You don't know what you've got til it's gone

 

I remember growing up and being told that we had fought the two world wars to protect our freedom and that the difference between us and Russia during the Cold War was that we had freedom, and they did not. It turns out that I was duped and that it was all just a lot of lies and nonsense to make the masses fight.

When I went to Russia, I discovered something rather different. Ordinary life was in many respects just as free as here. You could go for a barbecue in the woods with loads of vodka and cigarettes and you could do just what you pleased. There were limits when you got back to your job or your university, but if you played the game, they weren’t that onerous.

The real difference was in freedom to say what you wanted and read what you wanted. You could whisper to your friends in private without much risk of anything going wrong so long as you were careful. But the books you could read and the news that was printed in the newspapers or broadcast on the TV was controlled by the state.

The problem with this is that ordinary people have no other source of information and after a few generations of selective truth and lies most people knew no better. I had to teach my teachers Russian history.

There is a museum in Moscow dedicated to the Second World War that only has exhibits about Soviet victories. The defeats are unmentioned and largely unknown. The truth about how Soviet soldiers behaved when they raped and pillaged while conquering Berlin is still unknown in Russia or dismissed as Western propaganda. When I first mentioned the murder of Polish officers at Katyn I was met with blank looks from educated people.

When communism ended people found that everything, they had been told was lies that the god they had worshipped was merely decaying in tomb outside the Kremlin and that their whole belief system was built on sand.

When you cease to believe in Lenin it isn’t that you believe nothing, it’s that you believe anything.

This is what followed. In Russia people rediscovered Orthodoxy but didn’t know who the icons represented, and so weird beliefs began to take hold. There were cults involving strange men preaching the end of times, there were imported cults of Hare Krishna, scientology and Mormonism. Finally, there was the cult of Putin, and we were back where we started with the falsification of history and ordinary Russians not quite knowing what was true anymore.

To maintain the falsehood that Russia was still a major power Putin had to start invading other people’s countries just to maintain the illusion that he had created.

We in Britain looked on and still look on smugly at the stupid Russians believing their own governments propaganda, but we are losing our freedom too and the loss of it has already gone very far very fast.

There are two important freedoms. The freedom to do what I please so long as it does not harm others and the freedom to speak and write what I please with very few limits such as not shouting fire when there is not a fire.

It is not the business of government to protect me from myself. That is to treat me as a child where my parents were absolute monarchs because I knew no better, and they could stop me harming myself and could tell me when to go to bed.

The excuse that government must protect me from harming myself because it will cost the state money to treat me is to take away all freedom of action. It could be used to stop me driving a car as I pollute and might have an accident. It could be used to stop me eating fish and chips as it makes me obese. Go down that route and it is as if John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty never was written and soon will be banned.

 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was sent to the Gulag for making a joke about Stalin that was overheard and reported. He was unlucky. He was made an example of. The purpose of the example was to deter others from speaking freely or writing freely. It worked.

So too here. Labour has punished random people some of whom said things that were dreadful, but many of whom were merely unlucky.  On another day they would have got away with it. If there had not been any riots and the need to punish someone like poor Admiral John Byng, then no one would have been jailed.

Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.

My goodness me that was written in the eighteenth century. Quite candid or indeed Candide. It could have been written right now. Better not translate it. It might not be safe.

I hate both the rioters and the government for making me feel this way.

The result of all this random punishment is that no one quite knows what they are allowed to say or indeed do. Under certain circumstances, if for instance there is another riot, the government might find it convenient to punish almost any action or anything that is written. It is in this way that we all lose freedom. We self-censor and gradually what we took for granted is lost.

The loss of freedom of speech is not felt immediately. For the first generation or two people in the Soviet Union knew what the truth was because they had been able to read reasonably freely before the Revolution. So too here.

What Labour is trying to do is to limit our freedom to object. Mainstream opinion commonly held in the 1970s or 1980s let alone the nineteenth century about a whole range of topics gradually becomes unsayable. Much highly erudite Victorian scholarship about Islam will very soon be Islamophobic and therefore illegal to say and soon perhaps even to read. Mainstream Christian views about marriage and homosexuality that all of our grandfathers held are now taboo and could get your fired.

It’s only because I could read freely and write freely and think freely that I could teach the Russians their own history, but already we are one generation into students believing in critical race theory and that boys can become girls and that our whole history is one of villainy until a rush of wind brought us enlightenment and all of the benefits that went with it.

Labour is much worse than I thought it would be. It’s one thing to be socialist we can endure that like we did in the 1970s even if the lights go out, it’s quite another to be authoritarian.

I look back at the time when as a student on a grant I could go to the pub with my friends whenever I wanted. We could buy chips or a curry whenever we wanted because it was cheap. We could smoke because it was cheap, and you could smoke in busses and the cinema and it seems like I am looking back to a time before the Revolution curtailed all our freedoms.

I am reduced to writing riddles and fairytales and waiting like Shostakovich on the landing for the NKVD to arrive because he didn’t want to wake up his family.

There was a time not very long ago when we laughed at the Americans for banging on about freedom all the time because we took it for granted.

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone?

They took down Thatcher and put up Lenin a lot

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A fairtytale that has nothing to do with Britain

 

Once upon a time there was a stammerer and his father was a fool maker. He ruled the Visigothic kingdom of Baetica in the year 636 AD and wore black clothes with white powder on his face with thick black eyeliner and listened to Susan and her Banshees while pretending to be depressed.

His queen was merely a daughter of a barrel maker and King Beer as he was affectionately known because of his love of a beer with curry continually reminded her and everyone else that he was the son of a fool maker which made him much more working class than a petit bourgeois barrel maker.

Beer’s chancellor was the daughter of border reiver only she robbed from the elderly so as to pay the trade unionists. When someone told her that lots of old people were freezing, she said “Well let them eat coal”.

Now Beer thought it was one of the benefits of Moors crossing into Baetica that it was now possible to eat curry. Prior to that there had only been paella, tortillas and patatas bravas. But multiculturalism was so beneficial that Beer could now have his beer with Chicken al Medina.

Now Baetica had signed up to an agreement not only with the rest of Hispania but with Byzantium too. Anyone who arrived on a small boat and said they were scared to go back to where they came from had to be allowed to stay. Things didn’t work out all that well for Byzantium, but that’s another story. There is no more Byzantium and its capital Constantinople fell in 1453. But there was nothing to worry about and the idea that the people of the Eastern Roman Empire would ever be replaced was and still is a conspiracy theory. There just aren’t any left for some strange reason.

Now some people in Baetica began to be worried about the number of Moors who were living in their country. These Moors began going on demonstrations complaining about the fact that Palaestina Prima was ruled by Byzantium and that it dared to fight back against the Moors who were attacking it.

From the river to the sea Palaestina Prima will be free they shouted and what they meant of course was that it would be free of Byzantines.

Some of the Baeticans were concerned that the demonstrators also rather hoped that Baetica would go the same way as Jerusalem and that it too would benefit so much from multiculturalism that there would only be one culture from Al Andalus to Indonesia.

Now Beer thought that it wouldn’t do to arrest any of the Moorish demonstrators even though they kept shouting support for those who were terrorising the Byzantines who were under siege. It wouldn’t get any better for the poor Byzantines even though they dragged out their demise for a few hundred more years. But Beer kept telling everyone about the benefits of multiculturalism even as beer was banned in Jerusalem though it had the benefit by then of Chicken al Medina.

Now one day word reached Beer’s palace that someone had arrived at the northern port of Compostella, and he was called Iago. Better not trust anyone called Iago said Beer he’s liable to make you murder your wife.

Now Iago also claimed to have been a friend of someone called Hay Zeus and Beer found this story even less likely. Not only had Hay Zeus claimed to have been God he had also died over 600 years ago. So how could this Iago have been his friend?

Now at this time some of the Baeticans began demonstrating about their concerns about ever more Moors arriving in Baetica. They could see that things were not going well in Palaestina Prima and they thought that if things continued in this way it would be the same there.

But Beer told them that it was all a conspiracy theory and that the multiculturalism that followed the Moors arrival only benefited Baetica just as it benefited Palaestina Prima.

Now Iago who was sometimes known by the Prefix Sant was called by the Moors El Sydney James and he pointed out that if they didn’t get rid of Beer there would be no beer in Hispania either and then he would have to lead the Reconquista even if he was dead on a horse, which after all made a certain sense given that he was at least 600 years old.

It may have been a conspiracy theory that the Moors were going to conquer all of Hispania, just as it was a conspiracy theory that the Pilgrim Fathers would conquer all of North America. Who could believe that this small bunch of pious puritans in funny hats could do that? But they did.

Anyway, Sant Iago wanting to save himself 800 years thought it best not to wait until 1492 and the fall of Granada before realising that the benefits of multiculturalism might have been a touch exaggerated. So, he began warning people about what was likely to happen if they didn’t do something now.

But the son of the fool maker and the daughter of the barrel maker and the thief from the border all decided that something must be done. We can’t have people going around stirring up trouble. We can’t let this El Sydney James Carry on.

And so it came to pass that Sant Iago was brought before the court of King Beer the son of a fool maker and his queen the daughter of a barrel maker and Beer washed his hands in one of his wife’s father’s barrels and Sant Iago who was the first to join Hay Zeus was again the first to be martyred for telling the truth.

Beer soon found that there was no beer and indeed no Beer and is remembered now merely for his continual boast of being the son of a fool maker and for cooperating in his own destruction. A fool indeed.

The attempt to stop people telling the truth failed. Santiago Matamoros came back when he was needed, because truth is eternal and merely awaits those who have the courage to tell it.  

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What should the government pay for?

 

What should the government pay for? Sometimes these things are described as being free. But of course, they are not free. They are paid from taxation.

This can be viewed in terms of a calculation. At the bottom of the scale someone with no income receives a lot from the government. He receives some form of unemployment benefit. He receives housing benefit. He receives medical care and schooling for his children. But he doesn’t personally pay for any of these benefits.

On the other hand, there may be someone who is very wealthy who receives no benefits, pays for private medical care and private schools for his children. This person pays a lot of taxes but receives few benefits.

Unless you earn a very great deal of money you probably take out more than you pay in with tax. But this isn’t the only calculation.

If there were no unemployment benefit, it doesn’t follow that the unemployed would starve. There are many countries without a welfare state like ours which do not have mass starvation. Rather the lack of a welfare state means that the unemployed have a strong personal incentive to do anything to earn money.

So too the lack of an NHS would not mean that we had no health care it would just mean that we all had to pay some form of insurance rather than pay taxes.

If schools were not paid for by taxation, we would instead each pay for them out of income. Some of us would be better off some of us would be worse off, but most of us would pay about the same as we do now, only we would pay the cost of the school rather than taxation.

The point is not to suggest that we abolish the welfare state or fund schools and healthcare by taxation. The point is to show that it is just as possible to fund the services we want with our own income as it is to give a proportion of our income to the government and have it fund it. Some people with very high incomes would win some people with very low incomes would lose, but everyone else would be about the same.

Funding things through taxation does not benefit the rich and it does not benefit those on average earnings, it benefits those on low to very low incomes who otherwise would be unable to afford schools and healthcare and their living expenses without the subsidy from other people’s taxation. This is usually called socialism. The poor vote for socialism because they want other people’s money by taxing it instead of earning it themselves. If they broke in to steal your money they would be called thieves, but because they vote for Keir Starmer they are called virtuous.

If we were to have laissez faire capitalism in its purest form, then there would be minimal taxation. The government might pay for the police and the army, but otherwise would leave citizens to pay for everything out of their own income.

This sort of society would have very little unemployment. It would probably have better healthcare for those who can afford it and schools would provide a better education because we would demand it for the money, we all had to pay. A poor school would fail just like a poor shop that did not give value.

Laissez faire capitalism would mean firms could pay lower wages and lower taxes and would therefore make greater profits. They would have no problem attracting workers because people would be willing to work for lower wages as there would be no welfare state to pay them if they didn’t. The result would be higher growth.

Again no one is suggesting that we should return to this sort of Victorian model of capitalism. But it was precisely this model that made Britain prosperous and powerful.

At the other end of the scale, we have the government paying for everything. At this point we have socialism. Taxes are 100% and income is distributed by the government so that everyone has equity. It doesn’t matter if you are unemployed or Taylor Swift you receive the same amount.

But why should Taylor go to all these stadiums? Why should she write all these songs? Why should she perform in a swimming costume? She would receive just the same if she stayed in bed all day. This of course is the problem with socialism. It takes away all of the incentives to work or study or try to improve. It therefore has to compel you to work and prevent you from going somewhere else where you can earn more.

We can all see the disadvantages of laissez faire capitalism even if it would be economically advantageous. It leads to an impoverished underclass like in Dickens. We can all also see the disadvantages of socialism.

The problem we have in Britain is that we are moving away from a situation where people were happy to have schools and healthcare and a welfare safety net, but where otherwise we all had to take responsibility to a government which is paying so much in free this and free that it no longer makes a profit and even people on average earnings are paying nearly 50% of what they earn in taxes.

If laissez faire capitalism is the most efficient economy and 100% socialism is the least efficient then Britain is at the midpoint of the scale, and it is getting worse. This means not only is Britain less efficient, it means we barely grow. Because we barely grow, we become poorer in relation to those economies that do grow. Countries which only recently were much poorer than us are now on a similar level or set to surpass us.

This is the danger of socialism. It may seem fairer, and it certainly is beneficial to the poor in the short term. But if Britain becomes steadily poorer because of socialism even the poor will be worse off than they would have been. Would you rather be on benefits in Britain today or in Albania? Well continue as we are, and you will find yourself in Albania.

So, the issue is what should the government pay for? I might accept that the government should fund a limited welfare state, schools and healthcare. But every new thing that government pays for pushes us nearer to socialism and further away from laissez faire capitalism. It therefore makes us poorer.

Should government pay for university tuition? No. The person who benefits from university education ought to be able to pay back a loan and if he will not be able to he ought not to study further but rather work.

Should government pay for the arts? No. Theatre, fiction, orchestras and art are forms of entertainment. They should pay for themselves in the same way any other form of entertainment such as Taylor Swift or wrestling.

Would this make art boring? On the contrary the most boring forms of art are those that have benefitted from subsidy. Every great novel and play I can think of was funded by the market.

The state needs to become smaller because then it will become wealthier, and this will benefit all of us not only the wealthy but the poorest also. If Britain can grow over the decades ahead, we will be able to afford to provide a more generous welfare state to those who really need it. If we continue to increase the size of the state not only will we become more inefficient we will become poorer too and then we will be able to be generous to precisely no one.

What should the government pay for? As little as possible.

This is also the only way to discourage people from coming here.

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Labour will force us to be free

 

Labour would like to create a society where everyone is equal and where poverty has been eradicated. Just as socialism is its long-term goal so too, I think is a world without borders where there are no such things as countries, no such concepts as nationality and where everyone regardless of race and religion can move where they please.

This is why the Left reacted with such fury to the UK voting for Brexit. If the EU can create a Europe without borders where everyone can move freely and where the distinctions between European countries are lessened and eventually erased, then in time it may be possible to replicate that model worldwide.

But the creation of socialism requires the state to force people to share their wealth with strangers and requires the state to re-educate people so that they are no longer motivated by their own profit and care just as much for strangers as they do for their own families.

So too it is quite clearly human nature for people to wish to form countries otherwise the world would not be full of countries. We wish to create borders just as we wish to create fences that separate my property from yours. It will take force to make us change our minds on this issue or else perhaps it can be done in the same way that the EU progresses. Mission creep.

The EU clearly presented its goal from the beginning. It wishes to create a federal European state. But it was possible for Britain to join thinking that the EC was merely a common market and would not change the nature of the UK as a sovereign nation state.

I came to the conclusion in 2016 that if you didn’t want the UK to be a member of a federal EU state you had to vote to leave, but lots of Remainers thought it was possible to have both the benefits of EU membership and to retain what we have always had. Even now citizens of member states don’t quite grasp the destination. It all happened so gradually. It’s just that one day they find that what they thought was their country was really subordinate to people they didn’t vote for in Brussels and now it’s too late to leave.

It will then matter very little indeed if you play international football because there will be no more European nations.

So too with erasing borders worldwide. If you had told people in 1945 that Britain could not defend its borders against people arriving in rubber dinghies, they would have laughed. After all we had just defended our borders against the Luftwaffe.

If you had told them that one day more than 20% of the UK population was from abroad with much more than that in London and that sometimes 700,000 migrants would arrive in the UK from overseas in just one year, they would have been furious. What were we fighting for then?

But it all happened gradually. It didn’t matter whether you voted Conservative or Labour it happened just the same.

The demographics of the UK have been changed more radically in the past 70 years than in the past thousand years, but it began slowly only now to accelerate. It is a fait accompli. You wake up one day to find your town changed beyond recognition. First, it’s London and Birmingham, but then it’s small towns in out of the way places. Then it’s everywhere.

Migration is part of human nature. We are all descended from migrants of one sort or another. The Celts migrated here and the people who built Stone Henge were lost to history. The Celts too had to deal with migrating Romans, Angles, Saxons and Normans. We are the result.

We cannot therefore blame people for wanting a better life. That is what our ancestors wanted too. But you likewise cannot blame the Celts for resting the arrival of the Romans, or for the Anglo-Saxons resisting the arrival of the Normans.

The Left I think would like a world where the issues of race, religion and nationality had ceased to divide humanity.

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too.

If populations around the world become so mixed and if it is possible to live wherever you want without borders, then the goal will have been achieved. If there is nothing to distinguish between one population and another then the concept of nationality becomes redundant, not merely between states within the EU but between states everywhere.

This ideal is on its way to being achieved. In twenty or thirty years the demographics will have changed so that 40% are the descendants of relatively recent migrants in another ten or twenty years it will be 60% and at that point the concepts of nationality and identity that we have had for many centuries will become meaningless.

To get where we are now it has been necessary to educate people that they are wrong to complain and that if they do nasty words will be said about them. If anyone predicts that this experiment with mass migration might not end well, they are condemned and called nasty words too. But where in history has it worked well?

It didn’t work out well for the Native Americans when Europeans arrived in North America, and these were at far lower levels than recent migration to Europe. The Native American died of disease, were driven from their homes, fought wars and lost and ended up on reservations.

It didn’t work out well for the Aboriginals in Australia. The lifestyle they had led for thousands of years ceased, many were murdered, and their descendants live disadvantaged lives frequently below the level of those who descend from migrants.

I don’t blame the migrants who went to either North America or Australia anymore than I blame the Celts, the Angles the Saxons or the Normans. But it’s hard to find a single example from history where migration was beneficial to those who were there already. There is nothing left of the Picts who ruled Caledonia for centuries apart from some earthworks and a few carvings in stone.

Every single instance of mass migration in history has been met with conflict for this reason. This is Labour’s problem and we have seen how it will solve the problem.

In order to achieve its goal of a world without borders with socialism Labour will have to use a lot of force indeed, because we will not choose it. No one ever has.

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The annual GERS argument helps the SNP

 

I never pay much attention to GERS figures, and I think that the Pro UK arguments that follow them each year are stupid and harmful to the argument against Scottish independence.

The argument goes Scotland makes a loss therefore it requires a subsidy from the UK. Therefore, it couldn’t become an independent state because doing so would involve bankruptcy.

The argument is stupid primarily because it depends on hoping that Scotland will continue to be poorer than the UK as a whole. But if we are Pro UK, we ought to hope that both Scotland and the UK prosper and that the existing economic inequalities between regions lessen and eventually cease. The GERS argument depends on hoping that Scotland remains worse off. It is anti-UK and anti-Scotland. It fuels nationalism and fuels separatism.

If you argue that Scotland cannot become independent because it runs a deficit and depends on a subsidy from the Barnett formula (the so-called Union dividend), what do you argue if Scotland in the future runs a surplus? It is perfectly possible that a future Scottish businessman may invent the next important technology just as a past American businessman invented Amazon or Microsoft or Apple. Scotland may then become more prosperous than other parts of the UK. So, what do the GERS enthusiasts argue then? Do they join the SNP?

The truth is that Scotland does not run a deficit. The GERS figures are nominal and theoretical. If parts of the UK whether the Northeast of England, Cornwall, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland spend more than they raise in taxes these all become part of the UK’s deficit and ultimately the UK’s debt. Scotland no more runs a deficit than Cornwall, because Scotland is neither a federal state because the UK is not a federation, nor an independent state, because the UK is a unitary state that happens to have devolution.

Would Scotland or Cornwall run a deficit if they became independent states. This too is a theoretical question. You might argue that the GERS figures suggest that Scotland would immediately be bankrupt, but you could equally have argued that Latvia and Ukraine would immediately be bankrupt after leaving the USSR. No doubt Soviet Economists did.

But this is to ignore the behaviour of people in newly independent states and the behaviour of their governments. Every one of the states that became independent after the breakup of the Soviet Union continues to exist and continues to have a functioning economy. If they discovered upon independence that they were running an unsustainable deficit they cut spending, raised taxes or sold debt on the open markets. It might not have been a pleasant experience, but each of them managed.

The idea that out of all of the newly independent countries in the world including South Sudan, Uzbekistan and East Timor only Scotland would be unable to manage is preposterous.

Indeed, if I were concerned about Scotland running a nominal deficit and I was desperate to reduce it to one or two percent, I would argue that the only way for this to occur is for Scotland to become independent, because it looks unlikely to happen otherwise. The GERS figures are therefore an argument for independence not against it.

Why does Scotland nominally spend more than it earns? It does so because it can.

Next year the GERS figures will no doubt show that Scotland spends still more than it earns than this year? Why because there is nothing to stop it doing so.

This is the fundamental problem with devolution in the UK. It gives power and quite a lot of power, but without responsibility. If the UK economy ran a 10% deficit there would be a crisis like the one Liz Truss provoked only much worse. Markets are willing to lend to the UK at sensible rates only because they believe they will get their money back. But there is no such problem for Scotland.

Our government can have free tuition fees, it can have free prescriptions, it can have stupidity like rent controls and spend a fortune on ferries that don’t arrive precisely because it has power without responsibility.

It’s exactly the same situation as a student at university who depends on his parents to subsidise his spending. He can go out every night, he can go on holiday, he can feel independent, but he has power without responsibility because in the end Daddy will pay the rent and pay off the credit card bill.

This is why Scotland has poor governance. Voters do not have to make hard choices. They can vote for free this and free that without facing the consequences of their votes.

It is for this reason that public spending has reached the absurd level of 51% of GDP in Scotland. It is easier for us all to work for the public sector than to make products that the rest of the world wants to buy. All of this would immediately cease on day one of independence.

At that point Scotland would be able to manage a deficit of perhaps two percent and so we would have to give up employing quite so many in the public sector, we would have to give up the free this and the free that, we might have to increase taxes and we would have to deal with the negative consequences of breaking up the UK as would everyone else in the UK. But we would all have to manage.

The Pro UK argument cannot depend on GERS. It wouldn’t occur to anyone in the USA to argue that California ought not to be independent because it runs a deficit. The unity of the United States does not depend on such calculation and nor should it here.

The full stupidity of the GERS argument each year is that it treats Scotland as if it were independent in order to argue that it ought not to become independent. It is a soft nationalist argument as indeed was the whole concept of being better together. We are one nation indivisible don’t treat us as being separate if you don’t want to fuel separatism.

Scotland does run a nominal deficit, and this would have consequences if it chose to become independent, but it runs this deficit only because it is part of the UK and because it can.

The soft nationalism that gave us devolution is the root cause of our poor governance. It treats us like children who need not face the consequences of our folly. No wonder we behave like them with our flag waving and our grievances.

If Scotland and the UK as a whole, which has a level of debt that is close to unsustainable, wants more prosperity, we are all going to have to grow up. The answer is not nationalism. The answer is free markets, working hard, making goods and services that others want to buy and spending less than we earn. That way we can all profit. To suppose that we would be better off with separatism is to suppose that the USA would be better off if it is split up. No one thinks that. No one at all.

 

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The Labour pressure cooker

 

In 2020 there was widespread rioting, civil disorder, vandalism and looting in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police. This spread to Britain where large numbers of people broke the Covid regulations in place at the time forbidding crowds to gather.

The cause of the disorder in the USA was not merely that a police officer killed Floyd, but the perception that large numbers of black people had similarly been killed by the police and that nothing was being done to prevent it. So too many black people feel a long-standing grievance going back some centuries that they are not treated equally but rather are the victims of the same racism that brought their ancestors to North America as slaves. These and other reasons can be given as the causes of the disorder.

In Britain there is not the same degree of police violence against anyone as there is in USA. Still many black people sympathised with the Black Lives Matter demonstrators and many on the Left in particular sympathised also and were keen to show their support for the demonstrators even if some of those demonstrators were involved in violent disorder. Keir Starmer was one of them.

Since October 7th last year when Hamas murdered 1200 Israelis and kidnapped hundreds of others there have been large numbers of demonstrations against Israel with expressions of sympathy for the Palestinian cause. At times these demonstrators have expressed themselves violently by means of the signs that they carry and the words that they have shouted.

Why have so many people in Britain demonstrated about a war that does not involve the UK and over which the UK has little if any influence? There is on the Left a general sympathy with the Palestinian cause. It is also obviously the case that many British Muslims in particular feel deeply that it was unjust for Jews to migrate to the Middle East and take over land that had previously been owned by Muslims. I think they view it as a religious goal that Palestine ought to be once more controlled by Muslims. I can think of no other reason why they are interested so much in this conflict rather than any other.

So, I am able to explain without passing any particular judgement over both the demonstrations that followed the death of George Floyd and those that followed the latest war between Israel and the Palestinians. It ought to be possible for me to do this about any contemporary disorder without being accused of sympathising with the disorder or justifying violence.

The recent violent disorder in the UK followed the murder of three girls. But the causes go back further, and I think they are connected with the difference in response from the authorities to the disorder.

The response of politicians, the media and the police to the disorder following the death of George Floyd and the Pro Gaza demonstrations has been quite different to the recent rioting in response to the murder of the three little girls. What’s more I strongly suspect that if a white person for far-right reasons had murdered three little black girls and black people had created widespread disorder and rioting the response would have been quite different too.

Black people can demonstrate about George Floyd and Keir Starmer will take the knee in sympathy as will footballers for some time afterwards. Gaza supporters can say dreadful things about Jews and argue for the eradication of Israel from the river to the sea and nothing much will happen to them. But compare and contrast what happened in response to the more recent disorder.

I don’t think anyone should be demonstrating. The Black Lives Matter demonstrations didn’t help anyone either in USA or here. The Pro Gaza demonstrations did not save one life in Gaza. The recent violent disorder by white people has merely made life worse in the places that it occurred.

We live in a democracy. We must decide matters by electing politicians rather than demonstrating.

But just as I can justifiably seek to explain the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and the Gaza demonstrations so I can legitimately seek to explain why some poor white people have been rioting. This does not mean that I either think they were right to riot or that they have been harshly treated.

I believe that the police ought to catch and the courts ought to punish criminality so as to deter others. I don’t particularly care if some poor unfortunate has a sob story. If you don’t want to go to jail don’t engage in violent disorder.

But there is a widespread feeling that there is one rule for one sort of offender and another rule for another. The media, the police and the courts will look the other way when the Left sympathises with the cause of Black Lives Matter or Gaza and will react quite differently if the case involves white people.

This has been going on for some time now and gradually it is fuelling discontent, and that discontent is giving way to fury.

The root cause is that the demographics of the UK has been changed radically without the consent of its population. No reasonable person can object to limited migration, but it has not been limited. Voters have repeatedly made clear that they support controlling our borders. This was one of the main reasons for the Brexit vote. But successive government over many decades have simply ignored what they knew voters wanted.

When governments ignore what voters vote for, what is the point of voting? If voters cannot change matters by means of the ballot box, then you are in a situation similar to having an absolute monarchy and under those circumstances the response can as with France and Russia become revolutionary. Disorder is what happens when democracy fails.

It isn’t just two-tier policing that is the problem. It’s two tier everything. Humza Yousaf can complain about white people having top jobs in Scotland, but if a white person made a similar complaint about black people, he would be a racist. British people are blamed for the existence of slavery even though the Royal Navy fought to eradicate it, but Arabs and Africans are not blamed even though they were involved in the slave trade too. We have to be colour blind about the casting of black actors where they were not in the original story, but we cannot have white actors playing black characters.

There is a double standard about everything.

Gradually we find that the worst consequence of mass immigration since 1945 is that white people are the villains of British history and that our only task is to take the knee in shame and to atone for our multitude of sins. There is a certain sort of person who has nothing left to lose who rebels against this. That is what we have been watching lately. He will feel this still more now that his whole community has been cast as racist losers unworthy of the least degree of sympathy. Let’s kick him some more to see what happens.

The only hope is that we treat everyone in Britain equally. Treating different groups differently according to their race is explosive and if it continues it will explode again.

In the last few years we have had black people demonstrating, Muslims demonstrating and now the poor white underclass demonstrating. We need to look at why people get involved in disorder and do our best to address these grievances no matter what the cause. We also need to find ways to improve the standard of living for everyone and to erase all forms of injustice. We need to treat each other equally and without prejudice.

But above all we need to realise that if we keep the present levels of migration and if we continue to form divided societies which view each other as strangers rather than fellow countrymen, then the present situation will get worse.

I don’t think any population in history has been as radically transformed as ours in the years since 1945 without conflict. Please provide me with an historical example if you disagree.

I wish we could all live together in peace and harmony only noticing our shared humanity, but I fear that pressure is building, and all Labour is doing is putting a lid on it with the intention of continuing on in exactly the same way. Go on Labour keep holding down the lid of the pressure cooker while pumping in more migrant steam.

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Humza Yousaf creates the division he fears

 

Humza Yousaf has spent his whole political career arguing that Scottish people ought not to live in the same country as English, Welsh and Northern Irish people. It is unendurable he thinks to force a different people called Scots to live in the same nation state as those they have lived with for centuries and with whom they share a common language and for the most part a common religion and a common culture. Scottish independence is the only solution.

I don’t know anything about Humza Yousaf’s ancestors, but it is likely that they also believed that it was unendurable for Muslims to share the same country as Hindus and therefore supported the partition of India. Having set up Pakistan they likewise discovered that it was unendurable that any Hindus remained there and so these Hindus left just as many Muslims were forced to leave India.

Humza Yousaf’s wife Nadia El-Nakla thinks that Zionism is wrong and would like the whole of Palestine to be ruled by Palestinians. But what is Zionism but the migration of Jews to the Middle East? There is an inconsistency in denying Jews the right to migrate while supporting the right of everyone else in the world to migrate to Britain.

Moreover, if a majority of Scots have the right to choose independence, why didn’t a majority of a Jews have the right to declare independence in 1948? If Scots can fight wars of independence and still be celebrated for doing so by Humza Yousaf and family, why can’t Israelis?

But this is our problem. Palestinians did not want to peacefully coexist with Israelis and set out to destroy Israel from the beginning. They have never ceased to have this goal. But you cannot very well support the Palestinian right to not peacefully coexist with Israel and at the same time expect everyone to peacefully coexist with you.

It is quite wrong if Humza Yousaf and his family fear living in the UK. We have a duty to treat each individual as an individual and to try as far as possible to see him simply as a fellow human being rather than as a representative of a group be it a racial, religious or national group. No Muslim should be discriminated against or threatened because of his religion. That is unchristian, unfair and unjustified.

But how human nature is and how it ought to be are quite different things. It ought to be possible for Scots to reflect that there isn’t much difference between us and our neighbours and therefore there is no need to separate from them. But large numbers of Scots including Humza Yousaf think that Scots are so much a separate people that separatism is the only answer.

It ought to have been possible for India to have remained intact upon independence with Muslims, Hindus and other religions living peacefully side by side. But it was not possible, and conflict erupted, and tension continues to exist between India and Pakistan and within India.

It ought to have been possible for Jews to flee persecution in Europe both before and after the Holocaust and settle in their ancient homeland. It ought to have been possible for Palestinians and Jews to share the land without discrimination and peacefully. This is largely the case within Israel where Muslims coexist with Jews peacefully, but at the moment it appears impossible to extend this peaceful coexistence to those Palestinians who live in Gaza and the West Bank.

The problem is that while we may believe that we ought to treat everyone on the basis of our shared humanity, it is human nature not to do so.

We are tribal and we prefer to live with those who are similar to us. This is why we developed first as bands of nomads, then as tribes and finally as countries. We care most about ourselves and our families and then about our country. We are expected to pay taxes that help our fellow citizens because they share our language and our history. In times of war, we may be expected to serve our country and we do so because of our shared identity.

But what if this shared identity breaks down as it appears to be doing? What then?

But the problem for Humza Yousaf becomes clear. He can’t bear to live in the same country as English people. His ancestors doubtless could not bear to live in the same country as Hindus. His wife’s family could not bear to coexist with Jews and would be delighted if there were no Jews in the Middle East. But everyone has to peacefully coexist with him and them.

This too is the problem. If Scots are so different from English people that they must demand a separate state, where does that leave migrants and the descendants of migrants who are often much more different than either? Can they decide that they can’t bear living in the same country as British people, and can other British people decide that they can’t bear living with them?

The UK in 1939 had approximately 7000 people from ethnic minorities. Since then, we have conducted an experiment as to whether it is possible to maintain a common identity, shared values and unity while moving from less than 0.01% of the population being from an ethnic minority to more than 20%. There have been successes but there have been failures also. We find that people still prefer to live in proximity to those who are similar to them. There is far more division between some communities living in England than there ever was between Scottish and English people. No doubt Humza Yousaf thinks the answer is independence for those communities.

I am pessimistic I’m afraid. We ought to be able to get on with our neighbours no matter their race, religion or where their parents came from. But if even Scots and English people cannot bear to live in the same country when we share the same language values and history, what hope is there for forging unity and commonality when we have unlimited migration from everywhere and these people choose to live with those who are like themselves?

The answer is not rioting. The answer is certainly not violence. We are where we are. Even if we conclude the experiment with mass migration has failed, we still have to make the best of the results. This is our country shared equally by everyone who is here legally. If we trash it, we trash what is ours and no one else’s.

If Humza Yousaf wants there to be less division in the UK then he might reflect that it was unwise to argue for division. Most Scots have a lot more in common with our English neighbours than we do with him despite the fact that he was born and brought up in Scotland.

So too those people waving Palestinian flags and arguing that Jews who were born in Israel don’t have the right to live there, might reflect that it is a dubious argument if you are the descendent of migrants to suppose that only the indigenous have rights and everyone else must leave.

The only solution for Britain is to find our common humanity and to develop a shared identity that is available to all of us. Neither rioting nor demonstrations in favour of terrorists in Gaza, nor Scottish nationalism will help us to get there.

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These are Anti-UK rioters

 

We have all spent the past decade and more trying to defeat Scottish nationalism. We have largely succeeded with the result of the General Election reducing the SNP to 9 seats, putting independence support at 30%. But just as we have achieved that victory some of us seem intent on giving Scottish nationalism another chance.

Imagine if there is a largescale “Pro UK” demonstration in Glasgow with elements from the far right, the dregs of what remains of the English Defence League plus others with Union flags misbehaving and perhaps rioting. Imagine if there is a counter demonstration with independence supporters fighting a latter-day Battle for Cable Street to defend Scottish values against English fascists. Who do you suppose is going to come out of this clash with the most Brownie points rather than the most Brown shirt points?

I think it was me that popularised the use of “Pro UK” as opposed to unionist as I thought that unionist helped our opponents, but I certainly would not describe the EDL as “Pro UK”. These people are English nationalists. I also wouldn’t describe people who riot against the police as Pro UK. We need the police to investigate and stop crimes such as the murder of three little girls, rather than waste time and effort trying to stop hooligans burning cars and trashing businesses. Damaging the reputation of the UK as being a place of peaceful coexistence, respect for law and the rights of individuals is not Pro UK.

We just had the largest demonstration possible of public opinion. It happened on July 4th. The result was a large Labour majority. I see no point in demonstrations a month later. In general, I see no point in demonstrations at all.

The people most likely to demonstrate in the past year in favour of Gaza won I think four seats at the election. The far right won zero seats. That is as it should be. All of the demonstrations up and down the country, all of the riots do not change the fact that the far right has almost no political support in Britain.

So, what do the demonstrations demonstrate? They demonstrate that an apparent majority on the streets whether they support terrorists in Gaza or far right extremism in Britain does not represent any majority here.

This is the whole problem with demonstrations. I understand there is a right to assemble and to march peacefully. But such marches invariably are designed to distort rather than clarify public opinion.

What matters is not how many people you have on a march, let alone a riot, but how many you can get to put an X on a piece of paper and put it in a box.

The Pro UK argument has succeeded because it has been able to appeal to people who vote Labour, Lib Dem and Conservative. It has remained mainstream and moderate.

It is the Scottish nationalist side of the argument that has flirted with ideas of a unilateral declaration of independence, an unauthorized referendum, hijacking the result of an election and sometimes even rebellion. It was SNP supporters who were invariably angry and tending to demonstrate in the streets and shout at opponents. Meanwhile we quietly sat at home and defeated them at the ballot box when it mattered.

The only way to achieve any political goal is by means of peaceful persuasion and by showing that your side of the argument is better than your opponents.

If we are to eventually achieve a right-wing government putting forward free market economic policies and limiting migration, we will do it by behaving better than the Left and by winning the argument.

But we are not going to be able to do this if the Left is able to portray the Right as a bunch of extremist thugs.

It is perfectly legitimate to be concerned about the level of migration into Britain and it is also legitimate to be concerned about crime, but we are only going to win this argument if we are able to appeal to everyone in our society and if we treat everyone fairly as individuals first rather than representatives of any group.

It is particularly obtuse and stupid to blame Muslims for the actions of someone born in Britain to parents who arrived from Rwanda. This is unjust, unfair and contrary to our historical traditions.

The wish to limit migration must not involve any hostility to anyone who lives in the UK legally. These people have the same right to equality before the law and have the same rights to live here as anyone else. To attack someone because of his religious beliefs, his race or where his parents came from is likewise contrary to our historical traditions and is therefore not Pro UK.

After we won a victory in 2014 a few far right nutters gathered in George Square Glasgow and made fascist salutes I spent the next ten years being shown pictures of these people whenever I made arguments against the SNP.

So too after defeating the SNP in 2024 a few far right nutters are liable to repeat these scenes. I hope I am not going to be shown pictures of these people for the next ten years nor of the heroic clansmen who defended Scotland from fascists.

The moderate right must rebuild in order to provide an alternative to Labour, but we must also as democrats respect that Labour forms our legitimate government and that the result it won at the election is worth more than every single demonstration combined.

Labour must show fairness and demonstrate there is equality before the law. It is disastrous to our country that there is a perception that you will be treated by the law differently according to your race or religion.

I would urge everyone to stop demonstrating or counter demonstrating. It achieves nothing. The only result of the Gaza demonstrations is to show that some people living in the UK sympathise with terrorists. The only result of the recent far right riots is to make it harder for the mainstream right to win the argument.

The same applies in Scotland. Above all else we must avoid the Pro UK cause becoming associated with thugs and rioters. If you are tempted to take part or support these people cease. These people do not share our values they oppose them. They are not Pro UK. They are anti-UK.

 

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Is this a woman?

 

It is clearly wrong for men to take part in women’s sport just as it is wrong for men to go into women’s changing rooms and serve time in women’s prisons. But there is a desperate lack of clarity and confusion over an issue that ought to be straightforward.

The transgender debate has done much harm to our ordinary commonsense ideas of how to determine sex and gender. Until very recently indeed it was considered obvious that each baby was born either a boy or a girl and that this was unchangeable. This is what nearly everyone in the world still believes.

It is no doubt the case that some people throughout history have been dissatisfied with being a man or a woman a boy or a girl and have wished to become the opposite sex. Women have pretended to be men in order to escape female roles. Men have dressed as women. But we have always been able to distinguish the reality from the pretence. A woman soldier may be discovered to be really a man when she is treated for a wound. The most convincing male bride will be discovered on the wedding night to not really be a woman.

The confusion in our thinking on this issue began when governments and the media began to treat people who claimed to have changed gender as really having changed it. Someone with a male body is able after some relatively straightforward steps to obtain a gender recognition certificate that enables him to claim that he really is a woman, and everyone is expected to use his new female name and call him she. From this all else follows.

Once someone has been able to legally change from being a man to a woman even to the extent of changing his birth certificate, then it becomes discriminatory not to allow him into a women’s prison, a women’s changing room or a role that is only available to women.

The root of the problem is allowing someone legally to change sex at all.

Once you allow people to change sex on the basis of their feelings, you lose all hope of basing sex on objective characteristics and logically being a man or a woman becomes for everyone a matter of feelings rather than a matter of fact.

You cannot have two methods of determining whether someone is a man or a woman one for transgender individuals and one for everyone else. If the transgender method prevails then it will logically be impossible to determine a baby’s sex at birth we will have to instead wait for the baby to grow up and tell us how it feels.

If this way of thinking became widespread it is likely that the concepts of being a man or a woman would cease too. Once a characteristic ceases to be objective, it ceases also to be useful as a means of distinguishing. In this way transgender destroys feminism. You cannot have both.

But the controversy regarding the Algerian and Taiwanese boxers at the Olympics is quite different from this and ought to be sharply distinguished.

It is certainly a form of dishonest and dishonourable cheating for someone born a boy to try to compete against women on the basis that he feels himself to be transgender. But both the Algerian and Taiwanese boxers were certainly born girls.

Pictures of the Algerian fighter as a little girl dressed with ribbons and girl’s clothes and the fact that she was brought up in rural Algeria tell us that everyone determined that she was a girl in the ordinary way. She has therefore not changed sex, but rather remained the sex she was born with.

The controversy regarding these two fighters is not about transgender, but rather the fact that they have both male and female characteristics.

It may be that they are genetically male but were born with female genitalia. It may be for another reason, but both fighters have abnormally high levels of testosterone.

It is undoubtedly the case that people who are genetically male but who were born as girls ought not to be competing in women’s competitions. They have many of the physical advantages of men including high levels of testosterone even if they were born as girls. This makes the competition both unfair and dangerous. But by any normal standard these fighters are women.

In order to determine whether someone is a boy or a girl a man or a woman we use objective criteria that ultimately depend on the person’s body. We don’t require either DNA tests or tests of a person’s level of testosterone to determine their sex.

If someone is born a girl and brought up a girl and then only in adulthood discovers that she has male DNA or some other unusual characteristic that gives her high levels of testosterone, it would be unfair and also untrue to say now you are a man.

I have never had a DNA test, nor most likely have you. My identity does not depend on such a test that I have never had.

These cases are perplexing, because they do not fit into the norm. But I think we are forced to say that both fighters are women for otherwise we would require each baby to have a DNA test in order to determine whether it is a boy or a girl and this is as absurd as waiting until it grows up to tell us about its feelings.

Sex is determined by DNA. We know this because of science. But we do not ordinarily determine sex by means of DNA tests otherwise no one before the discovery of DNA would have known who they could marry.

The Algerian and Taiwanese boxers would have been called by Plato hermaphrodites. The danger of allowing such people to compete in women’s sport is that there would be a temptation for countries to search for hermaphrodite girls to train to be Olympic champions. This would be as disastrous for biologically female people as allowing men to compete against them.

But it is not the fault of someone born a girl and who has grown up to be woman that her DNA is what it is. Though both fighters should for safety’s sake be banned from fighting, they should not be vilified for being what they are.

 

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