The Social World

Tag: Britain

  • Is Kemi Badenoch plotting an American move?

    Brits who make a pivot to America tend to fall into two categories. There are those who seek a bigger stage – like Alfred Hitchcock or Christopher Hitchens. Then there are those who were in some sense “run out of town” back in Britain and now seek solace and refuge in the New World. Under this heading we can put the Pilgrim Fathers, Thomas Paine, Mark Thatcher (wayward son of Margaret Thatcher), and now, Kemi Badenoch – beleaguered leader of Britain’s Conservative Party.

    Badenoch has penned an odd op-ed for the New York Post celebrating the policies of the second Trump administration. The article begins with a strangely wry hat tip to the 47th President on the “Not bad, kid” pattern:

    “But often these days I look across the pond at the United States and think you guys might be on to something.”

    Which is rather a lot like me informing Michael Phelps that he may be “on to something” with his butterfly stroke. The rest of the article carries on in a similar vein, praising action on the border, energy and defense. 

    Yet why did she write it? It is safe to say that the voters Mrs. Badenoch so desperately needs (her Tories have now fallen to third place in the polls, displaced as the party of the right by Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK) are unlikely to be regular readers of the Post. 

    Cockburn can think of some slightly lower motives. Could the article be an attempt to set the seemingly doomed party leader up for a career on the American lecture circuit? Bolshy conservative British firebrands are always in demand stateside, as the post-premiership of Liz Truss shows. In that case, we would refer Mrs. Badenoch to the words of the English poet W.H. Auden, himself a plyer of this trade:

    “Another morning comes: I see,
    Dwindling below me on the plane,
    The roofs of one more audience
    I shall not see again.

    God bless the lot of them, although
    I don’t remember which was which:
    God bless the USA, so large,
    So friendly, and so rich.”

  • Does Prince William need to ‘change’ the British monarchy?

    Does Prince William need to ‘change’ the British monarchy?

    Of all the people who might be expected to get revelatory public comments out of the Prince of Wales, the beetle-browed actor Eugene Levy would not be high on the list. Yet during the Schitt’s Creek and American Pie thespian’s new show, The Reluctant Traveler, Levy ticks off a series of “bucket list” experiences – one of which was getting close to the royal family. While it would, presumably, have been fairly easy to get an audience with Prince Harry, Levy’s intentions instead lay with Britain’s actual royal family, and so the encounter took place between him and Prince William.

    The most striking remarks that the heir to the throne made to Levy were that he clearly regards his father’s reign as an interregnum between two rather more significant periods on the throne: his grandmother’s, and his own. Not, of course, that he was so tactless or brazen to make such a comment, but Levy managed to elicit some unusually candid remarks from William, who was filmed drinking a pint of cider with him in Windsor’s best pub, the Two Brewers.

    “I like a little bit of change,” said William. “I want to question things more. I think it’s very important that tradition stays. And tradition has a huge part in all of this. But there are also points where you look at tradition and go, ‘Is that still fit for purpose today?’ So I like to question things.”

    Levy, scenting something of a scoop, pressed him by saying “it sounds like the monarchy will be shifting in a slightly different direction”, to which the Prince of Wales expressed agreement.

    It was notable that, while William talked fondly about his grandmother at several points during the interview, his father King Charles was barely mentioned, save for the rather blasé observation that: “My father needs a bit of protection but he’s old enough to do that himself as well.” In other words, recent gossip that the relationship between king and heir has been strained of late will only be fanned by this, rather than dispelled.

    There were, of course, fond comments about his family. Unsurprisingly, William described 2024 as “the hardest year I’ve ever had”, remarking that “it’s important my family feel protected and have the space to process a lot of the stuff that’s gone on [in the] last year.”

    Sounding more like his estranged brother than usual, he went on to sigh: “I enjoy my job but sometimes there are aspects of it, such as the media, the speculation, the scrutiny…” And, he might have added, participating in such pieces of entertainment as The Reluctant Traveler.

    Yet whether it worked or not as television, it was a fascinating insight into a very private man’s psyche. It is widely expected that William will be a transformative monarch in a way that his father has not been. His comments that he will not be looking to the past were more telling than might have been intended. William said that: “I think if you’re not careful history can be a real weight and an anchor around you. And you can feel suffocated by it and restricted… It’s important to live for the here and now. But also I think if you’re too intrinsically attached to history, you can’t possibly have any flexibility because you worry that the chess pieces move too much and therefore no change will happen.”

    This may be true. However, one hopes that if William has a trusted courtier or two at his side, that they might be able to convince him that change – presumably on the significant scale that he is intending – is not always a good or even necessary thing. In any case, a reign that many have pre-emptively dismissed as dull might yet surprise the world, although whether for good or ill remains to be seen.

  • Do Jews have a future in Britain? 

    Do Jews have a future in Britain? 

    I was on my way to synagogue yesterday when I got news that was surprising and unsurprising at the same time. That there had been an attack at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur was a shock, but only the location and the timing. The fact that terror had struck our community felt like the confirmation of our worst fears – and something that was grimly predictable. 

    For as long as I can remember, Jewish life in the UK has been closely guarded and protected. My childhood synagogue in the leafy London suburb of Surbiton was behind locked gates with security guards posted outside when anyone was in the building. My Jewish newspaper office today has similar protections and an address we’re told must never be made public. Every kosher shop in North London has a permanent security presence, twice or three times that of a supermarket in a dodgy area. 

    British Jews are always watching over their shoulders, silently clocking the escape routes out of synagogues and constantly feeling like a target when we congregate. We are a group that, by virtue of existing, is targeted. Jewish schoolchildren are told to change their uniforms when going home on public transport, observant Jewish men hide their kippahs with baseball caps when on the tube, everyone does the little things they can to try and feel safe. 

    All of this of course, was true before October 7 and it will be true for a long time after this war ends. But there has been a remarkable uptick in the last two years. The right-thinking consensus that anti-Semitism was bad is crumbling before our eyes, as the horseshoe theory that sees us hit from the far-left and the far-right becomes stronger every day.

    The Community Security Trust, a Jewish organization that collects data on anti-Semitism in Britain has recorded an unprecedented rise in all manner of attacks on British Jews, from casual anti-Semitic remarks to violent assaults on visibly Jewish people, buildings and communities. Just last month, a man was arrested in North London for a spate of attacks where he smeared his own excrement on synagogues. 

    The reaction to what’s happening in the Middle East is coming home to affect British Jews, making us feel like outsiders in a country that we’ve lived in and loved for centuries. I see it all the time in my own life and work. The social media channels of the Jewish Chronicle are inundated with hateful, anti-Semitic comments every day that have nothing to do with Israel. I’ve seen anti-Semitic graffiti appear all over my neighborhood in south London and I’ve been accused of “killing kids” at a friend’s birthday party by someone I had just met. 

    The nature of anti-Semitism means that it is ever-present, always under the surface. And it has been allowed to fester. Partially by a government that through its own poor politicking is pandering to extremists in its own party, but also by a media so desperate to raise the temperature of debate in Britain, that it forgets that Jewish people’s safety is at stake. Anti-Semites across the UK and in public life have been allowed to grow in confidence, to march on the streets of London, a city that Jews have thrived in, with placards of blood-drenched swastikas and depictions of Jewish leaders with horns. 

    Britain has always been seen as different to the rest of Europe when it comes to Jewish life. For years, our community has looked at violence in places like France, where Islamist terror attacks against Jews are a regular fixture and thought, “That wouldn’t happen here”. 

    But now it has. The events of yesterday will be a scar on Britain’s Jews, in the same way that the Tree of Life shooting, and the HyperCache attack, and the Boulder firebombing forever changed those communities. The Jews of Manchester and those across the UK will remember Heaton Park for years to come. There will also be soul-searching. Does this mean we should all go to Israel, to live among a different type of Islamist threat? What can we do to prevent this happening ever again? 

    There’s a certain feeling among British Jews that in any country other than Israel we are not in control of our own destiny, that our safety in the UK or in any other country is dependent on the government of the day listening to our pleas and taking our security seriously. To the credit of the police, they acted quickly to protect the Jews of Heaton Park. But many Jews today will be feeling that the attack was grimly predictable, and wondering why the government or the police allowed this country to become a place where Islamists’ toxic ideas and hatred of Israel are allowed to take the lives of British Jews. 

    Killing Jews in Manchester or London or Paris or Washington DC will not bring this war to an end. Not a single Palestinian life is saved by the taking of one from a synagogue worshipper. Yesterday’s attack feels like a turning point. If British Jews can be killed simply for being Jewish, then do the rest of us have a future here?

  • Has Trump changed Britain’s stance on Palestinian statehood?

    Has Trump changed Britain’s stance on Palestinian statehood?

    As Donald Trump visited the United Kingdom this week, the press seized the opportunity to confront both him and Prime Minister Keir Starmer about the issue of Hamas and Britain’s posture towards Palestinian statehood. In a rare moment of lucidity, and perhaps influenced by the firm presence of the President, Starmer appeared, briefly, to align his moral compass. Faced with questions over why his government was proceeding with the recognition of a Palestinian state in the wake of the October 7th atrocities, Starmer delivered what may be his most unequivocal statement to date:

    “Let me be really clear about Hamas: They’re a terrorist organization who can have no part in any future governance in Palestine. What happened on October 7th was the worst attack since the Holocaust. We have extended family in Israel. I understand first-hand the psychological impact that that had across Israel. So I know exactly where I stand in relation to Hamas. Hamas of course don’t want a two-state solution. They don’t want peace. They don’t want a ceasefire. I’m very clear where I stand on Hamas.”

    It was also strikingly convenient that, at this critical juncture, Starmer suddenly remembered his extended family in Israel. One wonders how reassured they feel about his use of them in such a moment – deployed as a sort of bauble to decorate a policy that is not only contradictory but potentially dangerous. If they are to serve as moral ballast for his position, they deserve more than to be name-dropped in the midst of strategic incoherence.

    Had Starmer stopped there, one might have mistaken him for a leader with conviction. But in the next breath, he returned to form, assuring the press that his decision to recognize a Palestinian state had been set out in July and had “nothing to do with this state visit.” He insisted that the matter had been discussed with president Trump “as you would expect among two leaders who respect each other and like each other and want to bring about a better solution in the best way we can.”

    The irony, of course, is that just as Starmer found the fortitude to call Hamas what it is, the group was issuing yet another declaration of grotesque barbarism. In a statement released by its al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas promised to turn Gaza into a “graveyard” for Israeli soldiers, to use hostages as human shields, and to ensure that not a single captive would be recovered alive. They referenced Ron Arad, the long-lost Israeli airman abducted by Iran-backed terrorists in Lebanon, as a model for how future hostages would disappear without trace.

    “We have prepared for you an army of martyrs,” they declared. “Your prisoners are scattered throughout Gaza City’s neighborhoods, and we will not spare their lives… you will not recover a single prisoner, neither dead nor alive, and their fate will be the same as that of Ron Arad.”

    So when Starmer finally managed to utter the truth about Hamas, it was as though he had been coaxed into it by the magnetic clarity of the man standing beside him. Trump, sensing the moment, actually grinned with approval and gave him a pat on the back – like a dog that had finally learned to sit when commanded. It is said the two spent around thirty minutes alone before the press conference, with no aides present. One can only imagine what was said, but it would not be a stretch to presume that Trump reminded him of the basics: do not reward genocidal jihadists with the trappings of statehood.

    Yet, despite the bluster, Starmer still intends to confer symbolic recognition upon a Palestinian entity that does not exist in any coherent, lawful or democratic form. He has mouthed the words of moral clarity, but he cannot follow them through with coherent policy. This is the essence of his weakness: he learns to say the lines but not to dance the dance. For all the talk of opposing Hamas, his government is giving succor to its cause by validating the fantasy of a state that Hamas itself openly defines through martyrdom, bloodshed, and the annihilation of Jews.

    Starmer’s rhetoric on Hamas is thus at odds with every other aspect of his posture. He decries their atrocities, then gestures toward recognition of a statehood project that would reward them. He acknowledges they do not want peace, then backs a policy that empowers them. He understands their strategy of hostage warfare, then gestures towards concessions that would only embolden it. And he said nothing of the failures of literally all other mainstream Palestinian leaders and political movements to act with decency, respect for humanity or international law, or indeed any ambition of peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state. If not Hamas, Sir Keir, then who? It is not biased or racist to state these facts, however distressing and undesirable: it is merely looking a hard truth in the eye. Without that, how else can the situation be improved?

    Starmer’s position makes Britain appear rudderless. If the leader of His Majesty’s Government cannot translate his apparent convictions into action, if he cannot resist the theater of international appeasement even in the face of Islamist terror, then he diminishes not only himself but the standing of the nation he represents. One hopes that Trump, in those thirty private minutes, managed to plant a seed of realism. But there is, as yet, no sign that it has taken root.

  • Trump’s state visit to the UK could not be going better

    Trump’s state visit to the UK could not be going better

    So, the Donald was on his best behavior after all. There had been rumors flying around that President Trump would use his speech at the formal banquet that has been thrown in his honor by King Charles to make some pointed reference to free speech and its perceived absence thereof in Britain today. In the event, there was nothing but a series of emollient statements of praise for his hosts, their family and the country he was visiting, as well as, of course, himself.

    This threw up some incongruities – who would ever have imagined hearing Trump allude to Locke and Orwell? But his sentiments were warm (only partially reduced by his less-than-fluent delivery, reading at times haltingly off what looked like a giant prompt book). As such, they would have gone down well with those in St George’s Hall in Windsor Castle and far beyond.

    In truth, Trump’s state banquet was never expected to be a controversial or difficult event. Whether the King had wanted to host this second, unprecedented state visit for the American president or not, he was never going to make any public protestation, and so the speech of welcome that he gave his guest was typically warm and eloquent. He talked of the “enduring bond” between the two countries, in language soon echoed by Trump, and made a good joke, saying, in an allusion to George III and the War of Independence: “It is remarkable to think just how far we have come. My five times great-grandfather did not spare his words when he spoke of the revolutionary leaders.”

    Still, both men had their own agendas in mind, too, and they were expressed in polite yet pointed ways. The King talked with vigor of the enduring special relationship, but also – in lines presumably suggested by the government – he observed that “Today, as tyranny once again threatens Europe, we and our allies stand together in support of Ukraine, to deter aggression and secure peace.” Was there the slightest hint of irony when he praised Trump – a man obviously angling for the Nobel Peace Prize – and his “personal commitment to finding solutions to some of the world’s most intractable conflicts”? There almost certainly was.

    And even in his peroration, when Charles spoke of how “in renewing our bond tonight, we do so with unshakeable trust in our friendship and in our shared commitment to independence and liberty”, there was the hint of a suggestion that this commitment might present itself in rather different ways. Talk of Trump’s attempts to protect the environment may have been more wishful thinking on Charles’s part than demonstrable fact.

    The President, meanwhile, has had a splendidly indulgent day of watching military displays in his honor, all of which have taken place out of public view in the grounds of Windsor Castle, so as to avoid the embarrassment of any protests marring his fun. Therefore, when he delivered his remarks, they came from a place of apparent contentment – hence the sincerity of his warm words about the royals. Nevertheless, he was still unable to resist a spot of self-praise as he announced that America has gone from being “a very sick country” to the “hottest anywhere in the world”. The King, to his immense credit, kept his best poker face throughout.

    Still, everyone involved in organizing this state visit will, rightly, congratulate themselves on how well the day went. Even the gray, overcast weather did not turn into the downpour that occasionally threatened to materialize, and the pageantry and glitz on display (at a rumored cost of £15 million for the entire event) show that, when Britain attempts to put on a performance like this, it usually succeeds.

    The political aspects of Trump’s visit come today, and they will be harder-won than this largely decorative display of soft power. But this coming together of two very different men, with very different values, over watercress panna cotta and ballotine of Norfolk chicken could hardly have gone better, either for them or their respective countries. And Charles will also know that the occasion will not – cannot – occur again, either, which may have made the whole thing easier to bear with suitably well-bred equanimity.

  • Trump will be on his best behavior for King Charles

    Trump will be on his best behavior for King Charles

    The Donald has touched down in Britain for his unprecedented second state visit. It makes sense in a way that this most unconventional of American presidents is being granted a privilege that has never been offered to any other US leader, namely a repeat performance of pageantry and pomp that will flatter this Anglophile’s ego to its considerable core. That the event is happening against King Charles’s wishes might bother any other prime minister, but such was Keir Starmer’s desire to curry favor with Trump that he even waved the King’s handwritten invitation on camera. And with that he ensured favorable treatment for the country he is (barely) governing. The question is what happens next.

    Unusually, Trump is not the issue at hand, at least as far as things currently stand. For all of his volatility and unpredictability, he is a fully paid-up admirer of the royal family. He has proudly, if erroneously, boasted that he was the late Queen’s favorite president. As such, he is unlikely to make any sort of trouble during his notably brief visit to Britain.

    He will be feted during Charles’s speech at Windsor Castle during the formal banquet, given every kind of pomp and respect that he surely sees as his due, and will generally be treated like a major global politician. Trump is a man of considerable ego, and that ego will be flattered. From Starmer and the government’s perspective, it is unlikely to be a troublesome trip.

    However, from Charles’s perspective, Trump’s ingress into Britain is less welcome. The two men may only be three years apart in age, but they could scarcely be more different. Charles is a liberal horticulturalist who has a great love of art, literature and history. Trump is a McDonald’s-munching pragmatist whose bestselling book was entitled The Art of the Deal; meanwhile, his host’s best-known publication is called A Vision of Britain.

    The King is a traditionalist – and a small, rather than large, ‘c’ conservative – who likes to think of his country as a fine place besmirched by ugly progress. Trump, meanwhile, shares the monarch’s idea of his own country having fallen behind, but his rabble-rousing slogan of “Make America Great Again” will find no echo this week. For Charles, Britain has never stopped being great.

    There are other issues that might prove contentious. The King has begun cautious steps towards a rapprochement with his younger son, and Trump’s last reported comment on Prince Harry was to say that, although he was now prepared not to deport him over his admitted drug use, “I’ll leave him alone. He’s got enough problems with his wife. She’s terrible.” It is probably accurate to say that Charles’s thoughts on his daughter-in-law may be similar, but he would rather see his throne fall than ever be caught making such an indiscreet admission.

    This sums up the difference between the two men and their respective values. One has always believed that “never complain, never explain” is an admirable way to live one’s life; the other has complained, explained, and then, for good measure, hurled invective at his enemies. How they will make small talk off camera remains to be seen.

    Still, one thing that decades spent as Prince of Wales have taught Charles is the value of smiling and waving, even when a situation – or a person – is not to his taste. Veteran royal watchers can easily see when the King has exerted his own influence (witness his reception of Zelensky at his private home of Sandringham, a conspicuous mark of regard after his appalling treatment by Trump and his Vice President J.D. Vance in the Oval Office earlier this year). Although Trump will be on his best behavior this week, every tactless or crass remark of the President’s will be noted. You can be sure that Starmer’s government will never be allowed to forget the help that Charles has given them – assuming, that is, Starmer is still in office, if not Labour in power, long enough for the King to ever call in his favor.

  • America is obsessed with the UK’s decline

    America is obsessed with the UK’s decline

    As Sigmund Freud pointed out way back in mid-June 1905, everyone feels a bit schizo about Mom. On the one hand, she carried you in the womb, she probably nursed you at the nipple. She made the greatest of sacrifices for you to exist. Heck, maybe you really love her cooking.

    On the other hand, you have to escape her. The Italians have a brilliantly pejorative word for the man-child who stays in the maternal home far too late in life: mammoni. No one wants to be that guy. And to get away from this menace, sometimes you have to scorn your mother, to break the psychological apron strings.

    So it is with American attitudes to the Mother Country. Whereas the US had many midwives, its mother was unquestionably Britain. It was Britain that seeded the first colonies in Virginia. Britain that gave America her mighty language. It was largely Britons who drafted the US Constitution – indeed the Founding Fathers saw themselves, quite overtly, as more British than the British: more honorably in love with their freedoms.

    As a patriot, I’d like to rebut this barbaric assault on my own country. The trouble is, I can’t

    It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that Americans have an Oedipally schizoid relationship to Britain, even today. On the one hand you have that entire Downton Abbey strand of American desires. Our accents are adored, poshness is weirdly revered, an idealized concept of echt Britishness – from manners to furniture to clothes (Ralph Lauren built a billion-buck business on this) – is admired and aped, or created ex nihilo. Donald Trump’s White House is probably the most pro-UK administration in several generations. Trump celebrates his Scottish roots; J.D. Vance holidays in the Cotswolds. Winston is back in the Oval Office.

    At the same time, America has often scorned Britain, mocked her, bossed her around and generally treated Mum something terrible. And right now, and from the same Trumpite wing of US politics, the UK is facing a lot of this pitiless scorn. Across conservative social media we Brits are seen as decrepit, weak, cucked, lame, broke, snaggletoothed losers who are utterly doomed to extinction.

    You’ll find this discourse everywhere. From Tucker Carlson lamenting that Britons are “slaves,” to Elon Musk calling us a “tyrannical police state” to internet pundit Charlie Kirk describing us as “a husk” and “a conquered country.” Earlier this month, after comedian Graham Linehan was arrested for his views at Heathrow Airport, the British politician Nigel Farage went to Washington to tell members of Congress that Britain had turned into North Korea. Americans listened avidly.

    Whatever the provenance of these critiques – and plenty come from a place of grief, or regret, not mere contempt – they hit home. They can make Brits wince. And one of the times I’ve winced the most came via a much less well-known voice: a Substack called Starstack, created by – as far as I can see – a firmly right-wing but not crazy Republican, known on X as @youngtroon.

    The particular essay about the impending doom of the YooKay (and he uses this demeaning nickname quite deliberately) is entitled “Mind the Gap,” but the subhead gives us the gist: “A powerful set of systemic factors are threatening to bring chaos unseen in centuries to the shores of the United Kingdom.”

    I advise you to read the entire essay yourself. It is articulate, considered, perceptive and, if you are British, quite harrowing. He has given us the gift to see ourselves as others see us. And, my God, it is a dismal portrait. And it therefore deserves a close analysis, as a shining example of the genre.

    The author attacks us from all sides. Not with pointless venom, but with outright astonishment at our grotesque and self-harming stupidity.

    Here are a few choice descriptions: to him, Britain is “a laughable caricature of what the government would be like if it were run by your neurotic mother-in-law.” Parts of the North resemble “a collapsing civilization.” The National Health Service is “a black-hole money pit with some of the worst dollar-per-dollar outcomes.”

    We also have “some of the nuttiest benefits handouts in the entire world.” He notes that our Chancellor recently broke down weeping in parliament. He says the economy is “effectively stagnant, and there is little or no plan to resolve underlying systemic factors.” He adds that Britain is a country “where tens (hundreds?) of thousands of white girls were systematically sexually exploited by gangs of Mirpuri Pakistanis” – a fact which was then covered up. Meanwhile, we are also a nation that “received well in excess of 1 percent of its population for several years straight during the ‘Boriswave.’” Mr. Troon does not see this as a good thing.

    Then he really gets going. I’ll spare you the gory fiscal details, but it’s when the essay turns to our growing debt crisis – those gilt yields soaring over 5 percent – that the apocalypse promised by the subtitle begins to loom. It is not pretty.

    Naturally, as a patriot, I’d like to rebut this barbaric assault on my own country. The trouble is, I can’t. I have been through the essay, insult by insult, and I’ve found only two arguable errors. Firstly, the UK does not – thank God – suffer weekly or daily terror attacks. Secondly, Britain does not have a “uniquely violent street gang culture.”

    Apart from that, I cannot find major flaws. Which makes it all the more depressing, and makes me wonder whether the author’s prognosis is correct and Britain is, actually, “rapidly heading toward a grand and brutal reckoning” and that “the United Kingdom is undergoing severe stress-testing that now threatens to sink the entire enterprise entirely.”

    To make it worse, the author does not see a savior anywhere, not in Reform, Labour, the Conservatives, because we have “one of the most clownish and intolerable political castes that presently exist anywhere on the planet.” Ouch.

    However, he does offer the motherland one brief filial hug at the end. The author states that, despite all the above, the native Britons have somehow managed to keep a functional country together, so far. And on that basis he predicts that, after the inevitable revolution, our innate virtues should prevail and we will rebound.

    Nonetheless, as things stand, let’s just say, from a certain American perspective, Mom has drenched herself in gasoline. And is about to light a cigarette.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • Does Britain want Prince Harry back?

    Does Britain want Prince Harry back?

    “Success,” Winston Churchill was once reputed to have said, “is the ability to go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” By this metric, Prince Harry must be about the most successful figure in public life today. Despite a series of myriad embarrassments and humiliations, which have included his Sentebale charity descending into chaos, his well-publicized legal shenanigans (which, apparently, cost him over a million pounds, for little reward) and a consistent ranking as Britain’s third most unpopular royal (ahead only of his disgraced uncle and perennially disliked wife), he is returning to Britain this week, for his first significant visit to 2022.

    Harry is “determined to press the reset button,” according to press reports. Although Harry’s popularity has been in the gutter in his home country over the past few years, he has decided that he is going to go on what amounts to a public relations offensive to change this. Ominously, according to a well-sourced report in the Sunday Times of London, the Duke of Sussex has decided that “he is going to have some fun” on his return to Britain. Given that the younger Harry’s definition of “fun” included everything from dressing up in a Nazi uniform to being surreptitiously photographed playing poker naked in Las Vegas, we might fear the worst. In fact, the itinerary that has been briefed to the media is impeccably wholesome. There are the WellChild awards on Monday, plenty of receptions with charities that he supports, including the Invictus Foundation, and he will be attending a meeting in Nottingham for young people affected by violence. This is, those around Harry hope, the best of him: his mother’s compassion and sincere interest in others channeled through to a new generation.

    At least, this is the hope. Yet during his four-day visit, which is, perhaps wisely, “jam-packed with hardly any downtime,” there are two rather significant elephants in the room.

    The first, of course, is Harry’s family. He is not believed to have any direct contact with his father in recent months, since they last met in February 2024, and his ill-judged remarks about the King’s health in his equally ill-judged BBC interview in May – after failing to succeed in taking legal action against his government – are understood to have caused deep offense that will make any reconciliation hard.

    As for relations between Harry and William, there is more chance of Meghan Markle making her West End debut in a one-woman production of Mother Courage than there is of the two estranged brothers speaking any time soon. The tawdry revelations in Spare set the kibosh on another very frosty relationship. Notably, he will be staying in expensive hotels, rather than at Buckingham Palace.

    The other problem is that Harry is incapable of keeping his mouth shut. He is an impetuous, emotional man who is all too keen to use the media to get his message across, but as his lack of popularity shows, he could often do with removing his foot from his mouth. It has been briefed that Harry would someday like to bring his young children back to the country of his birth – where they have not visited since June 2022 – and that: “He wants to be able to show his children where he grew up. He wants them to know their family here. He really would like to come back to the UK much more.” Yet the myriad difficulties with the practicalities of this may well make such a thing impossible. For the Duke to be accepted once more into the bosom of his family, one can imagine that various conditions might be made – which may or may not include leaving his fragrant wife in Montecito, where she would certainly rather remain – and a proud and headstrong figure like Harry might be unwilling to debase himself in so public and humiliating a fashion.

    The Duke’s visit this week will inevitably attract headlines and much attention, and he is hoping, as one well-sourced friend has briefed the papers, that it will go well. “He is excited to be on the ground, helping his organizations where he can. He’s pumped for the visit, he’s happy.”

    Should it proceed according to plan – in other words, uneventfully – then it might be the beginning of a rapprochement with his home country. But should anything go amiss, or the coverage of his visit be less rhapsodic than he might wish, then it will be hard to imagine that this return will be as regular an occurrence as Harry might be hoping for. How heartbroken his former subjects would be by this remains to be seen.

  • The death throes of free speech in Britain – and its opponents

    Free speech, the very bedrock of constitutional democracy, is writhing on its deathbed in England. It will take a mass movement to restore its vitality. Fortunately, one can see that movement emerging among a once-free people, tired of government suppression.

    The dire state of British liberties was outlined Wednesday in Congressional testimony by British MP, Nigel Farage, who testified before the US House Judiciary Committee. He was backed by the committee’s Republican members and attacked, alas, by Democrats. 

    Powerful as his testimony was, it was overshadowed by an even more striking event: a phalanx of armed police arriving at Heathrow airport to arrest an Irish comedian for a tweet he posted in Arizona. His crime: he made fun of transgender people. Toss him in the dungeon.

    This is the same law enforcement, mind you, that ignored decades of child rape and “grooming” by Pakistani Muslims in northern England. 

    How is the lax treatment of grooming gangs connected to the harsh treatment of tweeting? By more than the lunacy and hypocrisy. The deeper connection is that successive Labour and Conservative governments have considered it more important to “protect” minority groups against bad words and criminal investigations than to protect innocent children or ensure free speech and open inquiry. “Social justice,” don’t you know?

    The collapse of free speech, under the repressive hand of British government, is deeply linked to the massive influx of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, who have little interest in adapting to English laws and customs and every interest in protecting the customs of their native lands. They have consistently refused to adopt the basic ideals of tolerance and forbearance that are fundamental to any functioning multicultural democracies.

    Instead of pushing back against this illiberal tide – an essential task if liberal democracy is to survive – political leaders in the UK and most of Western Europe have appeased it. Just as bad, they have suppressed any opposition.

    The common theme among these feckless leaders is their lack of confidence in their own cultural traditions and historic national achievements. They have refused to stand up for those basic values and traditions in the face of ferocious, illiberal assaults, stemming mainly from these hostile immigrant communities, often supported by progressive elites, who share the leaders’ lack of cultural self-confidence. Instead of resisting these illiberal assaults, halting immigration, and limiting the lifelong provision of free housing and income, those leaders have acceded to these demands and smacked down anyone who says different. The price has been enormous.

    How bad is it? Bad enough that people are now being arrested in England and Scotland for putting up flags or wearing them on their clothes. Waving the national flag is somehow considered an insult to immigrants. This show of patriotism must be stopped and the miscreants arrested.

    These arrests do more than crush free speech. They also deter free assembly, or at least they are intended to do so, if that assembly opposes government policy. But the right to assemble peacefully to protest government policy is the very essence of a functioning democracy.

    The connection between speech and assembly is often overlooked, but it is crucially important. It is free assembly – mass crowds, mobilized around political demands – that threaten governments. That is why the two rights, speech and assembly, are paired in the First Amendment to the US Constitution. That is why their absence in English law is so devastating. Their absence gives free rein to a repressive government. That is exactly what is happening now in England and Scotland.

    The right to speak openly and assemble freely, allow citizens to voice their opinions, demonstrate the intensity of those views, protest some government policies and advocate others, and express those opinions without seeking permission from the very government they may be contesting.

    The British, who have no written constitution or bill of rights, give no such protections to their citizens, either in theory or in practice. That is why today’s repressive governments can treat citizens like subjects, to be suppressed or arrested when they say something objectionable to those in power. What is objectionable? We in power will decide. Not you.

    It is a special tragedy to see this repression take place in England, the fountainhead of free speech and assembly in western civilization. The theory was best stated in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), with roots that run back two centuries to John Locke and still further to the Glorious Revolution and Magna Carta. Mill’s vital points are that ideas need to withstand the test of counter-arguments and best evidence, that multiple views need to be heard and tested, and that citizens can then reach their own, informed judgments.

    The wisdom of Mill’s analysis was not limited to his book or the scholarly discourse it prompted. It was already embedded in Parliamentary debate, public speeches, and the free publication of newspapers and magazines.

    This open discourse is a magnificent achievement and a historically rare one. Few countries have ever permitted it, and it is in jeopardy now in the very birthplace of these freedoms, trampled by ignorant and malign political leaders. It’s easy to see why those in power don’t want to hear opposing voices or critical tweets. They don’t say so plainly, of course. They prefer to wrap themselves in the high-flying moral language of “social justice.” Whatever the justification, they use the full repressive weight of state power to smash alternative views. They alone decide which views are permissible.

    They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this power grab – this blatant suppression of basic democratic rights. Politicians, bureaucrats, and police shouldn’t decide what can be said and what must be silenced. Not in a free country. They shouldn’t be allowed to turn the birthplace of liberty into its charnel house.

  • Father Ted and Havel’s Greengrocer

    A softer version of totalitarianism has been gnawing its way through the British body politic like a cancer for many years now. With the Graham Linehan (creator of the classic sitcom Father Ted) arrest at London’s Heathrow Airport this week, it seems to have metastasized into something entirely malignant. If Linehan’s arrest isn’t a bright red line for Britain, what on earth would be?

    A decade ago, living in the US at the dawn of the Great Awokening, I began hearing from older people who had fled to America from the Soviet bloc, seeking freedom. They were telling me that the things they were starting to see in their adopted country reminded them of what they had left behind. 

    They spoke of people having to watch their words for fear that they would step on an invisible land mine, and put their jobs and businesses at risk. They talked about the abandonment of classical liberal values, and the adoption of “social justice” norms that judged people based on group identity. They witnessed ideological mobs intimidating people into silence, and institutional elites changing language to fit a utopian leftist paradigm.

    I found this hard to grasp at first. If this was totalitarianism, where were the gulags? Where was Big Brother? This was precisely the problem, I came to understand. The fact that relative to life in the Soviet bloc, the West remained free and prosperous helped conceal the totalitarian threat. That, and the fact that this new ideology presented itself in largely therapeutic terms: as a program not only for achieving social justice, but of easing the burden of groups suffering the pain of marginalization.

    Yet the more conversations I had with these people, the more I experienced their anger at the inability of Americans to comprehend what was happening. Said one professor in the Midwest, “I was born and raised in the Soviet Union, and I’m frankly stunned by how similar some of these developments are to the way Soviet propaganda operated.”

    Another émigré professor, this one from Czechoslovakia, was equally blunt. He told me that he began noticing a shift even further back in time: friends would lower their voices and look over their shoulders when expressing conservative views. When he expressed his conservative beliefs in a normal tone of voice, the Americans would start to fidget and constantly scan the room to see who might be listening.

    “I grew up like this,” he tells me, “but it was not supposed to be happening here.”

    My conceptual breakthrough happened when I realized that growing up during the Cold War, I had come to imagine totalitarianism according to George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In fact, the emerging therapeutic totalitarianism in the West today is far more like Aldous Huxley’s model in Brave New World. The outcome is the same: the gradual erosion of liberty and individuality, and the seizing of power by ideological fanatics who asserted the power to alter reality. By the time the book I wrote about this phenomenon, Live Not By Lies, was published in 2020, wokeness had conquered US institutions, and one could be sent to the unemployment line for refusing, say, to agree that men could be women. 

    For all the madness that ensued, no American had to fear arrest for stating anti-woke opinions, because we have a constitutional right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. This is why the fate of Graham Linehan, like the fate of so many lesser known UK dissidents from the ruling ideology, could not happen in America. But it can happen in Britain, and is happening. The spectacle of English patriots being taken into custody for flying the Union Jack, on grounds that it might cause distress to foreigners, many of whom came into the country illegally, reveals the absolute state of the tyranny now reigning in once-free Britain.

    Yet if the Soviet bloc emigres reveal to us the truth of what was and is overtaking the West, those who stayed behind tell us how to resist and overcome it. In researching Live Not By Lies – the title is taken from a Solzhenitsyn communique to his Soviet followers, on the eve of his exile – I traveled through the former communist lands to ask ex-dissidents for their advice.

    The core lesson: you must be willing to suffer for the sake of the truth. Those in power count on a population cowed by fear. Nearly everyone is willing to live under the yoke of ideological lies, because they are understandably afraid of what will happen to them if they don’t. Those brave souls who dare to tell the truth, and who are willing to suffer for it, hold the key to society’s liberation.

    Czech dissident leader Vaclav Havel explained why in his famous Parable of the Greengrocer, from his 1977 book-length essay, The Power Of The Powerless. Imagine, he said, a simple greengrocer in a communist city, in whose shop window hangs a sign saying, “Workers Of The World, Unite!” He doesn’t believe it, nor do any of the other shopkeepers who display the same sign. They do it out of fearful conformity.

    One day, the shopkeeper decides he won’t lie anymore. He removes the sign. What happens next? He is arrested. The state confiscates his business. He must endure punishment, including loss of privileges, and becoming a social pariah to his former friends. He pays a significant price.

    But what does he gain? For one, he gains self-respect, for having defending his own integrity. For another, he demonstrates to society that it is possible to live in truth, provided you are willing to suffer for it. If enough people within that oppressed society take courage from his example, and accept the challenge of suffering for truth, then eventually the entire system built on lies will crumble.

    Solzhenitsyn said something similar in his 1974 “Live Not By Lies” message. It is not possible to go to Red Square and shout, “Down with communism!” he said. But that does not mean ordinary people are without means of resistance. He recommended practical everyday means of refusing to cooperate with the official lies. 

    “Our way must be: never knowingly support lies!” he wrote. You may not have the strength to stand up in public and say what you really believe, but you can at least refuse to affirm what you do not believe. If we must live under the dictatorship of lies, the writer said, then our response must be: “Let their rule hold not through me!”

    Graham Linehan is a comedian and actor, but he is also Havel’s Greengrocer. So is J.K. Rowling – and though it must be conceded that it’s easier to live not by lies if you are sitting on a mountain of cash from book sales, she has nevertheless become a total pariah to many of her peers and admirers, because she would not bow her head to the misogynistic lies of gender ideology.

    The British people are being put through an extraordinary test now by their government, their media, and all the institutions of the ruling class. They are being forced to endure humiliation, criminality, displacement, and the virtual expropriation of their land, with its ancient liberties, by an ideologically captured ruling class. 

    Earlier this year, I was in London for a screening of the documentary film series Angel Studios made from Live Not By Lies. I had seen the film many times before, but watching it in the British capital, it struck me how many of the people in the documentary are British people, talking about actual existing tyranny in Britain today. 

    They are people like Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, the Christian pro-life campaigner shown on camera being arrested for praying inside her head near an abortion clinic. Vaughan-Spruce is also Havel’s Greengrocer – a brave person who possessed enough self-respect and love of truth to suffer arrest, multiple times, for thoughtcrime.

    The older men and women of Eastern Europe know what the British are suffering. The fact that British totalitarianism is softer than its Soviet antecedent makes it no less totalitarian in spirit. A former Soviet citizen now living in America told me what is coming for us if we don’t derail the totalitarian train now.

    “You will not be able to predict what will be held against you tomorrow,” she warned. “You have no idea what completely normal thing you do today, or say today, will be used against you to destroy you. This is what people in the Soviet Union saw. We know how this works.”

    Then as now, there remains only one sure antidote to it: ordinary citizens realizing that enough is enough, and at personal risk to themselves, choosing to live not by lies. This is the hope that Solzhenitsyn offered to his people in 1974 – and the challenge.