the thing: I am not responsible for those actions’, so ‘Me, I think, Israel? Meh’ (p.93; my emphasis).

Note what Baddiel has done here: with a stroke of his pen he’s undermined the increasingly accepted practice of present generations accepting responsibility for past generations’ misdeeds and making appropriate reparations.

So I wonder what he makes of the 1949 German law that established legal pathways for descendants of Jews who lost their citizenship during the Nazi regime to reclaim their German citizenship? Subsequent immigration law amendments have strengthened that commitment to recognise past injustices and make appropriate reparations - despite the fact that present generations of Germans had nothing to do with the Nazi persecution of Jews between 1933 and 1945.

Then there’s the Spanish government’s 2015 decision to grant citizenship to 72,000 descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain over 500 years ago by King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile. Has the Spanish government gravely misunderstood the nature of responsibility?

And there’s more.

Baddiel’s claim that the fact that he’s a non-Israeli Jew (repeated twice, so it’s obviously important to his argument) absolves him of any particular responsibility for commenting on the actions of the Israeli government is not only counter-intuitive but also an ignoring of the kind of fact that in most ethical schemes makes a difference to the question of responsibility.

It’s this: as a Jew, he will know that the state of Israel calls itself the state of the ‘Jewish people’ and is the ‘collective property of the “Jews of the world”’ (from Shlomo Sand’s ‘How I stopped being a Jew’, p.1). As a Jew, in most ethical schemes this ties Baddiel more closely to Israel than to Myanmar, Kurdistan, Syria or Burkina Faso - where his ethical commitments might indeed be regarded as less strong.

In the face of all this, how are we to read Baddiel’s refusal to care (much) about Palestinians, about Gaza? Maybe he’s just a non-committal kind of guy. Maybe he’s heartless. Maybe he approves of the murder of tens of thousands of children. We just don’t know.

Twitter is full of suggestions that the rise in anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic sentiment in the UK would be lessened by Jews making clear their opposition to the actions of the IDF and the Israeli government. It’s also full of posts by Jews saying that this position/stance/demand is racist. So there’s a standoff, and in the meantime Palestinians in their thousands across Israel and Lebanon continue to die and be displaced.

But Israel? Well … meh.

When yesterday is today

5/6/2026

Stefan Zweig's 'The World of Yesterday'.

There is so much one could write about this extraordinary memoir: the roll-call of twentieth-century personalities that Stefan Zweig met and knew, the searing honesty of his reflections on the callow but very fortunate youth he was when he came into contact with ‘the real world’ (even before the events that were to turn Europe and much of the rest of the world upside down), music, education, gender relations, the role of women, the array of countries he visited and his assessment of their benefits and drawbacks, his views on Theodor Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism. This is a remarkable life, beautifully told.

But what struck me most about it, page after page, was the uncanny similarity between the accelerating slide to geopolitical disaster he describes and the chaotic situation we are living through today. I ended up reading ‘The World of Yesterday’ as a long cautionary note about The World of Today.

Zweig was born in 1881, an Austrian, a Jew, writer, humanist, pacifist - and victim of the volcanic changes that took place in the first 40 or so years of the twentieth century. ‘Against my will,’ he writes, ‘I’ve been witness to the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the whole of history.’ Looking around, we might be forgiven for thinking that, hyperbole apart, brutality again reigns supreme while reason is stuffed away at the back of the spice rack.

Analysing the reasons for the catastrophic world wars that marked the first half of the twentieth century, Zweig lays much of the blame at the door of nationalism. He writes that he’s ‘experienced revolution, hunger, devaluation, terror, epidemics, emigration, fascism in Italy, national socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and above all the pestiferous plague of nationalism’.

From ‘America First’ to Brexit and the right-wing mobilisation of nationalist sentiment, we’re presently assailed by similar forces, designed to tear apart the fragile arrangements that keep centrifugal tendencies in check. He talks of the ‘thin layer’ of liberal impulses, so susceptible to the collapse of conciliation, and the ‘invasion of politics by brute force’. Ring any bells?

He writes that, ‘In spite of everything we all persisted with the illusion that one’s word was one’s word, that an agreement was an agreement and that one could negotiate with Hitler if one talked with him sensibly … The new Germany was overturning all the rules of the game as far as relations with other countries were concerned, as well as any legal frameworks that didn’t suit it.’ As Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu make a diabolical habit of saying one thing and doing another, riding roughshod over international law and apparently free to do so, the parallels are obvious. ‘Hitler turned lies into an everyday occurrence’, says Zweig. More chilling parallels.

Another theme is the rapidity with which everything can fall apart, how a settled and peaceful life can be turned upside down practically without warning. On the very eve of what was to become the First World War, the beaches and restaurants were full, then they were shared with soldiers carrying rifles, and then they were empty.

And Zweig experienced this calamity not once but twice. Here he is on events as Hitler came into power: ‘To tell the absolute truth I have to admit that in Germany and Austria in 1933 and 1934 we didn’t think that a hundredth or even a thousandth of what would happen a few weeks later was possible’. Part of the reason for this, Zweig tells us, is that no-one took the looming threats seriously. In particular, Hitler was a figure of fun who everyone took for a buffoon and who would disappear from the stage once he was rumbled for what he was: a narcissistic rabble-rouser whose flame would soon burn out once reason prevailed. ‘Our belief in reason, that its use would help us avoid all the madness at the last moment, was our only mistake … Our idealism, our optimism, rooted in decades of progress, led us to underestimating and badly misjudging the oncoming danger’. More bells ringing?

In a final echo of today Zweig writes unbelievingly of how quickly and profoundly cruelty and brutality can be normalised, with barely a shrug of the shoulders from the international community. ‘In 1938', he says, ‘our world was already more used to inhumanity, anarchy and brutality than for hundreds of years. While in the before times what happened in the unfortunate city of Vienna would have been enough to provoke international ostracism, in 1938 the world’s conscience either remained silent or grumbled a little before forgetting and forgiving’.

It’s impossible to read these words without thinking of what’s been going on in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon since October 7th 2023 (well, since long before that but hopefully the point is taken). Blind eye after blind eye has been turned by leaders across the world as the genocidal regime run by Benjamin Netanyahu, and apparently supported by a good majority of the Israeli population, has murdered tens of thousands of men, women and children and displaced (again and again) tens of thousands more.

No-one who reads ‘The World of Yesterday’ can say we haven’t been warned about the dangers of ignoring evil when it’s staring us in the face. The evil that, in the end, did for Stefan Zweig. A few days after finishing the manuscript he and his second wife committed suicide in the city of Petrópolis in Brazil.

They were found holding hands.

then Israel killed her

4/9/2026

This is Rita Rayhan of Gaza. She is 13 years old. This morning she chose some jeans to put on, picked out some earrings and a green scrunchie to tie back her hair, opted for a black anorak against the cold of the Gazan morning.

Then Israel killed her.

Overton's window

10/5/2025

690 words: 5-minute read

As far as political opinions go it’s generally believed that we get more conservative, more reactionary, as we get older.

It’s less often recognised that sometimes we stay the same, politically speaking, and what changes is everything around us.

That’s the gist of this letter from Dr Stephen Watkins of Oldham, Lancashire (and many thanks to son Patch for spotting it!).

Watkins is pointing out that progressive taxation, earned privilege, public service and a welfare state were so much the centre of political gravity in the early 1960s that they were the unquestioned bedrock of Harold Macmillan’s conservative politics. What’s moved, he says, is not him but the Overton Window.

I used to give lectures to University students on political ideologies - liberalism, socialism, anarchism, fascism, conservatism, ecologism. That sort of thing.

Once, when I was casting around for a way of locating the heart of English conservatism for students, I came across this snippet of a speech by the then Prime Minister John Major to the Conservative Group for Europe on 22nd April 1993.

This is what he said:

‘Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’.

This is brilliant.

In a handful of redolent words Major sums up English conservatism perfectly, locating England’s future in a mythical past, which most likely never existed but which has settled status in the country’s cultural repertoire.

In an idle moment the other day I came across another snippet of a speech given by a major UK politician. It ran like this:

‘People like this – they are the real face of Britain, painting a fence, running a raffle, cutting the half-time orange, or even just that gentle knock on the door that checks your neighbour is alright ... that’s real Britain.’

Who was this, I wondered? The similarity with Major’s 1993 speech was uncanny. So surely a conservative politician - current Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch perhaps?

But no, this was UK Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer ransacking the conservative cupboard of myths and legends for ways of articulating his latest wheeze for confronting the extreme right-wing challenge of the Reform Party: a pot-pourri patriotism. This was a key moment in his address to the Labour Party Conference on 30th September 2025, saved up for the rousing moments at the end of his speech.

The position of the Overton Window isn’t like the law of gravity, unavoidable, ineluctable. It’s the result of political decisions taken by a succession of politicians over the past 45 years or so which have resulted in 1960s Tory voters looking like lefty radicals today. These politicians have effectively robbed us - in the UK at least - of a whole political repertoire by making it appear outrageous, extreme, impossible.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be like this. Pedro Sánchez’s socialist government in Spain, for example, offers a polar opposite option to Starmer. And in the UK itself, there’s the Green Party and the nascent Your Party to the left of Starmer.

The rightward drift of the Overton Window wouldn’t have been possible without actual flesh-and-blood human beings taking it there. The roll-call of shame on the left is long and depressing, and thinking through it makes one want to jump out of an actual window. So many missed opportunities, so many high expectations betrayed.

High up on the list we will surely find the current Labour Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood.

Here she is in 2014 at an outdoor meeting shouting that Israel’s ‘killing of children and bombing of schools and hospitals must be condemned’, and ‘we will not be silent until the Palestinians are free’.

And here she is in 2025 granting police forces powers to put conditions on ‘repeat protests’ as the government doubles down on the repression of pro-Palestine protest - of exactly the sort she supported in 2014.

It’s moot here whether it’s Mahmood or the frame of reference that’s shifted. The fact is that the blackout has been pulled down on Overton’s window and protesting genocide can land you in prison for up to 14 years.

if solzhenitsyn had had a mobile phone ...

9/16/2025

919 words - 4 minute read

I’ve just attended an excellent conference on life in concentration camps in France, Germany and the USSR during and after the Second World War.

Much of the discussion turned on the different strategies employed by ex-inmates to communicate the horror of what had happened to them: how to express the inexpressible, describe the indescribable.

If we’re looking for a common denominator in this regard I think the closest we’ll get is ‘distancing’. This might seem counter-intuitive - after all, isn’t it exactly the fine-grained immediacy of the horror that needs to be communicated? If that’s the objective then some literary equivalent of the haptic shot in cinema seems to be what’s required.

But according to Spanish Buchenwald survivor Jorge Semprún, distancing is essential to effective communication of the horror. This is because ordinary language, ´factual’ language, won’t work: the quotidian simply isn’t up to the task of expressing the ineffable.

So Semprún insists on metaphor as a way of communicating what it’s like to be in possession of a body in the liminal, purgatorial, space between life and death. Metaphor creates a space in which the reader’s imagination can get to work, prompting precisely the instinctive, emotional and creative response that Semprún is aiming for.

Taking this a step further, he consistently employs fiction as a means of communicating the privations he underwent in Buchenwald and elsewhere. ‘No se llega nunca a la verdad sin un poco de invención´, he writes. ‘You never get to the truth without a little invention’. He’s come in for criticism on this score: if he admits to invention how can we know what’s true and what’s false?

But this is too literal an understanding of the distinction between fact and fiction and their relationship to the truth. There might not have been an actual Good Samaritan, for example, but the story tells a truth at least as accurately - and perhaps more so - than if he’d actually existed. And the same goes for every single fairy tale we tell our children.

So distancing, through metaphor and inventive fiction, is paradoxically a way of bringing the truth of the horror of concentration camps close to those of us fortunate enough not to have experienced them.

As the conference unfolded I couldn’t help thinking about another actually existing concentration camp at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean - Gaza. (For concentration camp it certainly is; the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a concentration camp as ‘a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard’).

Jorge Semprún had no way of communicating his experiences to the outside world while he was imprisoned in Buchenwald. And the same goes for all the others whose names we have come to know through their testimony: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Eli Wisesel, Varlam Shalamov, Józef Czapski and Elinor Lippe, among countless others.

What these testimonies have in common is that a) they were after the event, and b) they come to us via the written word.

Testimony from the concentration camp called Gaza couldn’t be more different. It comes to us live, direct, unfiltered, immediate. And it comes to us in visual form, 24 hours a day, incessantly and unsparingly, on our TV screens, mobiles and tablets. Literary inventiveness seems unnecessary. No doubt there’ll eventually be a literature of this genocide, this second Nakba, but thanks to modern communication technology we haven’t had to wait for it.

Is this a difference that makes a difference?

You might have thought so. It’s often said that the reason Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the rest of the German web of concentration camp suffering lasted so long was that no-one knew about what was going on in them.

So what if Jorge Semprún had had a mobile ‘phone and had somehow managed to use it to broadcast the camp conditions in Buchenwald to the outside world?

We’d maybe like to think that with this knowledge the Allies would have found a way of bringing a swift end to the genocide taking place in Germany, Poland and elsewhere.

But the evidence from Gaza suggests otherwise. Two years of direct visual testimony of the daily slaughter of Palestinians - mostly women and children - by the Israeli army are apparently not enough to persuade Western governments to bring an end to the carnage.

Far from it, in fact.

In the very week that a UN Special Committee has determined that Israel is committing a genocide, and concluded that Israeli President Isaac Herzog - among others - has incited the commission of genocide, UK Prime Minister welcomes the self-same Herzog to 10 Downing Street.

This puts the UK in direct contravention of Article 1 of the 1948 Genocide Convention which demands that contracting states ‘prevent and punish acts of genocide’. No-one - not even President Herzog - is immune from the charge of genocide - something which renowned human rights lawyer Keir Starmer is either unaware of or indifferent to.

So it seems to make no difference how testimony comes down to us - written, visual, delayed or immediate. Apparently it’s not the seed that counts, it’s where it lands. And when the soil is as contaminated by cruelty and indifference outside the camp as inside, the result is Starmer and Herzog shaking hands on the steps of 10 Downing Street while women and children continue to be butchered with impunity.

love, anger and betrayal

9/7/2025

1096 words, 5-minute read

I’m on the London Underground. Reading a book. I look up to check the station. Clapham South. Dammit. I’ve missed my stop. I close the book - source of my distraction, engrossing doesn’t cut it - and cross platforms to head back upstream.

The book in question is ‘Love, Anger and Betrayal’, the latest from environmental campaigner Jonathon Porritt. Jonathon has been in the game a long time (he joined the Green Party in 1974 and has since covered every possible base in the environmental movement - and invented a few more besides), so what he says, matters.

In ‘Love, Anger and Betrayal’ he turns his attention to 26 young Just Stop Oil (JSO) campaigners, all of whom have been arrested for peaceful direct action and some of whom are in prison. In truth these 26 are Jonathon’s co-authors as each of them is given space to detail their involvement in JSO, their motivation, inspiration, relationship with nature, and hopes for the future. They also reflect in their own words on the chapter themes: climate science, taking direct action, confronting the law, the emotional burden of arrest and imprisonment etc.

It’s impossible and invidious to generalise about these extraordinary young people, but four things stand out for me. First, their selflessness; there is not an iota of self-aggrandisement on display here. Second, their surprise that not everyone sees things the way they do, when it’s so obvious that not changing course will lead us to perdition. Third, the equanimity with which they accept their punishment, not because the sentences are fair but because they believe they’re doing the right thing at the right time, and in that sense they’re where they have to be.

Fourth, the road travelled. Each and every one of these protestors has started near the bottom of the commitment escalator and ridden it to the top. From there they survey an uncertain future, both theirs and the planet’s, making sacrifices along the way (though they may not see them like that) that few of us would be willing to make. At some point in that uncertain future these young activists, vilified on all sides (including by those on the same side) will be recognised for the courageous, right-minded people they are.

These 26 campaigners are just a handful of those, young and old, who have fallen victim to the government’s determination to drive direct action from the streets of the UK. Successive governments - both Conservative and Labour - have passed legislation that makes it increasingly difficult to take action (even making a Zoom call) without being threatened with arrest. (Jonathon himself has fallen foul of legislation that makes supporting the currently proscribed group Palestine Action a criminal offence).

Historical comparisons are hard to avoid. Some of the activists, and Jonathon himself, cite the Suffragettes as a source of inspiration, and it’s a measure of the government’s duplicitous insincerity that the erstwhile Home Secretary Yvette Cooper can sickeningly dress up in Suffragette colours and then pass legislation proscribing Palestine Action which uses the same tactics as those that got Cooper the vote.

The environmental movement has a very broad front and practically every tactic has been used to try to turn round the juggernaut that is leading us to environmental and social disaster. Just Stop Oil, like Extinction Rebellion, is at the radical end of the spectrum (though does anyone remember monkeywrenching?)

I think it’s fair to say that Jonathon has spent most of his political life on the moderate flank: the Green Party, Director of Friends of the Earth, founder member of the sustainable development charity Forum for the Future. In the light of this, one of the most poignant passages in the book is this one:

‘There may well be a climate majority out there, just waiting for the right moment to show how much they care, to demonstrate how determined they are to see their elected representatives get a grip on this crisis. But I’ve spent more than fifty years trying to reach out to that majority of citizens, if only to mobilise a bigger minority of them, and I have no illusions left - about both my failure and theirs. If we continue to rely on the same old business-as-usual theory of change, the inevitable result will be that such a majority will be mobilised only when it is already too late to make any significant difference.’

And it’s for this reason that he ‘is deeply disappointed by all those mainstream climate campaigners and environmentalists who never spoke up in support of Just Stop Oil’. It’s said that we get more conservative with age. Jonathon seems to have taken the wrong potion. A combination of lived experience and over a year spent with these extraordinary young people looks to have placed him firmly on the radical flank.

In the context of UK environmental politics this is an important moment, because concerted calls for a ‘moderate flank’ are being made by significant figures in the environmental movement, aimed precisely at the ‘climate majority’ that Jonathon has spent 50 years trying and failing to reach. Can it be ‘both … and’ rather than ‘either … or’? Maybe, but time spent working on the moderate flank is time you can’t spend anywhere else.

What other options are there? Years ago a university colleague of mine pointed me towards the insurance industry. After all, he said, who thinks more about the future than them? Since then, insurance has come up over and over again as a weak spot in capitalism’s armoury, as the costs of insuring against future environmental disasters rise inexorably. (Most recently for me in John Vaillant’s magnificent and shocking ‘Fire Weather’).

Jonathon imagines a worst-ever hurricane season in Florida causing state-based insurance company bankruptcies, followed by a cascade of bankruptcies up the chain to the World Bank itself. ‘That’s the only way,’ he writes, ‘as I see it right now, in which today’s suicidal capitalist system turns out, against all the odds, and at absolutely the last possible moment, to be capable of rescuing itself from itself’. That’s quite a journey from Jonathon’s 2007 ‘Capitalism as if the World Matters’!

So perhaps, in the end, the Death Machine will chew itself up from the inside. Meanwhile, courageous young people, given voice here by Jonathon, are dragged through the Machine’s ‘justice system’, a system in which judges ludicrously demand that protestors show remorse before they pass sentence. ‘How could I be morally compelled to take action one week’, asks Indigo Rumbelow, ‘and then be filled with regret for acting the next?’

Back in the UK/Ussr

8/24/2025

411 words: 3-minute read

Maybe my mistake was watching an episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror the day before departure to the UK from Spain, but as our spanking new train slid past the sleek glass-fronted apartments that line the track between Stansted and London Liverpool Street, I kept expecting something sinister to happen.

It was all just too good to be true.

And the (infuriating) ‘See it, Say it, Sorted’ incantation that’s been running on London trains for what seems like forever didn’t help, hinting as it does at the dark Black Mirror underbelly that the government would like us to think lurks just beneath the civilised and civilising veneer of British society.

But what are we being asked to look out for? What are we being asked to report? What will be ‘sorted’? And how?

The answer came the day before our arrival in the UK.

On that day - 9th August - over 500 people were arrested in London for carrying placards displaying the words ‘I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action’. The Labour government proscribed Palestine Action in July under the Terrorism Act, making membership of or support for it a criminal offence, punishable by up to 14 years in prison. The arrests were the most made by the Metropolitan Police in a single day in the last 10 years.

The average age of those arrested was 54, and the most arrests - 147 of them - were of people aged between 60 and 69.

So now I know what needs to be seen, said and sorted in the UK in 2025.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly women and children, are being murdered by the Israeli army, the UN has declared a famine in Gaza while Israelis BBQ just over the border, Keir Starmer and David Lammy wring their hands over the ‘intolerable’ situation in Gaza having glad-handed Netanyahu and his cronies for the past two years.

Given all this, you’d be forgiven for thinking that ‘see it, say it, sorted’ must be aimed at keeping a look-out for those in the UK complicit in the Gaza genocide.

But no. In Starmer’s Mad Hatter UK it’s those who protest the genocide who need to be ‘sorted’.

People like this old lady.

If you live in the UK today, save yourself a Netflix subscription. Black Mirror is coming to a street near you.

culture wars - in the swimming pool

8/3/2025

It’s well known that there are cultural variations as far as allowing each other the appropriate amount of personal space is concerned.

I’ve spent most of my life in a ‘low-contact culture’ (the UK) where people supposedly feel uncomfortable if their personal space is invaded. As it happens I’m not much bothered by people coming close to me: I’m quite happy with proximity, and kisses and hugs are absolutely fine by me.

Since I now live in Spain this is a good thing because I’m apparently now in a ‘high-contact culture’ where ‘physical contact is common, and maintaining close proximity is a sign of friendliness and openness.’

But there’s another side to the personal space story - the way in which space is unwittingly occupied by the people around you. And this can be really annoying!

Here’s a rather beautiful and sensitive account of the way it works, from a young Irish man who has spent 18 months in Spain grappling with the issue of space occupation.

Every single non-Spanish person to whom I’ve shown this video instantly recognises the bewilderment: how on earth don’t they know they’re right in the middle of the pavement?! And most Spanish people clock it too …

(It’s also worth saying that once you’ve asked ‘¿puedo pasar?’ [can I get by?] the reaction is instantaneous - ‘Of course! No problem!’)

At the root of all this is a basic unawareness that bodies occupy space - and there’s nowhere I’ve found this more aggravating than in the swimming pool, doing lengths.

In the UK if you get to the end of a length and it’s obvious to the person in front of you that you’re quicker than them, they generally wave you through.

In Spain, you can spend an entire length nibbling the heels of the person ahead of you, reach the end of the length, and then see them stare you in the eyes before setting off once again at their habitual, regular and absolutely infuriating snail’s pace. It’s clear that the thought that they might let you through simply doesn’t cross their mind.

So what to do? If you can’t beat them, join them? Plonk myself in the superfast lane and hold everyone up?

I’m honestly not sure I could. Too much cultural baggage of my own for that. So at most it’s going to be a timid ‘¿puedo pasar?’ in the slow lane.

And even that may be beyond me. More likely I’ll be ploughing up and down the lengths, with the sound of clashing cultures ringing in my ears.

we need to talk about palestine and action

7/26/2025

Here’s a scene that’s being played out pretty regularly on the streets of Britain nowadays.

It features a pro-Palestine protestor holding a placard outlining their belief that opposing genocide/war crimes/the holocaust in Gaza is a not a terrorist act.

The placard is a comment on the recent law passed in the House of Commons, proscribing an organisation called Palestine Action - the first direct action group to be labelled terrorist. Support for the group attracts a maximum 14 years in prison.

The protestor in the photograph has carefully avoided the fateful formula ‘I support Palestine Action’ by writing ‘Those who take action against genocide in Palestine are not the terrorists’. The words PALESTINE and ACTION are capitalised. Perhaps that’s what drew the attention of the two policemen who are arresting the protestor.

Yes, you read that right: the protestor is being arrested for carrying that placard.

The vast majority of commentary on what’s going on regarding Palestine protest focuses on the draconian legislation passed by a supposedly progressive Labour government that seeks to criminalise it.

But any legislation needs agents to put it into action - like the two policemen in this photograph. What is their role and responsibility in all this?

Look at them closely: all the paraphernalia of the modern police officer wrapped around two tall, bearded, well-groomed young men invested with the monumental and unassailable power of the state to do things to you that you’d rather they didn’t.

When they get home these two young men see what we all see on the television, our phones, tablets and laptops: chaos at Gazan feeding stations, skeletal children, grieving mothers and fathers weeping over the white shrouds covering their children, refugees murdered by Israeli forces as they try to get food, endless bombing and indiscriminate destruction.

Then the next day they don their uniforms and go out and arrest a few more people protesting this indescribable horror.

Arresting the protestor in the photograph may not mean that the policemen agree with what’s going on in Gaza. But it does mean that they are able to ignore it to the point where they are content to action the legislation that criminalises (some of) those who oppose it.

Question: why you are arresting this protestor?
Answer: because they might be breaking the law.
Question: is there any law you would refuse to action?
Answer: no.
Question: why?
Answer: because I am bound as a police officer to action the law.
Question: if you knew that this protestor would spend the next 14 years in jail as a result of your arrest, would you still arrest them?
Answer: Yes.

In 1970 Albert Hirschman published his ‘Exit, Voice and Loyalty’, outlining the three options open to any of us working in an organisation some of whose activities we don’t endorse. ‘Voice’ relates to us voicing a complaint within the organisation, ‘Loyalty’ refers to us knuckling down and getting on with it, and ‘Exit’ involves us leaving the organisation.

The two policemen in the photograph are driven by Loyalty, but I'm left wondering what it would take for them to go for Voice - or even Exit?

In the 1945-6 Nuremberg trials it was determined that following orders was not sufficient defence to avoid punishment for war crimes. Our two policemen are not committing a war crime, though the people they are protecting from protest most certainly are.

Question: what did you do to stop the genocide/war crimes/holocaust in Gaza, Daddy?
Answer: I arrested a man in a wheelchair dressed as Charlie Chaplin, carrying a copy of Picasso’s Guernica dressed in the colours of the Palestinian flag, while he played an excerpt from Chaplin’s iconic speech in ‘The Great Dictator’.
Question: Why did he play that speech?
Answer: It might have been this bit. Very powerful, but absolutely nothing to do with me.

‘Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!’

I did this so you don't have to ... (versión en español)

6/21/2025

El 18 de marzo de este año, Isabel Díaz Ayuso pronunció un discurso en el Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) de Londres (fundado por Alfred Sherman, Keith Joseph y Margaret Thatcher). Para quienes no hayan oído hablar de Díaz Ayuso y busquen un análogo en el Reino Unido, piensen en Nigel Farage, no tanto por su política (aunque hay similitudes) como por su capacidad para atraer la atención de los medios de comunicación mucho más allá de lo que su posición electoral justifica.

Para ser justos, Díaz Ayuso tiene más peso formal que Farage, porque mientras su partido sólo tiene 5 diputados en la Cámara de los Comunes, ella es Presidenta de la mayor de las 17 Comunidades Autónomas españolas (según el PIB), la Comunidad de Madrid. Lo que comparten, sin embargo, es su incomparable capacidad para captar la atención de los medios de comunicación en sus respectivos países.

Así que lo que diga Díaz Ayuso, importa. Incluso podría ser elegida algún día para liderar el país, tras haber defenestrado ya a un líder de su partido (el Partido Popular) y con el actual (Alberto Núñez Feijóo) inseguro e ineficaz.

Y para que no tengas que hacerlo tú, he escuchado tres veces su discurso de 20 minutos en un intento de desentrañar lo que podríamos llamar a lo grande su filosofía política.

En primer lugar, hay que destacar su originalidad y descaro. Describe sus convicciones políticas como «liberales», pero es un liberalismo muy su generis. Y para colmo se refiere al «liberalismo a la española» como el liberalismo original, puro y auténtico, mientras que otros han perdido su norte.

Hay, por supuesto, algunos principios compartidos y conocidos entre estos liberalismos - el respeto al Estado de Derecho, la separación de poderes, la afirmación de que el fin nunca justifica los medios- pero lo que destaca es el contenido antirracional y moralizante del liberalismo de Ayuso. Le interesan tanto las tripas y el corazón como la cabeza.

Así, los principios clave del liberalismo puro y auténtico son aparentemente estos: la alegría, la valentía, la generosidad, la verdad. Lo sorprendente de estos principios es que son tan superficialmente atractivos como radicalmente imprecisos, y ahí radica su potencia retórica y política. Ayuso ha dado con la receta del éxito retórico en lo que podríamos llamar estos tiempos políticos antiilustrados: hacer una lista de homilías que suenen cálidas, repetirlas a menudo (lo hace a lo largo de todo el discurso) y hacer de su imprecisión una virtud para atraer a su órbita al mayor número posible de personas.

El liberalismo moderno, tal y como lo entendemos hoy en día, tiene muy poco contenido moral: todo su sentido es que, dentro de las limitaciones de la ley y el respeto a los demás, somos libres de elegir la vida que queremos llevar. Libertad es una palabra que Ayuso utiliza con frecuencia, casi siempre de forma reductora: no somos libres si no hay donde tomar una cerveza a las 3 de la mañana. En este discurso añade una pizca de sustancia intelectual al citar al filósofo español José Ortega y Gasset y su afirmación (junto con los existencialistas) de que los seres humanos son constitutivamente libres y, por tanto, están obligados a elegir.

Esto parece impecablemente liberal, pero Ayuso se separa del liberalismo moderno cuando dice que debemos «elegir bien». Está claro que no se refiere sólo a «elegir bien» en el sentido de atenerse al imperio de la ley, porque en su discurso deja claro que hay opciones que aborrece aunque sean legales. Dos de ellas son el aborto y la eutanasia. Una tercera es el consumo de drogas (mencionado no menos de cuatro veces en el discurso) que, por supuesto, algunos liberales desean ver despenalizado precisamente por motivos de libertad de elección.

Se trata de un liberalismo moralizante que rechaza la idea del «individuo» desarraigado en favor de la «persona» nacida en una circunstancia particular que informa sus elecciones (morales) y condiciona sus posibilidades. Si esto es un liberalismo, es el liberalismo comunitario que surgió como reacción a lo que sus partidarios consideraban un individualismo excesivo que conducía al egocentrismo (un punto que Ayuso plantea exactamente en esos términos en su discurso).

El problema con el liberalismo comunitario es que tiene el potencial de restringir severamente las opciones abiertas al individuo. Para Ayuso la naturaleza de la comunidad en la que uno nace es fundamental en la medida en que condiciona y limita las opciones que el individuo puede legítimamente tomar. Las características de la comunidad que propone Ayuso son (las extraigo de su discurso): cristiana, anti-'woke', anti-izquierda, nacionalista, anti-feminista, pro-maternidad. Elegir bien en el Planeta Ayuso significa elegir de acuerdo con estos principios y los comportamientos que se derivan de ellos.

Llevar a cabo una política de tan alto contenido moral es arriesgado. La política de izquierdas es casi constitutivamente moralizante y a los políticos de izquierdas se les reprocha muy a menudo no estar a la altura de las normas morales que promueven. Esto da a la derecha un palo muy conveniente con el que golpear a la izquierda - y lo hacen en cada oportunidad.

A primera vista, Ayuso corre un riesgo similar, y en una serie de aspectos es tan susceptible de ser acusada de hipocresía como cualquier político de izquierdas. Por ejemplo, habla mucho del principio de «respeto a la vida humana». Esta es la mujer que defendió su negativa a trasladar a los pacientes mayores de Covid de las residencias al hospital alegando que habrían muerto pronto de todos modos. Una vez más, ensalza la importancia del «decoro» en política. Esta es la mujer que llamó hijo de puta al presidente Pedro Sánchez en el Parlamento y luego afirmó que sólo dijo que le gustaba la fruta (hijo de puta/me gusta la fruta). Una vez más, insiste en la importancia del Estado de Derecho. Es la mujer que grita «¡calumnia!» cuando acusan a su pareja de defraudar a Hacienda, acusación que él mismo ha confesado. Por último, Ayuso entra en combate blandiendo la espada de la verdad. Esta es la mujer que se refiere al «wokeismo» como el caballo de Troya que la izquierda está utilizando para instalar el comunismo en todo el mundo occidental. (A algunos nos gustaría que tuviera razón).

Al fin y al cabo, y a pesar de las protestas de Ayuso, el suyo no es un liberalismo. Es un conservadurismo profundo, enraizado en el catolicismo, el nacionalismo español, la idealización de la familia y la tradición. Y ella no es tan susceptible de ser acusada de hipocresía como los de izquierdas, porque nadie ha esperado nunca un comportamiento moralmente coherente de los políticos de derechas. Y menos ahora que Trump ha hecho de la antivirtud virtud. Los partidarios de Ayuso deliran tanto como los de Trump cuando la ven saltarse las normas, incluso (¿especialmente?) las que ella misma ensalza.

Qué oportuno que Ayuso haya elegido dar su conferencia en un centro fundado por Margaret Thatcher. La presidenta madrileña es, desafortunadamente, la prueba de que el conservadurismo de esta última sigue vivo y coleando en todo menos -literalmente- el nombre.

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