Tableau

I came upon it in the garden, quite by accident – a small patch of grass transformed into a macabre tableau. At first glance, it might have been an illustration from one of Beatrix Potter’s lesser-known works, “Rodney Rat’s Unfortunate Encounter with Mr Tibbs.” There he lay, paws arranged with an almost theatrical delicacy, tail draped just so, as if auditioning for the role of “tragic victim” in an Edwardian morality play.

Only the eye gave the game away – fixed, glassy, staring not at the reader but into eternity, like a character who has finally realised that he won’t be appearing in the sequel. One could half expect him to sit up, brush himself down and remark, “Well, that’s quite enough fresh air for today.” But no, the cat had made sure the curtain had fallen for good.

The sheer artistry of the pose was what struck me most. Beatrix Potter spent hours sketching hedgerows and country cottages to get her settings just right, yet here was a creature laid out as though she herself had positioned it: the limp paw for sympathy, the fur ruffled for drama, the tail curled as an afterthought. My cat, apparently, has a sense of composition that would put some illustrators to shame.

And what moral should we draw? In Potter’s tales, the lesson was usually something along the lines of “Listen to your mother” or “Don’t pinch cabbages.” Here the only possible moral is: “Do not cross the cat, for she has both a taste for blood and an eye for mise-en-scène.”

McCarthyism II

The Trump 2nd Presidency is McCarthyism in a red baseball cap – except the witch-hunt isn’t for communists, it’s for anyone insufficiently worshipful of the Great Orange Leader. Forget “reds under the bed” – it’s “RINOs in the ranks” and civil servants who didn’t genuflect deeply enough before His Trumpness.

McCarthy had his hearings; Trump’s got a rolling circus of loyalty tests, sackings and social media denunciations. Careers are torched not for ideology, but for the sin of insufficient sycophancy. It’s less a government than a cult headquarters with nuclear codes.

The Red Scare at least pretended to defend America from an external foe. This is an orange scare, turned entirely inward – hollowing out institutions, stuffing them with nodding dogs, and ensuring that the only guiding principle is “What does Trump want today?” It’s not statesmanship – it’s courtier politics, medieval in its pettiness.

And like McCarthy before him, Trump insists it’s all to protect the nation. From what, exactly? From independent thought? From the quaint notion that public office is a public service? The man’s remaking America in his own image – loud, fragile, and permanently in need of applause.

Form & Function II

Following on from yesterday's granite mortar and pestle - as if the gods of design were on a roll- I stumbled yesterday into a tap house in Torcross and found another example of brutal genius: urinals made from sawn-off beer barrels. Forget clinical porcelain – here was a direct cycle of life and lager. What goes in must come out, and what better vessel than the very container that delivered the pint in the first place? It’s poetic really – the circle of pint. No chrome, no gloss, just stainless steel barrels with a chunk carved out, like some Dadaist artwork that dares you to question whether you’re in a pub toilet or a modern gallery.

Taken together, the spice crusher and the barrel urinals prove a point that Britain stubbornly refuses to learn. Stop over-engineering. Stop gilding the lily. You don’t need thirty focus groups, a £10 million contract, and a failed IT system to make something work. You just need a lump of granite, a beer keg with a hole in it, and the good sense to realise that form and function aren’t enemies. Meanwhile, the country sinks billions into schemes that don’t work, when the answer, time and again, is sitting there staring us in the face: simple, honest design that actually does the bloody job.

Conviction

Two thousand years ago, the Jewish leadership in Judea had a problem. Rome. Not the easiest of neighbours – and definitely not a power you wanted to antagonise without a clear plan for survival. Yet the priests, zealots, and political schemers of the day seemed to think that chest-thumping bravado would see off the legions. 

They confused principle with stubbornness, unity with factional squabbling, and strategic vision with shouting at the biggest empire in the known world until it lost its temper. The result? The Temple flattened, Jerusalem in ruins, and the population scattered to the winds for nearly two millennia. That’s what bad leadership looks like – long-term devastation served up as the inevitable outcome of short-term hubris.

Fast-forward to today, and Benjamin Netanyahu presides over a modern, militarily dominant state. He has no foreign occupier threatening to cart the nation off in chains – quite the opposite. Yet his government is steadily steering Israel into diplomatic isolation, alienating allies, and ensuring the country is defined less by its achievements than by the settlements it builds and the civilians it bombs. 

Just as in the first century, the leadership confuses defiance with strength, and tactical gains with strategic success. The cost will not be borne by Netanyahu or his ministers, but by ordinary Israelis who will have to live with the consequences long after the architects of this mess have swapped the cabinet room for the dock.

Because Netanyahu is already spending a good portion of his time there. His corruption trial – dragging on since 2020 – carries the risk of a decade in prison for bribery, plus extra for fraud and breach of trust. Yet here he is, juggling international crises while trying to save his own skin in court. This is leadership at its most self-serving: not guiding a nation to safety, but steering it through a storm while keeping one eye on the horizon and the other on the prison gates. 

Judea’s leaders failed to see the cliff until they were tumbling over it. Netanyahu appears to be accelerating towards it, convinced that the sheer force of his own conviction will keep the drop from existing — though history suggests the more likely outcome is a conviction of an entirely different sort.

Form & Function

I was wandering round a shop in Hay-on-Wye when I spotted it, perched proudly on a box like a druidic paperweight – the Granite Spice Crusher. At first glance I thought it was a model of a prehistoric burial mound, or perhaps an entry-level chess piece for giants. Then I realised it was, in fact, the most honest piece of kitchenware I’d ever seen.

Most pestles and mortars are exercises in futility – shallow bowls designed by sadists where a single peppercorn can stage an escape worthy of Colditz. You spend half an hour chasing it round like some deranged Tom after Jerry, only to end up with aching wrists and barely a whisper of crushed spice. But this lump? This magnificent lump? The pestle actually fits the mortar. Tight. No gaps, no gaps means no chase, and no chase means the peppercorn dies swiftly and with dignity.

It’s brutal, really. There’s no pretence at elegance. No smooth curves to stroke absent-mindedly while the pasta boils. It’s just two chunks of rock that could have been nicked from a Neolithic dig, now tasked with teaching cumin who’s boss. Form and function here have finally called a truce – no frills, no frippery, just a clunk and a crunch.

I left the shop without buying it, but it’s been haunting me ever since. Not because I need another gadget, but because it radiates a truth too often ignored in design – sometimes the answer really is a great bloody rock.

Taxing the Goose that Fouls the Pond

I’ve always held the view – perhaps quaint, perhaps downright naïve – that business exists for the betterment of humanity. You know, that old-fashioned notion that companies are here to make life better for the rest of us, not simply to keep their directors in new yachts and their shareholders in Tuscan villas.

Of course, the Right would have you believe that if you so much as breathe on corporate tax rates, the economy will immediately collapse into a Dickensian workhouse. “Jobs will be lost!” they cry, as if the only thing keeping the working population from starvation is the benevolent hand of some FTSE 100 CEO – not the welfare state those same CEOs insist we can’t afford.

But here’s the thing. Taxes pay for public services. Public services keep the workforce alive, healthy, and able to turn up to work in the first place. They also keep society from descending into Mad Max with worse haircuts. So if a business can’t survive paying its fair share towards the roads its lorries use, the NHS that patches up its employees, and the schools that train its future staff, then perhaps it’s not a business at all, but a very elaborate charity for the wealthy.

Ah, but not all businesses are created equal. Some really do add value to human life – inventing vaccines, creating green technology, building infrastructure. Others… well, let’s just say that if civilisation vanished tomorrow, nobody would be desperately trying to reboot payday lending or weapons sales to warlords. Then there are the big polluters who hand the taxpayer the bill for cleaning up after them, while issuing press releases about their “commitment to sustainability” printed on recycled paper.

So how about this: a corporate taxation regime based on public utility. If your company demonstrably improves the lives of ordinary people, you get a break. If you make life worse – by poisoning rivers, exploiting staff, or creating products whose health warnings read like a coroner’s report – you pay more. The golden goose still gets to lay eggs, but if it’s also crapping in the pond, it cleans up after itself.

And here’s the clincher – none of this “mark your own homework” nonsense. Every claim, from carbon footprint to staff welfare, gets verified by an independent auditor with the power to name and shame. And not some cosy consultancy outfit where the partners go fox-hunting with the same directors they’re meant to be assessing. This auditor organisation would be led by people voted in by the public, the same way we elect councillors or MPs. That way, if they start going soft on the very companies they’re meant to police, the electorate can give them the boot.

Granted, the sheer size of the task would be colossal – every major business, every supply chain, every subcontractor, all combed through like nits in a school hair inspection. Armies of inspectors, forensic accountants, environmental scientists, and people who can spot greenwashing at fifty paces. Feasible? Yes, but only if it’s treated as a permanent institution, funded properly, and shielded from the political weather. It would cost billions to run, but then so does HMRC – and they bring in far more than they spend. The trick would be to make the benefits so obvious that dismantling it would be political suicide. Start small, prove it works, and make sure the public can see every win.

Of course, in a sane world this would be a no-brainer. But politics, dear reader, is not a sane world. Even if it worked beautifully – healthier workforce, better infrastructure, fatter pay packets – you can bet that a change in leadership would see it scrapped overnight. Not because it failed, but because the new lot’s donors prefer a simpler system: one where “public utility” is defined as “whatever keeps the dividends flowing.”

And voters? They can be swayed by three-word slogans and tabloid front pages faster than you can say “complex fiscal policy.” Never mind that your bills are lower, your streetlights are working, and your kids’ school actually has books – if the headline says “TAX WAR ON BUSINESS” over a photo of a sad-looking man in a hard hat, half the country will be sharpening the pitchforks.

So yes, business should be there for the betterment of humanity. But unless we can make that not just good ethics but good politics – with hard, audited proof overseen by people answerable directly to the public – we’ll keep ending up with the same old cycle: promise, progress, election, reversal. The circle might be squareable in economics – but in politics, it’s more of a revolving door.

AI Art

The other morning, someone on the Today Programme was getting terribly hot under the collar about AI-generated fashion models. These images, he sniffed, were somehow “fake”, “unrealistic”, even “corrupting”. It was the sort of sermon that could curdle your cornflakes. But the more I thought about it, the more absurd it became. Art has been at this game for centuries.

Take Botticelli’s Venus – a fully grown woman emerging from a seashell the size of a paddling pool. Nobody in 1486 was writing furious letters to The Florentine Gazette saying: “Excuse me, this depiction is deeply misleading – I’ve been to the beach and have yet to see a 6ft blonde drifting ashore on crockery.” Or Monet’s water lilies – lovely things, all dappled light and gentle haze – but they look absolutely nothing like the murky scum ponds we have to fish crisp packets out of every summer.

Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism – all of them “distorted” reality, and that was precisely the point. Picasso painted faces with two noses and an ear where the mouth should be. AI gives someone legs a foot too long and suddenly the theologians are gasping into their cassocks about civilisation collapsing.

Of course, there is a difference, and it’s one worth admitting. If a person paints a picture or sculpts an object, at least it’s a human interpretation – someone wrestling with the world through their own hands, eyes and peculiarities. Every brushstroke is a trace of thought, every chisel mark a little argument between artist and stone. Even when the proportions are ludicrous or the colours impossible, you can still feel the human intent behind it.

An algorithm doesn’t wrestle. It doesn’t argue. It doesn’t think, it calculates. It doesn’t stare at a blank canvas, despair, drink half a bottle of Chianti and try again. It just… churns. And maybe that’s what really unsettles people – there’s no visible struggle, no hint of the human flaws that make art charming.

But here’s the thing: art has always been an interpretation, not a photograph. Michelangelo’s David isn’t an accurate rendering of the average Florentine lad – he’s a marble superhero who looks like he could bench-press Florence without breaking a sweat. Yet no one shouted “fake!” when he first appeared.

So let’s not pretend this moral panic is about “truth.” It’s just the latest round of “new thing bad.” Once, Impressionism was scandalous; now it’s printed on biscuit tins. Give it twenty years and AI-generated models will be hanging in the National Gallery, while someone on Thought for the Day rails against whatever fresh sorcery has come along to replace them. 

However, if you had the choice of an AI rendition produced by your 5 year old, or a daub done by the same small person, which would you cherish?

The Great, British School Uniform Scandal

Here’s a thought that’ll have the uniform retailers choking on their Costa flat whites – what if we did what Japan used to do and gave every school in the country the same basic uniform, with the only difference being the badge? Just one sensible, affordable design, made in vast quantities so you could pick up replacements in Asda, M&S, or from Mrs Patel’s shop down the road. No more “exclusive supplier” nonsense where a blazer made from the tears of bankrupt parents costs more than your first car.

Think about it. No more ludicrous rules about “only charcoal grey, not mid-grey” trousers. No more parents being frogmarched to some obscure outfitters in a back street in Swindon because little Josh’s tie must have exactly 3.2mm stripes. No more kids being sent home for the heinous crime of wearing the wrong shade of black socks – because in this new world, all socks would be the same. Unless of course you live in the Cotswolds, where children would no doubt be issued with artisan socks hand-woven from alpaca wool and blessed by a retired bishop.

Meanwhile, most of Europe is looking at us like we’ve all taken leave of our senses. France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands – no uniforms at all. Their children somehow manage to learn their times tables and write essays without the psychological support of a polyester blazer. They still grow up to be engineers, doctors, and pastry chefs without a single detour into anti-social behaviour caused by the trauma of wearing trainers to school.

Of course, the first ones to scream would be the “school identity” brigade. They’ll tell you that without their special tartan skirts or navy blazers with gold piping, their precious heritage will be lost. Absolute cobblers. Your “heritage” is a redbrick building that smells faintly of cabbage and floor polish, not a polyester blazer from a monopoly supplier.

And then there are the retailers, clutching their pearls because their monopoly margins would vanish overnight. If every kid in Britain wore the same outfit, the whole scam would collapse. Parents could buy trousers in Tesco for a tenner instead of coughing up £40 for the “official” pair that disintegrates after three washes. Imagine the horror.

Let’s be honest – the current system is a racket dressed up as tradition. It’s as if we’ve outsourced common sense to the mafia. A national uniform would end the nonsense, level the playing field, and save families hundreds of pounds a year. But it won’t happen, of course. There’s too much money to be made keeping parents as captive customers in the Great British School Uniform Protection Racket.

Still, we can dream. Or, if you’re feeling brave, we can storm the barricades – armed with nothing more than a sensible pair of trousers, a reasonably priced blazer, and a badge you can sew on yourself.

Operation 'Fool the Reform Supporters'

Farage and his crayon munchers are giving me a field day at the moment. Every time I think they can’t possibly top the last absurdity, along comes “Operation Restoring Justice” - a plan so riddled with fantasy it makes Liz Truss’s growth strategy look like hard science. 

The premise? Spend £2bn bribing countries like Afghanistan and Eritrea to take back migrants who cross the Channel, lock up anyone arriving on small boats, leave the European Court of Human Rights, bin the Human Rights Act, suspend the Refugee Convention, and somehow watch the boats “stop in days.”

Reform UK’s plan reads like Farage has been binge-watching reruns of Dad’s Army and drafting policy after his third pint. The idea that Britain can wave a £2bn chequebook at regimes like the Taliban and Eritrea’s dictatorship, expecting them to take deportees out of goodwill, is laughable. And just imagine the reaction here: handing taxpayers’ money to the Taliban won’t exactly go down well with veterans and families who fought in Afghanistan. 

Add in ripping up the Human Rights Act, leaving the ECHR, suspending the Refugee Convention, and somehow squeezing 28,000 arrivals into 24,000 detention spaces at disused RAF bases, and you’ve got a plan that collapses the moment it meets law, logistics, or arithmetic. And then there’s the genius move: offering migrants £2,500 each to leave voluntarily. That’s not deterrence – it’s an engraved invitation.

Farage’s big promise is that the boats will “stop in days” once mass deportations begin from day one. It’s right up there with Trump’s pledge to “end the Ukraine war on day one” – both rely on personality over physics. You can’t magic away treaties, hostile regimes, courts, and infrastructure just because Nigel bellows into a microphone. But, like Trump, he knows his audience: promise the impossible, bank the anger when it fails, and blame everyone else.

The whole plan collapses on four fronts:

1. Legally: Deporting people to Afghanistan or Eritrea breaches international and domestic law. Leaving the ECHR doesn’t magic away non-refoulement obligations baked into other treaties. The courts would block it, and rightly so, unless we fancied dismantling the entire judicial system.
2. Diplomatically: The UK has no relations with the Taliban. Paying them directly would be political suicide. Eritrea’s dictatorship isn’t co-operating either — and threatening “sanctions” on non-compliant states would make deals slower, not faster.
3. Logistically: The UK currently removes around 3,500 people per year. Reform would need to multiply that by ten overnight. That means fleets of charter planes, thousands of staff, massive new infrastructure, and yes — permission from other countries to land. It would take years, not days.
4. Economically: The £2,500 “voluntary return” payout is a gift to smugglers, not a deterrent. The Yes, this is less than the £3,000 already offered today under the Home Office’s targeted scheme. The difference is scale: Farage’s plan offers a mass incentive. People will come, claim, cash out, and come back. Australia tried it. It failed.

Farage and his supporters love to point at Denmark’s low asylum numbers as if it proves this would work here, but they leave out the detail. Denmark’s approach was built slowly over years – tightening laws, making refugee protections temporary, and investing in deterrence. There’s no £2,500 cashback scheme in Copenhagen. And when Denmark tried the Rwanda-style plan, it collapsed. No partner countries would co-operate, EU law intervened, and the government quietly shelved it in 2023. Britain, post-Brexit, faces an even harder task. We have the Channel, a hostile France, no EU opt-outs, and zero groundwork. Farage wants Denmark’s results without Denmark’s long-term strategy. That’s not policy – it’s theatre.

If the goal is to deter crossings and stay inside the law, there is a workable path – but it isn’t Farage’s fantasy or Labour’s firefighting. Set up UK embassy-based processing centres abroad – in Paris, Brussels, Calais, The Hague, and key transit hubs. Embassies are legally UK sovereign territory, so this requires no host-country agreements. Asylum claims can be submitted before anyone sets foot on British soil. Cap the numbers annually to restore fairness and public trust. Offer safe, legal routes so genuine refugees can access secure transport once approved, avoiding the Channel entirely. And declare zero tolerance for illegal crossings once legal routes exist – after these pathways are open, anyone arriving by boat faces instant detention or fast-track deportation.

This flips the incentive structure. Smugglers lose their pitch overnight because the safer, faster, free option exists. Courts lose the argument that “there’s no alternative,” making enforcement legally watertight. And we regain control of the numbers without shredding treaties, bribing warlords, or pretending we can deport 28,000 people on day one.

Farage talks about “restoring justice,” but his plan would do the opposite: bankrupt the Home Office, shred Britain’s diplomatic standing, funnel taxpayer money into the hands of warlords, and invite endless legal defeats. Embassy-based processing with capped legal routes is the grown-up alternative – one built on law, leverage, and control, not rage and fantasy.

You can’t shout international law into submission, you can’t bribe the Taliban into compliance, and you can’t detain your way out of geography. All Reform’s plan restores is the comforting illusion that someone, somewhere, has a magic button that makes complex problems disappear.

Spoiler: they don’t.

Just One Question

Operation Raise the Flag - or “Raise the Colours,” if you’re feeling grand - is sold as a harmless display of patriotism. Just ordinary Brits zip‑tying Union Flags to lampposts and painting roundabouts for the love of country. Nothing political, nothing divisive, just good old‑fashioned pride (and a bit of criminal damage to roundabouts and zebra crossings).

Except it isn’t. Scratch the surface and you find Tommy Robinson’s network, Britain First’s funding, and EDL hangovers pulling the strings. The lead organiser, Andy Saxon, has long‑documented ties to Robinson, and Britain First didn’t bulk‑buy hundreds of flags out of some sudden passion for community spirit. This isn’t organic; it’s orchestrated.

So here’s the litmus test: pose one simple question to those cheering on this mindless activity -

“What’s your opinion of migrant hotels?”

That’s when the patriotism mask slips. Suddenly, the flag‑waving turns into tirades about “illegals,” “freeloaders,” “our culture under attack,” and Farage‑flavoured conspiracies about “taking back control.” Those who don’t rant tend to fall silent, which says just as much.

One question is all it takes. The real motive isn’t bunting or civic pride - it’s grievance, resentment, and an anti‑immigration agenda dressed up as patriotism.

Drill, Baby, Drill

Richard Tice has dusted off the old shale gas fantasy and is waving it around as if he’s discovered El Dorado under Lancashire. He calls it “grossly financially negligent to a criminal degree” to leave shale in the ground. Strong words. But words are all it is. Britain has been down this road before. Cameron promised a shale boom. Truss tried to force it through. Both ended in bans, protests and earthquakes.

Tice now wants to revive the zombie with his slogan “drill, baby, drill”. It sounds like energy policy written on the back of a beer mat. Even if you got the stuff out, it would not make gas bills cheaper. The geology is difficult, the extraction expensive, and imports will always undercut it. The idea that Britain will become Texas with hedgerows is absurd.

The jobs bribe is being dangled again. Egdon Resources claim 250,000 jobs and a £140bn windfall. Deloitte have apparently signed it off, but no one is allowed to see the report. When numbers are hidden, it usually means they don’t stand up to scrutiny. Job creation is the flimsiest defence of all. Asbestos once created jobs for whole towns – until the deaths started mounting. A toxic legacy, still costing billions to clean up. Fracking has the same stink of short-term gain and long-term regret.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is racing towards clean energy. Labour talks about a 2030 grid powered by renewables. Reform wants to lash us to an idea that failed ten years ago. It is like turning up at a Formula E race in a Marina and insisting it is the future.

Fracking in Britain has already been tried, tested and rejected. What Tice is selling isn’t a plan – it is a gimmick. A showy promise to sound tough while ignoring the obvious. It won’t cut bills. It won’t provide security. It won’t last longer than the first tremor under a terraced street. It will just give Reform UK another headline while the cracks run through the brickwork.

And if it all sounds familiar, it should. Across the Atlantic Trump is bellowing the same “drill” mantra while the world moves on. Reform aren’t offering British answers – they’re importing American slogans and hoping no one notices the cracks beneath their feet.

And we don’t have to look far to see why Reform is flogging this dead horse. Follow the money. Since 2019, more than two million quid of their funding has come from fossil fuel investors and climate change deniers. Forty percent of their 2024 war chest was bankrolled by people with their fortunes tied to oil, gas and mining. When your donors are betting against the planet, you don’t get to call it patriotism. You’re just doing their bidding, while the rest of us are left with the cracks in the walls and the clean-up bill.

Britain 2040 - Post-Consumerism

Imagine a Britain where the high street isn’t just a graveyard of shuttered Debenhams and boarded-up shops, but a place where you actually need to go. Not for endless rails of polyester from Bangladesh, but because you want your boots resoled, your phone repaired, or your bike serviced. You might even stop for a coffee in a café that isn’t a soulless chain, because the chains couldn’t survive when the country stopped living off tat and debt.

Consumerism’s slow death didn’t bring collapse, despite the squeals from the usual suspects. The Tories shrieked that without endless shopping sprees Britain would fall into barbarism. Farage and Reform called it “eco-communism,” raging that the right to buy a third SUV was being stolen by “globalists.” Labour, true to form, muttered about “balance” while sitting firmly on the fence. The Greens were the only ones to call it what it was – survival – and for once history gave them the point.

By 2040 we’d had enough of buying a new car every five years, a new kitchen every ten, and a new phone every eighteen months. Our homes became less cluttered, our wardrobes less stuffed, and our debt piles smaller. We didn’t collapse into misery. We stopped mistaking consumption for prosperity. The repair trades came back – tailors, cobblers, joiners, and mechanics suddenly mattered more than hedge-fund gamblers in the City.

Air travel shrank, not because of rationing but because people realised you don’t need to fly to Prague for a weekend on the lash when Scotland, Cornwall, or Brittany are a train ride away. Food became local and seasonal again, not air-freighted asparagus in February. And yes, meat became a treat instead of a daily entitlement – a shock to Daily Mail readers who’d rather starve than give up their bacon sandwich.

The GDP charts looked flatter, but people looked healthier. The high street stopped being a monument to despair and started being useful again. Communities revived. The great status game of who has the newest iPhone fizzled out, because no one gave a toss. Even the banks had to find something more useful to do than flog credit cards to people already drowning in debt.

And before any American readers smirk, have a glance at your own rotting malls and boarded-up Main Streets. Trump promised “growth” while presiding over decay – a country where the only thing multiplying was debt and gun shops. His Reform UK admirers tried the same playbook here, peddling shallow slogans about “freedom” while really fighting for the right of billionaires to keep fattening their wallets. Both cults wanted you to believe that endless shopping was liberty. In reality, it was just servitude with a rewards card.

So when you hear the bleating that “without endless consumption the economy will collapse,” remember this: collapse never came. What came instead was a country that stopped worshipping tat and started living again.

Social Networks

There was a time – not so long ago – when if you wanted company, you had to actually turn up. At the pub, the parish hall, the youth club. You joined the darts team not because you loved darts but because that’s where people were. It was messy, human, and the glue that held communities together.

Now? That glue’s dissolving. My own Old Boys Club is the perfect example. We used to meet once a year for the AGM, swap half‑remembered stories, and then disappear for twelve months. Now we talk every day via an email chain that loops across the globe. It’s warm and constant – but it also shows how the internet replaced proximity with something far stickier: choice.

Instead of nodding at neighbours out of habit, we connect with people who share our humour, our history, or our niche obsessions – no matter where they live. These ties are deliberate, not accidental, and often feel stronger for it.

But here’s the cost: the physical clubs – the ones that forced you into the company of people who weren’t just like you – are fading. The British Legion, the working men’s club, darts night at the Dog and Duck – all quietly hollowed out by austerity and the fact you no longer have to show up in person to belong to something.

Even faith has slipped online. You don’t have to darken the church door now – just livestream the service, skip the hymns, sip tea in your dressing gown. There’s no awkward pew small talk, no stacking chairs, no congregation – just worship on demand. Convenient, yes, but what was gained in efficiency has been lost in communion.

And now, in Australia, there’s talk of banning under‑16s from the internet altogether. The logic is safety – keeping kids away from predators and toxic feeds – but it ignores a glaring truth. The internet hasn’t just given kids something to do. It’s replaced what they used to have. Youth clubs, Scouts huts, church halls – most have closed or withered, victims of budget cuts and indifference.

Switch off the Wi‑Fi without rebuilding those spaces, and where do kids go? Hanging around the Co‑op car park? Trouble finds bored teenagers faster than you can say “community initiative.” And here’s the kicker – students need the internet. It’s their library, their encyclopaedia, their way of collaborating on projects and learning things their schools don’t even teach. Cut that off, and you hobble their education as much as their social life.

Some suggest a “kids’ internet” – a safe walled garden with no predators, no scams, no bile. Lovely in theory. But who builds it? Who polices it? And how long before teenagers find a crowbar and a VPN and go looking for the real thing?

This is the point. Physical community has been dismantled in the name of efficiency. Local ties traded for curated feeds. Shared space replaced by personalised bubbles. And now, just when we realise something vital’s been lost, we talk about banning the only thing still connecting people – however imperfectly – without putting anything real back.

If we want genuine community again, we have to stop pretending it lives in servers. We have to replant it in village halls, pubs, school gyms, and scout huts. We have to make showing up matter again – not as nostalgia, but as necessity. Otherwise, we’re not heading for a safer future. We’re heading for a polite, digital loneliness – the kind that feels efficient right up until it hollows us out.

Farage's Latest Trump Cosplay

So Farage has pulled another rabbit from his battered old hat – five deportation flights a day, packed with asylum seekers and bound for anywhere that’ll have them. It’s meant to sound tough, a quick fix to what he insists is Britain’s “invasion.” In reality it’s pantomime, a slogan with wings.

Here’s the bit he skips. Planes don’t just land where they like. International aviation law means you need clearance to enter airspace, and the receiving airport has to agree to process the passengers. Without that, the aircraft doesn’t even touch the runway. And even if it did, no immigration staff, no ground crew, no refuelling – just a jet sat there with the doors locked and the engines cooling. In short: an airborne pub boast.

Commercial airlines won’t go near it. They’re liable for every soul they carry. If a deportee is refused entry, the airline must fly them back at its own expense. That’s why they check visas so carefully at the gate. Now imagine the PR disaster – “British Airways, now flying tourists, business travellers and bulk-rate deportations.” No chance. Which leaves government charters – eyewateringly expensive, negotiated country by country, and at the mercy of regimes who have no incentive to cooperate. Remember the Rwanda plan? Hundreds of millions down the drain and not a single flight has left. Farage wants to multiply that by five every single day.

And there’s another snag. Even if by some miracle you got people onto planes, those same aircraft couldn’t pick up fee-paying passengers on the return leg if the deportees weren’t accepted. Aviation runs on turnaround. An empty plane grounded abroad is just a giant money pit on tarmac. Airlines won’t risk it, crews won’t fly it, and taxpayers won’t foot the bill forever.

Farage likes to borrow from Trump’s playbook, but geography isn’t on his side. The US can bus people to Mexico or run short-hop flights into Central America under long-standing bilateral deals. Even then, Trump’s big “mass deportations” never happened – Obama’s totals were higher. What Farage is proposing is Trump’s empty theatre, without the land border or the agreements to make even a fraction of it work.

And here’s the final kicker. Even if Britain left the ECHR tomorrow, it wouldn’t change a thing. Airlines would still be bound by international aviation law. Countries like Afghanistan and Eritrea still wouldn’t take people back without agreement. And the UK would still be bound by the Refugee Convention it signed up to in 1951. So all scrapping the ECHR would do is strip Britons of our own legal protections while leaving Reform’s fantasy flights grounded at Heathrow.

What we’re left with is this: Farage’s five-flights-a-day deportation plan is a stunt. It ignores law, logistics, diplomacy and economics. It’s the political equivalent of promising to tow Britain out into the Atlantic to avoid migrants in dinghies. The only things likely to be deported under this wheeze are reason, humanity, and what little credibility Britain still has abroad.

Of course, Farage's fans will lap it up, like they do the rest of his populist drivel.

The Decline of Monarchies

The decline of monarchs since 1700 has been a slow‑motion costume change on the world stage – crowns slipping off heads one by one as republics strutted in wearing sensible trousers. Back then, kings were as common as pigeons in Trafalgar Square – Europe practically tripped over them. But as the centuries ticked by, thrones were overturned, dynasties dissolved, and more than a few royal heads parted company with their owners.

And yet, in the middle of all this upheaval, Britain managed to make the simple act of counting kings a bureaucratic nightmare. Before 1707 you had England and Scotland – two monarchies, two crowns, one rather overworked monarch shuttling between them like a 17th‑century Avanti commuter. Then came the Act of Union and, abracadabra, the same monarch suddenly counted as “just one”. Scotland didn’t get independence, it got filed under “miscellaneous”.

Ireland, not to be left out, remained its own kingdom until 1801, when Westminster scraped it into the United Kingdom like the last spoonful of trifle no one wanted to go off. On the monarchy graph, these changes look neat – a single line calmly drifting downwards – but the story behind it is anything but. The British essentially redefined “one country” every time it made the maths awkward, while the world’s kings quietly disappeared.

It’s one thing for monarchies to vanish thanks to revolutions and guillotines. It’s quite another to watch Britain turn the whole exercise into a paperwork issue – the only nation that could make the fall of kings look like an entry in the wrong ledger.

Do Your Research

It’s funny how often “Do your research!” is hurled about by people whose investigative skills barely match those of an amoeba – and a rather sluggish one at that. Take the RNLI “funded by the taxpayer” myth. It’s been debunked so many times it’s practically on the endangered species list, yet it still pops up whenever the Facebook research squad needs something to be cross about.

The facts – actual, boring, printed-in-the-RNLI’s-own-accounts facts – are that over 90% of their funding comes from donations and legacies, the rest from trading and investments. No regular government funding. None. Zilch. But hand this to Frank and his mates and they’ll squint at it like it’s the Rosetta Stone, mutter “Yeah, but…” and carry on reposting whatever their mate’s cousin’s plumber said down the pub.

Lately, the outrage has shifted from how the RNLI is funded to who they rescue – namely, migrants in the Channel. The theory goes: they’re taxpayer-funded (false), they’re acting as a “taxi service” (offensive nonsense), and therefore they should… what? Let people drown? Toss them a water wing and a cheery wave? Maritime law and basic human decency say otherwise, but that’s inconvenient for the narrative.

The RNLI’s remit is beautifully simple – rescue anyone in trouble at sea. No nationality checks. No politics. If you’re clinging to a life raft, you get pulled out. And the people who fund that mission – willingly, through donations – do so because they value saving lives more than scoring points in an online bunfight.

So the next time someone barks “Do your research!” while peddling the idea that the RNLI is some taxpayer‑funded migrant ferry service, remember: the only thing they’ve actually researched is how to keep their prejudice afloat in the face of tidal waves of evidence. And that’s a sinking ship if ever there was one.

Not Learning a Lesson

Lucy Connolly strolls out of prison and what’s her first move? Not a hint of reflection, not a whisper of contrition, but a promise to sue the police for supposedly misquoting her. Nine months inside and she’s emerged convinced she’s Joan of Arc with a Twitter account. The right-wing press laps it up, of course – why waste a perfectly good martyr when you can flog her victimhood for clicks?

The lesson any sensible person would have taken – that calling for arson in the middle of a riot is a staggeringly stupid and dangerous thing to do – seems to have been completely lost on her. Instead, we’re treated to a morality play about “free speech,” starring a woman who turned her platform into a megaphone for hate. And the same brigade who wail about “personal responsibility” are suddenly fine with her blaming everyone else for her downfall. The hypocrisy is almost impressive in its shamelessness.

And here’s the massive irony: when Islamist hate preachers were jailed for saying much the same sort of thing, the very same media outlets now weeping for Connolly were silent – or cheering their prosecutions. So it’s not about free speech at all, is it? It’s about whose tribe you’re in. The outrage is selective, the principles non-existent.

As for her threatened lawsuit – good luck with that. Defamation against the CPS is like charging a windmill with a water pistol. Even if a press officer mangled a word or two, her reputation was already shredded by her conviction. You can’t libel someone with the truth of their own actions. The courts will swat this away as quickly as you can say “qualified privilege.”

But that’s not the point, is it? The legal theatre is just the latest act in a self-pity pantomime designed to whip up the faithful and rattle the donation tin. Prison hasn’t changed her, it’s refined her – from a reckless poster into a professional martyr. And while she polishes her halo for the cameras, the rest of us are left watching the slow transformation of British justice into yet another prop in the right’s never-ending grievance circus.

Epping - Shooting Itself in the Foot

So Epping Forest District Council – run by the Conservatives since 2006 – has just had its little courtroom jolly. A rousing legal “victory” against the dastardly plan to house asylum seekers in the Bell Hotel. You’d think they’d liberated Normandy. Right-wing pundits, frothing like bulldogs in a butcher’s shop, are hailing it as a blow for community, sovereignty, and whatever faded dream of 1952 still haunts their barstool politics.

But peel away the triumphal headlines and what you’re left with is a masterclass in political self-harm. Because what Epping Forest has actually done is kick a hornet’s nest with a Union Flag boot – and now the hornets are angry, homeless, and the Council may be told to put them up in their own guest room.

The ruling, in essence, says that housing asylum seekers in the Bell Hotel is a “material change of use” under planning law – and requires permission that was never granted. A neat legal technicality. But this isn’t some noble stand for democratic accountability. It’s bureaucratic NIMBYism with delusions of grandeur.

And the consequences? Oh, they’re poetic.

Because those asylum seekers haven’t vanished. They haven’t been whisked away on a barge to Rwanda. They’re still here – needing shelter, and still the legal responsibility of the state. And now that Epping’s Tories have slammed the hotel doors shut, the government – desperate to move people out of hotels – may well turn to local councils and say: “Right then – your turn. You house them.”

You wanted them out of hotels? Splendid. Let’s see what you’ve got available. A few spare council flats? Maybe a closed care home? Bit of underused social housing? Go on, Epping – you were so keen to defend your community, now you can manage its moral obligations too.

It’s the sort of self-sabotage that ought to be studied in public administration courses: How to use legal red tape to shoot yourself in both feet. By blocking hotel use, Epping has actually made it more likely that Labour will push for mandatory council involvement, cut out the private contractors, and hand the problem back to the very local authorities waving pitchforks in the planning committee.

Worse, once asylum seekers are placed in ordinary council housing, they’re less visible – and harder to remove. No grand campaign outside a Travelodge. No “Save Our High Street” stunts. Just quietly integrated lives in homes the council now has to explain to its constituents. The political responsibility shifts from Whitehall to the Town Hall.

And that’s where the real fireworks will start – not from the left, but from the Tory and Reform-voting faithful who’ve spent years fuming about their place on the housing list. Because once asylum seekers are placed into council-managed housing, the same voters who cheered this ruling will be screaming about queue-jumping. They’ll think their council stitched them up. And who will they blame when they’re told the next available flat’s gone to a Sudanese family? Not Labour. Not the Home Office. The council. Tory-run Epping Forest Council. They’ve served up their own base with a side of betrayal.

And make no mistake – Epping’s legal gambit may become the justification for nationwide legislation. Labour could respond by tightening dispersal rules, overriding local objections, or tying housing grants to mandatory participation. You wanted control? Now you’ve got it – and the bill.

Let’s not forget the grotesque irony: many of these asylum seekers come from war zones Britain helped destabilise – Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan. They’re here because we sold them democracy and delivered drone strikes. And now, faced with the mess we helped make, Epping Forest Council runs to the courts waving the Town and Country Planning Act like it’s the Magna Carta.

The Daily Mail, of course, called it “a win for common sense.” The same brand of common sense that gave us Brexit, Rwanda flights that never take off, and Suella Braverman. But actual common sense would recognise that housing is a national problem – and turning displaced people into planning disputes is not governance, it’s cowardice.

So let Epping bask in its temporary reprieve. Let them hoist the St George’s Cross outside the Bell Hotel and strut about like they’ve defended the realm. Because in a few months’ time, they may be doing what they feared most: housing asylum seekers in council-owned stock, under central government instruction, with no hotel buffer to deflect public ire.

They’ve mistaken a courtroom technicality for a political triumph. But the law is still the law – you can’t leave people destitute just because the local golf club doesn’t like the look of them. And now, having won their little planning spat, Epping may find they’ve lost the war on discretion.

They wanted to keep the front door locked. Now they may have to make up the spare room.

And here's the biggest irony: if Labour chooses to restructure asylum accommodation, not only could councils be made responsible for placements, but they may also end up footing more of the bill. What starts as a centrally funded obligation can easily become a cost quietly dumped onto local authority budgets, dressed up as "empowering local decision-making." So Epping may not just pay politically – they may soon pay literally.

Inverse Relationships in Farming

Farming in Britain is a bit like being in a three-legged race with a drunk badger – just when you think you’ve found your rhythm, it bites you in the shin and dives into a ditch. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the perverse dance of cause and effect that governs the nation’s fields and orchards.

Take heatwaves. Lovely for strawberries – they swell up all juicy and sweet like they’re off to a village fête to win Best in Show. But for dairy cows? It’s like sending a fur-coated opera singer to jog round Qatar. Milk yields plummet, tempers fray, and the poor sods spend more time loitering under shade cloths than actually chewing the cud. So while berry farmers are toasting their glut with rosé and a smug chuckle, dairy farmers are watching their profit margins evaporate faster than a puddle in Provence.

And don’t get me started on wet springs. Great news for pasture – the sort of growth that makes sheep frolic and silage men dream of a third cut. But if you’re growing carrots or tatties? It’s trench warfare. You’re one thunderstorm away from discovering your entire crop has succumbed to a fungal death sentence or decided to drown in solidarity.

Then there’s the late frost lottery. Cereals love a brisk April – it keeps the fungal spores at bay and makes the barley boys beam. But if you grow apples or pears? One whiff of icy wind and it’s game over. Your blossom’s been flash-frozen into something that looks like a garnish on a Scandinavian dessert. Cue orchardists weeping gently into their pruning shears while wheat farmers order another moisture meter off Amazon.

Click the above to enlarge for an overview.

Labour shortages, of course, are another seasonal farce. The berry brigade hoover up every warm body in May and June, luring pickers in with promises of sunshine and strawberries. By the time apples are ready in August, the workforce has either gone home, buggered off to a warehouse, or decided that picking fruit for 12 hours a day in a Herefordshire drizzle isn’t quite the bucolic dream they were sold.

Even storage has become a turf war. Apples and potatoes now wrestle for cold room space like two prizefighters in a meat locker. One grows too well, and the other ends up rotting in a shed or dumped on a roadside verge with a passive-aggressive sign: “FREE TO A GOOD HOME (NO TORIES)”.

And throughout all this, the media trots out nonsense about “global Britain” and “sunlit uplands” as if we’re all in charge of our own microclimate and macroeconomics. No – we’re at the mercy of jet streams, pricing algorithms, and whichever bloke at DEFRA last opened a file labelled “Contingency Plan – Do Not Ignore”.

It’s not farming anymore – it’s a seasonal, soil-based episode of Gladiators, with farmers leaping hurdles and dodging giant foam mallets of weather, market forces, and ministerial idiocy. And they still expect the shelves to be full, the prices to be low, and the apples to be shiny.

If you ask me, anyone still trying to grow food in Britain should get a bloody medal – or failing that, a guaranteed storage unit and first dibs on the pickers.

The Reform Voter's Mind - a Study

 

End of study.

When a Flag is Dragged Through the Mud

There’s a movement afoot this week, flags sprouting like weeds on our streets. Driving into Yate I saw a St George’s Cross tied to an overbridge, flapping over the traffic. Nearby a Union Flag had been hoisted on a lamppost, but that felt different, not as badly tainted. The Union Flag can still pass as a symbol of the country as a whole. The Cross of St George, though, has been dragged into darker company. These flags aren’t going up to celebrate football or a fête. They’re being planted in protest at asylum hotels, as if a bit of bunting could stand in for an immigration policy. 

My 25-year-old son, on seeing the one on the overbridge, felt an urge to climb up and pull it down. That’s what happens when a symbol that should unify has been turned into a mark of division – the instinct is revulsion, not pride.

Patriotism, to hear the flag-wavers tell it, is nothing more than draping yourself in polyester and shouting at foreigners. They’ll insist they’re “proud to be British,” as though the rest of us are ashamed. Yet most people show their patriotism quietly – paying taxes, supporting the NHS, looking out for neighbours, keeping the country running. That, apparently, doesn’t count. What counts is a £4.99 flag from Amazon and the conviction that everyone who doesn’t salute it is a traitor.

The irony is that their beloved St George wasn’t even English. He was a Levantine soldier, most likely born in Cappadocia or Palestine, and therefore an immigrant – exactly the sort they’d be screaming to deport if he pitched up at Dover today. Imagine the headlines: “Brown-skinned man with foreign accent seeks asylum.” Straight on the next flight to Kigali. Yet these same people bellow under his cross about defending “our” culture, oblivious to the fact that their mascot comes from somewhere they couldn’t find on a map.

And that’s why I feel revulsion when I see the Cross of St George in their hands: they’ve debased it. Once it meant football tournaments, village fêtes, a sense of community. Now it’s been dragged through the muck of xenophobia and petty nationalism. And it isn’t just England. In America the Stars and Stripes has been hijacked by militias and Capitol rioters, while the Confederate rag became shorthand for white supremacy. In Germany, neo-Nazis wave the old Imperial colours because the swastika is banned. In Japan, the Rising Sun flag still reeks of militarism. Everywhere the far right touches a symbol, it corrodes it – leaving ordinary people disgusted at the very thing they ought to feel pride in.

That disgust isn’t at the cloth itself, but at the meaning smeared across it. If I didn’t care, I’d simply shrug. The sour taste proves the opposite – I do care, which is why their misuse of it offends me.

Real patriotism doesn’t need to be shouted from a flagpole. It doesn’t screech about “loving Britain” while voting against the very things that make Britain decent – fairness, tolerance, public services. It certainly doesn’t rely on bunting as a personality substitute. Their noisy pantomime doesn’t honour the flag, it cheapens it. They haven’t reclaimed St George’s Cross for the people – they’ve debased it, just as their counterparts have debased national symbols the world over. And in doing so, they’ve revealed the emptiness of their cause, leaving only a hollow rattle beneath the fabric.

Perhaps I should buy an EU flag to hang next to the St George's cross.......

Beowulf

So, in the spirit of cultural enrichment – and with half a mind to arm myself with British culture for the next encounter with a Reform supporter, who probably wouldn’t know Beowulf from Baywatch – I thought I’d better dip into the thing. Beowulf, that is, not Baywatch - and not just any Beowulf, mind you, but Tolkien’s translation – the man who spent his spare time inventing entire languages, which tells you all you need to know about his hobbies. And lo, I found the original ring-givers, the fire-breathing dragons, and the sort of hall-brooding doom that Tolkien later parcelled up as Middle-earth.

But good grief, what a slog. It’s Homer on steroids – every time you think you’ve hit a nice, punchy sentence, the thing turns into three pages of embroidered waffle about whose uncle’s cousin once slew a sea-monster. This isn’t a story you read, it’s a story you endure. Like a Reform Party leaflet, only with more dragons and fewer tax breaks for landlords.

And then it struck me – of course it’s waffle. It wasn’t written for someone curled up on the sofa with a nice glass of red. It was for bellowing across a smoky mead-hall to half-cut warriors slapping each other on the back. The endless kennings and genealogies are just bardic throat-clearing, the oral equivalent of “meanwhile, in a hole in the ground…” Without the embroidery, there’s no performance. Without the performance, you’re just left with the plot – which, boiled down, is: bloke fights monster, bloke fights monster’s mum, bloke fights dragon, bloke dies. Hardly Dostoevsky.

And here’s the real irony. Reform voters love to bang on about British culture, but the foundations of the whole heroic code they fetishise – loyalty, gold-giving, dying gloriously in battle – come straight from Scandinavia. From Danes. From immigrants. The very same foreigners they’d like to keep out if they washed up today on a Kent beach with a shield and a longboat.

The contrast is almost comic. Yukio Mishima could sketch an entire character in a single phrase, describe a death in a sentence so sharp it drew blood. Beowulf, by contrast, gives you forty lines just to say “he put his armour on,” and not merely “put on his armour” either, but “buckled the war-bright, ring-bound byrnie of hammered steel about his shoulders, each plate forged by cunning smiths long dead, so that the light of morning broke upon him like the glittering spray of the whale-road at sunrise.” You can see why the scop needed a captive audience.

So yes, Beowulf is tedious to read. It’s meant to be told, not read. But it’s also a reminder that British culture didn’t spring from the cliffs of Dover fully formed. It was imported, translated, embroidered, and retold. If only today’s self-proclaimed cultural guardians understood that their precious “tradition” was written down by a monk with an eye for a Norse yarn.

But don’t expect them to grasp that nuance. They’d skip the waffle, miss the point, and just insist it should all be condensed into a slogan. Something stirring, something heroic, something… three words long. Something like: “Stop The Boats.” The bardic refrain of our age, chanted over and over by the beer-bellied slogan-shouters, the flag-waving hall-hobbits, the grievance-thanes of Clacton – all presided over by their ale-bench ring-giver, Farage, who dispenses not gold but promises, and never quite pays out.

Britain’s First Biological Chatbot

Computer scientists are fretting that people can’t tell the difference between a clever chatbot and a sentient being. They worry that because AI can simulate empathy, some will start treating it as alive, confusing mimicry with mind. Fair point. But if we’re being honest, you don’t need silicon to see the problem. Just look at Nigel Farage.

Farage is Britain’s first biological chatbot. He doesn’t think, he loops. Brussels, immigrants, boats, pint — that’s his training data, endlessly recycled like a faulty autocomplete. Ask him about housing, productivity, or the climate crisis and you’ll get the political equivalent of a 404 error. If he were software, you’d delete him and start again. Instead, he’s somehow landed a seat in Parliament.

The irony is that a genuine chatbot at least tries to please its user. Farage doesn’t. He’s programmed for himself while convincing you he’s speaking for you. His “common sense” routines spool out like a satnav stuck on “Turn right” while you’re ploughing across a field.

The one sure way we know he’s not a machine? Machines can be updated. Farage can’t. Thirty years on the same script, still insisting Brexit hasn’t been “done properly” — without ever once defining what properly means. That’s not sentience, it’s stasis.

So if scientists want a living case study in confusing simulation for thought, they needn’t worry about chatbots. They can switch on the Parliament channel and watch Farage glitch his way through another soundbite.

Putinism in a Clown Suit

There’s a theory doing the rounds – not one I’d dismiss lightly – that Trumpism is basically Putinism, but in a clown suit. A fair comparison, if you imagine Putin as a KGB taxidermist, stuffing the last breath of democracy into a glass case, and Trump as the bloke who smashes the case with a golf club and tries to flog the remains at Mar-a-Lago as “The Greatest Democracy Ever. Really Fantastic.”

Where Putin is a cold-eyed chess player with a fondness for polonium and poisoned rhetoric, Trump is a shouty bingo caller for fascism – half Mussolini, half reality TV reject, all grievance. The difference? Putin doesn’t need a Capitol riot – he is the system. Trump, bless him, still needs to con the base into believing the system is rigged against him, even while he’s trying to rig it in real time.

It’s like watching a pantomime villain attempt a coup d’état with the cast of Duck Dynasty and a foam finger. And yet, somehow, it’s working.

Where Putin has full-spectrum control – judiciary, press, parliament, and whatever passes for civil society under a neo-feudal oligarchy – Trump’s ambitions have been curbed only by the fact that America still has courts, journalists, and enough voters who don’t believe Jewish space lasers control the weather. But give it time.

You see, Trump doesn’t want to run a country. He wants to run a protection racket dressed up as a presidency, where loyalty trumps law (pun very much intended), and where being mean to Nancy Pelosi on Twitter is considered governance. It's not that he admires Putin despite the assassinations, the media clampdowns, and the jailings. He admires him because of them.

But whereas Putin would have Navalny killed with plausible deniability and a dab of Novichok, Trump would announce it on Truth Social, blame Joe Biden, and then mispronounce “Russia” three times before wandering off to sell $99 NFTs of himself riding a bald eagle in boxing shorts.

And let’s not forget the enablers. The Republican Party, once the home of Eisenhower and mildly repressed tax accountants, is now a performative cult draped in red caps and conspiracy. They don’t just tolerate the clown suit – they iron it.

So yes – Trumpism is Putinism in a clown suit. The ideology is the same: rule by fear, lie with impunity, blame the outsider, dismantle oversight. The only difference is that Trump’s version is marketed as family entertainment. It’s the same authoritarianism, just with fart gags and gold-plated bogs.

And while Putin offers grim resolve with a dead-eyed stare, Trump offers the American people a three-ring circus – with himself as ringmaster, lion tamer, and the bloody lion.

Laugh while you can. The tent is still going up.

The Diff

So here’s the tangle. I’ve a Triumph GT6 chassis, strong as a ship’s ladder, and into it I’m trying to graft Mazda’s tidy little drivetrain. But Mazda, in their wisdom, never imagined their gearbox and diff would be divorced. They tied the pair together with that great aluminium spine, the Power Plant Frame, as I've discovered tat it's called. Trouble is, the GT6 chassis rails were in the way, so off came the PPF from the Mazda gearbox. It was only there to carry Mazda’s aluminium spine anyway, so no great loss — except it reminds me that what I’m doing is tearing up the rulebook.

And what did I find with the replacement chassis? What looks suspiciously like a Torsen 2 diff (which is what I need), but butchered to fit and never intended for serious work - certainly not for a turbo engine. The whole Mazda rear-end fabrication had been built around that bodged unit, powered by a Spitfire engine, not the full-width Torsen 2 that I actually need if I’m to handle proper power without the back end tying itself in knots.

Above you can see the two diffs - the lower is the old Torsen 2 (it may not even be an LSD, although it looks identical) with the butchered arms, and the upper is the full-width Torsen 2. 35cm separated support in the former and 60cm in the latter.

So there’s the rub. I either get the welder in (structural stuff is important and beyond my pay grade) and build mounts stout enough to tame the twisting forces, or I try to lash it together with old GT6 ironwork and rubber bobbins pinched off a Mini. 

One path is proper engineering, the other is an invitation to vibration, propshaft misery and gearbox mounts that won’t last a fortnight. All because Mazda never imagined some lunatic would be shoving their running gear into a 50-year-old Triumph — let alone with a turbo strapped on.

Sense dictates some fabrication on the replacement chassis' rear end to take the full-width arms. The list of work just gets longer and longer, but it will be worth the effort and I'm learning so much.

Misused Stats

So, here we are again – faced with headlines screeching that “kids who vape are three times more likely to start smoking.” Cue pearl-clutching pundits, moral panic, and the inevitable calls to ban things that glow in the dark. But let’s just hit pause and ask the one question none of these breathless articles ever do:

Compared to what?

Because if you want to claim that vaping is a gateway to smoking, you need to prove more than just correlation. You need to demonstrate that it actually causes a net increase in smoking. And here’s the problem: none of these studies do that. They don’t measure what proportion of vapers would have taken up smoking anyway. They don’t tell us how many would-be smokers vaped instead and didn’t go on to smoke. In fact, they don’t even try.

What we’ve got is a classic case of statistical misuse by omission. We’re given a relative risk figure – “three times more likely!” – but no base rate, no absolute numbers, and no context. If smoking rates are already in decline among youth (which they are), then even with a tripled risk among vapers, the total number of future smokers might still be falling. But you'd never know it from the headlines.

Worse still, this sort of lazy arithmetic gets trotted out as if it’s gospel. The moment a teenager touches a vape, it’s apparently only a matter of time before they’re chain-smoking Bensons behind the bike shed. Never mind that the overwhelming majority of youth vapers are also experimenters, not daily users – or that nicotine dependence among teens is lower today than it was during the Marlboro Man’s heyday.

Public health messaging built on this sort of half-baked inference does real harm. It distracts from targeted regulation, misinforms parents, and hands ammunition to prohibitionists who’d rather ban things than understand them.

Here’s a radical thought: if you want to know whether vaping leads to more smoking, try measuring the total number of smokers – before and after vaping became widespread – and control for socioeconomic and behavioural factors. Until then, shouting “gateway!” based on relative risk is the intellectual equivalent of saying umbrellas cause rain.

Let’s not pretend we’re doing science when we’re really just spinning fear for headlines.

Tribal Loyalty

There was a time – before scooters became soulless plastic whirligigs with Bluetooth and shame – when a proper two-stroke machine was more than transport. It was identity. It was rebellion. And in some towns, it was practically religion.

Because let’s be clear – you didn’t just ride a scooter. You chose sides. Vespa or Lambretta. There was no middle ground. No ecumenical council for Mod unity. Your town either bent its knee to the Church of Piaggio or kept the faith with Innocenti.

Southport? Lambretta, through and through. Why? Because the local scooter oracle – aka my best mate’s dad – ran the emporium on Duke Street. And when the high priest of two-stroke tuning speaks, you listen. If you turned up on a Vespa, he might sell you a tin of oil, but he’d do it with the sort of expression normally reserved for unhousebroken dogs.

My own initiation came at sixteen, still serving time at HMS Conway – the school, not the ship – where discipline, maritime tradition, and creative rule-bending were honed in equal measure. That’s where I bought my first scooter: an LI125, from a cadet who lived in Beaumaris and used it to sneak home at weekends.

He kept it stashed in the woods like a Cold War fugitive. It had a certain aura about it. Frankly, it probably had belonged to a Druid. You could imagine it being wheeled between standing stones during a solstice, reeking of two-stroke and mysticism.

I handed over £30 – a princely sum when you’re living off powdered egg and institutional gruel – and suddenly I was a scooterist.

Come the end of term, my parents turned up to fetch me. I declined the lift. I had a machine. They drove home, doubtless wondering when exactly they’d lost control of the narrative, while I roared off across Wales with the sort of blind confidence only teenagers and hedge fund managers possess.

Four and a half hours later, I pulled into Southport. The scooter didn’t miss a beat. No breakdowns, no fried electrics, not even a dropped bolt. It was like riding a miracle powered by Castrol R and sheer bloody-mindedness.

Of course, being sixteen and possessed of all the patience of a Labrador on Red Bull, I immediately had it rebored to 150. And, naturally, couldn’t be bothered to run it in properly. It seized up repeatedly – usually at the worst possible moments – but I treated that as character building.

That first scooter was a gateway drug. I briefly defected to a Vespa – a youthful indiscretion, like folk music or lentils – but it never felt right. A Vespa was too… civilised.

Then came the SX225. Arctic White and English Electric Blue. Exquisite. It had once belonged to my best mate – yes, that mate whose dad owned the local scooter emporium on Duke Street – and it purred like a well-fed leopard. Tuned, polished, admired, feared. It didn’t just get me noticed – it got me worshipped.

It wasn’t always obedient. It once tried to throw me into a hedge. But that was part of the deal. Lambrettas weren’t pets – they were feral companions. You didn’t own one. You entered into a pact.

Today’s kids don’t get it. They’ve got e-scooters that whimper when it rains and won’t even start without a postcode and parental consent.

Back then, a scooter didn’t just move you. It meant something. It was heritage. It was rebellion. It was a lifestyle involving mirrors, parkas, and the distinct possibility of third-degree burns.

Lambretta or Vespa?

No contest. Not in Southport. Not when your best mate’s dad was the Lambretta Pope of Duke Street.

And not when your first scooter had probably been blessed under a full moon by someone in a robe.

Peace in Our Time

We’ve been here before. In 1938 the Sudetenland was carved off Czechoslovakia with the blessing of the so-called grown-ups in the room. The excuse then was that it was full of ethnic Germans who, poor lambs, felt alienated under Prague’s rule. Hitler swore blind that once he had those mountain valleys he’d be satisfied. A year later, tanks were rolling into Poland and the world was ablaze. Appeasement wasn’t just cowardice – it was complicity.

Fast-forward to today. Ukraine stands where Czechoslovakia once did, and the Kremlin has its eye on more than just Donbas or Crimea. The excuse is the same tired playbook: “ethnic Russians,” “historical lands,” “security concerns.” All nonsense, of course – it’s naked expansionism. Just as the Sudetenland was the opening act for Lebensraum, so Ukraine is only the start of Putin’s imperial project.

What do we hear from the apologists in the West? The same old waffle about “understanding Putin’s concerns,” “Ukraine being a buffer,” “maybe a negotiated settlement.” It’s the Munich Agreement all over again, dressed up in modern PR. Peace at any price, they say – except the price is always paid by someone else first. Ukrainians now, Poles and Balts later.

And let’s lance another boil while we’re here: the nuclear bogeyman. Nukes are only used on lands you don’t intend to occupy. That means Ukraine won’t be nuked by Putin – he wants it intact. The Baltics? Same problem – he’d rather absorb them. Poland? Quite possibly on the wish-list. So who’s left as a potential target? The rest of Europe. Us. The irony is grotesque: by tip-toeing around Putin, Western leaders aren’t avoiding nuclear risk – they’re increasing it.

George Santayana nailed it in 1905: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” And yet here we are, watching Putin smirk as today’s Chamberlains shuffle forward, clutching their papers and muttering about “security guarantees.” We know the script. We know the ending. Still, some would rather replay it, this time with nuclear weapons in the wings.

And then there’s Trump. He bellows that Ukraine mustn’t be admitted to NATO as part of any deal. Why? Because a strong Ukraine inside NATO would slam the door on Putin’s ambitions for good – and that’s the one thing Trump won’t do. Instead, he waves around his party piece about “six wars” he supposedly stopped: Israel–Iran, Congo–Rwanda, Cambodia–Thailand, India–Pakistan, Egypt–Ethiopia, Serbia–Kosovo. A grab-bag of shaky ceasefires and half-forgotten disputes, some of which he barely remembers, having once called the Democratic Republic of Congo the “Republic of Condo.” These are sideshows at best – the geopolitical equivalent of fixing a dripping tap while the house burns down.

The central war of our time is in Ukraine. The survival of European security depends on it. Trump’s refusal to back NATO membership for Kyiv doesn’t make him a peacemaker – it makes him Putin’s most valuable asset. He isn’t Hitler, he isn’t even Mussolini – he’s Joseph Kennedy reborn, the arch-isolationist, cheerfully declaring “peace” while Europe edges towards catastrophe. History has already shown how that script ends: Kennedy thought appeasement would spare America from conflict, but his own son faced the Cuban Missile Crisis a generation later. Isolation always comes full circle.

History has handed us a clear warning – and Trump, strutting like Joseph Kennedy in a red tie, is determined not to read it. Ignore it, and we’ll deserve the disaster that follows.