Death

We keep being warned that the Assisted Dying Bill is a Slippery Slope. Allow physcians to prescribe suicide pills to terminally ill adults who request them, and before you know it, Kier Starmer will be telling everyone over the age of 29 to report to the Termination Center.

And it is in fact true that most social reforms happen incrementally. We abolished hanging for crimes other than murder in 1823; we abolished it for the majority of murders in 1954; and stopped killing criminals altogether in 1965. We decrimalised (fine word) homosexuality in 1967, but equal marriage didn't arrive until 2014. We banned corporal punishment in schools in 1983; Scotland and Wales banned all forms of smacking in 2020 and 2023, and its only a matter of time before England follows suit. 

So, in fact, yes: if we let doctors prescribe suicide pills to terminally ill people who positively want to end their lives, there is a distinct possibility that in a few years time Esther Rantzem or someone will say "Why aren't we prepared to do the same favour for people who are very old, people who are horribly disabled, people with incurable chronic clinical depression, people who have irrevocably besmirched their honour, people whose one true love has rejected them, people who don't much fancy the prospect of spending the next thirty years in jail, or for that matter people who just happen to be having a really bad morning."

And if you thank that outcome is undesirable, then surely it is better to not take the first step in the wrong direction?

I am very sorry for the twelve year old kids being sent to Tyburn for petty theft, but if we stop hanging children who steal pocket handkerchieves then in a couple of centuries we will probably stop hanging nurses who murder babies.

It's a slippery slope. Innit.

But why do we so rarely hear the converse argument -- what I suppose we could call the Rough Incline argument? The logic of those who are opposed to asssist dying in principle -- because longevity is to be pursued at all costs, because suffering may have value, because all killing is wrong, because life has a quality called "sanctity" -- would surely require you to say that suicide, with or without the assistance of a medical professional, is wrong under all circumstances. Rejecting the Assisted Dying Bill is a Rough Incline that leads inexorably to the repeal of the 1961 Suicide Act. Remember Charlie Chaplain's Limelight (1952) where the washed up comedian finds the ballet dancer with her head in the gas oven, and has to keep it secret because, as the doctor says "Attempted suicide means jail."

Which, I assume, is what some Roman Catholics clergy, at least, do actually want; and which would, as a matter of fact, be a relatively self-consistent position. It is very odd to have a law which says "It a serious criminal offence to help someone, or indeed to fail to prevent someone, from doing a thing which it is perfectly legal for them to do by themselves."

Granted that suicide is no crime, why do we need all these safeguards and doctors and committees? Won't there be something a little ghoulish about the spectacle of a late-stage cancer patient arguing before a judge that he's really does want to cash in his chips and at time and place of his choosing? Wouldn't it have been perfectly logical in 1962 to have fully legalised suicide and made suitable tablets available in chemist shops for anyone who chose to purchase them? Or, failing that, provide walk-in suicide clinics for people who wanted to avail themselves of their services? 

Certainly, a lethal tablet is a dangerous thing to have in your possession -- you could take it accidentally, or use it to kill someone non-consensually -- but that's equally true of a knife or a can of rat-poison. Slipping a suicide pill in granny's gin without asking her first would be murder, and murder is already frowned on by the law. We don't generally ban a thing because there's a chance it could be misused.

And doubtless, the free availability of death drugs on demand would be rolled out in conjunction with lots of help and advise and psychological treatment for people in desperate situations who aren't ready to end it all; in the same way that when we legalise heroin drugs, we'll put lots of resources into medical and psychological assistance for people who want to come off it or not get on it in the first place.

But rather than howling that the state is going to start killing people, couldn't we reasonably ask what possible business of the state's it is to try to stop people from killing themselves if that is what they really want? 

Some of the people who are horrified by the assisted dying bill think that requiring manufactures to label product (so consumers know how much sugar and salt their cheeseburger contains) is an unacceptable intervention by what they call the nanny state. They throw up their hands in horror when Kier Starmer suggests that it should be illegal to smoke cigarettes in pub gardens, and indeed that tobacco might eventually become a prohibited substance. 

Why should nanny require a permission slip from two doctors and a judge before she allows you to do something which is not illegal in the first place?

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Donald Trump is not in fact a supporter of an Italian political movement between 1919 and 1945. The British and the Americans use the word "liberal" in different ways. The only thing which matters right now is that we all get this right. Everyone knows exactly what "woke" means and anyone asking for a definition is an elitist pedant. I am very clever indeed.

 So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one more thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, government of the people by the people for the people, even America itself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm going to live as like an American as I can even if there isn't any America.

why did christianity come to an end in the UK?

a: because it became too liberal: church men said 'it's all about ethics and spirituality, you don't need to worry about all the Jesus and God stuff' and people said 'if we don't have to worry about all the Jesus and God stuff we don't see why we should worry about all the vicars and hymns stuff either'' 

-- solution: start to preach that ol' time religion again

b: because it didn't become liberal enough: people wanted spirituality and moral guidance and all they got was creeds and ancient texts

-- solution: apologise to J.A.T Robinson

c i: because the institution itself became corrupt -- people wanted god and jesus and mass and evensong but not from an institution that shielded child molesters and diverted funds into the hands of flamboyant televangelists 

 -- solution: be less evil

c ii: because the institution failed to move with the times: people wanted god and jesus and mass and evensong but not from an institution that didn't recognise women's vocations, couldn't accept LGBTQ+ people, wouldn't acknowledge its historical role in slavery and segregation etc

-- solution: be less evil

c iii: because the institution became too woke: people wanted god and jesus and mass and evensong but not from an institution that kept banging on about slavery and women and LGBTQ+ rights 

-- solution: be, er, more evil

d i: because the basic premises of christianity became impossible to sustain: people ceased to believe in god because god's existence became impossible to believe in and therefore stopped supporting an institution which did believe in it

-- solution: none; accept that the church was an historical mistake and move on

d ii: because changes in social mores revealed the situation that has always existed; a very small number of believers and a very large number of indifferent or hostile persons who no longer feel social pressure to attend service 

-- solution: none -- both believers and skeptics should welcome the new situation although it does create an issue about what to do with all the pretty buildings scattered round the countryside

why did liberalism come to an end in America and the UK

a:  

 it's all right he didn't mean a word of it nothing is going to happen

people have predicted the end of the world after every election result in my life time

it's all right he probably did mean most of it but he won't actually be able to do it because they have a constitution and we don't

i mean last time around you said he was going to overturn roe vs wade and that never

the most important thing is respecting the result as he would have done if he had

 

closest allies special relationship shoulder to shoulder common values

liberal tears woke virtue signal still not tired of winning

seriously kemi badenoch

right to defend themself 

if liberals hadn't been so liberally then the right wouldn't be so righty so it's all our fault

several reliable well informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitlers anti semitism was not so genuine or violence as it sounded and that he was merely using anti semitic propaganda as a bait to catch

all their disadvantages rust belt middle class privilege if you were in that position you might have done the same so don't go casting the first 

the negro's name is used it is plain for the politicians gain as he rises to fame and the poor white remain on the cabose of the train but it ain't him to blame he's only a pawn in their game 

woke box ticking DEI liberal communist SJW 

i am loyal to nothing colonel except the dream

kemi badenoch seriously

come back emma goldman rise up old joe hill the barracades are going up they cannot break our will come back to us malcolm x and martin luther king we're marching into selma as the bells of freedom ring

it's all right it might never happen 

it's all right it probably won't happen 

every thing is fine

every thing is fine 

Here Comes The Flood

Have you seen that old clip of David Frost interviewing Oswald Mosley?

Frost plays a clip of one of Mosley's speeches. There are really only two possibilities, he says. Either you were deliberately trying to emulate Hitler. Or you were impersonating Charlie Chaplain in the Great Dictator.

The Conservative Party is in the process of choosing a new leader. That leader will automatically become the Leader of His Majesty's Loyal Opposition, and will presumably be Kier Starmer's opponent at the next General Election. 

A decade ago, faced with a similar situation, the Labour Party gave its members the choice between a half-way plausible leader (I honestly can't remember his or her name) and an obviously unelectable one. The party members, including my good self, selected the second option. Overwhelmingly. Twice. 

The Tories are obviously not going to repeat this mistake. Instead, they have offered their members a straight choice between two obviously unelectable candidates. There's the one who wants to fight culture war battles against trans people and equal opportunity acts and the one who would only have people in his cabinet who want to withdraw from the European convention on human rights. I do concede that framing "culture wars" as a "left wing dog-whistle" implies a kind of Joycean genius for word play. 

It will be aesthetically displeasing to have to listen to one or other of these people talking this kind of rubbish at Prime Minister's question time every week. But it makes no difference. It doesn't matter who becomes Leader of the Opposition. Not even a little bit.

And it doesn't matter if Kier Starmer has been a little bit naughty about who pays his tailor's bills; although, since the whole point of Starmer was that he was bright and sensible, it is a little disappointing that he has done something quite so dumb and quite so stupid quite so quickly. We used to slag off Rev'd Tony for his obsession with spin, but you would think that these people paid people to tell them when they were about to do something that is going to look terrible in the papers. 

Of course, it's up to you Prime Minister. I'm sure you know what you're doing. A very courageous move.

British electoral cycles and American electoral cycles are out of sync. Ms Badenoch and/or Mr Jerrick are going to get one shot at becoming PM, and that won't come much before June 2029. By which time either Kamala Harris or JD Vance will be beginning their second terms in the White House.

Or else something weirder and scarier will have happened in the Land of the Free. The repeal of the Twenty Second Amendment. A third Trump term. A Democrat victory overturned by a bigger and more decisive January 6th coup d'etat.

And this blog believes in balance. There is another possibility. If Mr Trump and Mr Vance do not win the election, and do not succeed in overturning the result by legal jiggery pokery or mob violence, then by June 2026, Kamala Harris will have established a Marxist dictatorship and ended free elections in America.

That's certainly the opinion of the official Republican nominee; and it's also the opinion of the richest and cleverest man in the world. And they wouldn't say so if they didn't truthfully believe it. 

When Jeremy Corbyn suggested that internet access might become free his own party literally accused him of being a Trotskyite. 

When Kier Starmer recently moved a painting to a different wall in Downing Street, newspaper columnists literally accused him of being a Stalinist.

But try drawing any kind of parallel between anything that Mr Trump and Mr Musk say and things that that funny little German with the moustache used to say, and see what happens....

"Oh, you liberals, any one who disagrees with you even a little bit is automatically a Fascist!"

"Oh, well, the word Fascist can mean anything you want it to mean and doesn't mean anything at all."

"I shall tell you who the real fascists are -- the ones saying that white people are just the same as black people and that some people are trans and that it's OK to be gay. And the ones who put a black elf into Lord of the Rings!"

"Why oh why oh why can't liberals carry out an argument without resorting to insults?"

I always thought that the Nemesis the Warlock comic-strip in 2000AD took a wrong step when it turned out that nasty inquisitor Torquemada didn't really hate aliens at all: he just thought that giving his human subjects someone to hate was good for business. The legendary Clan of the Fiery Cross Superman story ended on a similar revelation. The chief wizard of the clan didn't believe in any of his white supremacist bullshit. He'd invented the cult because he had a warehouse full of bedsheets he needed to sell.

And how comforting it would be if that were true. There are no Nazis. There are no Fascists. And, in the interests of balance, there are no Liberals and no Communists. There are only gullible people who have been hoodwinked into believing an obvious lie; and cynical liars hoodwinking the gullible for their own ends.

I don't believe it. I think it is highly probable that Mr Hitler really did have an issue with Jewish people. I think it highly probable that Tommy (who's-real-name-is-Yaxby-Lennon) Robinson really does dislike immigrants and dark skinned people and people who say "Allah" rather than "God". But I think it is very likely indeed that many of the people currently serving time for inciting or participating last summer's attempted pogrom had no strong feelings about immigrants or Muslims one way or the other. They were just caught up in the moment. 

Which is why we should have as few of those moments as possible.

I am perfectly sure that everyone who heard Yoko Ono speak at Glastonbury in 2014 believed in that moment that if we hugged our neighbours and imagined that all the grapefruits were made of clouds then war and fracking would end there and then. I am equally sure that everyone at Billy Bragg's Bristol gig earlier this year truthfully believed, in that moment, that the sense of empathy between singer and audience could spread out and defeat the forces of cynicism (which is the real enemy).

In the cold light of day, we might have decided that it was all a bit over done and not entirely realistic. But we were carried along in the moment because we really do believe that love and imagination and solidarity are good things. I have said that I always come out of one of Martyn Joseph's concerts honestly wanting to be a better person. 

It is not fair to think that everyone who goes to right-wing rallies is evil any more than everyone who attends a revivalist meeting is a saint. Not everyone in the audience necessarily believes that everything in a Trump speech is the gospel truth, any more than everyone in the mega-church necessarily believes that everything in the Gospel is the gospel truth. But it is fair to assume that they are going for some reason. It is fair to assume that they are getting something out of it. It is fair to assume that repeated exposure to that kind of thing has some kind of affect. 

It would be very hard to argue that Mr Trump is not an authoritarian -- let's avoid the F-word. It seems very hard to argue that Mr Trump is not an extreme nativist, even a white supremacist. Let's avoid the R-word. 

I would personally find it very hard to argue that Kamala Harris was a Marxist. She seems to me to be rather to the right of most British politicians. But I'm not the richest and cleverest man in the world. I'm not even in the top three.

What would British politics look like after four and a bit years of Authoritarian Nativist rule in America?  Or, to remain completely unbiassed, in the equally believable and plausible circumstance that US democracy had come to an end and the Hammer and Sickle was flying in the Oval Office?

Some British politicians would undoubtedly say that a jolly good shot of Nativist Authoritarianism up the backside is precisely what Britain needs to put a stop to all those National Trust scones and unisex lavatories.

Some British politicians would certainly say that if the leader of our strongest and traditionalist ally has decided to deploy the armed forces against his political opponents, or to intern or expel religious and racial minorities, then it is our job as a friend to back them up. 

Some British politicians would even say that opposing coup d'etats is the self-indulgence of the metropolitan hipster.

And I am very much afraid that some British politicians might say that opposing Authoritarian Nativism is on a level with demanding a unicorn on every street corner.  Very nice and fluffy of course, but not the sort of thing that serious grown-ups talk about. Serious grown-ups understand that if you are really against Authoritarian Nativism, then the serious grown-up thing to do is to stop going on and on about it, sit down to dinner with Authoritarian Nativists and maybe be just a little bit more Authoritarian and Nativist yourself. 

Life isn't like Love Actually. Tough choices. I for one welcome our new insect overlords.

But it's a safe bet that after four years of American fascism (or, to be completely unbiassed, American communism) winter fuel payments and sewage in Lake Windermere will be the least of our worries. 

Whatever happens, on November 6th we will be in uncharted territory. I propose to continue eating and drinking, marrying and being given in marriage, reading comic books and singing sea shanties, until the day that Trump enters into the White House. 

At this stage there doesn't seem a great deal that anyone can do about it. 

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Did Kier Starmer Really Win the Election?

I thought on July 3rd that we had an absurd electoral system; I still thought we had an absurd electoral system on July 5th.

But there is something I little UnBritish about complaining about the rules of a game you have gone all out to win but nevertheless lost? Cricket is a silly game and if you say I was out I am taking my bat and my ball and going home. People talk about "British Values", but I would have thought that sportsmanship and not being a sore loser was pretty high on the list of things that we value more than some other nations do.

It is perfectly true that about a million fewer humans voted Labour this time (when it won a Famous Victory) than last time (when it suffered a Historic Defeat). It is equally true that Labour's 33% of the votes equated to 65% per cent of the seats, when the Tories 23% equated to 19%. None of this is exactly news. Corbyn got lots and lots of votes in 2019 because he got massive majorities in a small number of left-wing constituencies but was narrowly trashed in a huge number of more traditional ones. There is no point in competing under a system which counts the votes by constituency, and then moaning that you would have won under a system which counted total votes across the whole country.

Have you ever played D&D with one of those people who says that he if he'd rolled that natural twenty when attacking the frost giant, instead of when he was opening the door to the frost giants cage, he would have killed the frost giant so it wasn't fair that the frost giant squashed his hobbit?

Counting up the total number of votes cast across the whole country is a pretty feeble way of finding out whether THE PEOPLE loved Jeremy more than Kier, or whether the new PM truthfully has a POPULAR MANDATE. One of the things which makes the present system so silly is that voters don't necessarily vote for the candidate they love the mostest -- or even for the party they actually wanted to win. Everyone takes that for granted. The Tories spent the last weeks of the campaign telling people not to vote Reform even if they supported Reform because voting Reform might take votes away from the Tories and let Labour win. The Greens spent the whole of the campaign telling people that it was safe to vote Green because Labour was definitely going to win so there was no danger of accidentally letting the Tories back into power. Reform had a theory since Labour was definitely going to win anyway, you ought to vote Reform in seats where Reform had no chance of winning because if they managed to come a strong fourth votewise, Farage would be the de facto leader of the opposition.

David Cameron, you will recall, opposed proportional representation because he just intuited in his little heart of hearts that it was not the British way of doing things. The main argument for the divine right of first past the post has always been that the people understand it and know how to use their vote. And I think that is roughly what happened. Overwhelmingly people wanted to Vote The Bastards Out, and voted for the Not A Bastard candidate they thought had the best chance of winning .



There are 650 parliamentary seats and some 46 million votes, so a truly proportionate system would give each party 1 seat for each 70 thousand votes cast. It is perfectly true that, under such a system, no single party would have had the magic 326 votes necessary to form an overall majority. However, a Labour/Liberal alliance would have 299 compared with the Tories 156. The Green Party would have brought it up to 345. The Tories and Reform together could only have managed managed 247. I suppose it is possible that the Liberals would do as they did in 2010 and form an alliance with the Tories, making 234 seats, but Labour/Green would beat them on 267. A Tory/Reform/Liberal alliance would clock in 325 votes, but Nigel Farage working with the Liberals really is the stuff of fantasy. It is overwhelmingly likely that under a True PR system, we would have ended up in with a Centrist Labour Government with a Right Wing Tory opposition.



Doubtless, a Starmer administration which had to pay attention to the opinion of some Green MPs and some Liberal Democrat MPs would feel aesthetically different from one where any dissidents and rebels are back benchers from his own party. And a Tory opposition which had to vote with Reform to stand any chance of ever defeating the government on anything would feel different from the one we have at the moment, where some "Tory" MPs are pretty far to the right and others not so much. But we'd be pretty much in the same place we are now.

Some people are horrified by the idea of a coalitions and alliances. They think that it would lead to a legislature permanently caught up in compromise and horse-trading. Some people believe that once there has been an election, the Prime Minister should be allowed to do what he wants and challenging him goes against Democracy and the Will of The People. (Tony Blair often talked as if that was what he thought.) But some people think that a parliament where politicians have to negotiate with other politicians, as opposed to merely hurl zingers at them, might be rather an improvement.

But so far as I know, no-one is proposing a literally proportional system: what they are imagining is some kind of Preferential Voting System or Automatic Run-Offs, where the punters are allowed to indicate their first, second and third choices and second choice votes are reallocated if no-one gets an overall majority the first time around.

Now, this does change things a little bit -- although since most Green voters would put Labour in second place and most Reform voters would put the Tories in second place, not as much as you might think.

I argued before the election that since Starmer is probably less of a bastard than the other bastards; and certainly one of only two bastards with the slightest chance of getting elected, he was the best bastard to vote for, even though he wasn't the best bastard possible. I entirely stand by that analysis. But it would have looked very threadbare under the preferential system. There would have been lots of First Choice Green/Second Choice Labour cards; and a goodly wodge of First Choice Reform / Second Choice Tory ones. I myself would have written a a big 1 by the New Corbyn Idealists party, a medium sized 2 by the Green party and a small but reluctant 3 by the Centrist Labour candidate.

But under such a system, the entire campaign would have been conducted differently. "Don't vote for that lot because the other lot might get in and you hate them even more than you hate us " would have ceased to be such a compelling argument. Parties would have had to spend more time saying "Vote for us because we've got the better policies" and less time engaged in a prisoner's dilemma exercise in which punters have to second guess where the punters in the other booths are putting their crosses.

What I would like best would be a system of Compulsory voting. I am not envisaging Orwellian stormtroopers frogmarching citizens down the road to the polling station. I imagine elections would be more like censuses, with a week or a fortnight before the deadline to get your votes in, small fines for people who don't comply, and sensible conscience clauses for people who think that every time you vote, God kills a puppy. Currently, elections are largely won by the party who most efficiently identify their supporters and persuade them to get off their bottoms and cast their vote. Under a compulsory system, persuading uncommitted voters that you were the best candidate would become a much bigger part of the process.

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad, mad, mad system: a system where the incumbents best tactic is to say "A vote for the Far Right will result in too decisive a victory for the Moderate Left." But it happens to be the system we have. And the answer to the question "Did Starmer really win" is "yes, of course he did?"

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Now Gods, Stand Up For Bastards!

[I'm still in freeform mode, here]

Of course, in an absolutely perfect world, I would not have chosen to write a provocation about how we had a better class of fascist bastard in the 1970s than the class of fascist bastard we have in the 2020s literally seven days before fascist bastards started rioting in cities across Britain, including my own fair city of Bristol.

It's not the first time we have had rioting in Bristol, but it's usually about something serious, like the site of a new supermarket. 

I was out of town for the whole thing. Perhaps someone could write a surrealist drama about a group of people in a tent in an English seaside town listening to folk music while civil society collapses around them: perhaps it would be the British equivalent of Cabaret. 

I only saw Cabaret, the movie, quite recently, although, weirdly, I knew the title song from Butlins end-of-the-pier shows. Songs about too much pills and liquor were not thought un-conducive the to the hi-di-hi atmosphere. I liked Cabaret very much indeed. 

The little man whose name escapes me who comperes a lot of the Sidmouth gigs was cross about the riots as only an English person can be cross, and said (correctly) that the atmosphere of a folk festival, where there are no strangers, only friends you met in the tent last night and whose names you have totally forgotted, and where wholesome teenagers learn to morris dance and play the squeeze box represents the true spirit of England. Which it does. But trust Martin Simpson to look out into his audience and mention the elephant at the ceilidh -- that everyone present was privileged by virtue of their age and class and most particularly the colour of their skins. There were black performers -- two of my very favourite performers of the whole week were black people -- but vanishingly few black punters. 

I think I mentioned that Martin did Woody Guthrie's song about the Mexicans who died on a plane to Los Gatos Canyon as a protest against the dehumanisation of immigrants. You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane; all that they'll call you will be deportees. 

I don't think that Farage can be directly blamed for what happened; but then I don't think any one person can be directly blamed for what happened. I don't believe in Engrams. I don't believe in Woke Mind Viruses. But I don't believe in Fascist Mind Viruses either. I don't believe in free floating ideas that jump into people's heads and make them disown their parents and throw bricks at policemen. I don't believe that the world is being controlled by a cadre of Jewish Communists holed up in a cave in Frankfurt; but neither do I believe that the world is being controlled by a continuity Nazis from a bar in Argentina. I don't believe in Satan, not in the way that some evangelicals seems to envisage him, at any rate. This is probably the greatest trick he ever pulled.

But I do think that the process that brought us to where we are is bigger than one man and bigger than one party. If Hari Seldon had wanted to produce race riots in 2024, he might very well have started in 1984 by planting the idea of "political correctness" in the minds of nice, mild mannered and not even remotely fascist newspaper columnists and Radio 4 panel show hosts. Ha ha ha you can't say bald you have to say differently hirsute ha ha ha. And so the idea is planted that there are things that They Won't Let You Say. Let the idea fester and grow for forty years. Woke this, SJW that, actually-its-about-ethics-in-game-design, British Jobs For British People, critical race theory, make America great again.  

Is Centrism a counter attack, intended to stop the forty year retreat from liberalism in its tracks? Or is Centrism, which by definition shifts the centre of gravity to the right, part of the Plan? Would a beardy Prime Minister in a cardigan who said "immigrants are nice" have brought the far-right to a stand still, or provoked them into being even farrer and ever righter? Will a sensible Prime Minister in a suit who says "immigrants are a problem, but not as much of a problem as some people think" make the universe less racist in the long run? Are the 2024 race riots the endgame, or are they another small step towards a fascist dictatorship? Or is Hari Seldon doing something much subtler? Perhaps psychohistory tells us that once we have seen the ugly face of patriotism, we will recoil from it and create a Corbynite utopia, in, say, 2064. History is very long indeed.

I don't believe in secret Foundations. I don't believe in memes or engrams. I just believe in Me. Yoko and Me. 

In the 1970s, Irish republicans blew things up on the British mainland with alarming regularity. Mrs Thatcher consistently took the line that these attacks were nothing to do with politics, and were simple outbreaks of criminality. On the one hand, this was a perfectly pragmatic and indeed moral approach. Murder doesn't stop being murder because there is a political motivation behind it. If someone kills innocent people, it is no defence to say "But I honestly believed it would help a political cause I sincerely believed in." Terrorism is, I can say without fear of contradiction, bad. (Never mention Nelson Mandela.)

But on the other hand "the Provisional Irish Republican Army has nothing to do with politics" was a blatantly false statement. The idea of a person waking and thinking "Top of the morning, to ye, to be sure to be sure, I surely would like to blow something up just for the craic, so I'll pretend to be opposed to the partition of Ireland and join an illegal paramilitary organisation, so I will" is beyond far-fetched. The "solution" if you can call it that, to the "troubles", if you can call them that, turned out to be political.

What should we call this month's riots and this months rioters? Our beloved Prime Ministers may god bless him is largely going down the Thatcher route of saying that they are simply criminal thugs. I agree that calling them anything else would give then spurious credibility. Starmer could probably have used the army to quell the unrest, but that would have fed into to the lunatic theory that we were experiencing the first shots of a European civil war. 

But clearly, the rioters are not just criminal thugs, although criminal thuggery certainly occurred. A person may steal a sausage roll during a period of civil unrest without particularly caring what the other civilians are getting restless about.

It is tempting to wonder if what we were experiencing was a very British take on January 6th? You and me and Jeremy Corbyn believe Kier Starmer to be a very moderate socialist; or perhaps even a slightly less conservative Conservative than Rishi Sunak. Some of us think he has betrayed his political principles; some of us think that he is engaged in some very practical political pragmatism; some us think that both of those things might be true at the same time. But hardly any of us think he is a lefty. But if you read the Daily Telegraph (which you shouldn't) or the online hate site formerly known as Twitter (which you definitely shouldn't) you will discover that very many people think that Starmer is a Stalinist, a creature of the hardcore Left, a manifestation of the phenomenon called Woke, and an actual Communist. And if the Woke is literally going to reduce the UK to a nuclear wasteland and a third world shit-hole, then resistance is obligatory.

Elon Musk says that civil war in Europe is inevitable, that the "the present situation" is precisely analogous to that in Star Wars, the Matrix and V for Vendetta, and that is incumbent on people to "join the resistance".

A civil war between whom, incidentally? White people and brown people? The cross and the crescent? The People and the Government? Or is his theory that the woke engram can be defeated with sticks and petrol bombs?

Meanwhile Farage says this kind of thing.

"Remember, of course, he [Kier Starmer] doesn't have much legitimacy any way. The party only got 33.8% of those that voted. Only 20% of the eligible electorate put this man in power. He needs to start listening to the people."

Our electoral system yields wildly disproportionate results. Everyone knows that. But the idea of a "less legitimate" or "illegitimate" prime minister -- and a separate, authoritative "voice of the people" expressed other than through the ballot box, is alarming. It feels like standing in front of a mob of psychotic knights and wondering out loud is anyone will rid you of a particular priest.

What percentage of the eligible electorate voted for your Brexit, Nigel? Can you remember?

There is a story in the Canterbury Tales about how a Jew cuts a Christian child's throat and throws him down a well. So the local people kill all the Jews. There is a folk song, the Jew's Garden, on a similar theme. Some Christian children are murdered: a rumour breaks out that the murderer was Jewish; a mob starts attacking Synagogues and ghettos.

We don't yet know exactly what happened in Stockport. We do know that an unimaginably horrible, and so far as anyone knows, pointlessly motiveless murder took place.

Strict empiricism says that up to now, water happens to have always boiled when we apply heat to it; but that it doesn't follow from this that heating water causes it to boil. We can't definitely say that the murder "caused" the riot. Many things "caused" the riot. But sing "merely pointless criminality" until you raise the roof,  the riot was in some way related to the unimaginably horrible murder. 

The murder happened and then the riots happened is a story; the riots happened because the murder happened is a plot.

"Enough of this madness now. We need to permanently remove Islam from Great Britain. Completely and entirely" wrote Laurence Fox, a few hours after the murder. It is unclear how you remove a religion from a country. Is the plan to deport all the people who practice the religion -- or all the people who look as they might -- to some foreign country? (To where? Rawanda?) Are there going to be forced conversions? Will the Muslims have to embrace Christianity or is merely renouncing their current faith sufficient? But what if some people renounced their faith in public and continue to practice it in secret? Something like that happened in Spain in the fifteenth century. Will there be some organisation whose job it is to ask former Muslims tough questions about their new found lack of faith? To have, in fact, an inquiry? I never expected that.

There is a word for "attacking the Jewish quarter because you think a Jew has killed a Christian". I think the word also applies to "attacking Muslim communities because you think a Muslim has killed a white person." I think we should start using that word.

As a matter of face the presumed killer was neither Muslim nor an immigrant, although he did have dark coloured skin. But that is really neither here nor there.

Some right wingers believe in an ethnostate: an England purged of people with dark skin and unusual names. People who think that you are only British if your father and forefathers unto the tenth generation were English. I saw a man on the hate-site formally known as Twitter stating that left-wing comedy writer Armando Iannucci was not British despite having been born in Glasgow. "Being born in a stable doesn't make you a horse" he explained. But some right wingers believe in cultural hegemony, in Powell's theory of flags and institutions and churches; in Tebbit's cricket test.

After the murder but before the riots, Nigel Farage released a video podcast. He said that the police described the murder as a "non terror incident"; but that he "wondered if the truth was being withheld from us". He said that he thought this was a "legitimate question".

Legitimate. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

If "legitimate" means "conforming to the law" then "are the police lying to us?" is indeed "legitimate" question. There is not and should not be any law against asking if the police are telling fibs. They sometimes do. There isn't an shouldn't be any law against me asking whether Kier Starmer is a shop window dummy being controlled by an alien consciousness resembling a giant octopus. "Is Kier Starmer an auton?" a legitimate question. But it is also a bloody silly one.  

But if "legitimate" means "conforming to logic", I am not quite so sure. The idea that the police would say that something was not a terrorist attack when something, in fact, was a terrorist attack requires you to believe a whole set of things about the police, and the state, and government, which are not, I think, supported by logic.

Policemen do tell lies. They certainly withhold the truth. That is why twenty-seven year old men are always helping the police with their enquiries; and officers are always pursuing multiple lines of investigation; and suspects sometimes cannot be named for legal reasons. Some secrecy, some withholding of information goes with the territory.

"Are the police lying?" may be a legitimate question. But legitimate or otherwise, I would not have a high opinion of a man who stood in crowded theatre and said "As a thought experiment I would like you to entertain the possibility that the management is withholding information and this building is as a matter of fact on fire."

People on the online hate site formally known as Twitter said "well of course it was a terror incident don't you think those poor kids were terrified?" This is not an argument. It barely even qualifies as a pun. It's on level with the man who says that civilians are subject to naval law because we address judges as "your wor-ship" and that the royal family must all be pedophiles because some gay men refer to themselves as "queens".

But perhaps it would have helped is the police spokesman had said "not a terrorist incident", "not politically motivated" or "not part of an organisation". It turns out they were telling the truth: it was in fact none of these things.

Farage concluded that "something is going horribly wrong in our once beautiful country". Well: yes and no. Yes, murders are horrible and wrong. But no, unimaginably terrible murders don't happen very often; that is why they are so terrible and so hard to imagine. To draw a general conclusion about the state of the country from one abhorrent event is silly. No-one sensible would look at a single horrible incident of a child being killed by two other children and infer an epidemic of child-on-child violence; and conclude that we need a new political party to deal with it.

Later that day, Farage explicitly framed the rioting as a putative revolution.

"Our country is being destroyed, our values trashed and the public on the point of revolt."

And two days later, he wrote:

"The majority of our population can see the fracturing of our communities as a result of, mass, uncontrolled immigration, whether legal or illegal. Yet to attempt to debate this in the public arena leads to immediate howls of condemnation. A population explosion without integration was always going to end badly. I have said this for many years." 

It isn't exactly clear what "integration" would look like: Farage frequently claims that Reform can't be a racist or right wing party because there are Muslims who support Reform. These are presumably good Muslims, assimilated Muslims; where the Muslims being terrorised by the rioters were bad Muslims, un-integrated Muslims; Muslim Muslims. What's the difference? It can't really just come down to clothes and accent and a preference for spicy food, can it?

But the message is clear. Population explosion without integration. Always going to end badly. I have said this for many years. I said a long time ago that if we let too many people into Britain; and if they didn't immediately start living like British people and doing what British people do then a very bad thing would happen, and now the very bad thing is happening and if we aren't careful it is going to carry on happening and happen even worse and this will be the fault of everybody except the people actually doing the bad thing. One wonders if he ever saw the Tiber frothing with much blood?

Farage is asking legitimate questions. The people rioting against immigrants are expressing legitimate concerns. Starmer is not a legitimate Prime Minister. Fine word, legitimate. The most common meaning, of course, is "a child born to parents who are married" as opposed to one born out of wedlock.

I think the people who keep insisting that their questions and their concerns are legitimate do so because deep down, on some unconscious level, they know that they are bastards.

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