The Social World

Tag: Britain

  • The strange death of England

    The strange death of England

    Whatever happened to Britain, or the UK, or England, or whatever they’re calling it? We can’t even agree on what it’s called. But what happened to England, the England that, if you’re over 50, you grew up learning about, the England that controlled the world, the England that ran the largest empire in human history at the end of World War One? 

    Britain, which is an island in a pretty inhospitable climate, controlled literally a quarter of the Earth’s surface – and not controlled in the way the United States controls the rest of the world with an implied threat or with economic ties through trade, but with administrators and people sitting at desks with eyeshades, counting things. Way more than Rome, way more than the Mongols, way more than anybody, ever, or maybe in the future, ever. 

    Britain was the most powerful country in the history of the world. And then 25 years later, it was this kind of sad, soggy welfare state, which is, to some extent, what it still is, except maybe even a little bit worse. What happened? 

    There are a couple of levels on which to think about this. First is just geopolitical, and I guess they spent a lot of money in these wars and the ruling class, half the class at Eton in 1910 was killed in the trenches. You can think of a lot of different ways to explain what happened to Britain. The fact remains, however, the British won the two biggest wars in human history. They won and yet they’re still greatly diminished and to some extent humiliated. What is that? 

    So again, the first explanation can be described in economic terms. The United States took over. The British Empire just moved west to its child, the US. They just transferred the power and a lot of the gold to this new country, which had its systems and some of its customs. 

    But there’s something deeper. If that were the whole story, then Britain would still be recognizably Britain. The English people would still be recognizably English. They would just be not in charge anymore. They would have less money and less power. But the country would be, by any conventional measurement, thriving, just not running the Bahamas and Hong Kong and Pakistan. 

    But that’s not what’s happened. After winning the two biggest wars in human history, Britain has shrunken not just physically, but in some way that’s hard to describe. Its culture has changed, some might say has been destroyed, and it’s become something completely different. And what is that? And why does it matter what it is? 

    Well, it matters because what’s happened to Britain, to England, is also happening to many countries in the West, certainly its heirs, the Anglosphere: Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Ireland. It’s happening to those countries. It’s also happening to the rest of western Europe all at the same time. 

    A bunch of different profound, never seen before phenomena are happening to all of those countries, and again, including ours here in the United States. So it’s worth understanding what has happened to Britain. So maybe the best image that describes it is the one that we’re about to show you.

    In case there’s no context in the tape, what you’re watching is a woman being arrested outside an abortion clinic. And keep in mind, as you watch this, she’s not being arrested for throwing a firebomb, a petrol bomb, through the window of this abortion clinic in the UK, or even for obstructing access to this abortion clinic. No – she is being arrested and taken to jail for praying outside the abortion clinic.

    Watch this. 

    So what is that? It’s hard to argue that if your government is arresting people for praying that you’re watching a political phenomenon. Because, of course, praying is not simply a non-violent act. It’s not even a physical act. It can’t possibly, at least in secular terms, affect outcomes or harm anyone. Praying for people can never be a crime. But it is a crime in Great Britain, literally a crime. And the woman you saw is not the only person who’s been arrested for doing it. So clearly we’re watching a spiritual phenomenon here. There’s sort of no arguing it once you see things like that. 

    But what is that spiritual phenomenon and what are its effects on the people of this country? Before we go further, we should just say that if you visit the “Yookay” as it’s now called, or London, its capital and completely dominant city, the first thing you’ll notice is it’s actually pretty nice. The nice parts of London are as nice or maybe even nicer than any city in the United States. Certainly nicer than any city in Canada or Australia. It’s a great city, filled with lots of happy people. 

    But broadly speaking, this country has changed dramatically, and it’s changed in ways that are recognizable. Here’s what you recognize. The people of Great Britain are going through a series of crises, and they’re all internal. Drug use, alcohol use. Their appearance has changed. People are no longer as well kept, the streets, the landscape is not tidy anymore. It’s got lots of litter and graffiti in some places. To technocrats, these are not meaningful measures of anything. Who cares if you’ve got graffiti? Does that affect GDP? Well, maybe. Maybe not, but it’s definitely a reflection of how people feel about themselves. 

    People with self-respect do not tolerate public displays of disorder or filth or graffiti or litter because they care about themselves and their family and they understand intuitively, as every human being does, that once you allow chaos and filth in your immediate environment, you are diminished. So you just don’t allow that. No healthy society does. 

    But all through the West, these are not just features, they’re defining features. All western cities are filled with litter and graffiti, and people who look like they didn’t bother to get dressed this morning, but are instead wearing their pajamas in Walmart. It’s not just in your town, it’s everywhere in what we refer to as the West. 

    The point that underlies all of this is a really obvious one, that too few people say. This is the behavior of a defeated people. This is what it looks like when you lose. This is what it looks like when you’re on your way out to be replaced by somebody else. This is what it looks like to be an American Indian. 

    Now, one thing nobody in the United States ever says about the American Indians, except in a kind of pro-forma white guilt way, is these weren’t just impressive people – and no, they didn’t write the Constitution before we did – these were some of the most impressive people, most self-reliant, most dignified. Read any account of early American settlers, people who were pushing west, who came into contact with Indians and yes, were often scalped and forced to eat their own genitals and roasted over open fires. I mean, these were cruel people. But even the people who were in danger of being murdered by them respected them. Because the Indigenous Americans had a great deal of self-respect. They had what we call dignity. And now, hundreds of years later, the opposite is true. The poorest people in the United States are American Indians. Why? Because the federal government hasn’t given them enough. The federal government is completely in charge of the indigenous economy in the United States, and has been for over a hundred years, and it hasn’t worked. American Indians are still the poorest. 

    Why? Because the Iroquois and the Navajo weren’t impressive? No, they were the most impressive. Again, read the account of anyone who dealt with them. Even people who were dodging their arrows thought they were amazing people, because they were. And now they are by many measures, the saddest people in the United States. Why is that? Some inherent genetic predisposition to patheticness? They couldn’t deal with modernity? Well, they probably could. They were defeated. They were defeated. And in some deep, the deepest way, they wound up destroying themselves, and it’s not unique to them. That’s the point.

    And just to be completely clear, all of this is observed with a great deal of sympathy, not scorn. No one’s mocking the American Indians. Everyone should feel bad about it. For real. Again, not in a silly white girl guilty way, but in a real way. These are amazing people. Greatly diminished. And the reason it’s worth remembering is the same thing is happening to the West.

    And it makes you realize, especially if you travel a lot, that the problem is not necessarily the immigrants. The problem is what mass migration does to the people who already live there. They’re the victims of it in a way that, again, is hard to measure and sometimes hard to notice, but totally real. 

    So you walk through this city, London, and it’s been completely transformed by immigration. Completely. And the numbers are really, really clear. One hundred years ago it was 100 percent European white. Now it’s less than 40 percent. OK, that’s massive, unprecedented demographic change. The immigrant areas are absolutely poorer than the traditionally white English areas. There’s just no question about it. But wealth as measured by the government is not the only measurement. Actually, and this is true in the United States, too, lots of immigrants who have a lot less money than the native population seem a lot more balanced and happy, both because this is a huge upgrade for them just in terms of annual income and standard of living. But it’s more than that. They’re not defeated. They don’t hate themselves. 

    And if you have traditional nationalist opinions in the United States, I can confirm this personally, you’re never going to be stopped on the street and screamed at by some Guatemalan who’s like, you are racist for having your views on immigration. No, they’ll probably agree with you. The only people who ever get mad at you are the people who already hate themselves, and it’s always, famously, some private equity wife or somebody who should be happy about how things are going because they’re in the portion of the population that’s benefiting from it. But they’re not happy. They’re angry.

    What is that? That exact same thing is going on in this country. Exact. And it’s part of a very recognizable syndrome, and it’s the most destructive of all. History is just filled with examples of people who get invaded and clubbed to death and have their women stolen from them, and they’re fine. They’re fine. It’s the people who feel defeated inside who no longer exist. And that is happening to the West. And it’s measurable. 

    What other society hates its own national symbols? It’s only happening in the West, only in Great Britain. This is coming to be true in the United States. It’s already true in Canada and Australia. What other country finds it embarrassing to fly their national flag? What are you saying if that embarrasses you? You don’t hate the flag. You hate yourself. 

    And it’s obvious because people who have dignity, self-respect, who believe in their own civilization want to continue it. How do you do that? By talking about it a lot? No. By continuing it through reproduction. No one is preventing the West from reproducing. And people who come up with these conspiracy theories, like, oh, they’re doing it. No, we’re doing it to ourselves. What else is abortion? It’s not empowering for women. Of course not. That’s absurd. Anyone who believes that is an idiot. Abortion is the way to stop people from reproducing. So is birth control, by the way, of course. So is convincing people that their dumb job is more important than having kids. It’s not. It never will be. Any person who can get clarity for a second will recognize that. It’s only about stopping you from having more of you. 

    And is there anything that’s a clearer representation of how you feel about yourself than how you feel about having kids? And by the way, it’s not just because these people are selfish and they want to go on vacation and don’t want to pay for children, or they’re worried about how much it might cost. Notice that none of these impoverished immigrants living on Snap and housing subsidies, they don’t seem worried about it at all because they know it’ll be fine. Most of the time it will be fine. They’re having kids when much more affluent natives are not, because they believe in themselves and their culture, their civilization. They’d like to see it continue. It’s the most basic of all human desires. 

    So here in Great Britain, which has about a 30 percent abortion rate, 30 percent of all conceived children are killed. Who’s doing that? It’s not the immigrants because they don’t hate themselves. They’re not defeated. They’re ascendant. And so they can see the future. They know that they may not live to experience it, but they’re still fully human. And they know you plant the tree not because you can bask in its shade, but because your grandchildren will. This is the most obvious of all human instincts and the most basic. 

    But the native population in Britain is not debating abortion because it’s not even a debate here. Everyone agrees it’s just an affirmative good, of course, to eliminate your own people. Absolutely. But again, no one’s making them do this. They’ve decided to do it themselves. But now their most enthusiastic campaign is for state sponsored suicide. They’ve already done this in Canada. It’ll come to the United States. What is that? That’s an entire people saying we should exit the stage. Our time is done. It’s over. Let’s go. Someone else will take our place. Not the first time that’s ever happened.

    This is what defeated people do. This is what happens when you break people inside. And maybe it’ll just reach its terminus. Maybe there’s no way to stop it.

    So in Great Britain, if you were to say, wait, what the hell is this? This looks nothing like the country I grew up in – guess who’s going to arrest you? Your fellow Britons. The ones whose great-grandparents lived here. The whites. They’re the ones enforcing this. They’re the ones determined to eliminate themselves. 

  • Trump team warned over London’s Chinese super-embassy

    Trump team warned over London’s Chinese super-embassy

    So much for simple Chinese takeout. In his never-ending search for economic growth, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has finally alighted on the obvious answer: cozying up to the liberal-minded democrats of Tiananmen Square. The Prime Minister is expected to fly to Beijing in the new year, once the long-awaited Chinese super-embassy in the London neighborhood of Tower Hamlets secures planning approval next month. No wonder 2025 is the year of the snake, eh? 

    But there now seems to be a wrench in the works, ahead of the mooted approval on December 10. For a group of American politicians are up in arms about the possible threat to global financial security. Cockburn has been shown a letter by a quartet of Nebraskan state politicians addressed to Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury. It warns that the Royal Mint Court site in London poses potential risks to “Nebraska-based insurers and financial-services firms and, by extension, the broader US financial system,” arguing that:

    Because the site may provide a vantage point for physical access to fiber-optic lines, the risk extends beyond accidental outages and could include intentional metadata capture or traffic interception… Many US insurers and financial-services firms rely, directly or indirectly, on systems routed through London. Should an incident occur, the underwriting, operational-resilience, and reputational capacities of firms far removed from London could be strained.

    State Senator Eliot Bostar went further, telling Cockburn:

    It is one thing for the UK to take decisions that imperil its own national security, but quite another for risks to be taken which impact United States financial services. As a close ally of the UK and Five Eyes partner, we expect credible assurances, not denials or obfuscation. Such assurances have yet to be provided.

    So much for the “Special Relationship,” eh?

  • Will the Andrew formerly known as prince appear before Congress?

    Will the Andrew formerly known as prince appear before Congress?

    Amidst all the ceremony and gravity of Britain’s Remembrance Day service on Sunday, one salient fact could not be ignored. The King has long talked of his desire for a “stripped-down monarchy,” and now he has his wish. The only male figures from the Firm who were out on show alongside him were the Prince of Wales and Prince Edward, who together had the effect of making the royals look a rather paltry selection compared to the grander gatherings of the past.

    We all know about Harry, but although some would like to see him, too, stripped of his royal title, Montecito’s second most famous resident continues to be able to refer to himself as a prince. This is not a luxury that his disgraced uncle enjoys any longer, as he adjusts to life not as Prince Andrew, Duke of York, but plain old Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. As he prepares to leave Royal Lodge for a more modest existence in a grace and favor home tucked in some obscure corner of the Sandringham Estate, he may look around and wonder if his disgrace is yet over. Well, judged by recent events, the bad news for him just keeps on coming.

    During his “heyday,” Andrew liked to present himself as a swashbuckling, entrepreneurial figure, thanks to his Pitch@Palace initiative, which invited would-be moneymakers to come to Buckingham Palace and get their businesses off the ground. Unsurprisingly, given his shame, this is no longer a going concern. Documents seen by the Guardian show that the last remaining part of the business, Pitch@Palace Global, has been wound up after its UK side foundered in 2021.

    Admittedly, after Andrew’s disastrous 2019 Newsnight interview, it is doubtful that even the most desperate would-be businessman would have seen the soon-to-be banned old Duke of York as the answer to their prayers, but the knowledge that this beleaguered endeavor is no more shows how total, and terminal, his disgrace is. (Lest we forget, it was from the Chinese arm of Pitch@Palace that the alleged Chinese spy Yang Tengbo emerged, suggesting that Andrew’s judgment when it comes to those he kept company with has always been terrible.)

    And what of middle England? Well, Andrew has a few supporters who argue doughtily for the presumption of innocence before guilt is proved. Yet the overwhelming majority of the country consider that enough wrongdoing has now been established to regard the former prince as unspeakable, and they are not afraid to make their feelings felt. Residents of Prince Andrew Road and Prince Andrew Close in Maidenhead are hoping that the names of their streets will be changed, to avoid the taint of association. One long-sufferer local, Kelly Pevy, told the Daily Telegraph that: “If you’re giving someone the address, it’s the first thing [they’re] going to say. When I speak to energy companies and they ask for the address, they make a little joke. It’s mentioned more and more, and so then you start thinking about it more.”

    It remains to be seen whether the dwellers of Maidenhead succeed in their petition to the local MP to end this little joke, but if Andrew takes a moment out from a head-down routine of self-pity and video games, he may by now be seeing the enormity of the disgrace he faces. The Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have asked that he be summoned to the United States and Congress to answer questions about the precise nature of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Although they have no legal power to compel him to attend, Andrew knows that to do so would be potentially hazardous. Not only could he be prosecuted for perjury if any part of his testimony is false, but his presence in America would open him up to investigation, even arrest, for his alleged activities with the then-17-year-old Virginia Giuffre.

    Andrew Mountbatten Windsor – there is currently some debate as to whether his last name will be hyphenated or not – is as maligned as anyone in public life today. Yet if he had stopped playing Call of Duty on Sunday and watched his elder brother and nephew remember the fallen, he would have been aware of what real courage and real sacrifice look like. Andrew, by contrast, is an insignificant figure, too sinister and grim to be pathetic and too boring to be laughable. His downfall, in all its embarrassing little details, reflects the man perfectly.

  • The sinister rise of Churchill revisionism

    The sinister rise of Churchill revisionism

    Winston Churchill is one of Britain’s enduring symbols. His relentless drive, deep conviction and steadfast leadership means that he remains admired by millions around the globe. Yet for years, the political mainstream has been compelled to defend his memory from spurious attacks from the left, such as the British politician John McDonnell calling him a “villain.” Depressingly that threat – and the same pernicious desire to denigrate one of the West’s greatest heroes – can now be found on the right.

    Spawned from a sinister fringe of the ultra-MAGA movement, these views have been propagated to millions. Tucker Carlson hosted the pseudo-historian Darryl Cooper on his podcast in an episode that has attracted over 33 million downloads. Cooper made a series of absurd and ahistorical claims – including that Churchill was “the chief villain” of World War Two – while actively downplaying Nazi atrocities in eastern Europe.

    Carlson and Cooper are not alone. Major figures of the US online right, from Candace Owens to Dave Smith, have either backed Cooper or engaged in their own rewriting of the history of World War Two. Grokipedia, Elon Musk’s new AI alternative to Wikipedia, has an entry on Sir Oswald Mosley which states that “recent reappraisals” have validated his “policy prescience.” Mosley was the leader of the British Union of Fascists; the clue to his policy ideas are obvious in the name of his organization.

    Sadly, such revisionism is not confined to the United States. A new online fringe in Britain – from former Reform UK party candidate Ian Gribbin and party advisor Jack Anderton, to the popular contrarian podcast Lotus Eaters – have dabbled in revisionism of Churchill’s life, actions and legacy from an ultra-right perspective, essentially arguing that Britain should not have fought in World War Two. Of course, such views have been expressed in the past by Pat Buchanan, Alan Clark, John Charmley, David Irving and even Maurice Cowling, but were always niche. Today they are turbo-charged by tens of millions of people on social media. This new strain of ahistorical US-led Churchill skepticism must not be allowed to establish a bridgehead in British politics.

    As my and Zachary Marsh’s new report for Policy Exchange, “Defender of the West,” argues, these critiques consistently misrepresent or manipulate the historical record to present myths about Churchill as fact, such as that he was behind the decision to offer a guarantee to Poland in April 1939, when in fact he was a backbench MP and in no decision-making role. (Nonetheless it was the correct decision of Neville Chamberlain’s government.) Or that it was Churchill who initiated civilian bombing raids, despite the fact that they had been a central part of Nazi military strategy since Guernica in the Spanish Civil War.

    The repeated assertion by these critics that Churchill’s “warmongering” sustained an unwinnable war – forgetting it seems, that the Allies ultimately triumphed – is intended to suggest that Britain should instead have made peace with Hitler in 1940. Yet Hitler routinely breached every single agreement he ever signed, from the Munich Agreement to the Anglo-Germany Navy Treaty to the Nazi Soviet Pact. That he could be trusted to leave Britain and her empire alone is of the same naïve school of appeasement that Churchill himself rightly fought throughout the 1930s. He understood that a European continent dominated by any power – and particularly by Nazi Germany – was incompatible with Britain’s international interests as much as her values. Lebensraum did not just apply to the east.

    Rebutting Churchill revisionism is not only important for protecting the principles of good scholarship and evidence within the academy, but is also essential because this transatlantic fringe is determined to expand its influence over insurgent right-wing populism both in America and Europe. In doing so, the aim is not simply to manipulate the public’s view of Churchill, but through his denigration to create the intellectual space for their other pernicious ideas to flourish, specifically that isolationism and nativism should triumph over internationalism and interventionism.

    By blackening Churchill’s name (and of course that of President Franklin Roosevelt), the ultra-MAGA ideologues, several of whom have been disavowed by President Trump himself, hope to damage the cause of anti-totalitarianism more widely, to the benefit to Vladimir Putin. The attack on Churchill is not just an ivory tower spat; it is profoundly connected to calls for the West to rip up the postwar international order that Churchill helped build.

    In recent weeks, most notably with the fallout from Tucker Carlson’s interview with the foul Nick Fuentes, fueling civil war in MAGA-land and at the influential Heritage Foundation – where I have given speeches in the past – we have seen how this same fringe has embraced anti-Semitic and white supremacist rhetoric. These views are infused with admiration for the authoritarian strongmen who would thrive in a world where countries like Britain and the United States abrogated their responsibilities towards smaller democracies. Gribbin, whilst standing for Reform UK in 2024, even combined his criticism of Churchill with praise for Putin, saying, “If only the West had politicians of his class.”

    Historical debate and discussion of the merits of western internationalism are necessary and healthy for our discourse. Yet they must be routed in facts, evidence and made in good faith. These attacks on Churchill, the greatest Briton, seek to present the United Kingdom’s sacrifice and achievements in World War Two as an entirely pointless endeavor, which justifies a new isolationism. Rational, decent, conservative-minded people of all parties and movements should be steadfast in rejecting such dangerous ahistorical rubbish. 

    Lord Roberts of Belgravia is the co-author of Policy Exchange’s new report: “Defender of the West: A response to attacks on Churchill’s life and legacy”

  • What the UK can learn from Trump’s second term

    What the UK can learn from Trump’s second term

    When John Swinney, the Scottish National Party leader, and former ambassador Peter Mandelson visited Donald Trump in the Oval Office a few months ago, the President showed them three different models for his planned renovation of the East Wing of the White House, which he has demolished to build a new ballroom. “If you’re going to do it,” Scotland’s First Minister suggested, “you might as well go big.”

    This Wednesday marked one year since Trump’s election victory, and going big captures the essence of his second term – bold and controversial moves, which have impressed even British politicians who thought him reckless in his first term. When Trump visited Chequers, the British Prime Minister’s country residence, on his state visit to the United Kingdom in September, one senior official told him: “You’re the most consequential president of my lifetime.”

    It has not all been decorous. Convention, tradition and the law have been subordinated to delivery. The East Wing redevelopment is a case in point. “When they were bulldozing, they came across some Jefferson-era brick,” explains one White House watcher. “They kept going.” Why tiptoe around the author of the Declaration of Independence when there is a real estate deal to complete?

    And yet the Trumpites see themselves as like the founding fathers, forging a new nation. “The bricks have become trophies,” says one Washingtonian. “It’s like people keeping chunks of the Berlin Wall.” Just as that was torn down, so Trump’s second term, much more radical and (so far) successful than the first, has been one of discontinuity and disruption.

    After speaking to more than a dozen British and American officials, aides to the President and the Prime Minister Keir Starmer, civil servants, former diplomats in both countries, pollsters and political strategists, it is clear there is much that Trump II can teach Britain. In his first term, Trump was held back by staff who didn’t share his world view and the claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election. This year, he issued hundreds of executive orders and successfully brought migration to a halt at the Mexican border. Private polling circulating in the highest reaches of the Republican party shows that even 22 percent of those who voted for Kamala Harris a year ago support what Trump is doing on immigration.

    Those who helped him triumph say Trump II is very different from Trump I, in that he “brought in a team which supports his agenda” and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, enforced a rigorous policy of loyalty to the President. “In this administration everyone has to be loyal to everyone,” a Washington-based diplomat observes. “There is no infighting, it’s simply not allowed.”

    This unity of purpose and direction has given Trump the ability to “move fast and break things” – and even the British in Washington, who were horrified in 2016, seem energized by his example this time around.

    “Think about the speed at which we’ve been able to move,” says one White House official. “We’ve cut out so much infighting and been able to execute. In the first term a lot of cabinet members thought they should be president. We also found there were a lot of unnecessary layers in the bureaucracy. Now the President gets the right people in the room, and if we need to move fast we will. We didn’t want to be Tony Blair, after a long campaign saying, ‘What do we do now?’ on day one. The President said he wanted the ‘big beautiful bill’ passed by July 4. There was a mentality to get things done. That was very different this time.”

    These are lessons that it is now too late for Labour to learn, after 16 months in power. This is a government that never seemed clear on what it wanted to achieve at the beginning, nor, as things have deteriorated, on what to do next. In Washington, every-one knows what Trump wants. Keir Starmer has been unable to provide similar clarity.

    However, Trump II is providing a blueprint for Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage, another populist insurgent, on how to seize power and then use it effectively in the face of a hostile political establishment.

    Key players in the White House and the MAGA movement say that Farage must be ready on day one, as Trump was, to impose his power on the permanent civil service. That could mean ramming legislation through parliament in a single day to give Downing Street the ability to issue emergency orders as well as immediately publish bills on key issues.

    Dominic Cummings, a chief adviser to former prime minister Boris Johnson, who has discussed how to reshape Britain’s civil service with Farage, wrote on Sunday: “A true strategy needs defined goals, a plan for controlling the government and building a team… It should include writing key primary legislation well in advance of an election.”

    In Trump’s case, key policy proposals were worked up by the Heritage Foundation thinktank and the America First Policy Institute, who also identified people who could be drafted in to work on them in government. “They had hundreds of executive orders ready to go,” says one who admired Trump’s preparations. “Susie Wiles said, ‘The President wants to deliver on migration, tariffs and tech,’ and worked out who could deliver it. She sent Stephen Miller to go after woke stuff and [Robert] Lighthizer to work on tariffs. She sent the attorney general’s office to go after the people who tried to shaft Trump in the first term. The orders went out, the foot soldiers did their thing. It was a masterclass.”

    Asked how Reform UK could prepare for power, Sebastian Gorka, the White House head of counterterrorism, says: “That’s easy. Be even more like President Trump.”

    While curbing migration was a central election pledge, Trump’s more notable achievements have come in the international arena. From the once queasy Europeans there is mostly admiration for the ceasefire in Gaza, and for Trump’s decision to attack Iranian nuclear sites with bunker buster bombs.

    “What they’ve done in the Middle East with Netanyahu and Hamas is pretty impressive,” one British official says. Security sources say the attack did not destroy Iran’s nuclear program, as Trump has claimed, but he has “trimmed them” and delayed them by “a few years.” More importantly: “He’s demonstrated they can do it. The bottom line is that they can do it again – and they will.”

    After months of playing footsie with Vladimir Putin, Trump also seems to have finally lost patience with the Russian President and has moved to impose sanctions. “He’s genuinely putting pressure on Putin now,” a Foreign Office source says. “At Chequers he was so angry at him.”

    Trump told Starmer: “I thought he was a good guy, I thought I could do a deal with him, but every time we agree something his people then renege on it.”

    In many ways, the “special relationship” is in rude health. UK and American sources say Jonathan Powell, officially Starmer’s national security adviser and unofficially the head of UK foreign policy, helped with the substance of the Gaza deal, alongside his old boss Tony Blair, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and the President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

    When Trump hit Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, he did so just days after Britain sanctioned the same firms. “We were able to give Witkoff a palette of options when the President was deciding what to do,” a senior UK government source says. “And we’re prepared to talk Trump’s language on tariffs.”

    The proto-populist Trump and the cautious, legalistic Starmer are odd bedfellows, but insiders say the relationship is still strong. One witness to their exchanges says, “Keir agrees with him as far as he can and then he’ll say, ‘I disagree on that but let me explain why we see things differently.’ Trump looks at him and listens and says, ‘OK.’”

    Keeping a volatile President on side has been one of the signal successes, if not the signal success, of Starmer’s premiership, but there are some cracks in the paintwork. “President Trump likes winners,” says a Trump aide who follows British politics, “and Starmer is beginning to look like a loser.” On areas of domestic policy Trump has become more outspoken in recent months about what he sees as Britain’s sclerotic economic approach, as well as the failure to exploit energy resources in the North Sea. “The President tore him a new one on this stuff in private at Chequers,” a US official says.

    Among the MAGA fraternity in Trump’s team – including the Vice-President J.D. Vance, Miller and Gorka – there are also concerns that the UK has allowed mass migration to dilute its cultural heritage. All three have an Atlanticist Judeo-Christian concept of western civilization in which American democracy stands in a direct line of descent from Magna Carta, the rule of law and trial by jury.

    Vance has spoken about the erosion of free speech in Europe. Miller is urging British officials to limit migration, as America did between the 1920s and 1970s, to allow new arrivals to be properly integrated. He sees Islamist imports from the tribal areas of Pakistan as a cultural challenge Britain will need to deal with. They cite the fact that the FBI was set up to combat the Mafia, who along with millions of Italian migrants arrived in the US in the 19th century. This is uncomfortable territory for many in No. 10, but one senior figure says: “If your friends are telling you something out of concern, then perhaps we should listen.”

    On illegal migration in particular, the Americans find the inability of the government to prevent cross-Channel crossings inexplicable. Asked what Trump would do, one source suggests: “Tell the French that British intelligence officers and special forces will destroy the boats before they sail. Slash them with knives, use snipers. Burn down the warehouses of the gangs, use cyber to attack their communications.”

    The most acute source of tension was the forced departure of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington over his friendship with the convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. While Mandelson was an adept operator, some in the President’s circle never forgave his historic anti-Trump comments. Trump’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita publicly condemned the appointment (and privately told British friends that Mandelson was doomed to fail because he had criticized Trump). US officials say White House aides boycotted dinners at Mandelson’s official residence at the instigation of Wiles, though some did meet him outside. “There was great irritation that Mandelson was rammed through in the dying days of the Biden administration,” a source close to the White House reveals.

    Mandelson was initially saved by Mark Burnett, the British-born Apprentice producer who is Trump’s envoy to the UK. He convinced Trump that Mandelson was contrite. A US diplomat says: “Mark knew a rejection would be awkward for Morgan McSweeney [Starmer’s chief of staff],” who had pushed Mandelson’s case. The episode suggests the Trump team, often depicted as a bull in a China shop with allies, actually has a sophisticated and sympathetic understanding of No. 10’s internal issues.

    Insiders say LaCivita will probably run “opposition research” on any new candidate for ambassador. “Do not pick someone who has, at any point, gone on the record to criticize Trump,” the US diplomat says. That rules out Mark Sedwill, the former cabinet secretary, who has denounced Trump publicly for “blundering” and “capriciousness with allies.” It is understood that he has not actually applied.

    Those with their hats in the ring include Christian Turner, the political director at the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, and Simon Manley, who was ambassador to the World Trade Organization and the United Nations in Geneva until July, plus a British Ministry of Defence official. Oliver Robbins, the British Foreign Office permanent secretary, is expected to give Starmer a list of those who are “appointable” by the end of the month.

    Varun Chandra, Starmer’s business liaison man, who played a key role in ensuring that Britain got reduced tariffs, is widely seen as the frontrunner. The US diplomat says Chandra got his current role because Mark Burnett told Starmer’s team that “he knows how to talk to Americans.” A second source says: “Lutnick loves him, Bessent loves him, Susie Wiles loves him.” It is also said that James Roscoe, the acting ambassador, is well plugged in with the White House; US officials say Trump “likes him” and they hope he remains in some capacity.

    The final area of potential tension is China, where Trump is trying to neutralize Beijing’s control of the global market in rare earth minerals, while Starmer is desperate to go to China to secure investment. Labour is embroiled in the fallout from the recent collapse of the trial of two suspected Chinese spies and Beijing’s demand that it be allowed to build its vast new embassy in London, which many view as a security risk. “It’s been made clear by Beijing that Keir’s trip to China is contingent on them getting the embassy,” a government source says.

    Many in Washington are skeptical about whether the economic spoils of cozying up to Beijing will be worth the political costs. When UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves visited China she only secured investments worth £600 million ($785 million), a rounding error in government finances. By contrast, whoever becomes ambassador to the US will try to hurry into play the £150 billion ($196 billion) pledged by US companies as part of the recent UK-US tech deal, which Chandra and Mandelson helped secure.

    It is not all good news for Trump. On economic matters he has a lot of the same problems as Labour: stubbornly high inflation, a sluggish job market and (as the election of the socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City shows) facing a left-wing populist surge like the one fueling support for the Green party in Britain.

    Both Trump and Starmer face crunch elections next year: the Prime Minister in the Welsh, Scottish and council elections, the President in the midterms. A big defeat might cost Starmer his job. If the Republicans lose control of Congress, Trump might well face fresh indictments from his political opponents or another impeachment charge. The loss of the Virginia and New Jersey governor races on Tuesday night points to a tough road ahead. The polling circulating among Republicans shows the Democrats winning the House of Representatives by a single seat next year, but predicts Trump will hang on after redistricting electoral boundaries.

    On Tuesday, Rachel Reeves rolled the pitch for massive tax rises in the Budget, blaming her economic inheritance, but even Labour insiders found her unconvincing. A source close to Downing Street characterized the Chancellor’s argument as: “Don’t blame me, I’m just the Chancellor. We have no power, we are just the government.”

    Trump also has a big speech on the economy this week, and there are similar stirrings in MAGA world. “The numbers are shifting on the economy,” says a prominent Trump ally. “I think people are concerned. They’re not feeling like prices are much lower. We’ve done a lot of international stuff. We need a pivot to the economy.” However, the Republican pollster says Trump’s early success and his decisiveness mean that even those feeling the pinch are still prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt: “People are feeling worse off but they think he has a plan.”

    The same, demonstrably, is not true of Labour, where Starmer’s failure to “go big,” as Trump has done, has left Labour vulnerable. Perhaps Starmer should draw up plans to bulldoze part of Downing Street.

  • Lord Young goes to Washington

    Lord Young goes to Washington

    I’m writing this from Washington, DC, where I’ve spent the best part of a week talking to politicos and think-tankers about the state of free speech in the mother country. Don’t believe our Prime Minister when he says it’s in rude health, I’ve been telling them. It’s on life support and any pressure that can be brought to bear on His Majesty’s Government to protect it would be hugely appreciated. Once again, it’s time for the new world to come to the rescue of the old.

    Not that they need much convincing. The view of Britain among Washington’s political class isn’t informed by diplomatic cables or articles in the Economist, but by viral videos on X. The impression these give is of a country rapidly descending into lawlessness in which the police are too busy arresting people for hurty words to protect them from violent criminals. “What the hell’s going on over there?” is the constant refrain.

    When I tell them the footage they’ve seen is just the tip of the iceberg and the police are detaining more than 30 people a day for speech offenses – outdoing Russia – they’re anxious to help.

    But what can they do? I had hoped that the US-UK trade deal might provide Donald Trump’s administration with some leverage. Could a preamble be included in which both sides affirm their shared commitment to the long-standing guarantees of freedom of expression and association as set out in the First Amendment? That wouldn’t be legally enforceable, but would be politically significant and might make Keir Starmer think twice before further eroding free speech, lest he be accused of jeopardizing the deal.

    However, the people I met in the State Department said the President is anxious to get the trade agreement over the line and unlikely to countenance anything that would delay it. The sense I got from meetings with members of the administration, which probably won’t come as a surprise, is that Trump is very much in charge and no one wants to do anything to irritate him. Indeed, they were careful to refer to the “Department of War” and the “Secretary of War,” even to me, although occasionally they stumbled and said: “The Department of Defense… I mean War.” A Washington Post editor I had lunch with confirmed this was an important loyalty test, with WaPo journalists getting into bad odor with the President because the newspaper insists on continuing to use “Defense Department.”

    Trump’s iron grip was often contrasted with the chaos of the previous administration, with Joe Biden portrayed as a drooling idiot. I met with staffers at the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee, which has just published a report accusing a group of senior Democrats in the last administration – the “Politburo” – of covering up the President’s cognitive decline and effectively ruling in his place, signing off executive orders – and pardons – using an autopen. The Committee’s view is that all the clemency actions taken by the Biden administration were illegitimate.

    Does this mean Anthony Fauci, pardoned by Biden in one of his final acts before leaving the White House, can now be prosecuted? I asked an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services over dinner and he laughed but declined to answer. Incidentally, I was reliably informed that Health Secretary RFK Jr is the second most popular member of the administration after Trump. The reception he gets from the MAGA faithful is rapturous, apparently.

    Another possibility I discussed with officials was withholding visas from UK citizens who work for censorship bodies such as Ofcom, which is currently trying to take enforcement action against US tech companies that refuse to comply with Britain’s new “Online Safety Act.” But after kicking around that idea we concluded it would probably be politically unhelpful. If Dame Melanie Dawes, the CEO of Ofcom, was refused a travel visa, she’d spin it as Trump doing the bidding of his buddy Elon Musk when all she’s trying to do is keep children “safe.” A better alternative, we thought, would be for the White House to offer political asylum on human rights grounds to British thought criminals. That would be a piece of epic trolling, given that our PM is Mr Human Rights. If any Christian street preachers are facing prosecution for misgendering some pro-abortion activists, do get in touch.

    Even that might not fly. The overall impression I got is that, for reasons no one was quite able to explain, the President still thinks of Sir Keir as a useful ally. So our best hope of harnessing the might of the US to protect free speech in the UK is if Starmer is replaced by someone more antagonistic to Trump. It surely won’t be long.

  • New York is not the city that Mamdani pretends it is

    There is an unhappy history of left-wing Britons getting involved in US elections. Back in 2004, the Guardian – the flagship organ of the British left – organized a letter-writing campaign, urging voters in the swing state of Ohio not to re-elect George W. Bush. The good people of Ohio didn’t take kindly to a bunch of North Londoners telling them how to vote, and although the Guardian’s campaign probably can’t be given all the credit, the voters of Ohio duly went to the polls and swung firmly behind Bush.

    One wishes that London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s intervention in this week’s election in New York might have had a similar result. Interviewed shortly before Zohran Mamdani was elected, the Mayor of London praised the Democratic Socialist candidate for mayor of New York as “fun” and “authentic.” A spokesman for the London mayor proclaimed: “The mayor hopes that like in London, New Yorkers see through the politics of hatred and fear and embrace Mamdani’s hopeful and optimistic vision for the future.”

    I think we all know the drill here. If the subtext of the Guardian’s fateful 2004 intervention in US politics was that a bunch of rural hicks in Ohio needed to be instructed by better educated types about what a ghastly man their then president was, then the subtext of the mayor of London’s intervention into the New York race is that if you don’t vote for the Socialist candidate it’s because you’re anti-Muslim and therefore anti-progress and anti-diversity. 

    The trouble is that not many New Yorkers want to hear from the Mayor of London on how to run a city. While Khan wafts around the world telling everyone what a diverse and vibrant place London is, the news that floats back over the Atlantic from London is rarely positive. 

    Most Americans I speak to who have recently been to our capital return rather shocked. Not least among their observations is how wild the crime in London is. New Yorkers might risk being set on fire on the subway by a spice-addled illegal immigrant, but they are also used to being able to walk down a street with their phone in their hand. They do not have to hide their device for fear that it is going to be snatched from them by a youth on a bike. Every American tourist who does experience this aspect of London tends to tell their friends about it. So while Khan thinks that London’s bad reputation in the US is a result of Donald Trump’s occasional swipes at his mayoralty, it is in fact merely a reflection of Americans visiting Khan’s London and returning home with stories of the reality.

    Another line I hear plenty of people voicing in America is something along the lines of: “Whatever happened to London?” This would of course be dismissed as appalling, backwards racism by Khan and his PR team. But I have heard it often enough to know that it is an expression of genuine surprise. There was a time when you could tell American friends that it was all fine really, and that Downton Abbey and other popular dramas might have unduly raised expectations of what the average day in Britain looks like. But these American visitors are on to something. The problem with “diverse” cities is that they all end up monotonously resembling each other. 

    In any case, if New York really is going to follow London’s lead, then New Yorkers can only blame themselves. Mamdani must count as the least qualified person ever to run for major political office. The son of a Columbia University professor and an award-winning film-maker, he seems to have drifted through his career. He tried and failed to be a rapper. Then he worked for his mother for a bit. And now he’s meant to run the biggest city in America. 

    It is true that he seems to have entranced many voters because of his youth (he’s 34) and “vibe.” But whenever he has actually been questioned about his policies he cannot explain how he is going to pay for any of them, other than by taxing the rich. 

    To say that he is economically illiterate is an understatement. Early in the campaign it became clear that he cannot read a budget sheet. It also transpired that he thinks that the already beleaguered New York Police Department is some sort of wing of the KKK. Trained by the Israelis, naturally. 

    Possibly alert to the whiffs of anti-Semitism that have pervaded his career, he has chosen to counter this by saying that any criticisms of him are because of his Muslim-ness. In fact few New Yorkers, like Londoners, care what religion their mayor is. But they do take exception when a candidate stands outside a mosque during election season, as Mamdani did, and starts to tear up while telling a story about an aunt (who turned out not to be an aunt) who was said
    to be fearful of wearing her hijab in New York after 9/11 – as if she was the real victim of that day.

    One of the demonstrations that New York is not the city that Mamdani sometimes pretends it is can be seen from the fact there was no widespread “anti-Muslim” backlash after 9/11. Just as there was no meaningful opposition to his candidacy because of his Muslim faith. 

    It was one thing for the Guardian to misread the people of Ohio. It is quite another for people running for elected office to misrepresent their fellow citizens.

    Perhaps this is just one more similarity between London and New York. Both must count as among the world’s most tolerant populations. But they are populations that have become used to being misrepresented by politicians whose own gilded lives and effortless careers should be demonstration enough that we aren’t the people they often find it useful to pretend we are.

  • Do black lives still matter?

    Do black lives still matter?

    It was an ethnic massacre so bad that it could be seen from space. Satellites picked up bloodied patches of soil in North Darfur’s capital, El Fasher, after Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) swept into the besieged city. Pools of blood and piles of bodies were identified. Thousands of people are feared to have died in the appalling violence. Many thousands more have fled for their lives. Others remain trapped in the city.

    The scenes of slaughter were so blatant that it should have brought marchers out onto the streets in passionate protest. But there wasn’t a peep from the usual suspects. Was this because the killings did not take place in Gaza or the West Bank, but in Sudan, one of Africa’s largest countries? The perpetrators, of course, weren’t the Israel Defense Force, but Sudanese militants fighting a vicious civil war in the vast country.

    The RSF, which had been besieging the town of El Fasher for 18 months, is primarily an ethnically Arab group. The victims in the most recent atrocities appear to be black Africans in the famine-stricken and war-torn Darfur province of eastern Sudan. When El Fasher finally fell, helpless civilians were gunned down in cold blood. There are reports that in one maternity hospital alone almost 500 people – including patients and their families – were killed. The Sudan Doctors’ Network said that RSF fighters had “cold-bloodedly killed everyone they found inside the Saudi Hospital, including patients, their companions, and anyone else present.”

    In London, this was seemingly of little interest to the marchers whose protests against “genocide” by “Zionists” in Gaza have regularly disfigured the streets of Britain’s capital since Hamas carried out their pogrom on October 7, 2023 – the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Do black lives matter?

    The slaughter in El Fasher echoed the massacres in Darfur in 2003, which were declared a genocide by the United Nations. In those terrible scenes, Sudanese government militias killed approximately 200,000 black African Darfuris and tortured, abused and displaced thousands more. Once again, protests in Britain were notable mostly by their absence.

    This one-eyed hypocrisy is remarkable, since Sudan, like Palestine, is a former de facto British colony. Events there were once of such pressing concern that the Victorian-era prime minister William Gladstone was forced by public opinion to send a military expedition up the Nile to save the legendary General Gordon, who was besieged by followers of a messianic Islamic leader called the Mahdi in the Sudanese capital Khartoum.

    The expedition arrived too late and Gordon was murdered by a Mahdist mob. For years after that, British troops attempted to gain control of Sudan by force. In 1898, the young Winston Churchill rode in one of the Army’s last cavalry charges at the battle of Omdurman when an Anglo-Egyptian army commanded by Sir Herbert Kitchener killed 20,000 Mahdists for the loss of fewer than 500 of their own men.

    The tomb of the Mahdi was desecrated and Kitchener was widely – but falsely – rumored to have used his skull as a drinking goblet. When Sudan finally won independence in 1956, the country continued to be the scene of conflict and inter-ethnic slaughter as the ethnically Arab north oppressed the mainly Christian and black African south.

    This finally led to South Sudan breaking away and being recognized by the UN in 2011 as Africa’s most recent independent state. But coups, civil wars and inter-ethnic violence continue to scar the Sudan. So when will the London rent-a-mobs pay attention and act? I’m not holding my breath.

  • Enoch Powell understated Britain’s problems

    Enoch Powell understated Britain’s problems

    The great John O’Sullivan has a story about Enoch Powell which he keeps promising to put into print. Since he still hasn’t done so, I will risk repeating it here. It occurred during a conversation some years after the Rivers of Blood speech. A group of conservatives were talking, and Powell was among them. At some point one of those present referred to the 1968 speech and asked Powell: “Why did you do it?”

    Powell’s reply started something like this: “When the lark sings in the morning they do not say – ‘Oh lark why dost thou sing?’ When the nightingale gives forth her song…” and so on. After Powell had gone through an array of the bird kingdom metaphors, he came to his clincher: “And so it was with me that day in Birmingham.”

    I was thinking about Birmingham, Britain’s second-biggest city, and Powell this week for a number of reasons. Firstly, because he was the MP for nearby Wolverhampton; secondly, because it is where he gave his famous speech; and finally because it is where the latest outbreak of sectarian politicking in England has occurred.

    The bad news on immigration and integration in this country floods in so fast these days that it is hard to keep up with. But even in the mêlée that is modern Britain, the news that Israeli football fans have been told not to go to Birmingham because they will not be safe there is striking.

    Nowadays the area has local politicians of a lesser intellectual caliber than Powell. Ayoub Khan was last year elected as the MP for Birmingham Perry Barr. Khan is one of a number of MPs voted in at the last election solely because of their appeal to the sectarian Muslim vote and specifically its obsession with Israel and Gaza. So of course Khan applauded the idea of Israeli football fans being kept out of the city he represents. Indeed he issued a statement “welcoming” the news and thanking the police for listening to “our community’s concerns”. And what “community” might that be?

    Elsewhere, there has been some outrage at the ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans turning up in Birmingham. Even Prime Minister Keir Starmer has expressed concern at the idea that a British city should be deemed literally unsafe for visible Jews to be in. But I can’t see why he or any other MP should be surprised. Birmingham is one of those places where “multiculturalism’ is approaching its natural endpoint.

    Conservative MP Robert Jenrick was recently raked over the media coals for comments he made about the lack of white faces in Birmingham. As has been the British way for almost 60 years now, opportunistic MPs and others rallied around, to attack not the vast demographic change that has got us here but the person who committed the crime of noticing. Because the only thing anyone is meant to say when going to a city like Birmingham today is how wonderfully diverse it is.

    Yet many of us do not think this is a blessing, and cannot help noticing that parts of the city are not diverse at all. They are simply ethnically homogenous in a different way – in the same manner as it would be if a city the size of Birmingham had moved to Mirpur in the past few decades, rather than the other way around.

    Today, Birmingham is one of a number of British cities in which people who identify on the census as “white British” are in a minority. To which we are again meant to say only “Hooray – our country was built on diversity.” That is the sort of mantra still spilling out of the empty heads of people like the leader of the Green party, Zack Polanski. This week Polanski spewed this far-past-its-sell-by-date cliché in a debate with the admirable Conservative MP Katie Lam. A visibly disdainful Robert Peston joined Polanski in pouring scorn on Lam’s point that our country wasn’t actually built on diversity. Of course it is, was Polanski and Peston’s message, and surely only a racist, backwards Powellite would dare to claim otherwise.

    This, for the time being, remains where the debate is. Which is roughly where it was in 1968: don’t say what you see with your eyes or we will tell you that your eyes are racist and lying.

    The problem is that this argument is even harder to defend in 2025 than in any previous year, as the results of legal and illegal migration are felt across the country. In the past I have summarized the “diversity is our greatest strength” argument as going something like this: the immigration isn’t happening; it is happening but it is good for you; it may not be good for you but you deserve it; it’s happened and there’s nothing you can do about it.

    If you want to find one of the principal causes of the enervation of British society, it can be found there. And yet what people would put up with a process like this forever? And what are we going to do about it?

    To understand just how bad things are, it is worth going back to 1968. Pretend that Powell used his speech not to say what he said, but to say what is now true. Pretend for a moment that he had used his speech to say that within the lifespan of many of his constituents, white British people would be a minority in the whole of Birmingham. Pretend he had predicted that by the 2020s, significant numbers of Birmingham voters would vote in a Pakistani-born Muslim on specifically sectarian, racial, religious lines. And pretend he had predicted that as a result of this change, visibly Jewish people would be barred from attending a soccer match because the local Muslim community would not tolerate it. If Powell had said even a portion of this, he would have been derided even more than he was. In fact he would most likely have been deemed certifiable.

    The question today is not why the lark sang, nor why his song was ignored. The question is why the facts now prove that he understated our current problems so much.

  • Good riddance (or not) to George Abaraonye

    Good riddance (or not) to George Abaraonye

    It was rather sly of George Abaraonye to move the motion of no confidence in himself as president-elect of the Oxford Union. He said it was an act of “true accountability”, but it seemed to me more a sense of false virtue.

    The ballot question was: “Should George Abaraonye, President-Elect, be removed as an Officer of the Society?” The franchise wasn’t limited to current students or those in the environs of Oxford who could conveniently vote in person, but was extended extraordinarily to potentially thousands of life members all over the world who could vote by proxy. This was at the request of the standing committee – at quite short notice – and has been the cause of considerable confusion and chronic delay.

    The problem was that life members do not all have membership cards (these do get lost over the decades) and so were permitted either to vote in person with photo ID, or email proof of ID with matriculation details to the single extraordinary returning officer (to whom I shall return). Still, many alumni who live in or around Oxford and who went along to the Goodman Library to vote in person were turned away because their past memberships couldn’t be corroborated manually from central ledgers. Those who were turned away included Baroness Deech (a former head of house), Lord Moynihan of Chelsea, and former presidents of the Union Viscount Hailsham and Melanie Johnson (despite photographic evidence adorning the walls). Scores of others were similarly prevented from voting on account of lost records. Shambolic.

    Abaraonye’s supporters have been challenging every proxy vote cast by email to ascertain whether the senders were ever members. It is of course perfectly reasonable to seek to prevent electoral fraud, but cross-checking a thousand votes can take some time given that dusty ledgers from the 1960s and 1970s seem to have disappeared altogether. The standing committee knew this and should have foreseen the chaos it might cause. The validity of the vote has been further undermined by unconfirmed reports that the extraordinary returning officer gave other students – some distinctly partisan in the proceedings – access to his email inbox. There was no way of knowing if proxy votes were tampered with, deleted or even received.

    Unsurprisingly, amid allegations and counter-allegations of procedural irregularity, it is hard to see how the returning officer and extraordinary returning officer were able to confirm a safe and fair result at all. Proceedings were also informally suspended at noon yesterday because of “an impossible working atmosphere”; the extraordinary returning officer having been “subjected to obstruction, intimidation and unwarranted hostility by a number of Representatives”. 

    And then came the first dramatic twist worthy of Conclave. In a meeting of the standing committee, which Abaraonye was permitted to attend as president-elect, he and his supporters moved a revenge motion of no confidence in the current president, Moosa Harraj, for allowing alumni to vote on Saturday. And they came prepared (very) with the requisite 150 signatures, so that vote will take place on Thursday. All this was decided before even starting to count Saturday’s no confidence vote.

    Another twist came this morning, after white smoke had seemingly finally emerged. Abaraonye had been voted out (or “resigned”, as it is deemed) according to Donovan Lock, the extraordinary returning officer, with the motion which needed a two-thirds majority being accepted, 1,228 to 501. But Abaraonye has now said he will contest the decision. In a statement this morning, his camp said that his opponents had access to Lock’s email account to which the proxy votes were sent: “We do not know if or how many proxy votes have been tampered with… George Abaraonye remains the President-Elect per the Oxford Union rules. According to Rule 47(h)(v), the result of a confidence ballot cannot accepted until disciplinary appeals have been resolved”.

    This whole sorry saga is such an Oxford farrago. Perhaps we could have read the runes when email signatories to the motion of no confidence discovered they had to copy in Abaraonye as the mover of the motion, conveniently providing him with a database of a couple of hundred names and contact details of those who wanted to oust him. His supporters have also been able to see the names of those who voted by proxy, including influential public figures, thus breaching the secret ballot. 

    Since news circulated of his moment of ecstasy at the shooting of Charlie Kirk last month, Abaraonye has been trying to redeem himself with exculpatory excuses. His celebratory comments on Instagram and WhatsApp were “poor judgment”, he “reacted impulsively”, his words have been widely “misrepresented”. He also said that his remarks (“Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s f***ing go”; “Charlie Kirk got shot loool”) “did not reflect my values” – which is strange because the impulsive reaction is usually a rather accurate reflection of a person’s values. He even claims to have become a victim of “cancel culture”, which is also odd given that he was the mover of the motion and so canceled himself. 

    Toby Young was of the view that Abaraonye “should not be penalized by the Oxford Union or the university for saying something offensive but perfectly lawful. That’s free speech”. I agree that he shouldn’t be disciplined by his college or the university, but the Oxford Union has every right to expect elected officers to uphold its institutional ethos. It is indeed a bastion of free speech, and Abaraonye is perfectly free to express his views. But he does not then have the right to hold the office of president if he believes, as it appears to me, that political assassination and violent revolution are justified when the ballot box and free speech are deemed to have failed.

    It may be “perfectly lawful” to express such a view, but it would rightly disqualify him from holding a number of positions in public life, including, I believe, one that seeks to advance education through free speech and expression. He has damaged the interests of the Oxford Union and brought it into disrepute. Free speech can have perfectly justifiable consequences, and 1,227 members evidently agree with me. 

    Some of Abaraonye’s allies have been framing the attempt to remove him as “racist”. According to the Oxford branch of Stand Up To Racism: “If this racist campaign to depose George is successful it will further embolden fascists and the far right.” I’d say that’s a good example of what I call “censory smearing”: tarnishing Abaraonye’s critics with unpleasant character smears to shut them down. But I’m not going to be shamed into doubting motives or thinking that the desire for Abaraonye to be removed as president-elect was based on anything but a concern for the reputation and standing of the society. As for “racism”, it is worth noting in passing that another screenshot from one of Abaraonye’s WhatsApp exchanges shows him boasting: “I don’t frequent white establishments.” But perhaps those words don’t reflect his values either.

    The problem was not only his celebratory outburst at Kirk’s death, but the fact that other messages have emerged suggesting he holds the Oxford Union itself in contempt. When one friend wrote to him before his election in June “if u hate it then you should run for presidency!!!!”, Abaraonye responded: “real lol that’s what I did.”

    It seems it was all one big gas to him. His presidency wasn’t to be one that dignified a hallowed chamber, but subversive of and corrosive to its traditions. He clearly despises the establishment (too white, perhaps?), and inclines to a necessary destruction. Why else would you seek to lead an institution you apparently hate?  

    The fact that high-profile speakers have withdrawn over his comments, and major donors are withholding funds, ought to have made him reflect a little deeper on the damage he was doing. The conduct of his supporters since the close of poll has also been deeply damaging. But self-reflection seems to be beyond him, as is the moral-intellectual process of weighing whether his endorsement of political violence could coexist with his aspiration to lead a debating society that eschews it. If he cared at all, he’d have resigned weeks ago. 

    The Oxford Union is in a state. It is facing bankruptcy, with a projected loss of £400,000 this coming year, and looking at a maintenance bill for their Grade 2 listed building of between £4-5 million. Membership has collapsed, lawsuits abound, staff are leaving and trustees are resigning. The Augean stables need clearing out, and the society is in desperate need of fundamental reform if its reputation is to be restored. But children like George Abaraonye are not the ones to lead that. He doesn’t even seem to appreciate that when you are an elected officer of a world-renowned debating society that prizes freedom of speech, your own free speech is necessarily constrained by institutional obligations and reputational demands. If you don’t like that, at least try to learn why you shouldn’t stand for a public-facing office.