Category: democracy

Is it them or us?

We are no longer viewing events at a distance. This isn’t history. I’ve talked often about the dangers to democracy, our democracy. But now they are here, they are immediate.

Hilary Mantel referred to history as ‘the plan of the positions we take when we stop the dance to note them down’. We are the dance.

We’ve always had sharp differences of view, left and right and in-between. But the principles of representative government, freedom of speech and association, and the rule of law, have in the post-war era, in the Western democracies, never been under threat. Until now. Could it now be, literally, them or us?

We’ve always had a ruling class, defined by money or land, or both, but our democracy has over two hundred years more or less (we could of course go back much further) held them in check. But now we have social media businesses kowtowing to Trump (Silicon Valley likewise), while shedding the responsibilities they once avowed, And the message that they and other media convey so readily is that here – in the UK and in the USA – we’re broken societies, failed states.

We’re at risk of surrendering our democracy too easily.

Reading a review of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, ‘Shadow Ticket’, I came across the following. The words are the reviewer’s, not Pynchon’s. ‘Fearing disorder and rejecting freedom’s responsibilities, we willingly cede liberty in exchange for simplicity and a false sense of safety. Fascist tendencies have always been lodged deep in the American grain.’

Are we now more willing to cede power to a new ruling class, one that will be disinclined to relinquish that power through the democratic process?

Extending that line of reasoning… it’s argued we want safety from a defined enemy, who the media have helped define for us and who, in the case of the UK and the USA, is an immigrant population who are deemed to be taking our jobs and preying on our services, and on our women and children as well. Take it up another level, and there are conspiracies, and a class, in our case a self-serving middle-class, who are in effect conspiring against us.

The direction of travel is ominous.

Reading Paul Preston’s ‘Architects of Terror’ I’ve been made aware of the role that an entirely fictional ‘Jewish-masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy’ played in justifying the violence of the Spanish Civil War. Franco likened his victory to that of the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, some 450 years before: ‘We have not shed the blood of our dead to return to a decadent past, to the sad liberalism that lost us Cuba and the Philippines.’

Germany after 1933 and Spain from 1936 are just two examples of how easy it is to slip from democratic government, vilified as ‘sad liberalism’, to autocracy.

The violence in Palestine and Gaza, in the Yemen and Sudan, the brutality of ISIS, Boko Haram and Islamic State, have all seemed distant. We didn’t ourselves feel threatened. Putin invading Ukraine has brought it to our doorstep and yet swathes of people across Europe are willing to support him. He represents an old order which, however divided, gave people security. Young people headed to towns, to western Europe, industries closed or moved away, remittances from abroad weren’t enough to secure either prosperity or pride. We’re not yet faced in Europe with the effective transfer of power from the courts to one man, as is happening with the Supreme Court’s connivance in the USA. But we’re heading that way.

We liberals have always thought we had the moral high ground. We’re locked into the old post-war order and it’s as if nothing has changed. But swathes of our populations want to claim back that ground. They don’t have the same sense of moral niceties that we do. To them, our high morality is sham. Our cities prosper while local towns, once the backbone of our prosperity, are in decline. Democracy has failed them. It is our game, no longer theirs.

And look at the language I’m using. Is it really us or them? And which side am I on? Could I be persuaded that democracy has failed, and some form of autocracy, backed up as necessary by violence, might be the only answer?

OK, that’s a rhetorical question, for me at least. But for how many others might it be a reality?

Soft power in a weaponised world

Many themes in this Putin and now Trump-disrupted world are in play at the moment. One is soft power, which we in the UK have relied on, aided by the strength of our services sector, in the post WW2 years. Soft power requires a global perspective, anchored by a trade in merchandise and ideas worldwide, something which over the last ten years we’ve downplayed. It has little time for supremacist ideas. Country always comes first, yes, but in the same way that family comes first. A well-functioning society is one where cooperate with, we don’t denigrate, other families.

Cutting foreign aid is another very much related theme. It impacts directly in our soft power. So too does immigration policy as outlined a few days ago by Keir Starmer. Do we really risk becoming an island of strangers? And is he really doubting that immigration at least sustains economic growth, or doesn’t actually help drive it?

Here in the UK we’ve tucked in behind the USA, hugging coat tails, slipstreaming, over the last few decades. But you can’t slipstream a stalling vehicle, or one, worse, that wants to go the other way. Nor should a government be slipstreaming an opposition characterised by a total absence of workable policies.

We need, in the UK, a complete reevaluation in how we relate to the world. How our embassies, trade missions and aid policy function. How our role as educators to the world, through our universities, can be expanded. How we, in cooperation with other countries, face up to very real immigration issues. How we build on our digital strengths. How we rebuild our social capital (see below). How we rebuild our relationship with our European neighbours. How we can lead a green revolution. How all the above relate to building our output, productivity, trade and prosperity. Above all, how, in working with the EU, we can strengthen and guarantee our defence.

How, in short, we can relate to the world on our own terms and no longer as a smiling American lackey.

It also requires an end to defeatism. There’s a sense in some quarters that we’re in crisis. But that is in the nature of democracy. Democracies thrive on crises. They add urgency but within a broad boundary of shared expectation.

But is this true now? A related theme specific to our time is the apparent demise of the two-party system which has anchored our politics since as long ago as 1924, and the demise of the old Liberal Party. Tory and Labour long operated within a broad framework of understanding and possibility. With Reform in play, as a false prophet, and five parties in competition in recent local elections, our politics is open to more extreme views. In Germany the Christian Democrats would never cooperate (would they?) with the far right AfD, but our hollowed out Tory party might do just that with Reform.

Is ours in any sense a failed state? As Reform would have us believe. Yes, our self-belief as a nation is at a low ebb. Likewise our social capital, our confidence in our health service, education system, judiciary and prison service, roads and infrastructure, utilities. But in each area there’s a functional basis to build on. Disruption isn’t the answer. A key purpose of government has to be to re-create that sense of self-belief.

We require that same positive approach looking beyond our borders, as exemplify by Starmer’s just-announced deal with the EU. And the government’s India trade deal.

There is a sense in which we are, in the second Trump era, all so much wiser. Under Biden we could wander along the edge of the precipice, worried about falling, but not actually do so. I’ve often written about preserving liberal democracy, sensing that precipice, one of many waving banners with too few taking notice. Now we’re over the edge, and clinging on. With Trump in power we can see what falling might be like.

How could it have come to this?

I’m focusing here on Trump’s Heritage-Foundation-inspired attack on universities and where it might take us. Mindful always of where it might lead in the UK.

They are portrayed as bastions of privilege and wokeism. Deny funding is the Trump approach, until they cave in. But if 80% of academics are left-of-centre, how can a 180-degree turn be effected, one which is focused on wokeism broadly defined and freedom of speech reversed? The aim is to disallow issues of gender and race and promote attitudes to family and sex from a bygone era, applying a crude pseudo-Christian justification. In effect a forced conversion and a meek acceptance of a new power and ideas structure. In that context some research programmes may be retained. But who is to decide what is worthy and unworthy? What programmes would lose out? Or lose their essential continuity?

More than that, could America’s lead in research and its implementation survive under a different regime, denied the self-belief that drives it? Turn academia into a state-sponsored Chinese-style mega bureaucracy? But that requires state funding, which will never be forthcoming under Trump.

Columbia University caved in to Trump’s financial threats. Harvard is holding out and taking the Trump administration to court. Harvard have to hold. They all do. 400 university presidents recently signed up to a statement condemning ‘unprecedented government overreach and interference’.

Higher education is characterised as an elite activity. That gives opponents an opening. Elites which self-perpetuate down generations invite attack. How can endowments continue to be encouraged without conveying privilege on the donors?  If that was an issue easily sidelined it needs to be front of stage now. More broadly, how can access be widened?

But privilege, in truth, isn’t what it’s about for Trump. In the same way it isn’t for Orban as Hungary’s far-wing populist trailblazer. It is about the transfer of power to a moneyed rather than academic elite. To a power which dictates to academia not only what it should study but what academics should believe.

The Trump/Heritage approach is, like Brexit, window-dressed to appeal to a socially-conservative population which can easily be manipulated into believing that woke and privilege are somehow two sides of the same coin. Remove one and you remove the other. The reality is that privilege would remain but find a different home, in Silicon Valley and indeed, should tariffs allow, a Wall Street resurgence. The old blue-collar regions will remain as outcast as before. New AI and Silicon-charged inspired investment will go elsewhere, and not to the benighted rust belt.

China is not an example to follow. They have made an extraordinary success of state-directed capitalism, and they have instilled a sense of urgency into elite workforces with remarkable skill and commitment levels, but at a cost in terms of freedom no free society should ever contemplate.

It could be argued that Trump and Orban populism is only Chinese-style autocracy dressed up for a post-liberal post-democratic dispensation. Liberal societies die when illiberal parties win over electorates, innocent of what they might be about to lose, and then pull up the drawbridge behind them.

I’m trained as an historian, a field currently open to all ideas and persuasions. Let governments control academia and history and all its kindred subjects within the humanities could be twisted into the tame service of the powers that be.

Where are we now??

I abandoned my blog a few months ago. ‘Abandon’ feels like the right word. The liberal world was already in crisis and that was before the profoundly illiberal Trump was re-elected. So much has happened since. It’s more than I could do to resist the temptation to put down a few thoughts on where the world is now.

What kept me awake last night were jail sentences. An American resident illegally deported and now imprisoned in a brutal Salvadorian jail. No, he won’t be returned to the USA, said the Salvadorian president, Bukele. Trump standing alongside smirked a complicit smirk. Does Trump care that Ekrem Imamoglu, Mayor of Istanbul, and main rival to Erdogan in Turkey, has been locked up on absurd corruption and terrorism charges? Would Trump look to stymie some future presidential challenger if he had the chance? There’s no certainty he wouldn’t. You could argue that nepotism and the accumulation off family wealth are Erdogan’s stock in trade. Looking no further than the role of Trump’s own family, and their financial transactions, and to bitcoin, might one not say the same about Trump?

Imamoglu would have known the risks and yet he stayed the course. There can be no certainty that he will ever be released. Think of the Kurdish leader, Abdullah Ocalan. It’s now 26 years in jail. The title of Ahmet Altan’s book was ‘I will never see the world again’? He did. He was released. Arrested on a whim. Released on a whim.

Courts in Russia hand out long prison sentences for any kind of anti-government expression. Five years for associates of Navalny. Sixteen years for a social media post.

The four freedoms of the European Union, allowing the free movement of goods, services, capital and people, allied to freedom of expression, now stand out ever more clearly. Giorgio Meloni in Italy has surprised many by holding true to them, albeit while pursuing a socially conservative agenda. Where might a National Rally government take France if elected next year? What of Orban and Hungary? He’s taken over both the press and courts. Will that be enough to ensure his re-election next year? Might we have another Poland, where the populist Law and Justice government was voted out in 2023?

Law and Justice in Poland, and Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy, are both opposed to abortion and wider gender rights. The National Rally in France claims to be an ardent supporter of women’s rights. It supports abortion. But many in its ranks disagree.

On the subject of gender, here in the UK we have had today had a Supreme Court ruling stating that the legal definition of a woman has to be based on biological sex, which is not what supporters of transgender rights had been hoping for. The decision was, I think, inevitable. The safe spaces argument has cogency. But the issue won’t go away.

Staying in the UK. We have Reform still polling 25%. How will that convert into votes come next month’s local elections? Any support for Trump’s tariff agenda will surely be a vote loser, but his attitudes to gender and race, his scorn for academia, his taking down of ‘elites’ and bureaucracy, may well appeal. And that puts Farage on strong ground, even if he hasn’t through his political life ever propounded a sane, considered and politically workable policy. A focus on investment and social mobility has to be the way to handle social division. Not disruption for its own sake

We should be focusing on Ukraine and Gaza, and, as David Lammy as Foreign Secretary has bravely tried to do, on Sudan. Helping Ukraine produce the weapons it needs, as well as supplying from our own stocks. Holding Putin to account for the incredible number of his own Russian soldiers killed in pursuit of a very personal vision he has of restoring the old Soviet hegemony. (Yes, we were at fault for being far too slow to recognise this was his intent. And for our Western arrogance. But that story is not for here.)

Also, holding Netanyahu to account, as we should the RSF (Rapid Support Forces) and government forces in Sudan for the appalling loss of life they’ve inflicted. There is also Taiwan, and what China might yet do. We’re now in the crazy position of taking sides with China in a trade war against Trump’s USA, when Xi Jinping’s China is the most illiberal society of all.

Even truces or cease-fires can be hard to imagine. In Sudan, Arab versus non-Arab divisions in Darfur have been intractable for decades. In Israel/Palestine divisions go back a hundred years. For Ukraine/Russia it’s many hundreds of years. The UK and the EU working together on defence, and the UK and France, Starmer and Macron. That at least has to be positive.

Tacking another tack, what of Starmer’s benefits policy? His return to the old Blairite and especially Cameronian agenda of reducing benefits. There’s been a massive increase since 2019 but it’s argued that we’re only now approaching the level of benefits enjoyed in some other Europeans countries. At the same time, there has to be a reason for this surge in the take-up of benefits. Are we genuinely less healthy, physically and mentally? I can see both sides but there are good reasons why a financially straitened government has to take the action it’s taking.

Tariffs are our current obsession. It seems we might, in the UK, escape the worst of them. We shall see. But such minor straws of good fortune in the current whirlwind are no more than straws. As I said many times in this blog we must deep-anchor our liberal values, personal, social and economic. I think we have currently a government with as good a chance of handling our current crises as we’re likely to have. That is a small mercy.

Making Things: Jony Ive and Elon Musk

Compare the worlds of Jony Ive, designer (with Steve Jobs) of the iPhone and iMac, and Elon Musk.

Both Ive and Musk are makers. Ive spends much of his time in his own mind, he tells us*, and he shows a remarkable contentment. It’s an inheritance from his father, a passionate and pioneering maker in his own right. He has always operated at a personal level. Musk’s aspiration from early on was to scale-up. Apple magic is small-scale, intimate, the hand and fingers. Musk it seems can only operate at mega-scale.

While Ive is always part of a team Musk has totalitarian instincts. Indeed, a totalitarian practice, as DOGE, his ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, has demonstrated.

Human history is the history of making things. ‘Making maketh man.’ Back in the mid-sixteenth century even Michelangelo, dominant in his own sphere, relied on patronage, as artists before and since. Musk by contrast has no need of patronage. He has turned that old order on its head. He now patronises power. He is a would-be prince. If he’d been alive in sixteenth-century Rome and Florence he’d have pushed both Popes and Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici aside, as I imagine he’d quite like to do with Donald Trump.  

(The Doge of Venice back in the same era had limited authority but maximum glamour. Musk’s very different DOGE has maximum authority and nil glamour.)

He wants to get directly to the result. By the shortest possible route. Compare Boeing’s Starliner, so long in the making, and Musk’s Space X, already there. You focus only on what is important to efficient functioning. And you deal ruthlessly with any obstruction. (You also have to have luck on your side.)

If you apply that to people who work in government service, they can be dismissed as readily as Tesla employees. Processes can be engineered. Automated. Re-engineered. But can the efficient operation of a state with its very different objectives be compared to running a business?

We’ve not touched on methodology, in this case the callow youngsters that Musk is using at DOGE. A 25-year-old investigating Internal Revenue Service files. The clueless looking for clues. 340 million people. They are not spare parts, they have individual realities.

The result – the ‘baby’ of a caring and compassionate society gets thrown out with the bathwater. And compassion is somehow seen as criminal. Any gain is efficiency is unlikely. A wrecking ball produces – a wreck. To support this, a culture of dishonesty, and ‘accidental’ lies, is permitted, and more, encouraged, with Musk leading the way. And, to date, vilification is more than OK with the Republican base.  They’re used to it. It’s part of government. And if you lie to win power then you will lie to hold on to it.

Think back to Jony Ive. He speaks with a deep integrity, he evinces calm. How the world appeals in the hand and to the eye, to the user, is what drives him. His world and Musk’s didn’t have to be incompatible. But Musk wants to rule the world and if a Musk-style world implodes, then he will always have Mars to retreat to.  The rest of us will probably miss out.

*To hear Jony Ive talk about his life, check out a recent edition of the BBC programme, Desert Island Discs.

Goodbye to all that

If I can resist the temptation to hit the keyboard again – this will be my last post, after fifteen years. There is a time and a season for all things.

We’re in crisis times. The height of the Cold War might have matched them but I was a toddler or grubby-kneed kid at the time. We’ve lived in a blissful paradise in the post-Berlin Wall years. And we never doubted liberal democracy. But from our elevated heights we’ve looked down on other countries. Dictators and ideologues have seen their chance and fired up negative sentiment. They are calling the shots.

There is also a new and disturbing breed of doubters on the right of our own politics. They focus on a false dichotomy between liberalism and conservatism. Left matched against right is a better way of characterising differences of opinion. (We don’t have socialists in the manner we used to, but we do have wide sections of the population committed to social action.) Or engaged state versus small state.

Issues of immigration, race, gender, sovereignty, Empire and its legacy, all divide us. No liberal society or any part of it should seek to dictate their resolution. We must hold fast if we are to avoid the populism of a state-controlled media and courts (illiberal democracies as they are rightly characterised), and all that might follow.

As a good liberal I believe we will prevail again, with our freedoms to write and think and associate and vote intact. But any resolution will be well beyond my lifetime.

That’s driving my decision to bring this blog to an end. It was all, in those heady days fifteen years ago, about enhancing liberal democracy. It’s closer now to a behind-the-barricades defence.

A few final thoughts. All rather negative. But hang in there, if you can bear it, to the end.

Is there any optimism left in the world? Must we all now hunker down with our own private pleasures, treat wars in Gaza and Ukraine as on another planet, play wait-and-see with Trump, until the inauguration, and then wait-and-see what happens, and all the while acclimatise ourselves more and more to disaster, so that with each month that passes we hunker down yet further, retreating into rabbit holes?

Forget the geopolitical, you might say, what about the UK? We have farmers demonstrating over the introduction of inheritance tax on farmland above £1m in value, with Jeremy Clarkson a tub-thumping arch-hypocrite to the fore, and the Daily Mail et al stirring up their ancient readerships.

Surely, the government could have anticipated there’d be a furore?

Likewise on the Winter Fuel Allowance. Removing it within weeks of the election was a lousy idea. It has coloured everyone’s view of the new government.

So, yes, we can engage with our own home-grown politics. But it’s pretty bleak story. And then there are the climate-change talks in Baku, a fossil-fuel paradise, of all places. And I haven’t mentioned China.

How many more reasons for gloom? And yet, it’s always been like this, going back two centuries and more, bad times then good times then bad times. We’ve hung in there before. We have to now. Liberal democracy has been hard-won and it’s now in the gene pool of the world. Autocracies take many forms. Liberal democracy at its core has one simple core liberal message. One I’ve elaborated on it in this blog for fifteen years.

Keep the faith!

Next year in America

I posted a blog after the 2019 UK election which I intended as a marker to check, over the longer term, the outcome of the promises made by Boris Johnson. He failed on all counts. I’d like to do something similar for Donald Trump. I’m not, however, on such sure ground, expecting failure, as I was then. Trump has been through the hoops once and knows the route and can anticipate the snares, and he has his accomplices already in mind, if not yet in place.

I intend in a year’s time to check back with this post and see how it’s all working out. I’m not into predicting. Over the last ten, maybe fifteen years, we have seen the world turned on its head. I can’t see any kind of stability coming any time soon.

I’ll make the deep state my starting-point. Agencies such as the FBI and CIA and Federal departments have to function within government and cannot normally be held accountable in the public space. Under Trump they’ve been labelled the deep state and turned into a conspiracy against the American people which can only be rooted out by turning traditional merit-based appointments into political appointments. That includes appointments to the Supreme Court and Federal courts.

His appointment as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will ‘ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions’. ‘Drill, baby, drill’ in his mantra. ‘Government bureaucracy, excess regulations and wasteful expenditures’ are all in the firing line. Elon Musk will be a key figure.

He will continue to play games. Might he in a few cases row back on hard-line policies? His apparently amiable meeting with Joe Biden yesterday, and the orderly handover which now appears likely, took me by surprise. But, also yesterday, he’s put forward an ultra hardliner, Matt Gaetz, as the new Attorney General. He would end ‘the partisan weaponisation of our Justice System‘.

How will conspiracy theories, which thrive in this kind of environment, play out in the coming months and years? And will Trump continue to demonise opponents? He has made wild threats against journalists. Musk has helped enormously by turning Twitter into a right-wing promotional agency. Will the January 6th protesters be pardoned?

Fox News will have a free rein. The Washington Post and LA Times hedged their bets ahead of the election. Don’t alienate Trump has been the mantra. How much will free speech will be impaired? LGBTQ+ rights and critical race theory will be, more than ever, in the Trump media cross-wires.

What will be the effect on university campuses and by extension on anyone with a liberal arts education and a belief in an open, liberal democracy? The difference in voting preferences in last week’s election between locations which have high levels of college education and those that don’t were stark.

Are the old right/left dividing lines gone forever? A working class with socially conservative instincts is now firmly Republican. But might that change if Trump Republicans turn out to have feet of clay? Will Democrats realise how important it is to be a broad church on social issues?  Could the party re-discover its working-class roots? Might turncoat Latino voters turn back?

Disillusion with the Federal government in Washington has played into Trump’s hands. He has the blue Republican states very much onside and will use it to his advantage. One example may the abortion issue which he will probably leave to the legislatures of the individual states.

Trump will build his wall. His credibility depends on it. Deporting up to 12 million immigrants is a challenge at a whole other level, both logistically and in terms of the resistance and violent response it will engender. And heedless of the damage it will do to the American economy.

To what extent will tariffs, 60% on Chinese goods, 10% or more the rest of the world, impact the American economy and industry and patterns of consumption? Mercantilism, maximising exports, minimising imports, is a throwback to another age. The other side of American exceptionalism is and has always been America-behind-closed-doors. Leave it to the merchants, the industrialists and the money men to look abroad.

Taxes will fall (or, in the case the 2018 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, be renewed) and regulations cut back, with the aim of streamlining business. If high interest rates result might Trump intervene to keep then low? Might the Federal Reserve lose its independence? Can short-term stock market gains be sustained?

Related this is the rise of the plutocrats, the new libertarians, with Musk their primary example, and their likely role in a future administration, and their belief on a slimmed-down government. Michael Lewis points out that the gap between the billionaires who know how to manipulate finance and ordinary guy is getting ever wider. Financial markets will become ever more opaque.

With an avowed ‘America First ‘ and non-interventionist approach to foreign policy Trump could as easily be friends with autocratic regimes as democratic governments. We could lose any sense of American democracy as a role model for free societies worldwide

How will relations with Russia, Ukraine, China, Israel, Gaza, Iran work out? And North Korea. Might Trump have a better chance of influence because his government wouldn’t be trying to tell governments how to improve their human rights records? And what of the ‘friends’ of America and the West: the EU, the UK, India, Japan, South Korea, also Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Will they be kept onside?

The ultimate test will be 2026 mid-terms and 2028. Will Americans go into those contests with the same open debate (however fractious) and open and accountable elections as they’ve done in 2024? Trump, we know, has plans to suborn the courts. To what extent might he suborn the media, both social and imprint? Hungary’s Viktor Orban has pointed the way.

Leave God, leave Allah, out of it

Book festivals are a feature of our times. The two big festivals at Hay and Cheltenham bring in big crowds. Over the last two days in Cheltenham the subjects of events I’ve been to have included trade routes centred on ancient and medieval India, the American election, and Palestine and Gaza. They are apparently disparate but there is a link I’d like to explore.

Speaking during a panel discussion on the subject, ‘Trump: The Sequel’, Tim Montgomerie, founder of the Conservative Home website, referred to his belief in the superiority of Judeo-Christian civilisation.  That set me thinking. It’s not a notion to which an Indian would subscribe. 2000 years ago, and more, India traded west, to Rome and Europe, and east, as far as China. Both Hinduism and Buddhism had their origins in India. It is a necessary humility on our part, in our modern world, that we recognise India as having a status equal with our own.

A little closer to home there is an alternative and wider appellation than Judeo-Christian and that is ‘people of the book’. It’s an ancient Islamic term that refers to religions which had a shared scripture with Islam, and that included Christianity. ‘People of the book’ were protected in Islamic countries by a legal status known as ‘dhimma’.’ There is of course a wider, non-legal status – our common humanity.

We have 1400 years of divisions between Christian and Muslim. It is helpful to be reminded of that common heritage, as I was when we listened intently to two Palestinian novelists talking about their books, and about their life stories. One growing up away from her home country, the other growing up in Israel, near Jaffa, from which her parents had been forced to move.

I am English, and a Christian. My instinct is indeed that my heritage is somehow special, focused on notions of democracy and liberty, and freedom of speech, which struggled to find acceptance anywhere in the world down the millennia. Including our own, until relatively recently. I will always argue passionately for liberal democracy and a superior form of government, but to argue beyond that, for some kind of special status, and more than that, for superiority, we are on dangerous ground. (Is Christianity inherently democratic? That would be an interesting discussion.)

Other civilisations have their own sense of their uniqueness, as places apart from others, offering a world-view no others can. The consequences can be pernicious. China defines itself against the West in terms of its four-thousand-year history, and boundaries defined as the furthest point of its past imperial expansion, which has had terrible consequences for Tibet and the Uyghurs.

There’s also a deep significance in the combining of ‘Judea’ and ‘Christian’. Christian history has until recent times treated Jews as outsiders in their midst, never escaping guilt for the death of Jesus, tolerated and too often terrorised and murdered.

Now all is changed. The Jewish people have a home, and Western and specifically Christian support. ‘Judeo’ now combines easily with ‘Christian’ and Palestine is viewed by the American and most European governments from an Israeli and not an Arab standpoint. Atrocities can be justified.

The best teachers and some of the best friends of my life were Jewish. I am a passionate supporter of the Jewish people, of co-existence of Palestinian and Jew, and I am a Zionist if Zionism had recognised the constraints that sharing territory with another people, who had occupied that land for many centuries, involved.

‘Judeo-Christian’ is at risk of being associated with a right-wing and intolerant agenda, and with a form of populism that at its extremes becomes the ‘great replacement theory’, whereby an Islamist (not Islamic) conspiracy aspires by means of higher birthrates and migration to become the dominant force in Western cultures. It is the Protocol of the Elders of Zion, used so perniciously from the 1920s onwards by Hitler and others against the Jewish people, refashioned.

The testimonies of the two Palestinian novelists, talking about the lives and reading from their novels, will stay with me forever. They have lost their country, and those who choose to fight on their behalf are terrorists. Terrorists, as the Irgun were considered, fighting after World War Two for a Jewish state against the British.

Beyond October 7th, and the retribution that followed, and continues, lies a Palestinian state, and a radical cessation of Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. And an end to the notion that there is anything biblical, Jewish or Christian, about the process.

Leave God, leave Allah, out of it.

What might happen next in France?

The news from France last evening briefly pushed aside Emma Raducanu, Starmer’s whistle-stop journey through Britain, and Lewis Hamilton winning the British Grand Prix. That last one got a cheer from me, but the defeat of the National Rally (RN) in France really lifted the spirits. I’m not just a bit of a political junkie, I’m a foreign affairs junkie. What goes on in India, Russia, Germany, above all the USA, really matters.

Starmer’s election had already lightened the mood. Now the news from France: the National Rally pushed into third place in the second round of the parliamentary elections by the New Popular Front (NPF), with Jean-Luc Mélenchon France Unbound the lead party, ahead of President Macron’s Ensemble alliance.

Big questions were raised weeks back over Macron’s decision to call a parliamentary election in France. Various shades of madness. Rory Stewart on the Rest is Politics podcast was appalled. It made no sense. But to Macron it did.

I’m writing this from what might just be a Macroniste point of view. I have absolutely no inside knowledge. But I’m intrigued as to why he called the election.

He had a marginal, just-about-working majority but the RN had just won big in the European elections, and they had momentum. And it was building. Delay until the presidential election in 2027 and Marine Le Pen might just have been a shoe-in. France’s record as one of the strongest European economies and a leader in Europe would have counted for nothing. Maybe better to face the issue head-on now.

The assumption seems to be that he expected a centrist majority. A coming together of centre left and centre right. But did he? He will surely have factored in the possibility of a strong hard-left showing.

The Mélenchon left is France is well-entrenched and opposed to Macron on key issues like pension reform and retirement age. The financial markets see the NPF as ‘dangerous for the economy’. They may be right, but I don’t see them as an existential threat. They are not threatening the institutions of democracy in the manner of Victor Orban in Hungary. (Though Mélenchon has only recently come out with full-hearted support of Ukraine.) Also, the far right’s nativist agenda is anathema to the French left.

While I can’t see Mélenchon compromising I can see others on the left working with Ensemble to form a left-of-centre government. The aim of any such government should surely be to target the biggest issue, in France as it is in the UK – the sense of being overlooked, left behind, by a city-based, out-of-touch and (in France’s case – not the UK’s) overly technocratic government.

It may be that Macron had factored in something like the outcome we had yesterday. The European election may have convinced him that some kind of change of direction was needed. And he may indeed have no choice but to tack toward the concerns of small town and rural France, where the RN’s base lies. We will see how things work out over the coming days. Before the Paris Olympics get underway?

Beyond that – will it be chaos? Or disaster? In either case, giving the RN a free run.

The day after election day

Elections are emotional occasions. And referenda: I remember lunchtime drinks after a night watching (literally, as a teller) as voting slips were unfolded in 2016. The empty glass. This time, a chunky bacon bap and a full cup of coffee at the local village hall.

As for the big-timers. Exultation: arm-waving and Sweet Caroline if you’re Ed Davey, big big smile if you’re Keir Starmer. Glad-I’m-out-of-it chuckle from Jacob Rees-Mogg. (He may be fooling us.) Hiding on the age of the stage, in a state of shock, thoroughly deserved, if you’re Liz Truss.

But then there’s Nigel Farage. He’s going for Labour, he says. He thinks their support is wafer-thin. That he can win folk round with his rabid ‘Britain is broken’, left-behind, anti-immigrant narrative. He’s now in parliament. He has a mouthpiece.

I’d like to disregard him, but he is a superb maker of noise. A favourite word of Labour in its early days was fellowship: Starmer is part of a long tradition. Compare Farage. A man without a sense of history. He pitches one group against another. He feeds off hostility behind that over-wide smile. He’s at home with Trump. Half-truth comes easily.

Contrast key words in Starmer’s Downing Street speech yesterday: ‘stability and moderation’ (two words working as one), and ‘service and respect’ (again, two as one). Compare the provocateur that Sunak had become, pushed by party and media.

One interesting stat: more than half the new intake of MPs are new to parliament. In 2019 only 21.5% were new. In every way, we’ve a clean sheet. Farage and his small team won’t be the only newbies, though they may shout more. 

Also catching my eye. Larry the cat has now over thirteen years outdated five Tory prime ministers. The green of Angela Rayner’s trouser suit walking to 10 Downing Street. (She is Stockport. Her, and my, home town. I’m proud of her.) And Wes Streeting lost in a sea of nautical metaphors. Don’t sail when you’re tired!

Back to the essentials. How will Tories respond now? Penny Mordaunt, speaking when she lost her seat: make it a broad church. Robert Buckland and Grant Shapps are of similar mind.

Invite Farage in, match him with Braverman, and the Mail and Telegraph, and we will have division, and some pretty wild misreporting. If Starmer can push through his agenda, then Farage and the Tory far-right will have less and less to rant about. The far-right want there to be battle-lines. Play their game, put our liberal democracy into play, and the battle would become existential.