The Eggsperiment

There are moments when modern life hands you a small, ridiculous victory. This was one of them.

I had read, somewhere on the internet, that you can boil a chicken egg in an airfryer. Already this feels like heresy. The airfryer is supposed to crisp, not poach. It is the machine equivalent of a smug fitness influencer claiming it can also do mindfulness. Still, curiosity won.

We do not, however, eat chicken eggs. That would be slumming it. We eat duck eggs, which are to chicken eggs what a proper engineering drawing is to a biro sketch. Bigger, richer, structurally more serious. So clearly the regulation nine minutes would not do. This required adjustment. Science was consulted. Experience was invoked. Two minutes were added.

The egg went in. One duck egg. One airfryer. One hundred and fifty degrees. Eleven minutes. No water. No pan. No rolling boil. Just hot circulating air and quiet confidence.

With two minutes to go, I set the toast to toast. This matters. Timing is everything. This was not guesswork. This was coordination. Breakfast as a system, not a sequence of damp improvisations.

When the egg came out, it looked unchanged, which is always the worrying part. Eggs give nothing away. You only find out whether you’ve succeeded when it is far too late to correct the error.

There is, however, a critical post-operation step. You must stop the cooking. Not theatrically. No ice baths or culinary spa treatments. Just a cup of cold water. A brief plunge. A few seconds. Enough to say, politely but firmly, “that will do”.

I do not peel a boiled egg. That way lies mess and pointless fiddling. I slice the top off. Cleanly. Decisively. This is an egg, not a puzzle box.

Perfection.

Set white. Fully cooked but not chalky. Yolk gloriously molten, as if it had been briefed in advance. No sulphur. No grey ring. No apology required. The toast arrived at exactly the right moment, butter melting on contact, suggesting forethought. Which, of course, there had been.

There is also the small matter of energy efficiency. A pan of water must be coaxed into boiling. It sits there absorbing heat, demanding patience and fuel while doing nothing useful. The airfryer delivers heat immediately, directly, and only to the thing you actually want cooked. No litres of water brought reluctantly to temperature. No waiting. No waste.

At this point you are meant to pretend this is normal. It is not. I have boiled eggs in pans for decades. I have watched water boil and counted minutes like a Victorian railway guard. All of that is now optional. You can put an egg in a countertop box of hot air, stop it cooking with a splash of cold water, synchronise the toast, remove the lid with a knife, and carry on with your morning.

This is how civilisation collapses. Not with a bang, but with an airfryer quietly outperforming everything else in the kitchen.

Of course, this will enrage purists. There will be muttering about tradition and how eggs have always been boiled in pans. These people are still adjusting dampers on coal ranges and eyeing electricity with suspicion.

The airfryer does not care. It does not argue. It simply produces a perfectly cooked duck egg, efficiently and on schedule, and waits patiently for the next task.

I will, reluctantly, be doing this again, but with 2 eggs. I only did one this time as it was an experiment.

Free Speech for Me, Prison for Thee

I see Lucy Connolly has discovered the joy of calling the police about social media posts. “Yas Nige”, she trills, as Nigel Farage reports Alaa Abd el-Fattah to counter-terrorism police over tweets from 2010. Free speech, it turns out, is a flexible concept. Stretchy. It fits best when worn by people you agree with.

This is the same Lucy Connolly who was jailed for urging people to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers during live public disorder. Not an abstract opinion. Not a historical rant dredged up years later. A direct call for arson while tensions were already high. She was convicted under the Public Order Act and sent to prison. Entirely orthodox. Tedious, even, if you understand how criminal law works.

At the time, Farage and Reform howled about tyranny. Two-tier justice. Thought crime. Prison for online speech, they insisted, was the mark of an authoritarian state.

Fast forward a few months and prison for online speech is suddenly a public service. Report him. Deport him. Strip his citizenship. Lock him up. Preferably on arrival. The only thing that has changed is who is speaking.

Graham Linehan is the awkward control case they would rather forget. Arrested at a port, questioned, released. No charge. No jail. Five armed officers, not six, for those who enjoy numerical embellishment. The system investigated, applied the threshold, and decided there was no case to answer. That is what due process looks like when it is allowed to function.

Alaa Abd el-Fattah sits in the same legal lane. Historic posts. No live disorder. No arrest. A police review, not a prosecution. Condemnation without pre-emptive punishment. Again, entirely orthodox, however unsatisfying that may be for people who think the law should move at the speed of social media fury.

There is a deeper irony here that rarely gets mentioned. The same Conservative governments now demanding action spent years campaigning for Alaa’s release from an Egyptian prison. They did so because the principle was simple - British citizens should not rot in foreign jails for political speech. That principle does not magically expire at Heathrow passport control.

The law has not shifted an inch. Thresholds, context and due process remain exactly where they always were.

What has collapsed is the right’s claim to believe in free speech.

They do not oppose prison for online speech.
They oppose prison for their online speech.

Everyone else can burn.

The banner in the photo at the top of this blog says “POLICE OUR STREETS NOT OUR TWEETS”. It presents itself as a universal principle. Yet when Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s historic tweets resurfaced, the Free Speech Union had nothing to say. No ringing defence of free expression. No warning about chilling effects. No concern about police involvement over speech alone. Just silence.

That silence matters. Because the FSU has been vocal, energetic and litigious when speech cases involve people they sympathise with. They mobilise press releases, crowdfunders and court cases with impressive speed. Here, nothing. Which tells you what the banner really means. Not “don’t police tweets”, but “don’t police our tweets”. Others can be reported, reviewed, investigated and quietly written off as exceptions.

The law, inconveniently, does not work on selective outrage. Context, intent and harm still apply. And slogans photographed outside the Royal Courts of Justice do not become principles just because no one asks the awkward follow-up question.

Stalin

I am reading a biography of Stalin by Stephen Kotkin, although for the first half you would be forgiven for wondering if Stalin has missed the train. It is really a book about everything else. The long, creaking lead up to the revolution, the revolution itself, and the immediate aftermath. Stalin is somewhere in the background, taking notes, while an entire political ecosystem collapses in slow motion.

Kotkin does this deliberately, and to be fair he earns it. What he is really describing is not a man, but a milieu. An uncontrolled spillage of factions. Factions splitting into factions, which immediately split again over the wording of a resolution nobody could implement anyway. Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Left SRs, Right SRs, anarchists who despised organisation but somehow ran three committees each. Everyone agreed the old system was rotten. Nobody agreed what should replace it, or who was in charge while they argued.

And then there were the committees. Endless committees. Workers’ committees, soldiers’ committees, peasants’ committees, regional committees, central committees, executive committees, provisional committees, emergency committees, committees to investigate why the last committee had failed to meet. They sprouted like wheat in spring. Wheat at least feeds people. These fed paper.

The theory was collective leadership. The reality was perfect cover. Nothing was ever anyone’s fault. It was the committee’s decision, or the sub committee’s interpretation, or sabotage by a rival committee. Meanwhile trains stopped running, cities starved, and men argued furiously about whether the revolution had been sufficiently revolutionary.

Layered on top of this was the farce of post war diplomacy. After WWI, while Russia was bleeding and barely holding together, the factions were busy pussy-footing with the Germans. Peace, no peace, revolutionary war, neither war nor peace. Trotsky even gave the world a policy that meant precisely nothing and stuck to it until German troops advanced briskly to concentrate minds. Lenin wanted to sign anything to stop the haemorrhage. Others preferred to posture about international revolution while giving away territory by the week. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk eventually emerged from weeks of argument, walkouts and moral grandstanding. Everyone hated it. Everyone signed it. Everyone later claimed it proved they had been right all along.

Only gradually does Stalin drift into clearer view. He is not arguing theory or dazzling anyone with intellect. He is counting. Who appoints whom. Who controls which committee. Who owes their position to whom. While others were busy denouncing each other or practising interpretive diplomacy with Berlin, Stalin quietly mastered the only skill that mattered in a system obsessed with committees.

Kotkin makes clear that this was not accidental. Stalin did not rise because he had the best ideas. He rose because he understood the machinery. Lenin eventually noticed the problem and warned that Stalin was rude, power hungry, and dangerous. This was filed under “to be discussed later”, which in revolutionary terms means “ignored until it is far too late”.

Trotsky would have argued better. Bukharin would have fed people better. Martov might even have avoided the whole blood soaked farce. But none of them mastered the true art of the revolution, which was not ideology but control of appointments, paperwork and process. Stalin did. He took the committee jungle Kotkin spends hundreds of pages patiently describing and turned it into a single trunk, then used it as a cudgel.

By the time the book finally becomes recognisably about Stalin, the committees are still there in name. They issue unanimous decisions, clap on cue, and approve outcomes they did not design. The wheat has been harvested. The field belongs to one man.

Kotkin’s unspoken joke is that you cannot understand Stalin without first wading through the chaos that made him possible. The lesson is simple. Revolutions that believe history is on their side tend to drown in paperwork and posturing on the way there. And the man who survives is rarely the one with the best ideas, but the one who understands that committees are not about decisions, but about power.

Scumbag Is Not a Legal Category

Watching Reform and assorted Tory outriders demand the deportation of an Egyptian - British dissident over decade old tweets is a masterclass in performative amnesia, laced with legal illiteracy and a great deal of noise.

We are invited to believe that Britain has suddenly discovered an ancient constitutional principle whereby offensive speech, once rediscovered, triggers immediate banishment. No trial. No threshold. No process. Just exile. Preferably announced on the radio, with an air of righteous certainty and a Union Flag somewhere in the studio.

In the real world, deportation does not work like that. British citizens are not parcels with awkward labels that can be returned to sender. Citizenship is a legal status, not a rolling probation scheme subject to ministerial mood swings. You cannot deport a British citizen at all unless you first strip them of citizenship, and that power exists for terrorism, espionage and serious national security threats. Not for angry tweets written during the Arab Spring.

That small inconvenience has not stopped Chris Philp going on the airwaves and calling the man a “scumbag”. Not once, but three times, as if repetition might substitute for statute. This is not policy. It is incantation. If you say it often enough, perhaps the audience will forget to ask awkward questions about law, process or proportionality.

But then Philp gives the game away. In the same breath, he argues that Britain must leave the European Convention on Human Rights so we can deport people like this. That is not a solution. It is an admission. If deportation were already lawful, there would be no need to invoke Strasbourg at all. You only demand to leave a legal framework when that framework is preventing you from doing what you want.

The problem for Philp is that the ECHR is not even the main obstacle here. The primary barrier is domestic law, written by his own party. He is a British citizen, and not by some administrative whim. He acquired citizenship through his British mother, under long-standing nationality law. That makes his status qualitatively different from the caricature being pushed. This is not a guest whose welcome has worn thin. It is a citizen whose connection to the UK runs through parentage.

Leaving the ECHR tomorrow would not change that by one millimetre. To deport him, the government would first have to strip his citizenship under the British Nationality Act, and that power is constrained by statute, precedent and proportionality. If citizenship acquired through a British parent can be revoked because of historic speech, then citizenship itself becomes conditional. Not just for him, but for anyone whose Britishness is not conveniently uncomplicated.

The ECHR only comes into play later, if citizenship were stripped and removal pursued, mainly because of Article 3 and the very obvious problem of deporting someone to a country whose prisons we have spent years condemning. Philp is pointing at the last fence on the course while pretending the earlier walls do not exist.

Once you start handing out the label “scumbag”, logic becomes awkward anyway. If historic antisemitic speech is enough to place someone beyond the pale, then Philp must logically include Nigel Farage in the same category. Farage has faced repeated criticism over remarks widely regarded as flirting with antisemitic tropes. He denies specific allegations, and he is entitled to do so. But denial does not create a separate moral universe. Either offensive speech disqualifies you, or it does not.

And here politics intrudes. Philp cannot apply that logic consistently because he almost certainly does not want to. A man loudly auditioning for the hard right may well have one eye on Reform’s benches. Calling Farage a scumbag would be career limiting. Much safer to reserve the insult for someone without a safe passport, a party machine, or structural immunity from the powers being demanded.

Philp knows all of this. He has been a Home Office minister. He knows perfectly well that citizenship cannot be revoked on the basis of moral disgust, that historic speech is not a present security threat, and that deportation is not a heckler’s veto administered by talk radio. The insult is doing the work because the legal argument will not.

Reform, meanwhile, have joined in with their usual gusto. Deport him, they cry, without ever explaining how, or on what lawful basis. No statute. No threshold. Just a demand for removal, as though exile were an opinion rather than a legal act.

When defenders of this approach reach for comparison, the only one that ever survives contact with reality is Shamima Begum. But that case only underlines how weak the current argument is. Begum travelled to Syria to join ISIS, a proscribed terrorist organisation. Her citizenship was removed on explicit national security grounds. That decision was controversial, but it rested on involvement with terrorism, not speech.

This case does not. It involves historic posts, predating British citizenship, not criminally prosecuted, not linked to any current extremist activity, and now apologised for. None of that makes the content acceptable. But it does make the leap to exile legally absurd. Law deals in present risk and proportion, not retrospective outrage dredged up for political convenience.

We are also told, with a theatrical shake of the head, that this should all have been picked up when citizenship was granted. It was not, for a very simple reason. Citizenship vetting is not a forensic trawl through a decade of social media looking for ideological impurity. It checks identity, criminal records, security databases and fraud. It is risk led. In 2021, the risk assessment was clear. A political prisoner, not a terrorist. That decision was taken by a Conservative government, with eyes open, applying rules that still exist.

Only now, once the optics have shifted, do we hear calls for retroactive purity tests. If citizenship acquired through a British parent can be revoked whenever a journalist finds something unpleasant in an archive, it ceases to be citizenship and becomes a visitor badge with a temperamental bouncer.

Which brings us back to the insult itself. “Scumbag” is not a legal category. It is a rhetorical solvent, used to dissolve due process and make extreme powers sound reasonable. Once someone is reduced to that, why bother with courts, appeals or rights at all.

If antisemitism is the concern, the correct response is condemnation, challenge and, where thresholds are met, prosecution. What Philp and Reform offer instead is abuse as a substitute for law, and “leave the ECHR” as a substitute for thinking.

Three repetitions do not make it truer. They simply make the absence of a serious argument impossible to ignore.

NATO Was the Alibi, Not the Cause

I watched a Vlad Vexler YouTube chat recently that put into words something that has been bothering me for a while. The idea that Putin invaded Ukraine because of NATO expansion has the causality neatly backwards. NATO is the excuse. Ukraine was always the problem.

Look at the timeline, not the slogans.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine became independent with borders Russia formally recognised. Moscow signed up to that settlement repeatedly, including the Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine even gave up nuclear weapons on the back of it. If this was about Russian insecurity, that should have been the end of the story.

It wasn’t.

Putin’s worldview hardened long before Ukraine was anywhere near NATO membership. His grievance was never missiles in Poland. It was the loss of empire. He has said as much himself. The “geopolitical catastrophe” line was not about NATO bureaucracy. It was about territory, status, and control.

When NATO expanded in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia complained but cooperated. It worked with NATO in Afghanistan. It accepted the reality. Ukraine was not part of this, and not a serious candidate. If NATO expansion were an existential threat, this period makes no sense.

Then came Georgia in 2008. Not a NATO member. No NATO troops. Still invaded. The lesson was clear and it was not about defence. Drift away from Moscow and force will follow.

Ukraine learned that lesson the hard way. And here is the point that destroys the reactive narrative entirely. In 2010 Ukraine explicitly dropped its NATO ambitions. Non-aligned. Neutral on paper. If NATO were the cause, pressure should have eased. Instead Russia turned the screws harder.

When Ukraine finally slipped out of Moscow’s political grip in 2014, Russia took Crimea and lit the Donbas fuse. Again, no NATO membership. No NATO bases. No imminent threat. Just a neighbouring country refusing to stay in its assigned box.

From then on, the NATO argument became louder and more theatrical, precisely as Russia armed itself, rewrote history, and denied that Ukraine was a real nation at all. That is not the language of a state worried about security buffers. It is the language of an empire nursing a grievance.

By 2021 the demands were so sweeping they gave the game away. Not just “no Ukraine in NATO,” but a rollback of NATO itself and a veto over other countries’ choices. That is not defensive realism. It is a claim to dominion.

And when the invasion came, it went straight for Kyiv. Regime change. Erasure of Ukrainian statehood. Occupying Ukraine would not have reduced NATO’s border with Russia. It would have doubled it. That alone tells you what this was not about.

Vexler’s point is a simple one, and it holds. NATO did not cause the invasion. The invasion made NATO expansion inevitable. Finland and Sweden are not joining because they suddenly fell in love with Washington. They joined because Russia demonstrated, beyond doubt, that neutrality is only respected when Moscow finds it convenient.

So when people say “Russia was provoked,” what they really mean is that Ukraine tried to exist independently and Russia objected. NATO is the alibi. Empire is the motive. The timeline is not complicated, unless you are trying very hard not to see it.

Proud Abolitionists Who Would Bring It Back Tomorrow

Over the weekend a group of Conservative MPs decided that the most pressing moral crisis facing the nation was the Church of England daring to spend £100 million acknowledging its historical links to slavery. Not on safeguarding, not on poverty, not on the churches they spent fourteen years letting rot, but on the sheer impertinence of an institution looking at its own books and saying, quietly, this money was made from something ugly and we ought to do something decent with it.

The argument, we are told, is legal. The endowment must only be spent on clergy wages and church buildings. This is, at best, selective reading and, at worst, wilful nonsense. The Church Commissioners have always funded mission, education, pensions and social investment. But legal hair-splitting is just the respectable wrapper. What really offends is not the spending but the remembering.

Which brings me neatly to my Facebook feed.

Lately my Facebook feed has taken on a curious Victorian flavour, full of people thumping their chests about Britain’s noble role in ending the slave trade. Wilberforce this, Royal Navy that, and the inevitable flourish about how we, uniquely, stood tall against barbarism. All very rousing if you ignore the three centuries we spent running the largest slave-trading operation on the planet, and the small detail that the only people compensated at abolition were the slave owners. But historical amnesia is a national pastime, so on they march. 

What really catches the eye, though, is what lurks directly underneath these patriotic homilies. The comments sections are piled high with the same crowd who can barely utter the word black without reaching for a dog whistle. They celebrate abolition with one hand and type out barely coded racial resentment with the other. It is like watching someone boast about their family’s centuries old vegetarian tradition while clutching a dripping kebab. The cognitive dissonance could power the grid.

And it is everywhere. A preponderance, as my old English master would say. Post after post telling me how proud we should be of our anti slavery heritage, followed by the usual suspects explaining how modern Britain is being ruined by the very people whose ancestors bore the brunt of that heritage. The irony is so thick you could spread it.

The lack of self awareness on these posts is mind boggling. They wield history like a comfort blanket, utterly oblivious to the fact that their own comments would have made Wilberforce choke on his tea. The post declares Britain the heroic slayer of slavery; the replies read like a recruitment pamphlet for the mindset that made slavery possible in the first place.

Let’s be honest. They are not celebrating abolition because they cherish equality. They are celebrating it because it makes them feel virtuous without demanding any self examination. It is a shield. An absolution. If Britain banned slavery in 1807, then how could any of them possibly harbour prejudice now? They tuck themselves into that warm historical duvet and hope no one notices the bile they spill today.

But they are not abolitionists. They are nostalgists for hierarchy, furious that the world no longer organises itself around their imagined place at the top. If you could bottle the sentiment in those comment threads, you would not be sending it to the British Library, you would be locking it in a museum of bigotry with a sign saying Do Not Touch.

This is the great tell. The louder they proclaim Britain’s noble role in ending slavery, the more likely they are to sneer at black Britons in the next sentence. They want the credit for moral courage shown two centuries ago while clinging to prejudices that abolitionists were trying to drag out of society in the first place.

History is not their friend here. It is the fig leaf they hide behind. Scratch it and you expose what was always there. The problem is not that they don’t know our history. The problem is that they know just enough of it to weaponise the comfortable bits while ignoring the humanity of those still on the receiving end.

It would be funny if it weren’t so grotesquely familiar. But there it is, scrolling past my eyes every morning. Britain ended slavery, they cry. Yes. And judging by the comments beneath, too many of them would bring it back tomorrow if they thought they could get away with it.

Beware the Exact Date Snow Bomb

Every winter, like clockwork, Britain is menaced by the same terrifying phenomenon. Not snow. Not ice. But the annual migration of the “snow bomb”.

It arrives not from the Arctic but from a newsroom, usually escorted by a purple map, a dramatic arrow, and a level of certainty that no serious meteorologist would dare to use about anything more than twelve hours away. The phrase itself is a triumph of marketing over meaning. There is no such thing as a snow bomb. There never has been. It is not used by the Met Office, nor by anyone who understands weather rather than clicks.

What usually lies behind it is a single speculative model run, ten days out, showing cold air flirting with moisture. One frame is selected. The uncertainty is quietly dropped. The ensemble spread is ignored. Probability is buried. Then comes the headline, breathless and triumphant, promising Britain “buried”, “blasted”, or “paralysed”, usually just in time for a weekend.

The UK, inconveniently, is not Siberia. It is a damp island sitting in a temperate maritime flow, where winter precipitation spends most of its life deciding whether it wants to be rain, sleet or a brief embarrassment of snow that melts before the kettle boils. Proper, widespread, disruptive snow requires a stubborn cold pool already in place and a very specific alignment of systems. It happens occasionally. It does not happen every January, despite the desperate hopes of headline writers.

The Met Office, which has the tiresome habit of being right more often than the tabloids, talks instead about frost, ice, localised wintry showers, and increased risk. These phrases do not perform well on social media. “Patchy ice” does not drive engagement. “Possible hill snow” does not terrify commuters. So they are replaced by theatrical nonsense.

The real damage is not that people are misled into buying extra bread. It is that trust is eroded. When genuine severe weather does threaten, many have already tuned out, conditioned by years of false alarms and lurid exaggeration. Cry wolf often enough and eventually the wolf does not need to bother turning up.

And so we endure it every winter. Another “snow bomb” that turns out to be cold rain and a grumpy dog. Another round of breathless graphics, followed by silence when nothing happens. No retraction. No reflection. Just a quiet pivot to the next crisis.

Snow will fall in Britain from time to time. That is called winter. The real blizzard is the one of nonsense, blown in annually from the click economy, where meteorology is optional and accuracy is the first thing buried.

The secret is to avoid like the plague any publications that spread these stories, as they're unlikely to be right about anything else either. They're in the click generation business, not news.

Failure, Provided You Can Afford It

I was listening to Radio 4 on Boxing Day, with James Dyson guest editing Today. He kept returning to a familiar theme: the importance of failure. Failure as teacher. Failure as an essential part of innovation. It is an appealing idea, and not an untrue one.

But it rests on an assumption that rarely gets said out loud.

Failure has to be affordable.

That thought did not come from theory. It came from experience. We invested in a start up operating firmly in the Dyson sphere, if you will forgive the pun. A new vacuum cleaner. Serious engineering, real intent. We backed it in two ways: providing business premises and making a financial investment.

The company failed.

Brexit came first. It introduced friction, cost and uncertainty into supply chains and exporting that had previously been manageable. Components became harder to source. Margins tightened. Planning horizons shortened. The business survived, but with less room for error.

Then Covid arrived.

Demand collapsed. Supply chains seized up. Cashflow was squeezed from both ends. The business limped through the crisis, but emerged weakened, with no spare capacity left to absorb further shocks. There was no bounce back. The company could not recover.

What makes this harder to dismiss as an abstract story is that the failure is tangible. We still have a few of the machines. Finished products. Properly designed, manufactured, boxed and branded. Not prototypes, not vapourware, not a pitch deck fantasy. Objects that existed, were sold, and worked. Hay declares it bulletproof. 

When people talk cheerfully about failure, they rarely have an artefact sitting in front of them.

Here is the asymmetry that changed how I hear talk of failure. I could afford that failure. The investment came from excess, disposable income. Losing it was unpleasant, but survivable. It narrowed options rather than ending them. For me, failure was a risk I knowingly carried.

The company could not afford it.

For the business, failure was not a learning experience. There was no second iteration, no chance to apply lessons. The runway ended. Employees lost jobs. Founders lost years of work and momentum. Failure did not teach the company anything useful, because it ended it.

This is what tends to be missing when successful people talk about failure. They are often describing it from the perspective of someone whose failures are cushioned. Their mistakes stretch them, but they do not break them.

That does not make the argument wrong. It makes it incomplete.

Failure is educational when it happens in a system that allows recovery. When shocks are survivable. When the downside is buffered. Brexit reduced that margin. Covid erased what was left.

So when we praise failure, the honest version of the argument needs a qualifier. Failure can be valuable, even necessary, but only when it is borne by those who can survive it.

Otherwise we are not celebrating learning or innovation. We are confusing survivorship with virtue, and mistaking the ability to bounce back for a universal human trait, when in reality it is often just the privilege of having something solid to land on.

Testing Times

I began this Ashes series under the reasonable assumption that England were engaged in an endless single match that nobody was allowed to finish. This turned out to be wrong, but only in the way that discovering a building has more floors than you thought is technically reassuring while making the fire escape problem worse.

What is actually happening is this. The Ashes is a series of Test matches. Each Test is a single game, except it lasts five days, contains multiple internal battles, can end without a winner, and is narrated as if it were a moral struggle. Fine. I can live with that. What finally tipped me into confusion was realising that England have already lost the Ashes, definitively, mathematically, and beyond appeal, yet the whole thing stubbornly carries on regardless.

Australia went three nil up. That settles it. The urn is retained. England cannot win the series. End of story. Except it is not the end of anything. The 4th Test turns up. Then the 5th Test. Same players, same whites, same commentary voices, same slow grind of time, as if the central objective had not quietly expired days earlier.

In most sports, this would be the point where everyone shakes hands, plays the reserves, and pretends the last fixtures are about “development”. Cricket, however, simply clears its throat and carries on as though nothing awkward has happened. You are informed that the remaining Tests now matter for pride, momentum, individual averages, the World Test Championship, contractual obligations, and a sort of collective stiff upper lip.

Which is all true, but also faintly mad. England are playing matches they cannot win in order to avoid losing badly. Victory is off the table, but dignity is still in play. This is very English, come to think of it.

It also explains why the thing feels non-ending. The original prize has already gone, yet the rituals continue. The resets are invisible to the casual observer. New Test, new pitch, fresh start, except emotionally and narratively it feels like the same argument being resumed after everyone already knows who is right.

And then, just to underline cricket’s perverse sense of humour, England go and win the fourth Test anyway. Not enough to matter in the obvious sense, but enough to prove that the later games are not pointless, merely philosophically awkward. They matter sideways rather than forwards.

So the Tests go on because cricket refuses to collapse time into a neat conclusion. Each match insists on its own meaning, even when the overarching story has already finished. It is tradition, finance, pride, global rankings, and stubborn continuity rolled into one.

In other words, it is not that cricket cannot end. It is that it does not see why it should, simply because the answer is already known.

Farage the Drag Queen

Nigel Farage has come out in support of fox hunting. Not as an aside or a slip of the tongue, but as a deliberate flourish. He knows perfectly well it is unpopular. He also knows it plays beautifully with his hardcore membership – that tight little knot of culture warriors, libertarian fantasists and people who believe the Countryside Alliance is a persecuted faith, and who would not know one end of a horse from the other unless it was racing at Kempton Park.

This is not a misstep. It is choreography.

Fox hunting is political poison if you have even the faintest intention of governing. Large majorities oppose it. Even most rural voters have moved on. Which is precisely why it is useful. It signals absolute loyalty to a narrow tribe while guaranteeing you never drift into the dangerous territory of broad appeal. It keeps you noisy, marginal, and safely unelectable.

Which is the point.

Farage is not funded to take the levers of power. He is funded to move them. His role is not delivery, but distortion. He shifts the Overton Window, then stands back and watches other parties chase him across the field, breathless and panicked, terrified of being outflanked by a man who has never once shown the slightest interest in building anything that might survive contact with reality.

Brexit was the masterstroke. He laid the scent, persuaded the Conservative Party – once a broadly sensible, if self-interested, governing outfit – to abandon its remaining grip on sanity and become a fully fledged nutter collective, and then stepped aside while they smashed the furniture. When it all went wrong, he was already down the pub explaining how it was nothing to do with him.

The collateral effect was even better. As the Conservatives careered into culture war cosplay and economic illiteracy, Labour quietly slid rightwards and parked itself in the abandoned One Nation Conservative space. Fiscal restraint. Institutional respect. Boring competence. A phenomenal outcome – just not for the Tories.

Immigration followed the same pattern. Loud claims. No workable mechanisms. Endless outrage. Now fox hunting joins the parade – a position that achieves nothing except signalling and spectacle. Perfect for a man whose entire business model depends on permanent insurgency.

Taking power would end it. Government demands numbers, trade-offs, delivery. It demands that slogans grow up and turn into spreadsheets. It demands accountability. Worst of all, it kills the grift. You cannot pose as the bloke shouting from the sidelines while holding a red box full of consequences.

And this is where the metaphor becomes almost too neat. Farage is not the fox. He is not the huntsman. He is the drag in a drag hunt.

He lays the artificial scent. He excites the hounds. The press bays. The parties charge off after him. The country is dragged along behind the spectacle. And at the end there is nothing there. No fox. No policy. No responsibility.

Just another successful run, another shifted debate, and Farage already off laying the next trail.

All motion, no destination. Noise without consequence. And judged by the wreckage left behind and the space he forced others to occupy, a phenomenal success for his backers.

The First Casualty of Christmas

Boxing Day. A sacred interval in the British calendar devoted to eating leftovers, mild regret, and pretending that time itself has paused. I had received, not twelve hours earlier, a gift of genuinely needed new socks. Practical. Sensible. A clear signal from the universe that my existing hosiery had crossed from “well worn” into “anthropological exhibit”.

So naturally, I decided to do some welding.

In Crocs.

This was not a moment of sudden madness. It was the slow, deliberate confidence of a man who has done this sort of thing before and survived. Many times. What could possibly go wrong? The Crocs had holes, yes, but they were ventilation holes. Designed. Intentional. A triumph of modern polymer footwear. And the socks were new. Untested. Full of promise.

Enter the spark.

Welding sparks are tiny, incandescent reminders that physics does not care about your recent gift haul. One of them executed a perfect ballistic arc, slipped neatly through the Croc’s design feature, and burned a hole straight through a sock that had not yet lived a full day. Less than a day. Barely broken in. Still warm from the goodwill of Christmas morning.

This is not carelessness. It is tradition. The British male has always tested new possessions immediately and destructively. New tools are scratched. New coats catch on nails. New socks are sacrificed to molten metal. It is how ownership is confirmed. If it survives first contact with real life, it is worthy. If not, it was clearly overconfident.

There is also a deeper moral here. Socks are given to protect feet from the world. Welding exists to remind us that the world is hotter, sharper, and more spiteful than socks. The spark was not malicious. It was instructional. A tiny glowing footnote saying, “Perhaps do not weld in beach shoes”.

The sock now has a hole. A small, precise, almost elegant hole. A reminder that optimism should never be allowed near power tools. It will be worn again, of course. I am not a monster. But it will be worn knowingly. With humility. Possibly with proper boots.

And next Christmas, when someone asks whether I need socks, I will say yes. Always yes. Because somewhere in the garage, physics is waiting.

A Pale Imitation of Psychohistory

The idea that markets might be better judges of political reality than polls, pundits, or panel shows did not come out of political theory. It came out of embarrassment. Specifically, the repeated embarrassment of people who were paid to explain events watching markets quietly get there first.

Economists, traders, and policy analysts began noticing something awkward. Markets that allowed people to bet on real-world outcomes kept getting things right while the experts got them wrong. Not occasionally. Repeatedly. And not because markets were clever or moral, but because being wrong cost money.

That observation was later spelled out by people like Robin Hanson, though anyone who has watched markets for a while had already clocked it. The logic is not complicated. If you want to know what people really think will happen, make them risk something. In surveys, you can posture. On television, you can bluff. In markets, fantasy is punished quickly.

As these ideas resurfaced through modern prediction markets, the same pattern reappeared. They moved early on Trump’s 2016 win, long before polite opinion was ready for it. They refused to believe inflation would be “temporary” after Covid. They assumed interest rates would stay high longer than ministers promised. They priced wars as grinding on rather than wrapping up neatly for the evening news. Again and again, the market shifted before the official story did.

That is where the comparison with Asimov comes from. Not because anyone thinks history is mathematically inevitable, but because of the underlying insight. Individuals are emotional, tribal, unreliable. Large groups, taken together, often behave in predictable ways. Prediction markets apply that idea, clumsily but usefully, to politics and policy.

But here is the distinction that actually matters, and which tends to get lost. Markets do not respond to opinion. They respond to power.

Opposition parties can promise the earth, denounce the government, and dominate the airwaves. Markets barely notice. Not out of cynicism, but because those people cannot actually do anything yet. They cannot set budgets, change laws, impose tariffs, or send troops anywhere. Until they can, their ideas are just words.

Governments are different. When a government acts, markets react immediately. A budget is announced. Rules change. Trade barriers go up. Sanctions bite. The moment policy becomes real, prices move. Not because the market agrees or disagrees, but because consequences are now unavoidable.

This is why election polling is such a poor guide to reality when treated as fate. Polls measure mood. Markets measure impact. A surge for an opposition leader is gossip until it turns into votes and then into decisions. A policy announced by a government is tested instantly. One is theatre. The other has consequences.

Look at how this plays out now.

In Britain, markets are calm under Starmer. Sterling is steady. Government borrowing costs are dull, which is not an insult. There is no hint of the panic seen during the Truss episode, which still looms large in institutional memory. That alone tells you the verdict. Stability is expected. Chaos is not. But neither is growth. British companies are still cheap, foreign buyers are still bargain hunting, and expectations of rising productivity remain low. The judgement is blunt. Competent management of a damaged economy, but no obvious route to rapid improvement. Stability without momentum.

In the European Union, markets do not really judge individual leaders at all. They judge the machine. Germany is still treated as the anchor. France causes occasional nerves. Southern Europe is watched carefully but no longer treated as a crisis waiting to happen. The EU is seen as solid, slow, and heavily constrained by its own rules. It is not expected to fall apart. It is also not expected to move quickly. Endurance, not dynamism.

In the United States, the message is more conflicted. Share prices remain high and money still flows in, which is what people point to when they want to sound confident. But underneath that sits unease. Long-term borrowing costs suggest worry about rising prices and rising debt. Trade tariffs are treated as likely to push costs up, not bring them down. Trump is not being judged as a mystery. He is being priced as a known risk. Markets are not panicking, but they are charging extra for unpredictability.

And then there is China.

China is different because its markets are not free to speak openly. Prices there are shaped by heavy state control, capital restrictions, and political intervention. Even so, signals leak through. They always do.

What those signals say is fairly clear. The era of effortless growth is over. Property no longer looks like a one-way bet. Local governments are under strain. Confidence is fragile. Beijing can still command banks, direct resources, and suppress panic. What it cannot easily do is force people to feel optimistic or to spend freely.

Outside China, this is reflected quietly. The country is no longer priced as the unstoppable engine of global growth. It is priced as a powerful but cautious state, focused on control and stability rather than expansion. That is not collapse. But it is a change of phase.

Put together, the picture is not flattering to anyone.

Markets are not excited by today’s leaders. They are relieved by some, wary of others, and inspired by none. Stability is rewarded. Chaos is punished. Grand promises are ignored unless they come with the power to deliver.

This is why prediction markets and real pricing make people uncomfortable. They expose how much of modern politics is performance. A market that calmly prices the failure of a flagship policy cannot be accused of bad faith. It cannot be shouted down. It cannot be spun away. It just sits there, quietly contradicting the story.

This is not psychohistory. These tools are imperfect and sometimes wrong. They miss things decided in private rooms. They can be distorted. They are human.

But they do something quietly radical. They separate noise from agency. They remind us that only those in power shape outcomes, and that once they act, reality follows whether anyone likes it or not.

Asimov imagined a future where emperors feared mathematics. Today’s leaders face something less dramatic, and more awkward.

They are being audited in real time.

Eurovision Dilemma

Eurovision insists it is non-political, which is one of those statements that only works if you never examine it. Countries compete under flags, voting blocs form along diplomatic fault lines, and Russia was rightly excluded after invading Ukraine. At that moment, Eurovision stopped being a neutral song contest and became something else. A cultural event with values. Or at least with lines it was prepared to draw.

That decision matters, because it created a problem Eurovision would rather not face.

Israel’s participation now sits squarely in that space. Gaza is not a footnote. It involves mass civilian casualties, displacement, and allegations of war crimes now before international courts. Letting Israel perform as if this is just another year of smoke machines and costume changes looks uncomfortably like normalisation. Not endorsement, but sanitisation. A projection of business-as-usual when business very clearly is not.

From that perspective, withdrawal by other countries makes moral sense. It is not censorship. Nobody is stopping Israel singing. It is a refusal to provide a glittering backdrop of normality. A quiet way of saying “this has crossed a line we are not prepared to paper over”. And once Russia was excluded, the question stopped being whether culture should be political and became whose violence counts.

But here is where the argument starts to fray.

Russia and Gaza are not the same conflict. One was a war of conquest aimed at erasing a neighbouring state. The other is a brutal, asymmetric war following a mass-casualty terror attack by a non-state actor embedded in a civilian population. That distinction does not excuse Israeli actions, but it does matter. If you flatten everything into a single category of “bad enough”, you replace moral reasoning with slogan logic.

Then there is the effectiveness problem. Withdrawal feels righteous, but it is also largely performative. Israel does not change military strategy because Ireland or Slovenia sit out a song contest. The people actually affected are artists, broadcasters and audiences, many of whom oppose the war. The government being protested remains unmoved, while the protestors enjoy the glow of having “taken a stand”.

Worse, withdrawal will be read, whatever the intentions, as collective ostracism. You can insist it is about policy, not people. It will still feed a siege narrative and reinforce the idea that Israel is uniquely beyond the pale, while conflicts in Yemen, Sudan or Ethiopia barely trouble the cultural calendar. Selective outrage is not a strong foundation for moral authority.

The soft-power argument cuts both ways. If Eurovision really is a platform with influence, then keeping cultural channels open matters too. It gives space to dissenting Israeli voices rather than handing the stage entirely to hardliners who thrive on isolation and grievance. Cultural quarantine rarely moderates anyone.

And there is the legal reality. International courts investigate, they do not yet rule. If participation becomes contingent on unresolved allegations, Eurovision will need a permanent tribunal just to decide the running order. That way lies paralysis.

So the dilemma is real.

Staying feels like complicity dressed up as neutrality. Withdrawing feels like moral clarity that risks collapsing into gesture politics. One says “this is regrettable but tolerable”. The other says “this is intolerable, even if our response is blunt”.

Perhaps the most honest position is to admit that neither option is clean. Eurovision crossed its own Rubicon when it excluded Russia. Having done so, it cannot now pretend that consistency does not matter. But nor should it kid itself that boycotts of song contests are a substitute for serious political pressure, legal accountability, or diplomatic effort.

The discomfort here is not hypocrisy or cowardice. It is that culture is a poor tool for resolving atrocities, yet too visible to ignore them. Eurovision wants to sing about unity while standing on a fault line it helped expose.

And that unresolved tension is the truest note in the whole contest.

Ninja Shibunkin - Not!

Right then – the mystery of the missing black shubunkins. For weeks I thought they’d gone full ninja, melting into the dark depths of the pond like aquatic special forces. Every feeding time, the orange and calico mob would charge the surface like lager louts at a buffet, while the half-dozen-plus dark ones were nowhere to be seen. I assumed they were just being sensible – camouflaged against the detritus, quietly avoiding the heron’s spear.

Then the penny dropped. They weren’t hiding. They were gone.

It turns out that what looks invisible to me – standing beside the pond with a mug of tea and a smug sense of ecological balance – looks like a neon target sign to a heron. From above, that mirror surface reflects the sky, and my stealthy black fish stand out like burnt toast on a white plate. The heron, lurking in the reeds like a feathery assassin, clearly knows this. He’s been landing silently, probably at dawn, running an efficient little takeaway service.

The bright, spotty shubunkins, who look like they’d be easiest to spot, are still very much alive – milling around, completely oblivious. But the dark ones, my sleek stealth division, have been picked off one by one. Nature’s cruel sense of irony in action: the camouflage that fools me only advertises them to the enemy.

Now the survivors hang mid-pond, low and wary, glancing upwards like villagers in a Hitchcock film. It’s been two months, and they still won’t come up unless I give the water a reassuring swish. They’re traumatised, and frankly, I don’t blame them. Somewhere nearby, a heron is digesting the last of my black squadron and congratulating himself on his refined taste.

Still, I can’t be too cross. The heron’s only doing what herons do. He’s the pond’s version of natural stock control, removing the overconfident and the unfortunate, keeping the ecosystem honest. Besides, the shubunkins that remain are now the sharpest, most paranoid fish in Gloucestershire. They’ve seen things. They’re veterans.

So yes, I’m down half a dozen black fish (plus a few calico ones) – but I’ve gained a lesson in optics, evolution, and irony. From above, invisibility isn’t what you think. And from the heron’s point of view, my pond must look like an all-you-can-eat buffet with excellent lighting.

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.