A Shrine to Merc Classics

Before I jump in - Merry Christmas to my reader.

My local garage did the right thing. They reached the limit of what they could do and said so. My 1993 Mercedes 500SL needed fine tuning using a specialist adapter they simply are not tooled up to own, and could never justify buying for the sake of one 500SL. That is not incompetence. It is professionalism.

That left me needing a specialist.

Up to that point, my dealings with the SL Shop had been entirely by email. Polite, efficient, businesslike. Useful, but abstract. Like most people, I carried a vague suspicion that “specialist” might mean little more than confidence and a glossy website.

 
The next hurdle was physical rather than intellectual. Getting a non running car across the county is not a trivial exercise. It took an age to beg, borrow and blag a recovery truck, several favours called in, and a fair amount of logistical faffing before the Mercedes finally made its slow journey to Stratford upon Avon last week.

When I arrived, the mental picture I had built from email correspondence dissolved almost immediately.

The first thing that recalibrated my expectations was scale, but not showroom scale. Industrial scale. Cars stacked three high inside the building, not as a gimmick but as a deliberate space maximising system. I started calling it “Rapid Racking Mercs”, because that is exactly what it was.

Rapid Racking is not about display. It is about process, throughput and capital discipline. You only store assets vertically when you understand exactly what they are worth, how long they will sit, and where they sit in the workflow. Applying that logic to classic SLs tells you this is not a shrine, and not a hobby. It is an operation.

Outside, rows of cars sat in the open. At first glance it looks harsh. Then the penny drops. These are not cars waiting to be sold. They are cars in the system, queued for diagnosis or repair. A dealer hides cars. A specialist sequences them.

Inside, the tone tightened further. Interiors were right. Not flashy, not over restored, not Instagram bait. Just correct. Anyone who knows these cars knows how difficult that is, and how quickly shortcuts reveal themselves.

I will admit to a sharp intake of breath when the diagnostics rate was quoted. £168 an hour, with four hours pencilled in. That figure triggers an instinctive suspicion if you are used to independent garages that price reassurance rather than certainty. But that reaction did not survive contact with what I was actually looking at.

This was not time with a spanner. It was accumulated judgement, model specific tooling, and a business prepared to own the outcome. Guessing would have been cheaper in the short term and ruinously expensive later. My local garage understood that. So did the SL Shop.

The difference between expectation and experience was stark. From emails, I had imagined a competent niche specialist. In person, what I found was something much closer to a classic main dealer operation, stripped of corporate gloss but heavy on infrastructure, process and discipline.

It took effort to get the car there. But once I was standing among the rapid racking Mercs, it was immediately obvious why I had needed to.

It will be 2 weeks before they can start work on the car, but that suits me fine. Once up and running I can go there and drive it back home without the aid of a recovery truck.

A Christmas Thought Experiment

A thought experiment for Christmas Day.

Imagine a rule quietly slipped into canon law. No bishop, no cardinal, no Pope may be older than Jesus was when he was crucified. Thirty three, give or take the usual theological hedging. At thirty four you retire. Hand back the mitre, clear your pigeonhole, stop explaining God to other adults.

The Church would implode overnight. Two millennia of accumulated gravitas replaced by what is essentially an ornate student union. Bishops with flawless skin and absolute certainty. Cardinals who have never buried a parent, watched ideals erode, or learned that reality does not care about theory. Synods that conclude by lunchtime because nobody has yet discovered nuance.

Peter would not qualify. Augustine would be told to stop reminiscing. Aquinas would be dismissed for excessive footnotes. Experience would be heresy. Wisdom would be disqualifying.

And yet, inconveniently, it was enough for Jesus.

Jesus was an idealistic revolutionary precisely because he was young. Not naive, but unencumbered. He had not spent decades trimming beliefs to fit institutions, or mistaking longevity for wisdom. Youth gave him the one thing every revolutionary needs and every institution fears - the willingness to take ideas seriously. Literally. To follow them to their logical end without checking whether they were administratively convenient.

Older men ask whether something is practical. Younger ones ask whether it is right. Jesus did not run cost benefit analyses on compassion, or worry about stakeholder buy in for mercy. He spoke as if truth mattered more than survival. Which, inconveniently, it did.

Now imagine Jesus growing old.

Not crucified. Not martyred. Just ageing. The sermons become longer and more conditional. Parables acquire footnotes. He starts prefacing moral absolutes with “of course, we must be realistic”. The poor still matter, obviously, but they must help themselves. Charity is fine, but only if it does not encourage dependency.

By his fifties he has concerns. Not hateful ones. Sensible ones. About order. About cohesion. About borders. About how loving thy neighbour has been taken rather literally. Compassion remains important, but it must be balanced with personal responsibility and the rule of law.

By sixty he has a grudging admiration for the Romans. They keep the roads in good order. They understand authority. They get things done. Crucifixion is regrettable, of course, but deterrence matters. One cannot simply overturn tables without an impact assessment.

The Sermon on the Mount becomes a keynote speech. Blessed are the meek, yes, but let us not romanticise meekness. The meek can be terribly disruptive if left unchecked. "Common sense" theology.

This is why Jesus did not get old.

He was dead by his early thirties. No office, no book deal, no committee work. He preached, disrupted the establishment, frightened the authorities, unsettled his followers, and was executed by the state. In Christian terms, that was apparently sufficient to alter the moral direction of Western civilisation. But not, it seems, enough to run a diocesan finance committee.

If Jesus applied today, HR would show him the door. No qualifications. No management experience. No pension plan. Too young. Lacks gravitas. Come back after forty years in the Curia and we might talk.

The Church venerates a man who never grew old, never governed, never accumulated power, and was gone by his early thirties. It then insists on being run by men whose entire formation consists of ageing gracefully inside an institution designed to preserve itself. Poverty becomes symbolic. Sacrifice becomes optional. Youth becomes a probationary inconvenience.

Idealism tends to curdle with age, not because people become wiser, but because they become invested. Careers form. Status accumulates. Risks acquire consequences. Radical edges are sanded down until what remains is respectable, manageable, and safe. Institutions then call this maturity.

“If it was good enough for Jesus” is precisely the argument institutions cannot tolerate. Because if you take it seriously, authority stops being something you accumulate and starts being something you burn through. Briefly. Publicly. At some personal cost.

Much safer to canonise the sacrifice, then construct a system that ensures nobody ever has to repeat it. Revolutions are inspiring, but continuity pays the bills.

Still, one cannot deny the appeal. Short papacies. Fast conclaves. No gerontocratic politics. A conveyor belt of intense, messianic careers followed by enforced silence.

Speak truth. Disrupt power. Exit young. Leave a mess behind for others to argue about for centuries.

Which, come to think of it, is about as Christ like as it gets.

Rowing Back

So, Starmer has rowed back on farm IHT. However…

The important point is not the rowing back. It is the rowing out in the first place.

This was not a policy accident or a Treasury brain-fart. The change was announced, legislated, and voted through. It cleared the Commons. It sat there, calmly, waiting to take effect in 2026. Only then did the tractors appear and the shouting begin. And only then did Labour “listen”.

That sequence matters, because it exposes the method.

Starmerism, as I understand it, is not dithering centrism. It is overreach followed by controlled retreat. You push further than you expect to end up. You absorb the outrage. Then you pull back to roughly where you wanted to land, while allowing everyone to declare victory.

Farmers say they forced a U-turn. The NFU puts out a relieved press release. Rural Labour MPs tell their constituents they fought bravely. Meanwhile the Treasury quietly keeps a reformed inheritance tax regime that no longer treats very large agricultural estates as sacrosanct.

Both sides cheer. Labour keeps most of the substance.

This was not a climbdown from defeat. It was an anchoring move. Start with something that looks brutal. Let the protests burn themselves out. Then soften the edges and call it pragmatism.

You can see the same shape elsewhere. Planning reform. Welfare conditionality. Public sector pay. Push hard, provoke outrage, then retreat just far enough that the centre holds and the original objective survives in diluted but recognisable form.

Critics on the right call this weakness. Critics on the left call it cowardice. Both miss the point. This is a leadership operating with a narrow fiscal corridor, terrified of spooking markets, yet aware that doing nothing is not an option.

The risk is obvious. Do this too often and people learn the script. Escalate early, shout loudly, bring tractors or placards, and force the retreat. Once that happens, overreach stops being a tactic and starts looking like incompetence.

But in this case, the theory holds. The policy was passed. The reaction was measured. The retreat was partial. And the end result sits closer to Starmer’s likely starting point than the noise suggests.

Starmerism, in short, is not flip-flopping. It is engineered conflict with a pre-planned exit. And farm IHT is a textbook example.

The Law is Strong Enough Already - For Us.

Yet another shot across the bows of the Countryside Alliance. I do so enjoy Countryside Alliance baiting - it should be a recognised sport. They do make it so easy though.

A member of the Countryside Alliance (probably a city stockbroker) was being interviewed yesterday on the Farming Today programme and said the law was already sufficient on fox hunting - you kill a mammal and you're prosecuted. However, they are leaning on a half-truth, which is their usual refuge.

Yes, in theory, killing a mammal unlawfully can already be prosecuted under existing law. In practice, that statement quietly dodges three awkward realities: who gets prosecuted, what offences are actually charged, and how intent and mitigation are treated.

First, who is prosecuted.
Ordinary individuals acting alone are far more exposed than organised hunts. A lone person caught killing a fox illegally has no organisational buffer, no legal war chest, and no ability to diffuse responsibility. Hunts, by contrast, operate collectively, on private land, with multiple actors and a fog of plausible deniability. The hounds did it. The huntsman was elsewhere. The fox doubled back. The kill was “accidental”. Responsibility evaporates into the mist like breath on a frosty morning.

Second, what is prosecuted.
Most cases involving hunts do not hinge on proving a fox was killed. They hinge on proving intent to hunt illegally. That is vastly harder. The Hunting Act does not criminalise the death of a fox per se; it criminalises hunting with hounds as an activity. Proving that a death occurred is not enough. Prosecutors must show that the hunt was deliberately pursuing a wild mammal, not trail hunting, not flushing to guns, not some other permitted activity that just happened to go wrong. This evidential threshold is high, and hunts know it.

Third, intent, mitigation and excuse.
Courts do not operate in a moral vacuum. They consider intent, accident, proportionality and mitigation. A defence of “no intention to kill”, “loss of control of hounds”, “unexpected behaviour of the fox”, or “reasonable steps taken to comply with the law” is routinely advanced. These arguments may be thin, but they are legally relevant. They also tilt proceedings heavily in favour of organised defendants who can afford specialist counsel and expert witnesses.

This is where the Countryside Alliance’s claim really collapses. The law is not simply about whether a mammal dies. It is about enforceability. A law that relies on proving subjective intent in a fast-moving outdoor environment, policed sporadically, against defendants with resources and rehearsed defences, is weak by design. That is not accidental. It is the point.

Meanwhile, enforcement itself is uneven. Police forces rarely prioritise hunting offences. The CPS is cautious. Cases are complex, politically sensitive, and resource-intensive. The result is predictable: very few prosecutions, even fewer convictions, and a culture in which the law is treated as an inconvenience rather than a boundary.

So when the Countryside Alliance says “the law is already strong enough”, what they mean is that it is strong enough for them. Strong enough to look tough on paper. Weak enough to be sidestepped in practice. And elastic enough to ensure that accountability, like the fox, rarely survives the chase.

This is not about rural ignorance of the law. It is about a law structured in a way that protects organised hunting while exposing individuals. That is why repeated calls for clarification, tightening and test cases keep coming back. The problem is not morality. It is architecture.

If the entire hunt was prosecuted and fined very heavily, even for the action of one, perhaps enforcement would be relatively easy, as few would be willing to take the risk.

The Precision Thumb

I committed a small but catastrophic act of seasonal self sabotage. I cut my fingernails. All of them. Including the left thumbnail.

Women, of course, do not make this mistake. They understand that the left thumbnail is not cosmetic excess. It is a tool. Maintained. Ready. A precision instrument for citrus ingress. Men, by contrast, hack it off in a spasm of misplaced tidiness, then wonder why Christmas goes wrong.

The left thumbnail is not decorative. It is not optional. It is specifically designed for one task alone – the clean, dignified piercing of tangerine and clementine skin. Remove it, and civilisation frays.

Without it, you are reduced to squidge. Blunt thumb. Excess pressure. A sort of damp fumbling that bruises the fruit and sprays citrus oil like tear gas. Instead of a crisp peel, you get pulped segments and sticky fingers, accompanied by the unmistakable sense that the fruit is disappointed in you.

There are no viable alternatives. Knives are excessive. Teeth are barbaric. Starting at the stalk end with a fleshy thumb is the act of someone who has lost control of their life.

Women do this properly. Calm hands. Functional nail. One decisive breach and the peel lifts away in a single, elegant movement. No mess. No drama. Tangerine compliant.

This is not biology. It is culture. The left thumbnail is infrastructure, not vanity. Ignore that, and you descend rapidly into chaos and fruit based regret.

I will not make this mistake again. The left thumbnail will henceforth be protected, respected, and allowed to grow in quiet readiness for its seasonal duty. Some tools are too important to blunt.

A Fox, a Horn and a Convenient Fiction

This is becoming a recurring subject for me. 

The Countryside Alliance has once again emerged from the hedgerow, red in tooth and press release, to announce that restricting hunting proves the government “doesn’t care about the countryside”. This is a familiar cry. It is also nonsense, polished to a high gloss and sold as heritage.

The trick relies on a sleight of hand so old it ought to be listed. Hunting is quietly substituted for “the countryside”, as if rural Britain consists mainly of people in pink coats galloping about after a fox on borrowed land. It does not. The countryside is farmers worrying about margins, villages losing their buses, young families priced out by second homes, and rural surgeries shutting early because they cannot recruit staff. None of these problems has ever been solved by blowing a horn and releasing hounds.

Hunting is not rural life. It is a hobby, and a very particular one, practised by a tiny and socially unrepresentative minority. Most rural people have never hunted, never wanted to, and do not see it as the beating heart of their community. To suggest otherwise is like claiming snooker is the backbone of Sheffield because a few people once wore waistcoats there.

The economic argument fares no better. We are solemnly told that banning hunting devastates rural jobs, usually by people who have never tried to count them. The numbers involved are microscopic compared with agriculture, construction, tourism or even garden centres. Horses still exist. Land still exists. Rural leisure did not collapse into a sinkhole when foxes stopped being chased for sport. Many hunts simply rebranded as drag hunts and carried on with the bits that did not involve tearing an animal apart.

Then there is pest control, wheeled out like a favourite antique. Fox control happens every night across rural Britain, with lamps, rifles and people who actually want the fox dead quickly rather than theatrically. Hunting with hounds was never an efficient management tool. It was pageantry with a corpse at the end, and everyone involved has known this for decades.

What the Countryside Alliance is really defending is not the countryside but a story about it. A story in which tradition equals virtue, opposition equals metropolitan sneering, and any ethical objection is dismissed as ignorance of “how things are done”. It is culture war politics, not land management. Hunting became a convenient symbol because it allowed a small group to wrap a private pastime in the Union Flag and dare anyone to unwrap it.

The irony is that this performance has actively harmed rural politics. While energy is spent pretending that fox hunting is the litmus test of rural authenticity, the serious issues are neglected. Farm incomes remain squeezed by supermarkets. Post-Brexit labour shortages go unresolved. Planning rules please nobody. Broadband crawls. Buses vanish. Vets are thin on the ground. None of these problems has ever been top of the Countryside Alliance’s marching order, which tells you something.

Public opinion, including rural opinion, has been consistently against hunting with hounds. This is not townies lecturing yokels. It is a broad judgement that cruelty for entertainment is not a compelling tradition, however old the waistcoat. Rural people are perfectly capable of holding that view without surrendering their identity to Islington.

So when the Countryside Alliance claims that limiting hunting proves contempt for the countryside, what they really mean is contempt for them. The two are not the same. The countryside is vast, diverse, working and often struggling. Hunting is a hobby. Confusing the two is not an argument. It is camouflage.

Tarmac Tales

I’d been hunting for an animated map of the UK motorway network – you know, one of those hypnotic ones that show blue lines crawling across the country like an outbreak of concrete measles. And sure enough, there it was: the story of how Britain took to the open road, then immediately decided to close half of it for maintenance.

It all began with the Preston By-Pass in 1958 – eight miles of sheer optimism, the first proper motorway. The Prime Minister at the time, Harold Macmillan, cut the ribbon with the enthusiasm of a man who thought traffic jams were something that happened to other people. Within weeks, the surface was peeling up like cheap lino, and the whole thing had to be resurfaced. Thus began our national tradition: build it fast, dig it up faster.

By the 1960s, we were unstoppable. Engineers carved through hills, farms, and occasionally someone’s back garden in the name of progress. The M1 was the glory road, a symbol of modernity. Britain’s first true north-south artery – though to drive it today, you’d think it was still under construction. Half a century later, we’re still “adding a lane,” which seems to mean narrowing the others and installing average-speed cameras every 20 yards.

The M6 followed – the backbone of Britain, if the backbone occasionally seized up from overuse. Then came the M25, our proudest folly, built so Londoners could experience gridlock in a full 360-degree panorama. It’s the only motorway in the world where you can set off at dawn, circle the capital, and arrive home in time for next week’s breakfast.

Each motorway has its personality. The M4 has a faint whiff of ambition – “London to Wales, via a lifetime of roadworks.” The M62 crosses the Pennines like a civil-engineering dare, featuring a farm in the middle because the owner refused to move. The M5, meanwhile, is a slow-motion migration of caravans and melting ice creams, inching toward Cornwall in scenes resembling the retreat from Dunkirk.

By the 1980s, we’d paved the nation into submission. Then came the great existential question: what now? Build more? No – we invented the smart motorway, a concept as logical as “self-toasting bread.” Lanes vanish, speed limits think for themselves, and drivers stare at overhead signs saying “Obey All Signals” – which, when blank, is oddly philosophical.

Still, there’s something endearing about our motorways. They’re the arteries of a nation that still believes in movement, even when stuck behind a lorry doing 56 mph overtaking another lorry doing 55. They represent our collective yearning for freedom, which we immediately undermine by scheduling roadworks in both directions for the next 18 months.

Watching that animated map, you can almost feel the optimism – the idea that if you just lay enough asphalt, the future will come roaring down it in a gleaming Austin Cambridge. Instead, we got the M25 and a nation of sat-nav zombies. But still, I can’t help but love it. The UK motorway network is a masterpiece of over-engineering, under-planning, and sheer British bloody-mindedness.

We built it, we curse it, and we queue on it. It’s our greatest monument – not to speed, but to patience.

Dubai Doubt

I keep seeing these jars of Dubai chocolate spreading across British supermarkets like an outbreak of aspirational beige. One minute it was a niche confection invented by a Dubai chocolatier with a pun for a product name, the next it was everywhere from Aldi to the darker corners of TikTok, pushed by influencers who seem to think pistachio goo and a bit of fried pastry constitute the height of civilisation.

And now we learn, courtesy of Europe’s food inspectors, that the whole craze is less culinary enlightenment and more a reminder that humanity will buy anything if you attach the word Dubai to it. Half the stuff isn’t even made in Dubai. Some of it hails from Turkey, some from factories of indeterminate location, and a few bars appear to have been assembled in conditions that make a 1970s sweet shop look like a sterile surgical theatre. A court in Cologne has already ruled: if it says Dubai on the wrapper, it really ought to have been within shouting distance of Dubai at some point. Radical, I know.

Meanwhile in Britain the FSA has had to issue alerts because certain imports forget to mention what’s actually in them. Allergens? Optional. Peanuts? Surprise. Aflatoxin? Just a little sprinkling to spice up your day. Some bars barely qualify as chocolate under EU definitions, being more a cheerful blend of random fats held together by the marketing equivalent of Sellotape.

And yet the punters queue. They film themselves biting into the things as if they’re unwrapping a rare treasure from Tutankhamun’s tomb. They swoon over the green pistachio ooze as though it’s the nectar of the gods rather than a substance that, according to German lab tests, sometimes contains more contaminants than the Somerset Levels after a winter flood.

What fascinates me is that the real secret ingredient is not pistachio or chocolate at all. It’s branding. Dubai has become shorthand for shiny excess, so the name is slapped on anything sweet in the hope that shoppers will imagine they are sampling a luxury desert delicacy rather than an industrial pastry tube dipped in middling chocolate. If someone launched Dubai Brussels Sprouts, they would probably sell out by Friday.

And here we are, soberly warned by regulators that some of these bars are dodgy enough to deserve their own crime number, while the craze rolls on regardless. It is the perfect modern parable: take a perfectly ordinary idea, add imported glamour, inflate demand through influencers, then watch Europe’s courts and food watchdogs sprint to keep up.

As for those jars in the supermarket, I suspect the only genuinely Dubai-related thing about them is the price. If you fancy something authentically Middle Eastern, try making proper knafeh. If you want a jar of pistachio-flavoured risk, by all means stick with the Dubai chocolate fad.

But don’t say the FSA didn’t warn you.

When Institutional Silence Becomes Alignment

If non-Israeli Jews want to stop antisemitism in their own countries, why don’t they simply criticise Israel’s overreach in Gaza and the killings and land grabs in the West Bank?

This claim is often made, sometimes politely, sometimes with menace. It rests on the idea that antisemitism is a reaction to Israeli behaviour, and that Jewish criticism of Israel would therefore defuse it.

History suggests that this is, at best, unreliable.

Deep, structural antisemitism does not depend on Israeli behaviour at all. It predates Israel by centuries. Jews were persecuted when they were stateless, powerless, assimilated, patriotic, socialist, conservative, religious and secular. The notion that safety can be earned through correct political posture has been tested repeatedly and has failed every time. German Jews’ loyalty did not save them. Soviet Jews’ denunciations of Zionism did not protect them. Antisemitism adapts.

That said, it would be dishonest to pretend nothing has changed since Gaza.

There has been a sharp rise in hostility following Israel’s assault on Gaza, and not all of that hostility was previously entrenched. Israel’s actions have acted as an accelerant. Televised civilian deaths, the flattening of neighbourhoods, explicit statements of collective punishment, and the continued, well-documented violence and land seizures in the West Bank have generated anger far beyond the usual activist base.

Some of that anger has manifested as antisemitism. Some has been deliberately redirected into antisemitism by those inclined that way already. And some has been categorised as antisemitism through an increasingly expansive political lens. These categories overlap, messily. Denying any one of them weakens the analysis.

Many Jews outside Israel already criticise Israeli policy. Some march. Some write. Some organise. This has not insulated them. In some cases it has increased hostility, exposing them to attack from both directions. Antisemites do not check someone’s views on settlements before targeting a synagogue or school.

Where institutional behaviour does matter is in how conflation is challenged or allowed to persist.

Major representative Jewish bodies in the diaspora, in their dominant public messaging, have tended to avoid sustained, explicit criticism of Israeli actions, even where those actions involve matters that are not in serious dispute. Civilian deaths in Gaza are documented by the UN and humanitarian agencies. Systematic law-breaking in the West Bank, including settlement expansion and settler violence, is documented by Israeli human rights organisations, international monitors, and Israel’s own legal authorities. These are objective matters of record, not ideological interpretation.

The reasons for institutional caution are understandable. Fear of internal fracture. Donor pressure. A defensive instinct shaped by historical trauma and by the real increase in antisemitic incidents. None of this requires conspiracy to explain. 

In 2025, 36 elected deputies to the Board of Deputies signed an open letter in the Financial Times critically describing Israel’s war conduct, warning that “Israel’s soul is being ripped out” and referencing West Bank violence and other excesses. That letter led to disciplinary action and suspensions of some signatories, which shows that public criticism does exist inside the institution - but is not endorsed as the Board’s official position.

But it has consequences.

By declining to draw a clear public boundary between Jewish identity and Israeli state action, institutions leave others to draw it for them. Antisemites insist Jews are collectively responsible for Israel. Political actors insist that criticism of Israel is anti-Jewish by definition. Silence does not neutralise that logic. It allows it to harden.

This is where the category error becomes dangerous. Protest against a state is collapsed into hostility towards a people. Political slogans are treated as intent. Criticism becomes hate by definition. Policing and public suspicion then follow visibility rather than evidence. We reach the absurd position where Jews protesting the war in Tel Aviv are rhetorically grouped with those attacking synagogues in London.

At the same time, the definition of antisemitism has been stretched well beyond its original diagnostic purpose. The IHRA definition was never intended as law, but its illustrative examples are now routinely used to reclassify opposition to Israeli policy as antisemitism. This does not eliminate antisemitism. It dilutes the term, making it harder to identify and confront when it genuinely appears.

Selective silence reinforces this problem. The muted institutional response to Nigel Farage’s antisemitic remarks at Dulwich College illustrates the point. Grassroots Jewish voices and Holocaust survivors spoke. Formal leadership largely did not. Antisemitism is condemned loudly when it comes from marches and foreign-sounding language. When it comes from a politically useful ally aligned with Israel’s war aims, the threshold quietly rises.

If the priority of non-Israeli Jewish institutions is to reduce antisemitism at home, this approach is counterproductive.

Their role is not to defend a foreign government from scrutiny. It is to protect Jewish citizens as citizens. That requires clarity as well as caution. It requires saying, publicly and consistently, that mass civilian killing is wrong, that settler violence and land theft in the West Bank are wrong, and that none of this is done in the name of Jews everywhere.

This would not eliminate antisemitism. Nothing will. It may even carry short-term risk. But it would deny antisemites their most convenient pretext, expose deliberate conflation for what it is, and restore meaning to the word itself.

When everything is called antisemitism, eventually nothing is taken seriously as antisemitism at all. And that leaves Jewish communities less safe, not more.

Well, It Worked for Me.

The Telegraph has discovered a timeless truth of British politics: if something once worked for me personally, it must never be changed for anyone else. Richard Holden was acquitted by a jury, therefore juries are sacrosanct, judges are suspect, and any attempt to unclog a court system smashed to pieces under fourteen years of Conservative rule is an attack on liberty itself. Case closed. Verdict reached. No appeal.

The sleight of hand comes early. “A jury acquitted me of a crime I didn’t commit” sounds reassuring until you remember that acquittal does not mean innocence was proven, only that guilt was not. That distinction matters in law, but it is inconvenient for column inches. The article leans heavily on the romance of “12 ordinary people”, as if magistrates, judges and recorders were plucked from some alien priesthood rather than being, inconveniently, ordinary people with training.

What is quietly avoided is why this debate exists at all. Jury trials are not under threat because Labour ministers woke up one morning with authoritarian urges. They are under strain because Conservative governments starved the courts, gutted legal aid, let buildings rot, and presided over a backlog so severe that justice now routinely arrives years late. Delay is not neutral. It punishes the innocent and the guilty alike, and it corrodes public confidence far more effectively than a judge sitting without a jury ever could.

The Telegraph wants this framed as lawyers versus the people. It is not. It is a question of whether a justice system should function at all. Judges already decide guilt every day in magistrates’ courts, appeals, and specialist cases, without the sky falling in. Pretending that modest, targeted reform is an assault on liberty is not a defence of justice. It is nostalgia as policy, deployed by the same political class that broke the system and now objects to anyone trying to fix it.

Reusable Christmas

I have an idea that will horrify the Christmas industrial complex, confuse the Daily Mail, and mildly irritate anyone who thinks waste is festive. Reusable Christmas crackers.

Yes, I know. Tradition. Paper hats. A bang like a damp mouse being stepped on. A “joke” last written when rationing was still a fond memory. And a plastic widget destined to live out eternity in landfill, long after civilisation has quietly given up.

Every year we buy the same things, pull them apart with a noise that briefly alarms the cat, put the hats on at jaunty angles, groan at the jokes, and then sweep the debris into a bin bag with the turkey carcass and our remaining dignity. It is ritualised waste, dressed up as cheer.

The argument against reusable crackers is always the same. “It wouldn’t be the same.” Quite. It would be better. No more tat designed to be manufactured, shipped, pulled, sneered at and binned in the space of five minutes. Instead, a decent cracker you keep. Refill it. Put something in it that does not immediately ask to be thrown away. A proper joke. A chocolate that does not taste faintly of despair. Maybe even something thoughtful. Radical stuff.

And if we are doing this properly, the cracker itself should be something worth owning. Not shiny cardboard pretending to be luxurious, but an object. Something with weight. Something that survives grandchildren. I am thinking pottery. Glazed. Properly made. Possibly Wedgewood, or at least Wedgewood-adjacent. Blue and white, maybe, with vaguely classical figures who look as though they disapprove of novelty gifts. Crackers you lay on the table and think, “Those are rather nice,” rather than “How quickly can I hide these.”

The bang, I’m told, is essential. Fine. Keep the bang. There is no technical reason why a ceramic cracker cannot go off with a satisfying crack, other than a lack of imagination and a surfeit of inertia. We managed the Industrial Revolution. I think we can cope with a reloadable snap.

The paper hats can stay too, if we must. But let’s be honest, they fall apart if you look at them sternly, and nobody really wants to wear one except out of grim obligation. A reusable cracker could have proper hats. Or none at all. This would be a net gain for humanity.

Of course, the real objection is that reusable crackers would force people to think. To choose what goes inside. To abandon the comforting illusion that Christmas joy comes shrink-wrapped and pre-discarded. That is unsettling. Much easier to buy the same box every year and call it tradition.

But tradition is not doing the same stupid thing forever. It is choosing what is worth keeping. Roast potatoes. Yes. Family arguments. Apparently unavoidable. Plastic landfill filler masquerading as fun. Less so.

Reusable Christmas crackers would still be silly, noisy and mildly chaotic. They would just stop pretending that waste is a virtue. And if that feels un-Christmas to some people, I suggest the problem is not the crackers.

The Composting Caddy Inquiry

It began, as these things always do, with evidence. Hard, aromatic, citrus evidence. A tangerine peel, brazenly sitting in the general waste, flagrantly bypassing the compost caddy. Hayley, whose composting discipline would shame a German recycling plant, immediately launched an inquiry.

I did what any seasoned operator would do when confronted with an inconvenient truth. I denied everything, just like Nigel.

This was not my peel. I had no recollection of such a tangerine. I questioned the provenance of the peel itself. Could it really be mine? Had the bin been infiltrated? Was this peel, perhaps, being taken out of context?

When denial failed, I moved seamlessly to evasion. Even if I had handled a tangerine, which I absolutely had not, was the composting guidance sufficiently clear? Were citrus peels universally accepted compost material, or was this another example of regulatory overreach? I was not making an accusation, I stressed. I was just asking the question.

Then came the witch hunt defence. One peel does not constitute a pattern. This was being blown wildly out of proportion. I was the victim of selective enforcement. Other infractions surely went unnoticed. Why was this peel headline news? Why now? Who benefits? Again, I emphasised that I was merely raising reasonable concerns.

I may also have suggested that the whole affair was being weaponised by the kitchen establishment, eager to distract from its own failures. The compost caddy lid, for example, which never quite closes properly. No one ever talks about that. Curious, that.

At no point did I apologise. That would imply guilt. Instead, I presented myself as a man standing firm against compost orthodoxy, bravely resisting the creeping tyranny of the green bin.

In the end, of course, the truth was obvious. I had thrown the peel in the wrong bin because it was late, I was tired, and I could not be bothered to open the caddy.

But admitting that would have undermined the whole strategy. And besides, as Nigel himself has taught us, the point is not to be right. The point is to never, ever concede the tangerine.

Satrapies, Myths and the Politics of Survival

War may be politics by other means, but in Ukraine it has revealed the sort of politics usually kept hidden behind closed doors and bad metaphors. Strip away the noise and you are left with three projects colliding in broad daylight. Ukraine fighting to exist. The West trying to keep a workable security order. And Russia, a neo fascist oligarchic kleptocracy in full imperial cosplay, trying to drag its neighbours back into a world that expired with the fax machine.

Ukraine’s aim is brutally clear. Survival. Not the Westminster variety, where a minister claims the nation is doomed if they lose a junior post. Actual survival. If Ukraine loses, it does not get a stern editorial; it gets occupation, deportation and enforced amnesia. This is politics in its rawest form: fight or vanish.

Russia’s aim, by contrast, is a sort of historical pantomime with live ammunition. Putin wants satrapies because without them he has neither strategic depth nor a convincing bedtime story for the Russian public. The military logic is antique: Russia has been invaded from the west often enough that its security elites still think in terms of buffers and glacis, as if NATO cavalry might come clip-clopping across the steppe at any moment. In that world view, an independent Ukraine choosing Europe is not a sovereign decision; it is sabotage.

But the deeper logic is political. Putin’s regime is not held together by prosperity or democratic legitimacy. It survives on mythology. Russia is surrounded by enemies. The West is plotting. Only the great leader, bestriding his map like a slightly baffled colossus, can restore the rightful sphere. And a sphere, alas, requires subordinate countries to prove the point. Independent neighbours suggest weakness. Subdued neighbours suggest strength. A free and thriving Ukraine, especially one run by a Russian speaking comedian who chose democracy over the Kremlin, is therefore intolerable. It ruins the script.

And yes, resources sit in the wings, waving enthusiastically. Ukraine’s farmland is world class. Its iron ore, lithium and rare earth deposits would be helpful to an economy currently staggering around under sanctions. But minerals are not the core motivation. If this were a smash-and-grab raid for commodities, the Kremlin would not waste time insisting Ukrainians are not a real people. You do not need to erase a nationality in order to steal its lithium. You just need a compliant administration. What Putin wants is political dominion. The mineral wealth is a bonus prize.

Which brings us to the unavoidable comparison with the twentieth century’s other great enthusiasts for territorial revision. Hitler ranted endlessly about Bolsheviks while quietly adopting the same Soviet strategy: secure buffers, dominate neighbours, and justify it all with mystical talk of destiny. Putin has pulled the same trick in reverse. He shouts about fascists while borrowing the communist playbook on spheres of influence and mixing it with a strong dose of fascist pageantry. It is ideological pick-and-mix, held together by fear, oil revenues and a population conditioned to see borders as suggestions.

The West’s aim, naturally, is less theatrical. It wants a Europe where big countries do not get to carve up smaller ones. Supporting Ukraine is not heroism; it is the budget option in a world where the premium alternative is fighting Russia later at ten times the cost. Deterrence is cheaper than war, even if certain corners of British politics prefer waving the Union Flag and shouting about migrants to grasping that dull little truth.

So the Ukraine war, viewed without the filters of propaganda, is the meeting point of three imperatives. A nation fighting to live. A regime fighting to preserve its myth. And a continent trying to avoid replaying the bit of the 1930s that ends badly.

Everything else is embroidery from people who think geopolitics is something you learn from memes.

Farage Apology? Never!

Farage’s refusal to apologise is often explained as ego or bloody mindedness. That still understates what is going on. This is not a man misreading the room. It is a man performing for a business model.

The evidence is no longer a single accusation or a hazy memory. It is dozens of former pupils and staff independently describing the same behaviour. The response has followed a familiar sequence. It did not happen. If it did, it was exaggerated. If it was said, it was banter. If people were offended, that is on them. Each step is a retreat, not a rebuttal.

There is an obvious alternative, and we have seen it work. Public figures have apologised for youthful stupidity, owned it plainly, and moved on. Justin Trudeau apologised for blackface. Gordon Brown apologised for homophobic language he used when young. David Miliband apologised for student political material that used antisemitic language. The pattern is always the same: it happened, it was wrong, I am not that person now. In most cases, the story dies because there is nothing left to argue about.

Farage knows that playbook and refuses it, because apologies break populism. His brand is grievance and defiance. He is never wrong, only targeted. Any concession punctures that persona and invites awkward follow up questions about judgement, pattern, and how youthful attitudes relate to later rhetoric on migrants, Islam and British identity. Denial shuts that down. Apology opens it up.

His base also punishes contrition. Refusal is read as strength. Criticism is proof of an elite stitch up. From a narrow electoral perspective, the incentives are clear.

But there is more. Reform is drifting uncomfortably close to responsibility, and the results are not flattering. Reform run councils are struggling. Several mayoral candidates have become embarrassments through incompetence or scandal. Governing requires delivery. Opposition only requires noise. The closer Reform gets to power, the more exposed its lack of seriousness becomes.

Then there is the financial incentive. Farage does not make his money by governing. He makes it by being permanently outraged on the outside. Media contracts, speaking fees, donations, clicks, attention. All of it depends on conflict, not competence. Being a martyr is lucrative. Being accountable is not. A softened, apologetic Farage is a less valuable Farage.

Seen through that lens, the behaviour stops looking irrational. It is deliberate polarisation. Waverers are sacrificed. The base is hardened. Reform stays loud, aggrieved and safely insulated from expectation. Failure can always be blamed on others, while the revenue streams keep flowing.

So yes, there is evidence. Yes, there is a clear exit ramp. And yes, he knows it. The refusal is not an accident. It is self sabotage with a purpose. Better to remain a well paid irritant on the outside than risk exposure, responsibility and boredom on the inside.

He demands apologies from everyone else as a condition of respectability. When it is his turn, he discovers that apologies are weakness, history is irrelevant, and responsibility is for other people.

What's Goin' On?

I was watching a documentary the other night about how the music of 1971 supposedly changed the world. The breathless thesis was that everything pivoted on a single point, and that point was Ohio State. Not because the campus suddenly discovered harmony and counterpoint, but because four students were shot dead the previous spring at Kent State. One documentary error in the title, and suddenly the history of protest becomes a geography lesson. But the idea holds even if the narrator cannot tell Ohio’s universities apart. The killings in 1970 were the moment the American state demonstrated it was quite prepared to turn its rifles on its own children, and the music that arrived in 1971 was a howl of disbelief.

It is worth remembering that the National Guardsmen who pulled the triggers were acquitted. Not because the evidence was thin, but because the judge made it abundantly clear the case belonged in the wastepaper basket. The legal test was intent; the defence offered fear; and the politics of Nixon’s America did the rest. Four dead, nine wounded, 67 rounds fired, and the official conclusion was a collective shrug. The state apologised years later without admitting fault, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of sending flowers after running someone over.

Out of that moral vacancy came the music of a country that no longer believed its own civic fairytales. 1971 was a year in which the sheen came off everything. Marvin Gaye asked what was going on, which was a polite way of saying everything was going wrong. Sly Stone moved from technicolour optimism to a kind of exhausted paranoia. Lennon tried to imagine a better world because the one outside his front door looked increasingly deranged. Even the soft stuff, the Carpenters and their fellow purveyors of musical anaesthetic, existed because people needed something to dull the edges. Protest and escapism were two sides of the same national migraine.

And this is the point the documentary almost stumbled into. Popular music does reflect the state of a country, but not in the simplistic way the nostalgia merchants would have you believe. It absorbs the tension in the air and then spits it back out in melody, distortion, and the occasional banshee wail. When a society is confident, the music struts. When it is frightened or divided, the music retreats into introspection or hardens into rage. When it is exhausted, it becomes minimalist or nostalgic. If you want a cultural seismograph, skip the newspapers and listen to the charts.

Look at the eras. Postwar prosperity gave us cheery pop and the first rebellious twitch of rock and roll. The 60s began with optimism and ended in a fog of assassinations, Vietnam, and bad acid. The early 70s fractured along every political seam. Britain’s late 70s managed decline gave birth to punk. Reagan and Thatcher offered glossy confidence on the surface, while the underside produced Public Enemy and goth kids wearing sunglasses in the rain. The 90s oscillated between Britpop’s champagne foam and grunge’s existential hangover. The 2000s served up R&B gloss as a pressure valve for a decade defined by terrorism and the credit bubble. The austerity era brought grime from the margins to the main stage because it was the only genre honest enough to describe the country that had actually emerged.

Music does not mirror events, but it certainly catches their smell. You can tell more about a society’s state of mind from what its young people dance to than from any number of speeches in Parliament or Congress. Kent State proved that in 1970. The bullets hit flesh, but the echo hit the culture. By 1971 it was ringing out of every radio.

So yes, the music of 1971 did change the world, but only because America had already changed and not for the better. Artists reacted because the country was reacting. The documentary, bless it, wanted a simple origin story: a single year, a single spark. The truth is messier and far more interesting. Music is not the cause. It is the aftershock. And sometimes, as in 1971, it is the only honest record of what a country refuses to admit to itself.

The Politics of Recognition

This follows on from yesterday’s post about the policing of pro-Palestine marches and the sudden fixation on the chant “Globalise the intifada”. But the real issue was never one slogan. It is how visibility drives suspicion, enforcement and hostility in Britain.

The law has not changed. The climate has. The police are responding to perceived impact rather than dictionary definition, trying to prevent violence rather than adjudicate politics. That is understandable. What is harder to defend is how selectively that logic is applied.

It is also worth being precise about what is actually being policed. Whatever one thinks of the chant, neither Hamas nor any other Israel-focused group has treated “intifada” as a call to attack Jewish communities outside Israel. International attacks on Jewish targets have overwhelmingly come from global jihadist movements such as ISIS and al-Qaeda, not from protest movements or from Israel-Palestine-focused actors. Treating the slogan as a proxy for violence against Jews in Britain collapses the distinction between Jews and Israel and assigns a global intent that simply is not borne out by evidence or precedent. It is a category error. Police can and should act on incitement, threats and intimidation. They cannot credibly claim that a slogan constitutes a call for worldwide violence against Jewish civilians.

Britain has long tolerated far-right chants that perform the same function. “We want our country back.” “Stop the invasion.” “Send them home.” They are vague by design, emotionally loaded, and intended to intimidate without spelling anything out. Everyone knows who they are aimed at. Yet they pass as robust political speech, usually because they are wrapped in flags, accents and familiarity. Language that sounds foreign is scrutinised. Language that sounds native is normalised.

This is not an argument for letting everything go. It is an argument for recognising what is already happening.

Hate follows visibility. Where difference is visible, hostility becomes opportunistic and ambient. Where it is not, hostility becomes ideological and symbolic.

Muslims face higher volumes of street-level abuse because visibility produces frequency. Jews, most of whom are not visibly identifiable, face a far higher per-capita risk through threats to synagogues, schools and institutions. When Jews are visibly identifiable, as with Lubavitch or Chabad communities, the pattern shifts again. Visibility invites projection.

The Bondi tragedy showed this clearly. Rabbis appeared publicly offering comfort, doing what Chabad always does. For some observers, that visibility alone triggered suspicion. Not because of what they said, but because of what they looked like. The hatred was already primed. It simply needed somewhere to land.

The same mechanism runs across society.

Physically disabled people are instantly recognisable and face constant, casual judgement. Staring, comments, accusations of fraud. Mental disabilities are not visible, so discrimination arrives later and harder, when behaviour departs from expectation and is punished rather than understood. Black people are stopped and searched more often not because they offend more, but because visibility feeds preconception. LGBT people are tolerated until visibility increases, a Pride flag, a same-sex couple holding hands. Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities are treated as a problem simply by arriving. No chant required. Presence is enough.

This is why the “disabled, black lesbian” trope exists. It is not satire. It is a sneer at visibility itself. Stack multiple recognisable markers together and the mocker convinces themselves they have spotted something artificial, performative, excessive. What they are really doing is punishing legibility. Turning a human being into a caricature so they do not have to confront how differently society treats those who are seen.

Which brings us back to chant policing. Chants matter, but they are triggers, not causes. Enforcement is drawn not to meaning, but to recognisability. What looks threatening is policed. What feels familiar is indulged. The flag provides cover. The accent reassures.

The danger here is not free speech versus public order. It is inconsistency. When enforcement looks asymmetric, extremists on all sides exploit it. One cries repression. The other cries indulgence. Both feel vindicated.

None of this is resolved by pretending words have fixed meanings detached from context. Nor by acting as if only one form of hatred exists, or only one community bears its weight.

Hate does not require logic. It does not need evidence. It does not even need words. It only needs a shape it can recognise.

Codicil

It is also worth noting what Farage has said, repeatedly and unambiguously, about Israel and Gaza. He has rejected the charge of genocide, opposed any suspension of arms sales, dismissed recognition of a Palestinian state as “rewarding terrorism”, and framed the war largely as a civilisational struggle between the West and Islamist extremism. Criticism of Israel from the British left, he has suggested, is driven less by concern for civilians than by hostility to Israel itself.

That positioning matters. Farage is not neutral on this issue. He is emphatically aligned with a maximalist, security-first defence of Israel and routinely uses the conflict to reinforce his wider narrative about Islam, immigration and cultural threat. At the same time, he has previously trafficked in rhetoric that Jewish institutions themselves have criticised as drawing on antisemitic tropes.

Against that backdrop, the silence over the Dulwich College allegations becomes harder to explain as mere caution. Grassroots Jewish bodies spoke. Holocaust survivors spoke. The formal leadership did not. Yet some of those same institutions have been vocal, and rightly so, about slogans at marches and the policing of protest language.

This need not imply approval, endorsement or conspiracy. It does suggest that political familiarity and perceived alignment can lower the threshold for public challenge. Farage’s overt Islamophobia and his vocal alignment with Israel’s war aims appear to render him a more comfortable figure to ignore, even when credible allegations of antisemitism surface.

Once again, the pattern holds. Antisemitism is confronted aggressively when it comes from the margins, from protests, from foreign-sounding language. When it comes wrapped in blazers, banter and Union Flags, and attached to a useful political alignment, the response softens or disappears altogether.

That is not moral consistency. It is selective indulgence.

When Ambiguity Becomes a Crime

This week, the Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police announced that people chanting or displaying the phrase “globalise the intifada” should expect to be arrested. No new law was passed. No parliamentary debate took place. Instead, the police declared that “the context has changed” and that words now carry consequences they did not before.

That matters, because this is not legislation. It is interpretation by enforcement.

We therefore begin with ambiguity, because that is where this phrase has always lived.

“Globalise the intifada” is not a precise instruction. Like many phrases in common use, its meaning shifts with context. “Hold the line” can mean don’t retreat, don’t panic, or simply don’t hang up. Language works that way. Courts have recognised this for years, which is precisely why earlier attempts to prosecute similar chants have failed. There is an established legal precedent that the ambiguity stands.

What has changed is not the phrase, and not the law, but the way it is being policed.

Historically, intifada refers to Palestinian uprisings against Israeli occupation. It was not coined as a religious slogan, nor as a call to kill Jews. The First Intifada was largely a civilian uprising against military rule and the denial of political rights. The Second Intifada became far more violent and morally compromised, and that shift understandably altered how the word is heard. But even then, it referred to resistance to an occupying power, not to Jews as a people. Conflating Israel with Jews is a political move, not a historical one.

That distinction matters, because the police announcement rests on the assertion that the phrase now has only one meaning, and that meaning is the most extreme one available. Ambiguity is no longer acknowledged. A phrase that once carried multiple interpretations is now treated as if it can only mean incitement, and in its darkest reading, violence against Jews.

That interpretation explains why the phrase alarms people. It is not invented out of thin air. But it remains an interpretation, not a linguistic fact, and crucially, it is not one that Parliament has written into law.

What is striking is what has been excluded from the frame. The phrase is not being assessed through the lens of the killing of civilians and children in Gaza. Not through the lens of ongoing settler violence and dispossession in the West Bank. Not through decades of occupation, grievance, and asymmetrical power. Context has not been removed accidentally. It has been selected. Only one context is now permitted, and all others are treated as irrelevant.

There is also an uncomfortable mismatch between cause and effect. The Bondi attackers were motivated by ISIS-style jihadism, not by Palestinian nationalism or resistance to Israeli occupation. Whatever one thinks of the chant, it does not belong to the ideological universe that produced that atrocity. Collapsing these distinct currents into a single category of threat may be emotionally understandable in the aftermath of violence, but it is analytically weak. It risks treating Palestinian solidarity, anger over Gaza, and ambiguous slogans as proxies for a form of extremism to which they are not historically or politically connected.

From the police perspective, the motive is not ideological but preventative. Faced with recent lethal attacks, heightened fear within Jewish communities, and the risk that certain slogans might act as accelerants in an already charged environment, their instinct is to head off any violence before it happens. That caution is understandable. Policing is, by nature, about risk management rather than fine linguistic or historical distinctions. But explanation is not the same as justification. Preventing disorder does not dissolve ambiguity, and acting to reduce risk does not confer the authority to redefine meaning or create new offences by interpretation.

In truth, the police are caught between a rock and a hard place. Do nothing, and they are accused of complacency. Act, and they are accused of repression. Seen in that light, this move looks less like a settled legal position than a form of tokenism: a visible assertion of control designed to reassure anxious communities and demonstrate resolve. It may calm the moment, but it does not resolve the underlying legal or linguistic problem. It simply pushes it downstream.

This selectivity matters because it is being used to justify enforcement without legal change. The police are not applying a new offence created by statute. They are asserting that because the moment is charged, words which were previously not prosecutable now are. Meaning is being fixed by policing guidance rather than by Parliament or the courts. Arrests may follow, but arrests are not convictions, and they do not themselves settle what the law means.

This is where legal reality intrudes. Policing decisions do not override precedent. The law has not been amended, and the courts remain the ultimate arbiters of intent, proportionality, and free expression. The same ambiguity that defeated earlier prosecutions has not evaporated simply because the emotional climate has hardened.

In the short term, the courts may well defer. With recent violence still raw, caution is likely to trump principle. The odds, for now, probably favour the authorities. But enforcement moving faster than law is not the same as enforcement being legally secure. The ground for challenge remains, and it is substantial.

This is the thin end of the wedge. If ambiguity, once recognised and protected, can be declared void whenever circumstances become fearful, then it is not a safeguard at all. It becomes a convenience, honoured only until it proves inconvenient.

None of this is to deny that words can wound, intimidate, or incite. They can. But the danger lies in pretending that language can be made unambiguous by assertion, or that one interpretation can be enforced into existence. When precedent is quietly set aside and meaning is fixed by authority rather than law, it is not just one chant that is narrowed. It is the space for dissent itself.

History suggests that once that space contracts, it rarely re-expands without a fight.

The £5.99 Solution

A Mobylette, for the uninitiated, is France’s idea of motorised transport for people who aren’t in a hurry. A sort of halfway house between a bicycle and a moped, powered by a tiny two stroke engine that only bothers to run once you’ve pedalled hard enough to shame it into waking up. In motorcycling terms, it’s the two wheeled equivalent of the Citroen 2CV: slow, charming, mechanically simple, and determined to keep going no matter how much dignity it costs you. They were everywhere in the early 70s, buzzing through French villages like caffeinated wasps, beloved by teenagers, pensioners, and people who didn’t mind arriving eventually.

And I’ve spent the last month trying to resurrect mine.

The trouble actually began last year, when the original M4 thread holding the tower cap finally gave up. It stripped itself clean out of the carb body, leaving the cap wobbling like a loose tooth. The result was predictable: air leaks, fuel starvation, and an engine that would only run if I held the cap down with one hand while pedalling with the other, like a circus act devised by someone who disliked me personally. I promptly relegated the whole machine to the bike shed, where it sat in quiet disgrace until I had the time and the willpower to tackle it.

Complicating matters is that I am not entirely sure what Mobylette I actually own. Motobecane delighted in producing endless variants, subvariants, transitional models, and revisions of revisions. Mine appears to be a cross between at least two of them, and even one of those underwent several engine updates. Trying to identify it feels like conducting genealogy for farm equipment. Which is why sourcing an exact replacement carburettor is an exercise in futility – I can’t order one for “the correct model” when I haven’t the faintest idea what that model is. And even if I found one, it wouldn’t be original unless I nicked it from another Mobylette.

At some point I even replaced the original single seat with a double, on the optimistic premise that Hay might want to accompany me on a gentle jaunt – provided, of course, that there are no intervening hills. Some Mobylettes did come with double seats as standard, but that was a triumph of hope over physics. The poor thing struggles with me on board; add a second passenger and you might as well walk.

The ergonomics are, naturally, all wrong with the double seat - you're much closer to the pedals, which makes peddling from a seated position impossible; you have to stand to pedal and get it going, and then proceed down the road at 25 mph with your knees somewhere near your chin.

At that stage, the thought of drilling out the M4 filled me with dread. Aluminium is unforgiving. One slip and you’ve punched clean through. Yes, I could have used a Helicoil (or whatever the modern thread insert is called), but the idea of attacking a 50 year old French carburettor body with power tools felt like tempting fate. Hence the attempt at the simple solution: buy a replacement carburettor instead and avoid the drama entirely.

So I did. Thirty quid. Not Chinese. Utterly wrong. Back it went.

I tried again. Another thirty quid. This one was from China and, to my astonishment, looked absolutely perfect. Unfortunately, it arrived without the float, piston, or indeed any internal parts at all. A beautifully cast carburettor-shaped ornament. Refund obtained.

Which left me exactly where I had been a year earlier: staring at the original French carburettor, held together by nostalgia and the shredded remains of an M4 thread.

This is where the vagaries of the M designation come in. An M4 bolt is not 4 millimetres. An M5 bolt is not 5 millimetres. The number refers to the outer diameter including the thread. What appears to be a minor jump is actually quite a leap. And then you discover, usually after a small crisis, that the tapping size for M5 is 4.2 mm. The entire system seems designed to keep the uninitiated alert.

Before I could do anything, I had to find my tap and die set which, thanks to the Law of Garage Entropy (about which I’ve written before), had migrated to somewhere between ‘exactly where I left it’ and ‘the spirit realm’. After half an hour of rummaging, muttering, and finding tools I had forgotten I owned, I eventually located it wedged behind a box that definitely wasn’t there last week.

With no alternatives left, I took a deep breath, accepted my fate, and drilled the thing out. A clean 4.2 mm hole into the alloy, tap it to M5, and open the cap to a straight 5 mm so the bolt could pass through without complaint. There was just enough metal. Not an abundance. Just enough.

Cost of solution: £5.99 for a pack of M5 bolts.

Cost of carburettor-related optimism: £60 and two wasted orders.

With everything bolted together, I gave the pedals a shove. One and a half turns out on the mixture, and the Mobylette coughed, spluttered, then burst into life in its familiar peddle and pop fashion. It still won’t idle, choosing instead to stall like a French civil servant refusing to work after lunch, but that’s just a matter of tuning now. And honestly, it feels entirely true to the marque.

At least it’s original – which is more than can be said for many survivors of its age. Well, original apart from the M5 bolt that now holds the tower cap on, but that’s a minor mechanical enlightenment disguised as authenticity. These early 70s peddle and pop relics aren’t valuable enough to justify selling, which was the original plan. So instead, I’ll keep it a while longer and sling it on the back of the motorhome when we go on safari around Britain. If nothing else, it’ll give the locals something to point at.

So the moral is simple. You can buy two carbs for £30 each, discover neither is remotely usable, and still end up fixing the original with a £5.99 packet of bolts.

The Mobylette lives again. Badly, temperamentally, and without idling. But it lives.

Acceptable Exploitation

During our visit to Beaumaris last weekend we thought we'd take in Penrhyn Castle but, having been there before, we instead went to Penmon Point.

However, Penrhyn Castle was created in the usual way great Victorian fortunes were created. Money first, morality later, if at all.

The Pennant family did not conjure wealth out of thin air. It came from Caribbean sugar plantations worked by enslaved people, followed by compensation paid to slave owners when abolition finally arrived. The enslaved got nothing. The owners were paid handsomely by the British state. That capital was then folded into land ownership, slate quarries, and eventually a castle designed to look ancient while being entirely modern in its purpose. Power made visible.

Later came the slate. The Penrhyn quarries became industrial behemoths. The men who worked them were not enslaved, but they were ruthlessly exploited. Low pay, dangerous conditions, and when they organised, a lockout so long and bitter it shattered communities. The castle sat above it all, a stone receipt for who benefited and who paid.

That story is not contested. It is settled history.

What is contested is which bits of it are allowed to be emphasised.

The National Trust, to its credit, tried to tell the whole story. In 2020 it published research linking properties, including Penrhyn, to colonialism and slavery. It did not invent anything. It cited records. Compensation registers. Account books. Basic facts.

That was enough to trigger outrage from the Conservative benches. Sir John Hayes talked about “cultural vandalism”. The ineptly named Common Sense Group, with figures like Sir Edward Leigh and Brendan Clarke-Smith, accused the Trust of politicising heritage. Newspapers took up the cry. The Charity Commission was leaned on. All because a footnote connected a castle to slavery.

Notice what they were not objecting to. No Conservative MP demanded that the Penrhyn quarrymen’s story be toned down. No one accused the Trust of class warfare for discussing the 1900-1903 lockout. That exploitation was apparently acceptable. That suffering could stay.

Because it is safely in the past, safely white, safely domestic.

Slavery, they say, was also in the past. And of course it was. But it is not the timing that bothers them. It is the implication. Slavery exposes the origin of wealth. It shows that abolition did not mean restitution. It reveals that estates like Penrhyn are not just products of industry but of empire, violence and inherited privilege.

The Conservative Party’s position, whether it admits it or not, is that history should be curated to flatter the national story. Industrial exploitation can be acknowledged because it fits a narrative of progress and reform. Slavery must be backgrounded because it punctures the myth that Britain’s greatness was earned cleanly and then magnanimously surrendered.

The National Trust did not invent this history. It did not impose modern values on the past. It simply joined the dots.

Penrhyn Castle was built with money extracted from people who had no meaningful choice. First enslaved Africans. Then Welsh quarrymen. One was worse. Both were real. Both are in the stonework.

Calling that “woke” is not an argument. It is an attempt to control which truths are permitted to survive. And that tells you far more about the modern Conservatives than it ever does about the past.

Operation Tinsel Thunder: The SA Mobilises

Christmas looms, which means the Salvation Army is about to mobilise its annual campaign. Most charities settle for a quiet leaflet or the odd social media plea. Not these chaps. They field a full military orchestra, complete with brass artillery and percussion capable of levelling a small parish.

First on the streets is the Reconnaissance Corps, otherwise known as the Carol Detection Unit. These are the ones who materialise outside supermarkets at dawn, polished instruments gleaming, ready to ambush the unsuspecting shopper with a surprise rendition of O Come All Ye Faithful. They do not negotiate. They do not retreat. You will hear the tune whether you planned to or not.

Next comes the Logistics Regiment, a highly trained unit specialising in the deployment of collecting tins. These operatives can position a donation bucket under your elbow faster than you can say turkey crown. Their stealth skills are legendary. Many a civilian has discovered, on returning home, that a tenner has vanished from their wallet without any recollection of having donated. That is the precision of the SA’s fundraising machine.

Then we have the Heavy Brass Division. These are the big guns. Tubas the size of water butts, trombones capable of taking an eye out, and cornets calibrated to a frequency specifically designed to cut through December gales. This is the shock and awe phase of the campaign. By the time they finish a round of Hark the Herald, even the sturdiest cynic finds himself fumbling for change, partly out of goodwill and partly out of self-preservation.

Lurking behind them is the Psychological Operations Brigade. This lot specialise in sentimental manipulation. They wait until you have a mince pie in hand and then strike with Silent Night played at a tempo that suggests you really ought to think more fondly of your fellow man. Perfectly harmless until you realise you’ve just agreed to buy a bag of brussels sprouts for the food bank.

And of course, Christmas Eve is reserved for the Elite Yuletide Commando Band. These are the veterans, the ones who can play Little Donkey from memory in minus three while wearing gloves. They appear from nowhere, usually just as you’ve reached the point in your shopping where you’d cheerfully fight a reindeer for the last parking space. Yet the moment they strike up their final chorus, peace descends, wallets open, and small children look on in awe at this display of humanitarian firepower.

Say what you like about the Salvation Army. When the festive season begins, they run the most effective, least lethal military operation in Britain. And unlike the real armed forces, they never complain about equipment shortages. Their trumpets always work, their regiments never go on strike, and their only known act of aggression is the ability to lodge a carol so firmly in your brain that you’re still humming it in March.

If every public service ran with the same efficiency as the Salvation Army’s Christmas manoeuvres, we’d have nothing to complain about. But then what would we do during the long winter? Probably listen to the band.

Bondi - When Precision Gives Way to Panic

I have been arguing with an Australian friend about the Bondi Beach attack. He is an immigrant himself. He is not Jewish. He is not frightened. He is furious.

His anger is directed not primarily at the attackers, but at pro-Palestinian marchers. He describes the marches as “anti-Jewish” by definition. All of them. That claim is striking not least because Jews themselves have been marching in significant numbers. When Jewish protesters calling for a ceasefire are treated as part of an “anti-Jewish movement”, it tells you something important about the frame of mind at work. This is no longer about protecting Jews. It is about enforcing a single political interpretation.

In his telling, the marches were anti-Jewish, the government was weak for allowing them, and the atrocity was the foreseeable consequence of not cracking down sooner. That narrative is also being actively reinforced by sections of the media that flatten everything into outrage-friendly headlines. Nuance disappears, anger is rewarded, and complexity is treated as weakness. It is not surprising that this framing feels emotionally airtight once absorbed.

I understand why Jewish Australians are afraid. Synagogues attacked. Children harassed. Restaurants vandalised. People escorted to school. If the state has failed to stop that decisively, it has failed in its duty. That is not in dispute.

What is in dispute is the leap from those crimes to collective blame.

Chanting “gas the Jews” is not protest, it is incitement. Arrests should have followed. If police failed to act, that is a policing failure. It does not convert every march into a hate rally, nor does it make everyone present complicit. Precision matters. Once you abandon it, you stop targeting criminals and start punishing by identity.

The attacks on synagogues and homes were not caused by marches being allowed to happen. They were caused by individuals choosing violence. Blurring that distinction has a long and ugly history, and it never leads where people think it will.

There is a historical parallel that keeps being ignored. During the Troubles, the IRA carried out lethal attacks on the British mainland. Yet no serious voice called for banning Northern Irish people, criminalising Irish identity, or treating Irish marches as proof of collective guilt. The state held the line, imperfectly but deliberately, on individual responsibility. That was not weakness. It was how Britain avoided turning terrorism into communal war.

What has changed is not the logic of extremism, but the willingness to abandon principle when anger takes over.

The symmetry here is uncomfortable but unavoidable. The shooters justified killing civilians by blaming a whole group for the actions of a state. When we respond by blaming whole communities, or entire protest movements, for the actions of individuals, we are using the same logic in reverse. Different conclusions, identical reasoning. Once that logic is accepted, civilians everywhere become expendable.

Then reality intrudes.

One of the people who physically stopped a shooter, at great personal risk, was a Middle Eastern migrant. He ran towards a gunman while others ran away. In that moment, he demonstrated what collective blame always obscures: individual moral agency.

There is another imbalance in my friend’s position. He expresses fierce outrage at attacks on Jewish civilians in Australia, rightly so, but none at the killing of civilians in Gaza or the ongoing land grabs and settler violence in the West Bank. That selectivity matters. It does not excuse antisemitism. Nothing does. But it explains why people protest. When one set of civilian deaths counts as tragedy and another as background noise, outrage stops being principled and becomes tribal.

At that point, even Jewish protesters are no longer acceptable, because the issue is no longer safety. It is alignment. Who is allowed to speak, and on whose behalf. Once dissent itself becomes the enemy, the argument has fully detached from protecting Jews and drifted into enforcing a single political narrative.

This is also where the danger of precedent creeps in. If protests can be shut down, charged for policing, or delegitimised because someone else commits violence, that power will not remain confined to this issue. Powers created in anger never stay pointed at the original target.

Israel’s own trajectory should give pause here. It still has democratic structures, and those structures matter precisely because they restrain the state. Courts, press, protest and internal dissent are brakes. Remove them, and the range of state action widens dramatically. Democracies do not collapse overnight. They hollow out by treating dissent as disloyalty.

What all of this points to is something deeply unfashionable and stubbornly dull. Law. Individual responsibility. Evidence. Limits. No collective guilt. No panic dressed up as strength.

If civilian lives matter, they matter universally.
If guilt is individual, it stays individual.

Abandon those principles, and you do not defeat extremism. You imitate it.