Bubble & Yuk

There are vegetables I merely dislike, and then there are vegetables I actively distrust. Mashed potato sits firmly in the latter category. It is potato that has surrendered. All texture gone, all ambition crushed, reduced to a beige paste whose chief virtue is that it fills space. Sprouts are worse. Little sulphurous cabbages that smell faintly of punishment and taste like regret, unless drowned in bacon bits as an act of culinary mercy.

Hay, however, operates on an optimistic theory of cookery. She believes that if you take two things someone loathes, fry them together, and give the result a jaunty British name, they will somehow emerge reborn. Bubble and squeak, she reasoned, would alchemise failure into triumph. A sort of vegetable Witness Protection Scheme.

This is magical thinking. If you dislike sprouts, frying them does not make them charming. It makes them louder. If you dislike mashed potato, compressing it into a greasy slab does not restore its dignity. It merely allows it to absorb oil while remaining fundamentally apologetic. Combining the two does not cancel their flaws. It compounds them. One plus one still equals two, even in a frying pan.

Bubble and squeak has form. It is nostalgia food, invented to use up leftovers and justify them with patriotism. It relies heavily on the belief that anything served with a crisp edge and a browned underside must be good. This is untrue. Burnt disappointment is still disappointment, just with better PR.

I ate it, of course. I am not a monster. But let the record show that culinary transformation is not achieved by shouting “fried” and hoping for the best. Some things are irredeemable. Mashed potato remains potato’s lowest calling. Sprouts remain small green liars. Frying them together does not produce joy. It produces a double disappointment, now lightly crispy.

However, I did rescue the situation by drenching them in Lingham's chilli sauce, which helped to disguise the disgusting flavour.

Basic Maths Failure

There is a special kind of political myth that survives only because repeating it is easier than thinking, and I'm seeing it repeated ad nauseam on social media. The claim that Labour “blocked Brexit” while the Conservatives held a majority is one of its finest specimens.

The latest exhibit is a meme brandished as proof: 243 Labour MPs voted against the EU Withdrawal Bill in January 2018, supposedly “blocking a smooth Brexit”. The fact is true. The conclusion is nonsense. What's often conveniently miss is on that particular report-stage vote, virtually all Conservative MPs (and others supporting the Government’s position) voted against the amendment too, not against the bill overall.

In January 2018 the government had no settled Brexit plan. None. No agreed future relationship, no answer to the Irish border, and no clarity on whether it wanted Norway, Canada, or something it could not describe at all. The Withdrawal Bill at that stage was a skeletal framework that handed ministers vast delegated powers while postponing every substantive choice. Oppositions oppose badly drafted, incoherent legislation. That is not obstruction. It is their job.

More importantly, a vote against a bill at one stage does not “block” anything if the government can command a majority. Bills go through multiple stages. Governments amend, re-table, and ultimately pass them if they have the numbers. If they cannot, the problem is not the opposition. It is their own internal collapse.

And in 2018, the Conservatives did not have a majority. They were propped up by the DUP and at war with themselves. That paralysis was not caused by Labour, the Lords, or Brussels. It was caused by a governing party that could not agree what Brexit even was.

Fast-forward to the moment this excuse should have died. From December 2019 onwards, the Conservatives had an eighty seat majority. Eighty. The sort of majority used to reshape the state without breaking stride. And what happened then? The Withdrawal Agreement passed. The Trade and Cooperation Agreement passed. Brexit was “done”. No Labour votes required. No Lords ambush. No remainer conspiracy.

The Brexit we got is the Brexit the Conservatives chose.

What really infuriates those pushing this myth is not obstruction but scrutiny. Brexit legislation forced its contradictions into the open. You cannot leave the single market and keep frictionless trade. You cannot shout “sovereignty” and then complain when decisions have consequences. When these realities were pointed out, the response was not to resolve them, but to cry betrayal.

There is also a delicious irony at work. The same people who insist Labour blocked Brexit also insist the Conservatives were too weak to deliver it properly. A party with full control of government, the Commons timetable, and later an enormous majority was somehow thwarted by the opposition. This is not analysis. It is magical thinking.

Blaming Labour for the failures of Conservative governments is not just dishonest. It is an insult to basic reasoning. And if someone genuinely believes that an opposition vote in 2018 overrode a government with an eighty seat majority in 2019, then the problem is no longer Brexit.

It is that they do not understand how Parliament works, how legislation works, or what actually caused Brexit to unravel.

The Danger of Lying to a Credulous President

The CIA assessment was blunt. There was no assassination attempt. No evidence that Ukraine targeted Putin or any of his residences. No corroboration for the dramatic tale Moscow pushed. That matters, because this was not a Ukrainian denial or a media rebuttal, but a cold intelligence judgement delivered after Putin had personally briefed the US President.

Trump did not approach the claim as a hostile sceptic. He listened. He reacted as if it might be true. He did the one thing Putin endlessly complains Western leaders never do - he trusted him. And then US intelligence checked the story and quietly dismantled it. At that point the issue stopped being geopolitics and became credibility. Putin was not being contradicted by enemies, but corrected after speaking directly to a president inclined to believe him.

This is not an isolated episode. Election interference. Pre invasion troop movements. Now a phantom assassination plot. Each time, Putin offers an assurance or a claim to someone open to taking him at his word. Each time, the claim fails contact with reality. The effect is cumulative and corrosive. Putin is not being argued with. He is being exposed as someone who squanders trust when it is extended in good faith.

Here is the unintended consequence. Trump’s much criticised weakness - his instinctive credulity, his preference for personal assurance over process - is actually working in Ukraine’s favour. Because he believes first, the system is forced to check. Because he speaks publicly, the check becomes visible. And because he pivots without embarrassment when trust is shown to be misplaced, Russian narratives collapse in the open rather than being quietly filed away. Ukraine does not need to persuade Trump. Reality does it for them.

The irony is that a more sceptical president might have spared Putin this. Private disbelief can be smoothed over. Public belief followed by public reversal cannot. Trump’s habit of repeating what he is told, then discarding it when it no longer serves him, strips away diplomatic cushioning. It leaves the person who misled him naked. A man who lies to his enemies can posture. A man who lies to someone who wanted to believe him looks reckless and unbankable.

We have seen this pattern repeatedly in Trump’s dealings with others. Jeff Sessions was trusted until he followed the law, at which point trust became betrayal. Comey was trusted until he refused personal loyalty. Tillerson was trusted until he applied restraint. Bill Barr was trusted until he told an inconvenient truth about the election. Michael Cohen was trusted until he stopped absorbing risk. In every case, trust was personal, intuitive, and conditional. Once it proved misplaced, Trump did not quietly adjust. He pivoted and moved on.

Marjorie Taylor Greene fits the same mould. She was trusted while she functioned as a loyal instrument. The moment she freelanced, made herself the story, or became unreliable to Trump’s interests, the trust cooled. Not with a dramatic rupture, but with distance. Less amplification. More silence. The unmistakable downgrade from trusted ally to tolerated noise.

That is where Putin now finds himself. Not denounced, not dramatised, just quietly contradicted and set aside. Trust, once squandered, does not regenerate. The damage here is not rhetorical, but structural. Verbal assurances stop carrying weight. Informal understandings harden into demands for proof. Even those who want a deal begin to hedge.

Putin’s problem is no longer that the West doubts him. It is worse than that. He has demonstrated, repeatedly, that even when trust is offered by someone predisposed to believe him, he cannot be relied upon to tell the truth. And in a conflict where credibility is a weapon, Trump’s weakness has become one of Ukraine’s unexpected strengths.

Communism in 'Merican

In America, “communism” is not an economic system. It is a scare.

Suggest that people should not go bankrupt because they got cancer and someone will whisper “communism” the way Victorians used to say “cholera”. Propose a minimum wage that keeps pace with rent and suddenly you are Lenin, personally, with a fake beard and a five year plan tucked under your arm.

The term now covers a remarkable range of offences. Libraries. Buses. Teachers. Recycling bins. Queueing. The idea that fire brigades should turn up whether or not you have a credit card. All communism. Especially if it helps someone you do not personally know.

Ask for universal healthcare and Americans will explain, very patiently, that this is exactly what Stalin did. He began with hospitals, and within weeks everyone was living in a grey apartment, wearing the same hat, eating beetroot, and reporting their neighbour for insufficient patriotism. History, apparently.

The real giveaway is that nobody using the word can define it. Ask what communism is and you will get a haunted look and a story about Venezuela. Or Cuba. Or a university campus where someone asked them to use a different pronoun once. Marx never gets a mention. Neither does public ownership. It is all vibes and cable news graphics.

This produces the uniquely American political spectrum, where the centre is right wing, the left is barely allowed to exist, and anything to the left of a tax cut for billionaires is treated as an early warning sign of the gulag. Europe looks on, mildly baffled, from countries that have had public healthcare, state pensions, and labour rights for decades without accidentally summoning Trotsky.

The irony is that the loudest anti communists are often quite keen on handouts. Farm subsidies are fine. Military contracts are sacred. Corporate bailouts are just “supporting job creators”. It is only when money flows downwards that it becomes Marxism.

So no, America is not “fighting communism”. It is fighting the terrifying idea that society might, on occasion, act like one.

The Union Flag Does Not Shorten the Waiting List

This Facebook Reel is a perfect little capsule of modern political nonsense. A man, a Union Flag, a stern face, and a slogan that sounds radical until you realise it describes the system we already have. Veterans should get free medical and psychiatric care for life. They do. It is called the NHS.

That is not an opinion. It is a fact. Veterans are entitled to lifelong healthcare on exactly the same basis as everyone else, with additional pathways for service related physical and mental health conditions. The problem is not access in law. It is capacity in reality. Long waits, overstretched staff, patchy mental health provision. In other words, the same problems faced by everyone else.

So what is the Reel actually saying? Once you scrape off the sentiment, it is hinting at priority treatment. Jumping the queue. Being seen faster than other patients because of who you are rather than how ill you are. That is a very different claim, and one the sign never quite has the courage to state.

Because the moment you do, the questions become awkward. Priority over whom? The child with cancer? The nurse with burnout? The pensioner waiting for a heart operation? The NHS is based on clinical need precisely to avoid this kind of moral sorting.

And if priority really is the argument, then even that collapses unless it is limited to those who saw active frontline service and for conditions clearly linked to that service. Anything broader turns into a vague hierarchy of worth, where simply having worn a uniform at some point confers lifelong precedence. That is not healthcare policy. It is cosplay compassion.

The final irony is that the same political culture that shares these Reels with misty-eyed reverence spent fourteen years hollowing out the NHS, squeezing mental health services, and treating veterans as a photo opportunity rather than a funding line. You do not fix that with a Reel and a flag in the background.

Care is delivered by money, staff and systems. Not by placards that demand something we already provide while quietly sabotaging the means to deliver it.

The Tension of Betrayal

There is a particular kind of betrayal that only diaspora Jews can feel, and it is not easily explained to people who treat Israel as just another state with a flag, an army and a foreign office.

This is a follow-on to my blog post of a few days ago regarding Jewish institutional silence on Gaza and the West Bank violence and, in a way, explains it.

For many Jews outside Israel, Israel is not a political identity but an insurance policy. The place you hope never to need. The place that exists because history taught a brutal lesson about relying on civilisation, progress, or good manners. When things go very wrong, there is meant to be somewhere left to go.

That is what makes the present moment so corrosive. To oppose Israel’s actions on moral, legal or humanitarian grounds, while knowing that this same state is the final refuge if antisemitism elsewhere turns murderous again, forces an impossible double vision. You are asked to criticise the lifeboat while still needing it to float.

This tension is all over diaspora Jewish writing. Hannah Arendt warned that a refuge built on permanent coercion would rot from the inside, turning Jewish survival into something indistinguishable from the brutal nationalisms that once threatened it. She was dismissed as naive, even traitorous. In retrospect, she looks painfully clear-eyed.

Primo Levi never argued that Jewish suffering conferred moral exemption. Quite the opposite. Survival, for him, imposed obligations. Memory was meant to restrain cruelty, not license it. Many diaspora Jews feel that this has been inverted, with trauma now used as a political solvent that dissolves ethical limits rather than reinforcing them.

Tony Judt put it more bluntly. Israel, he argued, had become the wrong answer to the right question. A refuge had hardened into an identity, and identity into a permanent state of siege. For Jews who never wanted Israel to be the centre of their lives, only the backstop, this felt like a quiet theft of purpose.

More recently, writers like Peter Beinart describe a generation raised to love Israel uncritically, now discovering that love is conditional on silence. Criticism is recast as betrayal. Moral concern as disloyalty. The refuge demands applause, not scrutiny. That is not how insurance works.

And here is the cruelest part. When Israel acts in ways that many Jews cannot defend, it does not just damage Palestinians or regional stability. It makes Jews elsewhere less safe. It erodes the moral authority that once underpinned the idea of Israel as sanctuary. It hands antisemites a narrative they were always eager to abuse, while insisting that any discomfort this causes is the fault of the critic, not the conduct.

Diaspora Jews are then trapped between two bad choices. Defend actions they believe are wrong, and betray their own ethical inheritance. Or speak out, and be told they are endangering the very refuge they may one day need. Either way, the bargain feels extortionate.

This is not self hatred. It is grief. Grief that the one place meant to stand outside ordinary political failure now behaves like any other hard-edged state, but insists on exceptional immunity from judgement. Grief that Jews are once again asked to trade ethics for safety, as if history had not already shown where that road leads.

A refuge that requires moral amputation to remain viable is not a refuge. It is a warning. And for diaspora Jews who still need Israel to exist as a last place of safety, that is the betrayal that cuts deepest of all.

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.