I Intend To Escape ......................And Come Back

Keir Starmer and the Camden Cadre?

How to understand Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour party he has created?

In this article in The Spectator I argue that the London borough of Camden, part of which Sir Keir represents as an MP, is a lens through which Labour's beliefs and policies are best viewed. Its not the Islington of Tony Blair that is running the country, but the Camden of Sir Keir Satrmer!

You can read the article online here, or a as a pdf below:

Download Keir Starmer and the truth about the Camden cadre spectator 07 06 2024

Scruton faith

Over the holiday season I enjoyed Roger Scuton's book "Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life".

Less a memoir than a series of essays on particular chunks of his life or matters of importance, Scruton grasps faith perfectly here:

"Faith is not simply an addition to our repetoire of ordinary opinions. It is a transforming state of mind, a stance towards the world, rooted in our social nature and altering all our perceptions, emotions and beliefs."

Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 220

Margaret Thatcher and Islam

Back in 2021 I attended a Thatcher Network conference at Newcastle University.

The city was just emerging from the Covid lockdown, and staying in the left-leaning area of Jesmond, it was remarkable how impacted it was compared to small town Northamptonshire. New cycle lines and card only payment in coffee shops demonstrated a certain marking of territory that we had simply not gone through.

My paper at the conference was on Margaret Thatcher and Islam, and that has now been published as an article by the Conservative History Journal. Its fair to say modern day Conservatives may be surprised at some of the nuances and ambiguities of Mrs Thatcher's position - and not just when it comes to Cold War alliances.

A pdf of the article can be viewed below:

Download More questions than answers Thatcher Islam Con History Journal 2024

The Balkanisation of the UK's Police Forces

I had neglected to post here a short article I wrote for the Daily Telegraph last month, on what might be called the Balkanisation of the police. We sometimes forget how rapid these changes have been - it is not that long ago the authorities in forces like West Yorkshire would struggle to recruit ethnic minority officers - now they see officers prosecuted for supporting Islamist terrorist groups such as Hamas!

You can read my thoughts on the Telegraph website here, or as a pdf below.

Download The police must reckon with their extremism problem Telegraph 14 11 2024

The Importance of Confidence

The biggest single difference between working class people and middle or upper class people? At an individual level - confidence. I look at some of the interns I have met in Westminster, and they have more confidence in their late teens or early twenties, than I had in my late thirties.

"I truly believe that confidence is learned. No one is born confident. I think confidence is dependent on how your brain functions and what you have experienced in your life. I have not read or studied anything to back this up. This is just what I think from my experiences. If you want references and scientific evidence you need another book. I think people are born with different levels of chemicals in their brain which affect levels of anxiety and stress and depression. The levels of these chemicals will make it easier or harder to learn to become confident, but you still have to learn. I totally reject the idea that some people are born confident."

The comedian Rob Beckett in his book "A class act: Life as a working class man in a middle class world" (London: Harper Collins), p. 221

The end of the world is nigh? Environmentalists, Fascism and Eco-Collapse

If the earth is going to die screaming, as UB40 prophesised, what political forms will emerge before it dies?

For many in the environmental movement, fascism is not just a future threat, but is encapsulated in today's campaigns to save fossil fuels. Worse, those fuels themselves have always been brown - that is fascist, and never green.

I think much of that world view is nonsense, and have set out a three page argument in the current Notes From the Borderland magazine, making that very point. There is also room along the way for comment on political figures as diverse as Paul Mason, Boris Johnson, Roger Hallam, Tommy Robinson, and the National Union of Mineworkers campaign against apartheid.

You can order a copy of NFB here, and can find a pdf of my article below.

Download Eco-Fascism Stott NFB 12 2024

The Joy of Old Books - What's Tucked Inside The Greatest Treason: The Bizarre Story of Hollis, Liddell and Mountbatten?

My current reading is this 1990 title, by the late espionage writer Richard Deacon.

I am only 60 pages in, but it does seem this is an apologia for MI5 and a rebuttal of the view that the Service's Director General from 1956-65, Roger Hollis, was a Soviet spy. How else to take a book which claims one of Hollis' greatest rivals and chief inquisitor, Peter Wright "served in MI5 for a relatively short period" (p.6) Wright actually served for 21 years, being recruited as the organisation's principal scientist, going on to specialise in counter-intelligence.

One joy of buying and reading second hand books from thirty plus years ago, is that they so often come with news cuttings and other bits and pieces tucked away inside them. In this case it is not a news clipping or an obituary, but a series of comments written on the previous owners bookmark.

No one using a kindle will ever know the pleasures of such random discoveries. May they be preserved for ever!

The Decline and Fall of Brother Tariq

For a time, Tariq Ramadan was the epitome of what western elites felt they needed - the Muslim theologian they could do business with.

You can read The decline and fall of Tariq Ramadan here, or view it as a pdf below.

Download The decline and fall of Tariq Ramadan The Spectator.pdf 12 09 2024

On Hanging About In Men's Toilets

I am not the sort of man who spends his time hanging about, Tom Driberg style, in public toilets (honest). And I do not, normally, take pictures in them.

I make an exception though for the beautifully preserved and maintained convenience at Rothesay on the Isle of Bute. Three pictures below should suffice:

Anyone who remembers the toilets in Carry on Screaming, where Dan Dan The Lavatory Man meets a watery end, will understand the style here. All roads, and ferries, should lead to Bute!

To read more about the history of what is described as a "jewel in the santiarian's crown" there is an excellent little article on a website called The Coracle.

On the dangers of Iran (again)

I had a short article - just 600 words in the Telegraph over the weekend, concerning Iranian influence in the UK.

This really ought to be addressed in Yvette Cooper's 'extremism review' currently being conducted somewhere inside the Home Office. You can read the article online here, and download a pdf below.

Download Iran promotes UK extremism – it must be stopped 31 08 2024

More in Common?

I have just finished Douglas Murray's "The War on the West: How to prevail in the age of unreason" and was struck by these lines, towards the end of the book:

"In the absence of anything else, the only public ethic in the West that people are encouraged to unite around is opposition toward itself." (p.265-66).

It raises a very pertinent question - if Britain is divided, on what can it unite?

The Islamic Republic of ...............Torsa?

There's not much to laugh about at the moment, but there was some light relief last week at the suggestion Shia cleric Sheikh Yasser al-Habib wished to buy the Scottish Island of Morsa, currently home to two holiday lettings and not a lot else.

I was quoted in the Daily Telegraph article on 30 July, which called the whole idea absurd:

"Paul Stott, head of security and extremism at Policy Exchange, added to the chorus of concern sparked by the reports."

“It’s bizarre, but not totally bizarre, in that religious communities have bought up land in rural parts of Britain before,” he told The Telegraph.

“But I can’t remember a Muslim group doing so before. If you look at al-Habib, he is a contentious figure. This would involve a part of UK territory becoming the land of a contentious religious grouping. I think that requires public debate before it can go ahead.”

Defining 'Islamophobia'?

For some reason I neglected to post on here the article on the Labour party and Islamophobia debate, which I had published back on 21 May.

You can read it on the Reaction website here, and as a pdf below.

Download Labour must define Islamophobia very carefully Reaction 21 05 2024

Turning the tables on extremism?

Yesterday I had a short piece published in The Critic on the new report by Lord Walney on political extremism.

The Critic added the sub-heading 'vital but flawed' as a description of Walney - you can read his report here, and my view is on their site. I think it is great we are having these debates, and some of Walney - for example on schools and blasphemy - is encouraging. But a large part of the problem in Batley simply came down to the school, local Labour party, and the teachers union, not having the strength of their supposed convictions to say 'No' to those who picketed the school. Until that happens, these debates will always be lost.

A pdf of the review is below.

Download Turning the tables on coercion The Critic 21 05 2024

Notes from the Borderland: Back and sizzling at the table

After a very considerable hiatus, the parapolitical magazine Notes from the Borderland is back. Issue 12 is out now, and covers an eclectic range of issues. The magazine is available in bookshops like Housmans in Kings Cross and stores stocked by Central distribution, and also via the Magazine Heaven chain.

The front cover shows the disastrous National Action rally in 2015, where the far-right's finest ended up hiding in the left luggage facility at Liverpool Lime Street station, besieged by anti-fascists and surrounded by rather nervous looking coppers. Larry O'Hara and Dave Hughes question the state response to far-right terrorism in recent years, not least when it is a phenomenon so significantly dwarfed by its jihadist rivals. A significant player in the trials involving neo-Nazis has been academic Matthew Feldman - O'Hara dissects just how low the bar may be when it comes to academic 'expertise' in some of these cases. The sorry collapse of CARR - the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right - an organisation Feldman founded, features as a perhaps classic example of the ability of some of those on the left of politics (as they would see themselves) to eat their own. The questions this debacle raises illustrate that even within an academia where it has the pitch to itself, the left's iconoclasm ensures that it is more interested in smashing up, than building institutions.

NFB is perhaps the only parapolitical magazine in the UK now appearing in print form. Old rival Lobster moved to online only many years ago, and if there are any new kids on the block (Declassified UK perhaps?) they have been born and will no doubt only ever breathe and toddle online. I think that's a shame - I don't believe the human brain can read detail or theory online for a significant amount of time. Its pleasing therefore to see Verona Silenda pick up her stiletto and wield it in the direction of artificial intelligence and the threat technology poses to both our politics and our personal freedoms. Technology of course, makes hypocrites of us all, and it was a delight to be reminded once more of Steve Booth's old cartoon, on page 50 about the primitivist CD-Rom.

One book I don't have from my days in the Anarchist movement is the Anarchist Cookbook. Heidi Svenson covers recent terrorism trials involving this text, and some of the curious specimens caught up in them - none more so than Mr Logic lookalike Oliver Bel. I have contributed a short piece on the environmental movement and its giddy approach to fascism, which it seems to see virtually everywhere, but most certainly in the production of the fossil fuels that we, for now at least, cannot do without. Comments on my article are welcome.

In general terms the magazine, while detailed, sustains a humourous tone, is well produced and is perhaps best read in chunks. As Brian Clough once said of televised football - you don't want Sunday roast every day of the week. Notes from the Borderland is a roast dinner, not a sandwich at your desk. As with any roast however, some parts are perhaps better than others. If there is a rubbery carrot served it is Dave Hughes's article 'It isn't just them.' This is almost teenage in its naiveté about pro-Palestinian marches, and the wider Gaza conflict. Contrary to Mr Hughes's rose tinted spectacles, the reason the arrest rate at these marches is 'lower than Glastonbury' is because the authorities (including the very spooks NFB is supposedly watching) have treated them as a safety valve, broadly allowing extreme behaviour, threats and support for terrorism to occur on the streets, rather than force it underground. Indeed the point is made by Neil Basu, former head of counter-terrorism policing and Sir Keir Starmer's newest buddy, that the marches are important for that very reason. Bear in mind though, that those people calling for jihad here or anywhere else are not your friend........

And there's more. There is also an NFB special issue on the 1999 London nail bombings, an outrage for which we have just seen the twenty-fifth anniversary. Details of that publication and where to order it, are here.

Its not who you vote for, but what you vote for

Is democracy in good health following the May elections?

One thing that struck me was the defeat of the likeable Jamie Driscoll, formerly Labour's North of Tyne mayor and latterly an independent after being purged by Sir Keir. Driscoll stood and lost to Labour in the first election for the much bigger position of North East Mayor. This covers Northumberland, Tyne and Wear and County Durham.

What's interesting about this exercise in devolved power is that it looks remarkably similar to one rejected previously by the electorate. Katie Balls wrote in the 20 April issue of The Spectator:

"Metro mayors were created in 2017, not necessarily by popular demand. In fact, Newcastle, Sunderland and Gateshead all rejected mayors. They're now getting what no one really asked for: a single elected figure to cover all their areas, along with North and South Tyneside. The new North East Mayoral Combined Authority arrives 20 years after the idea of a devolved assembly for the north-east was rejected by voters by a three-to-one margin. The new authority was created in a direct deal with the councils: this time the public was not consulted."

There is of course a pattern here. Back in 2012, Prime Minister David Cameron wanted to see Mayors replacing council cabinets across the country. That was until nine cities voted no - Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield, Wakefield, Coventry, Leeds and Bradford. These election results were in many ways a mere hiccup - by 2017 Manchester had an elected Mayor anyway. Birmingham went even bigger with a Mayor for the whole West Midlands, and Newcastle, as outlined above, is now stuck in a very similar regional structure.

One of the things which should interest us more in politics is how things happen without anyone directly voting for it, or even being fully aware it is happening until it happens. I would much prefer to see, wherever possible, power devolved to as local a level as it can be. That gives the public more connection with those who are running things. Better Corby council, than North Northamptonshire. Better North Northamptonshire than Northamptonshire. And better Northamptonshire than any future East Midlands combined authority of Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire, Rutland, Leicestershire and whoever else.

Now - how do I vote for that?

The Conservatives have failed to conserve our environment

One of themes which dominates my thinking is decline, and the signs of decline that are all around. One of the most obvious, especially when you get out of the city, is in our rivers.

"I began to realise that this country is peppered with thousands of little community groups comprised of decent, ordinary people who know their river is not the way it was in their childhood. Decent people who put their trust in the Environment Agency and the water regulators , and trusted that they would nurture, protect and conserve these rivers. And the system's been doing none of that for decades."

Feargal Sharkey interviewed by Chris Packham in the Radio Times, 20 April 2024, p. 14.

I find Packham tedious, but his interview with Sharkey is important for these very arguments.

Recognising the Islamic Republic of Iran's threat to the UK

Last month Policy Exchange published the report I have worked on for some time - 'Tehran Calling: The Iranian Threat to the UK'.

This takes the view that the Iran poses a unique challenge to both the security and social cohesion of the United Kingdom.

Iran is a hostile state in the style of Russia or China: it seeks to interfere with our online systems and takes British citizens hostage. Yet Iran also seeks to wield social and cultural influence in this country, declaring and imposing blasphemy codes, and creating institutions that project power and influence.

You can read the report online here. A pdf can be downloaded below.

Download Tehran Calling The Iranian Threat to the UK 2024

For St George's Day

It sometimes takes an Irishman to remind us of our greatness. Discussing books, the Count states:

"Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her."

Bram Stoker, Dracula.

Call 999 - I need a hijab and a prayer mat!

In Carry On Again Doctor, Dr Ernest Stoppidge (Charles Hawtrey) famously stated that he did not object to jiggery, but takes exception to pokery! I do not object to either, but I draw the line at wokery, and unfortunately there is a lot of it about.

On Wednesday the Daily Express published my latest on that bastion of wokeness, the police force, and in particular the pride West Midlands police take in officers driving around Birmingham with prayer mats and hijabs in their patrol vehicles (?).
While citizens of Gotham City used to put up the bat signal at times of distress in order to alert Batman and Robin, perhaps in Moseley the West Midlands Police logo will be projected in the skies when someone needs a hijab to be urgently delivered?

You can read the article online here, and a pdf is available below.

Download The police are taking the public for granted by indulging in wokery _ Express Comment 10 04 2024

When football was football

I always rather liked Joe Kinnear, who died at the weekend aged 77.

For an insight into football from another era, his obituary in The Telegraph discussed the bonus he got for winning the 1967 FA Cup final with Tottenham:

"His Cup bonus came to £2,500: he gave his mother £500, his sisters £30 and a new outfit each, bought his grandmother in Dublin a TV and an armchair, and himself a new Ford Corsair for £600. He then took his extended family for a six-week holiday in Ireland until the money ran out. “I couldn’t get rid of it quick enough,” he recalled."

While it is easy to dismiss the Kinnear of his Newcastle period as a buffoon, he managed Wimbledon to sixth spot in the top division, and two top ten finishes. Well anyone ever do that again?